by Ian Rogers
For a moment it seemed as if she was there in the room with him. He could almost feel her eyes burning a hole in his back. He turned around, but of course no one was there.
Of course.
He went back downstairs, slipping quickly past the wallpaper again, and into the kitchen. He stood before the cellar door, and when the urge returned to wipe out the writing on the plank, he didn’t fight it. He dragged his fingertips across those strange curves and dips and curlicues, and felt something loosen in his chest. He gripped the plank and pulled it off with a loud screech.
At the same moment he heard a strange sound from outside. A great torrent of wind rushing through the yard.
He went out on the porch. Something had changed, but at first he couldn’t tell what it was. Then, once he saw it, he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
The trees.
They had unfolded their branches into the yard.
Panic gripped him like the vines gripping the house. He looked at the greasy pencilmarks on his fingertips and heard Beth’s voice again: Are you going to hang up again, Danny?
No. He wasn’t going to hang up. Not yet.
There was something he had to do first.
The girl behind the counter at the post office was deeply engrossed in an issue of Entertainment Weekly. She didn’t look up when Daniel came in. Nor did she look up when he asked her a question.
“To your left,” she said, and pointed to a recessed wall with rows of safe-deposit boxes.
Daniel found box 089, unlocked it, and removed a mahogany case. He thought about opening it there, then tucked it under his arm, and left the post office.
Daniel thought the only thing he inherited from his father was insomnia and a house, but as it turned out, he got a gun, too.
There was also a note. He read it once, but couldn’t bring himself to look at it again. It was easier to look at the gun, sitting in its bed of red velvet. There was a compartment that contained six bullets.
He drove back to the house. The trees were still as he left them, branches stretching out into the yard. He barely noticed them.
He walked up the porch, opened the door, and went directly to the kitchen. He sat down in the chair with the case on his lap like an old woman with her knitting. He stared at the cellar door. He didn’t have to wait very long before he heard the slow, steady creak of someone climbing the stairs.
He had never handled a gun before, and it took him a moment to get the cylinder open. He loaded the bullets with fingers that threatened to drop them, then snapped the chamber shut. He took a deep, steadying breath and let the gun hang limply between his thighs.
His grip tightened as the cellar door swung slowly open. He stared into the blackness beyond, and two thoughts chimed loudly in his head, like a clock announcing the second hour.
The first was that he had known deep down that his father hadn’t sold the house. It was the thing that had been keeping him up nights, the thing that filled him with an inexplicable underknowledge that his life here had never truly ended.
This realization should have terrified him, but it didn’t.
The second thought did.
Sissy. . . .
At first he saw nothing in the black maw of the cellar door. Then a grey shape began to materialize, developing slowly like the image on a Polaroid picture.
He saw something tall and gaunt with arms and legs as thin as rails.
Eighteen years had passed, but Daniel still recognized his sister.
She was a sickly, sallow thing with long, greasy hair. Her bony shoulders supported the frayed straps of a garment that might have been a nightgown once upon a time. Her eyes, once a deep glacial shade of blue, had turned completely white: no irises, no corneas.
She stepped out of the doorway. Her feet looked normal enough until he saw her toenails: thick, black talons that clicked on the linoleum.
Daniel felt adrenalin flood his veins, and although he was overcome with fear and guilt, thoughts of running away never entered his mind. He had been seized by another, stronger emotion: responsibility.
Sissy opened her mouth. Her voice drifted out like smoke.
“Danny . . .”
The mahogany case slipped off his lap. The note fluttered onto the floor, face up. Daniel glanced down and saw his father’s final message, the deposition of a coward:
I’m sorry. I couldn’t do it.
Sissy came forward, arms outstretched. Daniel stood up and raised his own.
Don’t worry, Sis. I’ll take care of you.
