Ragnarök

Twenty-Six: The Departed

Mason bends his ear to hear someone giving chase. He can't shake the mirage of Lefty roaring and cackling, that scorpion blade of his catching the moonlight. His rubber soles smack the road but there is no accompaniment. No pursuer. He's alone, hauling ass toward town. Straight to the police station. It feels like he was imprisoned for eons in that kitchen.

Those footsteps still bang at the door of his reason, begging to be debunked. Is he absolutely certain Mildred stayed tucked away in her bedroom? Is it possible she relocated without anyone noticing? Driven to the basement out of fear? Fear of all that angry havoc? Fear of having her kitchen upended? Or perhaps it wasn't fear at all that drove her down there but a resolve to take back her castle.

Hasn't he seen firsthand the widow's vengeful side? Didn't he himself narrowly escape the chopping block of her enmity, as he now knows? The woman who stabbed her own husband when she discovered his crime, wouldn't she be capable of ousting unwanted company from her house at the business end of a shotgun?

Winter frost binds his lungs. His pace starts to slacken. Clarity, lucidity seep back into his thoughts. It's a viable explanation. He may have bailed just when Mildred was taking a stand. Just when she needed backup and support more than ever, he panicked and fled.

Ashamed, Mason turns back. It's not an easy decision. He must override the protest of every nerve in his body.

From a distance, the farmhouse looks deceptively cozy, with its warm yellow light stark against the darkness and the January cold.

Chickens gab in their coop like they can sense irregularity in the air. The curtains in his bedroom window are drawn tight. A mound of snow marks the spot where he buried his burn pit, where his mattress and blankets went up in flames. From inside the house he hears muffled voices, voices that crystallize when he nudges his way into the rear corridor, the place where he and Liza stomped their boots and stripped their jackets, not a word passing between them as the shock of her brutal misjudgment weighed on their hearts.

Such worries seem insignificant now. The Snow King and Queen are safe at school, enthroned at the head of their clique. He saw them with his own eyes, and it rends his heart to think of the relief he should be sharing with Liza. The euphoria that should be theirs. She would never have acted so rashly again. He knows this. It would've been a wake-up call, and with her reckless streak excised, there would've been no other impediment to loving her. No other misgivings. In every other way she was perfect.

But his reveries are pointless.

He hears Rourke babbling in the kitchen, a man shattered by fear, and Mason reverts to his old paralysis in seconds. The spell cast by the farmhouse poisons him. Inside it's a different realm, a deranged realm with its own deranged verities. The widow's bedroom door is shut tight; light seeps from underneath. He keeps waiting, waiting and praying to hear her voice journey from the kitchen. Mostly it's Aubrey who dictates conversation, calling Rourke weak, calling him altogether malleable, a man who wears authority like a Halloween costume, a man who adopts the principles of the highest bidder. More chillingly, she keeps referring not to Mildred but to Edgar. As though he's standing in the room.

Mason peers around the corner, finding the basement door still wide open and thus the perfect concealment. It's the stairs that will betray him, so creaky, so bent between stringers that no one can travel them undetected. He decides to slip off his shoes. In the middle of untying his laces, he hears a new voice. A man's voice. Rourke is still whimpering, so it can't be his. And unless Lefty has had his windpipe crushed, it can't be his either. This voice is indecipherable, painful just to listen to, the way it crackles and gargles, as if laboring through a blood-choked tube of broken glass.