The Drought

Chapter 8 – Dune Limbo

Under the empty winter sky, the salt-dunes ran on for miles. Seldom varying more than a few feet from trough to crest, they shone damply in the cold air, the pools of brine disturbed by the in-shore wind. Sometimes, in a distant foretaste of the spring to come, their crests would be touched with white streaks as a few crystals evaporated out into the sunlight, but by the early afternoon these began to deliquesce, and the gray flanks of the dunes would run with a pale light.

To the east and west the dunes stretched along the coast to the horizon, occasionally giving way to a small lake of stagnant brine or part of a lost creek cut off from the rest of its channel. To the south, in the direction of the sea, the dunes gradually became more shallow, extending into long saltflats. At high tide they were covered by a few inches of clear water, the narrowing causeways of firmer salt reaching out into the sea.

Nowhere was there a defined margin between the shore and sea, and the endless shallows formed the only dividing zone, land and water both submerged in this gray liquid limbo. At intervals the skeleton of a derelict conveyer emerged from the salt and seemed to point toward the sea, but then, after a few hundred yards, sank from sight again. Gradually the pools of water congregated into larger lakes, small creeks formed into continuous channels, but the water never seemed to move. Even after an hour's walk, knee-deep in the dissolving slush, the sea remained as distant as ever, always present and yet lost beyond the horizon, haunting the cold mists that drifted across the salt-dunes.

To the north, the dunes steadily consolidated themselves, the pools of water between them never more than a few inches deep. Eventually, where they overran the shore, they rose into a series of large white hillocks, like industrial tippings, which partly concealed the coastal hills. The foreshore itself, over the former beaches, was covered by the slopes of dry salt running down to the dunes. The rusty spires of old distillation columns rose into the air, and the roofs of metal huts carried off their foundations floated like half-submerged wrecks. Further out there were the shells of old pumping gear and the conveyers that once carried the waste salt back into the sea.

A few hundred yards from the shore, the hulks of two or three ships were buried to their upper decks in the salt, their gray superstructures reflected in the brine-pools. Small shacks of waste metal sheltered against their sides and beneath the overhangs of the sterns. Outside their lean-to doors, smoke drifted from the chimneys of crude stills.

Beside each of these dwellings, sometimes protected by a palisade of stakes, was a small pond of brine. The banks had been laboriously beaten into a hard margin, but the water seeping everywhere continually dissolved them. Despite the to-and-fro movements of the inhabitants of the salt wastes, no traces of their footsteps marked the surface, blurred within a few minutes by the leaking water.

Only toward the sea, far across the dunes and creeks, was there any activity.

Shortly after dawn, as the tide extended slowly across the margins of the coastal flats, the narrow creeks and channels began to fill with water. The long salt-dunes darkened with the moisture seeping through them, and sheets of open water spread outwards among the channels, carrying with them a few fish and nautiloids. Reaching toward the firmer shore, the cold water infiltrated among the saddles and culverts like the advance front of an invading army, its approach almost unnoticed. A cold wind blew overhead and dissolved in the dawn mists, lifting a few uneager gulls across the banks.

Almost a mile from the shore, the tide began to spill through a large breach in one of the salt bars. The water sluiced outwards into a lagoon some three hundred yards in diameter, inundating the shallow dunes in the center. As it filled this artificial basin, it smoothed itself into a mirror of the cloudless sky.

The margins of the lagoon had been raised a few feet above the level of the surrounding saltflats, and the wet crystals formed a continuous bank almost half a mile in length. As the water poured into the breach it carried away the nearer sections of the mouth, and then, as the tide began to slacken, swilled quietly away along the banks.

Overhead the gulls dived, picking at the hundreds of fish swimming below the surface. In equilibrium, the water ceased to move, and for a moment the great lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the gray light, were like immense sheets of polished ice.

At this moment, a shout crossed the air. A dozen men rose from behind the bank surrounding the lagoon and with long paddles of whalebone began to shovel the wet salt into the breach. Sliding up to their waists in the gray slush, they worked furiOusly as the wet crystals drained backwards toward the sea. Their arms and chests were strung with strips of rag and rubbber. They drove each other on with sharp cries and shouts, their backs bent as they ladled the salt up into the breach, trying to contain the water in the lagoon before the tide turned.

Watching them from the edge of the bank was a tall, thinfaced man wearing a sealskin cape over his left shoulder, his right hand on the shaft of his double-bladed paddle. His dark face, from which all flesh had been drained away, seemed to be made up of a series of flintlike points, the sharp cheekbones and jaw almost piercing the hard skin. He gazed across the captured water, his eyes counting the fish that gleamed and darted. Over his shoulder he watched the tide recede, dissolving the banks as it moved along them. The men in the breach began to shout to him as the wet salt poured across them, sliding and falling as they struggled to hold back the bank. The man in the cape ignored them, jerking the sealskin with his shoulder, his eyes on the falling table of water beyond the banks and the shining deck of the trapped sea within the lagoon.

At the last moment, when the water seemed about to burst from the lagoon at a dozen points, he raised his paddle and swung it vigorously at the opposite bank toward the shore. A cry like a gull's scream tore from his throat. As he raced off along the bank, leaving the exhausted men in the breach to drag themselves from the salt, a dozen men emerged from behind the northern bank. Their paddles whirling, they cut an opening in the wall twenty yards wide, then waded out to their chests in the water and drove it through the breach.

Carried by its own weight, the water poured in a torrent into the surrounding creeks, drawing the rest of the lagoon behind it. By the time the man in the cape had reached this new breach, half the lagoon had drained, rushing out in a deep channel. Like a demented canal, it poured onwards toward the shore, washing away the smaller dunes in its path. It swerved to the northeast, the foam boiling around the bend, then entered a narrow channel cut between two dunes. Veering to the left, it set off again for the shore, the man in the cape racing along beside it. Now and then he stopped to scan the course ahead, where the artificial channel had been strengthened with banks of drier salt, then turned and shouted to his men. They followed along the banks, their paddles driving the water on as it raced past.

Abruptly, a section of the channel collapsed and water spilled away into the adjacent creeks. Shouting as he ran, the leader raced through the shallows, his two-bladed paddle hurling the water back into the main channel. His men floundered after him, repairing the breach and driving the water back up the slope.

Leaving them, the leader ran on ahead, where the others were paddling the main body of water across the damp dunes. Although still carried along by its own momentum, the channel had widened into a gliding oval lake, the hundreds of fish tumbling over one another in the spinning currents. Every twenty yards, as the lake poured along, a dozen fish would be left stranded behind, and two older men bringing up the rear tossed them back into the receding wake.

