The Stranger (7 page)

I laid the hooked pole down onto the beach, ready to give him a hand, when he let out this cry of shock.

“What’s wrong?” I saw that he was staring into the mass of twigs. His eyes had turned big and round in his face. His body had fixed into the same position, as if he couldn’t bring himself to move.

“Oh, my God . . .” he gasped, then lost his balance to fall back onto his butt on the shingle.

“Ben?” I bent down to look into the tangle of sticks that still dripped water. “What’s the matter, it’s only a head. So what’s the problem, buddy? You’ve seen three of those today.”

“Not like this one I haven’t.”

“Why, what’s so different about it?”

“Take a look for yourself.” He swallowed hard, as if his breakfast threatened to come storming back. “And while you’re about it: Count the eyes.”

Eight

******************
THIS IS A
***WARNING***
****************************

Following a meeting May 15, the
Caucus has implemented the
following emergency ruling with
immediate effect:

STRANGERS

No more strangers are to be
admitted into Sullivan.

Report any outsiders you see
approaching the island by road or
by boat.

If you see anyone on the island you
suspect might be a stranger

REPORT IT!

Be aware that anyone giving food or
shelter to a stranger
will be punished.

Any such punishment will be severe.
Be warned.

OFF ISLAND TRAVEL

All travel off island is strictly
forbidden.

TAKE THESE MEASURES
SERIOUSLY
THEY HAVE BEEN MADE TO KEEP
OUR COMMUNITY SAFE.

Caucus Order 174, May 15

We read the notice stapled to the post by the jetty. I saw more of those yellow sheets of paper fixed to trees on the road that lead up to the town.

“The Caucus is getting jittery,” I told Ben.

“They’re not the only ones.” He still looked pale after seeing the severed head caught up in the branch he’d pulled from the water. “The whole world’s in meltdown.”

I’d only seen the head for a moment before it slithered from the fork in the branch and sank out of sight. Hell, it looked weird. Sickeningly weird. I was happy to see it vanish again, believe me, but Ben had shouted to me to pull it out with the hook (but on no account to touch it with my bare hands; something I wouldn’t have done for all the tea in China anyway). Showing as a gray ball through the clear water, the head came to a rest on pebbles on the lake bed. I must have disturbed it as I splashed into the shallows because in a moment it rolled away. Soon I couldn’t even see it, never mind hooking the thing out. Ben had called me back, telling me that the lake bed plunged down a good fifty feet there into an underwater ravine. The head was gone. Sweet Jesus, I was pleased to no end it had gone, too.

Even so, I still had a sharp mental image of it as it lay there wedged into the fork of the branch. A man’s head, it had only just started to decompose; that meant it had to have come from someone who’d been alive and well until a few days ago.

I use the word
well
loosely . . . very, very loosely. Because there was something about the head that just wasn’t right. The hair had been long, the face heavily bearded. A bread bandit, I figured. The eyes were closed. You could have fooled yourself that the guy was only sleeping (if it hadn’t been for the strings of raw meat hanging down where the neck should be). But what took your breath away, and what horrified Ben so much that he cried out, was that a sickening bulge of brown flesh came out of the side of the face where the cheek should be. Set in that were two wide blue eyes. And those eyes seemed somehow
alive
. They stared right into mine. Then a second later the head slipped from the branch and back into the water, where it now lay fifty feet beneath the surface. Thank God.

Usually Ben would be full of ideas about anything new or unusual. This time he kept silent. As we walked back all he did was swallow in a queasy way.

This piece of yellow paper at least took his mind off what he’d just seen.

“It’s because of the stranger. . . .” I thought for a moment he was going to say
that stranger you killed
. Instead he said, “It’s because of the stranger who arrived recently.” He wiped his mouth, as if the taste of his own vomit was still on his tongue. “The Caucus decided that because he wasn’t a bread bandit and he was from this part of the country, the disease must have infected North Americans.”

“They believe he really was infected?”

“
You know
,” he said firmly. “You saw it in him. God knows how you do it, but you knew he’d got it in him.”

I sensed a creeping cold in my blood. “I might have been wrong.”

