I joked before about the irony of somebody who usually only skims through the real-world sections of the Chrons getting this chapter to dissect, but actually, I could hardly have picked a better one if I tried. Herewith then, my first dissection. Such an intense chapter...It starts on almost a frantic note, levels out at high anxiety, and then suddenly escalates even more steeply. This chapter alone justifies the constant anticipation of readers...the thought that is their constant companion through these books: "God, after this, what next? How will this be topped?"
I wrote this at home, so it's a bit long.
The chapter opens on Linden...distraught as she often is, but consumed by one over-riding emotion: Rage. Rage at the old prophet for abandoning her. Maybe for abandoning the Land, because that is the closing thought of the previous chapter, but for giving her no warning.
To me, this is the first hint that Linden is, if not unbalanced, at least dangerously close to the type of mindset that will cause the Land harm rather than heal it. The Land and its needs are not served by anger. Anger is always a tool of despite. She makes an assumption based on faulty logic. The Prophet appeared to Covenant...once in the real world, the day he first was summoned. And yet he went four times to the Land. The prophet appeared to her once, the first time she went to the Land.
I can't fathom why she even thought that he should appear again, let alone be enraged by it. Instead, I think of her selfishness, the almost arrogant way in which she assumes that she must again be the Lands salvation.
Seconds before the chapter opens, Linden finds out that Bill Coty, the man she pressed into service to watch for Roger, has been killed. Shot in the head by the man she told him wasn't dangerous enough to warrant more effective protection than a can of mace.
Reason enough to shake her on it's own, reason enough to raise the ugly spectre of guilt that Linden has lived with for most of her life, and whose hold has only relatively recently been loosened.
Perhaps tellingly though, her first instinct is to check on Jeremiah. Although we may wonder since he is clearly not in immediate and present danger what spurs her, (afterall, any threat to him must surely pass her anyway), but to be fair, she has more than the usual amount of experience with what, for want of a better term, can only be called "the supernatural."
She overcomes her instinct though. The first thing she does is instead call Sandy, the girl who looks after Jeremiah. Her responsibilities have, for now, outweighed her fears, although at least partly because she has no reason to suspect Roger even knows of the existence of her son.
As she calls Sandy with trembling hands,the reality of Linden's personal potential culpability in the death of Bill Coty suddenly strikes home.
Stark, harsh, perhaps unbidden, it's the first indication that Linden realises her underestimation killed Bill. But the thought is almost an academic one in a way. "I thought this, now I nknow better." As though it's a lesson she's learned in time, and she is more focused on Sandy than on guilt.Linden had told Bill that Roger was not dangerous enough for guns. Now she knew better.
Now, as another brief aside, I must mention that in the previous chapter dissection, somebody, (Dlb or WayFriend or both IIRC), put an unpleasantly sneaky suspicion in my head. One that I haven't been able to get rid of. So I'll borrow freely from it. They pointed out the curious fact that Sandy apparntly had no ambition other than to care for Jeremiah. Not even a social life that interfered with her opportunities to do so, and questioned her motives. Is she a plant? And now, here is the first part of the next suspicious element:
Sandy answers the phone almost at once. As if she had known that it would ring.
Telling Sandy that there was an emergency, Linden thinks again:
But she seems to ignore it. Sandy summoned, she rushes upstairs to check on Jeremiah, who sleeps peacefully, as blissfully unaware of any strife as he would be if he were wide awake and at her side.Bill Coty was dead because Linden had underestimated Roger's madness.
Fears assuaged for now, she heads down to wait for Sandy, where, even knowing she can't be this fast, she hears something and opens the door in case it is her.
The winds slaps her in the face, "unnaturally cold." Is this Foul touching the world again? Or merely Linden externalising her fears?
It is Sandy out there though, although.it's unlikely that Linden could have heard her yet. Commenting on the speed of her arrival, we get part two of that suspicion. Sandy confirms herself that she had been waiting for the call.