Guiding it with their blades, the men took up their positions around the bows of the lake. At their prow, only a few feet from the front wave, the man in the cape piloted them across the varying contours. The lake coursed smoothly in and out of the channels, cruising over the shallow pools in its path. Half a mile from the shore it tilled along, still almost intact.

"Captain!" There was a shout from the two look-outs in the tail. "Captain Jordan!"

Whirling in the damp salt, the leader raised his paddle and drove the oarsmen back along the shores of the lake. Two hundred yards away, a group of five or six men, heads lowered as they worked their short paddles, had broken down the bank on the western side of the lake and were driving the water outwards across the dunes.

Converging around both banks, the trappers raced toward them, their paddles flashing at the water. The pirates ignored them and worked away at the water, propelling it through the breach. Already a large pool some fifty yards wide had formed among the dunes. As the main body of the lake moved away, they ran down across the bank and began to paddle the pool away among the shallows to the west.

Feet splashed after them through the brine, and the air was filled with whirling paddIes and the spray of flying salt. Trying to recover the water they had lured with such effort from the sea, the trappers drove it back toward the lake. Some of them attacked the pirates, splintering their short paddles with their own heavier blades. The dark-faced leader beat one man to his knees, snapping the bony shaft of his paddle with his foot, then clubbed another across the face, knocking him into the shallows. Warding off the flying blades, the pirates stumbled to their feet, pushing the water between their attackers' legs. Their leader, an older man with a red weal on his bearded face, shouted to them and they darted off in all directions, dividing the water into half a dozen pools, which they drove away with their paddles and bare hands.

In the melee, the main body of the lake had continued its gliding progress to the shore. The defenders broke off the attempt to recapture the water and ran after the lake, their rubber suits streaming with the cold salt. One or two of them stopped to shout over their shoulders, but the pirates had disappeared among the dunes. As the gray morning light gleamed in the wet slopes, their footfalls were lost in the streaming salt.

Nursing his cheek against the rubber pad on his shoulder, Ransom made his way carefully among the watery dunes, steering the small pool through the hollows. Now and then, as the pool raced along under its own momentum, he stopped to peer over the surrounding crests, listening to the distant cries of Jordan and his men. Sooner or later the sternfaced captain would send a party over to the beaches, where the outcasts lived, on a punitive expedition. At the prospect of smashed cabins and wrecked stills, Ransom rallied himself and pressed on, guiding the pool through the dips. Little more than twenty feet wide, it contained half a dozen small fish. One of them was stranded at his feet, and Ransom bent down and picked it up. Before he tossed it back into the water, his frozen fingers felt its plump belly.

Three hundred yards to his right he caught a glimpse of Jonathan Grady propelling his pool through the winding channels toward his shack below a ruined salt-conveyer. Barely seventeen years old, he had been strong enough to take almost half the stolen water for himself, and drove it along untiingly.

The other four members of the band had disappeared among the saltflats. Ransom pushed himself ahead, the salty air stinging the weal on his face. By luck Jordan 's paddle had caught him with the flat of its blade, or he would have been knocked unconscious and carried off to the summary justice of the Johnstone settlement. There his former friendship with the Reverend Johnstone, long-forgotten after ten years, would have been. little help. It was now necessary to go out a full mile from the shore to trap the sea-the salt abandoned during the previous years had begun to slide off the inner beach areas, raising the level of the offshore flats-and the theft of water was becoming the greatest crime for the communities along the coast.

Ransom shivered in the cold light, and tried to squeeze the moisture from the damp rags beneath his suit of rubber strips. Sewn together with pieces of fishgut, the covering leaked at a dozen places. He and the other members of the band had set out three hours before dawn, following Jordan and his team over the gray dunes. They hid themselves in the darkness by the empty channel, waiting for the tide to turn, knowing that they had only a few minutes to steal a small section of the lake. But for the need to steer the main body of water to the reservoir at the settlement, Jordan and his men would have caught them. One night soon, no doubt, they would deliberately sacrifice their catch to rid themselves forever of Ransom.

As Ransom moved along beside the pool, steering it toward the distant tower of the wrecked lightship whose stern jutted from the sand a quarter of a mile away, he automatically counted and recounted the fish swimming in front of him, wondering how long he could continue to prey on Jordan and his men; By now the sea was so far away, the shore so choked with salt, that only the larger and more skillful teams could muster enough strength to trap a sizable body of water and carry it back to the reservoirs. Three years earlier, Ransom and the young Grady had been able to cut permanent channels through the salt, and at high tide enough water flowed down them to carry small catches of fish and crabs. Now, however, as the whole area had softened, the wet sliding salt made it impossible to keep any channel open for more than twenty yards, unless a huge team of men were used, digging the channel afresh as they moved ahead of the stream.

The remains of one of the metal conveyers jutted from the dunes ahead. Small pools of water gathered around the rusting legs, and Ransom began to run faster, paddle whirling in his hands as he tried to gain enough momentum to sweep some of this along with him. Exhausted by the need to keep up a brisk trot, he tripped on to his knees, then stood up and raced after the pool as it approached the conveyer.

A fish flopped at his feet, twisting on the salt slope. Leaving it, Ransom rushed on after the pool, and caught up with it as it swirled through the metal legs. Lowering his head, he whipped the water with the paddle, and carried the pool over the slope into the next hollow.

Despite this slight gain, less than two-thirds of the original pool remained when he reached the lightship. To his left the sunlight was falling on the slopes of the salt tips, lighting up the faces of the hills behind them, but Ransom ignored these intimations of warmth and color. He steered the pool toward the small basin near the starboard bridge of the ship. This narrow tank, twenty yards long and ten wide, he had managed to preserve over the years by carrying stones and pieces of scrap metal down from the shore, and each day beating the salt around them to a firm crust. The water was barely three inches deep, and a few edible kelp and water anemones, Ransom's sole source of vegetable food, floated limply at one end. Often Ransom had tried to breed fish in the pool, but the water was too saline, and the fish invariably died within a few hours. In the reservoirs at the settlement, with their more dilute solutions, the fish lived for months. Ransom, however, unless he chose to live on dried kelp five days out of six, was obliged to go out almost every morning to trap and steal the sea.

He watched the pool as it slid into the tank like a tired snake, and then worked the wet bank with his paddle, squeezing the last water from the salt. The few fish swam up and down in the steadying current, nibbling at the kelp. Counting them again, Ransom followed the line of old boiler tubes that ran from, the tank to the fresh-water still next to his shack. He had roofed it in with pieces of metal plate from the cabins of the lightship, and with squares of old sacking. Opening the door, he listened for the familiar bubbling sounds, and then saw with annoyance that the flame under the boiler was set too low. The wastage of fuel, every ounce of which had to be scavenged with increasing difficulty from the vehicles buried beneath the shore, made him feel sick with frustration. A can of gasoline sat on the floor. He poured some into the tank, then turned up the flame and adjusted it, careful, despite his annoyance, not to overheat the unit. Using this dangerous and unpredictable fuel, scores of stills had exploded over the years, killing or maiming their owners.

