Lightfall (21 page)

“Yes
sir
,” the mayor replied in a clipped and toneless voice. He did not yet rise from his knees, however, for Michael had clamped a restraining hand on his shoulder. It was as if he had to hold on for dear life, squeezing his first mate black and blue while his fast hand pumped and drove him mad.

“Tell them,” hissed Michael, “I died at sea.”

And with that his loins broke open.

The spurt itself was minor enough, and once again he caught it in his hand. But the groan was more like a roar of pain, as if he'd begun to hemorrhage. The sound a man made falling. The cat leaped out of the basket and skittered away through the open door. The little wooden ships were all tipped over. Arthur Huck cast his eyes aside the instant he saw it spill, less from shame than from the sense that a man might want to be alone. Michael's cry was like some final protest over something so dead and done with that just the cry remained.

Yet it scarcely died in his throat before the numbness over spread him once again. When he saw the mayor crouched below him, his lip curled in a sneer. He held out the hand with the cum, pushing it close in Arthur's face to taunt him. Yet when the mayor dropped open his mouth to eat it like a sacrament, Michael snatched it away again, bored by the whole idea. His hip thrown out in a saucy way, he waited till Arthur lifted his head. The mayor wore the puzzled look of a man awaiting sentence.

Still that dreamless smile. The whole thing might have been a child's fool dare. Suddenly Michael lifted his palm like a cup. His tongue snaked out like a lizard, and he slurped up the little puddle like an egg. And then he laughed.

And laughed and laughed.

They were eight at the candlelit table. With the rose Limoges, the Venetian glasses, the richly worked vermeil, each place had been set to an order strict and clear as the harpsichord that sang on the old Oz gramophone. In the center stood a double strand of orchids, out of the greenhouse. Emery sat at the head, with Iris on his left, then Roy, then Felix Quinn the doctor. Maybeth Blue was stationed at the foot to be closest to the kitchen, with Dr. Upton of the weather station beside her jotting notes. Then Polly Allen, in a faded lilac dinner gown, the only one to dress. And next to her, on Emery's right, a dark-eyed boy named Jeff. Like Roy he was a ranger—just turned twenty-two, and totally wanting in company manners.

At eight
P.M.,
when they all assembled, there was a ninth as well—a tearful, grimy six-year-old who'd fled her house that afternoon. Her parents had glided away to the church at the two o'clock ringing of bells. The child had hidden under a bed. Later she tried joining up with her playmates, but they wanted to make her eat their rotten cake. Maybeth found her weeping in the barn and brought her along to Emery's when she came to do the cooking. The poor thing sobbed and sobbed, for to her the world was already over. In the end, Felix had had to give her a sedative. Now she slept in the bedroom off the kitchen, the only one asleep in all the village.

Nobody spoke at first. They passed the food and poured the wine and sized one another up. Though it didn't appear to surprise them who was there, Iris saw no evidence they'd ever met as a group before. Now was the first acknowledgment. She could tell that none of them, not even Roy, had ever guessed there might be others who didn't want a prophet. Until today, each had assumed he was utterly alone. Now, she thought, recalling something Emery said, they were suddenly in a lifeboat.

By the time the salad came, the taciturn mood began to crack. They ceased to seem like refugees, whose only strength lay in huddling close, and fell to talking to one another. Iris listened as Emery rambled on about his family. She couldn't really hear what the others were saying, but found she didn't care. As long as they were making free with everything they knew, it didn't much matter who they said it to. She wasn't out to possess them. She had arrived at Emery's house full of gloom and desperation, because no one had come to talk to her all afternoon. The church bell had rung at two and then again at five. Though she snapped at Roy that she didn't want to know, he told her anyway. Fifty had turned out for Michael's vespers.

Clearly, the prophet was winning.

All through dinner Roy kept coming back to her, as if to give her comfort. Twice he grazed his fingers along her inner thigh. He pressed his knee against hers. All of it surreptitious, therefore thrilling. She constantly glanced across at Polly to make sure they weren't flaunting it.

