Lightfall (24 page)

A minute or two, and they'd all sat down with their bundles on their laps. Treasure chest in hand, Michael came down into the aisle and watched them look over longingly. It seemed there could hardly be anyone left in the village. There were surely a hundred fifty here. This did not include the children, whom he'd already given leave to miss all meetings.

No one made any move to talk, though clearly they were clustered mate with mate, family to family. The bonding instinct filled him with fury. More than he loathed their pocked and wizened bodies, he recoiled from the homing sentiment. Why did they ever go to sea at all if they couldn't stand the distances? It would take him the better part of an hour to feed so many. Then they would all go through the phase of drunkenness and dancing, till they drove him crazy laughing. What did he owe them fathering for? He didn't need a crew. He wasn't going back.

He opened the box and peered inside. His face lit up with delight. Then, not even thinking, he tipped it upside down and let the scum spill out onto the floor. He could feel them tense like a pack of dogs, but they didn't stir. He stepped in the ooze and slowly stamped his feet till it gushed between his toes. He mashed it into the old stone floor. It slicked and then drank in, as if its truest medium were deep within the earth. The ocher stain against the slate made a pool like a spot of sun.

All through the room they panted for it. Spit rolled off their lower lips. If nothing else, he loved them for their hunger. Then he said: “Today is the day you rid your land of houses. You understand?”

In every row they nodded up and down, with a motion that was strangely slack. They didn't have the energy. Their limbs looked rubbery; they slumped like dolls. They couldn't say no to him, though they hadn't the strength to swallow. He had tossed out their last hope of going blank. Some even cried, without a sound.

“I want it to look like nothing has ever been here,” Michael said. “The way it was before.”

With that he nodded back at them, in a kind of courtly bow. Then he drifted up the aisle toward the doors. It was all they needed. They surged from their seats and lunged at the spot he had spoken from. Those in the very first row, the aged, knelt in a circle around the stain and bowed and kissed it like a shrine. They tongued up the crumbs and swooned in a moment, before the next fanatic wave could come and pull them off. They fell aside in a fetal crouch, grinning from ear to ear.

The strongest were soon in front. They pushed their way through the others like troopers, straight-arming and using their boots. When they reached the place, they bent in a huddle—eight or nine men from the ranger corps. They scraped at the stone with their fingernails and lifted enough in chips and shavings to feed their immense desire. Their next impulse, as the others began to crowd them in and clamor for a share, was protection of the source. They turned to face the hungry, locked in a ring like warriors.

But they had no weapons, and the drug had begun to wear their edges off. They mauled and pummeled the nearest weaklings—one gouged out his sister's eye—but they couldn't seem to keep their minds on the violence at hand. They were full of seaborne dreams and the plunder of mountain empires. A break occurred in the circle. Immediately, a dozen parishioners swarmed about on the floor, tongues lolled out like crazies. They beat their fists on the stone, as if pleading to be entombed. The rangers soon surrendered. They clapped their arms around one another and wept for the wars they used to win.

Michael, for whom the crowd had parted like a wave, stood in the door of his temple and watched. For all the devouring madness of the crush, the only sound he heard was whimpering. Though the villagers threw themselves into the pile, groping and pulling, they'd already given up the notion of finding any morsel. They were in it as much for the fighting now, each one out to satisfy a hatred old as time. They seethed at their rotten neighbors. Went after their bosses and landlords. Naked to them was delicious, for all the nail marks showed, the welts, the bites, the bruises.

Before he knew it, Michael was swamped by lust. As he turned to go, he suddenly felt he was falling over. He looked down to find a whole family, four or five at least, slavering at his feet. They were trying to suck the residue off his toes. They reached their hands to caress his legs, and he teetered backward, seized with a fear of drowning. Arthur Huck had to pull him away and out the door to safety.

Rabid though they were, they didn't try to follow. For the moment the world beyond the church was nothing. They spun around and waded into the fray. The pulsing mass of bodies pulled them forward. It seemed as if no one could leave till every spore was clawed from the ancient stone.

