Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

DAVID CASE Pelican Cay

They left another load of supplies down on the rocks this morning. I haven’t bothered to pick them up yet, although I blinked out a message thanking them and letting them know I was still all right. There were three men in the boat. I think they were the same three as last time but they still appeared terrified. They kept looking up here and their faces were so white it seemed as if I’d turned the beam of the lamp onto them. They dropped the crates off — heaved them out, really — without ever touching the boat to shore. You’d think they’d know, by now, that I’m not infected. Still, I’m thankful for the supplies… they could just as well leave me, like the others.

I’ve been here two weeks now, in the lighthouse, and I’m getting much better at signalling with the big lamp and at receiving messages from the ships. They sent too fast, at first. But thank God for the light, there would be no way to communicate without it and it feels better to be in touch with the world, even if only by lamp — even if they won’t believe me.

I wonder if my paper knows I’m here; if they’ve tried to contact me? What a story! And how absurd to think of it that way, now… as a newspaperman instead of… what I am. I wonder, too, what they’ll do about me when the others are all dead? I don’t think that will be too long now. I’ve been observing them through the glasses and they seem less furious, slower, weaker. They’re all very thin. I saw three of them eating a dead one, earlier. I don’t know if they killed him or not and I don’t know if they are beginning to regain human instincts… like feeding. But they didn’t seem ravenous or even very determined about it, they were just pulling ribbons of flesh off his bones and chewing them in a desultory manner, as if it were something they dimly recalled doing in the past.

A few of them are gathered on the docks now, not too near the water. They’re terrified of water. They seem to be looking out at the patrolling ships or maybe beyond, to the dim line of the Keys. I can see the Keys quite clearly from the tower. It really is a remarkable vista, the lone line of islands spanned by the bridges. It was just over two weeks ago that I drove along those linked islands. A long time. I think about it often, too, for I have a great deal of time to think and, terrible as it was, it is better than thinking of the future…

United States Highway One begins in Fort Kent, Maine, at the borders of icy Canada, and ribbons all the way down the Eastern seaboard, spanning the islands in the tropical Gulf like concrete cartilage linking the spine of some coral sea beast. I’d followed that road from New York, spent the night in Miami and, in the early morning, with the bay on one hand and the straits on the other and the dew still sparkling on the tropical flowers, I motored slowly over the bridges. I had plenty of time and was enjoying the drive. I’d not been in the Keys for years and noticed the highway had developed in terms of human progress — at night, I feared, a neon holocaust threatened — but the morning mood was changeless. Like feathered boomerangs behind a screen of palm trees, the pelicans were banking and sliding sideways into the blue waters of the Straits of Florida. Behind the planing birds the sun climbed from the Atlantic and began its arc towards the Dry Tortugas and Mexico. A few early anglers were fishing from the bridges, not as efficiently as the pelicans; a shrimp boat parallelled my passage, high pronged masts distinctive, draped with net; a young couple wearing scuba gear basked on thrusting black rocks, drinking wine from the bottle and laughing with white teeth. It was a pleasant trip on a pleasant morning. I figured my stay would be pleasant, too. If I got a story out of it, that was fine and, if I didn’t, that was fine, too. There are worse things than an expense account assignment in Florida, I thought.

And how wrong I was.

The Mangrove Inn was built out over the water, the outdoor platform at the back raised on wooden stilts. A tourist was on the platform, having his picture taken beside a hanging shark. The shark looked mildly embarrassed. I parked the car and went into the bar. It was air-conditioned and traditional, with fish nets on the walls and starfish ashtrays. I was a bit early and didn’t think my contact was there yet, but as I moved to the bar the girl stood up from a dark corner booth and raised her eyebrows.

‘Mister Harland?’

I nodded and she walked towards me, a pretty girl, blonde, wearing a light cotton dress. She had nice eyes and a nice smile. She said, ‘I’m Mary Carlyle,’ and held her hand out. ‘Dr Elston asked me to meet you.’

‘I’d expected him.’

‘Yes. He was… well, busy, I suppose. Anyhow, I had to cross over and he thought perhaps I could bring you back to Pelican in my boat.’

‘Yes, all right,’ I said. Then: ‘What’s Pelican?’

She looked mildly surprised. ‘You don’t know?’

‘No. Elston wrote me. He asked me to meet him here. He asked me not to write or phone — in fact, he made rather a point of that — just to be here, today.’ I made a gesture, manifesting my presence. ‘My paper seemed to think he was newsworthy — eminent biochemist and all that — and I wasn’t inclined to pass up a trip to the Keys. I’m a bit intrigued by all the secrecy, I must say.’

‘Oh, that. It’s very secret on Pelican,’ she said, smiling.

I had an idea that she didn’t really feel like smiling when she said that. It was a shadowed smile… or, perhaps, a smile that foreshadowed something.

‘It must be… since I have no idea what it is.’

‘Pelican Cay. It’s an island.’

‘And that’s where Elston is?’

‘Um hum.’

The bartender came wandering down the bar, flicking at the polished surface with a towel. I asked Mary if she would like a drink and she said, ‘Of course.’ I liked her immediately. I also thought it could do no harm to talk to her. I had no idea how much she knew about why Elston had summoned me, but if it was anything at all, it was more than I knew. I was completely in the dark and curious about the things that — that no one should ever have to know. We got a couple of tall rum punches and went back to the booth. I sat opposite with a starfish ashtray between us, both of us in cool shadows.

‘Are you his assistant?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, laughing. ‘Do I look like a biochemist?’

‘Not really.’

‘I’m relieved. Actually, I live on Pelican. I’m one of the few natives, a real Conch. I was born there and never saw much reason to leave. Until recently…’ she added.

I waited but she didn’t follow that up.

I said, ‘Have you any idea what it’s about?’

She shrugged and sipped her drink, gazing at me across the rim of the glass.

‘Or why Elston chose me?’

‘Ummm,’ she said.

‘I don’t know if you’re familiar with my sort of work…’

‘Don’t be modest.’

‘… but I don’t write scientific papers and it seems… well… strange that Elston wanted to talk to me. Intriguing, in point of fact. A biochemist contacting a scandalmonger…’

Mary was laughing again. She said, ‘Dr Elston chose you because of your well-known discretion.’

‘Hardly.’

‘Oh, yes. When you refused to reveal your sources to the investigating committee after you broke the Warden scandal, and risked going to jail… well, he feels he can trust you.’

‘It’s like that, is it?’

‘Like that,’ she said, suddenly serious.

Well, she obviously knew something. But she was fencing. I thought I might engage her at an oblique angle. I said, ‘You know, Mary, I don’t like being an investigative reporter.’ She blinked, surprised. I managed a sheepish grin. ‘I’ve always wanted to write a novel,’ I told her, and that was true enough, but to my purpose. ‘I’ve tried. Not recently. Platitudes have bested me… and time… and following the course of least resistance. I make investigations and I write about them. I’ve acquired a certain reputation. And yet… the media deform truth. And that, in itself, is a truth. A fact, given to the masses, becomes malleable, as if the printed page were a distorted looking-glass, casting anamorphic reflections. The most blatant lie acquires an aura of truth, truth, in turn, is shadowed and pigeonholed and compartmented to fit the reader’s mind.’ I shrugged, not looking at her. I was turning the starfish ashtray on the table between us.

‘Strange talk from a newspaperman,’ she said.

‘Not so very strange. I’m no Diogenes, holding up a lantern. And yet… I do write the truth, be that as it may. And I want people to be truthful with me.’ I looked up. ‘Mary?’ I said.

She flushed slightly.

She leaned closer; said, ‘Look, I’d better level with you, Mister Harland…’

‘Jack,’ I said. ‘And yes, you had.’

‘All right. Jack. It was my idea to write to you. I sort of talked Dr Elston into it, with the help of a few drinks and a little flirting. Oh, he wanted to. I didn’t force the idea on him. But he would never have done it, on his own. What I’m saying is… you may have come down here for nothing. Elston may not go through with it. But I figured it was worth a chance.’

‘Then you do know what it’s about?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Now she was playing with the ashtray, turning it back and forth like the pointers in a game of chance. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. But I do know he’s doing something, some sort of work, that he doesn’t want to do. He let me know that much, no more. He was… disturbed. More than disturbed. I got the impression that he’s in deeper than he intended, that his work is being applied in a manner of which he does not approve.’ She had a way of gesturing when she spoke, as if punctuating her words and making her statements profound — but it didn’t seem intentional or mannered. She was just a lively girl who got things done… who had got me to the Keys. ‘Dr Elston is a timid man, the classic scientist who knows little of humanity. He can be manipulated just as he manipulates his chemicals — just as I manipulated him into writing you. He was afraid to meet you today, Jack… afraid someone would find out.’ My eyebrows went up. ‘Oh, no, he’s not being restricted in any way, nothing like that. But he’s afraid. Afraid of his employers, afraid of his work. He trusts me, probably because I have no connection with those employers… or perhaps because he needs to trust someone. But he’s given me no details.’

‘So you’re just a catalyst, causing reactions.’

‘That’s about it.’

‘Who are these employers?’

‘The government. A government agency.’

‘Which agency?’

‘I don’t know.’

I looked at her. She said, ‘Really… I don’t.’

‘It’s getting interesting.’

‘It can get more than interesting, I think. This agency has taken over a large portion of Pelican… fenced it off in a compound, posted guards all around it… mined the island. And this happened just after the ban on germ warfare.’

She gazed thoughtfully at me.

‘Is that it? Germ warfare?’

‘Not that, I think. But something… that should be stopped. Elston wants it stopped. I suggested you. He’d heard of you, vaguely; he’s not the sort to read newspapers. I told him about the Warden thing and convinced him that you could let the world know what’s being done here, and thereby halt it, without implicating Elston. So that’s the story, so far. I can’t guarantee that he will talk to you, after all. As I said, he’s a timid man; he may well back out. He looked a bit sick after telling me as much as he did, in fact. But I think he will and I hope he does.’ She smiled. ‘I have an interest in this, you see. I bitterly resent them ruining Pelican. It was a paradise, now it’s like a prison. Why, they even fenced off my favourite beach!’ Then, serious again, she said, ’Whatever they’re doing there, it’s really very secret. Since the agency took over, we can’t even get an open telephone line out; have to channel all calls through a switchboard within the compound. That island is my home, Jack; you can imagine how I — and the other residents — feel about it. Jack, I work for the Coast Guard. Just a part-time thing. There’s a supply depot there and a lighthouse just off shore and… well, even the Coast Guard has to go through the switchboard, even the lighthouse is only connected to Pelican by a cable. No radio. One of my duties, in fact, is to talk to the lighthouse keeper. Sam Jasper. He’s very talkative.’

’A talkative lighthouse keeper?’

’Yep. Phones in all the time. You think maybe he’s in the wrong line of work?’

’Well, talking to you is… interesting.’

’I hope it pays off,’ she said.

I nodded. Our drinks were finished. I would have liked another and she was looking at her glass, but she had piqued my interest; I figured this might be a bigger story than I’d planned on. I said, ‘Shall we go, then?’ and we went.

In the launch, which she handled expertly, she told me a bit about Pelican Cay. I took my shirt off and leaned against the gunwale, enjoying the spray and listening to her. Pelican, she told me, was a small island with one town looping in a crescent around a natural harbour. It had a colourful history. The first inhabitants had been wreckers, salvaging cargo from ships that had gone aground on the unmarked reefs — and were often lured onto those reefs by the wreckers. I raised an eyebrow at that; she shrugged; that was how it had been. Construction of the lighthouse had finished the wrecking industry in the mid nineteenth century, however, and the locals had turned their bloodstained hands to cigar-making, salt refining and, of course, fishing. It had been as populous and important as most of the Keys, for a while, but had declined after the Overseas Highway was completed in 1938, when the linked islands became more accessible and convenient. Mary was pleased by that; she liked Pelican as it was — as it had been before the agency moved in.

‘Of course, that’s exactly why they did move in,’ she said. ‘It’s an easy place to guard, to keep isolated and secure — and any stranger who showed up would be instantly noticed. Oh, the odd tourist makes the crossing… not enough to spoil things, though — they add to the local colour by contrast, bring in some money and, most important, give the locals an audience to which to play. We Conches are all born actors.’ She turned to smile at me. I recalled the way she gestured when she spoke. ‘Shrimpers, fishermen, Cuban refugees, retired smugglers… but they all play up to their images.’

She made Pelican sound pleasant and I could well understand why she resented the intruders.

‘What about accommodation?’ I asked.

‘There’s an inn. It functions mostly as a bar these days, but they’ll give you a room. The Red Walls.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the name of the place. The Red Walls. Red as in blood, don’t you know? The walls awash with blood. Used to be a smugglers’ den and the shrimpers drink there now… quite a history to the place, probably a story in itself. The locals will be pleased to give you all the gory details… embellished, no doubt; they’re rather proud of the reputation, they cherish infamy. Anyhow, you can check in there and I’ll let Dr Elston know where you are and try to get him to contact you, all right?’

I agreed.

‘And maybe…’ a spray of salt water slanted from her cheek; she paused; then: ‘Maybe you’d better not tell anyone who you are… why you’re here, I mean. Just pretend to be a tourist. I don’t expect they’d like it, if they knew Elston was talking to you… and he will feel better about it, anyway.’

‘Oh, I’ll use my famous discretion,’ I said.

‘I don’t know if they’d..’ she hesitated, then shrugged. She didn’t continue. A moment later she pointed. ‘There’s the lighthouse.’

I saw the grey tower rising up, mild surf breaking at the base. I could make out the low outline of the island. The launch was quick and the island came up fast. I saw a stretch of water between the island and the lighthouse and, anticipating my query, Mary said, ‘The lighthouse is off shore… sort of. About a hundred yards out, but there’s a rock reef connecting the two so that you can walk out at low tide, if you’re nimble. A reef and…’ she smiled… ‘a cable, connecting Sam Jasper to me. He’ll be getting twitchy by now, with no one to talk to all morning.’

‘Well, you are nice to talk to.’

She looked at me, tilting an eyebrow.

‘The sheriff thinks so, too,’ she said. ‘He’s my boyfriend.’

I said, ‘So much for that.’

Pelican Cay came up.

White as bleached bones in the sunlight, it dazzled; the glare made the shadows solid slabs of blackness so that, adjacent, they did not relate. Light and shade did not flow together through grey transition, they existed in separate dimensions… just as the island could be perceived on two levels — a pleasant, sunwashed isle… and the base whence wreckers had lured ships to destruction. Now, physically divided by the fenced compound, the dichotomy was truer than insight, more solid than a mood. Seagulls screamed as they dived at the water… and the timeless cry could have been the wail of doomed sailors drowning in the surf. The heat was so great it seemed to obey gravity, heavy on my shoulders and, in that glaring heat, I felt a chill…

Then we were moving into the harbour, gliding past shrimp boats and a few cabin cruisers and some naked kids who were jumping off the dock. I noticed at least three waterfront bars. The screaming of the gulls faded; there was nothing sinister in the happy cries of the children. My mood passed.

Mary brought the launch into the Coast Guard slot and jumped nimbly out. I figured she would have no trouble crossing over the reef to the lighthouse. I tossed my overnight bag onto the dock and stepped out with seemly caution. Since she was the sheriff’s girl there was little sense in risking a soaking by feigning nimbleness. She tied the boat to the iron stanchion with a deft, intricate loop that looked, to me, like a Gordian knot. We walked up the wooden planking and I paused to put my shirt on. I had already started to burn. The docks were fenced off and there was a customs shed, but the gates were open and no one stopped us as we passed into the street. A pair of shore patrolmen sauntered past, all dazzling white. They looked into one of the bars. They appeared more wistful than dutiful. The dark interior was inviting, textured shadows unlike those black umbrae that had so strangely chilled me as we sailed, in. But Mary said she would walk me to the inn and we set off along the curved waterfront. Most of the town’s business fronted on the harbour and we walked past a turtle kraal, a ship’s chandler, a Cuban cigar-maker busy in his window and a couple more bars. Then we came to the jail and the sheriff came out.

He was a tall, fair-haired man with dark aviator glasses and a chin as big and square as a boot. He had a big, white Stetson in his hand and when he saw Mary he put the hat on, so that he could take it off again as he greeted her. He gave her a big smile and then looked suspiciously at me — not official suspicion.

‘Jerry, this is Jack Harland. Jack, Jerry Muldoon, Pelican’s only lawman.’

The suspicion left his face. He stuck his hand out and we shook. His hand was as big and square as his chin and I was surprised at how pleasant his smile was — one of those natural, easy smiles.

Mary said, ‘Jerry knows why you’re here.’

‘Good thing, too,’ he said. ‘I saw the two of you a-walkin’ together, took it to mind that he was bent on courtin’ you.’

‘Oh, no!’ I said, hastily. ‘I’m not even nimble.’

‘Ummm. What I mean is, it’s a good thing you’re here, not that I knew why you were here.’

‘Well, it’s a nice change to be welcomed by the law,’ I told him. I meant it, too. I had been advised to get out of town by sundown a few times. I said, ‘I take it you resent this… agency, too?’

‘Sure do. Damn usurpers.’

‘What?’

‘Usurpers,’ he said.

He put his hat on again and pulled the brim down to the top of his dark glasses, so that he had to tilt his head back to look at me.

‘That’s what they done, they done usurped my authority,’ he told me. ‘I was the only law on this here island and I admired to have it thataway, oh-yuh.’ His jaw worked as if he were chewing tobacco, but he wasn’t. Then he grinned and Mary giggled and I saw he was joking — playing his role. But joking on the square, I thought.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked, dropping the accent.

‘I was taking Jack to the Red Walls.’

Jerry laughed. ‘You’ll get your ear bent there, Jack. All those old boys that can’t forget the old days — nor remember them with any accuracy, either. They get them a landlubber, they plumb wear his earholes out.’ He slipped in and out of his rednecked accent and grace. ‘It was quite a place, though, going back a few years, from what I hear. Had the plumbers in there, year or two back, they were fitting a new toilet. Had to rip the plaster out; found eighteen wallets that had been slipped down a hole in the wall, where the whores and pickpockets slung them after they took the money out. Shootin’s, stabbin’s… you name it. Not the same now, though; tamed down. Or so I hear. Couldn’t say for sure, ‘cause there’s no way I’m gonna walk into that place on my own.’

‘You’ll scare Jack,’ Mary chided him, embarrassing me and making me wish I had deboated more nimbly.

‘Naw,’ Jerry said. ‘What I hear, Mr Harland is used to playing with the big boys. He won’t scare. Although, come to think of it, I ain’t so sure that these ain’t the real big boys he come to play with here.’

He looked thoughtful, rubbing that incredible jaw.

‘Might be sort of scary, at that,’ he said.

Jerry Muldoon looked like he wouldn’t be scared of a grizzly bear, and his point was well taken…

The Red Walls was a solid mahogany structure built to withstand hurricanes, which it had. My room was adequate and had an air-conditioning unit in the window. The bathroom was down the hall, but that was no inconvenience, for I was the only guest. I hadn’t been asked to register. I took a cold shower, changed my clothing and went down to the bar to wait. Mary had to get in touch with Dr Elston in person, not trusting the telephone, and I had nothing to do but wait. The barroom was impressive, a huge chamber that would have made a passable cathedral, with arches and beams across the ceiling. The walls, disappointingly, weren’t red. They were white. And they were slatted like Venetian blinds, so that they could be opened to take advantage of the sea breeze. They were open when I came down, laying bars of sunlight across the floor in a grid. I took a wicker stool at the bar and the barman was pleased to have a customer — the shrimpers and fishermen who made up the steady clientele were plying their trade at that hour. I ordered a tall rum punch and the barman waited across the counter, fidgeting, obviously feeling obligated to entertain me with tales of the notorious Red Walls. I didn’t feel much like talking. I was thinking about Elston and speculating on what he would, I hoped, tell me. But the bartender looked so hopeful that I figured it was only common decency to give him an opening.

‘Sort of quiet here today,’ I said.

He beamed.

‘The place’ll get livelier, later on,’ he assured me. ‘When the boats come in. Not as lively as it used to be, mind you. I could tell you a tale or two…’

‘Which you no doubt will. ’

‘… about this place that’d curl your toes. Yessir. This here place was known far and wide. Why, I remember…’

He talked. It was quite interesting, really, and I listened and made proper responses and drank a second rum. He was still talking when Elston came in…

‘… So, like I say, there was thirteen shrimpers standing at the bar here. This is going back ten, fifteen years. They was standing here, elbows on the bar, drinking away and minding their business, when what should happen but this jigaboo walks in. He’s got him a gun. In he walks, bold as brass, says, “This is a stick-up!” Now, these thirteen shrimpers are all facing the bar, they don’t pay him no mind. He waves the gun about. He’s waving it, he says, “I say, this is a stick-up!” Well, sir, these thirteen shrimpers looks at one another and shakes their heads. Then they all turn around, nice and easy, all at the same time. There’s thirteen of em, mind. And twelve of them got guns!’ He chuckled. ‘So there this jigaboo stands, he’s got one gun and twelve shrimpers are all pointing guns at him. What’s he do? Why, he puts his gun away and he says, “I guess I done robbed the wrong bar!” And he ups and buys a drink for the house. Yessir! Things was plenty lively in them days…’

The barman was chuckling merrily and preparing to launch into another story, but I shoved my glass out for a refill in order to distract him.

Elston was standing just inside the door.

I knew right away that it was Elston from Mary Carlyle’s description of the man… timid. He had stepped to the side of the entrance, into the shadows, and his eyes shifted furtively around the big room. I raised my hand, casually, and he nodded with a quick, jerky movement. He looked out the door, then came across the room with a crablike, sidewinder gait.

‘Harland?’ he whispered.

‘Yeah. Shall we go up to my room?’

He hesitated; then: ‘Better stay here, just as if we had met socially, at the bar… as one does.’

He didn’t strike me as the type to meet socially at a bar, but I nodded. The bartender, looking grieved that I had found another conversationalist, slid my drink across the counter. He looked at Elston, but Elston didn’t notice and didn’t order a drink. His eyes still flitted about.

‘Let’s go down to the end of the bar,’ I suggested.

I took another seat there. Elston stood. The bartender, glowering, began washing glasses.

‘What’s it all about?’ I asked.

’You won’t mention my name?’

’If you don’t want me to.’

‘You swear you won’t bring me into it?’

‘Boy Scout’s oath and all that.’

’This isn’t funny, Harland, not at all funny.’

’Sorry.’

He nodded. He said, ‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea. I let Mary talk me into this. But…’ He took a deep breath, as if about to submerge under water, then very quickly he said, ‘I want you to expose what is being done here before it goes any further. It must contravene the ban on germ warfare or something, some treaty or agreement… I know nothing of such matters, but I’m sure that public outrage…’

’I’m no scientist, so if this is technical. ’

’Technical? Well, of course it’s technical… my work, I mean. But… gruesome, that’s what it is. Gruesome. It was bad enough with the animals, but now that they have determined to use human volunteers — ’ He shuddered and rolled his eyes. His whisper was a rasping thing in that great, vaulted chamber. It was eerie.

‘Dr Elston… if all you want is to prevent this research, or whatever it is, why don’t you simply resign? Refuse?’

’It’s too late for that!’ he snapped. He had spoken loudly, and he shot a startled glance down the bar, but the bartender was taking no interest in our talk. In a lower tone, he said, ‘It’s done, God help me. My assistants could carry on without me, at this point… assistants provided by them. And I’m not sure — ’ with his eyes flitting about ’ — that they’d let me resign. I’m afraid of them, Harland.’

’Who are they?’

’A branch of the government… nameless. The navy provides ships and guards, but I’m not concerned with them, it’s the others… the civilians… the ones who represent… ruthless men, Harland. If you had seen what I have seen…’

He seemed to be seeing those things now, looking through me. He was a shaken man, and frightened. I didn’t like him, but I felt a touch of pity; perhaps some sympathetic vibration of his fear.

’You’ll tell me?’

’Yes, yes. I will give you the details and you must reveal them to the world, without implicating me. Surely that will be enough, this fiendish thing will be stopped once it has come to light.’

I nodded. I took out my notepad and pen. Elston chewed his lip. He placed one hand flat on the counter and, not looking at me, he said, ‘It began… it was pure research, my goal was to treat madness… not to create it.’ He glanced at me and I moved my pen, just scribbling; waiting for details. He was grimacing as he continued, ‘My research was in chemical lobotomy… not a pleasant thing in itself, but in certain cases… it is sometimes necessary to make the incurables… obedient. I trust you will understand that?’ He looked at me doubtfully, the sort of man who must always preface an opinion by a justification. I sort of nodded. That he was taking such pains — and they were pains, they registered physically on his countenance — to excuse his involvement removed any lingering doubts I might have had, about this being a hoax, at any rate.

