Once the ambulance leaves Grady finds himself standing at the front door of the mammoth house. The house is silent in the way old and large houses are silent. In short, the entire house seems to be creaking and rocking with the wind. Of course, he realizes he is not alone. Upstairs and down about a million hallways an old man lies dying. Grady wonders if he can find him.

Death is close for this man. Grady can feel it. He swears he can see tendrils of the smoky aura of death filtering around the ceilings and creeping along the floors. Mostly it is like a shadow that he sees out of the corner of his eyes but when he looks it is gone. He can also feel death tugging on his heart and his soul. He is drawn to death since he accepted his power.

Grady closes his eyes. Now the physical world is lost to him. He can still see, however. He sees the world in the form of auras and tendrils of blackness. The blackness comes in waves from a source upstairs. When he tilts his head up he can see where the blackness is coming from.

Grady opens his eyes again and he can see the black waves wandering along the ceiling. He starts walking. He heads up the stairs which are just inside the front doors. He moves slowly, watching the blackness undulate and move like waves. He walks down the hallways. He wanders up more stairs. The black tendrils extend into other rooms as though they are tentacles reaching out to explore each relic and room. Each of those tendrils gets weak and turns gray, however, as it explores the room. Grady follows the thicker black form.

He wanders through doorways and heads back up another stairway. He has lost this way again and he knows he but he is fascinated by the undulating blackness. He has never seen it quite this strong before. Death has been something Casey has lived with for a long time.

Grady stops in front of the old man’s door. The door is covered with the thick black undulating smoke. It crawls over the surface of the ornate wood like hungry fingers. He pushes his hand through a clump of it as it hovers near the doorknob. He sees a very clear vision of Casey as a young soldier when he does so. Grady knocks on the door. The voice that responds sounds somehow younger and lighter than the voice he last spoke with the day before.

“Come in Grady!”

Grady pushes the door open and has to shade his eyes from the sunlight streaming through the window. The land looks an amazing reddish color which is a combination of the sun, dessert and tinting on the windows. The dark cloud is everywhere in here. Grady has to concentrate and focus past the cloud in order to see Casey. He is smiling at Grady and Grady smiles back.

“There’s been some excitement today, Casey.”

“Yes, that asshole that lives with my great-granddaughter. I have ways to listen in on nearly every room in this house. I am usually pretty aware of what’s going on around here.”

“First of all, he’s her husband. Secondly, did you say you are aware of everything that goes on around here?”

“Well, my response to that would be that for him to actually be her husband he would have to act like one and actually love her. All that he’s ever wanted was my money and to tear this house down. Secondly, yes, I do know everything and, don’t worry, I would not be upset for Sharon to leave that son-of-a-bitch for you.”

Grady smiles and shakes his head and enters the room. He heads for his seat next to Casey’s bed. He sits down and sighs. He realizes for the first time he is really tired.

“I don’t think that would be a smart choice, Casey. I don’t exactly live a normal life.”

“Well, perhaps you could retire.”

“I don’t think it works that way, Casey. I kind of have this destiny thing going on.”

“Your father was a sin-eater, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and his father before that and on and on all the way back as far as anyone can remember.”

“It must not be easy to have things planned out for you like that.”

“No, Casey, I can’t say that it has been. I fought against it for a long time, as I may have told you.”

“Then you lost her, didn’t you?”

With that simple sentence Grady’s world seems to stop. He feels like he was just punched in the stomach. A million memories he doesn’t want to remember come flooding back. Some of the memories are not this memories. He remembers faces and a car and rain and holding a hand that slowly turns cold in his. He remembers pain that is beyond imagining.

“You have very good intelligence-gathering capabilities, Casey.”

“I’m sorry, Grady. I didn’t mean to cross a line.”

“I guess I can forgive you, Casey. It’s kind of what I do.”

“I have lived through some things that changed my life too, Grady. My life changed after the war. I became what I am today because of what happened when I was on that terrible spit of land in Turkey.”

“I’m sure you did, Casey.”

“What was your father like, Grady? Did he accept his destiny with open arms?”

“No, I don’t think so. We never talked about it much but there were hints. My grandfather would talk about how rebellious he was, for example. He would talk about how much trouble it was to deal with my father. When I went into training to deal with my abilities I was told my father had been tough to train.”

