“Eleven thirty PM,” he said, more to himself than to Constance. “The wind would have been blowing from that direction.” He looked northeast, toward the lighthouse. “And the light would have been extinguished.”
He picked up the GPS and the strange device and began walking southwestward, moving tangentially to the shoreline. Constance followed, waiting as he paused now and then to consult the GPS. He stopped at a point that placed them between the lighthouse and a nasty line of jagged rocks that stretched out into the sea.
“The bonfire would have been built well back on shore, and on a high point, perhaps the crest of a dune,” he murmured. “It would not have been a large fire — maintaining an illusion of distance being important — but it would have burned hot and bright.”
More pacing back and forth; more consulting with the GPS unit. Then, taking the sou’wester from his head and stuffing it into a pocket of his coat, Pendergast lifted the unknown device and pointed it in various directions, sighting along it as a surveyor might sight along a theodolite.
“What is that?” Constance asked.
“Laser range finder.” Pendergast took a number of measurements, comparing them to the GPS readout. After each measurement, he moved to a new location. Each move was progressively smaller.
“Here,” he said at last.
“Here what?” she said, half exasperated with Pendergast’s inscrutability.
“Here would have been the ideal place to situate the bonfire.” He nodded south, toward the fang-like series of rocks surrounded by blistering surf. “That reef is known as Skullcrusher Rocks. You will note that our location lies on a line with the Exmouth lighthouse, but in such a fashion as to place Skullcrusher Rocks, there, between the lighthouse and a passing ship. A ship on a southerly course, keeping near the shelter of the coast because of the storm, would have used the Exmouth Light to guide it around the northern shore of Cape Ann. If you move the light a mile south, the ship, using the false light as its bearing, would steam right into those rocks — which on a dirty night would be invisible.”
Constance looked at the ground around them. They were standing on a shingle beach, covered in small, even pebbles. It stretched away to both the north and the south.
Pendergast went on. “With a high-tide storm surge and a northeast wind, the debris would have washed in all around us.”
“So where is it? Or was it? The reports said no debris was ever found. A three-hundred-foot ship can’t just vanish.”
Pendergast continued staring out toward the rocks, his eyes narrowed, the wind stirring the blond-white hair back from his forehead. If he was disappointed, he showed no sign. Finally he turned and looked north.
Something in his stance and expression stopped her. “What is it?” she asked.
“I want you to turn around slowly — do it casually, don’t excite attention or suspicion — and look at the rise of dunes to the north, toward Exmouth.”
Constance ran a hand through her hair, stretched with feigned leisureliness, and swiveled around. But there was nothing — just a bare line of dunes covered with a thin mantle of sea grass, whipping in the wind.
“I don’t see anything,” she said.
“There was a figure,” Pendergast said after a moment. “A dark figure. As you turned, he disappeared back behind the dunes.”
“Shall we investigate?”
“By the time we get there, I’m sure he’ll be long gone.”
“Why are you concerned? We’ve seen other people wandering these beaches.”
Pendergast continued gazing northward, saying nothing, a troubled expression on his face. Then he shook his head, as if to throw off whatever speculations were running through his mind.
“Constance,” he said in a low voice, “I am going to ask you to do something.”
“Fine, so long as it doesn’t involve swimming.”
“Would you have any objection if we were to remain here for some time?”
“No. But why?”
“I am going to undertake a Chongg Ran session.”
“Here?”
“Yes, here. I would appreciate it if you could ensure that I remain undisturbed, save on one condition — if the figure, any figure, were to reappear again, atop that line of dunes.”
Constance hesitated only a moment. “Very well.”
“Thank you.” Pendergast looked around once more, his gaze bright and penetrating, as if committing every last detail to memory. He knelt. Then — smoothing away some pebbles and making a small depression in the sand for his head — he lay down on the beach. He tightened the belt of his oilskin coat, pulled the sou’wester from his pocket, and arranged it beneath his head as an improvised pillow. Then he folded his arms across his chest, one over the other, like a corpse, and closed his eyes.
Constance studied him for a long moment. Then she glanced around, noticed a large piece of driftwood rearing out of the sand about ten feet away, walked over to it and took a seat, her back rigid, carriage erect. The beach was utterly deserted, but had there in fact still been an observer hovering nearby, something in Constance’s demeanor might have suggested to him a lioness, watching over her pride. She became as motionless as Pendergast: two still figures, set against a dark and lowering sky.
31
Special Agent Pendergast lay, without moving, on the shingle beach. Although his eyes were closed, he was intensely aware of his surroundings: the cadence of the surf; the smell of the salt air; the feel of the pebbles under his back. His first job was to shut down the external world and redirect that intensity inward.
With a conscious effort born of long practice, he slowed his respiration and heartbeat to half their normal rates. He lay in stasis for perhaps ten minutes, going through the series of complex mental exercises necessary to attain the meditative state of th’an shin gha — the Doorstep to Perfect Emptiness — and preparing himself for what lay ahead. And then, very methodically, he began removing the items that made up the world around him. The town of Exmouth disappeared, along with all its inhabitants. The leaden sky vanished. The chill breeze no longer rustled through his hair. The ocean, with its sound and smell, disappeared. Last of all went Constance and the surrounding beach.
All was blackness. He had reached stong pa nyid — the State of Pure Emptiness.
He allowed himself to remain in this state, floating, alone in the void, for what in the heightened state of Chongg Ran seemed like an eternity, but was in fact no longer than a quarter of an hour. And then, in his mind, with exquisite deliberation, he began to reassemble the world in the reverse order from which he’d deconstructed it. First, the shingle beach unrolled itself in all directions. Next, the firmament arched overhead. And then came the sea breeze — save that it was no longer a breeze, but a howling midnight gale, full of lashing rain that stung as it pelted the skin. The sea came next, thundering in with great violence. Last, Pendergast placed himself on the Exmouth beach.
It was not, however, the beach of today. Through intense intellectual focus, Pendergast had re-created, in his mind, the Exmouth of long ago — specifically, the night of February 3, 1884.
Now, as he allowed all his senses to return, he became fully aware of his surroundings. In addition to the raging storm, he noticed an absence: a mile to the north, there was nothing but darkness. The lighthouse did not blink; it had vanished in the murk. But then, in a brief flash, it stood revealed when a tongue of lightning split the sky: a pale finger of stone rising into the angry night.