Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  “Is that in his journal?”

  “No. I found it out myself,” said Polly, unable to conceal the pride. “One year I worked at the weather station. I studied a lot of old charts.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose so I could tell you.”

  They drank a cup of coffee then as if they did it every day. Polly poured, and Iris took the bright green cup she’d drunk from only yesterday. While the bell tolled on for half an hour, they laid out what they knew about the coming break of dark. Polly knew all the facts, as if so many years in the town hall made her see it in triplicate. It was calculated for Tuesday morning, at twenty after seven. Estimated coverage: 98 percent total. Duration: eleven minutes. Probable conditions: cloudy.

  Yet the sky outside was unseasonably clear, just four days short of the solar event. The winter rains, constant November to April, had withdrawn the moment Michael and Iris arrived. This had never happened before. The couples who came in other years did all their loving in a downpour. They jumped from the cliffs in the teeth of a hurricane wind.

  Polly agreed to spread the word among the weathermen that Iris would be at the boardinghouse, prepared to talk to anyone. Iris only understood now, as she listened to Polly list the lost connections, that the town was completely cut off. The weather station in Arcata Bay was officially abandoned, since all the technicians lived here at The Landing. No wonder Roy could not get out as he’d always planned. There was no question of scrambling down the ravine where the bridge was out, or building a raft of driftwood, thus to escape by sea. Their sudden isolation here was the nature of things, this sunny week in the thick of winter. There was no world outside.

  Or to put it another way, the world outside was as much the prey of forces as the village. It was clear to Iris as she wandered down the field to the church, thinking to check the graveyard before she turned home. The world existed now as if behind a mirror, the other side of which was a mirror too. Trucks rolling by on the coastal road missed nothing as they passed the turnoff. Those with cargo for Pitt’s Landing divided it up among other towns. Mail piled up at the central station in Eureka, only to be tossed in the dead-letter bin. The weather station was empty the same way factories were, or dead motels, or the depots of bankrupt railroads. It was no odder to people out there that one town ceased to be than the loss of the world was odd to the villagers stranded here. No one could see that far anymore.

  She stepped through the gate at the side of the church and walked among the tight-grown pines. The graves were marked by stones set into the earth, but most of these were covered over by the autumn shed of needles. Where they were in the open, the lichen bloomed in ochre circles on the marble. When Iris peered up close, she saw there was nothing written but the year, on a slab no bigger than a book. The first she came to was 1961. Then 1936. Then 1910. The carving got quainter and quainter. The further she walked in the grove, up and down hills, sometimes right at the edge of the cliff, the stones grew more and more faded—1835, 1807, 1760—till finally the numbers had all worn off, and they looked like random paving stones or a wall that had fallen down.

  She stood in the woods and wondered, and the church bell rang in her ear. She didn’t feel especially sad. The buried race of nameless couples, borne up here from the harbor floor, seemed better off dead. Perhaps if they’d really been lovers—husbands and wives, midnight secrets or mad obsessions, incestuous, unrequited, married to someone else—then she might have wept at so much life snuffed out. But as it was they seemed, each pair, like nothing more than duelists. The game they played was settled. She was only touched by the care the village took to mark their passing.

  She walked back up to the church. As she left the yard and entered the rutted street she could almost feel him beyond the wall, pulled up by the rope and yanking down. He was clearly determined to ring till someone came. The noise no longer troubled her, or rent the air like an omen. She was almost glad of the fury of it—the mindless anger, the teasing, almost like a tantrum. She was twenty yards beyond the church when she saw a tear-streaked woman leave her house up a little lane and stumble toward the tolling bell. Blood foamed out of her mouth from the gnashing of her teeth. She held her hands at her ears as if the noise would drive her mad, and yet she went toward it.

  Iris quickened her pace. She did not turn around to see if the woman had reached the church. She was damned if she would keep a count of how many Michael won. The numbers didn’t matter. But if that was so, then why did Iris stagger against a tree when the bell went suddenly still? Why did she have this hunger to heave herself from the cliff?

