第14章 The Sixth Name

Cole spent the next morning doing what he was good at: gathering evidence. He drove to the ridge above the Hollow, where the phone signal sometimes reached, and stood on the roof of the car with his phone held high until he caught one bar. He called the state police and left a message with a trooper who sounded bored, asking for any file on disappearances near Millhaven, on a society that had operated under multiple names, on a structure in the woods. He did not mention the flesh or the breathing. There were words you did not use on the phone. He left his name and his old badge number and hung up, and he knew, the way he had always known, that nothing would come of it in time. He hiked into the clearing with a camera. The doorway stood in the daylight, ordinary and grey, a ruin of old stone that might have been anything. He photographed it from every angle. He photographed the symbols, close, from a foot away, and the camera did not care that the stone felt warm under his fingertips, warm the way skin is warm, though the air was cold. He did not touch it. He had touched it once, and once was enough. On his way out of the clearing he walked the perimeter, the way he had walked a thousand crime scenes, looking for anything the forest might have kept. He found a child's shoe, bleached white by weather, wedged between two roots. It was small. It had been there a long time. He photographed it, and he left it where it was, because taking it felt like stealing from a grave. On the way down he stopped at the diner for lunch, and Anna was not there. The cook said she had not shown up for her shift, which started at six, and her car was still in the lot, and her apron was still folded on the hook. Cole asked the cook to make him a coffee and took it outside, and he stood in the parking lot and looked at the empty car and felt something in his chest go cold and certain. He had stood in parking lots like this before, looking at empty cars, and the feeling had never once been wrong. The cook came out and stood beside him, wiping his hands on his apron, and Cole asked him when he had last seen Anna. The cook said yesterday evening, closing up, that she had said she was going for a drive, that she had looked excited and scared at the same time, like a kid on the way to a fair. He asked Cole if that was important, and Cole said he did not know yet, which was the truest thing he had said all day. He drove to Anna's rented room above the hardware store. The door was unlocked. Her phone was on the kitchen counter, screen cracked, and on the screen was a photograph: the stone doorway, taken from the tree line at night, and beside it a figure in white. The photograph was time-stamped two nights before Cole had ever reached town. Anna had been watching the Hollow long before he arrived. She had been planning to go. On the back of Anna's door, in chalk, someone had drawn the spiral, unclosed. Fresh. The room itself told the rest of the story. The bed was made. The coffee cup in the sink was washed and upside down on the drainer. She had not been taken by surprise; she had left the way you leave when you mean to come back, or when you know you won't. Cole stood in the middle of the room and let that sink in, and then he took the phone and went out to find Mara Venn. Cole confronted Mara at the chapel in the middle of the day, out in the open, where the street could hear. He dropped the cover, the whole careful visitor act, and told her he was a retired detective and a girl was missing. Mara listened with her head tilted, patient, almost kind. "No one is missing, Mr. Cole," she said. "Anna went where she wanted to go. She asked the right questions, and the door answered her. She is not dead. Nothing in the Hollow ever truly dies. It only passes over." She leaned closer, and her voice dropped. "The door is hungry, Mr. Cole. It has always been hungry. It feeds on minds that ask questions. That is its whole nature." Cole said he would burn the chapel down, or call the state police and have the Hollow dug up, and Mara's smile turned patient, the way it had been patient with the room at the reading group. "You'll do none of that," she said. "Because you've touched the door, and it has touched you. You'll be at the Hollow at midnight on the full moon. Not because we make you. Because you want to know what's on the other side. And because," she said, and her voice was almost gentle, "there's someone waiting for you there. Someone you lost." She said Ellen's name. Cole went still. He had not spoken Ellen's name in Millhaven. He had barely spoken it to himself in years. "How do you know that name?" Mara did not answer. She turned and went back inside the chapel, and the door closed softly, and Cole stood in the street with the afternoon sun on him and felt cold all the way through. He drove to Frank's house. Frank was on the porch, and his face went grey when he saw Cole's. Cole said: "How did she know about Ellen?" Frank was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "She asked about you, Cole. Years ago, before I ever called you. She came to me, said she'd heard I had an old partner, asked what kind of man you were, what you'd lost. She knew your name. She knew your wife's name. She knew the date Ellen died." His voice was very tired. "She's been expecting you, Cole. The whole town has. You're not the last detective because you're good. You're the last one because they've been waiting for you." Cole stood on the porch and understood, in a slow and terrible way, that the case had never been about five missing people. It had been about him. The door had been set for him, baited with grief, and he had walked into the trap with his eyes open, because that was what grief did to a man who had stopped being afraid of anything else. He asked the only question that mattered. "Is Ellen in there, Frank? Is she really in there?" Frank would not meet his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "That's the part that keeps me up at night. I don't know if it's her, or if it's just the door wearing her face. And I've been trying not to find out for fourteen years." ---