The Glittering World (33 page)

Maureen bit at her thumbnail. “Once the Colony was toast, I told Yvonne to take the boy and split, and thank God she listened to me. Look what happened to Gavina—well, not Gavina, but the one sent back looking like her.”

“What did happen to her?”

“Daniel Jessed did.”

Gabe had suspected as much, but now he knew for certain. He thought of Jessed beating on Fred Cronin, and the small man’s agonized cries.
The law is a huntsman in disguise. He dresses in the skins of sheep. He hunts the things that creep.

Maureen fixed Gabe with her gimlet gray eyes. “He’s been poking around, you know. Asking about you and Elisa. What you’ve been up to, what you might be planning. He’s called from the station house the last two days, late at night.”

Gabe looked up at the sun and attempted to discern the time from its position; it was rising too fast for his liking, which meant it would set too soon.
No moon like the new moon,
or so Elisa had promised
.
The dark would show them the light. “What does Jessed want?”

She shrugged. “Used to be heroin. All I can say for sure is that since he went on the straight and narrow and joined the Mounties, he’s been getting high off that old-time religion instead. And those types around here, they don’t approve of the
Other Kind. Think they’re some kind of abomination. That’s what Flora MacKenzie thought, her and the rest of her church folk, the old-school fire-and-brimstoners. That’s been ingrained in them since William MacLeod’s day. Flora and Daniel Jessed were both big wheels at the congregation, and got pretty close before she died. That should tell you something. Not to mention Jessed’s the point person on the search-and-rescue operation. Those fires on the mountain? They keep popping up in the strangest places. Even during the rains.”

Maureen’s troubled countenance flared, then just as quickly lifted from her face like a veil. “If it makes you feel better, I told him you and Elisa were heading back to New York. Speaking of which,” she said, retreating into small talk, “the housekeeper’s coming next week to close down the house. She’ll call before she shows up, but you’ll have to be gone by the time she arrives, so I wouldn’t wait much longer to book your way home. It really is too bad you never made it up north. Newfoundland? You’d love it. It’s all edge.”

She started back to the car, but Gabe slipped in front of her. “Donald’s field notes,” he said. “From what I can tell, they say the only remaining entrance to the caverns beneath the cove is the Fairy Hole at low tide.”

“Forget it. Foolish to go that way, at any time. Plenty of folks have tried over the years, but I’ve never heard of any making it. Not even native guides attempt to navigate those passageways. And that’s because they know better.”

“What about the rum-running tunnels? I pulled some old maps from the Gaelic College archives, but—”

“Oh, they’ve been sealed off for decades. And besides, they aren’t constant. The tunnels down there . . . they change.”

“What do you mean, change?”

“I . . . can’t anymore. I just can’t, I’m sorry.” Her voice quavered, and she appeared, for the first time, old. “When you hear them in their true voices, inside of you, inside your head . . . There’s no coming back from that. No matter how much time has passed, no coming back. You’ll never be alone with your own thoughts again.” She glanced back at the car. “So don’t. Don’t go down there.”

“Maureen . . .”

“Leave it alone. And let your friend go.”

Now it was Gabe’s turn to look away. Chastened, he stared down at a matted patch of grass. “You’re under his spell,” she said. “Under
their
spell.” When he looked up, her face was grave with sorrow and longing. “I understand better than you know.”

“It’s not only me.” They turned to observe Elisa at the passenger side of the car. She had her arms resting on the open door, leaning inside toward Donald so that her head was no longer visible. Only a bisected torso and legs, one calf crossed over the other, with Olivier bounding about in the backseat. When she emerged, a beam of sunshine escaped from the cloud cover to wash her in amber light, her face radiant as she walked to where they stood.

Maureen hugged them both, for what felt like the very last time. “Here,” she said, and produced Donald’s notebook, gently pressing it toward Gabe. “I think he would want you to have it now. It should belong to someone who can still appreciate it.” She started down to the car, then stopped to squint up at Elisa, a hand over her eyes in the newly bright light. “You’re still glowing,” she said. Then she nodded, turned back, and continued down the hill.

Gabe and Elisa stayed close to each other as the Toyota crawled the rest of the way down the gravel drive and toward
the main road. All was quiet save the birds and their chirrups, the insects and their whining cries. He looked across the cove and everything was still, but when he focused on the surface of the water, it appeared to be moving very rapidly and out of sync, as if the bay had been filmed in time lapse. His vision blurred, and he rubbed at his eyes.

“We have a problem,” he said. “Maureen says the trip through the Fairy Hole is suicide. No one’s ever made it through there and lived to tell. We’ve got to find another way.”

“There
is
another way,” Elisa said. “We have to go through the tunnels. I know that’s how I did it, I’m sure of it. It’ll come back to me once I’m down there, and then I’ll find my way.”

You’ll find
your
way?
he thought, but suppressed his unease. “But see, that’s the thing . . . Maureen said the tunnels aren’t constant. That they change. Donald confirmed as much in his journal, when he gave up trying to map them in the sixties.” Gabe dizzied a bit, and canted his head, which made him see dark spots. He fumbled in his pocket for the remainder of the candy bar. “Even if you could figure it out, I still don’t see how we can get down there.”

Elisa opened her hand. “Maybe this will help.” In her palm rested a slender and ornate iron key, strung from a thong of Tibetan prayer beads that tangled in her fingers like a rosary. “Donald just slipped me this. What do you think it’s for?”

“A door.” Gabe reached for it and pointed the key skyward, the beads tightening between them. “And I think I know which one.”

