by Joe Hill
“I didn’t know they were a going thing.”
Ben waggled his hand. “On again, off again. Apparently on again.” He smiled at this. When he spoke once more, his voice was pitched low and soft. “Putting the thief in the meat locker might be a kindness. You don’t see that, because you think everyone is as warmhearted as you. Father Storey doesn’t see it either. You and he are two sides of the same coin in that way.”
“How is it a kindness?”
“It would keep her from getting killed. It’s less a punishment, more like protective custody.”
Harper opened her mouth to disagree, then recalled Allie’s talk of finding the thief and yanking out her tongue. She closed her mouth and said nothing.
Three canoes were tied alongside the dock, bobbing in the sea. The Fireman lowered his burning left hand, put it under one flap of his turnout jacket, and smothered the flame.
“It’ll be safer and faster to go the rest of the way by water.” He settled into the canoe at the far end of the dock, slid his halligan into the bottom.
Ben frowned. “Um—John? Am I counting wrong, or are we at least a boat short? We’re rescuing two men, aren’t we? So . . . where are we going to put them?”
“You’ll have room for them. I’m not coming back by boat. I’ve arranged for other transportation.” The Fireman undid a rope and pushed the canoe into the Atlantic. It rode low in the water and Harper wondered how heavy a halligan bar really was.
Ben gestured at one of the other canoes. “Harper, I don’t know much about boats. Do you want to steer and I’ll—”
“Actually,” Father Storey said, “I have a private medical matter to discuss with Nurse Willowes. Do you mind?”
Ben did mind—for a moment the disappointment on his face was so bald it was almost funny. But he nodded, and climbed down into one of the other canoes. “We’ll see you when we get where we’re going, then. Watch out for icebergs.”
Harper untied them while Father Storey carefully climbed into the front of their canoe. As they pushed out into the water, Harper shut her eyes and inhaled deeply. The air was so clean and smelled so richly of the sea, it made her briefly dizzy.
“I like it out on the ocean. Always have,” Father Storey said, speaking over his shoulder. “You know, the camp has a nearly forty-foot sailboat stashed on John’s island. Big enough to—oh, will you look at that!” He pointed across the water with a dripping paddle.
Allie was in the front of the Fireman’s canoe with a paddle. She had sat up as soon as they were fifty feet from the dock.
“Do you remember what John said to her, back on shore? ‘If you want to have a row with me, it’ll have to be later.’” Father Storey did a voice that was a little like Paul McCartney in Yellow Submarine. Not a bad imitation of the Fireman at that. He said it again—“‘A row!’”—the British way, so it rhymed with cow, then repeated it once more, but in the American fashion, so it rhymed with low. “Ha! He was telling her we were taking the canoes, so she could run ahead and wait for us. Well. She comes by her go-screw-yourself streak honestly. I could never tell her mother, Sarah, a thing, either.”
The shoreline, bristling with firs, scrolled by on either side of them as they made their way out of the little harbor.
“What’s bothering you, Father? You said you’re not feeling well?”
“I believe I said I had a private medical matter. I don’t think I said it was anything to do with me. I guess I’m all right. A little sick at heart. You don’t treat for that, do you?”
“Sure. Take two chocolates and call me in the morning. I think Norma Heald has a few Hershey’s Kisses in the kitchen. Tell her I wrote you a prescription.”
He didn’t laugh. “I think I’m going to have to send someone away. I’ve been trying to figure out how to protect someone no one will forgive. It seems to me that sending her away is the only hope for her. If she stays here, I’m afraid of what the camp might do to her.” He cast a glance back at Harper and smiled a little. “Every time I see them sing and shine together I always wonder what would happen if they formed a lynch mob. Do you think the Dragonscale would like a lynch mob as well as a chorus? I do.”
8
He knows who the thief is, Harper thought. The idea was a sharp jolt, the mental equivalent of stepping on a tack.
“Why are you telling me this?” Harper asked.
