Then he noticed something that wasted hope.
Another voice had been added to the natural flow of wind from the ocean, and in every direction, as far as the eye could see, the moon-silvered thickets were rippling, betraying the presence of far more wind than was evident atop the hill. He pushed Sara away. She followed his gaze and put a hand to her mouth. The immensity of the elemental stunned Peter. They might have been standing on a crag in the midst of a troubled sea, one that receded into an interstellar dark. For the first time, despite his fear, he had an apprehension of the elemental’s beauty, of the precision and intricacy of its power. One moment it could be a tendril of breeze, capable of delicate manipulations, and the next it could become an entity the size of a city. Leaves and branches—like flecks of black space—were streaming up from the thickets, forming into columns. Six of them, at regular intervals about Altar Rock, maybe a hundred yards away. The sound of the wind evolved into a roar as they thickened and grew higher. And they grew swiftly. Within seconds the tops of the columns were lost in darkness. They did not have the squat, conical shapes of tornadoes, nor did they twist and jab down their tails; they merely swayed, slender and graceful and menacing. In the moonlight their whirling was almost undetectable and they looked to be made of shining ebony, like six enormous savages poised to attack. They began moving toward the hill. Splintered bushes exploded upward from their bases, and the roaring swelled into a dissonant chord: the sound of a hundred harmonicas being blown at once. Only much, much louder.
The sight of ’Sconset Sally scuttling for the jeep waked Peter from his daze; he pushed Sara into the rear seat and climbed in beside Sally. Though the engine was running, it was drowned out by the wind. Sally drove even less cautiously than before; the island was criss-crossed by narrow dirt roads, and it seemed to Peter that they almost crashed on every one of them. Skidding sideways through a flurry of bushes, flying over the crests of hills, diving down steep slopes. The thickets grew too high in most places for him to see much, but the fury of the wind was all around them, and once, as they passed a place where the bushes had been burned off, he caught a glimpse of an ebony column about fifty yards away. It was traveling alongside them, he realized. Harrowing them, running them to and fro. Peter lost track of where they were, and he could not believe that Sally had any better idea. She was trying to do the impossible, to drive out the wind, which was everywhere, and her lips were drawn back in a grimace of fear. Suddenly—they had just turned east—she slammed on the brakes. Sara flew halfway into the front seat, and if Peter had not been braced he might have gone through the windshield. Farther along the road one of the columns had taken a stand, blocking their path. It looked like God, he thought. An ebony tower reaching from the earth to the sky, spraying clouds of dust and plant litter from its bottom. And it was moving toward them. Slowly. A few feet per second. But definitely on the move. The jeep was shaking, and the roar seemed to be coming from the ground beneath them, from the air, from Peter’s body, as if the atoms of things were all grinding together. Frozen-faced, Sally wrangled with the gearshift. Sara screamed, and Peter, too, screamed as the windshield was sucked out of its frame and whirled off. He braced himself against the dash, but his arms were weak and with a rush of shame he felt his bladder go. The column was less than a hundred feet away, a great spinning pillar of darkness. He could see how the material inside it aligned itself into tightly packed rings like the segments of a worm. The air was syrupy, hard to breathe. And then, miraculously, they were swerving away from it, away from the roaring, backing along the road. They turned a corner, and Sally got the jeep going forward; she sent them grinding up a largish hill…and braked. And let her head drop onto the steering wheel in an attitude of despair. They were once again at Altar Rock.
And Hugh Weldon was waiting for them.
He was sitting with his head propped against the boulder that gave the place its name. His eyes were filled with shadows. His mouth was open, and his chest rose and fell. Labored breathing, as if he had just run a long way. There was no sign of the squad car. Peter tried to call to him, but his tongue was stuck to his palate and all that came out was a strangled grunt. He tried again.
“Weldon!”
Sara started to sob, and Sally gasped. Peter didn’t know what had frightened them and didn’t care; for him the process of thought had been thinned down to following one track at a time. He climbed from the jeep and went over to the chief. “Weldon,” he said again.
Weldon sighed.
“What happened?” Peter knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder; he heard a hiss and felt a tremor pass through the body.
Weldon’s right eye began to bulge. Peter lost his balance and sat back hard. Then the eye popped out and dropped into the dust. With a high-pitched whistling, wind and blood sprayed from the empty socket. Peter fell backward, scrabbling at the dirt in an effort to put distance between himself and Weldon. The corpse toppled onto its side, its head vibrating as the wind continued to pour out, boiling up dust beneath the socket. There was a dark smear marking the spot on the boulder where the head had rested.
Until his heart rate slowed, Peter lay staring at the moon, as bright and distant as a wish. He heard the roaring of the wind from all sides and realized that it was growing louder, but he didn’t want to admit to it. Finally, though, he got to his feet and gazed out across the moors.
