She took a long, stuttering breath. The imp’s ties were tangled in her fingers. Its chin nuzzled against her leg.
“Sadie?”
“Yes.”
He nodded and opened the door. “Two minutes.”
Then he was gone.
Down the stairs, out the door, running light-footed into the street. The night air was sharp and cold. There was a moon cruising white among remnant clouds, only a few children’s voices crying the sweet seasonal choice. Trick or treat? Sadie ran, the imp gyrating on the end of its ribbons, ran because she could, because her blood was on fire and she needed to gulp the cooling air. Free again.
Leo! she wanted to shout. Rayne! Tom!
Free!
Across the street and into the park. There were no children here. Folded into darkness, she slowed to a jog, to a walk. To a halt. For a moment she’d forgotten how hungry she was. Her head whirled. The imp mask nudged her leg.
Burn it and wash the ashes down the drain. Fine. All she needed was something to light it with, something to help it burn. And then—
And then?
“Sex-y Sa-die.”
That damn stupid bit of song.
“Sex-y Sa-die.”
The call of the hunter who stalks his game through the dark. She flinches, deep inside. But the imp, ah, the imp does so love to dance—to hunt. The mask’s ribbons still tangled in her fingers, she turns, slow and graceful as a line of music, gravel biting under her heel.
BY THE LIGHT OF TOMORROW’S SUN
I arrived by boat, because End Harbor is an outport and that’s the only way to get there. Jacques Devries came to pick me up at Kiet’s Inlet in his dad’s old diesel-powered troller. He looked so much like his old man, with his black hair tucked under a greasy John Deere cap and deep grooves already around his mouth, it shocked me when his young man’s bawl rang out across the wharf. “Daaaaan- yuuuuuuul!” He slapped my shoulder and called me a city slick, and carried my duffel bag down the gangway to the float as if he didn’t trust me not to fall in the drink. But the subtle shifting of the boards was intensely familiar to me, like the slap of the oily water under my feet, the creak of boatlines, the stink of fish, diesel exhaust, and the sea. So terribly familiar I didn’t know if it was love or panic that filled my chest. I sat in the wheelhouse with Jacques and we talked, of all things, hockey.
When we arrived I could see the End was the same as it always had been. And yet, that’s a lie. Though I’d lived there all my life until I ran away, there were things about the place I hadn’t known. Or rather, I knew them only at the roots of me, in my cells, not in my mind.
But I had no trouble recognizing the village’s unpainted frame houses strung together by floats and boardwalks and stairs. The old cannery still leaned on its pilings across the inlet, its steel roof a sagging tent of rust, and the crescent of beach was still tucked at the far end like the web of flesh between a finger and a thumb. And the trees still hung above it all, giant firs black with shadow, feathers on a raven’s wing that reached to snag the fog.
There’s always fog on that stretch of coast. Sometimes, like it was that day, it’s a thin veil that glitters in the trees when the sun eases through the clouds. Other times it submerges the world under a breathable ocean of gray. Days like that the only clarity is at the still surface of the ocean, where a seal coming up to gasp for air sounds like a message from another world. And that was the surprise I felt, the new recognition of the old, old truth: End Harbor looks like nothing but what it is. The meeting place of worlds.
Jacques slowed the boat, killing our wake before it could rock the floats, and glanced my way. “Hey, Dan. Glad to be back?”
I couldn’t say it, but I was. I was.
God, how I loathed myself for that.
The house I grew up in was on the ocean side of Tempest Point, a twenty minute walk from the village through the trees. The warm mushroom smell of decaying fir needles filled my lungs, an earthy undertone to the rank green of the wet salal and thimbleberry that lined our way. Black mud oozed under my boots, long stretches of the trail so smooth I could see that only deer had been that way since the last big rain.
It being the coast in springtime, the last big rain could have been that morning, but Harold Peach said apologetically, “It’s been a while since anyone’s been out there. Your granddad made it plenty clear he didn’t need no visitors, and Dick Turnbull took out a box of groceries last Sunday, so—”
“You know the old man,” Jacques added. “Grumpy as a sea lion in rut.”
