The Glittering World (6 page)

Above the angel’s head, a tiny halo: an actual gold band, like a wedding ring, embedded in the wall. He’d seen this ring before as well. He was sure of it. Could it have belonged to his mother? His grandmother? Or was it always right here, stuck to the closet ceiling?

On the floor was yet another illustration, this one painted across the wooden slats. It was similar in manner to the angel, wings spanning the cramped space from edge to edge. Only this was no angel. Naked skin chalk white, its bright honeycombed eyes stared out from a tapered and sunken face, jagged teeth bared like an insect’s mandibles. The wings were leathery like a bat’s wings, wide and capped by elongated fingers that ended in serrated claws. Blue squatted and brought the increasingly warm lighter closer to the rendering. The creature’s nails and teeth were tiny rusted staples riveted directly into the floorboards, its eyes hollowed-out copper filings hot-glued inside the dark spaces between the slats.

There was a legend beneath this one as well, but it was written
on the floor behind him. He stepped out of the closet for a better look when a hand grabbed his arm.

“Do you hear that?” Gabe said, head cocked.

They crept down the hall. Blue thought of the words from the woods, spoken in that unidentifiable yet achingly familiar tongue. The shifting wind through the open windows made any sound difficult to place, and he wasn’t sure if his imagination was getting the better of him.

“I think so,” Blue said. “Someone whispering?”

“Someone whistling.”

Elisa and Jason stole down the stone stairs. They all heard it, a lilting little tune carried on the air, soft and then softer, depending on the direction of the wind. They went out back—not much there but an old covered well, along with some sodden kindling and planks—and stood silent for a few moments, trying to pinpoint the sound. There was a crunch of leaves farther out in the woods, and Jason stepped forward, placing a protective hand in front of Elisa. “Hello?” he called out. “Is someone there?”

The whistling stopped. Another sound now, softer but no longer masked: water, close by and babbling. Jason tiptoed off the path into the trees with Blue behind him, while Gabe and Elisa hung back.

About ten yards into the woods there was a break in the foliage where a small creek wound its way downhill. Beside the water a man in a checked flannel shirt and nylon waders crouched upon a rock; a book was laid open across his lap, but he stared into the distant trees.

“Donald,” Jason called out. The older man raised his head and smiled, then returned his attention to the spot where the stream disappeared into the woods. “How are you doing today?”

“Not terribly,” Donald said. “Just out here looking. Dry summer . . .”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Not yet.”

Elisa and Gabe made their way down the embankment, and Donald tracked them, shielding his eyes from a shaft of sunlight penetrating the leaves. “There’s four of you,” he concluded. “Bridge numbers.” A loud rustling sounded behind him and a large brown dog scampered from the underbrush. “This is Olivier. He was trained as a bird dog, which I grew up calling a pointer. He’s a rescue dog. My wife got him for me to ‘better my mood.’ ”

The dog made a beeline straight for Elisa, who tried shooing it away until Jason stepped in and lured it back toward the creek with a branch. “Sorry, doggie,” she said by way of apology.

“She’s allergic,” Jason explained. He tossed the stick a great distance; the dog disappeared back into the brush only to reappear a moment later, branch in mouth and begging for another go. “We once stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont and she had an attack. After landing up in the emergency room we found out that a dog had been in our room. It was scary. She could barely breathe.”

“Actually, it was a cat,” Elisa said. “But dogs aren’t so great for me either.”

“Barbara is just the same,” Donald said, and peered at her through his Coke bottle lenses. “She’d never let us have a dog, even though the boys begged for one.” His words were punctuated with reverence, as if his former wife and Elisa shared some rare and magical trait. Blue’s stomach tightened, and he thought of Maureen.

“Where are you all heading from?” Donald asked, and ran his hands over the dog’s hide, dirty fingers dug deep into brown fur.

“We saw the sign,” Jason said. “For the . . . community?”

“Ah. Yes. The Colony. May she rest in peace. Folks heard ‘artists’ colony’ and thought they’d find a host of little cottages out here, but we only ever had the one biggie. Used to be an old loggers’ quarters, back when you could still do such things in these woods, before all the appalling environmentalists such as myself came along and ruined everything. I still like to come back for a little visit now and again, just to see the old girl. It was a magical place. Fairy-touched, until the end. The wife doesn’t like me to go inside in its current state, so . . .” He shook his head. “Coming up from the old logging road, then?”

“Yes,” said Jason, who apparently had not only an innate sense of direction but an understanding of local geography as well. “Maureen said that’s where all the best trails are.”

“Just be careful. It’s best to go in a group. Easy to get disoriented. You might not find your way back.” Donald shut his book, glanced back up the creek mouth, and stood to face them. “There’s all sorts of legends concerning these woods. A fishing captain taught me an old ditty about an Irish moonshiner the mountain was supposedly named after. It goes”—and here he sang—“
Kelly dearly loved the Highlands but he couldn’t live alone. For the breezes used to whisper, ‘Kelly, boy, you must come home.’
”

The word echoed in Blue’s head.
Home, home. Come home, you are home.

Donald whistled for a moment, tried to find the melody again. “
The breezes kept a-callin’
,” he sang, dropping into a near whisper, “
kept a-callin’ night and day. Till from the lofty mountain, they lured him far away.
” He looked up at the sky. “So old Kelly went back where he came from. Though I suppose we all must, in due course. Even the queen.”

