Lightfall (10 page)

“It's time we met,” said a voice behind him.

He turned with a tipsy innocence, delighted at the thought that he could give his flowers freely. Because she stood with the sun behind her, he didn't at first see who she was. He did not blink in the glare of light, nor squint nor move to shade his eyes. He simply stared.

“I'm Iris,” she said, curiously formal. Then she turned quite breezy. “You know what I just found out? You don't get hit by lightning for fighting back.”

“Fighting who?”

“
Them
,” she said impatiently. She was damned if she would tell him any more until he paid in kind.

He sidled a couple of steps to the right to get her out of the sun. He felt a tingle of shock at the base of his spine. Of course: the yellow car. He hadn't heard the voice before. He felt funny, being caught with flowers. He wanted to run inside and bar the door.

“I don't know who you mean.”

“Really?” She leaned an elbow on the mailbox, slouching there and seeming to appraise him. “Maybe I'm not as far behind as I think,” said Iris mildly. “All I know is, we're in it together. That much I can
feel.
” Then she dropped her voice and spoke in a thrilling whisper, daring him to join her: “You can feel it, can't you, Michael?”

A throb of rage rose in his throat, like a cry that only waited for a stab of pain to burst it. He squeezed the flowers so tightly in his fist that the stems went to jelly and slimed his skin. He would have torn her to bits, like everything else that got in his way, but his sudden attachment to Joey had left him weak and shy. Perhaps he ought to clear it first. They might have a local custom here for ridding the place of undesirables. Safer to wait, in any case. Thus did he fall victim to his first lover's compromise: he let the moment go for the sake of keeping things intact.

“Get out of here,” he warned her, stark as the winter sea. “We'll give you till sundown. Get in your car and go.” She started to laugh, flinging his kindness back in his face. He gave a savage hiss and snapped: “There's nothing
left.
Don't you see—it can only kill you.”

She leaned across the picket fence and halved the distance between them. Though she laughed out loud, it wasn't a laugh that made her happy.

“Is that all?” she mocked, with a withering look. “Well, let's get started then. I thought I was going to hell.”

And she stood up tall and tossed her hair—perversely, as if she'd just been given a reprieve instead of a sentence. When the screen door creaked and Joey appeared, they both looked up with a fire of pride. They meant to make it plain they'd held their own, as if the boy had come to be their referee. When he strode down the steps and over the lawn it seemed he would have to make a choice that would crack the world in two.

“So you
know
this man,” she said to Joey as he placed himself between them, trying to shut her out. She watched them exchange a glance. Two against one only seemed to make her brazen. “Has he told you yet about the love of God?”

“There is no God,” said Joey automatically. He would not look her straight in the eye.

“Don't tell me,” she said. “Tell your friend.”

“Michael, listen,” Joey pleaded. He reached out and touched the prophet's chest, the tips of his fingers just above the heart. “She's nothing. She's got no power. She couldn't stop you then, and she can't now.”

This speaking of her in the third person had the effect of closing Iris out. Michael nodded and followed as Joey went through the gate. The two men crossed the muddy lane and made their way steadily down the beaten field to the white stone church among the pines. Iris stayed close behind for a while, but she didn't move to hector them any further. She was trying to figure how much Joey knew.

He clearly connected them both with who they used to be—as if they looked no different now and no time stood between them. What was worse, he'd suffered no memory loss of his own. He wasn't, like her and Michael, tied to a blind unconscious will, gray as the tides below. Who was he, anyway? All she saw was a grizzled, crew-cut fisherman, lonely and daft and slightly fanatic. He had not shed his years for her, the way he had for Michael.

Since when did a destiny sure as theirs require a third party? Why could she not have a confidant, too? In her eyes, Michael trod the field ahead with a wise man at his side. Her brazenness fell away. She had learned her first crude lesson in class: she would ferret out all the facts, while he would be entrusted with the meaning. It made her ache with jealousy.

