One of the orderlies said to the other, “I better get upstairs before someone starts wondering what’s taking me so long.” He walked away, toward the far end of the garage.
The collapsible legs on the first gurney folded up with a hard clatter as the bald man shoved it into the back of his van.
Sandy opened the rear door on the hearse as the remaining orderly arrived with the second gurney. On this one, evidently, was another opaque vinyl bag containing the body of the nameless vagrant.
A sense of unreality overcame me—that I should find myself in these strange circumstances. I could almost believe that I had somehow fallen into a dream without first falling into sleep.
The cargo-hold doors on the van slammed shut. Turning my head to the left, I watched the bald man’s shoes as he approached the driver’s door.
The orderly would wait here to close the big roll-up after the two vehicles departed. If I stayed under the hearse, I would be discovered when Sandy drove away.
I didn’t know which of the two orderlies had remained behind, but it didn’t matter. I was relatively confident that I could get the better of either of the young men who had wheeled my father away from his deathbed.
If Sandy Kirk glanced at his rear-view mirror as he drove out of the garage, however, he might see me. Then I would have to contend with both him and the orderly.
The engine of the van turned over.
As Sandy and the orderly shoved the gurney into the back of the hearse, I eeled out from under that vehicle. My cap was knocked off. I snatched it up and, without daring to glance toward the rear of the hearse, crabbed eight feet to the open door of the cold-holding chamber.
Inside this bleak room, I scrambled to my feet and hid behind the door, pressing my back to the concrete wall.
No one in the garage cried out in alarm. Evidently I had not been seen.
I realized that I was holding my breath. I let it out with a long hiss between clenched teeth.
My light-stung eyes were watering. I blotted them on the backs of my hands.
Two walls were occupied by over-and-under rows of stainless-steel morgue drawers in which the air was even colder than in the holding chamber itself, where the temperature was low enough to make me shiver. Two cushionless wooden chairs stood to one side. The flooring was white porcelain tile with tight grout joints for easy cleaning if a body bag sprang a leak.
Again, there were overhead fluorescent tubes, too many of them, and I tugged my Mystery Train cap far down on my brow. Surprisingly, the sunglasses in my shirt pocket had not been broken. I shielded my eyes.
A percentage of ultraviolet radiation penetrates even a highly rated sunscreen. I had sustained more exposure to hard light in the past hour than during the entire previous year. Like the hoofbeats of a fearsome black horse, the perils of cumulative exposure thundered through my mind.
From beyond the open door, the van’s engine roared. The roar swiftly receded, fading to a grumble, and the grumble became a dying murmur.
The Cadillac hearse followed the van into the night. The big motorized garage door rolled down and met the sill with a solid blow that echoed through the hospital’s subterranean realms, and in its wake, the echo shook a trembling silence out of the concrete walls.
I tensed, balling my hands into fists.
Although he was surely still in the garage, the orderly made no sound. I imagined him, head cocked with curiosity, staring at my father’s suitcase.
A minute ago I had been sure that I could overpower this man. Now my confidence ebbed. Physically, I was more than his equal—but he might possess a ruthlessness that I did not.
I didn’t hear him approaching. He was on the other side of the open door, inches from me, and I became aware of him only because the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the porcelain tile when he crossed the threshold.
If he came all the way inside, a confrontation was inevitable. My nerves were coiled as tight as clockwork mainsprings.
After a disconcertingly long hesitation, the orderly switched off the lights. He pulled the door shut as he backed out of the room.
I heard him insert a key in the lock. The dead bolt snapped into place with a sound like the hammer of a heavy-caliber revolver driving the firing pin into an empty chamber.
I doubted that any corpses occupied the chilled morgue drawers. Mercy Hospital—in quiet Moonlight Bay—doesn’t crank out the dead at the frenetic pace with which the big institutions process them in the violence-ridden cities.
Even if breathless sleepers were nestled in all these stainless-steel bunks, however, I wasn’t nervous about being with them. I will one day be as dead as any resident of a graveyard—no doubt sooner than will other men of my age. The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.
