ONE

Under a luminous moon, the garbage dump on Yarkie Island off Cape Cod began to shudder and vibrate grotesquely. It might have seemed an illusion of the moonlight on the quiet Atlantic that serene summer night, but the strange phenomenon near the beach was no mirage. It was as unmistakable as it was mysterious and ominous.

The thin topsoil over the island’s refuse was trembling with an eerie drift. It was a sluggish and sickly motion, as if the mounds had turned into a viscous muck, or were mucidly floating on a hermetic current oozing from the depths. Without seeming reason, the slimy flux would stop and then pulse again. Sometimes an unearthly bulge appeared, like a tumor or festering pustule that seemed ready to split open, almost as if a buried-alive victim were straining to push out of a mouldy grave. A viewer might, with stopped heart, expect to see the excrescence burst, and a cadaverous hand lift a bony claw into the night.

But there were no witnesses to the shifting motion, or to the maddened rats that began to fling themselves wildly out of the garbage piles.

The vermin were squealing with agony as they sprang into the night air. Their writhing bodies were as bizarre as their gyrations and screaking; they were covered not with fur but with what seemed to be shells, scintillating in the moonlight. The pinpricks of fire on their rodent bodies flashed crazily over the dump with a metallic sheen until there was a quick change to the crimson of blood. The rats were cloaked in sequins of death; a nightmare scene out of an animal hell.

Routine poisons normally controlled the noxious creatures everyone knew and tacitly accepted as living in the dump. Wafarins held the inevitable rat population in check, and the cockroach broods were standardly contained by pyrethrum and sodium fluoride. Since the prevailing southwest winds carried the stench conveniently out to sea, it was easy for the dump—out of the sight and smell of Yarkie’s homes—to remain out of mind.

Thus, no one marked, suspected, or theorized about the slithering mass of preternatural life seething through the stinking intercises. No one considered or remarked that conditions were ideal for breeding in geometric multiplication. For cockroaches, particularly, the ever-enlarging dump was a great progenitive womb—warm, fetid, moist, with food so cornucopianly plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and scurrying through the foulness could gorge to satiation.

Until the change in Yarkie’s poison controls by unwitting health officials upset the balance Nature had contrived, and unleashed a new appetite that bloodless garbage could not satisfy.

Aside from the dump’s ugly acre at the northeast tip of Yarkie, the island was travelogue-picturesque. It sat “like a bowler hat” in the sea off the Cape some ten miles eastward of Chatham. It was about two miles wide, and four miles long, running south-north; with a central, forested dome—the “bowler”—bordered with beaches broken sharply by steep cliffs and ridges.

The village of Yarkie rose on the west side, facing toward the Cape, above a deep-water harbor crowded with working fishing boats. The small town made a tidy New England grid of prim lawns and white spires amid tree-lined, red-bricked sidewalks. The old homes of long ago whaling captains stood doughtily behind boxwood hedges and whitewashed fences “making good neighbors.” Outside the town, the Yarkie houses were scattered on a lace of lanes, once cart and wagon roads and a challenge to the few cars that used them. Bikes and shank’s mare were more common on the island.

Most of the buildings were crisp white or gray shingles on hewn oak, what Thoreau had described as “sober-­looking, and reflecting the (Cape Cod) virtues of thrift, neatness and independence.” Almost all were topped with widow walks from which Yarkie wives and children had, as long ago as the late 1600s, scanned the surrounding waters for the first sign of sail of husband, son, brother, lover.

The four hundred-odd inhabitants of Yarkie were no-nonsense. They pretty much held with what one long-faded Cape newspaper had noted for posterity: A person would be “warned out of town” if he were not “twenty-one years old, of sober peaceable conversation, orthodox in religion, and possessed of saleable estate to the value of twenty pounds.” In modern Yarkie, this proscription took the form of discouraging tourists and all publicity about the island’s very existence. One ferry a day served more than adequately between Chatham and Yarkie even in midsummer.

It was not so much that the people were unfriendly as that they were self-satisfied; not so much uncharitable as parochial. They were quietly proud of their wealth and their heritage as whaling men, mariners, jack tars and fisher­men (if not pirates and buccaneers), and they preferred to keep their island free of the vacationists who flooded Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

The Yarkie-ites continued to be “. . . of sober peace­able conversation.” The redoubtable Johnson clan had produced one firebrand, a daughter named Jessica, now married to a Harvard biology professor, Richard Carr. But their daughter, Elizabeth Carr, visiting her grandfather, Elias, was more like the conservative old man than her activist mother. Captain Elias Johnson’s view, expressed with some force, was that women, modern or old-­fashioned, had enough to do making a home and raising children.

