Carousel Seas (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

SUNDAY, JULY 9

HIGH TIDE 10:24
A.M.
EDT

Mr. Ignat’ and I parted ways on the sidewalk in front of Bob’s. He was bound for Fun Country, and I was bound for the top of Dube Street, and a probable session with the maps and guidebooks.

The cat was sleeping on the fluffy blanket of inebriated elephants when I let myself in. She immediately opened her eyes, rose into a full Halloween cat stretch, and jumped to the floor. I pushed the door closed and stood still as she jogged across the room and wove around my ankles.

“Hi, there,” I said, leaning down to offer a finger. “I’m glad to see you, too, but you didn’t have to get up for me.”

She bumped my finger politely with her nose, and gave me a squinty-eyed cat smile before strolling off to the kitchen.

“The meeting went well,” I said, following her. “Jess Robald is shaping up into quite the leader of people. I hope she can lead them to answers that work, if not exactly to the Promised Land.”

I opened the fridge, got out the bottle of cranberry juice, and opened the cabinet for a glass.

“After,” I continued, for the cat’s edification, “I went up to Heath Hill. Mr. Ignat’ was in a forthcoming mood, so I got a history lesson. We stopped at Bob’s and had grilled blueberry muffins for breakfast, just like old times.”

I shook the juice until it was foamy, filled the glass, and put the bottle back in the fridge. Leaning against the counter, I sipped, gasping a little at the icy tartness.

The cat was at her food dish, crunching kibble with enthusiasm. She flicked an ear, which might equally have been a request to continue the fascinating account of my morning, or an appreciation of my brief silence.

“I figure to do a little still zone research,” I said. “You can help, if you want, or you can go back to your nap.”

No response from the cat. Well, what did I expect? She was eating.

I finished my juice, rinsed the glass and put it in the sink. Then I crossed to the French doors, opened them and stepped outside for a moment to overlook the beach. It being Sunday morning, there weren’t epic crowds overflowing the beach, but there was a nice sampling of fun-seekers about, and a vigorous game of volleyball going on in the high, dry sand near the dune fence.

Nice day, I thought, taking a deep breath of salt air. It was good to be home.

I stood for another minute, just . . . appreciating the fact that I was home, the land making satisfied music at the back of my head, before I went back inside and opened up my books.

* * *

I was flat on my back on the floor, map and guidebooks to hand. One deep breath to center me, and another to clear my mind. Third—

Right then I felt a weight on my stomach, which moved up to my chest, and began pushing. Hard.

I opened my eyes, and lifted my head.

The cat smiled at me.

“I’m trying to concentrate here,” I said. Then I remembered that I’d told her she could help, if she wanted to. Obviously, she wanted to.

“For this job,” I said, “I need to be able to focus, and not be distracted. Kneading my breast bone is distracting.” I paused, and added. “If you want to lie on me, that would be a big help. I’m hunting, but inside my head.”

The cat smiled again, folded her front paws neatly under her chest and settled in, chicken-style. I could feel her purr, but I didn’t think that would create a problem with my concentration. Bowie’s purrs had focused me wonderfully.

I closed my eyes, feeling the comfortable weight on my chest. One deep breath to center; two to clear my mind; three, and I opened myself to the land.

The full riot of life and of living that was Archers Beach opened to my senses . . . diffidently. We’d both learned something in the course of our search for still zones. The land had learned to moderate itself.

And I had learned to trust that the land wouldn’t overwhelm me, and swallow me into itself.

They do say that practice makes perfect.

The music of the land beckoned me. I allowed myself to sink just below the surface, observing with a sense that wasn’t really like hearing or sight, but a combination of both. From this level, I could feel the disparate voices that made up the song, like the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the universe.

Every piece fit right where it was best suited; each informing the pieces immediately touching it; connecting, and connecting again, the whole stronger than the parts. At least the parts that were doing their jobs. The parts that had fallen silent, they weakened the whole; they offered nothing for pieces adjacent to them to anchor to, and created an unstable situation.

Buoyed by the land’s song,
in
it, but not quite
of
it, I allowed myself to expand, casting my net wide, until suddenly, I heard it—Check that.

I
didn’t
hear it.

I narrowed my attention until I had that patch of stillness directly in my sights. Holding it close, I expanded myself very, very slowly, trying to identify the pieces nearby, the voices that were still joined in song.

This was the nerve-wracking part, and, sadly, the part that practice hadn’t made anywhere near perfect. Or at least, not yet.

I brought every bit of concentration I possessed to bear, and took . . . call it a
mental snapshot
of the still zone, and its surrounding pieces.

Then I rose to the top of the song, and higher still, until I was fully back in my own body, lying flat on my back on the living room floor, my face cooled by the breeze from the open doors, and a cat purring on my chest.

I raised my hand, and held it near her face, the backs of my fingers parallel with her cheek; close, but not too close.

She leaned into them, rubbing her cheek down my skin, the purr output increasing.

“Okay,” I said softly. “Now what happens is that we look at the map and try to match that snapshot I took to the lay of the land, so to speak.”

The cat smiled.

“You’re cute, too, but I need to change position to look at the map, so here we go . . .”

