“Only one?”
Roosevelt held my stare in silence for a long time, long enough for Orson to eat the second biscuit, and when at last he spoke, his voice was softer than ever: “There were more than just cats and dogs and monkeys in those labs.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I said, “I suspect you aren’t talking about guinea pigs or white mice.”
His eyes shifted away from me, and he appeared to be staring at something far beyond the cabin of this boat. “Lot of change coming.”
“They say change is good.”
“Some is.”
As Orson ate the third biscuit, Roosevelt rose from his chair. Picking up the cat, holding him against his chest, stroking him, he seemed to be considering whether I needed to—or should—know more.
When he finally spoke, he slid once again from a revelatory mood into a secretive one. “I’m tired, son. I should have been in bed hours ago. I was asked to warn you that your friends are in danger if you don’t walk away from this, if you keep probing.”
“The cat asked you to warn me.”
“That’s right.”
As I got to my feet, I became more aware of the wallowing motion of the boat. For a moment I was stricken by a spell of vertigo, and I gripped the back of the chair to steady myself.
This physical symptom was matched by mental turmoil, as well, and my grip on reality seemed increasingly tenuous. I felt as if I were spinning along the upper rim of a whirlpool that would suck me down faster, faster, faster, until I went through the bottom of the funnel—my own version of Dorothy’s tornado—and found myself not in Oz but in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, solemnly discussing the fine points of reincarnation with Pia Klick.
Aware of the extreme flakiness of the question, I nevertheless asked, “And the cat, Mungojerrie…he isn’t in league with these people at Wyvern?”
“He escaped from them.”
Licking his chops to be sure that no precious biscuit crumbs adhered to his lips or to the fur around his muzzle, Orson got off the dinette chair and came to my side.
To Roosevelt, I said, “Earlier tonight, I heard the Wyvern project described in apocalyptic terms…the end of the world.”
“The world as we know it.”
“You actually believe that?”
“It could play out that way, yes. But maybe when it all shakes down, there’ll be more good changes than bad. The end of the world
as we know
it isn’t necessarily the same as the end of the world.”
“Tell that to the dinosaurs after the comet impact.”
“I have my jumpy moments,” he admitted.
“If you’re frightened enough to go to the mooring to sleep every night and if you really believe that what they were doing at Wyvern was so dangerous, why don’t you get out of Moonlight Bay?”
“I’ve considered it. But my businesses are here. My life’s here. Besides, I wouldn’t be escaping. I’d only be buying a little time. Ultimately, nowhere is safe.”
“That’s a bleak assessment.”
“I guess so.”
“Yet you don’t seem depressed.”
Carrying the cat, Roosevelt led us out of the main cabin and through the aft stateroom. “I’ve always been able to handle whatever the world threw at me, son, both the ups and the downs, as long as it was at least
interesting.
I’ve had the blessing of a full and varied life, and the only thing I really dread is boredom.” We stepped out of the boat onto the afterdeck, into the clammy embrace of the fog. “Things are liable to get downright hairy here in the Jewel of the Central Coast, but whichever way it goes, for damn sure it won’t be boring.”
Roosevelt had more in common with Bobby Halloway than 1 would have thought.
“Well, sir…thank you for the advice. I guess.” I sat on the coaming and swung off the boat to the dock a couple of feet below, and Orson leaped down to my side.
The big blue heron had departed earlier. The fog eddied around me, the black water purled under the boat slip, and all else was as still as a dream of death.
I had taken only two steps toward the gangway when Roosevelt said, “Son?”
I stopped and looked back.
“The safety of your friends really is at stake here. But your happiness is on the line, too. Believe me, you don’t want to know more about this. You’ve got enough problems…the way you have to live.”
“I don’t have any problems,” I assured him. “Just different advantages and disadvantages from most people.”
His skin was so black that he might have been a mirage in the fog, a trick of shadow. The cat, which he held, was invisible but for his eyes, which appeared to be disembodied, mysterious—bright green orbs floating in midair. “Just different advantages…do you really believe that?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said, although I wasn’t sure whether I believed it because it was, in fact, the truth or because I had spent most of my life convincing myself that it was true. A lot of the time, reality is what you make it.
“I’ll tell you one more thing,” he said. “One more thing because it might convince you to let this go and get on with life.”
I waited.
At last, with sorrow in his voice, he said, “The reason most of them don’t want to harm you, the reason they’d rather try to control you by killing your friends, the reason most of them
revere
you is because of who your mother was.”