“You’ve not been wrong yet.”

“Yet.”

“The town’s put their faith in you. You’ve got some instinct that tells you when a person’s infected.”

“And so they turn a blind eye when I hack some poor bastard to pieces. I don’t want to kill, Ben. I just find myself doing it, but it’s like I’m watching it all happen from across the street. Why don’t they just put anyone arriving in town in quarantine until they’re sure? They don’t have to wait until I’ve passed fucking judgment on some poor fucking stranger.” I began to feel angry again. That anger always lurked below the surface . . . as soon as I started to think or talk about what I’d done it came shooting out of me in flames of bloody red.

Ben was quick to try and calm me. “Greg. We’re lucky to have you. You’ve saved our necks.”

“Lucky?” I gave a sour-sounding laugh.

“Sure. Before you turned up we’d let anyone in who came to town, bread bandits as well as our own countrymen. But we didn’t know what was in the blood of the bread bandits or what was in their brains. We’d give those people food and lodging. They’d be completely normal, completely sane. But then . . .” He clicked his fingers. “One day, they’d snap. One Chilean guy said he was a doctor. He was polite, charming even. But one night he went downstairs, grabbed a carving knife and cut the throats of the family he was lodging with. Now you’re here, Greg. You’ve got a nose for who’s infected. Somehow you can see it in them, but we can’t. You’re our best early warning system.”

“Yeah, right . . . but now I’ve killed a guy who’s an American. Who might have been born just down the road.”

“And that means the disease has spread. We know it can infect our people.” Ben nodded back at the yellow notice. “That means the town has got to be more security conscious. From now on nobody comes onto the island. No one leaves.”

“And that means suddenly our world has gotten a whole lot smaller.” I looked ’round. “We’ve turned the place into a prison.”

He shook his head. “Not a prison. A fortress.”

“Either way, nobody’s going anywhere, are they?”

We headed off to Ben’s apartment, where he’d left some beers in the icebox of the refrigerator. Even though the electricity had been cut at midnight they were still cold enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. He also maintained a store of rechargeable batteries. So we sat there listening to Hendrix hurl those amazing guitar sounds out into the cosmic hereafter while we poured the beautifully cold beer down our hot and thirsty throats.

For a long time we didn’t say much. Suddenly a whole army of question marks had come marching over our mental horizons. They were dark, menacing. And I found myself thinking: Why had the disease suddenly spread to our own countrymen? Had it infected us here in Sullivan? If it had, when would we see the first symptoms? Or would it be only me who recognized the disease in people? If that was the case, how long would it be before I used the ax on a neighbor? Or even Ben, sitting there on the sofa, listening to Hendrix’s guitar calling out to eternity?

I swallowed the beer in big, hard gulps.

There was another question, too. A weird, twisty one. One that lurked in the background but seemed every bit as sinister as the rest. What had gone wrong with that human head we found tangled up in the branch? How could it bud an extra pair of eyes? Questions, Valdiva. Questions. Questions.

We’d been in Ben’s apartment barely an hour before the siren started. Its phantom wail cut into the room like the bad news it was.

When the siren called, able-bodied men and women were expected to collect weapons, to assemble at certain points in the town, to be ready for Trouble with a capital
T
. On account of his shaky hands, Ben wasn’t in the guard—the idea of him handling a rifle with those twitchy fingers put the fear of God into the guard sergeants. Even so, he came along. He often wrote articles for Sullivan’s (increasingly) slender newspaper; with a change of hats he moved from stock clerk to reporter. In ten minutes I was sitting in the back of the a pickup barreling with half a dozen others in the direction of the wall. Which was a “misnomer,” as Ben would have said, for a twenty-foot mass of steel fencing and barbed wire running the entire width of the isthmus and cutting the island off from the outside world.

A guy in an engineer’s hard hat shouted to the half dozen or so of us in the back of the pickup that outsiders were aiming to break in.

Hanging on to the sides, slipstream zithering his hair, Ben looked at me. “It looks as if we’ve got our first invasion,” he called.

