“Good Christ!” he muttered, craning his neck as Polly tilted the lamp. “It’s straight up …” He dropped the bag which fell over and began to roll down the beach. “Straight bloody up! I’m no mountain goat, you may have noticed—”
“Don’t grouse,” she said. “You only make yourself feel worse.” She paused, directing the light at the path. “I admit it is rather steep …”
The path rose abruptly, apparently at right angles to the beach, snaking upward among the wet, harsh shrubbery, between the rock facing which glistened treacherously on either side. Chandler picked up the bag yet again and began the climb. Occasional moss-covered stones provided handholds which he used to lever himself painstakingly onward: the footing was not only slippery and muddy but dotted with patches of ice made worse by the steady rain which coursed down the path, as well as inside his collar. His feet were raw from rubbing the inside of his wet shoes. He kept finding himself on his hands and knees, trying to keep from falling ass over duffel bag back down the hill and onto the beach. How long, oh Lord, how long?
“Why did we climb it, you ask,” Polly puffed from somewhere behind him. “Because it was there!”
Chandler tried to laugh but his mouth was dry and nothing came out. Anyway, he was too tired to laugh. The angle of ascent never seemed to lessen, just went on, wet and icy and muddy and what in the name of God had he ever done to deserve this? “Shine the goddamn light up ahead,” he shouted, “see where the hell we are—”
“Don’t be testy and ruin everything, Colin. This is an adventure—”
“Oh, shit,” he cried, slipping suddenly backward, clutching the bag, free arm flailing until he found a foothold in the rocks.
“Come on, Nimrod, we’re almost there.”
“Don’t be cheery,” he said. “I can’t bear that—not cheeriness.”
“You have mud all over your face.”
“Ah, yes, I expect that happened when I was pushing the bag ahead of me with my nose. In fact, my dear girl, I have mud in places where—”
“I never knew I had places, yes, yes. Very, very old.”
He lay panting, clutching the duffel bag to his mudpacked raincoat: “But true, nonetheless.” She sat down next to him, drew her knees up, rested her chin on them.
“Maybe we should, you know,” she said, “take a little rest for a moment.” She licked the rain off her upper lip and peeked over at him. “Every so often I can’t quite remember how we got here …”
Chandler grunted: “Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert …”
After a while she took a deep breath, said: “Well, can you start again?”
“I’m not altogether sure.”
“You take the light. I can push the bag—”
“No, my dear, I’m only out of shape, not actually dead.” He stood up, balancing precariously. “Come on.”
It went more quickly the second time. Ten minutes of hard slogging brought them to the top where they stood gasping, sucking deep gulps of cold air into tight, aching lungs. They were standing on a dark lawn and the house itself loomed indistinctly another hundred yards away, up a gently sloping rise. Steeling themselves, they set off wordlessly, trudging across the slick grass, following the jiggling beam of light as if it were a leash and they were being wound inward.
Chandler’s vision blacked out every so often, leaving him with a faint pinpoint of light and shadow, a goal, toward which he kept marching, one slogging, squishing footstep after another, shoes apparently trying to suck themselves from his feet. Polly went on, sturdy, uncomplaining, a marvel. She was slightly in the lead and he watched her, tried to absorb her determination and energy: she was the stronger at this point and it was indicative of the change he’d undergone that it never occurred to him to feel ashamed, irritated, or frustrated that she was there ahead of him, seeing him through the ordeal. He was just damned glad …
The house was a long red brick and gray-stone building, gabled somewhat excessively, fronted along its entire length by a porch with square brick pillars, backed at one end by leaded glass French windows like sleeping eyes, drapes drawn behind them; hooded chimney pots cluttered across the slate slabbed roof, heavy lead gutters, the architecture generally an example of the kind of 1920s brutality of weight and size, here for the purpose of withstanding the onslaughts of the Atlantic storms themselves, yet a building whose very overtness, like the presence of Marie Dressier in an old movie, finally overcomes its form and substance to achieve a variety of timeless grace. Lions with clawed feet sat at the corners of the second-floor balcony which was in fact the top of the porch. Standing in the rain, holding the light, Chandler imagined for just an instant a porch full of women in pastel frocks and men in white flannels, tennis racquets in hand, club ties waffling in the cool ocean breezes, a summer weekend fifty years before, but the images were soon gone and Polly was calling to him from the shelter of the porch. “Come on, crazy man, get out of the rain …”
The immense oak door, banded by black wrought-iron hinges like straps, bore a brass plate engraved with the single word in artless block capitals: STRONGHOLD. The key worked smoothly and the huge door swung back with a creak from the massive hinges … It was like a replay of their arrival at the house in Maine, only on a much grander scale, as if they were stepping through a series of ever enlarging mirrors, doomed endlessly to run away, afraid, always repeating themselves.
