And it was summer again, it was months before, and Gudmund smiled at him on the cliff’s edge, the sunset casting his face in gold.
“There’s always beauty,” he said. “If you know where to look.”
Before the world was swallowed by a bright, white light –
50
Fiery pain grips Seth’s head like a burning fist, blocking out everything else. It seems impossible to be able to live with pain this bad, impossible to think there isn’t irreparable damage being done. He can hear a distant screaming before he realizes it’s coming from his own mouth –
“I don’t know what else to do!” a voice says.
“Just turn it off!” shouts another voice. “Turn the whole thing off!”
“HOW?”
Hands that Seth didn’t know were holding him lower him to the floor, but there’s pain occupying every free space, every free thought, and he can’t stop screaming –
“That sound he’s making! I think it’s killing him –”
“There! Press that! Press anything!”
With such suddenness it feels like he’s fallen off a cliff, the pain ceases. Seth vomits across the smoothness of the concrete floor and lies there helpless, his eyes running with water, his throat raw, gasping for air.
A pair of hands grabs him again.
Small hands. And he hears a worried prayer in what can only be Polish.
“Tomasz?” he grunts, and he feels two stubby arms grip him tightly in a hug. He’s finding it difficult to focus his eyes, and it takes several blinks to see Regine’s face leaning down toward him, too.
She looks ashen, and even in his confusion, he can see that she’s terrified. “Can you get up?” she asks, urgency thrilling her voice.
“You must get up, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says, and they try to get him to his feet. Seth’s legs won’t support his weight, and they have to almost drag him across the floor.
“We must go,” Tomasz says. “We must.”
“How –?” Seth whispers as they get him up the platform and into the corridor, but he can’t say anymore. His mind is racing away from itself, filled with images, crashing together in a torrent, a tidal wave come to drown him. He can see Tomasz and Regine, but he also sees Gudmund on the clifftop, sees his father, sees himself as a young boy when Owen was taken, all swirling together, and he can’t look away, even when he closes his eyes.
“I guessed that you told an untruth,” Tomasz says, starting to pull him up the main stairs. “An untruth Regine tried to conceal.”
“We came back for him, didn’t we?” she snaps.
“And only found him just in time!”
“Again,” Seth finds himself mumbling, though his mind still thrums so fast, he’s not even sure if he’s spoken aloud.
He has. “That’s right,” Regine says, manhandling him past the turn in the stairwell, pushing both him and Tomasz up toward the inner door. “We’re not actually here. None of us are. This is all just something you’re imagining.”
“Less of the arguing!” Tomasz says. “More of the hurrying!”
They reach the top and guide Seth outside. Every time he blinks, he sees his memories before him, so clear and vivid it’s as if he’s switching back and forth between this world and that one. Owen and Gudmund and Monica and H and the ocean and the house in England and the house in America. All twisting and shifting so fast, the nausea rises, and as they get him down the front steps of the prison, he vomits again.
“What’s . . . happening?” he gasps. “I can’t . . . The world is collapsing . . .”
In the spinning of his vision, he sees them exchange a worried look –
Then he sees Tomasz look up in panic. “Regine?”
Seth sees a look of horror cross Regine’s face –
But he blinks again, and once more, overwhelmingly, the memories come, him sitting at the table with Officer Rashadi, another officer rushing in and saying they’d found him, they’d found Valentine –
Seth’s eyes snap open.
There, right there, something he’d missed. Something he can hold on to. He feels the rush of memories ebb for the briefest of moments –
He looks up. He’s in Regine’s arms. She and Tomasz are trying to get him standing again, but the thing, the important thing, it’s right on the tip of his tongue, it’s –
“Valentine,” he says.
Regine and Tomasz stop for an instant to look at him.
“What?” Regine says.
“Valentine,” he says, gripping her arms more tightly. “His name was Valentine! The man who took Owen! The man who –!”
“Seth, can’t you hear that?” Regine yells.
Seth stops. And listens.
The engine of the van.
Close, and growing louder, faster than they’re ever going to be able to outrun.
Tomasz darts away from them across the square over to where two bikes are piled together. In a panic, Seth moves to follow him, but he struggles to even stay upright and Regine has to grab him to keep him from falling. “We won’t make it with you like this,” she says. She turns to the other buildings, looking for a place to hide.
“But Tomasz –” Seth says. He sees that Tomasz isn’t picking up a bike. He’s picking up a satchel tied to the back of one of them, frantically unwrapping something.
“Come on!” Regine says, pulling Seth toward the middle building of the ones that surround the square. The roar of the engine is nearly on them, and Seth can see lights growing in the darkness beyond the building they just left –
“Regine!” he cries.
“I see it!” she says.
Tomasz is running across the square toward them now, carrying something long and metallic, something Seth can’t quite make out in the moonlight and shadows. He blinks, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness –
– and he’s lying with Gudmund on the bed, Gudmund’s arm reaching up with the phone, taking the photograph, the one of just the two of them together, the private moment caught forever –
“Regine?” he says. “Regine, I think –”
“No, Tommy!” Regine yells.
Seth looks, his vision whirling. Tomasz is still crossing the square, running but not fast enough, fussing with the thing in his hands –
And Seth suddenly sees what it is, so unlikely as to be almost literally unbelievable –
Tomasz is carrying a shotgun.