The Stranger (8 page)

Then I thought something insane. I decided to take a boat over there myself. It didn’t make sense. All I might find was a pack of bread bandits who’d break my skull. Or maybe I’d be find someone who’d infect me with Jumpy. But that insane notion blazed inside my head.
Go there, Valdiva. Anything to get out of this hole for a few hours
.

At this time of night there’d be no one to see me slip one of the cruisers from its mooring. I’d be in Lewis in twenty minutes. By starlight I followed the path down from the bluff, through the trees to the jetty. There, the boats sat so still on the water you’d swear that the lake had become as hard as onyx. There were cruisers with big hunky motors that could fly me across the lake in minutes. But the noise they’d make at this time of night would wake a skeleton.

I opted for the smaller tourist cruisers. These harked back to the time that the town council started taking green issues seriously and encouraged boat rental businesses to bring in boats with electric motors rather than the old internal combustion engines. They weren’t fast, but they were whisper quiet. I knew the batteries would be charged because Peter Gerletz and his daughters used them as fishing boats. I even borrowed one every now and again to collect driftwood where it beached on a sandbar a hundred yards off-shore.

Taking careful steps, I moved down the jetty, hearing the mousy squeak of timbers shifting under my feet.

“That you, Gerletz? It’s OK, I’m not stealing your precious boats.” It was the voice of the old police chief coming from the shadows. I stepped forward to see him sitting on the jetty boards with his back to a mooring post. He looked relaxed. No wonder; I saw a bottle of whiskey on the boards beside him. Well, a third of a bottle, to be more precise. A shot glass sat neatly beside the bottle.

“Gerletz, don’t worry. Go back to sleep. I’m guarding your damn boats tonight.”

“It’s not Peter Gerletz,” I said.

“Who then? Not one of my ghosts come to haunt me?” I heard a soft laugh as he poured a splash of whiskey into the shot glass.

“It’s Greg Valdiva.”

“Oh, the outsider?” He swallowed the shot in one. “But it’s not fair to call you an outsider now, is it? You’ve been here . . . what? Six months?”

“Eight.”

“Eight? As long as that?”

He groaned a bone-weary groan as he made himself more comfortable against the post. “So, what brings you down here? A midnight swim?”

“No.” I could hardly say I intended to break one of the Caucus’s shiny-new laws. Instead I shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Ah, Valdiva, you’re one of the guard, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So you saw that sorry spectacle today?”

I nodded.

“You know, that really works against my grain, Valdiva. I swore to uphold law and order and protect the innocent. I’ve still got my badge and I still clean it with complete and sincere pride.”

“We had no choice. We had to refuse them entry.”

“Especially after last week. When that blue-eyed American boy . . .” He merely gestured with the glass instead of finishing the sentence. “It seems that damn bug can get into our blood, too. No one’s immune, isn’t that so?”

“I guess.”

“You guess right, my friend. But even so. What happened today just didn’t seem right. That pregnant lady? She needed our help. But we just told them to shove off. That sticks in my craw. I say if we’re going to go down with a case of Jumpy we might as well get it over with, because we’re only postponing the inevitable by hiding away here.”

“You’re going to tell the Caucus that?”

He looked up as if seeing me properly for the first time. “Valdiva. You speak your mind, don’t you? As well as being our town executioner. . . . Pardon me, you didn’t need reminding of that. Jack Daniel’s always did loosen my tongue past the point where my diplomatic side becomes a mere speck on the horizon . . .” He seemed to lose the thread for a while. He charged his glass again, then downed it in one. “Here I am like some old wino. I busted plenty of those when I first joined the force. Hell, the smell of their pee followed you home. It got so Mary made me change out of my uniform in the garage. We even had a shower installed in the utility room there. ‘Get out of those clothes,’ she’d say, ‘you’ve been hauling in drunks again. I can smell the pee on your jacket.’ ” He chuckled. “That’s why I refuse to drink this whiskey out of the bottle like a bum. I’m drinking it out of a glass like an officer and a gentleman.” He poured another shot. “The answer to your question, Valdiva, is no. I won’t be telling the Caucus that Sullivan here is a hopeless case . . . a terminal patient waiting for the inevitable. That we’re all going to contract that damn disease one day. We are, but I won’t tell them that. I have what you might call such a strong sense of duty it’s pathological. So I’ll do my hardest to do the right thing for our community. Even if I sometimes think—privately, mind—it stinks . . . stinks of something brown and wet. Now, sir, can I interest you in a glass of this?”

“No thanks. I just needed some air. I’m going to turn in.”

“Good night, Valdiva. I hope you sleep better than I will.”

“Good night, Mr. Finch.”

I’d started walking back along the jetty when he called out again. “Valdiva, do yourself a favor.” I looked back at him sitting there, pouring himself another whiskey. “Get away from here. It’s useless advice, I know. But this town is going to start getting unhealthy. And I’m not talking about any disease here. I don’t know what it is, that’s the funny thing. But when I walk ’round and look in my neighbors’ faces I start getting a bad taste in my mouth.”

