Each evening, before settling down to sleep at midnight, Asher walks the street where, when there is a moon, as now, the fine dust underfoot is silvered by the lunar glow, which is fitting for the road that leads to his great destiny. In this dim reflection of the sun, Earth’s patron star that blazes on the farther side of the planet, the weathered buildings are the only ghostly presences, like pale shapes that an artist has scored in the black ink that covers the white clay on a piece of scratchboard.
Asher stops before the church, waiting for a scream, but he isn’t rewarded with one. He is patient. Ophelia will not be broken easily, but eventually she will break.
Although he prefers the celestial panorama without a moon, he tips his head back and stares into infinity, which enchants him. The universe is a graveyard. The perfect blackness between the twinkling billions of distant suns is the hard truth of it, the darkness of the void. By comparison to the sea of blackness, the light of the stars is insignificant and cold, emitted so long ago that by the time it is seen on Earth, many of those suns had died hundreds of thousands of years earlier. Asher can imagine how beautiful it will be when, countless millennia after the last man and last woman have perished, the final star goes dark as well. The universe will then be cold, without a scintilla of light, and whatever remains of the works of humankind will lie frozen and still under the big dark sky.
The big dark sky.
Sometimes, when he stands here in Zipporah’s only street, his gaze turned to the vault of the night, he thrills to the inevitable advent of nothingness. The stars inspire nihilists to a greater purpose than they inspire lovers.
20
The Navajo rugs, the Pueblo pottery, a collection of copper cowboy-hat ashtrays, ornately painted Mexican chairs, a bedroom furnished entirely with antique twig-work furniture, the sofas draped with colorful Pendleton blankets: All this had been here through two previous owners, and Liam O’Hara wanted to live with it and add to it. For a city boy like Wyatt Rider, the decor was undeniably warm and beautiful, but it also felt alien, almost otherworldly, and insistent. Enough was enough.
Liam O’Hara intended to double the size of the existing house from seven thousand to fourteen thousand square feet, not because the current size of the residence provided too few rooms to display the entire spectrum of this type of decor, but maybe because making everything bigger was what multibillionaires did. Liam’s enthusiasm for what he called the “Santa Fe and True West style” was such that he needed not extra living space in a getaway like this, but space to accommodate what he wished to collect.
Well, the guy worked hard, built a thriving company, employed thousands, created more wealth for others than for himself, so he had earned the right to do what he wanted with his money. Wyatt envied the man, not because of his fortune, but because of the family with which he shared all this. Liam’s wife, Lyndsey, was lovely, intelligent, warm, with a great sense of humor; the kids, Laura and Tavis, were lively but polite, smart but not smart-ass.
Wyatt had not yet married. He had not yet been engaged. Hell, he hadn’t yet enjoyed a relationship with a woman that didn’t end in dire suspicion, recriminations, and regret. His love life was about as romantic as an arm-wrestling contest. He was self-aware enough to know that he—not the women—was the problem, but he didn’t know how to fix himself.
As he passed through the large, dimly lighted living room again, sipping the last of his second mug of coffee, he was thinking not about why he’d come to Rustling Willows, but about Sandra Chan, the lawyer who’d been his most recent companion. He truly cherished her, but nevertheless he lost her. Actually, he’d driven her away by doubting her when he’d had no reason to doubt, offending her with his distrust.
If the living room had not featured one wall of nine-foot-tall windows, he might have been too distracted by thoughts of Sandra Chan to notice the eerie luminosity on the front yard. In this rural immensity, the only significant nighttime light was either man-made or moonglow, although neither of those sources explained the display beyond the veranda. This radiance was diffuse, a soft cloud of yellowish light that seemed both to swirl lazily and pulse as it moved back and forth, five or six feet above the lawn. Wyatt stood watching it for a minute or longer, trying to make sense of it, but he needed to have a closer look.
When he stepped onto the veranda, the August night proved to be mild, even somewhat warm for Montana. As during the day, a stillness lay upon the land, every trace of wind locked in the vault of the distant mountains.