Lightfall (28 page)

“Ah, but you didn't love me back,” he said in a faintly mocking tone. The joke was all on him.

“I love you now. Isn't that enough?”

“Do you?” he asked with a smile, and glided to his feet.

He beckoned her to follow. She scrambled up right after him, so anxious was she not to be left alone in the central ring. He moved among the beasts with a pensive frown, patting them on their rumps as he passed. He trailed his fingers along the flank of the llama, lingered over the wildebeest, as if he were looking for something special. Iris couldn't outguess him. She stayed as near as his shadow and waited his bidding. She knew she was wholly on Michael's ground, though she couldn't see where she'd crossed the border.

His naked back was beet-red, his shoulders peeled and blistered. His hair had already caught a streak of yellow from the sun. He fit in here better than she did. She was tired from the climb uphill and longed to have a bath. She'd hurt a muscle falling. Next to him she was old and weary: surely he'd gotten thinner—younger, even—since he landed.

He stopped at a bright-striped zebra, grazing a tuft of buttercups. He pulled up its legs to check its hooves. He made soft noises as he went around, till the creature lifted its dull-witted head and nuzzled its master's hand. “See what I bring you?” he asked with a grin, and it took her a moment before she knew it was she and not the zebra he'd addressed.

“Beautiful,” whispered Iris.

“Get on.”

Again there was no mistaking: this was an order. She started to pull off her sweater before she took another step. It wasn't to do with Michael, somehow. She had as much distance from him as ever. The beast, though, seemed to demand some higher innocence. The sweater fell in the grass, and a long-nosed thing like an anteater whisked it away to bed its nest. She kicked off her shoes and dropped her jeans, not much aware of anything now but how it would feel to ride again. She was still one step behind herself as she groped her way to the other life. The ride would bring it all back.

Patting the zebra's neck, she crooned a fragment of lullaby she'd never heard before. Then she leaped and swung into place. The feel of the beast naked, flesh to flesh, shivered her like a girl again. She caught a grip at his sharp, electric mane. They started forward, swishing the grass like a squall of rain.

The animal, bred to the heat of plains, lumbered along at a plodding pace, so Michael had no trouble keeping up. He padded beside them across the meadow, whistling an eerie tune. If the zebra had been bridled, Michael would have held the reins.

Iris was furious. She thought he meant to let her really gallop, and so recover the bounds of her ancient lands. She looked about for a way to defy him. She figured she'd wait till they reached the edge of the wood, slip off and run like crazy.

Then she began to see how the other beasts withdrew. They bowed from the path at her approach. She was part of a kind of ceremony. For a moment she was humbled by the awesome dance of forces. It was grander now than she and Michael. There wasn't room for hate. Let go, she thought, and racked her brain to remember where she'd heard those words before.

“What's it like?” she asked him softly.

“You mean out there?” He pointed a finger west to the water—as casual as she had, not five minutes since. “It's like a nightmare.”

“People aren't happy?”

He gave a brief, contemptuous laugh by way of answer. They'd reached the end of the field now, and she swung around to gaze at them, rank on rank in a holy ring. She held her breath and for that one instant saw the point of it all. They would make a place where the last of every sort—no matter how bizarre—could come and finish out his time. Like a sanctuary.

“That's why they're better off dead,” said Michael.

Just as he spoke, she was thinking: Wait. There really ought to be two of each, if the thing was going to work. It was as if she'd completely forgotten her earlier notion, that kind was meant to mate with kind. And it seemed she hadn't even heard him, as to who should die and who should not. She turned back now with a beatific smile.

“So we'll start all over, is that it?” she asked, indulgent as she dared. “You want sons, I suppose.”

“No,” he retorted, most distinctly. “I want all that to stop. We will be the last.”

They entered the grove of firs, and she had to duck her head. She was right up among the lower branches and saw the rows and rows of birds perched in the inner reaches, silent. As if they waited to hear what answer she would give.

“See, we get to live forever,” Michael added carefully, holding up a judicious finger as if he meant to gauge the quarter of the wind. He seemed to want to lighten up the prophet talk—to make a deal, almost.

