Stranger Page 8

  But it was different now, wasn’t it? Now that they’d sealed themselves from the outside world they didn’t need my services anymore. What’s more, they’d always been suspicious of me. They tolerated me because I was essential to their own survival, that’s all. The old ex-cop’s warning came back to me from the night before. Valdiva, do yourself a favor. Get away from here . . . as far away as you can. . . .

  Maybe right now they were discussing the proposal on the agenda: Get rid of Valdiva . . . oust the monster. I could see all those gray heads nodding ’round the table as Miss Bertholly agreed: “Valdiva’s surplus to requirements now. Can anyone nominate a hunter who’s good with a rifle?”

  “Get him before he figures out he’s redundant,” old man Crowther would say. “Make his whore girl go down to cook him breakfast. I know a guy who’ll blow him to pieces with a twelve-gauge while he’s still in bed. Better still, why waste good bullets? Wait until he’s screwing her and kill the pair of them with one shell.”

  That mental movie of my blood hitting the bedroom wall was clear enough, I can tell you. At the sound of the door opening downstairs I bounced out of bed and went to the top of the stairs. Lynne looked startled as she opened the screen to the veranda.

  “You gave me a scare, Greg,” she said, seeing the expression on my face. “What’s wrong?”

  I looked at the plate full of breakfast on the table. “Where are you going, Lynne?”

  “Nowhere. Well . . . I was just throwing out this bread for the birds. You should get in the habit of checking it. It’s so stale you could crack rocks with it.” She threw the crust out onto the grass, then came back into the kitchen, smiling. “There’s chilled juice, and I made fresh pancakes. Coffee?”

  “Yeah.” I looked through the window at the top of the stairs. Outside there was no one about. No Crowther narc anyway, with a shotgun. Maybe my imagination had gotten overripe. Even so . . .

  “Greg. Relax. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Yeah, my own.

  She played with her hair a little in that sexy way of hers. “Say . . . do you want breakfast in bed this morning?”

  I thanked her but declined. I said I needed to make an early start cutting wood out back. She was thoroughly pleasant, even flirty, but all we did was make small talk.

  The old cop swilling whiskey on the jetty had prevented me from taking the boat across the lake to Lewis to find out who it was burning the lamp up in the ruins. But now I was more than ever determined to take that trip. What’s more, this town seemed even more claustrophobic—dangerous, even—now that I realized its people didn’t need me anymore. When I walked down Main Street I knew I’d get an itch between my shoulder blades just where a rifle bullet might find a home.

  Lynne nibbled toast with me as I ate her breakfast. It was good, and the temptation to suggest half an hour up on the bed took some time to quit. But eventually she said her good-byes before heading back up the hill in the direction of home. I hauled the chainsaw from the shed, topped up the tank, then fired her up. The logger’s chainsaw was muscular enough to loosen the fillings in your teeth, but it made short work of the heftier pieces of driftwood. I cut the timber into disks maybe eight inches long. Soon a blizzard of sawdust filled the air, turning the sunlight misty and golden.

  I worked through the pile of timber the lake had given up (along with its more grisly fruit). I thought of the severed head with its extra set of eyes. Suddenly I could taste the scrambled egg in my mouth again with that extra spice of bile.

  Revving the chainsaw motor, I forced the image out of my skull. Instead I concentrated on the blurring teeth that bit through the timber. The world was getting stranger by the day. No doubt about that. Hell, I just wondered what strange turn lay around the corner to take us all by surprise.

  Later I made my deliveries in the hot sun. With the pickup piled with firewood I drove through town. Everything looked rock-solid normal. People waved at me. If anything their mood seemed lighter now that a goodly number of days had passed since I killed the outsider. Normal rhythms reasserted themselves. The supermarket had its usual quota of customers pushing shopping carts of groceries to their cars. The McDonald’s just across from the cinema boasted a few people chewing the fat over coffees and cake (the old Ronald McDonald menu had varied through necessity over the last few months). Cars cruised by. A cop on a motorbike gave me a thumbs-up as I made a left into the residential area. Here I found the few children who remained in Sullivan playing on skateboards, riding bikes. A couple of toddlers were running in and out of a lawn sprinkler shrieking like crazy. Even when I at last reached Crowther’s house all he did was shoot me a sullen look before sloping indoors. I piled wood on the drive for him to collect at his own sweet leisure, then pointed the nose of the pickup back into town.

