“What on earth would Stillwater’s wife be doing here?” Marjorie
demanded of Bek.
“Spying,” Ella answered succinctly. They stared at her; she added darkly, “
There’s something here Stillwater wants. Maybe a cook, maybe a server. Maybe
just a taste of something he hasn’t thought up himself. In a week, you’ll
find Carrie’s croquettes on his menu.”
“I really doubt it was her,” Marjorie said soothingly, though she sounded
unconvinced. Carrie had never met Stillwater, but she knew enough about him to
doubt that the owner of the classiest restaurant in Chimera Bay would ask his
wife to eat in a place that offered fried-chicken nibbles for lunch.
Ella, still upset, brooded at the burger, flipped it to reveal the blackened
underside, and upended it into the trash.
“I’ve known Stillwater on the prowl before,” she said, reaching for fresh
meat. “I’ve seen what he can do when he wants something.”
Carrie felt her arms prickle into goose bumps, despite the heat in the
kitchen. “What did he do that time? And why,” she added puzzledly, “didn’t
he come himself?”
Ella started to answer, then closed her mouth and shook her head at some
unspeakable, unholy tangle of memory. “It’s complicated,” she said grimly,
and left it there, in the place where every other inexplicable event at the
inn ended up.
Carrie stayed late to help Ella clean the kitchen after supper; they lingered
in the weird, soothing rhythms of the dishwashers, eating crab bisque and Ella
’s olive and black pepper biscuits at the kitchen counter. It was late when
Carrie drove home, but as she climbed out of the truck, she heard Merle still
chanting. She couldn’t see him. The only light in the slough came from the
moon, and from the little flashlight on her keychain. She paused beside the
truck, wondering if she should check on him. His voice sounded hale, if a
little hoarse, and he seemed to be moving away from her, deeper into the wood.
She went indoors, crawled into bed instead.
Her father’s voice, or the memory of it, drifted in and out of her dreams
until she wove it into a rich night-language that almost made sense, that
almost made her see what it was conjuring.
Then the moon set, and the wild chanting stopped.
3
Somewhere south of Cape Mistbegotten, a sign in one of the little towns along
the coast highway caused the traveling Pierce Oliver to veer impulsively off
the road.
ALL YOU CAN EAT FRIDAY NITE FISH FRY the sign said. His sudden, overwhelming
hunger drove the car to a halt beneath it.
He got out. It took a moment to find the door, hidden within a makeshift
tunnel beneath scaffolding that went up and up, higher than he would have
expected from such ramshackle beginnings. Part of a turret, a cone of white,
jutted incongruously from behind a plywood wall covering the face of the
building. There were no windows in sight. The sign was scrawled in chalk on a
large board hooked to the scaffolding. It clattered and swung in the gusty
wind blowing in from the west, or from the south, or from anywhere, according
to the tipsy weather vane on top of the turret, which squealed crankily as it
spun.
Odors wafted through the door as Pierce pulled it open. He smelled citrus,
garlic, onions, and felt his empty stomach flop like a fish out of water. The
vast cavern beyond the door was shadowy; he stood blinking, aware of a bar at
his right, stretching off into the dimness, ghostly glasses floating upside
down above it, a body or two on the stools, the dull gleam of amber and silver
and gold from the bottles lined behind it. Other things were scattered among
them: weird paintings, masks, street signs, totems that had drifted into the
place through the years and clung. A mobile of porcelain Fools’ heads hanging
from the gloom above the bar swung slowly, glint-eyed and grinning, as though
his entrance and the wind that pushed in behind him had disturbed them.
“Hello?” he called. He couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. That
morning? The evening before? Time blurred in his head like the light and
shadow blurred in this twilight place where, in the depths of the cavern, near
the ceiling, a star blazed suddenly with light.
“Up here,” a voice said briskly from above. “What can I do you for?”
“I saw your All-You-Can-Eat sign?”
“Ah. Dinner will be along anytime now as soon as my brother gets the crab
traps in. Crab cakes tonight—your lucky night. You can wait in the restaurant
through that door, or in here.”
Pierce’s eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, threaded here and there
by golden, dusty tendrils of light of no perceptible origin. The size of the
place shifted by greater lengths and depths. He blinked again. A ladder stood
in a muddle of tables, chairs, stools, worn couches, odd, mismatched pieces of
furniture. Above the ladder, an immense crystal chandelier depended: a lovely
ice flower with a hundred petals. That, he realized, explained the star. The
speaker stood near the top of the ladder with a cloth in his hand, polishing
the prisms.