Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  The other work force of the village was another matter. Scientists and technicians, they were employed at a weather-tracking station, ten miles south in Arcata Bay. Fewer in number than the parks crew—a dozen at most—but a little went a long way. To the rangers, they had no feel for the vitals of the place. They didn’t roam the forests. Didn’t sail. Didn’t swim. They preferred to hole up in their houses whenever they weren’t at work, as if it were raw Alaskan tundra just beyond the door. They listened to a lot of classical music.

  Perhaps they had enough of weather, measuring rain in their calibrated barrels. After all, they lived through storms from the first puff of cirrus to the last dying rumble of thunder. The wind socks filled. Thermometers rose and fell with feverish regularity. Somehow, none of it touched them. They might have been filing it all away on a spaceship.

  They had a certain hierarchy, centered around the director of the station: Dr. Upton, frail and gray, who looked as though he’d never recovered from a terrible case of frostbite. The other weathermen, steeped in his shadow, tended to take on the role of students. Bright and cutthroat, currying favor, out to be on top. The mere technicians were the lower class. They held to a certain drabness, colorless as their lab coats.

  Pitt’s Landing had only a handful of simple townsfolk. There was Arthur Huck, the nominal mayor and keeper of the light. Ned Dexter, harbormaster and sole proprietor of the stiff-priced general store. Miss Polly Allen, spurned in her youth and steely-eyed, held the fort at the combination town hall-library-historical society. They had a country doctor, Felix Quinn. Even a grinning idiot: Joey Barnacle, who sold live bait off a cart at the dock.

  These and some few others did what they could to make things run to type. But they never got over the feeling that the rangers and the weather people both were on the order of an occupying army. Not that they could have gotten anyone else to settle in so precipitous a place, but the sense of having been cheated was a comfort. Indeed, they all kept peace, of a minimal neighborly sort. They smiled and nodded. Yet village life was clearly not as picturesque as it ought to be; this rankled.

  “I know why you’re here,” said Maybeth Blue as she set down a lumberman’s breakfast, plunk in front of Iris. The wide veranda, flooded with morning sun, looked down on the quiet harbor. The table was set for two. “The eclipse—right?”

  Iris looked up vaguely at the sun as she broke open a biscuit. Maybeth leaned on the balustrade—fifty if she was a day, but rouged and coiffed as if to go onstage just as soon as she heard her cue.

  “How do you know?” Iris asked with a certain briskness, pricking the yolk of an egg.

  “What the hell else ever happens here? Besides, you’re not the first.”

  “You mean that man,” said Iris, perfectly neutral, gesturing toward the empty place beside her.

  “Not just him. There’s half a dozen been here for days, and it’s still a week away. Mrs. Thome’s got a little man from Australia. Looks like a kangaroo.”

  “Astronomers, I suppose.”

  “Are you kidding? Nuts, more likely. Pardon me.”

  She shuffled back across the porch and disappeared inside. Iris stopped eating and listened hard. She’d heard him come in the night before to ask for a room, just after Maybeth showed her upstairs. Though she didn’t know what he sounded like—hadn’t seen him floating in the light out on the point—she knew who it was instinctively. Maybeth gave him the third-floor front. Iris was one flight below, in a bow-windowed room above the harbor. She didn’t sleep for hours. She kept glancing up at the ceiling—as if, like a digger insect, he might burrow through and drop to the floor and fling a web about the bed.

  She woke at dawn with the same wild dream of cliffs and hurtling bodies. There was no need to dream it anymore. She dressed and raced downstairs, to be out of the house before he stirred. Not counting on the bed-and-board traditions hereabouts. The landlady stopped her and sat her down to a hearty meal. She picked at the fatty food and sipped her coffee till Maybeth went to see to Michael’s plate. As soon as Iris was alone, she leaped up and went to the railing, thinking to empty her own plate into the shrubbery just below.

  She didn’t have to bother. A sleek gray dog with golden eyes lay dozing in the cliffside grass. “Hey!” she whispered. The dog perked up his head. She leaned out over the gingerbread rail and waved her breakfast back and forth, making clicking sounds to tempt him. Obediently, the dog came trotting over. He lolled his tongue and gulped the whole mess up in half a second.

