Lightfall (33 page)

They headed for the lighthouse to take shelter from the aching shock of light. Roy broke free, ran ahead and opened the door. Iris longed to follow him but feared he would name the thing she'd done, and that would be the end of them. So she went with the sway of the cart, as it dug long tracks in the grass and flung up luminous buried shells. She took a deep breath to calm herself, before the real ordeal began. Then Maybeth leaned up close and touched her, shoulder to shoulder.

“Iris, why?”

With awful dread, she turned to face the question. She owed the landlady better than lies. For days now Maybeth had led her out of the dark, telling all the customs of the country. She deserved to be paid in kind. Yet as soon as Iris saw her eyes, she knew it was nothing serious. Maybeth was just bewildered and needed a little reassurance. Even now, with blood on the daughter's hands, there was no hint of accusation.

“Trust me,” Iris said in a husky whisper. She hardly believed it herself.

“Of course,” retorted Maybeth tartly, hurt to think there was any doubt. “Just let us be free, will you? You owe us nothing.” Here she demurred and looked down at the body. A deep frown creased her face. “Go home and be happy.”

No answer seemed required. Besides, there was something of an incline here, and they had to throw their shoulders in and heave if they ever meant to reach the moonstruck tower. Roy came back to help, taking hold of the pull rope at the front and drawing it hand over hand, like a fisherman hauling nets. When they brought it up snug by the lighthouse door, all but the strongest stood aside to leave them room to lift. As Roy and Simon, Jeff and Felix bore him up like stretcher-bearers, Iris stepped inside to see if the trap was open.

Yes: the lid swung lightly in the well below. The rusted lock and key lay discarded on the doorsill. She bent to scoop these up, as the pallbearers crowded in. She scampered across to the spiral stair to watch. It was very smooth; the body never banged the walls. Jeff went down with the feet, and the others let go as Felix took the shoulders. Only two could maneuver it down the stairs and into the cliff.

Startled, Iris drew her hands behind her back. All along she'd assumed that Roy would stay with the body till they reached the final tunnel. As he looked up now and held out his hand, waiting to take her down, she dropped the lock on the stair behind. She smiled and descended, entering the cave in front of him, feeling the weight of his open palm between her shoulders. It almost seemed she was under guard.

At first they went by second sight. The candles were passed along only when Polly thought to rummage for them in the keeper's cupboard. One by one, through cold and dark as pure as the winter sky, they went round and round the spiral. When the stairs gave out they snaked along in single file, down a deep and twisting track. But for all the forks and pitfalls, they never made one wrong turn or hit a dead end. They went deeper and deeper till the sound of the waves came beating up from below with a roar like a broken dam.

Fissures opened along the route, with hollows and rooms on every side. No one knew where to go. No one appeared in charge. But at last, at a hairpin turning, as they walked across a bridge of stone through a vast domed cavern of swirling water, they knew it was just ahead. They came to a niche in a wall of rock, about the size of the window seat in Emery's parlor. A kind of bench ran along the bottom. Jeff and Felix set the body down, fixed the collar and straightened the flowers, and the mourners clustered round in the vaulted tunnel. No one knew what to say, till Iris spoke.

“Pray for him now,” she commanded, shrugging Roy's hand away. She flashed her eyes around the group till everyone bowed his head. “Pray that our father will open the gate. Do you understand? He is only gone to clear the way. Get
down
.”

With the last word ringing, she dropped to her knees in a sort of swoon. She lay her cheek on the cool and porous stone beside the body, as if to listen to something far, far down, and then began to moan. The others were only too glad to oblige, once she had shown the way. They fell to their knees. The candles shook and guttered. They set them on the floor, so their moon-white faces floated on the light. They shut their eyes and clasped themselves. In a minute they were jabbering thick as animals. They'd started to speak in tongues.

Iris knew it was now or never. She rose and turned and skimmed across the bridge. The babbling in the tomb never wavered. With a burst of exhilaration, she lunged from tunnel to tunnel. Nothing could stop her. The dark was so perfectly velvet that it didn't matter if she shut her eyes or not. Here was the perfect medium at last: a dream where she was free to run, without the least imagining. She longed to explore every dead end turn, to hole up deep in a crevice like the hiss of the sea in a nautilus.

