Lightfall (20 page)

Michael was sweating buckets. He had a pain dead center in his lower back from lifting wrong. The whole enterprise was futile. It would take him most of a day to clear out all these graves. In an hour he had to begin his visits. So what was the point? He'd have done much better to pass the time in the shade of his empty head. After all, a prophet had to have a little space to keep his vigil. He could not go on forever knowing nothing.

Oh, but the sheer physical work was such a joy! It brought him back to the certainty that had spurred him all night long. He kept to a square of stony soil, where perhaps a dozen years were laid edge to edge in ordered ranks. He found that if he twirled in a circle, holding the slab like a discus, he could lob it far enough out from the cliff so it dropped unbroken to the foaming sea. He dispatched a whole decade before he was through. As he traced his steps to the church again, he swore he would finish the rest as soon as he was alone.

The village street was still as death. Though of course he couldn't say who lived where, he knew from the billowing chimneys which were his. He sauntered up a grassy lane to where a line of linen hung between a whitewashed cottage and a peeling shed. It touched him to think that they kept to a daily life, when they hadn't the ghost of a chance. He ducked beneath a pale striped towel and up three wooden steps.

The door was half a foot ajar. When he passed inside, he heard a woman crying before his eyes adjusted to the dim and shuttered light. It was Judith Quinn. She knelt on the hearth rug, sifting through a drawer she'd pulled from the desk in the corner. The fire was high and smoky, sizzling on the grate. She was burning pictures.

“Is it so hard?” he asked her quietly, coming to stand above her.

She held in her hand a fan of snapshots. Somebody's wedding, in an ancient garden. He couldn't say whose it was, her own or a laughing daughter's. The only thing he knew for sure was that Judith Quinn had faded. He liked them younger or not at all.

“Why, no,” she said indifferently, and tossed the whole lot on the flames. As if to show how brazen she could be, she grabbed up a handful of other stuff—a passport, he noticed, and a deed of some kind—and flung them in. “It's a relief, really.”

“You're not afraid?”

“It's my husband,” she said. Her voice was all clear of weeping now, and thus she could speak it coldly. Or perhaps she thought it wiser to hide the way she felt. “He's gone over to
her
.”

“I see.”

“We came here eighteen years ago,” she said bitterly, leaning back so that her shoulder brushed his thigh. “I thought we'd agreed to wait for you. I never knew there was someone else.”

“Where is he?”

“In there,” she said, with a desultory nod at an inner door. “He's getting it all set up like a hospital.” Here she gave a contemptuous snort. “As if there's going to be
wounded
,” she said with a withering irony. Then shrugged: “He's a very dull man. The only doctor I ever knew who never made a penny.”

She tilted her head back as if she would laugh, then lolled it against his crotch. Her mouth was slack. Her lids had drooped in a drowsy way. Michael despised the whole idea. He'd have liked to bring his knee up—knock her skull so hard as to snap the cord at the top of her spine. He saw things now for how they broke. But he also began to understand that he could use this rage. Could draw it out so they had it both ways, he and she.

He clenched his hand in her hair till she gasped. Then he heaved her aside so she sprawled on the floor, looking up with her face gone ashy white.

“Just get undressed,” he said huskily, not even trying to mask the disgust.

Even as she reached to unzip her skirt, he turned to kick at the fire, as if to show he had no truck with foreplay. Stooping down, he dumped the drawer wholesale on the crackling flames. He swept a line of books from the mantel—the doctor's ledgers, it looked like—and tumbled them in like logs. He cast about for something more, as if he had to stoke an engine. A pile of second-class mail on the table. A sheaf of magazines.

She was naked now, with her clothes spread underneath her on the carpet. Propped on her elbows, she waited his pleasure. When he'd thrown in all the paper he could find, he turned to see how bad it was. Every line on her ivory skin stood out sharp as a scar. The pale of the veins below the nipples. The stretches at the abdomen.

“Over there,” he ordered, pointing at the door to the doctor's office.

At first she didn't get it. She thought perhaps he had changed his mind. She made as if to retrieve her bra and panties, folded neatly beside the woodbox. Michael took a single stride and kicked them out of her hand. She shrank away toward the office door. “I want him to
hear
it,” Michael seethed, as he loosed his belt and slipped his pants to his knees. His stubby tool stood up straight. “Beg for it, honey,” he sneered at the doctor's wife.

