Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  God, he was happy. Once he had severed each lighting connection and broken all the circuits, he shinnied excitedly down the pole. He loped away across the field, through brush, then into the trees. He padded over the web of groping roots. Sticking close to the edge of the gully, he kept his eyes peeled for a thing he could see in his mind but could not name for the life of him. It was about three feet high, like a pipe with a cap. A slight ticking—

  And there it was, with a lady slipper growing at the base in a sift of needles from the fir above. A steel shaft sunk into the ground, with a small square of aluminum screwed to it like a note on a door: Property of General Telephone. Dangerous: Underground Cable! Do not dig! Now he looked closer. He could just make out, ever so faintly in the wider darkness, a groove in the earth. A foot-wide trench, long filled in, kept its contour like a hairline scar.

  He knelt upon the fragrant mat of needles and dug with both hands. He had never done any of this before—not stood twenty feet in the air, not run in the woods at night for fear, not even dug a hole. It seemed like a rich man’s sport. He drank in the smell of the forest earth. He had gone about eight or ten inches down, in a circle twice as wide, when he hit up against the white vinyl core of the cable.

  He wiped the last bit of earth from the joining of the ground pipe and the periscope. Then he gripped the collar fitting and twisted hard till it gave like a snapped pencil. Inside were the wires. He reached in and yanked them out, all livid like intestines. He pulled and pulled. Though they stretched to an aching thinness, they wouldn’t break. The plastic coating was too tough. If he’d had a knife, he could have slit them through like veins. Even a pointed rock would do. He scrambled around in the bed of needles, but the mossy floor offered up no loose change. For a moment, clasping the mass of wires in his useless hands, he almost wept with rage.

  Then he bent down close and bared his teeth. With a savage grunt, he bit into the cable. One by one, the wires broke open, and a taste like sweetened tea flooded through his mouth. The shock of it was different from the current overhead. It bonged his brain like a tuning fork. A hum of distant singing swept along his blood. It seemed as if he’d knelt to drink at a spring full of nothing but voices. His head was awash with words he would never, never need. Still he kept on chewing through, undaunted, brute as a trapper tearing at a haunch of fallen game.

  In the village, all the late-night calls were strangled and cut dead. The deputy head of the rangers, alone in the station, had dialed his sister in San Diego to tell her he was sorry for a lot of things long past. A retired accountant, sleepless three days running, had rung up a hotline in Portland. Though he hemmed and hawed, he could not seem to put his terror into words. A woman cried for half an hour to her daughter in London, who kept interrupting to tell her the cost. A few just sat in the dark and dialed their neighbors.

  And suddenly, every phone was choked. The silence closed like a ring of doors. One by one, each villager set the receiver back in the cradle. Then they waited, as if they thought it would ring again, but this time with their doom.

  He was done before he knew it. The two ends of the cable lay on the earth like sleeping snakes. A soundlessness was shining on the face of things, like a moon behind a cloud. So still were his footfalls, walking away, he almost could have believed he was floating a foot off the ground. He sucked the dirt from his fingers, loving the crunch of it in his teeth. He finally slowed his pace a bit and walked the gray-green bluff with a growing sense of calm. He was going to make it.

  He arrived at the bridge about quarter to five. He stood in the middle for a long moment and savored the last of the night as he peered down into the shadows below. He could not see the bottom of the gully. This seemed to please him mightily, as if it cleaved to the core of the earth. Meadow birds perched in the iron catwalks overhead and sang in snatches. Just where he leaned on the railing was a plaque. 1931, the inscription read, Erected by the Men of This Village, followed by a list of names that didn’t mean a thing. Then a small-town motto in bold italics: Build One Bridge Before You Go. The pathos of it didn’t touch him. He walked casually to the island side, as if he meant to go home at last.

  At the end of the bridge he swung over the railing and dropped to the weeds on the edge of the bluff. He patted the side of the nearest girder and read it like Braille. When he came to the bolt he flexed his fingers and turned it like a knob. In a few short twists it fell out into his hand, and he heaved it down the side of the chasm. There was no answering echo. It seemed to fall forever.

