Lightfall (7 page)

In summer it must have been beautiful. Picnic tables perched in the wayside turf. Parks were staked, and vast preserves, in which nothing irreversible could be done by men to trees. Presumably the ominous retreated when the tourists were at large. Or the whirlwinds took the summer off, to seed the next year's growth. In any case, it was not summer now. The moiling clouds were low against the gorse. The bitter roots hissed. The seabirds bellowed warning. All along the road, the sand blew in and lay in ripples on the asphalt. Everything was drift.

Michael Roman was all but asleep. The car kept roaring off across the gravel, spinning its wheels on the uphill edge of the road. The heather-blue bushes swiped at the side of the Cadillac with a sound like someone clawing on slate. His lids went up, and he jerked awake. His gaping mouth snapped shut. With a dreamlike lunge, he swung the car back on the road—then swerved with a violent wrench and shrieked to a stop. His head went crack on the windshield.

There in the mist, like a sentry barring the way, was an ice-gray wolf who would not flinch. He stood broadside across the road and raked the dying afternoon with his yellow eyes. Michael shrank in his seat. Before he could slip the car in reverse, the animal trotted up to the passenger's side, so close he could breathe on the window. He stood and locked eyes with Michael, waiting for his place. It was clear he would not brook a moment's indecision. Quickly, Michael reached across and flung the door wide so he could enter. The wolf went into a crouch and made as if to leap—when he saw the hunched-up body on the floor. Now he drew back. Shied, almost. His nose was faintly trembling. He seemed to be offended.

In a single vague maneuver, Michael picked up Ruby in his arms and dragged her with him out of the car. He lugged her off the road to the downhill slope, through a patch of burrs, and dumped her in a rain ditch, staring at the sky. By the time he scrambled up to the roadway, the wolf was in the car, one paw up on the dashboard. Michael climbed in carefully.

The smell of wildness was so rank he felt his stomach tilt. It wasn't rot, nor raw infection—more like the carnal stench of death by inches, agonizingly slow. Michael had to lean past him to pull the car door shut. The animal's fur was old and matted. His skin was aquiver with mange. A low growl boiled in his throat when Michael brushed an arm against him.

Yet the prophet felt no fear. He eased the car back on course and steered through the gathering dusk. He's mine, he thought with a drunk rapacious smile, though to anyone peering in it would have looked quite the opposite. They rode four miles in silence. Michael had no wish to stroke him, to win his trust or make him loyal. He would not, like a man with dogs, talk nonsense. What he longed to do mostly was command him.

The hedges grew thick on either side, and the night now gained a foothold. It did not seem that a town could be this far away. The loneliness was too extreme. The blasted land had long grown void of all gesture to human scale. Thus, Michael would never have seen the turnoff if the wolf hadn't started to whine. With a night hunter's luminous concentration he lowered his massive head and looked past Michael, out at the blue-gray darkness. He shook with a rage to run free. Spellbound, Michael followed the glow of his eyes. And suddenly, weird as the clefts in a dream, saw the tunnellike break in the trees.

He turned and crept down a wooded road, where the lower limbs were all torn and hanging, as if some terrible engine had barreled through to clear the way. A mile downhill he came out at the lip of a gorge. An iron bridge shot over it. Michael drove slowly across. On the island side he entered a rolling plain where the straw grass rippled in the cold sea air. The road ran switchback up the rise to an empty crest that Michael knew would outlook miles and miles of open water. He drove forward with a mounting sense of calm, as if something deeper than memory were pulling him out of the path of time.

He gained the high ground and braked on the edge at the top of the rise. His face lit up with a strange delight. The rocky meadow below swept down to a close-built village strewn across the cliffs. Perhaps half a hundred houses ringed the lower hill—dazzling white, each with a square of garden front and back. Then a single row of shops with covered porches, one or two sullen public buildings, and a church with a stunted spire. This main street, such as it was, led out to a grassy open space on the outermost point of land. There was a squat brick lighthouse set like a jewel at the tip.