Why? Heebee-jeebies? Or foreknowledge?Whatever bothered you today must be catching...I knew you were going to call. I already had my coat on when the phone rang.
And then again:
The wind the Linden herself had apparently already ascribed some malevolent quality to. Instructions? Or simply a distraction?Sandy nodded. She appeared to be listening to the wind rather than to Linden.
Convinced that she is abandoning her son, even in the absence of any visible threat, even in fact in the sureness that Jeremiah is unknown to roger, Linden heads for the hospital through some fine examples of the descriptive qualities of the writing. The wind whining in the wheel-wells, dark streaks of street-lamps, dust dancing from the windshield and tortured paper scraps of paper in the wind.
She arrives to find three patrol cars in her domain ahead of her, and an ugly hole where the door lock of the outer door had been before Roger shot it out, as she thinks for a moment of the orderlies, and writing off immediately the apparently timid Harry Gund, reflects on the determination of Roger, and possibly the potential death of the "huge and compulsively responsible" Avis Cardaman.
The redoubtable Sheriff Lytton and at least 6 deputies await in the hospital lobby, eyeing her as she walks in. On the floor, at her very feet, lies the body of the Bill Coty, in a pool of blood, futilely clutching his can of mace. Vividly, he is described:
The orderly previously dismissed as ineffective gives every impression of having been so, Maxine and her husband hold each other in shock, and the duty nurse, Sara Clint is nowhere to be seen.The exit wound in the back of his head an atrocity of brains and bone. A dark trickles across his cheek underscored the dismay in his sightless eyes.
Linden drops to her knees beside Coty, perhaps in grief, reaching out for a second as though in the Land already, where she had been wont to heal with a touch. Perhaps already expecting the events triggered by Roger to result in a transfer.
Lytton barks a command at her, as she covers her face, but as she drops her hands, "her trembling fell away as if one aspect of her ordinay mortality had sloughed from her." The snake shedding its skin may be an unpleasant image to bring to Linden kneeling beside the body of a man who was friend enough to her to die trying to carry out her request. Let us hope it's not prophetic.
Now, grief and guilt perhaps sloughed away with the trembling as well, Linden faces the crisis alone. Where before she had Covenant to buffer her, now she must be sufficient unto herself.
Already we see a form of clarity come upon her. She notes the freshness of the blood, estimating Rogers head start, when suddenly Lytton again interupts her. His description is not flattering. Fleshy, paunchy, it gives an impression of fake substance, and Linden bites back imprecations.
Harry pushes up as she replies to Lytton, and despite Lytton's attmpts to silence him, proceeds to give her the tale of the events. He describes Rogers gun, seemingly shocked that they hadn't been able to stop him and Linden listens carefully as Harry tells how a smiling Roger had shot his way into the hospital, and held them at gunpoint, of Bill's advance in the face of the threat, holding up his mace "as though it could stop bullets" and of the casualness with which Roger shot him down. Of Avis, huge Avis, tackling Roger and being beaten down by a quick blow to the head that meant he'd end the night on the operating table, as surgeons worked to remove bone fragments from his brain.
Almost as an aside Linden wonders at the ease with which Roger has proved so murderous. I've wondered about that myself in fact. We know next to nothing about his time before his appearance. If anything, his facility reminds me of Ravers I think. Of Marik's attack in particular, the speed, the strength, the...casualness, all hallmarks of Ravers, as, now that I think about it, that indifferent arrogance that he has so far demonstrated.
Harry also tells her of the abduction of Sara Clint...Rogers unwilling hostage, and of Joan, his willing one. The hostages suggest an ominous overtone to Linden. why, she reasons, would he need a hostage if he just wanted to get away? He was away clean already. hostages suggested insurance. And insurance suggested he wasn't done yet. Touched but not moved by Harry's appeal for understanding as he finishes, I must wonder if this sort of callousness can serve her. A doctor out of guilt rather than compassion, is she truly the healer she believes herself to be?
