Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  “What the—” sputtered the older man. “Who the hell are you?”

  Dean Bartlett did not wait to say. He pushed past and crossed the hall and threw open his bedroom door. Two little girls in bunk beds, wakened by the noise, sat up in terror. They had never seen him before in their lives. No more than their father had, who shouted down the stairs for his wife to call the cops. They had only lived in this house since August. They had scarcely met their neighbors—at number 86.

  For this was the house next door. The Bartlett boy wasn’t home at all. His brain was that far off, from three weeks on the ceiling. He had two sisters himself, in fact—twenty-four and thirty—and he somehow got it into his head that they’d all gone back in time and left him. It made him feel quite murderous. His sisters had stolen his room, before he was even born. This strange and violent man who beat him about the head, demanding that he leave, was the father who would not ever hold him. He thought: if he could only stop these people here, he would never have to come into this world at all.

  So he started to rip the place apart. While the terrified man in the tie carried his daughters out as if his house was burning, Dean Bartlett tore the mirror off the wall. He cracked it across the nightstand, flung it down on the floor, and drummed his frostbitten feet till the surface was crazed all over. Then he snatched up a half-scale rocking chair and smashed the dormer window. Frantically picking things up, he heaved out onto the lawn their toys, their dolls, their stupid little dresses. He grunted like an animal. Dean Bartlett was past the point of feeling danger.

  So oblivious was he that the man he had trespassed against had all the time in the world to get his gun.

  It was over before the first siren sounded. With the .38 he had promised his wife he would never use, he advanced to meet the darkness. The raving boy in the orange robe was tumbling the bedclothes out the window. He shot him point-blank in the back of the head. It was simple self-defense. The body fell like a sack of goods, the folds of the garment swirling about him. The blood bloomed like a halo around his head.

  Across the side lawn, at number 86, the bedroom shades went up. Ray and Irene pressed against the window, trying to see what it was without getting involved. The neighbors, it seemed, had troubles of their own. A thief perhaps, or the wife was faithless. Look at the crap all over their lawn. Like pigs. Then the cops drew up, and the Bartletts’ shades came rattling down.

  In Pittsburgh, it was a former medical student. He sneaked into County General and went on a rampage, pulling the tubes in Intensive Care. In Buffalo, it was a baby’s funeral. Two bald cultists stood and sang songs till a gravedigger beat them back with a shovel. In Fort Lauderdale, a naked one with long red hair threw herself into an open brazier where a spit of chickens was slowly turning.

  It wasn’t so much the body count. For the most part, the cultists themselves were the ones who were maimed and strangled. In every case, you could track down a culprit and toss him in jail till he rotted. The problem lay in the madness. No one knew what to call it, or dared to guess what it boded. It was as if death itself were making the whole thing up as he went along. Picking them off in a reckless pout, like petals off a daisy.

  As she followed the cliffside path in the red-gray light, Iris could see she was growing more accustomed to the place. The darkened tower stood stark and still on the promontory. There was no clue in the grassy field—its few poor blasted firs like sentries—that the village had just gone through a sea change. She walked to the end of the land with a healthy stride, as if she meant to merely whet the appetite. The lighthouse door stood open, and she went right in. She mounted the old stone steps in a circle, like a sea wife going up to make a brief appearance at her widow’s walk. She stepped out onto a rough-beamed platform that circled a center column of lenses and foot-thick crystals. A few feet away was the keeper’s desk, littered with paperback thrillers and pipe-ash. Roy sat back in the chair with his feet up on the windowsill.

  “There’s been a light here for a thousand years,” he said with a pedagogical air.

  How do you know, Iris nearly asked, annoyed at his endless smugness. She gave him a cold-blooded look, as if to agree to the terms of a duel. Then she sat on the corner of the desk, saying nothing. She waited for him to start over.

  “What are your powers?” he asked her suddenly.

  Iris laughed. “I have none,” she said.

