Then in the uneasy silence came a strange echo. Buchanan spun about and cursed, bellowing for his police. But they took only a few steps and stopped as the wind renewed, carrying other voices toward them. Lined up on the ridge at the far side of the ravine, far from their reach, were at least fifty more of the bone-thin exiles, many with hoods covering their ravaged features, singing the eulogy for beloved Jonah, the last real human on earth.
CHAPTER Three
THE CABIN TUCKED between two steep ridges sat as it had for over a century, flowering vines creeping up its stone walls, touched by nature but not by the ruin of man. A sense of melancholy overtook Hadrian as he approached it along the well-worn path. In his fatigue he saw Jonah waiting for him, inviting him to sniff the fresh herbs in the kitchen garden before gesturing him inside. In recent years Jonah had spent most of his days, and many nights, in his library workshop, but this had been his home, and the birthplace of the colony.
Hadrian paused, wiped at the moisture in his eyes, then looked back up the path. The plainclothes policeman had reappeared when he had walked into town from the cemetery, lingering half a block away whenever Hadrian stopped, once conferring with another man in casual clothes. He had ducked down several alleys and doubled back before slipping into the trees on the far side of the ridge. The path behind him now was empty. With a sigh of relief he opened the door and froze.
The ruin of man had reached the cabin after all. The floors were covered with debris thrown from shelves and drawers, much of the furniture in splinters. The kitchen, the sitting room, the bedrooms had all been ravaged. He righted a ladder-back chair and collapsed onto it, his head in his hands. Here had been his one possible sanctuary, here he had expected to feel the restorative presence of his friend again. Instead it felt as if he had stumbled upon a continuation of Jonah’s murder. It was as if the killers hadn’t only wanted the old scientist dead and buried, they wished his very existence pounded into dust and cast into the wind.
For a moment he was back at the grave, to which he had returned an hour after the burial, sinking in grief to his knees. He had wanted to apologize somehow. For the colony’s parting message to Jonah had been the senseless beating and arrest of the two exiles, one of them an old friend of theirs. Hadrian had found himself thrusting his fingers into the freshly turned earth as if reaching for his lost friend when his fingers unexpectedly touched something that didn’t belong, something dull grey and plastic. The object was so alien he simply stared at it in confusion after bringing it to the surface. He was holding a small phone, a model that would have been old even at the time the world shifted. Someone had secretly buried a cell phone with Jonah. Yet he had watched the grave from a distance as the crowd thinned and had not seen anyone bury anything.
Hadrian did not know how long he sat in Jonah’s house, the memory of the phone only adding to his despair. Eventually he became aware of the lengthening shadows and the chill in the sitting room. He lit a candle, then a fire in the stone fireplace, and began to clean the cabin.
He lost himself in the task, carrying what he swept up outside to a pile at the edge of the garden. Not stopping at righting the work of the killers, he filled a bucket from the hand pump in the kitchen sink, collected rags and soap, and scrubbed, feverishly cleaning windows. As tears welled again in his eyes, he worked even harder, losing himself in memories of earlier days there.
Emptying his bucket near the little herb garden, he paused, seeing again in his mind’s eye the reverse writing on the desk in the library. Quaere verum imprimis. Seek the truth among the first things, in the first things. His interpretation may have been wrong. Perhaps it referred to a location. He dropped the bucket and ran to the fireplace, running his fingers over the stones along the side of the chimney until he found the loose one he sought, pried it away, and extracted a key wrapped in a scrap of leather.
He walked with a lantern along the cliff face behind the cottage, probing the vegetation hanging on the rock with his hands for nearly a quarter hour before finding the one place where the surface underneath was not natural ledge stone but mortared rocks. He and Jonah had erected the wall years earlier to obscure the opening, leaving only room for a man to slip sideways into the narrow passage. Hadrian raised the lantern over the small but heavy-timbered door with the iron lock plate, which Jonah had helped his father erect fifty years earlier. Jonah’s father, owner of an engineering firm, had insisted the cavern chamber was necessary to preserve his wine collection. When the wine had been depleted at the first Carthage Thanksgiving, Jonah had decided to use the chamber for something else. A brittle, dusty paper with a carefully rendered skull and crossbones was tacked to the door, over a hand-lettered sign that warned TOXIC CONTAGION: ENTRY WILL RESULT IN FATAL EXPOSURE.
