Lightfall

by Paul Monette

“She still won’t come,” choked the doctor. “She doesn’t know what she wants.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Iris fiercely, gathering him into her arms. “We’ll get her—I promise.”

  And then Mrs. Jeremy screamed.

  The only thing with wheels was a flatbed cart in Emery’s shed. All the cars were over the side and smashed to bits on the shore below. It seemed a pity to lay him down on the bare and splintered wood, so Maybeth took the old Bethlehem quilt off his bed and tacked it to the cart. Roy and Jeff cleaned him up and dressed him in his wedding suit. Polly went through his things till she found an old sepia picture of Harriet, the daughter. This went into his breast pocket. Then his watch and chain across his vest. Then the signet ring from the dining room table—gold, with a ship etched into the ice-blue stone. They laid him out and put a bunch of flowers from the front garden in his hand. This, they said, was how he would have wanted it.

  They had not neglected to open their gifts. Though none of the packages bore a tag, each of them managed to pass the table before it had gone quite dusk. Everyone got a present, even the baby, and everyone found the time to stop and tear the paper off. So before too long some had a pocket of coins or a silver dish to carry around. Polly got a little silver mouse. Roy got an inlaid drinking mug, Maybeth a hammered cross. Everything shone with polish, reminding them all how very much he loved them.

  Before setting out, of course, they had a cup of tea.

  For her part, Iris kept outside while they got him ready. She picked the flowers. They let her alone because they figured it was private. Naturally, they couldn’t help but notice the resemblance between her and Harriet, but it only seemed to make them more determined not to intrude. When she finally came in for tea, they weren’t surprised that all she wanted was crackers and a little marmalade. She drank water out of the tap. No one would have been so forward as to offer a spot of tea.

  At last she raised her voice to say that it was almost six, or almost dark. They hardly knew the numbers anymore. Putting up their collars against the chill they tramped out and smiled at the staggering, starlit night. Fourteen of them ringed around the cart made the going slow but sure. They eased it down the rutted lane, with no one complaining or carrying light. Iris was at the back. So was Roy.

  “Iris?” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I know.”

  And that was all they said. The ruts got deeper, and somebody came between them—Dr. Upton. She found she only had enough room to lay one hand on the cart. It was just as easy to fall behind and wait to see if they needed her. Nobody noticed she wasn’t pulling her weight. They were all intent on keeping the motion gentle, as if they feared to wake him. Iris counted on that intensity. The narrower they focused, the further in they’d go.

  The night was not yet black as ink. Far out on the horizon, a streak of mackerel gray with a teal-blue rim made clear how fierce the day held on. The cart tipped some in turning from the lane to the muddy street, so the women gasped and put out hands to hold the corpse in place. Iris wondered: where was the split between women and men when it came to death?

  They passed the church and the cemetery gate, not pausing for a moment. Neither place had any bearing here. Even if the church had not been jammed with naked revelers, they wouldn’t have held their service in it. They hurried by, averting their faces from chaos. It seemed they could hardly wait to lay a body in the caves. So much so, they had ceased to wonder how the death had come about.

  At first, Iris thought it was a ghost. The scene was overwrought with the creak of wheels and human silence. Perhaps the borders had broken down between some other world and this. She caught a glimmer of white in the corner of one eye—following at her own pace, passing from tree to tree on the right of the path. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have looked, figuring to give it a chance to fade. But she had so much to do when they finally got to the lighthouse, she decided she’d better meet it face to face in case it wanted a hand in things. She turned and walked toward it. She wasn’t afraid. Not any more.

  It was only Judith Quinn.

  Iris fell into step beside her. They walked together in the cliffside grass, watching the funeral wind along the street. No one seemed to miss either of them. Iris noticed for the first time that they were both about the same weight and height. They easily could have exchanged clothes, if the doctor’s wife had had any.

  “Who killed him?” asked Judith. “Did you?”

  “Shh! He killed himself.”

  The naked woman dropped her voice to a whisper: “At first I thought it was Felix.”

  “Why?”

  “I make him so unhappy. I don’t see how he stands it.”

