Strange, I thought. The glossy photograph hadn’t been damaged by the rain that had fallen off and on, a fitful deluge, most of the day. The way the mask had been placed, protected from the elements against the fissured bole of the old tree, seemed, however morbid, almost like a shrine. Not wanting to handle it, distressed that anybody would have been cruel enough to use it to torment us, I left it where I’d found it. As I hurried back through the woodland toward the house, the world before me began rivering, wavering, growing more and more indistinct. No sooner had I brushed away my tears than they welled up again. I hoped against hope that neither Maisie nor Will, nor anybody else, was watching as I made my hasty, unsteady way home.
Once a forger, always a forger. For twenty long years I had been an exception to that truism, never practicing the dark art I had once loved so well, the mystical crafting of a new reality with ink and a steel-nibbed wand. Until I was arrested for injecting countless beautiful faked literary manuscripts and inscriptions into the bloodstream of the rare book trade, I had quietly earned my living as a master mimic, an impersonator on paper of some of the most revered writers in the canon. So fully had I escaped my past, I’d almost forgotten that I myself was my own best forgery. But now my nemesis had returned, angrier, it seemed, crazier than before. If my wife and daughters were the foundation of my life, and the leafy lushness of our upstate house was meant to be free of strife, free of cares, then his message to me tonight was that I was living in a fool’s fortress. One in which barely perceptible fissures could easily open, zigzag from the roof of the building to its base, causing everything to collapse and swallow me whole. We all have demons. Some imaginary, others flesh and blood. Mine had resided for years as an ugly memory, one so suppressed it seemed unreal. Would that it had stayed in the realm of nightmares.
I lowered the wooden blinds, despite my reluctance to convey fear to the man I imagined might be lingering outside in the pitch-dark field, and slowly opened the envelope string-tied to the package Maisie had delivered. Though my wife and daughter were surprised I hadn’t opened it immediately, I couldn’t possibly have risked revealing its contents in front of them, given that I had no idea what Slader had secreted inside. Alone in the letterpress printing studio I shared with Nicole, set up in an extension at the rear of our house, I unfolded the letter.
Dear Will-o’-the-Wisp, it began, We both knew this day or, better yet, night, would eventually come, did we not? Before reading another word I folded it back up and returned it to its envelope. The handwriting, I immediately recognized, was impeccably that of Edgar Allan Poe. My gut went hollow.
I hadn’t bothered to track this man, the true author of the letter, after he had been arrested, tried, and imprisoned back in the late 1990s for his attack on me while I slept with Meghan in our cottage outside the fairy-tale Irish village of Kenmare, near the Ring of Kerry in the southwestern elbow of the country. After I’d made my barest minimum of statements to the authorities, I did my best to cut—sever, slash, cleave—the assailant Henry Slader from mind and memory. Meg and I had moved to Ireland in order to live quietly, simply, above reproach and outside the turbulent, churning stream of life, of which he was a small if virulent part. Pipe dream, I suppose. But then, most dreams are. Still, I never imagined my past would catch up with me in the hinterlands of Eire in the form of a man attempting to butcher me in bed, hacking at me with my own kitchen cleaver, any more than I imagined it would find me again here, a hundred miles north of New York City on a narrow road in the upstate sticks.
Meghan was seven months along in her pregnancy then, so I had more than my share of reasons to get well, or at least functional, as soon as possible. Our idyllic haven having turned out to be anything but, we were set on returning to New York to have the baby. Before our ship sailed back across the pond, I plodded through weeks of recovery and long hours of rehab each day to learn how to work with a partially severed, if nondominant, right hand. My physical therapist, an amiable young woman named Fiona, who filled our time together with tales of a Galway childhood and her passion for bodhrán and fiddle playing in pubs, was more than skillful at her day job. And I, her patient and pupil, strove to make my work with her proceed apace. A southpaw since youth, I hadn’t realized how much I had relied on my right hand to do simple quotidian tasks. Buttoning my shirt, tying my shoes, buttering my bread—these were paltry acts I did unthinkingly before my injury. Now they all became bedeviling problems that needed to be solved. Motor skills had to be learned anew as I healed, methods of compensation practiced and mastered. Many were the frustrating hours when I had to remind myself that going through life with a fleshy crab’s claw at the end of my right arm was better than having no hand at all.
Thanks to Fiona’s expertise, and that of my doctors both in Ireland and stateside, as well as the support of my devoted wife, I succeeded bit by bit. No doubt, my own vinegary stubbornness played its role as well. And on a wet February morning, as freezing rain blistered the windows of the sublet Meg’s friend and former store manager, Mary, had found for us, Meghan, with the help of a midwife, gave birth to a healthy, bouncing, elfin baby girl. At Meg’s insistence we named the child Nicole, in honor of my mother, who I knew would have been thrilled by her granddaughter, though not by the events that had led up to the baby’s father having to flee a would-be assassin. An amateur assassin, quite literally a hatchet man, whose motivations, I had to admit to myself though not to those who held him behind bars, were not entirely without reason.
After Nicole’s birth, I continued my work with a physical therapist on Union Square through the rest of that winter and deep into spring. Meghan and I were bewitched, if run a bit ragged, by the presence of little Nicole in our lives. Insofar as things could settle back to normal after such upheaval, they did, and the fear of Henry Slader that had haunted me slowly began to dissipate, like thinning mist under a strong morning sun. Stretches of time passed now and then without his coming into my waking mind or even visiting me in dreams. His name had surfaced in the local County Kerry papers for a brief period after his crime was made public, but he and his victim soon enough slipped from view. Which was fine by me. Memory is gossamer. Most of us have, I always believed, the attention span of a kitten rushing from one toy to another. Once the food is set down, the string and the tinfoil ball are swiftly forgotten. Whether my theory is true or not, I hold it as close to my heart as a mackintosh in mizzle.
Spring came and went, as did summer, before Meg and I truly adjusted to having left Kenmare. We loved it there, but told ourselves that enchanting as rural Ireland was, young Nicole should have the advantages of the culture and diversity of experience that life in a metropolis would afford her. Besides, it wasn’t as if there weren’t expanses of bucolic forests, beaches, and mountains just a few hours’ drive from Manhattan. One could, to be sure, make a reasonable argument that growing up in such a pastoral, sane, kind-spirited place as rural Ireland was superior to the hardships of urban living. But we figured we could always visit the old country whenever we liked, once she was old enough to travel. What was more, hadn’t we gotten a little homesick for the grit and genius of the city?