Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  Here a silence fell that lasted till they’d finished. They ate their soup in a huddle, as if food had grown quite scarce. The evening lengthened out to perfect calm. For a while, they stood together at the wide and pitted slate-stone sink and washed up three days’ dishes. After that, they repaired to the parlor. They stoked the cedar fire and sat in a pair of wing chairs drawn up close to the hearth.

  Time ceased to hunt her. She pulled the shawl snug like a blanket and stared into the flames like a schoolgirl. Later, she started asking questions, drawing Maybeth out. Nothing to do with the fatal strangers. Nothing about herself. Just a steady thread of inquiry, designed to open up the other woman’s heart.

  Slowly, shyly, Maybeth gave her back the tale of a life lived in dread. Disaster and illness had plagued her youth. Those she loved were snatched in the night. She went hungry for months on end. Having come this far alive, she trembled now at the thought of getting old. One false move, and she’d break a hip. Then be consigned to a dungeon cell, to moan till the end of time. It was as if she hadn’t ever spoken it aloud and thus could hardly keep it straight which agonies were current, which gone by. Later on, about midnight, she started to cry. Later still, she pulled a bottle of muskat wine from a cupboard under the stairs.

  Throughout it all, Iris thought that as long as she had to die, she ought to help whoever she could while she still had the presence of mind. The pitiless story of the two doomed lovers, endlessly repeating, touched her like all obsessions did. Everything fit: the rage to become some other than the self; the loss of time; the living on air. She almost wished she could write it down, to see it all schematically. It seemed she had spent her whole life following the twists of logic that locked a certain kind of person in.

  The only way was to let them talk. So she sat all night with an awesome patience, clear as the glow at the heart of the fire. She did not judge, or pretend to know the truth. Her strength was in her concentration. Her mind never veered an inch from what she heard.

  Before the night was done, a healing lull began to beat in the rhythm of Maybeth’s voice. It rose like a breeze off the black night sea and shook the savage pines. In the end, the two women had floated free of all their dreams. In the night’s dead center they sat like druids; the silence was incalculable. Each saw that the other was not to blame. They were just two people from somewhere else, met in a monstrous circumstance.

  By the last of the wine there was no doubt: Iris had brought one over to her side.

  Michael stood outside the parlor window, trampling the primrose border. He stood so close he fogged the glass, till he had to wipe it clear with his sleeve. As he watched the two women across the room, he clouded the pane again and again. When he buffed it up to a polish, he seemed to be shining a lens. He didn’t fear they would glance his way and catch him. Things had gone too far for that.

  What was strange was the edge of glee in his face. His eyes danced over everything. His mouth stood wide in a clownish grin, and every now and then he stuffed his knuckles in to keep from laughing. The other hand clamped at the front of his trousers, as if his bladder might let go at any second.

  He had just come up from the sea. A fisherman’s stench still clung to his clothes. He was wet to the skin. In the dark of Maybeth’s garden he steamed like something out of a swamp. For supper he’d eaten four fat snapper, raw from the boy’s abandoned net. This after a half-day’s sail.

  He’d skimmed across the harbor in Joey’s two-horse boat and fetched the riddled body off the rocks. Close under the face of the cliff, he zigzagged through the shallows till he found him—floating on his face as if to search the pebbled bottom for a pearl. When Michael hauled him in, the terns wheeled in a clatter overhead. He beat them away with an oar and nearly tipped. He took his time: before he ventured out on the water again, the boy was arranged just so in the bow, as if he were fast asleep. The effect was perfect. Turned a certain way, the caved-in chest and shattered skull seemed whole again.

  Circling the bay, black-green in the hazy afternoon, they passed among vast and mossy rocks, spaced like ghosts of the moon across the distance. Gradually, in a sort of hollow in his mind, the secret place he’d sought for them seemed possible again. In the stillness of the waning day, there was no longer any danger that the boy would flee.

