The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  II

  On the night of October 16, 198-, during the worst storm of the season, the fishing trawler Preciosilla, with its engines dead and wheel-house afire, was swept through the Muskeget Channel between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, then westward in heavy seas toward Nomans Land. Four of the ten-man crew had been lost in the explosion that had ripped apart the engines, and three more had been washed overboard. As the vessel drew near Nomans Land, the survivors caught sight of the island silhouetted in a lightning stroke against churning clouds, and knowing that the Preciosilla could not long stay afloat, they committed their souls to God and their bodies to the sea in an attempt to reach solid ground. One of the three, Pedro Arenal, a Portuguese man of New Bedford, was carried by the tidal rip past the island and never seen again. However, the remaining two, Odiberto “Bert” Cisneros, age forty-six, also Portuguese, and the ship’s cook, Jack Tyrell, an Irishman just entering his thirtieth year, reached shore within fifty feet of one another and took shelter in the lee of a concrete bunker, where they sat shivering, too cold and shaken to think, stunned by the thunderous concussions, gazing out at the toiling darkness, at detonations of lightning that illuminated waves peaking higher than circus tents and plumed with phosphorescent sprays.

  It was Tyrell, a thin black-haired man with a sly cast to his sharp features, who had the urge to move inside the bunker, feeling the cold more intensely than Cisneros, who was the better insulated of the pair, being muscular and bandy-legged, with the beginnings of a potbelly, a seamed, swarthy face, and—at the moment—a terrified grimace punctuated by two gold canines. He gave no sign of hearing Tyrell’s shouts, and at last Tyrell came to his feet, staggering with the wind, his hair flying, and took hold of Cisneros under his arms. Cisneros let himself be hauled erect, but when he realized that Tyrell was trying to wrestle him inside the bunker, he tore loose from the Irishman’s grasp and went stumbling farther down the slope of the dune. To his eyes the bunker, with its pale concrete bulk and black slit mouth, had the look of an immense jawbone from which the demented howling of the wind was issuing, and he wanted no part of it. A powerful gust buffeted him, driving him backward, his eyes rolling up toward the sky in time to spot a flash of amber radiance and the sweep of the beam from the Gay Head light across the bottoms of the racing clouds. Though he had sailed those waters for twenty years, in his panic he had no recollection of the lighthouse, and the blade of light seemed a portent from hell. He dropped to his knees in the mucky sand and crossed himself, deeper into fear than ever before, shreds of prayers running through his head like tattered distress flags.

  Tyrell was tempted to leave him. He had no great love for the Portuguese, none whatsoever for Cisneros, who had twice menaced him with a knife aboard the Preciosilla. But their ordeal had welded something of a bond between them, and besides, Cisneros’s fear acted to shore Tyrell up. “Damn your ass!” he shouted, fighting through the wind to Cisneros’s side. “You stupid piece of shit! Do you want to freeze…is that it?” Once again he grappled with Cisneros, hauled him up, and began dragging him toward the bunker.

  His brush with prayer had left Cisneros resigned to fate. What did it matter how he died, whether blown into the sea or crushed in the jaws of the bunker? At the last moment, as Tyrell pushed him in over the concrete lip and into the black maw, his fatalistic resolve eroded and he tried to break free; but strength had drained from his limbs and he toppled onto the floor. Tyrell crawled in after him, and they huddled together close to the wall. Lightning flashes strobed the interior of the bunker, revealing pocked walls streaked with whitish bird droppings, matted with cobwebs, and more cobwebs spanned the angles of the corners, billowing and tearing loose in the wind. Cisneros shut his eyes, preferring blindness to flickering glimpses of what seemed to him redolent of dungeons and torture chambers. He began to mutter the Stations of the Cross, repeating those consoling words until they had insulated him against the fierce battering of the storm, and before long, shrinking like a child from a confrontation with his fears, he sank into a deep sleep.

  Tyrell, too, was afraid, but his fear derived not from the storm or the island, but from the past few hours aboard the Preciosilla. He stared into the darkness, seeing there the faces of the dead, the burning wheelhouse pitching like a great mad window inset into the darkness, with the blackened, shriveling figure of the captain erect amid the flames, still clutching the wheel, and the mate, his eyes slits of reflected fire, throwing up his arms like a benighted Christian to welcome the huge talon of ebony water that had plucked him up and borne him down to hell…Tyrell shook his head, trying to clear it of those nightmarish images. He peeled away his slicker and rubbed at a cramp in his thigh. A shudder passed through his chest and limbs, seeming to liberate all the dammed-up weakness inside him, and he leaned back, resting his head against the wall, feeling distant from the storm, from all that had gone before.