Only the older among the colony’s inhabitants would remember the great debate about the bodies of the wretched souls who’d stumbled into the fledgling settlement dying of typhus. Sure of his own immunity, Jonah had insisted on singlehandedly sealing the tightly wrapped bodies inside the little crypt, taking the corpses away over the ridge in a handcart at night.
Now Hadrian nervously held his lantern close to the door. The dust of the years coated the wood, but the lock plate was clean. Clenching his jaw, he inserted and twisted the key. The door swung open with a groan. With a hesitant step he entered the vault, lifting the lantern to survey the chamber, then stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
Knowledge is the contagion that all tyrants fear. At least one of the old man’s jokes had outlived him. Here was no crypt, but rather a secret vault of knowledge protected by the myth of contagion. As he began lighting the candles scattered around the room, Hadrian remembered once encountering Jonah bringing a dinghy to shore late one night. No one would have questioned Jonah about the bodies at the time, but Hadrian realized now they had been given a watery grave.
Above a table made of planks and crates and lining the adjacent wall were shelves of books, scores of books, many of them banned by the government. On the table, beside a magnifying glass, were more volumes, of medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry. Jonah must have collected them in the early years, secreting them when the censorship campaigns had resulted in thousands of books being sent for recycling. With an unexpected rush of emotion he sat on the stool at the table and found himself facing a plank hanging on the wall inscribed in Jonah’s careful hand. DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT, it said. OLD AGE SHOULD BURN AND RAVE AT CLOSE OF DAY. RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT. The plank was at eye level for a reason. Jonah wanted to see those words of Dylan Thomas’s every time he sat at the table.
Hadrian pulled his own meager hoard of words from his shirt, laying the precious book pages he carried before him, then extracted the sword-knife from his belt. As he set it to the side, he noticed a small stand beside the table covered with a tattered square of linen. Holding his breath he lifted the cloth.
His heart leapt as he lifted the book from the stand. Jonah had tooled the thick leather cover of his secret journal with images of oak and maple leaves. The title, inscribed in elegant calligraphy on the first page, was simply Chronicle of the New World. Nearly three inches thick, the book was bound with strands of leather tied at the back so that adding a page simply required untying it and removing the back cover. He turned to the one most recently added. Like the others, it had a date penciled on the back, in the bottom corner. It was from the week before. He read the first paragraph and smiled. It was not about secrets of state, it was about secrets of the spirit.
Ten thousand geese we have counted this past week, more than double the migration rate of five years ago. Nature is well pleased with her scoured planet. Once I dreamt of fixing a camera to the leg of one of these feathered vagabonds. Now I dream of becoming one.
The earliest of the pages read like an almanac, giving a statistician’s review of life in the colony, listing number of inhabitants, babies born during the past year, cows, horses, and pigs in the colony farms, the size of
the grain harvest, milk production, tons of flour produced, even the gallons of syrup gathered in the maple groves. Every page had the same format, elegant text framed in a box, the shaded borders containing artwork and sometimes brief aphorisms or quotes, several in Latin.
An unexpected contentment settled over Hadrian as he ranged through the journal. His old friend was still alive in the pages, his presence so real he could smell one of the sassafras twigs Jonah often chewed when coming in from the forest. He couldn’t help taking pleasure in the accounts of the little events that made up life in Carthage.
A pet goat followed a girl into the school building. Two hundred pies were consumed in the last night of the midsummer fair. A new schooner had been launched to haul lumber and salt from up the coast. Surely this had been Jonah’s real goal, simply to document the normalcy, show the colony as a living organism, demonstrate how, despite all their trials and the self-destruction of advanced societies, individual humans would find a way not only to survive but also to celebrate life.