  It was change that had always driven him mad. Oh, yes—from his earliest walks through the walled gardens ringing his father’s estates he’d had an eye for the breakdown of things. No lapse was too minor to notice. The wrinkling at the corners of a smile, the first gray hair, the loss of nerve in the quick of skin—these were the classic symptoms. Nothing was immune. The trees in the park, his hounds and Arabian horses, his fretful nanny and his drunken groom, all rushed headlong into the arms of time. So he hid in closets. He hid in caves. He knew one day he would have to run. There had to be other places where the country roundabout was not so feverish with change. In spring the whole world stunk like an open wound.

  As the day wore on to dusk, he steered the windless bay in ever wider circles. He studied each brief and jagged island. He seemed to be trying to find a place to land. He’d approach a cove or a ribbon of beach, search it like a picture, and shake his head and sail on by. He was looking for something particular. And he’d almost given up, having combed the barren faces of a score of islets and brute outcroppings. He was arcing back to the dock when he passed the flat-top boulder with the birds in a skittish row along the spine.

  From the dock it had looked like a tilted cube, maybe twenty feet on a side and eroded at the corners. Now, coming at it over the water, he caught sight of it a certain way, so it massed in a shape like a man’s head. There: it peaked against the sky with the profile of a giant. Almost like he was sleeping in the bay, leaning against a phantom pillow, the sheet of the tide drawn up to his neck. The birds perched at his brow and nested in his eyes. His hooked chin was a bare five feet above the water. The throat below was all in shadow.

  Without a break in speed, Michael swept the boat around so he came in under the overhang. He killed the engine and let them lap against the stone. It domed them over like a canopy. But he knew there was much much more: just next to where the boat now huddled, a narrow doorway opened in the rock. The giant’s head was hollow, and deep enough to be dry.

  Michael stepped from the boat to the threshold, braced himself, and reached to pull Joey over the gunwale. He staggered backward into the cold dank chamber. There he stood for a moment, arms around the boy, gauging the folds of stone for a proper bier. Though the harbor rocks were razor-sharp and savage on the surface, here in the belly the lines were soft, the texture smooth as skin. He spied a kind of bench toward the back and dragged his burden over. Once again, he propped the body till it looked to be asleep.

  As he lingered there admiring it, he did not think to look at the floor of the cavern beneath his feet. The brassbound trunks had rotted long ago, so the gold lay about in heaps. Amulets, buckles, and priestly cups. Link chains and a burst of coins. They gleamed like the dimmest candles. Where Michael stood, the heel of his boot crumpled what was left of the silver dish from Peru. It was black as a deep-sea shell, and he didn’t even feel it. All his other treasures had vanished into the air.

  All but one: the delirious spores he had stolen off a holy man in a sky-high mountain village deep in Ecuador. They were stored in an alabaster jar, tissue-thin and dry, like the petals of long-dead roses. Some sea wind a century past—some turtle, some mindless crab—had knocked the jar over. It lay on its side on the ledge, not a foot from Joey’s head, yet Michael was so rapt, he did not spy it there in the shadows. The lid had fallen off. The spores had billowed out and seeped across the surface like a fungus. The whole inside of the cavern swarmed with it, two or three inches thick in places. If Michael had carried a lamp he would have seen: the walls were furred with an ochre scum, vile and gelid and somehow conscious.

  It did not require that you eat it. So much mutant life shot through it that it quiver
ed and sent forth a fishlike odor that drugged the blood just by the act of breathing. Michael swayed and seemed about to topple over, as if the giant rock had come unanchored and pitched and rolled in a dreadful storm. He grinned at nothing, and the grin buzzed in his ears. He was so far off his head that he thought he was in the cabin of his ship. His dear boy slept in the bunk, while he sailed them out to a desert island.

  When he left the cavern and stepped down into the waiting boat, he felt as if only a part of him were going. He had become the sudden demon of the cave, and now he need only dream his passage through the fallen world. He’d recovered his former sanctuary. It was pure to him as a fountain of youth, or a long-lost gilded city seen through a chink in a mountain wall.

  Emerging from the core of darkness, he reached a hand to the stone of the upper doorway. He sopped up a handful of gleaming junk and brought it aboard the runabout. He lay it gently on the seat beside him like a tuft of moss or a garland. He sniffed at his fingers as he crossed the dusky harbor toward the dock. There was no longer any problem which hand was which. He was all of a piece now.

