First You Make a Stone of Your Heart
Part I
C1.1
There is a rhythm to life, and to death, and yet we remain unprepared for that final reality, that the beating heart we know will never understand the infinite. Yet somehow, perhaps when we peer through the sharp lens of time, we find that we have grown accustomed to the idea of that last sharp moment, that singular, defining moment of our passing from existence. Some have accommodated their own gnawing fear through the practice of rituals that are at once very personal yet of origins beyond the arcane, while others have grown content with whatever fate or destiny or even random chance has in store for them. Along the way most grow accustomed to the reality that the best we can hope for is a long life unfettered by pain and that with a little luck, we can dance in our parents' shadows without a care in the world, and that -- again, with a little luck -- our children might dance inside the best shadows we made in our passage. Still, it seems that of all the creatures in this world, only humans have embraced an overarching sense of goodness as a guide to our actions, and conversely, most have repudiated evil in all its many guises. This repudiation, at times, defines the outer contours of our dance. As the shadow of our acquiescence comes to define our sorrows.
Yet we take it for granted that for goodness to exist there simply has to be a countervailing force, this thing we call evil. Yet, indeed, has it been possible that good and evil have never truly existed outside of our mind? But, what of this mind? Was it not this same soaring intellect, the same proud voice that loudly proclaimed that good and evil were the defining limits of our existence? Are we to consign those voices to the entombed reliquaries of an unusable past, as little more than the constructs of a more primitive mind -- a fever that has run its course? Remnants, perhaps, of an age when humans above all else feared the night? When everything was lost in shadow?
But what of the voice of reason? The vaunted vox clamantis in deserto? Why do some heed this call while others turn away and run headlong into the night, consumed by fear?
Could it be, possibly, that these proud minds are the most evil thing of all? Or could it be that the light of reason will, in the end, be our salvation?
But time is an arrow that carries us onward.
Oh, Diogenes! If only we could open their eyes!
C1.2
She sat at the battered old Steinway, drifting along unseen currents as amber candlelight washed over the dark oaken walls of the old dining room. Drifting through a careless melange of Debussy's first Arabesque and Rachmaninov's Liebeslied, she was afloat among notes and passages that had spoken to her all her life, yet she was weaving subtle new emotion with the passages she chose, intonations at once as obscure as they were arcane. No one noticed. Not one head turned, and yet it seemed she had been waiting all her life for someone to turn to her in appreciation and offer even a careless whisper of thanks.
She was playing in the small alcove adjacent to the Grill Room, a hallowed enclave within the St. Francis Yacht Club's main floor, and if she had bothered to look she might have seen the city lights winking on across the far reaches of San Francisco Bay. As it was, she sat erect with her eyes closed, swaying to the tapestry she wove as kelp might on a slackening tide.
Her father was a member of the club and on Saturday afternoons she liked to come and sit by the fireplace, and no one seemed to mind when she played the old piano in the corner. Indeed, most people there seemed to consciously ignore her.
'She's not well, you know...' one hushed note might imply.
'Oh?' a soft, contrapuntal note could often be heard in reply.
'Yes. Schizophrenia, or so I hear...'
'What a pity...?'
But those knowing voices mattered not at all to her, not anymore, not after so many years of taking in their knowing, sidelong glances. Theirs were eyes that could not see, and they spoke in hushed, shallow voices that knew only half-truths -- and yet she loved most of those voices. She knew them, had known them for years, and she had sailed with those voices so many times she could barely remember all their names.
Her 'father' came up after the sun settled into darkness, and he leaned into the old Steinway just as he always did before he spoke to her.
"I'm heading home now, Dev. Did you want to stay a while longer?"
She swayed to the left just a bit as she settled into Gershwin's Love Walked In, but then she shrugged -- playfully -- before she finally relented with a quiet smile and said 'Yes' ever so softly.
"Okay. Try not to stay out too late."
She looked after the man as he walked out into the night, then she returned to her thoughts...and to the currents she alone danced within...and she settled in there for a while.
"Miss Devlin, we closin' now..."
She opened her eyes, noticed the bartender leaning over to gently roust her and she nodded. "Is it midnight already, Jimmy?" she asked.
"Yes, Miss Devlin. You want I should go and get your coat?"
"Thanks, Jimmy. Would you mind?"
"Not a bit, Ma'am. You just wait right here."
She looked around the room, noted embers dying in the fireplace and that a dense fog had settled over the bay, then she noticed a tall stranger sitting in a corner opposite the piano, and that the man was nursing the remnants of a brandy. She thought the sight a little odd, too, if only because she knew every member of the yacht club -- and had for years. Her house, or her father's house, was only a few hundred yards distant, not even a block inland on Baker Street, so it felt to her as if she'd spent her entire life within these walls. And in a way she had.
She looked at the stranger again and felt a sudden wave of unease wash over her, then as she watched he turned and looked her in the eye before he stood and pulled a hood over his head, then the stranger turned and made his way to the main entry foyer and, presumably, then out to his car. Jimmy the bartender returned with her coat, a heavy old US Navy pea-coat, and after the boy helped her into the jacket he walked with her to the foyer.
"You best turn up that collar, Miss Devlin. It feels right cold out there tonight."
She saw the shadow run up one wall and then watched it turn and slide along the ceiling and then out into the night and she wanted to turn and run but she didn't want to make another scene, didn't want Jimmy to have to call her father to come pick her up again, so she turned up her collar and followed the inky shadow out into the night. She walked beside the sentinel rows of eucalyptus down to the dinghy docks, knowing that the shadows were out there somewhere just ahead, out there just waiting for her -- then she saw the man, the tall stranger from the Grill Room -- and he was walking away from her along the beach trail by the Green. She stood near a neatly ordered covey of Etchells 22s racers, watched the man as he walked up to the crosswalk at Marina Boulevard -- but then he simply disappeared, just like all the other shadows passing within and through the clinging fog.
She stood in the stillness and watched for a moment, and by the time she had walked all the way to the Green she realized the tide was in -- and that the black water was close to the mute stones that lined the trail here -- so she stopped by an ancient streetlight and stood in the safety of the pooling light, until she realized the fog was growing colder and was now -- quite suddenly -- impossibly thick.
She stepped back into the fog and made her way quietly along the trail towards home -- but she stopped dead in her tracks when she heard a violent commotion in the water off to her left, and when she turned to look she saw an inky black creature oozing silently out of the water. And as she watched she suddenly realized that the thing was slithering up the stone steps towards her. At first, she thought it must be a large harbor seal but then the quivering creature stood on human-like legs and turned to face her and she didn't know what else to do but scream.
+++++
Kirk Dooley was the first officer on the scene and he took one look at the blood-soaked woman and called dispatch: "6-12, will need a Watch Commander and Homicide at my location, and I think we're going to need the divers..."
Dooley gathered the half-dozen or so witnesses, as well as the woman's father, in the yacht club's parking lot, and as other responding units arrived 'Crime Scene' tape was strung out to cordon off the area adjacent to the Green. Paul Weyland gathered up his 'daughter' and held onto her as she stared off into the night, and Officer Dooley tried to figure out who had seen what and when, scribbling down notes as fast as he could...
Then a large blue step-van pulled into the lot, and two men got out and began suiting up in dive gear. Everyone watched as the divers began hauling their gear down to the water's edge, casting nervous glances at the black water all the while.
