Shuttered Sky

soon after he was laid to rest. “Or is there another reason why you came?”

Winston knelt down to the grave. “I don’t know.” He reached his hand down to touch the earth, and for an instant the dream flashed though his mind again like a static shock.

A lavender lounge chair.

A ledge.

Three figures.

Why have I come here, Michael? I’m not Dillon, I can’t give you back your life. What is it I’m supposed to do? But Michael’s grave, like all graves, gave its answers in variations of silence. His only course now was south, following the solitary lead that might take him to Lourdes.

By the time they left a few minutes later, Michael’s Ivy was green and lush, and Winston’s mind was still a dry heave, willing him to action against a painful absence of purpose.

4. Lost Horizon

Transcription excerpt, day 202, 13:51 hours

“I’m worried about Lourdes. Winston’s fine out there—But I don’t think things are right with her. I think she got pushed off the brink, and never came back.”

“How much damage could she do on her own?”

“Lots, if she chose to. When I last saw her, she could put a room of people to sleep, or turn them into a kick-line, hopping in time against their will. We called her the puppeteer, and she hated it. But now there’s no telling how many she’s got on the end of her strings.”

“If she hasn’t surfaced, maybe she won’t. There’s a good chance the gov­ernment has her, like they have you, and are hiding her in some other secret installation.”

“No. When I’m out there in the tower I can feel her somewhere out there. And it scares me.”

* * *

The cruise ship was never actually reported missing.

Monarch cruise line simply listed the S.S. Blue Horizon as out of serv­ice, but rumors abounded. Rumors that it had vanished in the Ber­muda Triangle; that it broke apart in a storm; that it was torpedoed by friendly fire. The truth, however, was much simpler, and slightly more embarrassing to Monarch Cruises. Simply put, the eighty-thousand-ton cruise ship had been seized by pirates.

Winston Pell had kept his ear to the ground for many months in search of such anomalous events, which was no easy task, because over the past year, daily life had evolved into one anomalous event after another. Riots springing up unprovoked, stocks fluctuating so violently analysts were jumping out of windows. There was a surge in the num­ber of militant religious zealots, as well as rampant hedonism popping up in the most straight-laced of bible-thumping towns.

And all because everyone could sense that the world had suddenly become a sinking ship. What began with the Backwash had taken on a momentum all its own, metastasizing to the far reaches of the globe. There was a prevailing, unnameable sense that something immense and terrible was about to occur. Winston suspected people had a kind of species instinct about it, the way dogs could sense a coming earth­quake.

And so on the police bands, and in the media, and in the chat rooms, Winston searched for any anomalous event that was simply too anomalous to be anything but Dillon, or Lourdes.

Finally he narrowed his sights down to the S.S. Blue Horizon. As maritime industries were not immune to the decay of social structure that marked these days, the Blue Horizon was not the first large vessel to fall victim to latter-day pirates. Everything from freighters to river boats had gone missing. What made the Blue Horizon different, how­ever, is that it was the only ship that defied being brought to justice. The ship would come into various ports, from Juneau to Jamaica, in the middle of the night for fuel and supplies, appearing like the flying Dutchman, only to be gone by morning—which was theoretically impossible, because every port was manned with a night crew. Yet every port gave the same story—no sooner had the ship arrived, than the night crew fell asleep at their posts. When they awoke, the ship was gone.

As Lourdes had a very special knack for rendering whole groups of people unconscious, news of this particular ghost ship was of special interest to Winston.

It was on a Saturday in October that Winston drove a rented car across the Mexican border to Ensenada. The word was that the Blue Horizon had anchored offshore, staying put for the first time in many months.

As he drove along the coast, past a smattering of Ensenada resorts, he could see the great ship, half a mile off shore. He parked by the docks amidst a bazaar of trinkets and curios, where tourists from the two other ships in port bargained for deals. Most locals and tourists, fairly oblivious to the Blue Horizons presence, went about their busi­ness. It was when Winston tried to get a tender to take him out to the ship that he began to encounter resistance. The fishermen and boatmen would shake their heads when he asked, but offered no explanation, until he finally found one who would talk; the driver of a glass-bottom boat, docked too far from the ships in port to see any action.

“No, my friend,” the boatman said. “I don’t go out there. She is La Llorona—the wailing woman. A ghost ship.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I know all the ships that come in: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity. But this one. She not supposed to be here.”

Winston pulled out his wallet and fanned out the corners of several bills. “Dime lo que sabes,” he said in perfect Spanish,'y te pagare por la informacIon.” The boatman was caught off guard. Not necessarily by the money, but by the accent. Winston smiled knowingly. People were always surprised when he spoke their language, whichever language that happened to be.

The boatman then gazed forlornly at his glass-bottom boat. Busi­ness had obviously been slow. The man stared at the money in Win­ston’s hand, then sighed. He shoved the bills in his pocket. “Yesterday, four men from the cruise line come in by helicopter,” he explained. “Fancy suits, very important-looking. A friend of mine, he takes them out there, and as soon as they get near the ship, three of them pass out cold, like someone poisoned them or something. The one man left—he is the one they let on the ship. My friend waits and waits in his boat, but the man doesn’t come back, and the other three, they don’t wake up. Then he hears the man screaming on the ship, he doesn’t wait anymore. He comes back, goes home.”

“And the other three men?”

The old man shook his head. “The hospital. Still they don’t wake up.”

Winston pulled out a roll of bills, and handed the boatman a twenty, but kept his billfold out. “How much for you to take me out there?”

The boatman shook his head. “I told you—I don’t go out there.”

Winston slowly began flipping twenties. “You’re telling me you’re afraid?”

The boatman began to scratch his beard stubble, thoughtfully at first, and then nervously, as the number of bills increased. “It’s drugs. Some drug lord took over that boat. You go out there, he cuts your throat—maybe mine, too.”

“I thought you said it was haunted.”

“That, too.”

Winston had flipped four bills, he flipped a fifth to make it an even hundred. The boatman began to sweat. “?Estas loco, eh?”

Winston flipped another bill. The boatman took one more glance at his passengerless boat, and sighed. “Ai, mierda.” He took the money, and let Winston on board.

They pulled away from port, leaving behind the commotion of tourists. The sea was calm, and although the glass-bottom boat wasn’t the fastest vessel, Winston was grateful for the time it gave him to prepare for what he might find. As they got closer and closer to the white behemoth, Winston could hear music growing louder as they drew nearer. Upbeat salsa. Cruise music. The kind of music that sum­moned images of streamers and balloons, and