Gethsemane Hall (26 page)

Meacham ran back inside the house. In the Great Hall, she hesitated. She had run out of actions. She wanted to burn the house down. She knew the attempt would be pointless. Reality was waiting for her outside. If it grew bored, it would take her in the house. The Hall wasn’t a refuge. It was an antechamber.

Nothing left to do. And yet her mind was working the details of what she had seen outside as if there were something that didn’t fit. False dawn hope, she thought, dismissive of her own efforts.

Come for me, then
. She wouldn’t go rushing for the end. She might yet pull off that good death, like that was worth anything. She made her way to the library. The howls of the wind and the damned were more muted here. She kept her face turned away from the window. She approached an armchair. She almost didn’t sit down, in case it decided to eat her. But then, there was nothing preventing the floor from doing the same thing. She sat. The upholstery didn’t feel any different.
All right,
she thought.
Let’s get this over with.
She waited.

Night deepened. She didn’t know if that was because time was passing or not. She didn’t think she’d been sitting there long before the shape formed in the centre of the room. The black ectoplasm gathered consistency and definition. It became the silhouette of a woman. The silhouette took on pale colouring. It grew a face. It was a bone-white, angular, iceberg woman. Rose looked at Meacham steadily.
Special treatment for the last in line
, Meacham thought. Rose glided forward.

The wrong details clicked into place. Gray’s phrasing: “You’re both
going to be
wrong.” And there had been another texture overlying the vistas outside. She glanced away from the ghost, let herself go cross-eyed and saw the twinned versions of the Hall again, and saw that they weren’t identical. One of them had the same quality as the gardens. The texture was a grid, a weave,
textile
. A tapestry. She looked back at the ghost. Rose had seen the real and was bringing her message to the rest of the world, but she hadn’t really opened up the portal. The world that had swallowed Meacham’s reality was another simulacrum, closer yet to the truth, but still an interpretation. It was Rose’s testament, her evangel. It took power from its accuracy, but it was still a shadow on Plato’s wall. It was a prophecy. It was a real yet to come, a truth so terrible that the power of its mere arrival echoed down to the present and past and made all other truths lies because they would end.

If only Hudson had known. The coming truth was even worse than what had killed him.

(God is the Reptile.)

“Wait,” Meacham said, and perhaps because she wasn’t pleading, merely asking to finish her thought, the ghost paused. Her mind sped. She was back in Intelligence again. She had never left. The arc of her career had been aimed at this point. Her working life had been tied to the control of information, its spread, its distortion, its suppression. Its release. She made compromises. She brokered deals. She had sold her soul a hundred times over. She could do it again. Anything to hold onto life a little bit longer, to stave off the inevitable. “I can help you,” she said.

There was no expression on the ghost’s face. Its angles deepened slightly, as if amused.

“What are you going to do after me?” Meacham asked. She was making a pitch. “Stay here like a spider, waiting for the next flies? That’s no way to spread the truth.”

The ghost was motionless, waiting.

Meacham was sweating. How much time was she buying with each word?
I want years,
she thought.
Many years. I can’t face that eternity
. “When this is over,” she said, “people are going to wonder what happened. If there’s no one left, how will anyone learn the truth?”
Use the words that will resonate
. “How will anyone hear your gospel? How will anyone know the prophecy? You need an apostle.”

I swear I’ll be that apostle
, she thought. She didn’t need to speak.

Rose cocked her head. She floated towards Meacham again. A hand, white as the face, emerged from the ectoplasm. It stretched out a finger. Meacham waited for it touch her, but the finger paused, having covered only half the distance between them. The ghost waited. Meacham swallowed, and reached out with her right hand. She extended her index finger and touched the ghost’s.

The last layer was stripped away. The tapestry was pulled back, and Meacham
saw
.

catch and release

Meacham walked up the drive from Gethsemane Hall. The web was ready once again. The gardens were quiet, their grooming perfect. There were no bodies. There was no trace of the party. The air was fresh with morning. Meacham heard birds. The woods were well-behaved and did not block her path. They held shadows. The smell of moss was the reminder of darkness.

She reached the gate. It was open. She marched along the road to the ghost town. She would wait at the train station. If the authorities arrived first, she would deal with them and answer their questions. If the train came first, she would board it and head for London. She had a lot of travel ahead.

She would keep her word. She would spread Rose’s virus. The contagion of future reality would eat away at the foundations of the illusion she had bargained to live in for a bit longer. She didn’t care for it as much as she thought she did. Not now. She understood Rose’s contempt for the lie.

Meacham had touched the truth of the coming god.

Copyright © David Annandale, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Editor: Allister Thompson

Design: Courtney Horner

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Annandale, David, 1967-

Gethsemane Hall [electronic resource] / David Annandale.

Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-4597-0226-4

I. Title.

We acknowledge the support of the
Canada Council for the Arts
and the
Ontario Arts Council
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the
Government of Canada
through the
Canada Book Fund
and
Livres Canada Books
, and the
Government of Ontario
through the
Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit
and the
Ontario Media Development Corporation
.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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