And then she heard him bellow close behind her: “Iris, no!”

She flattened herself against the tunnel wall, biting her cheek so she wouldn't breathe. She hadn't tricked him at all. Everyone else huddled on the floor at Emery's grave, gnashing their teeth and begging for release. She could hear them, echoing up the dim recesses. Roy had slipped away as silently as she.

“Where are you?” he whispered stealthily, for now he had stopped to listen. All those years in the pine wood overhead had honed his senses. He could hear the slightest move.

“Here,” she called to him sweetly. “Over here.”

And she bent down as if to pick a flower. She trailed her hand on the rippled floor, where the tides had scored the rock like a frozen river. She came on a sea-broken stone about the size of a potato. She could hear him getting nearer, though he walked as light as a deer. He stopped five feet away.

“I won't let you, Iris,” he warned her.

“Roy,” she said in a soothing tone. “Please—you have to help me. I'm all confused.”

He was starting to inch away when she brushed his arm. He flinched and drew back as if she'd burned it. He stumbled and reached for the wall. She put out an empty hand to touch his chest, the tips of her fingers above his heart. As if to say she would go no closer, not unless he wished.

He replied precisely: “You don't need me and you know it.” Not bitter, exactly, but hard as a diamond. Clearly, whatever it was was over. “I was just a cover—
I
know that.”

She didn't contradict him. Though she quivered with impatience, the fingers on his breastbone never moved. She felt as if she were stilling a nervous animal. She said: “I thought you wanted to survive this thing.”

“I want to
see
it first,” retorted Roy. “And anyway, I'll save myself, like I always have. I don't need you either.”

“Please—just hold me.”

She sank against him. Automatically, as if by instinct, he folded his arms about her. She knew him as cold as he knew her: he was too long driven by a pioneer code to throw her off. A woman required protection, even if he had to steel himself to do it. She grazed her lips across his cheek, which shivered with the grinding of his teeth. She nuzzled and bit at his lip.

And finally he couldn't help it. He believed too much in people. Forces he didn't acknowledge, except for the throes of nature. He bent to her. Here in the pitch of night they would join against the horror running rampant up above. They would be one again and lock death out. It was only when he kissed her that she brought up the stone and smashed him above the temple.

He slumped in her arms without a cry. He gave the barest gasp. All the sound spilled out of Iris. She whimpered as she lay him down, cradling his head till it rested on the floor. She sobbed when she felt beside his ear, terrified there would be blood. There wasn't. She crouched down low to listen at his lips, to be sure he was still breathing. She almost prayed, but she couldn't linger a second more, to take it back or make it stop. The moment the blow was struck, the babble deep in the tunnel ended in mid-harangue. The labyrinth held its breath, as if a quake had started. She knew before she heard another sound: they were after her.

She leaped to her feet and raced off up the tunnel. She heard them coming, nearer and nearer, for someone had started to call her name, continuous like a death knell. It was all the echo needed.
Iris
rang in every pocket of the cliff. The tide itself, groaning below like a man in shackles, rocked to the sound of her name.
Iris, Iris, Iris
, till it seemed the earth had dreamed her up.

She wasn't afraid they'd catch her. She'd already reached the foot of the spiral, tumbling up two or three steps at a time. A chase was what she needed. Staggering, gasping, counting stairs—she laughed at the sheer hard work of it. Below, she heard Jeff reach the bottom. He shrieked her name in a murderous rage, as if she'd brought his only brother down. Felix was right behind him. He tried to quiet Jeff, even as he hollered up at Iris. She wondered who had stayed to tend to Roy. Maybeth, she thought, or Polly. All the friends she'd lost.

Then she saw light and lunged toward it. Five steps more, and she'd reached the top. It was only the moon, but even so, she could hardly see for the brightness of it. She climbed out onto the landing, where the tower door stood wide. Outside it was just as much of a dream as what she'd left behind. She pulled the trapdoor after her and held it shut as she reached for the padlock. It wasn't there.

