Anarchy (46 page)

32

P
acking boxes.

Whether it was the actual smell of cardboard or some more nebulous aura of transience, of dust and things unfinished, it was the packing boxes that gave it away.

She'd been trying to establish which of the various beds that counted as her own bed she'd woken up in. (Woken, she thought, by the distant shatter of breaking glass, or was it an accelerating engine, or a nocturnal shout?) It was, certainly, her own bed. Before she knew anything else, she knew that. Instinct told her she was home. But . . . her bedroom next to Tess's, with the brass headboard where she hung medals from school and arranged hockey stickers from packs of gum? The basement apartment in Toronto, where condensation beaded on the paint above the bed because there wasn't an extractor fan in the shower? Or was it her place in Victoria? Which smelled of Chinese cooking from the restaurant backing onto the overgrown yard. . . . In the absence of light or noise she thought about smells, and so caught the ambience of boxes and paper and stuff still not put away. Alice. Which meant the Anglepoise lamp would be
there
(she stirred, reached out . . . ).

Her arm moving in the dark: it was warm, dry. Or at least not cold, not wet. She held still, not feeling the metal bell of the shade (had she moved it?—when she, when she . . . ).

Her consciousness drew its own outline and came back where it started. Whole, and home. She felt . . . fine. No pain, no hunger.

It was absolutely dark, a hundred percent dark. Whatever fragment of noise had woken her had vanished, the pop of a bubble. She batted a cautious hand but still failed to find the lamp or its cord. No light. There ought to have been an infinitesimal electric shimmer from the kitchen, the LED on the stove, as well as a rectangular blur around the edge of the blind, but neither was where it should be, unless she'd forgotten which way around the room was.

She sat up. A soft presence sat up with her, attached; not sheets. She drew her own outline again and found she'd gone to sleep in her uniform shirt and pants. She never did that, no matter how tired she was when she got home, and anyway, she couldn't have been that tired because the one thing she'd learned over the couple of weeks she'd been posted up here was that nothing ever happened. She should have finished unpacking days ago.

The clock she'd had since seventh grade (when she started having to wake herself up to go to school; she couldn't drive with Dad anymore because Dad had moved out and her mother didn't like driving in the snow or before breakfast) had glow-in-the-dark hands. They weren't glowing. Unless she hadn't unpacked it yet, though she thought she had, on the second shelf of the unit by the bed. No light. The luminescent stuff needed something to reflect, of course. The power was out. She thought she remembered that. The power had been out since, since . . .

“Tell him to go home to his father,” someone said.

Goose looked around, or thought she looked around, though the futility of the effort impressed itself on her straightaway.

“Who's there?” she said. Not being able to see herself had the weird effect of disembodying her voice also.

“He can undo what was done to me. What I did. He can refuse it. He can go back and say no. Tell him that.”

The other voice was hard to place, close and far away at the same time. Was she listening to the neighbors talking, through the wall? She didn't remember a Brit woman living anywhere in the building, though. Not that she'd met everyone yet.

“And that I loved him. For the few days we were together. I carried him as far as I could. Remember.”

“Are you talking to me?” Goose tried to ask so quietly that only someone in the room would be able to hear. Hardly moving her lips, if at all.

“Tell Gawain.”

“What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”

“I can't stay any longer. Remember. Three things. Return. Refusal. Love.”

“How did you get in here?”

“Say them. Return, refusal, love.”

It must have been a neighbor after all, talking to someone else. Or perhaps a crazy person in the corridor. Goose put her feet down carefully. The problem with leaving packing boxes everywhere was that she couldn't remember where the clear space was in the room. She swept a half circle with her toes and took a pace toward where she thought the door was. Repeat.

“You still there?”

A whisper of light. She was in the corridor outside, and over by the stairwell was something that wasn't entirely nothing. She must have left the apartment door open, another thing she never did. At least that accounted for hearing the voice.

“Who's out here?”

Or had she imagined it? Like she'd imagined, or dreamed, the other . . .

She certainly wasn't imagining the power outage. There was supposed to be one of those motion sensor lights in the corridor, and an exit sign, both over the stairwell. She remembered them working the day before, or whichever day it was, whenever she'd last come home. Anyway. Neither was working now, for sure. The something that wasn't nothing in the stairwell was a dim blur reflected from somewhere else, down at the bottom, by the door. She went that way. She did remember that things had started going wrong. Top to bottom. Her job was to know that sort of thing and be prepared.

She remembered fog.

She remembered it so vividly she knew it was true. She could feel the nonweight of it. The absence. She had a strong, clear recollection of that absence, that hush, that shrouding invisibility, descending on the town and on the sea. And a ferry blasting through it. And a blind ferryman, and no passengers. Or one passenger, Goose herself, crossing dark water with the ferryman her guide.

Which couldn't be right, because here she was.
Here.
Corridor, stairwell. Alice.
Vous êtes ici.

She went down toward the intimation of light.

The stairs didn't clank like usual. She must have been going extra carefully. It occurred to her that she hadn't put shoes on. The night seemed milder than recently. No wind; that made all the difference.

On the linoleum at the bottom of the stairwell was a blob of nondarkness. She went all the way down. The door there had a square window of frosted glass crossed by a lattice that looked like chicken wire. The square shimmered, the eerie color of a harvest moon.

Somewhere outside glass popped and tinkled. Agitated voices rose for a moment, as distant as seabirds.

The power was gone, definitely, and communications were down. Everything had started to go wrong. She remembered the bank being out of money and having to suspend accounts because of the computer glitch: that was definite too, because she remembered it in lots of different ways (talking to her father, talking to Jonas, unspooling police tape outside the ATM, watching the news and seeing the pictures of people standing in long lines on the sidewalks in Toronto holding cups of takeaway coffee; they couldn't all be part of the same dream or nightmare). And the autumnal glimmer in the door was surely fire.