  What a bloody mess! he thought.

  Still and all, he’d been in worse spots, he had. He was a survivor, and he had survivor’s luck. Take the time he, Joe McIlrane, and Pepper Swayze had been trapped by the Brits at Pepper’s house, with only one rifle and a hail of bullets shattering vases and pictures on the wall. And then prison. God, hadn’t that been a stroke of fortune, to be stuck in the same cell as the best damn breakout artist in the IRA? And that same luck had been at work for him in fleeing Ireland, in making it to the States and the sweet life, with a nice girl and a clean bed and plenty of time for the muckle part and having a few beers in the evening. Of course, sooner or later he was bound to take up the struggle again. He couldn’t be letting others have all the glory of driving the goddamn Brits back to their gloomy little bloat of a kingdom…A violent burst of lightning split open the black moil of the storm, burning afterimages of the bunker walls on Tyrell’s eyes, and he let out a squawk.

  “Jesus!” he said to the sky. “Are you wanting to kill me?”

  Thunder grumbled, the sea boomed.

  “Well, fuck you, then.”

  He tried to force his thoughts back to Ireland, but found that his memories—that was how he related to the lies he’d told so often, as fond, brave memories, inhabiting them with more frequency than he did his actual past—he found that they had ceased to be a comfort. He wondered how much longer the storm would last. Probably no less than a day. Afterward he’d build a fire on the north shore, big enough so they’d notice the smoke at Gay Head. It was for certain he’d have to do whatever was necessary, because Cisneros wasn’t going to be any help. The bastard had been all nails and sharp edges with a deck beneath him, but just tip him over, give him a shake, and he wasn’t worth spit. Well, old Bert was a fortunate soul this night, for he had as companion the Scourge of Belfast, one Jack Tyrell, who never yet had been known to let a brother-in-arms fall untended by the way.

  “Easy there, old son,” he said, patting Cisneros’s shoulder. “I’m ever with you, don’t you know?”

  Bert Cisneros moaned, the world cracked and dazzled, and Jack Tyrell, who once had laughed in the face of the firing squad of dreams, laughed now, believing there was no terror in the entire universe that could withstand the arsenal of his imagination.

  III

  Cisneros did not so much sleep as fall down the staircase of his forty-six years, tumbling slowly head over heels, bumping and rolling across the landings, taking long enough at each to register its consequential evils. The man he’d knifed when they’d put into Nantucket during a nor’easter; the friends he’d cheated; the women he’d beaten. He saw his wife, her face purpled and lumped with bruises, tearstained, clutching the little gold cross that hung from her neck, and for the first time he felt shame. His was a foul dark slant of a life, an inch of time fractioned by violent stupidities, energized by an ego convinced—despite all the evidence against—of its mental superiority, and looking at it in this wan light, he had a sense of relief on passing the final landing and plummeting back to where he had begun, lying curled like a dark pearl in the mout
h of a giant oyster, not asleep, but somnolent. He could see the whole island, see it from alternating perspectives and through a lens of perception that transformed each sight into a strange jeweled design upon a black ground: birds with ruby eyes tucked in among the dune grass, which showed as waving silvery cilia, and ghostly pale clouds eddying above, and the shattered timbers of an old ruin edged with an unholy shimmering of green fire amid the winded pines, and jade blue waves marbled with an iridescent circuitry of foam that broke over a cliff to the west, and the wind a whirling gray-green fog. He wondered how he could be lying in the bunker and yet appear to be hovering above different quarters of the island, and then he noticed the thousands of golden wires extending from his body, each connected to some point on the island. It was through these wires, he realized, that his senses were being channeled, allowing him to overlook the place, to inspect every detail. He heard a voice…no, two voices. One was muffled, agitated, calling him back to the darkness of life, and he resisted it, listening instead to the second voice, which was soft—more a musical sonority than actual speech—and transmitted a feeling of tranquillity and power similar to that he’d experienced as a child when kneeling in church: a feeling he associated with God. He didn’t believe that the god speaking to him was the god of his childhood, but he was gratified that his prayers had reached someone’s ears, and since to his mind one god was much like another, he had no moral problem with the transference of faith. And when his thoughts began to change, becoming oddly angular and literate, full of grim resolve, when he began to think of himself not as Bert Cisneros but as Quentin Norcross, to see himself as a tall pale man with hawkish features and deep-set eyes shaded by tufted eyebrows, dressed in his Sunday suit of black broadcloth, he did not question this, knowing that God’s ways were not his to understand, and surrendered to those thoughts…