I
did
dread the light, and now the perfect darkness of this cool windowless room was, to me, like quenching water to a man dying of thirst. For a minute or longer I relished the absolute blackness that bathed my skin, my eyes.
Reluctant to move, I remained beside the door, my back against the wall. I half expected the orderly to return at any moment.
Finally I took off my sunglasses and slipped them into my shirt pocket again.
Although I stood in blackness, through my mind spun bright pinwheels of anxious speculation.
My father’s body was in the white van. Bound for a destination that I could not guess. In the custody of people whose motivations were utterly incomprehensible to me.
I couldn’t imagine any logical reason for this bizarre corpse swap—except that the cause of Dad’s death must not have been as straightforward as cancer. Yet if my father’s poor dead bones could somehow incriminate someone, why wouldn’t the guilty party let Sandy Kirk’s crematorium destroy the evidence?
Apparently they needed his body.
For what?
A cold dew had formed inside my clenched fists, and the back of my neck was damp.
The more I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in the garage, the less comfortable I felt in this lightless way station for the dead. These peculiar events stirred primitive fears so deep in my mind that I could not even discern their shape as they swam and circled in the murk.
A murdered hitchhiker would be cremated in my father’s place. But why kill a harmless vagrant for this purpose? Sandy could have filled the bronze memorial urn with ordinary wood ashes, and I would have been convinced that they were human. Besides, it was unlikely in the extreme that I would ever pry open the sealed urn once I received it—unlikelier still that I would submit the powdery contents for laboratory testing to determine their composition and true source.
My thoughts seemed tangled in a tightly woven mesh. I couldn’t thrash loose.
Shakily, I withdrew the lighter from my pocket. I hesitated, listening for furtive sounds on the far side of the locked door, and then I struck a flame.
I would not have been surprised to see an alabaster corpse silently risen from its steel sarcophagus, standing before me, face greasy with death and glimmering in the butane lambency, eyes wide but blind, mouth working to impart secrets but producing not even a whisper. No cadaver confronted me, but serpents of light and shadow slipped from the fluttering flame and purled across the steel panels, imparting an illusion of movement to the drawers, so that each receptacle appeared to be inching outward.
Turning to the door, I discovered that to prevent anyone from being accidentally locked in the cold-holding room, the dead bolt could be disengaged from within. On this side, no key was required; the lock could be operated with a simple thumbturn.
I eased the dead bolt out of the striker plate as quietly as possible. The doorknob creaked softly.
The silent garage was apparently deserted, but I remained alert. Someone could be concealed behind one of the supporting columns, the paramedics’ van, or the panel truck.
Squinting against the dry rain of fluorescent light, I saw to my dismay that my father’s suitcase was gone. The orderly must have taken it.
I did not want to cross the hospital basement to the stairs by which I had descended. The risk of encountering one or both of the orderlies was too great.
Until they opened the suitcase and examined the contents, they might not realize whose property it was. When they found my father’s wallet with his ID, they would know I had been here, and they would be concerned about what, if anything, I might have heard and seen.
A hitchhiker had been killed not because he had known anything about their activities, not because he could incriminate them, but merely because they needed a body to cremate for reasons that still escaped me. With those who posed a genuine threat to them, they would be merciless.
I pressed the button that operated the wide roll-up. The motor hummed, the chain drive jerked taut overhead, and that big segmented door ascended with a frightful clatter. I glanced nervously around the garage, expecting to see an assailant break from cover and rush toward me.
When the door was more than halfway open, I stopped it with a second tap of the button and then brought it down again with a third. As it descended, I slipped under the door and into the night.
Tall pole lamps shed a brass-cold, muddy yellow light on the driveway that sloped up from the subterranean garage. At the top of the drive, the parking lot was also cast in this sullen radiance, which was like the frigid glow that might illuminate an anteroom to some precinct of Hell where punishment involved an eternity of ice rather than fire.
As much as possible, I moved through landscape zones, in the nightshade of camphor trees and pines.
