Folly

by Laurie R. King

  Rae gazed up at the four wide, immobile granite slabs. Stone was a medium foreign to her, a woman who had spent most of her adult life in a dialogue between the organic subtleties of wood and the ever-present danger of wickedly sharp steel, but there was no doubt that rock like this spoke of another world entirely, one of eternity, imperviousness, and utter solidity.

  She put a foot gingerly on the lowest step, rocking her weight back and forth; the step did not budge. Scuffling some of the generations of leaf mold to one side revealed a mottled gray surface, finely textured. The next step was equally solid, and the third.

  Shoving a pile of rich soil off the end of the third step, Rae’s boot encountered something hard among the brambles. She burrowed through blackberry canes as thick as her thumb and rose stems hairy with thorns, and found herself looking at a slab of milled wood nearly two inches thick, dark with age but otherwise well preserved. She ripped and yanked, hesitant to commit her leg to leaving the steps but curious to see what this immense plank might be. After a few minutes, she had cleared one corner of it, a handsbreadth in both directions. The rest disappeared into the mass of vegetation. She grabbed the object and wiggled it from side to side; a lot of the growth moved in response. Without a concerted daylight effort there was no guessing the final measurement, but Rae looked from the steps to the wood and concluded that, despite its inordinate thickness, this was likely to be Desmond’s front door, fallen here when the house burned away from it. She knelt on the granite and stretched out to shove the growth from the lumber’s upper edge; a foot from the bottom her gloves found an enormous iron hinge.

  Rae was smiling when she drew back her arm. Desmond’s door; who would have expected even a corner of it to have survived? She yanked off both gloves and pulled the knife from her tool belt, snapped open the blade, and stretched down to shave a thin layer from the door’s edge. Her hands seemed certain of the grain’s direction even if her eyes couldn’t see beneath the dirt, and indeed, as the blade traveled down the plank toward her thumb, the wood curled obediently over it. She caught the wide shaving and held it up to the fading light, noting its red interior, then put it to her nose. Beneath the earthy smell lay the faintest ghost of a tang: Western red cedar. She studied the revealed grain for a moment, caressing its fine dry texture, then slipped the curl into her shirt pocket before standing up and giving the protruding corner a last speculative glance.

  Then she retreated. Back at the fire pit she threw some wood onto the coals to heat water for the dishes, retrieved her dinner plate from the arms of a bush, and washed up, taking care to lock away all traces of food. She was still hyperconscious of the unaccustomed noises around her, aware of the twitchiness of her muscles and every motion of the waves, but it was not as bad as it had been earlier. Perhaps uncovering the stones had helped: nothing like a ton or so of granite to lend a touch of reality to an enterprise. Maybe the unexpected glimpse of Desmond’s own woodwork steadied her. Or it might have been just the consumption of food that brought her down to earth. Whatever the reason, she now felt strong enough for the next step.

  She picked up the green knapsack and took from it a mashed white paper bag with the name of a pharmacy printed on the front. The sky had cleared while she wasn’t looking, particularly out toward the western horizon; the undersides of the clouds now glowed rosy with the angle of the sun. Sticking the flashlight into an empty loop of the tool belt, she carried the paper bag down across the beach to the rock promontory— and nearly leapt into the cove at her left when a pair of heavy objects splashed into the open water to her right. She peered, trembling, at the water, and a moment later burst into nervous laughter as two drowned-looking heads popped up from the water: harbor seals, disturbed from their perch by her passing. They looked up at her reproachfully with their liquid eyes.

  “Sorry,” she told them. The two gleaming heads sank back beneath the surface, and Rae somewhat nervously continued on down the promontory. She reached the end without further mishap, chose a rock facing due west, and settled down to watch the sunset paint the sky.