TWILLINGATE
It was a few minutes before dusk and we were out walking along the shore below the cliffs. The sun was beating a fast retreat, bleeding the colour out of the day and making everything look grey and lifeless. The waves lapped the beach with a marked lack of enthusiasm. The receding water sluiced through layers of sandy grit and water-polished pebbles, making a sound like crackling fire.
I sat on the wooden stairs that ran up the side of the cliff, breathing in the sharp tang of saltwater and decomposing seaweed. I wondered if my memory of that smell would be enough to adequately recreate it once our vacation was over. I doubted it.
I looked over at Toby. He was walking with his head down, looking for flat rocks. He spied one, picked it up, and weighed it on his palm. After a moment he dropped it and went back to conning the beach, his eyes narrowed to slits as he struggled to see in the diminishing light.
Jill and Eva had wandered off down the shore, their arms linked companionably, huddled inside their fall jackets.
“Hey, where you going?” I called out to them.
“We want to see the lighthouse!” Jill called over her shoulder.
“The lighthouse?” Toby said. “It’s way the hell out on the end of the Point.”
“We just want to see it!”
Eva suddenly bolted away from Jill and ran along the beach. After a moment, Jill followed, kicking up sprays of wet sand in her wake.
They came to the point where the sand ended and the big rocks began. Giant boulders and long, flat slabs of rock that bore the constant brunt of the waves. Eva and Jill started to climb.
Toby and I exchanged a look: that was all it had ever taken with us.
We ran.
The girls had a good lead by the time we reached the rocks. They were moving quickly and carefully, making sure they had secure footholds and handholds as they went. Overhead a pair of seagulls watched their progress, unusually silent in the violet sky.
Toby and I climbed over the rocks like a pair of crabs. The girls were far ahead, but we had longer arms and legs, and we managed to catch up to them as they reached the edge that marked the end of Twillingate Harbour. At that point they changed direction and started moving up the cliffside.
I looked back over my shoulder. Toby was making steady progress, his face contracted in an expression of intense concentration. It was the same look he wore when we played chess. Further back, the whitewashed houses along the rim of the harbour gleamed like lanterns. From this distance you couldn’t see the peeling paint or the weather-beaten boards; they looked brand new. Past them, up on the hill, the dark brooding hulk of the hospital stood over everything like an enormous totem.
As Toby passed me, I saw that he had put on his toque—the one we thought made him look like a fisherman. He had it cocked on a jaunty angle that caused me to chuckle.
“Don’t be makin fun of m’hat, b’y,” he growled in a faux accent that sounded more Nova Scotian than Newfoundlander. “A curse on anyone who laughs. A curse!” His voice echoed in the dark cavities between the cliffs.
The girls, already a fair pace up the cliff, looked down and showered us with their loud, raucous laughter. Toby started climbing after them.
I looked back once more, out into the harbour this time. The tide was still slinking away like a bully who had received some of his own medicine. A single buoy bobbed in the water. It was shaped like a wine
bottle and the shadow it threw on the water was perfectly formed, no ripples.
A light breeze washed over me and made hooting sounds in the cliff pockets.
I started after Toby. The cliff wasn’t very steep, but it was high and wet. I moved slowly, aware of how easily my rubber-soled sneakers could slip on the rocks.
The girls were moving slower. I could hear them puffing exhaustedly. Toby and I closed the gap.
“We’ll make sure you don’t fall,” Toby said. He had swapped the bad East Coast accent for a lecherous tone. “I’ll keep my eye on you every step of the way.”
“Keep an eye on this, Toby m’boy.” Eva turned around and flipped him the bird.
Toby clapped one hand over his heart. “That hurts, babe. I was just watching out for ya.”
Eva pulled herself up to a slender ledge of stone. “I’m sure,” she said, out of breath. “But who’s going to watch out for you?”
Toby snapped his head back in my direction. “Joey’s got my back. And my backside, too! Don’t you, Joey? Can’t take your eyes off it!” He gave his rear end a little wiggle and slid down the cliffside a bit.