Every few weeks came a different type of page, ones filled with drawings and instructions, like little manuals for civilization. These recorded the designs for the equipment and buildings that had advanced the colony. The pile driver used for building the docks, the water-powered saw mill, the first steam boiler.
He found himself gazing at the darkest corner of the vault, where Jonah had leaned wide planks, pinned to which were detailed drawings of his future projects. Hadrian stacked these planks against the bookshelves, exposing an obsolete highway map that he pulled away from the wall. Then he choked with emotion as he brushed away the dust accumulated over years. Waist high on the wall were six rows of identical marks cut into the wood. Hadrian did not need to count them. He himself had carved ten in each row, twenty-five years earlier.
This was the place of first things.
IT WAS A storm, Hadrian had told himself when he glimpsed the first flashes on the horizon. Hiking in the mountains by the lake, he had been in a low ravine when he’d seen the brilliant flashes of light reflected off the clouds and felt the first gale-force winds. He had gone in two days ahead of the rest of the family to do repairs on their little cabin deep in the mountains and felt it prudent now to descend closer to the lake to find phone coverage, to tell his wife to wait at home with the children until the weather improved.
The storm was like none he’d ever seen, with intense bursts of light on the horizon yet no rain, only long angry strokes of lightning arcing across the sky and violent blasts of wind that began leveling trees along the ridgetops. He was not surprised to find no phone service by the time he reached the water and had been about to return to the cabin when he first heard the frantically ringing bell. Running down the coastal trail toward the sound, uneasily watching the strange white-capped roiling in the water, he nearly stumbled over the bearded man hammering the old bell mounted at the edge of a high cliff, a vestige of an old fog warning system. Neither man spoke, for they had both caught sight of the large sailing yacht struggling to reach shore, her mast broken, a makeshift sail shredded in the wind. Suddenly a huge wave appeared and just as suddenly swallowed the boat. Tears streaming down his cheeks, the stranger had turned and pointed toward a little cabin tucked into the bottom of the ridge.
In the house two other men waited, a pair of hunters who’d also fled toward the bell. The four of them had watched in disbelief the horrific, confused television reports of rogue nations engaging the rest of the world with nuclear and biological agent strikes. First one station, then another had abruptly left the air, until the only one they could receive was Canadian, from across the vast lake. Those final broadcasts had lasted a few more hours, then with one more blinding flash on the horizon they too were silenced. There was no more television, no more radio, but they had heard enough to know that those who had survived the initial blasts would likely die of radiation or biological poisoning.
Their host, a retired professor of astrophysics, they learned, had brought them to his wine vault, insulated under two hundred feet of stone. He had quickly explained that it had a filtered ventilation system that had been overdesigned by his father, and they had frantically stuffed the vault with food, bedding, and every candle and oil lamp they could find. Their host did not know how long they would need to hide underground but gave his scientific opinion that sixty days should be sufficient for the air to clear. Winding an old alarm clock, he set it to ring every twelve hours. After every two rings, Hadrian had sliced a mark into the wall.
For the first few days they had spoken of their families, pretending they would see them again, and how they hoped the roads would not be too clogged when they finally drove home. After the first week Jonah had sat for hours at his table making calculations. It was then that he’d begun to speak in colder technical terms, about the reach of warheads and the half-life of radiation, the depletion rates of biological agents. He had worked in weapons research, developing models for the government demonstrating how once the low-quality, wide-ranging biological warheads favored by lesser nations had been deployed they would contaminate the entire planet, would wipe out nearly all human life as well as other higher life forms.
In the long silent hours, Jonah had developed a new model, using weather data from the last newspapers, showing how their location—one of the most remote in the eastern part of the continent and protected by the high ridges—had been spared the worst contamination by an unusual shift in wind patterns.