  She could hear the sound of screaming. Throngs of people were running toward the light. She fell to her knees and began to crawl. Every inch she went was a last, small triumph. She would never make the boardinghouse. But she swore that her final gasp would carry her that one further step from Michael and his monstrous god.

  Suddenly someone stooped beside her. An arm went around her belly and lifted her back on her feet. She could not see who it was—the membrane of blood had filmed her eyes, and the long cliff meadow was dazed with flowers and all the houses vanished. She knew enough not to be scared. At least it wasn’t Michael. She stumbled along, bent over, and gripped her savior’s arm like someone fleeing a burning house. Gradually, as they walked the street, her sense of things returned. The village emerged as if out of a mist. Whoever it was knew just where to take her: down the dirt alley beside the barn, where the patch of mustard in flower was a blur like a pool of sun. She smelled a pie in Maybeth’s kitchen. Then they came around the veranda and up the wooden steps.

  “Sit here,” said Emery Oz, easing her into her breakfast chair at the rain-warped table above the bay.

  She stared at his back as he pattered into the house. The spell had passed like a dream. She brushed at the dust on the knees of her jeans, then stopped to gaze at a tear that ran across one fingernail. When he brought out a pitcher of water she shook her head no with the faintest laugh, as if to play it all down. When he sat beside her, natty as ever in ancient tweeds, with a purple cravat and a pocket silk, he seemed more worn by it all than she.

  She made a most formal thank-you, as one who had had a slight touch of the sun. Oh, he protested, it was nothing. Neither gave a clue to the real occasion—but not, she thought, because they wished to hide it. They’d already put it behind them. Nothing seemed to surprise them anymore. This may have accounted for her bluntness, as she went on now without the least transition.

  “We were talking about your niece,” she said.

  “My … niece?” he retorted, with a puzzled frown.

  “Harriet.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember now,” he said, with an odd apologetic smile. “You look just like her. Did I tell you that?”

  “Who was she?” Iris snapped, as if everything heretofore was a lie.

  It died with a falling ring. In the silence that followed, she looked off the bluff at the tireless sea, all aquamarine and whitecaps. She didn’t mind if he took all day to answer. Time seemed not to haunt her. She gazed at the long-winged cliff birds, glassy-eyed, squat on the rocks below the porch, who could dive two hundred feet straight down and land on a sheet of the sea without a ripple.

  “She was my daughter,” Emery Oz responded, the slightest extra stress on the final word as if to correct a minor point. “She died very young.”

  “Died here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Drowned. She was just eighteen.” He paused with a sudden frown, as if even this were not naked enough. Then amended it: “She drowned herself.”

  “I’m sorry,” Iris replied.

  “She had these visions. We didn’t allow them.” He sighed as if he would weep, but didn’t. His hands in his lap did a little twitch, by way of the scarcest shrug imaginable.

  “I was very different then,” he said, gazing down in disbelief at the spots that splashed his skin. “I thought we could build a city here. So I shut my ears when she tried to tell me. I punish
ed her.” He swallowed hard and went on almost dully. “After she died I started having them too. Since then there’s not been a day I haven’t felt something. The difference is, I’ve never told a soul.”

  “Visions of what?”

  “Why, of who I used to be,” he said.

  Saying it seemed to change everything. He poured a glass of water and sat back easily, tilting it up to drink it down. Where she would have expected dread, or even shame, he suddenly seemed quite jaunty, the way he had been the day she met him. It was the first indication she’d had that the double life was not a thing of horror. There might be an obverse side, as clear as the hazy sun now burning through to start the day for real.

  “I think I have the best idea of anyone,” said Emery Oz. “Anyone here, at least. Perhaps there are others, thousands of towns just like this one. It looks like anywhere else.” He stopped to reflect a moment—to wonder, perhaps, how many more such towns had gone like his to war. He snapped out of it with a sigh. “Anyway, most of them only remember in fragments—what a doctor would call déjà vu. They know there’s something there, but they can’t get to it. In my own case”—here he groped to find the words, and shrugged—“I’m as much him as me.”