‘I meant only good,’ he went on, still staring at me, gauging my reaction or looking for scepticism. I kept my face blank. I had written one word: Lobotomy. A Pandora’s Box of a word, opening up dark implications just as the lobotomist opened up a skull.

‘Go on,’ I said, unwilling to express the vindication he sought as he searched my face.

‘My work came to their attention. This agency of the government. They saw possibilities that had never occurred to me — nor ever would have. I was not… given all the facts. I was given a government grant and brought to this place, provided with all the facilities to continue my research, assigned eager — too eager — assistants. I worked. That is what I have always done. I have few friends and little social life. I work. Naively, I still believed I was in control of my research, that I was working towards my own goals.’ His lips tightened in a bitter smile. ‘Well, gradually, I came to see what they intended.’ He paused, twitching his cheek up several times, as if chewing and tasting his words. He did not relish the flavour of those syllables. ‘If only I had renounced them then. I was still important to the project, it was still mine and without me… but I did not renounce them and there’s no sense speaking of what has not been.’

He dropped his head. With his face still twitching, it seemed he was gnawing through his breast.

‘They did not threaten me — but the threat was there; they spoke of the Russian menace — they were menacing. And then there were… volunteers…’ My pen moved on the paper. I wrote: Volunteers. There were two words on the paper that should not have been linked and an icy sensation climbed up my spine.

’Volunteers,’ he repeated. ‘Say, rather, men to whom the alternative was worse. Well, who thought it worse, not knowing…’ His head le snapped up abruptly. He had to look directly at me as he said the next words. ‘There are chemicals, Harland… chemicals that warp the fabric of the soul, that alter the structure of the mind as surely as the keenest scalpel. This treatment. ’

He stopped.

Loudly, he said, ‘So I don’t get much time for fishing, but I understand it’s good here… I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourself, Mister… I didn’t get your name…’

I blinked in surprise; Elston was very white.

’Well, it was pleasant meeting you,’ he said, and he looked wildly about for a reason to be there. He snatched up my drink and gulped at it, then clutched it possessively, leaving me no reason for being there. Then he nodded curtly and brushed past me. Bewildered, I turned, getting an elbow on the bar and I saw the man who had just come in — the man Elston had seen a moment sooner.

He wore a dark suit and necktie in that blistering heat and he wasn’t sweating. He had steel framed spectacles and his hair was close cropped and he looked about ten pounds underweight — but it was underweight the way an athlete in training is underweight. He was heading for the bar, not looking at us. The open walls had laid a grid of sunlight across the floor and he moved through that grid as if describing an arc or a graph, not so much a man as — a statistic.

Elston crossed in front of him, nodding en passant.

The man nodded back.

Elston took two more steps, then turned jerkily back.

’Oh, hello, Larsen,’ he said, as if he’d just identified the newcomer.

’Doctor,’ said Larsen.

’I just stopped in for a drink, you know,’ Elston said.

’Uh, huh,’ said Larsen.

’Well… back to the grind,’ Elston said and he walked to the door with his shoulders squared, like a man anticipating a bullet in the back. He went out. For a moment, framed in the doorway, he looked two-dimensional, a flat shadow of himself. Then he was gone and Larsen as was standing at the bar.

I put my notebook away.

’Nice day,’ I said.

‘They’re always nice here.’

’Hot, though. You must be boiling in that suit.’

’Not really.’

The barman came down and Larsen ordered a beer. The barman served it without a word, the same barman who had talked nonstop to me. Larsen didn’t touch the glass.

‘Tourist, are you?’

‘That’s right. For the fishing.’

‘Um. Staying long?’

‘Just a day or two.’

‘Uh huh,’ he said.

He picked up the glass and turned to face me. His eyes were like lenses. I felt I was being filmed and filed away behind those steel-rimmed sockets. They drew me like a vacuum. He sipped his beer and I drank the last of my rum and all the while he watched me with his eyes glinting behind his spectacles.

Larsen had the one beer and left.

I felt he was taking a part of me with him, that he had dragged some intangible segment from my spirit, unravelled a thread of my soul and wound it up again inside his skull, where he would dissect it at his leisure. I was sweating heavily and it had nothing to do with the heat now. It was the sweat of anxiety and Larsen had pulled it from my pores.

The bartender nodded at the door.

‘One of them geezers from the compound, we don’t care to have their trade. Damn liberty, it is, them comin’ here. That guy you was talkin’ to… he was really filling you ear, eh? He come from the compound?’

‘I don’t know him,’ I said.

‘That a fact? Why, the way he was gibbering away, I figured you was old friends. Some folks is like that, though… they’ll bend anyone’s ear, even a total stranger’s.’

He proceeded to manifest that fact while I considered Elston and Larsen… what Elston had managed to tell me and how Larsen had affected me. I was truly interested now… and disturbed. The big room with the open walls had been cheerful: now it was atrabilious, Larsen had left gloom in his wake. The bright grid of sunlight remained, yet now those lines did not illuminate the cathedral distances — they segmented the room in a sequence of cramped oblongs, like crypts in a graveyard.

I wondered if Elston had been frightened off for good or if he would contact me again? Perhaps through Mary Carlyle, certainly not by telephone.

Then, thinking about the telephone and realising I might have to stay on Pelican longer than I’d expected, I asked the bartender to put me through to the Mangrove Inn. He did so, grumbling about the delay as the call went through the switchboard and, taking the phone, I felt sure that my call was being monitored. But that was all right. I told the owner of the Mangrove that I’d decided to spend a day or two on Pelican and asked if my car would be all right in his parking lot. He assured me it would and assumed I would be fishing. I didn’t disabuse him — or the monitor — of that. The bartender had been listening as well, and after I hung up he spent some time telling me where to get the best value in hiring a boat. I told him I’d surely take his advice. I supposed that I should, too, to validate my cover story, but I didn’t want to go fishing and cursed Elston for throwing that at me in his panic. I was no fisherman and my inept attempts would be a dead giveaway. But then, rationalising nicely, I figured that the average fisherman spends more time drinking than fishing and it would look odd were I to follow an aberrant routine. It would look… fishy. So I had another drink, quite in line with my cover — and needed it, after being in the line of Larsen’s gaze…

In my room I stretched out on the bed and glanced at the meagre notes I’d taken. There wasn’t much there, certainly nothing concrete, but the words were chilling. Lobotomy is a harsh word, not softened when prefaced by chemical… no more on the page than in the wreckage of a mind. I read the words, aware that my lips were moving as I mouthed the unsavoury syllables, then I tore the page out, and the two pages beneath where an impression might have been indented, and I burned them in the ashtray and flushed the ashes down the toilet in the hallway. I was taking this seriously now, absolutely. Larsen’s ominous appearance had impressed me more than Elston’s aborted statement. There was something cold and dangerous about Larsen. Not a viciousness so much as a void of compassion, a man to whom charity would be alien. He had the eye of a serpent and I’d fluttered like a bird, mesmerised by his gaze. I felt that, had he moved towards me, I would not have been able to retreat; that he’d pinned me with his eyes like a moth on a display board whilst he studied the texture of my spirit, traced the veins of my instincts and laid bare the articulation of my bones.

I was still sweating from the encounter.

I moved to the window and gazed out. A middle-aged man slowly and methodically pedalled past on a bicycle. He had a terrycloth sweatband around his high-domed, glabrous brow. His Adidas shoes went up and down on the pedals. His bony back was bent deeply over the dropped handlebars. The bike was a ten-speed, on an island devoid of hills where those multiple gearings were as useless as the fashion that compelled him to have them. Man had spent the long eons rising from the slime: he had learned to walk upright: now racing handlebars were pushing his face once more, unseeing, into the mud. I was feeling distinctly uncharitable towards the human race — a legacy, no doubt, of Larsen’s gaze. I mourned Darwin. The industrial revolution had put paid to evolution; now giant, pea-brained athletes may outlast the dinosaurs and wizened accountants survive to breed; millions of joggers jarring their spines will fall in love over Perrier water and produce little joggers to trot through a world where trend has superceded evolution.

And men like Larsen existed.

Elston could well have been a bleeding heart, panicking for slight reason, but Larsen — there was a good reason for him to be there. I lay on the bed, waiting. I didn’t expect Elston to contact me again so soon, probably not until Mary Carlyle inspired him once more, but I waited, anyhow, and after a while I slept and when I woke up I thought, for a moment, that the walls were vibrating or grating — as if all the violence that had taken place in this building in the past had somehow seeped into the fabric of the walls. I sat up. The vibrating slowed. It had been the drumming of my heart. Yet I had not been dreaming. I took a deep breath and smiled at my fanciful sensation. This strange island, with its sordid past, and its great panorama of pretence, was affecting me. But whatever was going on here, it was not supernatural.

Unnatural, perhaps.

My heartbeat was regular now.

I was hungry and decided to try the diner I’d noticed across the street.

The Fisherman’s Café, a long, narrow building much ravaged by time, was diagonally across the street from the Red Walls. It wasn’t elegant but it was handy. I went in, squinting from the dazzling sun, and took a seat at the chipped Formica counter. The Cuban counterman agreed to make a sandwich and served good coffee in a cracked mug. There was one other customer, an old fellow at the end of the counter. He had one eye, a greasy cap and leathery skin. After a while he walked down and stood beside me.

’I see you just come outta the Bloodbath.’

’I beg your pardon? What?’

He pointed across the street, his finger like a gnarled rope, his hand mangled from long years on the shrimp boats.

’Place there. See you come out.’

’Oh, the Red Walls? I did.’

’Yeah, that place. Bloodbath is what we calls it.’

I smiled at the idea that the Red Walls was too euphemistic for this old sailor.

’Ain’t no place now like that was then. My oh my, that was a place. That surely was a place.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

He squinted at me. Strangely enough, he squinted with the empty socket, not the eye.

’You’ll be no Conch, then?’

’No.’

’Didn’t think you was a Conch.’

’Coffee?’

’Wouldn’t say no.’

He sat on the stool beside me. The Cuban slid a mug across and the old man enfolded it in his remarkable hand.

’Lost an eye in there,’ he said.

He was peering down into his coffee mug and, for a moment, I thought that his eye had dropped in like a lump of sugar and he was wondering if he should stir it.

‘In the Bloodbath,’ he said. ‘What you call the Red Walls. That’s where I lost my eye. You notice I only got the one eye? That’s ‘cause I lost it in there. Fightin’.’

’Oh,’ I said.

‘Cuban fella and me, had to get at it. Over a woman, you know. Quite the woman. No better’n she ought to be, but a good old gal. Old Jenny what they called the Wolfgirl, on accounta how she used to howl. Howlin’ fool, she was. Dead now, Jenny. Forget how she died. This big Cuban and me, we got down to it with fishknives. Not like you see in the moving pictures, no sir. We was sword fightin’, up and it down the bar. Hunks of flesh and bone flying all over the place. I flipped a big chunk of shoulder right off of him. That’s how I lost my eye. Knife got wedged in his tendons, see, so that I had to sort of lever it out like haulin’ in on an anchor. That’s when he got my eye, while I was liftin’ his shoulder off. Figured we was even. Neither of us relished fightin’ much after that. Worse on him, really. Big, strappin’ fella, worked on the docks, weren’t much use there after he lost that big chunk of shoulder. Hanged hisself, in the end.’

He turned the mug around in his hand like the memories unwinding in his mind.

‘That was in the Bloodbath, too, come to think of it. Nothin’ to do with me, though, unless maybe he was broodin’ and mopin’ about his shoulder. Yep. Got to feelin’ morose, the way some of these Cuban fellas get to feelin’, got him a rope and walked in the bar, just plain announced he was aimin’ to hang hisself. Plenty of fellas in there, friends of his, they tell him he hadn’t ought to do that, but he says his mind is plumb made up. Don’t even care if he has to go to Hell ‘cause of it. Throws the rope over one of them big beams up to the ceiling, puts the noose around his neck and commences to haul away. Well, it was plain as day he was never gonna hang hisself that way. Plain as the nose on your face.’ He squinted at me, the empty socket closing like an envelope. ‘Say, I ain’t borin’ you, am I?’

‘Not at all,’ I told him.

He nodded and went on, ‘We all got to feelin’ sorry for him. He looked so danged foolish, tuggin’ away with his eyes poppin’ out, standin’ on his tiptoes. One of his friends asked if he wanted some help. So he sort of nodded, looked like he nodded… hard to tell, his head in the noose and all. So three or four of his buddies got the end of the rope and give him a hand; hauled him off the floor and tied the end of the rope to the bar rail. Brass, it was. The bar rail. He kicked around awhile and we had some drinks. Then we got to thinkin’ as he might of changed his mind and we cut him down but it was too late, if’n he did change his mind, ‘cause he was already hanged. Be a bitch, he did change his mind.’

He giggled with fond memories, a man whose history was carved upon his body in runic scars and wrinkles and who added to his substance by subtracting an eye.

He saw I was fascinated.

‘Say, can I get some rum in this coffee?’

‘All right.’

The Cuban pulled an unlabelled bottle out and sloshed a healthy portion in his mug. The old man took a big gulp. He had a more interesting delivery than the bartender and I wanted to hear more. I said, ‘Things like that don’t happen so much these days, huh?’

‘Not so much, not at the Bloodbath.’ He gave me another eyeless squint. ‘Strange things happen, though. Maybe even stranger than what usedta be. Not so natural, maybe.’ Now he was squinting at his cup, with his good eye. I nodded to the Cuban, who poured some more rum in. There was more rum than coffee now, and the old man stared into the amber fluid as if seeking inspiration reflected in the surface. He looked vaguely uncomfortable.

‘Things like fightin’ and hangin’, they is natural enough. Thing do what I saw the other mornin’, now… that was strange. Happen it’s the strangest thing I ever see…’

His voice trailed off. I felt he wanted encouragement — a proud man who wished to pay for his rum with words — and said, ‘What was that?’ but he didn’t seem to hear me. He was thinking, either choosing his words or gathering his recollections. Then he looked up and said, ‘Say, now… you wouldn’t be connected with this government thing here, would you?’

’No. I’m just…’ I hesitated. I had been about to tell him that I was just a tourist, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to lie to this old man. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Didn’t figure you was. You don’t look like most of them government Johnnies. Thought as I’d ask, though. On account of… they got lots of security up to the compound,’ he added. I realised that he was actually debating whether to continue; it didn’t seem in character. For some reason he was wary. But then his basic nature won out and he began to speak.

’I got a boat,’ he said. ‘Used to be I did a bit of free trading, you take my point. Well, now, other side of the island there is this little cove, place you can land and nobody sees you. ‘Cept you can’t land there no more, they told me to bugger off. But they don’t give a hoot what’s on my boat, nothin’ to do with customs duty, just don’t want me there. Well, I tell you this ‘cause it was around there I saw this strange thing. Maybe three weeks ago, it was after they told me not to land there no more, but I had to go sneakin’ back. I’d left some crates there, things what I didn’t want found. Nothin’ bad, nothin’ like dope or stuff, just some duty free stuff from the islands. Anyhow, I sneaked back there, took the dingy so I wouldn’t make no noise and got to the cove all right; got ashore and dug up these crates. Then, just ‘cause I was there, I went on up to the fence — this big fence they has built around the compound — just to have me a look. It was dawn. Just before dawn, sky sort of pearl-coloured and plenty of shadow for me to stand in. Well, that’s when I see this strange thing.’

I was well and truly interested now. I nodded to the Cuban and got some rum in my own coffee.

‘Happen you won’t believe this I’m saying,’ he went on. ‘Tell you. My name’s Tate. John Tate, although of late they’s taken to callin’ me One-Eye Tate. That don’t matter. What I mean is, you can ask anyone about John Tate, they’ll tell you he’s an honest fella; might say he talks a piece too much but that what he says is straight. You can ask. Thing is, this I’m tellin’ you, I don’t believe it myself. I mean, I saw it, but I don’t believe it, you follow me.’

I nodded. I had taken but a single bite from my sandwich. The Cuban was washing plates at the far end of the counter. Tate pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket and extracted one. It was wrinkled and a fine dust of dry tobacco spilled from the end.

‘Well, while I’m standin’ there in the shadows, just without the fence, a group of these Johnnies comes down from the big building. Laboratory, I guess it is. I was just about to light a cigarette, just stopped from strikin’ the match in time; they’d of see me, I hit the match.’ Now he lighted the crinkled cigarette, as if he’d been waiting to use it as evidence as he gave witness. Dry smoke writhed up around the grotto of his empty eye socket. ‘So down they come, there’s half a dozen of ‘em, two of ‘em got white coats like doctors or scientists and three of ‘em are wearing dark suits. You see these dark suits guys around town, time to time. Don’t like the weave of ‘em, myself. But it’s the other guy, the sixth guy, that takes my interest. He’s wearin’ a white thing, not like the doctors, more like a patient wears in hospital. And he looks… unnatural. Looks like a robot, maybe. Or like one of them zombies what you get down to Haiti and Jamaica, them living dead Johnnies, you see it? Face all blank, eyes all rolled back white, he’s to droolin’ down his chin somewhat. Walks stiff. Knees and elbows ain’t got much bend to ‘em. Well, sir, I figure he’s a pretty sick fella, and naturally I wonder why they’s walkin’ him down to the beach at dawn.’

He shifted on his stool. He had the mug in one hand and the wrinkled cigarette in the other and it appeared he couldn’t decide which to lift to his mouth. And it seemed a monumental decision; he looked nervous and jumpy.

‘I hunker down to have me a observation,’ he said, speaking more slowly now. ‘Down they come. They stop and then I see this big slab of concrete. It’s real big, big square block with an iron ring set in the top. Thing must of weighed, I don’t know… must of weighed plenty more’n a ton. Well, they gather around it. One of the dark suits takes the ring, gives it a pretty hard tug. Them dark suits is sort of skinny, but they looks to be strong enough. Slab of concrete don’t budge at all. Too heavy.’

Now Tate raised the coffee mug to his lips, very slowly, as if that, too, were too heavy. He sipped. Big veins stood out in his forearm and his hand was shaking slightly.

‘Dark suit fella nods; he’s satisfied.’

Tate nodded himself, not with satisfaction. He lowered the mug and raised the cigarette, both movements distinct, as if his arms were connected by a system of levers across his sunken chest. One went down and one went up. He moved by clockwork, timing his tale.

‘Then one of the doctors says to the sick fella, “Lift it.” No hemmin’ nor hawin’, just tells him to lift it. Now, I can see it ain’t possible for a man to lift it. Anyone can see that. ‘Ceptin’ this sick lookin’ Johnny. What’s he to do but step right up and take the iron ring in his right hand and commence to lift. Matter-of-fact, like it was a pillow. Don’t set his feet, don’t take no deep breath, nothin’. Just commences to lift. It was awful funny. Strange funny, I mean. Got some ground mist rising around them, sky all grey, they look strange standin’ around that concrete slab, like maybe they was worshippers at a tomb. And this guy is lifting!’

Tate lifted the mug, lowered it, lifted again; his leathery face was strained with the imagined effort.

‘I mean, his face don’t change none, it’s blank, got no expression to it, but he is liftin’ so hard I can hear his joints creak. He really thinks he can lift that slab!

‘Now, ain’t no man what could lift it, it’s plain too heavy, but he don’t know that. Ain’t no big guy, neither. The others are all watchin’ him and he’s liftin’ hard as he can and the slab ain’t shiftin’ at all, don’t move an inch. The doctor says, “Lift it,” again, but the guy is trying as hard as he can.

‘Then the real strange thing happens.’

He put the mug down on the counter with a solid clunk, as if he wanted no further part of it. The Cuban looked up. His hands made slippery sounds in the soapy water.

‘What I don’t believe, ‘ceptin’ I see it. I’ve been a fisherman in my time, I’ve fought the big fish for hours, game as any man. I know when even the strongest guy has got to give in. But this guy don’t know that. And all of a sudden there is this snap, just like a tree splitting in a hurricane. A loud crack…’ the onomatopoeia of the word struck him: he repeated it, ‘Crack,’ relishing the word… but not the image behind it.

‘And the guy has broke his own arm!’

Tate grimaced and gave a little shudder. ‘Well, the bones are stickin’ out from the elbow, where it has snapped.’ He touched the inside of his own elbow. ‘Blood is spoutin’ out on the slab. And the guy is still liftin’. With his arm ruined, broke near in half and the bones all sticking out splintered, he is still trying to lift that concrete slab!’

He shook his head and peered at me. He looked down. I suddenly realised that I was gripping my own arm, rubbing it. It ached, tingling with some sympathetic vibration. I saw that concrete slab like a sacrificial altar, running with blood. My hand seemed to be stuck to my arm; it was hard to pull it away. When I did, the effort registered in my spine… my backbone seemed to be raising as if, set with rings, it was a handle by which his tale was hoisting me.

‘I don’t blame you, you don’t believe it, but that is what I saw. Guy still had to expression, you could tell he was to feeli’n’ no pain, he’s heavin’ with that bust flipper… Made me sort of sick. Ain’t told no one about it before, ‘count of I hadn’t ought to be there and ‘cause I maybe didn’t have it all straight in my mind. But that’s what happened. No, I don’t blame you, you doubt it. Don’t believe it, myself.

‘But I saw it, though; that is the thing.’

I said, ‘I believe you, Tate.’

‘You do?’ He looked pleased.

I said, ‘Listen, could you take me to that place?’

Then he looked uncomfortable. He drained his cup and I nodded for a refill. The Cuban came down, his forearms lathered with soapsuds. He poured some rum. It didn’t make Tate look any more comfortable.

Tate said, ‘I don’t believe I fancy going to there again.’

I didn’t press him. I paid the tab and left without finishing the sandwich. Elston didn’t contact me, I turned in early and had unquiet dreams…

There had been wreckers.

This island had been founded and prospered upon wreckage, they had drawn innocent ships onto the reefs with false lights and butchered the sailors as they foundered in the surf. They had not been sadistic men, those wreckers, nor cruel for the sake of cruelty. It was simply what they did, a way of life.

And there was wreckage now — the broken spar of a shattered arm, the breeched hull of a mind… drawn by the false light of science beamed from such as Larsen’s eyes…

Unquiet dreams…

The sun, too hot to be contained, spread in a pale curtain across the sky. It was ten in the morning and I was walking the pebbled beach south of the town with some vague idea of having a look at the compound, or at least the surrounding fence. Elston hadn’t been in touch and I didn’t fancy spending the day waiting for a contact that might not come. The bartender at the Red Walls, drawing with his index finger in some spilled beer, had given me a rough idea of how the compound was fenced off and I knew I should come to that barrier soon. I would have liked to have a look at the cove on the far side of the island, and that immovable concrete slab, but knew that was only possible by boat. Nor would there be anything to see now. Just a slab of concrete. But the image that John Tate had stamped into my mind was graphic. He knew how to deliver a tale and I could visualise those men standing around the slab; could hear, in my mind, the terrible sound of shattering bones. I remembered Elston’s whispering, rasping voice, as well, and thought of the connection between the two… and of Larsen, with his eyes magnified in the lenses of his spectacles, glinting at me.

I scrambled over some layered limestone and at the highest point of the island, which was not very high, paused to fill my pipe and gaze out over the sea. The water was very clear. I could see the sandy bottom some eight feet below and, further out, the water bubbled green over a coral reef. The lighthouse, from there, seemed to be on the island, a fold of the landscape hiding the stretch of water between. Seagulls looped around the grey tower and the beacon flashed with regularity, almost invisible in the glaring sunlight. I wondered why Sam Jasper left the light on in the daytime — if it was normal procedure, or if he had simply forgotten? Sitting on the limestone shelf I smoked contemplatively for a while. But it was too hot to enjoy the tobacco. I tapped the pipe out and walked on and, in a short time, came upon the tall, metal-meshed fence. It ran down to the edge of the water and I could go no further. Beyond, I knew, was the beach that Mary liked and which was now barred to her.

Then, suddenly, I laughed.

There was a hole in the fence.

With all that supposedly tight security and the monitored telephones and the secrecy, it struck me as very funny that the fence should be breached. Several strands of wire had been snapped off and bent back. The gap was large enough for a man to slip through and, for a moment, I was sorely tempted to do so — to enter that secret compound and see what I could see. I had actually moved up to the fence before I thought better of it. I would not be able to get into the buildings and would no doubt be apprehended before I’d gone very far and it was hardly worth compromising myself for the sake of a stroll through the grounds. I still thought it amusing that the security had been breached and wondered if someone, like Mary, resenting the barrier, had cut through to get to the further beach — or simply to aggravate the intruders.