  He went from fitting to fitting, taking it all apart. He worked with a mechanic’s pure dispassion, trying to get it right. He crawled along the underbelly, unscrewing screws as he came to them. He pulled apart riveted plates. He stripped the beams of every bolt, like buttons off a shirt. And just as the light in the sky began to gray, a groaning started up in the core of the bridge. The iron beneath his fingers commenced to vibrate as the pieces pulled away. He was way up underneath, and the whole thing shrieked when the first beam ripped and fell. It was all going to go in a second, yet he hummed and kept on working, totally relaxed. By the time he reached the center of the span, it was holding together by silken threads, thin as aluminum foil.

  He monkeyed along the bottom to the side. Swinging by one arm, he heaved himself out and up. He scrambled onto the quaking surface. The superstructure sagged. The steel tried to bend with the arc, but the center of gravity would not stay. It was mad to plummet. Michael came to his feet and tottered down the bridge a second time, moving toward his kingdom. His teeth knocked in his head. His feet were on fire from the pile-driver slam of the road. And yet he grinned at the wildness of it. He had just stepped back on the ground and shifted his weight from the rocking bridge when the time was suddenly up. It fell with an unbelievable roar, and the gnashing of iron on iron.

  He did not so much as turn to watch as he made his dreamy way uphill. A mushroom cloud of dust came billowing out of the chasm. It rolled up the meadow like a dry, dry fog and swirled about him, thick as a plague of flies. For a moment the new day’s sky was dimmed. It couldn’t last: the sea winds soon dispersed it. The earsplitting noise itself could not hold on. Before he’d reached the hilltop there was silence all around. The fall of the bridge was the final cry of warning. Nobody heeded it.

  Perhaps there were those who tensed in their chairs, or woke with a sudden start. But no one made a move to break away. They must have had some reason, to stay past all the cutting off of the links to other life. Perhaps the grin on the prophet’s face, as he stood on the crest of the hill and watched the dawn, was not so monstrous after all. Perhaps they thought they could live with it. It may have been that, secretly, they felt relieved to lose the world outside.

  For the business of change was over now. The paradise he’d dreamed of, all the long years in the manicured walks, was about to come to pass. He rattled off the treaty in his head. They would have no truck with the dying. The lame, the mute, the anxious—all would have to be winnowed out. Only those at the peak of power could constitute the circle of the blessed. He saw his ancient altar, ringed in stones on the bluff below with the whole of the sea to protect it. High on the ridge like a risen thing, he exulted in the task at hand: the choosing of his crew. At last he had found his proper island, pure as the rim of heaven. He had cut off all the bonds of time. They would stay like this forever.

  V

  THE NIGHT did not go unmarked in the broader fields beyond the village limits. When the lights went out in Pitt’s Landing, a sense of occasion bloomed in the earth’s dark places. In patches and clusters here and there, like flowers wed to a certain climate, of the sort that only grow for a week in March. There were brief and mindless episodes, identical one to another in perversity alone. They took place thousands of miles apart, each with a rhythm something like a dance. Events that had the feel of the ages in them, of pain without end and all hope lost. And the horror of it was simply this: there was nothing local about it. Whatever it was
was everywhere, and gaining.

  In the autumn hills of Charlottesville, for instance, where the country club was antebellum. The back nine was all but empty. The earliest foursome had teed off shortly after five, as soon as there was light enough to see. Coming up now on the fourteenth hole they were talking big, like any mix of businessmen. One had a restaurant, one sold cars. Every one was a rival for the bright suburban dollar. They’d played this Saturday round for years.

  They sported pale knit trousers and white mesh caps. They snacked on a bag of doughnuts. They had already, some miles back, decided who they’d vote for, come November. Cursed the bite of taxes. Made their separate deals. The long green swath, with its clump of artful oaks and a serpentine of ice-blue water, must have looked to them like the pastures of the Psalms.

