The Lost Country, Episode One

Chapter 7

I’M NOT GOING TO LIE; I hadn’t really expected to find it—the key—regardless of what I’d expressed previously; so, imagine my surprise when I searched the corpse’s stained pockets—managing, somehow, to keep a tenuous grasp on my breakfast—and touched a crenulated edge.

Bingo, I remember thinking, not lastly because it seemed to absolve Amelia—whom I’d come to suspect had taken it and not told me—but also because it would allow me to test something; something I’d been thinking about a lot since discovering the strange crater. One of many things I’d been thinking about.

I peered up at the lantern as the rain fell and the clouds drifted, as the melancholy of the day hung over everything like a shroud. Tell me now why humanity is worth saving, and why we shouldn’t finish what They started. What They instigated with the Flashback but failed to complete. What can be completed still.

The words sat on my stomach like poached eggs. Absolved her? Perhaps. But not explained anything.

I gazed along the beach: at the desolate breakers and the gray tide rolling in, at the vortex of saltbushes about a half mile away—flies buzzing my face as I did so. I wasn’t ready for this s**t. For burying the lighthouse keeper. Then I started walking (wondering, as I went, what the weather was like in Montana, and if they had children there—and if so, were they happy and well-provided for?) ... until at last I came to the crater; where I quickly noticed something which should have been obvious the day before (but somehow hadn’t been), and that was that it was incredibly close to the road itself—and that, indeed, they were separated only by a sandy embankment. An embankment, I soon realized, which still had drag marks in it—as though someone had unearthed whatever had fallen and pulled it up to the road.

I looked back the way I’d come—the rain pelting my jacket, the wind buffeted my hair.

As though someone had loaded it onto a truck; and then driven it—not bothering to pass “Go” or to collect $200—back to the lighthouse at Granite Point.

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“AMELIA?” I KNOCKED on her door gently but firmly. “The Jeep’s all ready to go. Also, I—I buried the keeper. I mean it’s pretty shallow, but ... it’ll have to do.”

I waited a moment to see if she’d answer. When she didn’t, I added: “And there’s something else. Something I want to show you.”

Still no answer. Only the breathing of the ocean, the ticking of the grandfather clock. I knocked again.

“Amelia? Hey. You there?”

That’s when I knew. That’s when I knew she’d had the key all along—had it since before I’d even discovered the antechamber; since she’d found it on the hook next to the lighthouse door—and that she must have planted it on the keeper only recently, possibly even the previous night.

And then I was turning the knob and the door was opening—just swinging in as easy as could be—and my shadow had fallen across her bed which was piled with blankets and clothes; after which, sweating and trembling, I looked at the lighthouse door—and saw that it was lazed open.

And began to move toward it.

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