The Ghost

kept his eyes on the ground. “Soil bad. Wind bad. Rain bad. Salt bad. Shit.”
    After that, there didn’t seem much else to say on the horticultural front, so I kept quiet. We passed the first two cubes. He stopped in front of the third and unlocked the big double doors. He dragged back one of them and we went inside. There must have been a dozen bicycles parked in two racks, but my gaze went straight to the tan-colored Ford Escape SUV, which took up the other half of the garage. I had heard so much about it, and had imagined it so often when I was coming over on the ferry, that it was quite a shock to encounter it unexpectedly.
    Duc saw me looking at it. “You want to borrow?” he asked.
    “No, no,” I said quickly. First the dead man’s job, then his bed, then a ride in his car—who could tell where it might end? “A bike will be fine. It will do me good.”
    The gardener wore an expression of deep skepticism as he watched me go, wobbling off uncertainly on one of Rhinehart’s expensive mountain bikes. He obviously thought I was mad, and perhaps I was mad—island madness, don’t they call it? I raised my hand to the Special Branch man in his little wooden sentry’s hut, half hidden in the trees, and that was very nearly a painful mistake, as it made me swerve toward the undergrowth. But then I somehow steered the machine back into the center of the track, and once I got the hang of the gears (the last bike I’d owned had only three, and two of those didn’t work) I found I was moving fairly rapidly over the hard, compacted sand.
    It was eerily quiet in that forest, as if some great volcanic catastrophe had bleached the vegetation white and brittle and poisoned the wild animals. Occasionally, in the distance, a wood pigeon emitted one of its hollow, klaxon cries, but that served more to emphasize the silence than to break it. I pedaled on up the slight gradient until I reached the T-junction where the track joined the highway.
    The anti-Lang demonstration had dwindled to just one man on the opposite side of the road. He had obviously been busy over the past few hours, erecting some kind of installation—low wooden boards on which had been mounted hundreds of terrible images, torn from magazines and newspapers, of burned children, tortured corpses, beheaded hostages, and bomb-flattened neighborhoods. Interspersed among this collage of death were long lists of names, some handwritten poems, and letters. It was all protected against the elements by sheets of plastic. A banner ran across the top, as over a stall at a church jumble sale: FOR AS IN ADAM ALL DIE, EVEN SO IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE . Beneath it was a flimsy shelter made of wooden struts and more plastic, containing what looked like a card table and a folding chair. Sitting patiently at the table was the man whom I’d briefly glimpsed that morning and couldn’t remember. But I recognized him now, all right. He was the military type from the hotel bar who’d called me a cunt.
    I came to an uncertain halt and checked left and right for traffic, conscious all the while of him staring at me from only twenty feet away. And he must have recognized me, because I saw to my horror that he had got to his feet. “Just one moment!” he shouted, in that peculiar clipped voice, but I was so anxious not to become embroiled in his madness that, even though there was a car coming, I teetered out into the road and began pedaling away from him, standing up to try to get up some speed. The car hit its horn. There was a blur of light and noise, and I felt the wind of it as it passed, but when I looked back the protester had given up his pursuit and was standing in the center of the road, staring after me, arms akimbo.
    After that, I cycled hard, conscious I would soon start to lose the light. The air in my face was cold and damp, but the pumping of my legs kept me warm enough. I passed the entrance to the airport and followed the perimeter of the state forest, its fire lanes stretching wide and high through the trees like the shadowy aisles of cathedrals. I couldn’t imagine McAra doing this—he didn’t look the cycling type—and I wondered again what I thought I would achieve, apart from getting drenched. I toiled on past the white clapboard houses and the neat New England fields, and it didn’t take much effort to visualize it still peopled by women in stern black bonnets and by men who regarded Sunday as the day to put on a suit rather than