The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “Julian!” I shouted his name aloud, but I knew that he would never answer me. That he must, inevitably, be dead.

  There was no reply. I moved cautiously into the room, looking in the litter at my feet for what I dreaded to find. Before I reached the center of the room the white, sharp glare of a flashlight cut through the murk behind me and I saw the bulk of the sheriff in the doorway.

  “Perfessor,” he shouted. “Are you here?”

  “Yes, I’m here,” I said.

  He came cautiously up to me, walking close to the walls. The remnants of the floor creaked under his weight, but it held. “Where’s Mr. Blair?”

  “I haven’t found him yet.”

  He ran the finger of his light over the floor. I have never seen anything so completely devastated as that room. It seemed to me, as he picked out one fragment of debris after another, that there was, on the whole, less volume of wreckage than I would have expected, but greater destruction. One steel shutter was lying near the edge of the hole in the floor. Another still hung, bent limply double from a single hinge, so that it lolloped into the room like one of Dali’s deliquescent watches. Of the table there was no trace except the fragments I have mentioned.

  “There he is,” the sheriff exclaimed suddenly and began to circle the rim of the crater in the floor. I saw what he meant. A body was lying almost on the lip of the hole. The sheriff stopped opposite it and crawled toward the thing. Gingerly he reached out a hand and drew it toward him. It came with a sudden and horrible ease and, as it moved, it made a scratching noise on the floor. I knew then what he had found. Not Julian, but one of the seven who had sat around the table. His lamp played on it for a moment, and then I heard him scuttling abruptly backward.

  “Jesus!” There was unadulterated horror in his voice. “That wasn’t a man, Perfessor.”

  “I know. There were seven of them once. I can’t see the others, but maybe these snarls of wire are what’s left of them . . .”

  The sheriff, back against the comparative safety of the wall, played his light over the room. His hand shook, but he did it methodically. The bar of light probed the place from corner to corner and from end to end. Twice he moved to scuff at a heap of rubble. When it was all over he came and stood beside me. “You try,” he said.

  “There’s no use,” I told him. “He’s not here.”

  “You mean he got away? Damn it—”

  “No, he didn’t do that either.”

  “What are you givin’ me, a Chinese puzzle?”

  “Call it that if you want. But don’t look at me, Sheriff. Try looking for that steel door. It must have weighed two hundred pounds, and where is it now? There’s a shutter or two missing and a lot of other things that were in here. They’re gone, too. Some of them,” I said slowly, “were a lot heavier than a man.” The numbness that had clotted my thoughts began to lift. “What about the others?” I demanded, and my voice sounded surprisingly loud and harsh in that room. “Are they all right?”

  “Yep. I got ’em out, like you said to.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “We ain’t found him yet.”

  I started for the door. “I’ll look downstairs, under the hole in the floor. If I find him I’ll holler.”

  “Do that.” He sounded suddenly as if the whole thing were a nightmare past believing. I left him still pushing at heaps of rubbish with his foot. But I knew he wouldn’t find Julian.

  There was almost nothing in the living room under that hole up into Julian’s laboratory. Even the plaster must have been sucked

  clean through, up and into that maw of darkness there at the last. I shouted through the hole: “Nothing at all down here. Not even plaster!”

  The sheriff’s voice boomed down at me. “Wait outside, Perfessor. I’ll be down in a minute.”

  They were all standing in a huddled group on the edge and triangle of ground at the end of the Point, almost at the water’s edge a hundred yards away from the house. The moment I started toward them there was a cry and a figure came flying across the grass toward me. Anne. Her arms were round me in one instant. That made up for the rest of it. We held each other for a while and laughed and babbled incoherencies, and she exclaimed at the plaster in my hair, and we kissed each other. Then I hobbled over to the rest of them with my arm around her. I looked at Mrs. Walters first.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  She did not flinch. “And the communicator?”

  “What’s still there is wire and powder. I think the thing got most of it.”