  Iris stopped and faced her. Judith trailed another step or two, but she couldn’t ignore the confrontation. The funeral was getting away from them. It was halfway there already. The doctor’s wife looked shyly at the ground.

  “What do you want?” Iris demanded sharply.

  Judith didn’t even think. She pouted and spoke in a queer, defiant whine: “Look, Iris, I just want to die, okay? I’m sorry if that’s too much for you.”

  “Why don’t you, then? What are you waiting for?”

  Judith searched her eyes and smiled in a cunning way. She primped her hair like a woman out for the evening. “I’d just as soon not know about it,” she said with a touch of irony. “How do you die in your sleep, Iris? You think you can teach me that?”

  Iris wavered and studied her face. Part of her wanted to hurl the woman off the cliff without another word. The edge was only a few feet away, beyond a clump of gentian. But then they would be in collusion, and Judith would die happy. It was all a trick to have it taken out of her hands.

  “Meet me at the light,” Iris said. “In about ten minutes. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  She didn’t stop for an answer. She bounded over the grass and down the street, rushing to catch the procession as it crossed the brook and into the park. When she reached within ten feet of the cart, she heard a low, rhythmic chanting. Though each of the mourners was barely audible, no one was exempt. Together they sent up a murmur as gray as the wind on the bluff. Iris shouldered in between Maybeth and Jeff. She could tell they never even knew she left.

  They passed through the center of the circle of stones, and as if there had been an explosion deep in space, they suddenly turned to gaze at the sky. In the north-northeast quarter, the moon lay white and gibbous, one day short of full. Its bloodless light raked the point with a thousand shadows. It gleamed their eyes and laid their faces open. The chanting stopped. They shivered now at last, as if the night were white with ice. Then they looked around the circle, vague and strangely agitated, as if the blank their minds had drawn had finally come to shame them.

  They headed for the lighthouse to take shelter from the aching shock of light. Roy broke free, ran ahead and opened the door. Iris longed to follow him but feared he would name the thing she’d done, and that would be the end of them. So she went with the sway of the cart, as it dug long tracks in the grass and flung up luminous buried shells. She took a deep breath to calm herself, before the real ordeal began. Then Maybeth leaned up close and touched her, shoulder to shoulder.

  “Iris, why?”

  With awful dread, she turned to face the question. She owed the landlady better than lies. For days now Maybeth had led her out of the dark, telling all the customs of the country. She deserved to be paid in kind. Yet as soon as Iris saw her eyes, she knew it was nothing serious. Maybeth was just bewildered and needed a little reassurance. Even now, with blood on the daughter’s hands, there was no hint of accusation.

  “Trust me,” Iris said in a husky whisper. She hardly believed it herself.

  “Of course,” retorted Maybeth tartly, hurt to think there was any doubt. “Just let us be free, will you? You owe us nothing.” Here she demurred and looked down at the body. A deep frown creased her face. “Go home and be happy.”

  No answer seemed required. Besid
es, there was something of an incline here, and they had to throw their shoulders in and heave if they ever meant to reach the moonstruck tower. Roy came back to help, taking hold of the pull rope at the front and drawing it hand over hand, like a fisherman hauling nets. When they brought it up snug by the lighthouse door, all but the strongest stood aside to leave them room to lift. As Roy and Simon, Jeff and Felix bore him up like stretcher-bearers, Iris stepped inside to see if the trap was open.

  Yes: the lid swung lightly in the well below. The rusted lock and key lay discarded on the doorsill. She bent to scoop these up, as the pallbearers crowded in. She scampered across to the spiral stair to watch. It was very smooth; the body never banged the walls. Jeff went down with the feet, and the others let go as Felix took the shoulders. Only two could maneuver it down the stairs and into the cliff.

  Startled, Iris drew her hands behind her back. All along she’d assumed that Roy would stay with the body till they reached the final tunnel. As he looked up now and held out his hand, waiting to take her down, she dropped the lock on the stair behind. She smiled and descended, entering the cave in front of him, feeling the weight of his open palm between her shoulders. It almost seemed she was under guard.

