“Can I hunt for a new one while you’re gone?” said the Collector, gesturing at the radio.
“Sure. Like this.” Spook put his hand on the knob at the base of the compass face, pushed it in, and started to twirl it. Spats of static filled the air. Boat-chirp. Guitar strum. BBC again, Arabic voice, static-spat—
“Wait,” the Collector snapped. “Go back.”
“Back where?”
But the Collector had seized the knob. When he’d finished futzing, he sat up, raised an eyebrow at Nadine, and she smiled in surprise.
“I love this song,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said. “So there.”
“You love songs? There are songs you love? Or recognise as songs?” She was laughing, reaching for his hand when he burst out singing.
“She was gone when I first met her
couldn’t even find the floor.”
Nadine joined in, and to her amazement, Spook did, too.
“I helped her out, I brought her down
but when I did she wasn’t there anymore.”
Beer, she was thinking. Group singalongs, to songs they had in common. Maybe she and the Collector still lived on this planet, after all. They were positively harmonising as that exquisite verse arced towards its conclusion, their voices hitting the rise right on time at
“Swept off down the . . .”
Except that the voice on the radio didn’t rise. It plunged, instead, off that so-familiar melody and down to a low, droning drawl, where it rooted furiously in a furrow of words Nadine had never heard before, gorgeous and wrong and strange. Something about “mist in the bones”, about “the heat under midnight”. Then – like a rabbit chased from a garden – it skipped from the song entirely, and the music grooved out on a skewed, broken acoustic guitar arpeggio. The Collector swivelled the volume almost all the way to silent.
“You knew that was going to happen,” Nadine said, her voice somewhere between amazed and accusatory.
“I thought it might,” said the Collector, fast, his fingers drumming the table. “Actually, I didn’t really think so. I mean, frankly, I thought that particular search for that particular client was never going to . . . Spook, where’s that signal coming from? Can we locate it?”
“You can if I’m involved,” said Spook, beer and group singalong immediately discarded in favour of quest. Because he and the Collector were the same species, Nadine realised. And here she was sitting forward. Watching what Spook did. Calling up from her own formidable memory everything she already knew about Robert William Guthrie, and pulling the RAM-crammed netbook she never left home without from her nightpack. Because she was one of them, too, apparently. Had she always been? Or had she changed when the Collector had – metaphorically – spirited her off ? Like a selkie?
From the long bookshelf above the galley sink, Spook had taken down some sort of cloth-bound reference volume. He opened it and started flipping pages, asking, “What band? Can you read the number off the dial? I need the whole set of digits.”
But when the Collector told him, he glanced up. “You sure?”
The Collector actually twitched in his impatience, like a bird dog with the scent in his nostrils, the leash all but strangling him.
“It’s local,” said Spook.
“How local?”
“Next door, practically. Right there.” Spook gestured toward the front of the boat, the open water, as if pointing to a precise spot. “Hang on.” He stood up, popped a latch on what Nadine had always taken for a breadbox – partly because it had the word BREADBOX engraved across the front – and drew down an impressively ridiculous piece of machinery. Another radio-type thing, two mini-dish antennae on top, some lights, the words COAST GUARD ISSUE stamped on the side. When he flicked a switch, the lights blinked.
“You are a spook.”
Spook swivelled another dial, and the dish-antennae rotated. Rotated some more. The lights flashed. “Hello,” he said, and looked up. “Not even fifteen miles out. Straight toward the Farallons.”
“We need a boat,” said the Collector, standing. “How do we get a boat?”
Spook glanced meaningfully around him. The Collector and Nadine caught the meaning at the same moment.
“This thing actually floats?” Nadine said.
“What would be the point of living on a houseboat if it didn’t?” Spook was already halfway up the little stairway toward the deck, the Collector right behind him, leaving Nadine, for a single moment, alone in the hold. Rodenbach forgotten in the fridge. Robert William Guthrie song still echoing in her head, in her companions’ voices.
