’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.
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
