Lightfall (11 page)

IV

IT
WAS
Thursday afternoon in Houston. The sky was yellow-gray as it mulled over whether or not to fling a storm. From the swaybacked mansion on Montrose Avenue, once an oilman's dream of baronial splendor, the air was alive with chanting. It was the holiest time in the Covenant's day. The morning's work of selling flowers was all tallied up. The afternoon dose of Thorazine had taken. About forty of them sat in a double circle in the gilt-and-paneled parlor. They sent up a constant babble, each with a rosy grin in place.

The anxious calls between their warden and twelve other Houston units reflected nothing troublesome within the rank and file. At five they would have their cocoa and sponge cake. Then they would do the housework. Then the stuffing of envelopes, to bid for contributions. Then their supper, such as it was—beans and rice and ice cream, more than likely. They didn't have to think about a thing.

Slurred and flushed though they were, they thrilled with expectation when the warden entered the circle at prayer's end. They'd been in full lotus for two hours straight, but now they shifted and slouched like schoolkids. It could only be a new rule about to be announced. They braced for the challenge as he cleared his throat and held up a paper to read from. Rules were the source of earthly joy. They filled the heads of the faithful like a roll of the blessed saints.

“I have a special message for you,” he said with unctuous smoothness, “direct from Father Paradise himself.” A low buzz went around the group, and they rubbed their hands together like a band of insects zinging. “He has gone away on a long retreat,” said the thin and mottled warden, hair in a freak like a mad chemist. “His enemies have already started spreading the usual lies. If we let down our guard for a moment, they will steal in here and shroud us all in sin.”

Around him, the murmur grew into a whine. Despite the rounded corners of the drug, they never seemed to lose the anxious edge. It lay concealed in their praying hands like a prisoner's spoon, honed to a needle point.

“He has left one last commandment. Listen now:
you must go into the wilderness.
”

On the instant, three of them rose to their feet. The warden meant to let the prophet's words sink in, then use them as text for a sermon. He wasn't a preacher himself. He was a druggist from Nueva Laredo who'd lost his license peddling ups and downs across the border. He bubbled up most of the Covenant's Pharmaceuticals right in the kitchen beside the rice and beans. He saved the organization thousands of dollars a year, keeping things in the family. But he had a theatrical streak as well, and so drew breath to give them fire and brimstone. His charges, clustered about him, were so tame and baby-faced that he thought the three who came toward him now were only trying to get a little closer.

They grabbed him like an animal, pinning his arms and legs. They drove him back against the Carrère mantel, where one of them reached down a Tudor candlestick and brained him. He slumped to the hearth. Two of the robed, bald cultists stood at his head and feet like acolytes. The third smashed a Celadon vase and slit his throat with a sharp-edged piece. As he bled him like a chicken, the rest of the crowd got up and shuffled off to fetch their cocoa. Only these three men were in the forefront.

And when they were done with the ritual, they left the house in a band. They had no plan. They lumbered down the sidewalk three abreast, like the backfield of a football team. They looked so out of place in their dun-colored, belted caftans that they might have been playing out some half-wit fraternity prank. In any case, the ordinary residents—students mostly, in boots and jeans and the random Stetson—scarcely seemed to notice them. The neighborhood hewed to a live-and-let-live dispensation. The Revelation cultists were considered a fairly harmless lot. No one thought to look twice when each of the three reached into his pocket and pulled out a book of matches.

They stood at the wide intersection at Fannin and Montrose, seeming to cast a votive eye on the rush-hour chaos before them. It almost seemed they meant to light a candle, as if they could fashion an instant curbside shrine, or say an impromptu mass. They split up as if by prior arrangement. One walked across the street when the light went green. One stepped down into the gutter and trailed past a row of parked cars. The third stood and waited, as if on watch. Each appeared to discover what it was he had to do by doing it. Time was not an issue. They didn't seem to care that people were going to stop them.

