Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

Constance looked at the ground around them. They were standing on a shingle beach, covered in small, even pebbles. It stretched away to both the north and the south.

Pendergast went on. “With a high-tide storm surge and a northeast wind, the debris would have washed in all around us.”

“So where is it? Or was it? The reports said no debris was ever found. A three-hundred-foot ship can’t just vanish.”

Pendergast continued staring out toward the rocks, his eyes narrowed, the wind stirring the blond-white hair back from his forehead. If he was disappointed, he showed no sign. Finally he turned and looked north.

Something in his stance and expression stopped her. “What is it?” she asked.

“I want you to turn around slowly — do it casually, don’t excite attention or suspicion — and look at the rise of dunes to the north, toward Exmouth.”

Constance ran a hand through her hair, stretched with feigned leisureliness, and swiveled around. But there was nothing — just a bare line of dunes covered with a thin mantle of sea grass, whipping in the wind.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“There was a figure,” Pendergast said after a moment. “A dark figure. As you turned, he disappeared back behind the dunes.”

“Shall we investigate?”

“By the time we get there, I’m sure he’ll be long gone.”

“Why are you concerned? We’ve seen other people wandering these beaches.”

Pendergast continued gazing northward, saying nothing, a troubled expression on his face. Then he shook his head, as if to throw off whatever speculations were running through his mind.

“Constance,” he said in a low voice, “I am going to ask you to do something.”

“Fine, so long as it doesn’t involve swimming.”

“Would you have any objection if we were to remain here for some time?”

“No. But why?”

“I am going to undertake a Chongg Ran session.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here. I would appreciate it if you could ensure that I remain undisturbed, save on one condition — if the figure, any figure, were to reappear again, atop that line of dunes.”

Constance hesitated only a moment. “Very well.”

“Thank you.” Pendergast looked around once more, his gaze bright and penetrating, as if committing every last detail to memory. He knelt. Then — smoothing away some pebbles and making a small depression in the sand for his head — he lay down on the beach. He tightened the belt of his oilskin coat, pulled the sou’wester from his pocket, and arranged it beneath his head as an improvised pillow. Then he folded his arms across his chest, one over the other, like a corpse, and closed his eyes.

Constance studied him for a long moment. Then she glanced around, noticed a large piece of driftwood rearing out of the sand about ten feet away, walked over to it and took a seat, her back rigid, carriage erect. The beach was utterly deserted, but had there in fact still been an observer hovering nearby, something in Constance’s demeanor might have suggested to him a lioness, watching over her pride. She became as motionless as Pendergast: two still figures, set against a dark and lowering sky.

Special Agent Pendergast lay, without moving, on the shingle beach. Although his eyes were closed, he was intensely aware of his surroundings: the cadence of the surf; the smell of the salt air; the feel of the pebbles under his back. His first job was to shut down the external world and redirect that intensity inward.

With a conscious effort born of long practice, he slowed his respiration and heartbeat to half their normal rates. He lay in stasis for perhaps ten minutes, going through the series of complex mental exercises necessary to attain the meditative state of th’an shin gha — the Doorstep to Perfect Emptiness — and preparing himself for what lay ahead. And then, very methodically, he began removing the items that made up the world around him. The town of Exmouth disappeared, along with all its inhabitants. The leaden sky vanished. The chill breeze no longer rustled through his hair. The ocean, with its sound and smell, disappeared. Last of all went Constance and the surrounding beach.

All was blackness. He had reached stong pa nyid — the State of Pure Emptiness.

He allowed himself to remain in this state, floating, alone in the void, for what in the heightened state of Chongg Ran seemed like an eternity, but was in fact no longer than a quarter of an hour. And then, in his mind, with exquisite deliberation, he began to reassemble the world in the reverse order from which he’d deconstructed it. First, the shingle beach unrolled itself in all directions. Next, the firmament arched overhead. And then came the sea breeze — save that it was no longer a breeze, but a howling midnight gale, full of lashing rain that stung as it pelted the skin. The sea came next, thundering in with great violence. Last, Pendergast placed himself on the Exmouth beach.

It was not, however, the beach of today. Through intense intellectual focus, Pendergast had re-created, in his mind, the Exmouth of long ago — specifically, the night of February 3, 1884.

Now, as he allowed all his senses to return, he became fully aware of his surroundings. In addition to the raging storm, he noticed an absence: a mile to the north, there was nothing but darkness. The lighthouse did not blink; it had vanished in the murk. But then, in a brief flash, it stood revealed when a tongue of lightning split the sky: a pale finger of stone rising into the angry night.

Directly before him, however, was a very different source of light. A teepee-shaped pyramid of sticks, twigs, and bracken had been built on a dune above the beach and was burning fiercely. Less than a dozen figures clustered around it, huddled in greatcoats. Even though he was there in mind only, Pendergast retreated from the light of the fire into the reassuring safety of darkness. The men’s features, backlit by the flames, were barely distinguishable, but they all shared the same look: hardness, desperation, and a cruel anticipation. Two of the men were holding a thick blanket, and they were standing between the ocean and the bonfire. A third man, apparently the ringleader, and whose heavy, brutish features seemed somehow familiar in the firelight, held an ancient stopwatch in one hand and a lantern in the other. He was loudly counting off the seconds, from one to nine, and then starting over again. For two seconds out of each nine, the men holding the blanket shifted it to one side, exposing the light of the bonfire briefly, before blocking it again. This, Pendergast knew, was to simulate the nine-second periodicity of the Exmouth Light.

To the south, the indistinct shapes of the Skullcrusher Rocks were visible only as smudges of creamy, storm-tossed waves.

Skullcrusher Rocks. Walden Point, on which the Exmouth Light was situated, was too close to town; a wreck there would have been noticed. But a wreck on Skullcrusher Rocks... south of town, out of sight — and the wreckage would have been swept directly into this stretch of beach, concentrated in a small area.

Except for the man with the stopwatch, the group near the bonfire spoke little, their gleaming, rapacious eyes staring out to sea, probing the murk. The wind howled in from the northeast, and the rain was driving almost horizontally.

And then a shout went up: someone had spied an evanescent gleam in the darkness, out to sea. The group crowded forward, peering. One pulled a spyglass from out of his greatcoat and peered to the northeast. There was an anxious period of silence as he stared through the howling dark.

Then, the call: “It’s a steamer, boys!”

Another shout went up, this one quickly hushed by the leader, who continued to count with his stopwatch, ensuring that the flame of the bonfire maintained the precise periodicity of the Exmouth Light. Now the lights of the ship became more visible, appearing and disappearing as the vessel rose and fell on the heavy seas. An electric shiver went through the group: the ship was clearly steering by the fake light, and was on a heading directly for Skullcrusher Rocks.