Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

Drew put down his empty can. “Why? You gonna fill out his ivy?” Winston frowned, scalded by the remark. “I’m sorry,” said Drew. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just—" He reached up and flicked a droplet from his eye that could have been sweat, but was most likely a tear. “It’s not far from here. Let me finish up, and I’ll take you.”

Corona Del Mar Memorial Park was a piece of land with a gor­geous ocean view.

“It’s up here,” Drew said as they trudged up the gentle slope. “There weren’t many plots left for sale. It’s a popular spot.”

It struck Winston as odd that such a view would be wasted on residents with no windows to appreciate it. Best to be entombed like Snow White, in a casket of glass facing west to catch the rays of the setting sun.

They stopped by a rectangular patch of earth surrounded by other occupied graves—older ones with well-trimmed hedges and low gran­ite headstones. Michael was buried among strangers. It was a modest grave. Still unmarked, with sorry plugs of ivy that had yet to take root.

“No gravestone yet?” questioned Winston.

“Not yet. And his father isn’t even sure he wants one.”

“Why not?”

“Ever been to Paris?” Drew asked. “Ever see Jim Morrison’s grave?”

Winston had never seen it, but he knew enough to get Drew’s point. It was a counterculture shrine, the area around it defaced by graffiti and spoiled with litter. The names of the Shards were known now in just about every corner of the world, and whether or not they were considered mere servants of Dillon, fanatics were everywhere. For the same reason Winston had to travel under an assumed name, the marked grave of Michael Lipranski would never see any peace.

He noted the sad, forlorn way Drew looked at the grave. For a moment he wished he had Dillon’s skill at divining a person’s thoughts and feelings. “Were you and Michael lovers?” he asked.

Drew shook his head. Even without Dillon’s power, Winston could read a whole canvas of emotions there. “More of an unrequited love thing,” Drew said. “At least for me. He wasn’t into it.”

“I shouldn’t stay too long,” Winston said. “I’ve got to follow a lead that might bring me to Lourdes.” Winston gave Drew his pager number. “If you find Dillon, let me know.”

“I won’t find him,” Drew said. “I’m not looking.”

Winston lingered a few moments more.

“Did you just want to pay your respects?” asked Drew, clearly uncomfortable to be at his friend’s grave so soon after he was laid to rest. “Or is there another reason why you came?”

Winston knelt down to the grave. “I don’t know.” He reached his hand down to touch the earth, and for an instant the dream flashed though his mind again like a static shock.

A lavender lounge chair.

A ledge.

Three figures.

Why have I come here, Michael? I’m not Dillon, I can’t give you back your life. What is it I’m supposed to do? But Michael’s grave, like all graves, gave its answers in variations of silence. His only course now was south, following the solitary lead that might take him to Lourdes.

By the time they left a few minutes later, Michael’s Ivy was green and lush, and Winston’s mind was still a dry heave, willing him to action against a painful absence of purpose.

Transcription excerpt, day 202, 13:51 hours

“I’m worried about Lourdes. Winston’s fine out there—But I don’t think things are right with her. I think she got pushed off the brink, and never came back.”

“How much damage could she do on her own?”

“Lots, if she chose to. When I last saw her, she could put a room of people to sleep, or turn them into a kick-line, hopping in time against their will. We called her the puppeteer, and she hated it. But now there’s no telling how many she’s got on the end of her strings.”

“If she hasn’t surfaced, maybe she won’t. There’s a good chance the gov­ernment has her, like they have you, and are hiding her in some other secret installation.”

“No. When I’m out there in the tower I can feel her somewhere out there. And it scares me.”

The cruise ship was never actually reported missing.

Monarch cruise line simply listed the S.S. Blue Horizon as out of serv­ice, but rumors abounded. Rumors that it had vanished in the Ber­muda Triangle; that it broke apart in a storm; that it was torpedoed by friendly fire. The truth, however, was much simpler, and slightly more embarrassing to Monarch Cruises. Simply put, the eighty-thousand-ton cruise ship had been seized by pirates.

Winston Pell had kept his ear to the ground for many months in search of such anomalous events, which was no easy task, because over the past year, daily life had evolved into one anomalous event after another. Riots springing up unprovoked, stocks fluctuating so violently analysts were jumping out of windows. There was a surge in the num­ber of militant religious zealots, as well as rampant hedonism popping up in the most straight-laced of bible-thumping towns.

And all because everyone could sense that the world had suddenly become a sinking ship. What began with the Backwash had taken on a momentum all its own, metastasizing to the far reaches of the globe. There was a prevailing, unnameable sense that something immense and terrible was about to occur. Winston suspected people had a kind of species instinct about it, the way dogs could sense a coming earth­quake.

And so on the police bands, and in the media, and in the chat rooms, Winston searched for any anomalous event that was simply too anomalous to be anything but Dillon, or Lourdes.

Finally he narrowed his sights down to the S.S. Blue Horizon. As maritime industries were not immune to the decay of social structure that marked these days, the Blue Horizon was not the first large vessel to fall victim to latter-day pirates. Everything from freighters to river boats had gone missing. What made the Blue Horizon different, how­ever, is that it was the only ship that defied being brought to justice. The ship would come into various ports, from Juneau to Jamaica, in the middle of the night for fuel and supplies, appearing like the flying Dutchman, only to be gone by morning—which was theoretically impossible, because every port was manned with a night crew. Yet every port gave the same story—no sooner had the ship arrived, than the night crew fell asleep at their posts. When they awoke, the ship was gone.

As Lourdes had a very special knack for rendering whole groups of people unconscious, news of this particular ghost ship was of special interest to Winston.

It was on a Saturday in October that Winston drove a rented car across the Mexican border to Ensenada. The word was that the Blue Horizon had anchored offshore, staying put for the first time in many months.

As he drove along the coast, past a smattering of Ensenada resorts, he could see the great ship, half a mile off shore. He parked by the docks amidst a bazaar of trinkets and curios, where tourists from the two other ships in port bargained for deals. Most locals and tourists, fairly oblivious to the Blue Horizons presence, went about their busi­ness. It was when Winston tried to get a tender to take him out to the ship that he began to encounter resistance. The fishermen and boatmen would shake their heads when he asked, but offered no explanation, until he finally found one who would talk; the driver of a glass-bottom boat, docked too far from the ships in port to see any action.

“No, my friend,” the boatman said. “I don’t go out there. She is La Llorona —the wailing woman. A ghost ship.”