His headlights blinked out behind him when DeMarco was thirty feet or so beyond the three metal security posts. He stood in the middle of the lane in sudden darkness. Low trees and sumac and a heavy tangled wall of fox grape vines on both sides of the lane blended with the now-black sky. He felt enclosed in a long, narrow closet, and because all directions were now uniformly black, he felt a dizziness swoop into him, and he lurched a step to his left before catching himself, standing still with his legs spread wide. He knew that it was only an illusion that he was falling—he had both feet on the ground; the earth was still flat beneath him. He could hear his engine ticking as it released its heat, as hot oil flowed back into the oil pan, as hot metal cooled and contracted.
He felt an urgency, yet knew that it would do neither him nor Huston any good if he went rushing headlong into the bushes. The lane was still there. It had not disappeared from existence just because his headlights went out. His eyes would adjust. A step at a time, he told himself.
He was carrying his flashlight but decided not to use it here. It would have cast a powerful beam, enough to illuminate the path for two hundred feet ahead. But if Huston was indeed up ahead somewhere, and DeMarco felt certain he was, he would see the light coming toward him, jerking back and forth, and some vague premonition told DeMarco that the only productive approach would be a cautious one, that he needed to move in on Huston as carefully, as reverently, as one might approach a wounded animal that had crawled into the brush to die.
He thought for a moment about taking out his cell phone and using its dull blue glow to illuminate his path, but he did not want to chance even that. His eyes would adjust. He was moving north toward the lake, and in all likelihood, Huston was facing north, if indeed he was not already facedown on the boulder-strewn shore. But an anomalous blue light bobbing up the lane might still catch Huston’s attention, might force a tragic decision that had not yet been implemented. Most suicides, DeMarco knew, were anything but sudden. Most victims sat a long time with the gun in their lap, the razor pressed between finger and thumb. It took a long time to summon the courage or despair sufficient for the next step.
DeMarco drew hope from the fact that Huston had reached out twice. Unfortunately, the first call had been answered by a machine. Nathan would have had the prescience and empathy necessary to intuit Huston’s motives and might have swayed the man’s resolve somehow, might have pulled him in. Danni, however, was very young—too young to know the depth of Huston’s sorrow. Too far away, in a sense, to extend a hand into the chasm of Huston’s grief.
DeMarco wondered why Huston had chosen Danni and Nathan to contact. A stripper and a student. Did the man have no friends, no trusted confidante? At first, DeMarco thought this very strange. Then he asked himself, Do you?
DeMarco knew that his only choice was to proceed cautiously under the assumption that the implication of Poe’s poetry had not yet been fulfilled. His own arm was long enough to reach into any chasm. No chasm was deeper than the one gouged out by the loss of a child.
Ten minutes later, having stepped off the lane several times before pulling himself back toward its center, and having felt his trajectory making a slow turn toward the north, he now saw the blackness shift ahead of him, saw it open up into a lighter shade of blackness. His eyes were adjusting now, cones and rods taking in more light. Ahead, at a distance impossible to calculate, maybe forty feet and maybe forty miles, was a charcoal wall. Vague silhouettes darkened it here and there, but the only one that interested DeMarco was the one that rose like an obelisk, like a lighthouse without a light, an obsolete beacon of hope.
He could smell and hear the lake now. The scent of wet earth, so too like the scent of sex. A soft rumble. Water lapping against rounded stones. Soft darkness washing against a harder darkness, sighs against groans, tears against grief.
He did not see the security fence as much as he sensed it, so black had the night become. No moon or stars, an absolute occlusion of sky. Something told him to put out his hand as he walked, and soon he felt the coldness of wire emanating toward him, so unlike the chill of a living night. He slowed his approach but kept moving and, a few seconds later, touched the fence, the mesh of thick wire against a palm.
The boy had said that the fence had to be climbed. He had not said whether the top was laced with spikes or barbed wire or some other deterrent. DeMarco gazed upward but saw only more darkness.
The fence rattled softly when DeMarco pushed himself against it and pulled himself off the ground. He held himself there, letting the noise dissolve away, until his fingers ached. The boy had said “an eight-foot fence.” DeMarco was two inches short of six feet tall and had pulled himself a foot and half off the ground. So the top of the fence should be only a few inches above his head. Spikes or a coil of razor wire would be a foot higher.
He slid his left hand up the wire. A rounded bar looped with chain-link wire. Emptiness above. And DeMarco thought, Thank God for small favors.