The Mysteries (7 page)

The hot Texas sun beat down on me, out of a blue sky cloudless but faintly hazed by the city's pollution. Perspiration soaked my cotton shirt. I was hot and tired and hungry. Mom wouldn't be home for at least another hour, and inside the Stahlmanns' house, instead of Regina with her dolls and ice cream and freshly homemade lemonade, a naked middle-aged man was dozing on the couch.

I felt like bursting into tears, so I got mad and yelled, “You're crazy! I live here! Why should I go anywhere with you?”

“I can give you everything you want. In my country, you'll live and be young forever. And you'll always be safe with me. I'm very powerful, Peri. Who do you think made Ray fall asleep?”

“I guess you mean
you
did.”

He nodded.

I shrugged. “Why?”

“To protect you.”

“To protect me from
Ray?
”

“The man is sick with love for you. He's been waiting all day for you to come. And, if not for me, there'd be no one to stop him having his way.”

“That's sick. That's totally sick. He's an old man. I'm just a kid!”

“You're a beautiful woman. But love can be a sickness, that's true. Don't worry, I've given him a healing sleep, and when he wakes, his sickness will have passed. He won't ever try to bother you again.”

“He'd better not! It's totally illegal, you know. I could call the police.” My face was burning, but I started to shiver, feeling cold and hot, disgusted and excited.

“I've taken away Ray's sickness, but other men will fall in love with you, whether you will it or no. That is your fate. But, I promise you, I won't let you be harmed or dishonored. I'll always watch over you, even if you don't return my love. When you are ready to take a lover, it will be by your own choice entirely.”

My feelings changed again. I noticed how handsome he was, how noble and sad. Maybe, once upon a time, in another country, I really
had
been his wife. I said, “Can I see you again? I mean, I'd like to. When I'm older.”

He smiled. “When you are ready for a husband, I'll come again. I've waited more than a thousand years; a few more years don't matter to me.” He smiled, and his bright eyes were looking into mine, seeing me as I'd never been seen before. He was so handsome I could hardly stand it, it was like a sweet ache in my bones.

And suddenly I was scared, not of him, but of the way I was feeling about him. I turned around and ran back to the safety of my own house.

I took a big breath, and stood quietly for a few moments in the living room (in shape, exactly the same as the one next door), breathing in the familiar smell of home, listening to the slow ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the plain white wall, feeling the cool breath of the air-conditioning.

I yawned. Then I wriggled and stretched, blinking and feeling sleepy. Did I fall asleep on the bus, or what? Maybe the whole thing had been a dream.

I went to check out the refrigerator. It looked to me like we were going to have to eat out that night, unless Mom remembered to stop off at the supermarket on her way home from work. There was some half-flat Diet Dr Pepper left, so I drank that, and made myself a jelly sandwich and wolfed it down.

Feeling better, I went back to my bedroom.

Cu lay on my pillow, as usual. I flopped down and hugged him. “Cu! Darling Cu, you'll never guess! I met a man. He said he used to be my husband in another country, before I was born—what do you think of that?”

Cu said nothing.

I stared at his sleeping face, frowned, and shook him. “Wake up, sleepyhead!”

He had nothing to say. Loyal he was, but sometimes a bit slow. I picked up Queeny from her throne on the tissue box on the bedside table.

“Who was he, Queeny? What's his name? Was it true, what he said?”

The silence rang in my brain as Queeny stared back with her blind, painted eyes, and did not respond. Sometimes, to tease or punish me, she would delay answering, but this time, I knew, was different. She didn't answer because she couldn't. She was just a doll.

“Mocky?” The little purple pony smiled at me, looking shy and sweet and as loving as ever, but I knew as soon as my fingers closed around her soft, rubbery body, that she had changed, too.

It had happened. They'd left me in spite of their promises.

Or had I left them?

Into my loneliness rushed the memory of
him
.

He
said he would watch over me.

I believed him.

I didn't even know his name, but he was my future as well as my past. He had promised to come back for me, when I was ready.

I'm ready now.

P.L.

7. James, Donald, and Thomas

Joseph Moore, James Ducat, Donald McArthur, and Thomas Marshall, four retired seamen, took up their posts as lighthouse keepers in the newly constructed lighthouse on Eilean Mor in December 1899.