Jacques and Harold Peach had volunteered to walk out with me. As much to make sure I actually went, I thought, as to offer me support. They knew I would never have come back if Margaret Peach, Harold’s wife, hadn’t tracked me down and told me to. The old man was failing, she had said, and the house was falling into the brine. My mouth was full of cold saliva, a result of the nausea of fear. I wanted to push my way off the path and lie down under the ancient trees, to disappear under the blanket of moss. Why had I come? But even as my mind flailed, my bones knew. Fate gripped the back of my neck and marched me to the end of the trail.
Falling into the brine. It was no exaggeration. The house hung at the edge of a cliff, the stumps of its foundation posts buried in earth that was being eaten by the waves. Like an organic glacier, the thick black forest duff, that was centuries of dead needles, dead animals, dead trees, poured off the mountainside and into the sea. Underneath, frangible basalt cracked and crumbled away, bedrock less certain than water. The house had been twenty feet back from the edge and twenty feet above high tide when it was built. This winter past, according to Harold Peach, storm waves had washed the back porch, warping the wood and worrying the foundations.
“You can see the lean in her,” he said, and he was right. I could. Small weathered house, its roof of cedar shakes green with moss and infant trees. I felt a visceral dismay that the whole thing hadn’t been washed away. As a blank space at the edge of the world, it would have been beautiful.
“Gotta take a leak,” Jacques said, heading around the side of the house to the cliff edge.
Coward, I thought at him, who’d once been my best friend.
Harold Peach climbed the stairs to the front porch and stamped his feet to clean the mud off his boots, better than knocking. “Matwa? It’s Harold Peach.” From within, silence. “Hey, Matwa! Come see who’s home!” He turned to slip me an uneasy wink. The only sound was of the waves beating the shore below. I stood stupidly on the bottom stair. Even the hand of fate couldn’t drag me any further. Again, I thought, why am I here?
Then Jacques shouted, a wordless yell of horror.
A cold sheet of sweat washed my skin. A tide of sick relief.
“That’s why.” The words escaped my mouth. Harold Peach gave me a strange look as he ran past me down the stairs.
But of course it wasn’t what I hoped. The old man had fallen, yes, but he was still alive.
The cliff below the house wasn’t a clean knife cut. Nibbled by storms, it fell by stages into the waves, a rough slope of earth and roots above, and then steep crannied stone down to the water. Slow waves sloshed against the shore. It was low tide and the tumbled lumps of black rock at the base of the cliff were clad in white barnacles, purple mussels, green and russet weeds. Spring kelp was visible beneath the surface just beyond the intertidal zone, and then, beyond that, the smooth blue swells of the ocean. The clouds were breaking up, letting sunlight through to dazzle on the water. I squinted, some relic of a habit making me search the horizon for strange ships. Usually they appeared after storms, or on the still gray days when they got lost in the fog, but we always looked when we were kids, wanting to be the first ones to wave them into the harbor. The visitors, the strangers, like Matwa my grandfather once had been.
“Hey. Daniel. We could maybe use your help here.”
Harold Peach was crouched at the edge of soft dirt staring up at me. God knows what he thought, me gazing out to sea with the ol
d man stranded down below. One of Matwa’s canes was there by the house’s corner foundation post, its rubber foot clotted with mud. I picked it up and propped it against the wall. Harold Peach was easing himself down to the ledge where Jacques perched by the old man’s side.
“He must of fallen last night,” Jacques said looking up at us. “He’s good and wet. I can’t believe he’s alive.”
The old man was an ungainly huddle against the dirt. He’d drawn his crippled legs as close as he could for warmth, and he had his right arm hooked around an exposed root. The trees that might have stabilized the cliff edge had been cut down to build the house and expose the view, but their huge root boles had remained under the ground until now. Dead and buried, keeping him alive. Saliva filled my mouth. Jacques was wiping mud off the old man’s face, that was dark and heavy with bone, strong even when it was slackly unconscious. There was no sign of the other cane. I turned against the wind and spat.