And Judith started pleading. For the next four minutes, she slouched on the threshold, there in the heart of her tidy house. She moaned and grunted and shut her ears to the torrent of vile imaginings that spewed from Michael's mouth. He pumped her, dumb as a teenage boy, all the while hurling babble on the full-blown flesh before him. When he was done he pulled out shooting, as if he would not deign to leave his seed. He caught it fast in his hand, then reached and grabbed her underwear and wiped it off like slime.

He rose to his feet without another look. He turned and lumbered out, not pausing even to hoist his pants till he stood in the yard by the billowing sheets. Then he shut his eyes and faced the sun. In half a minute, it dried to streaks the film of sweat that slicked him head to toe. By the time he strode back down the lane, he was bland as ever. In his face was no experience at all. He stood on the corner before his church, looking left and right as if he didn't care which way he went.

An old couple came along, wheeling a garden barrow—very very carefully, as the thing was heaped with stuff. They gave him a cheery smile as they passed by. Michael saw an Irish linen tablecloth, a stack of blue bone China, vases, clocks, figurines. The plates all rattled as the wheel went rutting forward. Why did they bother to keep it whole, he wondered, if they were only going to bury it? Did they think their things would appear again, in some green glade on the other side?

He stepped out into their path. They stopped and set the barrow down, as if they expected a formal interrogation. The wife shied slightly back, and the grizzled man stood tall, prepared to give strict account. The pink of Michael's tongue appeared between his lips, so he looked just then like a mischievous child. He crouched as if to root among the treasures. With a single finger he tipped the edge of the barrow. It was so top-heavy that it fell over in a flash. The plates went crazy and broke like crackers. The clockface burst, and the works flew haywire. A Dresden shepherdess split at the waist, her skirts all crushed by a candlestick.

The old couple didn't move a muscle. They waited to see what words he'd speak to reveal his mystic purpose. The moment called for commandments. Yet when he looked up from his jewel of a ruin, Michael scarcely smiled before his face went vague again—as if he had a lot to think about. He scooted around the upturned barrow and sauntered off downtown, his hands in his pockets playing at his balls. The couple stooped in the road, the barrow righted, and filled it bit by bit with scoops of junk.

Across from the general store, in a patch of grass by a low stone basin, a group of children sat and laughed. He recognized two from the feeding at the church, but the others must have found the cakes he left on the grocer's shelf. Their hands were grimed with chocolate paste, their faces smeared with cream. They stuck their tongues out, thick with a mangle of half-eaten matter, and whooped to see their mirror image in one another. They could have cared less about Michael. They certainly weren't going home anymore. Soon they would make their way to the woods, the whole pack of them. There they would stalk the fallen trees for grubs and pee in the hollows where the bears made nests.

Michael passed contentedly. He did not require a formal recognition, not from them at least. He recalled his own fierce separation, ages and ages gone. For the next hundred yards or so, he indulged in sentiments no one who'd ever known him would have recognized. He wished the children three days' perfect wilderness: caves and treetops, flights of deer, a steep descent to the whirling tide. That they should end up more like wolves than miniature people, thus to face the darkness open-eyed. He almost wished he could keep one.

Up ahead, the mayor stood dignified on the short front porch of his bungalow. Green shutters framed the deep-set windows left and right, and an arc of winter ivy groped the wall beside the door. More than anyone else so far, Arthur Huck stood at attention. Perhaps he had more expectation of a visit than the others. Yet as Michael approached along the street, what the prophet noticed first about Arthur Huck was his chimney. There wasn't a breath of smoke.

“Don't you think you'd better get started?” Michael asked politely. “Later you'll have all the time you need to watch the sun on the water.”

“But I did it already,” retorted the mayor. “A month ago. I burned my papers and threw the ashes off the light. Perhaps you don't know—I work there.”

“I know,” Michael said simply.