  “One of them, you mean.” She had only a vague notion who they were; all she’d seen was skeletons. Yet it seemed important not to be dumb. He knew so much, she feared for her power.

  “For a long time,” he said, “I thought I must be the chief. I could feel this power”—funny, she thought, how the word came up—“like reverence, almost. Then I began to understand it had nothing to do with leading people. I must be some kind of holy man, though that’s the wrong word, of course. They didn’t believe in any of that.”

  “Have you actually been there?”

  “Where?”

  “Well—here. But I mean, do you go back and forth? Is then as real as now?”

  “No, no,” he reassured her. “It’s all in my head.” He tapped his temple as one who could tell what was crazy and what quite sane. “I don’t travel there. Heavens, no.”

  He treated the whole idea as a witticism. He chuckled and mulled it over, shook his head clucking, and poured a second glass of water. She remembered Polly, that first day, saying “You don’t suppose it’s ghosts, do you?”

  She leaned forward and grasped his hand: “Emery, tell me—who am I?”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s any doubt of it,” he said, with his most imperious air. His breath came back with a vengeance. “I’ve watched these women for fifty years, who come to jump from the light. I never recognized a single one. Not till I first set eyes on you. Your hair’s the same, your smile …” He paused with a flush of pleasure. She felt as if she’d come all this way to make him happy. Then: “You’re the chief!” he exclaimed with an unexpected flourish, like he’d plucked a scarf from the air behind her ear.

  She fixed him a naked stare, groping to see what the metaphor was. Till this moment she’d never thought twice what her role had been among them. Now she saw she’d assumed herself a princess of some kind—without any power at all, prey to the winds of others. All at once she understood he was telling the truth, and she felt betrayed. The only victim she’d ever taken the blame for was herself.

  “You mean, they let a woman …”

  She could not even think about her, at first. She combed the scattered data in her head. They never had a woman for a chief. Not anywhere. The system was fixed in 1580, from Borneo to Paris.

  “Odd, isn’t it?” Emery said cheerfully. “The thing is, they had no natural enemies. There was just the one tribe, the whole length of this coast. For three days’ ride in any direction, this was nowhere.”

  “It must have been inherited,” said Iris, trying to piece together a picture of kings and their progeny. No sons in the line. The occasional queen turned up, of course.

  “No. I think there was an election. I couldn’t tell you how long you held it. You have to understand, I can only see that one particular summer. All I know is, you were the head of us then.”

  “What happened?”

  He didn’t like the question, and he squirmed. In the moment before he answered, he faltered into a state like shame. But he said it. “Everyone died,” he declared, riddling it with apologies. “I don’t know how. Some fever, perhaps.”

  The church bell had started ringing again, but she didn’t even hear it. She was too caught up in a guilt of her own, trying to measure her losses. “But surely,” she whispered, “they all jumped from the cliff.”

  “Is that what you see?”

  She nodded, though see was far too strong a word. There was too much darkness, too much haze, for her to pick out figures on the cliff. Perhaps she was mixing it up with the pair of strangers who came at the end of every November. She didn’t have Emery’s confidence about the world of shadows. She didn’t want to be pinned to details. She only knew that it happened in the pitch of the last eclipse.

  But none of this was why she lapsed into such a sudden silence. Somehow she’d let her people down. She felt a terrible weight of grief and error. A prison with no walls had closed her round. She cast a lonely glance along the cliff edge, where the tufts of grass were billowing with sea breeze. Nothing had changed in the green of things. If the nightmare had never intruded, they could have lived here forever. A thousand thousand years.

  “Now,” said Emery briskly, breaking in, “when will you come to dinner? Tonight?”