  Desmond Newborn, she mused, might have sat on this same rock, watched that same sun go down in a blaze of oranges and blues. Well, perhaps not this very rock—adding boulders to the promontory had been one of the few actions Rae’s father had taken during his twenty-year stewardship of the property, to keep the point from eroding and opening up the island’s only cove to the sea. And Rae felt quite certain that Great-uncle Desmond had not sat down here in order to open a paper bag and take out six giant plastic pill bottles. Sleeping pills, tranquilizers, mood regulators, megavitamins (on the off chance that theory was not entirely bunk)—she lined them all up on a rock between her feet. The sleeping pills first. She wrestled off the childproof cap and slid a forefinger in to pull the first tablet up the side of the bottle, held it for a moment between finger and thumb, then flicked it away into the water. It disappeared with a small plunk and a sinuous spread of concentric circles, as did the next, and the one after that.

  It occurred to her belatedly that heavy-duty tranquilizers might not agree with sea life. Oh well; maybe they would dissolve before the fish found them. In any case, tonight the fate of the local wildlife was not her main concern.

  When the last sleeping pill had been swallowed by the sea, she screwed the cap back on and returned the bottle to the bag (wholesale poisoner of fish she might be, but she was not going to be accused of littering) before reaching for the Prozac. Those pills made a slightly different sound, more of a plink. And the giant megavitamins made a plonk, but they, too, vanished beneath the gentle undulations of the water, and they and the rest were all gone before the last banner of orange had faded from the horizon.

  Now she possessed nothing more lethal than a hundred aspirin tablets and a bottle of very old Scotch, two things any normal woman might have. Pretend normality was Rae’s current credo. She was sick to death of pills and control exercises and dream analyses and the overriding magnifying-glass approach of psychiatry. She’d come to envision psychotherapy as first cousin to the debriding horrors of the burn wards, taking control of the healing process by ripping away the body’s attempts at scar tissue, no matter how excruciating. Demons needed confronting, yes, but not every hour of the day. Avoidance was, after all, a coping technique; so, now, she would treat her problems with a healthy dose of avoidance, even if Psychiatric Truth declared: You can’t hide, you can’t ignore.

  Bullshit. Normal people did, every day.

  The rebellious thought made her a little happier. The absence of pills frightened her a little, but that was only to be expected. Fear was normal, too.

  Beneath a sky of deepest indigo, with the full moon rising and her pharmacological boats sunk behind her, Rae took out the flashlight and picked her way back to the tent along the unfamiliar shore.

  Four

  Rae’s Journal

  March 31

  I wonder if anyone but me has caught the significance of this date? Not only the night of the full moon, when Luna-cy is at its fullest, but the eve of April Fools’ Day as well. The Hunter surely would have been on it in a flash, but as far as she’s concerned, I left California on the Ides of March, which carries a very different sort of symbolic content. Give her credit, though—she might even be encouraged if I’d told her I was aiming for this date to begin my folly—a sense of humor indicates a healthy degree of perspective. But I haven’t told her anything of substance for weeks now. Poor well-meaning woman: I must send her a postcard.

  The date is a private joke. Alan would have appreciated it, if he were here, but then Alan living would drain the joke of meaning.

  I first saw the island five years ago, a few months after my father died. When his estate was divided up between myself and various distant relations, for some reason he had specified that the island be left to me. I knew vaguely that there had once been a house here, built by my mysterious Great-uncle Desmond, but no one I knew had ever seen it. So that summer, Alan and I decided to
take a look at what I had inherited before putting it on the market. It was actually more an excuse for a holiday than anything else. Bella came with us. She was four and a half then, and I was just back from London, triumphant and exhausted. I know I must have looked as tired as I felt, because while we were here three different people referred to Bella as my granddaughter. Alan was livid, but really, how many women have babies at the age of forty-two? Talk about an April Fool …

  Anyway, we hired a boat in Roche Harbor to bring us out here. It’s called Sanctuary Island on all the maps and deeds, and that’s the only name I had ever heard for it, but when I told the old guy in the boathouse where we wanted to go, he scratched his head for a minute and then said, “Oh—you mean Folly.”

