The Lonely Dead

I shook my head. 'Nice going.'

'So of course the Croatoans suddenly and reasonably retract all previous goodwill — and refuse to supply them with food. The colonists had arrived in summer, too late to plant crops, and what little they'd brought was going bad.'

'They were kind of stupid, the early settlers.'

'Stupid or brave. Or both. Either way, White decided to go back to England for supplies. There was no choice. It was agreed that if they ended up having to go inland, the colonists would leave markings showing which way they'd gone. Also, that if they'd left because of attack, they'd carve a cross somewhere prominent. Problem was, when White got back to England he found the country was at war with Spain — and he didn't make it back to Roanoke for three whole years.'

I thought about that for a moment. Abandoned in an alien land with neighbours who hate you, the food running out. The leader pops home for a take-out and stays gone from 1587 until 1590. 'And when he returned?'

'Gone. Every single one. Disappeared. Nobody living, no sign of bodies. Personal possessions left behind. No sign of a cross carved anywhere. There was the word 'Croatoan', however, carved on a gatepost.'

'Okay,' I said. 'That's kind of spooky. So what happened?'

He shrugged. 'That's the last sure thing anybody knows. White wanted to know what had happened to the people he'd left behind, but the captain and crew of his ship couldn't care less, so he was forced to go back to England. He tried to get another expedition out there in late 1590 but by this time Raleigh and his investors had lost interest. Since then lots of people have tried to put the thing together, starting with a guy called John Smith who was at the Jamestown settlement twenty years later.'

'And?'

'Smith talked to the locals and came up with a few ideas, and they're pretty much the ones still floating around. It turns out the word 'Croatoan' was applied not just to a tribe but also to a large and not very well defined geographical area. So it could have been carved to indicate a destination, as agreed with White. Alternatively it could have implied that the Croatoan themselves had a change of heart and started helping the hapless colonists. Or, if you choose to believe it meant the named tribe had started attacking, then you could theorize that the colonists were forced to head inland. Either idea leads to the possibility that some or all of the settlers (some theories have the male colonists being killed, leaving just the women and children) became assimilated into a local or not so local tribe, and there are a couple of native peoples — notably the Lumbee — who have long-term claims in this direction, some of which sound pretty solid. This theory has been taken seriously since the mid-1800s at least, and speculated about since Jamestown. There's stories of a minister in the mid-1600s meeting friendly natives in the area who spoke English, and talk of some German explorer whose name I couldn't track down who claimed to have had meetings with 'a powerful nation of bearded men' — i.e. possible descendants of the settlers.'

I'd thought the carvings on the door of the cabin hadn't made much impact on me, but as John said this, I found myself suddenly cold, out in the middle of nowhere, in the company of the dead.

Zandt waved an arm to catch the waiter's attention. The waiter started to explain he was busy, caught the look in Zandt's eye, and went to get him another beer. 'The question is why it was carved on the cabin door we found.'

'A quote?' I said. 'Some reference to the Roanoke mystery? But what sense would that make?'

'He's trying to tell us something.'

'I really don't think that place had anything to do with Paul. There was nothing to tie him to it. And anyway — why would he care? Why would he want to tell us stuff?'

'He spent half of Sarah Becker's incarceration lecturing her. Then there's the piece you found on the web three months ago, the diatribe about how everyone except the Straw Men are infected with a social virus which made us start farming, and started the slide towards being civilized. He's on a mission to inform.'

We paused, as drinks were put in front of us. 'The big thing about Paul,' I said, 'is that he doesn't think he's just another lunatic'

'None of them do, Ward. None of these men get up in the morning and think 'I'm going to do something evil today'. They do what they do, and some of them understand that it's bad, and some don't, but either way it's not why they do it.'

'Yes,' I said, irritated at his tone. 'I understand.'

'They do it because that's what they do, just like addicts jack themselves with smack. They're not trying to kill themselves. They're not trying to fuck up their lives. They just have to have some heroin, as you need a cigarette and some people need their shoes to be clean and others have to make sure they tape their daily shows or check the door's locked three times when they leave the house. Everyone's got their magic spell, their maintenance rituals, the private things they do that they believe make the world work.'

'What's yours these days — beer?'

'Fuck you.'

'What's the deal with you and Nina?'

'It's none of your fucking business.'

'Yes it is,' I said, angry now. 'There are three people in the world who know about the Straw Men. I've spent three months skulking around the country keeping out of the way. I beat the shit out of some poor guy in Idaho because I thought he'd come to clip me. I'm out on a very long limb with very few resources. You two are it.'

'What about the money from your folks?'

'Gone,' I said. 'Not spent. Wiped. They got to it.'

'Shit,' he said. 'I'm sorry to hear that.' He looked across the street for a moment. 'Things got fucked up,' he said eventually, apparently watching a man who was moving paintings around in a gallery window. 'I moved in. You know we'd been together before, back when I was married. I thought it might work. We both did. But… She's quite intense.'

'Right. Whereas you're just a big fluffy teddy bear.'

He turned his head back, his gaze ending on me as if I was by only a narrow margin the most interesting or relevant object in vision. 'I've always thought so.'

'What were you doing down in Florida?'

He just shook his head. He was beginning to really piss me off.

'Okay, so what else have you found out?'

'Nothing,' he said.

'That's it, for a month of looking? You came all the way over here to tell me this? That's your big news?'

'I haven't spent my entire time on it, Ward, and I don't report to you. I've been trying to have a life. There are other things that are important. The Straw Men aren't everything in the world. The Upright Man is just another killer.'

'Bullshit,' I said, loudly. 'He killed your daughter and my parents. He's not just another anything. And your investigative response is some crap that happened four hundred years ago?'

'Sometimes you have to go back a long way to do what needs to get done.'

'And that means… what?'

He shrugged. He'd said all he had to say.

'So what are you going to do now?'

'Check into a hotel somewhere, I guess.'