by Farris, John
Joe hadn't given any thought to Mr. Phipps since he'd seen him near the breastworks; such was the hold the hurricane had on his mind and emotions. Now he couldn't be sure that what he saw was real, as if his mind, weakened like his body by vertigo, had taken refuge in hallucination.
To make the hallucination worse, much worse, his drug-affected vision had begun to play even stranger, surreal tricks. The right eye, which all through his ordeal since waking up in the beach house hours ago had provided a normal visual field, was blurring now, from stress and irritation. The blurring was made worse by the opaque nature of the rain on the Lexan bubble. At the same time, in what had been a hemianopsic void, the filigreed, wisp-thin strands of light began to form a pattern, a mosaic of geometric shapes, so that the bubble around him began to look like a perfectly halved section of a geodesic dome—but flat, crystalline, without dimension.
He blinked and turned his head to the right.
Surprisingly, half of Mr. Phipps reappeared within the mosaic as he crept against the wind toward the cockpit. Motionless for a few moments, his lips pulled flat against his teeth, eyes nearly closed, the mosaic half of Mr. Phipps became dimensionless also, a figure composed of hexagonals and etched on glass. But his left hand and left leg continued to move, the hand reaching slowly for a vent near the front of the cockpit as he pulled himself across the top of the teak trunk cabin. The teak provided a lot of resistance even in the sheets of rain that swept across the shuddering boat.
Except for the slight movements of his head, Joe sat motionless and fascinated in the rear of the cockpit. He couldn't be sure, despite flashes of lightning, that Mr. Phipps knew he was there. He might only be seeking the best shelter he could find, as Joe had done.
With his grip, on the vent secure, Mr. Phipps rolled to his left side. His right half moved too, in Joe's mosaic vision, but in a discontinuous stuttering fashion, the action broken into a series of flash impressions, so that when his hand came up with the nickel-plated revolver in it, for Joe it was like watching a jerky old black-and-white silent film.
Confused by what his brain was telling him, and not telling him, Joe dwelled on this curious breakdown of space and time without processing the imminent danger.
Mr. Phipps fired a shot through the Lexan bubble. It missed Joe's head by a couple of inches. The immediate high-pitched scream of wind through the exit hole behind him galvanized Joe. He threw himself off the seat and to his left to avoid impaling himself on the helm mounting from which the wheel had been removed to storage.
The companionway doors were padlocked. He had less room to manuever in the cockpit than a gerbil in a cage. Crouched on the sole, he wouldn't be a target again until Mr. Phipps hitched himself closer—another few feet against the wind that was trying to tear him off the deck of the Wayfarer. His position was precarious but Joe's was impossible.
There was a miscellany of tools in the cockpit locker beneath the bench seat. Joe felt inside the locker and picked up a chromed winch handle eighteen inches long. Then he risked rising from his knees to try to get a glimpse of Mr. Phipps without also catching a bullet, full in the face.
Mr. Phipps was off to his right, gun hand outstretched. With the wind and rain in his face his sight lines were narrowed; and apparently he had lost his glasses. Visually they might almost be even, Joe thought. But Mr. Phipps didn't have to be able to see well to pull himself to the cockpit coaming and fire methodically down into the cockpit until Joe was dead.
His only hope was to go after Mr. Phipps before he could come any closer.
With the winch handle in his right hand, Joe groped for the sliding panel on the port side of the bubble and moved it back. Pushing his head and shoulders out of the bubble was like being beaten with the stream from a high-pressure fire hose. He wormed his way far enough through the opening to grab a cap-rail stanchion with his left hand, and used it to pull himself, flopping in the huge wind, onto the two-foot-wide port-side deck. The mosaic of his hemianopsia was still in place, his right eye blurred. He lifted his head a couple of inches off the deck and saw Mr. Phipps lying motionless with his head down between hatch covers in front of the cockpit. The wind billowed his suit coat like a small dark sail. They were both pinned down. Joe realized that if he tried to stand he would immediately be blown off the Wayfarer.
But he had to do something about Mr. Phipps, or get shot.