I fled across the narrow street into a residential neighborhood of quaint Spanish bungalows. Into an alleyway without streetlamps. Past the backs of houses bright with windows. Beyond the windows were rooms where strange lives, full of infinite possibility and blissful ordinariness, were lived beyond my reach and almost beyond my comprehension.
Frequently, I feel weightless in the night, and this was one of those times. I ran as silently as the owl flies, gliding on shadows.
This sunless world had welcomed and nurtured me for twenty-eight years, had been always a place of peace and comfort to me. But now for the first time in my life, I was plagued by the feeling that some predatory creature was pursuing me through the darkness.
Resisting the urge to look over my shoulder, I picked up my pace and sprinted-raced-streaked-
flew
through the narrow backstreets and darkways of Moonlight Bay.
TWO
THE EVENING
5
I have seen photographs of California pepper trees in sunlight. When brightly limned, they are lacy, graceful, green dreams of trees.
At night, the pepper acquires a different character from the one that it reveals in daylight. It appears to hang its head, letting its long branches droop to conceal a face drawn with care or grief.
These trees flanked the long driveway to Kirk’s Funeral Home, which stood on a three-acre knoll at the northeast edge of town, inland of Highway 1 and reached by an overpass. They waited like lines of mourners, paying their respects.
As I climbed the private lane, on which low mushroom-shaped landscape lamps cast rings of light, the trees stirred in a breeze. The friction between wind and leaves was a whispery lamentation.
No cars were parked along the mortuary approach, which meant that no viewings were in progress.
I myself travel through Moonlight Bay only on foot or on my bicycle. There is no point in learning to drive a car. I couldn’t use it by day, and by night I would have to wear sunglasses to spare myself the sting of oncoming headlights. Cops tend to frown on night driving with shades, no matter how cool you look.
The full moon had risen.
I like the moon. It illuminates without scorching. It burnishes what is beautiful and grants concealment to what is not.
At the broad crown of the hill, the blacktop looped back on itself to form a spacious turnaround with a small grassy circle at its center. In the circle was a cast-concrete reproduction of Michelangelo’s
Pietà.
The body of the dead Christ, cradled on his mother’s lap, was luminous with reflected moonlight. The Virgin also glowed faintly. In sunshine, this crude replica must surely look unspeakably tacky.
Faced with terrible loss, however, most mourners find comfort in assurances of universal design and meaning, even when as clumsily expressed as in this reproduction. One thing I love about people is their ability to be lifted so high by the smallest drafts of hope.
I stopped under the portico of the funeral home, hesitating because I couldn’t assess the danger into which I was about to leap.
The massive two-story Georgian house—red brick with white wood trim—would have been the loveliest house in town, were the town not Moonlight Bay. A spaceship from another galaxy, perched here, would have looked no more alien to our coastline than did Kirk’s handsome pile. This house needed elms, not pepper trees, drear heavens rather than the clear skies of California, and periodic lashings with rains far colder than those that would drench it here.
The second floor, where Sandy lived, was dark.
The viewing rooms were on the ground floor. Through beveled, leaded panes that flanked the front door, I saw a weak light at the back of the house.
I rang the bell.
A man entered the far end of the hallway and approached the door. Although he was only a silhouette, I recognized Sandy Kirk by his easy walk. He moved with a grace that enhanced his good looks.
He reached the foyer and switched on both the interior lights and the porch lights. When he opened the door, he seemed surprised to see me squinting at him from under the bill of my cap.
“Christopher?”
“Evening, Mr. Kirk.”
“I’m so very sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man.”
“Yes. Yes, he was.”
“We’ve already collected him from the hospital. We’re treating him just like family, Christopher, with the utmost respect—you can be sure of that. I took his course in twentieth-century poetry at Ashdon. Did you know that?”
“Yes, of course.”
“From him I learned to love Eliot and Pound. Auden and Plath. Beckett and Ashbery. Robert Bly. Yeats. All of them. Couldn’t tolerate poetry when I started the course—couldn’t live without it by the end.”
“Wallace Stevens. Donald Justice. Louise Glück. They were his personal favorites.”