It was a lonely place; one of the loneliest in the world. Eilean Mor (the name means “big island” in Gaelic, but it is barely five hundred feet wide) is the largest of the Flannan Islands, twenty miles west of the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Before the building of the lighthouse, no one had lived on the Flannan Islands for centuries, although they were regularly visited by Hebridean shepherds, who ferried their sheep across the sea to graze on the rich grass, and hunters intent on catching a few of the many birds who nested there. Yet visitors were reluctant to pass a single night ashore on the Flannans, for they'd heard legends of spirits and fairies haunting these lonely outposts in the sea. The islands took their name from St. Flannan, who built a chapel and his hermitage on Eilean Mor in the seventh century.

The only way on or off the island was via the supply boat
Hesperus,
which (weather permitting) called every two weeks to bring the mail, food, fuel, and other necessary supplies. The lighthouse keepers were to work in a team of three for six weeks on the island, taking turns for two weeks' leave on Lewis. Each time the
Hesperus
called she would bring one man back from his time off and take away another.

On December 6, 1900, Joseph Moore left on the
Hesperus
for his two weeks off. After his first year as a lighthouse keeper he was not looking forward to another, and the others felt the same. The lighthouse provided shelter from the wind and rain and cold, and their duties as lighthouse keepers were not arduous, but there was little to do on the tiny, rocky island. The long hours passed slowly as they read and reread the same books and papers, played draughts and dominoes, talked to each other, or thought their own thoughts and gazed out to sea. After six months they all knew each other's stories inside out and backward, and were starting to long for different company. Only the two weeks off every six weeks kept the job from being any different to a prison sentence, thought Joseph. Still, it was safer than his previous life as a sailor, and the pay was better: a man would be a fool to complain about such safe and regular employment.

Joseph Moore again boarded the
Hesperus
on December 21, ready to return to his duties. But although the weather had been calm throughout his leave, shortly after
Hesperus
left port, a storm blew up. For the next three days the supply boat rode the storm off the coast, as the winds and waves made it too dangerous either to go on or to turn back.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, the weather calmed, and the boat approached the Flannans. Moore was alarmed when he realized that the lighthouse was not showing a light, but the sea was still dangerously rough; it was another two days before the weather eased enough to allow the
Hesperus
to moor at the island's east dock.

There were no mooring ropes on the dock, as there should have been, and repeated blasts on the boat's foghorn brought no response. When Joseph Moore finally went ashore he found the lighthouse cold and empty. Everything was neat and tidy. The lamps had been filled with oil and their wicks trimmed, yet they had never been lit. On the shelf, the clock had stopped. Two of the three sets of oilskins and rubber boots were missing, but one remained. With a creeping feeling of dread, Joseph read the most recent entries in the log, written by Thomas Marshall:

December 12: Gale, N by NW. Sea lashed to fury. Stormbound.

9 p.m.: Never seen such a storm. Waves very high. Tearing at lighthouse. Everything shipshape. Ducat irritable.

Moore frowned. There had been no storm reported on Lewis at that date. And it was most unusual for the log keeper to comment on anyone's temper. Perhaps in a private letter, but this was an official report that anyone might see. He read on.

Midnight: Storm still raging. Wind steady. Stormbound. Cannot go out. Ship passing sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins. Ducat quiet. McArthur crying.

Moore blinked and read the words again, but there was no mistake. He tried to picture stolid, steady Donald McArthur in tears, and could not.

December 13: Storm continued through night. Wind shifted, W by N. Ducat quiet. McArthur praying.

Noon: Grey daylight. Me, Ducat, and McArthur prayed.

What a man did in the solitude of his own soul was between himself and his God. Moore had never known Marshall, Ducat, or McArthur to pray, publicly, alone or together. They were well used to extremities of weather—any man who had been to sea, or grown up on the coast of Scotland, had seen plenty of wind and weather. He could not imagine the storm that would have driven any of the men to tears or prayer. To swearing, blasphemy, maybe, but . . . He swallowed hard and shook his head, wondering what on earth had happened there in his absence. With a nameless dread coiling in his stomach, Moore read the final entry:

December 15: 1 p.m. Storm ended. Sea calm. God is over all.

