The Last Night at Tremore Beach

by Mikel Santiago

  “I told you, Leo, we’re not at that stage . . .”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “It’s just that whenever I see the two of you together, I say to myself, ‘What a great couple!’ Okay, I’ll shut up, now. Nosy old man that I am . . .”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” I said. “I like to hear your opinion. It’s just that right now neither one of us wants anything serious.”

  “I hear you, Pete. Crystal clear.”

  “But you’re right. She’s a fantastic girl.”

  We both fell silent for a moment. Waves broke on the shore beneath an orange sky. The ocean seemed aflame.

  “Well, now I really better get going, or Marie is going to have the broom ready. Pick up where we left off with the fence tomorrow?”

  “Whenever you want. I’ll take all the help I can get, but I don’t want to abuse the privilege.”

  “It’s my pleasure, bud. Besides, I’m going to need help with my fence pretty soon.”

  “You can count on me.”

  Leo sauntered home by the water’s edge under a darkening indigo sky, and I went back inside feeling my headache resurfacing. I went for the pills but figured I better eat something first.

  I’ve never been a great cook, but every now and then I’ve been known to whip up a killer bangers and mash; anyone who’s had them will tell you they’re finger-licking good. I started peeling potatoes while listening to Coastal Radio. “We’re expecting a warm month of July with some scattered storms but plenty of sunshine.” I was happy to hear it. I wanted Jip and Beatrice to have a great summer vacation.

  I dined on the bangers and mash, licked my fingers, and downed my pills. A few hours later, as I lay on the sofa reading my murder mystery, my headache had subsided but was still present. It had moved deeper inside. If I still felt like this next week, I should probably call the doctor.

  SIX

  I’M NOT SURE when I fell asleep or at what time I finally woke up. I never looked at the clock for some reason. But looking back—given everything that would happen—I wish I had.

  Something woke me. A noise. Or was it the headache? I opened my eyes and heard a pounding. Was that the door? Everything looked blurry. Maybe I hadn’t heard anything, after all. Maybe I dreamed it? Or had something fallen over?

  I was still lying on the sofa. I’d fallen asleep while reading, like so many other times, but this time I woke up confused. The pounding in my head had grown louder.

  It had started to rain. I could hear the drops pelting the glass and tile roof. Another storm? And then I heard it again: a pounding, louder this time. An urgent knocking at the door.

  “Hello?” I yelled, each word a struggle. “Is someone there?”

  I sat up on the sofa with my bare feet on the rug, the mystery novel rumpled beside me. No answer. You must be hearing things, I told myself. Who could be way out here at this time of night?

  I closed the book and pulled off the blanket that was still draped over my lap. I waited a minute. The room was bathed in shadows. Wind shook the windowpanes, but the rest of the house was silent.

  Just when I’d started to believe it was all a figment of my imagination, I heard it again: loud, clear knocks on the door. One. Two. Three. Heavy and insistent. I flipped the switch on the end table lamp, but I remained in darkness.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  I got up and tried the light switches in the hallway, but it looked like the power was out. Maybe that was it, a problem with the electricity. Maybe it was Leo or Marie, or some county worker or a firefighter . . . or a goddamn Martian. It had to be three in the freaking morning.

  There was no peephole on the door, but there was a small, stained-glass window that at this time of night was too dark to see through.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Who the hell is it?”

  I gave whoever-it-was a few seconds to answer, but I received only silence in return. I unlocked the door, all the while thinking I was making a big mistake, and opened it.

  Marie stood soaked and shivering in the doorway, my elegant and reserved neighbor who I’d just seen that afternoon in Judie’s store. Earlier when I saw her in town, she had told me she’d been waiting for Leo to pick her up on his way back from running errands in Dungloe. All of it flashed through my mind in a split second. I could taste the sulfur of bad news in the air. You always can when death darkens your doorstep.

  “Marie! My God, what’s happened?”

  She said nothing. She stood frozen in the doorway, completely soaked. She stared at some ambiguous point between my face and chest. She was completely out of it.