He examined the condenser for any leaks, and then raised the lid of the water receptacle. An inch of clear water lay in the pan. He decanted it carefully into an old whisky bottle, raising the funnel to his lips to catch the last intoxicating drops.

He walked over to the shack, touching his cheek, conscious that the bruised skin would show through his coarse stubble. Overhead the sunlight shone on the curving sternplates of the wrecked lightship, giving the portholes a glassy opaque look like the eyes of dead fish. In fact, this stranded leviathan, submerged beyond sight of the sea in this concentration of its most destructive element, had rotted as much as any whale would have done in ten years. Often Ransom entered the hulk, searching for pieces of piping or valve gear, but the engine room and gangways had rusted into grotesque hanging gardens of corroded metal.

Below the stern, partly sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds by the flat blade of the rudder, was Ransom's shack. He had built it from the rusty motorcar bodies he had hauled down from the shore and piled on top of one another. Its bulging shell, puffed out here and there by a car's bulbous nose or trunk, resembled the carapace of a cancerous turtle.

The central chamber inside, floored with wooden deck planks, was lit by a single fish-oil lamp when Ransom entered. Suspended from a chassis above, it swung slowly in the draughts moving through the cracks between the cars.

A small gasoline, stove, fitted with a crude flue, burned in the center of the room. Two metal beds were drawn up against a table beside it. Lying on one of them, a patched blanket across her knees, was Judith Ransom. She looked up at Ransom, her dented temple casting an oblique shadow across the lace-like burn on her cheek. Since the accident she had made no further attempt to disguise the dent in her temple, and her graying hair was tied behind her neck in a simple knot.

"You're late," she said. "Did you catch anything?"

Ransom sat down, and slowly began to peel off the rubber suit. "Five," he told her. He rubbed his cheek painfully, aware that he and Judith now shared the same facial stigma. "Three of them are quite big-there must be a lot to feed on out at sea. I had to leave one behind."

"For heaven's sake, why?" Judith sat up, her face sharpening. "We've got to give three to Grady, and you know he won't take small ones! That leaves us with only two for today!" She glanced about the shack with wavering desperation, as if hoping that in some magical way a small herring might materialize for her in each of the dingy corners. "I can't understand you, Charles. You'll have to go out again tonight."

Giving up the attempt to pull off his thighboots-like his suit, made from the inner tubes of car ties-Ransom leaned back across the bed. "Judith, I can't. I'm exhausted as it is." Adopting the wheedling tone she herself had used, he went on: "We don't want me to be ill again, do we?" He smiled at her encouragingly, turning his face from the lantern so that she would not see the weal. "Anyway, they won't be going out again tonight. They brought in a huge lake of water."

"They always do." Judith gestured with a febrile hand. She had not yet recovered from Ransom's illness. The task of nursing him and begging for food had been bad enough, but faded into the merest trifle compared with the insecurity of being without the breadwinner for two weeks. "Can't you go out to the sea and fish there? Why do you have to steal water all the time?"

Ransom let this reproof pass. He pressed his frozen hands to the stove. "You can never reach the sea, can't you understand? There's nothing but salt all the way. Anyway, I haven't a net."

"Charles, what's the matter with your face? Who did that?"

For a moment her indignant tone rallied Ransom's spirits, a display of that self-willed temper of old that had driven her from the Johnstone settlement five years earlier. It was this thin thread of independence that Ransom clung to, and he was almost glad of the injury for revealing it.

"We had a brief set-to with them. One of, the paddle blades caught me."

"My God! Whose, I'd like to know? Was it Jordan 's?" When Ransom nodded she said with cold bitterness: "One of these days someone will have his blood."

"He was doing his job."

"Rubbish. He picks on you deliberately." She looked at Ransom critically, and then managed a smile. "Poor Charles."

Pulling his boots down to his ankles, Ransom crossed the hearth and sat down beside her, feeling the pale warmth inside her shawl. Her brittle fingers kneaded his shoulders and then brushed his graying hair from his forehead. Huddled beside her inside the blanket, one hand resting limply on her thin thighs, Ransom gazed around the drab interior of the shack. The decline in his life in the five years since Judith had come to live with him needed no underlining, but he realized that this was part of the continuous decline of all the beach settlements. It was true that he now had the task of feeding them both, and that Judith made little contribution to their survival, but she did at least guard their meager fish and water stocks while he was away. Raids on the isolated outcasts had now become more frequent.

However, it was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo. Like all purgatories, the beach was a waiting ground, the endless stretches of wet salt sucking away from them all but the hardest core of themselves. These tiny nodes of identity glimmered faintly in the gray light of the limbo, as this zone of nothingness waited for them to dissolve and deliquesce like the few crystals dried by the sun. During the first years, when Judith had lived with Hendry in the settlement, Ransom had noticed her becoming increasingly shrewish and sharptongued, and assumed this to mark the break-up of her personality. Later, when Hendry became Johnstone's righthand man, his association with Judith was a handicap. Her bodkin tongue and unpredictable ways made her intolerable to Johnstone's daughters and the other womenfolk.

She left the settlement of her own accord. After living precariously in the old shacks among the salt tips, she one day knocked on the door of Ransom's cabin. It was then that Ransom realized that Judith was one of the few people on the beach to have survived intact. The cold and brine had merely cut away the soft tissues Of convention and politeness. However bad-tempered and impatient, she was still herself.

Yet this stopping of the clock had gained them nothing. The beach was a zone without time, suspended in an endless interval as flaccid and enduring as the wet dunes themselves. Often Ransom remembered the painting by Tanguy that he had once treasured. Its drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time, in some ways seemed a photographic portrait of the salt world of the shore. But the similarity was misleading. On the beach, time was not absent but immobilized, what was new in their lives and relationships they could form only from the residues of the past, from the failures and omissions that persisted into the present like the wreckage and scrap metal from which they built their cabins.

Ransom looked down at Judith as she gazed blankly into the stove. Despite the five years together, the five arctic winters and fierce summers when the salt banks gleamed like causeways of chalk, he felt few bonds between them. The success, if such a term could be used, of their present union, like its previous failure, had been decided by wholly impersonal considerations, above all by the zone of time in which they found themselves.

He stood up. "I'll bring one of the fish down. We'll have some breakfast."

"Can we spare it?"

"No. But perhaps there'll be a tidal wave tonight."

