How the Wind Spoke at Madaket



I
Softly at dawn, rustling dead leaves in the roof gutters, ticking the wires of the television antenna against the shingled wall, seething through the beach grasses, shifting the bare twigs of a hawthorn to claw at the toolshed door, playfully flipping a peg off the clothesline, snuffling the garbage and tattering the plastic bags, creating a thousand nervous flutters, a thousand more shivery whispers, then building, keening in the window cracks and rattling the panes, smacking down a sheet of plyboard that has been leaning against the woodpile, swelling to a pour off the open sea, its howl articulated by throats of narrow streets and teeth of vacant houses, until you begin to imagine a huge invisible animal throwing back its head and roaring, and the cottage is creaking like the timbers of an old ship . . .



II
Waking at first light, Peter Ramey lay abed awhile and listened to the wind; then, steeling himself against the cold, he threw off the covers, hurriedly pulled on jeans, tennis shoes, and a flannel shirt, and went into the front room to kindle a fire in the wood stove. Outside, the trees were silhouetted by a backdrop of slate clouds, but the sky wasn’t yet bright enough to cast the shadow of the window frame across the picnic-style table beneath it; the other furniture—three chewed-up wicker chairs and a sofa bunk—hunched in their dark corners. The tinder caught, and soon the fire was snapping inside the stove. Still cold, Peter beat his arms against his shoulders and hopped from one foot to another, setting dishes and drawers to rattling. He was a pale, heavyset man of thirty-three, with ragged black hair and beard, so tall that he had to duck through the doors of the cottage; and because of his size he had never really settled into the place: He felt like a tramp who had appropriated a child’s abandoned treehouse in which to spend the winter.
The kitchen was an alcove off the front room, and after easing the chill, his face stinging with heat, he lit the gas stove and started breakfast. He cut a hole in a slice of bread, laid it in the frying pan, then cracked an egg and poured it into the hole (usually he just opened cans and cereal boxes or heated frozen food, but Sara Tappinger, his current lover, had taught him to fix eggs this way, and it made him feel like a competent bachelor to keep up the practice). He shoveled down the egg and bread standing at the kitchen window, watching the gray-shingled houses across the street melt from the darkness, shadowy clumps resolving into thickets of bayberry and sheep laurel, a picket line of Japanese pines beyond them. The wind had dropped and it looked as if the clouds were going to hang around, which was fine by Peter. Since renting the cottage in Madaket eight months before, he had learned that he thrived on bleakness, that the blustery, overcast days nourished his imagination. He had finished one novel here, and he planned to stay until the second was done. And maybe a third. What the Hell? There wasn’t much point in returning to California. He turned on the water to do the dishes, but the thought of LA had soured him on being competent. Screw it! Let the roaches breed. He pulled on a sweater, stuffed a notebook in his pocket, and stepped out into the cold.

As if it had been waiting for him, a blast of wind came swerving around the corner of the cottage and numbed his face. He tucked his chin onto his chest and set out walking, turning left on Tennessee Avenue and heading toward Smith Point, past more gray-shingled houses with quarterboards bearing cutesy names above their doors: names like Sea Shanty and Tooth Acres (the vacation home of a New Jersey dentist). When he had arrived on Nantucket he’d been amused by the fact that almost every structure on the island, even the Sears, Roebuck store, had gray shingles, and he had written his ex-wife a long humorous let’s-be-friends letter telling about the shingles, about all the odd characters and quirkiness of the place. His ex-wife had not answered, and Peter couldn’t blame her, not after what he had done. Solitude was the reason he gave for having moved to Madaket, but while this was superficially true, it would have been more accurate to say that he had been fleeing the ruins of his life. He had been idling along, content with his marriage, churning out scripts for a PBS children’s show, when he had fallen obsessively in love with another woman, herself married. Plans and promises had been made, as a result of which he had left his wife; but then, in a sudden reversal of form, the woman—who had never expressed any sentiment other than boredom and resentment concerning her husband—had decided to honor her vows, leaving Peter alone and feeling both a damned fool and a villain. Desperate, he had fought for her, failed, tried to hate her, failed, and finally, hoping a change of geography would provoke a change of heart—hers or his—he had come to Madaket. That had been in September, directly after the exodus of the summer tourists; it was now May, and though the cold weather still lingered, the tourists were beginning to filter back. But no hearts had changed.

Twenty minutes of brisk walking brought him to the top of a dune overlooking Smith Point, a jut of sand extending a hundred yards or so into the water, with three small islands strung out beyond it; the nearest of these had been separated from the Point during a hurricane, and had the island still been attached, it—in conjunction with Eel Point, some three-quarters of a mile distant—would have given the western end of the land mass the shape of a crab’s claw. Far out at sea a ray of sunlight pierced the overcast and dazzled the water beneath to such brilliance that it looked like a laving of fresh white paint. Seagulls made curving flights overhead, hovered and dropped scallops onto the gravelly shingle to break the shells, then swooped down to pluck the meat. Sad-voweled gusts of wind sprayed a fine grit through the air.

Peter sat in the lee of a dune, choosing a spot from which he could see the ocean between stalks of the pale green beach grass, and opened his notebook. The words HOW THE WIND SPOKE AT MADAKET were printed on the inside cover. He had no illusions that the publishers would keep the title; they would change it to The Keening or The Huffing and Puffing , package it with a garish cover, and stick it next to Love’s Tormenting Itch by Wanda LaFontaine on the grocery store racks. But none of that mattered as long as the words were good, and they were, though it hadn’t gone well at first, not until he had started walking each morning to Smith Point and writing longhand. Then everything had snapped into focus. He had realized that it washis story he wanted to tell—the woman, his loneliness, his psychic flashes, the resolution of his character—all wrapped in the eerie metaphor of the wind; the writing had flowed so easily that it seemed the wind was collaborating on the book, whispering in his ear and guiding his hand across the page. He flipped the pages and noticed a paragraph that was a bit too formal, that he should break up and seed throughout the story:

Sadler had spent much of his life in Los Angeles, where the sounds of nature were obscured, and to his mind the constancy of the wind was Nantucket’s most remarkable feature. Morning, noon, and night it flowed across the island, giving him a sense of being a bottom-dweller in an ocean of air, buffeted by currents that sprang from exotic quarters of the globe. He was a lonely soul, and the wind served to articulate his loneliness, to point up the immensity of the world in which he had become isolated; over the months he had come to feel an affinity with it, to consider it a fellow-traveler through emptiness and time. He half believed its vague speechlike utterances to be exactly that—an oracular voice whose powers of speech were not yet fully developed—and from listening to them he derived an impression of impending strangeness. He did not discount the impression, because as far back as he could recall he had received similar ones, and most had been borne out by reality. It was no great prophetic gift, no foreshadowings of earthquakes or assassinations; rather, it was a low-grade psychic ability: flashes of vision often accompanied by queasiness and headaches. Sometimes he could touch an object and know something about its owner, sometimes he would glimpse the shape of an upcoming event. But these premonitions were never clear enough to do him any good, to prevent broken arms or—as he had lately discovered—emotional disaster. Still, he hearkened to them. And now he thought the wind might actually be trying to tell him something of his future, of a new factor about to complicate his existence, for whenever he staked himself out on the dune at Smith Point he would feel . . .
Gooseflesh pebbling his skin, nausea, an eddying sensation behind his forehead as if his thoughts were spinning out of control. Peter rested his head on his knees and took deep breaths until the spell had abated. It was happening more and more often, and while it was most likely a product of suggestibility, a side effect of writing such a personal story, he couldn’t shake the notion that he had become involved in some Twilight Zone irony, that the story was coming true as he wrote it. He hoped not: It wasn’t going to be a very pleasant story. When the last of his nausea had passed, he took out a blue felt-tip, turned to a clean page, and began to detail the unpleasantness.

Two hours and fifteen pages later, hands stiff with cold, he heard a voice hailing him. Sara Tappinger was struggling up the side of the dune from the blacktop, slipping in the soft sand. She was, he thought with a degree of self-satisfaction, a damned pretty woman. Thirtyish; long auburn hair and nice cheekbones; endowed with what one of Peter’s islander acquaintances called “big chest problems.” That same acquaintance had congratulated him for having scored with Sara, saying that she’d blue-balled half the men on the island after her divorce, and wasn’t he the lucky son of a bitch. Peter supposed hewas : Sara was witty, bright, independent (she ran the local Montessori school), and they were compatible in every way. Yet it was not a towering passion. It was friendly, comfortable, and this Peter found alarming. Although being with her only glossed over his loneliness, he had come to depend on the relationship, and he was concerned that this signaled an overall reduction of his expectations, and that this in turn signaled the onset of middle age, a state for which he was unprepared.

“Hi,” she said, flinging herself down beside him and planting a kiss on his cheek. “Wanna play?”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“It’s Friday. I told you, remember? Parent-teacher conferences.” She took his hand. “You’re cold as ice! How long have you been here?”

“Couple of hours.”

“You’re insane.” She laughed, delighted by his insanity. “I was watching you for a bit before I called. With your hair flying about, you looked like a mad Bolshevik hatching a plot.”

“Actually,” he said, adopting a Russian accent, “I come here to make contact with our submarines.”

“Oh? What’s up? An invasion?”

“Not exactly. You see, in Russia we have many shortages. Grain, high technology, blue jeans. But the Russian soul can fly above such hardships. There is, however, a shortage of one commodity that we must solve immediately, and this is why I have lured you here.”

She pretended bewilderment. “You need school administrators?”

“No, no. It is more serious. I believe the American word for it is . . .” He caught her by the shoulders and pushed her down on the sand, pinning her beneath him. “Poontang. We cannot do without.”

Her smile faltered, then faded to a look of rapt anticipation. He kissed her. Through her coat he felt the softness of her breasts. The wind ruffled his hair, and he had the idea that it was leaning over his shoulder, spying on them; he broke off the kiss. He was queasy again. Dizzy.

“You’re sweating,” she said, dabbing at his brow with a gloved hand. “Is this one of those spells?”

He nodded and lay back against the dune.

“What do you see?” She continued to pat his brow dry, a concerned frown etching delicate lines at the corners of her mouth.

“Nothing,” he said.

But he did see something. Something glinting behind a cloudy surface. Something that attracted him yet frightened him at the same time. Something he knew would soon fall to his hand.


* * *
Though nobody realized it at the time, the first sign of trouble was the disappearance of Ellen Borchard, age thirteen, on the evening of Tuesday, May 19—an event Peter had written into his book just prior to Sara’s visit on Friday morning; but it didn’t really begin for him until Friday night while drinking at the Atlantic Café in the village of Nantucket. He had gone there with Sara for dinner, and since the restaurant section was filled to capacity, they had opted for drinks and sandwiches at the bar. They had hardly settled on their stools when Jerry Highsmith—a blond young man who conducted bicycle tours of the island (“. . . the self-proclaimed Hunk of Hunks,” was Sara’s description of him)—latched onto Peter; he was a regular at the café and an aspiring writer, and he took every opportunity to get Peter’s advice. As always, Peter offered encouragement, but he secretly felt that anyone who liked to do their drinking at the Atlantic could have little to say to the reading public: It was a typical New England tourist trap, decorated with brass barometers and old life preservers, and it catered to the young summer crowd, many of whom—evident by their Bahama tans—were packed around the bar. Soon Jerry moved off in pursuit of a redhead with a honeysuckle drawl, a member of his latest tour group, and his stool was taken by Mills Lindstrom, a retired fisherman and a neighbor of Peter’s.
“Damn wind out there’s sharp enough to carve bone,” said Mills by way of a greeting, and ordered a whiskey. He was a big red-faced man stuffed into overalls and a Levi’s jacket; white curls spilled from under his cap, and a lacing of broken blood vessels webbed his cheeks. The lacing was more prominent than usual, because Mills had a load on.

“What are you doing here?” Peter was surprised that Mills would set foot in the café; it was his conviction that tourism was a deadly pollution, and places like the Atlantic were its mutant growths.

“Took the boat out today. First time in two months.” Mills knocked back half his whiskey. “Thought I might set a few lines, but then I run into that thing off Smith Point. Didn’t feel like fishin’ anymore.” He emptied his glass and signaled for a refill. “Carl Keating told me it was formin’ out there a while back. Guess it slipped my mind.”

“What thing?” asked Peter.

Mills sipped at his second whiskey. “Offshore pollution aggregate,” he said grimly. “That’s the fancy name, but basically it’s a garbage dump. Must be pretty near a kilometer square of water covered in garbage. Oil slick, plastic bottles, driftwood. They collect at slack points in the tides, but not usually so close to land. This one ain’t more’n fifteen miles off the Point.”

Peter was intrigued. “You’re talking about something like the Sargasso Sea, right?”

“’Spose so. ’Cept these ain’t so big and there ain’t no seaweed.”

“Are they permanent?”

“This one’s new, the one off Smith Point. But there’s one about thirty miles off the Vineyard that’s been there for some years. Big storm’ll break it up, but it’ll always come back.” Mills patted his pockets, trying unsuccessfully to find his pipe. “Ocean’s gettin’ like a stagnant pond. Gettin’ to where a man throws in a line and more’n likely he’ll come up with an ol’ boot ‘stead of a fish. I ’member twenty years ago when the mackerel was runnin’, there’d be so many fish the water would look black for miles. Now you spot a patch of dark water and you know some damn tanker’s taken a shit!”

Sara, who had been talking to a friend, put her arm around Peter’s shoulder and asked what was up; after Peter had explained, she gave a dramatic shudder and said, “It sounds spooky to me.” She affected a sepulchral tone. “Strange magnetic zones that lure sailors to their dooms.”

“Spooky!” Mills scoffed. “You got better sense than that, Sara. Spooky!” The more he considered the comment, the madder he became. He stood and made a flailing gesture that spilled the drink of a tanned college-age kid behind him; he ignored the kid’s complaint and glared at Sara. “Maybe you think this place is spooky. It’s the same damn thing! A garbage dump! ’Cept here the garbage walks and talks”—he turned his glare on the kid—“and thinks it owns the goddamn world!”

“Shit,” said Peter, watching Mills shoulder his way through the crowd. “I was going to ask him to take me to see it.”

“Ask him tomorrow,” said Sara. “Though I don’t know why you’d want to see it.” She grinned and held up her hands to ward off his explanation. “Sorry. I should realize that anyone who’ll spend all day staring at seagulls would find a square kilometer of garbage downright erotic.”

He made a grab for her breasts. “I’ll show you erotic!”

She laughed and caught his hand and—her mood suddenly altered—brushed the knuckles against her lips. “Show me later,” she said.