Fear, as death-white and cold as a Jerusalem cricket, crawled up the small of my back, and for a moment my lungs constricted so that I couldn’t draw a breath—although I didn’t know why Roosevelt’s enigmatic statement should affect me so instantly and profoundly. Maybe I understood more than I thought I did. Maybe the truth was already waiting to be acknowledged in the canyons of the subconscious—or in the abyss of the heart.
When I could breathe, I said, “What do you mean?”
“If you think about it for a while,” he said, “really think about it, maybe you’ll realize that you have nothing to gain by pursuing this thing—and so much to lose. Knowledge seldom brings us peace, son. A hundred years ago, we didn’t know about atomic structure or DNA or black holes—but are we any happier and more fulfilled now than people were then?”
As he spoke that final word, fog filled the space where he had stood on the afterdeck. A cabin door closed softly; with a louder sound, a dead bolt was engaged.
24
Around the creaking
Nostromo,
the fog seethed in slow motion. Nightmare creatures appeared to form out of the mist, loom, and then dissolve.
Inspired by Roosevelt Frost’s final revelation, more fearful things than fog monsters took shape from the mists in my mind, but I was reluctant to concentrate on them and thereby impart to them a greater solidity. Maybe he was right. If I learned everything I wanted to know, I might wish I had remained ignorant of the truth.
Bobby says that truth is sweet but dangerous. He says people couldn’t bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.
In that case, I tell him, he’ll never be suicidal.
As Orson preceded me up the gangway from the slip, I considered my options, trying to decide where to go and what to do next. There was a siren singing, and only I could hear her dangerous song; though I was afraid of wrecking on the rocks of truth, this hypnotic melody was one I couldn’t resist.
When we reached the top of the gangway, I said to my dog, “So…anytime you want to start explaining all this to me, I’m ready to listen.”
Even if Orson could have answered me, he didn’t seem to be in a communicative mood.
My bicycle was still leaning against the dock railing. The rubber handlebar grips were cold and slick, wet with condensation.
Behind us, the
Nostromo’s
engines turned over. When I glanced back, I saw the running lights of the boat diffused and ringed by halos in the fog.
I couldn’t make out Roosevelt at the upper helm station, but I knew he was there. Though only a few hours of darkness remained, he was moving his boat out to his mooring even in this low visibility.
As I walked my bike shoreward through the marina, among the gently rocking boats, I looked back a couple of times, to see if I could spot Mungojerrie in the dim wash of the dock lights. If he was following us, he was being discreet. I suspected that the cat was still aboard the
Nostromo.
…the reason most of them revere you is because of who your mother was.
When we turned right onto the main dock pier and headed toward the entrance to the marina, a foul odor rose off the water. Evidently the tide had washed a dead squid or a man-of-war or a fish in among the pilings. The rotting corpse must have gotten caught above the water line on one of the jagged masses of barnacles that encrusted the concrete caissons. The stench became so ripe that the humid air seemed to be not merely scented but flavored with it, as repulsive as a broth from the devil’s dinner table. I held my breath and kept my mouth tightly closed against the disgusting taste that had been imparted to the fog.
The grumble of the
Nostromo’s
engines had faded as it cruised out to the mooring. Now the muffled rhythmic thumping that came across the water sounded not like engine noise at all but like the ominous beat of a leviathan’s heart, as though a monster of the deep might surface in the marina, sinking all the boats, battering apart the dock, and plunging us into a cold wet grave.
When we reached the midpoint of the main pier, I looked back and saw neither the cat nor a more fearsome pursuer.
Nevertheless, I said to Orson, “Damn, but it’s starting to
feel
like the end of the world.”
He chuffed in agreement as we left the stench of death behind us and walked toward the glow of the quaint ship lanterns that were mounted on massive teak pilasters at the main pier entrance.
Moving out of an almost liquid gloom beside the marina office, Lewis Stevenson, the chief of police, still in uniform as I had seen him earlier in the night, crossed into the light. He said, “I’m in a mood here.”
For an instant, as he stepped from the shadows, something about him was so peculiar that a chill bored like a corkscrew in my spine. Whatever I had seen—or thought I’d seen—passed in a blink, however, and I found myself shivering and keenly disturbed, overcome by an extraordinary perception of being in the presence of something unearthly and malevolent, without being able to identify the precise cause of this feeling.