I pulled a strand of the wire out and inspected the end. It hadn’t been cut, it had been broken or twisted apart. It was heavy-gauge, hard to bend, and on one jagged end I noticed a dark stain. It looked like blood.

Then I heard voices.

I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded excited and they weren’t far away. I looked around, thinking to secrete myself and eavesdrop, but there was no place to hide near the fence. I didn’t care to be found there, by the break. Innocent of it, I nevertheless felt guilty. I turned away and went back over the limestone shelf and sat down on the far side. I felt excited, as if I were the quarry in a chase. The voices were yet closer and I risked a glance over the rocks.

Two men in naval whites were coming along the fence on the far side, following the line. As I looked, they came to the break. One of them cursed and both looked disturbed. They were armed and the flaps on their holsters were unsnapped. They looked around, standing back to back and whispering together over their shoulders. One shrugged. They were nervous and I caught a few snatches of their talk — enough to discern that they were arguing over who should remain guarding the break and who should report it. I wasn’t sure which duty was the less desirable one. But then one, the one who had cursed, said, ‘Well, what’s the point? He’s already got through, he won’t be coming back this way.’ They whispered some more, then both of them started back the way they’d come, heads turning as they looked around. I waited until they were out of sight. Then I slid down the limestone shelf and headed back to town.

The guards hadn’t thought the break in the fence was funny at all.

Neither did I now.

Walking back, I passed close to the lighthouse.

The rock bridge leading out was just emerging from the water, like a fossilised spine excavated by the tide. At the end of that spine the lighthouse reared up and wailed its mournful warning and the regular, pale beat of the beacon flashed like a charm in a hypnotist’s hand. I paused and gazed at that tall pharos rising from the sea. How like a symbol for man’s conceit, I thought. The grey tower aspires to the heavens, yet is rooted in the rocks… and man, considering the stars, disturbs the grass. What did man do, atop his shining towers, up there in those cloistered domains? Had he climbed there to a purpose, or was he no more than those swooping gulls who, having dined on filth, rise above the clouds?

I went on; I had decided to call on Mary Carlyle.

The Coast Guard Depot was a small white building with green shutters on the windows and a step before the door. It looked more like a country cottage than anything else. The door was open and I looked in. There was an office at the front and a store room at the back. Mary Carlyle was sitting behind a desk with some papers spread out in front of her and Jerry Muldoon was balanced on the corner of the desk, one leg swinging back and forth, hands clasped over his knee. Mary gave me a bright smile. Jerry might possibly have looked a little annoyed at my entrance, but nothing serious. I supposed they had been flirting.

’I see you survived the night,’ Jerry said.

’Neither stabbed nor shot, although I was well regaled with tales of stabbing and shooting.’

’Mostly true, probably.’

’Didn’t you arrest a man there once, Jerry?’ Mary put in, shifting some papers without looking at them.

’Why, yes. More than one, but only one that was serious. Shrimper that killed his wife, then got carried away and killed his wife’s sister and carved his own brother up a mite. Had to point my gun at him.’ He said that as if it distressed him. He shook his head once and his jaw was so heavy that it acted as a counterweight, so that his head swung a couple more times by inertia. ‘I locked this fella up in the jail and he couldn’t understand why. He kept asking me why in hell he had to get locked up. He was serious. I said, “For crissake, you just killed two women and wounded a guy,” and he looked at me, sort of puzzled; said, “But that was family.” And he meant it. Didn’t think the law had any business interfering in a family matter. They’re like that, shrimpers. He looked so puzzled that I felt sorry for him; for what he thought was unjust. Funny. Guy kills two women and I feel sorry for him.’

‘You’re all heart, Jerry.’

‘Why… yes,’ he said.

I said, ‘I don’t expect you’ve heard from Elston?’

‘Didn’t he see you? He promised…’

‘He stopped at the inn yesterday. But just as he was starting to talk, a man came in… man called Larsen…’ I saw that they both knew the man, or the name… ‘and scared Elston off. Not, I hope, for good.’

‘Oh. Damn,’ she said. ‘It’s no wonder. Larsen is head of security. Nasty sort, I should think. Did he suspect anything?’

‘I don’t know. He’s the sort of man that always looks suspicious. But Elston acted so damn flustered that he could have given it away.’

She gnawed at her lower lip.

‘I’ll talk to him…’ she began, and then the phone rang. She smiled. ‘But first I’ll have to talk to Sam Jasper, I see. That’s the direct line to the lighthouse.’

She reached for the phone. Jerry started to say something to me, then stopped. His teeth snapped shut. Mary’s face had recoiled from the receiver as the shout came out. Jerry and I looked at each other. We had heard the words clearly enough. ‘Help! For crissake, get some help out here…’ Mary, looking startled, held the phone out and the sheriff took it. The cry for help came again, ‘He’s trying to get into the lamproom! He’s trying to claw through the damn floor! Get me some help out here, Mary… fast!’

Jerry said, ‘Hold on! This is Muldoon. What in hell are you yelling about, Sam?’

‘Muldoon? Thank God. A berserker, Jerry. Tried to damn well kill me… after I went and saved his damn life, too… tell you he’s trying to claw through the floor… he’d of killed me, he hadn’t been full of water…’ His voice was disjointed and terrified. ‘Listen! You hear him clawing? Can’t you hear it?’

‘Hold on, old fella. I’ll be right out.’

Jerry hung up the phone with Sam Jasper still shouting over the cable. The last words I heard were, ‘… bastard bit me!’

Jerry looked at Mary.

‘Think he’s slipped a cog?’

‘No,’ she said, definitely.

‘Ummm. Fella that lives in a lighthouse… Well, I’d best get out there.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘How’s the tide?’

‘It’s out,’ she said. ‘But wait. Take the launch from here, that’ll be faster.’

He nodded. I touched his arm.

‘Mind if I come with you?’

He hesitated. ‘Can’t do no harm,’ he said. Then he said, ‘You got some idea on this?’ I shrugged. Mary was looking at me, her face clouded and worried, and she wasn’t worried for Sam Jasper’s sanity.

Jerry strode across the water from the dock to the launch and I jumped in right behind him, nimble as hell. Mary was pulling at the painter to cast us off as Jerry started the engines. She slipped on the wet dock and banged her knee against the iron staunchion. The skin split. It looked painful. She freed the line and tossed it to Jerry. ‘Get that gash fixed,’ he said. ‘You get coral dust in that, it’ll be nasty.’ She nodded quickly and stepped back. A trickle of blood ran down her skin. She gave us a nervous sort of half-wave and then Jerry was taking the boat out of the harbour fast. A couple of red-sailed Sunfish were gliding across the roadstead and then bobbled perilously in our wash, one of the sailors shaking a fist at us. We turned towards the lighthouse. It thrust up beyond the slope of the island, then slid away as the angle changed. I could see the line of black rocks extending from the island to the larger rock on which the lighthouse rested. The sea was lashing around the rocks, white and foamy. They were slippery with seaweed. I was just as glad we had taken the boat; that rocky bridge was not to my liking. Jerry was watching the rocks carefully, coming in parallel with them on the shortest course to the lighthouse.

We both saw the figure at the same time.

‘What the hell…?’Jerry said.

The man was on the rocks, coming from the lighthouse, leaping and bounding as if unconcerned about the treacherous footing — or so terrified that panic dictated his movements. He wore a long white coat, the tails flapping behind him like broken wings, and his face was… terrible. His eyes were rolled back white and hollow and white foam sprayed from his lips like an echo of the foam breaking at his feet. He sprang to a rock, hunkered down for an instant, then bounded to the next; slipped but leaped forwards before he could fall. His mouth was open, lips squared back from his teeth, a grimace of torment.

‘Is that Sam?’ I asked.

‘Not Sam,’ Jerry said.

The launch had headed for the rocks as Jerry stared at the bounding figure. He corrected, swinging the prow back out. I could sense his indecision, whether to turn the boat after the fleeing figure. But then he looked at the lighthouse.

‘We’d best see to Sam first,’ he said.

He hadn’t drawn his gun, either, and I liked him for his priorities.

Jerry went up the winding staircase first and I followed close behind. The staircase ended at a trap door which led up to the lamproom. The trap door was steel… and it was smeared with lines of blood and tracks of gore. Pieces of flesh and fingernail were pasted, by blood, to the steel… as if the man who had clawed at that door had been buried alive and was clawing at his crypt in final desperation. I tilted my head back, gaping upwards, and as I did so a shard of flesh dropped from the door and fell sluggishly past my face. I thought of John Tate’s description of the man who had broken his arm against the unliftable weight. But it was not right… the figure on the rocks had been more vigorous and his attack upon the trap door a thing of fury.

Jerry was shaking his head, looking at those gory tracks.

‘Sam! It’s Muldoon!’ he called. There was no response. ‘It’s Jerry, Sam!’

‘Jerry? You get him?’ Sam called from above, his voice distorted through the floor between us, drawn out and quivering as if his words were elastic.

‘He’s gone. I saw him on the rocks.’

There was another pause while Sam considered this; then; ‘You got a gun, Jerry?’

‘Yeah, I got a gun. Open up.’

The bolt rasped slowly from the socket and the trap door lifted a few inches. Sam Jasper peered out, balanced at the edge, ready to slam the door closed again. He was an old man with wild white hair and darting fear in his eyes. Jerry stepped back to let Sam see him. Sam gave a little whine of relief and let the heavy door drop back with a clang. He was sitting on the floor. The big lamp was flashing behind him.

‘He bit me, Jerry,’ Sam said, quite calmly.

Then he began to rave…

Dr Winston was a middle-aged, likeable fellow, who ran the local clinic. There was no hospital on the island and Winston was the only resident doctor — bar those, an unknown number, within the compound. He was not a native, but he had come there years before, simply because Pelican Cay needed a doctor and he needed nothing more than to practise his craft. Jerry Muldoon told me these things while we brought Sam Jasper back from the lighthouse, and I liked Winston the moment I saw him. He was fat; his belly hung over his belt and was obviously never subjected to exercise. He chainsmoked with nicotine-stained fingers and was short of breath. A certain colour to his cheeks and configuration of his nose hinted at a fondness for the vat. I figured straight off that this was a man one could trust.

When Jerry and I helped Sam Jasper into the clinic, Winston didn’t seem surprised; seemed the sort that was seldom surprised by anything. Sam was between us, stumbling and twitching. He’d been in shock and mostly incoherent since we found him in the lamproom. Winston asked no questions. He looked at Sam’s eyes and told us to get him onto a bed. Sam stretched out obediently, almost as if going to sleep, then sat up abruptly and looked around the room fearfully, turning his whole head while his eyes remained fixed in their sockets. Jerry kept a hand on his bony shoulder and Winston summoned his nurse; instructing her to administer a sedative. He examined Sam, his eyes darting about. Sam had a gash on his forearm and a slighter gash on the back of his hand, nothing that looked serious.

‘Human?’ Winston asked Jerry.

‘What?’

‘Those bites. Human, are they?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Thought so. Seen a few of those.’

He spoke to the nurse again, telling her to give Sam an anti-tetanus shot and antibiotics. She bustled efficiently about, a matronly, grey-haired woman with kindly eyes, and Winston started to question Jerry about how it had happened.

Then Sam, sedated and calmer now, sat bolt upright.

‘It was a hell of a thing,’ he said.

‘I’ll get him, Sam,’ Jerry said, but Sam didn’t hear.

‘Hell of a thing, I say,’ he repeated.

‘You ever see him before?’

‘What? See him? Naw, not before I pulled him out of the water. He was from up there.’

‘Up where?’ Jerry asked.

Winston hovered near, hands clasped behind his back, ready to halt the questioning if Sam began to get agitated. I hoped that didn’t happen, I wanted to hear what Sam Jasper had to say — to fit his story in with John Tate’s and Elston’s and — the break in the fence.

‘Why, up the compound,’ Jasper said.

‘Now, Sam, how do you know that?’

‘He was wearing one of them white kimonos, as sick people wear in hospitals, is how. Hell of a thing.’

‘You say you saved him… pulled him out of the water?’

Jasper nodded. The nurse was standing beside the bed with a hypodermic. She looked at Dr Winston and Winston looked at Jerry. Jerry stepped back a pace, waiting for her to put the needle in before he continued his questioning, but Jasper was talking now and didn’t stop. He said, ‘First I saw of him, he was clinging to the rocks. On the seaward side, see, as if he’s hiding from someone on the island. I see him from behind, see that white coat. Figured him for a drunk, but for that white coat. The water’s lapping at his feet and he keeps shifting from one foot to the other, like he don’t want to get his shoes wet. I called out to him but he didn’t hear me, least he paid me no mind. A couple of seagulls started diving at him, flying around his head, he slapped at them like they was flies.’ The nurse slipped the needle into his arm and pressed the plunger. Jasper glanced at her as if the process interested him, but he kept speaking to Jerry, from the side of his mouth. ‘Well, then he slips off the rocks and falls into the water. Don’t guess he could swim. He was clinging to the rocks with both hands and he’s screaming, but he’s screaming without making no noise, if you follow me. Screaming silent, mouth wide open but no sound coming out. Well, I didn’t much fancy chancing my feet on them rocks, so I got out the rowboat. Time I rowed out he was still clinging to the rocks. Like a limpet, he was. I got the idea that he was too scared to pull himself out… scared of the water, see… like in a dream when you can’t run away from what scares you. Must have been powerful strong, the way he was thrashing about you’d have thought he’d break his own grip. I got the boat up aside him, wedged up against the reef, and reached down to give him a hand. He looked up at me. Make you shudder, his face would. His mouth was wide open like his jaw was bust, I could see all his cavities and that little doodad what hangs down in your throat, but I couldn’t see naught but white in his eyes, they was all rolled back like a horse in a fire. I pulled him into the boat. Wasn’t a big man, nor heavy, but he was strong. Took a grip on my arm like a vice. But he never seemed to see me, he just sat in the boat all dumb. I figured it was best to row back to the lighthouse and phone in for help than to row to the island and have to walk the guy into town, and that’s what I did. Had a job getting him out of the boat; had to pull the boat right up on the shore before he would step out. He could walk, all right, but he was wobbling, figured as he’d gulped down plenty of water. Soon as I get him into the lighthouse I take to pumping him out, got him coughing and spitting. All of a sudden he shakes himself like a wet dog.’ Jasper shook himself as he said this, perhaps demonstrating what the other man had done — or perhaps shuddering involuntarily. ‘Then he turns on me. Like a wild animal, all teeth and nails, and he’s strong. I tried to hold him but he just throws me aside and bites me in the arm. Well, this puts a fright to me. He’s crazy and he’s plenty strong — it’s a good thing he’s still wobbly. I get away and run up the stairs with this guy snatching at my heels. Got into the lamproom and bolted the trap. Just in time, too. And what’s he to do but try to claw right through the trap. I mean, it’s steel, even a crazy fella ought to see that, but he claws away at it. I was so shook up I got to thinking he might claw through, at that. That’s when I phoned in…’

‘I think that’s enough for now, Jerry,’ Dr Winston said. ‘I have to clean that wound and get some stitches into it.’

Jasper said, ‘Terrible thing. That white coat, like that you see on a sick man… that was the worst of it, maybe — that and the silent screaming…’

‘Take it easy now,’ Jerry said.

He looked puzzled. Jasper lay back obediently and Winston started cleaning his torn arm. I followed Jerry into the office.

‘What do you think of that?’ he said.

Well, I was thinking of that. The man had tried to claw through solid steel… and John Tate had seen a man — a man in a white coat — try to lift an immovable object. Yet that man had broken his arm and the man who had attacked Sam Jasper had not had a broken arm; Tate’s man had been obedient and devoid of emotion and Jasper’s man had been ferocious. But both had been silent and immured to pain. Elston spoke of the chemicals that warp the fabric of the mind… and someone had torn through that heavy gauge fence. Chunks of the story that fitted together, not in a flat plane like a jigsaw puzzle but in a three-dimensional tableau — fitted together only roughly, but with contours that would dovetail once further knowledge had smoothed the rough edges. My thoughts flitted around through what I knew and I wondered how much I should tell Jerry. I liked and trusted him, and he was the sheriff, but I had an idea that this thing was far beyond his jurisdiction.

I turned to him, intending to speak.

But Jerry was on the phone.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Jerry said. ‘Yeah. Security, I guess.’

He waited impatiently, eyebrows raised. The phone made electric noises. Jerry started to say something to me, then paused and listened into the receiver.

‘Yeah, got a problem here,’ he said. ‘Larsen? Yeah, this is Muldoon. Yeah, a guy run amuck, wearing a white coat… you be inclined to know anything about that? You do, huh? What? Naw, I don’t need any assistance… it’s only one guy. What the hell. I can handle it, just wanted to let you know. Sure. I know you got the authority, damn it. But I got a say in the matter, right? Damn right. I’ll hold him for you but I ain’t about to sit on my thumbs while he runs around loose. Forget it. Yeah, yeah, I know.’Jerry sighed. ‘Okay, I’ll expect a couple of your people. But in the meanwhile I’m gonna be looking. What? What?’ he shouted. ‘He’s only one man, how in hell do I arrest him if I don’t get close to him? Are you crazy?’ Jerry set his jaw and glared at the phone. Then he slammed it down in the cradle.

He was angry.

He started to walk out without a word, then stopped and turned to me. He looked bewildered.

‘Shoot him,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That’s what Larsen told me to do. He said not to try to take the man alive, to shoot him. What the hell is happening on this island? He’s only one man!’

Then he walked out.

I hadn’t had a chance to tell him what I knew, but I didn’t suppose it mattered. I figured it was time that I tried to use the telephone myself.

‘Sorry, sir… I really can’t say,’ the electronic voice chanted. The operator was nervous. Her words crackled with an electricity of their own. It was as exasperating as conversing with a recording.

‘But surely you have some idea?’

‘Sorry, sir… a difficulty with the lines.’

I said, ‘Oh, hell,’ and hung up. It was frustrating to have a story and be unable to phone the paper; it built up explosively inside me. Oh, it wasn’t much of a story, really — not yet; not the important expose I’d hoped to get from Elston. But it was certainly worth a phone call. There was something particularly gruesome about the affair, the isolation of a lighthouse, the old keeper trembling in the tower while a madman raged below. It would — I grimaced despite myself — sell newspapers. And that, for better or worse, was what my job was, what any newspaperman’s job was, first and foremost — to sell papers. Whether one did this by revealing truth or popularising culture, by wallowing in scandal or spreading gossip or drawing comic strips, the job was the same. I was feeling cynical. Or maybe just honest with myself, knowing that my real success had come not because my exposé had put a halt to the Warden misappropriations, but because readers, thirsting for the blemished wine of scandal, had bought newspapers. Whatever good had come of it had been no more than a side effect and the public funds that had been saved had been saved for a public that preferred the vicarious thrill of being exploited. And mine was a respectable paper, at that.

Someday, I would write my novel.

Now I was going to write about what was happening on Pelican Cay. But what was happening? I had to find the hinge before I could open this mysterious box. I had uncovered graves of mouldering graft and unsealed Pandoran abuses in the past, but whatever I was looking for here did not deal with self-interest and the profit motive; it was deeper than greed, and more evil. Greed is a trait of living things, an integral slice of the will to survive and evolve, unpleasant, but part of the natural order. Whatever was being wrought behind those high fences had no place in nature.

There was no Western Union office on Pelican, but I thought maybe Mary Carlyle could help me. Surely the Coast Guard had communications not dependent on the switchboard and perhaps she could manage to patch me through to New York. With that in mind, I took leave of Dr Winston and headed down the waterfront.

It was then I became aware of how seriously the powers within the compound were taking the hunt for the escaped madman. Uniformed shore patrolmen were all over the place, walking in threes, and I spotted half a dozen civilians strolling about like tourists but with an intent they could not hide… lean, fit, hard-faced men like Larsen. My nerves began to flash like beacons and my flesh crawled like the tide, carrying the flotsam of foreshadowed fear. I told myself this was a newspaperman’s reaction to a story about to break, but in my heart I knew it was more than that… I was scared.

’Jack!’

It was Mary, coming towards me. I noticed that she had a bandage on her knee, where she’d struck it against the stanchion. I said, ‘I was just coming to see you,’ and she said, ‘I was just going to see Jerry. Is Sam all right?’

I told her, briefly and without the gory details, what had happened. She watched my face as I spoke. I added that Jerry wasn’t likely to be in his office for a while and she looked around, as if she expected to see him.

‘Poor Sam,’ she said. ‘I’m glad he’s all right.’

‘Listen, Mary… Is there any way you can connect me to the mainland from the Coast Guard depot? The telephone lines seem to be out.’

She nodded. ‘I know. And I could, although we aren’t supposed to use the radio now… except that I’m out, too.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve been given the day off. Dismissed, and quite curtly. Something very hush-hush is going on. I left the depot sort of flustered and forgot my handbag. When I went back for it there was a guard on the door. He wouldn’t let me in. They sent the bag out to me, but for some reason they don’t want anyone in there. The radio, I suppose. It figures, what with the telephones not working… or being worked…’ She looked around again, looking for Jerry or, perhaps, determination. She said, ‘Look, I have nothing to do now, Jack; I can run you over to the Keys in the launch, if you like. You can phone from there.’

I considered it. I have regretted my decision since, but at the time it seemed premature to leave Pelican before the madman had been captured… to rush off with the first half of a story only to be gone when the conclusion occurred. If I had… but perhaps, even then, they would not have let us go. At any rate, I said, ‘Well… let me buy you a drink, Mary; I may take you up on your offer later.’

Now Mary seemed indecisive, fidgeting with her handbag and looking around.

She said, ‘Do you think there’s any connection?’ I knew exactly what she meant, but she added, ‘Between Elston and the attack on Sam Jasper?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘So do I.’

‘I must talk to him again.’

‘It’s more than a story, isn’t it? I mean… something grotesque is going on here.’ She gestured in that way she had, turning a hand over. ‘Something that will affect us all.’ It had already affected her; I saw the effect registered in her face, troubled and concerned. Two shore patrolmen walked past us with angular strides. A third came up behind, quickly; hurrying to catch up. Mary glanced at them. Then she smiled slightly and said, ‘I’ll take that drink, Jack. I’ve nothing to do. Nothing ed. I can do,’ she added.

I could tell she didn’t feel like making any decisions, even in selecting a place to have a drink. I took her arm and guided her towards the nearest bar.

‘How’s your knee?’ I asked.

’Ummm? Oh, it’s okay. You have to be careful if you get any sort of break in the skin here. The coral dust is liable to get in it… keeps it to from healing.’ She touched her thigh, just above the bandage. ‘Silly of me; I was in such a hurry to cast you off. I like Sam Jasper.’

‘Well, he’s all right, it wasn’t serious; just scared him.’

I believed that to be true.

We were sitting in a pleasant dockside tavern. The bar was fashioned out of the side of a rowboat and we were sitting at the gunwales. At gunport had been cut out of the side of the boat in the middle and the snout of an old iron cannon thrust out. It made for a nice decor and I wondered if, in the wild days, loaded with grapeshot, it had ever been used to clear the premises of rowdies? The bartender wore a headrag and eyepatch and addressed the customers as landlubbers, but he seemed to enjoy his role so hugely that it didn’t seem phony. A few locals were drinking rum at round wooden tables and a drunk slept, undisturbed, at the stern of the bar. Mary and I, by tacit agreement, were not talking about what we both were thinking and it made the conversation somewhat disjointed. She was a very pretty girl, but I didn’t think about that, either. Then, by some strange alchemy, we knew that something had happened.

It came to us, and to the other customers, as if by a vibration sensed below the level of sound, just flirting with awareness. Drinking men looked up from their drinks, puzzled; Mary and I exchanged a glance. One does not explain these things. A moment later a young bait-cutter rushed in with the news that Sam Jasper’s attacker had been captured. A sigh — silent but definite — passed through the drinkers, not so much because they hated or feared the madman, but because, independent men, they resented having the wharfs and streets crawling with shore patrol. The bait-cutter knew no details, he had only got the news a moment before, but no one doubted it.

I said, ‘Let’s go see Jerry. I’d like to get some details. Then you can run me across to the Keys, if you will.’

Mary agreed.

We finished our drinks and walked down the waterfront to the police station through crowded streets that hummed with excitement.

