A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [62]
She disappeared the night of the new moon.
Tonight is the night of the new moon.
So sad, so tortured, such pain ... she’s reliving her loss.
I went to be with you and waited at the kelp bed for you. I’m waiting for you.
I bolted for the door. If she isn’t the lighthouse keeper’s daughter, she thinks she is. But insanity didn’t ring true, didn’t explain her mystical rise from the sea that full moon night. It didn’t explain how her flesh—so real to the touch—was clammy and wet, or the images of her as a cadaver with glazed eyes, scavengers feasting on the tender flesh in her mouth, the stench of death and rot on her, the kelp.
The kelp. In her hair.
I started down the hill, fighting the idea of making love to a dead woman, being in love with a dead woman, so much I couldn’t let her go, then realized I left the book in the house. I wanted to show her, ask her, to know for sure if it was her. Did she leave it for me to find, to read? Why did she think I was the lost sailor? I’m not. That’s why I don’t remember her name, or their love affair, or engagement. I can’t remember those things because I’m not him. But I love her, as much as he did perhaps, and want her to stay.
I skidded to a halt, arms wind milling, one eye on the dying sun. I wheeled to face the house, and froze. My blood ran cold.
The house was nothing but a shell.
Boards covered gaping window holes, paint cracked and spider-webbed on molded siding, fell off in huge flakes and chunks. The roof sagged, shingles fell into ragged black pits. The porch lay broken off, planks nailed helter-skelter over the front door that dangled from broken hinges. Missing clapboards exposed rotted supports in the ancient frame.
It was completely dilapidated, as if no one had been there in decades.
I went to the door, confused. My home—in an instant, aged to decrepit ruins.
How?
I peered between silver-aged boards across the door frame, the door I just came through.
Dust sheathed the charcoal, ashen, hollow, empty house.
When I knew you’d left me.
It can’t be. It can’t be!
I dashed for the cove, my heartbeat a merciless throb, my head raced to understand, grasp. It can’t be!
I flung myself down the hill, across quaint streets. The slope took me to the wedge of forest which embraced the cove, and I pounded through it and erupted on the other side as the sun splashed orange in the west and azure in the east.
She danced on the beach, cloaked in shadows and impending nightfall. Even from this distance her body undulated like the sea behind her. They seemed one beautiful creature then, the swells causing her midriff to ripple. She danced with arms overhead, her hands played in the air, as she learned from those exotic dancers so many decades ago.
Eight decades ago.
She danced on the beach, and I watched her, as real as I am, as real as—
— as I was?
I can’t remember anything before the two weeks I’ve spent with her. I don’t know how I spend my days. I can’t say where I go, have no recollection of my doings.
As real as I am.
I threw myself forward. I saw her finish her beautiful, alluring dance, head tipped skyward, hands held above her in a graceful pose. The light from her eyes beamed bright as the stars blinked into view above her, as if her dance beckoned them forth.
I dashed on, but she lowered her arms, then head, and turned toward the surf that crashed and wallowed before her.
One step, another. White foam raced around her ankles and up her calves.
I shouted, at the top of my lungs. I don’t know her name, couldn’t shout her name. I shouted “I love you” instead.
It worked. She stopped, and I ran on. I bounded through sandy dunes, breathless, and stopped at the water line. The panicky dread seized me short of the tumbling waves.
High tide. New moon.
“I love you,” I panted again.
She opened her eyes, and they burned with their own luminescence, like miniature lighthouse beacons. Their light fell on the beach, obscured her face, pierced me. Again my blood ran cold. But I couldn’t rip my gaze from her.
“Every year we go