He went up to the counter, got a beer, exchanged the pleasantries required to pass as no one in particular. Then he came straight over toward the booth. He had evidently used the mirrors behind the bar to scope the room, so he could look like he was coming to meet a friend, not searching for a stranger.
Oz turned from the window as the man slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Mr. Jones?”
The man nodded, looking Oz over. Oz knew what he was seeing. A man who looked ten years older than he should. Gray stubble over the dry jowls of someone who used to carry an extra sixty pounds. A thick coat that looked like it doubled as the bed blanket of a large dog.
“Glad you agreed to meet in person,” the man said. “A little surprised, too.”
“Two guys in a bar,” Oz said, “they’re the only people ever have to know. E-mails, anyone can find out what was said. Even after both of you are dead.”
The man nodded appreciatively. “‘They’ want to find you, they gonna.”
Oz knew this only too well, having been attacked by “them” a year before. He still wasn’t sure who “they” were. He’d managed to fix the damage they’d tried to cause before it became insurmountable, but he still felt he had to leave town. He’d kept moving ever since, leaving behind a job on a small local newspaper and the few people he’d called friends. Joining the undertow. It was better that way.
Jones didn’t know about this, of course. He was referring instead to the fact that every e-mail you send, every message you post, every file you download is logged on a server somewhere. Machines see nothing, understand less, but their memories are perfect. There is no anonymity on the Internet, and sooner or later a lot of solid citizens were going to discover that e-mails to lovers were not private, nor were hours spent bathed in the light of other people’s nakedness. That people were watching you, all the time. That the Web was not some huge sand pit. It was quicksand. It could swallow you up.
“So how come Hanley?” the man asked, looking around. A couple in the next booth were conducting a vague, whispered fight, bitter sentences that bore no relevance to what the other had just said. “I know Wisconsin, some. Never even heard of this town.”
“It’s where I am right now,” Oz said. “That’s all. How did you get my e-mail address?”
“Heard your podcast. Made us want to talk to you. Did a little digging, took a chance. No big deal.”
Oz nodded. Once upon a time, he’d had a little late-night radio show, back east. That stopped when he left town, of course. But in the last couple of months, he’d started recording snippets onto his laptop, uploading them onto the Web, started spreading the word again. There were others like him, doing the same thing. “It concerns me that you were able to find my e-mail address.”
“Should worry you even more if I couldn’t. Otherwise I’d just be an amateur, right?”
“And what did you want to say to me?”
“You first,” Jones said. “What you said in the ’cast was pretty oblique. I threw you a couple bones in my e-mail, hinted what we know. Let’s hear you talk now.”
Oz had thought about ways of communicating the bottom line while remaining circumspect. He took a sip of his beer, then set it back on the table and looked the man in the eye.
“The Neanderthals had flutes,” he said. “Why?”
The man shrugged. “To play tunes.”
“That just rephrases the question. Why did they believe it important to be able to replicate certain sounds, when just getting enough to eat was hard labor?”
“Why indeed.”
“Because sound is important in ways we’ve forgotten. For millions of years, it couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks—how come we need thousands of words?”
“Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.”
“But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.”
“Which was?”
“Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.”
The man had begun to smile faintly.
“Also why, when you look at European Stone Age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. New Grange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself—the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.”
“Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?”
“Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalog of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century, all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two-foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why—if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now center on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?”
“Tell me,” Jones said quietly.
“Because the walls-of-Jericho story is about sound breaking down not literal walls but figurative ones,” Oz said. “The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things, too.”
The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. “I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.”
Oz sat back. “That enough?”
“For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?”
“Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.”
“WeirdCon?”
“Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We e-mailed once in a while, I shared my research on prehistorical parallels with him. Then, nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.”
“Probably he’s fine,” the man said. “People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?”
“Hell no. Always private.”
“You never e-mail anyone else about it yourself?”
“Nope.”
“Never know when ‘they’ might be listening, right?”
This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Among people trying to find the truth, the concept of “them” was complicated. You knew “they” were out there, of course—it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world—but you understood that talking about “them” made you sound like a kook. So you put air quotes around it. Someone said THEM with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however…chances were the guy was okay.
