The Big Dark Sky (27)
He opened a can of gourmet chili—made with filet mignon, rich and spicy—that he found in the pantry. He heated it in an oven and spooned it from the container as he walked the house. Following that, he ate peaches from a can, and when those were gone, he roamed again and again through the rooms and hallways, drinking coffee.
He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just getting a feel for the place. The real work would start in the morning.
The low illumination allowed him to see both the interior and something of the night beyond the large windows. If he had flooded the residence with light, he would have felt blind to any threat from outside. Although he didn’t believe an immediate danger loomed, hard experience had taught him always to proceed as if one existed.
Besides, he was a little bit spooked, not as much by the house as by the land surrounding it. In spite of the verdant quality of these thousands of acres, he might not have felt more isolated if he’d been transported to a barren crater on the moon.
Wyatt Rider, thirty-nine years old and eighteen years a PI, was city born and city raised. Con artists, like his larcenous parents, favored metropolitan living not just because there were more fish to be hooked there, but also because those schooling millions took the bait quicker than did small-town marks. The popular conception of big-city residents as uniformly sophisticated and street smart was undercut by countless studies showing that a higher percentage of city dwellers than rural types not only suffered depression and psychoses, but lived with a simmering paranoia that made them more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. There was some truth to the term “madding crowd.” Good con men and women were quick to take advantage of this us-against-them paranoia, presenting themselves as the enemies of whatever conspiracy or segment of society that their hapless marks currently most feared and despised, deftly winning the confidence of those they intended to fleece.
As a consequence, a private investigator who needed to make a living but who also wanted to bring down the frauds and swindlers was less likely to be able to pay his bills and take satisfaction in his work if he set up office in Mayberry instead of Manhattan. In Wyatt’s case, Manhattan was Seattle, although his cases often took him far afield from the Emerald City.
He hoped never to get farther from the glass-and-steel towers and noisy concrete avenues of teeming humanity than Rustling Willows Ranch. Earlier, after Vance Potter had left, when the sound of his pickup had faded entirely, the quiet of the seeming infinity of land had been, in Wyatt’s experience, so unnatural that a sense of the uncanny had crept over him, akin to what Potter described as his own occasional reaction to the place. Wyatt was the least superstitious of men, not so impressionable that Potter’s words could unnerve him. Yet as he’d stood in the red sunset, in the dying of the light, he had felt that he was being watched. In fact, the feeling had been so intense that, surveying the yard and willows nearest to him, he’d been overcome by the bizarre conviction that whoever watched him was right there, not concealed in the distance and using binoculars, but within a few yards, maybe even within arm’s reach, real but somehow invisible.
Disquieted more by the fact that his imagination had run wild than by anything that might be out there in the fading twilight, he had returned to the house. As a rejection of baseless fear, he had not locked the front door. Later, after nightfall, as he ate while touring the residence, he engaged the deadbolt in passing, without making a production of it, almost unconsciously.
He was still exploring the rooms, studying them, warmed by his second mug of coffee, when the presence he’d sensed earlier revealed itself, though in a form that was incomprehensible to him.
19
As stated in Asher Optime’s historic manifesto, abandoned Zipporah stands testament to the transient nature of humanity, to the truth that the demise of the species is figured in its genes. This is not a ghost town, as the romantics would have it. These are ruins, all that remains of the hopes of self-important men and women who are dead and gone as if they never existed. The crumbling town isn’t haunted, for there are no ghosts, no spirits to survive those who lived and died here.
Each evening, before settling down to sleep at midnight, Asher walks the street where, when there is a moon, as now, the fine dust underfoot is silvered by the lunar glow, which is fitting for the road that leads to his great destiny. In this dim reflection of the sun, Earth’s patron star that blazes on the farther side of the planet, the weathered buildings are the only ghostly presences, like pale shapes that an artist has scored in the black ink that covers the white clay on a piece of scratchboard.
Asher stops before the church, waiting for a scream, but he isn’t rewarded with one. He is patient. Ophelia will not be broken easily, but eventually she will break.
Although he prefers the celestial panorama without a moon, he tips his head back and stares into infinity, which enchants him. The universe is a graveyard. The perfect blackness between the twinkling billions of distant suns is the hard truth of it, the darkness of the void. By comparison to the sea of blackness, the light of the stars is insignificant and cold, emitted so long ago that by the time it is seen on Earth, many of those suns had died hundreds of thousands of years earlier. Asher can imagine how beautiful it will be when, countless millennia after the last man and last woman have perished, the final star goes dark as well. The universe will then be cold, without a scintilla of light, and whatever remains of the works of humankind will lie frozen and still under the big dark sky.