It was as if he were standing at the center of an unimaginably large temple, one forested with dozens upon dozens of shiny black pillars rising from a dark green floor. The nearest of them were about a hundred yards away, and those were unmoving; but as Peter watched, others farther off began to slew back and forth, gliding in and out of the stationary ones, like dancing cobras. There was a fever in the air, a pulse of heat and energy, and this as much as the alienness of the sight was what transfixed him and held him immobile. He found that he had gone beyond fear. You could no more hide from the elemental than you could from God. It would lead him on to the sea to die, and its power was so compelling that he almost acknowledged its right to do this. He climbed into the jeep. Sara looked beaten. Sally touched his leg with a palsied hand.
“You can use my boat,” she said.
On the way back to Madaket, Sara sat with her hands clasped in her lap, outwardly calm but inwardly turbulent. Thoughts fired across her brain so quickly that they left only partial impressions, and those were seared away by lightning strokes of terror. She wanted to say something to Peter, but words seemed inadequate to all she was feeling. At one point she decided to go with him, but the decision sparked a sudden resentment. He didn’t love her! Why should she sacrifice herself for him? Then, realizing that he was sacrificing himself for her, that he did love her or that at least this was an act of love, she decided that if she went it would make his act meaningless. That decision caused her to question whether or not she was using his sacrifice to obscure her true reason for staying behind: her fear. And what about the quality of her feelings for him? Were they so uncertain that fear could undermine them? In a blaze of irrationality she saw that he was pressuring her to go with him, to prove her love, something she had never asked him to do. What right did he have? With half her mind she understood the unreasonableness of these thoughts, yet she couldn’t stop thinking them. She felt all her emotions winnowing, leaving her hollow…like Hugh Weldon, with only the wind inside him, propping him up, giving him the semblance of life. The grotesqueness of the image caused her to shrink further inside herself, and she just sat there, growing dim and empty, saying nothing.
“Buck up,” said Sally out of the blue, and patted Peter’s leg. “We got one thing left to try.” And then, with what seemed to Sara an irrational good cheer, she added: “But if that don’t work, the boat’s got fishin’ tackle and a coupla cases of cherry brandy on board. I was too damn drunk to unload ’em yesterday. Cherry brandy be better’n water for where you’re headed.”
Peter gave no reply.
As they entered the village, th
e elemental chased beside them, whirling up debris, scattering leaves, tossing things high into the air. Playing, thought Sara. It was playing. Frisking along like a happy pup, like a petulant child who’d gotten his way and now was all smiles. She was overwhelmed with hatred for it, and she dug her nails into the seat cushion, wishing she had a way to hurt it. Then, as they passed Julia Stackpole’s house, the corpse of Julia Stackpole sat up. Its bloody head hung down, its frail arms flapping. The entire body appeared to be vibrating, and with a horrid disjointed motion, amid a swirling of papers and trash, it went rolling over and over and came to rest against a broken chair. Sara shrank back into a corner of the seat, her breath ragged and shallow. A thin cloud swept free of the moon, and the light measurably brightened, making the gray of the houses seem gauzy and immaterial; the holes in their sides looked real enough—black, cavernous—as if the walls and doors and windows had only been a facade concealing emptiness.
Sally parked next to a boathouse a couple of hundred yards north of Smith Point: a rickety wooden structure the size of a garage. Beyond it a stretch of calm black water was figured by a blaze of moonlight. “You gonna have to row out to the boat,” Sally told Peter. “Oars are in here.” She unlocked the door and flicked on a light. The inside of the place was as dilapidated as Sally herself. Raw boards; spiderwebs spanning between paint cans and busted lobster traps; a jumble of two-by-fours. Sally went stumping around, mumbling and kicking things, searching for the oars; her footsteps set the light bulb dangling from the roof to swaying, and the light slopped back and forth over the walls like dirty yellow water. Sara’s legs were leaden. It was hard to move, and she thought maybe this was because there weren’t any moves left. Peter took a few steps toward the center of the boathouse and stopped, looking lost. His hands twitched at his sides. She had the idea that his expression mirrored her own: slack, spiritless, with bruised crescents under his eyes. She moved, then. The dam that had been holding back her emotions burst, and her arms were around him, and she was telling him that she couldn’t let him go alone, telling him half-sentences, phrases that didn’t connect. “Sara,” he said, “Jesus.” He held her very tightly. The next second, though, she heard a dull thonk and he sagged against her, almost knocking her down, and slumped to the floor. Brandishing a two-by-four, Sally bent to him and struck again.
“What are you doing?” Sara screamed it and began to wrestle with Sally. Their arms locked, they waltzed around and around for a matter of seconds, the light bulb jiggling madly. Sally sputtered and fumed; spittle glistened on her lips. Finally, with a snarl, she shoved Sara away. Sara staggered back, tripped over Peter, and fell sprawling beside him.
“Listen!” Sally cocked her head and pointed to the roof with the two-by-four. “Goddamn it! It’s workin’!”
Sara came warily to her feet. “What are you talking about?”