This summer, Elizabeth was clearly a child no longer. At twenty, she was to start her senior year at Radcliffe in the fall, and not even her deep love for Yarkie and her grandfather would keep her returning to the island many more years. On this visit she had displayed some of her mother’s independence by bringing a black classmate as her companion. The islanders were standoffish at first, but the young woman was warm, honest, and dusky beautiful. She won over the people, and they won her over. Elizabeth was delighted. She had feared a fuss, at just the time she herself wanted the island’s quiet perspective “to get her own act together.” She had barely passed her junior-year classes, and was restless without any clear idea of a career ahead. There seemed an embarrassment of choices and a poverty of inner conviction.

For her friend’s part, Bonnie Taylor was in love with Yarkie at first sight. She had expected to find the island as charming as Elizabeth had promised, but nothing had prepared her for the eighteenth century world she entered when she stepped off the small ferry. It was hard to believe that many homes used only kerosene lamps and candles for lighting, and wood and coal stoves for cooking. It was both enchanting and refreshing. She was amazed to find how quickly one learned to rise at dawn, wash with gasps of incredibility in cold water, warm one’s hands (and rear end) thankfully at the kitchen stove, and feel a steaming breakfast mug of coffee washing down to heat the stomach and the cockles of one’s heart.

She was half sorry to learn that these experiences had only been due to a temporary problem with Captain Johnson’s generator, which otherwise supplied modern lights, heat, and hot water.

Bonnie’s regret on this summer day of a planned picnic in the woods on Yarkie’s High Ridge was that Elizabeth could not join her. The captain had celebrated his seventy-­fifth birthday too enthusiastically the night before, and was resting a bruised toe and frayed temper. Elizabeth had insisted that Bonnie take the lunch basket, and—though there was nothing to be saved from on the island—the captain’s dog, Sharky. The small, frisky animal was as brave as his breed was nondescript. Two years before, when an imprudent youngster plunged from the captain’s fishing boat for an unscheduled swim, it was Sharky who had cata­pulted into the water to savage the Mako shark attracted by the boy’s splashing. It was the day the dog’s name was changed from Pooch.

“Just stay on the path,” Elizabeth told Bonnie as she started her off at the edge of the Yarkie woods. “Don’t go past the pine grove. You’ll recognize it by a little waterfall there and the picnic tables. The path beyond goes to the town dump. You don’t want that one.”

“No way,” Bonnie agreed, laughing. Dumps were what she was spending her life leaving behind.

Bonnie found the grove a sylvan setting out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The morning sun was slatting down between high tree branches, striping golden bars on a carpet of leaves and pine needles inches thick. The air’s freshness seemed almost tangible to Bonnie, as if she could rub it like a lotion between her palms and smooth it over her body. Being alone, she considered stripping, but thought it would be imprudent in case anyone else appeared.

As she spread her blanket, the woman noticed that the dog was sniffing nervously where an opening in the trees led out of the circle of the grove. That was the way to the dump, she remembered. Sharky’s sharp nose was probably picking up the odor. Smiling, Bonnie considered this was one time it was better to have duller senses. Let Sharky romp his own way.

She paid no attention to the dog’s soft growling that turned suddenly into little yipping barks. It was Sharky’s way of enjoying the outing, Bonnie thought as she lay down comfortably amid the pine fragrance. The hushing trickle of the small waterfall was a magic of its own. It brought to her mind quiet Japanese gardens and Zen koans, the settling peace of the simple acknowledgments of nature—the sky she could see vaulting above the treetops, the delightful bird songs all about. Boston was another planet. She called pleasantly to Sharky. He came to her slowly. She wondered why his little body was trembling under her stroking fingers. He was panting as if he had been running hard. He continued to turn his head toward the path, growling again. Bonnie considered it was probably the dog’s asking why Elizabeth wasn’t with them. She kept stroking the soft coat, but the trembling did not stop. On the contrary, the woman felt the animal’s heart beat faster under her hand.

“What’s wrong, Sharky?” she asked casually. “Something bothering you?”