Nine

Some invasion. The trucks skidded to a stop fifty yards from the gate in clouds of dust. We climbed out with the guard sergeants telling us to take it nice and easy; to stay back until the “threat had been quantified.” Jeez. Why don’t those guys speak so you can understand them?

There, under a cloudless blue sky, the wall ran from left to right, cutting across the highway and single rail-road track. Both ends of that mountain range of barbed wire ended in the water at either side of the land bridge. The guards’ officers—in real life a butcher, a cinema manager and a retired police chief— moved toward the gate. Someone handed me a shotgun and a handful of shells that I stuffed into my shirt pockets. I squinted against the glare of the sun. Through the monster of a steel gate I saw the invasion force.

Hell. Misnomers were thick as dog shit in a municipal park. Well, let me tell you, the invasion force consisted of a family in a sedan. The car was glossily clean.

It couldn’t have come far. Two of the car’s occupants climbed out, leaving a young woman in the passenger seat. She stared out at us, her eyes pumped full of anxiety.

The two who came forward to the gate were a man in his thirties and a boy of around eleven. Like the car they were clean; the man had shaved recently. Both were unarmed.

The stranger talked to the officers at the gate, though I noticed the three officers hung well back—
you don’t know what filthy little microbes are peeling themselves from the strangers, do you, boys?
I even saw one of them take a glance at the flag to see which way the breeze was blowing. The truth of the matter was, there was no breeze today. The lake was as flat as a mirror.

Curiosity got the better of us. We moved forward to hear the conversation.

“You’ve got to,” the stranger was saying . . . hell, not saying,
pleading
. He wanted something so bad it hurt.

“I’m sorry.” The cinema manager indicated a sign painted on a five-by-five board. “No one’s allowed in.”

“But my wife’s pregnant. She needs to be where she can get medical attention.”

“What’s wrong with the place you’ve just come from?”

“We’ve been living in a cabin up in the hills.”

“Go back there. You’ll be safe.”

The man shook his head. “There’s no one else there. She needs a doctor to look at her. Besides, we’re running short of food.”

“Got a rifle?”

“Yes, but—”

“Hunt, then. Catch food. The woods are full of wild game.”

“But don’t you understand?” The man sounded angry now. “My wife is seven months pregnant. She’s not been well lately. She needs a doctor.”

At that moment the woman pulled herself from the car, using the door to lever herself upright. “Jim, tell him about my brother.”

“OK, Tina, just you take it easy.” He looked at the boy. “Mark, go look after your Mom while I talk.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the retired police chief spoke now in that polite but firm voice he must have used a million times before in his career. “You’re going to have to turn your car around and leave the island.”

“What goddam fucking island?” The stranger’s patience had reached burn out. “It’s not an island. It’s a fucking town at the edge of a fucking lake. . . .”

“Jim,” the woman pleaded, “Don’t get mad at them. They’re just being cautious.”

“Tina, OK. Sit back in the car.”

“They don’t know us, Jim. For all they know we might be—”

“Bread bandits? Hey, guys. Do we look like bread bandits?”

“No,” replied the old police chief, “but you can’t—”

“Then let us in. Please.”

“Sorry.”

“But you can see my wife isn’t well.”

“We’re taking no chances.”

“But do we look South American? We’re from a place that’s three hours’ north of here.”

“What place?” asked the ex-chief.

“Golant, just off Route 3. Look, I’ve got a driver’s license that—”

The ex-chief gave a regretful sigh. “Sorry. No can do.

We’ve reached a decision to seal this town off from the outside. We can’t risk contamination.”

“Contamination! Do you think my wife and my son and my unborn child can contaminate you?”

“Jim,” called the woman from the car. “Tell them about my brother.”

Jim turned back to us. “My wife’s brother owns a vacation home here.”

“He’s living here now?”

“No. He was in New York with his family when the crash came. We haven’t heard from him since.” His voice softened into those pleading tones again. “Don’t you see? We wouldn’t beg a place to stay, we could move into my brother-in-law’s cabin. I know how to weld . . . look!” Suddenly eager, he gripped the gate bars with his two hands and gave it a shake. “I could make this even stronger. I could make it so strong it would keep an army out. You need to weld reinforcing bars diagonally across the—”

“Sorry.” The ex-chief spoke gently. He sounded genuinely regretful. “I truly am sorry. I can’t permit you to enter the town. You look like good people, but we just don’t know if you’re carrying the disease.”