“Having a house, maybe?” she murmured wistfully. To no one. “On a boat?”
Instead, she’d be spending the evening chugging out to sea, following the only known Pacific migration path of the giant Great Whites, but not to see them, either. No, she’d be chasing a signal, in the hopes of finding yet another arcane, lost thing for somebody else.
And that, she’d learned, years ago, turned out to be just how she liked it.
Grabbing her netbook off the table as the engines rumbled to life, she joined Spook and the Collector topside. The houseboat shrugged free of its moorings and slowly, cumbersomely – like a manatee, a domesticated one, something a Farallon Great White would swallow without even slowing – shuddered out of its berth and into the open water of the bay.
Earlier, on the way down from their cottage in the low Sierras to the harbour, both she and the Collector had remarked on the unusual absence of fog this night, the shadowy green of the grass valleys and then the ocean spreading unchecked all the way to the horizon and over it. But the moment the houseboat cleared the harbour’s headland, with its automated light flashing clear and white into the dark, the first wisps of mist rose in their wake. By the time they were three miles out, the northern California coast had vanished behind them, and the rumble of the boat’s engines had gone muffled, sunk into itself, as though swaddled in gauze. The mist wasn’t particularly thick, and it wasn’t cold, exactly. But the sensation it gave Nadine, wriggling along her skin and into her pores, proved no less unpleasant just because it was familiar. She’d last experienced it more than a decade ago, back in County Clare, on one of those winter nights when the fog streamed off Galway Bay and over the hillocks and all the way inland, causing this exact same painless ache. This dry damp. Even as a child, it had made her feel far from home. Long before she’d left.
Spook switched on an overhead flood, cut the speed, checked their course a lot. Once, he sent the Collector below to make sure the signal was still broadcasting. When the Collector assured him it was, he nodded.
“Be alongside him in twenty minutes. Maybe less. As long as we don’t accidentally run him over.”
Nadine held up the netbook. “Anything I can poke around for? Want to tell me what you heard?”
“Same thing you did,” said the Collector, staring into the fog as though he were translating it.
“Right. But it meant something else to you.”
“Not to me. To our client.”
“Are you really going to make me do this one question at a time again?”
The Collector didn’t look her way or anything. But he did smile. “Sorry. Habit. Plus, it’s kind of fun hearing you get—”
“I thought we didn’t do music people.”
“It’s not that we don’t do them. It’s that we’re almost never what they need. I mean, either they’re hunting rare pressings or stolen tapes or whatever, and those things usually aren’t that hard to track, and then it’s just a question of what someone’s willing to pay. So, snore. Or else they’re hunting something they’ve heard about, or been told stories about, and those almost always turn out to be stories. Apocryphal concerts, or mythical surprise shows no one actually saw but everyone somehow knows occurred. I really thought this was one of those. I mean, it’s been years.”
“At least eight, right?”
Now, the Collector did look at her. “How
the hell did you know that?”
Nadine sighed. “Because I don’t know about it. So, pre-me.”
“Oh, yeah.” His grin, she knew, was neither apology nor even acknowledgement. But there was love in it. Sometimes.
“Anyway,” she prompted.
“You’d have liked this guy. Super-passionate Robert William Guthrie-freak.”
“Aren’t all Robert William Guthrie freaks super—”
“Yeah. But this guy . . . I mean, he built a tower on top of his house. An actual turret, so he could go up and lock a trap door and be alone with the music. He calls it the Tower of Song.”
“Do dum dum dum, de doo dum dum,” Nadine hummed, and when the Collector just stared at her, she drummed her hands against her legs. “Oh for God’s sake, never mind, go on.” Then she wrapped her arms to her chest as the tendrils of mist wriggled in deeper. Spook just peered straight ahead, looking credibly captain-like. That was comforting, anyway, though the waters over the side, under the grey-white mist, looked nowhere near green now, but black. Opaque. Probably, they were empty. Not full of monsters.
“The way this guy talks about Robert William Guthrie performing . . .”
