Steven unfolded the long rectangular cloth. It was about ten feet wide.
‘Look at that,’ Mark said in awe as green and yellow flecks of light danced in the air above the tapestry, like fireflies on a humid summer evening.
‘It doesn’t hurt to touch it or be near it,’ Steven said, bewildered, ‘but it must be electric, or maybe radioactive, like you said. It’s really changing the atmosphere in here. Is that smell ozone?’
‘Uh, yeah.’ Now Mark was frightened. ‘We need to call someone. This guy must have come across some plutonium or radium in a mine up there. It might even be in that rock. Maybe over time it worked its way into the fabric of this thing.’
‘I can’t believe how large it is,’ Steven mused. ‘How the hell did it fit in that small container?’ He unfolded the last corner of the tapestry and let it fall from his hand to the hardwood floor. ‘What do you suppose these designs are?’ he asked, considering the series of strange figures and shapes arranged across the expanse of cloth.
‘I have no idea,’ Mark answered. ‘A lot of Asians helped open the west. Maybe this is some sort of Asian scroll, some art form.’
‘I don’t know. They don’t look like Asian characters to me. Look at that one near your foot.’ Steven pointed. ‘Is that a tree?’
‘Tree? Wait a minute-’ Mark cut their analysis short. ‘Steven, if that thing is radioactive, we’re dying, right now. We need to get out of here.’
Steven paused, his mind racing to come up with some way to avoid getting fired for breaking into the safe deposit box. ‘You’re right. Let’s go. We’ll head down to Owen’s and call the School of Mines or the police or someone.’ He started to back away. ‘C’mon, but you’d better not step on it.’
‘Right, right, let’s go.’ Mark started moving around the edge of the tapestry. ‘Grab my coat. It’s on the back of the chair in the hall.’
Steven went to retrieve Mark’s jacket and grab his wallet from the table in the kitchen. When he returned, his roommate was gone.
THE RONAN COAST
Mark’s legs failed and he fell to his knees. Struggling to stand, he found he was outside; the ground was soft, wet sand, giving somewhat under his weight.
‘What the hell is this?’ he heard himself ask, but he found little comfort in the flat sound of his own voice. ‘No. This isn’t right. This can’t be right. Where am I? How did I get outside?’ Disoriented, he tried to calm down as he slowly turned a full circle, taking in his surroundings. He was surprised at how bright the night was. He was standing ankle-deep in wet sand on the edge of a small stream that emptied into what appeared to be an ocean.
‘This can’t be.’ He took several deep breaths, then told himself, ‘Wait. Don’t think yet, just look around. This will all make sense when I calm down. Just slow down.’
Feeling the steady motion of cool water against his ankles, soaking down into his boots, Mark began slowly to relax. ‘It has to be the pizza. Maybe I had some bad mushrooms or old cheese or something: this is all a hallucination.’ Finding solace in that possibility, he continued to talk out loud. ‘Wait it out. Just like a bad drunk, just wait it out.’
He stepped from the edge of the stream and wandered out onto the beach. ‘It’s okay, I guess,’ he said, breathing the salty air and feeling a strong breeze blowing in off the water. ‘If I have to be stuck in a delusion, at least this isn’t too bad.’
His dream beach was much warmer than Idaho Springs. Mark pulled off his sweater, then sat down heavily. He dragged his heels back and forth, digging two parallel ruts in the sand, finding the repetitive motion comforting. He lay back and rested his head on the gritty pillow behind him, closing his eyes. The wind from the incoming tide, a sense of something familiar, helped him to relax, and he breathed deeply, remembering long days at the beach when he was young. His parents would load him and his sister into a behemoth Country Squire station wagon and drive out to Jones Beach. While he dragged an array of plastic toys in a brightly coloured bucket, his mother hauled a lunch basket and what seemed like several dozen towels and blankets across the burning sand. His father, looking taller in a swimsuit, always carried a cooler filled with cold beer in one hand and a large yellow beach umbrella, perhaps ten feet in diameter, slung over his opposite shoulder. Together, they would find a spot among a vast sea of colourful beach umbrellas, run up the yellow giant as if to claim a ten-by-ten foot spot of beachfront for a pastel kingdom and begin settling in as though the beach were nothing more than a guest room at Aunt Jenny’s.
Within minutes, every inch of carefully placed blanket or towel would be covered with a light dusting of sand, not enough to merit a complete dismantling of the beach apparatus, but enough to irk his parents, to creep into his sister’s diapers and to add a pleasant grit to everything eaten that afternoon. Mark smiled at the memory until reality crept into his reverie. ‘No!’ he exclaimed, sitting up. ‘This isn’t real. I’m sick. I ate something. I have to wake up now.’ Squeezing handfuls of sand between his fingers, he remembered the large cloth tapestry Steven unrolled on their floor. ‘It‘s got to have something to do with that thing.’
He pulled off his boots and socks and walked towards the water, muttering, ‘If that really was radiation, I might be dead already.’ He rolled up his jeans and stepped into the surf. ‘No, I can’t be dead. If I were dead, I wouldn’t care if I got wet.’ Mark leaned down to taste the ocean water. It was more briny than Long Island Sound. Still feeling the effects of that evening’s beer consumption, he wiped a sleeve across his brow. ‘Sheez, I hope I’m not dead. I’d hate to be half-hammered for eternity.’
Resigning himself to the fact that time would tell what had happened to him, Mark Jenkins began wandering along the beach, his feet ankle-deep in the frothy shallows.
Rounding a point that jutted out from the forest behind him, he stopped suddenly. Just above the horizon was the answer to why the evening was so bright: two moons hung silently in the night sky, like twin eyes of a vigilant sea god. ‘Two moons,’ he mused softly, then cried out, ‘Steven! What was that thing?’ His heart began to race and, feeling dizzy, he knelt in the sand and started repeating, over and over, ‘It can’t be… it can’t be,’ like a mantra.
Then, slowly, as if the truth might dash his hopes for a simple answer, Mark turned his gaze skywards. The constellations were different; he didn’t recognise a single star arrangement.
This was no hallucination; he hadn’t been poisoned and he wasn’t dead.
But no answers presented themselves. He sat down in the sand, his knees pulled up tightly against his chest despite the warm and humid evening.
‘Mark?’ Steven called down the back hall, ‘are you in the bathroom?’ There was no response. The bathroom door was open and the light switched off. There was no way his friend could have gone upstairs; he would have passed through the kitchen, where Steven was.
‘He must be outside already,’ Steven said to himself, hurrying back through the hall and shouting ‘Mark!’, but the door was locked and the deadbolt securely in place.
‘Sheez, didn’t you think I was coming with you?’ he called, finding it odd his roommate would lock the door from the outside without waiting for him. He had unlocked the door and stepped onto their porch before he heard a light jangle coming from the pocket of Mark’s jacket. In his haste to get away from William Higgins’s radioactive tapestry Steven had not realised Mark’s keys were still in the pocket. He checked the coat to confirm his suspicion, then re-entered the house to continue searching for his friend.
‘Mark!’ Steven shouted again, ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here!’
In the kitchen, the telephone rang again; probably Hannah, calling to confirm their date for the following evening. He was tempted to answer it, but right now he needed to find Mark; he’d call her from Owen’s later. He listened for footsteps coming from anywhere in the house: nothing. The air in their front room was still shimmering slightly; Steven could make out the small flecks of yellow and green light glowing dimly against the dark background of the old stone fireplace.