Stronghold was in perfect running order: obviously someone on Cape Breton must have been engaged to come across the water at regular intervals and keep order, tend to maintaining the pipes and whatnot. An hour later Polly and Chandler were bathed, wrapped in huge bath towels, their clothes drying before the stove in the kitchen, a fire roaring in yet another library fireplace, more books gleaming darkly and gilt-stamped. “Hollywood must do Prosser’s decorating,” Polly remarked. Rain rattled like stones on the windows.
The duffel bag was unpacked upstairs where another fire was roaring. The freezer offered an array of frozen steaks, packages of vegetables, orange juice; but they settled for coffee and toast smeared with butter. They savored the steaming coffee in the library. They were grateful for the fire. They huddled close to the crackle, felt the heat full on their faces, sneezed and laughed and moaned over their exhaustion.
“You look just about done in,” she sniffled. When she turned away from the fire, he could see her breath like smoke.
“In this case, looks are not deceiving.” He leaned back against a chair, stretched his cold, damp feet to the fire, pulled his towel closer like a toga, yawned mightily. “Here is where we make our stand, my dear, and fight it out, get the wagons in a circle … I’ve run just about as far as I can …”
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “I think there’s nothing left to do but wait it out.” She made an impatient face: “I wish I understood what Prosser is up to. God, it just baffles me—everything about him sets me on edge—”
“Don’t be so hard on him. I keep thinking, what if he’s lying in the house back there, shot to hell by that crazy son of a bitch … and if he’s dead, what the hell do we do then? How do we get out of here? Wait until somebody comes over to check the pipes? Just hope for the goddamned best … I tried the telephone, it’s the one thing that doesn’t work worth a damn.” He frowned at the fire, sneezed.
Finally she said: “Come on, we’re beat. Let’s go to bed.” In the darkened bedroom they climbed into a large oak fourposter, pulled the comforters up around their chins, and watched the shadows from a newly laid fire march around the walls like sentries on guard duty. He thought back over the past few nights: the couch in Polly’s living room, Percy Davis’s inn on the Maine coast, the night spent outdoors … my God, that was last night. Polly whispered to him, folded sleepily within the arc of his left arm. Outside the storm cursed and hammered at the house. “I know a poem,” she said softly, “from twenty years ago, from college freshman days … listen …
Bolt and bar the shutter
For the
foul winds blow:
Our minds are at their best this night,
And I seem to know
That everything outside us is
Mad as the mist and snow …”
He kissed her, said: “I’m not so sure about our minds.” Then he closed his eyes, hugged her, and went to sleep, as if it were all exactly as planned.
They made love in the early gray light, the room still snug from the heat of the embers in the fireplace. Pale shafts of iciness slid like knives through the thick leaded windowpanes; the carved lions on the balcony, watching the sea, cast bulky shadows. They slept awhile longer, then he got up and padded down the cold hallway, half awake but anxious to be up and about.