  I helped her inside and sat her on the faux velvet sofa in the foyer. I glanced out the door and saw only my Volvo parked outside. Marie had walked here in the pounding rain in the middle of the night. I grabbed a blanket from the couch in the living room and a bottle of Jameson from the bar.

  “Here, take a sip. It’ll help warm you up.”

  “Peeete . . . Peeeete.”

  She was in shock. Gone. Her eyes floated in their sockets, her face a skeletal visage. Her hair was matted against her head. I stroked it, trying to calm her. She raised her eyes to meet mine. Two frightened eyes that looked lost, wild.

  “Marie. Easy, now. Whatever it is, I’m here to help.”

  She wore soaked purple pajamas and a bathrobe caked in sand. She was barefoot. I put the blanket over her shoulders and quickly rubbed her arms and shoulders to warm her. She breathed heavily. He body was on fire, as if she’d just run a marathon. She was panting like an asthmatic. For a moment, I was scared she was going to have a heart attack on the spot.

  “Help . . . me . . .”

  “What’s happened, Marie? Where’s Leo?”

  The question made something come to life in her mind, and there was no doubt something terrible had happened. At hearing her husband’s name, Marie twisted her face into a pained expression.

  “Leo!” she yelled.

  She closed her eyes and leaned toward me, and I realized she had fainted against my chest.

  “Marie! God, oh my God . . . !”

  I held her up and tried to tap her face gently to wake her, but it was like touching a frozen corpse. My mind went to Leo. I realized I was wasting valuable time. If something had happened to Leo, I needed to act fast. I ran to the living room and grabbed my cell phone. I found it under a book of sheet music, but when I tried it, I discovered the battery was dead.

  I calculated it would take the police at least half an hour to get here, and that’s assuming Barry, Clenhburran’s garda, hadn’t gone to spend the night in Dungloe as he sometimes did. Same thing with the ambulance. Half an hour, at least, by the time they got here. And time wasn’t on our side.

  I ran back to the foyer, grabbed my keys off the hook, and ran out of the house. “I’m going to have a look,” I yelled to Marie, though neither she nor anyone else could hear me. And just then, I remembered the voice from the other night.

  Don’t leave the house. Not tonight.

  Outside, the wind raged. I sprinted toward the Volvo, but then something caught my eye that made me stop dead in my tracks. The picket fence Leo and I had spent hours sanding was broken. A stretch of about six feet near the house lay flat on the ground. I ran toward the car, drenched by raindrops that seemed to grow fatter with each passing moment. What the hell had happened? Maybe Marie broke it on her way here? Maybe it was the wind. But the wind wouldn’t have snapped the slats in half. Hell, the wind wasn’t this bad the night of the storm. The last thought I had before starting the car was that maybe they had been hit by lightning.

  Worry about it later, I thought. Focus on driving and not killing yourself.

  My mind was in a fog. I was nervous but managed to keep my cool. I wasn’t sure what was in store that night. Something had happened at Leo and Marie’s house, that much was clear. But why hadn’t they called me? Dammit, because your phone is dead, that’s why. Okay, but why had she walked the whole way when they have two perfectly good cars
in their garage? Was there a simple answer to that, too?

  I was reminded of Claire Madden, a neighbor in Dublin when I was still a boy. Mrs. Madden’s husband would beat her when he came home stinking drunk. She or her daughter would sometimes show up on our doorstep crying because he’d kicked them out of the house. Sometimes, one of them had a bloody nose or a busted lip. When they’d show up in the middle of the night, on a rainy night just like this one, my mother would wake the local priest, Father Callahan, who lived at the church down the street. He’d come over and they’d all sit and talk for hours. I remember her sobbing that she “couldn’t live without him.” I’d dreamed about killing her husband as a boy. I’d dreamed about it a lot. Could Leo be one of those types? Happy-go-lucky Leo? Could he have lost his mind and . . . No. No, it couldn’t be.

