Love Is Red (27 page)

You know how to bind. You know the overhand, the half hitch, the clove hitch and the lark's head, the square, often called the reef knot, and the bow line, the anchor hitch and the alpine butterfly, the double fisherman, the double overhand, the figure eight, the figure nine, the handcuff knot, the girth hitch, the blood knot and the Blake's hitch, the masthead knot and the crown, the highwayman hitch and the slipknot, bunny's ears and the monkey's fist, the butcher's knot and the child's swing and the sliding splice and the Solomon Bar.

But as you stood over her you decided to make it last just a little longer. After all, she was your favorite. After all, this was a glorious Ride and it seems such a shame to end it so soon.

There's nowhere for her to go. You've disabled the cars. No one around for miles and miles. But let her run, a desperate hope, pale to darker green, shards of jade adding infinite sweetness to the taste. Let her adrenaline rush through you; let her think she has a chance of escape before you end her and end your Ride, who's carried you so faithfully for your journey.

The Hunt, the glorious Hunt!

There has been only one through all the ages who died by her own hand. This is rare. There must be something within the Vessel that understands the potential she possesses, that wants to live. It is possible that she saw you coming, and it is possible that she knew why. After all, the world is filled with possibilities. But this time you will not be denied the pleasure of the Hunt, the thrill, the joy of delaying the inevitable for just a little while longer.

Ash and Alabaster, Fuchsia and Fluorescent, Bronze and Brass, Mauve and Mahogany, Champagne, Chartreuse, Sienna, Chestnut, Chocolate, Cocoa, and Copper, and Cobalt. Despair and Delirium, Delight and Disgust, Smugness and Solidarity, Apathy and Acceptance, Breathlessness, Vivaciousness, Competence, Nostalgia, Indulgence, Security, and Confidence, and Ardor.

You harvested each one and each one anchored you and gave you strength to walk upon the earth, to breathe, to live, to achieve your quest so that others too might live.

And so you listened, smiling, as above you your Katherine tried to move as silently as possible through the sliding glass door. She was trying to be quiet, trying to move quickly. She must be cold without her clothes, in shock, drenched in sweat.

Slowly you stand up, stretch, crick your neck one way and then the other, sighing with pleasure. You go upstairs to the bedroom and walk onto the deck and look out upon the wood and think of all that waits for you. The sky is lush with stars. They float in the thin pond of the night, stretched out, brimming purple and soft. A thousand insects, the katydids with clicks and cricks, the crickets, a full, sweet chorus trilling
hush
,
hush
,
hush
, the frogs a lower
brack
and
brock
down by the water in the dark mass of
trees. Now a faint breeze rises up, lifts and combs its fingers through the grass. She's started now, her final run; you hope she enjoys it and the summer all around her although you doubt she's taking much in. What a pity.

With easy, deliberate steps, you head down the wooden staircase into the glorious, pitiless night.

I run and I run and I run.

It's black and the air is cold and I run.

I follow the moving shape of faint ashy light through the trees. I crash and crack and push and blunder. The thin branches sting and scratch and tear at my skin, but the other woman running makes no noise, moves no branches. I'm gasping. I'm panting.

I have to get to the canoe.

I have to. I'll row, I'll row, I'll row to the other side of the lake to find help, away from here, away, far away. Stumbling and thrashing through the undergrowth, more falling than running, and now there's a bright needle of pain in my side, a sharp, agonizing stitch, and I scramble through a tangle of low-hanging vines, ducking under, and finally, finally, I am through to the clearing of the tiny cove.

There is no canoe.

Where is the canoe? Where is the canoe? Why is the canoe not upside down, pulled up along the sand, and where and where and where is it? I look left, I look right, and there on my right-hand side is . . .

The canoe, upright, its hull half in the water.

Thank God.

I move toward it. And in the moonlight reflecting on the water I see something. A figure sitting in the far end. I stop. I turn back, but the woman by my side runs on toward the canoe and its occupant. Turns to me, eyes burning.

Go!

I turn again and slowly approach. The blood in my ears muffling all sounds but a high-pitched hum of panic.

The shadow inside the boat doesn't stir. There is only the gentle lapping of the water against the sand.

