The Glittering World (29 page)

She shuddered, and the being stirred as if in response, raising its left arm in a stilted gesture. She mirrored it, raised her right one in imitation. Its spindly arm tapered and concaved into a rough sickle shape; this she mirrored as well. It slunk forward and conversely became harder to discern, but for the pronged shapes its feet left on the damp moss. She glided in
its direction, an arm cupped before her as if preparing for an embrace.

It’s just like dancing
. Like Madame Farber’s ballet class in fourth grade, when she first learned how to move with a partner. As the creature shifted closer, its swampy reek sweetened, citrus tanging the air. And then its face appeared, gleaming and moist. The outline of its wide domed eyes emerged, almost as an apparition, along with the shape of its scooped and bisected mouth. Elisa swayed on her feet like a stubborn leaf, a seagull in an updraft.

The thing trembled before her, nearly indistinguishable from the shifting ferns in its wake, green fiddlehead patterns a thousand fingerprints smudged upon bright sea glass. Elisa reached out, and it reached back, a nebulous motion that brought them within inches of each other. Was it mirroring her now? Impossible to tell, only that they seemed to move as one. Heat radiated from its body of bark and bone, a throb of white starlight that washed over her in a wave that tasted of plant sap.

Another pulsation and it was a razor’s breadth away. She could feel it examining every inch of her, inside and out. She still could not see it exactly, but it was here just the same, right here, made up of things from the wood. And as with the forest, Elisa felt renewed in the creature’s presence, the way a lost soul must feel when it is saved. Never before had she sensed the presence of God, or anything close to divine grace. Never, except when she was with her best friend, the only person she had ever belonged to without question.

She wrapped her arms around it and placed her hands on its back, where she took up flesh of dew-damp bark and frayed quill, as well as a sticky ooze beneath her cracked nails, her fingers roaming the same way they had explored the forest floor
upon waking. Everything in this moment was real, everything wild. She could feel it all, right down to the bone.

“Blue,” she whispered.

Her eyes widened, and for a split second she saw him, the old him. Gorgeous and flawed with his crooked wry smile, yes, but more as he was when she’d first met him—younger and fuller of face, a curtain of home-dyed hair draped across his cheek in a crest of blue and black. As soon as she locked on to his eyes, however, the familiar bottle-green ones that had held her so long in their sway, she found herself gazing up at the tree canopy instead. He had slipped from her grasp, her arms still cradled in front of her as if in a pas de deux. But it was him.

“Blue?” she called out.
Where has he gone?

Movement a few feet away, along the edge of the cliff. She carefully tread along the lichened rocks and followed a vague impression of his retreating shape, his tracks like two fork hoes in the grass and accompanied by a scritch-scratch sound of pen nibs on stiff parchment.

“Wait!” she cried. “What about our child?”

Blue froze by the edge of the cliff. Before she could help herself, she hurried forward and reached for him. She grasped his arm, and a convulsion of energy surged through her.

A nimbus of pulsating light, drawing her deeper into the throne room. High above, the wounded Queen deteriorates in her nest, the sound of her fire-damaged wings thrumming through the catacombs and punctuated by the crackling of embers. Fleshy and swollen tubers hang from the ceiling, discolored opalescent grubs that should be beating with emergent life but are instead puckered and scorched black with decay.

Below the nest is Blue, his flint-gray arms cradling something that looks like a woman, though one that is made of birch. They sway, as
if dancing. Its face is Elisa’s face, its womb her womb, and inside of it, inside . . .

A keening wail sounded everywhere at once, a dazzling assault so invasive that she fell once more to her knees. She struggled to right herself, afraid she might tumble over the edge to the bay below as the world spun out from beneath her. But Blue was there to steady her. He brought her away from the edge, and gently lowered her to the wet grass.

the unborn

it will

be

safe

Blue, inside her head. The sound of the words excruciating, his multilayered voice intoxicating to the point of nausea.

go

live

in this world

while you still can

you chose to leave

us

once

already

She managed to stand, but he was already bounding away toward the cliff in a flutter of dust and the lightning crack of hollow bone upon rock. The slender line of his spine, a glimpse of his gray paper-birch hide as he vaulted over the precipice as if launched from a springboard. She ran back to the cliff’s edge and watched him fall, his protean shape flickering as he crashed through the waves in an arc of bright emerald light.

Elisa placed one hand upon her stomach, then higher to
where the camera rested against her chest. Too late, but she released the shutter nevertheless, in the vain hope of capturing the blur of motion through the dimming waters before he disappeared entirely.

It was midafternoon when she crossed the familiar trail that led past the Colony, the weathered sign in the shape of a light green fairy pointing the way into the woods. She resisted entering the old burned-out husk, and remained instead by the covered well out back, its bucket long since lost to nature. She recalled a fairy tale she’d once heard, about a nixie surfacing from a well; she thought it might have had a happy ending. But that wasn’t Elisa’s story. She was no fairy. Was Blue? Donald seemed to think so, didn’t he? All Elisa was sure of was that Blue was a creature born of this land and below it, a species heretofore unknown to her but as real as any human being.