  The air had turned the drug spongy by the time he tied the boat up to the piling. He lifted the sacred balm carefully—it looked like a hunk of bread—and stowed it in his jacket pocket. Then he climbed to the dock to eat his supper. Not bothering even to skin the fish, he bit off chunks and chewed them slowly, alert to the slivers of bone that lurked in every mouthful. Sitting on a coil of rope he watched the rim of the cliff above as if to wait for the next to go.

  When he went uphill to the night-lit village he thought perhaps it was time to sleep. But as he wandered home along the quiet street he could feel the drug shining in his pocket. He wished he would chance upon a dying man so he could feed it as gentle as cake. Or stir the tiniest crumb of it in some kid’s cup of milk. Just then he passed a plate-glass window and happened to see thrown back at him his strange and grinning double. Automatically he walked over, laughing as soon as he saw what a motley figure he cut.

  Where was his short sword? Where were his deep brocades?

  He got so close he could see his eyes, and then, like a trick with mirrors, the room beyond the window leaped at him. It was the general store. He could see a double aisle of groceries, beyond it the butcher’s board. Then bags of potatoes and onions on the floor, and the window full of fruit in wicker hampers.

  He moved to the door without thinking. He tried the knob, and when it wouldn’t budge, he kicked in the window beside it, reached around and released the latch. The sound of the breaking window flashed through the town like a gunshot.

  Michael crunched across the broken glass to the fruit display. For a while he contented himself with stroking an apple at random, then a green pear, cupping them around in a swoon of wonder. His hands were slippery still with the dope, so he left a smear on every fruit he touched. It thrilled him to think what a stroke of luck now rode on every basket. He rubbed two fingers against the flesh of a tawny quince, wondering how soon now before another figure like himself came grinning up the street and wanting more.

  He almost seemed like a priest just then, come out to bless the harvest. Then he was seized by a sudden worry. What if they washed them clean before they ate them? He turned in a panic, to find a more suitable ground to breed in. He stumbled along the line of shelves, trailing a vague hand over row upon useless row of canned goods. He came to the jars of condiments. Reached for a pot of mustard, began to unscrew the lid—

  But the whole thing suddenly made him weary. It would take too long. He needed to spoon it in, to lay it on each one’s tongue like a wafer. This store-bought food was alien to him. He could not picture how it got from here to a person’s plate. He had not sat down to a dinner in years.

  So he turned to go. He had a notion that what he ought to do was trace the village’s pipes up into the hills, back to the stream that fed them. But even if he found it, his magic would dilute before it ever reached their lips. It would bloom no more than a blossom’s worth, and that as brief as lightning. If only they realized that he had this wonderful gift for them. This cure.

  And then he saw the rack of little cakes. Kids’ cakes: two for a quarter, with a cardboard sheet of frosting slicked across the top and a dollop of raspberry filling inside. And tiny four-inch pies and boxes of powdered doughnuts. Michael dropped to a crouch and looked. The children, he thought with a thrill of triumph. Feed the children first.

  He sat cross-legged on the floor. He drew the mess of fungus from his pocket and perched it on his knee. It gave off the faintest scent, like peaches. Then, with a hideous patience, he undid a package of cupcakes, careful not to tear the wrapping. He broke off a nipple-sized fragment of drug, pushed it with a finger into the bottom of the cake, then wrapped the whole thing up again. He counted on a certain pitch of hunger to keep the children from looking too closely. After all, he had subsisted for years on cakes like these, popping them into his mouth unthinking. He knew the impulse cold.

  It was hours before he was done. By then, the remaining fungus was no bigger than a half-gone bar of soap. All the fast-food pastries were arrayed as neatly as ever. There was eighty-eight dollars in the cash drawer when he left. He was not a common thief. He shut the door behind him precisely, and as he walked along the street he tossed the fungus back and forth between his hands like a queer itinerant juggler.

