by Jay Brandon
Kathy moved opposite. She moved without thinking; it was her body that
didn’t want the thing any nearer.
He/it stood still, putting out his hands. Jack’s hands. She recognized
their lines and their poise.
“Jack, what do you want?” she asked.
“You. To be with you always.” He laughed Jack’s easy laugh. “Don’t be frightened. Do you think I could ever hurt you? I want to save you from being hurt.”
She breathed deeply. Just for the sake of appearance, just to appease him. But the breaths did in fact calm her slightly. She could feel her shoulders rise and fall. She could feel.
“Kathy. You won’t ever have to feel pain. You won’t have to grow old. We can be young together. You can see your sister again.” Jack’s pale eyes seemed to swim.
What was Jack about to do? Kathy was no longer paralyzed. She turned and ran. Sand kicked high around her. Wind blew back her hair. She was running into the wind, toward the water. She veered the other way, still knifing through the air, faster than she’d run in years. She laughed, a frightened chortle torn out of her by the sudden and certain fear that she was about to die. Her heart pumped, making her know she was alive. Her body wasn’t ready to quit. Kathy ran with abandon, thrilled not only with what she knew was about to happen but with the pure exhilaration of running.
A hand grabbed her shoulder. She screamed, and her balance was so precarious that she fell, body pivoting under the hand’s touch so that she fell backward and twisted and landed on her face, turned back the way she’d come. She covered her head with her arms, and her knees gouged the wet sand.
And nothing happened. She raised her head, already scrambling backwards. But before she could get to her feet she saw that nothing was in front of her, only the empty beach. To her left the sea glittered brightly
in the late afternoon light. Waves carried in their endless burden of light, spreading it on the beach with the foam and going back for more.
Kathy hadn’t gotten far. The car was thirty or forty yards behind her. So was Jack. He had only moved as far as the front of the car. She could see his legs in the Bermuda shorts he wore. And she could see his eyes, more clearly than she should have been able to from that distance. There was sadness in his eyes.
Seeing Jack’s world-deep sorrow, Kathy walked slowly back to him. He smiled, his eyes not changing, and held up his hand again, as if pressing it against her out-turned palm. Then he turned and walked away, straight out from the car toward the water and into it, angling downward. The waves didn’t impede him. Jack sank slowly beneath them. At some point he should have started upward again as the sandy floor beneath the water rose toward the sand bar, but he never did, he went out and down at a steady angle that erased him from her, first his legs, then his shoulders, last his hair. He never looked back.
Michael ran along the beach, his flip-flops in his hand, putting as much distance between him and the church as possible. The sun was almost down. It lay on the horizon as if it were adrift on Gulf. The sky seemed empty. The beach did too, surprisingly so. The crowds, thinning earlier, were now almost totally gone. There was something troubling about a recently deserted place.
Michael stopped to catch his breath, silent with thoughts of Kathy. He didn’t really understand her sometimes, but it didn’t seem to matter. He loved her.
A small group of figures was gathered near the jetty, looking out toward the water. Michael gazed out at the darkening sea. In the deeper water, he saw a diver’s flag up. No sooner had he spotted the marker than a police car drove up on the beach.
An officer stepped out and Michael recognized the policeman who
had stopped him in the traffic line. The officer hardly noticed Michael;
instead he watched the sea, studying the movements of the diver.
As if signaled, the diver dove suddenly, then reappeared at the surface dragging something. He was swimming backwards toward the shore, and Michael saw he was pulling a body through the water.
The group murmured nervously; a young woman in blue sobbed. All watched as the diver made his way back to shore with his burden. Slowly, solemnly he proceeded. Finally, he managed to drag the body from the surf and up onto the dry sand. Behind him, the diver’s trailing flag seemed an afterthought.
A brief, almost whispered, gasp escaped the lips of the woman in blue, as if she knew the victim’s face. It was a boy’s face. Michael had seen the face before. The boy on the motor bike. Antonio. The boy who knew Vivian.