  I’d just helped myself to a Swiss cheese sandwich and a jug of iced water in the supermarket coffeehouse when Ben saw me and hurried in through the door. “Help yourself,” I said nodding at the iced water. “It’s hot as hell outside today.”

  “Yeah, it’s getting more like hell every day.” He pulled a grim smile. “Take a look at that.” He pushed a book across the table at me.

  I checked the title. “Secrets of the Arcane. Whatever lights your lamp, Ben.”

  “After we saw that head yesterday I did some reading.”

  I gave a heartfelt groan. “That head? Do you have to remind me? I’m still eating.”

  “But what the hell was it, Greg?” This was more like the old Ben. The proto-scientist Ben who enthusiastically searched for answers. “Every now and again you hear of four-legged chickens and two-headed lambs. But have you seen a human being with an extra set of eyes?”

  I groaned again and pushed the uneaten sandwich to one side. “I asked you not to mention it. I can feel eyeballs in the cheese with my tongue now.”

  “You find people with genetic defects and mutations, but have you ever see anything as . . . as severe as that?”

  “Listen, Ben . . . here, let me get that for you.” He made as if to pour water from the jug into a glass, but with those shaky hands he splashed liquid over the tabletop (and my now unloved sandwich).

  “Thanks.” He took a thirsty swallow.

  “Ben. You see weird mutant stuff in the Fortean Times and Ripley’s. Men covered with hair like apes. Women with three nostrils. Kids with paws instead of fingers.”

  “But that head was nothing like I’ve ever seen before in a book.”

  “It was probably some poor devil who’d spent his life locked in the attic being fed a pail of fish heads every Thursday. He escaped after the crash, then wondered ’round until he wound up in the lake. End of sad story.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “You really think it might be something else?”

  “Who knows? You might have noticed, but the world’s taken a weird jump out left of field these days.” He smiled. “Now listen to this.” And he started to read from the book. “ ‘Long ago the alchemist Thomas Vaughn wrote the hermetic treatise Lumen de Lumine. He described a process where animal and human bodies can be made to descend into primal matter, the tenebrae activae, as he termed it.’ No, Greg, don’t shake your head, just listen, will you? It says here that Vaughn believed this was a kind of melting pot into which you can feed human beings and from which new life could be created.”

  “You’re saying that’s what happened to old Johnny Cluster Eyes you found in the lake?”

  “Maybe.”

  I leaned forward. “Ben, listen to your buddy. You need to find yourself a girlfriend, you really do.”

  He shot me a kind of startled look, then he read something in my face. For a second I thought he’d be insulted, but he started laughing with that breathless bray of his. Right from the first time we met I’d found the laugh infectious, and now I started laughing, too. The other customers in the coffeehouse looked at us as if we might have gone half crazy.

  Come to think of it, t
hey might have been half right at that.

  Eleven

  Days slipped by in that breathless heat. In the cool of early morning I hooked driftwood from the lake. Sometimes I’d find human corpses in the shallows. Most were so far gone that you couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Young or old. Bread bandit or Yankee. They were mushy things resembling old leather satchels with ragged holes where the fish had picked away the soft tissues. They always went for the eyes, too. Fish must find eye meat the sweetest. Every so often Lake Coben would offer up a fresh specimen that proved to me that there were still people out there in the forests and hills beyond Sullivan. For reasons unknown to me they sometimes wound up dead in the lake. Maybe bread bandits hunted them down like wild dogs out there, beat them to death, then tossed them into a stream that fed the lake where they eventually floated here.

  As the days passed there were no more outsiders showing up either. What’s more, I didn’t see any more of that light in the ruins of Lewis, so the urge to take a boat across there sort of went off the boil.