Way up here where Michael was one could not see the harbor far below at the base of the cliffs. All the same, he knew it was there. For the first time since he went blank a picture bloomed in his head and stayed, so real he could hardly see around it. He had glided into that crescent harbor. He knew its every anchorage. There was a channel that ran between an enormous boulder and a loaflike headland. The boulder was thirty feet high, with tufts of weeds and three stunted pines on top. It looked like a fallen meteor. Close beside it the headland lay like a beached whale under the cliffs, a hundred yards from tip to tail. The mass of it was overspread with a violent thicket, where no one could walk. In July and August, bitter red berries flamed across it. They rotted and fell and stained the stony soil to a hue like the blood of armies.

He remembered it like a drowning man, except he didn't drown: the landing nestled between these two gigantic, other worldly forms. Then the steep trail up to the bluff, and the new world ripe for plunder. How he knew all this he couldn't say, but he let his foot off the brake with a wonderful release. He was home at last.

No one came out to welcome him. As the car sailed down the hill, he could see the place was empty. The night, the storm, the dead of winter had sent them all indoors. For the crux of his dark arrival, nothing moved in the naked village on the cliffs. Perhaps, like a seer mad with visions, he had to come by stealth.

He went in circles round and round till he had a feel for the borders of it. The windows lit. The evening meal. The chimneys sending up the sweet pale smoke of eucalyptus. He stopped at the gates to the cliff-top park. He got out and stood on the land like a sailor too long at sea. The wolf jumped through the open door and thundered by him. Michael was too glad to care. He watched the animal race across the flower beds that fronted a row of tightly ordered houses, then up the hill to the ancient pines. It didn't matter. Michael did not require his familiars by his side. He preferred them roaming the outer limits, to bring him word if the world intruded.

His work would not begin until the morning. This was his final stillness, here on the windy cliff, and he savored it like an explorer come to the end of the map. He also seemed to understand his triumph wouldn't ever be as perfect as now. He was free like the land itself tonight, because nothing could outlast him. Nothing could stand alone so long.

As if in celebration, the beacon light flashed on in the light-house on the point. It turned in a circle, bathing the startled heights with sweeps of piercing clarity. He started to walk toward it, homing like a moth, when it struck him full in the face with its naked beam. He shut his eyes and turned with a giddy smile, to see his brief and sudden shadow fall across the town. Then he looked back the way he came, not sure he hadn't dreamed his mystic passage here. Perhaps he had never left this place at all.

High in the meadow, at the crest of the hill, he saw twin lights like a pair of lanterns. They hovered there side by side. Michael started to laugh, for he guessed what it was right off. He laughed till the beam came around again and haloed him with night fire. Then he lifted his hand in a parody of welcome, or else it was some godless benediction. At least the sides were drawn, he thought. He could not see it, but still he knew.

The yellow car was here.

III

PITT'S
LANDING
was something of a company town. Of two hundred permanent residents, fully half were employed by the state, to oversee the keeping wild of Seal Rocks Park. Twenty-six square miles of coastal woodlands, a four-mile string of beaches, the last cascades of the Rotten River and its moiling spill to the sea below—all in the care of a squad of rangers who roared around in Jeeps and scouted trouble on the high ground. Fire and flood were their stock in trade. In the summer they rescued—failed to, mostly—various lunatic tourists who swam off savage rocks, fell into crevices, met up with spiders and snakes and generally lost their way. Which was why the year-round crew loved winter best of all.

They weren't all men, and they weren't all young. Women had equal standing in the ranger corps—more so here, in the lightly trafficked provinces, where the loner's plainness and resoluteness counted double. Wizened veterans, taciturn horsemen, brooders over the weather. A certain type had an instinct for the lighthouse brand of isolation. Not that they kept to themselves. Some had families. Several children were bussed to school at Orick, twelve miles north. The usual quota of aged parents came to live in the odd spare bedroom. Still, the rangers had a solitary streak: they lived deep down inside, like miners.

The other work force of the village was another matter. Scientists and technicians, they were employed at a weather-tracking station, ten miles south in Arcata Bay. Fewer in number than the parks crew—a dozen at most—but a little went a long way. To the rangers, they had no feel for the vitals of the place. They didn't roam the forests. Didn't sail. Didn't swim. They preferred to hole up in their houses whenever they weren't at work, as if it were raw Alaskan tundra just beyond the door. They listened to a lot of classical music.

