Now. Immediately. By the morning.
Because he wasn’t going to drive into Rock Bay.
* * *
The Living with Salt was a modified flat-bottom skiff, with a shallow bow and a stubborn reluctance to turn starboard with any kind of grace. It had a tiny shed of a cabin that would give him some relief from the strong ocean winds and a powerful if seasoned motor. It was ancient and the white paint had flaked, exposing the wood beneath. It almost looked like a tugboat to John, but had been used as a fishing vessel by the grizzled, barrel-bellied, bowlegged walking cliché of a fisherman who sold it to him for twice what it was worth. He almost thought the man had some illegal side business, must also be playing a part. He bought enough gasoline to either blow him sky high or last until the end of the world and loaded in the rest of his supplies.
It came with oars “for if the motor should give out” and nautical maps “though God help you if you don’t seek shelter, there’s a storm” and a flare gun. After a little persuading that involved more money, it also came with the skipper’s old raincoat, hat, pipe, galoshes, and a fishing net with a hole in it. The pipe felt weird in his mouth, and the galoshes were a bit too big, but it made him believe that from a distance his disguise might hold.
The motor had a ragged hiccupping mutter he didn’t like, but he had little choice—and he believed the boat might be as fast as the car on the treacherous roads that lay ahead, and harder to trace. As he lurched downriver toward the sea, he had a sense of impending apocalypse, the beached and blackened driftwood evidence not of bonfires and storms but of some more radical catastrophe.
* * *
Old houses lay among the rocks of the coast and the few crude beaches as he chugged along through choppy waters and calm waters, struggling to learn the jump and list of the boat, slowly adjusting to the current. Most of the houses were falling apart, and even those awake with lights at dusk seemed only temporarily resurrected. Smoke from grills. People on piers below. They all looked like they’d be gone by winter.
He passed an abandoned lighthouse, a low, squat white tower with a black crown. It slid past in silence, the fitted stones showing through the ruined paint, the beacon dark, and he had a startled sense of doubling, as if he were somehow traveling up the coast of an alternative Area X. The sense that he had passed beyond some boundary.
Somewhere in the fog, if he looked closely, he’d see Lowry and Whitby, wandering lost. Somewhere, too, the Séance & Science Brigade taking their measurements, and Saul Evans walking up the spiral steps of the lighthouse, with a girl, oblivious, playing on the rocks below. Perhaps even Grace, gathering the remnants of the Southern Reach around her.
* * *
By midafternoon, he had reached the part of the coast where the land curved sharply, an inlet that led to the town of Rock Bay. What the biologist called “Rock Bay” was actually the tidal pools and reefs that lay about twenty miles north of town. But her former cottage had been right outside of the town. Or village, if you wanted to be specific. Because it only had about five hundred residents.
The Living with Salt wasn’t the kind of boat that John could pull up onto the shore and hide under branches. But he wanted to do a recon of Rock Bay before moving on. He chanced going a little ways up the wide inlet, half-hidden by rock islands that jutted out from the water. Soon he spotted a rotten old pier where he could tie up. According to the maps it was close enough to the local wildlife refuge that he could walk from there and intersect a hiking trail, following it close to the town. He left behind his hat and pipe and, taking his raincoat, binoculars, and gun, made his way inland through scrubland and then forest. The smell of fresh cedar invigorated him. Soon enough, he was looking down from a bluff at the wooden bridge leading into town and the tiny main street beyond. He’d come across a roadblock manned by local police well before the bridge, but he’d seen nothing suspicious on the trails—just a jogger and a couple of teenagers clearly looking for a place to smoke pot. From his vantage now, looking down with his binoculars through the intense tree cover, though, he could see half a dozen black sedans and SUVs with tinted windows parked on the main street. The vehicles reeked of Central, as did the too-coiffed would-be lumberjacks who stood near the vehicles in bright plaid shirts and jeans and boots that looked too new to have yet been through a slog.
If they had come in such small numbers, then either this location was one of many being searched or the biologist was by now only part of a much larger problem, Central fully occupied elsewhere. Somewhere in the south, perhaps.
Depending on how well they knew the biologist’s habits, they might believe that she’d prefer to hide somewhere farther north, along the coastline. But they’d have to rule out the town and its environs first. All around was dense coastal scrubland or even denser rain forest, none of it easy to traverse. The kind of terroir even experienced locals could get lost in, once you went beyond the town, especially during the rainy season.