Antonio was barely recognizable. The diver stood up and stepped back from the body. The young woman bent down, and suddenly, unexpectedly touched the dead boy’s face. Not fearfully or horrified but gently as if touching a rare sculpture. Michael himself recoiled. He had seen Kathy make that gesture at Gail’s funeral.
“It this the boy?” asked the officer.
“Yes, he was riding a motorbike,” she said.
“That motorbike?” asked the policeman, pointing. Only then did Michael notice the drowned boy’s motorbike parked half-hidden back in the dunes.
“I think so, yes. And yesterday I saw him on the beach with a woman.” “Can you describe this woman?”
“I didn’t see her face. She was walking some distance from me. Her hair was blonde. She had a dog with her.”
Now an ambulance was driving up the beach, its lights flashing. It seemed so out of place, on the pale sand along the slate blue water.
The policeman and the ambulance driver picked up Antonio’s body
and placed it in the back of the ambulance. The small group watched as the ambulance pulled away.
For the first time, the officer turned to Michael. He looked hard at him, recognizing him.
“You,” he said. “Give me a hand.”
Michael did as he was told, joining the officer and helping retrieve the motorbike, and putting it in the back seat of the patrol car.
“You’d better come with me to the station,” the officer said. “I can’t, officer,” he protested. “I have to . . . ”
“I’ll need help unloading this bike,” replied the officer. “Get in the
car.”
The officer drove to the Law Enforcement Center on Alister, a few blocks. Michael helped unload the motorbike from the patrol car, and Antonio’s body from the ambulance. There was no medical examiner’s office on the island, just an empty storeroom at the police station. They had Antonio’s body on a table, with a sheet under it and a towel over its groin, but the body hadn’t been covered. It had seemed huge, filling the tiny storeroom: gross, with a giant bulging stomach, acres of white flesh marked by purple lines and blotches. Michael had felt sudden huge relief. This disgusting blob wasn’t Antonio, was nothing like human. This was some old –
“They swell,” the young policeman said. “In the water they bloat up.
Look at the face, please.”
Michael had already inched past the body to do that. In some horrible joke, someone had taken Antonio’s head, relatively unchanged and instantly recognizable, and sewn it onto this gross fat body. Antonio’s eyes were closed, but the head was tilted as if he were listening to someone’s familiar approach. His face was very youthful, pale as tennis whites, untroubled.
That image of Antonio, that image of death kept coming back to
him, long after the fact, growing more horrible, in fact, in memory, as the body seemed to expand, filling the room, forcing its touch on Michael, about to explode in his face.
“Why did you take off his clothes? Has a doctor – ?”
“This is how he was found. He might have been wearing a bathing suit that came off in the tide, or he might have left his clothes somewhere before he went in the water.”
“And you haven’t found them?”
“Sir, somebody might have, and kept them, or they might have been
washed out. We find a lot of clothes on the beach every year.” “Do you have a cause of death yet?”
“
Drowning, sir. Just drowning. No sign of any wounds. Maybe after the doctor on the mainland examines him, but I’ll tell you, sir, I’ve seen drowned people before, and that’s just how they look.”
“Let me see him,” a voice was saying. An old woman entered the room, and Michael retreated a couple of steps.
“Oh, Tony!” she cried, breaking down. “Poor Tony!” While the officer attempted to console her, Michael slipped out of the room. Kathy, he thought. He had to get back to Kathy. He had to get back to the cottage.
Michael stood next to the telephone. He’d been hovering around it for the last hour, pacing from the table in the living room, to the back door of the cottage from where he could look down at the empty parking spot and a little way up the road, then back to the phone, out to the porch or to a window where he could look at the dunes. Finally he came to a halt right next to the phone. Wouldn’t it be startling if it rang now, while he was standing right next to it? Michael consciously formed the thought, wishfully thinking of the way things sometimes happened when you wanted them to happen but had given up hoping. He even put his hand on the phone, anticipating the thrill of its bell vibrating up his arm.