Once every three or four years, in response to some distant submarine earthquake, a huge wave would inundate the coast. The third and last of these, some two years earlier, had swept across the saltflats an hour before dawn, reaching to the very margins of the beach. The hundreds of shacks and dwellings among the dunes had been destroyed by the waist-high water, the reservoir pools washed away in a few seconds. Staggering about in the sliding salt, they had watched everything they owned carried away. As the luminous water swilled around the wrecked ships, the exhausted beachdwellers had climbed up onto the salt tips and sat there until dawn.

Then, in the first light, they had seen a fabulous spectacle. The entire stretch of the draining saltflats was covered with the expiring forms of tens of thousands of stranded fish, every pool alive with crabs and shrimps. The ensuing bloodfeast, as the gulls dived and screamed around the flashing spears, had rekindled the remaining survivors. For three weeks, led by the Reverend Johnstone, they had moved from pool to pool, and gorged themselves like beasts performing an obscene eucharist.

However, as Ransom walked over to the fish tank he was thinking, not of this, but of the first great wave, some six months after their arrival. Then the tide had gathered for them a harvest of corpses. The thousands of bodies they had tipped into the sea after the final bloody battles on the beaches had come back to them, their drowned eyes and blanched faces staring from the shallow pools. The washed wounds, cleansed of all blood and hate, haunted them in their dreams. Working at night, they buried the bodies in deep pits below the first salt tips. Sometimes Ransom would wake and go out into the darkness, half-expecting the washed bones to sprout through the salt below his feet.

Recently Ransom's memories of the corpses, repressed for so many years, had come back to him with added force. As he picked up his paddle and flicked one of the herrings onto the sand, he reflected that perhaps his reluctance to join the settlement stemmed from his identification of the fish with the bodies of the dead. However bitter his memories of the halfwilling part he had played in the massacres, he now accepted that he would have to leave the solitary shack and join the Reverend Johnstone's small feudal world. At least the institutional relics and taboos would allay his memories in a way that he alone could not.

To Judith, as the fish browned in the frying pan, he said: "Grady is going to join the settlement."

"What? I don't believe it!" Judith brushed her hair down across her temple. "He's always been a lone wolf. Did he tell you himself?"

"Not exactly, but-"

"Then you're imagining it." She divided the fish into two equal portions, steering the knife precisely down the midline with the casual skill of a surgeon. "Jonathan Grady is his own master. He couldn't accept that crazy old clergyman and his mad daughters."

Ransom chewed the flavorless steaks of white meat. "He was talking about it while we waited for the tide. It was obvious what was on his mind-he's sensible enough to know we can't last out on our own much longer."

"That's nonsense. We've managed so far."

"But, Judith… we live like animals. The salt is shifting now, every day it carries the sea a few yards further out."

"Then we'll move along the coast. If we want to we can go a hundred miles."

"Not now. There are too many blood feuds. It's an endless string of little communities, trapping their own small pieces of the sea and frightened of everyone else." He picked at the shreds of meat around the fish's skull. "I have a feeling Grady was warning me."

"What do you mean?"

"If he joins the settlement he'll be one of Jordan 's team. He'll lead them straight here. In an obscure way, I think he was telling me he'd enjoy getting his revenge."

"For his father? But that was so far in the past. It was one of those terrible accidents that happen."

"It wasn't really. In fact, the more I think about it the more I'm convinced it was simply a kind of coldblooded experiment, to see how detached from everyone else I was." He shrugged. "If we're going to join the settlement it would be best to get in before Grady does."

Judith slowly shook her head. "Charles, if you go there it will be the end of you. You know that."

An hour later, when she was asleep, Ransom left the cabin and went out into the cold morning light. The sun was overhead, but the dunes remained gray and lifeless, the shallow pools like clouded mirrors. Along the shore the rusting columns of the half-submerged stills rose into the air, their shafts casting striped shadows on the brilliant white slopes of the salt tips. The hills beyond were bright with desert colors, but as usual Ransom turned his eyes from them.

He waited for five minutes to make sure that Judith remained asleep, then picked up his paddle and began to scoop the water from the tank beside the ship. Swept out by the broad blade, the water formed a pool some twenty feet wide, slightly larger than the one he had brought home that morning.

Propelling the pool in front of him, Ransom set off across the dunes, taking advantage of the slight slope that shelved eastwards from the beach. As he moved along he kept a careful watch on the shore. No one would attempt to rob him of so small a pool of water, but his departure might tempt some roving beachcomber to break into the shack. Here and there a set of footprints led up across the firmer salt, but otherwise the surface of the dunes was unmarked. A mile away, toward the sea, a flock of gulls sat on the wet saltflats, but except for the pool of water scurrying along at Ransom's feet, nothing moved across the sky or land.

Chapter 9 – The Stranded Neptune

Like a huge broken-backed lizard, a derelict conveyer crossed the dunes, winding off toward the hidden sea. Ransom changed course as he approached it, and set off over the open table of shallow salt-basins that extended eastwards along the coast. He moved in and out of the swells, following the long gradients that carried the pool under its own momentum. His erratic course also concealed his original point of departure. Half a mile ahead, when he passed below a second conveyer, a stout bearded man watched him from one of the gantries, honing a whalebone spear. Ransom ignored him and continued on his way.

Below him a semicircle of derelict freighters rose from the saltflats. Around them, like the hovels erected against the protective walls of a medieval fortress, was a clutter of small shacks and out-buildings. Some, like Ransom's, were built from the bodies of old cars salvaged from the beach, but others were substantial wood and metal huts, equipped with doors and glass windows, joined together by companionways of galvanized iron. Gray smoke lifted from the chimneys, conveying an impression of quiet warmth and industry. A battery of ten large stills on the fore-shore discharged its steam toward the distant hills.

A wire drift fence enclosed the settlement. As Ransom approached the western gate, he could see the open surfaces of the huge water reservoirs and breeding tanks. Each was some two hundred feet long, buttressed by embankments of sand and shingle. A team of men, heads down in the cold sunlight, were working silently in one of the tanks, watched from the bank by an overseer holding a stave. Although three hundred people lived together in the settlement, no one moved around the central compound. As Ransom knew from his previous visits, its only activity was work.

Ransom steered his pool over to the gateway, where a few huts gathered around the watchtower. Two women sat in a doorway, rocking an anemic child. At various points along the perimeter of the settlement a few subcommunities had detached themselves from the main compound, either because they were the original occupants of the site or were too lazy or unreliable to fit into the puritan communal life. However, all of them possessed some special skill with which they paid for their places.

Bullen, the gatekeeper, who peered at Ransom from his sentrybox below the watchtower, carved the paddles used by the sea-trappers. In long racks by the huts the narrow blades, wired together from pieces of whalebone, dried in the sunlight. In return, Bullen had been granted proprietary rights to the gateway. A tall, hunchbacked man with a sallow bearded face, he watched Ransom suspiciously, then walked slowly across the waterlogged hollows below the tower.