  In no time, I’d reached Bill’s Peak and was headed down the road to Leo and Marie’s. My windshield wipers, turned up to top speed, started squeaking against the glass. All of a sudden, the rain stopped. I could even see stars in the sky. Where the hell did the storm go?

  Leo and Marie’s house was plunged in darkness. There were no cars out front and the garage door was closed. I pulled up slowly, scanning the house. It was built right up against the rocks lining Tremore Beach. Nothing looked out of place. Even the sea was calm. Waves crashed languidly against the sand about a hundred fifty feet out.

  I parked by the fence, got out, and started up through the front yard. Wind chimes by the door clinked softly in the night. (Seriously, where the hell did this storm go?)

  I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Through the nearby window, I could only make out their darkened living room.

  I tried the doorbell and pounded on the wooden door.

  “Leo! Leo! Are you in there? Yell if you can hear me!”

  I waited a few seconds. If Leo didn’t answer, I could try to get in through the door that connected the garage with the kitchen. Worst-case scenario, I could break a window.

  Just then, I looked over and saw a lamp had been turned on in one of the rooms on the second floor. Shadows moved behind the curtains and a few seconds later, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. Lights came on in the living room, and the door opened. I was standing with my fists and teeth clenched.

  “Peter, Jesus! What’s going on?”

  It was Leo. He was wearing a black robe over his pajamas. He looked exactly how you would expect someone woken in the middle of the night to look. A little angry, maybe, but otherwise fine.

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s going on’? I should be asking you!” I said.

  There was a brief silence between us. Leo looked me up and down. Then he looked over my shoulder, scanning the yard.

  “Peter, it’s—” He looked at his watch. “—three-something in the morning and you’re pounding on my door. I think I should be the one asking the questions.”

  I held his stare. He didn’t know . . . that much was clear. He had no idea Marie was at my house, and I wasn’t sure I should tell him that his wife was passed out, soaked and shivering from the cold and fright. That she had hiked across the beach on foot in the middle of the night to ask for my help.

  I took a deep breath and held Leo by the shoulders. How to break this gently . . . ?

  “Listen, Leo,” I started to say, “I don’t want to alarm you, but . . .”

  And just as I started to tell him, a shadow moved behind him.

  “Look out!” I yelled, trying to pull him toward me. Leo, a former middle-weight boxer in his youth, was no easy chess piece to move across the board. But before I could save him from whatever was coming at him from the dark, I recognized the figure behind him.

  I think I lost my mind a little.

  Standing in a beautiful silk robe, her brilliant hair pulled into a perfect ponytail, looking sleepy and without a scratch on her, was Marie.

  “What’s going on, Peter?” she asked, leaning against her husband as if this were all some kind of a joke.

  “Oh, God,” I said in a burst of laughter that sounded crazy even to me. “Oh my God . . .”

  SEVEN

  “SO WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?” Judie asked, listening literally at the edge of her seat on the leather sofa in the office at her shop. “Did you go back home?”

  It was one thirty the following afternoon. I had shown up at Judie’s with dark circles under my eyes and told her I desperately needed to talk to her. She tried to finish up quickly with a British tourist who seemed hell bent on knowing all the finer points of miniature lighthouse statue construction. (Judie had three figurines for sale and hadn’t managed to sell a single one. This time would be no different.)

  We had ducked into a back office that Judie had decorated with Buddhas, paper lanterns, and other Asian trinkets to make it feel like “a temple of good karma.” It was furnished with a pair of comfortable leather couches and small tea table that Mrs. Houllihan had left behind. A kettle of fresh green tea steamed atop it. And next to it, in an ashtray with a yin and yang symbol, a small marijuana joint glowed with a red ember. (Judie guarded her supplier’s name with her life, even though I thought I knew who it was: one of the three musicians who regularly stopped in.)

  “We went back together,” I said, sipping my tea. “At first, they tried to convince me to just stay the night. But I was so sure that I’d left the door open and that woman inside, whoever she was, laying on my couch. Leo insisted on driving me, so they threw on some clothes and we drove over together.”