Maybe he should pick it up and call someone himself. But who? All
he could think of was to call the police. But what could he tell them if he did call? She’s disappeared. Who, your wife? We’re not married. Yes, the beach police probably had a special squad to handle that sort of crisis, he thought, the idea ripe with sarcasm; it would be such a high priority with them. He could spice it up, tell them he was afraid she’d been abducted. Can you describe the suspect? Sure, officer, a ghost. That might get the cops moving, all right, but not in a squad car down the beach looking for Kathy. It would bring a couple of soft-speaking officers around to the cottage to take Michael away to some place more comfortable.
If only he had a car. The island wasn’t big, and he couldn’t leave the island. If Kathy did, alone, that was fine, that was the best he could hope for. If Michael had a car he could scour the whole town quickly, looking for the Subaru, to make sure she was still in it alone. But she had the car. Maybe . . .
He’d left the back door of the cottage open. When he turned in that direction he flinched at the unexpected sight of Kathy in the doorway. She’d returned; Michael hadn’t heard her. The sounds of the night had been louder than her steps. Michael gasped, not only at her sudden presence but at the way she looked: so pale that the paleness extended down to her chest, her arms. Her eyes were downcast, he couldn’t see them.
“Kathy!”
It seemed as if he covered the space between them in one leap, he didn’t feel his feet touch the floor. As Michael reached for her he also reached past her to slam the door shut – as if the door could keep out what he feared. He pulled her against him and held her close. Her skin was cold. She stood like an automaton. He gasped at her coldness.
“Don’t,” Kathy said. ”Don’t say anything.”
Michael drew back. Some color had returned to Kathy’s cheeks, but it was as if she’d drawn the warmth from Michael and needed constant contact to maintain it because as he watched he saw the color drain away
again. He saw the tracks of tears down her cheeks. She held onto his arm. Michael felt his own warmth flow out of him. He felt hollow. His hands took her arms, but his hands were hollow, unable to grip. Neither of them spoke a word.
The silence between them lasted through dinner, through Kathy’s preparations for bed. Michael wasn’t tired. He turned on the television with the sound off. Flickering light danced off the walls.
She went to the bedroom, dropped her clothes on a chair, and rummaged in the suitcase for her lightweight nightgown. Suddenly she turned, searching the room, holding the gown to her breast. But she saw nothing wrong. She hurriedly turned off the overhead light. She looked at the moonlight coming through the window and saw nothing obstructing it. Shrugging, she put on her nightgown and climbed into bed. Only as her head touched the pillow did she realize how tired she had become.
She slept, but as she slept, something stirred in the room. Something moved from the front of the house toward the bedroom where Kathy was sleeping. Soundlessly it moved like a chill gentle breeze up to the edge of her bed. As if by magic, the bed sheet was turned back, her nightgown was disturbed. Dreaming, her face suddenly showed pleasure. “Michael,” she said. “Don’t.” She was in the netherworld between sleep and consciousness. She felt a hand touching her ankle, her leg, the inside of her thigh. She sighed, still in a dreamy, half sleeping state. She seemed to be raised up, as if suspended, and she felt something between her legs, penetrating her.
“Michael, no,” she protested, suddenly waking, expecting to find Michael next to her, but Michael was not there, not in the bed, not even in the room. She turned her head to see Michael thirty feet away, fast asleep on the couch in the living room. Kathy turned her face the other way, toward the window. In her dream state she wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but then her body told her: she was feeling pleasure. She gave herself up to the experience, along her sides, the back of her neck, then the
flick of tongue on her nipple. She felt her body’s growing tension, tension
. . . and then, suddenly with a gasp she could not suppress, the tension was
gone.