  “Good dog,” Iris said, her heart grown strangely light. She replaced the plate on the table, covered it up with her napkin, and hurried down the steps and out the gate before she was overtaken by another wave of small talk.

  Something was wrong with her eye. No pain especially, and nothing that showed in the mirror. More like a sense of things askew. This was only on the left, but when she closed the right to get a focus, life went fuzzy. She wasn’t worried at all. In fact, there were hours at a time when she seemed to have passed beyond the reach of anxiety and fear. On the plane, for instance. Or driving up Route 1—at least till Michael tried to run her off the road.

  Anxious wasn’t it at all. Mostly, she was interested. The aberrations of her body, the more she grew accustomed to them, began to seem like some kind of cutting edge. She listened closely to the beat of her blood, as if she could hear, like the rush of the sea in a shell, what tidal force it was that came and went inside her.

  Eclipse of the what? The sun? She realized she didn’t have the most basic eighth-grade notion—not what got in front of what, not how long it lasted, not even where to look without going blind. She wondered where she could dig up a little background. A good encyclopedia would do. After all, she didn’t want to know too much. Don’t go off on tangents, she thought to warn herself. Best to understand right off that it wasn’t going to get easier. Make the rules now. Discipline was the key to pulling through.

  She stopped to get her bearings in the street. She did not gasp when the dog came padding up beside her. He nuzzled her hand till she stroked his nose. Perhaps it was fit tribute to her mission that the poor dumb beasts should pay her court. She didn’t want people to get too close. Not here.

  Across the way was the village smokehouse, where most of the daily catch was cured for export. Pitt’s Landing was too far off to compete for the trade in fresh; and anyway, only three or four old fishermen still went out, so Maybeth said. It was her way to put the worst face on things, always. Iris didn’t care. Conditions in the town were not her problem. The stink of smoke jogged nothing in her head.

  Next door a rickety souvenir stand was boarded up for the winter. Then the town hall. Though it wasn’t any bigger than a two-room cottage, it sported a row of improbable pillars, holding up a pediment. Suddenly Iris saw what she needed: records. Anything—wills, deeds, births, taxes. Any list at all would tell her more about these people than a year of cautious questioning. Besides, she couldn’t go any further till she understood where the whole thing started. How did people get here? She moved with resolution up the street, the dog at her side as close as a seeing-eye, and tried to think of a story that would explain what she had to ask.

  “Harriet? Is that you?”

  She turned at the sound of the voice. The desperation in the second question drew her. She found herself face to face with a thin old man in an ancient woolen suit. He carried a gold-tipped cane. He lifted a porkpie hat from his bony head and bowed discreetly. He was clearly quite embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For a moment there … the way you tossed your hair—” He stopped.

  “Who’s Harriet?” she asked boldly. She knew how lucky she was: they would not all be disarmed like this.

  “My niece,” he said with clumsy hesitation. It was obviously a lie. “She left a long, long time ago. It must be twenty years.”

  “But how would you know her, then?” persisted Iris.

  “Well, I mean—you look the way she used to.”
He shrugged and sighed. “I’m an old man. Half the time I’m dreaming.”

  “So—you’ve lived here all your life,” she said, without a moment’s sympathetic pause to mourn his losses. Yet the accusatory tone was gone. She seemed to be thinking aloud, as if his being old were something in his favor.

  “Oh, yes,” he replied with an easy smile, on firmer ground at last. “Everyone leaves but me.”

  “Please—I need to see the records.”

  “Of course you do. You go ask Polly.” He nodded toward the pillared front. A woman stood at the window, one hand gripping the shade pull. Just as Iris looked over, the woman stepped back into the shadows.

  “What should I ask?”

  “All of it. Don’t hold back.”