The police station was a small, concrete building with Jerry’s office in the front and a single cell at the back. Jerry was sitting on the edge of his desk, the door to the cell was open and the cell was empty. Jerry looked bemused. He smiled when he saw Mary, but it was a serious sort of smile.

‘We heard…’ Mary started.

‘You get that knee fixed up?’ he asked.

‘Yes. We heard…’

‘Yeah, we got him.’

I glanced towards the cell again.

‘Naw, he ain’t here. They got him.’ He slid from the desk and moved to the door, closing it for no apparent reason — just something to do. He said, ‘I found him but I let them take him. I don’t know. Something about the way Larsen talked on the phone… I don’t like the guy, don’t like men like him, but he impressed me… maybe that ain’t the word I mean, but anyhow…’ He reached up to his head, as if intending to adjust his hatbrim, but he wasn’t wearing a hat. His hand hovered before his face and he looked embarrassed; he scratched his cheek, just as he’d closed the door — for something to do. Then he looked directly at us and said, ‘I guess maybe I mean he scared me.’ Then, wanting no comments on that admission, he went on, ‘I found him hiding in a jumble of crates down on Third Wharf. Not hiding, exactly… just sort of sitting there. I was going to arrest him, I found him, Larsen be damned, but it was the damnedest thing…’

He hesitated. Mary and I said nothing, knowing he was wondering if he should continue. Then his jaw set. A look of distaste contorted his handsome countenance.

‘He was eating a dead dog,’ he said.

Mary gave a little gasp and her face twisted up. I felt faintly sick. Jerry said, ‘A little brown dog. Just a stray. Don’t know if he killed it or found it dead, but he was squatting there beside the crates just sort of picking at it… not really eating as if he were hungry, but just pulling a piece off from time to time and chewing it, sort of like he couldn’t decide if it was to his taste… more curious than hungry. Just a little brown stray…’

‘Eating a dog!’ Mary rasped. ‘The poor man!’

‘Poor dog, the way I see it,’ Jerry said.

‘Oh my God…’

‘Chemicals that warp the fabric of the mind…’ I whispered, but they didn’t hear me.

Jerry said, ‘Well, I saw that… I didn’t try to make the arrest. I called Larsen and then I just stayed back and watched the guy. I see what Sam meant about that white coat, it was sort of eerie… worse than if he’d been naked, you know? Coat was all spattered with blood by then and the tails were dragging on the wharf. He’d tug at it from time to time, as if he would have liked to take it off but didn’t know how. Then the damnedest thing happened… they sent a truck down from the compound. Like a dog catcher’s van, it was, with a cage in the back. And must of been a dozen guys with it. Not shore patrol. Some of them were Larsen’s crew, dark suits and all, and some were… well, doctors, I guess. They were all plenty scared. Even them hard-faced guys, they were scared. The guys in suits had rifles. And… listen to this! The doctors had nets!’

‘Nets?’ I said, stupidly.

‘Nets. Goddamn nets. Just like they was butterfly collectors… just like in the cartoons, when the warders snag a crazy guy with butterfly nets. But the nets weren’t like in cartoons, really… they weren’t on the end of poles, I mean. Just big nets with ropes on ‘em, sort of like the gladiators, some of them, use in Hollywood films… or in old Rome, far as I know. They ignored me and I didn’t say a word. The guys with the nets whispered together, then began to move in on him from all sides — three sides, there was a big crate on one side.’ I had the impression that Jerry was trying to be absolutely accurate in his description, as if he didn’t think we would believe him — or didn’t believe it, himself. ‘The guys from Larsen’s crew kept their rifles trained on him, the way they looked, all tense and tight jawed, I knew they would of shot him the moment he made a move. Just the one guy, but they would of shot him. I never had call to shoot a guy, myself,’ he said irrelevantly; then, to the point: ‘Seeing them that way, what did I do but draw my own gun. Didn’t mean to. Just sort of had it in my hand before I knew it. Well… they moved in and tossed the nets over him. He was preoccupied, he didn’t seem to notice. They got about six nets onto him from all angles. Then, holding the ropes, they started to pull him towards the van. The minute he felt them tugging, he went berserk. He began to thrash about, he was rolling in the dead dog and tearing at the nets… foaming at the mouth… but he didn’t make no sound. Lord, that fella was strong. He got to his feet, even though all six of the doctors were hauling to keep him off balance, and he sort of staggered in one direction while the men on that side backed off and those on the other side tried to hold him and got dragged along. He had one hand out from the nets, all hooked up like a talon, reaching for them. Made my flesh crawl. Few strands of the net parted and I could see they had wire inside the rope, no way he could break the nets, but he sure tried.’ Jerry paused for breath. He was sweating. ‘Finally they got him to the van, more by coaxing him that way than hauling him, and they prodded him with long poles until he tumbled inside, into the cage. They tossed the ropes in and slammed the doors and bolted them. He was hammering on the inside of the van and the metal was bulging out when he hit it. Then they drove off. Nobody said a word to me and I didn’t ask.’

Jerry shrugged.

‘He must have some terrible contagious disease,’ Mary said.

‘I guess. But nets? Not a very dignified way to treat a man, even a madman…’

Very quietly, I said, ‘He bit Sam Jasper.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ Jerry said, we looked at each other, sharing an icy thrill of horror and, at that moment, Larsen burst in…

Larsen came through the door and his hard, cold face was vibrant with emotion now, his whole lean body taut and quivering.

Ignoring Mary and I, he confronted Jerry.

‘Why in hell didn’t you tell me someone was attacked!’ he shouted.

‘Take it easy,’ Jerry said, thrusting his big jaw out.

‘Who was attacked? You said he didn’t get into the room with Jasper…’

‘Well, now, is that what I said? Well, I guess I said it because it’s true.’ Jerry spoke with controlled fury; he didn’t like Larsen and he didn’t like the man’s approach. Larsen was slightly taken aback.

Calmer, now, he said, ‘I heard that the lighthouse keeper had been attacked.’

‘Yeah. Well. That was before he bolted himself into the lamproom, right? He got hurt a bit before that.’

‘Jesus! You should have told me, Muldoon!’

‘That a fact? Well now, how was I supposed to know that? You never told me a thing. A guy gets attacked, he ain’t hurt bad, I get him to the clinic… what’s the problem?’

‘The clinic? He there now?’

‘Last I saw him.’

‘How long ago was that?’ Larsen snapped. Then he said, ‘Think really carefully, Muldoon. Please.’

Jerry looked at his watch, then at me.

I said, ‘About three hours.’

Larsen turned to me; said, ‘Who the hell are you?’

Jerry said, ‘Yeah, it was just on three hours.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ Larsen said. He was white-faced and his eyes, magnified by the spectacles, seemed huge. He turned, stiffly, as if his spine were fixed in the floor and he was rotating his body around it.

Then he rushed out.

Jerry leaned back against his desk, as if his energy had suddenly been spent. Then he grabbed his hat, slammed it on and started in pursuit of Larsen. Mary and I exchanged a glance and we started after Jerry. Mary called for him to wait and he stopped, waiting for us and watching Larsen. Larsen was running and he ran like a sprinter. I doubted that Jerry could have overtaken him. But Jerry didn’t try, he was content to follow at a fast walk, with Mary and I at his heels. It was only a short distance and when we got there Larsen was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t gone in. And he had a revolver in his hand…

‘Now, that’s a strange way to call on a sick man,’ Jerry grunted. He wasn’t being funny. We stepped up behind Larsen and looked past him — looked where he was looking. The matronly nurse was sitting on a bunk. Her uniform was open and there was a bandage on her neck. She was staring at the gun in Larsen’s hand, looking bewildered. Then she saw Jerry move up behind him and figured everything was in hand. She remembered herself and modestly drew her uniform closed.

‘No need for that, young man,’ she said, nodding at Larsen’s gun. She switched her gaze to Jerry. ‘Didn’t you see the doctor?’

‘What happened?’ Larsen asked.

‘I have no idea who you are,’ she said. ‘Didn’t the doctor tell you, Jerry?’

‘I… haven’t seen him.’

‘Oh… I thought… well, it’s certainly not a matter for firearms…’

Larsen put his gun away. He wore it in a holster on his hip. He left his coat unbuttoned. Jerry started to move past him, but he blocked the doorway, not going in. He said, ‘What happened?’ again and when the nurse looked at Jerry, the sheriff nodded.

She said, ‘Well, it was an awful thing. Sam Jasper… he seems to have lost his mind. He was sleeping and I looked in on him just as he started having convulsions. Seemed to be in terrible pain. I called the doctor and went over to comfort Sam and all of a sudden he… he bit me. He sat right up in bed and bit me. Didn’t know what he was doing, of course. He must have been allergic to one of the shots I gave him.’ She fingered the bandage on her neck. ‘It isn’t serious, he just sort of snapped at me. Then he ran out.’

‘Where’s the doctor?’

‘Why, he went looking for Sam. He looked at my neck and saw it wasn’t bad, saw I could take care of it myself, so he set out to bring Sam back before he hurts himself.’

‘How long ago was this… when he bit you?’ Larsen said, speaking each word distinctly.

‘Why… not more than ten, fifteen minutes. I figured you’d run into the doctor, is that why you came along, Jerry?’

Larsen relaxed visibly. I could see his shoulders roll as they untensed. He stepped on into the room then. ‘Was the doctor hurt… wounded… too?’ he asked.

‘Why, no. He was in his lab. I’m not really hurt, either… it’s just a scratch. Sam meant no harm.’

‘He broke the skin, though?’

‘Well, yes. Who is this man, Jerry?’

‘I ain’t sure, Ma’am,’ Jerry said, looking at Larsen. Larsen had moved to the desk. He lifted the phone. The nurse said, ‘Phone isn’t working, young man; could have told you that had you asked permission to use it.’ Larsen ignored her. He snapped something into the phone, a number or code. The phone squawked. A moment later Larsen was speaking.

They came for the nurse in an ambulance, three attendants and two of Larsen’s men. She protested. ‘Nothing wrong with me,’ she said, ‘and if there were the doctor could take care of it. I’m a trained nurse, I know when…’

‘Please don’t be difficult,’ Larsen said. ‘This is for your own good. You, you may have contracted a rare disease… Well, it’s best that we examine you, that’s all.’

‘Jerry?’ she asked.

Jerry looked embarrassed. He said, ‘Well, maybe you had ought to let them have a look, Julia.’

‘Well… if you say so. Lot of nonsense, you ask me. But I don’t need the stretcher, I’m not in shock.’

‘Please get on the stretcher,’ Larsen said. He nodded and one of the attendants took her by the arm. She bristled. Jerry said, ‘Now, see here, Larsen… this woman is a civilian, you have no authority to order her around. She said she’d come and — ’

Larsen wheeled on Jerry. I thought he was going to shout. But when he spoke, his voice was soft, almost pleading. He said, ‘Muldoon, don’t interfere in this. Please. There are things you don’t understand.’ Jerry’s big jaw was sliding out like an avalanche, but something in Larsen’s soft tone stopped his anger. He said, ‘I guess you’d better do what he says, Julia. I’m sorry. I don’t know what the hell’s going on.’

The nurse made a huffing sound. She shook off the attendant’s hand and climbed onto the stretcher as if mounting an inflated horse in the water, trying to be dignified about it. She lay back and the attendants pulled the straps around her, with her arms against her flanks. ‘Ow! Not so tight,’ she said. ‘This is absurd. You don’t need those.. ’

‘Use ‘em,’ Larsen said. The nurse looked at Jerry and Jerry looked at Larsen. Jerry didn’t like anything about this, but he was past protesting. His shoulders drooped. They carried the nurse out and loaded her into the back of the ambulance, still strapped tightly to the stretcher.

Larsen watched them drive off. Then he looked at his watch, lowered his arm and immediately raised it again, as if the time hadn’t registered on the first look. His lips moved slightly, counting to himself… counting the minutes since or the minutes until… what?

Larsen went out of the door, buttoning his jacket. On the doorstep he turned back and said, ‘Muldoon, you want to help, see if you can find the doctor. Keep him away from Sam Jasper. We’ll find Jasper ourselves. I hope.’ Without awaiting a reply, he moved off. Little eddies of dust swirled at his heels. As soon as he was out of sight I lifted the telephone, wanting desperately to get through to Elston. The switchboard that had just made contact for Larsen grated the same, ‘I’m sorry, sir, the lines are out of order.’

Winking at Jerry, I said, ‘This is Larsen.’

There was a pause.

Then the voice, sounding human for the first time, said, ‘You’re not Larsen. Who is this?’

I slammed the phone down.

‘Well, it was worth a try,’ I said, feeling silly. Jerry grinned, but not much. He was lost in thought… thinking about things that, as Larsen had said, he did not understand. It was a hell of a position for a sheriff to be in. It wasn’t so good for a newspaperman, either.

‘Mary,’ I said, ‘I think maybe you’d better run me over to the Keys…’

Mary and I walked down the cobbled street and turned into the docks. Mary looked at me, frowning, her step faltering. The gates were closed and locked and there was an armed guard on the other side of the wire. She raised her eyebrows and I shrugged. We walked on to the gate and the navy guard came to polite attention. ‘Sorry, ma’am… sir… no one is permitted through until further notice.’ I was going to speak, but Mary had her bag open; showed him her Coast Guard ID card. His eyes skimmed it. ‘I have to use the launch,’ she said. He was a young fellow and not too sure of himself. He said, ‘Just a moment, please,’ and went back to the guard house. Through the window we could see him talking on the telephone. He came back out, slightly flushed, as if he’d just been given a rocket. ‘Sorry, no one is…’ He broke off the rote statement and grinned sheepishly. ‘They said you couldn’t go through,’ he told us. ‘Sorry.’

‘You mean no one is allowed off the island?’ I said.

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, sir. No one is allowed through this gate, is all I know.’

‘What the hell is it all about?’ I tried to sound formidable and authoritative. ‘Some sort of quarantine?’

‘Dunno, sir. Heard it was smallpox, or something.’

‘Well, so much for that,’ I said. Mary was still holding her ID card out in front of her. She tightened her fist, crumpling it. I nodded to the guard and he saluted and Mary and I walked back from the harbour.

I said, ‘Well, whatever they’re afraid of, they sure as hell can’t keep it a secret now. Closing the island off… that will have to be explained…’

‘Which means that they’re more afraid than secretive,’ she said. ‘That it’s more important to keep… something… contained on Pelican, than it is to keep it secret. ’

‘I wonder how long?’

‘I guess you’ll get your story,’ she said, smiling a little. ‘I didn’t get you down here for nothing, Jack. You’ll have an exclusive… if they ever let you write it.’

That disturbed me. We came out onto the waterfront. Quite a few men were standing about, shrimpers and fishermen and local shopkeepers, discussing the situation. No one seemed to know what it was all about, but they all thought it an unwarranted liberty. They were angry and surly and they glared at the shore patrolmen, who looked as confused as everyone else. Someone, loudly, said, ‘I don’t give a damn what they say, I’m taking my boat out in the morning and ain’t nobody about to stop me.’ Several other voices joined in, agreeing. ‘… burn the damn place down…’ ‘Didn’t want ‘em here, the first place…’ They weren’t a mob yet, they stood in individual clusters, but they were plenty angry. I said, ‘Someone had better give them an explanation pretty damn soon or things could get ugly.’

‘I’m going back to Jerry’s; if they have decided to bring things out in the open they ought to let him know first. Coming?’

I hesitated. ‘No, I think I’ll go back to the Red Walls. I’d like to get my notes written up as much as I can… have them ready as soon as the phones are working or I can get a boat.’

Mary walked off. I turned in the opposite direction. I had to pass several groups of men, but no one glared at me, they hadn’t mistaken me for the enemy. Maybe they knew just who I was, as far as that went… I hadn’t been very subtle. Things had just moved too fast to even think about building a cover story. Well, I wasn’t worried about that, now. Worried, yes. But not about that.

What were they playing at, those government bastards: what was Jerry Muldoon thinking of, letting them take Nurse Jeffries away? It was different with a crazy guy that ate dead dogs… he was one of them and, anyhow, what harm could you do to a guy that already ate dead dogs? But Nurse Jeffries was a local; they were fiercely possessive. That was the thread that ran, embellished by rare obscenities, through the pattern of the talk in the bar of the Red Walls. The crowd was feasting on their resentment, a smorgasbord of rancour; indignation gurgled like a percolator and invective was chewed and savoured in lumps, like a fat sausage. ‘Ain’t the point. Maybe they has got proper doctors up to there, ain’t the point; they didn’t take her ‘cause it was best for her, they took her ‘cause Jerry let em!’

They were in an ugly mood, although it probably wasn’t particularly ugly for such a gathering. I had intended to go straight to my room, avoiding the bar, but I heard the loud conversation from the doorway and it intrigued me. I figured I would be able to get some good background material from the outraged locals. I went past the stairs, but in the doorway of the bar, I hesitated. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go in there, or that I should. The bar seemed to have become an informal sort of townhall for shrimpers and fishermen, a place where mobs are born and lynchings launched. This was as rough a group of men as I’d ever encountered. I’d heard talk of the old days, when things were rougher, but they were plenty rough for me, with their Buck knives and bill hooks in their belts and their leather skin all seamed with veins. Not sure of my welcome, I looked in from the doorway. A dozen men were strung out along the bar and one woman, with net stockings and a black eye, had hiked herself up on the counter.

A beefy, bearded man was saying, ‘Like telling us we can’t go to our boats. What the hell! They’re our boats!’

‘Like saying we can’t fetch a little rum, a little Havana, up from the islands.’

‘That’s different. That’s agin the law. It ain’t right, but it ain’t lawful.’

‘Politicians!’ said a thin man with long black hair drawn back in a ponytail and a scar down his cheek. ‘Politicians, see, they got to be crooked by their nature. See it? They weren’t crooked, they would never of riz in politics. Figures, don’t it? But you or I do something what they ain’t told us to do, they pass a law what makes us crooked.’

‘These guys ain’t politicians, though.’

‘They’re bastards, though…’

The bartender nodded in agreement with the piratical philosopher and, nodding, spotted me in the doorway. He sensed my uncertainty and waved me in. Everyone else, seeing his gesture, turned to look at me. They stopped talking and stared at me, grim and hard-eyed. I knew how the misguided stick-up man must have felt when they turned on him, aborting his crime. They didn’t look hostile, exactly, but they looked infinitely capable of hostility.

I walked up to the bar and the bartender moved down to meet me, two ships joining on a charted course. I knew he was doing this to make me feel welcome and that embarrassed me. I was damned if I would act nervous and, instead of stopping at the end of the bar nearest the door, I walked right down the bar to the far end, running the gauntlet of their attention. The woman, laughing, swung a playful leg at me. The bartender passed me, going in the opposite direction, and now he had to retreat, parallelling my course along his own side of the bar. This struck me as funny and I laughed. The bartender laughed too, although he probably didn’t know why. Greeting me by name, he asked if I wanted my usual and that broke the tension. The locals relaxed. One by one, they nodded, not so much to me as to the realisation that I was a neutral. I knew how a Swiss must feel. The bearded fellow nodded first, then the man beside him, then the pirate, and the nod ran down the line, heads rippling in sequence, like falling dominoes. Then they ignored me.

I stood at the end of the bar, by the stairs, listening to the talk and wondering if I should buy a round for the house, or if that would compromise my neutrality? I had a second drink. The bartender, my ally, kept looking down to make sure my glass was filled. The woman gave me a shy look that, with her black eye and coarse demeanour, was rather endearing. A gradual change altered the mood of the drinkers. They were men of abrupt rage never long sustained.

‘Listen!’ said one. He slapped his hand on the bar like a gavel. ‘Listen, what if that dog-eater had walked in here?’

‘Hey, that would of been something.’

‘We’d of showed him what we does to dog-eaters, eh?’

‘It would of been just like the old days!’ cried an ancient mariner, gleefully.

This was rare good humour to them and everyone was laughing and drinking and taking turns in making lewd suggestions to the woman. Her replies outdid them. They had actually slipped from outrage to gaiety as abruptly as if they’d stepped from shadow into light and their levity depressed me far more than their resentment had. I finished my second drink and shook off the eager bartender. I didn’t run the gauntlet again; I went up the back stairs to my room.

These were the descendents of the wreckers.

I could still hear the undulation of their mingled voices from my room. Laughter came in sudden bursts, punctuating the steady drone. They were speculating on how they would deal with a man who ate dead dogs and they spoke of that unfortunate man without the slightest sympathy, just as, I knew, a wrecker from the past would have joked with his peers, mocking the way some pitiful victim had squirmed and pleaded under his cudgel — and then, without the faintest feeling of wrongdoing, dutifully fetch his loot home to his adoring wife and happy children.

I felt a timeless despair.

I dozed in depression and awoke to find the walls vibrating again. They seemed to pulse in and out like plastered lungs, billowing around me. It was not my heartbeat. A distant shouting sounded. I sat up, frightened, filmed by a pyrexia of dread. Then I realised the commotion came from below, running like fluids up the timbers of the building. There was a cry of anger… a crash… another cry that rose to a scream. It appeared that the ephemeral good humour of the crowd had turned surly again: autophagous anger devouring itself with ravenous rage. They had few tools, those rough men; they saw every frustration as a nail to be hammered by violence.

Then, of a sudden, the noise ceased.

There was no transition, no gradual ebbing of the uproar — there was bedlam and then there was a silence so absolute that it was sound in itself… a cosmic boom. That void of sound roared in my ears. Fights do not end in such abrupt silence, unless…

I went downstairs…

From the balcony, gripping the banister, I looked into the barroom. The men were standing in a circle, looking inwards and down. The bartender was standing back, a broken truncheon in his hand. The woman was leaning against the counter, one hand at her throat. No one moved. I waited, scarcely breathing, knowing that there was some terrible centrepiece to that silent circle. I wanted to bear no witness to this scene: my impulse was to creep back up the stairs but I could not move. My legs seemed to grow from the floor, my hand was glued to the railing.

The big, bearded man moved. Something flashed silver in his hand — flashed silver and, turning, flashed red. His hand went to his pocket, he stepped aside. Another man moved. One by one they broke from that ring, cast off by the centrifugal force of shock; they went to the doors. I saw the body around which that motionless orbit had described its silent arc. Blood had spread out like melted wax; in that blood, the body was like a fossil, preserved forever in red amber.

It was Sam Jasper, and he was dead.

The woman walked out, stumbling, still holding her throat. Only the bartender remained. He still gripped the broken truncheon, like driftwood that kept him afloat in reality; his face was as bloodless as if he, too, had spilled his veins onto the floor.

I was able to move then — I had to move, for my trembling legs threatened to collapse. I went down the final steps into the room. The bartender turned towards me.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

He had anticipated my words; already launched from my throat, they came out, anyway: ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, again.

I was trying not to look at Sam. I looked at the telephone and the bartender followed my gaze. He moved towards the phone and I stepped forwards. Then he came back towards me and I stopped. It was like some ritual dance choreographed in Hell. He moved the broken club like a baton, leading the silent music of our gavotte. Then he broke the pattern, leaning against the bar, his head lowered. He began to speak.

‘Jasper,’ he said. ‘But not like Jasper. He came in the door. Someone asked him how he was, but he didn’t answer. His mouth was open but not making any noise and… drooling. He came at us. Not fast, he had a strange, deliberate step… not like he was weak, like he was just remembering how to walk…’ The barman’s throat worked convulsively, disgorging his words as if vomiting up poisoned food. ‘… His fingernails… teeth… like an animal… Nobody did anything at first, we all knew old Sam…’ He looked at me as if he wanted confirmation. I nodded. I could imagine those men, confronted by the unknown, unable to react… unable to identify the nail that had to be hammered. ‘But then he grabbed Sally. She’d jumped up on top of the bar. Sometimes she used to dance on the bar,’ he said, as if that were miraculous. ‘Sam got her by the ankle… pulled her off. Her back hit the edge of the bar and she screamed… then everyone got hold of him… it was because of Sally… if she hadn’t of moved… that’s when Sam went for her, when she jumped up on the bar…’ He stared at me. He was justifying it. An attack on a woman had played the catalyst to their stunned immobility, it was a thing to which they could react in their fashion. I nodded my understanding.

‘But he was too strong,’ he said, wonderingly.

‘Just an old man everybody knew… too strong. He was throwing men aside, snapping his teeth… I thought he was going to kill Sally. I came over the bar and hit him… with this — ’ he held up the truncheon ‘ — and he didn’t even feel it. It snapped over his shoulder… Old Sam, but too strong…’

He let the broken club roll from his hand onto the counter; his voice was hollow. ‘Then there was a knife,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who started it… someone… then they all had knives and hooks out, they were stabbing into Sam like they couldn’t stop, like they was all crazy, like sharks when they get frenzied… or like they was too scared to stop. And Sam didn’t seem to know he was being stabbed. It went on and on. Then Sam was down on the floor, he must of been dead. All his blood has poured out, he’s dead, and everyone steps back from him… and Sam sits up!’