“You must punish them, master,” the mayor said, inching close to speak in his ear. “They defile this holy ground.”

Michael shook off the other's damp hand where it clung to his upper arm. Then he swatted at Arthur's half-swelled organ, and the mayor blushed and stepped away. “I want it
stripped
,” said Michael savagely, jerking a thumb at the church. “Benches, prayer books, candles—everything. Rip out the woodwork. Burn the linen. When I get back, I want it empty.”

“Can't I come with you?”

The prophet looked over coldly. “What?”

Arthur shuffled backward toward the door. Poor man, he only meant to serve. He'd have given almost anything to be his captain's bodyguard. Yet he had no choice but to turn and fight his way back in, wincing at the chaos that had torn his people open. The fire of his wrath grew huge as he bellowed for order and beat at the herd. In his heart he would have gladly made a throne room of this chapel, but his master wanted a naked cell, so a monkish air possessed him. He pulled down the cross off the altar. He swept away the communion silver. Then he turned to flog the rabble, to rid the place of sin.

Michael lingered a moment more, bedazzled by the madness framed in the open doorway. It was easy to make a room in hell: the people were so ready. Those who'd had the barest taste of fungus were doubled up with laughter, slumped against the walls. The wounded were down on their hands and knees, bumping about like blinded pigs. A few spilled what blood they could, one-on-one, like dancers—riddling all their partners' flesh with a crazed bare-handed hammering. Arthur grabbed up the window pole and drove them into the corners. He shrieked like a foreman, threatening a string of tortures. By noon, thought Michael, the exorcism would be over with. His fort would at last be purified of hope.

The village was wonderfully quiet now. He loped up the street and turned to count the number of his houses. Of the twenty he could see along the knoll, sixteen were already his. Two stood firm on the other side, and two more remained no-man's-land, with the holdouts locked in the basement. He started up the nearest lane and tried to think what he wanted. A woman? A man? Did he wish to claim more property? Dozens of laws still wanted breaking. Some sort of killing, perhaps.

No, nothing. He wanted nothing.

He turned to gaze at the aimless sea. The long gray years of the future stretched in ripples to the far horizon. If she wouldn't go with him, he might have to live alone forever. The country of his dreams was just another exile. His voyage had no end but her.

“I love you,” she whispered behind him, so close he could feel her breath on his neck.

As he turned to claim his kingdom, his eyes swept the cliffs like a skimming bird. The light was blinding clear. He gathered her in his arms and bent and kissed her throat. Her yellow dress, soft as the fall of summer, stirred him so deep that he began to sob. He grasped her close and ran his hands all over, as if to make sure there was nothing broken. He fell to his knees. He buried his face against her. As she held his head and stroked his hair, she hushed his dread with a murmur low as the wind in the pines. He drank in her smell. Dragged her down.

“Michael—darling.” She gasped as he rolled on top of her. She gripped his hair in both her hands and arched her hips against him. “Let's go now,” she whispered. “Trust me, Michael. We can fly.”

He froze as if at the hiss of a snake. The sweat sprang cold across his neck. One hand was already under her dress, ripping her pants off. Now he let go like a priest come back to his senses. He shifted his weight to the elbow on the ground and lifted off her. He knew who it was. He turned his lonely eyes and raked her face. It was Judith Quinn, the doctor's wife, and she stunk like death itself.

“What is it?”

He didn't answer. He merely came to his feet and sniffed the morning air. The woods beyond the town were winter ripe. They beckoned him in with secret trails. As he lurched away and stumbled up the grass, he didn't even recognize the name she sang out after him. He was sure he was no one
she'd
ever heard of.

He ought to have known they'd mock him with phantoms. He covered his ears and leaped from rock to rock across a stream. He didn't so much as glance over his shoulder to see it with all its streets intact. He couldn't bear it, not till they made things wild again. He staggered up the mossy bank. It was only there in the old world that his dream would come to earth. Only when they were all alone would she see him for who he was.