  She nodded, looking off to sea. At the top of the barn, behind Maybeth’s house, the sun glinted off the gilded cock as the wind flipped into another quarter. Everything went by measures. She thought to question this sudden rapport, but found she didn’t care. Even a moment ago, when he was still throwing up fictions, she had seen there was no veneer between them. This was not the same as being safe.

  “What you have to do,” the old man said, “is tell her something sad.”

  With that, he waved his hat in a jaunty twirl—he’d lost ten years in as many seconds—and walked away like someone late for an errand. Iris was so caught up in the struggle to get her story straight, she barely nodded good-bye. He wouldn’t be hard to find when she needed him. Then a question popped into her head, and she turned and blurted it out.

  “Does anyone know who Pitt was?”

  The old man grew quite motionless. For a moment he did not turn around, but bent his head to gaze at a gang of cats methodically scouting the garbage barrels in the lane beside the smokehouse. Iris waited. She realized, when she saw the cats, that the gray dog was no longer at her side. She could not remember seeing him leave, but had no time to piece it out, for the old man now looked coyly over his shoulder. His eyes were hidden by the brim of his hat.

  “Pitt was a monster,” he said with queer dispassion. “We should have let the name die out. Believe me, Iris—you’ll do a lot better if you leave him be.”

  She seemed to take these remarks to heart, as well as at face value. Abruptly, she hurried across the street and up the steps to the portico. She walked in without even stopping to read the rules—all written in longhand, taped to the door, headed Read This First. The lights inside were dim. The dust was thick as snow. Polly was pouring out two cups of coffee in old chipped Spode. She wore an exhausted skirt and sweater drained of all shape and color.

  “Yes? What can I do for you?” Polly asked with dangerous calm.

  “Well,” said Iris, out of breath, “I think I may have family here. I’ve got some Pitt relations back at home.” And when there was no answering smile of recognition, she went on. “In Connecticut,” she said, a trifle lamely, as if she were not sure of a foreign tongue. She waved her hand to indicate how distant all this was.

  “No Pitts here,” replied the other woman firmly. She handed over the second cup. The coffee was milky pale, like custard. “It’s just a name. They could have called it anything.”

  “But, I was told—”

  “You mean Emery Oz,” interrupted Polly, nodding out the window to where the old man mistook her. “I wouldn’t pay him any mind. Next thing you know, he’ll ask you to take him away. Like we’ve got him locked up or something.”

  “He’s old,” said Iris gently, lifting the cup to her lips. She drank, and her jaw clenched at the sudden sweetness.

  “Rich is what that one is,” retorted Polly, flat and cold. “His people made a fortune hauling lumber. They bought this land for a nickel an acre.”

  She stopped there, though she seemed prepared to spin the yarn for hours, if Iris got the questions right. As they faced each other across the tidy counter, Iris thought: We’re the same age. This was how she would look if she’d spent her whole life here. Abused. Mistrustful. Used to nothing. She felt a pang of kinship.

  “The truth is, I’ve got no one,” Iris said. “It’s like I’ve become an orphan. This town is the only clue I have.”

  There was the briefest pause, in which Polly seemed to weigh the equal thing between them. She stared into a mirror all her own. Then, without another word, she reached down and drew the bolt on the gate that divided the outer and inner office. As Iris stepped through, Polly turned and began to stride about. With gathering intensity, she pointed out the features of her system. These were the drawers where land was kept. These over here were taxes. This whole wall was main events: births, weddings, deaths. As she drifted past, she touched each file like a bureaucrat of Fate.

  She heaved back the door of a cube-shaped safe, where the artifacts of the Rotten River gold rush stood like pots and pans in a cupboard. Then she almost seemed to dance to a glass-faced cabinet in the corner. Here were displayed, as dry as tinder, a dozen curious fragments of the Indians who preceded them—perched on the jagged cliffs a thousand years, as if to summon the will to fly.

  Iris sat on a swivel chair to listen. Watching Polly glide from place to place, she tested her field of vision. She closed the one good eye and squinted through the blood-red fog that bleared the other. Strangely, she could have sworn that everything else had disappeared—houses, streets, cars, trees—everything but the outline of the woman before her. It was as if some other Polly, luminous and shorn of time, stood on the bare untrammeled ground she spoke of. She gestured one by one at several shards of ancient clay—dolls and sun disks, crescent bits of bowls, a swatch or two of deep red weaving. She droned on like a guidebook.