He began to creep on his belly, following the curved cap rail. The wind was at his back, wanting to pick him up and bowl him forward to the pulpit. His left hand and arm ached from the strain of holding on as hemoved from stanchion to stanchion along the half-height trunk cabin on which Mr. Phipps lay spread eagled, his feet braced against the low curved grabrails. He was less than three feet away. Joe raised his head and saw the face of Mr. Phipps, half of it a pensive mosaic, the other half as alive as earthworms: gray, contorted from tension. His gloved hand moved on the teak surface of the trunk cabin, and the muzzle of the revolver qme around slowly toward Joe.
Joe let go of the cap-rail stanchion, rose up and hammered at the revolver with the steel winch handle, knocking out the cylinder and disabling the weapon. In spite of the glove he wore, the blow also broke Mr. Phipps's trigger finger and crushed half of the knuckles on his right hand.
In the next instant Joe went tumbling forward in the wind, over the foredeck to the pulpit, where he was wedged painfully against the shrouded mast and the pulpit railing, crammed as tightly as a big cork in a jug.
Mr. Phipps had turned himself around on the trunk cabin. There was an aura clinging to the mosaic of Joe's hemianopsia, like the afterglow from a nearby flash of lightning. But he couldn't see much of anything with the rain driving full in his face. He had only painful glimpses of Mr. Phipps making his way to the pulpit, black suit coat billowing like the Jolly Roger.
A shroud line had come untied in the gale and was whipping across Joe's face. He couldn't get his arms unpinned. The Wayfarer had begun to buck up and down in the drydock cradle. At each jarring motion the shrouded mast and sail loosened. With his feet under him, Joe was able to twist his left arm and handfree and grab the line that was lacerating his cheek and ear. He wrapped it once around his hand. In a brilliant flash that accompanied a tree toppling only about a dozen feet away, Joe glimpsed the looming black wall of the tidal surge, racing up the narrow channel of Pandora's Bay.
And Mr. Phipps was there, with the winch handle that Joe had dropped, clutched in his left hand.
Somewhat protected from the wind by Mr. Phipps's broad back, Joe ducked inside the intended blow as the winch handle slashed down through the rain. He rammed the top of his head under Mr. Phipps's chin, coming up nearly hard enough to break the man's neck. Mr. Phipps sagged against the shrouded mast, his mouth spilling blood and shattered teeth. Joe pounced on him with the end of the shroud line and wrapped it around Mr. Phipps's neck—twice, three times; yanking the line tight. Then he fell to the deck, knowing the tidal surge was almost on them. The forward hatch cover was eight feet away. A couple of days ago he had removed the chromed catch fitting to clean it. There was a gasket around the hatch that resisted his frantic efforts to pry it open. The sound of the wind had sunk to that of a low organ note, endlessly held. Over this sound he heard the black surge coming like a freight train.
Joe felt around on the deck for the winch handle, found it near where Mr. Phipps was on his knees trying to dig the shroud line out of his neck with the gloved fingers of his working hand. Joe jammed the handle through the gasket. The hatch cover sucked free of the vacuum created by the low pressure of the hurricane and flew back on its hinges. He wriggled around and dropped down into the small forward cabin, pulling the cover down with him, as the tidal surge swept across the Wayfarer and lifted her from the cradle. The hull, deck and bulkheads groaned as if she had collided with a supertanker. But most of the seams and joinings held.
Dismasted, out of control, moving faster than she ever had under sail, Wayfarer was borne on a fifteen-foot wave
through the hurricane air toward the Barony.
Chapter Forty-Six
Lucas Thomason said to Abby, with a necessary gravity of tone but not lecturing, "You can do yourself some serious damage if you don't listen to me! You're days overdue for your steroid shot. If your spinal cord flares up, then you could be paralyzed all over your body, not just in the legs."
