Viator

The forest in close proximity to Viator was improbably lush, a micro-environment that would have been more appropriate to the Pacific Northwest. The black soil was carpeted with ivy, ground apple, and salvia; sword ferns sprayed upward from banks and hollows; mushrooms sprouted in gullies and beneath fallen trees; fungi and moss furred trunks and rotting logs; and, about thirty yards from the ship, a massive uprooted stump lying on its side, twelve feet in diameter, was so artfully decorated with lime green moss, it looked to have undergone an alchemical transformation—the dark circular underside of the thing, ragged with root fragments, some forming a witchy halo, had come to resemble those intricate reliefs depicting the Great Wheel of Life that embellish the walls of Hindu temples, only this particular great wheel was not painted in many hues, but done solely in green and black, and rather than illustrating the passage of a soul along the path of dharma, it presented a demonic version of that passage, a different course altogether, a far bleaker course complete with gnarled homunculi who appeared to have been banished, evicted, or otherwise brought forth from the emptiness at their midst, and whenever Wilander contemplated it—you couldn’t just glance at the stump; it drew the eye in; it sent your eye traveling over the circuit of incarnations suggested by the twisted postures of the little root men and the ornate symbology written by flourishes of moss—he half expected to look up and discover that he had been transported to one of the stations of the wheel, a land ruled by an opal moon floating in a maroon sky where black dragons wheeled above spindly onyx towers. The nearer he came to Kaliaska, the less dense and diverse the vegetation; the ground cover melted away. After a mile and a half, the forest gave out altogether and from atop a brush-covered rise he could see the town strewn across an acreage of gravelly dirt the color of weak coffee: close by the shore, a handful of two-story buildings plated in beige-and-brown aluminum siding, one of which contained the trading post and Arlene’s living quarters, another enclosing a beauty salon/barber shop, and a number of cubicle-sized rooms that were sometimes occupied by men from the freighters and fishing boats that stopped for supplies or were driven to anchor in the bay during storms; a swaybacked wooden dock to which a tug was moored; a gray beach with gray water lapping at it and a rubble of dark rocks jutting up from its southernmost reach; and, farther inland, more than a hundred small houses, many of the prefabricated variety, idiosyncratic in structure, but most of them white, with smoking chimneys, their unfenced yards littered by derelict cars, abandoned construction equipment, upside-down sleds and boats, doghouses, snowmobiles, ATVs. A couple of dogs were nosing along a deserted street near the shore, sniffing at debris. Parked behind the trading post were two state-owned yellow Caterpillar vehicles used for earthmoving and snow removal, and in each of their cabs, unidentifiable behind windows so smeared as to be opaque, someone was sleeping.