  Iris could not even hear her. Something had reached inside her, rigid as a chant. She thought it was the ocean, and she held her breath and dived down in. A moment later she came out into a high, high sound like a bird at the top of a tree. This strange mosquito whine went on at a siren pitch, shimmering on the air till the china rattled and the windows shook, so high it was no sound at all. Then the air itself caught fire. The surface of the earth groaned like burning iron.

  She had only to open the other eye to make the whole thing vanish. Things were tame as ever, here in the local memory bank. The morning sun streaked in through an angle in the blinds, shooting across the room at random, lighting here and there. She realized that she was leaning back, her neck taut, her body nearly prone. She came back upright and blinked her eyes. She looked over toward the Indian case.

  Polly had simply stopped in mid-sentence. She’d made no move to intervene when Iris drifted off. She simply stared and waited, one hand gripping the tassels on the California flag. All the force and rectitude had left her, as if she had just emerged from some unspeakable act of shame.

  “How long will you stay?” she asked in an ashen voice.

  “For a while,” said Iris quietly. “At least till the eclipse.”

  “It’ll probably rain.”

  “So what? It’ll still get dark. Besides,” she said, “it’s the principle that counts.”

  She wondered if Michael would need to look at records. If he did, did he know what to look for? Better than she, for all she knew, and yet she felt she’d gained a point already. She had staked this ground and claimed it for her own. As she sat at the rolltop desk, with a window on the downs, she knew the gray accumulation of the past was her best weapon.

  The poor drab woman across the room appeared to be hers for the asking, too, but that was far less sure. After all, Polly hadn’t met Michael yet. Iris was not so turned around as to think she could count on loyalty. Her adversary was far too skilled at putting lonely people under. Still, she might as well pick up a few lieutenants while she could, even if they defected before the day was out.

  “I’m Iris,” she said in a friendly way, extending a hand to the other woman.

  Only then did the prickle of horror really start. She remembered now—she hadn’t known her name all morning. She wouldn’t have known it now, if Emery Oz had
n’t called her by it. But how could he know, if he thought she was someone else?

  “Tell me,” Polly said in dreadful earnest, “what can I do?”

  “Show me what you’ve got on Pitt.”

  “It won’t do any good, you know. You’re just like all the rest,” she said as she reached down a folio volume off a shelf. She lugged it to the desk, laid it flat, and cracked the cover open. It looked like holy writ.

  “What happened to them?” asked Iris, her eyes on Polly’s pale impassive face. She would not look at the document before she knew what curse was on it.

  “Died,” said Polly wearily.

  Was there no point where she could stop these sudden changes? As soon as she began to understand what she could do, the instant she connected, something threw her off. There were others? When? And did they come alone, or in pairs like herself and Michael?

  “I didn’t come here to die,” Iris said with a certain pride.

  “Then you better find someone to kill,” retorted the other, unimpressed. She turned over pages, one by one, like a bored commuter going through the papers. “They want bodies.”

  “They?” She bent up close to watch as the brittle pages passed. They were covered with ink in a cursive hand. The entries were dated, in diary form. Crude-drawn maps and sketches adorned the margins. If Iris read it right, it was the summer of 1588.

  “Jesus, Iris, where do you come from?” Polly stood above her loftily. She sneered like someone who’d had her fill of innocents. “There’s no they. What do you think we’ve got here? Ghosts?” She gave a contemptuous laugh.

  “Please—do you know what I’m supposed to do?”

  “You heard me,” Polly said coldly. “All you have to do is die. It’s easy.”

  But how did the power shift like this? A moment ago she’d held this woman captive. They’d agreed to play it like sisters, hadn’t they? She couldn’t think of anyone she’d ever known who’d died. She had the vaguest recollection of a waxy man in a coal-black suit. Her father, was it?