But she was not in a state to listen to him, or anyone: she had done something rash and unwise, had nearly fallen fifteen feet to solid marble, a potentially fatal fall (Lizzie's quick hands had pulled her weight off the poorly anchored railing, and Abby had gone backward instead of headlong to the gallery floor), and she was so blanketed in bitterness and disappointment at her failure she couldn't speak. She lay on her bed, breathing hard, with eyes fixed on the slowly swinging light fixture and trapeze bars that cast multiple shadows on the the apple green walls and stamped-tin ceiling. The thick walls and shutters of the house accepted the full force of the wind and stood fast, but the house was not airtight; there were whistlings and moanings from every sliver of space around window- and doorframes, the house breathed as if it had lungs.
The lights were failing as the twin generators gulped gasoline. They needed to be refueled, by hand. Thomason had placed the ampule, which had arrived that morning from Switzerland, and which, in his hurry, he had not relabeled as Solumedrol, along with a packaged syringe on the Jacobean turned table beside Abby's bed. He looked at the paralytic, wondering if he should try to fill the implanted reservoir now, or give Abby a little longer to cope with her failure to take even a single step on her own. The despairing mood she was in, her long-standing hatred of needles—probably he should give her an oral tranquilizer first to settle her down.
Lizzie came out of the bathroom. "Can you do something about the lights?" she asked worriedly.
"Yes, I'd better take care of that. I'll be a few minutes. Sit with her, Lizzie. I'll send Lillian up with some cold Dr Peppers." He moved closer to the bed and blotted Abby's forehead with a tissue. "Or would you rather have a Sprite, Abby?"
Abby breathed harshly and didn't respond. Her hands were still clenched at her sides.
Lizzie edged onto the bed beside her and covered a rigid fist with her own hand. There was a sudden loud pounding downstairs: a sound of hazard, or threat. Lizzie jumped, her eyes blue sparks in a woefully flushed face.
"My God—what's that?"
Thomason frowned. "Somebody at the front door. I'll see."
"Maybe you shouldn't let them in," Lizzie said. "It could be a trick, you know, somebody pretending to be stranded when what they've really got in mind—"
"Don't let your imagination get the best of you, Lizzie," he said, but then he decided she had a point.
He smiled reassuringly at the girl and left the room.
In the hall outside Thomason paused to pick up a lighted hurricane lamp Lillian had left there—the gallery lights were now at a fourth of the wattage they had been a few minutes ago—and went to his own bedroom. From a compartment of a small English secretary he took out a compact eight-shot automatic and tucked it into his belt under the sport shirt he wore outside his pants.
Downstairs he responded to the frantic knocking at his door.
"It's Walter Lee!"
Thomason opened up. Walter Lee, soaking, stumbled inside, his black trousers muddy to the knees. Thomason forced the door closed again, and turned.
"Walter Lee, what—"
Walter Lee had his revolver out, pointed at the doctor's head.
"Look me in the eye. I said look me in the eye! And swear you didn't have nothing to do with killing my baby!"
"For Christ's sake," Thomason said, and threw the hurricane lamp at him.
The lamp exploded against Walter Lee's chest as he jerked his face aside and fired a shot, wildly. He fell to the floor, hands beating frantically at the burning kerosene, delicate flames that floated around his torso and head like an aurora. His clothing and even his skin was so wet the flames puffed out before they could do him serious damage. But he had lost his revolver, his impetus, his moral posture.
Walter Lee lay with his back against a wall, smoking and moaning, as Thomason retrieved the revolver. His own gun was in his other hand. He looked around quickly.. Kerosene was flaming all around him, on the green marble floor where it couldn't do real damage. None of it had landed on the vulnerable walls or stairs.
"Oh, God I'm blind!" Walter Lee screamed. "I can't see, help me!"
Lillian came from somewhere with another lamp and knelt protectively over Walter Lee. She looked back at Thomason, the rage of her race imbuing her with a bitter, brutal majesty.
"If you shoots him, then you just as well shoot us both."
"Lillian, get up from there! I'm not gonna shoot Walter Lee. He's gone crazy in the head, that's all. Accused me of killing Frosty. Now, that's crazy." There seemed to be a shortage of air in the house; he filled his lungs by gasping, but his head spun dizzily, he was sick of unpleasant surprises. He stuffed the guns behind his belt. "I don't think he's too bad off. His eyes probably got singed. I'll get some saline solution from the infirmary."
Lizzie was at the head of the stairs, screaming along with Walter Lee.