“You sure have stupid ideas, for someone who's seen the world,” said Iris. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

She plucked a pinecone off a branch and sniffed it like a flower. She felt better already, just knowing the worst. After all, it was only crazy. He simply had to be stopped. Didn't matter how.

“See?” he asked, with a pouting sneer, “I
told
you you didn't love me.”

She didn't waste another second.

“Edward,” she said, putting out a hand to twirl a lock of his hair, “I want you to tell me what it's like. Be honest now. Will I be happy there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said politely. “It's very pretty, really. There's miles and miles of woods. We've got deer and pheasants—” A queer, hypnotic singsong hummed at the back of his voice.

Don't listen, she thought. Just get him.

Already they'd gone so deep into the trees that they couldn't see out to the cliffs or fields. Only the random coin of sunlight patched the ferns on the floor below. She supposed she could use a stick, if she could just break off a branch in passing, but somehow the right thing stayed out of reach. If she jumped to the ground to get a rock, she would lose the sense of ambush. If only she had her own horse, she thought. At the least command, he'd have trampled this demon like a coiling snake.

“What will I do there?” Iris asked, trying to sound small and timid.

“Well, there's the house,” he said. “You'll see—there's a lot of work to running an estate. We'll have parties, of course. And people to stay. I promise you won't be lonely.”

“But, Edward,” she persisted, crouching low on the zebra's neck to peer into the captain's face, “why don't you marry one of your own?”

The line of his mouth went tight. He raised his chin to an arrogant tilt. “Because they die,” he said disdainfully.

They were coming up now on the rain-swelled stream. Banked with violets and lady slippers, it coursed like a dream through the heart of the wood. The sound of it rushing to meet the sea was charged, like something about to burst. Already the zebra shied, slowing its pace to thump one hoof in protest. “Come on,” said Michael, stroking its muzzle. He stepped into the water himself, to show it was only knee-deep. Fixing a stare between its eyes, he beckoned the animal forward.

Iris's breath began to come rapidly. As the zebra put out a shaky foot to the mossy rock, she rose up on its back. Michael bent to pull up a tuft of greens from the bank to give the beast a prize. With a splash the zebra lurched ahead another step till it stood half in the rolling stream. Iris drew up one leg so that she was kneeling. Michael scarcely noticed her. He was still half-crouched and murmuring promises, beckoning to the beast. As the zebra lowered its head to drink, Iris leaped. She landed square on Michael's shoulders, driving him right to the bottom.

The zebra thundered across to the opposite bank. Michael was pinned in the weeds. She knelt on his belly and gripped her hands around his throat. Her head just barely broke the water, as she gasped and choked on the current. Michael, as if to mock her, lay in an awful calm. He made no move to throw her off. He even seemed to clench the waving grasses so as not to have to touch her. His eyes were open wide, but they weren't remotely startled. Sad, perhaps. Disappointed. His breath escaped from his puffed-out cheeks in spurts of bubbles. He was going very white. And then—

She threw back her head in the water and screamed. “No!” she cried. “No—
please!
” As if someone were strangling
her.

She dragged him up from the bottom and clutched him in her arms. He was horribly limp and deadweight. When his face broke the surface, his tongue lolled out like a panting dog. Water gouted from his nose and mouth. She lurched for the shore and ripped her knees on the rocks. Still she kept moaning, “
No
,” as if she were pleading with him not to die. The current was pulling them further and further downstream, till she didn't think she had it in her to reach dry land again. Then she caught at a tree root trailing out from the bank. She nearly yanked her shoulder from the socket, but she held.

Straining, scrambling, bellowing her defiance—like pulling herself up a mountain—she drew them free of the water's roar. A sudden lurch and they lay in a shallow eddy where the bank had crumbled. She clamped her mouth on his. She held him cradled and filled his lungs like sails, willing the life back into him. When at last his limbs began to twitch, he seemed to struggle against it, as if he was being asphyxiated. She doubled her grip. The queer unruly kiss went on and on. For a time it wasn't certain who was there and who was not.…

… and over the barren, leafless hill, the band of marauders dragged like zombies. They had no plans. An hour ago, they'd swarmed through a country store about ten miles south of Hartford, so they weren't hungry. They'd left the old proprietor dead behind the counter and later strangled a group of girls playing jump rope in the park, so they weren't especially crazed for blood. There was an all-points bulletin out for them, but they'd left the road at Saybrook and were heading overland through deep November woods. The cop cars shrilled in vain, going back and forth in the bloody street. They were used to their killers one-on-one, and driving mid-size Chevys.

