2
THE NIGHT WAS QUIET—HAUNTINGLY QUIET, AS IF THE fog dampened the sound of her footsteps along with other nighttime noises. The bars and cafes along Main Street were closed, and there was little traffic. Anne could smell the fog on the air along with something else—dirty oil, she decided, although there weren’t too many wells still operating in the downtown neighborhoods, and the oil-soaked vacant lots that had once made up most of the acreage in the city were covered with apartments and condominiums now. The redeveloped downtown was a different place from the run-down beach city she remembered from her childhood visits, and although it was probably safer now—fewer bikers and bad alleys and bars—she wasn’t sure she liked the change. Probably it was just nostalgia. Up in Canada, when she had talked about moving south, people had warned her against walking at night in southern California, and now she couldn’t help but listen to the silences between her own footsteps, half expecting the slow tread of someone following, someone hidden by the night and the fog.
She had been in town only a few days, and she was entirely friendless. It was a perfectly loony place for her to have moved to, especially because she didn’t meet people easily. She stopped now at the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway and waited for the signal to change, trying to see through the fog to the foot of the pier and the stairs to the beach. The headlights of a northbound car appeared, and the car braked at the yellow light. She heard music from inside the closed-up car, and it took her a moment to recognize the tune—a pepped-up version of “Pearl on the Half Shell” that sounded strangely at odds with the foggy, motionless night. The “Walk” sign blinked on, and she stepped off the curb, reaching the other side just as the light changed again. The ghostly car accelerated slowly away, the sound of the jittery music disappearing along with the car’s taillights.
It was nearly midnight, and the pier was closed, barricaded by a high metal gate. That was disappointing. Anne hadn’t thought that the pier would be closed. She looked around her at the foggy darkness, and a rash idea entered her head. Suddenly she felt a little like a criminal, which, it occurred to her now, she was very nearly about to become—and not for the first time, either. Once, when she was about eight, she and her sister had climbed over the fence at the agricultural college and fed apples to the cows, despite written warnings to stay out. No one had caught them, and a week later they had risked another cow feeding, the success of which had clearly set her on a criminal path that had, these many years later, led her to the foot of this closed-up pier. What next? Tearing the tags off mattresses? Jaywalking? Murder?
She swung her leg over the top bar of the waist-high railing and climbed out onto the edge of the pier, where she sidestepped down past the gate. She looked below, down at the nearly invisible beach and the descending concrete stairs, then climbed back over the railing again, walking farther out onto the deserted pier in order to distance herself from the gate. She stopped at the railing when she knew she was invisible from the street, and peered down into the gloom. She had a picture in her mind of the ocean late at night: the moonlight on pier pilings, the ghostly waves rushing up out of the darkness, the empty beach, the shimmer of lights on the water up the curving coast.
She could hear the ocean sighing on the wet sand below the pier. And there was the sound of waves breaking somewhere out in the fog, which swirled around her now, the mists opening and closing like windows and doors. For a moment she got a glimpse of the beach below—the closed-up concession stands, a lonely towel left on the damp sand, a couple of oil drum trash cans. Then the fog closed in again, and she heard the heavy boom of a breaking wave as the pier shuddered from the impact.
She walked slowly through the mists, past the darkened lifeguard tower. The pier lamps glowed like moons overhead, but their light was mostly consumed by the fog, and very little of it reached the ground. At the end of the pier, the fog was dense enough so that she didn’t see the railing ahead of her until she was almost upon it. She put her hands on the cold metal, which was beaded with moisture, and looked down into the gray darkness. She imagined the ocean below, the shifting of the dark currents, the waves rolling in, the terror of falling over the railing, of finding herself in the cold ocean on a lightless night, the entire coast shrouded in fog….
There was a sound like something moving behind her—like the scrape of feet on concrete—but almost as soon as she heard it, it stopped. She looked hard into the mists around her, at the dark stationary shapes of a trash can, a low bench, a lamppost. Nothing moved. She listened, holding her breath, but couldn’t hear anything now, just the muted crashing of waves from farther in toward shore. The relative silence seemed to suggest something purposeful—someone hiding, perhaps, just out of sight in the fog.
And as if suddenly clairvoyant, she was aware of a presence in the night air around her, an unsettling change in the atmosphere, as if the very fog was stained with distilled emotion, with the long-ago fearful ghost of resentful loneliness and hateful despair conjured by the fog and the ocean and the sound of breaking waves.
It was time to go. She moved away from the railing, keeping to the middle of the pier, looking around her as she walked. She could see no one, but as soon as her own shoe soles scraped on the concrete pier, she was abruptly certain that someone was keeping pace with her, matching their own footfalls to her own. She stopped, and the sound stopped. Then she stepped forward again and was struck by this same illusion—probably a trick of the fog, an echo. She walked faster, the mist closing in around her so that she was completely enshrouded now. Dim objects loomed up along the edges of the pier—two ghostly telescopes on metal swivels, a tiny wooden building, a long sink for cleaning fish.
She stopped again and listened.
For a moment she could hear the footfalls, even though she herself was dead still. They didn’t sound like an echo. They were clear and unhurried, like someone strolling, scuffing their shoes on concrete. The sound was strangely loud, but then almost at once seemed to evaporate, fading away in the fog, and again there was a lingering silence. Still she could see no one, only the pale fog swirling up around the pier railings like languid spirits.
She hurried forward now. There were fifty yards or more between her and the gate, but the Coast Highway with its traffic lights and street lamps was still invisible ahead of her. She could see only the dim railing on either side of the pier, and, on her right, the lifeguard tower looming up again out of the fog, the lamplight glowing on the wide, angled-out windows.
Then she saw something—movement, at the edge of the tower.
She was certain that someone had just that moment stepped out of sight behind it, between the tower and the railing on a little outthrust section of pier. She had got just a glimpse of red—a flannel shirt? A cloth coat? She looked back again, her heart pounding, as she angled toward the opposite railing, ready to run, suppressing the urge to scream.
There—she saw it again: someone standing still, facing her but half hidden by the corner of the wall, just a shadow in the fog that swirled across the pier, the shadow growing more and then less distinct. She felt suddenly dizzy, and she gripped the cold handrail to steady herself, unsure whether it was the fog that obscured the waiting figure, or the fog that made it visible, like a film slide projected on mist. And now it vanished altogether as the ocean breeze momentarily swept the fog clear, and then almost instantly the mists billowed in off the ocean again, and the figure materialized within it, closer now, as if she had stepped forward five or six paces and stopped, waiting for another gust of sea wind to hide it again.
The sound of footsteps resumed, preternaturally loud, as if echoing down a corridor. Anne found herself running through the dreamlike fog, hearing the footsteps behind her louder even than the pounding of her own feet. She swung herself over the railing again, edged her way past the gate, and vaulted the railing back onto the pier where, after a quick backward glance, she headed straight across the Highway, ignoring the red light, not looking back down the empty sidewalk again until she was halfway up the block. A shadow in a doorway impelled her toward the curb, and when she realized that it was a man drinking out of a bottle in a paper bag, she almost sighed with relief. She slowed down now to catch her breath. There were no longer any footsteps. The night was quiet and still, but she hurried on up Main to Orange Street anyway, fumbling for her keys in her jeans pocket. Her hands shook as she unlocked the street door of her apartment, stepped through and locked it behind her, and then ascended the stairs through the empty building toward her flat on the second floor.