They went off-trail and across a field of tall grass spotted with purple lupine, the sky lit up by parti-colored rays from a
picture-book sun overhead as Gabe watched the brilliant orb whiten from bright yellow like a dandelion forming a seed head. He stole a glance at Elisa, who stared forward, dark bags heavy under her eyes. Over the past few days she had spent her nights screaming herself awake, as Blue once had. She claimed not to remember what her nightmares were about, but she needn’t have bothered, really. Because Gabe knew she dreamed of the place to which they were heading. Compelled in her sleep to travel the unmapped terrain beneath the mountain, follow the winding path to the dark place where she had been violated, her unborn child ripped from her womb. He couldn’t begin to imagine that forfeiture.

But there was something else. Another loss Elisa had alluded to beyond Blue and the child, some other, unknown entity she couldn’t bring herself to remember, or fully relay.

The past three nights he had stayed up to watch her, no trace of the scintillating energy she first exuded upon her return from the realm of the Other Kind. Still, she remained the closest thing he had to Blue. So he kept near. Last night he’d forgotten to sleep altogether, and stayed up watching Elisa until he swore he could see into her dreams, pictures of restless clouds rolling and unrolling in the dark, accompanied by the low growl of faraway animals.
When wolves are heard howling before sunset, expect the rains to come soon.
But the storm was only inside her head.

On the other side of the field they reentered the woods, and soon the crumbling chimney of the Colony appeared in the distance through the ragged scrim of branches. Elisa caught Gabe staring and she looked away, her hands gripped tightly to the straps of her pack, black cotton frayed at the elbow of her sweater. Just then Gabe had the uncomfortable
feeling that she was going to bolt.
Is she going to leave me behind?
She did have the key around her neck, after all, and claimed to remember her way through the caverns.
What does she need me for?

But that was ridiculous. Why would she run from him, when they were in this together?
We both want to bring Blue back.

Unless she didn’t want to come back at all.

Since they’d headed into the woods, he and Elisa had hardly exchanged a word. It was easier for him to keep his mouth shut and follow her, focus instead on the Colony building rising before them. The former loggers’ quarters and its charred brick walls looked different now that he knew it was Maureen who had set it ablaze, the wounds fresher, maybe. There had likely been other fires since, however, a succession of desecrations that had contributed to the building’s current state of ruin. The same way the MacLeod House had burned over and over across its long history, and the forest fires that seemed to occur whenever the Other Kind reared their heads.
Fire hides all traces and tracks
, and he fingered Blue’s lighter again, rolling the thumbwheel the wrong way until the flint sparked.
Fire cleanses all.

Once they entered the Colony’s burned-out shell they headed for the inner sanctum, its remarkably well-preserved walls adorned with the elaborate and phantasmagorical murals. Though Gabe had ventured inside many times over the last month to take in the vivid and complex illustrations, he viewed them now through new eyes. The once-inscrutable images, they told the story of two peoples, human and otherwise. The collages weren’t chronological or even directly representational, but he could follow parts of the story nevertheless. It was a secret history of this place, the alluring
darkness beneath the land and the promising half-light of the world above.

Here was a spent book of matches clutched in the hands of a voluptuous young woman, her eyes milky gray behind a praying mantis mask rendered in aluminum foil. Other figures circled her, including a man masked as a bear, a woman as a fox, another as a coyote—all huddled around a spent box of hypodermic needles, the syringes gone cloudy with use and age. Farther down the wall, a black-eyed boy was sketched in charcoal, his hands holding down a saucer-eyed child beneath a shellacked and ridged fiberboard relay of waves. Gabe put a hand to the mural but drew it away as if scalded, a faint trace of energy emanating from the brick.

The Gavina replacement, she made all this.
Which meant she knew she was going to drown by her false brother Daniel’s hands.

Elisa moved toward the hallway, and Gabe hurried to keep up. Down the dark passage were the pair of steel closet doors they’d discovered upon their first visit to the Colony, one door propped open with a cinder block to reveal the ongoing mural. He shined his flashlight inside. A dull bit of metal glimmered on the ceiling: a gold ring, embedded in the wood. It was part of the mural as well, a halo for a painted red angel whose dark red wings crossed the ceiling in two scarlet slashes. Beneath it was written the words
Borealis the Mother was sent up from the Heavens of the Faraway World to bring comfort to the New Children of the Screaming Places
. It wasn’t a biblical angel, the kind that Fred’s believer friend Tanya prayed to over her woodland altar, begging the heavenly hosts to bring back her husband, dead in a car crash three years past. This was another kind of angel altogether.

He swung open the closet door and watched as a desiccated
rag fell from a nail and landed with a dull paper thump.
A stranger is coming
. He recognized the omen from one of his books. The other door remained shut with its burned brass knob locked tight, though the scorched floor below it showed through in a sweep of blackened ash.

Elisa removed Donald’s key from around her neck and inserted it into the keyhole, worried it until it caught. When she pulled the knob the door belched open like a crypt, the humid smell of wet earth thickening the air. Gabe pointed his flashlight through the opening. He had assumed the mural would continue inside this space as well, and was surprised to find the closet’s interior was in fact a steel chamber, akin to an elevator car. The space was barren, save a spattering of residue at the corners, dried mud splashed halfway up the walls.
Blue and the Gavina replacement, they weren’t allowed inside here.

He got on his knees and ran his hands along the corrugated iron flooring. It wasn’t until he found a notch on the back wall and slid his hands inside the gap that he snagged a piece of loose metal on his finger. It was a ring, the same size and golden color as the angel’s halo embedded in the ceiling of the other closet. He took it as a sign, and tugged on it. In a cloud of dust and ash the floor began to rise, and Gabe continued to lift what he now saw was a cleverly disguised hatch door that spanned the length of the closet and opened onto a rough hole, no wider than two feet across and dug directly into the earth. The open gates to the underworld, without a Cerberus in sight.