Was she on duty?

She thought she ought to get to the station anyway. She couldn't quite see where the door was. The crazy Brit woman must have come out ahead of her and left it open; by the glow of hidden firelight she found herself outside, on the uneven stones by the street. Sparks tumbled upward into sight over the silhouette of the building next door. The fire was toward town. Its light was all the light there was. The outage had blacked the whole place. A car screeched into hearing and then sight on the road below, going the other way, much too fast. She felt her way onto the street and down to the main road, where she noticed again that she'd forgotten shoes. The tarmac didn't seem wet and wasn't cold. Anyway, it was an emergency: best to hurry. She felt light, that slightly delirious convalescent feeling. Now she could look along the road and see the splintered outline of flames, strips of gossamer yellow tearing themselves off and vanishing into the dark. A house was burning. Another house.

Down by the inlet people were shouting.

As she jogged into town a set of headlights swung out from one of the side roads. They swept round and came head on, blinding her. She turned aside and got herself out of the way. As the vehicle accelerated past, she waved from the side of the road to stop the driver. She leaned into the head-high brilliance of the headlights as far as she dared. Tires squealed and skidded, the lights tipped away, there was a crack like a cannon. Goose cowered in shock. The truck had swerved into a pole and embedded the wood in its crumpled front. After the crunch of impact, silence: then something heavy thumped against the inside of the side window and stuck there, leaking darkness.

Goose uncurled herself, dumbstruck.

The headlights were still on, picking out long grass and the foot of the building on the corner. A window slid open somewhere above.

“Hello?” Goose called. She approached the side window where the unmoving silhouette was sprawled. “Someone there?”

“You okay?” a voice shouted down.

“I think the driver's injured. Can you call an ambulance?”

“Anyone there?”

“I'm the police.” Shielding her eyes from the glare in front, she pushed her face to the glass. The silhouette became another face, looking back at her, pressed flat against the window, unmoving, cracked open at the temple. No need for an ambulance after all.

“Tabarnac
.
”
She'd seen plenty of vehiculars but the impact of the empty-eyed faces never wore off. “Fatal accident,” she called to whoever was leaning out of the building above.

“Hello?”

“I'm a police officer. Sir, I need you to—” She was about to say
call
: then she remembered (was it remembering?—it didn't feel quite like remembering, but there wasn't time to think about it) that the phone lines were down. She'd have to get help herself. Get the accident scene cordoned off, get back here with some light. If there was light. If she had time. She`struggled to think of the proper procedure. The fire was more urgent, anyway; the accident was over. The blink of an eye, and another life snuffed out, another person's whole history of fears and desires and things done and undone all gone as quick as pressing the off switch,
wink
. . . .

She backed away from the car.

“Anyone alive down there?”

“No survivors,” she called back. “Please stay away from the incident scene, sir. We'll be back as soon as we can.” Insects flittered silently out of the dark to bathe in the beam of the lights. She stepped among them, looking up to where the man at the window seemed to be. “I'm—” she began, and heard the window bang abruptly shut.

“Sir?”

A white-winged moth brushed by her face, too light for touch.

“I need your name, sir,” she called. “For a statement later.” No one answered. “That's an official police request.” Still no one answered. She glanced toward the fire again. She didn't have time for this. “Small-town piece-of-crap losers,” she added. All she could see of the building above was the dim echo of firelight in panes of glass, as though the apartment block were thinking about smoldering too. She tried to get the truck's tag number but the glow behind was too dim, though when she looked down the road toward the fire it seemed taller now, its heart a deeper red. The station, she thought. She could get herself back on top of things once she was properly at work. She could get Jonas to bring her up to speed. She didn't like to leave the scene of an accident but there wasn't anything more she could do on her own, and if there was a house burning in town she'd be needed there too, until the rescue squad came. She wondered how long it took them to get over from Hardy once they got the call—

No call. The phones were down.

She found herself jogging faster toward the firelight, imagining the volunteer firefighters in their beds in Hardy, on the other side of the island, thirty dark kilometers away. They couldn't hear or see the burning house and yet they were supposed to know and come racing. What happened when they didn't?

As she passed she glimpsed a few people standing on the doorsteps of houses back from the road. She yelled at them to stay clear. The inevitable bystanders, drawn to the fire like those insects in the headlights, would only be putting themselves in danger. She didn't wait to see whether they were listening. They probably couldn't see her in the dark anyway. The flames were rising from a property down near the water, where the road dipped closest to the inlet, not far from the dock. As she came closer the stillness of the night dissolved into the white noise of burning, a dry roar as constant as a waterfall. The heat was less fierce than she'd expected, but the sound was overwhelming.

In the surrounding darkness the fire was the uncontested center of the world. Trees and houses and trailers and the poles of dead streetlamps and empty electrical wires came into being around it, made of red light and shadows, and the surrounding streets shone like expiring lava, cooling into black as they flowed away. She saw a few silhouettes scurrying back and forth around the house, some carrying pails. Two kids on a motorbike came roaring past. The one riding shotgun tossed a bottle into the conflagration, whooping. A family ferrying possessions out of a nearby property and into the back of a camper van stopped what they were doing long enough to shout tepid insults after the kids. A weak chain of maybe six or seven people stretched between the street and the inlet, ferrying pails of water. The man at the top of the chain edged as close to the burning lot as he dared before chucking his load onto the house. Goose could see at once that his efforts were hopeless. The rising glow turned the surface of the inlet into a sheet of submerged copper, punctured by dark holes where a handful of boats were moored. Someone was shouting about wetting the bushes around the yard. Other townspeople were just standing around, hands in the pockets of their bathrobes. No one looked her way. The air hissed and crackled and hummed.