Sea of Tranquility(7)

9


When he returns to his senses he’s on the beach, kneeling on hard stones, vomiting. He has a vague memory of having fought his way out of the forest in a blind panic, a nightmare of shadow and blurred green, branches lashing his face. He rises shakily, and walks to the water’s edge. He wades in up to his knees—the shock of cold is wonderful, it’s the thing that will restore his sanity—and kneels to wash vomit from his face and shirt, then a wave knocks him over, so that by the time he stands he’s choking on seawater and soaked through and through.

He’s alone on the beach now, but he sees movement among the buildings of Caiette, in the middle distance. The priest disappearing into the white church on the hill.





10


When Edwin reaches the church, the door is ajar, and the room is empty. The door behind the altar is open too, and through it he sees a few gravestones in the green quiet of the tiny cemetery. He slips into the last row of pews, closes his eyes, and rests his head in his hands. The building is so new that the church still holds the fragrance of freshly cut wood.

“Did you fall in the ocean?”

The voice is gentle, the accent still indecipherable. The new priest—Roberts, he remembers—stands at the end of his pew.

“I knelt in the water. To wash vomit from my face.”

“Are you unwell?”

“No. I…” It seems silly now, and a little unreal. “I thought I saw something in the forest. After I saw you. I heard something. I don’t know. It seemed…supernatural.” The details are already slipping away from him. He walked into the forest, and then what? He remembers darkness; notes of music; a sound he couldn’t identify; all of it over in a heartbeat. Did it really happen?

“May I sit with you?”

“Of course.”

The priest sits beside him. “Would it help to unburden yourself?”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“I’m here to serve everyone who walks through those doors.”

But the details are already fading. In the moment, the strangeness Edwin encountered in the forest was utterly destabilizing, but now he finds himself thinking of a particularly bad morning at school. He was nine, maybe ten, and he realized that he couldn’t read the words in front of him, because the letters were wriggling into incoherence and there were spots swimming in his vision. He stood from his desk to ask to go see matron, and he fainted. Fainting was darkness, but also sound: a murmuring and chirping like a chorus of birds, a blank void followed rapidly by an impression of being comfortably at home in bed—wishful thinking on the part of his subconscious, presumably—and then he woke into utter silence. Sound returned gradually, like someone turning a dial, silence fading into clamor and racket, the exclamations of other boys and the rapid steps of the approaching teacher—“Stand up, St. Andrew, no more malingering”—and was the moment just now in the forest really so different? There were sounds, he reasons, and darkness, just like in that first instance. Perhaps he just fainted.

“I thought I saw something,” Edwin says slowly, “but as I say it, I realize that perhaps I didn’t.”

“If you did,” Roberts says gently, “you wouldn’t be the first.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just, I’ve heard stories,” the priest says. “That is, one hears stories.”

This clumsy amendment strikes Edwin as a kind of camouflage, Roberts changing his patterns of speech to sound more English. More like Edwin. There’s a wrongness about the man that Edwin can’t entirely pinpoint.

“If I may ask, Father, where are you from?”

“Far away,” the priest says. “Very far away.”

“Well, that’s all of us, isn’t it,” Edwin says, a little irritably. “Excepting the natives, of course. When we met in the forest just now, you said you were filling in for Father Pike, didn’t you?”

“His sister was taken sick. He left last night.”

Edwin nods, but there’s something about this that rings utterly false. “Odd that I didn’t hear anything about a boat going out last night, though.”

“I have a confession to make,” Roberts says.

“I’m listening.”

“When I saw you in the forest, and I said I was going back to the church, well, I turned back for just a moment, as I was walking away.”

Edwin stares at him. “What did you see?”

“I saw you walk under a maple tree. You were looking up, into the branches of the tree, and then—well, I had the impression that you could see something I couldn’t. Was there something there?”

“I saw…well, I thought I saw—”

But Roberts is watching him too intensely, and in the quiet of this one-room church, at the far edge of the Western world, Edwin is oddly spooked. He’s still a little ill—he has a pounding headache—and colossally weary. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He wants only to lie down. Roberts’s presence here doesn’t make sense to him.

“If Pike left last night,” Edwin says, “he must have swum.”

“But he did leave,” Roberts says, “I assure you.”

“Do you know how starved this place is for news, Father, really any news whatsoever? I live in the boardinghouse. If a boat had gone out last night, I would have heard about it at breakfast.” The obvious next thought occurs to him: “Speaking of things I should have heard about, how did you get here? No boat’s arrived in the past day or two, so am I to assume you strolled in through the forest?”