The one in the gutter sidled up beside a Chrysler, hunkered down behind, and screwed off the gas cap. He was so nimble, lighting the match and slipping it in as he leapt away to the curb, that the explosion only seemed to blow him safely out of the ball of fire. The car burned high and bright like a heifer on an altar. The man skipped the next three cars and approached a rusty pickup. The half a hundred who gaped from windows and screeched to a halt in traffic were so mesmerized by the conflagration that they didn't even see him as he bent to start the second fire.

Meanwhile, his fellow across the street had entered the neon pancake house. His dark eyes round as saucers, he swept by the startled hostess and entered the dining room proper. He went up to the heavy draperies that shut out the noisy street. Lighting his pack of matches like a flare, he held it close against the fabric, not knowing it had to be treated—by law—to resist the heat of a blowtorch. Unhappily, the pancake people had struck a deal with the draper, as well as one with the fire inspector. The material went up like a pile of oil-soaked rags.

It wasn't that anyone had to die. The busboys wrestled him to the floor as the choking patrons thundered out. The most that was going to be lost was the building. Similarly out in the street, where four different cars had been set ablaze, there was no one in any danger. A fire alarm had now gone through, and a squad car tore around a corner and blocked the intersection north and west. They'd been through worse, just covering crack-ups. The culprits were not even armed.

Except it was so weird. The sentry, who stood on the curb in a kind of trance, holding up his book of matches like a sacramental wafer, reached again into the kangaroo pocket of his robe. He drew out a cork-stoppered bottle full to the brim with a clear liquid. Why it was there was, like the matches, inexplicable. Perhaps it had always been there, pregnant as a seed, from the day the robe was issued to him. He inched out the cork and tossed it away. It seemed he would lift the bottle and drink, and thus be changed before their eyes to something vast and mythic. But he simply poured the liquid on the robe, sprinkling it all over him.

The cop who was coming across to arrest him—what for, loitering?—caught the whiff of ether in the wind from twenty feet away. He shouted an automatic word of caution, even as the grinning monk struck the fatal match. There was a whoosh of flame. The cop reeled back and drew his gun. He shot twice into the pyre. If he could not stop the nightmare of it, at least he could stop the suffering. But though the second shot went right to the burning heart, the monk did not fall over. He began to dance.

He twirled in a circle and floated into the street, as if to fan the flames to a white-hot shine. He seemed to be singing an ancient one-note song. By now the police had captured the other two. One was flung spread-eagle in the road, with people standing on his wrists and ankles while a sergeant tried to shriek him into confessing. Across the street, the third was out cold, bleeding deep inside from being roughed up by the busboys.

The spectators didn't know any of this. They collected three-deep on the sidewalks, riveting their attention on the fire dance. They fought to get the view before it died. Already the monk was tottering, and his skin hung black and threadbare like the ashes of his cloak. In a moment there would be nothing to see but a body, and that was not enough to hold a crowd.

The minicam unit from Channel 4 took a corner on two wheels, filming out their windows as they sped to the action. But it made no sense, and it wasn't going to. All the footage and brute interrogation missed the mark. It had nothing to do with Houston, or cults, or the general loss of reverence for property. Before the day was out they would appoint a most impeccable commission. Hints of a broad conspiracy would surface. Things would go back to normal, as neatly as the street was cleared of the burned-out hulks and the charred corpse.

A minute more, and the Thursday traffic flowed again, all the drivers suitably chastened, glad it was not they. What really happened here was too simple for them to grasp. Just this: the horrors they glimpsed in their dreams were on them. The night had become the day.

By sunset, Iris had pieced together a scant account. Polly had fled the town hall like a routed general, leaving the place to her. She sat alone for six straight hours, reading her way through documents. If she stepped outside every now and then, it was just to see how the lay of the land corresponded with the text. On one of these brief forays she spotted Michael in the vicar's yard and gave her name across the picket fence. To no effect, for by now he was under the fisherman's spell. At this, her pride flared up and stopped her in her tracks. She saw she had no other choice but to beat him back to the past.