  The Buick dealer was up. He sank a tee, drew a number 2 wood from his bag, and stood to address the ball. As he started to swing, he caught a sudden movement out of the corner of one eye and looked up to see a group of women loping out of the trees. They were dressed in saffron robes, and their hair was cropped to the bone. He counted four. He knew who they were immediately: the cultists from the dirt farm over by the Highway 80 interchange. And though it burned him to see them trespass on the club’s untrammeled land, he turned with a loud guffaw to his three companions, who loafed in the shade lighting cigarettes.

  “Look,” he said with a smutty sneer, pointing down the fairway, “it’s the Amazons.”

  Indeed. The quartet of women sailed across the close-clipped grass. They paused for a moment to execute a brief ballet around a sandtrap—peering in as if it were a pool in which they could see their lovely faces framed by the azure sky. The golfers could hear them chanting, raw as the buzz of hornets.

  “See if you can pick one off,” the druggist dared the Buick dealer, who gauged the distance and took a swing, sending the ball straight at them. It hit the sand like a bullet, sending up a spray.

  The women had already started forward. Though they didn’t appear to register the presence of the laughing men, they came that way directly, climbing up the rise. The idea of the two groups crossing paths was so ludicrous that the golfers almost welcomed it. So little ever happened to them anymore. They did not see the zombie blankness in the women’s faces, or if they did, they did not fear the power of it. Blankness they knew from their wives. It was harmless.

  The barefoot women crested the hill, and suddenly there was a crowd on the fourteenth tee. The men, in a straggly line, darted looks at one another, as if they could keep the moment antic with a grin. The women—but they were girls, and despite the sunken cheeks, they still possessed the put-on air of daughters, especially now in the presence of older men—the women did not require the camaraderie of glances. They did not, like the men, require one another.

  The first one pranced up next to the druggist and cut him with a chop—the side of the hand to the throat. He crumpled before his smile quite faded, and she brought a knee to the bridge of his nose, driving it straight to his brain. All of them had these Oriental skills, wonderfully perfected. The Italian restaurateur drew the 5 iron like a saber out of his bag. He waved it over the two girls nearest to him and made as if to bring it down on the dark one’s head. She did a quick twirl, and with an eerie sweep of her hands, snatched the club from the air. Her right foot smashed his kneecap so he fell, and she was on him.

  The Buick dealer and the realtor turned and ran, abandoning their weekend friends. The two remaining women crouched and sprang in a standing leap, rising limb for limb like a mirror image. They connected with the men, smack between the shoulder blades. The men pitched forward on their faces. Now all four were down—stunned, unconscious, bleeding from the ears. One looked awfully dead, in fact. The chanting never stopped, not even for the drawing of a breath.

  Out of nowhere, a knife was produced. The thinnest of the women held it up, and a sweet melodic sigh went rippling through the droning noise. The flash of the silvery blade in the sun seemed to seize them with a marvelous idea. As if to undo a favor, each began to tear at the trousers of her golfer. Belt and button and fly, they fumbled and ripped with a wild impatience. Only when the genitals stood revealed, all four, did an instant’s pink of shyness pass among them. The druggist’s girl almost seemed to titter. Then, just as suddenly, they each took hold of their proper victims, gripping each one like a chicken’s neck as they waited their turn with the weapon.

  The thin one cut the realtor through in a single swipe and flung aside the offending member as if it were diseased. She reached the knife across to her near companion. The sleeve of her robe was doused with blood and her hand was a horrible red, but already she seemed to forget what the whole thing had been for. She rose and drifted down the lawn, back the way she came.

  The second one was not so swift. She had no strength for the task at hand, and the Buick dealer’s tool was tough as gristle. Then something in the man came shivering awake, and a whinny of a scream bubbled from his throat. She had to clutch the knife like a dagger and plunge it into his heart. Again. Again. Finally he was still, but by then she’d clearly had enough. She leaped to her feet and traipsed away, trying to laugh it all off. The knife stood poised in his breastbone.

