The Dark of Summer

by Dean R. Koontz

  Still carrying her shoes, her feet sliding pleasantly through the warm, dry sand, she started southward, unintentionally moving toward the curve in the beach where, only the day before — running northward with her close behind — the ghost had disappeared. Occasionally, she looked out to sea, not really seeing anything but the color of the roiling water, and sometimes she looked up at the terns which were busy already. Most of the time, however, she kept her eyes on her feet, on the shifting sand which made way for her, letting the lift and fall of her own feet hypnotize her.

  She had never felt so tired in her life, so sleepy, as if she had been awake for days…

  She had lied to Grace about not having slept the night before. She had slept, though she'd awakened from countless nightmares, each worse than the one before it, all of which centered around a chase in which she was pursued by a faceless thing … The size, shape, texture, and substance of the pursuer always changed, from nightmare to nightmare, though one thing remained constant: its hands. Always, in the dreams, long-fingered, black hands, with nails as sharp as razors, reached out for her, rattling at the back of her neck…

  All that considered, she had still slept — so why was she so terribly sleepy now?

  The sound of the boat engine came to her over the rhythmic crash of the waves, though she did not identify it until it was nearly to shore. Then, looking up, surprised, she saw Jack Younger beach his fishing launch not a dozen steps in front of her.

  For the briefest of moments, when she recognized his sun-whitened hair and his lean, brown good looks, she smiled and waved at him, almost called out his name. Then, suddenly, she recalled what he had said about her Uncle Will, the accusations he had made two days ago, and her smile gave way to a grim, tight-lipped frown as she realized that, now, she would have to confront him with his pack of lies. The very last thing she would have thought she needed, this of all days, was an argument with Jack Younger (the younger). However, strangely enough, the prospect of it lightened her spirit considerably, put a much healthier glow on her cheeks, and jerked her out of the creeping malaise that had possessed her ever since she'd gotten out of bed a few disproportionately long hours ago. At least, in the heat of the argument, she ought to be able to put aside all thoughts of the ghost, momentarily forget her worries about her own mental condition. And that was, of course, to be desired.

  He approached her, apparently unable to see that she was going to give him a piece of mind, grinning, his teeth bright, his freckles like the specks on a brown hen's egg. Affecting a mask of mock admonishment, he said, “You shouldn't be here, on the beach, you know.”

  “Shouldn't I?” she asked, in a perfectly neutral tone of voice, deciding to make him initiate whatever verbal battle there was to be. She was quite sure that there would be one.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling again, pushing his white hair back from his forehead. “You shouldn't be here on the beach. As I understand it, mermaids are supposed to keep in the water.”

  Ordinarily, his compliment would have pleased her, though she would not have let on that it did. Now, however, it only served to give her anger a sharper edge, for she interpreted it as nothing more than a smooth line to soften her up, a false compliment to keep her from asking him why he'd told her a lot of awful lies about William Barnaby. She felt as if he were attempting to use her, mold her reactions, and she did not like that.

  “You aren't smiling,” he observed.

  “Should I be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “For one thing,” he said, “I'm the funniest man in the entire fishing fleet.”

  “And for another?”

  “Mermaids should avoid getting frown lines.”

  She still did not smile.

  “Headache?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “A bad breakfast?”

  She said nothing, but watched him.

  “Have I done something?” he asked. And then, as if remembering, just then, he said, “Are you angry about what I said, day before yesterday?”

  “Of course, I am,” she said.

  “I didn't mean to make you angry with me,

  Gwyn,” he said. “I was only telling you the truth as I -

  She interrupted him with a forced laugh, trying to sound as if she were mocking him. She was pleased to see him wince at the harsh sound of her voice.

  “Now the roles are reversed,” he said, no longer smiling. “You see something funny, and I do not.”

  “It's quite funny,” Gwyn said, “to hear you talking about 'truth,' since you have so much trouble recognizing it yourself.”

  “Oh?”

  “Even now you're not being truthful,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “You're pretending you don't understand what I mean, while you understand perfectly well. You told me a long string of lies about my uncle, sent me off thinking I was staying with a genuine human monster. But you neglected to add a few details that would have painted a very different picture.”

  “What details?”

  “Oh, come on—”

  He stepped closer, shaking his head. “No, really. I want to know what details you think I left out.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, still holding her tennis shoes in one hand. “Okay. You asked for it.”

  “I sure did. Tell me.”

  For days now, it seemed as if the world were striking out at her, striking out blindly and malevolently, bringing her pain and worry. It was nice to strike back for once, even in this limited fashion. She said, “For one thing, you told me that Uncle Will, when he first bought the place, refused to rent the facilities at Lamplight Cove.”

  “He did refuse!”

  “Outright?”

  “Yes,” Younger said.

  “That's not the way I hear it.”

  Younger said, “Barnaby wouldn't listen to reason, wouldn't give us a chance to—”

  “Don't continue to lie to me, please,” she said, in an even voice. “I know that my uncle would have let you rent Lamplight Cove if you had been willing to meet certain conditions which were altogether reasonable.”

  “Such as?”

