The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  I must have dozed off, because when I awoke the world had gone black. I thought I heard the rumble of distant thunder. It had that noncommittal quality that far-off thunder sometimes does, as of the skies clearing their throat, trying to decide whether they meant business. I hoped they didn’t. The last time I’d weathered a lightning storm in this cottage had been terrifying.

  —

  They say lightning is white, but I remember it as blue. I bolted awake with cannon exploding in the roof beams and a flood of sky in my bedroom, bluing every shadow. When the room went black again and the air stilled, the memory that left me shaking was the spooky way the corduroy fish on my mobile, reds and purples in daylight, had all been bleached that same dead color.

  That was the summer of my craze about lightning rods. For weeks I’d been peppering Mom and Dad with questions: Did our cottage have a lightning rod? Did it have enough lightning rods? Were these lightning rods the right lightning-rod height? How did lightning know to hit the rod and not our house?

  I was under the sheets now, cocooned in cotton, listening and trembling. Out of the silence came a thin, sizzling sound, as of tracing paper ripping cleanly, until that awful blue light flared under the edges of the bedsheet, burning my eyes. The next instant, another explosion shook my mattress.

  There was no point yelling for anyone, because the top of the house was empty except for me. It was our last weekend at Echo Harbor, and Marion, the mother’s helper who’d shared my room all summer, had already gone back to Bard. Mom had taken Quig home to New York, too, for a friend’s birthday party. It was just me and Dad left. I’d never been alone with him overnight, and I’d been nervous about it.

  I crept out of bed and down the stairs, feeling my way along the scratchy burlap walls. I could hear the wind shoving the darkness around outside. But I didn’t run. This was the most dangerous game of flashlight tag I’d ever played. I didn’t want the lightning to notice me. If it guessed that I was out of bed and alone, if its next blue bolt caught me tiptoeing down the hallway, I’d be a goner.

  When I got to my parents’ bedroom door, I reached for the knob but felt only a draft wafting into my pajama sleeve: the door—the whole door!—was gone. I ran into the room and felt around the taut sheet for Dad, cautiously at first, then more frantically as I felt only hardness and button dents and the fine wire grid of the electric mattress pad beneath the sheet. He was gone—the door was gone and the bedcover was gone and Dad was gone.

  Seized with panic, I went tearing around the house searching for him, in the bathrooms, in the kitchen, until at last I got up the nerve to look in the most exposed place of all—the family room, whose wall of windows faced directly onto the Great Bay. What I saw out there was horrible. The storm was crashing in the sky right in front of me, tree limbs thwacking against our windows, dark clouds sizzling blue every few seconds like the Insect-o-cutor the butcher hung behind his pork slabs.

  I saw him before he saw me. One bare foot resting lazily on the coffee table, my father was sitting on the sofa without fear, a soft statue watching the storm.

  “Oh, Griff,” he said when he noticed me. “You’re up. Come have a look.” I ran around the L of the sofa and burrowed my head into his armpit. He held me in there with a flannel forearm.

  “This is really something, isn’t it,” he said, his hand cupping my rib cage. “It’s been like a light show at the planetarium out there.”

  That caught me off guard. I liked light shows.

  “What do you mean?” I asked his chest.

  “I mean it’s beautiful. You couldn’t paint it this beautiful. And the thing of it is, the sky does all the work—all we have to do to be part of everything is just sit here and watch.”

  We sat together like that for a long while, lightning flashing off his chin. As far as I could tell, he was making no effort to calm me down. He just stared out the window with that look people get when they gaze into a fire and lose themselves.

  I started to get sleepy. Even with jags of electricity zigging into the bay outside our window, I could feel my terror draining away. I tried to get it back.

  “I think our lightning rod must be busted,” I said, “ ’cause the lightning hit the roof right above my bed!”

  Dad shook his head. “I don’t think so. Though it is pretty nearby—for a while it was striking the water out by Fish Island, and now it’s moved closer, near where Mr. Christie keeps his crab traps.”

  “Won’t that hurt the fish?”