“Isn’t that the truth,” Oz said, playing along. “You just never know. Even if ‘they’ don’t actually exist.”
The man smiled. “I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.”
“Me, too,” Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.
“We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,” Jones said, and left.
Oz watched the man get back into his car, drive out of the lot, and take the turn toward the freeway. Then he slowly finished his beer. He did not hurry, for once. He was feeling almost as if he were just sitting in a bar, rather than hiding there. The people at the counter were talking, laughing. The arguing couple were now chewing face across their table, the woman’s hand hooked meatily around the man’s neck. Oz wished them well.
When he event
ually stepped outside, it was cold and windy, the streets deserted. People with normal lives were home asleep. Oz was going to join them now. Home for the time being was an anonymous motel on the edge of town, but any kind of home is better than none.
As he walked, he considered the man he’d just met, what he represented. There were countless groups interested in the underbelly, in finding the hidden truths. JFK obsessives who met once a month to pore over autopsy shots. Online 9/11 nuts with their trajectory-modeling software, Priory of Sion wannabes, Holocaust revisionists—circle jerks for everything that might or might not ever have been true. Jones’s people sounded very different, or Oz would not have agreed to make contact in the first place. A tight, focused group of men and women who studied the facts without previous agenda, who met in secret, who weren’t too close to one particular issue to miss a glimpse of the whole. This was what Oz needed. People with rigor. People with dedication.
Just some fucking people, bottom line.
Maybe, after his time in the wilderness, things were going to start turning around. Oz picked up the pace a little, idly wondering if his motel had a snack machine.
It did not, and the soda machine didn’t work. After establishing these facts and becoming resigned to them, Oz let himself into his room, first noting that the strip of Scotch tape he’d laid across the bottom of the door had not been disturbed.
Once inside, he stood irresolute. It was late. He should go to bed. Get on the road early. Keep on the move. But he still felt hopped up from the meeting and knew that if he laid his head down, it would get locked in a long spiral that would leave him exhausted and headachy in the morning.
He turned instead to the ancient console television next to the room’s shabby desk. The huge screen warmed slowly, to reveal a rerun of a show so old Oz barely remembered it. Perfect. A little background noise, the kind that creeps inside your head and tells you everything’s all right. Comfort sound.
There was a knock on the door.
Oz turned fast, heart beating hard.
The television wasn’t on loud enough to provoke a complaint. It was hard to imagine why else someone should be outside. The bedside clock said it was 2:33 A.M.
The knock came again, more quietly this time.
Oz knew that the flickering of the television screen would be visible around the edges of the curtains. He went and stood behind the door. This was the moment he’d feared, the prospect that kept him awake at night, and he realized suddenly that he’d never really come up with a plan for when it came to pass. So much for the Lone Horseman of the Unknown.
“Mr. Turner? It’s Mr. Jones.”
The person outside had spoken very quietly. Oz stared at the door for a moment, put his ear closer. “What?”
“Could you let me in?”
Oz hesitated, undid the lock. Opened the door a crack, to see Jones standing shivering outside.
“What the hell do you want?”
Jones kept well back from the door, didn’t crowd him. “I got a few miles down the road and realized there were a couple things I forgot to say. I turned around, saw you walking through town, followed you back here.”
Oz let the man into the hotel room, annoyed at how careless he’d been to allow someone to spot him on the street.
“You scared the fucking life out of me, man,” he said, closing the door and locking it. “Jesus.”
“I know. I’m sorry, really. It’s just that I came all this way. And, you know, I think meeting up was kind of a big deal for both of us. The start of something bigger.”
“You could say that.”
“Right. So I just wanted to make sure we got everything said.”
Oz relaxed a little. “So what was it?”
The man looked sheepish. “First thing…well, it’s embarrassing. It’s just that Jones isn’t my real name.”
“Okay,” Oz said, confused. He’d already assumed that the other guy might have given a false one. “No big deal.”
“I know. Just…you were going to find out later, and I didn’t want you to think I’d been jerking you around.”
“That’s okay,” Oz said, disarmed, wondering if he should offer the guy a drink and realizing he didn’t have anything. The motel wasn’t the type that supplied coffeemaking facilities. It was barely the type that supplied clean towels. “So—what is it? Your name.”