Chief Stevenson was holding a formidable-looking pistol in his right hand. Although he was not in a shooting stance, his grip on the weapon wasn’t casual. The muzzle was trained on Orson, who was two steps ahead of me, standing in the outer arc of the lantern light, while I remained in shadows.
“You want to guess what mood I’m in?” Stevenson asked, stopping no more than ten feet from us.
“Not good,” I ventured.
“I’m in a mood not to be screwed with.”
The chief didn’t sound like himself. His voice was familiar, the timbre and the accent unchanged, but there was a hard note when before there had been quiet authority. Usually his speech flowed like a stream, and you found yourself almost floating on it, calm and warm and assured; but now the flow was fast and turbulent, cold and stinging.
“I don’t feel good,” he said. “I don’t feel good at all. In fact, I feel like shit, and I don’t have much patience for anything that makes me feel even worse. You understand me?”
Although I didn’t understand him entirely, I nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, sir, I understand.”
Orson was as still as cast iron, and his eyes never left the muzzle of the chief’s pistol.
I was acutely aware that the marina was a desolate place at this hour. The office and the fueling station were not staffed after six o’clock. Only five boat owners, other than Roosevelt Frost, lived aboard their vessels, and they were no doubt sound asleep. The docks were no less lonely than the granite rows of eternal berths in St. Bernadette’s cemetery.
The fog muffled our voices. No one was likely to hear our conversation and be drawn to it.
Keeping his attention on Orson but addressing me, Stevenson said, “I can’t get what I need, because I don’t even know what it
is
I need. Isn’t that a bitch?”
I sensed that this was a man at risk of coming apart, perilously holding himself together. He had lost his noble aspect. Even his handsomeness was sliding away as the planes of his face were pulled toward a new configuration by what seemed to be rage and an equally powerful anxiety.
“You ever feel this emptiness, Snow? You ever feel an emptiness so bad, you’ve got to fill it or you’ll die, but you don’t know where the emptiness is or what in the name of God you’re supposed to fill it
with?
”
Now I didn’t understand him
at all,
but I didn’t think that he was in a mood to explain himself, so I looked solemn and nodded sympathetically. “Yes, sir. I know the feeling.”
His brow and cheeks were moist but not from the clammy air; he glistened with greasy sweat. His face was so supernaturally white that the mist seemed to pour from him, boiling coldly off his skin, as though he were the father of all fog. “Comes on you bad at night,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Comes on you anytime, but worse at night.” His face twisted with what might have been disgust. “What kind of damn dog is this, anyway?”
His gun arm stiffened, and I thought I saw his finger tighten on the trigger.
Orson bared his teeth but neither moved nor made a sound.
I quickly said, “He’s just a Labrador mix. He’s a good dog, wouldn’t harm a cat.”
His anger swelling for no apparent reason, Stevenson said, “Just a Labrador mix, huh? The hell he is. Nothing’s
just
anything. Not here. Not now. Not anymore.”
I considered reaching for the Glock in my jacket. I was holding my bike with my left hand. My right hand was free, and the pistol was in my right-hand pocket.
Even as distraught as Stevenson was, however, he was nonetheless a cop, and he was sure to respond with deadly professionalism to any threatening move I made. I didn’t put much faith in Roosevelt’s strange assurance that I was revered. Even if I let the bicycle fall over to distract him, Stevenson would shoot me dead before the Glock cleared my pocket.
Besides, I wasn’t going to pull a gun on the chief of police unless I had no choice but to use it. And if I shot him, that would be the end of my life, a thwarting of the sun.
Abruptly Stevenson snapped his head up, looking away from Orson. He drew a deep breath, then several that were as quick and shallow as those of a hound following the spoor of its quarry. “What’s that?”
He had a keener sense of smell than I did, because I only now realized that an almost imperceptible breeze had brought us a faint hint of the stench from the decomposing sea creature back under the main pier.
Although Stevenson was already acting strangely enough to make my scalp crinkle into faux corduroy, he grew markedly stranger. He tensed, hunched his shoulders, stretched his neck, and raised his face to the fog, as though savoring the putrescent scent. His eyes were feverish in his pale face, and he spoke not with the measured inquisitiveness of a cop but with an eager, nervous curiosity that seemed perverse: “What is that? You smell that? Something dead, isn’t it?”
“Something back under the pier,” I confirmed. “Some kind of fish, I guess.”
