They’d left their equipment—the metal boxes with the strange dials and readings. Almost like a threat. Squatters’ rights. We will return. He didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, even up close. And he didn’t want to—didn’t want to know what was on the séance side and what was on the science side. Prebiotic particles. Ghost energy. Mirror rooms. The lens was miraculous enough in what it could do without trying to find some further significance in it.
Saul’s knee was acting up, putting too much creak in his step as he went through the Light Brigade’s equipment. As he searched for something he knew he probably wouldn’t recognize, he was reflecting that a man could fall apart from any number of ailments, and a bit of maintenance couldn’t hurt. Especially since Charlie was seven years younger. But that just hid the thought that came now in little surges of panic: that something was wrong, that he was more and more a stranger in his own skin, that perhaps something was beginning to look out through his eyes. Infestation was a thought that crept in at moments between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and wakefulness, drifting down the passageway between the two.
There was the sense of something sliding more completely into place, and the feeling confused and frightened him.
* * *
Thankfully, Gloria’s mother, Trudi Jenkins, agreed to see him on short notice about an hour before nightfall. She lived to the west, in a secluded bungalow, and Saul took his pickup truck. He parked on the dirt driveway, under oak and magnolia trees and a few palmettos. Around the corner, a deck peeked out that was almost as large as her home and had a view of the beach. If she’d wanted to, she could have rented a room to tourists in the summers.
It was rumored Trudi had come to the forgotten coast after plea-bargaining a drug-trafficking charge, this more than a decade ago. But whatever her past, she had a steady hand and a level head, and going to her was better than going to the clinic another fifty miles inland, or to the medical intern who visited the village.
“I had this sliver…” Another thing about Trudi was that he could talk about the sliver. He’d tried with Charlie, but, for reasons he couldn’t quite figure out, the more he talked about it with Charlie, the more he felt like he was somehow putting it on Charlie, and he didn’t yet know how much weight Charlie could take.
Thinking about that depressed him, though, and after a while he trailed off, without having mentioned the sensation of things floating at the edge of his vision.
“You believe something bit you?”
“Maybe not a bite so much as stuck me. I had a glove on my hand, but I still shouldn’t have reached down. It might not have anything to do with how I’ve been feeling.” Yet how could he have known? The moment of sensation, non-sensation, he kept returning to.
She nodded, said, “I understand. It’s normal to worry, what with all of the mosquito- and tick-borne illnesses. So I can check your hand and arm, and take your vitals, and maybe put your fears to rest.”
She might have been a pediatrician, but she didn’t speak to him as if he were a child. She just had a way of simplifying things and getting to the point that made him grateful.
“Your kid wanders over the lighthouse quite a bit,” he said, to make conversation as he took off his shirt and she examined him.
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I hope she’s not a problem.”
“No—she just climbs on the rocks a lot.”
“She’s a climber, all right. Gets into everything.”
“Could be dangerous.”
She gave him a sharp look. “I’d rather she go to the lighthouse and be around people I know than wander off on some trail or something.”
“Yeah, true,” he said, sorry he’d brought it up. “She’s got a talent for identifying poop.”
Trudi smiled. “She gets that from me. I taught her all about different kinds of poop.”
“If a bear craps in the woods, she knows about it.”
She laughed at that. “I think she might be a scientist when she grows up.”
“Where is she now?” He’d assumed she would have walked home right after leaving the lighthouse.
“Grocery store. That girl likes to walk everywhere. So she might as well walk down to the grocery store and get us milk and some things for dinner.” The grocery store adjacent to the village bar was pretty ad hoc, too.
“She calls me the defender of the light.” He didn’t know where that had come from, but he had liked it when she’d called him that.
“Mmm-hmm.” Back to examining him.
At the end, she said, “I can’t find any indication of anything abnormal on your arm or hand. I can’t even find a mark. But if it’s been a week it could’ve faded.”
“So, nothing?” Relieved, and glad he hadn’t gone into Bleakersville, thinking about how much time off he had coming, and how he’d prefer to spend it with Charlie. Peeling shrimp at some roadside café. Drinking beer and playing darts. Checking into a motel, careful to ask for double beds.
“Your blood pressure’s elevated and you’re running a slight fever, but that’s all. Eat less salt. Have more vegetables. See how you are in a few days.”
He felt better when he left, after having worked out a barter-and-money payment of twenty bucks and a promise to hammer down some loose boards in the deck, maybe a couple of other things.
But as he headed back to the lighthouse, reviewing the checklist for the lens in his mind, the relief that had invigorated him faded away and doubt crept in. Underlying everything was the thought that he had gone to the doctor as a kind of half measure for a larger problem, that he’d only confirmed there would be no easy diagnosis, that this wasn’t as simple as a tick bite or the flu.
Something told him to look back as he drove, toward Failure Island, which was a shadow to the west, appearing at that distance as if it were just a sharp curve to the coastline. A faint pulse of red light blinked on and off, too high to be coming from anything other than a container ship. But too irregular to be anything but handheld or jury-rigged. In the right location on the horizon to be coming from Failure Island, perhaps from the ruined lighthouse.