  They couldn’t do anything right. The third girl drew the knife like a quill pen out of an inkwell. Then with an idle hand she etched a cross on the pale of the druggist’s abdomen. The fourth girl had to yank it from her and cut the last two phalluses herself. Chopping them off at the root, first one and then the other, like stalks in a dead-end garden. She flung the knife aside. Then she set the two organs back in place, each against its bloody stump.

  She turned and grabbed her friend, who was eating the last of the doughnuts. They fled off the tee, down the long sward of the fairway toward the others, already lost in the trees. And not a moment too soon: a foursome was on its way up from the thirteenth hole, ribbing each other about the par five dogleg just ahead. The sun was smoked with morning fog. The hills were the vaguest blue.

  Six hundred miles to the north-northwest, it had already snowed in Highland Park. Everything wore an ice skin. The light gleamed liquid across the yards. At six A.M. there were people up, but not that many. These were white-collar types, with bankers’ hours. Their dogs were ridden with gout, from a diet of table scraps. All their children were off at school, getting A’s in higher values. Were it not for the snow, it might not even have been Chicago that was forty minutes south. Seattle, Atlanta, San Diego—they all had a Highland Park. In a word, it was upper. The zoning did not countenance exceptions.

  Yet, in spite of all the codes, you had a problem like the Bartletts. They lived in the requisite fieldstone house, on Cheever Circle, the corner lot. They had a copse of dogwood, a Country Squire, a milkman who still delivered and a split-rail fence all round. Number 86. Their oldest two were normal, but the baby, Dean, was a source of constant shame. In his senior year at Northwestern—with a seven-ninety on his law boards and a three-eight in history—he had dropped out cold. He attached himself to the band of crazies at the Revelation Covenant and severed all communications, family or otherwise. A pall of failure hung about the house on Cheever Circle. After twenty years of things getting better every day, the lights had all stopped turning green.

  The Chicago branch of the church, housed in a bankrupt junior college, was powered by a mix of Valium and Eskatrol. As a consequence, the cultists here were so skinny they looked like they had a tapeworm. Luckily, the Dexadrine edge of the Eskatrol had them laughing all day long, speeding around to do God’s work wherever they turned it up. They sifted the city dumps for salvage. They picked the lice from one another’s scalps. The lower the work, the louder they sang. Their violent thinness befit the saintly plainness of their lives. The Valium, all ground up in their nightly juice, laid them to rest like a little death and let them rise the morning after as if they’d gone to heaven.

  Just now they were being audited for illegal collection of welfare funds. Abou
t two hundred weekly checks were issued to their address, mostly to people who didn’t exist except as names on the Covenant rolls. Which is where the Bartlett boy came in. With his marvelous head for figures, he was sat in a swivel chair in the office and ordered to doctor the books. His Eskatrol was doubled, his Valium cut in half. He didn’t sleep for weeks. He chewed through pencils like a termite. His heart beat fast as a hummingbird’s.

  After a while, the columns of figures dancing down the page took on a chesslike inwardness. He felt he was on the brink of stating some universal truth, in the form of a simple number pure as the name of God.

  No wonder he got it into his head to go home: he needed a bit of vacation. He walked the whole way, five solid hours. Arriving at Cheever Circle about ten minutes after six, he strode past block after block of manicured houses. His robe billowed behind him as if he were a prophet. He held the perfect integer in his head. Either the millennium was at hand, or he had a burning wish to tell it to his mother. He carried no weapon. He wore no shoes.

  Still, they would have kissed him like a prodigal. They would have had a party if he’d let them. Ray and Irene, his father and mother, had waited seven months for any word at all. So when he turned and strode up the driveway, it was strange that they didn’t come running out. When he walked up the steps and flung the door wide, they should have been dancing for joy in the hall.

  “Your eggs are ready,” called a woman’s voice from the kitchen.

  He lumbered up the stairs, crazy to get to his room. At the top, he collided with a man in a tie who was rounding the corner to go and eat before his eggs got cold. His father, he thought—except he’d gotten younger.