I flinched. The bartender’s voice went into me as those knives had gone into Sam Jasper; I was bleeding sweat, congealed fear seeped from my pores The bartender gripped my arm; said, ‘He sat up and his jaw dropped open; then he fell over again… but all his blood was out and… he moved after he was dead…’

He was trembling. His hand shook on my arm and the trembling passed on into me. What terrible determination had caused Sam Jasper to move, to defy mortality with a final convulsion?

Locked together by the coupling of his hand, we shuddered face to face. Then he looked away.

‘They left,’ he said, as if aware for the first time that we were alone in the room. ‘They all left.’

I understood that. Murder had been done and these were not men to plead self-defence or to stand trial… nor to go, as Nurse Jeffries had, to the compound.

‘It wasn’t like the old days,’ he said.

His hand dropped away from me. He went down the bar and hesitated by the telephone. Then he turned and went out the door. I waited for a few minutes. Then I went down to the phone. The switchboard said, ‘Sorry, sir, the lines are still out of order…’ and I said, ‘You’d better listen to me.’ Ten minutes later Larsen arrived.

Even had the phone been working, it would never have occurred to me to call Jerry Muldoon, although, legally, Jasper’s death should have been his concern. And I wasn’t thinking of getting a story, either. I was lost in an emotional wilderness. I only hoped that Larsen would know what to do — that there was something that could be done. Waiting for him, I prayed that Mary Carlyle would not walk in, bearing some news for me. Mary had liked Sam Jasper. And that was not Sam on the floor, that sticky mould of red aspic… nor, worse, had it been Sam in the moments before he died. I could never tell Mary what had happened here. But I could tell Larsen — in his way, he too was a dead man.

I went behind the bar and poured myself a huge brandy.

I was halfway through it when Larsen arrived. He came in with half a dozen men and, while they inspected the body — gingerly, at first — he came directly over to me.

He said, ‘You were right to call me, Harland.’

‘I thought I might be. Have a drink?’

His cold eyes flickered.

‘The bartender left too,’ I said.

‘I’m going to need your help, Harland.’

I poured Larsen a drink. He didn’t refuse it. When I’d first seen him, he’d sipped very slowly at a beer; things were changed. They were taking Sam Jasper out on a rubber sheet and, as they stepped, their heels made squishing sounds in the congealing blood.

‘How can I help?’

‘The men he fought with… who killed him. I want you to identify them.’

‘I didn’t see the fight. I told you, I — ’

‘The men who were in the bar earlier,’ he said.

‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘I guess you’ll cooperate. You phoned me.’

‘No, I don’t mean I won’t… I’m not sure I can. I didn’t know any of them by name or — ’

He nodded crisply; said, ‘Understand this. You can’t protect anyone. I’m not talking about a criminal charge here, this isn’t crime and punishment. These locals are… independent types. They won’t come in voluntarily, we’ll have to find them. All of them. And they’ll be hiding, thinking they are guilty of murder or — ’

‘Guilty? It strikes me that if anyone on this island is guilty of anything — ’

‘Don’t be antagonistic,’ he said. Then he took his spectacles off and rubbed his eyes. He looked at me, for the first time, without the lenses between us. He seemed more human. He said, ‘Guilt? I know about guilt. I think every one of us, working on this thing, feels guilty. Sometimes, Harland… sometimes I feel guilt so heavy that it’s like a shroud draped over me. I have to stop whatever I’m doing and take a deep breath. And doing that, I only manage to inhale the guilt, it gets in my lungs, inside me. I’m not a robot, Harland. I thought I was a patriot… but a guilty patriot. Now… well, now we do what we can.’ He put the spectacles back on, as if hiding behind them. He took a slug of brandy. He was waiting for me to speak.

I said, ‘I only know what the bartender told me…’

Larsen nodded impatiently.

‘He… Sam Jasper… was inhumanly strong. He was insane, of course, but when the knives went into him he scarcely seemed to notice, he — ’

‘I know,’ Larsen snapped. ‘I don’t need an account of the affair, I know what… they… can do.’

‘They?’

He ignored that.

He said, ‘Do you know if any of them were… wounded?’

‘No. But Sam was fighting with them… and he had attacked a woman… so I think we can assume he inflicted some damage.’

Larsen sighed, nodded; said, ‘I want you to describe every one of the men who were in this room, as best you can. Then I’ll want you to identify them as we bring them in. We have to find them, and we have to do it in the next couple hours.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Probably not.’

‘And if you don’t?’

‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that. Just in case we do. If we don’t… why, then, you’ll know about it, just like everyone else. You won’t like it.’

‘This… disease, this madness. It’s infectious, right?’

‘Of course it’s infectious, goddamn it! You’ve seen what happens.’

‘And you have to find these men in time to treat them, to give them an antidote or inoculate them or whatever…’

‘Whatever! You’re wasting time.’

‘I have to be sure just what I’m doing, just why I’m helping you, Larsen.’

‘I told you, there will be no criminal charges. Isn’t that enough?’ He was looking at his watch. ‘Please, Harland,’ he said, quite softly.

‘All right. I’ll do the best I can.’

He nodded. ‘We’ll go up to the compound. You can dictate the descriptions in the car. I’m already having my men round up all the known regulars from this place, shrimpers, fishermen… it’s just possible…’

One of the others came up to him, awaiting orders.

Larsen said, ‘Get that blood up. All of it. We don’t need… Then seal the place.’ The man nodded. The blood, too? I thought. Larsen turned back to me. ‘Well, come on, then.’

I finished my drink and followed him towards the door.

Larsen grabbed my arm and maybe he said it to impress the urgency on me, or to frighten me, or maybe he just felt like saying it. He said: ‘None of us may get out of this, Harland… we may never leave this island. And, believe me, it won’t be a tropical paradise then…’

Drinking black coffee from a white mug, I sat behind a table in a small whitewashed room feeling depressed and sick and tired. I had described the men — and the woman — as best I could and, although the descriptions seemed pitifully inadequate to me, Larsen seemed satisfied. I expect he had a file on everyone who lived on Pelican. From time to time he nodded, as if in recognition. There was something almost intimate in our relationship as I confided in him in the back seat of the car. When I mentioned the woman, he said, ‘That’ll be Sally… salad girl on the shrimp boats… ship’s whore, to speak plainly,’ and he also put names to the bearded man and the long-haired philosopher… several others — I paid little heed; perhaps I did not want these men to have names, to label those I was betraying and thereby make them individuals. My information was slight. My memory for details had been blurred, knocked out of focus, yet Larsen drew from me more than I thought I knew in the shadowed intimacy of that moving car. I had exhausted my recollections by the time we entered the compound.

We drove up to the main building, a single-storey affair with wings on either side, and Larsen escorted me to the whitewashed room. His men had not been idle. They started bringing the locals in as soon as I had taken my seat. Larsen stood beside me, behind the table. There was a gooseneck lamp there and he kept his hand on the flexible shaft, tilting it up and down. The bulb was very bright, very white against the wall. Larsen leaned forward; his face sprang out with an albedo to shame the moon, lips drawn back, clenched teeth geometrical. Dark veins in his neck defied the lurid glare. Then he leaned back into darkness and his face receded.

They brought the locals in one by one, two guards to each man and another guard on the door. They were angry, bewildered men, roused from bed or rousted from bars without explanation. The Cuban counterman from the Fisherman’s Cafe was one of the first; he looked sullen and dejected. Others who had heard the news looked sly and cunning. They all stared directly at me and I felt the lowest form of traitor, but I neither flinched nor looked away, convinced that I was doing what had to be done, despite these secret police tactics. I recognised several of the locals, but not from the Red Walls. I spoke to no one and they just glared at me, their faces distorted by elongated shadows thrown up from the lamp. Perhaps they could not identify me as they looked into that glare. I shook my head each time and Larsen sighed. Knowing I had to identify the men who had been involved, I nevertheless felt satisfaction each time I was able to negate one.

Then they brought in an old man and my memory snatched his face from the crowd at the bar, moulding it to the frightened countenance that stood before me in this silent inquisition. It was the old man who had spoken fondly of the old days. I hesitated. I felt Larsen stiffen beside me. The old man was squinting in the direct beam of the lamp and I didn’t know if he could see my features, but I knew he could see my head, at least in outline; that he would know if I nodded.

Larsen sensed my hesitation; he tilted the lamp higher and the old man’s shadow sprang up the wall, crooked and distorted. The shadow seemed to have more substance than the man who cast it; there was a reality too dark to be illuminated in this room.

At last, I nodded.

The old man went rigid and Larsen’s head snapped around towards me. I nodded again. Larsen flicked a glance at the guards. They took the old man by the arms and led him out. He was protesting in a high-pitched whine. I felt truly treacherous now and Larsen must have known this, for he placed his hand on my shoulder reassuringly and, as if to certify the humanity behind the gesture, he took his spectacles off for a moment.

Then they brought the next man in.

Twice more, I nodded.

I must have confronted forty or fifty men and only three of them had been in the bar. The bearded man had not been found, nor the long-haired fellow with the political views. The woman had not been brought in, nor had the bartender, but in those cases the identification was definite and they may have found them without bringing them before me in my stark chamber. They the steady stream of — what? Suspects? Victims? Carriers?… whatever, the stream of unfortunates brought there to stand before their tortured shadows began to taper off. In the first stormtrooper round-up Larsen’s men had gathered up the unsuspecting and the innocent, but those who had been involved had already gone into hiding with, from their point of view, good reason — a man had been killed, one old, unarmed man had been stabbed to death by a mob and they had no desire to stand trial on that count. They were terrified by the bizarre aspects of the thing and, even discounting the murder, they knew that Nurse Jeffries had, under somewhat similar circumstances, been forced to go to the mysterious compound. They were not inclined to listen to the reasoning of authority and, even if they had, the time element was against that approach. I couldn’t blame them for going into hiding. But while they hid, the disease was incubating.

‘How long does it take?’ I asked.

Larsen and I were alone behind the table. The guard on the door had his back to us, hands clasped, looking down the corridor. No one had been brought in for the last ten minutes.

‘What?’

‘For the disease to take effect?’

‘That’s not. ’ He paused, leaning towards me so that his face came into the light as if he now were being identified, waiting for my dreaded nod. ‘Oh, hell, it’s a bit late in the game to play classified information, isn’t it? I appreciate your help, Harland. The time… it varies according to the subject’s weight and metabolism and, to a lesser degree, the body area where the… infection… was transferred. Say an average of… three hours.’

‘That soon?’

‘That soon,’ he said, playing with the lamp, manipulating the shadows, twisting the flexible neck from side to side in his strong hands. I felt the same need to do something with my own hands. I got my pipe out and began to fill it carefully. He twisted the lamp and I stuffed tobacco in the bowl and lit it. A great cloud of smoke billowed out and hung over us. I remembered how Larsen had spoken of the cloud of guilt that often enveloped him. The drifting smoke made filigreed shadows up the wall. The shadows moved; they were not as enduring as guilt.

He was fairly strangling the lamp.

‘It must be very virulent,’ I said.

‘Of course. Harland, it’s a disease such as the world has never known. A disease that never should have been known… and we created it here.’

‘What is it? Viral?’

‘Chemical.’

Chemicals that warp the fabric of the mind… I said, ‘Chemical? But how can that be contagious?’

Larsen dropped his head, twisting his own neck just as he’d twisted the lamp. He said, ‘I don’t know. But it is.’ The light, reflecting from his taut face, seemed to come from within his skull. ‘It’s directly infectious, by contact. It’s not… well, it’s not the Black Death, say. It won’t sweep across the world and decimate the population. Thank God for that. And yet, in its way it’s far more horrible. It’s so — ’ he sought the word ‘ — so personal! Yes, that’s it, exactly. Personal.’ The word itself seemed anathema to this bureaucratic man. ‘It goes beyond disease, Harland; it reaches into the realm of superstition and snatches up the stuff of legend, the dark fears that evolved with man. Werewolves, Harland… and vampires…’ His face rose and fell as if under heavy blows. He looked sick. He said, ‘These men… the man who contract this thing… officially, in the reports, they are termed subjects of Chemically Modified Behaviour. Informally…’ he looked at me. ‘We call them ghouls.’

I winced.

He said, ‘An ugly word, and not just terminology. Yet when you’ve seen them… it is a word that caught on quite easily, amongst the guards and attendants, at first… until even the doctors use it. I use it. You…’ He looked at me with a hint of a smile. ‘You, no doubt, will use it in your story…’

‘You know who I am, then?’

‘… if you ever get to write it.’

No threat was intended in his words — no threat from him. I puffed and smoke flowed laterally across the table, crossing the lamp like clouds shredding before the face of the moon.

I said, ‘How soon must the antidote be administered?’

Larsen looked as if he didn’t understand the question. His thin lips drew back from his teeth and he snapped the light off. From the sudden shadows, he said, ‘Not my field… I only know we have to have them before the damned thing takes effect. And…’ he looked at his watch. ‘I don’t guess we’re going to do it.’

He stood up and moved around the end of the table.

‘I have things to arrange,’ he told me. ‘Will you wait here? They may bring a few more in before it’s too late.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

He nodded and walked out. The guard saluted. I heard his footsteps drum hollow down the corridor and I didn’t envy him his task… the arrangements he must make.

My pipe had gone out.

I struck a match and relit it and, as if that flare had been a signal, the guard on the door turned and stepped into the room. I had supposed he was there to make sure I didn’t leave but, with proper deference, he said, ‘What’s going to happen next, sir?’

I gaped at him and he blushed. He was quite young.

‘Oh, I realise I’m not cleared for classified information, sir, but… you know how it is… a man can’t work in a place like this without getting a pretty good idea of what’s going on. And my wife will be worried, I haven’t been able to call her… I just wanted some idea of how long we’d be quarantined…’

I realised that Larsen and I had come in with such a flurry of haste that he had not explained the situation to the guard — or perhaps disdained informing a subordinate of anything. The young man obviously thought I was one of them. It was a natural enough mistake. Larsen and I had been collaborating as equals and he had even deferred to me on deciding which of the men brought in had been infected. The guard probably thought me an expert in detecting symptoms of the disease before they became apparent to others. It was too good a chance to pass up.

I said, ‘I can’t tell you that,’ trying to sound just curt enough to be authoritative without discouraging him.

‘I’m sorry sir.’

He started to turn away.

‘A bad business,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir. Very bad.’

‘I just arrived… from the other laboratory…’ I said. He showed no signs of disbelief. ‘I’ve been in such a rush, I haven’t had time to get the details. How did the first… subject… escape, do you know? The one who broke through the fence?’ I held my breath. He didn’t doubt me at all.

‘Oh, Jefferson,’ he said. ‘Why, he broke the restraining straps. He’d been taken to the laboratory for an examination or something and someone slipped up; didn’t use the reinforced straps, I guess.’

‘Damned inefficiency.’

He blinked at me; said, ‘Worse than inefficiency, if you’ll pardon my saying so, sir. I guess maybe you don’t know about Duncan?’ I shook my head. ‘Johnny Duncan. Friend of mind. Hell of a nice guy, Duncan. He was on the door, tried to stop the ghoul. Jefferson, I mean, sir. Only it’s hard to call one of them by their name… by the name they had when they were human, you know? Makes it seem worse, somehow. Anyway, Duncan tried to stop him and the… and Jefferson tore his arm damn near off. It was just hanging there by a few ropes of tendon. Right arm, it was. Poor Duncan, he was right-handed; had to use his left hand when he shot himself. ’

‘Shot himself?’

‘Lefthanded.’

He seemed to think this sinistral suicide more deplorable than had it been dextral; thus had morality been compromised and mutated in this place.

‘Funny, you know… I was there by that time; I felt as if I ought to stop him from shooting himself, but he just looked at me and I couldn’t do a thing. Even if it meant I got in trouble over it… couldn’t do a thing. He put the gun to his head. He was in terrible pain, what with his arm torn off like that, but it wasn’t the pain… it was knowing he was gonna turn ghoul. Hell of a guy. He said goodbye to me; made me feel awful. Then he blew his brains out. Wasn’t married, Duncan; that’s one thing.’

‘But… the antidote…’

‘Oh, you don’t have to tell me that, sir.’ He looked shy… maybe sly. He said, ‘I know there’s no antidote.’

I looked down at my glowing pipe and pretended that the alarm passing over my face was due to a congested stem. Slowly, I said, ‘These subjects… the ones I was able to identify, and the nurse… how are they being… treated?’

‘Oh, it’s painless, sir. No need to worry about that. One of the docs gives ‘em an injection, it’s over in a few seconds.’ He smiled at me. He was really quite young, his cheeks fuzzy, an innocent young man assuring me that murder was done efficiently and painlessly.

He said, ‘That’s what you meant when you said, antidote, huh? Funny how you scientists always use words that mean less than they ought. Meaning no offence, sir. Euphemism, is it? Well, anyhow, I guess that Duncan figured a bullet was just as painless as a shot in the arm, and a whole lot quicker. Or maybe he was afraid they wouldn’t give him the shot, come to think of it; that they’d let him turn ghoul and study him in place of Jefferson…’

‘Yes,’ I said. I felt a band of sickness tighten across my diaphragm. I had just condemned, with a nod, three men to death. And yet, if I hadn’t… it was mercy killing, benevolent condemnation, I could justify it… and yet —

The guard was saying, ‘Maybe they would of, too, far as that goes. Of course, that was before all these other guys got infected. Got more ghouls than they know what to do with, now; can’t study all of them. I don’t know about the other lab… the one you come from… fact is, I didn’t even know there was another one. But we only got three cells here strong enough to hold ‘em and you can’t put ‘em in together or they’ll eat each other. Guess they never reckoned on having more than three at once. So the only humane thing to do… but you know about that, sir.’

On abrupt impulse, I stood up. Yes, I knew about that… now; the knowledge was stalking around like a footpad in my soul.

‘It seems to me that you know a good deal more than you’re cleared for,’ I said, jaws tight.

The guard looked frightened.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, blanching.

I pointed at him with my pipestem, paused, then sighed.

‘Where is Elston now?’ I asked.

‘He’s in his lab, sir. It’s just down the hall, third door on the right,’ he said quickly, hoping that other matters would intervene between us. I gave him a crisp nod and brushed past. He saluted. I walked down the corridor with my heels drumming just like Larsen’s.

Elston was in his laboratory, but he was not working; he was seated on a high stool, all sunk up in himself. I had the impression of a dunce at a blackboard. I closed the door and he looked up. ‘You,’ he said, without surprise. He was beyond surprise. I walked over to him and knocked my pipe out against the edge of a shelf. Test tubes rattled in a rack and arcane fluids sloshed about in beakers.

‘You should have contacted me sooner,’ I said.

‘I wish to God I had.’

‘Will you tell me about this… thing?’

‘It’s too late.’

‘It could prevent a recurrence elsewhere.’

‘I doubt…’ he said, and paused, as if his doubt were a categorical statement. His eyes turned about, looking for some object deserving of that doubt. ‘I doubt that even the government would attempt such a thing again. I am not a brave man, Harland… but there does not exist a torture that would ever again induce me to cooperate.’

‘But you never intended this.’

‘My God, no! I… never…’ His voice trailed off. He lifted a murky beaker and looked into it, as if he expected to find resolution there, or courage; reading the runes of science. He moved the beaker and the fluid sloshed about; peering at it, he seemed to be contemplating a rare vintage, a distillate of evil. I felt that the fluid should be roiling and giving off vapours; had he suddenly drained it on a compulsive whim, I would not have been surprised.

Abruptly he began to speak, driven to explain and exonerate himself.

‘In my research into chemical lobotomy, I discovered a process by which to make men mindless. I had not sought this result, it was a side-effect, accidental. These… subjects… were totally obedient and docile, but they were immensely powerful, for they no longer had inhibitions of any sort. They no longer knew the limitations of self preservation; were no longer confined by human instinct. They could, upon command, perform tasks that amazed me…’

‘The man who broke his arm lifting against an unliftable weight?’

‘You know of that? Yes, that is an example. No normal man could exert enough pressure to break his own skeleton. But, feeling no pain and totally uninhibited, a man treated by this process became a superman.’

‘But to what purpose?’

‘To my purpose, to my intentions, it was merely a side-effect. I sought to make the incurable manageable, that was all. The purpose put to this by the agency, however… the dark vision of those fiends… they foresaw an army of living robots…’

‘Of course. Men without fear, unable to feel pain, totally obedient.. ’

‘That was the idea. An army that would walk through enemy fire, keep on walking even though they had been shot several times, had limbs blown off… even crawling, legless, to carry out the attack… only an absolutely mortal wound could stop them; even dead they could move for a few moments. It is shock that stops a wounded man, but only death itself could stop these poor creatures. But there was a flaw. Nearly mindless, they could make no decisions, could not discriminate between friend and foe; nor were they belligerent. They were unstoppable but they were useless. I believed that we had come to a dead end, and I was glad. But the devious minds that controlled me… those minds must be as warped as those of my creations, their thoughts twisted through hideous configurations which bleed out humanity and distil pure evil…’ He looked directly at me. ‘The next stage… I balked at this, they threatened… well, no matter; I am a coward; I did as they wished.’

Elston shook his head from side to side.

‘Harland, I took the obedience out. I made these creatures savage and bestial, instilling bloodlust and ferocity… the very factors that my original research had been designed to quell. It was not a difficult thing, merely a matter of finding the proper chemical balance. And again we seemed to have reached a dead end. Again I was glad. In taking the obedience from them, I made them unmanageable.’

‘Then you were back where you started…’

‘Not quite. In one day, these men that controlled me, in one day those minds had realised a use for this… monstrosity.’

‘I can see none.’

‘Nor did I. But we are not like them. By this time, other scientists, scientists who thought like them, were working with me. They had access to all my material. It was one of those men who discovered that this state of mindless bloodlust could be transmitted from man to man, from host to victim. The chemicals that transfigured the mind ran rampant through the body. They infected the blood, the saliva… and could be transmitted, like any disease… like leprosy, like plague… but far, far more terrible. It was communicable madness.’

He put his hands to his face, dragging his fingers down his cheeks.

‘I still don’t see…’

‘No, you wouldn’t. I… again I protested. But by this time the work could have continued without me — or so I told myself, to justify what I did. And it was hideous. The first man we treated tore his eyes out. Obviously not a trait desirable in a soldier. We corrected that. We tested their aggression by putting them in a cage together.’ He closed his eyes, remembering what he had seen in those cages. ‘To find the proper balance, you see. They did not want these… ghouls, they call them… they did not want them to be so ferocious that they killed. That would have defeated their purpose…’

‘And that purpose was?’

Elston ignored me. He continued, ‘Like rabid dogs… that was the desirable condition… wounding and then leaving the victim alive, so that he, in turn, would become… one of them. The madness would spread by geometrical progression. I say madness, I might say bestiality… there is no term for them, really. Ghouls — they call them ghouls — they caused them to be created and then call them that. They are not cannibals, yet they would eat human flesh as any other… nor necrophagics, although they would devour a corpse… quite casually, these mindless things would devour… themselves.’ He paused for a few moments, head cocked as though listening for the echo of his words from amongst the vials and beakers. ‘But this is no more than a side-effect of their condition. They might just as well eat nothing and starve to death. A side effect, just as their fear of water. I could have removed that inhibition, of course. It was deemed wise to let it remain — a way to control them, surrounding them by water, confining them; useful on this island and later, in other places…’

‘What places, Doctor?’

Again he ignored me. ‘Well, it was done. I had regulated their fury to the proper degree. That fury was contagious. In the initial instance, when the disease is induced by injection, the time period between treatment and the onset of the violence can be regulated — that is, knowing the subject’s weight and metabolism, I can regulate the dosage, leaving the disease like a slow fuse within him. But when it is transmitted directly from man to man, with the disease at full virulence in the host, it will take effect within hours in the victim. This was just as they wished it; it suited their scheme.’

‘But what was that scheme?’ I asked.

He looked at me, his fingers still dragging at his cheeks, drawing the flesh down.

‘Their plan, Harland,’ he said. ‘Their plan was… to infect enemy prisoners of war!’

I saw it then. My flesh crawled.