Perhaps they had enough of weather, measuring rain in their calibrated barrels. After all, they lived through storms from the first puff of cirrus to the last dying rumble of thunder. The wind socks filled. Thermometers rose and fell with feverish regularity. Somehow, none of it touched them. They might have been filing it all away on a spaceship.

They had a certain hierarchy, centered around the director of the station: Dr. Upton, frail and gray, who looked as though he'd never recovered from a terrible case of frostbite. The other weathermen, steeped in his shadow, tended to take on the role of students. Bright and cutthroat, currying favor, out to be on top. The mere technicians were the lower class. They held to a certain drabness, colorless as their lab coats.

Pitt's Landing had only a handful of simple townsfolk. There was Arthur Huck, the nominal mayor and keeper of the light. Ned Dexter, harbormaster and sole proprietor of the stiff-priced general store. Miss Polly Allen, spurned in her youth and steely-eyed, held the fort at the combination town hall-library-historical society. They had a country doctor, Felix Quinn. Even a grinning idiot: Joey Barnacle, who sold live bait off a cart at the dock.

These and some few others did what they could to make things run to type. But they never got over the feeling that the rangers and the weather people both were on the order of an occupying army. Not that they could have gotten anyone else to settle in so precipitous a place, but the sense of having been cheated was a comfort. Indeed, they all kept peace, of a minimal neighborly sort. They smiled and nodded. Yet village life was clearly not as picturesque as it ought to be; this rankled.

“
I
know why you're here,” said Maybeth Blue as she set down a lumberman's breakfast,
plunk
in front of Iris. The wide veranda, flooded with morning sun, looked down on the quiet harbor. The table was set for two. “The eclipse—right?”

Iris looked up vaguely at the sun as she broke open a biscuit. Maybeth leaned on the balustrade—fifty if she was a day, but rouged and coiffed as if to go onstage just as soon as she heard her cue.

“How do you know?” Iris asked with a certain briskness, pricking the yolk of an egg.

“What the hell
else
ever happens here? Besides, you're not the first.”

“You mean that man,” said Iris, perfectly neutral, gesturing toward the empty place beside her.

“Not just him. There's half a dozen been here for days, and it's still a week away. Mrs. Thome's got a little man from Australia. Looks like a kangaroo.”

“Astronomers, I suppose.”

“Are you kidding? Nuts, more likely. Pardon
me.
”

She shuffled back across the porch and disappeared inside. Iris stopped eating and listened hard. She'd heard him come in the night before to ask for a room, just after Maybeth showed her upstairs. Though she didn't know what he sounded like—hadn't seen him floating in the light out on the point—she knew who it was instinctively. Maybeth gave him the third-floor front. Iris was one flight below, in a bow-windowed room above the harbor. She didn't sleep for hours. She kept glancing up at the ceiling—as if, like a digger insect, he might burrow through and drop to the floor and fling a web about the bed.

She woke at dawn with the same wild dream of cliffs and hurtling bodies. There was no need to dream it anymore. She dressed and raced downstairs, to be out of the house before he stirred. Not counting on the bed-and-board traditions hereabouts. The landlady stopped her and sat her down to a hearty meal. She picked at the fatty food and sipped her coffee till Maybeth went to see to Michael's plate. As soon as Iris was alone, she leaped up and went to the railing, thinking to empty her own plate into the shrubbery just below.

She didn't have to bother. A sleek gray dog with golden eyes lay dozing in the cliffside grass. “Hey!” she whispered. The dog perked up his head. She leaned out over the gingerbread rail and waved her breakfast back and forth, making clicking sounds to tempt him. Obediently, the dog came trotting over. He lolled his tongue and gulped the whole mess up in half a second.

“Good dog,” Iris said, her heart grown strangely light. She replaced the plate on the table, covered it up with her napkin, and hurried down the steps and out the gate before she was overtaken by another wave of small talk.