The Fog (19 page)

“I think so, yes.”

“Will it hold?” Nick asked Reverend Malone. The pastor was sipping another drink. Nick suctioned his hand over the glass.
“Will it hold?”
he repeated.

“It’s held for a hundred years,” said Malone.

“Go ahead, Andy,” said Nick. “It’s all right. Don’t go anywhere but to the altar. And don’t go outside.”

“I won’t,” said Andy. “I promise.”

Malone laughed, a cackle. “No matter. It’s held until tonight because there was nothing for it to keep out. In reality it was designed to hold me here, to prevent me from speaking the truth I should have known. It doesn’t matter. Wood and bricks won’t stop it. Don’t you understand? It’s inside already. It’s always been here, in everyone who entered.”

Nick put the glass aside.

“Reverend,” he said. “Something is happening to our town. It started last night, at sea, and tonight it’s moved inland and it’s tearing us apart. You told me something a few minutes ago. I want you to finish it for them. You see, Reverend, there’s no more time.”

Malone elbowed up. He leaned on his knuckles and looked at them from behind a tired mask. Finally he dragged his feet across the floor and reached into a gaping hole near the crucifix.

“Be seated,” he said.

Kathy sat stiffly on the daybed. Sandy took the antique chair near her. Elizabeth went to be with Nick in the corner, but he left her and sat on the edge of the desk to see what Reverend Malone had removed from the wall.

Malone set it on the blotter and caressed its soft, gnawed leather binding. Water seepage had stained the cover and mummified spider eggs were affixed to the edges of the pages, but the contents were intact. On the first page was written in quill script:

JOURNAL
OF
FATHER PATRICK MALONE
1879–80

“This was my grandfather’s book. He kept these throughout his ministry, up until a short time before his death. This is the missing volume, hidden away these hundred years.”

He studied his visitors from behind the oak desk. His face was without expression. Only a tic on one eye disturbed his lax muscles.

“You are here tonight because it is time for you to know the truth.”

With a last effort of selfless service he spread open the pages to the middle of the book, as he had done so many times with the Lord’s word at so many services down the years. And now, tonight, with a membership that had dwindled to these few, he mustered the last of his failing voice and, in a fleeting moment of clarity, ministered one final time to these who had come to him for help.

He cleared his throat and smoothed the pages with shaking hands.

DECEMBER 9. Met with Blake this evening for the first time. He stood in the shadows to prevent me from getting a clear look at his face. What a vile disease this is! He is a rich man with a cursed condition. However, this does not prevent him from trying to better his situation and that of his comrades at the colony . . .

They listened with rapt attention, their eyes apprehensive in the guttering firelight. Malone bowed his head, entwined his fingers as if in prayer, and continued.

DECEMBER 11. Blake’s proposition is a simple one. He is desirous of moving off Tanzier Island and relocating the entire colony just north of here. For this purpose he has purchased with part of his fortune a clipper ship called the
Elizabeth Dane,
and asks only for permission to settle here. I must balance my feelings of mercy and compassion toward this poor man with my revulsion at the thought of a leper colony only a mile distant . . .

Father Malone leafed ahead to another page.

. . . Cannot sleep. My mind is filled with the truth of the abomination which I and my conspirators plan . . .

APRIL 11. The six of us met tonight. From midnight until one o’clock we planned the death of Blake and his comrades. We are a poor people and I tell myself that Blake’s gold will allow the church to be built and our small settlement to become a township. Yet this cannot soothe the horror I feel at being an accomplice to wanton murder . . .

Father Malone skipped further. Beyond the opening in the wall, a rat was foraging for sustenance, its ragged claws clittering around the stones. Malone pressed his forehead and went on.

APRIL 21. The deed is done. Blake and his twenty men sailed into our bay this night, expecting to be guided safely past the breakers by the signal bonfire our town had set for them on shore. We were aided in our deception by a passing strange fog that rolled in over all as if Heaven sent, though God had no hand in our actions tonight. For our false campfire, tended by myself and the others, directed them instead toward Spivey Point, where the
Elizabeth Dane
broke apart on the rocks with all hands lost. Blake’s gold will be recovered tomorrow. May the Lord forgive us for what we have done . . .

Malone closed the book.

“Your grandfather had a way with words,” said Sandy.

“The sin is plain enough in these pages. His stain, his corruption are mine.”

Kathy spoke up. “You’re taking this too far. We inherit nothing but a name from our ancestors. No one wants their past up in lights, but we can’t assume blame for what was done. They wanted a town. Your grandfather wanted a church.”

“They were lepers!”

“That is a little worse than if they were accountants,” said Sandy.

“Please, Sandy. Reverend, where did you find this?”

“My grandfather secreted it in the walls. But it could not remain hidden.”

“When did you find it?”

“Last evening.”

“What time?”

“It was shortly after midnight.”

“The same time the rest of the town dropped its pants,” said Sandy.

“And the same time,” said Malone, “that the six conspirators met one hundred years ago. This town has a curse on it. We all do. Why can you not see?”

Nick stiffened Malone’s drink and poured one for himself. The candle flame was waning, but the study did not grow darker.

There was a light outside the window, faint at first but becoming brighter through the stained mosaic.

Kathy gasped.

Nick downed the drink and braced himself. “All right. Is there a basement or cellar here?”

Malone smiled wryly. “We can’t hide from it. No matter where we go, it will find us.”

“We have to try,” said Elizabeth.

There was a sound of scurrying feet, and then the door to the study burst open.

Andy stood in the doorway.