  “Well, we’re up shit creek then,” Roy replied with a cocky sneer, “because he can do what he likes. He can break us all in two if he wants.” He was acting nasty, and his jaw began to twitch, like he wanted to fight dirty. It was clearly all her fault. “I was going to leave. I told you—this isn’t to do with me.”

  “Look,” she snapped at him, “I didn’t arrange this affair. Stop whining at me.” He looked away at the bitter blue morning sea. “Please—what is it you’re supposed to tell me?”

  “So anyway,” Roy continued, “everyone comes from somewhere else, but somehow they end up here. I always like to ask them what they used to do. Mostly, they were good solid citizens. Clerks and bankers and Little League coaches. No wonder they run this town like a ship.”

  “What do you want, Roy?”

  He turned and gave her a sorrowful look. Either no one had ever asked him before, or he didn’t believe they meant it. She almost thought he would cry, but he swallowed and cleared his throat instead. “Me, I’d just like to survive,” he said quietly.

  “That’s all?”

  He nodded, without any hope. Iris felt she had a right to much, much more. To survive it, yes, but then to go back to all she’d had without so much as a memory’s trace—as if nothing had ever intruded. Just to survive, it appeared as if Roy was willing to go with the sound of screaming in his ears. Not she. There were certain standards life would have to meet in order for her to go forward. Otherwise, she thought, she was better off dead and buried up behind the church. All or nothing.

  Roy stood up, as if he heard her question only now. He brushed past her and led the way downstairs. If they were leaving, Iris thought, then their meeting here in the tower was nothing but a scene. She’d got his number the night before: how he liked to play things out. But he reached the foot of the stairs and, instead of exiting into the park, pulled the door closed and barred it. A flutter of panic shook her stomach as he hunched down in the shadows.

  He creaked a lever back, and a trapdoor opened in. It swung back and forth on old strap hinges, with a well of dark below. A set of steps went spiraling down into the cliff. It was all so simple. Yet she had the feeling, following Roy, that she’d crossed some final line and entered the cavern of dreams. Now she could not rely on even the marginal real of the world outside the tower. The stairs bit deeper and deeper in; got colder and colder. She put a hand out to his shoulder as she walked behind, in a blackness without end.

  Why hadn’t he brought a light, she thought. But the question had no force. They had already passed beyond the pull of words, perhaps fifty steps in a minute. She wished she’d counted. And then—it was strange, this part, like going through a mirror—a glow began to appear in the tunnel of space below. A natural light, where a light could not possibly be.

  “What is it?” she whispered gently in his ear. Forgiving him all his moods, so glad was she to be with someone.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never been down.” And then, by way of apology as the glow lit up their faces: “I was waiting for you.”

  The stairs were cut out of solid rock. They descended from vein to vein—first shale, then granite, then a puddinglike stone, with here and there a crease of shells or a fossil fish. Before she knew it, they’d reached the end of the flight and come out into a hollow. They must have been right at the face of the cliff, because a thin long opening, shaped like the crescent moon, opened through the rock to the light of day. A ray of the risen sun streamed through, and the cry of the wheeling gulls.

  So that explained the radiance. All around the walls there were band
s of color—rose and lavender, bottle-green, coral, silver, deep sky-blue. The whole place was painted in rainbow waves, the colors trailing off into tunnels on every side. The mountain was shot through with labyrinthine ways. The dazzling hue of the painted cave made light of the deep, inverted world.

  “What is it?” she said, not aware she had repeated herself.

  He shook his head, as bewildered as she. “All I’m supposed to do is bring you down,” he said. But his tone had changed. He no longer wished to punish her. Now that he knew there was no way out except straight down the middle, Iris was his last hope. “The Indians must have painted it,” he added after a moment.

  “What Indians?” she asked. She ran the palm of her hand along a peach-colored bulge in the stone to where it whorled and deepened into red.

  “Don’t you know anything?” Roy retorted, full of exasperation. “That’s who used to live here. They camped along these cliffs for a thousand years.”

