CHAPTER ONE
Saturday Evening
The road was long and secret: a tunnel of trees that leaned overhead and wept like mourners in the wind. It ran beneath iron skies, past vacant fields and the lichen-crusted stones of ragged walls. It ran past a farmhouse, dark and empty, and through a stone village with few lit windows and no signs that named it. It ran on then towards the coast, and even in the hermetic car I smelled salt and rotting seaweed.
My driver had excellent posture, a glossy brown ponytail, and perfect silence. I trusted that she knew our destination—what else could I do?—though she had shared nothing about it with me, instead maintaining a near-statuary stillness as she drove. Nor had I any idea of why I’d been dispatched. To examine, to investigate, to discover, to take a confession, to punish, or simply to bear witness? I was authorized to do all of these, though I wondered lately about my qualifications for any of them. If nostalgia was called for perhaps, or distraction, equivocation, worry, longing, or bone weariness, then I might be useful. But in all these years, my masters had never sought such things from me, and I didn’t think this Saturday in March would be the first time.
The rear seat was deep and enveloping, the doors were distant, and the windows were tinted. Between the tidal sway of the car’s suspension and the thrum of pavement rolling away, I lapsed into a sort of fugue. It was not quite sleep, yet not quite dreamless—an unmooring, a drifting, and as I drifted, I crossed a frontier. There was no razor wire or striped barricade, no skeptical guards or surly dogs, no customs shed for stammered declarations, but a border nonetheless. When I came around, on the far side, it was to another world.
To an uncertain season, neither winter nor spring, under dark, colliding skies—the clouds swollen and malign, obedient to no known physics. To a fading sun pinned wrong in the heavens, casting shadows too long, too dark, and irreconcilable with their antecedent objects. To birds hurtling wildly—careening, tumbling, shedding feathers like confetti, as if they’d been shot from a circus cannon. It was as if the planet had been knocked from its axis, jarred fifteen degrees from true—and not just the planet.
The city, so many miles behind me, seemed even more distant now—a dying ember in my memory. My life there, even my Saturday morning, seemed suddenly remote and abstract—barely a pantomime. The people on my street and in the metro, in the shops and cafés, were like figures in an ancient film—silent, stiff-limbed silhouettes, thinner than smoke. The grocer, the sour man at the newsstand, my garrulous neighbor—it seemed any breeze could take them all into this alien sky. I might’ve been away from the city for minutes or hours or for a year or more—I had no idea, or any notion of what I’d find when I returned. If I returned. I shuddered and rubbed my eyes, but the feelings of dislocation, strangeness, and dread persisted. It was almost dark when we arrived.
The great house was behind stone pillars and iron gates, down a brick drive bordered with pollarded trees and boxwoods still in burlap, and with brown lawns rolling away. The drive ran for half a mile and rose steeply at the end, to where the house loomed above the sea.
It was an ancient pile of ginger-colored stone, with a massive central section and two long wings that reached towards me. Scrolled and fluted stonework framed dark windows, and stone birds brooded beneath the eaves of a copper roof. The wings embraced a brick forecourt with a fountain in the middle, in gray stone that had fared poorly in the salt air. Its figures were blurred and blunted, and in the failing light I couldn’t tell if the squat shapes spouting water were fish or frogs or demons, or if the male form they aimed at was bearing the world or heaving against a boulder. In either case, a thankless job.
The car swept around the court and stopped beneath a columned porte cochere. The driver remained still and mute behind the wheel but unlocked the rear doors. I’d barely wrestled my bag and briefcase to the bricks when she drove off again. The evening air was cold and briny, and a swirling wind raised funnels of stone dust and dry leaves. Beneath the lapping of the fountain and the sound of the receding car I could hear the heavy, restless shift of the sea.
Lights came on in the porte cochere, and one of the massive double doors swung back. A young woman stood there, small in the yawning doorway. She was slender and pale, in black boots, a gray skirt, and a black jacket with a mandarin collar. Her straight blond hair was parted in the middle and bound in a braid that hung over her left shoulder like the business end of a riding crop. Her white hands curled into fists, her lips made a skeptical line, and her large gray eyes narrowed. She looked at me for a long time—my battered luggage, my dark suit and coat, creased from the journey, my creased face and dark hair, tangled by the wind—before she spoke.
“You’re from Security?” she asked. Her speech was precise, her voice low and controlled, as if it was perilous to give it rein.
“Yes,” I said. “The Division of Security Standards—Standard Division.”
“You have identification?” I drew ID from a breast pocket and handed her the case. She flipped it open, studied it, studied me, and flipped it shut. “Agent Myles,” she said, and returned my ID.
“ ‘Myles’ will do.”
“Why is it ‘Standard Division’? Why don’t you call it ‘Standards Division’?”
I looked at her and shrugged. “Even we cannot control how the vernacular develops.”
The woman shook her head. “We expected you earlier.”
“It’s a long drive.”
“The cafeteria is this way,” she said.
“There’s no need, I’m not hungry.”
She tilted her head at me as if I’d spoken in tongues. “The cafeteria is where we found the body,” she said, and beckoned me on.