Michael woke abruptly as if a door had slammed. His head jerked up from the sofa pillow. It was still the middle of the night, but the room wasn’t dark. The television was off. Strange, Michael couldn’t remember turning it off. Moonlight made all the white objects in the room glow: his pants hanging on a side chair; a post card Kathy had bought and left on the coffee table; the loose, wrinkled sheet he had used for cover.
He started to call Kathy’s name, but his voice wouldn’t emerge. Michael stole out of bed as softly as he could; he feared waking her. By the time he reached the doorway to the bedroom he could feel his heart beating, fast enough to make his fingers tremble.
The bedroom was darker than the living room. He stumbled against a bedside table. Kathy wasn’t in the bed where he had hoped to find her. Retreating from the bedroom, he discovered the kitchen was empty too. In another minute, if he didn’t find her, he would lift his voice, if for no other reason than to disrupt whatever was happening, to let Kathy or anything within earshot know he was searching for her.
But she was on the porch. When he stepped outside he saw her at once. She was wearing the man’s white shirt she used as a robe, so she stood out from the darkness. A wind had come up suddenly, blowing her shirt as if it was undressing her.
“Kathy?”
Her back was to him. He didn’t want to frighten her. But at her lack of response his own fear renewed itself. He stood still. Clouds passed over the moon. He strained to see past her to whatever she was looking at. He could see the dunes, darkened by their grass covering, so that the cottage seemed to be surrounded by a miniature and magical forest, silently advancing on them. Then suddenly, on top of one of the dunes, silhouetted against the night sky appeared the pale figure of Jack. “I tried to tell you,” Kathy said.
Michael said nothing. Perhaps he had known all along, and refused to acknowledge it. The two of them stood there, motionless, as motionless as the pale figure on the dunes and the hulking creature beside him.
The cool air grew chillier. The wind rose, stirring the towels and wet bathing suits on the clothesline. The wind made the fabric bounce and snap, then blew strongly toward the house until the towels and suits were standing almost straight out. The moon was obscured by the growing masses of black clouds, until the whole island was lost in darkness.
P art 3:
Ghosts
Chapter 7
ow they didn’t know what to do. They had nothing to say to each
other. They made the motions of normal people, but they were only the motions. Each of them in his own way was unable to leave the other in the wake of the destruction; it was too painful to even attempt a confrontation. Michael reported Holr
oyd’s invitation and they had agreed to go on his boat; now they moved helplessly in that direction.
At the church a maintenance crew was working on the chapel. One side of the building had been damaged by fire and the outside wall showed the blackened signs of fire damage.
Kathy started to enter the church building, but Michael scrupulously avoided it. “Let’s not go in,” he said, “Let’s just meet him at the boat.” She didn’t argue, and they did as he said, skirting the building, moving back through the weedy lot and back to the boat shed and dock where Rev.
Holroyd was getting ready to cast off.
“Aren’t introductions in order?” asked Holroyd.
“Yes, sorry. Reverend Holroyd, this is Kathy,” said Michael. “Welcome aboard,” said the Reverend.
As the boat backed slowly away from the short dock Michael stood close to Holroyd, watching him work the controls. There didn’t seem to be much to it: a steering wheel, a throttle. The engine had started with the turn of a key, just like a car. Holroyd seemed to pay little attention to what his deeply-tanned hands were doing.
Michael looked back toward the church. “A work crew is doing repairs,” Holroyd said. There had been a small fire. Minor smoke damage. The fire had broken out the same night Michael had done his research. “It must have happened right after you left,” Holroyd told him, and Michael for his part said nothing.
The Bacchus seemed large because Kathy and Michael were its only passengers. The boat was sleek, its polished deck fifteen feet across and thirty feet long. The pilot’s cabin was a low-slung affair that arched up from the deck to cover the captain’s head, with a broad window so he could see forward. Michael went back to stand with Kathy at the railing as they eased out of the harbor, past rows of moored motorboats and sailboats with their sails furled, wrapped like shrouds around their dismounted masts. All bobbed in the same tempo on the waves of their own boat’s wake. The water churned out just below their feet.