No radio, no telephone, absolutely cut off so far as he could ascertain. He took bread out of the freezer and made toast. Coffee perking: the smell of normality calmed his early morning nerves. He had climbed back into the dried-out trousers, stiff shoes, and heavy oiled sweater which had apparently flourished with the previous day’s treatment. He sat munching toast, staring out into the fog, waiting for her to come down. She finally appeared in Levis and boots and a fresh heavy wool shirt nattily tailored with epaulettes and a profusion of buttoned flaps. She smelled faintly of shampoo and had a succulent moist look, freshly showered, pink-cheeked, and ready to eat a horse. He made more toast and as she ate she watched him, smiling. He felt her protection falling softly around him, felt her pleasure in it and the bond growing between them, but neither of them was tempted to comment on it. Their relationship seemed to be, something which already existed. It struck him as altogether pleasant, peculiarly liberating.
He broke the comfortable silence: “Well, I think we’d better look around the place, find out what we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
Viewed from the long porch at the front of the house, the island seemed to be smoldering, a kind of smoking pile with the outlines blurred by the blowing fog which obscured the water beyond, faded the forests, and gave it all the look of hardened lava: it was an image he’d seen before, deja vu, but he couldn’t place it … He was used to the dense and blowing fog which made everything look like a battlefield with the smoke hanging all about like impending death.
Heading across the damp grass, angled away from the direction they’d come twelve hours before, they saw the character of the island take form: a huge pile of firewood soaked beyond any hope of burning, behind it a solid bank of pines and firs, dark and impenetrable, forming a wall as flat and inhospitable as a bluff of shale. They followed the tree line through the heavy fog which damped them to their skin, heading toward the water, hearing the sound of the surf as they drew nearer, the crashing of the waves breaking through the velvety muffling effect of the fogbank.
Nearer the water the trees and the thick, grasping tangle of shrubbery clawed backwards, inland, trunks and limbs bent and twisted as if fleeing in terror from the sea. Along the top of the escarpment was yet another line of trees—hemlock, red and sugar maples, beech, and spruce—these planted deliberately by man, building a windbreak and leaving a fine view from the house which stood fully a hundred yards back and on much higher ground. They stood at the top of a long, shabby, decidedly rickety wooden stairway which zigzagged erratically down the steep rock face, moss pasted to the cliff on either side.
At the bottom, the beach was actually a shingle of large rocks scattered across a level expanse of sand finally giving way to the sea. A dock and boathouse sat gray and wet some three hundred feet below where they stood and another fifty yards to the right. Just beyond the boathouse was an arm of slate-gray rock sloping outward, covered patchily with brown underbrush and mosses. Well out in the water, forming a natural gateway, there were six large, uneven slabs of stone projecting upward, an arc swinging across the inlet like the teeth of a hag’s gummy lower jaw. The surf foamed white against the gray and purple and blue and black stones on the beach.
Even while they stood silently watching, the fog gusted in like a phantom army and swallowed the hag’s teeth, leaving what seemed to be a misty, hazy expanse of uninterrupted, quiet water, moving gently toward the beach, safe and flat … another burst of wind and they were there again, reminding Chandler of the great stone circles he’d seen in the English countryside, left there by another race of men with their significance and their awesome silence forever enigmatic … this island, he reflected, and the house—they were like that, too, as if there were secrets which would never be revealed. He looked back at the house and it had now disappeared in the fog, there was nothing but the blank grayness where it had been, that and the feel of the mist on his face. Spinning back, he knew what he would see: the hag’s teeth were gone, the water flat and untroubled. Polly smiled tentatively: she had seen it, too. “We’re in the middle, aren’t we?”
“Let’s climb down,” he said.
The stairway creaked but held. The beach made for tough walking and they stumbled frequently, scuffing their shoes, insult to injury which hardly made a difference anymore. Large gray boulders bore wide pink stripes. Polly found pretty little stones, scooped them up, dropped them in her pocket. The water, seen close up, had a savagery when it beat and foamed on the boulders which was not visible from above. Past the large rocks, the surf swept in across the small stones, furling and sucking at their shoes. The sky had a metallic blue-gray quality.
