NINETEEN
“Anything?” Reine-Marie asked when her husband crawled back into bed.
“Nothing,” he whispered.
It was just after 3 a.m. and he’d gotten up to check his emails. Henri had lifted his head, but even the dog was too tired to take this seriously.
Gamache had connected to the dial-up, wincing as the beeping and screaming filled the quiet night. Finally the messages downloaded.
Russian brides.
Lottery winnings.
Some emails from a prince in Nigeria, but nothing from Scotland.
It was 8 a.m. there. He’d hoped Constable Stuart might have an early shift. He also hoped Constable Stuart would care enough about the message to act on it.
This was, truth be told, the third time that night Gamache had gotten up to check his emails. The first two without real hope, but this time there’d been a chance.
He returned to bed and fell back into a restless sleep.
An hour later he got up again. As he crept down the stairs he saw a rectangle of light coming from the study. He didn’t think he’d left a lamp on and smiled as he stood in the door frame.
“Anything?”
“Tabarnac!” Beauvoir started. “You scared the shit out of me. Sir.”
“I hope not.” Gamache went in and looked over Jean-Guy’s shoulder. “Porn?”
“Not unless waiting ages for the damned dial-up to connect turns you on.”
“I remember when—” Gamache started and was rewarded with a surly look from Jean-Guy.
Finally the emails started downloading.
“Rien,” said Beauvoir, pushing away from the desk. “Nothing.”
The two men walked into the living room.
“You think that constable will recognize something from the paintings?” Beauvoir asked, sitting on the arm of the sofa. Gamache dropped into an armchair, crossed his legs and adjusted his dressing gown.
“Frankly, I’m hoping he doesn’t just delete my messages.”
“You really think those paintings are landscapes?” Beauvoir seemed less than convinced.
“I think it’s a possibility.”
Maybe, thought Gamache, Peter’s paintings really were markers, recording where he was. His inuksuit.
“If those’re landscapes, Scotland must be a pretty weird place.”
Gamache laughed. “I didn’t say he was good at it.”
“No kidding.”
“It might be like the Impressionists. They painted nature, but it was like they painted with their feelings.”
“Then he couldn’t have liked Scotland much.” Beauvoir slid off the arm of the sofa and landed on the seat. “But if he was so interested in experimenting with landscapes, couldn’t he have done it in Paris or Venice? Why Scotland?”
“And why Dumfries?” said Gamache. He hauled himself up. “Back to bed.”
But at that moment there was a ping.
They looked at each other. An email had arrived.
* * *
Reine-Marie felt the bed beside her. It was cool. She sat up and looked out the window. The sun wasn’t yet up. But Armand was.
Putting on her dressing gown, she went downstairs. This time Henri followed, his toenails clicking on the wood floors.
“Armand?”
The living room was in darkness but a light was on in the study.
“In here,” came the familiar voice.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Something,” said Jean-Guy, stepping out of the way so that his mother-in-law could get a good view. “I think.”
Gamache offered her his chair.
Reine-Marie sat down and looked at the screen.
“It’s cosmic,” she read, then looked up at her husband. “I don’t understand. Do you think he means ‘comic’?”
Armand and Jean-Guy were staring at the curt message with as much puzzlement as she felt.
Constable Stuart had replied to Gamache’s email with two short words.
It’s cosmic.
* * *
Robert Stuart had been in the pub the night before when his iPhone buzzed. He had it programmed so that it made different sounds depending on who was trying to reach him.
This was clearly a work email, and normally it would never occur to him to check it, except that the man on the next barstool had been prattling on and on about how he’d been screwed on some tax bill.
Stuart lifted his iPhone and gave his companion an apologetic shrug, which the man ignored, and continued to babble. Stuart took his iPhone and his pint and found a seat in a quiet corner.
The message was from that man in Canada. The French guy with the weird accent. It couldn’t be important.
Constable Stuart put the device down. The email had served its purpose in allowing him to escape. The actual message could wait until the morning.
He sipped his beer and looked around, but his eyes kept falling back to the worn wooden table. Finally he picked up the device and opened the message. His eyes widened a bit in interest, then he opened the attachments.
Scrolling through the pictures quickly, he shook his head and felt vaguely disappointed. He didn’t know much about art, but he knew shit when he saw it. He was glad Apple hadn’t yet figured out how to send smells.
And yet. And yet. There was something about one of the images in particular. The Canadian man, a retired homicide investigator he said, hadn’t asked him to judge the art. Just to tell him if any of the places looked familiar.