She saw how easy it would be to lose herself. Already she seemed to prefer to think of him, of the long hour they had spent in bed, beached till noon in a heavy-lidded slumber. No one else had ever tried him. She didn't see how she could stop herself from plotting where it went from here. Would they spend the night? If they did—if they just kept going—how could they stand to lose it three days hence, when the crisis came?

Dessert and coffee were in the parlor. A fire snapped in the grate, and a pair of spaniels dozed on the hearth. The eight of them filled the room as tightly as a family. Modest in scale like the rest of the house, the room gave little indication of the stature of Emery's forebears. He must have had all his assets in the bank. Or perhaps it was a point of pride that no one at The Landing lived in anything grander than the rest. They didn't waste time outdoing one another.

For a while she was stuck with Dr. Upton, who would not bend an inch. He knew so much about eclipses that he disdained as pure hysteria the sudden change that seized the village. He expected to return to his white-tiled lab on Tuesday morning. Once the thing was passed they would all see it was nothing but phenomena. Every aspect could be measured to the decimal. He did not deny there was something going on in people's heads, but on the planetary scale it hardly mattered. As to the broken bridge and the downed lines, he had been through half a dozen wars and revolutions. He was used to inconvenience.

“Just an excuse for a holiday,” he sniffed at Iris over his shortly cake. “They can't conceive of a thing this big, so what do they do? they develop symptoms. Don't you agree, Doctor?”

No, she did not. She stirred her coffee and looked about, trying to catch somebody's eye. She said: “But aren't people always a little crazy during an eclipse?”

“Ah, but that's exactly what I mean—it hasn't
happened
yet. In the ancient cultures you speak of, they had no preparation. Of
course
it looked like the end of the world. But it's not like an earthquake, you know. There's no preliminary activity.” His thin lips pouted disdainfully. “Don't you see? The villagers are all just having a game of apocalypse. It's really rather pathetic.”

He bent to the table of sweets and ladled another dollop of whipped cream onto his berries. Maybeth bustled over to make sure there was still enough. Iris couldn't tell if she'd always been this way—treating the world like a vast church supper—or whether it was events that brought out her nurturing instincts. Whatever it was, she seemed to fill everyone with relief. They clung to the formal order of the evening. Iris watched as Emery passed among them, offering brandy from a lacquered tray. Everyone said yes.

“You aren't eating,” Maybeth accused her, casting an eye at the black of her coffee as if she itched to drop in a couple of lumps.

“I'm full,” said Iris, smiling. “You've fed me three different times today.”

“You live on air, is that it?” The landlady sidled close, cutting off Dr. Upton. He had to take his second helping elsewhere. “
I
know why,” said Maybeth coyly. “It's because you're in love, isn't it?”

“What are you talking about?” retorted Iris, glancing up to see who'd heard. Roy and Jeff were huddled at the window, setting up gunsights, it looked like. She tried to catch the lazy, antic tone of the other woman. “We hardly know each other,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” scoffed Maybeth. “You don't hide it any better than he does.”

As Iris met the older woman's deep-black, glistening eyes, she grew puzzled and suddenly tongue-tied. In some quite tangible way she wished she could make a scene and throw it back in the landlady's face. If only they'd leave her alone.

“Three days from now,” Iris said, “it isn't going to matter.”

“Oh, yes it is,” replied the other, and turned once more to her row of desserts.

Maybeth wiped the cake knife clean of frosting, licking the residue off her thumb. Then she brushed up a litter of crumbs around the pie, pinching them up with her fingers and sprinkling the whole lot into her apron pocket. She hadn't been nearly so optimistic yesterday, thought Iris. As late as this afternoon, she had stood quite rigid on the stairs when Roy and Iris passed. What was it that turned her around?

“You've probably noticed,” said Maybeth dryly, “most of us have to do without. Don't ask me why. I hope you don't think we're nuns or something. Believe me, there's nights I sit up half crazy.”

Even if Iris didn't know what to say, she could see that Maybeth hadn't any demands to make of her. She registered no protest over fate. Neither did she whine, nor seethe with a rage of jealousy. She even appeared to derive a certain strength from Iris's success. What was queer was the notion that Iris ought to claim some sort of victory. What about the larger task of saving everyone? Surely that was the only triumph worth the celebrating.