  At first they went by second sight. The candles were passed along only when Polly thought to rummage for them in the keeper’s cupboard. One by one, through cold and dark as pure as the winter sky, they went round and round the spiral. When the stairs gave out they snaked along in single file, down a deep and twisting track. But for all the forks and pitfalls, they never made one wrong turn or hit a dead end. They went deeper and deeper till the sound of the waves came beating up from below with a roar like a broken dam.

  Fissures opened along the route, with hollows and rooms on every side. No one knew where to go. No one appeared in charge. But at last, at a hairpin turning, as they walked across a bridge of stone through a vast domed cavern of swirling water, they knew it was just ahead. They came to a niche in a wall of rock, about the size of the window seat in Emery’s parlor. A kind of bench ran along the bottom. Jeff and Felix set the body down, fixed the collar and straightened the flowers, and the mourners clustered round in the vaulted tunnel. No one knew what to say, till Iris spoke.

  “Pray for him now,” she commanded, shrugging Roy’s hand away. She flashed her eyes around the group till everyone bowed his head. “Pray that our father will open the gate. Do you understand? He is only gone to clear the way. Get down.”

  With the last word ringing, she dropped to her knees in a sort of swoon. She lay her cheek on the cool and porous stone beside the body, as if to listen to something far, far down, and then began to moan. The others were only too glad to oblige, once she had shown the way. They fell to their knees. The candles shook and guttered. They set them on the floor, so their moon-white faces floated on the light. They shut their eyes and clasped themselves. In a minute they were jabbering thick as animals. They’d started to speak in tongues.

  Iris knew it was now or never. She rose and turned and skimmed across the bridge. The babbling in the tomb never wavered. With a burst of exhilaration, she lunged from tunnel to tunnel. Nothing could stop her. The dark was so perfectly velvet that it didn’t matter if she shut her eyes or not. Here was the perfect medium at last: a dream where she was free to run, without the least imagining. She longed to explore every dead end turn, to hole up deep in a crevice like the hiss of the sea in a nautilus.

  And then she heard him bellow close behind her: “Iris, no!”

  She flattened herself against the tunnel wall, biting her cheek so she wouldn’t breathe. She hadn’t tricked him at all. Everyone else huddled on the floor at Emery’s grave, gnashing their teeth and begging for release. She could hear them, echoing up the dim recesses. Roy had slipped away as silently as she.

  “Where are you?” he whispered stealthily, for now he had stopped to listen. All those years in the pine wood overhead had honed his senses. He could hear the slightest move.

  “Here,” she called to him sweetly. “Over here.”

  And she bent down as if to pick a flower. She trailed her hand on the rippled floor, where the tides had scored the rock like a frozen river. She came on a sea-broken stone about the size of a potato. She could hear him getting nearer, though he walked as light as a deer. He stopped five feet away.

  “I won’t let you, Iris,” he warned her.

  “Roy,” she said in a soothing tone. “Please—you have to help me. I’m all confused.”

  He was starting to inch away when she brushed his arm. He flinched and drew back as if she’d burned it. He stumbled and reached for the wall. She put out an empty hand to touch his chest, the tips of her fingers above his heart. As if to say she would go no closer, not unless he wished.

  He replied precisely: “You don’t need me and you know it.” Not bitter, exactly, but hard as a diamond. Clearly, whatever it was was over. “I was just a cover—I know that.”

  She didn’t contradict him. Though she quivered with impatience, the fingers on his breastbone never moved. She felt as if she were stilling a nervous animal. She said: “I thought you wanted to survive this thing.”

  “I want to see it first,” retorted Roy. “And anyway, I’ll save myself, like I always have. I don’t need you either.”

  “Please—just hold me.”

  She sank against him. Automatically, as if by instinct, he folded his arms about her. She knew him as cold as he knew her: he was too long driven by a pioneer code to throw her off. A woman required protection, even if he had to steel himself to do it. She grazed her lips across his cheek, which shivered with the grinding of his teeth. She nuzzled and bit at his lip.

  And finally he couldn’t help it. He believed too much in people. Forces he didn’t acknowledge, except for the throes of nature. He bent to her. Here in the pitch of night they would join against the horror running rampant up above. They would be one again and lock death out. It was only when he kissed her that she brought up the stone and smashed him above the temple.