"Back again?" he said. Despite the infrequency of his visits, Ransom seemed to worry him in some obscure way, part of the general withdrawal of the settlement from the world outside. He pointed down at Ransom's pool with a paddle. "What have you got there?"

"I want to see Captain Hendry," Ransom said.

Grudgingly, Bullen released the gate. As Ransom steered the pool forwards, Bullen held it back with his paddle. Taking the hint, Ransom swept several bladefuls of the water into the basin by the tower. Usually Bullen would have expected a pair of small herring at the least, but from his brief glance at Ransom's appearance he seemed to accept that these few gallons of water were the limit of his wealth.

As the gate closed behind him, Ransom set off toward the compound. The largest of the freighters, its bows buried under the salt, formed the central tower of the settlement. Part of the starboard side, facing the shore, had been dismantled and a series of two- and three-story cabins had been built onto the decks. The stern castle of the ship, jutting high into the air, was topped by a large whalebone cross, and was the settlement's chapel. The portholes and windows had been replaced by primitive stained-glass images of biblical scenes, in which Christ and his disciples were surrounded by leaping fish and sea horses.

The settlement's preoccupation with the sea and its creatures could be seen at a glance. Outside every hut, dozens of small fish dried on trestle tables or hung from the eaves. Larger fish, groupers and sharks that had strayed into the shallow water, were suspended from the rails of the ships, while an immense swordfish, the proudest catch of the settlement and the Reverend Johnstone's choice of a militant symbol to signify its pride, was tied to the whalebone mast and hung below the cross, its huge blade pointed heavenwards.

On the seaward side of the ships, a second team of men was working in one of the tanks, bending in the cold water as they harvested the edible kelp. Swathed in rubber tubing, they looked like primitive divers experimenting with makeshift suits in the shallow water.

Directly below the gangway of the freighter half a dozen round basins had been cut in the salt dunes, temporary storage tanks for people moving with their water up and down the coast. Ransom steered his pool into the second of them, next to a visiting fisherman selling his wares to one of the foremen. The two men argued together, stepping down into the water and feeling the plump plaice and soles.

Ransom drove his paddle into the sand by his pool. Half the water had been lost on the way, and there was barely enough to cover the floor of the basin.

He called up to the look-out on the bridge: "Is Captain Hendry aboard? Ransom to see him."

The man came down the companionway to the deck, and beckoned Ransom after him. They walked past the boarded-up portholes. Unpainted for ten years, the hulk was held together by little more than the tatters of rust. The scars of shellfire marked the decks and stanchions-the freighter, loaded with fresh water and supplies, had been stormed by the insurgents breaking out from the rear areas of the beach, and then shelled from the destroyer now reclining among the dunes a hundred yards away. Through one of these tears, gaping like an empty flower in the deck overhead, Ransom could see an old surplice drying in the sun.

"Wait here. I'll see the Captain."

Ransom leaned on the rail, looking down at the yard below. An old woman in a black shawl chopped firewood with an ax, another straightened the kelp drying on a frame in the sunlight. The atmosphere in the settlement was drab and joyless, like that of an early pilgrim community grimly held together on the edge of some northern continent. Partly this was due to the vague sense of remorse still felt by the survivors-the specters of the thousands who had been killed on the beaches, or driven out in herds to die in the sea, haunted the bitter salt. But it also reflected the gradual attrition of life, the slow reduction of variety and movement as the residues of their past lives, the only materials left to them, sank into the -sterile dunes. This sense of diminishing possibility, of the erosion of all time and space beyond the flaccid sand and the draining branches, numbed Ransom's mind.

"The Captain will see you."

Ransom followed the man into the ship. The nautical terminology-there were some dozen captains, including Hendry, Jordan, and the Reverend Johnstone, a kind of ex officio rear-admiral-was a hangover from the first years when the nucleus of the original settlement had lived in the ship. The freighter sat where she had been sunk in the shallow water, the waves breaking her up, until the slopes of salt produced by the distillation units had driven the water back into the sea. At this stage thousands of emigrants were living in the cars and shacks on the beaches, and the distillation units, run by the citizens' cooperatives that had taken over from the military after the break-out battles, were each producing tons of salt every day. The large freighter had soon been inundated.

"Well, Charles, what have you brought now?" Seated at his desk in the purser's cabin, Hendry looked up as Ransom came in. Waving Ransom into a chair, he peered down the columns of an old leatherbound logbook that he used as a combined ledger and diary. In the intervening years the quiet humor had gone, and only the residue of the conscientious policeman remained. Dour and efficient, but so dedicated to securing the minimum subsistence level for the settlement that he could no longer visualize anything above that meager line, he summed up for Ransom all the dangers and confinements of their limbo.

"Judith sends her love, Captain," Ransom began. "How's the baby coming along?"

Hendry gestured vaguely with his pen. "As well as can be expected."

"Would you like some water for it? I have some outside. I was going to hand it over to the settlement, but I'd be delighted to give you and Julia the first cut."

Hendry glanced sharply at Ransom. "What water is this, Charles? I didn't know you had so much now you were giving it away."

"It isn't mine to give. The poachers were out again last night, stealing Jordan 's catch as it came in. I found this pool near the channel this morning."

Hendry stood up. "Let's have a look at it." He led the way out onto the deck. "Where is it? _That_ one down there?" Shaking his head, he started back for his cabin. "Charles, what are you playing at?"

Ransom caught up with him. "Judith and I have been talking it over seriously, Captain… it's been seffish of us living alone, but now we're prepared to join the settlement. You'll soon' need all the help you can get to bring in the sea."

"Charles…" Hendry hesitated. "We're not short of water."

"Perhaps that's true, in the immediate sense, but a year or two from now-we've got to think ahead."

Hendry nodded to himself. "That's good advice." He turned in the door to his cabin. For a moment the old Hendry glimmered faintly in his eyes. "Thanks for the offer of the water, Charles. Look, you wouldn't like it in the settlement, the people have given too much. If you came here, they'd drain you away."

Reflectively he patted the white carcass of a small shark hanging in the sun outside the cabin, the shriveled face gaping sightiessly at Ransom.

Resting on the rail, Ransom pulled himself together. Hendry's refusal meant that he was acting on some decision already reached by the other captains.

The look-out stood by the gangway, watching Ransom's tall gaunt figure move restlessly along the rail. Ransom went over to him. "Where's Captain Jordan? Is he here?"

The man shook his head. "He's over in the cliffs. He won't be back till evening."

Ransom looked back at the distant hills, debating whether to wait for Jordan. Almost every afternoon he went out to the hills above the beach, disappearing among the sand-dunes that spilled through the ravines. Ransom guessed that he was visiting the grave of his foster-father, Mr. Jordan. The old Negro had died a few days after their arrival at the beach, and Philip had buried him somewhere among the dunes.

