Page 130
“George, if you’re there, it’s Caleb Jaxon. I’m coming up.”
He found himself in a single large room with upholstered furniture and curtains on the windows. The homeyness of it surprised him—he had expected a scene of bachelor squalor. But George had been married once. The room was divided into two areas, one for living, the other for sleeping. A kitchen table; a couch and chairs with lace doilies on the headrests; a cast-iron bed with a sagging mattress; an ornately carved wardrobe of a type that usually stayed within a family, traveling the road of several generations. All seemed orderly enough, but as Caleb surveyed the space, he began to notice certain things. A dining chair had been knocked over; books and other objects—a kitchen pot, a ball of yarn, a lantern—were tossed about the floor; a large, free-standing mirror had shattered in its frame, the glass cracked in concentric circles, like a reflective spider’s web.
As he moved toward the bed, the odor hit him: the rancid, biological reek of old vomitus. George’s chamber pot sat on the floor near the headboard; that was where the smell was coming from. Blankets were bunched at the foot of the mattress as if kicked aside by a restless sleeper. On the bedside table lay George’s gun, a long-barreled .357 revolver. Caleb opened the cylinder and pushed the ejection rod. Six cartridges fell into his palm; one had been fired. He turned around and swept the pistol over the room, then lowered the gun and stepped toward the fractured mirror. At the epicenter of the cracks was a single bullet hole.
Something had happened here. George had obviously been ill, but there was more to it. A robbery? But the lockbox hadn’t been touched. And the bullet hole was strange. A stray shot, perhaps, though something about it seemed deliberate—as if, lying in bed, George had shot his own reflection.
In the alley, he filled his jugs from the tank and loaded them onto the buckboard. It wouldn’t do to leave without paying; he made his best guess and left the bills under the counter with a note: “Nobody here, door unlocked. Took fifteen gallons of kerosene. If the money isn’t enough, I’ll be back in a week and can pay you then. Sincerely, Caleb Jaxon.”
On the way out of town, he stopped at the town office to report what he’d found. At least someone should fix the door of the mercantile and lock the place up until they knew what had happened to George. But nobody was there, either.
—
Dusk was settling down when he returned to the house. He unloaded the kerosene, put the horses in the paddock, and entered the house. Pim was sitting with Kate by the cold woodstove, writing in her journal.
Did you get what you needed?
He nodded. Strange how Kate was now the silent one. The woman had barely glanced up from her knitting.
How was town?
Caleb hesitated, then signed: Very quiet.
They ate corn cakes for supper, played a few hands of go-to, and went to bed. Pim was out like a light, but Caleb slept badly; he barely slept at all. All night his mind seemed to skip over the surface of sleep like a stone upon water, never quite breaking the skin. As dawn approached, he gave up trying and crept from the house. The ground was moist with dew, the last stars receding into a slowly paling sky. Birds were singing everywhere, but this wouldn’t last; to the south, where the weather came from, a wall of flickering clouds roiled at the horizon. So: a spring storm. Caleb guessed he had maybe twenty minutes before it arrived. He gave himself another minute to watch it, then retrieved the first jug of kerosene from the shed and lugged it to the edge of the woods.
He didn’t know what he was seeing. It simply made no sense. Perhaps it was the light. But no.
The mounds were gone.
* * *
40
0600 hours: Michael Fisher, Boss of the Trade, stood on the quay to watch the morning light come on. A thick, cloudy dawn; the waters of the channel, caught between tides, were absolutely motionless. How long since he’d slept? He was not so much tired—he was well past that—as running on some reserve of energy that felt vaguely lethal, as if he were burning himself up. Once it was gone, that would be the end of him; he would vanish in a puff of smoke.
He’d emerged from the bowels of the Bergensfjord with some vague intention he couldn’t recall; the moment he’d hit fresh air, the plan had fled from his mind. He’d drifted down to the edge of the wharf and found himself just standing there. Twenty-one years: amazing how so much time could slip by. Events grabbed hold of you and in the blink of an eye there you were, with sore knees and a sour stomach and a face in the mirror your barely recognized, wondering how all of it had happened. If that was really your life.
The Bergensfjord was nearly ready. Propulsion, hydraulics, navigation. Electronics, stabilizers, helm. The stores were loaded, the desalinators up and running. They’d stripped the ship to the simplest configuration; the Bergensfjord was basically a floating gas tank. But a lot had been left to chance. For instance: Would she actually float? Computations on paper were one thing; reality was another. And if she did, could her hull, cobbled together from a thousand different plates of salvaged steel, a million screws and rivets and patch welds, withstand a journey of such duration? Did they have enough fuel? What about the weather, especially when they attempted to round Cape Horn? Michael had read everything he could find about the waters he intended to cross. The news was not good. Legendary storms, crosscurrents of such violence that they could snap your rudder off, waves of towering dimensions that could downflood you in a second.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104
- Page 105
- Page 106
- Page 107
- Page 108
- Page 109
- Page 110
- Page 111
- Page 112
- Page 113
- Page 114
- Page 115
- Page 116
- Page 117
- Page 118
- Page 119
- Page 120
- Page 121
- Page 122
- Page 123
- Page 124
- Page 125
- Page 126
- Page 127
- Page 128
- Page 129
- Page 130 (Reading here)
- Page 131
- Page 132
- Page 133
- Page 134
- Page 135
- Page 136
- Page 137
- Page 138
- Page 139
- Page 140
- Page 141
- Page 142
- Page 143
- Page 144
- Page 145
- Page 146
- Page 147
- Page 148
- Page 149
- Page 150
- Page 151
- Page 152
- Page 153
- Page 154
- Page 155
- Page 156
- Page 157
- Page 158
- Page 159
- Page 160
- Page 161
- Page 162
- Page 163
- Page 164
- Page 165
- Page 166
- Page 167
- Page 168
- Page 169
- Page 170
- Page 171
- Page 172
- Page 173
- Page 174
- Page 175
- Page 176
- Page 177
- Page 178
- Page 179
- Page 180
- Page 181
- Page 182
- Page 183
- Page 184
- Page 185
- Page 186
- Page 187
- Page 188
- Page 189
- Page 190
- Page 191
- Page 192
- Page 193
- Page 194
- Page 195
- Page 196
- Page 197
- Page 198
- Page 199
- Page 200
- Page 201
- Page 202
- Page 203
- Page 204
- Page 205
- Page 206
- Page 207
- Page 208
- Page 209
- Page 210
- Page 211
- Page 212
- Page 213
- Page 214
- Page 215
- Page 216
- Page 217
- Page 218
- Page 219
- Page 220
- Page 221
- Page 222
- Page 223
- Page 224
- Page 225
- Page 226
- Page 227
- Page 228
- Page 229
- Page 230
- Page 231
- Page 232
- Page 233
- Page 234
- Page 235
- Page 236
- Page 237
- Page 238
- Page 239
- Page 240
- Page 241
- Page 242
- Page 243
- Page 244
- Page 245
- Page 246
- Page 247
- Page 248
- Page 249
- Page 250
- Page 251
- Page 252
- Page 253
- Page 254
- Page 255
- Page 256
- Page 257
- Page 258
- Page 259
- Page 260
- Page 261
- Page 262
- Page 263
- Page 264
- Page 265
- Page 266
- Page 267
- Page 268
- Page 269
- Page 270
- Page 271
- Page 272
- Page 273
- Page 274
- Page 275
- Page 276
- Page 277
- Page 278
- Page 279
- Page 280
- Page 281
- Page 282
- Page 283
- Page 284
- Page 285
- Page 286