Anarchy (38 page)

“I can stand at your shoulder. There will be no mistake.”

“Oh yeah. I'd just love that.” She heaved the anchor out and slotted the chain through the bracket at the bow.

“Don't stop now. Not when you're so close. Séverine.” But she'd already dropped the anchor down into the black. The chain paid out noisily for only a couple of seconds before it went slack. Shallow water already. The sound under the hull changed again; the sea protested softly now, finding itself resisted. She wiped the gauges clear of condensation and checked the battery charge and the tank. Both were healthy. With plenty of diesel to spare, she decided to leave the outboard running. Its mechanical grumble was like a second anchor, something to cling to against the whispering pull of the sea. She settled herself into the seat, folding her arms, keeping her eyes on the light ahead.

“It would be better,” the voice behind her said, “to find the girl asleep.”

“Oh yeah?” Goose swiveled the seat from side to side, working the feeling back into her numbed feet. “Better for who?”

“For you.”

“Is that so. Because, you know. I'm wondering.”

“I can't lie to you.”

“You seem in an awful hurry, my friend. I'm wondering what that's all about. Anyway. I'm in charge here, like you said.”

“Do you dare force the girl, if it comes to that?”

“Oh, excuse me. Is that what's bothering you? Yeah, actually. I think I can handle a sixteen-year-old kid.”

After a long silence, the voice said, “There is so much you don't know.”

She couldn't stop herself turning angrily. There it was, bowed head all but invisible in the near dark, as though it hadn't moved at all since they'd left the dock at Hardy. Only the white hands stood out, spread over the seat like a pair of dead starfish. “You're so right. Which is exactly why we're going to wait now till I can see what I'm doing. That's what you're really worried about, isn't it? You know what? I reckon when daylight comes you're going to have to get back in your freaking coffin. Am I right? Are you going to turn to a puff of dust at sunrise? Huh? I don't know what you are and I don't want to know. Here's what I know. I know I'm not running aground in the middle of the Inside Passage in the dark. This isn't even my boat. For all I know we could be anywhere. It's, what”—she pushed her thick sleeve up to check her watch—“maybe a couple more hours till it gets light. Then we'll see who's been telling the truth, okay?”

The head lifted. Goose realized her hands were clenched and her heart was racing. The bleached starfish spread their withered limbs and slid gently over the seat, back and forth, back and forth.

“I fear nothing,” it said. Its voice did not change at all. “I hope for nothing. I am indifferent to dark or light. The million million manifestations of the world all touch me with equal weight, Séverine. Each one is so full. So . . . perfect. I cannot grasp this mystery of
desiring.
”

Her own sweat was turning clammy above her collar. She shrugged her neck deeper into the jacket. If it had moved toward her she'd have thrown something. She was tense all down her back and shoulders, braced for contact. If it had even begun to stand up she'd have pulled the fire extinguisher from its clips and hurled it like a bomb. But it merely caressed the dirty padding, with a lover's delicacy. Nothing else in the boat moved. The hands swayed as calm and gentle as weeds in a pond.

“If I went to sleep,” Goose said, once it seemed like nothing else was going to happen, “would you still be there when I woke up?”

The head bowed again, falling back behind its own screen of shadows.

“No,” it said.

28

S
he jolted upright. The spasm made her neck sting. The rest of her felt as numb as meat. An armada of dreams capsized and sank in an instant, leaving no trace. The sea where they drowned was a deep murky blue. She looked up to the surface, far overhead.

The blueness righted itself and became air. She rubbed her neck and stared around. An indigo world had whispered itself into half-being. The sea was purple-black, the wide bowl above it a few shades less dim. A blot of land nearby was a remnant of the night suspended between them.

She was alone.

Not entirely alone. A grey spot winged above the island group. It mewled a high tremolo: an eagle.

Goose looked around, shocked that she'd fallen asleep. She remembered telling herself not to, pushing herself upright in the chair. How could she have let herself drift off when she knew she was being watched by . . .

By . . .

She wrestled with the conviction that she was still dreaming. She made herself stand up and walk around the boat. The anchor chain scraped and creaked. She felt the horrible stiffness she associated with falling asleep in the car. She was cold to the marrow.

No one was aboard with her.

Take the boat away, and the dawn gathering around her could have been ten thousand years old. The mutter of the outboard and the lurid red and green and white of the running lights suddenly seemed intrusive. She switched them off, her fingers clumsy in thick gloves. At once an oceanic immensity of wilderness enveloped everything, too raw and vast for habitation. The only sound now was an ambience of gentle white noise, air and water at rest, like the dawn breathing. The eagle vanished against a darker line on the horizon. That long smear could have been either side of the passage, the mainland or the great island. She might have looked at the gimballed compass beside the wheel to find out, but she didn't want to. There were no charts or directions, no comings or goings. Everything was unnamed. A directionless breeze sent wavelets to brush against the hull. Their unstopped sibilance was the sound of her mother tongue, saying
vous êtes ici, vous êtes ici.