Judith appeared out of the shadows. She handed over the lock and key with a bow and an impish smile, like a drunken conspirator. Limp with shock, Iris took them. She hardly knew where to begin. The lock was locked, and the key wouldn't fit. There wasn't a moment left. Jeff was halfway up the spiral. Felix was at his heels. They were screaming: “No!”

“Come here!” cried Iris, and the doctor's wife knelt down beside her. “Hold this for me. Hurry!”

For an instant they were like sisters, looking down as if to see their faces in a pool. Judith grabbed the iron latch, leaning back with all her weight, immovable and fierce. Iris shrank against the stairs. In the final second, she struggled to force the key and finally sprang the lock, but mostly what she did was watch. It was all some kind of test she was putting Judith through.

An instant later, Jeff tugged at the ring on the other side. It wasn't much of a struggle. Though the drug gave Judith the strength of ten, Jeff had all the leverage and the gravity. As Felix reached him, the latch slipped out of Judith's hands, and the door sprang inward. Jeff went sprawling down the stairs. Felix leaped to take his place, and his head emerged from the darkness. He froze when he saw his wife. They exchanged a desperate look as Jeff came scrambling back.

And Iris, quick as a girl in a fairy tale, crouched behind the doctor's wife, placed her open palms on Judith's naked back, and heaved her over the edge. She tumbled in on top of them. All three fell in a tangle, rolling out of sight around the spiral. Iris reached down and brought up the trapdoor. Latching the latch precisely, she slipped the lock in place. She turned the key with a click that seemed to echo in her heart.

And that was that. She lay on the cold stone floor to get her breath, looking as if she'd tumbled down the stairs from the keeper's perch. Beneath her, the three survivors clambered back, pummeling on the lid so furiously that the wood sent up a cloud of sawdust. The lock had held a hundred years. They were past the point of turning things around. By the time the wave of those less swift had staggered up to the seal of fate, they were already fighting among themselves.

Iris listened. They seethed with accusations, as if they were stuck in a dungeon cell. Perhaps it was the total darkness, but something seemed to break inside them. In a minute they'd given up hope. They ceased to beat against the door. They wept aloud and collapsed on the stairs, and some went trailing down again to the tunnels and caves to suffer all alone. The fight had left them.

Dawn, thought Iris, would be another story.

She rose and stepped to the open door. The moon was huge, the whole earth silver. What was she going to do now? She stepped from the tower, blank and shaken, like someone released from a spell. She had never been so alone. Why, she wondered with a bitter smile, had she not locked herself in, too? Then Michael came out of the trees, walking toward her across the park. The moon made him seem to float. His outstretched arms took in the whole of everything. When he crossed the circle, he seemed to sway as if to a native dance. His skin was aching white. The tip of his tongue snaked out at the corner of his mouth. He was getting hard. He was only fifteen feet away.

She waited like a bride.

IX

AS THEY MADE THEIR WAY
up the moonlit street, she saw that the final houses were being pulled apart. A crew of six or eight had been assigned to each, and they worked with such intensity that none looked up, even for approval, when Michael passed. She felt a strange thrill of pride in walking with him as an equal. She gladly let him hold her hand and lead the way. It wasn't a matter of power: he was heading the way she would have gone herself.

Through the open door of the church, the drunken dancing had dwindled down to writhing on the floor. The bodies rippled wall to wall, like the surface of a stream. Michael and Iris went on by and through the cemetery gate, to the grove of firs where the deep-etched stones no longer held the years in place. Still she felt the weight of generations, though they didn't clutch her heart. As long as she and Michael walked together, all the horrors were on the other side.

They came out onto the meadow ledge, where the high grass shimmered in the cliff-top breeze. A frog and a rabbit leaped out of the path, as if they had been in league together. The crickets played over and over a one-note song. The fireflies winked like Stardust. Michael and Iris stopped. The seethe of life was everywhere, as they sat on an egg-shaped boulder slumped to its hips in the crumbling ground. The edge was a bare two feet away, with the long fall to the shining sea. She wasn't afraid. No one was going to get thrown off.