The next thing I knew Mrs. Stoa was rapping on the door. And not so quietly this time. “Matilda!” she called. “Open the door. I need to talk to you.” I pulled the pillow over my head and didn’t answer.
“It’s serious. Open this door at once!”
I threw the pillow on the floor. “What will you do if I don’t?” I shouted. “Force your way in?” I actually had to laugh, thinking about Mrs. Stoa with her little bird bones trying to break down my door.
“There’s a new fire, Matti.” Now it was Marsh talking. And he was using what I imagined was his war voice. “We have evacuation orders. Open up!”
I unlocked the door and opened it just a crack. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said. But to be honest I lost most of my steam when I saw Marsh’s face. It looked like it was carved out of stone.
He and Mrs. Stoa were both standing in the hall holding flashlights. That’s when I understood that the electricity was off in the house. “We don’t have time for this now,” Marsh said. “They’ve had lightning strikes up on Devil’s Thumb and the wind’s blowing the fire this way fast.
“Get your suitcase and come down stairs. That’s an order.”
By the time I’d done that, and I was pretty quick, Mrs. Stoa was sitting on the living room couch wearing her green mask. Her suitcase was on the floor beside her. “Marshall is making one last check before we leave,” she said.
She kept the mask on to talk and I didn’t comment about it. I stood with my back toward her and watched out the front window. I could barely see across the street for the smoke.
“So it’s finally here,” she said.
I started counting breaths. About every fourth or fifth, I felt a little catch in my throat.
“It’s here,” she said again. This time a little louder.
I whirled around. “Listen, Mrs. Stoa.This is a very hard time for me, and I don’t want to hear anything from you about the end of the world. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already happened anyway.”
“I never said the world was ending,” she told me. “I said conflagration was coming. A great fire.”
“That’s close enough.”
“It’s happened before. We’ll survive. We’re mountain people.”
I turned away from her and looked out the window again. I was in the process of taking back what I’d thought about not caring if we burned up, when I saw two orange lights like eyes coming through the haze.
I thought at first it was Marsh, but it was an army truck filled with firefighters. It went past. Then another. And another.
After that a jeep with a revolving light on the top came by from the opposite direction and stopped in front of our house. A guy in some kind of uniform got out and started up the front walk. I opened the door.
It was like we were in a movie — everything slow and lazy except my heart, which was beating like a stopwatch. “Anyone in the house who needs help getting out?” the guy asked me.
“It’s all right,” Marsh said. He’d pulled up behind the guy in the uniform and came running up onto the porch. “We’re leaving.”
18
D FOR DEAD
I’D EXPECTED MRS. STOA TO RIDE in the front of the truck with Marsh, but she got in the back of the extended cab beside me. After we’d gone through a couple of roadblocks, she turned to me and whispered, “I know you’re worried about Dan, but he’ll come through.”
“Like your guy Dante, I guess you mean,” I said. “But you’ve got the wrong D word.”
I wanted her to leave me alone so I told her flat out what I believed. It didn’t matter that I’d said I wasn’t going to. I didn’t see myself then as a person who kept her word.
“Not D for Dante,” I told her. “D for Dead. He drowned in the lake.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “Do you have any proof?”
I showed her the ring, which I still had on a chain around my neck. “He always wore this. I found it by the water’s edge.”
Mrs. Stoa shook her head. “Rings get lost. But he won’t. He’ll live.”
I wanted to believe what she was saying, but all she had to go on was an old story. What was it called, anyway? The Divine Comedy? So far I wasn’t laughing.
DAN
1
NOTHING CAN TRACK
A HUMAN OVER WATER
HE OPENS THE DOOR OF THE town office and looks out cautiously. The sky in the east is humming with colour but it’s already hot. And the air is hushed. In all of creation he thinks he may be the only one awake.
Except for the ravens. Two of them fly down and settle in the fir tree nearby. They cock their heads and look at him. Bob up and down and click their thick beaks. They want him to go. Now that the demons know where he is, it isn’t safe to stay.
He stuffs his clothes into the backpack, walks out and closes the door behind him. When he reaches the lake, he squats down and dips his hands in the water, sluicing some of it on his face and up over the back of his neck.
The snake ring slips off his thumb and sinks down into the sand. He starts to reach for it, then straightens up when he feels the shadow of something behind him.
He turns and looks into eyes that are level with his and rimmed with darkness. “You’re the amnesia guy,” the mouth below the eyes says.” Do you have another name to go with that yet?”
Dan shakes his head.
“I’m Virgil.” There follows the whisper of a handshake. “I guess you remember meeting me the other day with what’s her name. Frank Iverly’s girl?”
Dan doesn’t answer.
They size each other up, although Virgil does most of the sizing. “Okay,” he says. He nods a few times as if he’s made up his mind about something. “Have a good one.” He turns and walks toward his boat.
“Wait!” Dan is trying to remember something. “You’re . . . a guide, aren’t you?”
Virgil stops and turns around. “You need one?”
“I might.” Dan points across the lake. “What’s over there?”