She began remembering how she'd got there. It was a complicated effort. She seemed to have come loose from reasons, causes, effects. She couldn't find a good way of thinking about what she was doing on Jonas's boat far out in the Passage in the very early morning. She remembered Jonas; she remembered Jonas escorting the shriveled-looking blind woman with the grotesquely long hair off the abandoned ferry; she remembered the same woman sitting in the stern of the boat, saying things that sounded more like incantations than words; all of it seemed to belong to another dimension, dream or theater or fiction.

The nearby land was becoming solid. Light spread and sharpened the edges of its silhouette. She began to distinguish the shoulders of rock that separated one solid mass from another. The nearest was no more than a bare reef draped in kelp. Beyond that were tree-crowned hummocks, and a longer grey wall behind, a larger island still murky with distance.

What am I doing here?

Might as well ask that eagle. Or the reef. They weren't doing anything here, or not the way the question meant it. They just . . . were.

Jennifer. She was looking for Jennifer. That was right, wasn't it? She was looking for Jennifer because it was her job. She'd told her boss she'd find the kid; she was a Mountie and the Mounties always got their man. She had a duty of care. The girl was a vulnerable minor. Due in court. Due at the juvenile facility over on the mainland. Et cetera. Procedures, protocols, obligations.

She remembered that Jennifer had shut her mouth to that whole world. She remembered the girl sitting in the cell, looking at her, mute. Then the girl had walked out of the locked cell and disappeared into the silence.

This silence.

Goose knew then that what she really wanted was to find out what the silence had to say.

Back in the world she'd stepped away from, flights were canceled. Traffic had stopped. The navigation lights were all switched off. The ferry had turned into a ghost ship. The TV wasn't working. The Internet had failed. Voices from the wrong places came and went on the radio.

Instead of all that, then . . . what?

This, she supposed. She rubbed her arms briskly. This: daybreak in solitude. Sounds and colors unchanged since before there'd been people to hear and see them. She didn't doubt that Jennifer was here. Where else would she be? There were no due dates here, no court orders, no decisions made by legally constituted authorities. No papers. Zero megabytes. No words.

No place for herself either, Goose admitted, reluctantly. Hunger and cold were her prompts. She'd have to go back to Hardy, or whatever was left of it. Still, at least she could bring Jennifer with her. Not to the station, though. Not to be arrested or institutionalized or whatever. There'd be no more cells or court orders. She'd put the kid up herself if she had to, or maybe Jonas would. Jennifer had spoken, that night when it all began.
Shouting
, the file said.
Crazy stuff.
But it wasn't crazy, of course, and everyone would have to admit that now; or at least if it was crazy, that didn't stop it being true. They'd all have to try listening to her, instead of just yelling at her in the wrong language.

Starting with me, Goose thought. I'm here because some kind of undead ghost freak thing with an English accent sat in the back of the boat and told me where to go, unless I imagined it all, which maybe comes to the same thing anyway. I've got to be ready to hear some pretty crazy stuff.

She didn't bother checking the compass. It seemed unlikely that it would be reliable, and anyway, if she wanted to find out where she was, why not just look? She knew how the Passage ran, a widemouthed funnel with its open end to the northwest, the coastal range walling it on the mainland side. It was only a few weeks to the equinox. The dawn light would be spreading from the southeast, then. She turned a full circle counterclockwise and saw where the horizon brightened above a thin blur of forested land, and then where it rose into snaggle-toothed peaks, and then where it was serenely empty, sea and sky touching like watercolor paper peeling back from an ink-dark block. Southeast, northeast, northwest. Hardy lay somewhere to port and astern, then, hidden in its bay for now but easy to find if she simply turned the boat around and motored down the Passage along the southern shore. There wasn't another vessel in sight. Here, one of the world's busiest marine highways, and the only thing she could see traveling it was the eagle again, gliding toward the islands ahead.

She followed its flight, watching as it banked and vanished into the dark outline of the larger island. A spot of incongruous color caught her eye by the shore beneath the trees. Yellow.

She was looking down a channel between outlying rocks. Shadows made it hard to see but the daylight was strengthening steadily. There was definitely a brushstroke of unlikely yellow there, as alien to the grey-blue world as she and her boat were. She saw the way it sat above the waterline like a lurid instance of the ubiquitous stripped logs that decorated every shore along the Passage. She made the connection: the kayak. What was his name? Mr. Hall's kayak. (The scowling boy inside the house. What were they doing now, she wondered, while she was out here in this gigantic silence? Was it beginning to sink in there, too?)

An idea occurred to her.

She went forward and pulled up the anchor. She had to take her gloves off to get a proper grip, and the chain was rough and painfully cold. After she'd stowed it she had to sit on her hands for a few minutes before she could manage the key and the throttle. When she did finally get the motor going, the noise and the petrol smell and the froth behind the propeller embarrassed her, as though she'd caught herself taking a spray can to the dawn.

She eased the boat forward nevertheless. From the length of exposed rock at the skirts of the small islands ahead she could guess that the tide was a good meter below its highest point, but Jonas's boat drew very little, and the water was icily clear; the channel didn't look too risky. She noticed that she was almost deliriously relieved to be trusting her own eyes and making her own decisions. Whatever had happened to her in the night, the dawn must have banished it. There'd been a lot of bad nights recently. Even in her dingy apartment in Alice, surrounded by nothing more sinister than packing boxes, things could turn wrong quickly; even lying awake in her own bed had sometimes felt like being afloat in a black ocean. But when daylight arrived you could always see straight again: the despair turned out just to be tiredness, the bad thoughts just distractions. Whatever had haunted her this past night, the main thing about it now was that it had disappeared.

