“Why did they come here? What attracted them to this land?” I asked, remembering the museum exhibit and assuming the stone just ahead was the same one in the old photographs.
“They passed nothing on,” Freya said.
Roberto picked up an axe. Rust dropped from its blade onto the table.
“They passed nothing on,” Freya repeated. But of course. The Master was concerned with procreation, the begetting of cells, not art, so Royall’s community, and Roberto and I, met with pious disapproval.
Their ecological doomsday festered in their imagination as vividly as any revelation John experienced on Patmos. It was a wonder these people sent their low-caste children to panhandle among us in Provincetown; it was a wonder they hadn’t teamed with the fundamentalists against us. But perhaps Royall’s all-male enclave—dead by Harding’s inauguration—was scapegoat enough.
Freya now spoke in the singsong tone of a docent at a historic house: how the men were divided “by muse and material,” how the metal-workers’ forge had been struck by lightning and now lay in ruins under poison ivy, how local anti-German sentiment flared up after the Kaiser’s submarine shelled Chatham. “And then, in all the ruckus, Gilbert Dyer killed Royall.”
Gilbert Dyer—the model for The Fisher Boy in the Provincetown Municipal Museum. “What?” I said.
“Dyer killed Royall,” Freya said.
History, the authorities, the media of the day, had said Royall had disappeared. His clothing and car had been found in Truro, on the town’s Atlantic coast, at Skusset Beach. She laughed. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the stone walls had been plastered then whitewashed and painted with figures, with naked blond men wrestling and swimming in some vague summer landscape all conifers and fiords. Except for the absence of women, this display of Teutonic flesh might have suited the Master and his followers just fine.
“They found Royall’s grave in the woods,” Freya said, “while they were gathering mushrooms.” She shooed us out and was about to lock the door. “My sons found him,” she said, and her voice broke.
Then I knew—who they were and who she was. Of course, she handled the community’s finances—and she’d had two children, both of them sons.
“It got to my older son,” she said, banging shut the door, as if shutting out the memory of her older mad son, shutting out the memory of both sons…
As we neared the rock, I could see it was a boulder, scoured by a glacier from some place further north—the tundra of Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire—then transported here by that grinding sheet of ice. Scratched into its sides were graffiti of sorts, something patterned on the script of a dead people, a dead culture. Were they Norse? Probably not. But the markings on this rock had lured Royall to this land, and, in a sense, exerted significance for these people.
The tree, the beech, next caught my attention. It had bark the gray of varicose veins and was thick, surely thriving when the crew from the Mayflower stole ashore to raid baskets of corn local tribes were stockpiling for winter. Hanging from the limbs of the ancient beech, among its reddish-bronze leaves, were dozens of tiny golden bells—and pieces of what might be beef jerky, buzzing with flies.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Cause for celebration,” Freya said brightly. “Offerings from births. We’ve had three this month.”
Hanging in the tree, rotting in the sun, the umbilical cords twisted in the hot August wind. This was their Tree of Life—the tree connecting heaven and earth—Yggdrasill, the Norse had called it, but the umbilical cords smelled like roadkill. Like the rest of this place, their Tree of Life emanated the stink of death.
Freya touched the umbilical cords, her fingers lingering on their scabby surfaces.
“We should go now,” Roberto said.
Something stirred in the shade of the tree. On the grass by the pond, half hidden by the rock, something moved with the awkwardness of exhaustion. I thought it was a dog, but then saw the gleam of naked flesh and the links of a chain connecting a human ankle to the tree.
Roberto hadn’t seen this. He was trying to disengage from Freya. “Thank you for everything,” he was saying, using all of his skills. “This whole day has been fascinating.”
It was a girl. Her head had been shaved and her back was shining with welts swollen fat like maggots. She was naked, so that the mud mingled with her wounds. She’d been chained by her ankle to the tree with its rotting umbilical cords.
