At first, her instinct had been simply to get away — get away before she did something so violent and permanent she would regret it forever. But as she ran from the Inn, south toward the dunes and the salt grass, the faintest of plans began to form.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that what she was doing wasn’t simply defying Pendergast, but was also irrational and perhaps dangerous. She didn’t care. She also knew that her guardian, for once, was wrong: there was something else going on in the town of Exmouth, something dark, strange, beyond ratiocination — and still unsolved. She knew more than he did about such documents as the Sutter manuscript; she knew there was often more to them than was commonly believed. Obscura Peregrinatione ad Littus (A Dark Pilgrimage to the Southern Shore): there was a mystery here still to be uncovered, and the answer to that mystery lay to the south, in the ruins of Oldham — she was sure of it. What that answer was she could not begin to guess. But she would prove to Pendergast that she was right. She would prove it — and then she would shut herself away in certain sub-basement chambers of the Riverside Drive mansion known only to her until she felt in the mood to see the sun again.
As the land rose, the salt grass gave way to scrub oaks and twisted Scotch pines. She had passed Skullcrusher Rocks and the hook of land beyond, crossed a mudflat and channel — it was low tide — and reached Crow Island, at the far edge of the wildlife refuge. The ocean lay eastward, to her left, beyond the long, narrow barrier island. She paused to listen, but the wind was so loud that she could not hear the surf. The only thing visible in the swirling blackness was the faint blinking of the Exmouth lighthouse behind her, the beam sweeping by every nine seconds. It was this light that she navigated by, the beacon showing her the way to Oldham.
The scrubby trees began to thin, and dunes anchored by dune grass made their appearance. Now she could finally hear the thundering of the unseen ocean — or rather feel it beneath her feet, the shaking of the ground caused by the huge Atlantic rollers pounding the beach. She angled across the island, once again checking her position with the lighthouse. The deserted town could be no more than another mile or two. She would be there very soon.
A good nor’easter didn’t frighten Bud Olsen. On the contrary, he liked it. It filled him with vigor. And it didn’t bother Aubrey, his golden retriever. After retiring from fishing ten years before, Olsen had moved into town and now lived in a small house at the end of Main Street, where he could walk everywhere — especially to his Tuesday lunch club and to the library, where he was a vigorous borrower of books, preferring the maritime adventure stories of Patrick O’Brian, John Masefield, and C. S. Forester.
At nine o’clock, with the wind rattling the casements, Aubrey began whining at the door and wagging his tail. Olsen laid aside his book and rose from the chair with a grunt. He turned off the kerosene lantern and walked to the door.
“You want to go out, boy?”
Aubrey wagged his tail more vigorously.
“Well then, let’s have ourselves a little walk.” More by feel than by sight, he donned his oilskin and sou’wester, pulled on a pair of boots, fished the flashlight out of the hall drawer, and snapped the leash on Aubrey. He pushed the door open against the wind, then walked down the porch stairs and out into the street. The town was mostly dark because of the blackout, but the police station at the far end of town was lit up by an emergency generator. The wind whipped across the water of the bay, the rain lashing almost horizontally. Bud lowered his head, the wind tugging at the sou’wester, which was securely tied around his chin.
They turned left and headed down Main Street toward the center of town. As they passed the various houses he could see the soft shadows, backlit in orange, of people moving about with candles or lanterns in hand, giving the town a cozy, old-fashioned, Currier and Ives sort of feeling. This was how it had been in Exmouth a hundred years ago, Bud thought, before electricity. It wasn’t so bad. Electricity had brought nothing but trouble, when you thought about it — glaring light, pollution, computers and iPads and all that nonsense that he saw every day, as everyone — and not just kids — walked around town staring like zombies into little bright rectangles instead of greeting one another, instead of smelling the salt air and observing the scarlet maples in their autumnal glory...
His reverie was interrupted by a growl. Aubrey had stopped, staring ahead into the darkness, his hair bristling.
“What is it, boy?”
Another low growl.
This was unusual. Aubrey was probably the friendliest dog in town, who posed a danger to burglars only by virtue of tripping them in the dark. He would greet the grim reaper himself with a wagging tail.
Aubrey took a step back, stiff with fear, the growl turning into a whine.
“Easy now, there’s nothing there.” Bud shone the light around, but it didn’t penetrate far into the swirling murk.
Now the dog was shaking and cringing, the whine increasing in intensity. Suddenly Bud smelled a dreadful odor — the stench of shit and blood — and with a yelp the dog pulled back abruptly, a puddle of urine appearing on the ground beneath it.
“What the hell?” Bud backed up as well. “What’s that?” he called into the darkness.
With a screech of terror Aubrey jerked back on the leash, pulling it out of his hands and hightailing it down the street, leash dragging behind him.
“Hey, boy!” Bud watched the dog tear off into the darkness. This was the craziest thing. He heard a noise behind him and turned back to see something that at first he could barely comprehend: a stringy, naked, oddly elongated figure emerging from the darkness.
“What the hell—?”
The figure lunged forward and Bud felt the hot, gurgling breath of it, the stench of the slaughterhouse, and with a muffled shriek of terror he turned to flee when a pain he could never have imagined suddenly tore through his vitals; he looked down with surprise and horror to see a glabrous pate buried in his gut, streaming red with blood, muscled jaws working, apparently eating him to death...
Constance emerged from the last line of dunes, skirted a half-buried sand fence, and came out on the beach. The surf was tremendous, massive curlers collapsing far offshore, driving in as a line of boiling water and breaking a second time and thundering up the beach to the foot of the dunes. Until this trip to Exmouth, Constance had never seen such an angry ocean, and — with her inability to swim — she found the sight unsettling. It was easy to see how a ship would be pounded to flotsam in a sea like this in very little time. Her flashlight beam barely penetrated ten feet into the murk.
She looked back. The Exmouth Light was just visible, blinking away steadily despite the blackout. She recalled the old maps she had looked at in the Historical Society. The ruins of Oldham couldn’t be much farther to the south. Sure enough, as she continued on, she at last made out the stubs of pilings poking out of the sand as the shore curved into the estuary that formed the end of Crow Island and the former Oldham Harbor. A few more minutes brought her to a granite seawall, built of huge blocks that had once protected the opening to the harbor.
She skirted the seawall and walked inland. The dune area gave way to hard ground, scrubby pines, and stunted oaks. And there were house foundations here: cellar holes of stacked granite stone, full of oak leaves and drifted sand. It wasn’t hard to make out where the single street had passed through town, cellar holes on either side, along with the odd piling or rotten wooden beam.
A map of Oldham she’d examined at the Historical Society had indicated the town’s only church stood at the far end, where the street divided, so to be visible the length of town in a traditional New England arrangement. And sure enough, as she moved along the long-abandoned road, she found a larger, deeper foundation at the far end, in somewhat better condition than the other ruins, consisting once again of hand-cut and stacked granite blocks. A stone staircase led down into the remains of a basement.