Dark Specter

10

Over the next few days, I explored my new home and fell in love.

The first part did not take long. The island turned out to be much smaller than I had imagined. Despite the rough terrain, I was able to walk from one end to the other in less than an hour. The rain of the previous evening had stopped, the sky had cleared and the sun shone brightly in a pale blue sky.

“That’s the way it is here in the islands,” Sam told me later. “If you don’t like the weather, just stick around for five minutes.”

“But I suppose the same thing applies if you do,” I replied.

He didn’t seem to get it.

The island was roughly pear-shaped, rising from the coastline of smooth, sloping rock slabs and small stony beaches where we had landed to a single jagged peak sticking out into the open waters of the strait to the west. It was difficult to estimate distance, given the twists and turns in the overgrown trail that ran the length of the island, but the whole thing was probably not much more than a mile long and about five hundred yards across at the widest point, the relatively flat and low-lying plateau where the trees had been cleared for the buildings.

The rest was densely wooded with a mixture of evergreen and broadleaf trees: alders and sycamores, hemlocks and vine maples, cedar, fir, spruce, dogwood, and arbutus with its heavy, fleshy leaves and its trunk patched orange where the bark had stripped away. The undergrowth was lush with sword ferns and horsetails, every trunk and fallen branch verdant with moss, shafts of sunlight making distinctions between infinite subtly different shades of green.

I made my way along the overgrown trail which ran up the spine of the island toward the westerly peak. The vestiges of other, narrower paths could be seen at intervals to either side. Like all reminders of how provisional any of our projects are-uprooted railways, old lengths of highway superseded by the interstate, cracking concrete runways among flourishing acres of wheat-they were both melancholy and fascinating. I wanted to know who had made them and where they led, to what enchanted cove or sunstruck glade where time stood still. Once or twice I set out to follow them, but soon gave up, defeated by outbursts of sharp brambles, barricades of fallen trees and eruptions of ferns.

The trail curled up to the top of the peak and stopped abruptly, overlooking a cliff which fell maybe fifty feet in a sheer drop to the water below. The view was stupendous. To the south, a long line of brooding mountains massed against the sky suffused with the tender Pacific light. To the west, a snow-covered volcanic cone rose high above a range of foothills. A thick layer of fog spilled out from the invisible coastline, funneling down valleys and spreading out across the water in a shallow layer.

Nearer at hand, the surrounding islands were tucked one behind the other so that no open water was visible, their tone fading from clear green to hazy blue with distance. The shoreline consisted of a band of bare rock chewed by the waves, after which the vegetation began. Huge tree trunks bleached to a silver gray lay piled like garbage at the tideline. Depending on its depth and exposure to the wind, the water itself varied in color from a bright reflective glitter through a cloudy green to cold, steely blue. Where the turbulent currents met, huge circular patches, eerily smooth, basked on the surface like monstrous jellyfish. Above my head, sea gulls hung like toys on a string in the stiff breeze scooping up and over the headland.

It felt wonderful to be all alone in the midst of such beauty. I was pleasantly rested after my sleep, and the doubts I’d had the previous night about coming had faded like a bad dream. This was exactly what I needed to help me forget what had happened and to give me the courage and the energy to start again. I sat there for a long time, beguiling myself with pebbles and twigs like a child, feeling the vast ambient peace of the place seeping into my pores, unkinking all my tension, stilling my jangled nerves.

Inevitably, the return to the compound was something of a downer. The peak experience I’d just had was an impossible act to follow, but the sight of the crudely logged clearing and its slumlike jumble of shacks and shanties, dominated by a rusted metal water tank, was enough to destroy my mood of elation entirely.

The clearing itself consisted of two areas. There was an inner zone, about fifty feet square, where the trees and other vegetation had been dug out and the ground leveled, leaving a more or less flat table of packed dirt flecked here and there with patches of grass and clumps of horsetail. Around this stretched a desolate wasteland of rocks and scrub extending about a hundred feet up the hillside. Most of the trees here had been felled, presumably for firewood, but no attempt had been made to remove the roots or level the soil. As a result, all the buildings were crammed into the first area.