  This thousand years he spoke of grew more and more inexact. She could tell she had already reached the end of his information. She leaned up close to the wall. The paint was so old it had drunk right into the stone. The rock itself might have borne the color, except she could see the human frail of the brushstroke, the lopsided edges and passionate speed. It was not, like nature, perfect. It didn’t run to type.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Vanished,” he said, but as if to play the drama down. “Maybe they just moved on.”

  “No,” said Iris simply. She didn’t know how she knew, but she had a sudden vision of Fate, breaking like a dam. “Wiped out,” she said, though she couldn’t see how.

  They ventured down the nearest tunnel in single file with Iris leading. Since he’d done what was required of him, Roy could have now retreated. She knew that his staying was meant for her alone. There was light in the tunnel ahead, from the random hole in the wall that wormed its way to the outside air. A certain rippling along the stone made it clear that the tunnel led all the way down to the water.

  “Look at all the bones,” she said.

  For after a certain point, spaced every fifteen feet or so, there were skeletons propped against the wall. They sat on the floor of the tunnel, hands in their laps, heads tilted off to the side like they’d only just fallen asleep. It seemed they had slipped away to heaven without a shred of pain.

  “What bones?”

  Why, these, she thought.

  But then in a flash she realized: he couldn’t see them at all. And then, just as suddenly, they weren’t even there. The trick in her eyes had only taken over for a moment. Now it was back to the empty cave, and the smell like jasmine had disappeared. Iris did not continue—didn’t say more, didn’t go any further down the tunnel. There was no point trying to tell him. What she’d seen was something very old: the way a gentle people laid its dead to rest.

  As if, somehow, they were only resting. With a sea breeze to blow away the stink of their rotting bodies, to polish the bones till they gleamed like mother-of-pearl. No pall hung over the place. No silence. The tidal rhythm echoed up from below, wave after wave, like the mountain was breathing.

  Of course she knew these Indians. Now she remembered the dusty case in the town hall: the shards of broken pots, the swatch of weaving, the doll in the eagle-feather dress. She knew now she was one of them. She had lived out a life among her kind, on the thin edge between forest and sea. She had buried her father down here—a lover, a sister, a hundred more. She was sure, if she went up now, she could locate the square of land where she’d pitched her two-poled tent. She could almost see what lay about inside—an old black bearskin, a stack of painted bowls—

  “Will you help me, Roy?”

  “I guess,” he said with a shrug that was only part indifference. “What do I do?”

  “Go around to all the rangers. Tell them I want to see them.”

  “But when?” he demanded caustically, as if they were out of time.

  Iris shrugged. “Whenever. They can come to my room, or I’ll go to them. Whatever they like.”

  As she gave him these instructions, she slipped past and led them back to the cavern at the bottom of the stairs. When he made no protest, merely nodding, she began the long steep climb. Though Roy had been required to lead them down, only Iris seemed to know it backward. He followed her gratefully, scrambling up with his hands against the walls on either side, as if he had to work to keep his balance. He puffed and heaved, while Iris floated up like something freed of gravity. Her feet barely touched.

  When she reached the top, she unbarred the door and threw it wide, like spring returned from the underworld. She made straight for the hall of records, bounding across the dew-soaked park. She did not turn around to Roy, either to give him a boost or to say it in more detail. Once would have to do. She had already asked the same of Maybeth, just before she left the house at dawn. Even now, the landlady was out among the retirees, passing the word that this year’s woman would speak to them if they liked. Nothing was said about what she would say.

  All Iris needed now was someone to go to the weather people, and maybe someone else to do the men in power, the proprietors and officials who had charge of daily life. If she was going to be stuck all day just sitting and hearing stories, she would have to have intermediaries.

  You could tell that the rules had changed. All up the main street, blinds were drawn. No one walked abroad. At the general store, Ned Dexter surveyed the damage to his locks and windows and gave her a baleful look as she passed. She did not stop to protest her innocence. She and Michael were bound to be accused in equal measure. Most of the villagers probably thought they were lovers—the same as every other year, except this year things were worse. Everyone hid inside and waited. She wondered as she walked along who Michael would send around to knock on doors. How would he reach them?

