The Hickory Staff

THE RONAN COAST

Mark’s legs failed and he fell to his knees. Struggling to stand, he found he was outside; the ground was soft, wet sand, giving somewhat under his weight.

‘What the hell is this?’ he heard himself ask, but he found little comfort in the flat sound of his own voice. ‘No. This isn’t right. This can’t be right. Where am I? How did I get outside?’ Disoriented, he tried to calm down as he slowly turned a full circle, taking in his surroundings. He was surprised at how bright the night was. He was standing ankle-deep in wet sand on the edge of a small stream that emptied into what appeared to be an ocean.

‘This can’t be.’ He took several deep breaths, then told himself, ‘Wait. Don’t think yet, just look around. This will all make sense when I calm down. Just slow down.’

Feeling the steady motion of cool water against his ankles, soaking down into his boots, Mark began slowly to relax. ‘It has to be the pizza. Maybe I had some bad mushrooms or old cheese or something: this is all a hallucination.’ Finding solace in that possibility, he continued to talk out loud. ‘Wait it out. Just like a bad drunk, just wait it out.’

He stepped from the edge of the stream and wandered out onto the beach. ‘It’s okay, I guess,’ he said, breathing the salty air and feeling a strong breeze blowing in off the water. ‘If I have to be stuck in a delusion, at least this isn’t too bad.’

His dream beach was much warmer than Idaho Springs. Mark pulled off his sweater, then sat down heavily. He dragged his heels back and forth, digging two parallel ruts in the sand, finding the repetitive motion comforting. He lay back and rested his head on the gritty pillow behind him, closing his eyes. The wind from the incoming tide, a sense of something familiar, helped him to relax, and he breathed deeply, remembering long days at the beach when he was young. His parents would load him and his sister into a behemoth Country Squire station wagon and drive out to Jones Beach. While he dragged an array of plastic toys in a brightly coloured bucket, his mother hauled a lunch basket and what seemed like several dozen towels and blankets across the burning sand. His father, looking taller in a swimsuit, always carried a cooler filled with cold beer in one hand and a large yellow beach umbrella, perhaps ten feet in diameter, slung over his opposite shoulder. Together, they would find a spot among a vast sea of colourful beach umbrellas, run up the yellow giant as if to claim a ten-by-ten foot spot of beachfront for a pastel kingdom and begin settling in as though the beach were nothing more than a guest room at Aunt Jenny’s.

Within minutes, every inch of carefully placed blanket or towel would be covered with a light dusting of sand, not enough to merit a complete dismantling of the beach apparatus, but enough to irk his parents, to creep into his sister’s diapers and to add a pleasant grit to everything eaten that afternoon. Mark smiled at the memory until reality crept into his reverie. ‘No!’ he exclaimed, sitting up. ‘This isn’t real. I’m sick. I ate something. I have to wake up now.’ Squeezing handfuls of sand between his fingers, he remembered the large cloth tapestry Steven unrolled on their floor. ‘It‘s got to have something to do with that thing.’

He pulled off his boots and socks and walked towards the water, muttering, ‘If that really was radiation, I might be dead already.’ He rolled up his jeans and stepped into the surf. ‘No, I can’t be dead. If I were dead, I wouldn’t care if I got wet.’ Mark leaned down to taste the ocean water. It was more briny than Long Island Sound. Still feeling the effects of that evening’s beer consumption, he wiped a sleeve across his brow. ‘Sheez, I hope I’m not dead. I’d hate to be half-hammered for eternity.’

Resigning himself to the fact that time would tell what had happened to him, Mark Jenkins began wandering along the beach, his feet ankle-deep in the frothy shallows.

Rounding a point that jutted out from the forest behind him, he stopped suddenly. Just above the horizon was the answer to why the evening was so bright: two moons hung silently in the night sky, like twin eyes of a vigilant sea god. ‘Two moons,’ he mused softly, then cried out, ‘Steven! What was that thing?’ His heart began to race and, feeling dizzy, he knelt in the sand and started repeating, over and over, ‘It can’t be… it can’t be,’ like a mantra.