  “He asked you to stop polluting the waters of the cove; if you had agreed, you could have rented the buildings there. He asked you to cease dumping sludge oil from your boats into the cove waters, but you somehow couldn't agree about that. You repainted your boats there, and you let old paint, turpentine, solvents and other garbage run right out into the cove, where the fish and plant life were being killed.”

  “This is all a lie.”

  “You're quite bullheaded, aren't you?” Gwyn asked.

  He said, “I assure you, Gwyn, that your uncle did not make any conditions. He merely bought the cove out from under us and told us' to get packing. He offered no reasons for the eviction, and he provided no alternatives of any sort.” He sighed, bent down and sifted sand between his fingers, looking up at her. “Besides, we positively were not polluting the water around Lamplight Cove — or anywhere else, for that matter. A responsible fisherman — and most all of them are responsible — would never dump sludge oil overboard, because he knows the sea is his livelihood, his entire means of support. Sludge oil is pumped into barrels and sold, periodically, to a reclaiming plant near Boston. And though we had a dry dock at Lamplight Cove, it was extremely well policed by everyone who used it; no contaminants could have gotten into the sea from there, not even by accident.”

  “Are you saying Uncle Will lied to me?” she asked, looking down at him, fuming.

  “He's been known to lie,” he said. “Look, why don't you let me take you to Lamplight Cove? You'd see how clean it is. By no stretch of the imagination could you say—”

  “I'm sure it's clean, now,” she said. “After all, you people have been gone from there for a year.”

  “It was clean before,” he insisted. “Your uncle lied to you.”

  “I suppose he also lied about International Se
afood Products?”

  He fielded that one easily. “He probably did. What did he tell you about ISP?”

  In brief, clipped sentences, no longer able to conceal the depth of her anger, Gwyn told him exactly what her Uncle Will said about the proposed seafood processing plant, how it would damage the ecology, foul the air, and ruin the land values all around Calder.

  “Lies,” Younger said.

  “What is true, then?”

  He said, “Oh, there are seafood processing plants just like the one that he described for you, have no doubt. They're messy; they dump rotting fish into the sea just as he said they do; and the odor of decay clings like glue to the land for two or three miles in every direction.”

  Confused, she said, “Well, I thought you said he was lying.”

  “He is, Gwyn. I would be against the construction of a plant like that. After all, Calder is my home, the sea my livelihood and my love. But the ISP plant wouldn't be anything like that. It's a super-modern, one hundred percent mechanized place. They pack the flesh, but they don't then discard the scales, guts and bones, as many plants do. Much of that, along with the meat that can't be cut into filets, is pulverized to make a high-protein flour substitute. That's used in the making of other foods, and much of it's exported to poverty stricken countries overseas. What guts and bones can't be used for that are pulverized for fertilizer. The ISP plants don't throw out anything, and they produce no unfiltered wastes that are dumped into the sea. Furthermore, they've more than met all the federal government regulations on air emissions, and their new plants don't give off any odor at all. They have a plant like the one they want to build here up in Maine. I've seen it. It's clean as a church.”

  She turned away from him. Trying to digest all that he had told her, she looked far out to sea, squinting against the fierce glare of sunlight that shimmered on the water.

  For a time, they were both silent.

  And still.

  But, eventually, when he felt that he had given her sufficient time to think, he got impatiently to his feet, anxious to hear her reaction. He said, “Do you believe me, Gwyn?”

  “No.”

  Inwardly, however, she was not quite so certain what she should believe and what she shouldn't; circumstances were no longer clear cut, but shadowed and vague. She supposed there was at least a modicum of truth to what Younger had said about International Seafood Products, though she was sure that the plant could not be so clean as he said it was. After all, her Uncle Will had said that it would be filthy, and so far as she could see, he had no reason to make up elaborate lies for her. On the other hand, what reason did Younger have for lying to her?

  He said, “Your uncle really is lying to you, Gwyn, as hard as that may be to accept. I can't say why he's lying, but he most certainly is. His behavior is usually difficult to fathom.”

  Gwyn turned to face him again, her eyes so dazzled by the sunlight on the sea that he appeared cloaked in shadows and spots of moving light. She said, “I suppose you'll tell me that you never made threats against Uncle Will, either.”

  “Me, personally?” he asked.

  “Don't play word games with me,” she said, angrily.

  “I'm not.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” she said. “Did the fishermen, in general, make threats against him?”

  He said, “There's none of us who like your uncle, of course, but there's also none of us who would hurt him — or even threaten to hurt him. That isn't our way.” He paused, saw that she was still not prepared to believe him, and he said, “One thing I do understand about William Barnaby.”

  She waited.

  He said, “I understand his fanatical belief in classism, though it seems foolish to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He's a very refined bigot,” Younger said.

  “That's absurd!”

  “Oh,” Younger said, “he's not an out-and-out racial bigot, because that's not fashionable any longer, not even in the least well educated social strata. I'm sure he wouldn't consciously discriminate against a black man or a Spanish-American merely because of race. In fact, he'd most likely go out of his way to show racial minorities special courtesy. No, your uncle's bigotry is based on far different standards, though it's nonetheless petty for that.”

