doing,” Astrid said. She didn’t sound frightened to be driving straight toward a summer thunderstorm; she sounded interested and a little excited.
“I hope so, too.”
The grade steepened. The Galaxie’s rear end flirted on the loose gravel from time to time, but mostly it held steady. Two and a half miles beyond the turnoff, the trees pulled back and there was Skytop. Astrid gasped and sat up straight in her seat. I hit the brake and brought my car to a crunching stop.
On our right was an old cabin with a mossy, sagging roof and crashed-out windows. Graffiti, most of it too faded to be legible, danced in tangles across the gray, paintless sides. Ahead and above us was a great bulging forehead of granite. At the summit, just as Jacobs had told me half my life ago, was an iron pole jutting toward the clouds, which were now black and seemingly low enough to touch. To our left, where Astrid was looking, hills and fields and gray-green miles of woods stretched toward the ocean. In that direction the sun was still shining, making the world glow.
“Oh my God, was this here all the time? And you never took me?”
“I never took myself,” I said. “My old minister told me—”
That was as far as I got. A brilliant bolt of lightning came down from the sky. Astrid screamed and put her hands over her head. For a moment—strange, terrible, wonderful—it seemed to me that the air had been replaced by electric oil. I felt the hair all over my body, even the fine ones in my nose and ears, go stiff. Then came the click, as if an invisible giant had snapped his fingers. A second bolt flashed down and hit the iron rod, turning it the same bright blue I had seen dancing around Charles Jacobs’s head in my dreams. I had to shut my eyes to keep from going blind. When I opened them again, the pole was glowing cherry red. Like a horseshoe in a forge, he’d said, and that was just what it was like. Follow-thunder bellowed.
“Do you want to get out of here?” I was shouting. I had to, in order to hear myself over the ringing in my ears.
“No!” she shouted back. “In there!” And pointed at the slumping remains of the cabin.
I thought of telling her we’d be safer in the car—some vaguely remembered adage about how rubber tires could ground you and protect you from lightning—but there had been thousands of storms on Skytop, and the old cabin was still standing. As we ran toward it, hand in hand, I realized there was a good reason for that. The iron rod drew the lightning. At least it had so far.
It began to hail as we reached the open door, pebble-size chunks of ice that struck the granite with a rattling sound. “Ouch, ouch, ouch!” Astrid yelled . . . but she was laughing at the same time. She darted in. I followed just as the lightning flashed again, artillery on some apocalyptic battlefield. This time it was preceded by a snap instead of a click.
Astrid seized my shoulder. “Look!”
I’d missed the storm’s second swipe at the iron rod, but I clearly saw what followed. Balls of St. Elmo’s fire bounced and rolled down the scree-littered slope. There were half a dozen. One by one they popped out of existence.
Astrid hugged me, but that wasn’t enough. She locked her hands around my neck and climbed me, her thighs locked around my hips. “This is fantastic!” she screamed.
The hail turned to rain, and it came in a deluge. Skytop was blotted out, but we never lost sight of the iron rod, because it was struck repeatedly. It would glow blue or purple, then red, then fade, only to be struck again.
Rain like that rarely lasts long. As it lessened, we saw that the granite slope below the iron rod had turned into a river. The thunder continued to rumble, but it was losing its fury and subsiding into sulks. We heard running water everywhere, as if the earth were whispering. The sun was still shining to the east, over Brunswick and Freeport and Jerusalem’s Lot, where we saw not one or two rainbows but half a dozen, interlocking like Olympic rings.
Astrid turned me toward her. “I have to tell you something,” she said. Her voice was low.
“What?” I was suddenly sure that she would destroy this transcendent moment by telling me we had to break