And what had Blue and Elisa’s story been, after all, but a kind of fairy tale, ever since the halcyon haze of their youth? Despite all that had happened to them, that fact had not changed, not really. She and Blue were living a different kind of tale altogether, and she told it to herself as she left the trail to form her own desire line.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved to dance, never more so than when she was with her closest friend. But then her feet began to ache and she lost herself, out in the darkest wood. Her friend found her, though, and he brought her to live with his family made of leaf and light, beneath the waves and the land. She never felt so happy.

But down below the world they made another version of the dancing girl. A mirror girl, with her very own face, beneath the roots of
the ocean in the realm of the dying Queen. The dancing girl, she grew restless, and wanted to see the light of the sun again, but she was warned she could only leave once.

And so she decided to go. But the mirror girl stayed among them. Now she was the one who cleaved to the dancing girl’s friend, and they called each other by their secret names. And still they dance to this day, in the place below the world. Never stopping, never parting, forever and ever and ever . . .

She didn’t know how to finish the story.

Elisa stepped from the forest behind Maureen and Donald’s house. As she crossed the lawn she shielded her face from the low sun magnified off the water in waves of pink and lavender and orange; she felt washed out in the vivid glare, exposed. And, in fact, watched: Jason, up the hill, was tracking her from the porch of the MacLeod House, in an uncanny reenactment of when she had wandered out of these same woods ten days ago. He didn’t run to her, but instead stepped tentatively down the porch steps. There would be no tearful reunion, no cries for help or calls of prayer to a merciful god. Not this time.

Gabe appeared on the other side of the door, its dented screen a dark veil across his face as Jason met her beside the peony shrubs. The heady scent of the flowers was overwhelmingly ripe, so much so that a powerful and erotic thrill shot through her.
It all goes back to the land
.

She stared past Jason, past Gabe on the stairs and up to the house; she tried to make a welcoming smile of its windows and porch but the façade remained lifeless, its appearance inert.

“Elisa,” Jason said, and she was startled by the anguish in his eyes. Something was very wrong.

“What is it?” she said. Gabe sunk down onto the porch steps,
his form compressed like a crushed beer can. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Blue.” Jason’s face contorted, he was sweating now. “They found him.”

“What happened?” She steeled herself. “Where is he?”

“I’m so sorry,” Jason said, tears at the corners of his eyes; her pain had always been his, even now. “He’s dead.”

They’d found the body eight days ago, not long after Elisa had wandered out of the woods. There had been some sort of confusion, the corpse assumed to be one of the half dozen hikers who had gone missing after the forest fires began. It was only upon performing the autopsy that someone thought to compare the samples to DNA collected from Blue’s toothbrush. Despite the incompleteness of the remains—much of the body had been carried off by predators, including the teeth—preliminary lab results showed a perfect match.

Jason volunteered to meet with the coroner, but Elisa said she wanted to join him, so she could see Blue one last time. This was patently false, as she had no intention of seeing Blue for the last time, now or ever. Because she didn’t believe it was him, not really. Such a thing as never seeing Blue again just wasn’t possible; even if he were dead she would see his face in the stars, or the mirror, at the bottom of the sea or in the spidered cracks inside a teacup. No matter what kind of thing Blue might actually be, born of man or otherwise, alive or dead, made of darkness or the light. She would see him again, in everything. The way she had seen him that very morning, on the cliff overlooking the bay.

The coroner, a cotton-haired man of seventy with cauliflowered
ears and an aquiline nose, distributed surgical masks to Jason and Elisa before he slid open the steel meat locker door. The walls were finished in immaculate white tile, the floors marbleized linoleum; the space bore an eerie resemblance to the examination rooms in the medical center directly across the street, where Elisa had been kept for observation.

On the far side of the room was a morgue slab, upon which lay the body, a sheet pulled over it like a Halloween ghost. She’d been expecting the corpse to be slid out of some drawer, but no, it was just lying there, waiting. Her stomach seized up, and she put her hand upon her belly, cradled the small mound below her navel as if she were trying to keep herself together, or hold something inside.

“I have to warn you,” the coroner said, shifting around the table so the body was between them. “The remains have experienced a great deal of distress.”

It was only once he spoke and a cloud escaped his lips that Elisa became conscious of the fact that the morgue was refrigerated, and now that she noticed she grew cold, as if submerged in ice water. The tiled room was like a swimming pool, the cotton mask over her nose and mouth suggestive of a kind of breathing apparatus. “He won’t be recognizable to you,” the coroner added, and looked from her to Jason. “Viewing victims of fire . . . It can be a distressing experience.”

“I understand,” she said, but she needed to be sure. “I’m ready.”

The coroner pulled back the sheet. Jason, reflexively, squeezed Elisa’s hand.

And there it was. A muddy brown amalgam of charred bone and muscle, skin burned off so that the plate of the cranium was exposed. Both jaws were missing, with the bottom of the
skull concaved, excavated. The rib cage and stomach had been opened during the autopsy. What was left of the limbs was scorched black, the right shin and foot missing, along with the right hand. Wisps of red muscle were visible along the shriveled and rutted neck, threaded through with a bluish, veiny filament. From one of the eye sockets a single drab of yellow pus had oozed and hardened there like an amber tear.
Breathe
, she thought,
breathe
. She felt as if she were drowning.