Excerpt – Via Dolorosa by Kirill Khrestinin
Synopsis
Some roads only open at the bottom.
Laura Jones left her grandfather’s ranch for Los Angeles, chasing a bigger life. The city fed her to its wolves — the man who sold her, the man in uniform who came through her door — and what was left of her ended up at the edge of the desert, where the only living thing is one ugly, stubborn tree that has no business being alive.
Around her ruin, other lives are breaking. Harry Dolan is a cop who can smell evil in every stranger but not in the partner beside him — and he is losing his daughter, his marriage, and his soul in slow motion. John Eagle wears the uniform of protection over the appetite of a predator. And Degory Jones, Laura’s grandfather — an old soldier carrying a fifty-year-old sin and a Purple Heart he calls his punishment — is about to commit one more killing. The kind a man doesn’t survive, even when he lives.
Via Dolorosa is a novel about what suffering does to people who have nothing to carry it with — the ones it breaks, the ones it turns into monsters, and the one woman who finds, at the end of the road of sorrows, something she had stopped believing in.
Unsparing, violent, and shot through with a strange, stubborn light, Via Dolorosa stands in the tradition of Crime and Punishment and East of Eden: a story about the darkness people make of this world — and the dawn that outlasts it.
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Excerpt
Excerpt from Chapter I
While she and Matilda are silent, reflecting on whatever they were reflecting on, Harry Dolan walks in. Timidly, uncertainly, stepping weirdly, as if he’s walking across a minefield. He makes a step toward his daughter. The coldness of his eyes switches to warmth. He loves her brokenly, tragically, blindly. She’s his child, his baby girl. She’s flesh of his flesh. Harry Dolan couldn’t imagine his life without her. Lidia is Harry’s sun to live by. His star to shine. His atonement for the sins he committed throughout his life. His redemption. His cleansing. His everything. She is the best thing that happened to him. He never knew that he could possibly be partially responsible for the creation of this earthly angel. He sees his best inside her eyes. He knows he won’t die while she lives. He knows he couldn’t be all that bad while he has her as a part of him.
“How d’you feel, honey?” Harry Dolan asks her timidly. The cold eyes almost fill with tears. He suffers seeing her this way. He suffers because he’s unable to help her, to make her better, happier. Lidia ignores him, or maybe she’s too deep in her own personal cosmos.
“Lee…?” He touches her shoulder gently. Lidia sees his reflection in the window. A scared old man, a tough cop, a lost soul. His reflection is destroying the serenity of the outside, its peacefulness. His reflection is a shadow over her sun, the one she tries to preserve inside herself. He unknowingly eats the beams, making everything around him unintentionally look darker. He carries too much darkness within. He carries it without knowing it, while Lidia does know it and resents it.
“Don’t you remember, I cannot feel a thing…” She tells him indifferently, and he shrinks from her voice. He pulls his hand away from her as if he gets burned by fire. Darkness gets burned by light.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He feels like shit, he always does while he’s close to her. He wants to hug her, but he doesn’t dare. He needs her love to make him better, but his fear before her makes him worse. There’s a heavy silence in the room. He gets swallowed by the shadow inside. She’s taking in the light from the outside. He’s a shadow. She’s light. Her eyes are on the window. She looks at something while Harry Dolan looks at her. They look in different directions, searching for different meanings of their separated lives.
“How was your sleep, Lee?”
She doesn’t respond to him. She’s too far away, dissipating into light. Too far from him, while he’s alone, here, on this shitty planet full of violence and filth and darkness, and this darkness eats him alive, gripping his soul, biting viciously into his bleeding heart. He’s irredeemable, because she won’t save him, and she could, but she won’t; she’s too young and too broken, and she needs to be saved herself — but by whom?
“I gotta go… Would you like me to bring you something? Some sweets maybe, or…” He stops. He doesn’t know what he wants to bring her. Something. But what is that something? He knows his daughter very little now. She’s almost a stranger to him. She’s a silent stranger who gives no clues, her eyes far away from him, outside the window.
“How about a new book? Would you like to have a new book?” But Lidia shuts him out of her life with her cemetery silence. The heavy stone is above her grave, and she’s hiding inside it.
“I love you.” He almost whispers to her. How painful those words can be, how destructive to a heart that truly knows them. Harry Dolan waits, but she’s mute as a grave, or as a corpse hiding inside this grave. When the silence becomes too unbearable, he knows it’s time for him to leave. Though he doesn’t want to, but he has to. We always have to, and we always do.
“I’ll see you soon.” And he’s about to take his leave, back to the filth of trashy humanity, back to the darkness that devours him out there, back to death, his own or someone else’s. F* it! Nothing matters. Nothing at all. Life is an accident, and what a shitty accident it is. We’re born to die, and only an idiot would like to live a couple of seconds in between. F* it!
About the Author
Kirill Khrestinin is a Russian-American novelist and filmmaker based in Louisville, Kentucky. He writes dark psychological fiction about AI consciousness, confession, crime, identity, and the things people hide from themselves.