They had a few more drinks, talked about Peter’s work, about Sara’s, and discussed the idea of taking a weekend together in New York. Peter began to acquire a glow. It was partly the drinks, yet he realized that Sara, too, was responsible. Though there had been other women since he had left his wife, he had scarcely noticed them; he had tried to be honest with them, had explained that he was in love with someone else, but he had learned that this was simply a sly form of dishonesty, that when you went to bed with someone—no matter how frank you had been as to your emotional state—they would refuse to believe there was any impediment to commitment that their love could not overcome; and so, in effect, he had used those women. But he did notice Sara, he did appreciate her, and he had not told her about the woman back in LA: Once he had thought this a lie, but now he was beginning to suspect it was a sign that the passion was over. He had been in love for such a long time with a woman absent from him that perhaps he had grown to believe absence was a precondition for intensity, and perhaps it was causing him to overlook the birth of a far more realistic yet equally intense passion closer at hand. He studied Sara’s face as she rambled on about New York. Beautiful. The kind of beauty that sneaks up on you, that you assumed was mere prettiness. But then, noticing her mouth was a bit too full, you decided that she was interestingly pretty; and then, noticing the energy of the face, how her eyes widened when she talked, how expressive her mouth was, you were led feature by feature to a perception of her beauty. Oh, he noticed her all right. The trouble was that during those months of loneliness(Months? Christ, it had been over a year!) he had become distanced from his emotions; he had set up surveillance systems inside his soul, and every time he started to twitch one way or the other, instead of completing the action he analyzed it and thus aborted it. He doubted he would ever be able to lose himself again.

Sara glanced questioningly at someone behind him. Hugh Weldon, the chief of police. He nodded at them and settled onto the stool. “Sara,” he said. “Mr. Ramey. Glad I caught you.”

Weldon always struck Peter as the archetypal New Englander. Gaunt; weather-beaten; dour. His basic expression was so bleak you assumed his gray crewcut to have been an act of penance. He was in his fifties but had a habit of sucking at his teeth that made him seem ten years older. Usually Peter found him amusing; however, on this occasion he experienced nausea and a sense of unease, feelings he recognized as the onset of a premonitory spell.

After exchanging pleasantries with Sara, Weldon turned to Peter. “Don’t want you to go takin’ this wrong, Mr. Ramey. But I got to ask where you were last Tuesday evenin’ ’round six o’clock.”

The feelings were growing stronger, evolving into a sluggish panic that roiled inside Peter like the effects of a bad drug. “Tuesday,” he said. “That’s when the Borchard girl disappeared.”

“My God, Hugh,” said Sara testily. “What is this? Roust out the bearded stranger every time somebody’s kid runs away? You know damn well that’s what Ellen did. I’d run away myself if Ethan Borchard was my father.”

“Mebbe.” Weldon favored Peter with a neutral stare. “Did you happen to see Ellen last Tuesday, Mr. Ramey?”

“I was home,” said Peter, barely able to speak. Sweat was popping out on his forehead, all over his body, and he knew he must look as guilty as Hell; but that didn’t matter, because he could almost see what was going to happen. He was sitting somewhere, and just out of reach below him something glinted.

“Then you musta seen her,” said Weldon. “’Cordin’ to witnesses she was mopin’ ’round your woodpile for pretty near an hour. Wearin’ bright yellow. Be hard to miss that.”

“No,” said Peter. He was reaching for that glint, and he knew it was going to be bad in any case, very bad, but it would be even worse if he touched it and he couldn’t stop himself.

“Now that don’t make sense,” said Weldon from a long way off. “That cottage of yours is so small, it ’pears to me a man would just naturally catch sight of somethin’ like a girl standin’ by his woodpile while he was movin’ ’round. Six o’clock’s dinnertime for most folks, and you got a nice view of the woodpile out your kitchen window.”

“I didn’t see her.” The spell was starting to fade, and Peter was terribly dizzy.

“Don’t see how that’s possible.” Weldon sucked at his teeth, and the glutinous sound caused Peter’s stomach to do a slow flip-flop.

“You ever stop to think, Hugh,” said Sara angrily, “that maybe he was otherwise occupied?”

“You know somethin’, Sara, why don’t you say it plain?”

“I was with him last Tuesday. He was moving around, all right, but he wasn’t looking out any window. Is that plain enough?”

Weldon sucked at his teeth again. “I ’spect it is. You sure ’bout this?”

Sara gave a sarcastic laugh. “Wanna see my hickey?”

“No reason to be snitty, Sara. I ain’t doin’ this for pleasure.”

Weldon heaved to his feet and gazed down at Peter. “You lookin’ a bit peaked, Mr. Ramey. Hope it ain’t somethin’ you ate.” He held the stare a moment longer, then pushed off through the crowd.

“God, Peter!” Sara cupped his face in her hands. “You look awful!”

“Dizzy,” he said, fumbling for his wallet; he tossed some bills on the counter. “C’mon, I need some air.”

With Sara guiding him, he made it through the front door and leaned on the hood of a parked car, head down, gulping in the cold air. Her arm around his shoulders was a good weight that helped steady him, and after a few seconds he began to feel stronger, able to lift his head. The street—with its cobblestones and newly budded trees and old-fashioned lampposts and tiny shops—looked like a prop for a model railroad. Wind prowled the sidewalks, spinning paper cups and fluttering awnings. A strong gust shivered him and brought a flashback of dizziness and vision. Once more he was reaching down toward that glint, only this time it was very close, so close that its energies were tingling his fingertips, pulling at him, and if he could just stretch out his hand another inch or two . . . Dizziness overwhelmed him. He caught himself on the hood of the car; his arm gave way, and he slumped forward, feeling the cold metal against his cheek. Sara was calling to someone, asking for help, and he wanted to reassure her, to say he’d be all right in a minute, but the words clogged in his throat and he continued lying there, watching the world tip and spin, until someone with arms stronger than Sara’s lifted him and said, “Hey, man! You better stop hittin’ the sauce, or I might be tempted to snake your ol’ lady.”


* * *
Streetlight angled a rectangle of yellow glare across the foot of Sara’s bed, illuminating her stockinged legs and half of Peter’s bulk beneath the covers. She lit a cigarette, then—exasperated at having given into the habit again—she stubbed it out, turned on her side, and lay watching the rise and fall of Peter’s chest. Dead to the world. Why, she wondered, was she such a sucker for the damaged ones? She laughed at herself; she knew the answer. She wanted to be the one to make them forget whatever had hurt them, usually another woman. A combination Florence Nightingale and sex therapist, that was her, and she could never resist a new challenge. Though Peter had not talked about it, she could tell some LA ghost owned half his heart. He had all the symptoms. Sudden silences, distracted stares, the way he jumped for the mailbox as soon as the postman came and yet was always disappointed by what he had received. She believed that she owned the other half of his heart, but whenever he started to go with it, to forget the past and immerse himself in the here and now, the ghost would rear up and he’d create a little distance. His approach to lovemaking, for instance. He’d come on soft and gentle, and then, just as they were on the verge of a new level of intimacy, he’d draw back, crack a joke, or do something rough—like tackling her on the beach that morning—and she would feel cheap and sluttish. Sometimes she thought that the thing to do would be to tell him to get the Hell out of her life, to come back and see her when his head was clear. But she knew she wouldn’t. He owned more than half her heart.
She eased off the bed, careful not to wake him, and slipped out of her clothes. A branch scraped the window, startling her, and she held her blouse up to cover her breasts. Oh, right! A Peeping Tom at a third-floor window. In New York, maybe, but not in Nantucket. She tossed the blouse into the laundry hamper and caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror affixed to the closet door. In the dim light the reflection looked elongated and unfamiliar, and she had a feeling that Peter’s ghost woman was watching her from across the continent, from another mirror. She could almost make her out. Tall, long-legged, a mournful expression. Sara didn’t need to see her to know the woman had been sad: It was the sad ones who were the real heartbreakers, and the men whose hearts they had broken were like fossil records of what the women were. They offered their sadness to be cured, yet it wasn’t a cure they wanted, only another reason for sadness, a spicy bit to mix in with the stew they had been stirring all their lives. Sara moved closer to the mirror, and the illusion of the other woman was replaced by the conformation of her own body. “That’s what I’m going to do to you, lady,” she whispered. “Blot you out.” The words sounded empty.

She turned back the bedspread and slid in beside Peter. He made a muffled noise, and she saw gleams of the streetlights in his eyes. “Sorry about earlier,” he said.

“No problem,” she said brightly. “I got Bob Frazier and Jerry Highsmith to help bring you home. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely. I’m surprised Jerry could tear himself away from his redhead. Him and his sweet Ginger!” He lifted his arm so Sara could burrow in against his shoulder. “I guess your reputation’s ruined.”

“I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly getting more exotic all the time.”

He laughed.

“Peter?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I’m worried about these spells of yours. That’s what this was, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” He was silent a moment. “I’m worried, too. I’ve been having them two and three times a day, and that’s never happened before. But there’s nothing I can do except try not to think about them.”

“Can you see what’s going to happen?”

“Not really, and there’s no point in trying to figure it out. I can’t ever use what I see. It just happens, whatever’s going to, and then I understand thatthat was what the premonition was about. It’s a pretty worthless gift.”

Sara snuggled closer, throwing her leg across his hip. “Why don’t we go over to the Cape tomorrow?”

“I was going to check out Mills’s garbage dump.”

“Okay. We can do that in the morning and still catch the three o’clock boat. It might be good for you to get off the island for a day or so.”

“All right. Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

Sara shifted her leg and realized that he was erect. She eased her hand beneath the covers to touch him, and he turned so as to allow her better access. His breath quickened and he kissed her—gentle, treasuring kisses on her lips, her throat, her eyes—and his hips moved in counterpoint to the rhythm of her hand, slowly at first, becoming insistent, convulsive, until he was prodding against her thigh and she had to take her hand away and let him slip between her legs, opening her. Her thoughts were dissolving into a medium of urgency, her consciousness being reduced to an awareness of heat and shadows. But when he lifted himself above her, that brief separation broke the spell, and she could suddenly hear the fretful sounds of the wind, could see the particulars of his face and the light fixture on the ceiling behind him. His features seemed to sharpen, to grow alert, and he opened his mouth to speak. She put a finger to his lips.Please, Peter! No jokes. This is serious. She beamed the thoughts at him, and maybe they sank in. His face slackened, and as she guided him into place he moaned, a despairing sound such as a ghost might make at the end of its earthly term; and then she was clawing at him, driving him deeper inside, and talking to him, not words, just breathy noises, sighs and whispers, but having meanings that he would understand.




III
That same night while Peter and Sara were asleep, Sally McColl was driving her jeep along the blacktop that led to Smith Point. She was drunk and not giving a good goddamn where she wandered, steering in a neverendingS , sending the headlights veering across low gorsey hills and gnarled hawthorns. With one hand she kept a choke hold on a pint of cherry brandy, her third of the evening. ’Sconset Sally, they called her. Crazy Sally. Seventy-four years old and still able to shell scallops and row better than most men on the island. Wrapped in a couple of Salvation Army dresses, two moth-eaten sweaters, a tweed jacket gone at the elbows, and generally looking like a bag lady from Hell. Brambles of white hair sticking out from under a battered fisherman’s hat. Static fizzled on the radio, and Sally accompanied it with mutters, curses, and fitful bursts of song, all things that echoed the jumble of her thoughts. She parked near the spot where the blacktop gave out, staggered from the jeep and stumped through the soft sand to the top of a dune. There she swayed for a moment, dizzied by the pour of wind and the sweep of darkness broken only by a few stars on the horizon. “Whoo-ooh!” she screeched; the wind sucked up her yell and added it to its sound. She lurched forward, slipped, and went rolling down the face of the dune. Sand adhering to her tongue, spitting, she sat up and found that somehow she’d managed to hold on to the bottle, that the cap was still on even though she hadn’t screwed it tight. A flicker of paranoia set her to jerking her head from side to side. She didn’t want anybody spying on her, spreading more stories about old drunk Sally. The ones they told were bad enough. Half were lies, and the rest were slanted to make her seem loopy . . . like the one about how she’d bought herself a mail-order husband and he’d run off after two weeks, stowed away on a boat, scared to death of her, and she had come riding on horseback through Nantucket, hoping to bring him home. A swarthy little bump of a man, Eyetalian, no English, and he hadn’t known shit from shortcake in bed. Better to do yourself than fool with a pimple like him. All she’d wanted had been the goddamn trousers she’d dressed him in, and the tale-tellers had cast her as a desperate woman. Bastards! Buncha goddamn . . .
Sally’s train of thought pulled into a tunnel, and she sat staring blankly at the dark. Damn cold, it was, and windy a bit as well. She took a swig of brandy; when it hit bottom she felt ten degrees warmer. Another swig put her legs under her, and she started walking along the beach away from the Point, searching for a nice lonesome spot where nobody was likely to happen by. That was what she wanted. Just to sit and spit and feel the night on her skin. You couldn’t hardly find such a place nowadays, what with all the summer trash floating in from the mainland, the Gucci-Pucci sissies and the little swish-tailed chick-women eager to bend over and butter their behinds for the first five-hundred-dollar suit that showed interest, probably some fat-boy junior executive who couldn’t get it up and would marry ’em just for the privilege of being humiliated every night . . . That train of thought went spiraling off, and Sally spiraled after it. She sat down with a thump. She gave out with a cackle, liked the sound of it, and cackled louder. She sipped at the brandy, wishing that she had brought another bottle, letting her thoughts subside into a crackle of half-formed images and memories that seemed to have been urged upon her by the thrashings and skitterings of the wind. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a couple of houses lumped against the lesser blackness of the sky. Vacant summer places. No, wait! Those were them whatchamacallems. Condominiums. What had that Ramey boy said about ’em? Iniums with a condom slipped over each. Prophylactic lives. He was a good boy, that Peter. The first person she’d met with the gift for dog’s years, and it was strong in him, stronger than her gift, which wasn’t good for much except for guessing the weather, and she was so old now that her bones could do that just as well. He’d told her how some people in California had blown up condominiums to protect the beauty of their coastline, and it had struck her as a fine idea. The thought of condominiums ringing the island caused her to tear up, and with a burst of drunken nostalgia she remembered what a wonder the sea had been when she was a girl. Clean, pure, rife with spirits. She’d been able to sense those spirits . . . staggered to her feet, cocking an ear. More sounds of breakage. She headed toward them, toward the condominiums. Might be some kids vandalizing the place. If so, she’d cheer ’em on. But as she climbed to the top of the nearest dune, the sounds died away. Then the wind picked up, not howling or roaring, but with a weird ululation, almost a melody, as if it were pouring through the holes of an enormous flute.