  “Nope. And come to think of it, I bet the electric eels are having a pretty grand time of it.”

  “Even the little ones?”

  “Them especially—they can get their batteries all recharged tonight, see, and tomorrow morning, when the sharks come out of hiding and try to catch themselves some nice eel breakfast, they won’t believe how speedy the baby eels have gotten.”

  I laughed a little. I was pretty sure he was making all this up, but I liked knowing that he was in control of the truth.

  A frayed thread of lightning flashed over the bay. Trees writhed against our windows. We sat together and watched, the two of us, staring when it was dark and blinking when it got bright. And though I can’t say I thought the lightning was beautiful exactly, it did seem less like it was coming for me.

  —

  The next rumble shook me awake, and I hadn’t the faintest inkling where I was until I lifted my head. I threw that big pile of blankets off me and sat up in the chill to look out the round window at the bay. Morning had broken.

  It was startling how white all the whites were out there: the foaming tips of the waves, the single seagull riding the wind currents. Blinking through my grogginess, though, I realized that the whites hadn’t changed at all. The rest of the world had. Both sky and bay were a brooding ash-gray that lent the whites a charged immediacy.

  Lightning crackled in the distance, descending through the sky with jerky, Etch A Sketch movements. Mostly it vanished into the serrated water far out in the bay.

  —

  I was leaving Echo Harbor without discovering what I’d come for. I suppose it shouldn’t have made my insides feel so hollow. Just because Zev happened to have had a take-out sandwich from the Sandcastle didn’t have to mean that this town was where he’d been working for Dad all these months. It had only been a hunch of mine, after all, based on nothing more than a cheapo plastic swordfish that used to mean something to me.

  42

  THE GENERAL STORE WAS NOT ONLY OPEN this morning; it was downright hopping. A crowd of ten or fifteen people were clustered under the sagging overhang outside, some with bags and pet carriers. One guy had a TV in a folding shopping cart. None of the faces was the one I was hoping to see.

  The lanky old man behind the counter inside had gotten a fair bit wrinklier since I’d last seen him. He had a chapped red face and a neck like a turkey vulture’s.

  “Bus ticket, young man?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah, to New York.”

  He took my last twenty dollars and gave me change with my ticket. I asked about departure times.

  “Just the one at eight forty—that’s in, ah, nineteen minutes,” he said, holding his watch at arm’s length so he could see it clearly. “Don’t you miss it, either. They’re shutting all their routes down at noon up and down the Northeast, on account of Emma.”

  “Is she coming here for sure? Do they know yet?”

  “Well, they make like they kinda know. Weatherman says she might could hit us right in the teeth, but then he hedges his bets saying the thing’s gonna make landfall somewheres in a seventy-mile swath from Cape May to Long Beach. But it doesn’t much matter if it hits us direct or not, you ask me. The real trouble I see is the moon.”

  “The moon?”

  “Yeah, storm’s supposed to come ashore at high tide tomorrow. It does that and I can tell you, the flooding around here won’t be any joke.”

  A middle-aged couple in yellow slickers came in to buy tickets. I
headed over to the cookie aisle and picked up a box of Nilla wafers for my trip.

  There was a seating area in the back with two little round tables and a serve-yourself coffee corner. On hooks above the big percolator hung a couple dozen ceramic cups belonging to the store’s regulars. Each cup was painted with an identical striped bass but personalized by a first name brushed on with gold nail polish. I looked them over carefully. None had the name I was looking for.

  The wall above the tables was decorated with framed old newspaper clippings and fishing rods and old-timey black-and-white photographs of the area.

  AW, SHUCKS! ran the headline of one story, about a local kitchen worker who’d won two hundred dollars in a clam-shucking contest at Long Beach.

  “OLD STINKBOX” GUTTED BY FIRE, announced another, above a grainy picture of a four-story factory with flames roaring from its roof. HARBOR RESIDENTS REJOICE.

  The yellow-slicker couple went outside to wait for the bus.

  “That Fish Island factory,” I said to the old turkey-necked guy. “The Stinkbox. Was it burned down by lightning?”

