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.
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?”