Blinking out a code he didn’t recognize, a message from Henry that he didn’t want to receive.
* * *
After he got back, he called Charlie but there was no answer, then remembered that Charlie’d signed up for a night shift, hunting octopus and squid and flounder—the kind of adventure Charlie liked best. So he made a quick dinner, cleaned up, and then prepped the beacon. No ship traffic was expected during the night and the weather report was for calm seas.
With sunset came a premonition of beauty: The pre-dusk sky already had so many stars in it. Before he activated the lens, he sat there for a few minutes, staring up at them, at the deep blue of the sky that framed them. At such moments, he felt as if he really did live on the edge of the known world. As if he was alone, in the way he wanted to be alone: when he chose to be and not when the world imposed it on him. Yet he could not ignore that tiny dot of pulsing light still coming from Failure Island, even overshadowed as it was by so many distant suns.
Then the beam came on and obliterated it, with Saul retreating to sit on the top step to monitor the functioning of the lens for a few minutes before going back down to attend to other duties.
He wasn’t supposed to sleep on nights when the lighthouse lens was on, but at some point he knew that he had fallen asleep on the top step, and that he was dreaming, too, and that he could not wake up and should not try. So he didn’t.
The stars no longer shone but flew and scuttled across the sky, and the violence of their passage did not bear scrutiny. He had the sense that something distant had come close from far away, that the stars moved in this way because now they were close enough to be seen as more than tiny points of light.
He was walking toward the lighthouse along the trail, but the moon was hemorrhaging blood into its silver circle, and he knew that terrible things must have happened to Earth for the moon to be dying, to b
e about to fall out of the heavens. The oceans were filled with graveyards of trash and every pollutant that had ever been loosed against the natural world. Wars for scant resources had left entire countries nothing but deserts of death and suffering. Disease had spread in its legions and life had begun to mutate into other forms, moaning and mewling in the filthy, burning remnants of once mighty cities, lit by roaring fires that crackled with the smoldering bones of strange, distorted cadavers.
These bodies lay strewn across the grounds approaching the lighthouse. Visceral were their wounds, bright the red of their blood, loud the sound of their moans, as abrupt and useless as the violence they still visited upon one another. But Saul, as he walked among them, had the sense that they existed somewhere else, and it was only some hidden pull, like a celestial riptide, that drew them to manifest in that place, while the darkened tower of the lighthouse rose shrouded in a spiral of shadow and flame.
Out of this landscape Henry rose, too, at the lighthouse door, with a beatific smile on his face that kept growing larger until it curled off the edges of his jaw. Words erupted from him, but not aloud. And God said, Let there be light. God said that, Saul, and He has come from so far away, and His home is gone, but His purpose remains. Would you deny Him His new kingdom? There came with these words such a sense of sadness that Saul recoiled from them, from Henry. They spoke to all that he had put behind him.
Inside the lighthouse, Saul found not stairs leading up but a vast tunneling into the earth—an overwhelming spiral that wound down and down.
At his back, the moon had filled utterly with blood and was plummeting to the Earth, descending in the midst of a flame so hot he could feel it at his back. The dead and the dying had taken up the cry of approaching oblivion.
He slammed the door shut behind him, took that sudden path traveling down, his hand trailing against an ice-cold wall, and saw the steps so very far below him, so that he was either watching himself from a great height or his body had become as tall as the lighthouse, and each footfall occurred stories below him.
But Henry remained at his side, unwanted, and the stairs were also filling with water with a great rush and growl of fury, and soon most of him was submerged, Henry’s fine shirt billowing with water, while Saul still walked down, down, until his head was beneath water, taking no breath, teetering, and he opened his eyes to see the fiery green-gold of words on the wall, being wrought before his eyes by an invisible scribe.
Even as he knew the words came from him, had always come from him, and were being emitted soundlessly from his mouth. And that he had been speaking already for a very long time, and that each word had been unraveling his brain a little more, a little more, even as each word also offered relief from the pressure in his skull. While what lay below waited for his mind to peel away entirely. A blinding white light, a plant with leaves that formed a rough circle, a splinter that was not a splinter.
* * *
When he woke up, he was sitting in a chair outside the lighthouse, with no idea how he’d gotten there. The words still lived inside of him, a sermon now coming out whether he wanted it to or not. Whether it would destroy him or not.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms.
0008: GHOST BIRD
Soon after the storm, the trail they followed wound back to the sea along a slope of staggered hills running parallel to the water. The wet ground, the memory of those dark rivulets, made the newly seeded soil seem almost mirthful. Ahead lay the green outline of the island, illumined by the dark gold light of late afternoon. Nothing had returned to haunt the sky, but now they walked through a world of broken things, of half-destroyed silhouettes against that gleaming horizon.
“What happened here?” Ghost Bird asked him, pretending it was his domain. Perhaps it was.
Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time, as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.
But something bad had happened here.