  “And?” Judie said, her blue doe eyes open wider than usual.

  I relayed the story as if reliving the moment.

  “And nothing. The house was dark and silent. The door was closed, there was no one inside, not even a wet footprint. And the fence I’d seen blown down was perfectly in one piece. Even the ground was dry. There was no trace of the storm that had soaked me on the way out.”

  “Son of a . . . ?” Judie said as she took a hit off the joint then passed it to me. “It gives me goose bumps just to think about it.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said, slowly puffing out smoke. “I was so sure that woman was still in the house, I wanted to call the cops before going inside.”

  Leo considered it, but said there was no time to waste. He got out of the car, searched around the house and came back. “Did you see anything?” I asked. He said no, but that we should be careful, just in case. He’d go around through the back door and I’d come in the front. Marie would stay in the car and keep an eye out to make sure no one slipped out through a window.

  “My God, it sounds like something out of Law & Order. Then again, Leo was a cop or something, right?”

  “A detective,” I said. “Still, it was a sight to see him at sixty years old still so cool under pressure.”

  “Okay, so then what happened?” Judie said.

  “We went in and met up in the living room. The foyer was empty, not so much as a muddy footprint on the floor. The sofa where I’d fallen asleep was messy and unmade, and the sheet music on the piano showed the last notes I’d made before falling asleep. We searched the rest of the house. Nothing. A woman hadn’t been there at all.”

  “Well, not it the real world, at least,” Judie said.

  “We made tea, sat down, and Leo and Marie had me tell them all about the ‘nightmare’ again. Marie had this strange look on her face the entire time I told the story. ‘It’s a little disturbing to hear yourself the subject of some high-definition bad dream,’ she’d said. But she ended by cracking a joke about the whole thing. ‘It’s not every day you find out your neighbor dreamed about you in nothing but your nightgown.’”

  “What about Leo?” Judie said. “What did he have to say?”

  “Well, you know Leo. He had a good sense of humor about it. Told me about a guy who was sleepwalking and broke both his legs after falling from a third-story window at one of his hotels. That’s what he figured, that I was sleepwalking.”

  “You think that’s true? I don’t know
, Peter, you sleep like a log. You don’t even talk in your sleep.”

  “Clem never said she heard anything in ten years of marriage either. I did have an uncle Edwin who was a sleepwalker. One night he pissed into the refrigerator like it was a urinal, but he never remembered any of it the next day. On the other hand, I can remember every single thing I did. Not just that, I remember why I did it. I drove my car, and that’s as real as it gets.”

  “I don’t think you were sleepwalking, either,” she said. “What you’re describing sounds more like a delusion or a lucid dream.”

  She saw the quizzical look on my face.

  “It’s rare,” she said, pouring more tea into cups decorated with Chinese dragons, “but it does happen. Some people wake up in the middle of a dream and realize they’re still dreaming. It happens more often during childhood or adolescence, but there have been some cases in adults. There are even some people who continue to do it throughout their adult lives.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “What’s the matter? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, smiling. “I just remembered the girl who teaches yoga out of the store that sells incense is also a licensed psychologist.”

  “Idiot . . .”

  “You think that’s what’s happening to me?” I said. “Some kind of dream? But if it was really a dream, when did I wake up?”

  “That’s the part of your story I can’t make sense of,” she said. “Maybe you woke up once you left the house and got in your car. Maybe later. You did say the storm ‘disappeared’ suddenly. Maybe that’s when it happened. I’ve heard of cases of sleepwalkers who drove for miles, bought a hamburger, and drove home. But your case is something different altogether. It could have something to do with the lightning strike.”

  The same thing had occurred to me that morning. My headache was still there, despite the fact I’d already gone through half the blister pack of pills. After breakfast, I’d spent the morning scouring the Internet and found several cases like mine. Nightmares, suddenly waking at night, even epilepsy were some symptoms people reported after being struck by lightning. All of the possible effects could fill a book or two.