The back of Sally’s neck prickled, and a cold slimy worm of fear wriggled the length of her spine. She was close enough to the condominiums to see their rooflines against the sky, but she could see nothing else. There was only the eerie music of the wind, repeating the same passage of five notes over and over. Then it, too, died. Sally took a slug of brandy, screwed up her courage, and started walking again; the beach grass swayed and tickled her hands, and the tickling spread gooseflesh up her arms. About twenty feet from the first condominium she stopped, her heartbeat ragged. Fear was turning the brandy to a sour mess in her stomach. What was there to be afraid of, she asked herself. The wind? Shit! She had another slug of brandy and went forward. It was so dark she had to grope her way along the wall, and she was startled to find a hole smack in the middle of it. Bigger than a damn door, it was. Edged by broken boards and ripped shingles. Like a giant fist had smashed it through. Her mouth was cottony, but she stepped inside. She rummaged in her pockets, dug out a box of kitchen matches, lit one and cupped it with her hands until it burned steadily. The room was unfurnished, just carpeting and telephone fixtures and paint-spattered newspapers and rags. Sliding glass doors were inset into the opposite wall, but most of the glass had been blown out, crunching under her feet; as she drew near, an icicle-shaped piece hanging from the frame caught the glow of the match and for a second was etched on the dark like a fiery tooth. The match scorched her fingers. She dropped it and lit another and moved into the next room. More holes and a heaviness in the air, as if the house were holding its breath. Nerves, she thought. Goddamn old-woman nerves. Maybe ithad been kids, drunk and ramming a car into the walls. A breeze eeled from somewhere and puffed out the match. She lit a third one. The breeze extinguished it, too, and she realized that kids hadn’t been responsible for the damage, because the breeze didn’t blow away this time: It fluttered around her, lifting her dress, her hair, twining about her legs, patting and frisking her all over, and in the breeze was a feeling, a knowledge, that turned her bones to splinters of black ice. Something had come from the sea, some evil thing with the wind for a body had smashed holes in the walls to play its foul, spine-chilling music, and it was surrounding her, toying with her, getting ready to whirl her off to Hell and gone. It had a clammy, bitter smell, and that smell clung to her skin everywhere it touched.

Sally backed into the first room, wanting to scream but only able to manage a feeble squawk. The wind flowed after her, lifting the newspapers and flapping them at her like crinkly white bats, matting them against her face and chest. Then she screamed. She dove for the hole in the wall and flung herself into a frenzied heart-busting run, stumbling, falling, scrambling to her feet, and waving her arms and yelling. Behind her, the wind gushed from the house, roaring, and she imagined it shaping itself into a towering figure, a black demon who was laughing at her, letting her think she might make it before swooping down and tearing her apart. She rolled down the face of the last dune, and, her breath sobbing, clawed at the door handle of the jeep; she jiggled the key in the ignition, prayed until the engine turned over, and then, gears grinding, swerved off along the Nantucket road.

She was halfway to ’Sconset before she grew calm enough to think what to do, and the first thing she decided was to drive straight to Nantucket and tell Hugh Weldon. Though God only knew whathe’d do. Or what he’d say. That scrawny flint of a man! Like as not he’d laugh in her face and be off to share the latest ’Sconset Sally story with his cronies. No, she told herself. There weren’t going to be any more stories about ol’ Sally drunk as the moon and seeing ghosts and raving about the wind. They wouldn’t believe her, so let ’em think kids had done it. A little sun of gleeful viciousness rose in her thoughts, burning away the shadows of her fear and heating her blood even quicker than would a jolt of cherry brandy. Let it happen, whatever was going to happen, andthen she’d tell her story,then she’d say I would have told you sooner, but you would have called me crazy. Oh, no! She wouldn’t be the butt of their jokes this time. Let ’em find out for themselves that some new devil had come from the sea.




IV
Mills Lindstrom’s boat was a Boston whaler, about twenty feet of blue squarish hull with a couple of bucket seats, a control pylon, and a fifty-five-horsepower outboard racketing behind. Sara had to sit on Peter’s lap, and while he wouldn’t have minded that in any case, in this case he appreciated the extra warmth. Though it was calm, the sea rolling in long swells, heavy clouds and a cold front had settled over the island; farther out the sun was breaking through, but all around them crumbling banks of whitish mist hung close to the water. The gloom couldn’t dampen Peter’s mood, however; he was anticipating a pleasant weekend with Sara and gave hardly a thought to their destination, carrying on a steady stream of chatter. Mills, on the other hand, was brooding and taciturn, and when they came in sight of the offshore pollution aggregate, a dirty brown stain spreading for hundreds of yards across the water, he pulled his pipe from beneath his rain gear and set to chomping the stem, as if to restrain impassioned speech.
Peter borrowed Mills’s binoculars and peered ahead. The surface of the aggregate was pocked by thousands of white objects; at this distance they looked like bones sticking up from thin soil. Streamers of mist were woven across it, and the edge was shifting sluggishly, an obscene cap sliding over the dome of a swell. It was a no-man’s-land, an ugly blot, and as they drew near, its ugliness increased. The most common of the white objects were Clorox bottles such as fishermen used to mark the spread of their nets; there were also a great many fluorescent tubes, other plastic debris, torn pieces of netting, and driftwood, all mired in a pale brown jelly of decayed oil products. It was a Golgotha of the inorganic world, a plain of ultimate spiritual malaise, of entropy triumphant, and perhaps, thought Peter, the entire earth would one day come to resemble it. The briny, bitter stench made his skin crawl.

“God,” said Sara as they began cruising along the edge; she opened her mouth to say more but couldn’t find the words.

“I see why you felt like drinking last night,” said Peter to Mills, who just shook his head and grunted.

“Can we go into it?” asked Sara.

“All them torn nets’ll foul the propeller.” Mills stared at her askance. “Ain’t it bad enough from out here?”

“We can tip up the motor and row in,” Peter suggested. “Come on, Mills. It’ll be like landing on the moon.”

And, indeed, as they rowed into the aggregate, cutting through the pale brown stuff, Peter felt that they had crossed some intangible border into uncharted territory. The air seemed heavier, full of suppressed energy, and the silence seemed deeper; the only sound was the slosh of the oars. Mills had told Peter that the thing would have roughly a spiral shape, due to the actions of opposing currents, and that intensified his feeling of having entered the unknown; he pictured them as characters in a fantasy novel, creeping across a great device inlaid on the floor of an abandoned temple. Debris bobbed against the hull. The brown glop had the consistency of Jell-O that hadn’t set properly, and when Peter dipped his hands into it, beads accumulated on his fingers. Some of the textures on the surface had a horrid, almost organic, beauty: bleached, wormlike tendrils of netting mired in the slick, reminding Peter of some animal’s diseased spoor; larval chips of wood matted on a bed of glistening cellophane; a blue plastic lid bearing a girl’s sunbonneted face embedded in a spaghetti of Styrofoam strips. They would point out such oddities to each other, but nobody was eager to talk. The desolation of the aggregate was oppressive, and not even a ray of sunlight fingering the boat, as if a searchlight were keeping track of them from the real world, not even that could dispel the gloom. Then, about two hundred yards in, Peter saw something shiny inside an opaque plastic container, reached down, and picked it up.

The instant he brought it on board he realized that this was the object about which he had experienced the premonition, and he had the urge to throw it back; but he felt such a powerful attraction to it that instead he removed the lid and lifted out a pair of silver combs, the sort Spanish women wear in their hair. Touching them, he had a vivid mental image of a young woman’s face: a pale, drawn face that might have been beautiful but was starved-thin and worn by sorrows. Gabriela. The name seeped into his consciousness the way a paw track frozen in the ground melts up from beneath the snow during a thaw. Gabriela Pa . . . Pasco . . . Pascual. His finger traced the design etched on the combs, and every curlicue conveyed a sense of her personality. Sadness, loneliness, and—most of all—terror. She’d been afraid for a very long time. Sara asked to see the combs, took them, and his ghostly impression of Gabriela Pascual’s life flew apart like a creature of foam, leaving him disoriented.

“They’re beautiful,” said Sara. “And they must be really old.”

“Looks like Mexican work,” said Mills. “Hmph. What we got here?” He stretched out his oar, trying to snag something; he hauled the oar back in and Sara lifted the thing from the blade: a rag showing yellow streaks through its coating of slick.

“It’s a blouse.” Sara turned it in her hands, her nose wrinkling at having to touch the slick; she stopped turning it and stared at Peter. “Oh, God! It’s Ellen Borchard’s.”

Peter took it from her. Beneath the manufacturer’s label was Ellen Borchard’s name tag. He closed his eyes, hoping to read some impression as he had with the silver combs. Nothing. His gift had deserted him. But he had a bad feeling that he knew exactly what had happened to the girl.

“Better take that to Hugh Weldon,” said Mills. “Might . . .” He broke off and stared out over the aggregate.

At first Peter didn’t see what had caught Mills’s eyes; then he noticed that a wind had sprung up. A most peculiar wind. It was moving slowly around the boat about fifty feet away, its path evident by the agitation of the debris over which it passed; it whispered and sighed, and with a sucking noise a couple of Clorox bottles popped out of the slick and spun into the air. Each time the wind made a complete circuit of the boat, it seemed to have grown a little stronger.

“What the Hell!” Mills’s face was drained of color, the web of broken blood vessels on his cheeks showing like a bright red tattoo.

Sara’s nails bit into Peter’s arm, and he was overwhelmed by the knowledge that this wind was what he had been warned against. Panicked, he shook Sara off, scrambled to the back of the boat, and tipped down the outboard motor.

“The nets . . .” Mills began.

“Fuck the nets! Let’s get out of here!”

The wind was keening, and the entire surface of the aggregate was starting to heave. Crouched in the stern, Peter was again struck by its resemblance to a graveyard with bones sticking out of the earth, only now all the bones were wiggling, working themselves loose. Some of the Clorox bottles were rolling sluggishly along, bouncing high when they hit an obstruction. The sight froze him for a moment, but as Mills fired the engine, he crawled back to his seat and pulled Sara down with him. Mills turned the boat toward Madaket. The slick glubbed and smacked against the hull, and brown flecks splashed onto the windshield and oozed sideways. With each passing second the wind grew stronger and louder, building to a howl that drowned out the motor. A fluorescent tube went twirling up beside them like a cheerleader’s baton; bottles and cellophane and splatters of oil slick flew at them from every direction. Sara ducked her face into Peter’s shoulder, and he held her tight, praying that the propeller wouldn’t foul. Mills swerved the boat to avoid a piece of driftwood that sailed past the bow, and then they were into clear water, out of the wind—though they could still hear it raging—and running down the long slope of a swell.

Relieved, Peter stroked Sara’s hair and let out a shuddering breath; but when he glanced behind them all his relief went glimmering. Thousands upon thousands of Clorox bottles and fluorescent tubes and other debris were spinning in midair above the aggregate—an insane mobile posed against the gray sky—and just beyond the edge narrow tracks of water were being lashed up, as if a windy knife were slicing back and forth across it, undecided whether or not to follow them home.


* * *
Hugh Weldon had been out in Madaket investigating the vandalism of the condominiums, and after receiving the radio call it had only taken him a few minutes to get to Peter’s cottage. He sat beside Mills at the picnic table, listening to their story, and from the perspective of the sofa bunk, where Peter was sitting, his arms around Sara, the chief presented an angular mantislike silhouette against the gray light from the window; the squabbling of the police radio outside seemed part of his persona, a radiation emanating from him. When they had finished he stood, walked to the wood stove, lifted the lid, and spat inside it; the stove crackled and spat back a spark.
“If it was just you two,” he said to Peter and Sara, “I’d run you in and find out what you been smokin’. But Mills here don’t have the imagination for this kind of foolishness, so I guess I got to believe you.” He set down the lid with a clank and squinted at Peter. “You said you wrote somethin’ ’bout Ellen Borchard in your book. What?”

Peter leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “She was down at Smith Point just after dark. She was angry at her parents, and she wanted to scare them. So she took off her blouse—she had extra clothes with her, because she was planning to run away—and was about to rip it up, to make them think she’d been murdered, when the wind killed her.”

“Now how’d it do that?” asked Weldon.

“In the book the wind was a sort of elemental. Cruel, capricious. It played with her. Knocked her down, rolled her along the shingle. Then it would let her up and knock her down again. She was bleeding all over from the shell-cuts and screaming. Finally it whirled her up and out to sea.” Peter stared down at his hands; the inside of his head felt heavy, solid, as if his brains were made of mercury.

“Jesus Christ!” said Weldon. “What you got to say ’bout that, Mills?”

“It wasn’t no normal wind,” said Mills. “That’s all I know.”

“Jesus Christ!” repeated Weldon; he rubbed the back of his neck and peered at Peter. “I been twenty years at this job, and I’ve heard some tall tales. But this . . . what did you say it was? An elemental?”

“Yeah, but I don’t really know for sure. Maybe if I could handle those combs again. I could learn more about it.”

“Peter.” Sara put her hand on his arm; her brow was furrowed. “Why don’t we let Hugh deal with it?”

Weldon was amused. “Naw, Sara. You let Mr. Ramey see what he can do.” He chuckled. “Maybe he can tell me how the Red Sox are gonna do this year. Me and Mills can have another look at that mess off the Point.”

Mills’s neck seemed to retract into his shoulders. “I ain’t goin’ back out there, Hugh. And if you want my opinion, you better keep clear of it yourself.”

“Damn it, Mills.” Weldon smacked his hand against his hip. “I ain’t gonna beg, but you sure as Hell could save me some trouble. It’ll take me an hour to get the Coast Guard boys off their duffs. Wait a minute!” He turned to Peter. “Maybe you people were seein’ things. There musta been all kinds of bad chemicals fumin’ up from that mess. Could be you breathed somethin’ in.” Brakes squealed, a car door slammed, and seconds later the bedraggled figure of Sally McColl strode past the window and knocked on the door.

“What in God’s name does she want?” said Weldon.

Peter opened the door, and Sally gave him a gap-toothed grin. “Mornin’, Peter,” she said. She was wearing a stained raincoat over her usual assortment of dresses and sweaters, and a gaily colored man’s necktie for a scarf. “Is that skinny ol’ fart Hugh Weldon inside?”

“I ain’t got time for your crap today, Sally,” called Weldon.

Sally pushed past Peter. “Mornin’, Sara. Mills.”

“Hear one of your dogs just had a litter,” said Mills.

“Yep. Six snarly little bastards.” Sally wiped her nose with the back of her hand and checked it to see what had rubbed off. “You in the market?”

“I might drop ’round and take a look,” said Mills. “Dobermans or Shepherds?”

“Dobermans. Gonna be fierce.”

“What’s on your mind, Sally?” said Weldon, stepping between them.

“Got a confession to make.”

Weldon chuckled. “What’d you do now? You sure as Hell didn’t burglarize no dress shop.”

A frown etched the wrinkles deeper on Sally’s face. “You stupid son of a bitch,” she said flatly. “I swear, God musta been runnin’ short of everything but horseshit when He made you.”

“Listen, you ol’ . . .”

“Musta ground up your balls and used ’em for brains,” Sally went on. “Musta . . .”