Sandy smiled and nodded. Then: “Oh, excuse me, I forgot.”
Out of consideration for my condition, he extinguished both the foyer and porch lights.
Standing on the dark threshold, he said, “This must be terrible for you, but at least he isn’t suffering anymore.”
Sandy’s eyes were green, but in the pale landscape lighting, they looked as smooth-black as certain beetles’ shells.
Studying his eyes, I said, “Could I see him?”
“What—your father?”
“I didn’t turn the sheet back from his face before they took him out of his room. Didn’t have the heart for it, didn’t think I needed to. Now…I’d really like just one last look.”
Sandy Kirk’s eyes were like a placid night sea. Below the unremarkable surface were great teeming depths.
His voice remained that of a compassionate courtier to the bereaved. “Oh, Christopher…I’m sorry, but the process has begun.”
“You’ve already put him in the furnace?”
Having grown up in a business conducted with a richness of euphemisms, Sandy winced at my bluntness. “The deceased is in the cremator, yes.”
“Wasn’t that terribly quick?”
“In our work, there’s no wisdom in delay. If only I’d known you were coming…”
I wondered if his beetle-shell eyes would be able to meet mine so boldly if there had been enough light for me to see their true green color.
Into my silence, he said, “Christopher, I’m so distressed by this, seeing you in this pain, knowing I could have helped.”
In my odd life, I have had much experience of some things and little of others. Although I am a foreigner to the day, I know the night as no one else can know it. Although I have been the object on which ignorant fools have sometimes spent their cruelty, most of my understanding of the human heart comes from my relationships with my parents and with those good friends who, like me, live primarily between sunset and dawn; consequently, I have seldom encountered hurtful deception.
I was embarrassed by Sandy’s deceit, as though it shamed not merely him but also me, and I couldn’t meet his obsidian stare any longer. I lowered my head and gazed at the porch floor.
Mistaking my embarrassment for tongue-binding grief, he stepped onto the porch and put one hand on my shoulder.
I managed not to recoil.
“My business is comforting folks, Christopher, and I’m good at it. But truthfully—I have no words that make sense of death or make it easier to bear.”
I wanted to kick his ass.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, realizing that I had to get away from him before I did something rash.
“What I hear myself saying to most folks is all the platitudes you’d never find in the poetry your dad loved, so I’m not going to repeat them to you, not to you of all people.”
Keeping my head down, nodding, I eased backward, out from under his hand. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk. I’m sorry to’ve bothered you.”
“You didn’t bother me. Of course you didn’t. I only wish you’d called ahead. I’d have been able to…delay.”
“Not your fault. It’s all right. Really.”
Having backed off the stepless brick porch onto the blacktop under the portico, I turned away from Sandy.
Retreating once more to that doorway between two darknesses, he said, “Have you given any thought to the service—when you want to hold it, how you want it conducted?”
“No. No, not yet. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
As I walked away, Sandy said, “Christopher, are you all right?”
Facing him from a little distance this time, I spoke in a numb, inflectionless voice that was only half calculated: “Yeah. I’m all right. I’ll be okay. Thanks, Mr. Kirk.”
“I wish you had called ahead.”
Shrugging, I jammed my hands in my jacket pockets, turned from the house once more, and walked past the
Pietà.
Flecks of mica were in the mix from which the replica had been poured, and the big moon glimmered in those tiny chips, so that tears appeared to shimmer on the cheeks of Our Lady of Cast Concrete.
I resisted the urge to glance back at the undertaker. I was certain he was still watching me.
I continued down the lane between the forlorn, whispering trees. The temperature had fallen only into the low sixties. The onshore breeze was pure after its journey across thousands of miles of ocean, bearing nothing but the faintest whiff of brine.
Long after the slope of the driveway had taken me out of Sandy’s line of sight, I looked back. I could see just the steeply pitched roof and chimneys, somber forms against the star-salted sky.
I moved off the blacktop onto grass, and I headed uphill again, this time in the sheltering shadows of foliage. The pepper trees braided the moon in their long tresses.