“Dead. Dead and rotting. Something…It’s got an edge to it, doesn’t it?” He seemed about to lick his lips. “Yeah. Yeah. Sure does have an interesting edge to it.”
Either he heard the eerie current crackling through his voice or he sensed my alarm, because he glanced worriedly at me and struggled to compose himself. It
was
a struggle. He was teetering on a crumbling ledge of emotion.
Finally the chief found his normal voice—or something that approximated it. “I need to talk to you, reach an understanding. Now. Tonight. Why don’t you come with me, Snow.”
“Come where?”
“My patrol car’s out front.”
“But my bicycle—”
“I’m not arresting you. Just a quick chat. Let’s make sure we understand each other.”
The last thing I wanted to do was get in a patrol car with Stevenson. If I refused, however, he might make his invitation more formal by taking me into custody.
Then, if I tried to resist arrest, if I climbed on my bicycle and pumped the pedals hard enough to make the crank axle smoke—where would I go? With dawn only a few hours away, I had no time to flee as far as the next town on this lonely stretch of coast. Even if I had ample time, XP limited my world to the boundaries of Moonlight Bay, where I could return home by sunrise or find an understanding friend to take me in and give me darkness.
“I’m in a mood here,” Lewis Stevenson said again, through half-clenched teeth, the hardness returning to his voice. “I’m in a real mood. You coming with me?”
“Yes, sir. I’m cool with that.”
Motioning with his pistol, he indicated that Orson and I were to precede him.
I walked my bike toward the end of the entrance pier, loath to have the chief behind me with the gun. I didn’t need to be an animal communicator to know that Orson was nervous, too.
The pier planks ended in a concrete sidewalk flanked by flower beds full of ice plant, the blooms of which open wide in sunshine and close at night. In the low landscape lighting, snails were crossing the walkway, antennae glistening, leaving silvery trails of slime, some creeping from the right-hand bed of ice plant to the identical bed on the left, others laboriously making their way in the opposite direction, as if these humble mollusks shared humanity’s restlessness and dissatisfaction with the terms of existence.
I weaved with the bike to avoid the snails, and although Orson sniffed them in passing, he stepped over them.
From behind us rose the crunching of crushed shells, the squish of jellied bodies tramped underfoot. Stevenson was stepping on not only those snails directly in his path but on every hapless gastropod in sight. Some were dispatched with a quick snap, but he
stomped
on others, came down on them with such force that the slap of shoe sole against concrete rang like a hammer strike.
I didn’t turn to look.
I was afraid of seeing the cruel glee that I remembered too well from the faces of the young bullies who had tormented me throughout childhood, before I’d been wise enough and big enough to fight back. Although that expression was unnerving when a child wore it, the same look—the beady eyes that seemed perfectly reptilian even without elliptical pupils, the hate-reddened cheeks, the bloodless lips drawn back in a sneer from spittle-shined teeth—would be immeasurably more disturbing on the face of an adult, especially when the adult had a gun in his hand and wore a badge.
Stevenson’s black-and-white was parked at a red curb thirty feet to the left of the marina entrance, beyond the reach of the landscape lights, in deep night shade under the spreading limbs of an enormous Indian laurel.
I leaned my bike against the trunk of the tree, on which the fog hung like Spanish moss. At last I turned warily to the chief as he opened the back door on the passenger side of the patrol car.
Even in the murk, I recognized the expression on his face that I had dreaded seeing: the hatred, the irrational but unassuageable anger that makes some human beings more deadly than any other beast on the planet.
Never before had Stevenson disclosed this malevolent aspect of himself. He hadn’t seemed capable of unkindness, let alone senseless hatred. If suddenly he had revealed that he wasn’t the real Lewis Stevenson but an alien life-form mimicking the chief, I would have believed him.
Gesturing with the gun, Stevenson spoke to Orson: “Get in the car, fella.”
“He’ll be all right out here,” I said.
“Get in,” he urged the dog.
Orson peered suspiciously at the open car door and whined with distrust.
“He’ll wait here,” I said. “He never runs off.”
“I want him in the car,” Stevenson said icily. “There’s a leash law in this town, Snow. We never enforce it with you. We always turn our heads, pretend not to see, because of…because a dog is exempted if he belongs to a disabled person.”
I didn’t antagonize Stevenson by rejecting the term
disabled.
Anyway, I was interested less in that one word than in the six words I was sure he had almost said before catching himself:
because of who your mother was.