“Sally!” Peter pushed them apart and took the old woman by the shoulders. A glaze faded from her eyes as she looked at him. At last she shrugged free of his grasp and patted down her hair: a peculiarly feminine gesture for someone so shapeless and careworn.

“I shoulda told you sooner,” she said to Weldon. “But I was sick of you laughin’ at me. Then I decided it might be important and I’d have to risk listenin’ to your jackass bray. So I’m tellin’ you.” She looked out the window. “I know what done them condominiums. It was the wind.” She snapped a hateful glance at Weldon. “And I ain’t crazy, neither!”

Peter felt weak in the knees. They were surrounded by trouble; it was in the air as it had been off Smith Point, yet stronger, as if he were becoming sensitized to the feeling.

“The wind,” said Weldon, acting dazed.

“That’s right,” said Sally defiantly. “It punched holes in them damn buildin’s and was whistlin’ through ’em like it was playin’ music.” She glared at him. “Don’t you believe me?”

“He believes you,” said Peter. “We think the wind killed Ellen Borchard.”

“Now don’t be spreadin’ that around! We ain’t sure!” Weldon said it desperately, clinging to disbelief.

Sally crossed the room to Peter. “It’s true ’bout the Borchard girl, ain’t it?”

“I think so,” he said.

“And that thing what killed her, it’s here in Madaket. You feel it, don’tcha?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Sally headed for the door.

“Where you goin’?” asked Weldon. She mumbled and went outside; Peter saw her pacing back and forth in the yard. “Crazy ol’ bat,” said Weldon.

“Mebbe she is,” said Mills. “But you ought not to be treatin’ her so harsh after all she’s done.”

“What’s she done?” asked Peter.

“Sally used to live up in Madaket,” said Mills. “And whenever a ship would run up on Dry Shoals or one of the others, she’d make for the wreck in that ol’ lobster boat of hers. Most times she’d beat the Coast Guard to ’em. Musta saved fifty or sixty souls over the years, sailin’ out in the worst kind of weather.”

“Mills!” said Weldon emphatically. “Run me out to that garbage dump of yours.”

Mills stood and hitched up his pants. “Ain’t you been listenin’, Hugh? Peter and Sally say that thing’s ’round here somewhere.”

Weldon was a frustrated man. He sucked at his teeth, and his face worked. He picked up the container holding the combs, glanced at Peter, then set the container down.

“You want me to see what I can learn from those?” asked Peter.

Weldon shrugged. “Can’t hurt nothin’, I guess.” He stared out the window as if unconcerned with the issue.

Peter took the container and sat down next to Sara. “Wait,” she said. “I don’t understand. If this thing is nearby, shouldn’t we get away from here?” Nobody answered.

The plastic container was cold, and when Peter pried off the lid, the cold welled out at him. Intense, aching cold, as if he had opened the door to a meat locker.

Sally burst into the room and pointed at the container. “What’s that?”

“Some old combs,” said Peter. “They didn’t feel like this when I found them. Not as strong.”

“Feel like what?” asked Weldon; every new mystery seemed to be unnerving him further, and Peter suspected that if the mysteries weren’t cleared up soon, the chief would start disbelieving them on purely practical grounds.

Sally came over to Peter and looked into the container. “Gimme one,” she said, extending a grimy hand. Weldon and Mills moved up behind her, like two old soldiers flanking their mad queen.

Reluctantly, Peter picked up one of the combs. Its coldness flowed into his arm, his head, and for a moment he was in the midst of a storm-tossed sea, terrified, waves crashing over the bows of a fishing boat and the wind singing around him. He dropped the comb. His hands were trembling, and his heart was doing a jig against his chest wall.

“Oh, shit,” he said to no one in particular. “I don’t know if I want to do this.”


* * *
Sara gave Sally her seat beside Peter, and as they handled the combs, setting them down every minute or so to report what they had learned, she chewed her nails and fretted. She could relate to Hugh Weldon’s frustration; it was awful just to sit and watch. Each time Peter and Sally handled the combs their respiration grew shallow and their eyes rolled back, and when they laid them aside they appeared drained and frightened.
“Gabriela Pascual was from Miami,” said Peter. “I can’t tell exactly when all this happened, but it was years ago . . . because in my image of her, her clothes look a little old-fashioned. Maybe ten or fifteen years back. Something like that. Anyway, there was trouble for her onshore, some emotional entanglement, and her brother didn’t want to leave her alone, so he took her along on a fishing voyage. He was a commercial fisherman.”

“She had the gift,” Sally chimed in. “That’s why there’s so much of her in the combs. That, and because she killed herself and died holdin’ ’em.”

“Why’d she kill herself?” asked Weldon.

“Fear,” said Peter. “Loneliness. Crazy as it sounds, the wind was holding her prisoner. I think she cracked up from being alone on a drifting boat with only this thing—the elemental—for company.”

“Alone?” said Weldon. “What happened to her brother?”

“He died.” Sally’s voice was shaky. “The wind came down and killed ’em all ’cept this Gabriela. It wanted her.”

As the story unfolded, gusts of wind began to shudder the cottage and Sara tried to remain unconcerned as to whether or not they were natural phenomena. She turned her eyes from the window, away from the heaving trees and bushes, and concentrated on what was being said; but that in itself was so eerie that she couldn’t keep from jumping whenever the panes rattled. Gabriela Pascual, said Peter, had been frequently seasick during the cruise; she had been frightened of the crew, most of whom considered her bad luck, and possessed by a feeling of imminent disaster. And, Sally added, that premonition had been borne out. One cloudless calm day the elemental had swept down and killed everyone. Everyone except Gabriela. It had whirled the crew and her brother into the air, smashed them against bulkheads, dropped them onto the decks. She had expected to die as well, but it had seemed interested in her. It had caressed her and played with her, knocking her down and rolling her about; and at night it had poured through the passageways and broken windows, making a chilling music that—as the days passed and the ship drifted north—she came to half-understand.

“She didn’t think of it as a spirit,” said Peter. “There wasn’t anything mystical about it to her mind. It struck her as being kind of a . . .”

“An animal,” interrupted Sally. “A big, stupid animal. Vicious, it was. But not evil. ’Least it didn’t feel evil to her.”

Gabriela, Peter went on, had never been sure what it wanted of her—perhaps her presence had been all. Most of the time it had left her alone. Then, suddenly, it would spring up out of a calm to juggle splinters of glass or chase her about. Once the ship had drifted near to shore, and when she had attempted to jump over the side, the elemental had battered her and driven her below decks. Though at first it had controlled the drift of the ship, gradually it lost interest in her and on several occasions the ship almost foundered. Finally, no longer caring to prolong the inevitable, she had cut her wrists and died clutching the container holding her most valued possessions, her grandmother’s silver combs, with the wind howling in her ears.

Peter leaned back against the wall, his eyes shut, and Sally sighed and patted her breast. For a long moment no one spoke.

“Wonder why it’s hangin’ ’round that garbage out there,” said Mills.

“Maybe no reason,” said Peter dully. “Or maybe it’s attracted to slack points in the tides, to some condition of the air.”

“I don’t get it,” said Weldon. “What the Hell is it? It can’t be no animal.”

“Why not?” Peter stood, swayed, then righted himself. “What’s wind, anyway? Charged ions, vacating air masses. Who’s to say that some stable form of ions couldn’t approximate a life? Could be there’s one of these at the heart of every storm, and they’ve always been mistaken for spirits, given an anthropomorphic character. Like Ariel.” He laughed disconsolately. “It’s no sprite, that’s for sure.”

Sally’s eyes looked unnaturally bright, like watery jewels lodged in her weathered face. “The sea breeds ’em,” she said firmly, as if that were explanation enough of anything strange.

“Peter’s book was right,” said Sara. “It’s an elemental. That’s what you’re describing, anyway. A violent, inhuman creature, part spirit and part animal.” She laughed, and the laugh edged a bit high, bordering on the hysteric. “It’s hard to believe.”

“Right!” said Weldon. “Damned hard! I got an ol’ crazy woman and a man I don’t know from Adam tellin’ me . . .”

“Listen!” said Mills; he walked to the door and swung it open.

It took Sara a second to fix on the sound, but then she realized that the wind had died, had gone from heavy gusts to trifling breezes in an instant, and farther away, coming from the sea, or nearer, maybe as close as Tennessee Avenue, she heard a roaring.




V
A few moments earlier Jerry Highsmith had been both earning his living and looking forward to a night of exotic pleasures in the arms of Ginger McCurdy. He was standing in front of one of the houses on Tennessee Avenue, its quarterboard readingAHAB-ITAT , and a collection of old harpoons and whalebones mounted on either side of the door; his bicycle leaned against a rail fence behind him, and ranged around him, straddling their bikes, dolled up in pastel-hued jogging suits and sweat clothes, were twenty-six members of the Peach State Ramblers Bicycle Club. Ten men, sixteen women. The women were all in good shape, but most were in their thirties, a bit long in the tooth for Jerry’s taste. Ginger, on the other hand, was prime. Twenty-three or twenty-four, with red hair down to her ass and a body that wouldn’t quit. She had peeled off her sweats and was blooming out a halter and shorts cut so high that each time she dismounted you could see right up to the Pearly Gates. And she knew what she was doing: Every jiggle of those twin jaloobies was aimed at his crotch. She had pressed to the front of the group and was attending to his spiel about the bullshit whaling days. Oh, yeah! Ginger was ready. A couple of lobsters, a little wine, a stroll along the waterfront, and then by God he’d pump her so full of the Nantucket Experience that she’d breach like a snow-white hill.
Thar she fuckin’ blows!

“Now, y’all . . .” he began.

They tittered; they liked him mocking their accent.

He grinned abashedly as if he hadn’t known what he was doing. “Must be catchin’,” he said. “Now you people probably haven’t had a chance to visit the Whaling Museum, have you?”

A chorus of Nos.

“Well then, I’ll give you a course in harpoonin’.” He pointed at the wall of theAHAB-ITAT . “That top one with the single barb stickin’ off the side, that’s the kind most commonly used during the whalin’ era. The shaft’s of ash. That was the preferred wood. It stands up to the weather”—he stared pointedly at Ginger—“and it won’t bend under pressure.” Ginger tried to constrain a smile. “Now that one,” he continued, keeping an eye on her, “the one with the arrow point and no barbs, that was favored by some whalers. They said it allowed for deeper penetration.”

“What about the one with two barbs?” asked someone.

Jerry peered over heads and saw that the questioner was his second choice. Ms. Selena Persons. A nice thirtyish brunette, flat-chested, but with killer legs. Despite the fact that he was obviously after Ginger, she hadn’t lost interest. Who knows? A doubleheader might be a possibility.

“That was used toward the end of the whalin’ era,” he said. “But generally two-barbed harpoons weren’t considered as effective as single-barbed ones. I don’t know why, exactly. Might have just been stubbornness on the whalers’ part. Resistance to change. They knew the ol’ single-barb could give satisfaction.”

Ms. Persons met his gaze with the glimmer of a smile.

“’Course,” Jerry continued, addressing all the Ramblers, “now the shaft’s tipped with a charge that explodes inside the whale.” He winked at Ginger and addedsotto voce , “Must be a rush.”

She covered her mouth with her hand.

“Okay, folks!” Jerry swung his bike away from the fence. “Mount up, and we’ll be off to the next thrillin’ attraction.”

Laughing and chattering, the Ramblers started to mount, but just then a powerful gust of wind swept down Tennessee Avenue, causing squeals and blowing away hats. Several of the riders overbalanced and fell, and several more nearly did. Ginger stumbled forward and clung to Jerry, giving him chest-to-chest massage. “Nice catch,” she said, doing a little writhe as she stepped away.

“Nice toss,” he replied.

She smiled, but the smile faded and was replaced by a bewildered look. “What’s that?”

Jerry turned. About twenty yards away a column of whirling leaves had formed above the blacktop; it was slender, only a few feet high, and though he had never seen anything similar, it alarmed him no more than had the freakish gust of wind. Within seconds, however, the column had grown to a height of fifteen feet; twigs and gravel and branches were being sucked into it, and it sounded like a miniature tornado. Someone screamed. Ginger clung to him in genuine fright. There was a rank smell in the air, and a pressure was building in Jerry’s ears. He couldn’t be sure, because the column was spinning so rapidly, but it seemed to be assuming a roughly human shape, a dark green figure made of plant litter and stones. His mouth had gone dry, and he restrained an urge to throw Ginger aside and run.

“Come on!” he shouted.

A couple of the Ramblers managed to mount their bicycles, but the wind had grown stronger, roaring, and it sent them wobbling and crashing into the weeds. The rest huddled together, their hair whipping about, and stared at the great Druid thing that was taking shape and swaying above them, as tall as the treetops. Shingles were popping off the sides of the houses, sailing up and being absorbed by the figure; and as Jerry tried to outvoice the wind, yelling at the Ramblers to lie flat, he saw the whalebones and harpoons ripped from the wall of theAHAB-ITAT . The windows of the house exploded outward. One man clutched the bloody flap of his cheek, which had been sliced open by a shard of glass; a woman grabbed the back of her knee and crumpled. Jerry shouted a final warning and pulled Ginger down with him into the roadside ditch. She squirmed and struggled, in a panic, but he forced her head down and held tight. The figure had risen much higher than the trees, and though it was still swaying, its form had stabilized somewhat. It had a face now: a graveyard smile of gray shingles and two circular patches of stones for eyes: a terrible blank gaze that seemed responsible for the increasing air pressure. Jerry’s heart boomed in his inner ear, and his blood felt like sludge. The figure kept swelling, up and up; the roar was resolving into an oscillating hum that shivered the ground. Stones and leaves were beginning to spray out of it. Jerry knew,knew , what was going to happen, and he couldn’t keep from watching. Amid a flurry of leaves he saw one of the harpoons flit through the air, impaling a woman who had been trying to stand. The force of the blow drove her out of Jerry’s field of vision. Then the great figure exploded. Jerry squeezed his eyes shut. Twigs and balls of dirt and gravel stung him. Ginger leaped sideways and collapsed atop him, clawing at his hip. He waited for something worse to happen, but nothing did. “You okay?” he asked, pushing Ginger away by the shoulders.

She wasn’t okay.

A splintered inch of whalebone stuck out from the center of her forehead. Shrieking with revulsion, Jerry wriggled from beneath her and came to his hands and knees. A moan. One of the men was crawling toward him, his face a mask of blood, a ragged hole where his right eye had been; his good eye looked glazed like a doll’s. Horrified, not knowing what to do, Jerry scrambled to his feet and backed away. All the harpoons, he saw, had found targets. Most of the Ramblers lay unmoving, their blood smeared over the blacktop; the rest were sitting up, dazed and bleeding. Jerry’s heel struck something, and he spun about. The quarterboard of theAHAB-ITAT had nailed Ms. Selena Persons vampire-style to the roadside dirt; the board had been driven so deep into the ground that only the letterA was showing above the mired ruin of her jogging suit, as if she were an exhibit. Jerry began to tremble, and tears started from his eyes.