  He had no plans. He thought he would like to go lie in bed and set his mind to drift. Then if anyone wanted him in the night, he’d be right there. But he dared not enter Maybeth’s house, once he saw the women in the parlor. Somehow he had to wait till they were fast asleep, or else … he didn’t know what. He waited another good hour, sucking his hand and trampling the flowers, just watching. And the next step came to him slowly, and burst in his head like a seed.

  Of course: it was time to cut everything off.

  As he turned from the window and ran, he only feared the night would not be long enough. He didn’t see how a single man could do it. The fear of failure drove him. He ran full out to the end of the village, then went straining up the long dark hill. If he left so much as a line still open at daybreak, he knew the power would pass from his hands. An icy fog lay close against the hilltop. His lungs began to stab, but he didn’t stop to catch his breath till he’d crossed the bridge and made it back through the close-grown trees to the highway.

  What he sought was just on the other side: the sign he had not needed when he came. He moved along the pavement, savage with disdain. The road was a pagan artifact, like dolmens on a heath. One arrived by sea or not at all. He stood there staring up at it: Pitt’s Landing, white on green, with an arrow pointing seaward. Underneath that, the bare statistics: elev. 149; pop. 213.

  Two-twelve, he thought automatically, grabbing hold of the wooden post. Jerking it back and forth, he pulled it loose from the roadside. Flinging it down the embankment, he could feel the wilderness grow—as if the village had ceased to be, just by the loss of a name. All he knew was this: he was a million miles from his father’s house. He capered down along the wooded slope to the bridge, turned left, and beat his way through the waist-high grass that skirted the edge of the gully. He kept looking up at the sky as if to guide himself by the whirl of planets.

  He came at last, in a far field, to a double row of iron poles marching east to west, going out across the gully and on toward the village. A cat’s cradle of high-tension wires hung at the top of every pole, then paid out in a swoop of wire to the next set of stanchions down the line. He could hear the hum of power, even as he reached the foot of one of the columns. The metal itself, when he touched it, keened with a low vibration, as if blood coursed underneath the surface.

  He climbed it rung on rung like an insect on a stalk, clawing his way to the flower. When he reached the first crossbar, twenty feet up, he stood to look out at the nightland. It lay like an unclaimed country, wholly unexplored. When he reached above his head to the fluted white ceramic bell, wound tight with a black-t
aped cable, he might have been getting a teapot down, or a mug for his nightly cocoa. The raw juice flooded into him. A shower of sparks went up like a geyser as he twisted the cable to disengage it. The dark glowed yellow around him. He seemed like an angel hovering over the fields.

  As to the puzzle of the electric field, he didn’t understand a blessed thing. The phenomenon evaded him. He stood with his feet apart, unwinding the wires in the nexus above with a strange, intuitive skill. He’d been up in the rigging of countless ships, so he had the trick of loosing knots. The cable came undone in half a minute’s time. It dropped with a sound like a bullwhip, landing in the grass with a great whump. The last of the power poured out of it in a low blue flame on the cooling ground. From where he stood at the top of the mast, it looked like a nest of fireflies.

  He moved to the next conductor, hanging down from the bar a foot from his shoulder. By now he knew just how to do it. He loved the sight of his shimmering hands as he worked the cable off the spool. There was a certain iciness at the center of the current—as if he had dipped his hands in the deeps of space. How starlight felt, if you got that far. The cable fell like a broken vine. Then the next, and the next. He went down the row in a kind of dream, tugging things free as if he meant to launch a ship.

  Throughout the village, the night-light died. If he could have been two places then, he would have loved the sight. The single lamp in the living room window, the pea light plugged in the bathroom socket, the random clockface—whatever was kept burning against the black unknown—now snuffed and died. Some few, like the women in the boardinghouse parlor, knew it the moment it happened. There was nothing to say: they simply drew up closer to the fire.

  Most of the village slept through it. Their appliances sat like scrap in the shelves and closets. Their freezers started to thaw. It appeared that they were going to wake up innocent. They would not begin to feel the change till they tried to turn on some minor thing—the toaster, say—only to find that the heart of the house had had a seizure in the night, stranding them all in the Dark Ages.