“Come lookit!” he said. “There’s people outside! About seventeen or twenty of ’em! And guess what? They’re coming this way!”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“It has reached the windows now . . .”

Stevie rested her head against the double thickness of glass and closed her eyes for a moment as the fog overtook the observation platform behind her. She saw its swirls projected against the inner surfaces of her eyelids as if it were within her now, a living whiteness shot through with a vibrant, alien glow. The back of her head grew cold as the fog contacted the glass. She opened her eyes reluctantly and left the window.

“It’s cold, so cold,” she said with difficulty, vaguely aware that her microphone was still on. Her bones were stiff and her joints aching, her metabolism slowed to a crawl. “I think I have to go to sleep now. It feels like I’ve been on the air for a hundred years . . .”

A dream of pummeling waves lulled her into a timeless minute of twilight sleep. It was soothing in a way she associated with her earliest memories of the hand on the cradle, the el going by outside the apartment. I’ve got to sit down, she thought. I can’t feel my legs anymore.

She half walked, half fell across the studio.

Was that a pounding on the door below?

The waters are rising, she thought, lost in a stupor. It’s reached the lower level at last, the same way it reached Dan’s weather station. She tried to imagine his face, which she had never seen—was it handsome? Yes, I think so; it should be—at the instant the waves broke over his porch and drubbed insistently at his door. How surprised he was. I could hear it in his voice. That was because he did not expect it. I know, though. I know that it can’t be silenced.

The microphone slipped from her fingers.

Should I let it in?

No, that isn’t necessary. Nothing can stand in its way.

She slumped into her chair.

The pounding continued below.

Boom.

Boom.

Boom.

Wait.

Not yet, please. I have to see Andy first. He needs me, meeting it all alone in the night miles from here. It isn’t fair to him.

Could that be him knocking?

No, no.

But I need to see him one last time. I do.

She roused from the chair and leaned over the stairwell. The pounding assaulted her ears. She imagined the reinforced door ballooning inward under the impact of a battering ram. She heard the hinges deforming under the stress, as if they were on the anvil.

“Please . . .” she said weakly.

At that the pounding ceased. Then a steel hinge plate tore out of the plaster. A column of even colder night air ascended the staircase and tingled her face.

“Not ready,” she said. “Sorry, but I’m not. I have things to do. My son needs me. I know he does. It can’t end yet . . .”

There was a clanking on the first step.

Stevie lurched against the rounded wall, feeling instinctively for the seldom-used door to her upper level. She would use it now. It was her last defense.

It would not budge.

She put her weight to it. It stuttered from the wall and made warped contact with the frame. She forced her body at the knob until the latch caught. There was a hook screwed into the door, an eyelet on the wall. She flipped it into place.

She backed away from the door and across the studio as the clanking came again, mounting the steel stairs.

“There,” said Andy, “see?”

Tall figures were walking out of the ground fog in the churchyard, tattered and trailing braids of mist from their long arms and thick legs. Only the devil-red coals of their eyes pierced the night. They moved laboriously, as though through a swamp. They were coming closer.

He climbed down from the pew and let the adults take turns at the hole at the bottom of the stained glass window.

“I count ten so far,” said Elizabeth. “There may be more, passing behind the gravestones. It’s hard to be sure.”

“Why would people be coming here?” said Kathy. “Unless they were trapped, cut off like we were . . .”

“They aren’t people,” said Andy. “I can tell.”

“How many doors are there?” asked Nick.

“Does it matter?” said Reverend Malone. “They will get in. They are the crew of the
Elizabeth Dane
. They will be put off no longer.”

“Well, there used to be an inner office,” said Kathy, growing impatient with Malone’s attitude, “a kind of storage room. It’s at the back of the church, if I remember correctly, where the new section runs into the hillside. For a while they conducted the Sunday school there. I can show you.”

Nick commandeered the group and dispatched them up the aisle. Only Reverend Malone lingered behind. Nick went back for him. He grabbed the bottle out of the pastor’s hand and threw it at the wall.

Andy felt the hands of the women on his back, running him ahead of them. The hall was as dark as a cave.

“I better bring candles,” he said.

“No,” said Nick, “I’ll do it. Get going.”

It was dark for a while longer, and then the stone archway was glistening with damp, shifting shadows from the votive tapers Nick brought. The air was close and hard to breathe. A door was forced open. Nick lowered a crossbar into place and kicked cartons and bundles of papers out of the way.

“See if that file cabinet will move. If it will, shove it against the door. I’ll block the windows.”

“I know,” said Andy. “We need a hammer and nails and—”

“Keep back, son. Stay with Reverend Malone. Will you do that for me? He needs you.”

The pastor was in a corner talking to himself. Andy took the candle out of his wavering hands and found a niche for it in the wall where the mortar had crumbled. He watched wax drip drip down the wall, hardening before it could get very far. The flame stabilized and began to blacken the granite. The wick was bent at a bad angle but it was too late to do anything about that. An overflow of wax trickled down the side and plopped onto the floor. Something squeaked in the shadows and ran over Andy’s shoes.

An animal with burning fur hopped to the center of the room.

Kathy nearly fainted. It was only a rat. It crouched on the floor, twitching its snout in every direction like a compass. Then it circled and snapped, the way dogs do when they are trying to catch their own tails. Its yellow eyes blistered in agony as it gnawed at its back, trying to put out the burning in its skin.

“Do something!”

Nick brought his shoe down hard and put it out of its misery. He kicked it away and reached for some cuts of plywood stacked against the wall.

“Get this tip into the other window, if you can,” he said to Elizabeth. “It might work. Break the wood down if you have to. Use anything. I’ll see if there are tools.”