Harold Peach was digging rough steps in the earth with his boot heel. He said without looking up, “Dan, find a couple blankets and a rope. We’ll wrap him tight and pull him up.”
“If he busted something when he fell—” Jacques said.
Harold Peach shook his head. “Looks to me more like he climbed down and got himself stuck.” He was still kicking at the dirt, and starting to pant. “Come on, Daniel, get to it.”
Eels in my gut, my feet clumsy as anchor stones, I climbed through the side rail to the back porch—the steps hung out over pure air—and went inside.
Everything that was End Harbor was in that house. The wholly prosaic: homemade cedar table and chairs, iron stove, kerosene lanterns, braided rugs. And the wholly wonderful: the silk cushion embroidered with four-legged birds, the harpoon of shining golden stuff that wasn’t gold, the hide of the sea-beast with the long scaly neck and black flippers like wings. Mementos from the sailors who found themselves in the End, hopelessly lost, but still willing to trade. There were glass net floats on the windowsills, too, frozen bubbles of pale green and blue, but those had mostly washed ashore from Japan. I pushed into the old man’s bedroom, trying not to look at anything while I pulled a couple of wool blankets off the sour tangle on the bed, but on my way to the front porch for a length of nylon line my eyes fell on the trunk by the door. Dark wood bound in brass, carved with letters only one man on this earth could read. There was still a gleam of old polish under the dust. When I’d taken the coiled line from the hook in the porch roof I went around the house instead of cutting back through the inside.
Harold Peach had finished his stairway and was teetering at the old man’s feet, telling Jacques what to do. I passed down the blankets and line, and then stood there feeling sick and useless while they wrapped the old man in his cocoon. He moaned once, his eyelids flickering to reveal yellowish whites, but he didn’t come to. Harold Peach and I hauled on the line from above while Jacques pushed from below. Jacques’s footing on the unstable ledge wasn’t good, and the strain was visible in his face. Right past his head I could see the water, bright green now in the sun.
We got the old man onto level ground and then Jacques, clumsy probably with relief, slipped. He wasn’t in much danger, but he threw himself in a belly flop against the slope, scrabbling with his hands.
“Shit,” he gasped. “Shit!”
I left the old man to Harold Peach and ran to grab Jacques’s wrist. He grunted, but he didn’t look at me, or even try to pull himself up.
“Come on, man.” I gave his wrist a yank.
“Hang on.” He twisted his wrist out of my grasp. He was still scrabbling at the dirt, but not for purchase. “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t believe this.” His voice was blank, almost mild. Beyond shock.
His searching fingers had uncovered a skull.
By seven o’clock that night there were half a dozen people in the house, and a carefully wrapped bundle of bones on the back porch. The old man was in his bed. He’d come to long enough to drink down a cup of sweet coffee, but he was back under now. Margaret Peach had gone in to see him, and came out shaking her head.
“Still out,” she reported. “His breathing doesn’t sound too good, neither.”
This was accepted without much response. The silent consensus was that maybe it’d be easier on everyone if he never woke up at all. The discussion about whether to get on the radio phone and call Kiet’s Inlet for the RCMP had been perfunctory. Then there had been a lot of concern about the bones: how to get them out of the mud, and clean, and sorted away. But finally the skeleton was recovered, and now they were all inside, the leaders of End Harbor. The Peaches, Jacques’s folks, the Turnbulls that owned the store. They’d found themselves seats in the crowded living room and were all of them looking at me.
“So,” Margaret said. “What do you know about all of this, young Daniel?”
The endless waves sounded like they were right under the porch. Thud, rush, sigh, like the blood through my heart. I looked away to a dark corner, the skin around my eyes tight and sore.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” I said. “It has to be Lise.”
“It could be a stranger off a boat, or a body what washed ashore.” Harold Peach spoke so promptly I could tell he had been thinking it over for a while. I could also tell the alternatives were offered purely as a formality, like the offer to call the police.
“It’s Lise,” I said with too much certainty.