"What happened? What HAPPENED?"
"You get back in there with Abby," Thomason ordered. "He'll be all right." Lizzie's face was twitching out of control. "Don't you get hysterical on me, young lady. Do what I tell you."
He took the other hurricane lamp and was halfway down the hail to the infirmary next to the kitchen when he heard an ominous thundering sound—but deeper than atmospheric thunder, with a chilling liquid resonance—beneath the furious wind. He had a couple of moments to reflect on what it might be while his balls gathered tightly toward his groin and hairs sizzled on the back of his neck. Then the storm surge off Pandora's Bay, a crest of fifteen feet moving at perhaps sixty miles an hour and carrying with it everything from cemetery grave markers and aboveground coffins to the sheds and gazebo that had been in the garden to uprooted or snapped-off trees, reached the house.
The impact was like a bomb going off, followed by smaller but still massive thuddings and jolts as the contents of the surge were flung against the brick walls nearly as high as the roof. Shutters at several windows and the plywood sheets nailed over the French doors of the first-floor dining room were breached with loud rendings and reports of glass shattering. Something forbiddingly heavy had crunched through the plywood and jammed itself into the fifteen-by-twenty-five-foot dining room with enough force to buckle interior walls, creating gaps in the house through which all of Pandora's Bay was now flooding.
Seconds after the surge assault on the Barony, the lights went down for good.
Thomason had managed to stay on his feet and not lose his grip on the lamp. By its light he reached the infirmary and forced open a door that was hanging up in the jamb. Lizzie's screams resounded through the darkened house. He stood in the infirmary too dazed to think as black water swept in over his knees. Panic seized him and he waded out into the hall without remembering or caring why he had gone to the infirmary in the first place.
There was a swift current against him—the water surging at his hips, still rising—and wind in his face, but he had to see what Honey had wrought at the rear of the house. Severe structural damage could mean an impending collapse of his treasured home. The Barony, its history, the pretensions of its owners: the bitch hurricane had no inkling. She stomped everything flat in her path and moved on. A simple bird's nest high in a tree probably had better hope of surviving such winds.
Something sleek and black came toward him, swimming frantically, and instinct had him pointing his automatic before he recognized the head and popped, frantic eyes of Bruiser the mastiff .Bruiser bumped against him, making terrified yipping sounds, and was swept on down the hall in the direction of the front parlor and gallery. Thomason pushed against the tide, through pots and pans and bobbing bottles, to the kitchen. He held the lamp up to see furry
bedraggled creatures and glinting eyes on every elevated surface—range tops, counters, window ledges. He shuddered and waded waist-deep toward the dining room.
In the doorway between kitchen and dining room he stood braced against the swirling waters with the lamp held high, staring in disbelief at the Wayfarer—the forward two-thirds of the ketch, wedged into and taking up most of the space of the room, its keel resting on the remains of a mahogany dining table so long and heavy six strong men were required to move it, water beginning to ripple over the cap rails and decks. The immensely valuable crystal chandelier imported a century and a half ago from a Hapsburg palace lay, its many gold branches half-denuded like a discarded Christmas tree, on the foredeck.
And there was a body, hanging down from the pulpit of the Wayfarer, the head and shoulders submerged, swaying on a length of line running tautly over the pulpit rail from the shrouded horizontal mast. He couldn't see the face, which was under water, but the smallish puckers—like a child's finger-pokes in a brick of lard—from old pellet wounds that starred the partly bared buttocks and lower back were perfectly familiar to Thomason, since he was the one who had done the extractions many years ago.
While he was trying to account for the presence of the now-dead Mr. Phipps aboard the Wayfarer, then staring at the hole in the ceiling left when the chandelier was torn down, the forward hatch cover opened slowly and Joe Bryce, wet head gleaming in the light reflected from the, remaining crystal facets on one branch of the fallen chandelier, looked toward Thomason's lamp.
For a few moments they stared at each other. Then Thomason nodded, as if the bizarre occasion called for this minimum amount of ceremony. He fought the lassitude of shock and the urge to yawn, aimed his automatic and began firing.