One of my earliest memories of Scarborough was of watching old Clayton Urquhart presenting a plaque to Elizabeth Libby for long service in 1971. My grandfather was a volunteer member of the fire department, helping out when the need arose, and my grandmother was one of the women who worked the mobile canteen that provided food and drink to the firefighters when they were tackling big blazes, or fires of long duration, so they were both there for the presentation. Elizabeth Libby, who used to give me candy when we visited her, wore winged glasses and had a white flower pinned to her dress. She dabbed happily at her eyes with a small lace handkerchief as people she’d known all her life said nice things about her in public.

I tied Walter to the cemetery gate and walked to the place where my grandfather and grandmother were interred. She had died long before he, and I had few lasting memories of her apart from that occasion when Elizabeth Libby received her plaque. I had buried my grandfather myself, taking a spade after the mourners had gone and slowly covering the pine casket in which he lay. It was a warm day, and I hung my jacket upon a headstone. I think I talked to him while I worked, but I don’t remember what I said. I probably spoke to him as I had always done, for men are ever boys with their grandfathers. He was a sheriff ’s deputy once, but a bad case poisoned him, taking hold of his conscience and tormenting it so that he knew no rest from the thoughts that pursued him. In the end, it would be left to me finally to close the circle and help to bring an end to the demon that had taunted my grandfather. I wondered if he left those agonies behind him when he died, or if they followed him into the next world. Did peace come to him with his last breath, finally silencing the voices that had haunted him for so long, or did it come later, when a boy that he had once danced upon his knee fell on the snow and watched as an old horror bled away to nothing?

I pulled a weed from beside his headstone. It came away easily, as such plants will. My grandfather taught me how to distinguish the weeds from the plants: good flowers have deep roots, and the bad ones dwell in shallow soil. When he told me things, I did not forget them. I filed them away, in part because I knew that he might ask me about them at some future date, and I wanted to be able to answer him correctly.

“You have old eyes,” he used to tell me. “You should have an old man’s knowledge to match them.”

But he slowly began to grow frail, and his memory began to fail him, the Alzheimer’s stealing him away, little by little, relentlessly thieving all that was valuable to him, slowly disassembling the old man’s memory. And so it was left to me to remind him of all that he had once told me, and I became the teacher to my grandfather.

Good flowers have deep roots, and bad ones dwell in shallow soil.

Shortly before he died, the disease gave him a temporary release, and things that had seemed lost forever returned to him. He remembered his wife, and their marriage, and the daughter they had together. He recalled weddings and divorces, baptisms and funerals, the names of colleagues who had gone before him into the last great night that glows faintly with the light of a promised dawn. Words and memories rushed from him in a great torrent, and he lived his life over again in a matter of hours. Then it was all gone, and not a single moment of his past remained, as though that flood had scoured away the final traces of him, leaving an empty dwelling with opaque windows, reflecting all but revealing nothing, for there was nothing left to reveal.

But in those last minutes of lucidity, he took my hand, and his eyes burned more brightly than they had ever done before. We were alone. His day was drawing to a close, and the sun was setting upon him.

“Your father,” he said. “You’re not like him, you know. All families have their burdens to bear, their troubled souls. My mother, she was a sad woman, and my father could never make her happy. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t hers. She was just the way that she was, and people didn’t understand it then. It was a sickness, and it took her in the end, like cancer took your mother. Your father, he had something of that sickness in him too, that sadness. I think maybe that was part of what attracted your mother to him: it spoke to something inside of her, even if she didn’t always want to hear what it said.”

I tried to remember my father, but as the years passed after his death it grew harder and harder to picture him. When I tried to visualize him, there was always a shadow across his face, or his features were distorted and unclear. He was a policeman, and he shot himself with his own gun. They said that he did it because he couldn’t live with himself. They told me that he killed a girl and a boy, after the boy seemed about to pull a weapon on him. They couldn’t explain why the girl had also died. I guess there was no explanation, or none that could suffice.

“I never got to ask him why he did what he did, but I might have understood it a little,” said my grandfather. “You see, I have some of that sadness too, and so do you. I’ve fought it all my life. I wasn’t going to let it take me the way that it took my mother, and you’re not going to let it take you either.”

He gripped my hand tighter. A look of confusion passed across his face. He stopped talking and narrowed his eyes, trying desperately to remember what it was that he wanted to say.

“The sadness,” I said. “You were talking about the sadness.”

His face relaxed. I saw a single tear break from his right eye and slip gently down his cheek.

“It’s different in you,” he said. “It’s harsher, and some of it comes from outside, from another place. We didn’t pass it on to you. You brought it with you. It’s part of you, part of your nature. It’s old and-”

He gritted his teeth, and his body shook as he fought for those last minutes of clarity.

“They have names.”

The words were forced out, spit from his system, ejected like tumors from within.

“They have names,” he repeated, and his voice was different now, harsh and filled with a desperate hatred. For an instant he was transformed, and he was no longer my grandfather but another being, one that had taken hold of his ailing, fading spirit and briefly reenergized it in order to communicate with a world it could not otherwise reach. “All of them, they have names, and they’re here. They’ve always been here. They love hurt and pain and misery, and they’re always searching, always looking.

“And they’ll find you, because it’s in you as well. You have to fight it. You can’t be like them, because they’ll want you. They’ve always wanted you.”

He had somehow raised himself from his bed, but he fell back, exhausted. He released his grip, leaving the imprint of his fingers on my skin.

“They have names,” he whispered, the disease surging forward like ink clouding clear water and turning it to black, claiming all of his memories for its own.

I dropped Walter back at the house and played my unheard messages for the first time. The walk had cleared my head, and the time spent tending to the grave had brought me a little peace, even as it had reminded me of why Neddo’s words about the names of the Believers had seemed familiar to me. It might also have been the fact that I had come to a kind of decision, and there was no point in agonizing any longer.

None of the messages came from Rachel. One or two contained offers of work. I deleted them. The third was from Assistant SAC Ross’s secretary in New York. I called her back, and she told me that Ross was out of the office, but promised to contact him in order to let him know that I’d called. Ross got back to me before I had time to make a sandwich. It sounded like he was in Stark’s Veranda again. I could hear dishes banging behind him, the tinkling of china against crystal, and people talking and laughing as they ate.