Donald climbed the embankment and stopped to look down
on them, the dog at his heels. The afternoon light dimmed over his shoulder and the treetops above the horizon, his shape a stark and dramatic shadow. “Don’t worry,” he said, the twin windows of his spectacles frosted white as he looked back at the sun. “You’ll find your way eventually. Just remember to take me when you do.” With a little wave, he was off.

Gabe turned to Blue as they watched Donald disappear in the direction of the burned-out building. “Didn’t Maureen say he had dementia?”

“Alzheimer’s, actually.”

“So sad. I bet he has a lot of interesting stories left to tell.” Gabe let out a sprightly little whistle in poor imitation of Donald as they headed back to the trail.

The temperature began dropping as soon as the sun set. Back at the house, Blue made stew using more salvaged pantry ingredients, served from a green ceramic soup tureen hand painted with bright slices of apple. Once the plates were cleared they collected logs from the rear deck and put a fire on in the living room, which infused the woodstove with a pleasant cedar smell. A halfhearted game of Celebrity followed as they fell one after the next into a collective food coma, lulled to bed by the flicker and heat from the flames. Elisa and Jason dragged themselves off, and Gabe tried to coax Blue along as well, but he would have none of it. “Go ahead,” Blue said, “I’ll be along soon,” and he crashed out on the throw pillows. Gabe placed a quilt over him before he tramped upstairs himself.

Darkness.

Underground. A mineshaft? Hard to tell, but the space is dank and oppressive, the smell of wet earth heavy in the air.
Someone else is there with him, close by, the sensation of hot breath covering him from crown to foot. It’s not really breath, though. It’s dirt: he is buried alive. Unsure which way is up or out, he knows he should be scared but he isn’t. This is what he was made for.

Pushing forward, his fingers knead the earth like dough. His palms flatten, they pull and massage and flatten once more. He extends a finger. Its tip pierces the wall of dirt, forms a small pinprick of light. The finger slims, lengthens, and transmogrifies to fill the breach, a skeleton key of flesh and bone.

He makes a hole big enough to force his head through, slithering forward as if from a primordial pool. The glittering light blinds him. It stings, this shred of dawn’s brightness, burns the place where his eyes should be but are not. But still he crawls forth, until his body is birthed from the earth that is his home and shall always be, this land of emerald green and brightest blue.

Even as he lopes through the forest, the insects and birds scattering from his path, he knows that he must change; that is why he has been chosen. He reaches forward with a long and sickly gray finger to pull back the branches of pine, hairs aquiver upon his elongated limbs. He was sent up from the hive to bring new life, his only purpose. Only when he succeeds will he be allowed to return.

A field of grass, speckled with bright pink wildflowers; a distant green clapboard house, tilted upon the hill as if steeling itself against a storm; and the sound of two young children at play, their laughter circling closer and closer to the edge of the woods, where he waits for the others to arrive.

Blue awoke with a start. He thrashed against the quilt, which had made its way up over his head, and yanked it off, scuttling crablike from the woodstove. He was soaked with sweat. From the dying embers, yes, but also from the dream; the two had become intertwined. He pulled his wet shirt over his head and threw it before the stove, an offering to the livid god of fire.

One night back in March, Gabe, upon hearing of his recurring nightmares, had posited that Blue had died violently in a past life; it was as ridiculous a theory as you’d expect from a young man whose personal belief system was informed by the
Village Voice
horoscope column. But there was something about Blue’s dreams that had always held the unshakeable power of lived experience. His haunting nightmares of an underground existence had been his lifelong mystery; the woods and the house and the laughing children, though, those were all new, and spoke to him of his early years in Starling Cove.

He still held bitter memories of an itinerant youth spent at a distance from his peers. Most children hadn’t liked him. Feared him, even, though he couldn’t understand why. There was a time he was convinced he gave off some pheromonal signal that made them walk wide of him, as if he were contagious and to be avoided at all costs. Adults enjoyed his company, however, so he would cultivate those relationships, for better or worse. It was only once he hit adolescence that his classmates began flocking to him.

At eleven in St. Louis, Marybeth Freemont ran her Blow-Pop-sticky fingers through his downy black hair during recess before planting a wet kiss on his lips, the watermelon taste of her tongue remaining long after she’d hurried away. At thirteen in Atlanta, Ricky Barlow got into bed with him during a sleepover and sucked him off beneath his blanket before the boy
climbed back to the top bunk, never to speak of the incident again. At fifteen in high school in New York, Melissa Kaufman, a senior girl, asked him to the fall dance; it was during a medley of Beastie Boys songs that she (and this was the only way to put it) deflowered him on the back stairs, where she leaned against the railing, hitched up her crinoline dress, and pulled him out of his pants and into her with a raw hunger that had shocked him.

Apparently he’d begun giving off the right kind of pheromones. People just seemed drawn to him. His mother took notice and, calling him her “good luck charm,” dragged him along to job interviews and bingo nights at bars. On a few dates as well, a tactic so disarming that it usually worked in her favor. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she often told him after landing a new secretarial job or getting their latest landlord to forgo a missing rent payment. Eventually Blue left home and she fell sick in his absence, as if he were the root cause of all her fortune, both good and ill.