  “What other standards?”

  “Social rank and position,” Younger said. “I suppose this kind of snobbish bigotry isn't uncommon in wealthy families with a long social history and genuine blue-blood ancestry. Yet, he seems like a fool for clinging to it. Gwyn, your uncle seems to hate all fishermen, automatically, without even knowing us, simply because we aren't of his own social level. He pushed us out of Lamplight Cove because he didn't want to have to associate with us, even in the role of our landlord. He was terrified that his hoity-toity society friends would think of him as a patron to the likes of us, as a renter of old docks and flensing sheds. And when we had the gall to stand up and argue with him, he hated us twice as much as before; in his mind, you see, we should always remain silent and assent to whatever he does to us, merely because we are — by his scale, and no other — his social inferiors, a pack of dirty laborers.”

  “Uncle Will isn't like that,” she said.

  “Then you don't know him at all.”

  She said, “He used to be like that, I admit. But he's gotten over that, outgrown it. He's changed.”

  “Has he, now?”

  “Yes” she said. “And I'm proof that he has.”

  Younger looked perplexed. He said, “You're proof? How?”

  “That's a private, family story,” she said. She thought about her dead father and how mindlessly, unreasonably, the Barnaby family had hated him, how they had rejected him for being born into a family of less social stature than theirs. “But I can assure you that Uncle Will realized his own shortcoming along these lines, and that he's changed.”

  “I doubt he has.”

  “You're impossible,” she said.

  “No more than you are,” he said.

  She sat down on the sand and began to slip on her tennis shoes, fiddled with her laces, managed to string them tight and tie two neat bows even though her hands were shaking.

  While she was thus engaged, Younger walked closer to the water's edge, turning his back on her, and began to scoop handfuls of sand up, balling the wet earth and throwing it out to sea. He worked fast, scooping and pitching, scooping and pitching, as if trying to drain himself of his anger. His broad back and brown muscular arms worked in a healthy, flowing rhythm that was not unpleasant to watch.

  Shoes tied, Gwyn got to her feet, brushed sand from her clothes, and turned away from him, heading back toward Barnaby Manor.

  “Gwyn?”

  She turned.

  He was facing her now, his hands hung at his sides and covered with wet sand, perspiration strung across his forehead in a band of transparent beads.

  “Yes?”

  He said, “I wanted to be friends.”

  “So did I,” she said. “But you never gave it a chance.”

  “It wasn't all me,” he said.

  She did not reply.

  He said, “Don't go yet.”

  “I have to.”

  “Let's talk a while longer.”

  “We've nothing to talk about.”

  “Why don't we get together tomorrow for—”

  “That won't be possible.”

  “But—”

  “I've been told that I'd be wise to avoid you,” she said. “And now I see that was good advice.”

  She started walking away again.

  “Gwyn, wait!”

  She continued walking.

  “Who told you to stay away from me — that uncle of yours, that sweet and unprejudiced paragon of a man?” he shouted after her, his voice ringing from the cliffs, flat against the rolling sea.

  She ignored him.

  “I'm right about him, you know!” he shouted.

  She did not respond, but
walked a little faster. As the tone of his voice grew uglier, and as he put more volume to it, she grew more afraid that he would follow her.

  He shouted something else.

  With relief, she found that she had put so much distance between them that his words were indistinct.

  Fifteen minutes later, moving through shimmering curtains of heat waves as the mid-day sun beat down mercilessly on the brilliant white sand, Gwyn reached the steps that wound up the cliffside toward Barnaby Manor like a stone snake. As she stepped to that cool, shadowed shaft of risers, she discovered that the dead girl — pale, quiet, soft and wraithlike, but nonetheless real — was waiting for her. The dead girl looked up, her blue eyes bright as gems, smiled gently, pushed a yellow, lock of hair out of her face with a long-fingered hand as white and as unearthly as anything Gwyn had ever seen.

  “Hello, Gwyn,” the girl said.

  The specter sat on the third step from the bottom, her bare feet on the first step, still dressed in a fresh, white gown of many layers. Her hands were again folded on her lap like trained animals returning to their proper place, and she looked as if she had been here a long time, keeping her eerie vigil.

  Gwyn's mind had been fully occupied with the possible ramifications of her conversation with Jack Younger. Confused by everything that he had told her about the ISP plant and about her uncle, not wanting to believe him at all but nevertheless believing him at least a tiny bit, she had not had time to think of the ghost in more than an hour. Now, coming across the dead girl, her fears flushed back to her in a rush, like the crashing wall of water from a broken dam. Again, she felt a thousand years old, brittle and ready to crack apart.

  “You don't look well,” the ghost said.

  Gwyn said, “I'd like to use the stairs. Would you please move out of the way?”

  Her voice came out shallow, nearly inaudible, and it betrayed the intense fear which she was trying desperately to control.

  The specter didn't move.

  Gwyn started forward, caught herself before it was too late, stopped. She realized that she was not now capable of touching the dead girl as she had before. She was not up to discovering, as she had discovered that other time, that the ghost would feel as solid as she felt, as real as any living person.