‘They would be treated to go berserk in, say, a month’s time. Then allowed to escape, or be dealt in an exchange of prisoners, with the abomination smouldering in them. You can imagine the results. They laughed, those men… my masters… they laughed, thinking of a plague of ghouls behind the enemy lines. It would be most effective. The carriers would no doubt be killed, but not before inflicting wounds which would, in turn, create a second wave of monsters.’

‘My God,’ I whispered. ‘The cold calculation…’

‘Think of the panic, the confusion, the horror, when the enemy troops… and then the civilians… began to go berserk in ever-increasing numbers. By the time they realised what was causing it, if they ever did, it would be too late. The enemy army would be demoralised, if not destroyed. Perhaps the nation, itself… destroyed as surely as the minds of the infected. Then it would be a simple matter of quarantining the enemy country or holding the battle lines firm and waiting for the self-destruction. Such was their plan. They were greatly pleased with it..’

‘It could escalate… to what proportions? Where would it stop?’

‘We had to predict that. The… ghouls… would not survive for long. They cannot take care of themselves, they neglect the normal bodily needs. Those not killed outright would die, in due course, of accident, starvation, dehydration. But to say how long it would take…’ He shrugged.

I heard a gun go off from somewhere without the compound.

‘I guess we’ll find that out now,’ I said

Elston said, ‘What?’ and then he understood and said, ‘Why, yes; so we shall…’ Incredibly, there was a spark of scientific interest in his eyes… interest detached from guilt and regret. I turned and walked away and I don’t think he even noticed. His motives in summoning me had been laudable, but he was yet a scientist interested in his work. The horror of it all. well, as Elston might have put it: that was a side-effect, no more. He had talked into me, as if I were a recording device and now, to him, I was switched off. I think, of the two, I respected Larsen more.

I wandered the corridors for awhile. There was a great deal of activity, both naval and civilian types rushing about; no one paid me any notice. From time to time I heard gunfire. Presently I returned to the whitewashed room. The guard was no longer on the door. I went in and sat down behind the table. A few minutes later Larsen came in.

‘Where in hell have you been?’ he asked.

‘I took a walk. I don’t suppose there was anything wrong in that, was there? Or am I under restraint?’

‘What’s eating you, Harland?’

‘There is no antidote.’

‘Oh. How did you… oh, it doesn’t matter. Yes, we’re killing them. What else can we do? We have no facilities to lock up so many, even if we wanted to. Can’t lock them up together, you know. Anyhow, it’s best for them. Wouldn’t you wish to be killed, if the alternative was… becoming one of them?’

He was right, I supposed; or less wrong. I nodded, or shrugged. Right and wrong could not be taken in chunks, demarcated like the light and shadow of that room.

He said, ‘We’re shooting them as we find them; it’s too late for anything else.’

‘Are you finding many?’

‘Too many.’

He leaned out into the corridor and said something. Then he stepped aside and two uniformed guards came in with a stretcher. There was a body on the stretcher, covered with a sheet; not moving. They slid the stretcher on the table and Larsen pulled the sheet down. I looked at a dead man’s face.

‘Recognise him? Was he in the Red Walls?’

I studied the face very carefully. In death, the man looked normal enough. But I had never seen him before.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

‘You know what that means?’

‘Of course. The second stage has begun.’

‘So we no longer need your help, Harland. It was worth a try. I never really expected…’

‘How fast will it escalate?’

‘God knows. If every one of the men Jasper infected — except for the three we got in time — if they infect even two more… I can’t say. I suppose it’s a matter of mathematics.’ He turned to the guards. ‘Take that away,’ he said, and they jumped forwards and lifted the stretcher. ‘Got to burn the bodies,’ he said, to me. ‘It can spread from a corpse. If a dog or a rat got at one of the bodies… the dead flesh still carries the change, you see. We learned that in the early experiments, before we were using human… volunteers. The catalyst, being chemical, doesn’t need a living host. It can lurk in dead tissue and be ingested… got to burn them. I wouldn’t even trust them to the worms.’ The strain was showing on Larsen. He looked even thinner than before, his eyes were bigger behind his spectacles and his close-cropped hair stuck up in clumps.

‘The worst part will be the women,’ he said.

I didn’t get that, for a moment; said, ‘There was only the one woman, the salad girl…’ but Larsen shook his head.

‘No, the others. These men have wives, girlfriends… no bond of love will save them, if they are together when…’ He paled suddenly. ‘No, the worst part won’t be the women,’ he said.

‘What, then?’

‘The children,’ Larsen said.

And horror ran, like malaria, in my veins…

Like demons in hell, the guards stood around the rim of the smouldering pit. They had dug the pit behind the laboratory, not far from the fence, and they were burning the corpses. The lab was equipped with an incinerator, but it was not large enough for the grisly task. As they had not anticipated needing cells for more than three at one time, so they had not figured on having to burn so many. The stench was appalling. I stood in the open back door of the building, staring out and smoking my pipe; fearful and wondering.

Black smoke, shot through with red flashes, billowed up from the pit. The sky was pale in the east, making the smoke seem blacker and thicker as it coiled up in ebony ropes and plumes, a Stygian cable anchored in the pit. I watched as two guards carried a corpse to the rim. They looked as if they stood at the doors to Hell, washed with the red glow. They threw the body into the inferno. A wave of increased heat struck me; sparks spun from the incandescent crater and threads of orange weaved through the writhing black funnel. One of the guards slapped at his thigh. A spark had struck him. And then they brushed their hands together, gazing down into the fiery pit for a moment before stepping away, workmen with a task well done. They might have been advertising beer on television… a hard job done and now it’s time to relax with an ice cold…

Larsen stepped up beside me, his thin nostrils twitching.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

Then he grinned and said, ‘That pipe of yours sure does stink.’

I blinked at him, astounded, and then, suddenly, we were both laughing at his joke. It wasn’t forced laughter, we were honestly convulsed by his wit. He wrinkled his nose. Laughing, I said, ‘If we get a midget ghoul, you can stuff him in my briar,’ and Larsen howled with glee. I puffed away and the deep bowl of my pipe glowed and billowed in feeble imitation of the fiery pit.

Then, abruptly, we were not laughing.

It had been a strange impulse and only dimly grasped, yet I doubt I have ever laughed with such good humour as I did that night by the smouldering pit.

I said, ‘How many?’

‘Nine,’ he told me. ‘Not counting the nurse.’

He rubbed his lean jaw. One side of his face seemed to have ignited in the seething glow; the other was as dark as the smoke, the muscles in his cheek twisting in turbulent coils — a stormy face in a volcanic dawn. I knew that my own face reflected the same disunion, cleft by the chiaroscuro of the flames. Like carnal mirrors, we reflected one another.

‘I don’t know if we should be encouraged or discouraged by the numbers,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what they signify. The more we get might mean the fewer left… or it might mean we are simply drawing from a larger pool. ’

‘I know. We don’t know how many men Jasper actually wounded, but even if only three or four got away… three could become nine… or twelve… even with minimal numbers…’ Even as I spoke, I was aware that I was thinking strictly of numbers as a statistic; not of the men they represented. And that I had to. ‘… And then, the third stage… Thank God we’re on an island with a limited population.’

‘I may decide to evacuate,’ he said. He looked at me as if he wanted my advice. ‘If we can’t control the spread… but we’ll have to make damned sure none of the evacuees is infected. Some system of quarantine before boarding the boat. I’m not sure I want that responsibility, that decision… Well, it may be a moot point. They may not let us leave.’

‘If you do… we do. what about them? The… ghouls?’ The word had a bitter taste; I was appalled that I’d used it. ‘Will you just abandon them here?’

He looked at me with fire running down his profile.

‘That decision will come from higher up… and I’m just as glad of that.’ He rubbed his neck; his splayed fingers cast slender shadows and his hand glowed red; the heat rose and fell as if some terrible bellows pulsed in the pit.

‘It’s the ones who stayed in town that are hard to flush out… and have more opportunity to infect others,’ he said. His lips twisted the words out. ‘Most of the ones we got had come to the beach or inland. We’ve started a house-to-house search but the damnedest part is that we can’t tell who is infected and who isn’t until it takes effect.’

‘Are there no symptoms that show before?’

‘I asked Elston about that, a few minutes ago. None that he knows of. He’s… a dedicated man. He begged me not to burn all the corpses… to save a few for him to dissect.’

‘Maybe he hopes to find an antidote.’

‘That’s a charitable supposition,’ Larsen said.

He looked very human then, with his face inhumanly blazing in the glow. I wondered if he knew that Elston had written me. He knew who I was and maybe he’d known all along; maybe he, too, had wanted it stopped, wanting it helplessly from within the cage of his duty, the bureaucratic web that trapped his life. I felt the absolute helplessness of the man, the frustration; his life and his volition had been frozen in the ice of obedience, trapped as surely as a heart within a ribcage, a mind within a skull. I thought I might ask him — we had become friends, I think, in some twisted fashion — but as I was about to speak, gunfire sounded off to the side.

We both looked.

A man — a ghoul… the word asserted its rights in my mind… was running along the outside of the fence — not running as if frightened, for they knew no fear, but running as if he had started to run by pure chance and was too mindless to halt; running by inertia, as the planets run around the stars.

Three navy men in white uniforms were running after him, pausing to fire from time to time. They were hitting him. I saw blood spray out twice and once the impact of a bullet drove him to his knees, but he bounded up immediately and ran on. Immune to shock, he would run until the bullets broke his legs — and then he would crawl — until a shot pierced his heart or brain; he moved by descriptive law.

The fence took an outward turn just behind the pit. The ghoul ran into it. The three pursuers slowed and one went to his knees to take aim. Then the ghoul clenched his fist through the mesh of the fence and tore it open. I could hear the heavy metal snap. Beside me, Larsen snorted. The ghoul slid through the broken fence and bounded into the compound. The guards scattered back from the pit, darting silhouettes against the red glare and red-rimmed shadows against the smoke. The ghoul loped towards the inferno. He didn’t see the pit, or he disregarded it. He ran right up to the rim and past it — not falling, but running into the flames. A moment later he came up from the other side, clothing ablaze and flesh melting from his bones. He was climbing out. He slipped and slid back, then came crawling out again. His hair was burning. The three navy men were through the broken fence now and, standing side by side, like a firing squad, they shot into his body. They backed off, shooting. Blood sizzled like fat in a frying pan. Slowly the creature slipped back into the pit and did not emerge again.

One of the guards laughed.

‘Saves carrying that bugger,’ he said.

I passed a hand across my eyes. I understood his jest, his coarse and callous attitude. God help me, I understood. It had been the same as laughing with Larsen at my pipe and I, too, had started to think of them as ghouls, to reason with the mentality of the Inquisition and to loathe them with instinctive fear and hatred that obscured all pity. This was primordial fear, a horror that should have been left behind when man evolved from the slime… and now rose up again to brutalise and numb the emotions, as contagious as any disease.

The fire flared and crackled merrily as it fed on this new kindling. I was sickened. I felt I could stay there no longer. I turned to Larsen. His face was like a stone idol with living eyes. Sparks swirled and darted through the night; he looked on his fiery celebration as helplessly as any worshipped god.

‘I’ll go back to town,’ I said.

Larsen looked at me; for a moment he didn’t seem to know who I was or why I was there.

‘If I may?’

‘You’re no prisoner, Harland. No more than are we all. But you’ll be safer here.’

‘No, I’ll go.’

‘As you like. I can’t spare an escort.’

I hadn’t thought of that. Numbed by the horror, I had forgotten the danger.

Or it was danger too grim to register on the mind.

Larsen said, ‘I’ll check out a rifle for you, if you like.’

He must have thought I might have qualms about that, for he added, ‘It will be safer for you if you’re carrying a gun. My men are scared. They might not be too hesitant about shooting a stranger walking alone. The rifle will be like a safe conduct, I guess.’

He stared directly at me.

The rifle was offered as a talisman, not a weapon.

‘Thank you,’ I said, not for the rifle.

I had never shot a man. 1 didn’t know if I could. But it would be comfortable to have the option.

‘Jack! Thank God you’re all right!’

The front door of the jail had been locked and when Jerry opened it he stepped quickly back. He had a gun in his hand. I looked at his gun and he regarded my rifle. Mary spoke from behind him and, a bit sheepish, Jerry holstered the gun. Just a bit sheepish, like a thin veneer laid over grim determination. He said, ‘I had a look for you at the Red Walls; place was swarming with… patrols, I guess. But they wouldn’t tell me anything.’

‘They don’t know much.’

Jerry was locking the door again; said, ‘Do you?’

‘Yes; most of it.’

I leaned the rifle against the wall. I was drained with the tension of that solitary walk back from the compound, my nerves like vibrant webs under my skin. Jerry was waiting for me to tell him what I had discovered. Mary did not look so eager to hear it. I gazed out the window at the dawn through which I’d passed. It was a glorious morning, with sunrise ringing golden blows against the shield of dusk. A fan of pale light spread out in the eastern sky, opening slowly, as if reluctant to reveal the day. These things were better wrapped in darkness.

’You’ve seen Elston?’ Mary asked.

‘I saw him. And Larsen. I’ve been in the compound; I saw some other things that… I’d rather not have known.’

‘What in hell is going on?’ Jerry asked. He was lingering the bolt on the door. ‘They’ve had vans down here with loudspeakers, telling everyone to stay inside and keep the doors locked.’ He slid the bolt back and forth, as if playing a game of chance with the lock. ‘I got a special visit from one of Larsen’s men… polite sort of guy… but he sort of told me to stay right here and keep out of it. Whatever it is.’

‘And he heard shooting,’ Mary put in.

’There’s nothing you can do, Jerry,’ I told him. ‘It’s better to stay here. And keep Mary here. This thing… well, it’s a highly contagious disease… of a sort. ’

‘Of a sort?’

And then, with Jerry swearing from time to time and Mary’s eyes growing huge and frightened, I told them what I’d found out and what I’d seen. I was grabbing words in clumps and throwing them out, glad to be rid of them; but they left hollow impressions behind. When I finished we stood silent for a time. I could feel the pattern of my nerves tingling; felt as if the schematics of my nervous system were visible, glowing through my flesh.

Jerry twisted his hat brim. ’I wonder if they really would have done that?’ he mused. ‘If they really would have used it as a weapon?’

I said, ‘Probably not. The people who develop these things aren’t the ones who have the say on using them.’

He nodded, holding his hat so that his head dipped from it, exposing a wrinkled brow. He said, ‘I was in the army. Didn’t mind the idea of fighting. Never would of wanted to do a thing like that, though; ain’t no enemy deserves a thing like that.’

‘If only Elston had been more… courageous,’ Mary said. ‘A strange men, Elston. I’m not sure…’

‘Well, I reckon we’d best get Mary off the island,’ said the sheriff. He had slipped into his redneck accent; I wasn’t sure if it was deliberate.

’I doubt they’ll let anyone leave until. ’

’Hell, they can’t tell me not to go to the police cruiser. I’m still the law here… outside the compound, leastwise.’

‘They wouldn’t let me use the Coast Guard boat,’ Mary said.

’Different thing, that is.’

’We could try,’ I said.

‘Why, sure. Anyone tries to stop us, I’ll arrest him.’ He gave us a grim smile. ‘I’ll run you two over to the Keys. Guess I ought to come back, myself… although I can’t say I’m too damned keen on the idea.’

‘There’s no reason to; nothing you can do.’

‘That’s not the point, so much. Just that the sheriff hadn’t ought to run out on a thing like this.’ He was still mangling his Stetson; it was on the back of his head now, battered and twisted. His dedication was twisted, too; his sense of duty and obligation. I knew how he felt. Some insane part of my mind was telling me that I should stay on Pelican and see this out. It was more than getting a story, far more than a dedication to my work, but the turnings of such a resolve were too devious to follow, too sigmoidal to trace through the mind. I wanted to go.

Jerry said, ‘There’s no antidote at all, eh?’

‘They’ve not found one.’

‘And no one knows how long it will take for this thing to run its course?’

‘No.’

He shook his head. ‘Hell of a thing to do to a nice little island like this. Nice people. Well, let’s go down to the boat, let’s just see if we can…’

‘Jerry… if they let us leave… I don’t want you to come back here,’ Mary said.

‘Aw.. we’ll talk about that later.’

He moved to the door, drew the bolt and hesitated; then he threw the door open and stood back, with his gun ready. The street was empty. From the doorway we could look across the waterfront and out into the harbour. A large swordfish was hanging on a scale on the dock, hoisted up to be weighed and measured. Flecks of blue and green glinted in the drying skin. It would never be weighed now, never mounted. It seemed a shame. It was a big one; it had been caught at the wrong time, a death so vain it did not even bolster a fisherman’s vanity. The harbour was jammed with hobbling boats and there were navy boats crossing back and forth across the approaches. Jerry stepped into the street and looked both ways. A patrol was moving down the front, going away from us. There was no one else in sight. Mary and I moved out behind Jerry. I had forgotten the rifle; I went back for it. I followed Mary out and, as I did so, a loudhailer boomed from a naval gunboat.

‘Turn back! This island is under quarantine! Turn back at once!’

We saw the gunboat but we couldn’t see the reason for the command. Then, as we watched, a fishing boat slid into view, coming from the south. Jerry squinted at it. He said, ‘Why, that’s John Tate’s boat. What’s he doing out there?’

I said, ‘Tate? He told me he often ties up at one of the coves to the south, instead of using the harbour.’

‘He still does that? Old Tate! Used to do some free trading. Never very much; little rum or Havana. Hasn’t run a thing in ten years but he still clings to the image.’

Tate’s boat continued on its course.

I could see him on the bridge, a spindly old man with one eye and plenty of memories. The gunboat had veered towards him, intersecting his course, a white bow wave breaking from the grey prow. Tate spun the wheel and his wooden boat cut sharply to starboard. I had only met him the one time, but he’d left an impression. I could imagine him grinning with ferocious glee as he pitted his seamanship against the power of authority once again. He had run contraband past customs before and it was just like the old days — except he must have thought it a game, now, when he was doing nothing he thought illegal and could toy with them without fear of punishment or confiscated cargo. His small boat seemed to stand up on its stern as it changed course. The gunboat cut back, ponderous by comparison, and massive. The two vessels were dangerously close. The loudhailer sounded again. I couldn’t make out the words. Beside me, Jerry cursed violently.

‘They’re gonna ram him!’ he shouted.

‘Oh my God!’ Mary cried.

I saw Tate raise his fist, shaking it vehemently at the man on the bridge of the gunboat. He didn’t believe they were serious, I thought; he believed that some inexperienced navy captain was misjudging his approach and playing the game too close. Tate waved his gnarled fist, scolding the gunboat. The nimble wooden boat ducked down into a trough and the bow of the grey gunboat reared up. Tate’s fist came down; he still thought it was a mistake, but he realised it was a serious mistake. Then the gunboat rammed him.

Tate’s fishing boat went down within minutes.

The gunboat had taken the stern right off and veered away, like a bull hooking into a matador. I couldn’t see Tate. He must have been knocked down by the impact. Fragments of wood and rope dragged back from the gunboat, festooning the high prow and the bows of Tate’s boat pointed up to the sky and slid back and under. The water sighed as it closed.

The gunboat continued on.

Sailors looked back from the rails, but the boat never stopped. Jerry’s head was thrust forwards, the cords in his thick neck standing out like dark ropes, his throat rigged by rage.

He said, ‘They aren’t going to pick him up.’

‘No,’ I said softly. ‘They wouldn’t take him aboard… that wasn’t the idea.’

We looked, shading our eyes, but Tate never surfaced. Then we looked at one another.

‘So much for that idea,’ Jerry said.

We went back to the jail.

Mary had begun to sob hysterically. The sheriff put his hand on her shoulder and she clasped her own hand over his, her body vibrating. The tremors ran down Jerry’s forearm.

‘John Tate,’ she whispered. ‘Old pirate. He would have loved to live through this, wouldn’t he? It would have made such a fine story… better than how he lost his eye… how he eluded the navy gunboat. ’ She smiled sadly.

‘Or how he helped hang a man in the Red Walls,’ I said, not knowing why I said it; it seemed such an insignificant thing, viewed against the backdrop of his own death.

Jerry began to pace the room, like a prisoner in his own jail.

‘We’re safe enough here,’ he said. ‘We’ll just have to wait it out.’

‘But how long?’ Mary sobbed.

We had no answer to that.

Jerry said, ‘I guess it could be… days… maybe weeks, even.’ He looked at me for confirmation. I didn’t know. He said, ‘We could always lock ourselves in the cell; they couldn’t get at us there.’

‘Weeks…’ I said. ‘What about food? Supplies?’

‘Lord! I never thought of that. We’ll have to get some stuff in here.’

The thought of preparing for a seige was not appealing.

‘They may decide to evacuate…’

‘Yeah, and they may not. We’d better not take a chance… that chance. There’s a shop just down the front.’

‘I think, if we’re going out again, we’d better do it now. This is likely to get worse before it gets better… liable to spread until… well, I’ll go with you.’

‘No, you stay here with Mary.’

‘Nothing I’d like better than not going out there again. But Mary will be safe enough here, with the door barred, and the two of us can carry a lot more. There’s no sense in making more than one forage. And… we can watch each other’s backs.’

‘He’s right, Jerry. I’ll be okay here. Just… don’t be very long.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. Jerry regarded her for a moment, then he nodded.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, and we went.

I stepped deliberately, as if my footfalls were ticking off the moments, punctuating the passage of time. Jerry preceded me through the deserted streets. The low sun blocked sharp patterns on the buildings, as clearly defined as the light in the whitewashed room, but my own shadow dragged reluctantly at my heels, as if cast from a different source — thrown from me by the glow of my fear. A low fog was clinging against the walls and a heavier fog came rolling out from a sidestreet, curling like a cat across Jerry’s boots. He stumbled, as if he’d tripped on the mist. He held his gun at his side, pointing down. I quickened my pace to catch him up and we moved on together. The walk was a hundred yards, no more. It seemed eternal. We met no one.

Mendoza’s Market was a dusty storeroom with shelves and glass-fronted counters stocked with tins of almost everything. The door wasn’t locked. Jerry stood just inside the entrance and shouted for Mendoza, who lived above. There was no response. We looked around the gloomy room.

Jerry said, ‘We should of made us up a shopping list. Well, grab one of these boxes and fill ‘er up with whatever takes your fancy; might as well dine to our taste.’

He began plucking tins from the shelves. I crossed to the other side of the room and began raiding the shelves myself, paying little attention to what I took, just tossing things into a big cardboard box. I didn’t expect we’d have much appetite. The box was quite heavy when it was full; I had to tuck the rifle under my arm and use both hands to lift it. Jerry had filled his box before I finished; he held it easily under one arm. We moved back through the cluttered room, the tins rattling in the boxes. At the door, I paused.

‘How about tobacco?’

‘Why, yes… we might feel the urge to do some smoking, at that. I think Mendoza keeps the tobacco in the counter at the back. Might grab a couple bottles of rum from back there, too; can’t do any harm to have some rum. Might help, even.’

‘I’ll get it,’ I said.

I lowered my box to the dusty floor and stepped to the back of the room. I saw a variety of tobacco, in all forms, in a glass display case. The rum bottles were on a shelf behind. I filled my pockets with tobacco and stepped around the end of the counter… and a white face loomed up from the shadows!

I tried to scream.

My vocal chords rebelled; they stiffened like frozen iron in my throat and only a strangled gasp came from me. I recoiled. The butt of the rifle struck the glass case, shattering it. I distinctly heard each splinter of glass fall out, the tinkling sounds echoed by the rattle of tins as Jerry shifted the box. He was shouting something from the door and I think I was shouting then, too; I know my mouth was open and a rushing filled my ears. I swung the rifle up before me, not aimed as a weapon but crossed against my breast like a crucifix against a vampire.

Jerry shouted again.

‘Move!’ He was advancing towards me along the shelves.

But then I slumped against the broken case, my vitality sucked from me in the deflation of sudden terror. Jerry was behind me, one hand on my shoulder; the other thrust the pistol past me. I could feel the big man tremble. I shook my head. It took great concentration, my skull was heavy, my neck limp. By then I’d realised there was no danger… horror, yes, but no danger. The face had not moved towards me; I had inclined my head towards it as I reached for the rum and the white face had seemed to rise, thrown from the dark shadows as if buoyant from a heavy sea.

The man was dead, spread-eagled behind the counter as if nailed there by his final convulsions.

Jerry let his breath out slowly.

I was hollow. My energy, my life force, my very bones seemed to have been sucked from me into the vacuum of fear. I was still shaking my head — an act of inertia. I had thought the man alive, reaching for me — and I had been unable to flee, had never thought to use the rifle… had waited for his touch…

‘Mendoza,’ Jerry said.