  Alan was delighted. He’d once spent a summer with a college fiend whose family had a Victorian folly in the grounds of their country house, a fake ruin, forlorn and more than a little ridiculous, but appealing. The island’s nickname came from the house that once stood here, although I’ve never known if it was because the house had something quirky about it, invisible in the only photograph I have, or because in ruins it looked like the fake in the garden of Alan’s fiend. More likely the latter. But in either case, Folly it was called, by the locals and, from then on, by us.

  The house—the folly—that I intend to rebuild, those stones that I plan on reclothing with wood and plaster, was built and burned in the Twenties, and was long since jungle by the time we saw it. We came, Alan and Bella and I, and we saw, and we fell under its lonely spell. Our planned quick survey of the island stretched far into the afternoon, cut short only by Bella’s hunger. We hiked around the surprisingly large island, found a beach and a fresh, clear spring and eagles’ nests and trees and even a sort of mountaintop (well, hilltop) clearing where the world stretched on to infinity.

  No, we determined, we would not be selling off this part of my inheritance. When Bella was a little older, when Alan and I had less pressing schedules, it would be a retreat, not only a glorious summer holiday place but a building with personality, a folly in its truest sense of extravagance and irrationality (madness in one of its more amusing manifestations). We began the lengthy preliminaries—legal wrangles, engineer’s inspections, restoration permits.

  Three and a half years later, before we could return to the island, they were both dead.

  I am here instead.

  Newborn’s Folly.

  Only Alan would appreciate the joke.

  Five

  With reluctance, Rae closed the leather covers of her journal and laid it to one side, next to the old revolver and its six bullets arranged tidily on the corner of the makeshift writing desk, that they might keep her company as she wrote. She leaned back against the reassuring lumps of the tool belt, taken off only when she sat down at the desk, then rubbed absently at the surgical scar along her left forearm, over the metal plate that made her arm ache when fatigued, when cold, and whenever else it damn well felt like it. She took her hand away and gathered up the bullets. The six of them fit neatly into a fist; six bullets that made a lovely dull metallic rasping sound when rolled around in a closed hand, like a mouthful of wet pebbles. She poured them into her other palm, and picked one out. Soft, warm, gray lead at one end, cool brass jacket flaring into the base at the other. A simple thing, really, awaiting a tap in just the right place. She wondered if she shouldn’t number them, carve Roman numerals in their soft nub ends so she could tell them apart, but that seemed too much like the list making that marked her worst periods, so she warmed them some more and then arranged them back in their triangle, three on a side, good little soldiers.

  The tent surrounding her was brand new, ordered from a catalogue along with half the kitchen equipment and waiting for her in Friday Harbor. Petra had helped her raise it, making it clear that this was about the coolest thing ever, while Tamara looked on in growing disbelief that anyone could possibly consider it shelter. The air inside smelled of water-proofing chemicals and the wrinkles in the canvas and the mesh windows were still crisp from the packing box. Rae had been glad to find all the poles in with it.

  Rae Newborn’s family was not the sort to indulge in a camping holiday. The closest she’d been to the tenting life was a week with Alan in a canvas-roofed cabin in Yosemite. It had been cold. It was cold now. The walls shifted of their own accord, shivering when the air brushed against them. All the flaps were tied snugly across the windows, but the door was still crimped in spots, and lay against the opening unevenly. Someone outside could, by a stealthy approach and sinking to his knees, peep in at her where she sat at the desk.

  Rae reached behind her to pull the hammer from its belt holster, placing it squarely on the desk in front of her.

  There’s no one out there.

  The canvas shivered again; a twig or pinecone hit the peak of the roof with a slap. Rae’s body tightened against the noise. She started in on the breathing and visualization exercises that would encourage the muscles to relax, wondering all the while Why did that twig hit the tent? Was it a twig or was somebody throwing something, and will the next step be a branch scratching the wall even though there aren’t any branches for six feet in any direction and after that a knock or a noise like a key tapping on glass only there’s no glass window in a tent maybe the Watchers’ll just lean against the canvas lean in and push against my space here pushing in on me until the aluminum tent poles bend and the walls—

  She stood up so abruptly the chair toppled over, then reached for the control of the hanging kerosene lamp. Its bright glow faded, the shadows grew soft and then dimmer, until with a small pop the light died.