“Most people hate Robert William Guthrie performing. Because he never just sings the songs the way people love hearing them. That’s what I’ve always heard.”
“Right. That’s what this guy says. But he says people just don’t understand. He says Guthrie’s on this eternal quest. Because he knows there is a right way – and only one – for every single word, in every song, on any given night. The way those specific syllables, in that particular rhythm, to that individual tune, in his voice, are meant to sound that day. But he says catching all of that at the same time, in one performance, is like chasing a butterfly. Trying to get it to land on you. Some nights, it’s there, for a single second, and then . . .”
The first bump against the bottom of the boat did little more than surprise them, knock Nadine sideways half a step, and cause her to clutch the netbook. And that was good, because the second bump rocked the ship fifteen degrees sideways, dropped the Collector to one knee, and caused Spook to hiss in surprise.
“The hell . . .” he said, straightening, standing on tiptoes to see over the bow. The Collector had straightened, turned toward Nadine, and his expression proved so completely clueless, so astonished – as though he’d only just remembered or maybe realised he was on a boat – that she relaxed. A bit.
“Was that a log?” she asked Spook. “Shark?”
He didn’t answer right away, just held the wheel, watched the water. Every few seconds, it bumped against them, sometimes hard. Never too hard. Eventually, he shrugged. “It’s just the water. Water’s a little riled up. Just some chop.”
Which didn’t sound all that unusual to Nadine. She’d never seen any ocean without chop. And so while she noted that barely-there murmur of uncertainty in Spook’s voice, she was able to make herself ignore it.
“Should be there in five,” Spook said into the mist. “Maybe less.”
The boat heaved again. Not too hard.
“So, our man,” Nadine prodded the Collector. “Robert William Guthrie guy.”
“Oh,” said the Collector, blinked, and was off again. “Like I said, Nadine. You’d love hearing him talk. I’m not really a musico, as you know, but this guy made me get it. He made me understand. He talked about this one, legendary version – the version we just heard, I’m pretty sure – that Guthrie did of that song once, on some radio show, when he was very young, and then discarded for some reason. And it’s never been heard since. By anyone. He says that when Guthrie gets it right, you can just hear the magic. And when you sit with this guy, our client, and you listen to him explain, you really can hear—”
“You can’t, though,” Nadine said, and the boat bumped, and Spook swore. The Collector wasn’t surprised at her interruption. Or annoyed. He was waiting to hear. Because he was much more interested in what she might say than whether they might drown. Which was why they really were a team, as well as a couple. A little warmed, though no less damp or anxious, Nadine went on. “Not really. I know those guys. I’ve always known them. They’re all over Ireland. They explain it to you. They point out the moment, they get all excited. They get so excited, you think maybe you really do hear something. But really, I think they just make you want to. Because they do, so badly. But the magic in music . . . it’s not just in the singer. Not any singer. Not in any one way of singing, on one night, for everyone. It can’t be. It’s too simple. But maybe—”
“There,” said Spook, and right as he said it, the boat – as though juddering down a launch into a glassy pond – levelled, and the bumping stopped. Moments ago, Nadine realised, without being told and on instinct, Spook had cut the motors. They floated now, so slowly, toward the little sailboat just taking shape in the mist. Seemingly forming out of it. “Will you look at that . . .”
It looked tiny, drifting there. Very nearly still. Its deck empty and silent, its mast tall, green sail slumping in the absence of wind, like some kid’s toy sucked out to sea. As the mist closed around and behind them, blotting out the entire rest of the world, Nadine felt a shudder slide up her back, at least as much of awe as anxiety. As though she were on the Ark, and discovering the olive tree sticking up from the deluge. Abruptly, she turned around. Mist or no mist, she could see the water through which they’d come, swelling and flattening and slapping over itself as it churned.
She gestured toward the sailboat. “Isn’t that awfully small to be out here?”
Spook, she saw, was watching the water, too. The glassiness beneath them, so still it seemed frozen over. The roil everywhere else.