As he stepped past the look-out, the man said softly: "Miss Vanessa wants to see you."

Nodding to the man, Ransom glanced up and down the silent hulk of the ship, and then crossed to the port side. The look-out's feet rang softly on the metal rails of the bridge, but otherwise this side of the ship was silent.

Ransom walked along the empty deck. A rusty companionway led to the boatdeck above. Most of the lifeboats had been smashed to splinters in the bombardment, but the line of officers' cabins was still intact. In one of these small cubicles behind the bridge, Vanessa Johnstone lived by herself.

Ransom reached the companionway, then stopped to glance through a damaged ventilator. Below was the central chamber of the ship. This long, high-ceilinged room had been formed when the floor dividing the passenger lounge from the dining room below had rusted out. It was now the Reverend Johnstone's combined vestry and throne-chamber.

A few oil-lamps flared from brackets on the wall, and cast a flickering submarine glow on to the ceiling, the shadows of the torn deck braces dancing like ragged spears. The floor of the chamber was covered with mats of dried kelp to keep out the cold. In the center, almost below Ransom, the Reverend Johnstone sat in an armchair mounted in the bow section of an old lifeboat, the very craft from which Johnstone had led the first assault on the freighter. The conchlike bowl, with its striped white timbers, was fastened to the small dais that had once been the bandstand. On the floor beside him were his daughters, Julia and Frances, with two or three other women, murmuring into their shawls and playing with a baby swaddled in rags of lace.

Looking down at the two daughters, Ransom found it difficult to believe that only ten years had elapsed since their arrival at the beach. Their faces had been puffed up by the endless diet of herring and fish-oil, and they had the thickened cheekbones and moon chins of Eskimo squaws. Sitting beside their father, shawls over their heads, they reminded Ransom of a pair of sleek, watchful madonnas. For some reason he was convinced that he owed his exclusion from the settlement to these two women. The proponents above all of the status quo, guardians and presiding angels of the dead time, perhaps they regarded him as a disruptive influence, someone who had preserved himself against the dunes and saltflats.

Certainly their senile father, the Reverend Johnstone, could now be discounted as an influence. Sitting like a stranded Neptune in the bowels of this saltlocked wreck, far out of sight of the sea, he drooled and wavered on his throne of blankets, clutching at his daughters' arms. He had been injured in the bombardment, and the right side of his face was pink and hairless. The gray beard tufting from his left cheek gave him the appearance of a demented Lear, grasping at the power he had given to his daughters. His head bobbed about, and Ransom guessed that for two or three years he had been almost blind. The confined world of the settlement was limited by his own narrowing vision, sinking into a rigid matriarchy dominated by his two daughters.

If any escape lay for Ransom, only the third daughter could provide it. As he reached the deserted boatdeck of the freighter, Ransom felt that the climb had carried him in all senses above the drab world of the settlement.

"Charles!" Vanessa Johnstone was lying in her bunk in the cold cabin, gazing at the gulls on the rail through the open door. Her black hair lay in a single coil on her white breast. Her plain face was as smooth and unmarked as when she sat by the window of her attic bedroom in Larchmont. Ransom closed the door and seated himself on the bunk beside her, tentatively taking her hands. She seized them tightly, greeting him with her slow smile. "Charles, you're here-"

"I came to see Hendry, Vanessa." She embraced his shoulders with her cold hands. Her blood always seemed chilled, but it ran with the quicksilver of time, its clear streams darting like the fish he had chased at dawn. The cold air in the cabin and her white skin, like the washed shells gleaming on the beaches in the bright winter sun, made his mind run again.

"Hendry-why?"

"I…" Ransom hesitated, frightened of at last committing himself to Vanessa. If she opened his way to the settlement he would be cast with her forever. "I want to bring Judith here and join the settlement. Hendry wasn't very keen."

"But, Charles-" Vanessa shook her head. "You can't come here. It's out of all question."

"Why?" Ransom took her wrists. "You both assume that. It's a matter of survival now. The sea is so far out-"

"The sea! Forget the sea!" Vanessa regarded Ransom with her somber eyes. "If you come here, Charles, it will be the end for you. All day you'll be raking the salt from the boilers."

Ransom turned away, and for a few moments gazed through the porthole. In a tired voice he asked: "What else is there, Vanessa?"

He waited as she lay back against the white pillow, the cold air in the cabin turning the black spirals of her hair. "Do you know, Vanessa?"

Her eyes were on the gulls high above the ship, picking at the body of the swordfish hanging from the mast below the whalebone cross.

Chapter 10 – The Sign of the Crab

High above the dunes, in the tower of the lightship, Ransom watched Philip Jordan walking among the salt tips on the shore. Silhouetted against the white slopes, his tall figure seemed stooped and preoccupied, as he picked his way slowly along the stony path. He passed behind one of the tips, and then climbed the sandslopes that reached down from the ravines between the hills, a cloth bag swinging from his hand.

Sheltered from the wind by the fractured panels of the glass cupola, Ransom for a moment enjoyed the play of sunlight on the sand dunes and on the eroded faces of the cliff. The coastal hills now marked the edges of the desert that stretched in a continuous table across the continent, a wasteland of dust and ruined cities, but there was always more color and variety here than in the drab world of the saltflats. In the morning the seams of quartz would melt with light, pouring like liquid streams down the faces of the cliffs, the sand in the ravines turning into frozen fountains. In the afternoon the colors would mellow again, the shadows searching out the hundreds of caves and aerial grottos, until the evening light, shining from beyond the cliffs to the west, illuminated the whole coastline like an enormous ruby lantern, glowing through the casements of the cave-mouths as if lit by some subterranean fire.

When Philip Jordan had gone Ransom climbed down the stairway and stepped out onto the deck of the lightship. Beyond the rail a single melancholy herring circled the tank-Grady had come to demand his due while Ransom was at the settlement-and the prospect of the dismal meal to be made of the small fish caused Ransom to turn abruptly from the shack. Judith was asleep, exhausted by her altercation with Grady. Below him the deck shelved toward the saltdunes sliding across the beach. Crossing the rail, Ransom walked off toward the shore, avoiding the shallow pools of brine disturbed by the wind.

The salt slopes became firmer. He climbed up toward the salt tips, rising against the hills like white pyramids. The remains of a large still jutted through the surface of the slope, the corroded valve-gear decorating the rusty shaft. He stepped across the brown shell of a metal hut, his feet sinking through the lace-like iron, then climbed past a pile of derelict motorcar bodies half-buried in the salt. When he reached the tips he searched the ground for Philip Jordan's footprints, but the dry salt was covered with dozens of tracks left by the sledges pulled by the quarry workers.