They walked toward the boathouse: “Doesn’t look safe,” Chandler said, nodding toward the catwalk leading across the foam to the boathouse and its dock. The wood was rotting, slats drooping. “Look,” he went on, taking her hand, “let’s skip it. We’d better get back to the house. Suppose somebody comes for us, can’t find us, and leaves—”
She nodded, agreeable, squeezing his hand.
There was an idyllic quality to the moment, their breath hanging like speech balloons before them, holding hands, scuffing along the beach like a couple in a cigarette ad. They stopped once, she closed her eyes, he kissed her, wrapped his arms around her.
Yet, climbing back up the narrow stairway, reaching the tree line at the top, there was the inevitable sense of unease, the incompleteness, the waiting.
Hand in hand they walked back toward the house. A deer flickered across the lawn, white tail like a gentle flag of friendship. “Anyway,” Polly said, looking up at him, “it’s lovely being alone.”
They were not alone, however.
A man watched from a shrubbery-covered promontory above the beach where Chandler and Polly had arrived the previous night. He watched them until they disappeared into the bank of swirling, shifting fog.
Chandler sat by himself in a window seat, feet cocked opposite himself, and watched the lawn and the water far beyond which was a darker shade of gray-blue than the fog which slid constantly across his vision. He watched but saw nothing. Alone, with Polly off puttering by herself, his mind turned anxiously back to Hugh Brennan and Bert Prosser, either one of whom could be dead: he felt desperate and helpless, trapped on the island, unable to come to the aid of either. Though what his aid was worth he wasn’t quite sure. He went outside and paced the length of the porch, accusing himself of being an idiot for having gotten involved at all-then, of course, he realized he’d had no choice. If ever a man had sought to maintain his distance, his innocence, it had been sheltered, academic Colin Chandler.
In the late afternoon they grilled steaks, opened a nice claret, and lazed about the library looking through the matched sets of Thackeray and George Eliot and Jane Austen and Trollope. They snooped in desk drawers which proved to be empty and they admired the old English hunting prints. There wasn’t a clue as to what normally went on at Stronghold, nothing to snap the isolation.
Polly went upstairs, leaving him alone, the fire whispering and the wind racketing outside. He might have dozed: the next thing he knew she was standing in front of him tapping his arm, holding the oilskin package Prosser had wrapped so carefully before they’d left the house in Maine.
“Let’s have another look,” she said. “Maybe
you’ll have a revelation once you see it again.”
They unwrapped the package carefully. Underneath the oilskin Prosser had obviously wrapped the portrait and the documents in several thicknesses of newspaper. Polly stood watching, hands on hips, as he peeled the dry, perfectly protected pages away, came aware as he did that something was very wrong. Working feverishly, panicking, Chandler threw newspapers away in a frenzy. In the end he looked up, his face pale.
“It’s nothing but newspapers,” he said. “It’s not here, not any of it.”
“He kept the whole thing,” Polly breathed, a smile slowly spreading across her wide mouth.
“I just don’t understand,” Chandler said. He felt as if the fight had finally gone out of him.
“I knew it!” Polly gloated. “I just knew it … damn it, there’s just something weird about him …” She kicked a piece of newspaper, beaming. “Don’t you see, Colin? For once something’s happened that sticks right out. Prosser told us he was giving all the stuff to us, and then he kept it—somebody whose identity is perfectly clear to us has lied to us. And I thought Prosser was so worried about the bad guys getting it …”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s weird, everything is very weird …”
Chandler woke in the middle of the night, lay half asleep beside Polly, listening to her breathing and feeling the weight and warmth of her as she shifted, rested against him. The carefully wrapped oilskin packet of newspapers stayed resolutely in the forefront of his mind; when he closed his eyes he saw it, enigmatic, mocking … why would Prosser have done such a thing? So far as he could tell, it made no sense: they had been under siege at the time and the logical thing had been to give it to those who were escaping: keeping it, Prosser had clearly run a greater risk of its falling into the hands of the enemy … Unless—unless what?
The Glendower Legacy Page 26