Then, slowly, as if the truth might dash his hopes for a simple answer, Mark turned his gaze skywards. The constellations were different; he didn’t recognise a single star arrangement.

This was no hallucination; he hadn’t been poisoned and he wasn’t dead.

But no answers presented themselves. He sat down in the sand, his knees pulled up tightly against his chest despite the warm and humid evening.

‘Mark?’ Steven called down the back hall, ‘are you in the bathroom?’ There was no response. The bathroom door was open and the light switched off. There was no way his friend could have gone upstairs; he would have passed through the kitchen, where Steven was.

‘He must be outside already,’ Steven said to himself, hurrying back through the hall and shouting ‘Mark!’, but the door was locked and the deadbolt securely in place.

‘Sheez, didn’t you think I was coming with you?’ he called, finding it odd his roommate would lock the door from the outside without waiting for him. He had unlocked the door and stepped onto their porch before he heard a light jangle coming from the pocket of Mark’s jacket. In his haste to get away from William Higgins’s radioactive tapestry Steven had not realised Mark’s keys were still in the pocket. He checked the coat to confirm his suspicion, then re-entered the house to continue searching for his friend.

‘Mark!’ Steven shouted again, ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here!’

In the kitchen, the telephone rang again; probably Hannah, calling to confirm their date for the following evening. He was tempted to answer it, but right now he needed to find Mark; he’d call her from Owen’s later. He listened for footsteps coming from anywhere in the house: nothing. The air in their front room was still shimmering slightly; Steven could make out the small flecks of yellow and green light glowing dimly against the dark background of the old stone fireplace.

Slowly he turned to stare down at the mysterious tapestry, a swirling cauldron of colour unrolled across the floor. It was simple woven fabric – he guessed wool, but now could not remember exactly how it had felt in his hands. It had peculiar designs stitched in light-coloured thread, each meticulously detailed, but completely foreign to him. A dawning realisation brought a wave of nausea.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ he murmured, ‘not in there… that can’t be.’ Something deep inside told him no matter how impossible, he was right. Somehow, that cloth had taken his roommate. ‘Mark,’ he shouted down at the floor, ‘Mark, can you hear me?’ His voiced echoed off the wood and vibrated the delicate metal chimes in their hall clock. The ringing died away and he heard floorboards creak under his weight as he paced back and forth behind the sofa. No answer.

‘Think,’ he directed himself, ‘think of something, fast.’ But though he was desperate, his mind was blank. Maybe he could experiment. He moved to his desk, shoved the rosewood box containing William Higgins’s precious rock to one side and searched for a pencil, then turned back to the living room floor.

‘I feel okay. It doesn’t seem to be doing any physical damage to me – then again, I’ve never been around anything radioactive before, so I don’t really know.’ He rolled the pencil between his fingers. ‘Either way, it can’t have completely vaporised or disintegrated Mark in the fifteen seconds it took me to get back from the kitchen, especially if I’m standing here just fine ten minutes later.’ He cursed his inability to think straight in stressful situations. ‘So, if he’s not here in the house, he must be-’ Steven gently lofted the pencil towards the tapestry, ‘-in there.’

He watched in awe as the pencil arced towards the floor. Tumbling through the air, its bright blue and orange logo flashed twice: Steven had just enough time to recognise the words Denver Broncos printed below the pink nub of the eraser. It never landed. As soon as it crossed the plane above the shimmering tapestry, the pencil vanished from sight.

‘Holy frothing Christ!’ he exclaimed and immediately reached for something else he could throw into the cloth.