I had not paid much attention to them when I left that morning, but returning with my eyes attuned to the beauties of the landscape, I was appalled to see what an eyesore they were. The hall itself, clearly the oldest structure, was also the least offensive, its weathered timbers blending into the natural environment. There were two smaller outbuildings in the same style, one of which housed the equipment for generating the electricity supply, the other collapsing under the assault of a mound of brambles.

The rest were all more recent. Judging by the way they were jammed in at all angles, some just a few feet apart, they had been put up as needed, with no attempt at advance planning. It looked as if Sam’s little commune must have expanded pretty rapidly, particularly in the last few years. The earliest ones were mere shacks, mostly of timber which looked as though it had been scavenged from previous structures dating back to the same era as the hall. They had corrugated iron roofs and incongruous modern doors, or in some cases just a length of gaudy plastic sheeting-one was clearly a shower curtain-nailed to the frame.

Finally there were six cabins of identical design and construction, probably built from kits. These were mounted on a poured concrete foundation and sported aluminum siding, double-glazed windows and felt roofs. Some of the men were at work on a half-built one. Among them was Andy, the ex-baseball coach I had met the previous night. He and another guy I didn’t know were throwing up the Sheetrock on an inside wall, and Andy waved in a friendly way as I passed.

I waved back with some relief. The blank stares and sullen faces which had greeted me when I appeared at breakfast had almost been enough to send me scurrying back to my room. I hadn’t recognized any of the people seated around the long dining table. They were younger than the group Sam had introduced me to the night before, mostly in their twenties, and their taciturn, guarded manner couldn’t have been more different from the exaggerated welcome I received then. Sam himself was nowhere to be seen, and I felt like an unwanted older intruder.

The food consisted of plastic-wrapped slices of spongy white bread, a huge jar of peanut butter and a selection of sugary cereals. There was also a percolator of industrial-strength coffee. Since Rick had forgotten to buy fresh milk the day before, the only kind available was a concoction resembling runny wallpaper paste which had been made up from powder.

I poured myself some coffee and a bowl of Cheerios, which I ate dry. There had been some desultory conversation in progress, but this ceased as soon as I sat down. My comments elicited only grunts or shrugs. After a while I gave up. We sat in silence, munching and crunching like animals at the trough. The fire was out and the air felt cold and dank.

An hour after breakfast, Sam still hadn’t appeared. I asked several people where he was, but they either didn’t know or wouldn’t say. I thought at first that they were resentful that I wasn’t pulling my weight, acting like the place was a hotel, but when I offered to lend a hand with the dishes or some other chore they just looked blank. I approached one man who was chopping wood beside a stack of timber at the edge of the clearing.

“Want me to take over for a while?” I asked.

He shook his head silently.

“I kind of enjoy outdoor chores,” I told him. “I’d be happy to help.”

The guy just walked off, taking the axe with him. I was about to try my luck with someone else when Mark suddenly appeared.

“You got a problem?” he demanded.

“I was just offering to help.”

“We don’t need help. Everything’s under control. Just let these people get on with their work.”

“You know where Sam is?” I retorted, to remind him that I had some official standing there.

Mark looked me up and down with undisguised hostility, then spat thoughtfully between my legs.

“I don’t know anyone by that name,” he said.

This was the point at which I decided to remove my unwelcome presence and explore the island. There was still no sign of Sam when I got back, so I went to hole up in my room until he appeared.

At one end of the hall, four men were gathered around the TV watching a fuzzy video featuring a woman who claimed, as far as I could make out, to be an alien who had been sent to earth to foster relationships between humans and other inhabitants of the universe and had taken over the body of a “terrestrial” who had died in an accident. It seemed to me that in her position I’d have chosen a classier body than the pudgy, zit-ridden, bad-hair one she’d opted for, but maybe aliens see these things differently.

At the dining table, three children were watching a woman hold up flashcards with the names and pictures of animals. As I passed by, I recognized her as the one who had caught my eye the night before. I made a detour and went up to them.

“Hi there!” I said. “You all look very busy.”