The islands grew tall in front of her, trees crowding together on their shelves of rock like survivors on an insufficient raft. Dead wood tumbled over the edges, weathered and rotted into twisted arabesques. In their lee the water turned perfectly calm. She saw the sea floor rising beneath, but the gap was wide and deep enough. She steered through into a sheltered bay ringed by shoals and the low promontories of a more substantial island, draped with bunchberry and salal as well as the tight-packed evergreens. The kayak had been drawn up above a small arc of slate-colored sand. Behind the scent of damp forest Goose caught a momentary smell of smoke.

She cut the engine and raised the outboard. Every noise was magnified by the stillness but no one had come running yet. If Jennifer was awake by her fire, perhaps she was deep in the trees, or perhaps she didn't care. That was the advantage of her idea, Goose thought, as she stripped off jacket and gloves and watched the bow drift toward the sand. It would make any negotiation a lot simpler.

She took the bowline and waited till the drift brought her close enough to jump ashore. Solid ground jarred her for a moment and her legs were briefly unsteady. She looped the line around a spur of beached wood and went to fetch the kayak. Jennifer hadn't bothered to turn it over. The paddle was tucked down in the cockpit, washed by a small puddle of seawater and dew. Rather than dragging, Goose heaved the boat up to her shoulder and carried it back across the beach. There was no question of jumping now but she didn't mind getting her feet wet, though the first trickle that came in through her boots was astonishingly cold, bitter enough to make her swear between clenched teeth. Nor was there any question of being discreet. The only way to get the kayak into Jonas's boat was to reach up and tip it in. It clattered down onto the plastic tubs and other assorted junk he apparently needed for his fishing trips (
That's not junk, man, that's equipment
). A pair of ravens flapped out of the trees, annoyed by the racket, and began spiraling upward. Goose waded back to the beach, untied the bowline, and clambered back aboard. The stern had come round and was scraping gently against shelving rock. She used the kayak's paddle to push out away from the shore and then sat down to get her boots and socks off before her feet froze.

The island undergrowth crackled. She was drying her feet on one of Jonas's rags when the girl stepped out of the trees.

Their eyes met, as in the cell. Her look was the same, Goose saw. Jennifer was wearing the same clothes too, donated, probably, from some charitable collection in one of the various hospitals and holding pens she'd been shuttled among: a hooded athletic sweatshirt in burgundy, grey sweatpants, old sneakers. She had the hood up, which made her look even more like a seal, round-headed, wide-faced, with big dark silent eyes. The only thing that was different was that she'd acquired some kind of necklace from somewhere, the pendant a plain brown ring hanging from a grey chain.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Goose said. There was no need to raise her voice.

“That's my kayak,” Jennifer Knox said.

Goose was so surprised that the surprise was for an instant indistinguishable from fear: a sharp cold shock. She stood up.

“Well, hey. Nice to hear your voice.”

“What are you doing with my boat?”

The shaman girl sounded just like any other grumpy teenager. She came down to the wet sand. The sleeves of her sweatshirt were too long. She pulled them down over her hands, her fists improvising pockets.

“Technically,” Goose said, trying to keep the nerves out of her voice, “I think this belongs to a George Hall. Of Tsakis Road, Rupert. You know Mr. Hall? Fat little dog? He got it for his kids. The kayak. Not the dog.”

The girl stared. Her face was young, a girl's face, healthy and fresh the way only teenagers could look, but the way she stared made her look ten years older, or a hundred.

“You're that cop.”

“Officer Maculloch. I'm glad you remember. Though I probably just got decommissioned, so why don't you just call me Séverine. Though actually everyone calls me Goose. Long story. Did I tell you that already?”

“What are you doing here?”

The boat was barely drifting at all, sheltered from any wind and out of the pull of the tide. What little lazy momentum it had was away from the beach, which made Goose feel a little more secure. She propped her arms on her hips and tried to smile.

“It's time to go home, Jennifer. I thought I'd come and fetch you.” She patted the wheel. “Easier than paddling all the way back, eh?”

The girl's face was a mask, a smooth coppery mask.

“Not, like, your actual home,” Goose went on. “Obviously. Because you set fire to that. Right? Didn't you?”

Hands still curled in the sleeves, Jennifer folded her arms.

“No one was hurt. You'll be glad to hear. I guess.”

This was what Goose remembered from their few minutes' encounter in the back of the station in Alice: the way anything she said to the girl just bounced off.

“Okay,” she said. “Look. Actually I don't care about what happened with your house. Truly I don't. I'm sorry I brought it up, eh? That's all finished with now. Okay? I'm not trying to arrest you, nothing like that. No more cells, no more hospitals, no more lawyers, whatever. Promise. I didn't come here as a cop, I came here as me. You understand? Come on, Jennifer, talk to me.”