Lightfall (30 page)

“About what?”

“You seemed so sad last night.”

Now they held the moment still, as if to take each other's measure once again. Not that there was the whisper of an accusation. What startled Iris here was not the scent of danger. She simply assumed the others hadn't noticed.

“I guess I'm more afraid of the dark than I realized,” she said. The faintest curl of a smile played about her features.

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” Maybeth replied a trifle tartly. Then she headed down the stairs as if she'd had enough.

Of what? Lies? Iris leaned over the banister and tried to think of something that would stop her. Clearly, if they weren't going to speak things plainly, woman to woman, the landlady wasn't about to jeopardize her mood. She planned to go on with her daily tasks as if days were still the gauge of life. Iris had a sudden picture of herself crashing through the kitchen, breaking everything in sight till the other looked the nightmare in the face. She mustn't let herself be lulled by all this normalcy, no matter how much she wanted it.

Live every day like you mean to live forever.

Now who did she used to say that to? A memory began to surface, whirling about in the spiral dusk of the stairs below. A room with a kind of bed, it looked like, only the people spun their dreams aloud. Why had she given such useless advice? Because they were scared of death? Well, they
ought
to be.

It had all been such a blur last night. The harvest of mussels below the light, then dinner at Mrs. Jeremy's, the midnight walk in the cliffside woods, the bonfire on the point. In the end she went along because it seemed an act of cowardice to sit it out alone. She kept looking for cracks in the festive mood. Before the night was done she had sat by all eleven of them, and one way or another, she asked them what they meant to do when darkness fell on Tuesday morning. They all said the same thing: nothing. Then they smiled and stretched in the grass, fanning their arms like angels, to watch for shooting stars. They appeared to take a certain pride in having no recourse at all.

“You coming down?” trilled Maybeth from the kitchen. “I could use another pair of hands.”

Woman's work, thought Iris in a rage. So maddened was she to find herself pinned down that she scrambled up the stairs—so fast, she fell and banged her knee. At the third-floor landing, she flung the dowdy robe to the floor and marched stark naked down the hall. So Maybeth thought she knew her boarders, did she? It was time for breakfast, was it? She flung the door open and strode into her room without a thought what lay on the other side. If she'd only been alone she'd have paced it like a lioness. She'd have gladly watched the rain for hours.

Except for Roy.

He lay there socked in the deepest sleep, one arm draped across his eyes. The sheet was down to just below his waist, so the shock of his pubic hair peeped out at her seductively. She stopped as still as a picture: if he woke up now, he'd be wanting to do it again. Automatically she began to retreat, walking backward, holding her breath so she made no noise. She loved him better than anyone now. Perhaps it was only luck, but they hadn't made a single journey that didn't bring them home again. Even as she tiptoed out, she'd have gone to him in a minute if he'd called. Why was she fleeing?

Because she couldn't bear to be overcome with joy. The laughter, the whispered asides, the idle chitchat—all of that cost too much. She recalled his touch more vividly than anything he'd said. He loved as if the nights would never end. And now it had come to this: there was no way out of the sorrow that lay on the other side. Last night, when the bonfire died, she'd led him home. For a moonlit hour they tunneled in a dream. Then she lay and watched the ceiling, hour upon hour till the dark of day.

She stepped back into the hall and shut him in. As she made her way to the stairs she choked back tears. Then she stooped to retrieve the robe, slipping it on like a wave of shame. As she gripped the rickety banister and staggered down the stairs, she sorrowed for the likes of something vanished from the earth.

“I'm coming,” she called from the landing, as if there had been no detour. As if it was just her mind that wandered.

The words rang out so sweetly, no one would have guessed the tears. She glided down the stairs, wed to a set of fatal contradictions. She loved a man she dared not go to bed with anymore. She loved the blowsy woman in the kitchen like a mother. She might as well admit it: loved them all. Yet more and more, love was a kind of impotence. There was something more she was meant to do, requiring all her courage. If she couldn't break the cycle of this love, they would all just die.