When she saw they were bound for the church, she stopped. She watched them unlock the double door, slip through, and shut her out. She wouldn't have followed inside, no matter if all the doors and windows had been flung wide. Except what little she knew about Michael and his cult—two minutes' glance at her article, and nothing to put it in context with—she had no opinion of God, one way or the other. She'd taken the opposite route the moment she entered the village hall of records. Research was her only method.

She would not join with Michael on the runic ground of Higher Being. She knew they would never have chosen her for that. She didn't have the skills for what she couldn't prove. So she stood in the field at the stroke of noon, in a fountain of light, with the sea gone sapphire, and tried to picture the spring of 1588. As if she could will away the fact that he'd abandoned her.

Inside the church, Michael stood at the amber window, peering out at a world that gleamed like gold. He watched her survey the land, looking off across the water like a widow. Behind him, Joey worked to free a loose slab in the floor. He chipped at the mortar with a garden trowel and dug it out with his fish knife. He strained and groaned as he heaved the stone from its place. He was just lifting out an ironclad chest wreathed in cobwebs, about a foot square, when the prophet finally turned. Michael hardly glanced at the treasure as he padded, lost in thought, to the last pew. He sat heavily, propped his chin in his hands, and began to sort it out.

“Should I kill her, Joey?”

“You didn't before,” the other said vaguely. He bent down close to jimmy away the rusted lock. He wedged his knife and worked it like a lever. The rotted screws gave with a ripping sound. He creaked the lid back on its hinges.

“How long do I have?” asked Michael.

“Five days,” Joey said, wiping the dust from two or three objects he took from the box.

“What do I do?”

“It'll come to you, Michael. Don't force it. Here.”

Joey handed across what looked to be a compass. Then a sealing ring with a coat of arms. Then a snuffbox made of tortoise shell. Michael received them one by one, without any special interest. They would have no meaning till Joey told him. But the fourth and final thing drew him up short: a monogrammed silver box, about the right size for cigarettes. The name it bore was
Edward Dale
, with a ship above and a motto below:
To the end of the world.
Instinctively, Michael put a hand to his jacket pocket, but there was nothing there.

“Your papers,” Joey explained with a gesture toward the silver box. Not a fleck of tarnish anywhere. But when Michael moved to flick the catch, the boy leaped forward to stop him. “Not now,” he said. “We have to go down to the light so I can show you something.”

“Can't we just be alone?”

“Soon—very soon. Hurry.”

When they got outside they discovered that Iris had gone. Joey locked the door and held the key out to Michael, who begged off shyly. His hands were full. He didn't want it anyway—wished Joey would take charge of the keeping of symbols. Michael had no use for them. He made no protest, even so, when Joey slipped a hand in his pocket and left the key like a secret. They walked through the one paved street of the village, immune as before from curious stares. The townsmen who just an hour before had fawned on Michael and greeted him now busied themselves with close work, leaving them both alone.

If Joey had been some other sort than what he was, he might have gloated here, to think they now held him in awe. He had been the object of ridicule for as long as anyone in the village could remember. But he seemed too busy being Michael's guide to waste his time returning their contempt. On the contrary: as they strolled along he pointed out who lived where, with a warm and affectionate thumbnail sketch that brought each one alive. He might have been welcoming Michael into a family. Perhaps, thought the prophet, they didn't need to run away to the lonely valley after all. The people of Pitt's Landing might accept them just the way they were.

By the time they reached the lighthouse, Michael had managed to distribute his possessions in his pockets, so he clinked and sagged like a wandering tradesman. The park was noisy with villagers out to take the winter sun at its height. For one hour now, it was sweet as spring. A gang of rangers lounged on the lawn and picnicked, half an ear cocked to the radio calls that crackled in the Jeep they'd tumbled out of. Two mothers strolled their toddlers. Somebody flew a russet kite. Michael floated through, overflowing with the certainty that he'd stumbled into paradise. Just then he would have done anything to keep them safe. For all the hate he harbored toward the world at large, it had purified his heart, somehow, and made him ripe for love.