I walk up to the canoe. My feet wade through the air, thick and dense, one in front of the other. Moving forward I see that the figure is slumped and still within its hooded shroud. My limbs are leaden.

It makes no move. As terrible as this specter seems, it must be better than what will be behind me. I try to raise one foot and put it inside the hull, but my legs tremble uncontrollably. I try again, concentrating, clenching, using all my might to raise one foot to step in. My leg is still shaking, but this time I'm able to do it, to lift one foot,
one foot
, up and into the boat.

Then the shrouded thing slowly unfolds, slowly stands. I freeze. One sleeve extends, fabric cloaking the hand. It grips one of the wooden oars, thrusting it outward and barring me from getting into the canoe. I peer up into the hooded face. There is only blackness.

The irony is bitter. A moment ago it took all my strength to get one foot into the boat, and now barred, I am desperate to get on. “Please help me.” I do not recognize this weak and cracked voice, like a wheeze. I think it's mine. “Please, he's coming,
please
, he'll kill me, I have to get on!”

Its other hand, skin gray, almost blue, the nails thick and black and ragged, slowly emerges from deep within the robe's
folds, holding something out. It is a bowl that gleams bone white in the moon's glow, like mother-of-pearl or ivory.

There is a small sign taped to the side of the bowl, a little askew and slightly soiled. Its edges are torn, as if the piece of paper was ripped from a notebook.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION.

I bend down to peer at the contents. The light glinting off the water isn't much; still from the shadows I can make out a wallet and what looks like an empty perfume bottle, a tiny brush with a mirror on its handle, a pocket notebook, a cell phone. They glisten. An open lipstick, a key ring, a pair of sunglasses, a lip balm, a champagne cork, a creamy business card, a computer plug, a paper napkin with a number written on it, a silver charm bracelet, a red leather glove, a sleek pair of pink headphones. Shimmering. I stumble back and fall down onto the hard, damp sand with a little cry. The bowl is teeming and teeming with maggots. Maggots crawling over the wallet, maggots squirming through the key ring, maggots oozing across the fingers of the leather glove, clustering on the lip balm and curling around the coins.

From far away, I hear whistling.

I have to go.
I have to get on, but the oar blocks my way. “Please, he'll kill me, he's coming!”

The blade of the oar jabs wet, slick, hard against my sternum.

I look down.

The ring brooch hangs around my neck from its delicate chain.

Katherine, will you wear this, now and forever?

“This?”

The cloth of the hood moves a little; it's the faintest of nods.

Good enough.
I put my trembling hands behind my neck to undo the clasp.

Katherine, will you wear this, now and forever?

I don't care. I have to get into the canoe. It's my only chance.

With a loud, dry snap, a branch breaks behind me.

Instinctively I swing around, expecting that he'll be there, but she's standing next to the tree, the one we call the towel tree, close to the entrance of the cove. It must have been struck by lightning long ago. There's a blackened streak running through it, and one of its branches hangs down at a forty-five-degree angle, the perfect branch for hanging towels.

Now she stands by this branch, half turned toward the lake, her face in shadow. But I'd know that slim silhouette anywhere.

“
Andrea?!
” I stagger toward her.

She turns to me. I moan. She'd had a closed casket, even though I had asked to see her. “Too much damage,” said the coroner, “too disturbing for her loved ones.”

But she's here, she's here, and I stumble forward. She stares at me and then slowly she turns and gazes at the branch where Sael and I hang our towels.

There it dangles. Small, neon green, it swings from its beaded metal chain. I reach out and pull it off the branch. Furry, soft, and slippery.

As my fingers curl around it, I remember.

Reading in the park's late-afternoon sun, Lucas has fallen asleep on my lap. Looking down at his little curled eyelashes, I know.

“I love this kid.”

I look up into her ruined face. I wonder at the cost of love.

“I promise, I'll come back for him.”

I hold the rabbit's foot tightly in my hand.

The whistling is louder.

Hold it. It's lucky.

I run back toward the canoe, scuffing through the wet sand. The beach is small but the canoe seems an endless distance away.

I have to come back.
I have to return to Lucas. I have to come back.

The bowl is offered to me again.

Still, I hesitate.

The whistling grows closer.