“Cato City? History, mostly. Mine tailings. Lots of rotten wood. Buildings falling down. A few still standing, like the ones me and my relatives live in. Why? You want to go over there?”
“Maybe. What about people?”
“Everybody’s gone for the summer except me,” Virgil says. “And I’m about to leave myself.” He turns toward his boat again. “Make up your mind if you’re coming. I’ve been up all night . . . checking on things in town. I just need to get a little sleep at home and pack up before I leave for Kingman.”
While they’re launching the boat, Virgil gestures toward the two ravens who’ve settled on a rock at the water’s edge. “You three together?”
“They follow me around,” Dan says.
“We have quite a few ravens here, especially this summer. You sure they’re always the same ones?”
“They tell me they saved my life.”
“Oh, yeah?” Virgil steadies the boat while Dan climbs in. “Ravens told you that?” He gets into the boat next. “Of course ravens are known to exaggerate.”
Virgil picks up a paddle and holds it above the water while he thinks. “Two of them together means something, though.”He knifes the paddle down through the water and pushes away from him. The boat moves out into the lake.
“What?” Dan asks.
Virgil shakes his head. “I’m kind of like you.” He drops the paddle on the floor of the boat. “There’s a lot of stuff I can’t remember. Better hold on,” he says as he starts up the kicker. “This is a powerful motor.”
“Two stroke?” Dan asks.
“You know about motors?” Virgil asks.
“I know about how they sound. What’s your horse power?”
“Where I come from we say moose power. About five.” Virgil watches Dan as they move slowly out into the water. It’s possible he winks, although it may be the breeze off their passage catching in his eye.
The sun is well up by now, the surface of the lake brilli
ant with only a swirl of motion underneath. Virgil points to the long, wispy cloud trails above them. “There’s your horses,” he says. “Mare’s tails. Means a change in the weather.”
Dan follows the sweep of Virgil’s arm with his eyes. Then looks back down at the water. “How deep is it here?” he asks.
“Don’t know,” Virgil says. “Never been to the bottom before.”
He motions toward the life jacket crumpled on the floor of the boat. “It’s for my little cousin Charlene. You ever meet her?”
“No.”
“It’s just as well. She’s a holy terror. Anyway, that jacket won’t fit you, but you feel free to grab a hold of it if we go under.” He adjusts the throttle and they pick up speed.
Nothing can track a human over water. Does Virgil say that? Or is it the lake itself reassuring Dan? He stares at its shining surface. He’d like to travel in Virgil’s boat forever and let the world slip quietly by.
2
SLEEP
THERE ARE STEEP WHITE BLUFFS ON the Cato City side of the lake. They’re streaked with black in places. And with rusty brown. Virgil turns the boat and moves it parallel to them until a break suddenly opens up in the rock.
He guides the boat through that and into a sheltered harbour with a beach of black and tan pebbles. He ties up to a float made out of deadheads chained together, takes off his shoes and holds them over his head. Then he slips into water that rises up to his ribs.
“Isn’t there any easier way?” Dan calls after him.
“Sure,” Virgil calls back. “A bit farther north we built a pretty solid dock. But this is the one I use. People I bring here to fish want to feel like they’re getting the real thing.”
He stops and turns. “It’s a hot day. Water feels good. You don’t expect me to carry you, I hope?”
“No.”
“Because you can sit in my boat all day if you want to. But if you’re still here when I wake up, you’ll have to go down to Kingman with me.” Virgil puts his shoes on again and begins to climb a steep path sheltered from the lake by aspen and lodge pole pine.
“What’s in Kingman?” Dan calls.
“People.” Virgil’s voice comes out of the trees. “Supplies. Nothing burning.” He continues to climb and soon he’s out of sight.
By the time Dan gets to the shore he’s exhausted. He picks a grassy area sheltered by a dense stand of trees and lies down. He hears waves lapping quietly at the rocks on the shore. Lichen crumbling those rocks into sand. Ravens and nuthatches announce the passing of time before he closes his eyes and drifts into silence.
The sun is far in the west when he opens his eyes again. It takes him a moment to establish where he is. Then he stands up and stretches his long spine.
The wind has picked up. He walks out from the cover of the trees and feels how it’s scuffing up the surface of the lake. The sky has changed, too.
It’s all clouds now and there’s a darker charcoal smudge like a giant thumbprint moving over the mountains on the other side. It becomes a fist, and then while he watches, opens out into a hand groping toward him.
An omen, he thinks. It may not be safe here after all. Maybe he should go with Virgil to Kingman and then slip away.
He walks back toward the float and stands looking at it for quite a while before he puts words to what’s wrong.
The boat is gone.
Virgil has left without him.
3
THE DEAD ARE ALWAYS WITH US
DAN OFTEN HAS TO STOP AND get his breath as he climbs the steep path up from the lake. To his left he begins to see piles of decaying wood, and then further on, the broken bones of houses. Here and there a stone chimney or the skeleton of a roof survives. All around he hears a mournful sighing.
When he finally finds an A-frame with its roof on tight, he mounts the steps to the front deck. The door is locked. He knocks. Rattles the handle. He even shoves his shoulder against the door, but nothing responds except a few aspen leaves, withered from the drought. They drop to the ground and the wind eddies them around his feet.