“I imagine it was that way all the way down the line. I bet your grandfather didn’t want to accept his destiny either. I am willing to bet there were those in your line who ran from their duties.”

“Suicides appear to be popular as you go back in my family.”

“I can imagine. You always see the worst side of people, Grady. You see the terrible secrets that everyone wants to keep hidden. That kind of thing must weigh on you after a time. Have you ever felt tempted?”

“To kill myself?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t recall ever being tempted to kill myself. But I have certainly felt the desire to run away. I have been tempted many times to try to run and become something anonymous.”

“Destiny has a way of following you, though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Everywhere I go I find myself not wanting to touch other people. I can walk down the street and tell which people are going to die. The aura of death is around everyone at all times. We are all born just to die. But most of the time it is a little thing, like cigarette smoke. You can ignore it. The ones who are closest to death, though, it hangs around them like thick black smoke. It snakes out from them and touches things around them. It’s like it’s alive and seeking others.”

“There must be a lot of it around me by now, then.”

“Yes, Casey. It is so thick around you I was able to see its tentacles all the way down by the front door. I followed it to find your room this time.”

“I thought that might be the case. I can tell my time is very close now. I think I’m ready for it. I like to think I am. I wasn’t back when I was in the war, but I think I am now. I hope so. I want to be brave about it.”

“I don’t think that will be a problem for you, Casey. I can’t imagine you not being brave.”

Casey falls silent for a moment. Grady senses a sadness fall over him just like the black cloud. Casey stares out at the window for a moment but Grady can tell he is not looking at the window or the view beyond. He is looking at something in his past.

“I am afraid I have not always been brave, Grady. I have been a coward many times. Worse, I have been the most craven coward in my life. I have tried to hard to make up for those times, Grady. I have made it my life’s mission to make up for my downfalls.”

“There are those who say no matter how many good works you do, however, you still can’t be saved.”

“Yes, I know that. I hope that is not the case. Nevertheless, I have also attempted to make my peace with my God. I like to think He and I have an agreement on most things.”

“What happened when you were over there, Casey? What did you see?”

Casey sighs and turns from the window. He looks at Grady and his eyes sparkle with intelligence that Grady almost finds scary. He is so alive and so aware of what is happening to him. If he is in any pain he does not show it. His eyes are unclouded by cataracts. They sparkle from the sunlight and they see him clearly. In fact, Grady thinks, they see him clearer than any eyes have seen him for a very long time.

“I think you already know some of the story.’

“Yes, I do know the general story. I know that the whole thing bogged down in a stalemate just like you said. I know that the Allied forces were not prepared to set up a camp on those beaches. Sanitation was terrible. The living conditions were atrocious. Meanwhile, the Turks held the high-ground and they could almost pick you all off with ease. At the same time the unsanitary conditions caused diseases to spread among the Allied troops.”

“It was terrible. The stench was nearly unbearable. I watched friend get ill and weaken and die. Men were moaning in pain from bullets and bayonet wounds and from illness. It was like listening to some terrible chorus of voices. You add in the stench of all of that human waste that had nowhere to go and some tropical heat and you can only imagine what it was like.”

Grady doesn’t need to reach out toward Casey this time. The cloud of blackness is so thick he is already sitting within its grasp. Tendrils touch him and he can see Casey as he was then. He was so strong when he first got there but now, weeks later, he is thinner. The men around him are falling apart. Some are vomiting and yet they stay in their trenches. Others are dead on their feet. So much death, Grady thinks.

“The top brass were sure that we could break through the stalemate. They would send us on these missions into enemy territory. We might gain a few yards here and part of a mile there but they always came back. At one point the Turks launched a counter-attack. You would have sworn the rocks were spouting them. So many bullets flying everywhere and whining off of everything you would have thought they were mosquitoes. We held them back but at a terrible price. It turned out to be a terrible price on both sides.”

Casey falls silent again. Grady can see him fighting with his rifle and holding on to his helmet. He is terrified as anyone would be when the air itself suddenly becomes filled with deadly projectiles. Then the scenes change. It is night. The moon seems hidden and the darkness is nearly absolute. Casey is just one of a few men and they are part of a small company that is supposed to push beyond enemy lines. Then the images break up and Grady realizes that Casey’s force of will is as strong as that young man was and he is forcing those memories away.

