Many of those fleeing the tides ran into other troubles that made them forget the menace of the waters. At noon, Pacific Standard Time, the school bus and the truck carrying the saucer students were racing against fire. Ahead, walls of flame were swiftly climbing the saddle-backed ridge along which Monica Mountainway crossed the central spine of the Santa Monica mountains.
Barbara Katz watched the tiny bow wave from the left front wheel of the Rolls Royce sedan angle across the road and lose itself in the tall green swords of the saw grass, as Benjy stubbornly kept their speed down to a maddeningly monotonous thirty. As captain of the car, at least in her own estimation, she ought to be sitting up in front, but Barbara felt it was more vital that she keep in direct contact with her millionaire, so she sat behind Benjy with old KKK beside her and Hester beyond him, which put Helen up in front with Benjy and a pile of suitcases.
The sun had just begun to look into the front of the car from high in the sky as they traveled due west through the Everglades. The windows were all closed tight on Barbara’s side and it was hot. She knew that Lake Okeechobee ought to be somewhere off to the right and north, but all she could see was the endless green expanse of saw grass, broken here and there by clumps of dark, mortuary-looking cypress, and the narrow, mirrorlike corridor of water ahead covering the string-straight, level road to a depth of never less than one inch or more than four — so far.
“You sure right about that high tide, Miss Barbara,” Benjy called back softly and cheerily. “She come way in. Never hear tell she come so far.”
“Hush, Benjy,” Hester warned. “Mister K still sleeping.”
Barbara wished she were as confident about her own wisdom as Benjy sounded about it. She checked the two of old KKK’s wrist watches strapped to her left wrist — two-ten, they averaged — and the time for today’s second high tide at Palm Beach on the back of the calendar sheet — 1:45 p.m. But wouldn’t a high tide moving inland be later than on the coast? That was the way it was with rivers, she seemed to recall. She didn’t know nearly enough, she told herself.
An open car moving at almost twice their speed roared past them, deluging the Rolls with water. It forged swiftly ahead, beating up a storm in the water-mirror. There were four men in it.
“Another of them speeders,” Hester growled.
“Wowee! Sure lucky we Sanforized,” Benjy crowed. “I Sanforize this bus with lots of high-yellow grease,” he explained. Helen giggled.
The encounter roused old KKK, who looked at Barbara with red-rimmed, wrinkle-edged little eyes that seemed to her to be almost awake for the first time today. He’d gone through the preparations and actual departure in a kind of stupor that had alarmed Barbara but not Hester. “He just not had his sleep out, he be all right,” Hester had told her.
Now he said briskly: “Phone the airfield, Miss Katz. We want two tickets to Denver by the next plane out. Triple premiums to the reservation clerks, the pilot, and the air line. Denver’s a mile high, out of reach of any tides, and I have friends there.”
She looked at him frightenedly, then simply indicated their surroundings.
“Oh yes, I begin to remember now,” he said heavily, after a moment. “But why didn’t you think of the air, Miss Katz?” he complained, looking at the black shoulder bag of the Black Ball Jetline on her lap.
“I borrowed this from a friend. I hitchhiked down from the Bronx. I don’t fly much,” she confessed miserably, feeling still more miserable inside. Here she’d been going to rescue her millionaire so brilliantly and — dazzled by a Rolls Royce sedan — had missed the obvious way to do it, maybe doomed them all. Dear God, why hadn’t she thought like a millionaire!
A corner of her mind outside the misery area was asking whether old KKK had made a slip in mentioning just two tickets. Surely he’d meant five — why, he talked to Hester and Helen and Benjy like they were his children.
“We did at least bring some money with us?” he asked her dryly.
“Oh yes, Mr. Kettering, we took everything from the wall safes,” she assured him, drawing a little comfort from the thickness of the sheaves of bills she could feel through the fabric of her shoulder bag.
The Rolls was slowing down. The last car to pass them was off in the saw grass, its hood half submerged, and the four men who’d been in it were standing shoetop-deep, blocking the roads and waving.
The sight galvanized her. “Don’t slow down!” she cried, grabbing the back of Benjy’s seat “Drive straight through!”
Benjy slowed a little more.
“Do as Miss Katz says, Benjamin,” old KKK ordered him, with a harshness that set him coughing on the next word, which was, “Faster!”
Barbara could see Benjy’s head drawn down into his shoulders and imagined his eyes wincing half shut as he stepped on the gas.
The four men waited until they were two car lengths away, then jumped aside, yelling angrily. It hadn’t been a very good bluff.
She looked back and saw one of them grappling with another, who’d pulled out a gun.
Maybe I did the wrong thing, she thought.
Like hell!
Dai Davies was sitting on top of the bar, watching his candle-girls rill out their last white tears, their maiden-milk, and topple their black wicks in their waxpools and drown. Gwen and Lucy were gone and at this moment Gwyneth. It was a double loss, for he needed their simple warmth and light: the sun had set, and a clear but intense darkness was settling on the great gray watery mead that was all he could see through the diamond-paned windows and door. He’d hoped for a twinkle of lights from far Wales, but it hadn’t come.
The Severn tide had entered the pub some time ago and was now so high he’d tucked his feet up. Two brooms, a mop, a pail, a cigar box, and seven sticks of firewood floated around, circling slowly. He’d fleetingly thought of leaving at one point, and had tucked two pints in his side pockets against that eventuality, but he’d recalled that this was the highest bit of ground for a space around, and the candles had been warm and dear, and now he’d taken on more alcohol, he knew, than would allow sprightly perambulation for a bit.
In any case it was the best sport of all to play King Canute atop a crocodile’s coffin. Two inches more and the tide would stand and turn, he suddenly decided — and loudly ordered the water to do so.
After all, one o’clock, or a bit after that, had been low tide, and so now must be high or near — if this mad salt flooding obeyed any of the old rules at all.
He deeply sniffed at the open fifth in his hand — an American import, Kentucky Tavern by Erskine Caldwell — and watched Eliza shiver and fade and unexpectedly flame up blue and bright.
The lead-webbed windows pressed in at a new surge of the tide. Water gushed through the hole he’d kicked in the door. Then he distinctly felt the bar under him shift a little — in fact, the whole building moved. He took a sour hot swig of the bottle and cried laughingly: “For once it’s the pub that staggers, not Dai!” Then a great seriousness gripped him, and he knew at last exactly what was happening and he cried with a wild pride: “Die, Davies! Die! Deserve your name. But die dashingly. Die with a whiskey bottle in your hand, wafting your love to come again to Cardiff. But…” And then, for once wholly conquering his carping jealousy of Dylan Thomas — “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
And at that very moment, just as Eliza winked out, and the last pearly light seemed to die all over the gray Severn plain, there came a loud knocking at the door, a heavy, slow, authoritative triple knock.
Supernatural fear took hold of him and gave him strength to move against the whiskey, to drop down into the icy water and slosh through it thigh-deep and pull the door open. There, just outside, pressed against the doorframe by the tide, he saw by the dying light of Mary and Jane and Leonie a long, dark, empty skiff.