There were eight altogether, six men and two women. Till yesterday, they'd worked construction in the lower slopes of Vermont. They built ski shacks for the New York rich and managed, on account of the calluses, to keep in a country way, shaggy and uncorrupt. They called themselves a medieval guild. They lived eight strong in a reconstructed barn, with a greenhouse behind it in which they grew their dope.

Nobody knew where the seeds came from. Wandering types with beards to the chest often dropped by for a day or two, and they tended to leave behind the butt ends of weeds from Nepalese temple gardens. Stories abounded, as the pipe went around, of natives flogging the plants on the high spine of Chile, to make the resin bleed. Buds had been smuggled like diamonds from the sides of Hawaiian volcanoes. The barn people planted pips of every sort, with blue lights all night long and a lot of Mozart to keep things calm. They'd just taken in a bumper crop. Dried it for weeks in the darkroom. Then, because it was Saturday night, they broke it out in coarse cigars, like old-Havana millionaires.

By two
A.M.
they were in a van, careering south for no reason at all, singing ancient rock and roll. When at last they cracked up against a tree, about halfway down Connecticut, they stepped quite neatly onto the road, zipped their jackets and started walking. By dawn they were wandering east-southeast of Hartford, scanning the near horizon as if they were on the lookout for a half-finished Gothic spire. They had some vague idea they needed to get to a harbor. Not that they wished to sail away, or meet a ship from a mystic place. They merely wished to find a lonely bluff above the sea, to watch the sky for signs.

The three people locked in the house on the snow-dusted hill ahead knew nothing of any of this. The rector had read his daily lesson and, finding it strangely wanting, laid his Bible aside on the kitchen counter. His fifteen-year-old son, across from him, was studying for a test in Ancient History. The ten-year-old was up in his room playing jungle games with his spotted snake. They held to what normal life they could. They didn't cry. They watched the news at six and eleven, more and more aware that whatever it was was seeping through the world. But as no one had started saying so on the air, they kept it to themselves. To anyone who asked, they said the mother had gone to Cleveland to help her widowed sister close her life.

The eight stood resting under a lifeless elm in the falling twilight. They watched the house impassively—touched, perhaps, by its isolation. With a billow of smoke in its chimney and a row of gnarled old apple trees in the yard, it appeared as snug and safe to them as the barn they only dimly recollected. It seemed they would presently move along, when all of a sudden a strangled cry croaked from the first one's mouth. He groped the air and clawed at his throat, rather as if he were drowning. Before the others could turn and see, they were seized themselves. Their eyes bugged wide, and they gagged in pain. Some awful vision of godlessness had riven their quest with forks of flame. They were lost like souls, neither here nor there, and commenced to wilt like a bunch of flowers.

And the cozy house on the hill beyond was their only chance to avenge themselves. They would go like a swarm of bees: stinging.

Gibbering now and wild, they frenzied down the slope to the split rail fence. Three or four vaulted over and kept advancing. A couple more crouched to pick up clubs from the woodpile. Another lagged back to smash the gate to smithereens. Though the three in the house went suddenly still and cocked their heads at the sound, it wasn't much more, in that one moment, than the raccoons made on a moonlit night when they knocked the garbage over.

“Jenny'll get 'em,” said Michael, grinning across at his father. He meant the puckish dog.

Then everything fell apart. The door was knocked so hard that the panels splintered. The fanlight cracked and shivered. They must have hit the knob with a karate chop, for it fell in on the floor with a feeble thud. A finger wormed into the hollow, jiggling at the latch. All over the house windows broke at random, with stones whizzing through like a meteor shower. The rector leaped from his chair just as Michael was struck in the forehead. Shouting the younger boy downstairs, Tim dragged his bleeding son across the kitchen, out of the line of fire. He threw open the door to the cellar. As Gene came tearing around the corner, Tim saw the first one lunge through the dining room window, bathed in blood as the glass sank in its teeth.