Glimmering

Only there was: an entire roomful of phantoms, all familiar faces as at a spectral cocktail party, chatting and moving their hands quite animatedly. The one nearest to him—it was John—turned and with a smile opened his mouth to greet him. Martin screamed. His entire body spasmed with such horror that he shat the bed. He did not repeat the experiment. He took to swallowing tranquilizers at night and slept with a pillow over his head.

So it was with more than the usual green-starved longing that Martin awaited spring that year. One by one he’d cast off the few remaining ties that bound him to the rest of the world—lovers and friends, telephone, television, radio, car, computer—surprised at how easy it had become, and how commonplace, to take up all the antediluvian burdens this Hotspur century had thrown aside. Chopping and carrying firewood, retrofitting an old hand pump for the kitchen, getting used to the sheen of ice on the interior walls and windows of his poorly insulated cottage. Mrs. Grose’s canned zucchini and wax beans (the only things that grew reliably anymore, though they hardly flourished), a hot bath once a week. He’d offset the expense of wax candles by gathering stunted bayberries in the fall, and cursed himself for not installing solar panels years ago, as John had urged him. Now, of course, it was too late.

“Tired?”

From his porch Martin smiled wanly at Mrs. Grose. “A little,” he confessed. No use lying to a centenarian psychic. “I was thinking I might walk down to the beach.”

Mrs. Grose cocked her head, still staring across the bay. “That was some storm we had, eh?” At her feet the little pug gasped, as though at a bad memory. “I thought the roof would blow away!”

“I’m surprised it didn’t,” said Martin.

They stood in silence, watching the uneasy sky. “Well, I guess I’ll go down and see what the storm washed up,” Martin said at last.

“Dinner tonight?” Mrs. Grose called after him. “Diana’s supposed to come and bring us a chicken.”

“Then I’ll be there.”

He bent to pick up the canvas bag he took with him on his sea walks. Then, waving, he stepped from the porch and started downhill to the pier, past the sign so faded that its letters were imprinted only in his memory.

MARS HILL

SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITY

FOUNDED 1883

Drifts of leaves clung to the base of the signpost, but not so many as there had been, once. Martin glanced down at the few sickly daffodils thrusting through the mulch, and winced. Moony had always said she hated spring at Mars Hill: “It’s so hopeless!” To which Mrs. Grose had patiently explained that there was always hope—spring always came, followed by that sudden brilliant burst of northern summer that you never were quite prepared for, no matter how many times you’d seen it. But when Martin had last seen Moony a few weeks earlier, she’d avoided any mention of spring, avoided her annual rants against mud season and snow in May and the necessity of fires in cranky woodstoves that aggravated her asthma. At the time he and Jason had laughed about it (though not within Moony’s hearing). Now Moony’s unaccustomed silence seemed ominous.

She knows something, Martin thought as he trudged down the gravel road to the beach. She knows and she’s not telling.

Overhead the sky gleamed a soft metallic grey, streaked with undulating bands of violet and green. Seagulls called plaintively, trailing in the wake of a solitary lobster boat. The air had a harsh scent, hard to pinpoint but unmistakable. Jason was a marine biologist, and he believed the massive die-offs of krill and other plankton were changing the chemical content of the ocean. In the water a few cormorants bobbed, their heads snaking beneath the surface. Beside the rickety building that served as the community’s storage shed, Martin’s sailboat stood raised on concrete blocks, WENDAMEEN painted on its bow in plain block letters. Martin looked at the boat and sighed, and walked the last few yards to the beach.

Here, at last, things looked pretty much as they always had. No sand, just rocks everywhere, smooth and rounded by aeons of pounding waves. Braids of kelp and bladder wrack, stony hollows filled with periwinkles and goose barnacles; every now and then the fractured puzzle of a broken sea urchin’s shell, the astral shadow of a starfish or sand dollar. If you stared at your feet as you walked along the shore, you might almost imagine the world was as it had been, as it should be. But a glance at the bruised sky, the reflected glare of purple and gold put the lie to that.