Seeing me, she cringed, like a dog from a puppy mill that associates human contact with brutality. She wasn’t the girl from the Provincetown Public Library or the girl I’d encountered in the road in the woods or the child who’d served our food; it was someone else. She was crawling toward a bowl of water, which the chain prevented her from reaching. I gave her the bowl and she snatched it and rolled away, like a starving dog defending a hunk of gristle.
“How dare you?!” Freya was suddenly beside me. She’d bumped against a branch, jingling its golden bells.
“This girl needs a doctor!” I shouted. “Can’t you see that?”
The girl cringed, holding the bowl of water.
“Look how you’ve frightened her,” Freya said.
“She’s frightened of you, of whoever did this!” I said. “What did she do wrong? Do something inappropriate for her level?”
Roberto now saw her, saw the welts and the wound where the chain had grated away flesh. “Oh, God!”
They might be doing this to Chloe, I realized. Anyone who did this was capable of anything. “Undo that chain!” I said. “Undo it right now!”
“I think it’s time you went on your way,” Freya said.
“Not without her, not without taking her to the hospital,” I said.
“She is being healed right here,” Freya said, “by the air and sunlight, by the stone and the tree and the power of the Master.”
“That stone is a hoax!” I yelled. “The Norse never reached Massachusetts.”
“Now!” Freya called to a figure beyond Royall’s buildings.
From a distance, he looked like a welcoming sight, dressed in our century’s clothing, wearing a T-shirt, denim jeans, and orange work boots.
“He’ll show you out,” Freya coldly stated, and, as her colleague came closer, I saw that our argument was ended by what he carried in his hand—a very contemporary piece of metal, a gun.
His reflecting sunglasses made twin duplicates of my frightened face. He was swarthy, Mediterranean. Grit from a boat or garage had lodged permanently beneath his fingernails. He was missing his van with its backrest of wood beads and synthetic fur sheathing its steering wheel, and he was missing his soundtrack—the classical tapes he’d played louder and louder—after picking up a hitchhiker, a young man he knew, at the Orleans traffic circle earlier this year. The assault might have been fantasy, but the “assailant” from Edward’s story was here, exactly as described.
To see a gun pointed at your gut is to see a gun for the very first time. In a movie, it’s a prop; mounted on a wall, it’s a trophy; in a shop, it’s merchandise. But, loaded and aimed at your body, at the vulnerability of your flesh, it is something entirely different—the instrument of your destruction. Suddenly, your worrying about AIDS and finances and the loneliness of age falls away.
“We have treated you as guests, but you have not responded in kind,” Freya said.
I heard the flies buzzing on the umbilical cords.
“Please see them out,” Freya said to the gunman. There was a gentle sadness to her voice.
Chapter Thirty-nine
We could’ve run, I suppose, but the weapon made us obedient, tethered us to this man, their Enforcer, the way the naked girl was tethered to their tree.
“The car is the other way,” Roberto said.
Him saying that flooded me with guilt, guilt at my involving him in craziness I should have left to the police.
“Your things are at the steam bath,” the Enforcer told Roberto, forcing us i
nto the forest.
Were we really headed for the steam bath, or was he taking us deep into the woods to be shot? Or stabbed, like Ian, our throats cut ear-to-ear?
Now, like the night on the breakwater, everything became vivid—the sharpness of the briars, the gleam of the poison ivy, the corrugated texture of the bark on the oaks and pines, and the smell of heat and dry brush. The forest fire danger was “off the charts,” the radio had reported. I wondered, at this moment, was my mother painting? The thought of my mother painting brought tears to my eyes; it seemed like the saddest thing in the world.
We reached the steam bath. It was still fired up; genies of steam were seeping from its door. Our clothes, like rescuers, lay snagged on the same tree.
Roberto seized his.
“No,” someone said.
Beside the entrance to the steam bath stood Jason—and Edward, Arthur’s treacherous treasure. Edward was wearing his tie-dyed shirt and the gym shorts made of that icy-blue fabric, the clothing he’d chosen for Arthur’s party that grotesque Memorial Day weekend weeks ago. So he had abandoned the fundamentalists, just as he had abandoned Arthur—and his mother and these people in the past. It was part of his character, abandonment. Edward shifted from season to season, like the sandbars, like the shoals, of Cape Cod.