A breeze ruffled his hair.

Somebody wailed, shocking him from his daze. He should call the hospital, the police. But where was a phone? Most of the houses were empty, waiting for summer tenants, and the phones wouldn’t be working. Somebody must have seen what had happened, though. He should just do what he could until help arrived. Gathering himself, he walked toward the man whose eye was missing; but before he had gone more than a few paces a fierce gust of wind struck him in the back and knocked him flat.

This time the roaring was all around him, the pressure so intense that it seemed a white-hot needle had pierced him from ear to ear. He shut his eyes and clamped both hands to his ears, trying to smother the pain. Then he felt himself lifted. He couldn’t believe it at first. Even when he opened his eyes and saw that he was being borne aloft, revolving in a slow circle, it made no sense. He couldn’t hear, and the quiet added to his sense of unreality; further adding to it, a riderless bicycle pedaled past. The air was full of sticks and leaves and pebbles, a threadbare curtain between him and the world, and he imagined himself rising in the gorge of that hideous dark figure. Ginger McCurdy was flying about twenty feet overhead, her red hair streaming, arms floating languidly as if in a dance. She was revolving faster than he, and he realized that his rate of spin was increasing as he rose. He saw what was going to happen: You went higher and higher, faster and faster, until you were spewed out, shot out over the village. His mind rebelled at the prospect of death, and he tried to swim back down the wind, flailing, kicking, bursting with fear. But as he whirled higher, twisting and turning, it became hard to breathe, to think, and he was too dizzy to be afraid any longer.

Another woman sailed by a few feet away. Her mouth was open, her face contorted; blood dripped from her scalp. She clawed at him, and he reached out to her, not knowing why he bothered. Their hands just missed touching. Thoughts were coming one at a time. Maybe he’d land in the water.MIRACULOUS SURVIVOR OF FREAK TORNADO . Maybe he’d fly across the island and settle gently in a Nantucket treetop. A broken leg, a bruise or two. They’d set up drinks for him in the Atlantic Café. Maybe Connie Keating would finally come across, would finally recognize the miraculous potential of Jerry Highsmith. Maybe. He was tumbling now, limbs jerking about, and he gave up thinking. Flash glimpses of the gapped houses below, of the other dancers on the wind, moving with spasmodic abandon. Suddenly, as he was bent backward by a violent updraft, there was a wrenching pain inside him, a grating, then a vital dislocation that delivered him from pain. Oh, Christ Jesus! Oh, God! Dazzles exploded behind his eyes. Something bright blue flipped past him, and he died.




VI
After the column of leaves and branches looming up from Tennessee Avenue had vanished, after the roaring had died, Hugh Weldon sprinted for his squad car with Peter and Sara at his heels. He frowned as they piled in but made no objection, and this, Peter thought, was probably a sign that he had stopped trying to rationalize events, that he accepted the wind as a force to which normal procedures did not apply. He switched on the siren, and they sped off. But less than fifty yards from the cottage he slammed on the brakes. A woman was hanging in a hawthorn tree beside the road, an old-fashioned harpoon plunged through her chest. There was no point in checking to see if she was alive. All her major bones were quite obviously broken, and she was painted with blood head to foot, making her look like a horrid African doll set out as a warning to trespassers.
Weldon got on the radio. “Body out in Madaket,” he said. “Send a wagon.”

“You might need more than one,” said Sara; she pointed to three dabs of color farther up the road. She was very pale, and she squeezed Peter’s hand so hard that she left white imprints on his skin.

Over the next twenty-five minutes they found eighteen bodies: broken, mutilated, several pierced by harpoons or fragments of bone. Peter would not have believed that the human form could be reduced to such grotesque statements, and though he was horrified, nauseated, he became increasingly numbed by what he saw. Odd thoughts flocked to his brain, most persistent among them being that the violence had been done partly for his benefit. It was a sick, nasty idea, and he tried to dismiss it; but after a while he began to consider it in light of other thoughts that had lately been striking him out of the blue. The manuscript ofHow the Wind Spoke at Madaket , for instance. As improbable as it sounded, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the wind had been seeding all this in his brain. He didn’t want to believe it, yet there it was, as believable as anything else that had happened. And given that, was his latest thought any less believable? He was beginning to understand the progression of events, to understand it with the same sudden clarity that had helped him solve the problems of his book, and he wished very much that he could have obeyed his premonition and not touched the combs. Until then the elemental had not been sure of him; it had been nosing around him like—as Sally had described it—a big, stupid animal, sensing something familiar about him but unable to remember what. And when he had found the combs, when he had opened the container, there must have been some kind of circuit closed, a flash point sparked between his power and Gabriela Pascual’s, and the elemental had made the connection. He recalled how excited it had seemed, darting back and forth beyond the borders of the aggregate.

As they turned back onto Tennessee Avenue, where a small group of townsfolk were covering bodies with blankets, Weldon got on the radio again, interrupting Peter’s chain of logic. “Where the Hell are them ambulances?” he snapped.

“Sent ’em a half hour ago,” came the reply. “Shoulda been there by now.”

Weldon cast a grim look at Peter and Sara. “Try ’em on the radio,” he told the operator.

A few minutes later the report came that none of the ambulances were answering their radios. Weldon told his people to stay put, that he’d check it out himself. As they turned off Tennessee Avenue onto the Nantucket road, the sun broke through the overcast, flooding the landscape in a thin yellow light and warming the interior of the car. The light seemed to be illuminating Peter’s weaknesses, making him realize how tense he was, how his muscles ached with the poisons of adrenaline and fatigue. Sara leaned against him, her eyes closed, and the pressure of her body acted to shore him up, to give him a burst of vitality.

Weldon kept the speed at thirty, glancing left and right, but nothing was out of the ordinary. Deserted streets, houses with blank-looking windows. Many of the homes in Madaket were vacant, and the occupants of many of the rest were away at work or off on errands. About two miles out of town, as they crested a low rise just beyond the dump, they spotted the ambulances. Weldon pulled onto the shoulder, letting the engine idle, and stared at the sight. Four ambulances were strewn across the blacktop, forming an effective roadblock a hundred feet away. One had been flipped over on its roof like a dead white bug; another had crashed into a light pole and was swathed in electrical lines whose broken ends were sticking in through the driver’s window, humping and writhing and sparking. The other two had been smashed together and were burning; transparent licks of flame warped the air above their blackened husks. But the wrecked ambulances were not the reason that Weldon had stopped so far away, why they sat silent and hopeless. To the right of the road was a field of bleached weeds and grasses, an Andrew Wyeth field glowing yellow in the pale sun, figured by a few stunted oaks and extending to a hill overlooking the sea, where three gray houses were posed against a faded blue sky. Though only fitful breezes played about the squad car, the field was registering the passage of heavy winds; the grasses were rippling, eddying, bending, and swaying in contrary directions, as if thousands of low-slung animals were scampering through them to and fro, and this rippling was so constant, so furious, it seemed that the shadows of the clouds passing overhead were standing still and the land was flowing away. The sound of the wind was a mournful whistling rush. Peter was entranced. The scene had a fey power that weighed upon him, and he had trouble catching his breath.

“Let’s go,” said Sara tremulously. “Let’s . . .” She stared past Peter, a look of fearful comprehension forming on her face.

The wind had begun to roar. Less than thirty feet away a patch of grass had been flattened, and a man wearing an orderly’s uniform was being lifted into the air, revolving slowly. His head flopped at a ridiculous straw-man angle, and the front of his tunic was drenched with blood. The car shuddered in the turbulence.

Sara shrieked and clutched at Peter. Weldon tried to jam the gearshift into reverse, missed, and the car stalled. He twisted the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered, dieseled, and went dead. The orderly continued to rise, assuming a vertical position. He spun faster and faster, blurring like an ice skater doing a fancy finish, and at the same time drifted closer to the car. Sara was screaming, and Peter wished he could scream, could do something to release the tightness in his chest. The engine caught. But before Weldon could put the car in gear, the wind subsided and the orderly fell onto the hood. Drops of blood sprinkled the windshield. He lay spread-eagled for a moment, his dead eyes staring at them. Then, with the obscene sluggishness of a snail retracting its foot, he slumped down onto the road, leaving a red smear across the white metal.

Weldon rested his head on the wheel, taking deep breaths. Peter cradled Sara in his arms. After a second Weldon leaned back, picked up the radio mike, and thumbed the switch open. “Jack,” he said. “This is Hugh. You copy?”

“Loud and clear, Chief.”

“We got us a problem out in Madaket.” Weldon swallowed hard and gave a little twitch of his head. “I want you to set up a roadblock ’bout five miles from town. No closer. And don’t let nobody through, y’understand?”

“What’s happenin’ out there, Chief? Alice Cuddy called in and said somethin’ ’bout a freak wind, but the phone went dead and I couldn’t get her back.”

“Yeah, we had us some wind.” Weldon exchanged a glance with Peter. “But the main problem’s a chemical spill. It’s under control for now, but you keep everybody away. Madaket’s in quarantine.”

“You need some help?”

“I need you to do what I told you! Get on the horn and call everyone livin’ ’tween the roadblock and Madaket. Tell ’em to head for Nantucket as quick as they can. Put the word on the radio, too.”

“What ’bout folks comin’ from Madaket? Do I let ’em through?”

“Won’t be nobody comin’ that way,” said Weldon.

Silence. “Chief, you okay?”

“Hell, yes!” Weldon switched off.

“Why didn’t you tell them?” asked Peter.

“Don’t want ’em thinkin’ I’m crazy and comin’ out to check on me,” said Weldon. “Ain’t no point in them dyin’, too.” He shifted into reverse. “I’m gonna tell everyone to get in their cellars and wait this damn thing out. Maybe we can figure out somethin’ to do. But first I’ll take you home and let Sara get some rest.”

“I’m all right,” she said, lifting her head from Peter’s chest.

“You’ll feel better after a rest,” he said, forcing her head back down: It was an act of tenderness, but also he did not want her to catch sight of the field. Dappled with cloud shadow; glowing palely; some quality of light different from that which shone upon the squad car; it seemed at a strange distance from the road, a view into an alternate universe where things were familiar yet not quite the same. The grasses were rippling more furiously than ever, and every so often a column of yellow stalks would whirl high into the air and scatter, as if an enormous child were running through the field, ripping up handfuls of them to celebrate his exuberance.


* * *
“I’m not sleepy,” Sara complained; she still hadn’t regained her color, and one of her eyelids had developed a tic.
Peter sat beside her on the bed. “There’s nothing you can do, so why not rest?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I thought I’d have another go at the combs.”

The idea distressed her. He started to explain why he had to, but instead bent and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you,” he said. The words slipped out so easily that he was amazed. It had been a very long time since he had spoken them to anyone other than a memory.

“You don’t have to tell me that just because things look bad,” she said, frowning.

“Maybe that’s why I’m telling you now,” he said. “But I don’t believe it’s a lie.”

She gave a dispirited laugh. “You don’t sound very confident.”

He thought it over. “I was in love with someone once,” he said, “and that relationship colored my view of love. I guess I believed that it always had to happen the same way. A nuclear strike. But I’m beginning to understand it can be different, that you can build toward the sound and the fury.”

“It’s nice to hear,” she said, and then, after a pause, “but you’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“I still think about her, but . . .” He shook his head. “I’m trying to put it behind me, and maybe I’m succeeding. I had a dream about her this morning.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“It wasn’t a sweet dream,” he said. “She was telling me how she’d cemented over her feelings for me. ‘All that’s left,’ she said, ‘is this little hard place on my breast.’ And she told me that sometimes it moved around, twitched, and she showed me. I could see the damn thing jumping underneath her blouse, and when I touched it—she wanted me to—it was unbelievably hard. Like a pebble lodged beneath her skin. A heart stone. That was all that was left of us. Just this piece of hardness. It pissed me off so much that I threw her on the floor. Then I woke up.” He scratched his beard, embarrassed by confession. “It was the first time I’ve ever had a violent thought about her.”

Sara stared at him, expressionless.

“I don’t know if it’s meaningful,” he said lamely. “But it seemed so.”

She remained silent. Her stare made him feel guilty for having had the dream, sorry that he had mentioned it.

“I don’t dream about her very much,” he said.

“It’s not important,” she said.

“Well.” He stood. “Try and get some sleep, okay?”

She reached for his hand. “Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you. But you knew that, right?”

It hurt him to see how hesitantly she said it, because he knew that he was to blame for her hesitancy. He bent down and kissed her again. “Sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

He closed the door behind him gently. Mills was sitting at the table, gazing out at ’Sconset Sally, who was pacing the yard, her lips moving, waving her arms, as if arguing with an invisible playmate. “That ol’ gal sure’s gone down these last years,” said Mills. “Used to be sharp as a tack, but she’s actin’ pretty crazy now.”

“Can’t blame her,” said Peter, sitting down across from Mills. “I’m feeling pretty crazy myself.”

“So.” Mills tamped tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “You got a line on what this thing is?”

“Maybe it’s the Devil.” Peter leaned against the wall. “I don’t really know, but I’m starting to think that Gabriela Pascual was right about it being an animal.”

Mills chomped on the stem of his pipe and fished in his pocket for a lighter. “How’s that?”

“Like I said, I don’t really know for sure, but I’ve been getting more and more sensitized to it ever since I found the combs. At least it seems that way. As if the connection between us were growing stronger.” Peter spotted a book of matches tucked under his sugar bowl and slid them across to Mills. “I’m beginning to have some insights into it. When we were out on the road just now, I felt that it was exhibiting an animal trait. Staking out territory. Protecting it from invaders. Look who it’s attacked. Ambulances, bicyclists. People who were entering its territory. It attacked us when we visited the aggregate.”

“But it didn’t kill us,” said Mills.

The logical response to Mills’s statement surfaced from Peter’s thoughts, but he didn’t want to admit to it and shunted it aside. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said.

“Well, if it is an animal, then it can take a hook. All we got to do is find its mouth.” Mills grunted laughter, lit his pipe, and puffed bluish smoke. “After you been out on the water a coupla weeks, you can feel when something strange is hard by . . . even if you can’t see it. I ain’t no psychic, but seems to me I brushed past this thing once or twice.”

Peter glanced up at him. Though Mills was a typical barroom creature, an old salt with a supply of exotic tales, every now and then Peter could sense about him the sort of specific gravity that accrues to those who have spent time in the solitudes. “You don’t seem afraid,” he said.

“Oh, don’t I?” Mills chuckled. “I’m afraid. I’m just too old to be runnin’ ’round in circles ’bout it.”

