Charles Grant - Night Songs

The boats at the marina scraped against their docks; branches scraped against windows; the amber light on Neptune Avenue flared once, and went out.

The ocean was cold, nearly as cold as it was dark, and Lilla felt her flesh tightening as if she had been suddenly encased in stiff, cracking leather. She was naked, and she had begun to wish she had worn something to warm her, but there had been very little time to pick and choose among her wardrobe-most of it she kept in the house on Atlantic Terrace, and the few pieces left were in a trunk in the shack.

Besides, she thought, the clothes would be a hindrance, and right now she needed all the freedom she could get.

After Colin had reluctantly left her at the door, clearly not believing her assertion she was fine; after Reverend Otter had paid his condolences and commented on the service; after Garve and the others had drifted silently off the beach, she had sat on the floor, cross-legged and waiting. Patiently at first, until the wind began to blow; then fidgeting, drumming her fingers hard on her thighs, rocking on her buttocks, humming to herself until she thought it was midnight.

Hang on, Gran. Hang on, hang on.

She sat, humming and rocking, and every few moments blinking her eyes slowly as if vaguely aware of a distant beckoning light just below the horizon. A light that stirred memories, a light that had her frightened.

Once she shook her head violently and leapt to her feet. She stared about her in helpless panic. This is wrong, she thought (the light flaring for a moment). This was all wrong and she was condemning herself to the worst kind of hell if she… if she… (the light flickered)… if… (the light died)… she sighed, closed her eyes, a spectral smile on her lips. A smile that lasted until she opened the shack's door.

Hang on, Gran, I'll be singing you soon. Hang on, hang on, don't leave me, don't leave.

She stumbled down off the flat and raced up the beach, vaulting the snow fence as if it were only a foot high-, landing lightly on hands and knees in a dark spray of sand. A scramble for balance, and she was running again. No attention was paid to the wind now, or to the waves that hissed angrily toward the woods. She was dimly aware the moon and stars were gone, and just as dimly heard the distant blare of a car's horn.

The beach narrowed, became rocky, and the trees stalked the waterline. She slowed and moved into the shadows, picking her way cautiously through dank shallow pools and across long stretches of mossy rocks, dead leaves, and sodden needle carpets. Her hands shoved aside branches, her face ducked away from sharp twigs, and she felt nothing at all when a wide thicket she plunged through tore gaps in her dress. Her hair matted and snarled. Cracks spread across the heels and soles of her bare feet. And finally she bent forward into a partial crouch and slipped past stiff shrubs to the edge of the manna's reach.

To her left, on the other side of a crushed-gravel driveway, was a sturdy, three-story white house topped by a widow's walk and girdled by a closed-in porch. A station wagon and red jeep were parked in its shadow. A wide, well-kept lawn spread down to the water, illuminated in silver by spotlights bolted to tall poles at the end of each dock. All the boats, including the trawler, were there rocking against the nudging of the wind, dull thumps soft in the night air as used-tire buffers caught the hulls and eased them back.

On this side of the drive, in line with her left shoulder, was a huge, gray, barn-like structure that served as Alex Fox's workhouse, starkly outlined by glaring lights in the eaves.

She waited, squatting on her heels.

Then, on command of a timer Fox kept in his kitchen, the lights snapped out, one by one in rapid sequence, the black vacuum filled by a photo negative afterimage that blinded her for several moments. Once her vision cleared, however, she was out of the trees and running, hitting the nearest dock as quietly as she could and darting out to the end. A rowboat moored at bow and stern rose and fell with the rising wind.

She thought nothing, planned nothing. Her hands untied the ropes, her right foot pushed the boat off, and the oars were slipped expertly into their locks without a sound. She had almost turned the craft around when she realized what she was missing. She maneuvered back to the dock, tied up the bow and ran for the workhouse. The tall double doors were unlocked and slightly ajar. A swift glance at the house, and she ghosted inside. Though she barked her shins several times against obstacles invisible in the dark, it didn't take her fingers long to locate the shelving she knew was there, and to close around a gaff and a waterproof flashlight.

Once outside, she paused and stared up the drive, marking the place where the gravel became blacktop and started Neptune Avenue. The amber light was out. The Anchor's neon was blind. For all the movement she saw then she could have been the island's only inhabitant. Not even a leaf was stirred by the wind.

In half an hour, arms protesting and back dully aching, she reached the burial place. The water was cold, her flesh tight as cracked leather.

Now she was below the surface, and there were creatures of the night sea she had forgotten or had not known. They swarmed about her like black shadow lightning, taunting, teasing, darting nips and nibbles at her legs while she fought to keep air in her already straining lungs. Four times since she'd arrived she had slipped out of the rowboat, four times using the rough anchor chain to guide her as she pulled her way down; and four times she had failed, embattled, the cold too much and the air bubbling up and out in reluctant spreading streams, preceding her to the top where she clung wearily to the bow and spit, coughed, felt the salt stinging her reddening eyes and the cuts on her feet.

Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, though she no longer felt the water droplets on her face.

Her hair pulled at her scalp, as if trying to work loose.

On the fifth drive she nearly failed to locate the chain again, and the flashlight gained unconscionable weight.

On the sixth dive, as she sobbed silent fear and anger in equal frustration, she was lucky.

The shrouded corpse lay on the uneven bottom between two low ridges of tide-gouged sand; the feet were half buried by the weight inside, the torso and head canted upward and drifting in the slow-moving current. The pale beam darted over it, passed it, returned and held. Shapeless, yet unmistakable, the light giving it a gray aura that shaded out to black.

Lilla grinned and wanted to laugh, tasted salt water instead and returned flailing to the boat, breaking the rolling surface with a sound like a bark. She clambered over the side and lay panting on the boat's bottom, staring at the sky. Resting. Grinning. A dark strand of kelp burrowed into her hair, and pearls of water shivering across the bridge of her nose, in circlets around her breasts.

"I told you, Gran," she whispered. "I told you. I told you."

She hummed snatches of several tunes, all of them Gran's, and her left hand beat time on the planks while her right used the flashlight like a bloated baton. Her thighs quivered. Her stomach pushed out, caved in.

Hummed the old songs she had sung in the shack.

"Told you, Gran. Told you to trust me."

She giggled suddenly, and covered her mouth.

The cold rushed through her in spasms, and she made herself rigid to drive them away.

A cramp uncoiled in her right foot, and she jabbed out her heel until the pain subsided and died.

Then, over the humming, she heard the thunder coming at her from the mainland. Her head shook in outraged dismay; not now, no, not now, not now. She had found him. She had run the length of Haven's End and had stolen a boat and had rowed right to the spot and she had found him. She knew where Gran was, and now she wanted to rest. The thunder gave her answer. She sighed a weak protest, and saw lightning beyond the trees.

"All right," she muttered. "All right, damn it, all right."

She picked up a gaff with thick roping knotted at its looped end and dropped back into the ocean before the storm changed her mind. Unerringly, she swam directly down to the shroud and plunged the rusted hook into the upper end. She tugged at it repeatedly, as hard as she could to be sure it would hold, then retreated once more to the boat and the air. She lay there for a moment, her breath in shallow gulps, before scrambling around to her knees and taking hold of the rope. A shuddering inhalation, a murmured prayer, a mirthless smile… and she began to haul Gran in, feeling her palms sting and burn as she pulled slowly, slowly, hand over hand, bracing her knees on the coils building on the bottom, every few moments glancing over her shoulder to the shore to check for lights.

Hand over hand until Gran was beside her and she could sag against the rear seat, gasping and weeping, cooling her hurt palms against her stomach, her breasts.

She paid no heed to the thunder now, felt nothing but the sea swell beneath the keel and tip her gently, side to side.

"It's going to be all right now, Gran," she said five minutes later, taking up the oars and heading for the beach. "You're going to be all right now. I told you not to worry, didn't I? You got to trust your Lilla, Gran. You don't have to worry now. I've got you. I've got you."

In less than two hours the boat was returned, and the gaff, and the flashlight, and the night was still black.

Lilla sang.

(the dimlight flared and she almost screamed, but a darksoft whispering insinuated itself between the scream and the glare, a whispering that became the fog that comforted her again)

Slowly, she backed out of the shack, her nearly blind gaze on the shimmering glow in the other room. She could see the foot of the bed, she could see Gran's feet, and she could still hear the singing that lingered after she was done.

She walked away from Gran's house without once looking back, making her way stiffly over the dunes to Surf Court. She paid no attention to the looming houses and their yellow porch lights, to the cars in the driveways, to the trembling streetlamps. She showed neither haste nor purpose, as she walked down the road to Neptune Avenue, turned right and followed the broken white line past Tess Mayfair's dark-windowed boarding house, past the Rising Sun and the Seaview, and into the mile-long stretch of unbroken woodland. She did not feel the damp tarmac under her feet, nor the wind pushing hard at her hair.

A gray haze in the distance, the streetlights of the town, but she cocked her head to one side and knew she wouldn't have to go quite that far. There was a dark lump on the verge fifty yards ahead, and when a vicious gust passed over it, it squirmed and tried to crawl.

Lightning reached out to drag thunder after. Lilla smiled, and kept walking.

The figure shifted again, a shifting shadow against shadows, and finally stirred itself to standing.

Lilla stopped, but kept smiling.

"Warren," she said, her voice clear despite the howling wind. "Warren, you weren't at the funeral."

Harcourt passed a weary hand over his eyes and peered into the darkness, his mouth opening slightly when lightning showed him the speaker. "Lilla!" He tried to straighten his spine, his lapels, reached up for his hat and froze when he discovered it wasn't on his head. He stammered and managed an apologetic smile, became suddenly aware that his feet were still bare. "Lilla-"

She faced him. "You weren't at the funeral." Not an accusation; a simple fact.