WHEN DUNNY MATERIALIZES ON THE THIRD floor of the great house, in answer to the call, Typhon steps through the double doors from Channing Manheim’s private suite, into the north hall, shaking his head in amazement. “Dear boy, have you taken a tour of these rooms?”
“No, sir.”
“Even I myself have not enjoyed quite such luxury. But then again, with all my traveling, I stay mostly in hotels, and even the finest of them offer no suites comparable to this.”
Sirens arise in the night outside.
“Mr. Hazard Yancy,” Typhon says, “has sent the cavalry a tad too late, but I’m sure they’ll be welcome.”
Together they walk to the main elevator, which opens as they approach.
With his usual grace, Typhon indicates that Dunny should enter ahead of him.
As the doors close behind them and they begin to descend, Typhon says, “Splendid work. Magnificent, really. I believe you achieved all you hoped and much more.”
“Much more,” Dunny admits, for between them he is required to speak only the truth.
[597] Merry eyes twinkling, Typhon says, “You must acknowledge that I honored all the terms to which we agreed, and in fact I interpreted them with considerable elasticity.”
“I’m deeply grateful, sir, for the opportunity you gave me.”
Typhon pats Dunny’s shoulder affectionately. “For a few years there, dear boy, we thought we’d lost you.”
“Not even close.”
“Oh, much closer than you think,” Typhon assures him. “You were almost a goner. I’m so glad it worked out this way.”
Typhon pats his shoulder one more time, and Dunny’s body drops to the floor of the elevator, while still his spirit stands here in suit and tie, the very image of the corpse at its feet, but far less solid in appearance than the lifeless flesh.
After a moment, the body vanishes.
“Where?” Dunny wonders.
With a pleasant chuckle of delight, Typhon says, “There’s going to be some shocked and confounded people in the garden room back at Our Lady of Angels. The naked cadaver they lost is suddenly found well-dressed, with folding money in its pockets.”
They have reached the ground floor. The garages wait below.
With that note of sweet concern that is so characteristic of him, Typhon asks, “Dear boy, are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
Afraid but not terrified. At this moment, in his immortal heart, Dunny has no room for terror.
Minutes ago, looking at Ethan and the boy on the stone bench, aware of the love between them and of the future they would share as father and son in everything but name, Dunny had been pierced by a regret sharper than any he had known before. The night that Hannah died, a sorrow flooded through him, almost swept him away, sorrow not only for her, not only at the loss of her, but sorrow for the mess he had made of his life. Sorrow had changed him but had not changed him enough, for it brought him no further than to the point of regret.
[598] This anguish that now comes upon him on the way from ground floor to garage is not, in fact, merely a keener regret, but is instead remorse so powerful that he feels sharply bitten and torn by guilt, which is the mother of remorse, feels a terrible gnawing in the bones of his spirit. He trembles, shakes, shakes violently with the first true realization of the hideous impact that his misled life has had on others.
Faces rise in memory, the faces of men he has broken, of women he has treated with unspeakable cruelty, of children who have found their way to a life of drugs and crime and ruin along the path that he has led them, and though these are faces painfully familiar, he sees them as if for the first time because he sees in each face now, as never he had seen before, an individual with hopes and dreams and the potential for good. In his life, all these people had been but the means with which he satisfied his desires and needs, not people at all to him, but merely sources of pleasure and tools to be used.
What had seemed to him to be a fundamental transformation of the heart following the death of Hannah had been more sentimental self-pity than meaningful change. He had known sorrow, yes, and a degree of regret, but he had not known this fierce remorse and the wracking humility that comes with it.
“Dear boy, I understand what you’re going through,” Typhon says as they pass the upper garage. He means the terror that he believes now consumes Dunny, but for Dunny terror is the least of it.
Mere remorse is an inadequate description, as well, for this is such devastating remorse, such a grinding anguish, that he knows no word for it. As the faces plague him, faces from a life squandered, Dunny asks forgiveness of them, one by one, begs forgiveness with a profound humility that is also new to him, cries out to them though he is dead and cannot make amends, though many of them died before him and cannot hear how desperately he wishes he could undo the past.
The elevator has passed the lower of the two garages, and still they [599] descend. They are not in the elevator any longer, merely in the idea of an elevator, and a strange one. The walls are mottled with mold, filth. The air reeks. The floor looks like ... compacted bones.
Dunny is aware that changes are occurring in Typhon’s face, that the sweet androgynous features and the merry eyes are giving way to something that better reflects the spirit within the grandfatherly form that he has heretofore assumed. Dunny is aware of this only from the corner of his eye, for he dares not look directly. Dares not.
Floor after floor they descend, though the numbers on the panel above the door run only from one to five.
“I am developing quite an appetite,” Typhon informs him. “As far as I am able to recall—and I’ve got a fine memory—I’ve never been as famished as this. I’m positively ravenous.”
Dunny refuses to think about what this might mean, an............