What, Moore wondered, had happened on the fourteenth? Why was there no entry for that day? Even more urgent was the question of what had happened on December 15. When the sea was calm and “God . . . over all,” what strange disaster had befallen the three men?

Could a sudden, freakish sea swell have swept all three men from the jetty?

Yet regulations were clear: three men staffed the lighthouse at all times, because it was a stern requirement of the post that
one
man, at least, must always remain inside. This rule was always obeyed.

Might Ducat and Marshall have gone out in their oilskins onto the jetty to perform some task and been caught by a sudden high wave that swept them out to sea? If McArthur had rushed out in a futile attempt to save them, and been swept away himself, they could all have perished, and it would explain why his oilskin was left behind.

But it didn't sound right to Moore. He knew that if he'd just seen his two companions swept off the jetty in a storm, he'd hardly rush out unprepared and meet the same fate. Only a fool would jump into a raging sea in a doomed attempt to save someone else, and his colleagues were not fools.

And what to make of all those reported tears and prayers before the fatal day?

Was it possible that one of the three men had gone insane, killed the others, then leaped into the sea himself? Although every knife, axe, and hammer that might have been a weapon was clean and in its proper place, and there was no sign of blood or human violence anywhere, it was not impossible that the killer could have used his own hands, or a rock, and afterward thrown the bodies into the sea.

Theories have been put forward, possibilities suggested, and fictions contrived to explain the disappearance of the three keepers of the Flannan Lighthouse, but it seems unlikely that the whole truth will ever be known. Today, the lighthouse on Eilean Mor is, like most lighthouses, automatic. No one lives there. The mystery remains.

8. Hugh

Peri's story was familiar to me. Not in every detail, but I was certain I had read something very like it before in a book of fairy tales or old legends.

I closed the notebook and stowed it away in my briefcase. I was unsettled by it, uneasy for a reason I couldn't quite pin down. What did it tell me about Peri? That she was a fantasist? A plagiarist? A budding author? Or just a bored kid who longed to believe there could be magic in her very ordinary American suburban life?

Yet when I took another look at her photograph I couldn't believe she'd ever been ordinary, or even imagined herself so. I wished I knew when and why she'd written it. An assignment for school? Or something she'd felt compelled to write for her own reasons, something she maybe even believed . . .

“More coffee, sir?”

Lost in my thoughts, I hadn't heard the waiter approach. I looked up. No, not a waiter—the café's owner. I felt embarrassed, and a little guilty, that I didn't know his name. I glanced at my watch and was startled to see that most of the morning had gone.

“No, thanks, I'd better get going. What's the damage?”

When I got home there was just time to deal with my e-mail and a couple of other small chores before I had to shower and change my shirt (which reeked of fried bacon and other people's cigarettes) and head into town for my meeting with Hugh Bell-Rivers.

The air felt close when I went out again, warm and moist, the sky like dirty white cotton massed overhead, bearing down on the grey-and-green city, threatening rain. At the tube station, I bought a paper from the newsagent and read the story about Linzi Slater as I might have probed a wound. Once upon a time, I reminded myself, I had imagined Linzi alive and that I could find her, save her. Was I heading down that same self-deluding road in my search for Peri?

I left the train at Piccadilly Circus and walked through Soho, past Golden Square with its statue of George II and benches adorned with bare-armed office workers munching sandwiches from Boots or Marks and Spencer, enjoying their lunch
al fresco
. It wasn't raining yet.

There was just one noodle bar on Kingly Street, and as I approached it I thought I recognized the young man crossing the street. We reached the door at the same time, and our eyes met. He spoke first.

“Ian Kennedy?”

“That's me.”

I put out my hand and, after a hesitation, he shook it, rather limply. He seemed unpracticed at handshakes.
Young people these days,
I said to myself in an old-codger voice. A gloomy sense of my own mortality really had a grip on me: his youth and fitness seemed to emphasize that I was past it. Even without Peri's beauty to cast a shadow he wasn't what I'd call handsome, but young he certainly was. His hair, a pale, no-color brown, had been shaved off close to his head, and his blandly symmetrical features were dominated by enormous blue eyes. I find that neonate look freakish and slightly disturbing in a grown man, but have noticed that women like it. His chin was faintly stubbly, which made me suspect he shaved only a couple of times a week, and he wore three small silver rings in one ear.