  …and found himself walking in a high blue day with mackerel clouds far out to sea, planting each step firmly, squarely, as if intending to leave a clear track. When he reached the edge of the western cliff, he took a stand in the knee-deep grass, leaned forward, and peered down at the cliff face. With its fissured gray surface, it had the look of an ancient decaying forehead rising from the sea, grooved by harrowing thoughts. The cauldron of waves at its base seemed to pull at him, to lodge a knot of their chill tonnage in his stomach, and he straightened, fixed his eyes on the sunstruck sea, on cobalt swells flowing away to the horizon. He thought it peculiar that he had no pain. It had been the pain gnawing at his intestines that had brought him to this point, and now, as if his decision had proved a cure, he felt calm, translucent, free of affliction. If it had been only that, only pain, he would have seen it to the end; but he could no longer stomach the sight of his illness etching new lines on Martha’s face, disfiguring her as hideously as the sea had disfigured the cliff. This was the best way, the moral way. She would never believe him a suicide; she would assume that he had been walking by the cliff, suffered a spasm, and lost his footing. She’d have the money from the land, and she was still pretty enough to find a new husband, a new father for the children. Blessedly they were too young to feel the true sting of grief. Oh, they would weep and think of him in heaven. But time would heal those wounds, and all that he could do for them now was to hasten their healing by dying swiftly. And that would not be as difficult as he’d thought. He was dead already, killed by the force of his commitment. Standing there, he felt walled off from the past, from life, and he thought he could feel the entire island at his back. The cove on the eastern shore where urchins clung to the rocks of a tide pool; the beachvine fettering the north slope, its complex shadows trembling in the breeze; a vole peeking from its tunnel, its black eyes starred like Indian sapphires; the white spiders—unique to the island—that annoyed him with their incessant biting, but wove webs of unsurpassed intricacy among the pines; the terns wheeling and wheeling above the deep. He felt them all summed up in a unity of tension, as if they were a power that stood beside him, joining him in what must be done. He was not a religious man. His pragmatic nature had not allowed him to accept the existence of a hereafter, and he could not accept that possibility now. However, he believed that if there was a god it would be—like the island—an isolate thing capable of absorbing the lesser quantities that came within its sphere, assimilating winds that had touched the tops of Balinese temples and tides that swept past the shores of Tenerife. In a sense the island had been his god, the object of his devotion, his labors and hopes, and he felt closer to it now than ever before. He loved the old place, and perhaps that, not some mystical abstraction, was the definition of a god: something labored over and nourished, a thing that through long process of devotion became indistinguishable from its devotee. It seemed his thoughts were being orchestrated by the crashing of the waves and the screams of the gulls into a kind of music, a flight of logic and poetry, and he realized then that he had stepped forward, that he was falling. He had an instant of fear, but the shock of impact, the stinging cold of the water, numbed his fear, and he went pinwheeling down in blue-green light, icy light, icy dark, slowly, slowly, into a dream of a storm, into a secret place where others shared the dream, and no man lived, and truth was form, and form was chaos, and chaos was ordered anew.

  IV

  Morning, and the storm held over Nomans Land. Slate-gray waves piled in onto the beach, eroding the shore; the clouds blackened and lowered, and the wind flattened the dune grass, keening across the island, driving slants of rain into the mouth of the bunker, stinging Tyrell awake. All his muscles ached, and there was grit in his mouth. He groaned, rubbed a cramp from his thigh, scratched an inflamed spot on his wrist, and noticed Cisneros still curled up asleep, his neck and head turtled beneath his slicker, several cobwebs spanning between his legs and the wall. Tyrell hawked, spat, and said, “Hey, Bert! Rise and shine, you filthy spic!”

