The upstairs hall was cold and smelled of ash. I retrieved my camera and went into the room, leaned against the wall and stared at the photos.
After a few minutes I shot a few frames. It felt good to handle my camera again without someone yelling at me to put it down. I knew I’d never get anything worthwhile—I was fighting nightfall, exhaustion, Jack Daniel’s on a nearly empty stomach. I stumbled around anyway, struggling to get enough distance, enough light, a focus.
The sound of the shutter release was like a moth beating against glass. I took a dozen pictures then slid down to the floor. I began to cry.
Those photos … They were so fucking amazing. It was like she’d thrown open a window and let you look into a perfect world, the most beautiful place you could ever imagine, but you could never get inside it. No matter what I did, I would never be able to produce something that good. I would never make something great. Even at my best, for fifteen seconds thirty years ago, I wasn’t capable of it. Aphrodite had been right.
Bile and the afterburn of bourbon rose in my throat. I lurched into the hall and ran right into Gryffin.
“Jesus!” He caught me and shook his head. “Can’t you walk out a door without knocking me over?”
“No.” I pushed past him.
“Hey, wait up—”
He followed me to my room. I shoved my camera into my bag, avoiding his eyes.
“What happened?” he said. “Did Aphrodite get back?”
“No.” I fought to keep my voice even. “Did you find Toby? I really need to get out of here.”
“He wasn’t around. Suze said he had a job in Collinstown and he stayed over there.”
“I have to go! Isn’t there someone else? The harbormaster, the fucking Coast Guard—I don’t care who it is. Just get me back to my car!”
“Hey, I wish I could, okay? But no one’s around. Merrill Libby’s daughter never came home last night. Everett’s helping organize a search party.”
“Then why aren’t you there?”
“I’m city folk now. They don’t want me.”
He leaned against the door. “I came to see if you felt like celebrating.” He grinned and suddenly looked remarkably like the guy in the snapshot. “I just made fifteen grand.”
I snorted. “Stock market?”
“I sold a first edition to a guy out in L.A. That’s what took me so long. Suze has a better internet connection at the store, so I was working from there. I’ve been waiting till the market was right. I paid ten pounds for it—about fifteen bucks—at a shop in Suffolk a few years ago.”
“Nice turnaround. What is it?”
“Northern Lights. The original title for The Golden Compass.”
“What’s The Golden Compass?”
“I thought you worked at the Strand?”
“Not in the stacks. Stock room.”
“It’s a children’s book—that’s where the big money is. The English edition predates the American, so…”
“Is it a good book?”
“You think I have time to read these things? You didn’t answer me—you want to help me celebrate?”
“How? Where do you spend fifteen grand around here?”
He started down the hall. “I’m going to dinner again at Ray’s. I told him last night, if I came back I might bring another guest—I figured if you were still around you’d need to get away from this place. He’s a good cook. He has a decent wine closet. But I’m leaving now, so—”
I followed him downstairs into the kitchen.
“So either you come with me or you’re on your own, dinner-wise,” he finished.
He went into the mudroom, pulled on his coat and picked up a big flashlight, dashed into the kitchen and returned with a small book that he stuck into his pocket.
“For Ray,” he explained. “You coming?”
“Yeah, what the hell.” I glanced down at my T-shirt and leather jacket. “I’m not dressed for dinner.”
“For Paswegas, you’re overdressed.”
“How far is it?”
“Not that far. Come on.”
He walked outside, heading for the water then turned to where a line of white birches glowed ghostly in the early dark. “Less than a mile. There’s a path through here, just watch your step.”
He switched on the flashlight. The birches flared as though they’d been ignited, and Gryffin disappeared into a thicket.
“Is Ray another book collector?” I said, hurrying to catch up.
“Not really. He’s just … a collector. All kinds of things. Books, junk, stuff he finds at the dump. Folk art—he’s big into folk art. Primitive art.”
“Like Cohen Finster?”
“Not that classy. Ray likes his art down and dirty. Not pornographic—well, not necessarily pornographic—but he likes an artist with dirt under his fingernails. You know, guys who build a model of the Sistine Chapel out of old carburetor parts. Lifesized cows carved out of soap. That kind of stuff. But you’ll like his place—Toby helped him build it. Ray’s one of the original cliffdwellers.”
After about ten minutes the path began to climb more steeply. I grabbed at trees for balance. The wind raged up from the water, bitter cold, and sent dead leaves whirling around us. Finally we reached the top.
“This is it.” Gryffin stopped. He pointed the flashlight to where the ground abruptly disappeared. “See that? Don’t go that way”
The boom of waves echoed up to us, the relentless wind. He waved the flashlight, and its beam disappeared into the darkness. I turned and saw lights showing through the mist.
“What the hell is that?” I said.
“That’s Ray’s place.”
It was made entirely of salvage. Clapboards, barn siding; car hoods and bumpers; washing machine doors and a satellite dish, as well as cinder blocks, corrugated metal, blue sheets of insulation. There were dozens of windows, no two alike. Solar panels covered the roof. A row of propane tanks was lined up alongside one wall, and a Rube Goldberg contraption that looked like it might have something to do with water.
Weirdest of all was that it had all been fashioned to look like a castle, complete with a shallow moat filled with dead leaves, a footbridge made of two-by-fours, and a turret. Sheets of plastic flapped from the walls, as though it were a snake shedding its skin.
“Boy, Sauron’s really fallen on hard times,” I said.
“He built it all himself, and it didn’t cost a thing,” said Gryffin. He strode across the footbridge to a door which had once belonged to a walk-in freezer. “Hey, Ray! Company—”
The steel door swung open, revealing a teenage boy, maybe seventeen or eighteen. Tall and heavyset, with sandy hair and beautiful, almond-shaped blue eyes in a pockmarked face. He gave Gryffin a perfunctory smile, but when he saw me the smile faded.
“Gryffin, hey.” The boy lifted his chin in greeting and stepped away from the door. Around his neck he wore a necklace like the one Kenzie had made, of seaglass and aluminum tabs. “S’up?”
I followed Gryffin inside. The boy gave me a hostile stare. His mouth parted so that I could see a black stud like a boil on the tip of his tongue.
“Nice,” I said. “You oughta have that looked at.”
We walked into a large room filled with freestanding bookshelves. Faded banners hung from the ceiling like flypaper, emblazoned with mottoes in the same lurid colors as the old school bus.
VENCEREMOS!
THE MILK OF HUMAN KINDNESS HAS NO EXPIRATION DATE
TEMPIS FUCKIT
The books leaned heavily toward the Beats, mangled paperbacks of On The Road and Junkie and The Dharma Bums, but also some that were valuable. And there was artwork, if you could call it that: a couple of Paint-by-Number pictures in homemade frames; a series of paintings of fanciful dirigibles on small oval canvases; a poem composed of words and phrases cut from newspapers then glued on a sheet of cardboard and signed by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. That would be worth what the whole house cost to construct, plus a small retainer for Lurch back by the front door.