“Ah, well, I never lose hope,” said the landlady, irrepressibly gay. She called across the room. “Felix, all you've had is a sliver of cake. You on a diet?”

The doctor laughed. “I was just catching my breath,” he said. “I'll be right there.”

“You might as well eat while you can. The portions are awfully small on the other side.”

The landlady threw back her head and laughed. Felix left his place by the bookcase, where he'd just dipped fifteen pages into Gibbon. He smiled at the carpet as he started forward. Iris moved off nimbly so as to leave the two alone. There was no question what the landlady wanted. Without any warning, the party had reached the stage of assignations. For an instant Iris nearly blushed.

She stationed herself in the chimney corner and watched things even closer. Dr. Upton took a seat on the wide upholstered arm of Polly's chair. The spinster was perched on the edge of her seat, smoothing the pleats of her tea gown and looking as if she would die of shyness. The meteorologist bent down close, droning the very same facts with which he had bored Iris. He ran his spoon around his empty plate, catching up bits of shortcake. He didn't look any more carnal than Polly. They were stilted as adolescents at a dance.

It was all her imagination, Iris tried to tell herself. She'd never have seen the evening quite this way if she hadn't herself been so preoccupied. She was mirroring them in motives of her own. Yet just in the last few moments she saw that both couples had gone another step. The doctor and the landlady stood at the sweet tray, hardly speaking. Maybeth gravely piled his plate with tarts and cookies and a spoon of pudding. Their silence was more telling than a string of low endearments. Polly was showing Dr. Upton a raft of brittle photographs—the village a hundred years ago, intercut with endless stiff and frowning portraits. Emery Oz's ancient clan. There was an air of near-Victorian propriety in the gesture, as Polly let the pictures drop one by one into a shoebox.

The landlady, Iris thought, was a good deal closer to getting her man in bed.

She couldn't see why the idea of it agitated her so. It was as if she felt betrayed to find the impulse taking root in someone else. Did she want it all to herself? At least, she thought, she had the sense to keep things in their places. These solitary women of the village didn't know enough to hold their feelings separate. Their making love would only serve to send them all astray.

Just then, Polly looked over and saw her staring. Though Iris quickly glanced aside, the spinster lost the rhythm of her little show of pictures. She stopped abruptly, and her hand fell to her lap. Dr. Upton, thinking she had come to one that filled her with nostalgia, plucked the print out of her hand. Iris tried to catch Polly's eye, to apologize for spying, but the other had suffered a setback. She sat closed in and looked at nothing. The meteorologist didn't appear to know how to start it up again. The thread was all but broken.

Iris made a move to join them, to see what she could salvage, but she hadn't gone two paces before the door burst open from the kitchen. It's come, thought Iris, as she turned to see the shock on Emery's face.

“She's gone!” the old man exclaimed, in an agony of pathos.

Harriet
flashed through Iris's mind, though of course she knew who he meant. They all did. No one asked a single question. When Emery turned and headed back, they rose as one and followed, as if no one dared to stay in the parlor alone.

They straggled across the kitchen and stood in a clump at the door to the maid's room. The little girl's bed was empty. The blankets, the sheets, the pillows—everything was gone. The window stood open, and the curtains swayed with a sea breeze off the moonlit downs. Whoever had taken her must have wrapped her in the bedclothes.

“What's that?” said Maybeth, pointing at the naked mattress.

They drew up close and ringed it round. In the center was a pile of crumbs, all finely sifted to form a cone. It seemed to be some sort of residue. Emery leaned close to investigate. Perhaps because he was the one trespassed upon, he did not flinch from the evidence. He reached out and took a pinch and brought it close to his nose.

“Cake,” he said.

He put out his tongue to take a lick, and Maybeth hissed and gripped his shirt to stop him. He would have done it anyway, but a singsong noise drifted in at the window, so he turned. He looked so startled, the others glided forward. They huddled together and peered at the night, their fingers lightly grazing one another. Some had to crane to get a good look.