And now I can hear the
snap
and
crack
as twigs break and branches bend. He's almost here.

I give the rabbit's foot one final squeeze, one last squeeze for Lucas, and then I drop it into the bowl. There is a beat; then it begins to radiate with light. The world and I hold our breath as the rabbit's foot is sucked down, sucked down among the wallets and the key rings and the notebooks and the glasses, like a helpless animal in quicksand.

The bowl flickers even brighter for a moment and then it is extinguished as it is withdrawn into the folds of the figure's garments.

Whistling.

Branches splintering as someone walks toward the little cove.

With all my remaining strength I heave myself up onto the canoe.

The figure lowers the oar and pushes it into the sand and the boat shifts a little from side to side but stays firm. We aren't moving.
Oh God. Oh God.
I look around me and there is a woman now, tall and slender in what once must have been a pretty white sundress with shoulder straps and blue flowers, only now it's stained with blood; a massive stain has seeped through above her breasts. A delicate webbing beads bright, drops down her arms and thighs, still fresh, and she bends down, straining to push us off the sand.

But still we do not move.

He's moving faster.

Another woman runs down the cove toward us, her brown hair thatched with blood, topless above her smeared denim skirt, the bloody rents on her back shining wetly. She too bends down and I see a tattoo of an orange lily growing from a cluster of shooting stars there on her left shoulder; now there are two more women, one in a short, tight black dress and large gold hoop earrings and the other in white shorts, now stained pink, and a yellow tank top with a black smiley face, a beautiful girl—I can see how tanned she is even in the moonlight—and as she runs her hair flies up, exposing a cheek crisscrossed with bloody grooves. Each takes a side of the canoe and both strain to push.

Four dead women pushing a light canoe. The boat barely moves, only rocks maddeningly.

And then through the trees I see—

Please, please

—another woman running up. I haven't seen her face before; she is naked except for a river of scars cascading down her breasts. Then another with full thighs and short curly hair, one side of her open shirt stuck to her wounds, and another one, all bending down, shoulders shaking. And more and more women running out of the woods and up the little stretch of beach; some are heavyset while others are slim, one wears the last vestiges of
soft khaki shorts and another is draped in what looks like the remains of a toga. There's a woman clad in only her pink lacy bra, the left cup soaked a deep red, her softness jiggling as she runs. There is no self-consciousness, no attempts to cover nipples or shield pubic hair; shame is for the living. They only come, hands gripping the sides of the boat; some wade into the water but make no splash, raise no drop; they surround the bow and pull and pull, no ripples marking their movement.

I stare. On my left side a woman's shoulder blade contracts with effort, pulling black cuts raised on her brown skin; on my right a girl's high blond ponytail swings above her red-caked forehead, which wrinkles as she strains. Behind me a woman in the shreds of a long coarse dress—the fabric looks like burlap, torn and flapping—sets her broken blue lips, and all as one they push and it's working, it's working, the boat is slowly scraping over the last of the damp sand with a slopping noise, sliding into—

He's here.

David's body smashes through the fringe of the forest. Now in the clearing, walking out from underneath the trees.

Coming toward us.

He is smiling. He glances around. His nostrils are twitching, flaring. Then he stops abruptly, like a fisherman with a taut line. He's caught the scent. He turns and then he sees me. He sees me sitting in the canoe, the draped silhouette standing. He sees the women surrounding us, pushing and pulling to set us adrift.

He stops smiling. Now he's leaping toward us, faster than any human should be able to move, and although we're in the water now we're not far enough away from the shore and the lake is so shallow.

Now five feet, now four feet, now three.

He lunges, hands reaching out. I shriek and then, just as abruptly, he stops. Right on the lake's edge. He draws back. He emits a guttural hiss, completely inhuman; his tongue presses against his teeth, as if the water were toxic.

I look back at him on the lakeshore, growling and hissing, unable to touch the water. All the women are gone. As if they were never here.

A mist is drifting off the water, white and floating. It's harder to see now but I know he's there, waiting.

The voice rises out of the curtain of mist. The voice floats over the water. It has shreds of its prior humanity, David's voice with a grating metallic edge, the drone of a wasp, the rasp of a saw.

“You have an hour, and then I promise you, he'll suffer.”