Book Five: Save Yourself — 26.

Late on the nineteenth, Garrett returns to Colin’s hospital room with items from The Briars: an Aztec conch and Wolf Messing’s helmet. Colin, debilitated by a damaged heart and photophobia, orders privacy and wrestles with dread over Donna’s silence.

Text exchanges reveal Donna refused to deliver St. Helen’s blood and claims she gave it to Gwen, repudiating Colin and his motives. Panicked yet determined, Colin decides to act alone. He prepares a séance of sorts: water in the helmet, the conch at hand, and his digitized Elwood Hondo film playing as a focus to contact the dead medium.

Drugged by morphine and weakened, Colin slips into a vivid vision within the old film: an ecstatic table-lifting séance with his grandfather Llewellyn and other long-dead participants, their eyes obscured by black scribbles. The scene turns ominous as machinery reverses, lights die, and a figure approaches a door. Colin awakens in darkness, terrified that death’s scribbles are upon his own eyes.

Wishing for Arthur’s steadiness, Colin instead finds a straw-haired young man standing behind him—Elwood Hondo—who jovially dons the helmet. As the conch whispers distorted strains of “We Are the Champions,” Colin asks Hondo to kill someone. Hondo immediately seizes Colin’s pillow and presses it over Colin’s face.

Colin struggles futilely as pain knives his chest and the conch falls. Reaching mentally toward a receding light he associates with Arthur, Colin’s breath fails. The light winks out, and in silent darkness, Elwood’s smothering ends Colin’s life.