He stared out over the prow of the boat. “The person of whom I speak would never leave willingly. Could you—if you had to—administer something? To pacify a person if she was—hysterical? Dangerous? To herself or . . . or others?”
Whatever Harper had been expecting to talk about, it wasn’t this.
“I don’t have anything strong enough in my supplies. To be honest, Father—”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” he said, with a sudden bitterness. “I’ve never been ordained, not by any church. The only person who ought to call me Father is Carol. I never should’ve let that get started, but it satisfied my ego. I taught ethics and the history of Christianity at a prep school in Massachusetts. I’ve gone from old-fuddy-duddy-in-the-ivory-tower to high pope–Dalai Lama of the New Faith in five months. You show me someone who could resist that, I’ll show you a real saint.”
“Now, Father. If I heard someone sneering at you like that, I’d break something over their head. Don’t you know you give all these people hope? You give me hope, and that’s as magic as a whole church full of people glowing like Christmas lights. I’ve started to believe I might live to see my child born, and that’s because of you, and the songs, and all these wonderful people who have gathered around you.”
“Ah. That’s big-hearted of you, Harper. You just remember: I didn’t do anything to make all of you wonderful. You were that way when I found you.”
They swung out and around a headland into open water. The bank was forty feet away, a steep hill rising through scrawny bare trees and boulders.
“To return to your question, I don’t have sedatives of any strength whatsoever. God help us if I ever have to perform a surgery. The most powerful drug in the camp medicine cabinet is Advil. But even if I did have something stronger, I wouldn’t like to sedate someone as a punitive measure. I don’t do that. I help sick people.”
“This person—she is sick. And before you ask, no, I don’t want to say who I have in mind. Not until I’ve absolutely settled on what steps to take.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.” She had already noticed the way he was trying to avoid naming names.
He paused, considering for a time, then said: “What do you think of Martha Quinn’s island?”
“I think I’d feel a lot better about it if I knew someone who has actually heard the broadcast.”
Father Storey said, “Harold Cross claimed to have heard it. Once. And he was texting with someone in Lubec, which has been operating as the capital of Maine ever since Augusta burned to the ground.”
“Harold was texting with someone who said they were in Lubec,” Harper said. “I never knew him, but by the sound of it, Harold was a little too trusting.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Father Storey said, and again there was that caustic, nasty tone of bitterness that was so unlike him.
Harper could feel the ocean under the boat, the dreamy pull of it. If they stopped paddling, the current would catch the canoe and draw it to the east. In half an hour they would be far enough out to see all the lights of Portsmouth; in an hour, far enough perhaps to see all the lights on the New Hampshire coast. An hour after that they would be too far out to see any lights at all.
“We’re going to have to send someone away, I’m afraid. Force a woman from camp,” Father Storey said. “When that happens . . . well, I wouldn’t send someone, no matter how deluded, into exile, all alone. Sooner or later a Cremation Crew would catch her. No. I think I will go with her. Perhaps in the big sailboat out on John’s island. Myself and Don Lewiston. I’d like to go looking for Martha Quinn.”
“
Who’ll take care of camp?”
“It would have to be John. He’s the only one I’m certain is up to the job.”
They swung around the headland to a narrow inlet, not more than eighty feet across, with houses on either side and decks built right over the water. Directly ahead was a short bridge, spanning the entrance to the small bay beyond.
She didn’t recognize where they were until they were gliding under the bridge itself, where their breath produced metallic echoes, ringing off the rusting iron gridwork above them. South Mill Pond opened up before her, a gourd-shaped body of water between a park . . . and the Portsmouth Police Department.
Most of the buildings around the pond were dark, but the police department and the parking lot alongside it were lit up like a football stadium on game night. From where she sat, Harper could see two big hills of waste burning in the lot. Each pile was almost twenty feet high. Harper wondered what they were destroying—contaminated clothing? A few fire trucks were parked nearby, the fire department managing the blaze. Harper spied men in helmets and fire jackets moving here and there about the bonfires. The burning mounds produced an evil-looking smoke that climbed into the night, blanking out the stars.