The door flew open, and Sally came in. “Hot in here,” she said; she went to the stove and laid a finger against it. “Hmph! Must be all this shit I’m wearin’.” She plumped herself down beside Mills, squirmed into a comfortable position, and squinted at Peter. “Goddamn wind won’t have me,” she said. “It wants you.”

Peter was startled. “What do you mean?”

Sally pursed her lips as if she had tasted something sour. “It would take me if you wasn’t here, but you’re too strong. I can’t figure a way ’round that.”

“Leave the boy alone,” said Mills.

“Can’t.” Sally glowered at him. “He’s got to do it.”

“You know what she’s talkin’ ’bout?” asked Mills.

“Hell, yes! He knows! And if he don’t, all he’s got to do is go talk to it. You understand me, boy. It wantsyou .”

An icy fluid squirted down Peter’s spine. “Like Gabriela,” he said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Go on,” said Sally. “Talk to it.” She pointed a bony finger at the door. “Just take a stand out there, and it’ll come to you.”


* * *
Behind the cottage, walled off by the spread of two Japanese pines and a toolshed, was a field that the previous tenant had used for a garden. Peter had let it go to seed, and the entire plot was choked with weeds and litter: gas cans, rusty nails, a plastic toy truck, the decaying hide of a softball, cardboard scraps, this and more resting upon a matte of desiccated vines. It reminded him of the aggregate, and thus seemed an appropriate place to stand and commune with the wind . . . if such a communion weren’t the product of ’Sconset Sally’s imagination. Which Peter hoped it was. The afternoon was waning, and it had grown colder. Silver blares of wintry sunlight edged the blackish gray clouds scudding overhead, and the wind was a steady pour off the sea. He could detect no presence in it, and he was beginning to feel foolish, thinking about going back inside, when a bitter-smelling breeze rippled across his face. He stiffened. Again he felt it: It was acting independent of the offshore wind, touching delicate fingers to his lips, his eyes, fondling him the way a blind man would in trying to know your shape in his brain. It feathered his hair and pried under the pocket flaps of his army jacket like a pet mouse searching for cheese; it frittered with his shoelaces and stroked him between the legs, shriveling his groin and sending a chill washing through his body.
He did not quite understand how the wind spoke to him, yet he had an image of the process as being similar to how a cat will rub against your hand and transmit a static charge. The charge was actual, a mild stinging and popping. Somehow it was translated into knowledge, doubtless by means of his gift. The knowledge was personified, and he was aware that his conceptions were human renderings of inhuman impulses; but at the same time he was certain that they were basically accurate. Most of all it was lonely. It was the only one of its kind, or, if there were others, it had never encountered them. Peter felt no sympathy for its loneliness, because it felt no sympathy for him. It wanted him not as a friend or companion but as a witness to its power. It would enjoy preening for him, showing off, rubbing against his sensitivity to it and deriving some unfathomable pleasure. It was very powerful. Though its touch was light, its vitality was undeniable, and it was even stronger over water. The land weakened it, and it was eager to return to the sea with Peter in tow. Gliding together through the wild canyons of the waves, into a chaos of booming darkness and salt spray, traveling the most profound of all deserts—the sky above the sea—and testing its strength against the lesser powers of the storms, seizing flying fish and juggling them like silver blades, gathering nests of floating treasures, and playing for weeks with the bodies of the drowned. Always at play. Or perhaps “play” was not the right word. Always employed in expressing the capricious violence that was its essential quality. Gabriela Pascual might not have been exact in calling it an animal, but what else could you call it? It was of nature, not of some netherworld. It was ego without thought, power without morality, and it looked upon Peter as a man might look upon a clever toy: something to be cherished for a while, then neglected, then forgotten.

Then lost.


* * *
Sara waked at twilight from a dream of suffocation. She sat bolt upright, covered with sweat, her chest heaving. After a moment she calmed herself and swung her legs onto the floor and sat staring into space. In the half-light the dark grain of the boards looked like a pattern of animal faces emerging from the wall; out the window she could see shivering bushes and banks of running clouds. Still feeling sluggish, she went into the front room, intending to wash her face; but the bathroom door was locked and ’Sconset Sally cawed at her from inside. Mills was snoozing on the sofa bunk, and Hugh Weldon was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of coffee; a cigarette smoldered in the saucer, and that struck her as funny: She had known Hugh all her life and had never seen him smoke.
“Where’s Peter?” she asked.

“Out back,” he said moodily. “Buncha damn foolishness, if you ask me.”

“What is?”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Sally says he’s talkin’ to the goddamn wind.”

Sara felt as if her heart had constricted. “What do you mean?”

“Beats the Hell outta me,” said Weldon. “Just more of Sally’s nonsense.” But when their eyes met she could sense his hopelessness and fear.

She broke for the door. Weldon grabbed at her arm, but she shook free and headed for the Japanese pines back of the cottage. She brushed aside the branches and stopped short, suddenly afraid. The bending and swaying of the weeds revealed a slow circular passage of wind, as if the belly of a great beast were dragging across them, and at the center of the field stood Peter. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and strands of hair were floating above his head like the hair of a drowned man. The sight stabbed into her, and forgetting her fear, she ran toward him, calling his name. She had covered half the distance between them when a blast of wind smashed her to the ground.

Stunned and disoriented, she tried to get to her feet, but the wind smacked her flat again, pressing her into the damp earth. As had happened out on the aggregate, garbage was rising from the weeds. Scraps of plastic, rusty nails, a yellowed newspaper, rags, and directly overhead, a large chunk of kindling. She was still dazed, yet she saw with peculiar clarity how the bottom of the chunk was splintered and flecked with whitish mold. It was quivering, as if the hand that held it were barely able to restrain its fury. And then, as she realized it was about to plunge down, to jab out her eyes and pulp her skull, Peter dived on top of her. His weight knocked the breath out of her, but she heard the piece of kindlingthunk against the back of his head; she sucked in air and pushed at him, rolling him away, and came to her knees. He was dead pale.

“Is he all right?”

It was Mills, lumbering across the field. Behind him, Weldon had hold of ’Sconset Sally, who was struggling to escape. Mills had come perhaps a third of the way when the garbage, which had fallen back into the weeds, once more was lifted into the air, swirling, jiggling, and—as the wind produced one of its powerful gusts—hurtling toward him. For a second he was surrounded by a storm of cardboard and plastic; then this fell away, and he took a staggering step forward. A number of dark dots speckled his face. Sara thought at first they were clots of dirt. Then blood seeped out around them. They were rusty nailheads. Piercing his brow, his cheeks, pinning his upper lip to his gum. He gave no cry. His eyes bulged, his knees buckled, he did an ungainly pirouette and pitched into the weeds.

Sara watched dully as the wind fluttered about Hugh Weldon and Sally, belling their clothes; it passed beyond them, lashing the pine boughs and vanishing. She spotted the hump of Mills’s belly through the weeds. A tear seemed to be carving a cold groove in her cheek. She hiccuped, and thought what a pathetic reaction to death that was. Another hiccup, and another. She couldn’t stop. Each successive spasm made her weaker, more unsteady, as if she were spitting up tiny fragments of her soul.




VII
As darkness fell, the wind poured through the streets of the village, playing its tricks with the living, the inanimate, and the dead. It was indiscriminate, the ultimate free spirit doing its thing, and yet one might have ascribed a touch of frustration to its actions. Over Warren’s Landing it crumpled a seagull into a bloody rag, and near the mouth of Hither Creek it scattered field mice into the air. It sent a spare tire rolling down the middle of Tennessee Avenue and skied shingles from the roof of theAHAB-ITAT . For a while it flowed about aimlessly; then, increasing to tornado force, it uprooted a Japanese pine, just yanked it from the ground, dangling huge black root balls, and chucked it like a spear through the side of a house across the street. It repeated the process with two oaks and a hawthorn. Finally it began to blast holes in the walls of the houses and snatch the wriggling creatures inside. It blew off old Julia Stackpole’s cellar door and sailed it down into the shelves full of preserves behind which she was hiding; it gathered the broken glass into a hurricane of knives that slashed her arms, her face, and—most pertinently—her throat. It found even older George Coffin (who wasn’t about to hide, because in his opinion Hugh Weldon was a damned fool) standing in his kitchen, having just stepped back in after lighting his barbecue; it swept up the coals and hurled them at him with uncanny accuracy. Over the space of a half hour it killed twenty-one people and flung their bodies onto their lawns, leaving them to bleed pale in the accumulating dusk. Its fury apparently abated, it dissipated to a breeze and—zipping through shrubs and pine boughs—it fled back to the cottage, where something it now wanted was waiting in the yard.



VIII
’Sconset Sally sat on the woodpile, sucking at a bottle of beer that she’d taken from Peter’s refrigerator. She was as mad as a wet hen because she had a plan—a good plan—and that brainless wonder Hugh Weldon wouldn’t hear it, wouldn’t listen to a damn word she said. Stuck on being a hero, he was.
The sky had deepened to indigo, and a big lopsided silver moon was leering at her from over the roof of the cottage. She didn’t like its eye on her, and she spat toward it. The elemental caught the gob of spit and spun it around high in the air, making it glisten oysterlike. Fool thing! Half monster, half a walloping, invisible dog. It reminded her of that outsized old male of hers, Rommel. One second he’d be going for the mailman’s throat, and the next he’d be on his back and waggling his paws, begging for a treat. She screwed her bottle into the grass so it wouldn’t spill and picked up a stick of kindling. “Here,” she said, and shied the stick. “Fetch.” The elemental caught the stick and juggled it for a few seconds, then let it fall at her feet. Sally chuckled. “Me’n you might get along,” she told the air. “’Cause neither one of us gives a shit!” The beer bottle lifted from the grass. She made a grab for it and missed. “Goddamn it!” she yelled. “Bring that back!” The bottle sailed to a height of about twenty feet and tipped over; the beer spilled out, collected in half a dozen large drops that—one by one—exploded into spray, showering her. Sputtering, she jumped to her feet and started to wipe her face; but the elemental knocked her back down. A trickle of fear welled up inside her. The bottle still hovered above her; after a second it plopped into the grass, and the elemental curled around her, fidgeting with her hair, her collar, slithering inside her raincoat; then, abruptly, as if something else had attracted its attention, it was gone. She saw the grass flatten as it passed over, moving toward the street. She propped herself against the woodpile and finished wiping her face; she spotted Hugh Weldon through the window, pacing, and her anger was rekindled. Thought he was so goddamn masterful, did he? He didn’t know piss about the elemental, and there he was, laughing at her plan.

Well, screw him!

He’d find out soon enough that his plan wouldn’t work, that hers was the reasonable one, the surefire one.

A little scary, maybe, but surefire all the same.




IX
It had come full dark by the time Peter regained consciousness. He moved his head, and the throbbing nearly caused him to black out. He lay still, getting his bearings. Moonlight spilled through the bedroom window, and Sara was leaning beside it, her blouse glowing a phosphorescent white. From the tilt of her head he judged that she was listening to something, and he soon distinguished an unusual pattern to the wind: five notes followed by a glissando, which led to a repetition of the passage. It was heavy, angry music, an ominous hook that might have been intended to signal the approach of a villain. Shortly thereafter the pattern broke into a thousand skirling notes, as if the wind were being forced through the open stops of a chorus of flutes. Then another passage, this of seven notes, more rapid but equally ominous. A chill, helpless feeling stole over Peter, like the drawing of a morgue sheet. That breathy music was being played for him. It was swelling in volume, as if—and he was certain this was the case—the elemental was heralding his awakening, was once again sure of his presence. It was impatient, and it would not wait for him much longer. Each note drilled that message home. The thought of being alone with it on the open sea terrified him. Yet he had no choice. There was no way to fight it, and it would simply keep on killing until he obeyed. If it weren’t for the others he would refuse to go; he would rather die here than submit to that harrowing unnatural relationship. Or was it unnatural? It occurred to him that the history of the wind and Gabriela Pascual had a great deal in common with the histories of many human relationships. Desiring; obtaining; neglecting; forgetting. It might be that the elemental was some sort of core existence, that at the heart of every relationship lay a howling emptiness, a chaotic music.
“Sara,” he said, wanting to deny it.

The moonlight seemed to wrap around her as she turned. She came to sit beside him. “How are you feeling?”

“Woozy.” He gestured toward the window. “How long’s that been going on?”

“It just started,” she said. “It’s punched holes in a lot of houses. Hugh and Sally were out a while ago. More people are dead.” She brushed a lock of hair from his forehead. “But . . .”

“But what?”

“We have a plan.”

The wind was playing eerie triplets, an agitated whistling that set Peter’s teeth on edge. “It better be a doozy,” he said.

“Actually, it’s Hugh’s plan,” she said. “He noticed something out in the field. The instant you touched me, the wind withdrew from us. If it hadn’t, if it had hurled that piece of wood at you instead of letting it drop, you would have died. And it didn’t want that . . . at least that’s what Sally says.”

“She’s right. Did she tell you what it does want?”

“Yes.” She looked away, and her eyes caught the moonlight; they were teary. “Anyway, we think it was confused, that when we’re close together it can’t tell us apart. And since it doesn’t want to hurt you or Sally, Hugh and I are safe as long as we maintain proximity. If Mills had just stayed where he was . . . seeing Milk’s nail-studded face in his mind’s eye, he asked, “What’s the plan?”

“I’m going to ride in the jeep with Sally, and you’re going with Hugh. We’ll drive toward Nantucket, and when we reach the dump . . . you know that dirt road there that leads off into the moors?”

“The one that leads to Altar Rock? Yeah.”

“At that point you’ll jump into the jeep with us, and we’ll head for Altar Rock. Hugh will keep going toward Nantucket. Since it seems to be trying to isolate this end of the island, he figures it’ll come after him and we might be able to get beyond its range, and with both of us heading in different directions, we might be able to confuse it enough so that it won’t react quickly, and he’ll be able to escape, too.” She said all this in a rush that reminded Peter of the way a teenager would try to convince her parents to let her stay out late, blurting out the good reasons before they had time to raise any objections.

“You might be right about it not being able to tell us apart when we’re close to each other,” he said. “God knows how it senses things, and that seems plausible. But the rest is stupid. We don’t know whether its territoriality is limited to this end of the island. And what if it does lose track of me and Sally? What’s it going to do then? Just blow away? Somehow I doubt it. It might head for Nantucket and do what it’s done here.”

“Sally says she has a backup plan.”

“Christ, Sara!” Gingerly, he eased up into a sitting position. “Sally’s nuts. She doesn’t have a clue.”

“Well, what choice do we have?” Her voice broke. “You can’t go with it.”

“You think I want to? Jesus!”

The bedroom door opened, and Weldon appeared silhouetted in a blur of orange light that hurt Peter’s eyes. “Ready to travel?” said Weldon. ’Sconset Sally was at his rear, muttering, humming, producing a human static.