“They would send some small raiding parties into and across the Turkish lines. None of us were ever really sure what any of these were supposed to accomplish. The communications weren’t exactly state-of-the-art. I got be involved in on of those, Grady.”

Casey turns and looks at Grady. There is something that goes beyond sadness in his eyes. There is pain buried in there that is profound and deep. Grady begins to sense that within the story Casey is holding on to with his dying breaths is the actual center of his entire existence. Something this man saw or experienced when he was in that terrible place in that terrible war made him change his entire life.

“I saw and did some terrible things, Grady. They were the kind of things that a man shouldn’t be allowed to do even in war. I want you to be prepared for that, Grady. There are sins within me that you could not fathom.”

“Casey, war is not a sin. It may be sin at the levels of the politicians and the dictators but it is not a sin when soldiers do their duty.”

“What about when the soldiers go beyond their duty? The Nazis who ran the trains and turned on the gas swore they were just doing their duty. What would you say to those at Mei Lei? How about the prisoners in that prison over in Iraq? When does being a soldier cross the line from duty into sin?”

“What are you trying to tell me, Casey?”

“I can’t tell you, Grady. Despite my attempts to be brave throughout my life the fact is I am a coward when it comes to my memories from that place. So many were so sick, Grady. We knew everything had gone horribly wrong. We were angry but back then you just weren’t allowed to be angry at those who were in charge. There were no protests and student sit-ins back then. You were just told to take out your aggression on the enemy. Anyone who was on the other side of that line was the enemy.”

Casey falls silent again. He is starting to look like an old man again. These memories have been inside him for so long. In many ways they are what has sustained him all of these years and given him such a long life. These memories burned within him and fueled him to succeed. However, something can only burn for so long. Like a sun when it has run out of fuel these memories are now collapsing in on him and turning parts of him into a black hole.

“I lost most of my friends. Hardly any of the men I joined up with and who I knew from my school days made it back with me. Most of them died from bullets and explosions. The rest of them died from disease and the unsanitary conditions. I have never seen as much blood as I saw then. I saw enough blood to last a lifetime.”

His eyes come open at last. The blue in them seems faded now. Grady can tell that the time for his death is coming soon. Grady can almost smell death or see its shape in the corner. The aura around him is nearly as black as coal. The spark behind his irises is starting to fade. Grady cannot be sure when it is coming but he suddenly fears that Sharon may be at the hospital when her beloved great-grandfather passes away.

“I know you can see something, Grady. I can feel it, you know. I can tell my time is very close. It feels like I am winding down like and old watch someone has forgotten to wind. I am not upset by that. I know you are here and I am confident in your abilities. When you live as long as I have you get bent and stooped and I think that may be because of all of the memories you carry with. I have so many memories. I also have had a lot of time to commit a lot of sins in my time and those stoop you too. I am ready to unburden myself from those sins.”

“You are a good man, Casey. Whatever it is you may have done you have done so much since that time to make up for it. I hope you realize that. I am honored to be here to help you in this.”

“You say that before you get a chance to see what my sins are, Grady. Don’t pat me on the back too much just yet.”

Casey lets out a huge sigh. He turns to face the window. The view is spectacular, as always.

“I do love that view. I do love this country. I just wish Sharon could be here. She will be upset that she missed this. You will do what you can to make her feel better, won’t you?”

“I’ll do my best, Casey.”

Casey nods and lets his eyes slip closed. Grady closes his and does what he can to clear his mind. He envisions his white room. He breathes steadily in huge breaths. He wishes he had something to eat to help him focus. He sees the white room and he sees the familiar black dot at the far end and he knows that Casey is there burdened by his sins and is waiting for him.

Beside him, in his bed, surrounded by his home and his possession, Casey Libby’s breath falters. He takes in another breath. This one comes out in a ragged sigh. There is a long pause and then another ragged breath comes. Casey lets out a small moan. The breath catches in his throat. His mouth comes open. His eyes stay closed and his chin slowly falls to the side. His breath comes out slowly. There is not another breath for him after that one.

Inside his mind and within the white room where he envisions his power and his abilities Grady stands and faces the blackness at the far end. He extends his arms to either side. The blackness rushes forward toward him with the force of a freight train.