The Fireman began to paddle toward the police station.
“Oh, John,” Father Storey sighed. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
The pond was no bigger than a soccer pitch and bisected by a causeway, which lay directly ahead of them. There was no crossing the causeway to the water on the other side without portaging the canoes. Harper wasn’t sure where the Fireman intended to beach them, but one way or another, they’d be on shore soon.
Harper leaned forward and hissed, “We’ll talk more when we get back to camp. Of course, though, I’ll do what I can to help you. If I had the proper drugs, I’d be willing to sedate the thief, after you confront her . . . but only as a last resort. I can’t believe it would come to that. If you and Carol approach this person together, privately, and show her the kind of empathy and understanding you were talking about in chapel—well, I can’t imagine anyone in camp who wouldn’t respond to that.”
Tom Storey turned his head to look back at her, his brow furrowed in puzzlement, a question in his eyes, forming on his lips . . . as if she had posed a very baffling riddle. Harper wondered at it. She felt she could not have been more direct or clear. She wanted to ask him what he didn’t understand, but there was no time. The Fireman was bringing them into shore, close to the causeway. Harper pointed with her paddle, and Father Storey nodded and turned away. Later, she thought, not imagining that there wouldn’t be a later.
Not for Father Storey.
9
The embankment was made of rough-hewn granite blocks, rising from a ribbon of sand. The canoe made an agonizingly loud crunch as it came into the shallows. Ben was already waiting to pull their boat up alongside the other two.
The Fireman squeezed Allie’s shoulder and pointed toward the causeway. He murmured something into her ear and Allie nodded and began picking her way along the little ledge of sand, staying low.
“Where’s she going, John?” Harper asked in a whisper.
“The men we came here to rescue are on the other side of the causeway, and the only way to get to them without being seen is through that.”
He pointed again and this time Harper saw one end of a drainage pipe beneath the causeway. At high tide the opening would be underwater, but right now it was nearly dry. Allie crouched and began clearing away the dead branches and rusted beer cans that choked the entrance.
“You’re sending a sixteen-year-old girl to talk to a pair of felons?” Ben asked. “What happens when one of them grabs her by the hair and pulls her out of the pipe?”
“She doesn’t have any hair to grab, Ben, and she knows her business. This isn’t the first time she’s helped someone out of a tight spot,” the Fireman said.
He reached back into his canoe. Steel chimed. He rose with his halligan.
“I trust you, John,” said Father Storey. “As long as you can promise me Allie will be safe.”
“I couldn’t promise that even if she stayed behind to knit with Norma Heald, Tom. But I’m not afraid of the two men hiding on the other side of the causeway. They want to get away, not get caught.”
Michael said, “That pipe looks pretty small. You sure they’ll be able to follow her back through?”
Allie was wrestling with a rusted shopping cart that partially blocked the entrance.
“I’m sure they won’t,” the Fireman said. “One is as tall as Boris Karloff and the other is roughly the size of a water buffalo. If they tried to follow her through, they’d be even more stuck than they are now. No, they’ll have to go over the causeway, as soon as it’s safe to cross without being seen. Ben, Michael, Father: you just be ready to help them. I don’t know how well they’ll be able to walk.”
“What do you mean, they’ll have to go over the causeway?” Ben asked. “When will it be safe for them to go?”
The Fireman clambered up the steep pitch of the embankment, using the halligan’s pick end to hoist himself along. He glanced back and whispered, “When the screaming starts.”
He reached the top of the wall, stood for a moment at the edge of the parking lot with the bronze glow of the firelight shifting over his features, then leaned his halligan against one shoulder and walked away whistling.
“Does he make you feel dumb?” Ben asked no one in particular. “He always makes me feel dumb.”
“What now?” Harper asked.
“I guess we hunker down,” Ben said. “And wait to see if anything goes wrong.”
The Fireman had been gone not a moment—the strong, carrying sound of his whistle had only just faded away—when Allie reared back from the drainage pipe with a mewling cry of horror, stumbled, and sat down in the water.