Yet she was laughing by the time she reached the bottom stair. It echoed through the boardinghouse, full and loud and glad to be home, like a daughter with a real life somewhere else. For now she would go into the kitchen and do what she was told. Grind the coffee and stir the porridge and squeeze a sack of oranges. Perhaps she felt she owed them the chance to live their final day the way they liked. Or maybe it was all a trick, like painting on a face. She wasn't sure herself.

“Don't you love the rain?” she laughed, throwing her arms around Maybeth.

The landlady stood at the old zinc counter, rolling out a crust. She squawked and shook the younger woman off, but yes she did. She laughed as bright as Iris here. She loved the rain most fearfully. She watched as Iris went to a cupboard to fetch the tin of coffee. Then the grinder above the sink. Then the measuring spoon in the middle drawer. Everything was in its place, and she'd managed to pass it on. There wasn't any question: the rain was the answer to everything. Just between the two of them, she hoped it never stopped.

As the boat heaved up and down, troughed in the dun-green waves across the rain-swept bay, it surprised him most that he hadn't come alone. For one thing, Joey's grave was a secret place. For another, the hollow skull was still a proper treasure house. Enlisted men did not come back alive from pirates' caves. All his life his observation warned him: put out the eyes of any man who stumbled on your loot.

Twice they were slammed broadside, by an uprooted tree and a dead whale. They were already swamped with half a foot of water. It only made him wonder more: why had the mayor begged to come? Didn't he know it could only end one way?

“Will,” he said gravely, bow to stern, where the pink-skinned pilot sat the tiller, huddled against the wind. “I want you to sail without me. Today. This afternoon. By sunset you'll be just a speck. Don't worry—they'll all be up there watching.”

Here he half rose in his seat and swept his hand to indicate the line of cliffs in the clouds above. He grinned as if he could see it plainly. He sat back down with a thump and for a moment glanced about like a boy on his first trip out. They passed a rock in the looming surge with a row of wincing gulls along the top. Then a long low islet, washed across with waves, that looked for all the world like a foundered ship. They had no compass. He'd issued no orders. But somehow they were closing in, and at last it lay a little off to port, the skull's blank face awash with foam like something drowning.

“There,” he said in a hollow whisper, but not so the mayor heard. It was more like the sigh of the damned, in sight of the boiling shore. When he picked up the thread of his sea tale, he hardly seemed to know what he was asking anymore. He rattled it off by rote: “You just come back in a couple of days. They'll all be dead by then. See, I don't want the men to know, Will. How could I ever go back to England if they knew?”

He stopped as if the formal speech were over with. They passed the skull and came about, and the waves were up so high, they could hardly see the hollow beneath the overhang. Then, even as they crested, just at the lip of the wave that would sweep them in, he spoke with a sudden playfulness. “You can't have this and England too,” he said with a high-pitched laugh. “One of them's got to go.”

He held his head like a prince. As they rollicked down the wave and crashed against the rock, his stomach didn't tilt a millimeter's worth. He knew his boat could never sink. He reached out to a cleft in the barnacled rock and pulled them forward hand over hand. They edged up next to the entrance, under the shrieking upper lip of the skull, till the current whirled them through to where the landing was.

Here in the dome of the rock the water was choppy, but nothing at all like the bay outside. He hopped up onto the ledge, fit as an old explorer. He grinned at the sight of Arthur, green and cramped and lost at sea, still gripping the tiller for dear life. The mayor didn't look as if he ought to leave his post.

Michael laughed as he dipped his knees to snatch the bow rope. He stretched to loop it over a spur of rock in the egg-shaped doorway. How could it be he didn't see it? A second boat was fastened there, dry as a bone inside. Sixteen feet exactly, the mirror of his own. The two hulls bumped in the moiling water, gunwale to gunwale. The place had the air of an ancient dock, at the verge of an ancient country rife with temples. Michael didn't even look at the other boat.

“I'll only be a minute,” he said. The words were oddly hollow in the dome. The last had an echo, like the rock was laughing.