Seeking a path down to the shore that didn’t require lacerating themselves on rushes and sticker cactus, they had no choice but to encounter the memory of carnage. An old tire rut filled with mud, an abandoned boot sticking out from it. Dull glint of an automatic rifle hidden by the moist grass. Evidence of fires started and then hastily put out, tents raised and struck, then smashed apart—clear that command and control had been shattered into pieces.
“The storm didn’t do this,” she said. “This is old. Who were they?”
Still no answer.
They came to the top of a slight rise. Below lay the remains of a truck; two jeeps, one burned down almost to the wheels; a rocket launcher in a state of advanced decomposition. All of it gently cupped by, submerged in, moss and weeds and vines. Disturbing hints of yellowing bones amid rags of faded green uniforms. The only scent was a faint sweet tang from purple-and-white wildflowers nodding furious in the wind.
It was peaceful. She felt at peace.
Finally, Control spoke. “It couldn’t be personnel trapped in Area X when it expanded, unless Area X somehow sped up the rate of decay.”
She smiled, grateful to hear his voice.
“Yes, too old.” But she was more interested in another feature of the tableau spread out before them.
The beach and the land directly parallel had been subject to some catastrophic event, gouged and reworked, so that a huge rut on the shore had filled with deep water, and across the grass-fringed soil beyond lay what could be enormous drag marks or just the effects of an accelerated erosion. She had a vision of something monstrous pulling itself ashore to attack.
He pointed to the huge gouges. “What did that?”
“A tornado?”
“Something that came out of the sea. Or … what we saw in the sky?”
The wind whipped a little ragged orange flag stuck via a stake into the ground near the ruined tents.
“Something very angry, I’d say,” she said.
* * *
Curious. Down on the shore, they found a boat hidden against a rise of sea oats, a rowboat pulled up past the high-tide mark, complete with oars. It looked as if it had been there for a long time, waiting. A commingled sadness and nervousness came over Ghost Bird. Perhaps the boat had been left for the biologist to find, but instead they had found it. Or the biologist’s husband had never made it to the island and this boat was proof of that. But regardless, she could not really know what it meant, except that it offered a way across.
“We have just enough time,” she said.
“You want to cross now?” Control said, incredulous.
Perhaps it was foolish, but she didn’t want to wait. They might have another hour of real light and then that halo of shadows before true darkness dropped down upon them.
“Would you rather spend the night sleeping next to skeletons?”
She knew he didn’t much like sleeping at all anymore, had started having hallucinations. Shooting stars became white rabbits, the sky full of them, with smudges of darkness interrupting their leaping forms. Afraid his mind was playing tricks to disguise something even more disturbing that only she could see.
“What if whatever did this came from the island?”
Throwing it back at him: “What if whatever did this is somewhere behind us in the marshes? The boat’s seaworthy. And there’s time.”
“You don’t find it suspicious that a boat’s just waiting for us?”
“Maybe it’s the first piece of good luck we’ve had.”
“And if something erupts out of the water?”
“We row back—very fast.”
“Bold moves, Ghost Bird. Bold moves.”
But she was just as afraid, if not of the same things.
* * *
By the time they cast off, over that enormous scooped-out part of the shoreline, and then past a series of sandbars, the sun had begun to set. The water was a burn
ished dark gold. The sky above shone a deep pink, the blue-gray of dusk encroaching at the edges. Pelicans flew overhead, while terns carved the air into sharp mathematical equations and seagulls hovered, pushing against the wind.
The slap and spray of their rowing sent little whirlpools of golden water swirling off to disappear into the reflecting current. The prow of the boat had a blunt pragmatism to it that, set against all of that light, seemed serious to Ghost Bird, as if what they were doing had substance. Patterns could suffice as purpose, and the synchronicity of their rowing reassured her. They were meant to be rowing toward the island—to be here, in this place. The anxiety she felt about possibly finding the biologist and her husband on the island, of standing there and facing them, reversed or erased itself, lost, at least for a time, in the water.
The long, wide swathe of green that was the island at that distance was made irregular and disheveled-looking by the few tall oaks and pines that, along with the shattered spire of the lighthouse, broke through into the skyline. Trapped between: the calm motionless sky and the always restless sea, the island shimmering in the middle distance, surrounded by distortion as if it emanated heat. Sliding in between them from either side, rangy, scruffy islets with pine trees contorted low upon them, the silhouettes of these outposts extended by the rough gray-black line of oyster beds shot through with a startling iridescent white from dead shells pried open by birds.
They did not speak, even when they needed a course correction slightly to the west to avoid a sudden shallows, or when a surge in the current—waves breaking over the bow—required that they row with vigor. There was just the leaky roar of his grunting, her heavy breathing, in rhythm with the motion of her oar, the slight tapping of his oar against the frame as Control couldn’t match the fluidity of her strokes. There was in the smell of his sweat and the brine of the water, the sudden tangy smell, almost a flavor, a sense of honest effort. The tautness she felt in her triceps, her forearms as she put her back into it. The pleasing soreness that came after, letting her know this was effort, this was real.