“No,” he said slowly. “But I see what you mean.”
“It’s like a hurricane,” said Nadine. “Like we’ve reached the eye of one.”
“A hurricane in the water?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. Can that happen?”
“Sssh,” the Collector snapped, and they shushed, and their houseboat drifted closer. And then they heard it. Somehow – because of the open air, the ocean, the mist, maybe – what reached Nadine’s ears sounded remarkably like the signals that had streamed from Spook’s shortwave. Same tinny compression. Same sense of travelling unimaginable thousands of miles on a rush of air. Even though this sound came from right in front of them.
Hands on the bow, head tilted forward to listen, Nadine felt the music lap against her. Flow inside. Felt her fingers tingle, then her spine. “Muddy Waters,” she murmured. “Wow.” And she listened. “Really early. God, so early. Listen – hear that? This has got to be like one of the first times with the amp, when everyone first heard that . . .” She looked up, at the Collector. “Unless this is the first time. But that recording’s supposedly . . . okay, who is this guy?”
“Hallo, the ship,” Spook called out, and Nadine froze, half-expecting rifle shots. Pirates boiling out of the hold. Jolly Roger flags, peg-legs.
Then she turned on Spook. “‘Hallo, the ship?’ People really say that?”
Spook’s smile could be so shy, sometimes. A good fifty years younger than he was, somehow. “I’m pretty sure somebody says it.”
But nobody answered. In surprising silence for such a long, lumbering craft, Spook’s houseboat glided up to the little sailboat. With one more look toward Nadine – for approval, she realised, because like the Collector, he actually thought of her as captain, in his way – he took the coil of rope he’d already lifted from some deck-top receptacle, tossed it over the sailboat’s rail, and in a few efficient passes of his hands, knotted the crafts together.
“How about, ‘Permission to come aboard?’” Nadine murmured to Spook.
“I don’t know,” said Spook. “A little Star Trek?”
“What’s wrong with Star Trek?” said the Collector, and Nadine laughed, and Spook, too, and then Spook actually did it. Yelled it out.
And the music went silent. But just for a second. And only beca
use a song had ended. Almost immediately, another one started. Some 1930s crooning thing. Violins warbling. Voice floating up from the warble and crackle to drift on the mist, hollow as mourning dove call, and all the lonelier out here, in the sea mist, amid what Nadine realised really might be albatross keening.
Almost until the end of that song, they waited. The music set all three of them swaying on that still water. If they stayed any longer, Nadine thought, the Collector might even ask her to dance.
Instead, he said, “I’m thinking permission granted.”
“Normal . . .” Nadine warned, but the Collector ignored her.
“In fact, I’d say we were invited.”
And with that, he stepped onto the deck of the sailboat, just as the crooning song melted into its own wavering. To be followed, instantly, by some spry banjo hurtling off at breakneck speed, with a whistling guy bobbing around on its wake like a water-skier.
“Maybe it’s automated,” Spook said.
“Maybe we should find out before your man there decides he can hornpipe,” said Nadine, gesturing at the Collector, who’d already swung himself over some coiled ropes and was making for a small set of steps leading down into the sailboat’s cabin. He was tapping his hands to the beat of the banjo. Or the thrum of the search.
Carefully, Nadine swung her own legs over the houseboat rail and onto the sailboat. Spook followed, and Nadine experienced a momentary but powerful misgiving. She almost asked him to go back. Just in case this was something pirate-y. Or stranger than it already seemed.
But in a different way than the Collector, Spook was in his element. Hunched, scuttling forward, his feet making almost no sound on the dry, nearly bare deck. Playing spook. Being his dad.
Neither scuttling nor hunching – but keeping her feet quiet, all the same – Nadine joined her companions, who stood together at the mouth of the stairwell. Whatever was down there, she saw right away, it was candlelit. The light warm and orange, but twitching, some. Wavering, like the voice of the crooner. Melting, constantly, into itself.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books) Page 27