  The rest of my workday was taken up with cutting the wood and delivering it in the pickup. With electricity rationed to those six hours in the evening, anyone wanting a hot drink or a cooked meal used wood stoves, which were nothing grander than barbecues out in their backyards.

  Every night I fitted more stones to the tomb and made it that much larger.

  Hey, it wasn’t all work. We went to the cinema to see a movie that we might have seen a dozen times before. After all, with the world in pieces there’d be no new features coming to town. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. There was something magical about seeing the world as it once was, before the crash. Most nights the cinema was a good half full. Then there were the bars, the pool hall, bowling, or maybe just a tub full of beers swimming in a gallon of water and ice. A few of us would gather on a porch to sip beer while chewing the fat beneath starry skies.

  To say the whole world had gone shit-faced sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? I remember the beach barbecue when we must have eaten a whole hog, grunt and all. There weren’t a lot of young people in Sullivan, but we made a real party of it at night. We emptied a few cases of wine while the empty beer bottles rose in a glittering pyramid on the sand. A kid with a Jeep that boasted the mother and father of all sound systems drove it down to the shore. The music boomed across the lake. If the 50,000 ghosts that must surely haunt Lewis had ears they’d have had a feast of music that night.

  But there I go, remembering the good times. A kind of golden six weeks after the arrival of the pregnant woman and her family. There was no trouble. Unless you can count the underpants bunting that some drunken kids strung across the town hall. Or the Caucus complaining that certain work quotas weren’t being met. Like who cares that ten thousand tins of baked beans in warehouse A should have been moved two hundred yards to warehouse B? Or that some of the residents grumbled that the music was getting too loud? Or—horror of horrors—those young people were actually enjoying themselves and laughing in the streets at night? If you ask me, I say to hell with the whiny complaints. Those young people were taking a vacation from the cold, brutal reality surrounding us.

  And yeah, you’ve guessed right. It was too good to last.

  One Sunday in July a storm came down on the town like a landslide. Thunder. Lighting. Torrential rain. The lake turned to cream. Surf broke over the jetties. One of the fishing boats tore loose and went rolling away through the waves, never to be seen again.

  The Gerletz family were the boat experts. They raced through the storm tying extra lines to the lake cruisers and fishing craft to stop them being carried away. They had their hands more than full taking care of all the island’s boats as well as their own fleet. Soon they called in more help. I found myself with Ben and one of the Gerletzs’ daughters, a big-boned twenty-one-year-old, along with half a dozen townspeople. We hauled small boats out of the water high up onto the beach, away from the pounding surf. Everyone was soaking wet. The temperature plummeted so much our bodies steamed as we worked our way along the shore, tying more lines to the big lake cruisers in the hope they wouldn’t be torn out into the lake where they’d be lost for sure.

  And all the time we stumbled through lightning flashes, deafened by thunder that threatened to bring the entire sky crashing down.

  That was the afternoon the whole world turned rotten again. It happened fast.

  This is how fast.

  We moved away from the main harbor area to a stretch of coast where free-floating cruisers were moored. These were simply roped to concrete anchors in the shallows or to three or four rickety jetties that clearly weren’t going to withstand this storm-force punishment.

  Ben and a couple of middle-aged guys waded into the water to haul at a rowboat that had water sloshing ’round up to the seat planks.

  “Leave that one,” Gerletz called over the thunder. “Get the big lake cruisers secure first. This wind’s going to rip them from the moorings.”

  Quitting the rowboat, they waded to where a big white cruiser bounced on the surf. Miss Gerletz must have had muscles in her spit. She plunged into the water, reached up and grabbed the big boat by the guardrail post and dragged its prow to face the beach. “Tie that line to the cleat, then run it up to the concrete block on the beach.”

  This we did, but the boat bucked crazy-horse style. Even with three of us holding onto the rope it buzzed through our fingers, dealing out friction burns right, left and center.