  Ellen Hoskins’ voice in the dusk was cold as steel. “It was all for nothing, then, Mrs. Walters.”

  The big woman turned and faced her. “So you believe that ninny of a girl.”

  Ellen’s voice was still light, but its tone was unyielding. “You’re a great actress, my dear. But you should never have asked him that question about the communicator. That gave you away. You must have wanted it very much.”

  Mrs. Walters said nothing. In the shadow it was impossible to make out her impression. Suddenly she spoke. “Look!” she said. “The lights on the road!”

  We all turned our heads at her exclamation. Far up along the head of the bay and even closer, along the road down the Point, we could see the head lamps of cars. There seemed to be dozens of them, headed toward the house. It gave me a sensation of panic to see them coming on. I knew who was in those cars. The people of Barsham Harbor.

  “Reckon they heard the explosion,” said a voice that sounded like Pete Barnstable’s.

  They must have done so, of course. I wondered what would happen to us when they arrived. It was in my mind that we could expect short shrift from them, but I was too tired to care.

  Mrs. Walters was no longer in front of me when I dragged my eyes away from the oncoming lights. None of the shadowy outlines I scanned seemed to be hers. “Where’s Mrs. Walters?” I asked with a sudden feeling that something was happening of which I ought to be aware and wasn’t.

  For a second, no one answered. Then we saw her, on the very tip of the Point, standing alone. There was enough light left to turn the water of the river to a dull steel color, and show the line of ripples where the current sucked against the ultimate rock and swirled away toward the sea.

  We all shouted. Pete Barnstable broke into a lumbering run, but he had no possible chance of catching her. She was into the river before he had gone three steps.

  That was the last of it, the end of her ambition and her dream. The river took her out of our sight and world. Once I thought I saw the black outline of her head against the water and the flash of drops as she lifted her arm to swim. But I could not be sure.

  32.

  SOMETIMES Anne and I wonder whether she got clean away, swimming with the ebb of the tide till she came to land in some deserted place. If she did so, we have never heard of her since, and there is not much chance that it was so. The river had been kind to her once, there at the end of the haying road by Seth Marcy’s farm, but I do not believe that it was again. That water was too cold, too deep, too implacably strong even for her indomitable will. We are both happier, I think, in believing that Mrs. Walters never left the river again and yet, when we speak of her, as we sometimes do, it is with a reluctant admiration.

  As for the rest of it, we do not talk about that often. We were, I suppose, exceptionally lucky to come out of the whole thing with no more than several uncomfortable days of interrogation and examination in Barsham Harbor. The crowd of shouting, angry citizens, who arrived at the Point soon after Mrs. Walters escaped, meant business. What they might have done without the presence of Dan Hoskins I don’t care to speculate. He took us through the seething crowd of them with a heavy-shouldered insistence, a glowering obstinacy about doing his duty. Even so, he might not have succeeded if he had not had the fire to attract their attention to something besides ourselves.

  The house began to burn within a few minutes after Mrs. Walters had plunged into
the river. The cataclysm that destroyed Julian’s laboratory must have ripped the insulation from the power cable somewhere and, of course, the whole building was tinder dry after a century of existence. It burned high and yellow against the dark sky. Perhaps she saw it from the water before the end, lifting her head to gaze back at the house for one final look. We watched it from the sheriff’s car as we went toward the town along the far shore of the bay. The distance shrank it to a house in a microcosm, but it burned with a fierce, bright splendor.

  Of Julian we speak scarcely at all these days, but neither of us believes, I think, that he was in the house when it burned. We know that he was neither there nor in any other part of this substantial earth. Where that black vortex may have taken him I do not even speculate. It may have snatched him to itself as it must have devoured everything that it could tear loose from that room. But the few times when I have tried to imagine what that final moment was like for him, my mind does not picture it quite that way. The funnel of blackness must have grown hideously large by then. Perhaps it filled most of the room, from ceiling to floor. I think Julian may have made no effort to resist it. At least, in the picture in my mind, he is simply walking into it, like a man going through a door. . . .