Castle of Water: A Novel(27)
“Putain de merde, Barry, what do you want me to do, become a météorologue? The man said it was fine, and you’re probably worried about nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?” He sat back down and returned to his old banana peels, from which they had been hoping to scrape enough starch to make up for a lost meal. “You’re probably right.”
And the two of them went back to work, Barry’s nose twitching and skin prickling all the while, his entire body on high alert. He did his best to ignore it. The last thing he was in the mood for was another pointless fight.
As for Sophie, she may not have had much experience with storms, but she did know a thing or two about animals. Her grandparents had used the summers that she and her brother spent in the Pyrenees to pass on as much as they could of the region’s ample inheritance of folk wisdom. When a chamois goat came crashing down from the tree line and ran frantic circles in their village, her grandfather explained that it was suffering from a blinding sickness, a sign of general misfortune and a great danger to sheep. When a chorus of wolf howls rang out from the Spanish side of the Cirque de Gavarnie, her grandmother assured her that a June snow was coming, with the first miraculous flakes falling that same day. And when a dozen lammergeier vultures appeared circling over the church one Sunday after mass, both of her grandparents shuddered at the omen—and sure enough, an avalanche devoured two of the town’s shepherds just before sunset.
Which was precisely why, when, several minutes later, the island’s entire colony of sooty terns alighted from their rocks to circle the sky, Barry’s concerns took on for Sophie a fresh sense of relevancy. Urgency, too. Maybe he wasn’t entirely full of merde after all. The two of them climbed to their feet simultaneously, dropped their clamshells and banana peels, and gaped at the spectacle of a thousand birds blotting out the sun. The swarm did three counterclockwise revolutions high over their heads before elongating into a snake that climbed into the clouds.
And then they were gone. An island’s worth of seabirds vanished in less than a minute.
“Bordel. Have you ever seen them do that before?”
Barry shook his head, slack-jawed and confounded by the thing he had witnessed. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Sophie grimaced and reconsidered her position. “You were right. Something is happening—this isn’t normal.”
The same unusually chill wind from before picked up again, this time with a troubling insistency—the palm fronds reacted with a collective hiss, their silvery undersides exposed by the gust. Sophie shuddered visibly and hugged her arms across her chest. Barry rubbed at the haggardness of his beard, pondering the possibilities. Something was coming, and the sudden exodus of the birds was simply an augur of that fact.
“Let me see that radio. I’ll be back in a bit. Try to stay by the shelter, and if anything happens, shoot the flare gun—I left it right next to the survival kit.”
Sophie nodded, unusually cooperative. “Be careful.”
“I will.” And he kissed her on the cheek.
21
Barry’s reason for grabbing the radio and heading to the rocks was twofold: first, to gain a better vantage point and determine if indeed anything was heading their way; and second, to locate a better source of shelter in case there was. He jogged through the underbrush—by this point bending rather violently to the wind—and began scrambling up the boulders at the base of the island’s central peak, ever mindful of the shortwave under his arm. Generally, his climb would have been met by the screeches of the terns that inhabited its crannies, and he found their absence eerie and disarming; there was nothing but the whistling of the wind and the eighth notes of his heart.
Two-thirds of the way up, he found something. Not much of a cave per se, it was far too small and shallow to really dub it as such. But a crevice, a fissure in the rock face just big enough to harbor two crouching refugees from wind and rain. He made a mental note of its location and continued his climb, arriving at the summit just a few minutes later. He caught his breath and took an appraisal of the sea.
Barry noticed it immediately. Almost like glitter, a bleary scintillation in an unusually dark corner of the horizon. He used his index finger to adjust his contacts, thinking it might be some problem with the lenses, and squinted more closely.
No, it wasn’t a problem with his contacts. It was lightning. It couldn’t be anything else. Dozens upon dozens of flickering bolts. Hundreds, possibly. Granted, it was miles away, but still—even the very worst electrical storms he’d seen on the Illinois prairie paled in comparison. This was more like the grand finale of a distant fireworks show, but far from being the end, it felt like just the beginning.
He gave the radio’s little generator handle a few cranks, until the Tahitian station it was tuned to jump-started back to life. But again, there was something else there as well. Background voices, traces of multiple far-off conversations, even more numerous from the top of the mountain. He fiddled with the dial until the voices faded, and the broadcast came through loud and clear. The Monkees’ eponymous hit, “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees,” was playing, something that would have been good for a chuckle under different circumstances. But Barry didn’t even crack a smile. He elongated the telescopic antenna and began moving it in a slow circle, taking careful note of where the signal was strongest. It reached a crescendo just at “People say we monkey around,” the words shedding the static and becoming instantly sharp. Barry stopped there, the antenna poised like a weather vane to the southeast. That was surely the direction of the Tahitian station. It had to be. And if the cyclone was headed “harmlessly” to the north and west of the islands … well, he didn’t need a trained meteorologist to tell him that was bad news. It meant it was coming right at them.