“So you’re going to turn us away, and leave us to starve?”

The officers looked at each other; then the ex-chief spoke again. “We can give you food and medicine if you know what your wife needs.”

“I don’t know what drugs she needs. I need a doctor to see her. Hey, listen . . . listen!”

But the three officers moved back to our group. I glanced at Ben. His expression revealed that the incident sickened him. He had a good heart. If you ask me, he’d have allowed the family in.

The stranger returned to the car, spoke in an agitated way to his wife, then came back to the gate to yell, “We’re not moving, do you hear? We’re going to sit outside these gates until we starve to death or you let us in. Did you hear me? Did you?”

The ex-chief spoke to a couple of guards. “Bring them some food, boys. Pack it in fish crates so we can shove it through the gap under the gate.”

Sergeants dismissed us from guard duty; the idea was we’d return to our own jobs, but most of us hung ’round, not enjoying what we were seeing but feeling as if we somehow had to see it out.

Returning to his car, the stranger sat on the hood. Inside his family must have cooked in the heat of the car’s interior, but they weren’t quitting the standoff yet. Clearly, the guy thought we’d cave. That we wouldn’t stand here and watch the pregnant woman suffer.

After a while a truck returned with the wooden fish crates into which dried foodstuff and cans had been packed. Using broom handles so as not to get too close to the strangers and so risk possible infection, a couple of guards slid the crates through the gap under the fence in the direction of the strangers’ car.

We sweated it out for hours. At one point the guy tried to climb the gate, but there was so much barbed wire coiling ’round the bars, he didn’t make it halfway to the top before he had to slither down again. The boy came up to the gate to call at us, “Let us in. Let us in. My mom’s sick. Let us in!” And so on for a good twenty minutes. The woman looked tired and a kind of quiet resignation rotted the expression on her face. Later the guy cried. They sat in front of the car hugging each other. It was about that time the woman started saying something to the guy. For a while he shook his head, then he started to nod.

When next he climbed out of the car he never even looked at us. Nor did we look directly at him. There was something embarrassing about the situation now. No one made eye contact. No one spoke. For the next ten minutes the boy and the man loaded the car with food, then quickly they climbed back in, and the engine fired into life. Without even so much as a reproachful glance the family drove off into the distance to whatever hazardous future waited for them out there.

A shame-filled silence hung over us. It took a while, but eventually we returned to the trucks for the drive back to town.

Some invasion.

That night after the heat of the day it felt good to work on my mother and sister’s tomb. Cool air. Cool stone against my palms. It was good to be alone, too. As I worked on my three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle—my goddam obsession, as Ben had dubbed it—I couldn’t help but think about the family we’d turned away. I guess the woman might wind up losing the baby. She might even lose her own life with it. There’d be the man and the boy with the screaming woman in a lonely cabin in the woods. I slotted a cube of rock into the tomb structure. It fitted as neatly as a plug into its socket. I patted it down the final inch or so with the palm of my hand.

I immediately picked up another chunk of rock. This had a more complicated shape, with seven sides. With luck it would stop me thinking about the family.

But it wasn’t easy. What if we’d relented? Let them in. What if a few hours later that knot of tension came into my belly? That alarm signal at some deep, deep animal level that said:
Beware, Valdiva, you’ve got yourself a batch of Jumpies here. Kill them before it’s too late. . . .

So what’s worse, Valdiva? Turning the family away to maybe die a lingering death out in the woods? Or finishing them all with a few savage blows with the ax?

Some cousin of that instinct that gave me the ability to divine when a person was infected with Jumpy also identified the perfect-shaped void in the wall for the lump of rock I rolled ’round in my hands. In it went.
Snick
. Perfect fit.

I stood back to look at the tomb. There it was, the size of a truck, a perfect square, gleaming like cream in the starlight.