Hardy and strapping, his beaded skin tingling with the weather, Michael turned and strode into the cavern. What struck him first—more even than Emery standing there—was the wondering crash of the storm outside, beating the sides of the skull like a drum. He went right over to Joey. When he brushed the old man's arm in passing, Emery gave him back the mildest smile, as if he had done no more than enter a dim-lit room.

They exhibited no attitude at all. No shock. No reach for weapons. Not even a pang of doubt. They were queer as spies, and the feeling grew with every throb of silence. Emery stood, feet apart, in one hand a tin box about the right size for fishing. It had taken him the better part of a morning to sift the shell-strewn floor for the blackened silver. Plates and idols and earrings. Bracelets of solid gold. A string of perfect dove-gray pearls, especially for Iris. He held the box deadweight at his side, his shoulder sagged like an old peddler. He smiled a smile so lazy that he might have been standing mute on his porch, counting the miles to the ocean's end.

“Dear boy,” he said, “do you never stop?”

Michael caressed the dead man's forehead. A tuft of hair came out in his hand. Unflinching, he let it float like a feather to the sea wrack at his feet. Then he turned to the thin old man with a near-coquettish glint in his eye. “Emery, old fellow,” he said, with a hearty squeeze of the other's arm, “I wish you could see the way these places work. They run themselves. You could have one in every town, I'm telling you. All you need's the building.”

“When will it clear, do you think?” asked Emery as the other swiveled to scrape up spores from the bench near Joey's head. Michael raked his nails along the stone, methodically patting the shavings into a little cake in his palm. He didn't answer. Perhaps they didn't hear each other, what with the rain and all.

“Give us a couple of children, will you?” Emery said. If he couldn't get the younger man to talk, he meant to make a few demands. “And while you're at it, keep them out of my garden. There's a couple of plants that are going to need a thousand years to flower. Remember, we must provide.”

Michael had enough now, or he couldn't hold any more in his hand. Cupping it like a blossom, he drew it to his face and sniffed it as if for purity. His voice now shrank to a whisper, shy and strangely passive. “Teach me,” he pleaded. “There isn't much time.”

“There never was.”

“But I have to go out in the
world
,” cried the prophet. “What do I tell them?”

“The magic's over,” the old man said, punctual and clear-eyed. “From now on we do it for real.”

“Do what?”

“Doesn't matter,” he scoffed dismissively. Then he wagged his finger like a moralist. “We are a fire, my boy. We just go on. Consuming things.”

It wasn't the wind alone. They were having trouble getting through—couldn't even look each other in the eye. The longer they stayed, the more they shrank and shied like son and father. They'd run out of things to say. When the shade of a movement caught them up, in the corner by the door, they turned with a clumsy gratitude to watch.

The mayor was on his knees, picking the stuff off the walls and sucking his fingers. Neither made a move to stay his hand, though clearly he was eating a hundred times his share. In fact they grew quite scholarly, observing him with sea-gray eyes. He was just a small experiment. Feeding now too fast to breathe, he squealed and snorted like an animal—though an animal would have stopped at half a cup. Before a full minute was up he pitched on his side and began to roll about in a slow convulsion.

Michael and Emery didn't move till it turned to something strictly physical. Then they started forward as if by prior arrangement. Michael set his fungus on the floor and grabbed the feet. Emery stooped and cradled the mayor's shoulders. They staggered the three steps out to the landing and tossed the body into Michael's boat. The shock of impact seemed to send the mayor deeper into spasms. Now they really hurried. Emery drew the rope from the spur of rock as Michael heaved the bow back into the current.

It sailed on out to the storm. It just cleared the hood of the overhang and made purchase in the roaring bay, when the air was split with a huge explosion. Both men fell in a heap. They covered their faces and twined their arms, but still the fallout hit them. A hail of flesh and innards broke across their huddled forms like a slick of heat in the bitter winter air. There was nothing else, not the smell of gas nor the acrid smut of powder. It was a purely spontaneous matter: the body alone, in its endless bloom, crazy to be free. Utterly predictable, given the strength of the dose.