Paper clips, a balled-up telephone bill, two empty beer cans and a pizza crust later, Steven was truly terrified. Snatching up Mark’s jacket, he ran into the street and down the hill. Sprinting around the corner from Tenth onto Miner Street, he saw Owen’s in the distance, the lights and music a latter-day mirage at the far end of an otherwise silent row of city blocks. Despite tearing through Idaho Springs at a dead run, Steven’s thoughts caught up with him. He slowed to a jog. His story would sound absurd to the police.

He sat for a moment on a bench, contemplating his boots and trying to come up with a reasonable version, something that wouldn’t have them calling the nearest psychiatric unit. He rubbed his fingertips roughly against his temples and burst out angrily, ‘There is no reasonable version, you goddamn coward! You have to figure this out. You have to find him.’

Feeling alone and guilty, Steven Taylor rose and walked back home.

Two hours later found Steven sitting in a patio chair on the porch of 147 Tenth Street, watching the living room through the front window. He had failed to come up with any viable explanation for what had happened; now he was too frightened to re-enter the house. He kept hoping Mark would suddenly appear, unhurt, and he wouldn’t have to come up with some course of action. They would simply turn the tapestry over to someone who would know what to do with it and Steven would prepare himself to receive due punishment when Howard Griffin discovered he had opened Higgins’s safe deposit box.

Steven wondered how many other people were like him. His fear dominated him, broke his spirit; in turn, he could think of nothing to do. He was not brave. He was terrified. It must have been something from long ago that started him down this path, maybe something he’d run from as a child, that had grown, layer by layer, over the course of his life until now, when he was literally paralysed with fear.

He and Mark had often laughed that Steven was no risk taker. Everything had its place: he always needed to know what lay on the horizon, what was on the day’s agenda, in order to feel comfortable. He began planning vacations twelve months in advance so as to leave nothing to chance. Mark was different, a brave soul who charged willingly into risky situations and always seemed to emerge unscathed.

‘Why couldn’t I have fallen onto the damned tapestry?’ Steven asked of the still autumn night, hoping for some response to alleviate his anxiety. Mark would have known what to do – and if he didn’t, he would have leapt onto it anyway, boldly facing whatever it held. Steven couldn’t bring himself to stand up, enter his own house and step onto that miserable rug, no matter how thoroughly he beat himself up about it.

‘Sonofabitch!’ he cried, hating himself and embarrassed by his fear.

Later on he watched as the first light of dawn painted the mountains pink and heralded the advent of the new day. Mark had been gone almost eight hours and still Steven sat on his porch, a coward, suffering every coward’s worst nightmare: no escape and no excuse. He could either seek help, or he could go into the house and throw himself onto the mercy of the strange cloth he had stolen from the bank the day before. Neither option was appetising, and both required more fortitude than he had managed to summon up in years.

Watching the mountains slowly change colour in the morning light, he remembered an art history class in college. Impressionist painters believed sunlight on any subject changed slightly every seven minutes. He checked his watch: 5.42 a.m. Staring up at the stony peaks above Clear Creek Canyon, Steven waited. He would see the light change in seven minutes’ time; he would watch as the coming day shaded the mountain ridges in slowly evolving hues, and in seven and a half minutes’ time he would get up and go in search of Mark Jenkins. 5.45 a.m., and a car passed on Tenth Street: Jennifer Stuckey, heading for the bakery to get the morning’s first loaves in the oven. Sunlight inched its way down the sides of the canyon: every minute passed with his full attention. He could not remember the last time he had concentrated so fiercely on any one minute; this morning he would chart the full course of seven minutes. He was more frightened than he had ever been, but this morning was special. He wondered how often Monet or Renoir had waited seven minutes for the light to change on a flower or a small pond. He was seeing so much more than he ever had before: the clarity helped to mitigate his anxiety; it offered a sliver of courage for what was coming next. At 5.49 a.m. he rose to his feet and gave the canyon a long last look. The Impressionists had been right. He had seen the change in sunlight. Grasping Mark’s coat in one hand, Steven opened the door to his house, crossed the front room and stepped without hesitation into the shimmering haze above the tapestry.