VACANCY & ARIEL

I stopped just inside the cabin door. Isha was nowhere to be seen and this apparent sign of his caution convinced me to retreat deeper into the room; but I refused to turn away. I wanted to see the last of Ariel, to hold onto all of her I could for a while longer. The roaring rose in pitch and gradually thinned into a keening so intense, it kindled a fiery pinprick of pain in my skull. A supernal brightness infused the scene. The spruce trunks gleamed like burnished copper and their boughs had gone a solarized green. The shapes of things were distorted, elongated, like images painted on a fabric that was being stretched, indented by the receding ship, now reduced to a speck of redness at the center of a whirlpool of troubled air.

I had an apprehension that something calamitous was about to happen; I raced into the bedroom and shut the door. As I stood there, thinking I had overreacted, I heard a sound: a snap not unlike the discharge of a static spark, yet somehow organic, almost like the slap of water against a pier and, though no louder than, say, the pop of a faulty speaker on a concert stage, frightening in that it seemed to issue from within my body. A pressure wave must have followed, for I wound up on the floor, my head jammed into the corner. Woozy, my mind curiously blank, but unhurt. Not a single ache or pain, as if instead of being flung into the corner, I had been displaced and set down in that awkward position. I sat up, had a look around and noticed that the bed stood closer to the wall than I remembered. And the framed photograph of sea stacks along the Oregon coast above the bed, I could have sworn it had been hung higher. And the door, the grain of the spruce planks that formed it had, I was certain, been sharper. Lying in bed, I had often contrived pictures of their patterns, Native American shapes, animals and ritual designs; now I could see nothing of the kind. Whether this remarked upon a change in my perceptions or in the room itself, I had no clue, but it made me wonder if my body, too, had changed, perhaps in some deleterious way. Then a clatter from the living room, as of furniture being knocked about, yanked me back into the moment. Isha, cheated of his quarry, was hunting me.

Fear was sharp in me and I would have gone through the window, but the window was electronically locked and the punch code wouldn’t work. Maybe the circuitry, I thought, had undergone a change. The tranquilizer rifle was in the living room, where Ariel had left it. I searched about for a weapon and recalled the case, stored in the closet wall safe. I opened the closet, fumbled with the combination, hauled out the case, listening all the while to Isha wrecking the cabin on his way along the corridor. I removed Ariel’s gun from the case. Fifteen pounds of dull red metal. We had never tried to fire it and I had no confidence it could be fired, but I hoped it would discourage him.

Either Isha was unfamiliar with doorknobs or else he considered them inappropriate—the door flew off its hinges with a splintering crash and toppled across the bed. He ducked his head in, spotted me and entered with a sinuous twisting movement that made my heart leap. I trained the gun at him, holding it in both hands, and squeezed the grip; but to no result. I squeezed a second time, exerting greater pressure, and when again nothing happened, Isha gave forth with a seething, spit-filled sound that I, in my fear, took for gloating laughter. He could have reached me in a single stride, but he remained standing inside the door. Though I had the thought that he might not want to kill me, it was swept aside by the menace of his physicality. The bloody maw and those cracked yellow eyes and his fingers—I imagined them ripping the cartilage of my throat. As I readjusted my hold on the gun in order to exert more pressure, my forefinger touched a soft depression in the metal and the weapon came alive with a throbbing. Perhaps Isha was blessed with extraordinarily acute senses and felt it, too, for he spoke then the only words I allowed him to speak, and though as I’ve said my comprehension of his language was imperfect, the gist of his message came through:

“Brother,” he said. “This is all for nothing.”