Right about now, he thought it could stay like this forever.

They came around the cylindrical tower and went up a short flight of steps to a kind of balcony. They stood at a fluted balustrade, with the drop sheer to the rocks below, a hundred and thirty feet. They stood together with the land behind them—a whole continent's worth—and took in the roaming ocean, roughshod with the sun. It did not matter to Michael what was past. He laid no claim on it. Far too much attention seemed to be on him. Wasn't it time to hear Joey's side? How long had he been waiting?

They stood like heroes—captain and mate. Michael gave no credence to the cost. He had never lived the life of a moralist, making choices left and right. Wanting nothing, he'd never wanted two things both at once, and thus had no experience of having second thoughts. Except for certain small gold objects sifted from the day's collection, he hardly knew what it meant to acquire and keep. But he wanted to possess this boy forever. So much so, it seemed to him that everything else would have to realign itself, to accommodate his first desire. “We ought to have a ship,” he said.

“Now listen, Michael,” the boy replied, unhearing. “This is where it happened.” He made a gesture, hands outstretched as if to flare a cape, that took in the whole of the cliff that edged the park.

How funny, thought Michael, lazily peering over the brink. The boy was intent on the land, while he was mad to sail. Between them, they took in everything. Though he could not even fathom what he meant by wanting Joey—it was something unearthly bright and pure, and it straddled day and night—he knew the world would ever after run to the motions of what they dreamed.

He looked over happily, even as Joey climbed up onto the balustrade. It was barely half a foot wide. The wind did capers, billowing out his shirt so he teetered backward. Michael had no fear. If the larger rule of Fate had brought them back together, no mere freak like an accident could touch them on the heights. He probably ought to jump up there himself. They could dance on the razor's edge till the sun went down.

As if to beckon him, Joey turned with a perfect smile. He held up his hands like someone about to cup a butterfly.

“Michael,” he said, as soft as a brother, “it's all so easy. You'll see—they
want
to go this way.”

And he clapped his hands and stepped out into the noonday air. There was one last glint of his frozen smile as he dropped out of sight like a stone. A cry ballooned in Michael's mouth. It spilled like blood, in a rising wall, as he leaned far over the parapet and watched. About halfway down, the sea wind blew the falling boy against the cliff, where he dangled on a jagged point for the space of a breath, then hurtled and bounced through a string of vaulting somersaults. The splash when he hit the water was so small, the harbor barely shrugged.

Michael's was the only scream. The whole way down, the boy was silent as the ripples that briefly ringed his landing. In a moment there was nothing there at all. Bent double and half in the air himself, roaring with all he'd lost, Michael staggered back and down the steps, lunging away from the lighthouse tower. He wept to feel the ground beneath his feet. He did not stop till he'd gained the circle of grave and weathered stones, where he fell to his knees and shook with grief.

It was several minutes before he realized: they all went about their business as if nothing had transpired. Ten feet away, the rangers joked in their boots and khakis, strung in a circle all their own. Children seemed to be everywhere—whole teams of them, sides all chosen, as if the school in Orick had declared a sudden holiday. The oaf with the kite, showing off for his girl, did a pratfall over one of the sacred stones, missing Michael by an inch. A carnival air was on the place. Deliberately, it almost seemed, they made a point of acting happy. One notch higher and they would have sung a chorus.

Death wasn't good enough for them, Michael thought in a sudden twist of fury. He wanted them debased. The tears streamed down his face, but no one saw. He'd never cared for anyone before—never given himself away the way he had this morning. The rest of the village would pay for that. They'd die when he was ready. Beg for it, even.

Killing had always been a purely casual thing, like flicking away a speck of lint. Now it came like a true vocation. He went on sobbing freely, loud enough to drown out all the laughing. He seemed to understand that these were the first and last tears he would ever need. He dug his nails in his cheeks and moaned. He knew he should have killed Joey right at the start. Somehow, the killing he had not bothered with had set his heart to ticking. Just to make it stop again, he would have to drown the world.