The man moved slightly, so he was farther from the door.
“It’s Shepherd,” he said.
Oz held his gaze, noticing for the first time how dark the man’s eyes were. “Well, mine really is Oz Turner. So now we’re straight on nomenclature. What was the other thing?”
“Just this,” the man said. He pushed Oz in the chest.
Oz was caught off guard. He couldn’t maintain his balance against the calm, firm shove, especially when the man slipped his right foot behind one of Oz’s. His arms pinwheeled, but he toppled straight over backward, catching his head hard against the television.
He was stunned and barely had time to slur a questioning syllable before the man quickly bent down over him. He grabbed handfuls of Oz’s coat, careful not to touch flesh, and yanked him halfway back to standing.
“What?” Oz managed. His right eye was blinking hard. He felt weak. He realized that the man was wearing gloves. “What are you…”
The man put his face up close. “Just so you know,” he said, “‘They’ do exist. They send their regards.”
Then he dropped him, twisting Oz’s shoulder forward just as he let go. Oz’s head hit the side of the television again, at a bad sideways angle this time, and there was a muffled click.
Shepherd sat on the end of the bed and waited for the man’s gasps to subside, watching the television with half an eye. He couldn’t remember the name of the show, but he knew that just about everyone on it was long dead. Ghosts of light, playing to a dying man. Almost funny.
When he was satisfied that Turner was done, he took a fifth of vodka out of his pocket and tipped most of it into Oz’s mouth. A little over his hands, some on his coat. He left the bottle on the floor, where it might have fallen. A diligent coroner could question either stomach contents or blood-alcohol level within the body, but Shepherd doubted it would come to that. Not here in the sticks. Not when Turner looked so much like a man who had this kind of end coming to him sooner or later.
It took Shepherd less than three minutes to find where the man had hidden his laptop and notebook. He replaced these with further empty vodka bottles. He shut the room door quietly behind him as he left and then took only another minute to find the backup disk duct-taped under the dashboard of Oz’s car in the lot outside. All three would be destroyed before daybreak.
And that, he believed, was that.
When Shepherd got into his own vehicle, he realized his cell phone was ringing. He reached quickly under the seat for it, but he’d missed the call.
He checked the log. He didn’t recognize the number, but he did know the area code, and he swore.
A 503 prefix. Oregon. Cannon Beach.
He slammed the door and drove fast out of the lot.
chapter
SEVEN
If you lay still, really still, you could hear the waves. That was one of the best things about the cottage, Madison thought. When you went to bed, assuming the television in the main room wasn’t on—it usually wasn’t, because time at the beach was for reading and thinking, Dad said, instead of watching the same old (rude word)—you could lie there and hear the ocean. You had to tune yourself first. The dune was in the way, and depending on the tides the water could be quite a distance down the beach. You had to let your breathing settle, lie flat and very still on your back with both ears open, and just wait…and gradually you would begin to hear the distant rustle and thump that said tonight you were sleeping near the edge of the world. And you certainly would sleep, as the waves seemed to get closer and closer, tugging gently at your feet, pulling you into friendly warmth and darkness and rest.
So when Madison realized that she was awake, the first thing she noticed was the waves. Then that it was raining, and beginning to rain harder, drumming onto the roof of the cottage. The storm she’d seen heading down the beach earlier had arrived. Tomorrow the sand would be pocked and gray and probably strewn with seaweed. It got thrown up onto the beach in bad weather, and it felt weird and squishy underfoot. Assuming they even went for a walk tomorrow at all, which—
Suddenly she sat up.
She stayed absolutely still for a moment, staring straight ahead. The rain on the roof above her was so loud it sounded like hail. Madison looked at her bedside table. The clock said 1:12. So why was she awake? Sometimes she had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t now, though, and usually when she woke in the night, it was a vague and fuzzy kind of awake. Now she felt like she’d never been asleep. Ever. There was a question going around in her head, urgently.
What was she doing here?
Next to the clock was a small, round shape. She picked it up. A sand dollar, small. She remembered finding it that afternoon, but that felt like it was something that had happened a while ago, like last time they’d come here, or the summer before. She brought it up to her nose and sniffed. It still smelled like the sea.
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