The hand that had been trembling on my shoulder was firm now, solid as a stone, but the hand that gripped the gun had begun to shake as he lowered it.

He moved me aside and leaned over the corpse. He did not touch it.

‘Looks like he might of died of natural causes,’ he said. ‘Heart attack, maybe… he wasn’t young..’

‘Yes, it looks that way.’

Jerry looked at me, face as white as Mendoza’s.

‘Isn’t it remarkable?’ he said. ‘Here and now… a man dying of natural causes… it makes you see that life goes on.’

He paused, wondering if his statement had been absurd… or profound.

‘I never killed anyone,’ he said. Nor had he yet. But the gun was in his hand… he would have; he might have to. He was peering into my face. He said, ‘Harland, do you think these… things… will go to heaven?’

I gaped dumbly at him and he flushed; the question had been genuine.

‘Yes,’ I said. I held no brief for the hereafter, but I said, ‘Yes.’

And he said, ‘I’d like to think so…’

Walking back down the front with the heavy boxes, we met a patrol coming from the other direction. When they saw us they spread out and their rifles came up. They looked terrified — as terrified as we must have looked.

‘Take it easy,’ Jerry snapped.

‘Don’t come too close. Just move on.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There’s a dead man in Mendoza’s. We don’t know if he’s one of… them… but you’d better send someone to get the body.’

He didn’t look as if he understood.

‘To burn it,’ I said.

‘Oh. Yeah. You just move on.’

We moved on. The patrol turned, watching us. Then they went on in the other direction. When we had come to the jail, I looked back. The patrol had moved on down the street, past Mendoza’s and, as I looked, they turned to the right, inland… towards the compound. I hoped they wouldn’t forget to send a van for Mendoza’s body. I looked out at the harbour. There was some wood floating about, timber and planks, and an oily slick spreading slowly through the water. The swordfish still hung, neglected forever now, on the scales. The grey gunboats passed to and fro across the mouth of the harbour. How long? I wondered. How long would it be?

Mary was looking out the window as we approached.

Framed in the window, her face seemed to be disintegrating, dissolving with fear. Her cheeks were pinched in and her eyes were huge and staring. Jerry waved but she didn’t acknowledge the gesture. She turned, looking back into the room. Her profile spread like a pale wash against the glass. Then we had passed the window and I heard the bolt rasp free. Mary opened the door and stepped out. Jerry’s shoulders twitched as, instinctively, he tried to comfort her in his arms, but found the laden box between them. Mary was crying.

‘Hey, now… it’s okay,’ the sheriff said.

‘It’s not okay; nothing is okay.’

‘We’ll be all right. Just a question of — ’

‘Doctor Winston is here,’ she said.

‘Hey, that’s great,’ Jerry said. He went through the door. Winston was standing in the corner, smoking a cigar, hands clasped behind his back. He looked as if he were thoughtfully considering a diagnosis.

‘Glad you made it,’ Jerry said. He put the box on the desk. ‘That you thought to come here.’

‘Mary doesn’t seem to think it such a good idea,’ Winston said. He was calm enough, but he’d been chewing on the cigar; the wrapper had started to uncurl.

Jerry looked at the girl, blinking.

‘Doctor Winston has been… wounded,’ she said.

Jerry started, all his big body going taut.

‘He hasn’t touched me,’ Mary added, quickly. ‘He came to the door. I let him in. I was glad to see him… I didn’t know he had been hurt.. ’

‘How’d it happen, Doc?’

‘Why, it was one of these lunatics that seem to be about. That’s why I came down here… to see if you had any idea what is going on here? Something to do with the research in the compound, is it? I tried to phone there but couldn’t get past the switchboard and, by the way, I’ve heard nothing from my nurse…’

‘How long, Doc?’

‘What? Well, I phoned there at — ’

‘How long is it since you were attacked?’

‘Well, what does… or does it?’ Comprehension came into the doctor’s face. He took the cigar from his teeth. ‘It does matter, eh? Apparently you know more about this than I. What is it, some sort of germ warfare?’

‘Doc… how long?’

Winston winced at Jerry’s tone. They were friends; he didn’t understand it. He had paled slightly under his normal flush and Jerry’s jaws were tight with great bands of muscle.

Winston said, ‘Better part of an hour,’ and he was watching the sheriff carefully, gauging his reaction. Winston was a big, heavy man; he looked to have a slow metabolism. I relaxed somewhat but, in relaxing, went icy cold. ‘What is it, Jerry? What sort of thing is it? Am I liable to contaminate you by being here?’

Jerry didn’t know what to say.

I said, ‘Let’s have a drink.’

I think I’d managed to keep my voice normal. Jerry shot me a grateful glance. I opened a bottle of Mendoza’s rum and Jerry fetched glasses. We weren’t going to share the bottle with Winston. He was standing behind the desk and we stood opposite. Winston took a large swallow and licked his lips.

‘Excellent,’ he said. Then: ‘Well? Is it terminal?’

‘Not terminal,’ I said.

I had taken this upon myself and Jerry was glad enough to waive his authority. I sipped some rum. Winston watched me. I wasn’t sure if I should deceive him or not. Every man has his own way of facing death and a right to face it that way and if this had been a natural disease, no matter how lethal or painful, I would have told him the truth. But it was not natural. This was a thing that created its own values and judgements.

I said, ‘They have an antidote, at the compound.’

Jerry gave me a sharp look and I could tell he was thinking the same as me. Then he narrowed his eyes and looked down at his boots.

‘That’s why your nurse was taken to the compound,’ I went on. ‘We’ll have to take you there, or bring the antidote here. That’s all.’

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Winston said. ‘The way you were all acting, I thought I was a goner. But what is it, anyway? The way these lunatics are running around… some new strain of rabies?’

‘I believe it’s something of that nature.’

‘They shouldn’t have been fooling around with that.’

‘They know that… now.’

I refilled our glasses. I didn’t flinch as I leaned across the desk to pour into the doctor’s glass. Mary’s glass was still full; she said, ‘Is it wise to be drinking? I mean… hadn’t we better keep our wits about us?’

‘I think it’s better if we have a few drinks,’ Jerry said.

Mary knew what we were going to do, then. She said, ‘Oh, yes. I’ll have a drink as well.’ Then she realised that she already had a fall glass in her hand. She sipped. Tears streaked her cheeks, but she was no longer sobbing. We drank slowly and steadily. Doctor Winston seemed to be actually relishing the rum. Jerry and I needed it. We watched the doctor carefully, wondering what the first signs would be; whether it would be a sudden rage or a gradual transition? Unblinking, he gazed back over the rim of his glass. I started to pour some more rum.

‘Hadn’t we better see about this antidote, then?’ Winston said. ‘I suppose it should be administered as soon as possible. I’ll prescribe a good healthy dosage of rum for all of us afterwards.’

He spoke slowly, as if deliberating each word. I wondered if he were getting drunk or if the process was starting to affect his ability to form the words. But he looked at us with clear, alert eyes. He looked almost amused. I had a terrible idea that we hadn’t deceived him, after all; that he was playing the game with us, protecting our feelings as we tried to protect him from the truth.

Jerry snorted and slammed his glass down on the desk.

‘I’ll take the doc up to the compound now,’ he said. ‘You stay here with Mary. We won’t be long.’

I said, ‘I’ll go with him, if you like.’

Jerry stared at me. He appreciated my offer and he knew the doctor a lot better than I did. I think he was tempted to let me do it. But maybe he didn’t trust my nerve; he had seen me cringe from dead Mendoza, never even attempting to use the rifle.

‘No, it’s better if I go,’ he said.

Winston was looking back and forth between us.

‘I don’t suppose I could go on my own?’ he said.

Again I saw that look in his eyes. Jerry saw it, too.

‘Come on, doc,’ he said.

Mary was sitting with her face in her hands. She looked up at me once or twice, then lowered her face again immediately. We were not drinking now. I was taut as a tuning fork, waiting to vibrate to the sound of the gun… but no shot sounded.

Then Jerry came back in, his face a mask of anguish.

‘Goddamn me!’ he cried.

He slammed the door; across the room, the bars rattled.

I looked at Jerry, puzzled. I have never seen such torment on a face. He walked to the bars and gripped them, a prisoner outside the cell… inside a black despair.

‘He knew,’ Jerry said. ‘He walked on ahead of me… never looked back once. I guess he knew. I followed him. But I walked slower and slower… and he just kept on at the same pace, so I was dropping behind… and when he turned off towards the compound, I stopped… and came back. I let him go. I couldn’t do it! Goddamn me to hell!’ he screamed, cursing himself… for not killing his friend.

For a long while, no one spoke…

After a while Mary made a meal which none of us even pretended to eat. No shots had sounded for a long time. I looked out the window every few minutes but there was nothing to see. It was like a ghost town. A newspaper tumbled down the waterfront, starting to shred. A sea breeze had come up; it whined through the empty streets. From a wharf further down the front a door or shutter banged with a determined rhythm. The swordfish still hung from the scales, dry now; it looked like papier mâché. I felt sorry for the swordfish. It helped a bit to spread my sympathies. The others were looking out too, from time to time. We never looked out together, just took it in haphazard turns.

Jerry said, ‘There’s nobody… nobody at all. Maybe it’s tapering off. No patrols, either… funny…’

He came back from the window.

A little later, Mary looked out.

She saw the shore patrolman first.

He was alone and looked relaxed.

He was standing down by the dock, looking out towards the patrol gunboats, not even watching his back. I breathed a sigh of relief. It must be over… at least this particular patrolman believed it to be over, for he showed no signs of alertness or fear. He seemed interested in the boats, as if he were waiting for them to do something, perhaps for the blockade to disperse. Jerry opened the door and stepped out. He called to the man. The man didn’t seem to hear. Jerry called again, louder. The patrolman heard then. He seemed to shake himself around inside his crisp white uniform, like a dog shaking off water. Then he turned to face us.

Jerry’s breath went out in a rush.

I couldn’t breathe at all.

The ghoul in the white uniform made no move towards us; he stood, relaxed, watching us as he had watched the boats, with those blank, white eyes.

We went back in and barred the door.

We didn’t look out for a while.

When we did, later, he was gone…

After that, we avoided the window. We did not look out, not wanting to see what was in the streets, and we did not look at it, not wanting to see what might… be looking in. From time to time we heard… things… shuffling past the building; once something banged against the wall. But there was no real effort to get in. We sat at the desk in the centre of the room and looked at our hands. We drank a little rum. At one point, Mary raised the question that had been troubling me — and perhaps Jerry, as well.

‘What shall we do if someone… normal… wants to join us?’

She didn’t wait for a reply; said, ‘I mean, when Doctor Winston knocked on the door, I let him in as a matter of course… and then I found out… I mean, how will we know?’ She spoke the last words in a strained voice that rose towards hysteria. I had no answer. She said, ‘We can’t refuse to let someone in, if there’s a chance they might be all right…’ She gestured with both hands, vehemently, as if we were arguing with her… ^!We can’t leave them out there…’

Jerry said, ‘I guess what we’d do — will do, it happens — is lock ‘em up in the cell. Keep ‘em at gunpoint and explain that we’re sorry but can’t take any chances and get ‘em in the cell. If they’re still all right after… oh, say five hours, to be on the safe side… then we can let them out.’

Mary nodded. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘There is a flaw, Jerry,’ I said, shaking my head. When they both looked at me, I said, ‘It’s a good plan if only one person comes, but suppose two or three show up here? If they come separately — locking them up… would be like locking a man up with a time bomb, which might or might not explode… or a tiger, which might or might not be hungry. It would be torture.’

‘Hell,’ he said.

‘Elston told me they had tested the ferocity of the subjects by locking them up together,’ I added. ‘It was not a pretty sight, although, no doubt, of great scientific interest,’ I said, bitterly.

‘Well… if one of us kept a constant watch… the moment one of them showed any signs of going berserk, we could kill him before the other was attacked…’

‘Could we?’ I asked.

Jerry dropped his head. He had not been able to kill Doctor Winston and I had not even aimed my rifle at Mendoza and Mary… yet, who knows what one can do? ‘We might manage that,’ I said.

‘What else can we do?’

‘There’s one thing.’ I hesitated, wishing that Mary had been sleeping; not wanting to disturb her even more. But she was listening carefully; she had an interest in the matter, after all. I said, ‘We might need the cell for ourselves.’

‘How do you mean?’ Jerry asked.

‘They’re inhumanly strong. They could break in here, if they wanted to… no, not wanted to, they’re too mindless for that… but if the urge takes them. I thought… well, if they do try to break in, we can lock ourselves in the cell.’

Jerry grimaced. He said, ‘I don’t like that idea at all… locked in there, cowering back from the bars… with things maybe reaching in, trying to get at us…’ His great torso rippled; he shuddered like an earth tremor. ‘I’d rather be mobile… run… shoot if we have to… Yeah, I can shoot them… and hell, we don’t know how long we have to stay here.’

I hadn’t relished the thought myself; it was an option I thought I should mention. I said, ‘It may be a moot point. Maybe no one, normal or otherwise, will come. Let’s wait and see.’

And maybe it was a moot point.

But I was to be reminded, in a terrible way, of our agonising dilemma… the problem was not unique to us…

We spoke no more, with nothing to say. Time moved ponderously. And very slowly the light changed at the window.

The long night had begun…

We sat in the lighted cube of our sanctuary and things moved in the darkness without. The sounds they made were soft, as if they caressed the walls lovingly, longingly, yearning to enter. They sensed we were within; they gently stroked the walls around us. We knew we should turn the light out… that it was drawing them to the jail like a beacon… but knowing is one thing; we could not cherish darkness — by dawn we would have been inhuman.

Like a prisoner marking his passing sentence, Jerry drove his fist into his palm, not hard but as regular as a metronome; he winced with each soft blow, as if stung. Beside him, Mary sat with her face buried in her hands. From time to time she would shudder and look up, tearing her face from its shelter by main force… from the hooks of her hands came her tormented countenance, haggard, white, ghastly, the flesh drawn from her fingers. I looked past them, at the bars and, beyond, the shadow of the bars on the wall of the cell. My backbone was like a bar, riveting me to my chair… multiple bars, split by currents of fear and spreading like splintered bamboo through my torso — casting shadows on my soul. I was breathing heavily. We all were. And then something else was breathing heavily, at the door. Jerry looked up. His gun was on the table, but he did not touch it. The breath from without seemed to billow into the door; the door was solid, yet I felt as if it were fluttering like a sail, about to float open. A hand stroked the contours of the door, seeking, testing. Then it moved away; moving on, it drew with it shreds of my sanity…

Suddenly, I was back in Mendoza’s.

My mind out of time, I had just broken the glass case and the sound shattered in my ears. Mary’s face was writhing; Jerry was vibrating; my mind snapped back and I knew I had heard glass break behind me. There was glass in the window. I remembered seeing Mary at the window, through the pane… drawn against my will, I turned…

Sally the salad girl was reaching in…

Her face was framed in the window and her arm groped towards me, dripping blood where the glass had cut her. She was far more terrible than the men — somehow, she was still feminine and sensual, her painted lips drawn back as if smiling with lewd desire, her eyes rolling as if with passion, a mockery of what she had been; reaching out, it seemed she wished to fold me lovingly to her breast. I could not look away. Then she yielded, like a prostitute rejected; I did not go to her — she drifted away.

On the floor, shards of broken glass glinted in the light.

Within my body, my senses were shattered like the glass, cold splinters piercing my heart, sharp edges filing at the rim of my mind, jagged pieces rasping at my soul. I could almost hear fear grinding away at my guts. It was too much. The grinding horror wore away my humanity and polished my awareness to a smooth lump; I slipped into obfuscation. I did not move, I scarcely blinked. Things groped at the window and fondled the walls. And then the bars had double shadows. Dawn was at the window.

Mary shivered into reality, as if coming into focus from distortion or changing dimensions by some time warp. Jerry stood up, stiffly. I found I could move. I could think once more. The night had ended.

From the window, we saw a destroyer standing off beyond the harbour. My first thought, such was my state of mind, was that the navy intended to shell the town. But that was foolish and I smiled — although grimly — at myself. I did wonder what they planned, however. A destroyer was hardly necessary to quarantine fishing boats and motor cruisers. Some decision had probably been reached — been forced upon them once the first member of the patrols had been infected. Maybe it was only the one — the one we had seen — but we had no way of knowing, nor, I suppose, did they. It had taken that option from them. The search-and-destroy mission had automatically failed the moment a single member of the patrols became one of the enemy… to continue the patrols was to risk spreading the horror into the compound itself. They weren’t likely to chance that. And it explained why the patrols had been withdrawn. But not what they intended to do.

Sometime later a helicopter came in.

It was a big one and it passed over us, heading towards the compound. It didn’t stay long. It vanished towards the west and then, half an hour later, a second ‘copter came in — or the first one returned. It followed the same pattern, landing within the compound and flying off a short time afterwards. I wondered if reinforcements were being brought in, or if the compound was evacuating? Jerry, wondering the same thing, tried to phone through to the compound, but even the switchboard failed to answer now. The phone rang hollow and dead, a forlorn sound, as if the telephone itself knew it was not to be answered and sounded its despair.

Jerry slammed it down, cursing.

A few seconds later, it rang.

The sound startled us and we gaped stupidly at each other. Then Jerry snatched it up. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and at the same time I heard a loudspeaker blaring from somewhere in the streets behind us. Jerry said, ‘That’s right. Three of us. Right, we’ll be there at ten exactly. Well, sure… but look… how do we tell if they’re… all right? If we do find any others… is there some way to tell?’ He listened, tight-lipped. ‘All right,’ he said. He put the phone down.

‘They’re evacuating us from the navy pier,’ he said.

‘Thank God,’ Mary whispered.

‘We’re to be there at ten o’clock, on the dot… and they won’t wait long.’ Then, anticipating my question, he said, ‘They didn’t say how we could tell… said that everyone would be checked by a doctor, at the pier.’

‘Then they have found a way!’ I said. ‘Maybe Elston’s damned autopsies proved fruitful.’

Jerry nodded doubtfully.

A van moved down the waterfront, going fast and not stopping. The loudspeaker sounded the message, the same message we had received over the telephone. I wondered if they were phoning every number in the town; I had an eerie echo of telephones ringing, unanswered, in empty houses; ringing in sequence up and down the streets, forlorn and futile. The van passed and I saw armed men holding their weapons ready at the windows; it turned up the cobbled streets and we heard the message repeated again and again as it wound through the town, making an effort to get through to anyone hiding there… anyone who could understand. The message was given in Spanish on every third broadcast. I was cheered greatly by this, by the knowledge that something had been determined, something was being done, authority was taking measures. I suppose, without actually admitting it, I had feared that the compound had been overrun and that we were on our own. The authorities were responsible for this horror we were in, yet it was still reassuring to know they continued to function.

I said, ‘Well, thank heaven.’

But Jerry said, ‘It might not be so easy.’

He was at the window, looking out.

He said, ‘Christ, they’re all over the place!’

I felt my throat constrict. I joined him at the window and the hair came up stiff on my neck. The loudspeaker seemed to have attracted the ghouls, to have played the catalyst that brought them out of lethargy, summoning them from their various places and bringing them to the waterfront. There must have been twenty of them. They came filtering out of the sidestreets and from the warehouses, moving in the wake of the van… some Pied Piper syndrome which Elston would have termed a side-effect, bringing them together. I recognised the bearded man from the Red Walls and, I think, two or three others from the initial infection. There were several women; one clutched a baby to her breast in a mockery of the maternal instinct. The baby was dead. They moved after the van and then, when it had vanished, milled about mindlessly. They did not attack one another. From time to time two or three of them, following their own paths, would come into contact — would bump or brush together — and then they would snap and slash at each other in a momentary bestial rage, but it was fleeting ferocity. An instant later they would wander apart again. They did not kill each other. Elston could be proud of the nicety with which he had regulated their instincts…

At nine o’clock a landing craft came wallowing into the harbour and dropped its ramp alongside the navy pier. The pier was some distance down the front and it was hard to see just what was happening, but we saw men in blue uniforms splashing through the shallow water and others running along the pier. They all carried automatic weapons. They deployed in a crescent around the pier. Several men in white coats detached themselves from the crescent and moved forward. They were all on the seaward side of the link fence. A group of men in khaki came through the defensive lines, carrying strange, bulky objects. They moved quickly and, within minutes, those objects had been transformed into a tent-like affair of poles and canvas. It looked like the shield they put around a broken-legged racehorse on the track, before they shoot it — letting the animal linger longer in agony so the spectators will not have their delicate sensibilities offended. This structure was erected near the fence, on the perimeter of the armed crescent. As soon as it was up, the men in khaki hurried back to the dock. The men in white vanished behind the canvas.

It was nine-thirty.

The navy pier was only ten minutes away — walking.

We were ready to go — waiting.

While this activity was going on, the ghouls were still wandering along the docks. They showed little interest in the proceedings at the pier. They didn’t even look dangerous, somehow; demented, tormented, with the madness transfiguring their features, but not dangerous.

Jerry said, ‘You know… it’s funny… you’d think it would be more horrible with that whole load of things out there, but it don’t seem as bad as it did with one — when Sally looked in the window. One thing, alone…’ He was looking out, squinting, tight lines drawn around his mouth. ‘Well, it ain’t like snakes, is what I mean,’ he said.

Mary and I looked at him.

I realised what he was doing — that he was just saying the first thing that came into his head, to hold our attention; to keep us from considering the gauntlet we soon must run.

He said, ‘Now, you take your snakes. One snake, on his own… he ain’t so scary. But you get a whole pit of snakes, all squirming together and wriggling about, that scares anybody. Now, you’d think that whole load of ghouls would be the same. But it ain’t.’ He paused. I thought he’d run dry, but he was just getting his words in order. He said, ‘I guess they’re more on the line of rats in a sack.’

Mary and I looked at each other, then at Jerry. But he knew what he was saying.

He said, ‘Knew a fella once, used to make his living plucking rats out of a burlap bag. That’s right. He’d go around the bars toting this big bag full of rats. He wasn’t welcomed in restaurants, but he’d go in bars. He’d have fifteen, twenty rats in there. Well, he’d let everyone look in the sack, they’d see all them rats squirming around, they’d get pretty edgy. Then this fella, he’d wager he could reach down in that sack with his bare hand and pluck a rat out. Well, nobody would believe him. He’d get plenty of takers on his bet. Then, sure enough, he’d reach in and grab him a rat and pluck it right out, all wriggling and squealing. Saw him do it a dozen times. Never the once did he get bit.’ Jerry looked at his hand, as if amazed that it had not been bitten. ‘So one time I’m having a drink with him, I ask him what the secret is. He’d had some drink, he tells me there’s no secret to it at all; he don’t know why they don’t bite him, they just don’t. But here’s the thing. He said that when he first started rat-plucking, he tried it with just one rat in the bag. Well, he got bit every time. But as long as there was more than one rat in there, he never got chawed. Now, that was the secret, although he didn’t see it as a secret. When there was a whole squirming mass of rats, they just didn’t bite. He could pluck them out one by one, fifteen, twenty in a row, never got nipped — but as soon as there was just one rat left in the sack, it bit him every time. Just something in the nature of rats in a sack. Well, you see what I mean…’

He had spoken slowly and thoughtfully.

It was nine-thirty-five.

The canvas shelter on the pier was billowing like a sail and the men who’d gone in there wearing white coats came out looking like astronauts or deep sea divers. They were bundled into thick, protective clothing, heavy leather gauntlets and helmets with black glass visors. The visors were lifted and their faced showed white in the openings. These were obviously the men who would examine prospective evacuees — who would, I hoped, examine us.

It was nine-forty and we were discussing whether we should walk steadily down the front, carefully avoiding the ghouls, or try to make it in one quick rush. We had already determined that we must make our approach down the waterfront, even though it was swarming with ghouls. The alternative was to sneak through the back streets and with narrow roads turning and intersecting that was too dangerous — we would have no warning if one of the things were lurking around a turning, in a doorway, in an alley. On the front we could, at least, see the danger.

But to run or walk…

Mary summed that up.

She said, ‘I don’t think I could walk,’ and we knew what she meant. We decided to run. It might not be the safest policy, for quick movement might well draw their attention, just as the loudspeaker in the van had attracted them to it, but we doubted our nerve — doubted we could walk through that terrible throng. I felt my heart might explode if I denied my impulse to run… to maintain a moderate pace while my heart and brain screamed for the primordial solution, the flight that instinct demanded.

At nine-forty-five a van roared down to the gates.

