“You fuck!” Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.

“I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,” I said.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” he whispered. “The Shadow knows!” He laughed softly. “Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.”

“This meeting is over.”

“No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?”

I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his knowledge of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.

“Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.”

“You’re insane.”

“No,” whispered Faulkner. “I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.”

I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended in darkness. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.

“Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?”

I cleared my throat. The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.

“You didn’t even know them.”

He laughed. “I didn’t need to know them. But you…Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although-”

His face darkened.

“We have both paid a high price for the intertwining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.”

“Good-bye.”

I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning.

And Faulkner spit in my mouth.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me away as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.

“Take it as a gift, Parker,” he called. “My gift to you, that you might see as I see.”

I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, dark-haired man watching me more closely than the rest.

And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.

The guard knew what Cyrus was doing, but he paid him no heed. After all, Cyrus was a mute and that was what mutes did.

They signed.

I was almost at my car when I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind me. It was Anson. He shifted uneasily.

“You okay?”

I nodded. I had washed my mouth out in the guards’ quarters with borrowed mouthwash, but I still felt as if some element of Faulkner was coursing through me, infecting me.

“What you heard in there-” he began.

I interrupted him. “Your private life is your own affair. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“What he said, it’s not like it seems.”

“It never is.”

A red glow began at his neck and spread into his features as if drawn by osmosis.

“Are you being smart with me?”

“Like I said, it’s your business. I do have one question. If you’re worried, you can check me for a wire.”

He considered the offer for a moment, then motioned to me to continue.

“Is what the preacher said true? I don’t care about the law or about why you’re doing it. All I want to know is: was he correct in the details?”

Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.

“Could one of the other guards have let it slip?”

“No. Nobody knows about it.”

“A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.

“If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,” he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.

A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.

Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.

The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.