  She shook her head with a frown of disapproval. Really, she had to wonder if she could even take him seriously. Perhaps he was off his head.

  “Why?” he persisted. “Because you’ve passed the word that you’re here to listen? You think they’re going to be lining up?”

  Her eyes flashed. She spoke with a savage bluntness: “You want me to fail, is that it?” He saw he had overstepped, and dropped his eyes to the tabletop. “Well, bring them here, why don’t you?” she demanded. “There isn’t time for dinner anymore.”

  “My dear Iris,” he said with maddening calm, “I hope you save them all. I’ll be the first to applaud, I promise. But I think you’ll see—how shall I put it—they aren’t very open people. Myself, I prefer to concentrate on those I can be sure of. Three or four at most. Perhaps you know some others. Bring whoever you like. I think we have to try to pull together a lifeboat’s worth.” Then, hastily: “That’s only a manner of speaking, of course. We can’t leave.”

  She hardly listened. He seemed to be filling the empty space with social forms, and spending time like water. Yet something about it would not be dismissed. After all, she might as well hedge her bets. Emery’s three or four might know things she hadn’t yet uncovered.

  “Tonight—if no one needs me,” she said carefully.

  “Oh, good. We’ll bring out the old Oz china shall we? Really, we haven’t had a proper party in decades.”

  He stood to leave and bowed slightly from the waist, as if these traditions had faded away to almost nothing. In spite of herself, she lowered her head in response. What did it mean, that a holy man had ended up in the body of the village dandy? If so much mystic power could be diluted, then what kind of chance did the rest of them stand? Emery wasn’t the problem. He was lovely, really—gentle and charmed and touched by the world he walked in. But didn’t they need a man of spells, with broths and leeches and the gift of tongues?

  “I expect you’d like to recover the old ways,” Emery said. She looked up startled, to think he had read her mind. But he stood as guileless as ever, turning up his face for a bit of sun. “Some kind of ancient rituals—magic, even. Try to remember, that’s not who we are anymore. We have to make do with this world.”

  He spoke without a trace of smugness. It did not have the ring of wisdom, even. It was far too effortless. Yet she wondered if the remnant of his holiness lay there, in the ease with which he spoke of change.

  “Eight o’clock, then,” he said succinctly, concluding the morning’s business. And he wen
t down onto the lawn and back the way they’d come, toward the corner of the house. As he reached the end of the veranda, she saw him bow again to someone coming up the mustard alley by the barn. She could not see who it was, but felt a huge relief at being spared a lonely interval. At least she didn’t have to think.

  Just live here, she told herself. Repeating what he’d warned her: This is all we have.

  “Why did you run away?” asked Roy, and she looked up sharp to see if she had failed him. He was grinning. “Was it something I said?”

  “Of course not. I’m the one who had the little trance. It’s very rude, I’m sure.”

  “The bones, you mean,” he said, coming up the steps and heading for Emery’s chair. He carried his ranger’s jacket rolled under his arm. He set this down on the table, then flipped the chair around and straddled it. He folded his arms along the backrest, as though he was settling in for a story. “Turns out you were right about that,” he said. “I went back down with a light and checked the tunnels. There’s bits and pieces of bones all over the place—kind of bleached out, and real, real dry. There isn’t much left, but it’s obvious. It must have been their burying place.”

  She nodded. In her mind she saw a procession, a line of mourners trailing down the stairs. A body was propped in the tunnel, head lolled on the shoulder, as if the sound of the sea had put it to sleep.

  “This was the only one there,” said Roy, unwrapping the jacket. “It was up on a shelf, so the tide never got it.”

  He pulled out a bone-white skull and plumped it down on the jacket. As if to show it off to her, he fingered the line of its mottled forehead, like a shell off a coral reef. She struggled with a sense of disconnection that split her down the middle. She was shocked at the casual sacrilege. With a dreadful pang she saw how the dead were lost to her, like someone had shut a door.

  But all she said was: “What has the tide got to do with it?”