“What do you think might be wrong?”

“I don’t know. Something just isn’t right. So if I were you, I’d get right away from here . . . as far as you can. Call it cop instinct.” He picked up the bottle as if to read the label. “Aw, what do I know?” He smiled and seemed to step up the amiable old drunk act, as if he’d suddenly had second thoughts and didn’t want me to take what he’d said at all seriously. “Forget it, Valdiva. It’s just the whiskey talking. You get yourself a good night’s sleep. There’s nothing to worry about.”

There’s nothing to worry about
. I tended to believe everything the old cop told me. But I didn’t believe that last comment.
There’s nothing to worry about
.

With the man’s lie echoing inside my skull I walked home.

Ten

The smell of bacon woke me. Lynne had slipped in early to cook breakfast. She did this every week or so. When I pictured her husband making breakfast for their two children at the same time I pulled the sheet higher over my head.

As I heard her singing lightly to herself I imagined her moving ’round the kitchen to pour orange juice, or spoon coffee into cups. That lovely swaying walk of hers that made me think of Hawaiian dancers in grass skirts. After cutting bread she’d push her long hair back away from her face, or maybe move it with a flick of her head.

I knew if I called down to her to forget breakfast she’d come upstairs, peeling off her T-shirt as she came, exposing those firm, perfectly shaped breasts. She’d slip down the tiny skirt she wore. I’d admire those long golden legs, then pull back the sheet so she could slide into bed beside me.

That ache of longing twisted me up inside. All I had to do was take a breath, then say her name out loud.
Lynne
.

Instead I lay there not moving as the ritual continued. It was one of those sweeteners. Hot tasty breakfast for the town executioner. An idea cooked up by the Caucus months ago. Of course, they’d suggested it would be Lynne’s civic duty to provide anything else that I might want along with bacon, scrambled eggs and golden pancakes.

Just had to click my fingers. She’d be there naked in the doorway. Smiling sexily, she’d ask, “How do you want me? It’s your choice, Greg—anything. Just command it.”

A couple of hours later she’d walk up the hill to town, maybe a little on the sore side, so she’d discreetly carry her panties in a bag.

As I warred with my own conflicting emotions—part of me craving to call her upstairs, the other part ready to order her back to her husband—I suddenly realized that things might be set for change. Now that the town had slapped a prohibition on strangers entering the island, where did that leave me? Before they let me screen newcomers in (as the man said) my own inimitable fashion. When that monkey instinct inside a dark corner of my mind made me kill they’d accepted that it was a necessary evil. They cleared away the bloody aftermath and rewarded me with chocolate cake and sex.

But it was different now, wasn’t it? Now that they’d sealed themselves from the outside world they didn’t need my services anymore. What’s more, they’d always been suspicious of me. They tolerated me because I was essential to their own survival, that’s all. The old ex-cop’s warning came back to me from the night before.
Valdiva, do yourself a favor. Get away from here . . . as far away as you can. . . .

Maybe right now they were discussing the proposal on the agenda: Get rid of Valdiva . . . oust the monster. I could see all those gray heads nodding ’round the table as Miss Bertholly agreed: “Valdiva’s surplus to requirements now. Can anyone nominate a hunter who’s good with a rifle?”

“Get him before he figures out he’s redundant,” old man Crowther would say. “Make his whore girl go down to cook him breakfast. I know a guy who’ll blow him to pieces with a twelve-gauge while he’s still in bed. Better still, why waste good bullets? Wait until he’s screwing her and kill the pair of them with one shell.”

That mental movie of my blood hitting the bedroom wall was clear enough, I can tell you. At the sound of the door opening downstairs I bounced out of bed and went to the top of the stairs. Lynne looked startled as she opened the screen to the veranda.

“You gave me a scare, Greg,” she said, seeing the expression on my face. “What’s wrong?”

I looked at the plate full of breakfast on the table. “Where are you going, Lynne?”

“Nowhere. Well . . . I was just throwing out this bread for the birds. You should get in the habit of checking it. It’s so stale you could crack rocks with it.” She threw the crust out onto the grass, then came back into the kitchen, smiling. “There’s chilled juice, and I made fresh pancakes. Coffee?”

“Yeah.” I looked through the window at the top of the stairs. Outside there was no one about. No Crowther narc anyway, with a shotgun. Maybe my imagination had gotten overripe. Even so . . .

“Greg. Relax. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

Yeah, my own
.

She played with her hair a little in that sexy way of hers. “Say . . . do you want breakfast in bed this morning?”

I thanked her but declined. I said I needed to make an early start cutting wood out back. She was thoroughly pleasant, even flirty, but all we did was make small talk.