The children, two boys and a girl aged about six or seven, eyed me solemnly. I thought they looked scared.

“We’re learning to read,” the woman said. “Aren’t we, guys?”

She was wearing a man’s shirt, open at the neck, and jeans. I could see her breasts moving slightly as she breathed.

“Yes, Andrea,” the children chorused.

“That’s great,” I said. “I wish you’d teach me sometime.”

The woman’s brow creased in a small frown.

“You don’t know how to read?”

She didn’t seem terribly surprised.

“Yes, but I only read writing,” I explained.

“What else is there?”

I waved theatrically.

“Looks. Portents. The future.”

The ghost of a smile appeared on her lips. By daylight, she looked older than she had the night before. Her figure was attractive, her face pretty enough but unremarkable. I still couldn’t understand why she fascinated me so much. Just as she appeared to be about to say something, a door opened at the far end of the room and Sam appeared. The children immediately rose to their feet.

“Good morning, Los,” they chanted in unison.

“Hi, kids!” he called out breezily.

He stopped for a moment to exchange a few words with one of the men watching TV. Then he caught sight of me, broke off his conversation and strode over.

“How you doing, man? Sleep all right?”

“Fine. I was just admiring the old school-house scene.”

He narrowed his eyes, as though realizing for the first time what was going on at the table.

“Oh yeah, we home-school here,” he said. “Can’t schlep them over to Friday every day.”

“What?”

“Friday Harbor. That’s the nearest school. Nearest stores, everything. But Andrea here does an OK job. It’s legal in this state, lots of people do it. You can buy kits and stuff.”

He waved toward the door.

“C’mon, let’s take a walk. We’ve got lots to talk about.”

I shot Andrea a quick glance, but she was already bent over the textbook, her short brown hair concealing her face. I followed Sam out of the hall and across the compound, where he responded with nods and smiles to the greetings of the people we encountered. Like the night before, everyone seemed excessively pleased to see him, hanging with childish eagerness on his slightest word or gesture.

“You’re sure popular around here,” I remarked.

He smiled smugly.

“I’m the landlord. They’ve got to keep me happy.”

“How do you mean?”

“I own the place, Phil. They don’t get along with me, they’re out of here.”

I stopped and looked at him.

“You own this whole island?”

Sam nodded casually. I stared at him in genuine amazement. If he was trying to impress me, he’d sure found the hot button.

“But it must have cost a fortune!” I gasped. “Where did you get the money?”

He smiled.

“Didn’t cost me a cent.”

This was the familiar old Sam, being mysterious in order to provoke further questions which would cast him as the source of wisdom and me as the humble seeker after truth. I decided to back off and let him make the first move. After all, he was the one who’d said that we had lots to talk about.

The shoreline was visible by now, a stony beach surrounded by smooth planes of inclined rock. Small waves surged in, teasing the pebbles, while tall grave firs looked on like parents watching their children at play. I felt again the sense of joyful tranquility which had overwhelmed me on my walk.

“It’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed.

Sam nodded like a teacher whose student has given the correct answer.

“I knew you’d get it, Phil,” he said. “It took a leap of faith, but I knew. Some of the others were opposed to having you come here, but I overruled them. Everything is coming together.”

He looked me in the eye.

“Amazing things will happen to you here, Phil. Things you wouldn’t believe if I told you.”

This was too gushy for me. I decided to get back to solid ground.

“Those people who didn’t want me to come, I take it they include Mark.”

I told him about our confrontation by the woodpile. Sam smiled and nodded.

“Don’t let Mark get to you,” he said. “He’s basically an OK guy, although he’s kind of in-your-face sometimes. But I can handle him.”

He turned off down a steep path cutting through the trees to the left. Eventually it came out on a rocky bluff, where we had to scramble down, using a series of knobs and ledges worn smooth by many hands and feet. At the bottom was a small cove where a slab of basalt protruded out over a natural pool formed by two curving lines of rock. On the other side of a stretch of open water, only a few hundred yards away, rose the precipitous, fir-covered flank of another island.