Peter swung his legs off the bed. “This is nuts, Weldon.” He stood and steadied himself on Sara’s shoulder. “You’re just going to get killed.” He gestured toward the window and the constant music of the wind. “Do you think you can outrun that in a squad car?”

“Mebbe this plan ain’t worth a shit . . .” Weldon began.

“You got that right!” said Peter. “If you want to confuse the elemental, why not split me and Sally up? One goes with you, the other with Sara. That way at least there’s some logic to this.”

“Way I figure it,” said Weldon, hitching up his pants, “it ain’t your job to be riskin’ yourself. It’s mine. If Sally, say, goes with me, you’re right, that’d confuse it. But so might this. Seems to me it’s as eager to keep us normal people in line as it is to run off with freaks like you’n Sally.”

“What . . .”

“Shut up!” Weldon eased a step closer. “Now if my way don’t work, you try it yours. And ifthat don’t do it, then you can go for a cruise with the damn thing. But we don’t have no guarantees it’s gonna let anybody live, no matter what you do.”

“No, but . . .”

“No buts about it! This is my bailiwick, and we’re gonna do what I say. If it don’t work, well, then you can do what you have to. But ’til that happens . . .”

“’Til that happens you’re going to keep on making an ass of yourself,” said Peter. “Right? Man, all day you’ve been looking for a way to assert your fucking authority! You don’t have any authority in this situation. Don’t you understand?”

Weldon went jaw to jaw with him. “Okay,” he said. “You go on out there, Mr. Ramey. Go ahead. Just march on out there. You can use Mills’s boat, or if you want something bigger, how ’bout Sally’s.” He snapped a glance back at Sally. “That okay with you, Sally?” She continued muttering, humming, and nodded her head. “See!” Weldon turned to Peter. “She don’t mind. So you go ahead. You draw that son of a bitch away from us if you can.” He hitched up his pants and exhaled; his breath smelled like a coffee cup full of cigarette butts. “But if it was me, I’d be ’bout ready to try anything else.”

Peter’s legs felt rooted to the floor. He realized that he had been using anger to muffle fear, and he did not know if he could muster up the courage to take a walk out into the wind, to sail away into the terror and nothingness that Gabriela Pascual had faced.

Sara slipped her hand through his arm. “Please, Peter,” she said. “It can’t hurt to try.”

Weldon backed off a step. “Nobody’s blamin’ you for bein’ scared, Mr. Ramey,” he said. “I’m scared myself. But this is the only way I can figure to do my job.”

“You’re going to die.” Peter had trouble swallowing. “I can’t let you do that.”

“You ain’t got nothin’ to say ’bout it,” said Weldon. “’Cause you got no more authority than me. ’Less you can tell that thing to leave us be. Can you?”

Sara’s fingers tightened on Peter’s arm, but relaxed when he said, “No.”

“Then we’ll do ’er my way.” Weldon rubbed his hands together in what seemed to Peter hearty anticipation. “Got your keys, Sally?”

“Yeah,” she said, exasperated; she moved close to Peter and put a bird-claw hand on his wrist. “Don’t worry, Peter. This don’t work, I got somethin’ up my sleeve. We’ll pull a fast one on that devil.” She cackled and gave a little whistle, like a parrot chortling over a piece of fruit.


* * *
As they drove slowly along the streets of Madaket, the wind sang through the ruined houses, playing passages that sounded mournful and questioning, as if it were puzzled by the movements of the jeep and the squad car. The light of a three-quarter moon illuminated the destruction: gaping holes in the walls, denuded bushes, toppled trees. One of the houses had been given a surprised look, anO of a mouth where the door had been, flanked by two shattered windows. Litter covered the lawns. Flapping paperbacks, clothing, furniture, food, toys. And bodies. In the silvery light their flesh was as pale as Swiss cheese, the wounds dark. They didn’t seem real; they might have been a part of a gruesome environment created by an avant-garde sculptor. A carving knife skittered along the blacktop, and for a moment Peter thought it would jump into the air and hurtle toward him. He glanced over at Weldon to see how he was taking it all. Wooden-Indian profile, eyes on the road. Peter envied him his pose of duty; he wished he had such a role to play, something that would brace him up, because every shift in the wind made him feel frail and rattled.
They turned onto the Nantucket road, and Weldon straightened in his seat. He checked the rearview mirror, keeping an eye on Sally and Sara, and held the speed at twenty-five. “Okay,” he said as they neared the dump and the road to Altar Rock. “I ain’t gonna come to a full stop, so when I give the word you move it.”

“All right,” said Peter; he took hold of the door handle and let out a calming breath. “Good luck.”

“Yeah.” Weldon sucked at his teeth. “Same to you.”

The speed indicator dropped to fifteen, to ten, to five, and the moonlit landscape inched past.

“Go!” shouted Weldon.

Peter went. He heard the squad car squeal off as he sprinted toward the jeep; Sara helped haul him into the back, and then they were veering onto the dirt road. Peter grabbed the frame of Sara’s seat, bouncing up and down. The thickets that covered the moors grew close to the road, and branches whipped the sides of the jeep. Sally was hunched over the wheel, driving like a maniac; she sent them skipping over potholes, swerving around tight corners, grinding up the little hills. There was no time to think, only to hold on and be afraid, to await the inevitable appearance of the elemental. Fear was a metallic taste in Peter’s mouth; it was in the white gleam of Sara’s eyes as she glanced back at him and the smears of moonlight that coursed along the hood; it was in every breath he took, every trembling shadow he saw. But by the time they reached Altar Rock, after fifteen minutes or so, he had begun to hope, to half-believe, that Weldon’s plan had worked.

The rock was almost dead center of the island, its highest point. It was a barren hill atop which stood a stone where the Indians had once conducted human sacrifices—a bit of history that did no good whatsoever for Peter’s nerves. From the crest you could see for miles over the moors, and the rumpled pattern of depressions and small hills had the look of a sea that had been magically transformed to leaves during a moment of fury. The thickets—bayberry and such—were dusted to a silvery green by the moonlight, and the wind blew steadily, giving no evidence of unnatural forces.

Sara and Peter climbed from the jeep, followed after a second by Sally. Peter’s legs were shaky, and he leaned against the hood; Sara leaned back beside him, her hip touching his. He caught the scent of her hair. Sally peered toward Madaket. She was still muttering, and Peter made out some of the words.

“Stupid . . . never would listen to me . . . never would . . . son of a bitch . . . keep it to my goddamn self. . . .”

Sara nudged him. “What do you think?”

“All we can do is wait,” he said.

“We’re going to be all right,” she said firmly; she rubbed the heel of her right hand against the knuckles of her left. It seemed the kind of childish gesture intended to ensure good luck, and it inspired him to tenderness. He pulled her into an embrace. Standing there, gazing past her head over the moors, he had an image of them as being the standard lovers on the cover of a paperback, clinging together on a lonely hill, with all probability spread out around them. A corny way of looking at things, yet he felt the truth of it, the dizzying immersion that a paperback lover was supposed to feel. It was not as clear a feeling as he had once had, but perhaps clarity was no longer possible for him. Perhaps all his past clarity had simply been an instance of faulty perception, a flash of immaturity, an adolescent misunderstanding of what was possible. But whether or not that was the case, self-analysis would not solve his confusion. That sort of thinking blinded you to the world, made you disinclined to take risks. It was similar to what happened to academics, how they became so committed to their theories that they began to reject facts to the contrary, to grow conservative in their judgments and deny the inexplicable, the magical. If there was magic in the world—and he knew there was—you could only approach it by abandoning the constraints of logic and lessons learned. For more than a year he had forgotten this and had constructed defenses against magic; now in a single night they had been blasted away, and at a terrible cost he had been made capable of risking himself again, of hoping.

Then he noticed something that wasted hope.

Another voice had been added to the natural flow of wind from the ocean, and in every direction, as far as the eye could see, the moon-silvered thickets were rippling, betraying the presence of far more wind than was evident atop the hill. He pushed Sara away. She followed his gaze and put a hand to her mouth. The immensity of the elemental stunned Peter. They might have been standing on a crag in the midst of a troubled sea, one that receded into an interstellar dark. For the first time, despite his fear, he had an apprehension of the elemental’s beauty, of the precision and intricacy of its power. One moment it could be a tendril of breeze, capable of delicate manipulations, and the next it could become an entity the size of a city. Leaves and branches—like flecks of black space—were streaming up from the thickets, forming into columns. Six of them, at regular intervals about Altar Rock, maybe a hundred yards away. The sound of the wind evolved into a roar as they thickened and grew higher. And they grew swiftly. Within seconds the tops of the columns were lost in darkness. They did not have the squat, conical shapes of tornadoes, nor did they twist and jab down their tails; they merely swayed, slender and graceful and menacing. In the moonlight their whirling was almost undetectable and they looked to be made of shining ebony, like six enormous savages poised to attack. They began moving toward the hill. Splintered bushes exploded upward from their bases, and the roaring swelled into a dissonant chord: the sound of a hundred harmonicas being blown at once. Only much, much louder.

The sight of ’Sconset Sally scuttling for the jeep waked Peter from his daze; he pushed Sara into the rear seat and climbed in beside Sally. Though the engine was running, it was drowned out by the wind. Sally drove even less cautiously than before; the island was crisscrossed by narrow dirt roads, and it seemed to Peter that they almost crashed on every one of them. Skidding sideways through a flurry of bushes, flying over the crests of hills, diving down steep slopes. The thickets grew too high in most places for him to see much, but the fury of the wind was all around them, and once, as they passed a place where the bushes had been burned off, he caught a glimpse of an ebony column about fifty yards away. It was traveling alongside them, he realized. Harrowing them, running them to and fro. Peter lost track of where they were, and he could not believe that Sally had any better idea. She was trying to do the impossible, to drive out the wind, which was everywhere, and her lips were drawn back in a grimace of fear. Suddenly—they had just turned east—she slammed on the brakes. Sara flew halfway into the front seat, and if Peter had not been braced he might have gone through the windshield. Farther along the road one of the columns had taken a stand, blocking their path. It looked like God, he thought. An ebony tower reaching from the earth to the sky, spraying clouds of dust and plant litter from its bottom. And it was moving toward them. Slowly. A few feet per second. But definitely on the move. The jeep was shaking, and the roar seemed to be coming from the ground beneath them, from the air, from Peter’s body, as if the atoms of things were all grinding together. Frozen-faced, Sally wrangled with the gearshift. Sara screamed, and Peter, too, screamed as the windshield was sucked out of its frame and whirled off. He braced himself against the dash, but his arms were weak and with a rush of shame he felt his bladder go. The column was less than a hundred feet away, a great spinning pillar of darkness. He could see how the material inside it aligned itself into tightly packed rings like the segments of a worm. The air was syrupy, hard to breathe. And then, miraculously, they were swerving away from it, away from the roaring, backing along the road. They turned a corner, and Sally got the jeep going forward; she sent them grinding up a largish hill . . . and braked. And let her head drop onto the steering wheel in an attitude of despair. They were once again at Altar Rock.

And Hugh Weldon was waiting for them.

He was sitting with his head propped against the boulder that gave the place its name. His eyes were filled with shadows. His mouth was open, and his chest rose and fell. Labored breathing, as if he had just run a long way. There was no sign of the squad car. Peter tried to call to him, but his tongue was stuck to his palate and all that came out was a strangled grunt. He tried again.

“Weldon!”

Sara started to sob, and Sally gasped. Peter didn’t know what had frightened them and didn’t care; for him the process of thought had been thinned down to following one track at a time. He climbed from the jeep and went over to the chief. “Weldon,” he said again.

Weldon sighed.

“What happened?” Peter knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder; he heard a hiss and felt a tremor pass through the body.

Weldon’s right eye began to bulge. Peter lost his balance and sat back hard. Then the eye popped out and dropped into the dust. With a high-pitched whistling, wind and blood sprayed from the empty socket. Peter fell backward, scrabbling at the dirt in an effort to put distance between himself and Weldon. The corpse toppled onto its side, its head vibrating as the wind continued to pour out, boiling up dust beneath the socket. There was a dark smear marking the spot on the boulder where the head had rested.

Until his heart rate slowed, Peter lay staring at the moon, as bright and distant as a wish. He heard the roaring of the wind from all sides and realized that it was growing louder, but he didn’t want to admit to it. Finally, though, he got to his feet and gazed out across the moors.

It was as if he were standing at the center of an unimaginably large temple, one forested with dozens upon dozens of shiny black pillars rising from a dark green floor. The nearest of them were about a hundred yards away, and those were unmoving; but as Peter watched, others farther off began to slew back and forth, gliding in and out of the stationary ones, like dancing cobras. There was a fever in the air, a pulse of heat and energy, and this as much as the alienness of the sight was what transfixed him and held him immobile. He found that he had gone beyond fear. You could no more hide from the elemental than you could from God. It would lead him on to the sea to die, and its power was so compelling that he almost acknowledged its right to do this. He climbed into the jeep. Sara looked beaten. Sally touched his leg with a palsied hand.

“You can use my boat,” she said.


* * *
On the way back to Madaket, Sara sat with her hands clasped in her lap, outwardly calm but inwardly turbulent. Thoughts fired across her brain so quickly that they left only partial impressions, and those were seared away by lightning strokes of terror. She wanted to say something to Peter, but words seemed inadequate to all she was feeling. At one point she decided to go with him, but the decision sparked a sudden resentment. He didn’t love her! Why should she sacrifice herself for him? Then, realizing that he was sacrificing himself for her, that he did love her or that at least this was an act of love, she decided that if she went it would make his act meaningless. That decision caused her to question whether or not she was using his sacrifice to obscure her true reason for staying behind: her fear. And what about the quality of her feelings for him? Were they so uncertain that fear could undermine them? In a blaze of irrationality she saw that he was pressuring her to go with him, to prove her love, something she had never asked him to do. What right did he have? With half her mind she understood the unreasonableness of these thoughts, yet she couldn’t stop thinking them. She felt all her emotions winnowing, leaving her hollow . . . like Hugh Weldon, with only the wind inside him, propping him up, giving him the semblance of life. The grotesqueness of the image caused her to shrink further inside herself, and she just sat there, growing dim and empty, saying nothing.
“Buck up,” said Sally out of the blue, and patted Peter’s leg. “We got one thing left to try.” And then, with what seemed to Sara an irrational good cheer, she added: “But if that don’t work, the boat’s got fishin’ tackle and a coupla cases of cherry brandy on board. I was too damn drunk to unload ’em yesterday. Cherry brandy be better’n water for where you’re headed.”

Peter gave no reply.