“Maybe in one of your better dreams,” I replied.
Jill grabbed two thick handfuls of the tough grass that grew along the top of the cliff and pulled herself up. She let out a long theatrical sigh and called down: “Let him fall, Joe. Then we won’t have to watch any more reruns of Danger Bay.”
Jill crouched down and stuck out her hand. Eva took it and pulled herself up. Then they looked down at us together, grinning.
“Keep stepping on those wet rocks, Tobe. You’ll slide all the way down and that will hurt.”
“All the rocks are wet,” he grumbled. “We’re on the g.d. ocean.”
“You’re going to faa-aaall,” Eva said in a malicious singsong.
“Nope . . .” Toby grunted. “. . . Joey’d . . . break my . . . fall . . .”
As he reached the top, Jill raised one sneaker-clad foot over Toby’s questing hands. She turned her head to Eva and said, “Don’t suppose you’ve got a life insurance policy out on him?”
“Alas,” Eva lamented.
“You’d go to hell,” Toby huffed. “Where all the rocks are sharp and wet, and the air smells of dead fish, and the only thing on TV is Danger Bay.”
Eva glared at him. “My hell sounds like your heaven.”
Toby dragged himself up over the edge. “That’s how you know we’re in love, Eva m’dear.”
I found a good handhold and looked up in time to see Eva administer a light kick to Toby’s ribs. He made like she’d caved in his chest, rolling back and forth and groaning loudly. “It’s true,” he bugled. “Love hurts!”
The gulls continued to circle in the sky above us. They still hadn’t made a sound, and there was something ominous in their silence.
I made a final mad scramble to the top of the cliff. Jill offered me her hand, but I reached over and latched onto one of Toby’s big shore boots instead. He looked at me, and I made a deep, slobbering growl in the back of my throat. He slapped his hands to his cheeks and pulled them down in mock horror. “No, NO!”
I sank my teeth into the tough material that covered his ankle, tasting a mixture of old leather and seasalt.
Jill pointed an accusing finger at me and squealed. “Zombie!” Her voice leaped across the harbour and came back again. “Zom-BEEEEE!”
“Gross-out!” Eva said, laughing. “But I guess it’s cleaner than biting Toby’s foot.”
Toby snapped his head around and glared at Eva. His mouth gaped open and now he was growling.
“No!” Jill cried, but she was laughing, too. “Our men! Our men are zombies!”
The girls took off across the grassy slope. Toby and I clambered to our feet and went after them. We could see the sun now, or what was left of it—a bright pastel smear bleeding between the gaps in a line of spruce trees. Ahead of us, on the far end of the Point, stood the lighthouse.
The wind chilled the sweat on my face. I felt like I was freezing and on fire at the same time. Toby took off his toque and waved it over his head like a flag. His hair flew around his head in a blond corona that made me think of how halos looked in old religious paintings.
We ran and ran, out toward the end of the Point, where the cliffs dropped to the sea and the lighthouse kept its constant vigil.
The girls suddenly stopped running. We were about fifty yards from the lighthouse, and the pine forest was behind us. The sun was dipping below the horizon now, laying a burning track across the water. Below us, the long rock breakwater looked like a bony finger pointing at that part of the Atlantic known as Iceberg Alley. In the sun’s dying glare, the foam kicking up along its craggy length looked like blood.
Jill was looking at the lighthouse. She collected them the way other people collected coins or butterflies, except she didn’t have an album or a killing jar. All she had was the camera of her eyes and the album of her memory. That was all she needed. She told me that if all she wanted were pictures, she’d stay at home and order postcards off the Internet.
We stood there on the Point, catching our breath as the sun sank below the horizon and the wind buffeted our bodies. The light drained away as if it were controlled by a dimmer switch, leaving us in a sterile purple twilight. It felt like we had slipped seamlessly into another world.
And we were no longer alone on the Point.