The ship was called
Arcadia.
She was eighty-four feet from end to end, captained by Edward Dale, the Earl of Pitt. With a crew of thirty, she had raided her way up the western coast of South America, plundering gold from the Andes. When the gold gave out, they stole the Indians' drugs and furs and fine spun wool—slaughtering one whole tribe in northern Peru for the sake of a single silver dish. Officially, Pitt was under orders from the queen to find and claim for England the so-called Strait of Anian, thought to be the way around the north. Seven months out, he'd made it as far as what was now Oregon. There, perhaps because he hadn't seen a scrap of proper treasure in four thousand miles, he decided he'd better turn back.

Spring fog was so thick on the cliff-edged coast that he despaired of finding any sort of harbor. His men were so raw with scurvy that they spit up blood and huddled with the rats. The whine of delirium crept up Pitt's spine. Then, on May Day, 1588, the mists suddenly parted. The whale-shaped headland loomed on the water. The ship limped around and into the bay. With a chorus of Anglican hymns, they hauled her up on the agate beach beside the improbable boulder. Refitting her for the voyage home would take about a month. They camped in a grove of firs on the point of the cliff. A scouting party was sent to case the deep woods for game.

There the ship's log stopped for a long hiatus. The following entry was dated 9 September, when they were already under sail and going home. It was as if the story of the long summer on the lonely coast did not belong in a captain's records. For that sort of tale, you would have to rely on a landsman's account—say a merchant or a minister, if they had one aboard, or a sailor who secretly longed to be a poet.

Yet as much as Iris sifted among the artifacts, she could not turn up a diary. In one trunk were Pitt's feathered hat, his favorite pipe, his walking stick, and his riding crop. The plan of his lands in Dorset was sewn in a vellum book of accounts. How had it all gotten
here
, she wondered. Why, if he left this place forever, did his people back in England send his lordly things to a fishing village halfway round the world? If only she had more time, she thought, she would track the earl to his lair. She understood the type, somehow.

By the time she left the building, locking it tight behind, she felt a dreadful aching for the past. The village on the cliff was bathed in violent orange. She walked to the edge of the land and made her way home like a tightrope walker. The weathermen, turning into their driveways after a long day bent over luminous dials, did not give a glance at the westering sun. High in the wooded hills, the rangers checked in at the central station, filing reports on a day that had passed without apparent incident. The cliffs were bare. Iris was the only one out to watch the rose and coral rocketing the sky.

At the boardinghouse, she would have gladly slipped by Maybeth altogether, but the landlady had an ear cocked. She came lumbering out of the kitchen when Iris was only halfway up the stairs. She handed up a tray of tea. Dinner, she said, was half-past seven. Smiling neutrally, murmuring thanks, Iris slipped away, reeling under the weight of the afternoon's provision. She realized there was no other place to eat. She walked down the hall to her room, thinking to take a nap beforehand. She certainly didn't need tea and biscuits.

She eased the door open—there were no keys—and glided in like room service. Just at the last, with a sudden chill, she saw there were two cups on the tray.

A man stood at her window, looking out. She faltered and lurched toward the bed as if to seek cover. The teapot shot a geyser of hot water across her arm. She clattered the tray on top of the dresser, wincing at the pain as he turned to face her. A man about thirty, in ranger's fatigues. At least it was not Michael.

“So you've come,” he said dispassionately, indifferent to the scalded flesh.

“You know me?” she asked, her heart beginning to throb to the beat of the burn.

He scoffed as he strode across the room. “Oh, everyone knows you, Iris,” he said. “They just don't know it yet.” He snatched up a handful of biscuits and poured out half a cup of tea. Then he spooned four heaps of sugar in. “I'm Roy. I've been here about six years, just waiting for you.”

“Where did you come from?” Iris asked, for the moment more relieved to find a fellow alien than anything.

“Me? Daytona Beach,” he retorted proudly. “Now there's a nice place. They got a beach goes out for half a mile. Not like this shit.” He gestured his cup at the window, where the sky had now gone silver-purple, pale as a shark's fin.

“You felt this force—is that it?” She could not keep the excitement from her voice. “It pulled you out of your other life without any warning. Right?”