  At that, the bell in the church began to toll. It chilled her and made her go faster. She didn’t know why, but she was sure it was Michael pulling the rope. It could have been anyone. The church had a minister, didn’t it? Now was the time, if he had a prayer that worked. Yet there was something in the sound—insistent, lonely, as if to mock the striking of hours—that could only come from a prophet.

  She ran up the town hall steps and hurried inside, thinking to have a last hour to herself before the villagers came to talk. Polly was there in her usual place, as she had been every morning for eighteen years. Her cloak and scarf were all hung up, with a newspaper spread on the floor below to catch the occasional runoff. The coffee bubbled in the percolator. She looked up now with a bright expectant smile, the way she always did. She seemed to have forgotten entirely the naked words of the day before.

  “Well, hello again,” she said.

  Iris nodded and studied the moment briefly, then moved through the swinging gate to join her in the inner office. She walked right up to the specimen case and crouched to look at the artifacts. “Can you open it?” she asked.

  “I never have,” replied the other delicaately. “The air, you know. Wouldn’t it all disintegrate?” She made a helpless gesture, fluttering one hand like a fan. Then: “I suppose it doesn’t matter now.” She drew a ring of keys from her sensible pocket and stepped up close to the cabinet.

  “No,” said Iris, staying her hand. “You’re right. But tell me, why does he make no mention of them?” Pitt, she meant. She was talking about the folio journal, still spread out on the desk. The crinkled parchment pages rippled like the surface of a pond. “Surely they were still here.”

  Polly’s smile was suddenly full of complicity. She stepped up nearer, as if to whisper in Iris’s ear. The day before she had done all her stepping the other way. “But don’t you see,” she said, “the book’s been copied over.” Iris stared bewildered at the desk. “It’s old, all right,” said Polly, fairly reeling with the secret she was finally letting out. “It’s all one hand—it matches up with his letters. But the whole thing’s just too neat. There aren’t any br
eaks. We’ve got a dozen captains here,” and she swept an arm along a shelf of moldy volumes, each a different size, warped and discolored and falling apart. “Most of it’s scrawled all over the page—practically unreadable. Because of the roll of the ship.”

  Iris didn’t bother to go and check. The truth was the truth, pure and simple. Polly stood almost panting, as if she had not said half so much in her life. “So he cut all the Indians out,” said Iris, bitter and puzzled. “And now you’re going to tell me there isn’t any record of them.”

  “True,” admitted Polly, with a shy regretful smile. “There’s just these few little things. Except … what people remember.”

  Iris nodded. She looked from fragment to fragment, as if they formed a rebus she could read, if she only had the key. Then she said: “I remembered something myself, just now. I was—” Here she stopped short, not sure how much she ought to tell. The enemy might be anyone.

  “Down in the caves,” retorted Polly, finishing up the sentence for her. “The reason I know … see, Roy’s a friend of mine.”

  They had fallen into a halting cadence, as if they could scarcely say a thing without checking first for falsehood. The previous morning’s harshness had cleared out all the easy talk. If they were going to put it behind them, they had to be utterly guileless. Everything seemed much simpler now. There must have been people once, thought Iris, who always talked like this.

  “One other thing,” declared Polly. “About the eclipse …”

  She struggled to get it right, but then it seemed to escape her. Perhaps the astronomical part could not be put into words. She looked at the bars of sun thrown off by the tilted blinds. It almost seemed that the light itself—mottled, fearless, mute—was evaporating the thought before it could quite occur.

  “Yes?” prodded Iris. “Next Tuesday, right?”

  “No, no. The other one.”

  Iris looked across at the open book, her eyes full of wonder. She hardly had to ask the details, so sharp did the picture flash across her mind. There had been another one, then. Some perfectly normal day in the summer of 1588, and all of a sudden the lights went out.