  He slumped in her arms without a cry. He gave the barest gasp. All the sound spilled out of Iris. She whimpered as she lay him down, cradling his head till it rested on the floor. She sobbed when she felt beside his ear, terrified there would be blood. There wasn’t. She crouched down low to listen at his lips, to be sure he was still breathing. She almost prayed, but she couldn’t linger a second more, to take it back or make it stop. The moment the blow was struck, the babble deep in the tunnel ended in mid-harangue. The labyrinth held its breath, as if a quake had started. She knew before she heard another sound: they were after her.

  She leaped to her feet and raced off up the tunnel. She heard them coming, nearer and nearer, for someone had started to call her name, continuous like a death knell. It was all the echo needed. Iris rang in every pocket of the cliff. The tide itself, groaning below like a man in shackles, rocked to the sound of her name. Iris, Iris, Iris, till it seemed the earth had dreamed her up.

  She wasn’t afraid they’d catch her. She’d already reached the foot of the spiral, tumbling up two or three steps at a time. A chase was what she needed. Staggering, gasping, counting stairs—she laughed at the sheer hard work of it. Below, she heard Jeff reach the bottom. He shrieked her name in a murderous rage, as if she’d brought his only brother down. Felix was right behind him. He tried to quiet Jeff, even as he hollered up at Iris. She wondered who had stayed to tend to Roy. Maybeth, she thought, or Polly. All the friends she’d lost.

  Then she saw light and lunged toward it. Five steps more, and she’d reached the top. It was only the moon, but even so, she could hardly see for the brightness of it. She climbed out onto the landing, where the tower door stood wide. Outside it was just as much of a dream as what she’d left behind. She pulled the trapdoor after her and held it shut as she reached for the padlock. It wasn’t there.

  Judith appeared out of the shadows. She handed over the lock and key with a bow and an impish smile, like a drunken consp
irator. Limp with shock, Iris took them. She hardly knew where to begin. The lock was locked, and the key wouldn’t fit. There wasn’t a moment left. Jeff was halfway up the spiral. Felix was at his heels. They were screaming: “No!”

  “Come here!” cried Iris, and the doctor’s wife knelt down beside her. “Hold this for me. Hurry!”

  For an instant they were like sisters, looking down as if to see their faces in a pool. Judith grabbed the iron latch, leaning back with all her weight, immovable and fierce. Iris shrank against the stairs. In the final second, she struggled to force the key and finally sprang the lock, but mostly what she did was watch. It was all some kind of test she was putting Judith through.

  An instant later, Jeff tugged at the ring on the other side. It wasn’t much of a struggle. Though the drug gave Judith the strength of ten, Jeff had all the leverage and the gravity. As Felix reached him, the latch slipped out of Judith’s hands, and the door sprang inward. Jeff went sprawling down the stairs. Felix leaped to take his place, and his head emerged from the darkness. He froze when he saw his wife. They exchanged a desperate look as Jeff came scrambling back.

  And Iris, quick as a girl in a fairy tale, crouched behind the doctor’s wife, placed her open palms on Judith’s naked back, and heaved her over the edge. She tumbled in on top of them. All three fell in a tangle, rolling out of sight around the spiral. Iris reached down and brought up the trapdoor. Latching the latch precisely, she slipped the lock in place. She turned the key with a click that seemed to echo in her heart.

  And that was that. She lay on the cold stone floor to get her breath, looking as if she’d tumbled down the stairs from the keeper’s perch. Beneath her, the three survivors clambered back, pummeling on the lid so furiously that the wood sent up a cloud of sawdust. The lock had held a hundred years. They were past the point of turning things around. By the time the wave of those less swift had staggered up to the seal of fate, they were already fighting among themselves.

  Iris listened. They seethed with accusations, as if they were stuck in a dungeon cell. Perhaps it was the total darkness, but something seemed to break inside them. In a minute they’d given up hope. They ceased to beat against the door. They wept aloud and collapsed on the stairs, and some went trailing down again to the tunnels and caves to suffer all alone. The fight had left them.