He trotted across the meadow, through a grove of knee-high ferns. Ahead, the edge of the woods was alive with pacing beasts. They cooed and whirred excitedly, and when he reached the trees, they fell into place beside him as he ran. They didn't presume to choose the path or beg to be taken along. They went as a kind of escort, mostly. Somehow he didn't mind them, the way he did the villagers. Perhaps because they were different kinds, and men were all the same.

He came to a field of bright blue flowers, waving above an undergrowth of clover. The air was abuzz with honeybees, with moths the size of his fist. He was restless, angry, sick of power. He threw himself down and rolled about, as if to make a burrow deep in the woodland green. He tried to think if they'd ever spoken love to each other. Of course he couldn't recall. Beyond her face, he remembered nothing. He writhed in the thick-grown grass, mad to be something else besides a man. He felt, with a searing pain in his loins, how alien he was next to all this life that rooted in the ground. He floated free as a severed child, dying of the world.

He was fast asleep before he knew how perfectly they watched him. The big cats sat like sentinels, in a circle around his huddled form. A fox walked back and forth, peering anxiously into the trees. An owl came down and landed by his shoulder, asking nothing. All of them were waiting: bucks and does, bulls and cows; they couldn't break free of the forest till the day had gone to night. Though their coats and spotted skins brushed against one another with a rustle like silk, they scarcely connected, beast to beast. They didn't cry out. Didn't even growl.

At the clearing's edge, a giraffe had buried his head to feed in a bush. A kangaroo stood under him for shade. All the old forms—the hunters, the hunted, the staking of ground—had vanished. The fish were tanked by the millions in the tide below the cliffs. The air was clouded just to the north with a whole encyclopedia of creatures of the air. They only knew this naked man was master of the revels. If he could wait, then so could they. They had all the time in the world.

A lone clarinet was wailing on the veranda, beneath an arc of jasmine that had just gone blooming, four months early. Everything was slightly out of synch this Sunday morning. The radio said they were due for a blow, eight weeks after the hurricane season had given in. It was very, very hot on the mossy lawns of Esplanade. The man with the horn hadn't played in years. He was ninety-three. In his one locked drawer in the St. Charles Home, he kept a sepia picture of himself, with a band he founded back in 1910. All the others were dead. He'd sold his horn for a song maybe fifteen years ago.

But New Orleans wasn't the only place where things were turning queer in the upper air. Deep in the South Bronx there was an area six blocks square, mostly uninhabited, where the temperature dropped at night to ten below. In a town in the coal slags west of Scranton, the hail fell black for two nights straight. Out on the high Dakotas, little tornadoes took a house here, a school bus there, in a dozen random incidents. But New Orleans was the biggest place—the one most on the map. Since late the previous afternoon, the city had gone haywire. Crimes of passion. Virus. Fires.

For the most part everyone simply drank a little more, by way of compensation. Those who didn't stayed in bed, complaining of the weather. The French Quarter took in stride the lower forms of hallucination. Saturday nights were always bad, and Sundays had always started slow, since before the Civil War. The general level of hangover covered a multitude of sins.

The old man had been playing for an hour when the others began to emerge from the firetrap mansion just behind him. Most were black like he was. Most carried instruments. It took them a little while to get it right, since everyone had to have a solo—the banjo player alone was hot for fifteen minutes. Eventually, they were satisfied they had themselves a sound. They headed off the porch and up the street, one in a wheelchair, two on canes, the wizened man with the tambourine trailing tubes from both his arms. There were perhaps ten of them playing jazz, with half a dozen more singing along and clapping. They had gone four blocks—weaving through the Quarter, bringing the town to its windows—before there was any stir at the St. Charles Home.

The third-floor nurse on the women's ward went down to get a cigarette, to the second floor where the county kept the old and penniless jazz bums. This group was easy to handle. They ate like birds, they slept all day, and they moaned in pain if they were moved, so nobody ever bothered. The most that ever happened was that they died from time to time. It didn't seem especially quiet. It was always like a tomb. Still, as she went from door to door, calling out for Marsha who split the eleven-to-seven with her, she was startled to find the beds were empty.