  This had always worked at home, the cocooned feeling of being in the dark so those Watchers in the light couldn’t see in. What she had failed to take into account was that her campsite had no floodlights, no means of throwing up a barricade of light in the compound outside. Just the moon.

  That was stupid, Rae, she berated herself. Now you’ll have to wait until Ed comes to get enough lights to hang up outside, half a dozen ought to do it, but not kerosene, that wouldn’t be too safe. Propane ought to be better although what a racket they’ll make, and how long does a lamp burn on a propane canister, anyway? No good if I had to go out in the dark and change the canister, maybe the lamps could be put on one of the big canisters like I’m using for the stove, harder to hang but—

  “You’re not going to do that,” Rae said aloud. The tent seemed to agree, relieved that it was not about to be set beneath a spotlight. Ridiculous—trees strung about with dangling propane tanks. Everyone in the islands would come to see it. Planes would divert to look down at her.

  It’s dark. Get used to it.

  Rae felt her way over to the cot, and from there to the bedside table (two crates of builders’ reference books) that held clock and flashlight. She picked up the heavy metal tube, but instead of thumbing it on, she stood in the dark tent, listening and watching. The moon was still too low in the sky to illuminate the tent, which meant that it was also no protection against any Watchers trying to creep up on her. She clicked the flashlight on to check the door, immediately clicked it off again. On, off; which was worse? She wanted nothing more than to sit at the desk and write in her journal for the rest of the night, concentrating hard on ink and paper behind the shelter of the canvas walls until the darkness had been gotten through and dawn allowed her to buckle on the tool belt again. But writing was no solution. She turned on the flashlight, took Tamara’s matches out of her pocket, and lit the lamp again.

  She glanced down at the small battery-run clock beside her neatly arranged cot, and saw with despair that it was barely nine. Camp was set up, dinner dealt with, the tent’s sparse furnishings arranged and rearranged, tea made and drunk so slowly the dregs had been stone cold, the journal written in; still it was only nine o’clock.

  Keep busy; but doing what?

  Standing beneath the whisper of the kerosene lamp, Rae became aware of a rustle in the front pocket of her sh
irt. She worked a hand under her fleece pullover and pulled out the curl of red cedar she’d taken from Desmond’s front door. It was a lovely wood, with the tight grain of virgin growth, and sure to have been taken from very near here. She turned it over in her fingers, and put it down on the desk, on the opposite corner from the wood-handled gun. Then, taking a deep and steadying breath, Rae turned her gaze to the tent’s zipped flap. Her heart began immediately to race, her lungs seemed to tighten, and even sitting she began to feel dizzy. Doom filled the air, the sense of imminent disaster built and grew in her very bones until she’d have been certain she was having a heart attack had she not been through this a hundred times before.

  Not outside. Oh, no. Not at night.

  Yes, outside.

  I can’t. I’ll—

  You have to. It’s why you came.

  But if someone’s there—

  Stupid, stupid. A canvas tent is no refuge, Rae told herself ferociously, and took a deliberate step so that her shadow fell on the tent wall, its curve of fabric strangely motionless now despite the rising tempest. The darkness outside the screen pulsated with a throng of Watchers, whispering and waiting to grab at her as soon as she emerged, to seize her and press themselves against her and pant obscenities in her ears; she could feel the bristle of unshaven cheek scraping against her neck, hear the cheerful monologue of a dead child playing in the shrubs— She seized her hair with both hands.

  I am fifty-two years old, she shouted silently against the rushing noise filling her ears. I am the mother of two daughters, the survivor of more than my share of hell; the earth is not about to crack open, there are not two men breathing down my neck, my heart is not about to stop, and I will not be reduced to cowering imbecility by a panic attack. I will not!