The Rev. Lewis Merrill came to the crowded dressing room to offer his assistance, although Owen appeared more in need of a doctor than a minister.
“Owen?” Pastor Merrill asked. “Are you all right?” Owen shook his head. “What did you see?”
Owen stopped crying and looked up at him. That Pastor Merrill seemed so sure that Owen had seen something surprised me. Being a minister, being a man of faith, perhaps he was more familiar with “visions” than the rest of us; possibly he had the ability to recognize those moments when visions appear to others.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” Owen asked Mr. Merrill.
“You saw something, didn’t you?” Pastor Merrill asked Owen. Owen stared at him. “Didn’t you?” Mr. Merrill repeated.
“I SAW MY NAME—ON THE GRAVE,” said Owen Meany.
Dan put his arms around Owen and hugged him. “Owen, Owen—it’s part of the story! You’re sick, you have a fever! You’re too excited. Seeing a name on that grave is just like the story—it’s make-believe, Owen,” Dan said.
“IT WAS MY NAME,” Owen said. “NOT SCROOGE’S.”
The Rev. Mr. Merrill knelt beside him. “It’s a natural thing to see that, Owen,” Mr. Merrill told him. “Your own name on your own grave—it’s a vision we all have. It’s just a bad dream, Owen.”
But Dan Needham regarded Mr. Merrill strangely, as if such a vision were quite foreign to Dan’s experience; he was not at all sure that seeing one’s own name on one’s own grave was exactly “natural.” Mr. Fish stared at the Rev. Lewis Merrill as if he expected more “miracles” on the order of the Nativity he had only recently, and for the first time, experienced.
In the baby powder on the makeup table, the name OWEN MEANY—as he himself had written it—was still visible. I pointed to it. “Owen,” I said, “look at what you wrote yourself—just tonight. You see, you were already thinking about it—your name, I mean.”
But Owen Meany only stared at me; he stared me down. Then he stared at Dan until Dan said to Mr. Fish, “Let’s get that curtain up, let’s get this over with.”
Then Owen stared at the Rev. Mr. Merrill until Mr. Merrill said, “I’ll take you home right now, Owen. You shouldn’t be waiting around for your curtain call with a temperature of the-good-Lord-knows-what.”
I rode with them; the last scene of A Christmas Carol was boring to me—after the departure of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the story turns to syrup.
Owen preferred staring at the darkness out the passenger-side window to the lit road ahead.
“You had a vision, Owen,” Pastor Merrill repeated. I thought it was nice of him to be so concerned, and to drive Owen home—considering that Owen had never been a Congregationalist. I noticed that Mr. Merrill’s stutter abandoned him when he was being directly helpful to someone, although Owen responded ungenerously to the pastor’s help—he appeared to be sullenly embracing his “vision,” like the typically doubtless prophet he so often seemed to be, to me. He had “seen” his own name on his own grave; the world, not to mention Pastor Merrill, would have a hard time convincing him otherwise.
Mr. Merrill and I sat in the car and watched him hobble over the snow-covered ruts in the driveway; there was an outside light left on for him, and another light was on—in what I knew was Owen’s room—but I was shocked to see that, on Christmas Eve, his mother and father had not waited up for him!
“An unusual boy,” said the pastor neutrally, as he drove me home. Without thinking to ask me which of my two “homes” he should take me to, Mr. Merrill drove me to 80 Front Street. I wanted to attend the cast party Dan was throwing in Waterhouse Hall, but Mr. Merrill had driven off before I remembered where I wanted to be. Then I thought I might as well go inside and see if my grandmother had come home, or if Dan had persuaded her to kick up her heels—such as she was willing—at the cast party. I knew the instant I opened the door that Grandmother wasn’t home—perhaps they were still having curtain calls at the Town Hall; maybe Mr. Merrill had been a faster driver than he appeared to be.
I breathed in the still air of the old house; Lydia and Germaine must have been fast asleep, for even someone reading in bed makes a little noise—and 80 Front Street was as quiet as a
grave. That was when I had the impression that it was a grave; the house itself frightened me. I knew I was probably jumpy after Owen’s alarming “vision”—or whatever it was—and I was on the verge of leaving, and of running down Front Street to the Gravesend Academy campus (to Dan’s dormitory), when I heard Germaine.
She was difficult to hear because she had hidden herself in the secret passageway, and she was speaking barely above a whisper; but the rest of the house was so very quiet, I could hear her.
“Oh, Jesus, help me!” she was saying. “Oh, God; oh, dear Christ—oh, good Lord—help me!”
So there were thieves in Gravesend! I thought. The Vestry members had been wise to lock the parish house. Christmas Eve bandits had pillaged 80 Front Street! Germaine had escaped to the secret passageway, but what had the robbers done to Lydia? Perhaps they had kidnapped her, or stolen her wheelchair and left her helpless.
The books on the bookshelf-door to the secret passageway were tumbled all about—half of them were on the floor, as if Germaine, in her panic, had forgotten the location of the concealed lock and key … upon which shelf, behind which books? She’d made such a mess that the lock and key were now plainly visible to anyone entering the living room—especially since the books strewn upon the floor drew your attention to the bookshelf-door.
“Germaine?” I whispered. “Have they gone?”
“Have who gone?” Germaine whispered back.
“The robbers,” I whispered.
“What robbers?” she asked me.
I opened the door to the secret passageway. She was cringing behind the door, near the jams and jellies—as many cobwebs in her hair as adorned the relishes and chutneys and the cans of overused, spongy tennis balls that dated back to the days when my mother saved old tennis balls for Sagamore. Germaine was wearing her ankle-length flannel dressing gown; but she was barefoot—suggesting that the manner of her hiding herself in the secret passageway had not been unlike the way she cleared the table.
“Lydia is dead,” Germaine said. She would not emerge from the cobwebs and shadows, although I held the heavy bookshelf-door wide open for her.