“You can swim here in the summer,” Sam said, pointing to the pool. “The water comes in at high tide and then gets trapped and warmed by the sun. We go skinny-dipping here a lot.”

He sat down on the smooth rock, his long thin legs extended in front of him. In addition to his regulation work shirt and jeans, he was wearing a pair of fancy sports shoes with inch-thick soles and the logo of a basketball player.

“Wow, cool shoes!” I remarked in a teen-speak voice.

Sam glanced at them indifferently.

“Oh, yeah. Russ bought a pair, and I said I liked them, so he got me some.”

He said it casually, as though this was standard operating procedure.

“On account of you being the landlord and he has to keep you happy?” I queried with a touch of irony.

Sam shrugged.

“I was just kidding about that.”

“So who does own the place?”

“No, I was kidding about them having to suck up to me. Everything they do is done out of love, man. No one lays any power trips around here. We’re all in this thing together.”

He gazed out across the water at the island opposite for a moment, then began to talk in a slow, steady voice, as though reading a speech.

“The island used to belong to a group of Theosophists. This was back in the twenties. Then Theosophy went out of fashion. The place was deserted for years, then in the sixties it was bought by this woman from Seattle. She was working in the naval base at Bremerton, in the kitchens, and one day she put her hand through the meat grinder and lost two fingers. I happen to know she was stoned out of her skull at the time, but she sued the federal government and used the money to buy this place.”

“So where do you come in?”

“Well, what she did, she got all her hippie friends together and they all came over here to set up a commune. That was everyone’s dream at the time, right? Get away from it all, live off the land, all that shit. Well, that lasted as long as those things usually did, and then people began drifting away. In the end Lisa, that was her name, was hanging on here pretty well alone.”

I looked out over the reach of open water glinting and shifting in the raw sunlight. Gulls swooped and plunged for fish, efficient feeding machines, aerial rodents.

“By then she wanted out too,” Sam went on, “only it turned out this place wasn’t so easy to sell. There are a couple of hundred islands round here, but only some of them have a good supply of water, and even then there are shortages all the time. This place had enough for the Theosophists and the hippies and guys like us, but not enough to support people who want showers and washing machines and dishwashers and Jacuzzis. So Lisa found that having invested all her dough in this place, she was kind of stuck with it.”

“I still don’t see where you come in,” I said.

Sam grinned broadly.

“I got in, that’s how.”

He made a circle with the thumb and first finger of his left hand and inserted the forefinger of his right rapidly several times.

“We fell in love,” he added in a tone of contempt.

I thought of Andrea, of my inexplicable attraction to her. Was I too “falling in love”? How lame the phrase sounds, how hackneyed and banal! We need more and better words to describe the experience, a vocabulary as rich as the one that some cultures have for different varieties of snow. Presumably the reason we don’t is the same in both cases: an inability to distinguish, a feeling that neither snow nor love is important enough to our lives to warrant that degree of discrimination.

“Lisa and I had a friend in common,” Sam explained. “That woman who was teaching the class? I got to know her while I was hanging out in Seattle. Andrea used to spend a few months out here in the summer, but she had a job teaching back on the mainland. She introduced me to Lisa, who used to come over every now and then. It started off as a straight mercy fuck, but Lisa thought I was the hottest thing to come down the pike in a long time, and I was kind of at loose ends myself then. Next thing I knew we were married.”

“Oh, so it’s really your wife who owns the place,” I said. “Which one is she?”

I was irrationally furious at the discovery that Sam had known Andrea, and presumably slept with her.

“She’s dead.”

He pointed to the island on the other side of the strait.

“She tried to swim across to Orcas. Lisa was a good swimmer, but the currents around here are very treacherous.”

The sun had disappeared behind the firs massed on the heights behind us, and the air felt cold.

“I know things haven’t been easy for you recently,” Sam said in an almost inaudible voice. “But soon you will regain everything you have lost, and more besides.”

I stared at him, wondering again if he knew about David.

“Speaking of loss,” I said, “why did those kids call you that?”

Sam’s irritating little smile reappeared.

