A Song of Shadows by John Connolly Page A

could not be understood, the words emerging only as muffled sounds, as though in dying their identities had been lost and their names could no longer be spoken clearly, the flames stealing them away letter by letter along with their skin and flesh, turning them to black spirals that rose in the late morning sky and dissipated against the clear blue of a fall day. He was sorry, so sorry. He wanted to tell them that. He wanted them to know that he loved them, and had always loved them. He just couldn’t say it, but he would have done so, eventually. He would have made something of himself too. He was writing a book. It wasn’t bad, and it would get better. He had planned to show it to them, once he’d gotten a little more done. He’d already won an essay competition – so it was a religious essay competition, which was a bit embarrassing, but it had still earned him $100 as first prize, which wasn’t chump change – and he’d seen how happy it had made his mom and dad, even if he’d been too embarrassed and tied up in his own world to enjoy their pride in his achievements. He’d wanted to make them prouder still, but now that would never happen.
    His home was a fiery specter of itself, its shape visible only as yellows and oranges and, here and there, spikes of angry red. He heard an explosion deep inside, and the frame seemed to shudder in shock.
    And then the trunk of the car closed upon him, and there was only darkness.

9
    A manda was playing by the shoreline. She was trying to master the art of skimming stones, but any that she threw simply sank. Her mother couldn’t skim stones either, so there was no point in asking her for advice. It was at times like this that Amanda wished her father were around. Actually, she often wished for her father’s presence, if only so that she could see him in the flesh, and ask him why he had rejected her mother and herself, and if he was bad, and, if not, what he had done to get himself killed. (But she felt that it would also be useful to consult him briefly about the art of skimming stones, and a couple of other small matters on which it might be productive to have a male perspective.)
    Her mother had shown Amanda a picture of the two of them together. Amanda thought that her father looked very handsome, but also kind of rough, like some of the older high school boys. Beside him, her mother held on tight to his waist, smiling prettily. Seeing them in the same photo was like glimpsing her standing with a ghost.
    She didn’t spot Mr Parker until he had passed behind her. The sight of him brought back the memory of her dream, and the girl’s face that she had almost glimpsed, traces of red about to be further exposed before Amanda awoke. It was just a dream, of course: of that she was reasonably certain. She couldn’t properly explain the sand in her bed, though. She supposed that it might have lodged between her toes unnoticed that day, but it hardly seemed likely. Her toes weren’t webbed, so there was a limit to the amount of sand that could be stored between them. The other possibility was that she had somehow walked in her sleep, which worried her a lot. She didn’t like to think of her sleeping self wandering down to the sea and into the waves to be lost forever, or at least until the tide found a way to wash her body back to shore again. The thought of her final footsteps frozen in the sand, of her mother crying at the realization of what had befallen her daughter, made her sad, but in an interesting way, like a tragic heroine in a book or movie.
    Perhaps that image had come to her because of the body on the beach at Mason Point. The day before, she and her mother had headed out for a late breakfast at Muriel’s, the big old diner that lay halfway between Boreas and Pirna. Amanda liked Muriel’s because the pancakes were great, and the little jukeboxes at the tables still worked. On the way there, they had witnessed the activity down at Mason Point, and her mother