They did not. Truth be told, they didn’t look like “places.” Just splotches of bright paint.
Except for one. One had bright paint, but it had something else.
“Hey, Doug.” He waved a fellow over. “Look at this, will ya?”
Doug took the device and appeared to be having trouble focusing.
“What the fook is that?”
“Does it look familiar?”
“It looks like a migraine.”
He tossed the device back to Stuart.
“Look again, you great scrotum,” said Stuart. “I think I know this place.”
“It’s a place?” Doug took it and looked again. “On earth? Poor ones.”
“Not just on earth, down the road.”
“You’re pissed,” Doug said, but continued to study the picture. Then his eyes widened and he looked at Stuart.
“Speculation, lad.”
“Aye,” said Stuart. “I thought so too. It’s cosmic.”
* * *
Next morning, Constable Stuart got up early and drove six miles north. The sun was just coming up and burning off the mist when he parked the car and got out.
He changed into rubber boots and took his cell phone with him. Studying the photos Gamache had sent, Constable Stuart set off across the grass.
Once away from the road, the land dipped and he found himself in a gully where the mist and fog pooled. He wore a sweater, but suddenly wished it was thicker, heavier. And he suddenly wished he wasn’t alone.
Constable Stuart was not given to flights of imagination. Not more than any other Celt. But standing there, all color drained from the world, most color drained from him, the ghouls of his maternal grandmother’s tales came back. The warnings of his paternal grandfather came back.
The ancient ghosts, the restless souls, the malevolent spirits came back. They took all the colors from the world, and in the drained mist they settled around him.
“Pull yourself together,” he told himself. “Do this quickly, then get back in time for a coffee and a bacon butty.”
The very idea of the bacon sandwich cheered him as he walked carefully through the fog, his feet testing the ground in front of him.
He kept the image of the bacon butty in the forefront of his mind, like a talisman. A charm. A replacement for the crucifix his grandmother once wore.
Pulling out his device, he paused to send the Québec fellow a message.
“It’s cosmic” he typed, and got no further.
His foot slipped on the grass, wet with dew. His arms pinwheeled, trying to move backward in time. To before the misstep. To before he arrived. To before he’d decided to come to this God-forsaken place.
His right leg slipped out from under him. Then his left. His hand opened and his iPhone flew away. It went sailing through the air, to be grabbed by the ghouls in the mist. For an instant, Constable Robert Stuart was suspended in midair. Flying.
And then he fell, hitting the ground hard, knocking the wind out of him. Everything became a confusion of images and sensations as he skidded and tumbled and somersaulted down the slope, disoriented and grabbing, grappling for purchase. And finding none in the dew-slick grass.
He hurtled and skidded downward. Where would it end? With a tree? A cliff?
And then, as suddenly as it started, it was over. It took him a moment to realize he was no longer moving. His head swam, his eyes unfocused, his body and brain in two separate places.
Constable Stuart lay still. It was over.
And then the panic. It wasn’t over.
His eyes widened. His mouth widened.
He couldn’t move and he couldn’t breathe. He was paralyzed. The blades of grass, so close to his eyes, were huge. He knew they were the last things he’d see. Trees of grass.
He was about to die. His neck broken. Internal bleeding. He’d die in the gully. Where no one would find him for days. Weeks. And when they did he’d be unrecognizable. He’d seen enough bodies like that, and thought them grotesque. He was about to become grotesque.
They’d hold a state funeral for him, of course. His coffin draped in the Scottish flag. They’d sing “Flower of Scotland,” his grieving widow, his friends and colleagues. Inconsolable, his—
A whoop of air was sucked into his lungs. Expanding them. And then he exhaled. A long, painful moan.
He breathed in. He breathed out. He closed his hands, clutching the grass. The soft, sweet grass. He could move. He could breathe.
Stop the music. Put the funeral on hold. His life wasn’t over yet.
Robert Stuart lay there for a long time, breathing in. Breathing out. Staring up as the ghostly mist burned off into blue sky.
He sat up slowly. Then stood up on shaky new legs. And looked around.
He’d never been here before. This place rumored to exist by its own rules. In its own reality, its own space and time. With the power of life and death. Or death then life. This place that first killed and then resurrected.
Stuart stared at the world he’d tumbled into. A netherworld. An underworld.
A few yards up the hill he spotted his iPhone. Grasping it, he began taking photographs. Trying to capture what he saw. Only in reviewing them later did he realize no photo could really do that.
But those paintings had. Or at least they’d come close. Suddenly those paintings seemed a lot less odd.