Bernard Cornwell - Stormchild

“Where, exactly?” I insisted.

Von Rellsteb paused. “I won’t tell you.” He held up a placatory hand to still my protest, then, as though he needed to move if he was to think and express himself properly, he began pacing up and down the channel’s bank. “I have long dreamed of a community that could devote itself to oneness with the earth. A biocentric community, without distractions, living in a silence that might let us hear the echoes of creation and the music of life.” He gave me a sudden smile. “You, of all people, know what I mean! You’ve known the transforming wonder of sitting in a small boat in the center of an ocean in the middle of a night, and suddenly feeling that you steered a vessel among the stars. You could live forever at that moment. There’s no history, no anger, no pride, just you and creation and a terrifying, exhilarating mystery. If I am to pierce that mystery, and find its meaning, then I must live in the center of silence. That’s what we do.” He paused, seeking a further explanation that would satisfy me. “Perhaps we’re making the first eco-religion? Perhaps the new millennium will need such a faith? But to forge it, we must live without distraction, and so our first rule, our golden rule, is that we keep ourselves private. That, Mr. Blackburn, is why I will not tell you where we live.”

He had almost seduced me with his gently beguiling voice, but some part of me, a robust part of me, would not be sucked into his vision. “You call lacing a swimming pool with oil living in the center of silence?”

“Oh, dear.” Von Rellsteb seemed disappointed with me. He was quiet for a few heartbeats, then offered a further explanation. “We don’t want to be selfish. We don’t want to withdraw totally from the world. Most of the community does stay separate, but a few of us, like myself and Nicole, have to go into the world and deliver shocks to those people who would fill the planet with noise and disgust and dirt and rancor. One day, Mr. Blackburn, the whole world will live in harmony, and the Genesis community both anticipates that era and tries to bring it about. But if I told people where we lived, then I know visitors would come to us, and distract us, and maybe weaken us.”

“You don’t have much faith in your vision, do you?”

“I have no faith in those who do not share my vision,” von Rellsteb said firmly. “And even though I am sure you are not hostile to it, you are still not one of us. Unless you’d like to join us?”

“No!”

He laughed, then stepped back. “I’ll give Nicole your letter. I know she’ll be pained about her mother.”

“I want to see her!”

“Maybe you can.” Von Rellsteb stepped back another pace. He was going into the darkness.

“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded.

“If she wants to see you, then you will see her.” He stepped further back.

I felt my chances of seeing Nicole slipping away with von Rellsteb’s retreat. “Tell her I love her!” I called to him.

“The world is love, Mr. Blackburn.” Lightning slashed at the sea, drowning the air with its sudden light, and in its slicing brilliance I caught a frozen glimpse of Caspar von Rellsteb’s face, and, in that instant, he seemed to be laughing at me with satanic glee. What earlier had seemed comforting and intelligent now looked evil, but, when my eyes adjusted to the dark again, von Rellsteb had vanished. He had come from the night, and seemed to have dissolved back into it.

“Von Rellsteb!” I shouted.

There was no answer. The sea sucked at the mangrove roots.

“Von Rellsteb!”

But there was only silence and darkness.

I turned away. I felt dizzy, almost drunk, as though I had been mesmerized by von Rellsteb’s voice, yet I could not shake the memory of that sudden satanic epiphany. Had he been laughing at me? Had his victory this night consisted of fooling a man whose wife he had killed and whose daughter he had seduced? I stopped and, despite the heat, I was shivering. I also realized that my encounter had yielded me nothing. I had achieved nothing, and I had learned nothing.

Then why, I suddenly wondered, had von Rellsteb agreed to meet me? What had been his purpose this night? To mock me? Then I thought of his denial that he might have used real bombs instead of stink bombs, and remembered the real bombs that had stranded the two Japanese whaling ships in their Korean dry docks. Fear surged inside me. Suppose Nicole was dead? Suppose that von Rellsteb had killed her, and Joanna, and now wanted to kill me? Fletcher had been right when he guessed that my father had left David and me comfortably provided for. We were not flamboyantly wealthy, but nor were we stretched for money, and inheritance has always been a motive for murder. And why else, it suddenly crashed on me, would von Rellsteb have raised the subject of Nicole being disinherited! Sweet God, I thought, that was how von Rellsteb made his money, by making heirs and heiresses of his cowed disciples!

God, he was clever! I remembered the uniformlike clothes Nicole had worn on the day she left with von Rellsteb; clothes which suggested a perverted subservience to von Rellsteb’s wishes. Did he have some kind of mesmeric hold over his women? And, once they were under his spell, did he manipulate their lives to enrich his own? Even Matthew had wondered where the Genesis community found its money, and now I knew. I knew.

But I had to carry my knowledge off Sun Kiss Key, and if von Rellsteb wanted me dead so that Nicole would inherit my wealth where better to kill me than on this empty Key in the middle of a thunder-ripped night? Fear swamped me. I ran to the car. I freed the revolver from its holster, slid into the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the keys. The engine banged reassuringly into life. I was panting. Sweat was streaming down my face as I let out the clutch and the car lurched forward.

Were they waiting for me? Had they thought to have a backup party guarding against just such an escape as this? I scrabbled Charles’s gun close to me, then shifted into second gear. I had left the headlights switched off. The car bounced sickeningly on the rough track. I shifted again, accelerating hard, spewing a plume of white dust behind me as the bright red car charged toward the highway. Moonlight was bright on the dirt track while lightning blazed to the north.

No one fired at me. No gun muzzle sparked and flamed in the night, yet still the irrational panic made me crouch low behind the leather-covered steering wheel as the little car bucked and banged and howled in the night. I could see the headlights of a great truck hammering down the highway, and I knew I should slow down and let the truck go past, but surely the best position for a Genesis ambush was where the track joined the main road? So I ignored good sense and put my foot down to the floor to try and race the truck.

The truck’s noise filled the night. Its chrome trim gleamed in the light of the small orange lamps that the driver had strung across his high cab. This beast of a truck was an eighteen wheeler, one of the behemoth super tankers of the highways, and it was thundering south with a tractor trailer attached and I was about to spin Charles’s small car under its juggernaut wheels.

Christ, but it was too late to stop now! I shifted down, making the Austin-Healey’s reconditioned engine scream in protest. Then I had the back wheels drifting because the main road was close, very close, and still no one fired at me, but it did not matter, for I was about to die anyway under the hammer blow of a Mack truck’s impact. The driver flicked his headlights to full beam as he hit the Klaxons, and the blinding night was suddenly filled with the violence of his giant horns. I kept going, and the truck driver stood on his brakes, so that the Mack’s rear end slewed across the road as I accelerated into its path. The Austin-Healey’s back wheels screamed and smoked on the blacktop, the steering wheel shuddered as the car’s right-hand wheels began to lift, and then the little vehicle skidded toward destruction under the truck’s massive tires. The big rig was threatening to jackknife, and its towering chrome radiator grille was filling the noisy night just inches from my rear fender. The Klaxons howled at the moon, tire smoke hazed the bitter air, then the Austin-Healey’s starboard wheels hit the road and the small car found its traction, and, suddenly, I was accelerating safely away, while behind me the truck driver went on hammering his horns in angry and impotent protest.