The back opened and men jumped out, some in uniform and some in civilian clothing. The men in protective clothing opened the gates and the men from the van rushed through. The driver moved the van some ten yards down the barrier, then jumped out and ran back to the gates. A second van arrived, then a third. The occupants all passed through the gates and rushed directly out to the landing craft. There was no examination and I figured that must have already been done, at the laboratory. Examination at the pier was for us and any others who had remained in the town. I watched carefully but saw neither Elston nor Larsen. I figured they had left in the helicopters.

Then it was time for us to leave.

We went out the door fast, Jerry first and Mary next and I brought up the rear, shamefully close upon her heels. We went straight across the front to the fence, wanting that barrier on one side of our course. We passed within six feet of a ghoul. He turned stiffly, watching us, but did not offer pursuit. Two others took tentative steps towards us but, in doing so, they brushed against one another. They snarled in silence and snapped. Then we were running along the line of the fence and, for all our fear, it was easy. We made it to the gates with no more trouble than our labouring lungs and jangling nerves could claim.

We were not the first there.

Half a dozen others had come from the nearer streets of the town, joining at the fence, warily regarding one another. The gate was closed again and the men in protective suits had their visors down. Sunlight reflected from the black glass, glinting like stars in the void. They were faceless behind the glass, alien and inhuman. We drew up, panting, beside the others. Jerry spoke to a man he recognised. Three or four others came dashing from the streets, running hard. One was a woman, sobbing hysterically.

From behind his visor, one of the examiners said, ‘All right. You’ll come through one at a time. Go behind the canvas and take your clothing off. Take everything off.’ He paused at the gate. ‘The rest step back. Move it!’

Someone pushed the hysterical woman forward.

The visored man opened the gate and let her through. The men in blue uniforms had their automatic weapons trained on the rest of us. Two of them, standing apart from the line, held their guns on the woman. The visored man closed the gates again and the woman went behind the canvas. Two men in protective clothing followed her in.

Suddenly I felt like laughing… laughing wildly.

I realised that the canvas had not been erected to house some delicate instrument that could detect the latent disease but simply for the sake of modesty… so that we could undress in privacy! Modesty in the face of this horror! So was authority bound within their dimensions.

Then a darker realisation followed.

I knew we had hoped for too much from these saviours. They had found no way to detect the disease, they simply intended to examine us, naked, looking for any recent wound or break in the skin through which the disease might have got into our bodies.

I didn’t, at first and with my mind jumping madly, see how this would affect us.

The woman emerged from behind the canvas and was directed to the pier. She moved on, stumbling and sobbing. She looked back once. The gate opened again and a man passed through. Jerry took a step forward and the guns all trained on him.

He stopped dead, raising his hands to shoulder-height.

‘There’s another woman here,’ he said. ‘For crissake let her go through next!’

The man at the gate nodded. Sunlight ran like black fire up his helmet.

None of the ghouls had come any distance towards us, they were still milling about back by the jail.

Jerry took Mary gently by the shoulder and pushed her towards the gates, then stepped back. She looked at him over her shoulder, trying to smile, as she moved forwards. The faceless man had his hand on the gate, ready to open it the moment the preceding man had been cleared behind the canvas.

Abruptly, he stiffened.

The instant he stiffened, I saw the reason… and tumultuous horror spun through my guts.

He had seen the bandage on her leg.

‘Remove that,’ he said.

Mary looked puzzled and Jerry hadn’t yet understood. He still had his hands raised.

Mary said, ‘What do you mean?’ and the visored man said, ‘The bandage.’

‘What? Oh… no, that’s all right. I cut myself the other day, it’s not… what you think…’ She had started speaking easily, as if confident the explanation would suffice, but her words trailed off weakly. The man with the black glass face was rigid. I knew that his features, behind the visor, would be as hard and as cold as the glass itself.

Mary bent down and pulled the bandage from her leg. The cut was red and ugly-looking. The man stared at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘What the hell?’ Jerry shouted.

The guns were trained on him from behind the fence and his hands were still raised, as if he’d thrown them up in amazement.

‘They… won’t..’ I whispered.

‘I’m sorry,’ the faceless man said. ‘There’s no point in examining you further, miss. No one with an open wound can leave.’

‘It isn’t that!’ Mary screamed.

Her cry drew the attention of the guns. They shifted from Jerry to her. The faceless man was shaking his head, perhaps in negation, strengthening his words with the gesture — or perhaps in pity. The second man had come out from behind the canvas and headed for the landing craft. The others were pressing forward, clamouring to get through the gate.

One of the visored men by the canvas called, ‘What’s the hold-up, Jim? Get them through here!’

Jim said, ‘Please step back. You’re holding things up… I don’t want to have to…’ He turned his helmeted head to the side, indicating the line of armed guards. They were quite ready to shoot.

Mary gasped and moved back from the gates.

Jerry stepped forward, past her. He faced the faceless man. Jerry’s visage was like brittle glass itself. Had the visored man possessed a human countenance, Jerry might have argued with him, but they just looked at each other. Jerry had lowered his hands. I could tell what he was thinking as clearly as if my mind had been linked to his and the thought pulsing between us. He wanted to draw his gun and kill the faceless man who stood between Mary and safety. But he knew it would do no good — less than good, for he would be shot down in turn and Mary would still be on this side of the fence… without him.

After a long moment he turned back to us.

His face had shattered… just like glass.

Mary was calm, remarkably calm. We stood back from the gates, watching the others go through one by one. None of them were turned back. Mary said, ‘It’s the same decision we faced… talked about facing… in the jail. If someone should come…’

‘It’s not the same,’ Jerry rasped. But it was.

Then everyone else had gone through and the faceless man was looking at us.

Mary said, ‘Jerry… please go through.’

‘Well, I’m just likely to do that, ain’t I?’ he said.

Mary gave a little whimpering sigh. It was impossible to tell if it expressed relief or frustration; emotions were blurred in all of us now, our senses confused by anomie. It was worse for Mary, if anything, with an edge of guilt on her disorientation — without her, we could have gone through the gates.

The visored man said, ‘Anyone else?’ His voice was soft; he didn’t like what he had to do.

‘Jack… no sense in you staying,’ Jerry said.

I wanted to go. My muscles actually lurched in the direction of the gates and I had to restrain my body. I could feel my bones distinctly within my flesh, the scaffold of my skeleton fixing me in place. I shook my head, refusing my own instincts rather than Jerry’s suggestion.

‘Please go,’ Mary said. ‘It will be easier for me…’

And Jerry said, ‘Our supplies will last longer with just the two of us, Jack…’

It was so tempting I feared my honour would prove weak.

‘No one else!’ I called.

The visored man regarded us. Then he nodded and turned away. The line of men in uniform began to retreat, keeping formation and closing the crescent in around the pier. They moved as if executing a formal manoeuvre on the parade grounds, functioning exactly in a world gone mad. They had left the canvas shelter where it was; it snapped in the breeze, like a tent abandoned on a holiday in Hell.

Jerry’s big hand closed on my shoulder in gentle gratitude.

‘If it had been your girl…’ he said.

Maybe, I thought.

One by one the guards were filtering out of the line and boarding the landing craft. The men in protective clothing were already aboard. The three of us stood there by the gates and a line of faces gazed at us from the boat. It looked like a row of disembodied heads posted around a stockade. The last uniformed man had started up the ramp when a ghoul came loping out of a sidestreet and flung himself onto the fence…

Like a demented monkey, the ghoul began to scale the barrier. He was moving with purpose and I was reminded of Jerry’s tale of the solitary rat in the bag. His groping hand reached the top and clamped over the barbed wire. Blood ran down his arm. He jerked himself up. The other ghouls watched him, as if impressed by a virtuoso performance and envious of his agility.

The last guard was halfway up the boarding ramp when he looked back and saw the ghoul. His face set. The others, on board, were calling for him to hurry, but he turned back and sighted his weapon. He took aim as stolidly as if he’d been on the shooting range. I understood it. It was not a human target upon which he sighted. There was no need to kill the ghoul, the guard could have boarded in plenty of time, but he was guided by some instinct older than reason and deeper than logic. He squeezed off a burst from his automatic weapon. Cartridges spun over his shoulder, glinting in the sunlight. Splinters of bone and gore cascaded from the ghoul. Blood hung in a thin mist around him. He jerked; his body heaved up, then dropped back. He hung suspended from the top of the fence, his hand impaled on the barbed wire. Thick drops of blood fell from him and he swayed like some carnal fruit, bursting with red ripeness.

The guard grimaced — with satisfaction.

He turned back up the ramp. Spent cartridges were scattered at his feet and he looked down at them for a moment, as if they were runes which he had cast. Then he kicked at them. They spun off the ramp and dropped into the water. The guard went on up the ramp and then the ramp drew up and three of us were alone.

Mary buried her face in Jerry’s chest, clinging there, as if using his body as a shield against the sight of the dead ghoul. He stroked her hair.

‘We’d better get back to the jail,’ he said.

‘Again?’ The word was muffled against his chest, carved into his body. ‘Go through them again?’

‘It’s the safest place.’

I said, ‘Jerry… when we left… I didn’t close the door. I didn’t think… they might be in there now.’

He winced.

‘What about one of the vans?’ Mary said.

‘They seem attracted to them…’ I said.

‘Still, if we drive around without stopping,’ Jerry said.

Mary said, ‘I meant to drive back to the jail…’

‘Jack left the door open, goddamn it!’ Jerry snapped. Then: ‘Why shouldn’t he have left the door open? How did he know we’d be going back?’

He spoke as if it were an exercise in logics. He was looking around, standing with his back to the fence. Further down the fence, towards the jail, the dead ghoul was still hanging by his spiked hand… as if, like the swordfish, he had been suspended there to be weighed and measured and mounted. Blood still dripped from his erupted body, not spraying out — his heart no longer pumped — but falling in heavy globs obedient to gravity. The living ghouls still milled aimlessly about.

Jerry said, ‘If we drive around they won’t be able to catch us… as long as the gas holds out. But after that… those vans aren’t as strong as the jail. They could break into a van and we’d be confined, unable to manoeuvre… Damn! If only we knew how long we have to hold out here… how long we’ll be isolated before they… before they do whatever they’re going to do about the island. We have to get to some place we can defend.’

‘What about the compound?’ Mary said. ‘Take the van to the compound? The telephone is probably working from there, at least we could be in touch with… the world.’

Jerry considered that.

He was bareheaded now. He had lost his hat somewhere along the line. The sea breeze ruffled his fair hair.

‘What’s it like in the compound, Jack? Defensible?’

But I couldn’t remember what the compound was like. I could remember only that small whitewashed room… and the stinking pit. Black smoke rose from that pit, a tower of smoke like…

‘The lighthouse!’ I cried.

‘Why… yes. That’s right!’

Mary was nodding enthusiastically. ‘There’ll even be supplies there. Sam Jasper’s things. We won’t have to go back to the jail. ’

‘The tide?’ I asked.

‘We’ll take a boat,’ Jerry said, then paused, glancing out at the harbour, where John Tate had been rammed. The destroyer stood at the approaches, attended by gunboats. It would not be wise to take a boat.

Mary thought for a moment; said, ‘We can cross by the reef in half an hour.’

‘And so can they,’ said Jerry.

‘But only one at a time… we can shoot them down one by one, if we have to… if they come…’

‘If they come in daylight.’

‘Oh, Christ… I don’t know.’

‘But wait!’ Jerry said. ‘They won’t cross water, right? They won’t go into water. That reef is none too solid. There must be a tyre iron or something in one of the vans… if we could lever a couple of rocks out of place, make a break in the line… it should work.’

‘I think it’s our best bet,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be there than here. And someone might be more inclined to rescue us from there… in a day or two they must realise we aren’t infected… a boat or helicopter…’

‘Mary?’ the sheriff said.

‘I… yes. Anything rather than staying here or going back to the jail… waiting for them to break in. Yes. The lighthouse.’

I think we all felt greatly cheered at having reached a decision. At least we were still in control of our own options. We moved to the nearest van.

The keys were in it.

We all got in the front, Jerry at the wheel and Mary between us. Jerry waited a few moments before he switched on the ignition but, once he did so, he started the van moving immediately.

We drove towards the ghouls.

The ghouls watched us come.

Jerry drove at them in first gear, steadily, and they made no attempt to get out of the way. They seemed fascinated by the van, by a large moving object… something of a magnitude to register on their dimmed perceptions. As we closed on the crowd, I saw Jerry’s hand lift from the wheel and hover for a moment over the horn. It was a reaction from habit and he grinned grimly as he realised he had been about to sound the hooter.

‘No way through them,’ he muttered.

‘We’ll have to force our way through…’

Mary, tight-lipped and rigid between us, said, ‘Can’t you drive faster?’

She yearned for the sanctuary of the lighthouse.

Jerry said, ‘Afraid to ram them too hard… don’t want a fender jammed into a tyre or to bend the radiator back into the fan… just try to brush them aside…’

More ghouls were moving towards us. One was hanging on the fence, swinging by one hand, as if he’d discovered a new pleasure. I saw one come out of the open door of the jail and gaze up at the sun. He didn’t blink. I wondered if they would soon be blind? I wondered if that would matter?

Jerry was saying, ‘Why, there’s Joe Wallace… used to play cards with him… Tim Carver… Ike Stanton… Hell, I know these people! Used to know them when they were people… There’s Mrs Jones. Aw, hell.. there’s the Carpenter kid.. he’s only seven years old…’

I looked where he was looking and saw the child, its face preternaturally aged by drooling madness. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Larsen had been right about that… the kids were the worst. I guessed there were about forty of them on the waterfront, men, women and children. I had no idea how many were in the town or how many had been killed… nor how long they would survive.

They were still individuals.

They shared the same mindless countenance, but they moved in different ways, not following a pattern, each affected differently. Some hopped and leaped like frogs, some crept along, some stood upright while others were hunched over, faces downcast as if ashamed of their condition. Most of them seemed to be injured in some way. I saw one youth whose arm had been torn off at the shoulder; perhaps he had torn it off himself, for he held the severed limb in his other hand. A woman had torn her hair out; her glabrous skull was dotted with hundreds of pinpoints of blood. One had no lower jaw. Two were naked. I stared at them in terrible fascination.

‘Why, there’s my hat!’ Jerry said, and he brought his hand to his bare head.

The white Stetson was lying in the street just outside the jail. I thought, for a second, that Jerry was going to halt the van and retrieve it. But he drove steadily on, into them. The ghouls didn’t move out of the way, but they allowed themselves to be brushed aside. They seemed quite passive and docile. I began to hope that the initial frenzy had worn off, that it had been a temporary rage that had burned itself out. That hope burned like acid in my heart.

Then they attacked the van.

A ghoulish face loomed up at my window.

Mary screamed. There was a loud banging on the side of the van, shaking it. Another bang came from the roof. Someone was hammering and pounding at the panels and the windscreen suddenly shattered in a jagged star.

Jerry cursed. He stepped on the accelerator and the tyres skidded and squealed. For a moment the van did not move; someone was holding the rear bumper. Then there was a screech of metal and the bumper peeled free from the van. We surged forward with a jolt… and the engine stalled.

Jerry snapped the ignition and it rasped. The engine didn’t catch. I feared it was flooded. I think I was shouting at Jerry, and Mary was screaming over and over. But then the engine caught and we were moving again. As the van lurched forward the door on the driver’s side was jerked completely off. A ghoul held it by the handle and he fell back as the door came free. The door sailed up like a steel kite, floating. Then we were through them and going fast. I looked back. The ghouls were coming, following after us. Jerry was hunched over the wheel and Mary and I were shouting for him to drive faster. He grunted and touched his forehead again. I figured he regretted losing his hat.

The lighthouse rose up like surging hope.

It was an ugly grey tower upon which gargoyles might have perched, but it looked beautiful to me. Jerry brought the van to a skidding halt, slewing sideways in the sand, just where the reef began. The tide was going out and the black rocks broke through the surface all the way to the lighthouse. For a moment we just sat there. Time was precious, but we had to sit for an instant as the void of our drained emotions filled.

Jerry reached into the toolbox behind the seat and came up with a tyre iron.

He said, ‘This should do it.’

I was looking out the back, but we had gone beyond the sweep of the island. If the ghouls were still coming, I couldn’t see them. I knew that their span of attention was too feeble to keep them going in pursuit of a vanished prey… but feared that, once headed in our direction, inertia would keep them moving.

Jerry jumped out from his doorless side and stood, looking back. He had his gun in one hand and the tyre iron in the other. ‘No sign of them,’ he said. ‘I reckon we made it.’

Then a hand reached down from the top of the van.

I remembered the bang I’d heard on the roof and my mouth sprang open. I shouted, leaning past Mary. The hand hovered, tilting at the wrist, delicately groping at the air. Then it descended onto Jerry’s shoulder.

Jerry didn’t react.

He had heard me shout and must have supposed it was my hand, seeking his attention. He was still looking back along our trail. Mary screamed and the sheriff looked towards us and then he looked up, just as the hand tightened on his shoulder. His face exploded with frenzy; he dropped the tyre iron and started to lift the gun; then the ghoul heaved his big body up and hauled him onto the roof of the van.

I saw the polished toe of his boot kicking wildly.

I threw open my door and rolled out, bringing the rifle up, seeming to move in slow motion. On the top of the van they were pressed together like lovers in a terrible embrace. The ghoul loomed over Jerry; Jerry was struggling, trying to throw the creature off. I didn’t fire. In my horror, I did nothing. Jerry pressed his big revolver into the ghoul’s midrift and, as I gaped at them, he began to fire into the thing. The ghoul’s body jerked as the heavy-calibre slugs went into him. Jerry was cocking and firing the gun with terrible deliberation, fast but steady, and I saw the ghoul’s spine unpeel from his back, the bony articulation coming out from his flesh like the backbone of a fish. The spine snapped in the middle and the bloody ends twanged apart. The ghoul’s arms and legs went limp.

Jerry heaved him away and rolled from the van. The ghoul spread out across the roof, one hand hanging down on either side. His face was turned to me. He was still alive and, broken in half, trying to move.

I crossed behind the van. Jerry was sitting in the sand, panting. He was looking at his left arm. I moved towards him and we both looked at his arm and, as we did so, a red line appeared. His flesh was white, numbed by the ghoul’s inhuman grip, and on that pale background a thin thread unravelled, as if slipping from a tapestry — and a trickle of blood oozed from the broken skin.

‘Aw, hell,’ he said, very softly. ‘Aw, hell. ’

And he looked at the lighthouse, so close now and so unobtainably far.

Grey and bleak, it rose up beyond him.

Mary clung to him.

She was gasping and sobbing and heaving violently at him, almost attacking him in her despair. Jerry was trying not to touch her. He held his left arm out to the side.

He said, ‘I’ll go back.’

She was crying. ‘Jerry! Jerry! No!’

He said, ‘I’ll hold them for a while… stop as many as I can.’ He looked down at Mary, then at me. I understood. I took her by the shoulders and dragged her from him. She struggled against me, babbling incoherently, her mouth forming words that had no meaning… sounds that arose from depths far beyond language, from feelings far more ancient than speech. She struck at me. I had to change my grip. Jerry was reloading his revolver, tucking the shells into the open chamber with amazing delicacy. He snapped the cylinder closed and began fingering the bullets remaining in his belt. His lips moved; he was counting. He wanted no mistakes in that enumeration. He would have a use for the final bullet.

‘Jerry,’ I said. Words were absurdly inadequate. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Jerry. I… I’m glad I knew you.’

Mary was reaching for him, clawing for him.

And he couldn’t even kiss her goodbye.

He said, ‘Mary…’ and his voice broke. His eyes were glazed over. He shook his massive body and turned. He didn’t look back. He walked back the way we’d come with his shoulders square and I saw him raise his hand to his forehead. I knew he wished he had his Stetson as he walked back through the sunlight.

‘Mary, please… go to the lighthouse!’

She ignored me.

She didn’t even hear me. She stood on the rocks and looked back. Jerry had turned past the rim of the island. We couldn’t see him. Mary had tried to go after him and three times I’d had to stop levering at the reef and drag her back to the rocks. I handed her the rifle and she took it, holding it by the barrel, not knowing what it was. Crazed with grief and horror, her mind had slipped out of focus. Keeping one eye on her, I attacked the reef again. It was a harder job than I’d thought. The rocks didn’t roll off separately but splintered and came apart, spongy veins separating hard layers.

Jerry’s gun sounded.

It went off six times and Mary’s body jerked at every shot, just as if those bullets were slamming into her. I wondered if the sixth bullet had been for himself? But then he was firing again. He had reloaded, giving us all the time he could. He fired four more times. Then there was silence.

Mary sank down on a rock. One foot trailed in the water. I pried a black slice off and stepped back, wondering if the gap was wide enough. It wasn’t. I knelt on the slippery reef and tried to lift a huge segment of stone. It was too heavy for me I wished that Jerry had stayed to help break the reef. I heaved with all my might and the rock would not move.

Then the ghouls were coming.

Loping, bounding, skulking… in their various fashions, they came for us. One was dragging a disembodied forearm at his side. I didn’t want to know whose arm it had been. I heaved. The rock was far too heavy for me to lift, it was impossible that I should raise it and yet, ponderously, that great slab shifted. Fear had granted me strength as surely as mindless inhibition granted it to the ghouls. I rose up with the stone clasped to my breast; let it slide away, sideways, into the water. The water bubbled light green as the rock sank.

Mary screamed.

The first ghoul was on the reef, bounding from rock to rock. Blood streamed from an empty eyesocket. The other eye was fixed upon us. I backed away, reaching out for the gun, but Mary was too petrified to hand it to me; didn’t even know she had it. She was so terrified that she took a step forwards, towards the ghoul.

I snatched the rifle from her, throwing us both off balance. Mary slipped forwards and I fell back. The ghoul sprang up from the rocks, he seemed to soar over the break as I fired from my knees, awkwardly, and the recoil shoved me over the slippery stone. Flailing wildly, I dropped backwards into the warm sea.

I surfaced, kicking and gasping. I had lost the rifle. I took one automatic stroke towards the rocks, then recoiled, pushing away. The ghoul’s leap had fallen short… the gap had proved wide enough and the creature was in the water. His gory head bobbed up and down, water streaming from the open mouth, blood streaming from the open eyesocket, the other eye white and wild with terror. He was reaching for the rocks.

Mary stood there, staring down at the monster, frozen fast by her horror.

‘Go back!’ I cried.

Water swirled into my mouth, choking me.

The ghoul’s hand slapped down on the rock, shifted… and clamped on Mary’s ankle.

She never made a sound as the creature dragged her down into the sea. The water bubbled around them. She was trying to swim and the frenzied thing tore at her. Three or four other ghouls had come up to the break in the reef; they stood there, staring down at the ghoul in the water — and the woman. I stroked to the rocks beyond the gap and hauled myself out, gasping. I looked into the gap from my side of the break and the ghouls looked in from their side and in the water between there was blood.

Mary’s face turned to me.

She pleaded with her eyes, silently.

She reached out towards me and my hand went out to her, but she was too far away. She was closer to the other side. The ghoul had gone under now and Mary was alone in the turbulent gap. She twisted violently, trying to kick off from the rocks, but she had drifted too close. The ghouls reached down.

She still made no sound, even as their hands closed over her and they drew her up onto the rocks. I would have shot her, of course… but I had lost the rifle. Mary was on the flat rock. She kicked spasmodically with one leg. The ghouls bent over her, slowly, solicitously, as if they had rescued her from drowning… bent to her, as if to give the kiss of life…

I thought I saw Mary amongst them today.

I was watching through the binoculars, a group of them were milling about by the rotting swordfish and one looked rather like Mary. But I stopped watching. I didn’t want to know. I only want to know how much longer it will be, how many days or weeks I must sit here in my grey tower, rooted in the sea and rising towards the heavens. Not much longer, perhaps. They don’t seem as frenzied now, they don’t even fight amongst themselves when they make contact. I wonder if the madness is wearing off… if they are recovering some human instinct… or simply wasting away, weakening and dying? I hope it was not Mary I saw. When I looked later, most of them had gone. One was dead — lifeless, at least. The body had burst open and a length of intestine had uncoiled. I saw a seagull land on the ghoul’s shoulder and dip its sharp beak into the gruesome cavity.

The gull’s head came up and it seemed to shudder, as did I. Larsen’s words came back to me. If a dog or a rat got at one of the bodies… Again the gull’s beak dipped; the plumed throat pulsed. Above the patrol boats the sky was clear and blue. The seagull was sated. It poised, wings lifted, then bore itself away.