An old woman once walked down here as I worked.

She complimented me on my labors and said the structure reminded her of an ancient Egyptian tomb called a Mastaba. Mastabas, she said, were used to entomb Egyptian dead long before they built the Pyramids. I don’t know anything about that. Instinct told me to build it that way. Like instinct told me when a person was hot with Jumpy. I didn’t think or plan what to do. I only acted on instinct. And if God or the Devil shaped that instinct, I don’t know. That’s just the way it was.

Stars shone brighter than diamonds. I sat with my back to the tomb, feeling the cool stone through my shirt back. Even though it was close on two in the morning I didn’t feel like sleeping. That cabin of mine could be a lonely place; somehow it felt less lonely up here on the bluff by the graves of Chelle and Mom. Here, I counted shooting stars. “Wow, Chelle, did you see the size of that one?”

I bit my lip. It was so easy to believe they were sitting beside me, alive and breathing and singing out “Oooh” and “Aaah” when a fiery blue meteor came crackling through the atmosphere sixty miles above our heads.

Still biting my lip hard, I looked out across the lake. It had a silvery look tonight, yet somehow mixed with a lot of darkness. Glints of starlight reflected on the water before slowly vanishing, to be replaced by a great gulf of blackness that looked as dark as death itself. I imagined myself running to the end of the bluff and diving the twenty feet down into the water. Down, down, down . . . swimming through clouds of bubbles, through swarms of fish that would move with a metallic glitter. In my mind’s eye I saw myself swimming across the rocks, around clumps of weeds, over the rotting bones of sunken boats. I imagined swimming right away across the lake underwater on one gulp of air. There I’d climb out onto the harbor wall at Lewis.

Suddenly it seemed the most desirable thing in the world to get away from this claustrophobic town. The stores and cinemas and supermarkets across the lake might be smashed to crud, but it would be a real taste of freedom. There was an aura about Sullivan these days that pushed my mood down into a dark place. It was the same kind of feeling you got when you walked into an old folks’ home. You sensed it was a place where life hung by a thread. That, there, all the people looked backward to the past. That they had no future. No fun. Nothing but the slippered creep, creep of death getting closer and closer.

Maybe I wasn’t far from the truth. Most of Sullivan’s population was elderly. They’d only survived because they’d stayed put in this out-of-the-way place. And stay put they did. The poster warning people not to leave the island was a joke because no one had been away from it in the last six months. Fishermen never went past the orange buoys that market the two-hundred-yard line from shore. No one went hunting in the forest that stretched out into the mainland proper beyond the isthmus. Hell, no one had looked over the nearest hill for months. Someone could have built a new Disneyland there and we’d be none the wiser.

I’d been half asleep as I allowed those thoughts to run through my head. The grass was soft there; the night air could have been an all-enveloping comforter. So when I saw the light it didn’t register.

I watched it in that disconnected mental state. Not even asking myself who the hell was shining a light across the lake in that ghost town.

The yellow light showed as nothing more than a spark. It could have been a star that had somehow tumbled from the sky to rest in one of the ruined buildings.

It moved.

This did bring my head up. I stared, feeling a tingle spread across my skin.

Someone was across there in Sullivan. He was shining a light; a small lamp or even a candle, I don’t know. But it was steady enough. It didn’t look like starlight reflected by a window. It moved again. Now it disappeared, then reappeared, as if someone unseen carried the light through what remained of one of the buildings.

Sure. There were people out there. We’d seen strangers today. But this was the first time I’d seen a light in Lewis. Normally even strangers stayed away from the ruined town. It was as if people had a gut feeling that told them the place was contaminated, or even that it was lousy with ghosts.

The light moved higher. Disappeared.

Gone.

It’s not coming back, I told myself. They’ve left.

But then the light reappeared. This time it was at a higher level. I pictured the ruined waterfront buildings I’d seen through a ’scope. They’d stood up to six stories tall. Now it looked as if someone had set a light in one of the shattered windows to burn there as a signal to us across the lake. Not that anyone from Sullivan would take a damn shred of notice of it, never mind dare making the trip across to the ghost town.