I rolled, slowly. The cat came to her feet and walked against the roll—just like I was a log floating down the river, and she was the log driver—until I was on my stomach and she was standing on my ass. I propped up on my elbows, pulled the map to me, and held my mental snapshot against it. The technique that seemed to work best, when it worked at all, was to focus on both the image and the map and wait for a sign.

In the past, the sign had taken the form of a sudden and overwhelming conviction that
this place right here
on the map was what I was looking for. It was pretty damn’ intense when that happened.

Unfortunately, what usually happened was that I would focus until my eyes crossed, the map would blur, the mental snapshot would disintegrate and a line of white pain would sear through my head, leaving me with a sullen headache.

I focused, trying to look
through
the snapshot and
into
the map. Distantly, I was aware of something happening on my back, but didn’t really connect it with the cat until I felt whiskers tickle my ear as she hunched on my shoulder to stare down at the map with me.

It was either the whiskers in my ear, or the thought of her studying the map—or both. I laughed, the image and the map wavering in my bilevel vision.

I snatched at my control, fumbled, and saw a flash out of the corner of my mental eye before I lost it all.

“Damn,” I said mildly. I leaned my head softly against the cat’s head.

“You can’t do that, kid. I’m an amateur at this stuff. I need all the concentration I can bring to bear. I appreciate the help, though.”

I sighed. At least I didn’t have a headache this time.

“I thought I saw something just before it all went to hell,” I told the cat. “But it went by so fast that I didn’t get it.”

The cat stiffened on my shoulder, as if in surprise. I felt her weight shift, and saw one furry paw come down hard on the map.

I blinked, and slowly extended a finger toward the paw, which obligingly lifted away. The force of her blow had left a dent in the map; a claw tip had put a tiny tear in the glossy paper.

I put my finger on the tear, and felt a jolt of certainty.

“Holy moly, kiddo, that’s seventh-level shit. You’re wasted here.”

The cat jumped off my shoulder, using her back legs hard. I hastily reached for a magic marker and drew a circle, noting the place with a touch of astonishment.

“St. Margaret’s Church?” I asked, and rolled to my feet.

The cat was sitting on the floor between the living room and the kitchen, staring hard at exactly nothing. Somehow, her pose conveyed affronted dignity.

“Hey.” I stretched out on my side on the floor next to, but not touching her.

“Hey,” I said again. “Nancy should’ve told you that I’m an idiot. Always saying the wrong thing. What I meant was—you really helped me out, and I’ll go check that spot”—no putting this off until it was safe, I thought; not with hurt feelings in play—“tomorrow. That thing with being wasted? I’m only worried you’ll get bored with me and the job and move on. I wouldn’t like that.”

She turned her head and considered me out of solemn amber eyes. Then stretched her neck out—and nipped me lightly on the chin.

The level of relief I felt was ’way out of proportion with the problem. I smiled and reached out to rub her between her ears.

“Thanks.”

She purred.

“So, since it seems you’re staying, we ought to figure out a call name for you. Any suggestions?”

The cat yawned.

“Not useful, unless you want to be called Sleepy.”

That earned me a glare—also not particularly useful. I stared back.

The cat blinked first.

She sighed, stretched, and tucked up against me where I lay on the floor, her back against my chest. Another sigh and she seemed to go immediately to sleep.

I closed my eyes and cleared my mind.

The darkness behind my eyelids lightened, like I was looking through fog; I heard the familiar crash of waves, the sound of a buoy bell underneath. The fog lightened more, and suddenly I was looking at a rock. It was a biggish rock and unusual, even taking into account that I was probably looking at it from cat-high.

For one thing, the surface glittered, like it was made up of a thousand sharp crystals. For a second thing, the crystals seemed to be rooted in a stem of granite—sort of like a knife bouquet.

I noted the rock even as I tried to keep my mind open. If the cat wanted to show me something else, I’d better be with the program.

But it seemed as if the rock was the thing. Gradually, it faded from my awareness, and I opened my eyes to find I was staring into a pair of serious amber eyes.

“Okay,” I said, reaching out to rub her ear. “I got it, now all I have to do is decode it. I don’t suppose it’s remotely possible that you’re wanting to be called Crystal?”

The cat yawned.

“Figured.”

I thought about it. Given where she’d come from, it was almost a sure thing that the rock in question had been part of the Camp Ellis jetty, though I was willing to bet that the cat didn’t want to be called Jetty, either.

“Well,” I said, rolling over onto my back, “I’m not going to call you Rocky. Belle? Foggy?”

Two more yawns.

I sighed, rolled to my feet and went over to the bookshelf, and ran my fingers over the spines of the reference books there until I came to the tatty copy of
Roget’s International Thesaurus, Fourth Edition
, published in 1977.

Perfect.

I sat down on the floor, crossed my legs and cracked the book.

The cat came over and put front paws on my knee.

“Half a sec,” I told her. “We’ll getcha something good.”

Here we were—383.11. I cleared my throat.

“Let’s see—
lithic, adamantine, flinty, spall
. . .” I looked up. The cat yawned.

“Right. Hey—
chesil’s
kind of pretty.”

Another yawn. I sighed.

“Breccia . . .”

Claws pricked my skin lightly through my jeans.

I looked up and met the cat’s eyes.

“Breccia,” I said, just to be sure.

She squinted her eyes in a cat smile, and I closed the thesaurus.