  Cisneros didn’t move.

  Tyrell reached out, gave his shoulder a nudge, and Cisneros mumbled, but remained asleep.

  “Worthless bastard,” said Tyrell. “I’m better off without you, anyway. Plucking at your damned rosary and complaining to the saints like an old woman! To hell with you!”

  He sucked at the scummy coating on his teeth, glancing around at the bunker. Cobwebs everywhere fettering the pale yellow stone, with dozens of white spiders creeping along the skeins, some suspended like tiny stars on single threads. He felt itchy movement on his calf, let out a squawk, and crushed a spider that had climbed up under his jeans. He staggered to his feet, his flesh crawling, and began stamping on spiders that tried to scuttle away into the dark corners. When he was certain that the floor was clear, he stood shivering, hugging himself against the cold and keeping an eye cocked for any spider that might lower from the ceiling.

  “Cisneros,” he said shakily. “Wake up.”

  The sleeping man appeared to shudder.

  “You want these dancey little fuckers traipsing all over you?” he said, cheered by the sound of his voice. “Fine then, Bert. That’s just fine with me, old son. For myself, I’ve fucking had it. My stomach’s empty as a country church on Tuesday midnight, and I’m going to find me an oyster or a dead bird or some damn thing to fill it.” He climbed half-out of the bunker mouth, sat perched on the lip, turning up the collar of his slicker. “Can I bring back something for you, Bert? No? Well, maybe you’ll feel differently after your nap. I’ll be checking in on you. Sleep tight, now.”

  He swung his legs over the lip, sank to his ankles in the sand, then slogged up the face of the dune, stumbling, crawling on all fours to the crest. He got to his feet again, struck full by the wind and the slashing rain, and stared out across a broken ground: tufts of pale green grass sprouting from bowl-shaped depressions, some of them twenty feet wide, and beyond, where the land flattened out, stands of Japanese pine through which he could make out a fresh crater about a hundred feet off. Rising above the pines, near the center of the island, were spears of dark wood, obviously ruins. He started toward them, and
something big and dirty white in color flew up from the grass, screeching, its wings flurrying at him, black beak punching the air in front of his face; he shrieked, threw up his arms, swung his fists, fell and went rolling down the dune.

  He came to his knees at the bottom of the dune and looked around for the bird. A tern, it had been…he was pretty sure. It was nowhere in sight. He must, he realized, have come too near its nest, and he wondered if there were any eggs. Last resort, he thought. Last fucking resort. For one thing, raw eggs were low on his list, and for another, he wasn’t eager to tangle with the tern again. He stood, brushed clots of wet sand from his jeans, and set off for the ruins, picking his way among the overgrown craters. The air in the pines was shaded to a greenish gloom, with raindrops beaded like translucent pearls on the tips of the needles; the ground was less broken here, but cobwebs were everywhere—the webs of white spiders like those that had infested the bunker. He tore them away, clearing a path, and after a few minutes’ walk emerged from sparse cover into a large clearing centered by the ruins. From the spacing of the standing timbers, the shingles lying amid the other wreckage, he decided that they must have been part of a barn. And that mass of shattered boards to the right, smashed flat as if by a gigantic fist, that had likely been the main house. He walked over to the ruins, prodded the wreckage with his toe. Glistening dark planks with white brocades of mold, weeds poking up between their overlaps; shredded pieces of tin. He’d been hoping he might find an old store of canned food, but it was apparent there was nothing left that would do him any good.

  The clouds frayed overhead, rips of ashen sky showing through for an instant, the rain diminishing; but then they closed in again, lowering thick slabs of blackish gray like fleshy dead leaves matted together, and the wind gusted in a mournful rush, bending the pines all to one side, then letting them snap back to upright, like a line of tattered green dancers. Tyrell turned, unsure of what course to follow, wondering if he could knock off one of the birds with a stone, and could have sworn he saw someone standing at the edge of the clearing. Someone slender, wearing a hooded black slicker. His heart stuttered, he took a backward step. Then he understood that what he must have seen had been no more than a roughly human shape formed by an artful combination of shadows and the actions of the wind and the textures of discolored needles in a niche between two of the pines. However, a moment later he heard movement, and this time he caught a glimpse of a figure slipping behind a pine trunk.