Beyond the salt tips stretched what had once been the coastal shelf. The original dunes had been buried under the salt washed up from the beach during the storms, and by the drifts of sand and dust blown down from the hills. The gray sandy soil, in which a few clumps of grass gained a precarious purchase, was strewn with half-buried pieces of ironwork and metal litter. Somewhere beneath Ransom's feet were the wrecks of thousands of cars and trucks. Isolated hoods and windscreens poked through the sand, and sections of barbed wire fencing rose into the air for a few yards. Here and there the roof-timbers of one of the beachside villas sheltered the remains of an old hearth.

Some four hundred yards to his right was the mouth of the drained river, along which he had first reached the shore ten years earlier. Partly hidden by the quarry workings, the banks had been buried under the thousands of tons of sand and loose rock slipping down into the empty bed from the adjacent hills. Ransom skirted the edges of the quarry, making his way carefully through the wasteland of old chassis and smashed fenders thrown to one side.

The entrance to the quarry sloped to his left, the ramp leading down to the original beach. In the sandy face of the quarry were the half-excavated shells of a dozen cars and trailers, their fractured windows and grilles like veins of fossil quartz, embedded in the gritty face like the intact bodies of armored saurians. Here, at the quarry, the men from the settlement were digging out the old car shells, picking through them for tires, seats, and old rags of clothing.

Beyond the quarry the dunes gave way to a small hollow, from which protruded the faded gilt roof of an old fairground booth. The striped wooden awning hung over the silent horses of the merry-go-round, frozen like magical unicorns on their spiral shafts. Next to it was another of the booths, a line of washing strung from its decorated eaves. Ransom followed one of the pathways cut through the dunes into this little dell. Here Mrs. Quilter lived out of sight of the sea and shore, visited by the quarry-workers and womenfolk of the settlement, for whom she practised her mild necromancy and fortune-telling. Although frowned upon by the Reverend Jobnstone and his captains, these visits across the dunes served a useful purpose, introducing into their sterile lives,. Ransom believed, those random elements, that awareness of chance and time, without which they would soon have lost all sense of identity.

As he entered the dell, Mrs. Quilter was sitting in the doorway of her booth, darning an old shawl. At the sound of footsteps she put away her needle and closed the lower half of the painted door, then kicked it open again when she identified Ransom. In the ten years among the dunes she had barely aged. If anything her beaked face was softer, giving her the expression of a quaint and amiable owl. Her small round body was swathed in layers of colored fabrics stitched together from the oddments salvaged by the quarry workers- squares of tartan blanket, black velvet, and faded corduroy, ruffed with strips of embroidered damask.

Beside her, outside the door, was a large jar of fish-oil. A dozen herrings, part of her recent take, dried in the sun. On the slopes around her, lines of shells and conches had been laid out in the sand to form a series of pentacles and crescents.

Dusting the sand off the shells as Ransom approached was Catherine Austen. She looked up, greeting him with a nod. Despite the warm sunlight in the hollow, she had turned up the leather collar of her fleece-lined jacket, hiding her lined face. Her self-immersed eyes reminded Ransom of the first hard years she had spent with the old woman, eking out their existence among the shells of the old motorcars. The success of their present relationship-their fading red hair made them seem like mother and daughter-was based on their absolute dependence on each other and the rigorous exclusion of everyone else.

On the sloping sand Catherine had set out the signs of the zodiac, the dotted lines outlining the crab, ram, and scorpion.

"That looks professional," Ransom commented. "What's my horoscope for the day?"

"When were you born? Which month?"

"Cathy!" Mrs. Quilter waved her little fist at Ransom from her booth. "That'll be a herring, doctor. Don't give him charity, dear."

Catherine nodded at the old woman, then turned to Ransom with a faint smile. Her strong, darkly tanned face was hardened by the spray and wind. "Which month? Don't tell me you've forgotten?"

"June," Ransom said. "Aquarius, I assume."

"Cancer," Catherine corrected. "The sign of the crab, doctor, the sign of deserts. I wish I'd known."

"Fair enough," Ransom said. They walked past the merrygo-round. He raised his hand to one of the horses and touched its eyes. "Deserts? Yes, I'll take the rest as read."

"But which desert, doctor? There's a question for you."

Ransom shrugged. "Does it matter? It seems we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We've even sown the sea with its own salt."

"That's a despairing view, doctor. I hope you give your patients a better prognosis."

Ransom looked down into her keen eyes. As she well knew, he had no patients. During the early years at the beach he had tended htindreds of sick and wounded, but almost all of them had died, from exposure and malnutrition, and by now he was regarded as a pariah by the people of the settlement, on the principle that a person who needed a doctor would soon die.

"I haven't got any patients," he said quietly. "They refuse to let me treat them. Perhaps they prefer your brand of reassurance." He looked around at the hills above. "For a doctor there's no greater failure. Have you seen Philip Jordan? About half an hour ago?"

"He went by. I've no idea where."

For half an hour Ransom climbed the dunes, wandering, in and out of the foothills below the cliffs. Old caves studded the base, crude glass windows and tin doors let into their mouths, but the dwellings had been abandoned for years. The sand retained something of the sun's warmth, and for ten minutes Ransom lay down and played with the tags of wastepaper caught in its surface. Behind him the slopes rose to a smooth bluff a hundred feet above the dunes, the small headland jutting out over the surrounding hills. Slowly Ransom climbed up its flank, hoping that from here he would see Philip Jordan when he returned to the settlement.

Reaching the perch, he sat down and scanned the beach below. In the distance lay the shore, the endless banks of salt undulating out toward the sea. The wrecked freighters in the settlement were grouped together like ships in a small port. Ignoring them, Ransom looked out over the wide bed of the river. For more than half a mile it was overrun by dunes and rockslides. Gradually the surface cleared to form a hard white deck, scattered with stones and small rocks, the dust blown between the clumps of dried grass.

Exploring the line of the bank, Ransom noticed that a small valley led off among the rocks and ravines. Like the river, the valley was filled with sand and dust, the isolated walls of ruined houses built on the slopes half-covered by the dunes.

In the slanting light Ransom could clearly see the line of footprints newly cut in the powdery flank. They led straight up to the ruins of a large villa, crossing the edge of a partly excavated road around the valley.

As Ransom made his way down from the bluff he saw Philip Jordan emerge briefly behind a wall, then disappear down a flight of steps.

Five minutes later, as Ransom climbed the slope to what he guessed was the old Negro's secret grave, a rock hurtled through the air past his head. He crouched down and watched the rock, the size of a fist, bound away off the sand.

"Philip!" he shouted into the sunlight. "It's Ransom!"

Philip Jordan's narrow face appeared at the edge of the road. "Go away, Ransom," he called brusquely. "Get back to the beach." He picked up a second stone. "I've already let you off once today."