  The boat was a real millionaire’s toy. I could see white leather upholstery in the cabin and gin and whiskey decanters rattling in their holders. You might wonder why we worked so hard to save these vessels. The truth of the matter is, they made useful workboats now. More than one millionaire’s cruiser was used to ship gasoline barrels ’round the island to the part of Lime Bay that was inaccessible by truck. Even so I couldn’t resist a grim smile. The boat I wrestled to save that gleamed as white as a cheerleader’s grin had the name Crowther painted on the stern in gold. No doubt Crowther junior would thank me for saving his family’s boat.

  Yeah, right: some time never!

  There wasn’t time to dwell on it. The Gerletz girl finished tying off the mooring to the concrete slab firmly anchored into the beach. “Next,” she panted, then hurried to another boat.

  With waterspouts rearing up like goosenecks out in the lake and rain slamming into our faces, we moved forward. Inside forty-five minutes we’d secured extra mooring lines on a dozen lake cruisers. Some of these were hefty twenty-tonners that boasted galleys, cabins and bars. So far we hadn’t lost a single one on our stretch of coast. Some of the rowboats were a different matter. Several had sunk; one had been smashed into two clean halves across a rock. But they weren’t a real concern. There must be a good couple of hundred rowboats on Sullivan; plenty of those were pulled high and dry on the beach.

  A real cause for concern was a big cruiser tethered to the jetty at the far end of the beach. This was the farthest from town, the least used, certainly the most poorly maintained. Even from a hundred yards away I could see the whole structure rock under the pressure of the huge cruiser that had broken loose at the stern. The winds caught the boat, swinging it out first into the lake then back and—CRASH!—against the jetty. By the time we’d reached the thing the jetty’s planks had started to pop off the timber frame wiThevery knock of the boat.

  “Hurry up, you guys!” the Gerletz girl yelled through the storm. “We’re going to lose this one if we don’t work fast.”

  “Someone’s all ready up there,” Ben shouted.

  “See who it is.”

  I looked at the figure that wrestled with a rope, trying to tie it to the iron ring set in the jetty.

  “It’s Charlie Finch,” one of the men said, using his hand to shield his eyes from the stinging rain. “He’s got the front line tied.”

  Gerletz moved up the plank. “We need to get the aft line secure, otherwise she’s going to smash the jetty to pieces.” The b
oat underlined what she’d just said by swinging back into the jetty again wiThenough force to make the whole thing shudder. Ahead another plank popped off the frame. “It’s coming apart at the seams.”

  We were halfway along the jetty, all set to help the old cop tie down the boat, when he saw us. Then he did a weird thing.

  He waved us back. “It’s OK,” he shouted. “I can handle it.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Finch,” Ben called. “We’ll give you a hand.”

  “I’m fine!”

  But he didn’t look fine. “I can handle it,” he repeated. “Go see to the other boats.”

  “They’re all tied down,” Gerletz said. “This is the last one.”

  The last one. But it was the big daddy of them all. This was a multimillionaire’s yacht with what must have been half a dozen cabins and a couple of bathrooms. In the near darkness the thing looked like a big, angry bear that swung from side to side to butt the jetty with those crashing blows.

  “Go back,” Finch bellowed. “I’ll have it tied in a minute.”

  “You’ll never manage it by yourself.” Gerletz shook her head in disbelief. “I’ll climb onto the boat and throw another line.”

  “This is good enough.” The ex-cop looked furious that we were trying to help him. His eyes blazed at us through the spray.

  “The line’s not strong enough,” she said. “You need thicker rope.”

  “It’s not safe out here,” Finch insisted. “The surf will wash someone into the lake.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll make it.” With that, Gerletz bounded from the jetty onto the boat. The girl must have been scrambling across boats in all weathers since she could walk. Even though the boat bucked under her, she ran from one end of the deck to the other without touching the guardrail once. In seconds she’d pulled a hefty orange rope from a locker, uncoiled it, tied it to the deck cleat, then hurled it at us. The thing nearly got away from us into the surging water, but Ben got a grip, and soon we were all hauling the rope. It was like trying to pull a house from its foundations. For a while I didn’t think we’d bring the pitching boat under control, but at last it moved. Soon it lay hard against the jetty. It still rose and fell with the waves, but at least it no longer battered the wooden structure like a gigantic hammer.