“Of course. Now as to the village records, I've gone in and marked the major items. I didn't dare take things out, because of Polly. I don't trust her. She—”

At that, a sudden wave of blankness washed across the mayor, and he shivered. He wasn't as strong as he seemed at all. Though he spoke his lines quite cleanly, how could he ever explain the hours he'd spent at his shaving glass, getting the first few phrases right? He was just a little bureaucrat. When he took on the job as mayor, it was only because it went with being keeper of the light. He never even had a vision till six months ago.

“You did well, Arthur,” Michael said in a soothing voice. “We'll do that part together. Tonight, perhaps.”

“But … why can't we do it now?” he asked with a flutter of trepidation. “I'd just as soon get it over with, if it's all the same to you.”

“You're busy tonight?”

The other man shifted uncomfortably. “Not exactly,” he murmured at last. He was three steps up from Michael, who stood in the graveled walk, but it seemed just then the world turned upside down. As if the prophet spoke from a dais, while the mayor lay prostrate on the ground.

“But of course you are,” contradicted Michael. “You're busy every night.” He was full of a dangerous levity. Coaxing now: “Why won't you tell me about it?”

Arthur stared at the ground, and his shoulders slumped like a beaten child. “Because it's wrong,” he whispered softly. There was no point hiding it. Clearly, Michael already knew a good deal more than Arthur Huck could ever say. Yet he seemed to plead for a lighter sentence, as if no mere corporal punishment would make the slightest difference anymore. The agony was in him, deep as hell itself.

Michael let out a peal of laughter. “Wrong?” mocked the prophet. “What do you think this is? Sunday school? There's nothing
wrong.
”

So that when he moved to climb the steps, Arthur Huck might have reasonably expected nothing more than a manly slap on the back. Not once had Michael given indication they weren't equals. Why, therefore, did he shrink and wince? His head was bent so low against his chest that he looked like his neck was broken. Michael put out his hands and cradled the shamed man's cheekbones. He lifted his face and gazed into his eyes.

The mayor began to quake. Perhaps his sin had driven him perverse, and the specter of such gentleness was worse than whips and screws. Perhaps he had something to hide in his house—for that is where Michael now repaired, leaving the green door wide behind him. Arthur took one long final look at the vast and fretted sea, as if it had betrayed him. For a moment there he might have been the lone survivor of a shipwreck.

He turned and went inside.

Michael stood, half-sitting, at a long low cupboard against the wall. Beside him on either side was a row of tiny whittled ships, the work of a thousand hours. His pants were down to about mid-thigh. His penis, as before, stood upright. Raw and rather colorless, in fact—and scarcely bigger than his thumb. The smile that bathed his lower face hadn't deviated by a millimeter. If he had a rough command to give, or a rage inside that cankered all his guts, he didn't seem in any rush to speak it. He almost seemed to prefer the pose, as if, more than anything else, he wished to be admired.

But the mayor kept coming forward. Perhaps he found the prospect more repugnant than the act. In any event he needed no direction. He dropped to his knees not three feet off from the basket where his cat lay sleeping. He took the naked member in his mouth. Here he went stock-still for a second or two, as if to register the shock. Perhaps it was the sudden taste of musk. He had, after all, been drinking at the spring of Judith Quinn for eighteen years. Her rich and urgent perfume spooled his tongue with a tang like silver. How could he fail to recollect the source?

Unless it was only Michael's fancy. His smile gave way to a hoarse and guttural laugh, like a joke between two stevedores. He began to thrust his hips and buried a hand in Arthur's thinning hair, bobbing his head like a sex toy as he rode it to the top. Not ten minutes past he had heaped contempt on all these swollen spasms. Now he crooned: “You have to go back without me, Will. They need me. There's something terrible going to happen—in just a couple of days. It's waiting for them and me to be alone.…”

Then came the strangest thing. All of a sudden he yanked the mayor's head away, like a husk from a globe of fruit. Michael gripped himself tight in one hand and began to stroke in short little bursts, faster and faster the more he talked. The mayor sat back on his haunches, stunned and not quite trusting his reprieve. The prophet jerked with a lightning speed that almost seemed to lift him off the ground. Whispering now, and gasping as he lurched from thought to thought: “I wasn't ever meant to leave—it'll all be mine in a day or two. It's this light, Will. Please—please just go.”