The old cop swilling whiskey on the jetty had prevented me from taking the boat across the lake to Lewis to find out who it was burning the lamp up in the ruins. But now I was more than ever determined to take that trip. What’s more, this town seemed even more claustrophobic—dangerous, even—now that I realized its people didn’t need me anymore. When I walked down Main Street I knew I’d get an itch between my shoulder blades just where a rifle bullet might find a home.

Lynne nibbled toast with me as I ate her breakfast. It was good, and the temptation to suggest half an hour up on the bed took some time to quit. But eventually she said her good-byes before heading back up the hill in the direction of home. I hauled the chainsaw from the shed, topped up the tank, then fired her up. The logger’s chainsaw was muscular enough to loosen the fillings in your teeth, but it made short work of the heftier pieces of driftwood. I cut the timber into disks maybe eight inches long. Soon a blizzard of sawdust filled the air, turning the sunlight misty and golden.

I worked through the pile of timber the lake had given up (along with its more grisly fruit). I thought of the severed head with its extra set of eyes. Suddenly I could taste the scrambled egg in my mouth again with that extra spice of bile.

Revving the chainsaw motor, I forced the image out of my skull. Instead I concentrated on the blurring teeth that bit through the timber. The world was getting stranger by the day. No doubt about that. Hell, I just wondered what strange turn lay around the corner to take us all by surprise.

Later I made my deliveries in the hot sun. With the pickup piled with firewood I drove through town. Everything looked rock-solid normal. People waved at me. If anything their mood seemed lighter now that a goodly number of days had passed since I killed the outsider. Normal rhythms reasserted themselves. The supermarket had its usual quota of customers pushing shopping carts of groceries to their cars. The McDonald’s just across from the cinema boasted a few people chewing the fat over coffees and cake (the old Ronald McDonald menu had varied through necessity over the last few months). Cars cruised by. A cop on a motorbike gave me a thumbs-up as I made a left into the residential area. Here I found the few children who remained in Sullivan playing on skateboards, riding bikes. A couple of toddlers were running in and out of a lawn sprinkler shrieking like crazy. Even when I at last reached Crowther’s house all he did was shoot me a sullen look before sloping indoors. I piled wood on the drive for him to collect at his own sweet leisure, then pointed the nose of the pickup back into town.

I’d just helped myself to a Swiss cheese sandwich and a jug of iced water in the supermarket coffeehouse when Ben saw me and hurried in through the door. “Help yourself,” I said nodding at the iced water. “It’s hot as hell outside today.”

“Yeah, it’s getting more like hell every day.” He pulled a grim smile. “Take a look at that.” He pushed a book across the table at me.

I checked the title. “
Secrets of the Arcane
. Whatever lights your lamp, Ben.”

“After we saw that head yesterday I did some reading.”

I gave a heartfelt groan. “That head? Do you have to remind me? I’m still eating.”

“But what the hell was it, Greg?” This was more like the old Ben. The proto-scientist Ben who enthusiastically searched for answers. “Every now and again you hear of four-legged chickens and two-headed lambs. But have you seen a human being with an extra set of eyes?”

I groaned again and pushed the uneaten sandwich to one side. “I asked you not to mention it. I can feel eyeballs in the cheese with my tongue now.”

“You find people with genetic defects and mutations, but have you ever see anything as . . . as severe as that?”

“Listen, Ben . . . here, let me get that for you.” He made as if to pour water from the jug into a glass, but with those shaky hands he splashed liquid over the tabletop (and my now unloved sandwich).

“Thanks.” He took a thirsty swallow.

“Ben. You see weird mutant stuff in the
Fortean Times
and
Ripley’s
. Men covered with hair like apes. Women with three nostrils. Kids with paws instead of fingers.”

“But that head was nothing like I’ve ever seen before in a book.”

“It was probably some poor devil who’d spent his life locked in the attic being fed a pail of fish heads every Thursday. He escaped after the crash, then wondered ’round until he wound up in the lake. End of sad story.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

“You really think it might be something else?”

“Who knows? You might have noticed, but the world’s taken a weird jump out left of field these days.” He smiled. “Now listen to this.” And he started to read from the book. “ ‘Long ago the alchemist Thomas Vaughn wrote the hermetic treatise
Lumen de Lumine
. He described a process where animal and human bodies can be made to descend into primal matter, the
tenebrae activae
, as he termed it.’ No, Greg, don’t shake your head, just listen, will you? It says here that Vaughn believed this was a kind of melting pot into which you can feed human beings and from which new life could be created.”

“You’re saying that’s what happened to old Johnny Cluster Eyes you found in the lake?”

“Maybe.”

I leaned forward. “Ben, listen to your buddy. You need to find yourself a girlfriend, you really do.”

He shot me a kind of startled look, then he read something in my face. For a second I thought he’d be insulted, but he started laughing with that breathless bray of his. Right from the first time we met I’d found the laugh infectious, and now I started laughing, too. The other customers in the coffeehouse looked at us as if we might have gone half crazy.

Come to think of it, they might have been half right at that.