“No,” Edward repeated.
“What do you mean, No?” Roberto asked.
With the last courage in my system, I blurted, “Is Chloe here, Edward? Is Chloe Hilliard here? What in God’s name do you want with that little girl?”
“There is no Chloe here,” Edward stated.
“We just want to leave,” Roberto said.
“You must be cleansed first,” Edward said. He nodded toward the steam bath. “Go inside.”
They weren’t going to shoot us, they were going to scald us to death, they were going to scald us to death in the steam.
“Go inside,” Edward repeated, his voice the only cold thing at that moment. Then, lightly, he touched my shoulder—tentatively, as if to make sure that I was real. It was eerily like my gesture at St. Harold’s years ago, my touching Ian Drummond in the chapel.
“You’re a fool doing this,” I told Edward. “After what happened to your brother.”
He smiled, in his self-effacing way, the geisha’s smile he’d used at Herring Cove to beckon men to his blanket so he could rebuff them. Then he walked briskly up the trail until the vegetation closed over him and he was gone.
“Gentlemen,” someone said, “we don’t have all day.” It was Jason, in his Armani. But it was the Enforcer and his gun coming closer that made Roberto and me obey when the Enforcer commanded, “Give back our clothing.”
Naked, I felt that much more defenseless. There were two of us and two of them, but we stood still as the dolls in Mrs. Mikkonen’s shop. Was the Enforcer’s the last face Ian had seen? Would I die at the hands of the man who’d killed my brother?
Jason opened the door to the steam bath.
“Cleansing,” the Enforcer said.
As if we needed to be cleansed to leave their property.
Steam rushed from the door, in scalding, lethal billows.
We’d been allowed to eat the same food as the Master not because we were on his level, but because we’d been sentenced to die. We’d been sentenced to die before I’d derided their stone or demanded they free the chained girl. The Enforcer was waiting for Freya’s signal. They had meant to kill us all along.
“We just want to leave,” Roberto said. “We’ll leave you alone, we won’t say a word.”
The Enforcer advanced toward us, pointing the gun. In desperation, I remembered he had let Edward go. If Edward’s story was true, he had assaulted him, raped him, but ultimately he had let Edward go, let him flee to Provincetown, where Arthur found him, sleeping on the sand on the beach.
The Enforcer jabbed the gun into my ribs so that my heartbeat amplified, filling my chest.
Roberto ducked into the steam bath and I followed.
Steam scalded my skin, made my whole body sting like a fresh cut.
“It hurts to breathe!” Roberto yelled.
We heard a bolt fall outside and lock the door.
I felt the skin around my nostrils begin scorching. “Get down, get close to the floor!”
I thought the floor might be spared the rising heat, but the tile seared my hands and knees.
I found the altar through the thickening steam, but the potential weapons I’d seen during our “cleansing”—the iron tongs, the pokers, the jars of oils and herbs—had been confiscated.
“They’re going to kill us!” Roberto was yelling. “They’re going to kill us!”
I pulled him through the steam toward the entrance. I struggled to open to steam bath door, but the bolt defeated me. Scratching at the spongy wood got me nothing but splinters for my efforts. I could feel the arteries in my head pounding. In desperation, I threw my weight against the door again and again until something in my shoulder snapped.
Then, suddenly, coolness slapped my face. I wasn’t even aware the door was yielding; that was obliterated by the injury to my shoulder, a white-hot searing that made me urinate.
Someone seized my wrists, saying, “Hurry up, damnit!” and pulled me upright. It was Jason. He yanked out a gasping Roberto.
My chest and arms were, red, scarlet, as though I’d sustained a hideous sunburn. My eyes were runny, but, once they cleared, I could see the Enforcer sprawled still on the ground, next to his sunglasses and some tongs from the altar.
“Get dressed and hurry the fuck up!” Jason told us.