Lucy Devries looked at me out of hollow eyes. Her husband echoed Margaret: “What do you know, Daniel?”
Jacques, their son, Lisette’s brother, didn’t look up from the floor.
I said, “Nothing you don’t know. My folks took grandma up to Kiet’s Inlet to see the doctor, and the fog rose, and they never made it back. The old man went nuts. Lise disappeared. What more do you want? I mean, Jesus!” I couldn’t get enough air. Their stares were crowding it all out of the room.
“Is that why you ran away?” Mr. Turnbull asked. He was a short, graying bear of a man, one of those quiet men who are listened to when they speak.
“Listen,” I said. “You don’t know what he was like after the boat disappeared. He was crazy. He stayed all night on the cliff screaming at the ocean. Half the time he said he should have been with them, half the time—” I caught my breath.
“Half the time?” Margaret said.
I couldn’t bear their eyes. I looked at the floor, muddy from all our boots. “He said we should go after them. Him and me.”
“You mean looking?” Jacques said. “In a boat?”
“No.” My throat was so tight it was a whisper. “Not in a boat.”
Margaret sighed and shook her head. “Still, Daniel, crazy with grief is one thing. Killing a little girl is another.”
There was a general stir of discomfort. “Now, Margaret,” Mrs. Turnbull said in her soft way, “as far as that goes, burying someone isn’t to say the someone was killed.”
“You don’t know what he’s like!” It tore out of me, beyond control. “You never knew him, none of you did! You all saw him fall in love with grandma and stay behind when his ship pulled out, so you all thought, how romantic! As if that’s all there was. You don’t know how hard it was for him to learn the language. You don’t know how he kept after my grandmother to live by his people’s ways. How he kept after my dad even when dad was grown. Even when I was a kid, he was always— You don’t know the stories he used to tell about murder and war and sacrifice. Sacrifice!” I wrestled myself silent. Finally I wiped my face with my sleeve. “You’re right, Mrs. Turnbull, I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know what he was like, and I know Lise was supposed to come out to see me the day she disappeared.”
The silence was different then. There was compassion in the way people looked away. The surf washed underneath the porch where Lisette’s naked bones lay. Boom, hush, sigh.
Finally, Mr. Turnbull let out a huge gust of air. “I remember. We searched all the woods between here and town.”
“And the shorela
p,” Harold Peach agreed. “For two weeks we had our boat out every time the fog lifted, looking for a sign.”
“Oh, yes, that was a terrible year for the fog, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Turnbull said. “Days at a time socked in, and when it lifted not a ship in the harbor nor a crab in the pot.”
“And the old man sitting out here,” Margaret said, as if she’d no patience for their attempt to ease the heartbreaking tension. “Sitting out here alone, and young Daniel coming into town for a bite to eat and a civilized word.”
“And I remember,” Burt Devries said, “how the old man said he was looking for our daughter on the day he fell on the rocks and broke his legs, when none of the rest of us had set eyes on him the whole time we were searching.”
People who live in the End have a way about them. A sort of philosophy developed over generations living in a place where other worlds come to call. They leave room for the mysteries. They let silences speak. They allow you to find your own way through the fog.
I knew that I was absolved from suspicion by the way Mrs. Turnbull and Margaret Peach washed the coffee cups and heated me a tin of soup. There was no argument when I declined Jacques’s offer to stay overnight. Even if the old man was a murderer, he was old and crippled, probably dying, and I was young. But there was a promise in the look Jacques gave me, and in the way his father shook my hand. The question of Matwa’s guilt remained.
When they were gone I ate the soup, though I wasn’t hungry. I washed the pot and bowl, swept the drying mud from the floor, built up the fire in the stove. Old habits still lived in my hands, doing the work without any direction from my mind. I knelt for a while, the dry heat of the coals stinging my face as I watched the seasoned hemlock start to burn. They had taken the bones from the porch, but the dead still spoke in the spaces between the waves.
I walked out the back door and vomited all the lies over the railing into the sea.
In the Palace of Repose Page 15