We went into the steamy little café and took a table beside the window.

“Drink?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I have to work. You go ahead. The Japanese beer is nice.”

I was intending to work later, too—in fact, I was at work then—and didn't think one bottle of beer would incapacitate me. There seemed a challenge implicit in his comment. I'm not a particularly macho guy, and he gave the impression, with his earrings, trendy casual gear, and mild blue gaze, of being a modern, sensitive young chap; yet from that first moment of meeting there was something charged in the atmosphere between us, something that seemed to demand dominance displays. Or maybe I'd just made up my mind not to like him, suspecting that whatever had happened to Peri would turn out to be his fault. If it's not the father, it's the boyfriend, in cases like these, more often than not.

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I'm a filmmaker. Writer-director. We're in postproduction now, but the filming took longer than we'd thought, and time is getting tight. I'm under a lot of pressure.”

I must have looked surprised—I certainly hadn't expected this kid would be doing anything so grand—because his eyebrows went up. “Laura didn't tell you?”

“She didn't tell me a whole lot. She said something about you being artistic; I didn't ask for details. I was more concerned with learning about Peri than about you. No offense,” I said blandly.

“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “Only, I thought she might have showed you my first film. Not because I made it, but—Peri's the star. Anyway, it won a few awards, and led to my getting backing to write and direct my first feature. Which is what I'm working on now.”

The waitress arrived to take our orders. Hugh didn't need to consult the menu. Not having much experience with Japanese food, I said I'd have the same, plus a Kirin.

He got right down to business. “You want to know about the last time I saw Peri. It'll be three years in December, but I remember it like it was yesterday. She'd just come back from college in America, so we hadn't seen each other for more than three months. I saw her the day she got back, but her mum was there, too, and she was tired from traveling, so the Friday night was our first date, the first chance we'd had to be together.”

“How was it? You were happy?”

“Of course.”

“You didn't find it awkward at all? Your feelings were the same?”

“I was totally in love with her,” he said flatly. “Nothing had changed, not for me. I wanted to spend my life with her.”

“And she felt the same? As far as you could tell.”

He nodded, eyelids briefly dipping to half-mast, a slight curl to the lip. “As far as I could tell, yes.”

“But you didn't talk about it?”

He sighed. “We'd never stopped talking. E-mails, instant messaging, and phone calls every day. My phone bill was positively gigantic. Caused a huge row with my mum, even though I said I'd pay it off.”

“So you think, if she'd met someone else in America, or changed her feelings toward you, you would have known.”

“I thought so.”

He fell silent as the waitress arrived with our drinks.

I prompted him. “Where did you go that night?”

“I had a couple of comp tickets to a club in Soho. I didn't know anything about it, except it had to be some kind of music gig. I was working as basically the tea-boy for a TV production company for almost no pay. That sort of job's about making contacts, and there were perks, invitations and free tickets floating around. Those just happened to be the tickets I had for that Friday night. It didn't matter to us where we went. If I'd had my own place, I'd have taken her there. But we couldn't spend the whole evening in at my mum's, with all my sisters, and . . .” he trailed off, looking vulnerable. “But, God, I wish I'd thrown those tickets away! I wish we'd gone anywhere else.”

Our food arrived at this interesting juncture: enormous steaming bowls of soup full of noodles, meat, and vegetables. Each would have served a family of four.

“So where did you take her?”

He stripped the paper wrapping off his chopsticks and snapped them apart. “The address was in Golden Square.”

“A club? In Golden Square?” This seemed unlikely.

He shrugged. “Yeah. Twenty-three Golden Square, that's what it said on the card. From 9
P
.
M
. That was another odd thing. Nine o'clock is incredibly early. So I thought, well, maybe it was a party to celebrate the opening, or maybe it was an early gig; I thought—” He stopped, shook his head. “No, I didn't think. I really couldn't think about anything except being with Peri again. Maybe if I'd—”

“Don't beat yourself up. Just tell me what happened.”

He had picked her up from the flat in West Hampstead at about half past eight.