Baffled, stinging, grateful, we complied.
“He’s unconscious,” Jason said. “I just hit him.”
He was helping us, God knows why. He hadn’t pulled us from the steam to stab or shoot us. We pulled on our clothes. He showed us a trail that led to Old Barn Road. “There a gap in the fence there.”
“My car—”
“They abandoned it in Welfleet hours ago,” Jason said. “You were considered dead meat as soon as you drove onto the grounds. You’ve caused me enough trouble, now get the hell out of here!”
“What about Chloe? Have you got the little girl?”
“Get out of here!” screamed Jason.
We ran. My clothing chafed my scalded skin. The trail was confusing—overgrown, blocked by fallen branches, and, once, by a rotting possum, swollen with death. How close we’d come, I thought, how close we’d come to losing our lives.
At least water was not a factor interfering with our escape. The brooks we crossed were mere gullies of muddy stones; swamps, expanses of muck and straw. My calves cramped, I felt awful. “Rest, just a minute,” I begged Roberto, but, with his legs strengthened by bicycling as a courier, he refused. “Not yet. In a while.”
So, visualizing the Enforcer regaining consciousness, I ran. Why had Jason helped us? I kept wondering. Had the Master changed his mind and decided to spare us? No, of course not; Jason had stopped the Enforcer by force, by attacking him with the tongs, by risking his own life.
I was faltering again when Roberto plunged through a field of ragweed to call out, “Here’s the fence!”
Chapter Forty
But where in God’s name was the gap in the fence Jason had mentioned? We’d forged our own route from the woods through the ragweed. We traced our steps back to the woods then saw the answer. To the left, the ragweed was matted flat by foot traffic, matted like the hair of a dog with mange. We followed this path then located the gap in the fence, low, close to the ground, used by youngsters from the cult, I guessed. We had to squirm beneath the fence—worried that it might be electrified, which it wasn’t—tearing our shirts on the talons of metal, on the vandalized chain-mail guarding the Master’s kingdom.
But then we were free! We had reached Old Barn Road. I could’ve kissed its asphalt.
I wanted to contact the police the way someone stranded in the Sahara wants greenery and water. We saw a house a short distance away,
and, aware of our bedraggled state, asked to wait in the back yard, under a pear tree with the hornets, while the baffled owner telephoned the police.
***
Roberto sat in the station, drinking cup after cup of spring water while I recounted our story and my theories about our day, Ian’s death, and the probability the Master had kidnapped little Chloe. One policeman, Sergeant Colby, summed up, “So you’re saying that these people tried to kill you?”
“That’s a fact.” Roberto channeled his impatience into crushing his paper cup.
“Why were you visiting these people in the first place?” Sergeant Colby asked me.
“They killed my brother, Ian Drummond—”
“And you visited them? Believing that?”
“The man with the gun, their Enforcer, killed Ian. Clark, the schizophrenic, couldn’t have done it, he was too incompetent.”
Sergeant Colby, who had also been drinking a Dixie cup of water, began scraping the wax from its rim. He chose his words with equal care. “There are some solid leads in the Drummond murder and Hilliard kidnapping. In regard to the situation at the former Royall property, that is a very volatile group of people, with a history—”
“They tried to scald us to death!” I shouted. My head was throbbing as though I was still in that hellish steam. “There are children being abused—”
“We know,” Colby said, “we’ve heard these allegations. Yet you say this African American—”
“Saved our lives,” Roberto said.
Sergeant Colby stopped his scraping. “Isn’t that a bit contradictory?”
“What about Chloe?” I asked.
“We hope that case will be resolved shortly,” Colby said.
“Resolved” sounded grim.
Did the police believe us? They advised us to avoid the cultists at all costs. It would be best, in fact, if we could lie low a few days, stay clear of our customary Provincetown haunts in case the Master’s protégés tried to pursue us. My Volvo, ditched in Welfleet, according to Jason, had yet to be found, but the police would give us a ride anywhere in Truro.
The Fisher Boy Page 28