The cliffs and bluffs and the breakwater below us were crowded with wispy, insubstantial figures that glowed with a deep pearlescent light. Ghosts, I thought immediately. But that wasn’t exactly right. They had vaguely human shapes, but their arms were too long, and their legs were jointed in too many places. They wavered from side to side, as if drawn by the currents of the air or the water, ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing.
Jill was still looking at the lighthouse. She threw her arms in the air and yelled, “Number seventeen!”
Toby and Eva held hands and watched those white wisps that were not ghosts. I don’t think they saw us, or took much notice of us if they did. I don’t think we were of their world. For a brief moment we existed in a special place, on the terminator between day and night. Then the stars started coming out, dotting the darkening sky with their chilly, indifferent light.
I stared at them for a moment, and when I turned back, the white wisps were gone. It was like they were never there. Jill looked at us and we looked back. She had seen her lighthouse, and we had caught a glimpse of something else. Just a glimpse.
We started back across the Point, but I didn’t recognize anything we passed.
THE CANDLE
“Did you blow out the candle?”
Tom lowered his book and turned toward Peggy.
Peggy lowered her own book and bit her lower lip. Why was it that she could remember what she had for breakfast every day this week, could even remember what she was wearing on most of those days, but couldn’t remember if she had blown out the candle in the living room? Is this what middle age is? she wondered. The loss of short-term memory? She hoped not. She was forgetful enough as it was; she didn’t need to help it along.
“Yes,” she said finally. Then: “No. I don’t know.”
Peggy watched as Tom laid his hand on top of his book. She noticed the wrinkles on his fingers, the white hairs on his knuckles, and thought, We’ve gotten old, how did this happen?
He looked at her fully now. “Well,” he said, “which is it?”
“Huh?” She looked at him quizzically; her own book had slumped forward and was now lying open on her chest. “I’m sorry, Tom. I must be sleepier than I thought. What did you say?”
“I asked if you remembered to blow out the candle.” He was getting impatient. “In the living room?”
She bit her lip again, and Tom had to repress an urge, one that had been growing stronger over the twenty-six years of their marriage, to reach out and pull her lip from under her perfectly capped t
eeth. It drove him crazy. Biting her lip while she was trying to remember something was one of her half dozen or so little gestures. It was enough to drive a man nuts.
“I really can’t recall,” Peggy said at last. “I remember lighting it, of course, because the window was open and the smell of oats was really strong tonight. And I remember turning off the lamp after the movie was over. You put the DVD back on the shelf and I picked up the glasses on the coffee table. . . .” She trailed off, lost in thought. “But I don’t remember if I blew out that darn candle.”
“Well, can you go check?”
“Why can’t you go?” she asked, a little testily.
“Because you lit the damn thing,” Tom replied, a little testily himself.
“Because I lit it?” Peggy repeated. “What are you, six years old?”
“Are you?” he shot back. “What is it, are you afraid to go into the living room in the dark?”
“Are you?”
“I’m already comfortable.” Then, as if to accentuate this fact, Tom nestled a bit further down under the covers and picked up his book again.
“I’m comfortable, too,” Peggy replied, a bit indignantly. She opened her own book as if she was deeply engrossed in it, a tight little frown squiggled on her face.
Tom heaved a big sigh. “Listen, Peg, I’ve gotten up twice already. Once to make sure the side door was closed and locked—because you couldn’t remember if you did that—and again to feed the stupid cat.”
Peggy looked at him and decided it was probably easier to submit now than to continue arguing about it. On the day she had married Tom, her mother had given Peggy two pieces of advice: Don’t sign anything until your lawyer’s looked at it first and Never go to bed angry.
“Okay,” she said, closing her book and putting it on the nightstand. “But this means you’re making breakfast in the morning. Blueberry pancakes,” she added.
From behind his book, Tom snorted good-naturedly to show that he was a good sport, that bygones were bygones.