As they entered the village, the elemental chased beside them, whirling up debris, scattering leaves, tossing things high into the air. Playing, thought Sara. It was playing. Frisking along like a happy pup, like a petulant child who’d gotten his way and now was all smiles. She was overwhelmed with hatred for it, and she dug her nails into the seat cushion, wishing she had a way to hurt it. Then, as they passed Julia Stackpole’s house, the corpse of Julia Stackpole sat up. Its bloody head hung down, its frail arms flapping. The entire body appeared to be vibrating, and with a horrid disjointed motion, amid a swirling of papers and trash, it went rolling over and over and came to rest against a broken chair. Sara shrank back into a corner of the seat, her breath ragged and shallow. A thin cloud swept free of the moon, and the light measurably brightened, making the gray of the houses seem gauzy and immaterial; the holes in their sides looked real enough—black, cavernous—as if the walls and doors and windows had only been a façade concealing emptiness.

Sally parked next to a boathouse a couple of hundred yards north of Smith Point: a rickety wooden structure the size of a garage. Beyond it a stretch of calm black water was figured by a blaze of moonlight. “You gonna have to row out to the boat,” Sally told Peter. “Oars are in here.” She unlocked the door and flicked on a light. The inside of the place was as dilapidated as Sally herself. Raw boards; spiderwebs spanning between paint cans and busted lobster traps; a jumble of two-by-fours. Sally went stumping around, mumbling and kicking things, searching for the oars; her footsteps set the light bulb dangling from the roof to swaying, and the light slopped back and forth over the walls like dirty yellow water. Sara’s legs were leaden. It was hard to move, and she thought maybe this was because there weren’t any moves left. Peter took a few steps toward the center of the boathouse and stopped, looking lost. His hands twitched at his sides. She had the idea that his expression mirrored her own: slack, spiritless, with bruised crescents under his eyes. She moved, then. The dam that had been holding back her emotions burst, and her arms were around him, and she was telling him that she couldn’t let him go alone, telling him half-sentences, phrases that didn’t connect. “Sara,” he said, “Jesus.” He held her very tightly. The next second, though, she heard a dullthonk and he sagged against her, almost knocking her down, and slumped to the floor. Brandishing a two-by-four, Sally bent to him and struck again.

“What are you doing?” Sara screamed it and began to wrestle with Sally. Their arms locked, they waltzed around and around for a matter of seconds, the light bulb jiggling madly. Sally sputtered and fumed; spittle glistened on her lips. Finally, with a snarl, she shoved Sara away. Sara staggered back, tripped over Peter, and fell sprawling beside him.

“Listen!” Sally cocked her head and pointed to the roof with the two-by-four. “Goddamn it! It’s workin’!”

Sara came warily to her feet. “What are you talking about?”

Sally picked up her fisherman’s hat, which had fallen off during the struggle, and squashed it down onto her head. “The wind, goddamn it! I told that stupid son of a bitch Hugh Weldon, but oh, no! He never listened to nobody.”

The wind was rising and fading in volume, doing so with such a regular rhythm that Sara had the impression of a creature made of wind running frantically back and forth. Something splintered in the distance.

“I don’t understand,” said Sara.

“Unconscious is like dead to it,” said Sally; she gestured at Peter with the board. “I knew it was so, ’cause after it did for Mills it came for me. It touched me up all over, and I could tell it’d have me, then. But that stupid bastard wouldn’t listen. Had to do things his goddamn way!”

“It would have you?” Sara glanced down at Peter, who was unstirring, bleeding from the scalp. “You mean instead of Peter?”

“’Course that’s what I mean.” Sally frowned. “Don’t make no sense him goin’. Young man with all his future ahead. Now me . . .” She yanked at the lapel of her raincoat as if intending to throw herself away. “What I got to lose? A coupla years of bein’ alone. I ain’t eager for it, y’understand. But it don’t make sense any other way. Tried to tell Hugh that, but he was stuck on bein’ a goddamn hero.”

Her bird-bright eyes glittered in the webbed flesh, and Sara had a perception of her that she had not had since childhood: The zany old spirit, half-mad but with one eye fixed on some corner of creation that nobody else could see. She remembered all the stories. Sally trying to signal the moon with a hurricane lamp; Sally rowing through a nor’easter to pluck six sailors off Whale Shoals; Sally passing out dead drunk at the ceremony the Coast Guard had given in her honor; Sally loosing her dogs on the then-junior senator from Massachusetts when he had come to present her a medal. Crazy Sally. She suddenly seemed valuable to Sara.

“You can’t . . .” she began, but broke off and stared at Peter.

“Can’t not,” said Sally, and clucked her tongue. “You see somebody looks after my dogs.”

Sara nodded.

“And you better check on Peter,” said Sally. “See if I hit him too hard.”

Sara started to comply but was struck by a thought. “Won’t it know better this time? Peter was knocked out before. Won’t it have learned?”

“I suppose it can learn,” said Sally. “But it’s real stupid, and I don’t think it’s figured this out.” She gestured at Peter. “Go ahead. See if he’s all right.”

The hairs on Sara’s neck prickled as she knelt beside Peter, and she was later to reflect that in the back of her mind she had known what was about to happen. But even so she was startled by the blow.




X
It wasn’t until late the next afternoon that the doctors allowed Peter to have visitors other than the police. He was still suffering from dizziness and blurred vision, and mentally speaking, he alternated between periods of relief and depression. Seeing in his mind’s eye the mutilated bodies, the whirling black pillars. Tensing as the wind prowled along the hospital walls. In general he felt walled off from emotion, but when Sara came into the room those walls crumbled. He drew her down beside him and buried his face in her hair. They lay for a long time without speaking, and it was Sara who finally broke the silence.
“Do they believe you?” she asked. “I don’t think they believe me.”

“They don’t have much choice,” he said. “I just think they don’t want to believe it.”

After a moment she said, “Are you going away?”

He pulled back from her. She had never looked more beautiful. Her eyes were wide, her mouth drawn thin, and the strain of all that had happened to them seemed to have carved an unnecessary ounce of fullness from her face. “That depends on whether or not you’ll go with me,” he said. “I don’t want to stay. Whenever the wind changes pitch, every nerve in my body signals an air raid. But I won’t leave you. I want to marry you.”

Her reaction was not what he had expected. She closed her eyes and kissed him on the forehead—a motherly, understanding kiss; then she settled back on the pillow, gazing calmly at him.

“That was a proposal,” he said. “Didn’t you catch it?”

“Marriage?” She seemed perplexed by the idea.

“Why not? We’re qualified.” He grinned. “We both have concussions.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I love you, Peter, but . . .”

“But you don’t trust me?”

“Maybe that’s part of it,” she said, annoyed. “I don’t know.”

“Look.” He smoothed down her hair. “Do you know what really happened in the boathouse last night?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I’ll tell you. What happened was that an old woman gave her life so you and I could have a chance at something.” She started to speak, but he cut her off. “That’s the bones of it. I admit the reality’s a bit more murky. God knows why Sally did what she did. Maybe saving lives was a reflex of her madness, maybe she was tired of living. Maybe it just seemed a good idea at the time. And as for us, we haven’t exactly been Romeo and Juliet. I’ve been confused, and I’ve confused you. And aside from whatever problems we might have as a couple, we have a lot to forget. Until you came in I was feeling shell-shocked, and that’s a feeling that’s probably going to last for a while. But like I said, the heart of the matter is that Sally died to give us a chance. No matter what her motives, what our circumstance, that’s what happened. And we’d be fools to let that chance slip away.” He traced the line of her cheekbone with a finger. “I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time and tried to deny it, to hold on to a dead issue. But that’s all over.”

“We can’t make this sort of decision now,” she murmured.

“Why not?”

“You said it yourself. You’re shell-shocked. So am I. And I don’t know how I feel about . . . everything.”

“Everything? You mean me?”

She made a noncommittal noise, closed her eyes, and after a moment she said, “I need time to think.”

In Peter’s experience when women said they needed time to think, nothing good ever came of it. “Jesus!” he said angrily. “Is this how it has to be between people? One approaches, the other avoids, and then they switch roles. Like insects whose mating instincts have been screwed up by pollution.” He registered what he had said and had a flash feeling of horror. “Come on, Sara! We’re past that kind of dance, aren’t we? It doesn’t have to be marriage, but let’s commit to something. Maybe we’ll make a mess of it, maybe we’ll end up boring each other. But let’s try. It might not be any effort at all.” He put his arms around her, brought her tight against him, and was immersed in a cocoon of heat and weakness. He loved her, he realized, with an intensity that he had not believed he could recapture. His mouth had been smarter than his brain for once—either that or he had talked himself into it. The reasons didn’t matter.

“For Christ’s sake, Sara!” he said. “Marry me. Live with me. Do something with me!”

She was silent; her left hand moved gently over his hair. Light, distracted touches. Tucking a curl behind his ear, toying with his beard, smoothing his mustache. As if she were making him presentable. He remembered how that other long-ago woman had become increasingly silent and distracted and gentle in the days before she had dumped him.

“Damn it!” he said with a growing sense of helplessness. “Answer me!”




XI
On the second night out ’Sconset Sally caught sight of a winking red light off her port bow. Some ship’s riding light. It brought a tear to her eye, making her think of home. But she wiped the tear away with the back of her hand and had another slug of cherry brandy. The cramped wheelhouse of the lobster boat was cozy and relatively warm; beyond, the moonlit plain of the sea was rising in light swells. Even if you didn’t have nowhere good to go, she thought, wheels and keels and wings gave a boost to your spirit. She laughed. Especially if you had a supply of cherry brandy. She had another slug. A breeze curled around her arm and tugged at the neck of the bottle. “Goddamn it!” she squawked. “Get away!” She batted at the air as if she could shoo away the elemental, and hugged the bottle to her breast. Wind uncoiled a length of rope on the deck behind her, and then she could hear it moaning about the hull. She staggered to the wheelhouse door. “Whoo-oo-ooh!” she sang, mocking it. “Don’t be making your godawful noises at me, you sorry bastard! Go kill another goddamn fish if you want somethin’ to do. Just leave me alone to my drinkin’.”
Waves surged up on the port side. Big ones, like black teeth. Sally almost dropped the bottle in her surprise. Then she saw they weren’t really waves but shapes of water made by the elemental. “You’re losin’ your touch, asshole!” she shouted. “I seen better’n that in the movies!” She slumped down beside the door, clutching the bottle. The wordmovies conjured flashes of old films she’d seen, and she started singing songs from them. She did “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Blue Moon” and “Love Me Tender.” She knocked back swallows of brandy in between the verses, and when she felt primed enough she launched into her favorite. “The sound that you hear,” she bawled, “is the sound of Sally! A joy to be heard for a thousand years.” She belched. “The hills are alive with the sound of Sally . . .” She couldn’t recall the next line, and that ended the concert.

The wind built to a howl around her, and her thoughts sank into a place where there were only dim urges and nerves fizzling and blood whining in her ears. Gradually she surfaced from it and found that her mood had become one of regret. Not about anything specific. Just general regrets. General Regrets. She pictured him as an old fogey with a white walrus mustache and a Gilbert-and-Sullivan uniform. Epaulets the size of skateboards. She couldn’t get the picture out of her head, and she wondered if it stood for something important. If it did, she couldn’t make it come clear. Like that line of her favorite song, it had leaked out through one of her cracks. Life had leaked out the same way, and all she could remember of it was a muddle of lonely nights and sick dogs and scallop shells and half-drowned sailors. Nothing important sticking up from the muddle. No monument to accomplishment or romance. Hah! She’d never met the man who could do what men said they could. The most reasonable men she’d known were those shipwrecked sailors, and their eyes big and dark as if they’d seen into some terrible bottomland that had sheared away their pride and stupidity. Her mind began to whirl, trying to get a fix on life, to pin it down like a dead butterfly and know its patterns, and soon she realized that she was literally whirling. Slowly, but getting faster and faster. She hauled herself up and clung to the wheelhouse door and peered over the side. The lobster boat was spinning around and around on the lip of a bowl of black water several hundred yards across. A whirlpool. Moonlight struck a glaze down its slopes but didn’t reach the bottom. Its roaring, heart-stopping power scared her, made her giddy and faint. But after a moment she banished fear. So this was death. It just opened up and swallowed you whole. All right. That was fine by her. She slumped against the wheelhouse and drank deeply of the cherry brandy, listening to the wind and the singing of her blood as she went down not giving a damn. It sure beat puking up life a gob at a time in some hospital room. She kept slurping away at the brandy, guzzling it, wanting to be as looped as possible when the time came. But the time didn’t come, and before too long she noticed that the boat had stopped spinning. The wind had quieted and the sea was calm.

A breeze coiled about her neck, slithered down her breast, and began curling around her legs, flipping the hem of her dress. “You bastard,” she said soddenly, too drunk to move. The elemental swirled around her knees, belling the dress, and touched her between the legs. It tickled, and she swatted at it ineffectually, as if it were one of the dogs snooting at her. But a second later it prodded her there again, a little harder than before, rubbing back and forth, and she felt a quiver of arousal. It startled her so that she went rolling across the deck, somehow keeping her bottle upright. That quiver stuck with her, though, and for an instant a red craving dominated the broken mosaic of her thoughts. Cackling and scratching herself, she staggered to her feet and leaned on the rail. The elemental was about fifty yards off the port bow, shaping itself a waterspout, a moonstruck column of blackness, from the placid surface of the sea.

“Hey!” she shouted, wobbling along the rail. “You come on back here!I’ll teach you a new trick!”

The waterspout grew higher, a glistening black serpent thatwhooshed and sucked the boat toward it; but it didn’t bother Sally. A devilish joy was in her, and her mind crackled with lightnings of pure craziness. She thought she had figured out something. Maybe nobody had ever taken a real interest in the elemental, and maybe that was why it eventually lost interest in them. Wellsir! She had an interest in it. Damn thing couldn’t be any more stupid than some of her Dobermans. Snooted like one, for sure. She’d teach it to roll over and beg and who knows what else. Fetch me that fish, she’d tell it. Blow me over to Hyannis and smash the liquor-store window and bring me six bottles of brandy. She’d show it who was boss. And could be one day she’d sail into the harbor at Nantucket with the thing on a leash. ’Sconset Sally and her pet storm, Scourge of the Seven Seas.

The boat was beginning to tip and slew sideways in the pull of the waterspout, but Sally scarcely noticed. “Hey!” she shouted again, and chuckled. “Maybe we can work things out! Maybe we’re meant for each other!” She tripped over a warp in the planking, and the arm holding the bottle flailed above her head. Moonlight seemed to stream down into the bottle, igniting the brandy so that it glowed like a magic elixir, a dark red ruby flashing from her hand. Her maniacal laugh went sky-high.

“You come on back here!” she screeched at the elemental, exulting in the wild frequencies of her life, at the thought of herself in league with this idiot god, and unmindful of her true circumstance, of the thundering around her and the tiny boat slipping toward the foaming base of the waterspout. “Come back here, damn it! We’re two of a kind! We’re birds of a feather! I’ll sing you to sleep each night! You’ll serve me my supper! I’ll be your old cracked bride, and we’ll have a Hell of a honeymoon while it lasts!”