There are two Adirondack chairs on the deck. He sets his pack down and sits in one of them. He can see all the way down to the lake and across to the nightmare on the other side. Lightning flashes. He counts to five before he hears the following thunder.
He leaves the chair then. Moves to the floor in front of the deck railing and hunches his back against what’s happening across the water.
The sky grows dusky while he huddles there. What’s left of the sun shows blood red. The wind increases, tearing at the trees and flinging branches down around him, but his hearing is so acute he’s still able to detect someone breathing up behind him.
It’s quiet breathing — the soft inhale and exhale of a sleepwalker sneaking up on his dreams. He turns and sees Virgil holding a flashlight in his hand. “When did you come back?” Dan asks.
“I never left,” Virgil says. “Why don’t you go inside?”
“The door’s locked.”
“Of course. It’s private property.” Virgil’s light moves around to the side door of the cabin and Dan follows. “People usually hide a key under their door mat,” Virgil tells him. “You take it and open the door.”
Dan bends over to look, but there’s no key there.
“Or,” Virgil says, pointing at a pane of glass in the door, “you break this and let yourself in. Careful, though. Wrap something around your arm so you won’t be cut.”
Dan takes a T-shirt out of his back pack and uses it for protection. One tap and his arm is through.
There’s food in the cupboards: pork and beans. Tuna fish. Vegetable soup. Their labels glow in the murky light. “Get a can opener and help yourself,” Virgil says. He shows Dan where to look.
The power is turned off so Dan eats the beans cold — goes on eating until he can’t make any more go down. Then he unlocks the front door and goes out to where Virgil is standing on the deck. It’s dark as pitch outside now and the lake has turned to fire. He hears the forces of nature all around him.
“Are you afraid of the dead?” Virgil asks.
“Why?”
“Take a look.” Virgil holds up the flashlight and Dan sees that they’re everywhere — roosting up in the trees.Sitting on the deck railing.On the stairs.On the rocks beyond that. And more are coming.
They’re riding on horseback or in carriages and mining cars. Or they’re walking. Sometimes carrying each other. Sometimes crawling. They’re even rappelling down from the steep cliff behind the cabin.
There are thousands of them, all the colour of cobwebs.
“Word got out,” Virgil says. “And nobody new has been here for quite a while.”
The ghosts turn their heads in Dan’s direction. They stare at him through empty eye sockets. “They can be unnerving if you’re not used to them,” Virgil says. “And these are the most presentable.”
“What do they want?” Dan asks. He moves back toward the door.
“Some of them are hungry.” Virgil points to a group at the back who hold cracked bowls and plates up over their heads.
“Feed them, then. Take what’s in the cupboard and tell them to go away.”
“It won’t help,” Virgil says. “Their throats are full of sand and they can’t get anything down.”
Dan feels the food from his own stomach pushing up against the back of his throat.
“In one way, they’re just like you,” Virgil says. “They want to find a way out of here.”
“Why are they staring at me, then? You’re the guide.”
“Partly true,” Virgil says. “I am supposed to guide you. It’s too late for them though. And for me.” He begins to fade in and out while they talk. He removes his head and holds it briefly in the crook of his arm before replacing it again.
”I thought you might have noticed,” he says.
The dead move closer and closer to where Dan is standing.They hold up to him the few earthly possessions they’ve been a
llowed to save: a scrap of cloth from a child’s dress. A photograph. Wreaths of dried flowers. A shaker of salt. Glass beads in a moose skin pouch.
They begin to pull at Dan’s clothes with fleshless fingers. They touch his face and his hands. “Help us,” they cry. “Save us!”
“Get back!” Virgil commands. The arc of his flashlight cuts through the mass of their spectral bodies. He pulls Dan back inside the cabin.
There are iron horseshoes over all the doors and windows so the dead are forced to remain outside in the growing storm, crying and praying and consoling each other in their various languages.
When lightning flashes again and again in the sky, they begin to fade away, but they leave traces of sticky filament behind on everything they’ve touched.
4
DREAM JUMPS
IT’S PITCH DARK IN THE HOUSE. Dan finds candles and matches in a kitchen drawer and takes them with him into the bedroom at the back of the house. He shuts the door and wedges a chair in front of it. Then he lights candle after candle and sticks each to the top of a night stand with drops of wax. He knows fire can’t be trusted, but he’s desperate for light.
There’s a bed beside the night stand. It’s neatly made and covered with a patchwork quilt. In the middle of the bed is a shoe box. Dan pushes it aside so he can sit down, then takes the lid off the box and looks inside. It’s filled with snapshots, primarily of two girls. The younger one smiles a lot. Her front teeth are gone in some and back again in others. “Charlene,” someone has written on the back of one of the pictures. “Grade One.”
The older girl is beautiful. Innocent and exotic at the same time, like the girl next door, Dan thinks, if you lived on the Nile River. Her hair is long and blue-black. Her face the colour and shape of an almond. But the name on the back of her pictures isn’t Cleopatra. It’s Bee.
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