The dog’s answer was to startle her by leaping away. At the path, his body went rigid, his head up, his ears high, his nose forward, his left front leg lifted. He stopped growling, and it was then Bonnie Taylor heard the other, unfamiliar sound. It came out of the forest, a rustling susurration somehow inimical and threatening. She told herself quickly it was only a rustling of leaves, but there was no breeze and no motion as far as she could peer down the shadowed aisle outside the grove. Probably a snake, she decided. But not dangerous, or Elizabeth would have cautioned her. The woman turned calmly back to her blanket.

Sharky did not come when she called again. She saw his ears quivering, straining. She heard the sound once more, louder and clearer now. It was a hissing that sent sudden electric chills up her spine. She had known coon-­hissing back home in Mississippi, but this was not the same. And the dog was acting crazily. He had begun to hop about, as if the ground was hot. He was bobbing his head, yipping and whining in a way that would have been called hysterical in a human.

The sibilance was clearly coming closer. Bonnie jumped to her feet and hurried to collar Sharky. If there was some danger stirring such instinctual dread in the dog, she was not going to linger in the place. There might be animals in the woods Elizabeth had not thought to mention.

At the same moment, she became aware of a strange odor, as if a foul-­smelling acid had been vaporized in the air nearby. Sharky had sensed it before she did! It was making him cower and cringe now, in a way she had never seen. The dog was pressing his shaking body against her legs, whining pitifully. She lifted his body to hug and comfort him, but to her shock, he bared his teeth, snapped at her, and raked her forearm with his claws.

Crying out in surprise and pain, Bonnie dropped Sharky to the ground. “What’s got into you?” The dog faced her viciously. From the friendly, docile pet she had known, he became a snarling, ferocious-­looking beast. Seriously ­frightened, Bonnie backed away slowly. The beads of blood on her arm might be evoking some primitive instinct of attack. Dogs were descendants of wolves. With genuine alarm, Bonnie grabbed up the aluminum picnic box and held it in front of her breast for protection.

But Sharky transformed again. With quick, rough barks of furious challenge, he launched himself away from Bonnie into the deep woods toward the hissing noise.

Moments later, Bonnie was riveted by a change in Sharky’s barking. There was an abrupt high yelping, then a cry of acute agony. Bonnie shivered, trying to see the dog through the heavy growth. She stepped out of the grove gingerly. If there was an animal out there that could hurt Sharky, it could hurt her. But she had to know what had happened. The dog could simply have gotten into a patch of burrs, though that wouldn’t account for his erratic conduct earlier.

One careful step after another led Bonnie Taylor along the umbrageous path that went toward the dump. The way was through great mounds of springy leaves, the residue of scores of Yarkie autumns, undisturbed through the years except by occasional deer and the smaller denizens of the woods, raccoons, muskrats and the like.

Bonnie halted to listen. There was only silence now. Even the birds were quiet, she observed. No leaf rustled; there was no hissing sound, no dog noise, no motion anywhere that she could detect.

Then she heard the whimpering, a gasping for breath. It sounded almost human, but it was Sharky, certainly, somewhere near. Bonnie took a determined step in the direction of the soft cries, only to be stopped by the loud hissing. It was like an angry warning, a command for her to stay back.

With all her voice, Bonnie called, “Sharky! Sharky! Here, Sharky!” She bent for a fallen branch. Her mouth tightened with purpose. She would find Captain Johnson’s dog, and she would protect herself against whatever was lurking in the dark copses into which he had disappeared.

Moving forward again, Bonnie kept looking about alertly, feeling an idiot, not knowing what kind of danger she should be anticipating, and whether it might come at her from in front, or the sides, or even from above. She swung her branch grimly, as if to show that she was not afraid, though she was quaking inwardly.

Walking alone in the thickening woods, beginning to get a faint smell of the garbage stench, frightened of the mysterious hissing that stopped and started so disturbingly, Bonnie wanted desperately to turn back. She gritted her teeth harder. She’d be damned if she’d show yellow. The strange sibilant sound, she told herself firmly, was obviously just some kind of snake she was unfamiliar with, and Sharky had probably killed it by now.

It was then that Bonnie Taylor stepped sickeningly on the white body almost entirely buried in leaves that were stained crimson with blood. It was obvious that a thrashing battle had taken place. When she knelt to brush the leaves away, she found Sharky lying on his side. The dog’s coat was pocked with fresh blood. His legs were kicking in a palsy of animal pain. In Bonnie’s presence, his whimpering sounds became louder. He looked up at her with a piteous whine for help. Bonnie vomited. The dog had only empty sockets where his eyes had been.