It was a clear, cold night. Their breath puffed out in clouds before their faces, their heels rang on the cold pavement as they walked along, their arms about each other, snuggling close for warmth, high with the happiness of being together. They took the underground to Green Park and, rather than change to another stuffy, crowded train, emerged from the underground to walk along Piccadilly. Everything was bustling and brightly lit, humming with activity in the run-up to Christmas. Stores had extended their opening hours, and every pub and restaurant was packed to the gills and boisterous with parties. Soho, when they reached it, was like one enormous street party from the pub overspill.

But the address on the card took them away from all that, into a quiet pocket without shops or pubs, where there were only empty office buildings shut for the night. There were a few people on the benches in Golden Square, doing low-voiced deals with each other or drinking from bottles in paper bags.

Hugh brought the card close to his face, checking the address in the yellowish light of the streetlamp on the corner, sure it had to be wrong.

Then Peri squeezed his arm and pointed out a set of metal stairs leading below street level. On street level, the building housed some sort of media company, but the basement had a separate entrance. Yet it looked just as locked up and empty. Hugh felt uneasy, but before he could stop her, Peri went clattering down the metal stairs.

The door opened as soon as she put her hand to it. Hugh, pressed close against her, breathing in the flowers and citrus scent of her hair, was astonished by the room revealed. It was a surprisingly large, long space, with a gleaming parquet dance floor in the center. Small round tables, covered with white cloths, clustered in a rough semicircle on the dark red carpet surrounding the dance floor, and faced a small stage. It was like an elegant nightclub from some old-fashioned movie, and not the sort of place Hugh had ever been in himself.

Nearly all the tables were occupied by couples, every single one of them dressed to the nines: the men in dinner jackets, the women in elegant long dresses. Hugh had worn his usual casual-smart club gear, hoping and expecting to blend in. Beneath her puffy down jacket Peri was wearing a short black dress with patterned tights and a glittery, beaded cardigan in silver and purple. She looked great, she always did, but their clothing marked them both as outsiders.

He wanted to back out, but already a black-suited waiter had bustled up to greet them, beaming with welcome.

“How good to see you, sir, madam! I've saved you a table near the stage.”

“May I take your coats?” A young woman, also wearing a black suit and bow tie, was at their side, smiling and helping Peri off with her jacket. Peri did not resist. Her face glowed with excitement and curiosity.

When he saw that, he didn't feel so bad and handed over his own coat. He'd let everyone laugh at his inappropriate gear, anything to make her happy.

The waiter led them to an empty table. In the center, a candle glowed through ruby-colored glass.

“May I get you something to drink?”

“What sort of beer do you have?” Hugh looked at Peri's happy face and felt a rush of reckless generosity. “No, make that champagne.”

“I'm sorry, sir, but we're not licensed. I can offer you Perrier or Evian water, Coca-Cola, or orange Fanta. On the house.”

“Terrific.” Hugh laughed in disbelief. “OK, Perrier water for me. Peri?”

“Fine.” When the waiter had gone, she leaned across the table and grasped his hand, murmuring, “We can go to a pub after. But I'm
so
glad you brought me here. This is so cool!”

He didn't understand why, but all that really mattered was that she was happy—and that he had been able to make her happy by doing this simple thing. It had happened before, that she'd been blown away by something he'd taken for granted, or had never noticed. London, the big, grimy city where he'd lived his whole life, was a fabulous theme park to her.

He looked around the nightclub, trying to be cool about it and not look overly interested. Although he guessed Peri was the youngest person in the room, no one appeared to be over thirty. A whole room of twentysomethings dressed up like bright young things from the 1930s. There'd been no mention of a dress code on the invitation. And they were all good-looking, and nearly all of them were white. As his gaze flitted from face to face, he saw something else: they actually looked alike, with similar features and coloring. Were they related? Was this a family event? Maybe the invitations had been meant for someone else. His stomach plunged as he considered the trouble he might be in at work for snaffling an invite meant for somebody else.

The waiter returned with a big bottle of Perrier and two heavy red glass goblets. He asked their permission before breaking the seal on the bottle and pouring it. Then, with a bow, he backed away.

Peri smiled at Hugh, and the candle flame danced reflected in her eyes.

“Welcome back.” He lifted his glass.

“To us.” She clinked her glass against his.

“Forever.”

He was happy gazing into her eyes, breathing her perfume, luxuriating in her physical nearness after the long, frustrating weeks apart. They held hands, and he caught her knees between his beneath the table.