  The guy gave me a slightly patronizing smile. “Oh, I sure don’t think so, son. Arson, you’d have to think.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “Well, sometimes you can know a thing without knowing it, know what I mean? Wasn’t a man in town—exceptin’ the factory manager, I guess—who wasn’t glad to see the Stinkbox burn down.”

  I asked him why, and he laughed. “Well, how do you think it got its name? Worst thing you ever smelt in your life. When the wind come up in summer, the stink blew right in over the bay and the whole damn village here stunk of dead fish.” He crinkled his nose. “It’d get in your clothes, your hair. I can practically still smell it now, twenty-five, twenty-seven years later.”

  “So you think someone from town here just got fed up and set it on fire?”

  The old man chuckled. “You’d have to think it’s a good possibility. Though lightning did use to hit the factory’s water tower now and then. So who’s to say for sure?”

  “I just saw lightning hit it this morning.”

  He cocked his head. “Oh, I don’t think so. That water tower collapsed back in the fire. Anyways, it’s hard to see anything clear out there from so far away.”

  He was right about that. The island was distant enough that from our deck it didn’t look like much more than a green blur on the horizon.

  “So that was the end of the fish factory?” I asked. “The owners just, like, walked away?”

  He peered at me closely. “You want they should’ve rebuilt it?”

  “Why not? I mean, how do you just abandon a whole factory? Did the guys who worked there all lose their jobs?”

  “I suppose they did. They weren’t from around here, though. Mostly fellas from the south. They’d come up for the season by the boatload and live in bunk houses out on the island. Never even came to the mainland here to shop. But there was little sense rebuilding anyhow, son. The whole men-hatin’ industry was over the hill by then. Everyone knew it was only a matter a time till they fished ’em out.”

  I goggled at him. “What did you just say? The what industry?”

  “Men-hatin’. That was a men-hatin’ factory.”

  I couldn’t have been more confused. “You mean Manhattan?”

  “ ’Course not,” he said, raising his voice a little. “Men-hatin’! M-E-N-H-A-D-E-N: menhaden!”

  “What’s menhaden?”

  “You don’t know? They’re a nasty little fish too oily and bony to eat. Bunkers, some folks call ’em. They used to grind ’em up and make fertilizer and animal feed out of the scrap. Lamp oil, too, all up and down the East Coast. Stinkbox’s real name was the Great Bay Menhaden Fertilizer and Oil Works.” He looked at me like I was an idiot child. “You really never heard of menhaden?”

  I shook my head.

  “Where you from, anyway?”

  I sighed. “Manhattan.”

  “Manhattan?” He stifled a laugh.

  “Yeah, Manhattan.”

  “You’re from Manhattan and you never heard of menhaden?”

  I nodded.

  “In that case, son,” he said, pointing a spindly finger at me, “I got just one question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who’s on first?”

  43

  IT TOOK ME PRACTICALLY ALL DAY to get up the nerve to swipe a boat. I kept making excuses for myself. First I had to go home to our bungalow to carbo-load on Beefaroni for my expedition. Then I decided it wouldn’t feel right to leave without tidying up first, so I carefully folded all the blankets I’d used and dumped my dirty food cans in the neighbors’ trash bin. A couple of times I had to duck behind the wicker love seat when an Ocean County Sheriff’s car came by broadcasting a recorded loop of staticky urgings that “all persons” should voluntarily evacuate coastal areas. This was all the encouragement I needed to put off embarking on a sea voyage in favor of organizing the game cabinet and alphabetizing the food cans. It’s amazing how many hours you can fritter away doing busywork like that.

  After a while, the sheriff’s car stopped making its rounds. In an upstairs closet, I found a black wool cap and a man-size Irish fisherman’s sweater that smelled of tobacco and rain. I put them on and tugged my down jacket over the sweater’s lumpy bulk. Back on the first floor, I wrapped two thick blankets in a thirty-gallon Hefty trash bag, stuffed them into my duffel with the Nilla wafers, and headed down to the beach, where a burly Jersey-looking guy and his son were working offshore to tie up their moored motorboat with four lines. The guy was up to his waist in the agitated gray-green water; the boy was in the boat’s cockpit, feeding him rope. He looked cold and unhappy.