“Ah, you noticed that? Well, I guess you should know the answer to that one, Phil.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I knew,” I replied shortly.

“You do know. But you don’t know you know.”

I laughed derisively.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Sam turned to me, looking me in the eyes.

“You’re like all of us, Phil. You know more than you think, but you also know less.”

I sighed impatiently.

“That’s gobbledygook, Sam.”

“No, Phil, it’s a great truth. A sublime truth.”

He smiled suddenly and slapped me on the arm.

“But just stick around, kid, and pretty soon you’ll know it all.”

I’d had enough.

“Sam, listen!”

I paused, trying to find the right words.

“Can we just get something straight? I get the feeling that you guys are into some kind of religious or philosophical thing here. Is that right?”

Sam’s eyes left me, gazing out over the stretch of water where his wife had drowned.

“I guess you could put it that way,” he said at last.

“OK. Well, let me just say something. I appreciate you inviting me here, and it would be a great pleasure to spend three or four days in such a beautiful spot. But-and it’s a big but-you’ve got to understand that I’m not in the market for any kind of new ideology. I’m not knocking your ideas, whatever they may be. I’m simply saying that I’m not interested in signing up for anything. If you can accept that, I’ll be happy to stay. If not, it would probably be better for me to leave right now.”

Sam looked at me with a frown.

“Chill, man!” he said with a slightly forced laugh. “No one’s asking you to do a damn thing except veg out and enjoy yourself.”

“Great. And I’ll have to leave on Wednesday or Thursday in any case. My car’s at that house on the mainland. Lenny took the keys. Does he live there or what?”

There was a slight pause before Sam answered.

“He’s staying there this week, while Russ and the other guy are away, case they need to call in.”

“But there must be a phone here,” I replied. “You called me in Everett, remember?”

Sam looked uncomfortable for the first time. Then he shrugged.

“I’ve got a cellular, but we try not to use it too much. You never know who might be listening in.”

I laughed.

“Have you got secrets to hide, then?”

Sam jumped up.

“I better get going,” he said, turning away. “I’ve got to choose a reading for this afternoon. You stay if you want.”

I got to my feet.

“No, I’ll come.”

The truth was, I was already looking forward to seeing Andrea again.

I had been faithful to Rachael for the ten years we had been together, and since her death I had not thought of finding someone else. This was not a question of high-minded morality. I was simply out of practice. Without realizing it, I had sealed myself off from contact with the other sex. I had invested all I had in one relationship, and lost everything. The idea of starting all over again seemed more trouble than it was worth.

But Andrea had somehow penetrated the cocoon of indifference and sloth with which I’d surrounded myself, and had done so-this is what really disturbed me-without even trying. There was no evidence whatsoever to suggest that she was remotely interested in me. On the contrary, she was almost certainly fixed up with one of these guys who, for reasons beyond my comprehension, were kissing up to Sam. Nevertheless, for reasons equally beyond my comprehension, she had gotten to me, and before I left I wanted to know why.

I was also mildly curious to know exactly what kind of scam Sam was working. I had no doubt that it was one. If he’d bothered to get married to this Lisa, who must have been quite a lot older than him if she’d bought the place back in the sixties, it could only be because he knew that she was sitting on a nice chunk of real estate. This indicated a degree of financial planning I wouldn’t have suspected in Sam, even if he couldn’t have known that Lisa would be out of the picture so soon. But the way he’d parlayed this attractive but unsalable asset into a permanent meal ticket was even more impressive. I didn’t know who was grabbing the check for the cost of keeping the operation going, but it clearly wasn’t Sam. Probably the followers he’d recruited had to go and work on the mainland every so often, and hand over their earnings to him. Maybe that was what this Russ was doing. That would explain why Sam had seemed reluctant to talk about it.

But what were they getting in return? It didn’t have to be anything very much. Most of the people I’d seen so far struck me as classic high school dropouts. Nevertheless, Sam had to be offering them something they felt they couldn’t get anywhere else, the way they were treating him. Even if it hadn’t been for Andrea, I think I would have stayed just out of curiosity, to find out what it was.

At that point, of course, I still thought I had a choice.