Ransom held his footing in the shifting sand. He pointed to the ruined villa. "Philip, don't forget who brought him here. But for me he wouldn't be buried at all."

Philip Jordan stepped forward to the edge of the road. Holding the rock loosely in one hand, he watched Ransom begin the climb up to him. He raised the rock above his head. "Ransom…!" he called warningly.

Ransom stopped again. Despite Philip Jordan's advantages in strength and years, Ransom found himself seizing at this final confrontation. As he edged up the slope, remembering the knife hidden in his right boot, he knew that Philip Jordan was at last repaying him for all the, help Ransom had given to the river-borne waif fifteen years earlier. No one could incur such an obligation without settling it to the full one day in its reverse coin. But above all, perhaps, Philip saw in Ransom's ascetic face a likeness of his true father, the wandering fisher-captain who had called to him from the riverbank and from whom he had run away for the second time.

Slowly, Ransom climbed upwards, feeling with his feet for spurs of buried rock. His eyes watched the stone in Philip's hand, shining in the sunlight against the open sky.

Standing on a ledge twenty feet above the road, apparently unaware of the scene below, was a thin, long-bodied animal with a ragged mane. Its gray skin was streaked white by the dust, the narrow flanks scarred by thorns, and for a moment Ransom failed to recognize it. Then he raised his hand and pointed, as the beast gazed out entranced at the distant sea and the wet saltflats.

"Philip," he whispered hoarsely. "There, on the ledge."

Philip Jordan glanced over his shoulder, then dropped to one knee and hurled the stone from his hand. As the piece burst into, a dozen fragments at its feet, the small lion leapt frantically to one side. With its tail down it' bolted away across the rocky slopes, legs carrying it in a blur of dust.

As Ransom clambered up onto the road he felt Philip's hand on his arm. The young man was still watching the lion as it raced along the dry riverbed. His hand was shaking, less with fear than some deep unrestrainable excitement.

"What's that-a white panther?" he asked thickly, his eyes following the distant plume of dust vanishing among the dunes.

"A lion," Ransom said. "A small lion. It looked hungry, but I doubt if it will come back." He pulled Philip's shoulder. "Philip! Do you realize what this means? You remember Quilter and the zoo? The lion must have come all the way from Mount Royal! It means…" He broke off, the dust in his throat and mouth. A feeling of immense relief surged through him, washing away all the pain and bitterness of the past ten years.

Philip Jordan nodded, waiting for Ransom to catch his breath. "I know, doctor. It means there's water between here and Mount Royal."

A concrete ramp curved down behind the wall into the basement garage of the house. The dust and rockfalls had been cleared away, and a palisade of wooden stakes carefully wired together held back the drifts of sand.

Still lightheaded, Ransom pointed to the smooth concrete, and to the fifty yards of clear roadway excavated from the side of the valley. "You've worked hard, Philip. The old man would be proud of you."

Philip Jordan smiled faintly. He took a key from the wallet on his belt and unlocked the door. "Here we, are, doctor." He gestured Ransom forward. "What do you think of it?"

Standing in the center of the garage, its chromium grille gleaming in the shadows, was an enormous black hearse. The metal roof and body had been polished to a mirrorlike brilliance, the hubcaps shining like burnished shields. To Ransom, who for years had seen nothing but damp rags and rusting iron, whose only homes had been a succession of dismal hovels, the limousine seemed like an embalmed fragment of an unremembered past.

"Philip," he said slowly. "It's magnificent, of course, but…" Cautiously he walked around the great black vehicle. Three of the tires were intact and pumped up, but the fourth wheel had been removed and the axle jacked up onto a set of wooden blocks. Unable to see into the glowing leatherwork and mahogany interior, he wondered if the old Negro's body reposed in a casket in the back. Perhaps Philip, casting his mind back to the most impressive memories of his childhood, had carried with him all these years a grotesque image of the ornate hearses he had seen rolling around on their way to the cerneteries.

Cautiously he peered through the rear window. The wooden bier was empty, the chromium tapers clean and polished.

"Philip, where is he? Old Mr. Jordan?"

Philip gestured offhandedly. "Miles from here. He's buried in a cave above the sea. This is what I wanted to show you, doctor. What do you think of it?"

Collecting himself, Ransom said: "But they told me, everyone thought-all this time you've been coming here, Philip? To this… car?"

Philip unlocked the driver's door. "I found it five years ago. You understand I couldn't drive, there wasn't any point then, but it gave me an idea. I started looking after it, a year ago I found a couple of new tires…" He spoke quickly, eager to bring Ransom up-to-date, as if the discovery and renovation of the hearse were the only events of importance to have taken place in the previous ten years.

"What are you going to do with it?" Ransom asked. He opened the driver's door. "Can I get in?"

"Of course." Philip wound down the window when Ransom was seated. "As a matter of fact, doctor, I want you to start it for me."

The ignition keys were in the dashboard. Ransom switched on. He looked around, to- see Philip watching him intently in the half-light, his dark face, like an intelligent savage's, filled with a strange childlike hope. Wondering how far he was still a dispensable tool, Ransom said: "I'll be glad to, Philip. I understand how you feel about the car. It's been a long ten years, the car takes one back…"

Philip smiled, showing a broken tooth and the white scar below his left eye. "But please carry on. The tank is full of fuel, there's oil in, and the radiator is full."

Nodding, Ransom pressed the starter. As he expected, nothing happened. He pressed the starter several times, then released the handbrake and played with the gear lever. Philip Jordan slowly shook his head, only a faint look of disappointment on his face.

Ransom handed the keys to him. He stepped from the car. "It won't go, Philip, you understand that, don't you? The battery is flat, and all the electrical wiring will have corroded. You'll never start it, not in a hundred years. I'm sorry, it's a beautiful car."

With a shout, Philip Jordan slammed his foot at the halfopen door, kicking it into the frame. The muscles of his neck and cheeks were knotted like ropes, as if all the frustration of the past years were tearing his face apart. With a wrench he ripped the windscreen wiper from its pinion, then drummed his fists angrily on the hood, denting the polished metal.

"It's got to go, doctor, if I have to push it myself all the way!" He threw Ransom aside, then bent down and put his shoulder to the door frame. With animal energy he drove the car forward on its wheels. There was a clatter as the blocks toppled to the floor, and the back axle and bumper crashed onto the concrete. The car sagged downwards, its body panels groaning. Philip raced around it, pulling at the doors and fenders with his strong hands.

Ransom stepped out into the sunlight and waited there for Philip. Ten minutes later he came out, head bowed, his right hand bleeding across his wrist.

Ransom took his arm. "We don't need the car, Philip. Mount Royal is only a hundred miles away, we can walk it comfortably in two or three weeks. The river will take us straight there."