“That was fast,” Michael said.
10
Harper was the first to get to Allie, helping her to stand.
“What?” Harper whispered. “What is it?”
Allie shook her head, her eyes bright spots in the holes of her Captain America mask.
Harper went around her and crouched at the entrance to the drainage pipe. A mound of mud and sticks and leaves was wedged in there, a brushy, thorny mass, just beyond arm’s reach.
The mass of leaves rose, shifted, and turned sideways.
It was an animal. There was a fucking animal in the pipe, a porcupine the size of a Welsh corgi.
Harper spied a stick, two feet long and forked at one end. She had an idea she could reach the stick past the porcupine and pull him toward her, drag him out into the open. Instead, the forked end of the stick jabbed the porcupine in the side. Quills bristled. The porcupine grunted and crept farther into the pipe.
She looked back for Allie. Michael had scrambled over to her and put his jacket around her. Her jeans were soaked from her spill into the water and she was shivering steadily. Shivering . . . and regarding the drainage pipe with a bleak look of alarm. Harper had never before seen the slightest trace of fear in Allie Storey, and in a way it was a kind of relief to know something could get to her.
Harper didn’t blame her. The idea of squeezing into a three-foot-wide pipe with a fat, pissed-off porcupine was appalling, nearly unthinkable.
So she didn’t think. Harper got down on all fours and put her face into the pipe. She smelled rotting garbage and a warm mammalian reek.
“The hell you thinking?” Ben asked. “Aw, Harper. Aw, don’t do that. Don’t go in there. Let me—”
But when he reached for her, she twitched her arm away and pushed her shoulders into the pipe. Ben was six feet tall and over two hundred pounds and had as much chance of getting through the drainage pipe as the rusted shopping cart Allie had tossed into the shallows.
Harper, though, was only a little taller than Allie, maybe fifteen pounds heavier, and she knew if any of them were able to squirm through the pipe, it was her. It was going to be tight, tho
ugh. She could feel that already, the walls forcing her shoulders in close to her body.
She remembered then that she was in her second trimester and probably thirty pounds heavier than Allie. She wondered if she had fattened up enough to get jammed in here. She considered going back, then squirmed forward another foot.
The porcupine had stopped waddling and turned sideways to watch her approach. She jabbed him with the stick again and the eye that faced her seemed to flash with outrage. It was the color of blood frozen in a drop of amber. The porcupine hissed and shuffled onward.
She followed him, crawling on hands and knees across corkscrew corrugations. She had gone perhaps a third of the distance when her hips caught.
Harper heaved forward to free herself, but didn’t go anywhere. Instead, she felt the walls clamp tighter around her. She tried to go back, and couldn’t, and flashed to an image of a cork stuck in a wine bottle, that last night with Jakob.
The porcupine hesitated and seemed to give her a look of unfriendly speculation: What? Something wrong? A little stuck? Maybe you need a friendly poke from a stick to get you moving again?
The water trickling between her hands was icy and the stainless steel walls were rimed with frost, but suddenly Harper was hot. Heat prickled up her sides and in the cup made by her collarbones. It was not the ordinary flush of warmth a person sometimes felt in a moment of anxiety. She knew this sensation well, a feeling like bug spray on abraded skin. She drew another sharp breath and smelled smoke, a sickly sweet stink, like maple-flavored bacon burning in the pan.
That’s you, she thought, and when she looked down, she saw a pale fluff of smoke coming off the tracery of Dragonscale on the backs of her hands.
I told you, the porcupine whispered, in Jakob’s voice. We should’ve died together, the way we planned. Wouldn’t that have been better than burning to death like this, in a dark hole? You could’ve just gone to sleep in my arms, no fuss, no pain. Instead you’re going to roast here and when you begin to shriek, it will draw the police, and they’ll get Allie, and Father Storey, and Ben, and Michael, and make them kneel on the sand, and put bullets in their brains, and it will be your fault.