Sally picked up her fisherman’s hat, which had fallen off during the struggle, and squashed it down onto her head. “The wind, goddamn it! I told that stupid son of a bitch Hugh Weldon, but oh, no! He never listened to nobody.”
The wind was rising and fading in volume, doing so with such a regular rhythm that Sara had the impression of a creature made of wind running frantically back and forth. Something splintered in the distance.
“I don’t understand,” said Sara.
“Unconscious is like dead to it,” said Sally; she gestured at Peter with the board. “I knew it was so, ’cause after it did for Mills it came for me. It touched me up all over, and I could tell it’d have me, then. But that stupid bastard wouldn’t listen. Had to do things his goddamn way!”
“It would have you?” Sara glanced down at Peter, who was unstirring, bleeding from the scalp. “You mean instead of Peter?”
“’Course that’s what I mean.” Sally frowned. “Don’t make no sense him goin’. Young man with all his future ahead. Now me…” She yanked at the lapel of her raincoat as if intending to throw herself away. “What I got to lose? A coupla years of bein’ alone. I ain’t eager for it, y’understand. But it don’t make sense any other way. Tried to tell Hugh that, but he was stuck on bein’ a goddamn hero.”
Her bird-bright eyes glittered in the webbed flesh, and Sara had a perception of her that she had not had since childhood: the zany old spirit, half-mad but with one eye fixed on some corner of creation that nobody else could see. She remembered all the stories. Sally trying to signal the moon with a hurricane lamp; Sally rowing through a nor’easter to pluck six sailors off Whale Shoals; Sally passing out dead-drunk at the ceremony the Coast Guard had given in her honor; Sally loosing her dogs on the then-junior senator from Massachusetts when he had come to present her a medal. Crazy Sally. She suddenly seemed valuable to Sara.
“You can’t…” she began, but broke off and stared at Peter.
“Can’t not,” said Sally, and clucked her tongue. “You see somebody looks after my dogs.”
Sara nodded.
“And you better check on Peter,” said Sally. “See if I hit him too hard.”
Sara started to comply but was struck by a thought. “Won’t it know better this time? Peter was knocked out before. Won’t it have learned?”
“I suppose it can learn,” said Sally. “But it’s real stupid, and I don’t think it’s figured this out.” She gestured at Peter. “Go ahead. See if he’s all right.”
The hairs on Sara’s neck prickled as she knelt beside Peter, and she was later to reflect that in the back of her mind she had known what was about to happen. But even so she was startled by the blow.
X
It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that the doctors allowed Peter to have visitors other than the police. He was still suffering from dizziness and blurred vision, and mentally speaking, he alternated between periods of relief and depression. Seeing in his mind’s eye the mutilated bodies, the whirling black pillars. Tensing as the wind prowled along the hospital walls. In general he felt walled off from emotion, but when Sara came into the room those walls crumbled. He drew her down beside him and buried his face in her hair. They lay for a long time without speaking, and it was Sara who finally broke the silence.
“Do they believe you?” she asked. “I don’t think they believe me.”
“They don’t have much choice,” he said. “I just think they don’t want to believe it.”
After a moment she said, “Are you going away?”
He pulled back from her. She had never looked more beautiful. Her eyes were wide, her mouth drawn thin, and the strain of all that had happened to them seemed to have carved an unnecessary ounce of fullness from her face. “That depends on whether or not you’ll go with me,” he said. “I don’t want to stay. Whenever the wind changes pitch, every nerve in my body signals an air raid. But I won’t leave you. I want to marry you.”
Her reaction was not what he had expected. She closed her eyes and kissed him on the forehead—a motherly, understanding kiss; then she settled back on the pillow, gazing calmly at him.
“That was a proposal,” he said. “Didn’t you catch it?”
“Marriage?” She seemed perplexed by the idea.
“Why not? We’re qualified.” He grinned. “We both have concussions.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I love you, Peter, but…”
“But you don’t trust me?”
“Maybe that’s part of it,” she said, annoyed. “I don’t know.”
“Look.” He smoothed down her hair. “Do you know what really happened in the boathouse last night?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I’ll tell you. What happened was that an old woman gave her life so you and I could have a chance at something.” She started to speak, but he cut her off. “That’s the bones of it. I admit the reality’s a bit more murky. God knows why Sally did what she did. Maybe saving lives was a reflex of her madness, maybe she was tired of living. Maybe it just seemed a good idea at the time. And as for us, we haven’t exactly been Romeo and Jul
iet. I’ve been confused, and I’ve confused you. And aside from whatever problems we might have as a couple, we have a lot to forget. Until you came in I was feeling shell-shocked, and that’s a feeling that’s probably going to last for a while. But like I said, the heart of the matter is that Sally died to give us a chance. No matter what her motives, what our circumstance, that’s what happened. And we’d be fools to let that chance slip away.” He traced the line of her cheekbone with a finger. “I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time and tried to deny it, to hold on to a dead issue. But that’s all over.”
The Jaguar Hunter Page 17