Lytton intrudes a final time, and now she turns to him as he demands how she had known that Roger would do this, (or something like anyway), and she orders him for a change. Orders him into the office, where we get perhaps our best look at Lytton as a human being. A suggestion that he is perhaps not the cardboard caricature of a human being he has seemed to be.
Once in the office, she does her best to keep the initiative...assuming the position of authority, the doctor behind her desk as Lytton immediately vents his frustration. Here we see some of the occaisionally deplored profanity that people often complain was unnecessary.
Personally, I think it was as necessary and apt as profanity ever is. Say what you like about it, it's a wonderfully expressive way of sharing your feelings briefly. It all depends on the tone of course, In Lyttons first use of the word f***, we can detect equal measures of anger, surprise and suspicion.
He makes his next mistake about Roger here. And Linden knows it is a mistake. He still thinks his plan is to get away. Linden knows it's to get her to follow him. The hostage almost proves it to her. She explains her foreknowledge much more mundanely than the reality she suspects though, and concludes with the accusation she had wanted to make in the lobby.
And now the man behind the Sheriff appears. Dominant in posture, his eyes flinch. He knows she tried to tell him. And in as much of an apology as he is capable of making perhaps, he admits it.I tried to tell you.
Lytton almost rants about his need to find Roger...to save Sara. Perhaps he's driven by a need to atone for not listening. Perhaps it's an election year. I prefer the first explanation.Telling me how I ****ed up doesn't do shit for Sara Flint.
Linden is unmoved despite the justice she acknowledges in his response. She cannot trust him, and maybe she is right not to. She fears his involvement will make things worse. In the face of his almost frantic haste, she demands to know what happened between he and Joan that night ten years before when she was arrested as complicent in Covenenats "murder" and this time Lytton tells her the truth.
As her pager beeps, he admits to, and even attempts to justify, the degrading, perhaps inhuman psychological treatment that Linden must suspect worsened Joan's condition. And in doing so, Lytton reveals not only his baser nature, but his fear. The fear that may drive him through his darkest moments. Moments like this one. And in his fear, his self-displayed weakness, he responds the only way he can. With attack. He accuses Linden and the now late Dr Berenford of being accessories.
Linden does not reply. Nor did she tell him that Roger was almost certainly on his way to Haven Farm, the home of Thomas Covenant, and Rogers Birthright. Almost brazenly trumpeting his intention to discover the truth, whatever that is, Lytton stamps from her office.
Her pager beeps again, and she recognises the number of Megan Roman. Once Covenants lawyer, and now her friend, as well as the first stop for Roger in his attempt to gain custody of his mother. Tempted to ignore it, She succumbs to her self-interest in the hope the Megan can help. Unwilling to go after Roger alone, unwilling to risk her life, to risk abandoning Jeremiah, and with no other way of affecting things now that Lytton had gone on a Linden-caused wild goose chase, she phones Megan Roman.
This has been a night of phone calls. A phone-call from Maxine to shatter her peace with the news of murder and kidnap, and now this call to the lawyer, who answers immediately, her urgency so palpable that it seems to physically rock Linden. She who had just weathered a crisss now heard more crises in the voice of the lawyer, ordering her home immediately. She knows what has happened and knows that Linden must know of her mistake. An event so trivial to her that only this murder has made it clear.
Hell of a chapter. Lindens world torn apart not once, but twice in the space of...what...perhaps an hour or two?'I mentioned Jeremiah to Roger. A few days ago. He was asking questions about you. I told him you have a son.'
Somewhere in the background of herself, Linden started screaming.
Now perhaps you think that this chapter couldn't have been harder on Linden if Jay himself had done it. Perhaps you think THOOLah has paid me off.
Actually, she didn't do too badly. She forced her thinking to override her instincts. She thought rationally about what Roger would do. And like any mother, what motivated her more than anything was the continued safety of her son. Once she knew that threat was real though, it killed rational thought. But I suspect that this chapter shows the seeds of a havok that will be wrought in the future. Lets wait and see.--Avatar