  I wandered the village in my down jacket and jeans, up and down the canals, peeking through cottage windows. Nobody home. With only a couple of exceptions, the place was a ghost town.

  There was no shortage of boats to choose from. Most of the bigger ones were probably in a shipyard somewhere for the winter, but in every second or third canal I scoped out, someone hadn’t yet gotten around to hauling his boat out for the winter. Most of these neglected vessels were banged-up skiffs whose owners probably didn’t worry too much about losing them to the weather.

  In the canal behind Howells Road I spotted a docked fishing cruiser with looping chrome rails and a pair of two-hundred-horsepower engines. I steered clear of it. As a little kid I’d always watched Dad’s every move as he fired up the putt-putters he rented to take me fishing, and a bunch of times he even let me steer. These serious machines, though, I had no clue how to operate.

  The boat I settled on was a dinky Boston Whaler with a thirty-horsepower engine, tied up in the slip behind a birdhouse bungalow on Surf Walk.

  I’d forgotten that woggly feeling you get in your knees and hips the moment you step into a small boat, the way your arms rise and your fingers splay in reflexive, stick-’em-up surrender. I bent low to collect myself. In my mind, someone was always watching me to see if I looked cool or dorky. So even though I kind of half kneeled on the fiberglass seats while untying the lines, I tried to do it without looking afraid. I even tipped up my chin confidently as I pushed off the dock, easing the boat out of its slip.

  Neither of the life preservers fit me. The grown-up one was too big and the kid one too small. I tried not to dwell on it, instead tilting the little motor into the water the way Dad had taught me. I clicked the gear lever into the middle, guessing that must be neutral, and gave the rip cord a few good yanks.

  The motor gurgled to life. I sat in the right stern the way Dad always had and gripped the vibrating handle to steer. Another click of the gear and my little boat lurched forward down the opaque green runway of the canal.

  The wind seemed to pick up and begin shoving my boat around the moment the canal’s artificial order gave way to the wide-open churn of the Great Bay. Instead of puttering ahead in a straight line, my little whaler labored forth in an irr
egular corkscrew motion, the motor’s vibrations in my steering hand punctuated by the galUMPH-galUMPH of the boat’s snub nose banging off the waves. Rain spattered down in fat drops, chilly on my cheeks and hands. The sky thickened with moisture, blurring the speck of Fish Island on the horizon.

  Umoored. Untethered. At sea. This was the first time I really understood what those words meant. For a long while, the charcoal smudge of shoreline behind me grew more remote without Fish Island appearing to get any closer. I couldn’t imagine feeling more alone—God, I wished Dani were there with me. But slowly, gradually, the hulking, malformed ruins of the menhaden factory emerged out of the haze, as imposing and forlorn as a sacked island fortress.

  My boat rumbled closer across the waves and troughs until I began to make out distinct structures up ahead. On the near shore, the felled water tower lay on its side like a great stricken daddy longlegs, its scorched limbs twisted up beneath it. I steered left around the curve of the island, coming broadside of the two main factory buildings. Decrepit and huge, they were about the same rectangular shape and size. One was weather-battered but intact, with ripply metal skin. The other was its dead twin. Its flesh long since burned away to expose its steel beams, it now lay half-collapsed on the beach like the rust-red carcass of some gargantuan beast.

  Darkness was falling. The wind was rising. My jacket was wet, and my teeth were chattering.

  I was anxious to land. But pulling up anywhere near these two factory buildings was out of the question. Aside from a small section of charred planking, all that remained of the dock was its upright wooden pilings, which juddered in the water like teeth loose in their gums. Even if I managed to tie up to one of them, there was no getting ashore from here. The concrete landing that had once connected the dock to the factory was too high to reach from such a small boat. Worse, the edge of the landing was fringed with the corroded remains of what must once have been steel reinforcement but which had deteriorated into a row of jagged rusty stalagmites jutting upward from the water.