His three guests—but almost never Jonah—had sunk into dark, silent depressions lasting days at a time. In the night, in the blackness when the last candle was extinguished, they wept.
HADRIAN STAYED IN the vault for hours, reading many of the pages but also exploring the shelves. They held not only rare volumes—everything from common cookbooks to popular bestsellers to foreign dictionaries—but also glass tubes and columns containing the remnants of experiments, stacks of old magazines, even, in an old shoebox, a hand calculator and half a dozen corroded batteries. Hadrian had been the old man’s closest friend in Carthage, but still Jonah Beck had kept many secrets from him. Much of what was in the vault was illegal. But that did not explain why Jonah’s journal was so secret, or why Lucas Buchanan so urgently wanted to find it.
At last he returned to the stool and studied the little plaque again. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It wasn’t just a reminder. It was a manifesto. Jonah had been nearing the end of his tragic life. But there had always been one tragedy he thought he could reverse. On the very day he died he had spoken to Hadrian as if he were on the verge of doing so. With a new, rising pain, the realization came to Hadrian. Jonah had accepted death not simply because he thought he had saved the exiles, but because giving in to his killers’ demands would have jeopardized those plans.
He sifted through the pages again, pausing over an entry made eighteen months earlier, mourning the loss of the colony’s first steamboat, the Anna, in a storm, listing the names of the two men who drowned and mourning the loss of the sturdy little fishing vessel, named after Jonah’s long-dead daughter.
Hadrian arranged on the desk the shreds of Jonah’s last ornamented page, more frustrated than ever by his inability to understand the real reason Jonah had tried to destroy it.
He lifted the magnifying glass, then examined one piece of the colored margin after another. He studied the vines, looking for a pattern. Their twists and turns suddenly seemed to him not entirely random. He spotted a numeral two formed by the vine over one pumpkin, then saw a three in the one at its side. He found another number, then a letter. Stopping for a moment to reconsider the image as a whole, he began a more systematic search, starting at the bottom of the page.
As his eyes adjusted to the puzzle, the words leapt out to him. Auribus tener lupum. I am holding a wolf by the ears. He stared uneasily at the declaration, then worked his way up the unbroken left side and along the top. But there were no more words, only letters and numbers. H2GMAN4MGSS3GBC2CC, the series
began. The remainder had been in the pieces his friend had bitten off.
“Jonah!” he cried out in frustration, pounding the table with his fist. Why had it been so necessary to hide the words and letters? From whom was he hiding them? Surely his friend had not died over a jumble of letters and numbers. He did not know how long he stared at the paper fragments but at last he returned the journal to its stand, blew out the candles, and left.
Back in the cabin, he replaced the key behind the chimney stone and made himself some tea in the kettle hanging in the fireplace. It was two hours before dawn, but he could not sleep. He carried a rocking chair out onto the porch where he and Jonah had spent so many evenings. His gaze drifted up toward the moonlit clearing on the cliff where the old bell had stood. It had hurt to find the secrets in the hidden chamber, but he slowly realized that Jonah had kept the secrets from him to protect Hadrian. Something in the vault, Hadrian was certain, was the reason Jonah had been murdered. He had held the wolf by the ears, but the wolf had turned on him.
As he watched the stars setting, he felt more alone than ever in his life. His discoveries had brought back pains he believed he’d banished years earlier. Distant memories flickered in his consciousness, and suddenly he smelled licorice and was with his long-dead son, teaching him the constellations, hearing the boy whisper his questions, as if he feared to upset the beauty. His son reached to hold his hand as a shooting star streaked overhead. He felt the touch, as real as the stab of a blade. Tears welled in his eyes. In the early years Jonah had often assured him that in time all wounds would heal, but it had never been so for Hadrian. His soul had been cauterized twenty-five years before, but the scar kept cracking open, letting the pain ooze out again and again, numbing him to the life around him. It had been the reason for his recklessness, why he had lost everything in the colony.
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