The Glittering World (7 page)

He stepped onto the porch of the MacLeod House for some fresh air. The cove was tranquil in the muted light from the waning moon, the tower of Kelly’s Mountain vigilant in the distance. He hung the quilt over his shoulders and padded barefoot down the lawn, the grass damp between his toes. He stopped at the foot of the trail leading into the trees. The woods where the old Colony building was, where Donald had appeared to be waiting for something, or perhaps summoning it himself.

There was another source of light distinct from the quarter-moon: a sliver of illumination from the little shingled cabin Maureen used as a pottery studio. Blue crept across the drive to the cabin and peered through a slit in the curtains. Maureen, her back to him, was at a long, paint-spattered worktable and bent over something ridged and steely gray; he couldn’t see
more than that. The mono buzz of classic rock on the radio made the entire studio hum, a comforting defiance of the immense and silent blanket of night.

She shuffled to the slop sink on the far side of the cabin, glaze-stained latex gloves raised before her like a surgeon. Blue moved around the back to get another vantage point. By the time he made it to the opposite window, Maureen had unexpectedly turned to face him, her gray eyes bulging with alarm.

He hurried inside. “I am so sorry,” he said, mortified. “I couldn’t sleep and I just kind of wandered down here . . .” Now that he said it, what was he doing exactly? How bizarre of him to spy on her and scare her like that, dressed in little more than a quilt! Maybe he wasn’t fully awake after all, though it sounded like a poor excuse.

“You almost gave me a heart attack.” Maureen exhaled, a hand to her chest. “That’s not nice to do to an old woman.”

“I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking at all.” He pulled the quilt tighter around him. “Forgive me, please. And for the record, you don’t qualify as an old woman. Not even close.”

“Well. Thanks. That does make me feel a little better.” She gestured at a stool and Blue sat at the worktable, where an oversized clay mask lay facedown upon stained newsprint. An inverted bowl with twin slits for eyes, the mask was glazed metallic gray, a prism of shadow and color refracted in its bulbous contours.

“Very cool,” he said.

“Isn’t it? It’s going to be a praying mantis. Love those critters. Mantises are the best bug killers around, especially for farms and apple orchards, places like that. I’d tell you it’s my spirit animal if I wasn’t worried about you looking at me funny.” She wiped
a hand across her forehead, which left a faint trail of glaze. “Do anything fun today?”

“We smoked and went for a hike in the woods.”

“Good stuff, huh?”

“The weed or the woods?” Blue smiled. “They were both nice, actually. Thanks.” He picked a stray splinter of firewood from the quilt. “We saw Donald out there. He looked . . .”

“Like he was waiting for someone?”

“Exactly.” His heart began to thrum, as if planning an escape. “It was kind of strange, actually, but last night? He said he knew me or something. He seemed pretty sure of himself too.”

“That’s a new one. I’ll have to add it to the list.” She opened her mouth and then shut it, and was silent for a few moments before she spoke again. “He’s waiting for Barbara, by the way.”

“His first wife.”

“The very same. She’s going to come back any day now. Or someone like her, maybe.” She shook her head. “But who knows? A woman who died on the Isle of Skye forty years ago might just stroll on out of there yet. These are some strange woods, after all.”

“Donald said as much. Something about a moonshiner, old Kelly, hearing words on the wind?” He paused. “I heard something out there myself. Something in the trees.”

“Did you now?” She sat across from him.

“I heard . . . Well, it sounded like words being whispered, but in another language. I could understand it, though . . .” He waved his hand. “Never mind.”

“This is sacred ground, you know. From long before moonshining days. My people, the real natives from all over these parts—some of us believe this is the resting place of Kluscap. He was the first man, and also a kind of god. Not much wilder
than any other creation myth, when you think about it. I still call it Kluscap’s Mountain instead of Kelly’s, just like the rest of my family. The story goes that someday Kluscap is going to wake there from his sleep, and come with the fairies out of the sea caves under the mountain. The entrance to the caverns is actually called the Fairy Hole.” Blue was reminded of the vicious fairy-looking creatures on the walls of the burned-out Colony.

Maureen reached over and turned off the table lamp. The only light remaining was from the dull overhead fixture, so that her face was thrown into shadow. “Of course,” she said, “there’s a stranger legend about these parts, one even Mi’kmaqs don’t dare speak of. It’s about a dangerous species known to stalk the land, from early spring through Celtic Colours. Every year, you can feel them coming as soon as the snow melts, can even set your watch to it. They might even come to you at night. Watching, waiting on the other side of the window . . .” She leaned forward, elbows on the table. “They’re called the Summer People.”

Blue swallowed, hard. “What do they want?”

She burst out laughing, slapping a hand down on the table like a domino player throwing a bone. “Honey, that’s my idea of a bad joke. The Summer People is what we call the tourists.”

“Oh. Sorry.” He chuckled uncomfortably. “So basically you’re saying I should have knocked first.”

“Next time.” She rounded the table and squeezed his shoulders. “Really, though, it’s nice to have the company. Like I said, there’s something about you . . . Let’s just say you don’t seem like the usual sightseer doing the Cabot Trail for the summer.”

He wanted to tell her what they were actually doing in Starling Cove—that he was born here, and that his friends had come with him to put to rest a part of his past. But he held his
tongue. All he said was, “I guess I disguise myself better than most,” and left it at that.

Maureen finished straightening up and killed the light before they walked out onto the lawn. “Hey,” Blue said. “Thanks for letting me hang around.”

“Come back another night, a bit earlier, and I’ll teach you how to throw clay on the wheel. It’s especially fun if you’re a bit toasted.”

“It’s a date. If I can get you back, that is. Maybe I can cook you a meal?”

“Lovely. I heard you have the touch, after all.”

“Listen,” he said once they neared the drive. “What you said about Elisa, having ‘the glow’? Did you mean you thought she was pregnant?”

“Who’s been whispering in your ear?” she said, a sly smile creeping across her lips. “Good night, Michael. Sweet dreams.”

“Blue,” he said. “Blue,” but she didn’t hear him, only waved good-bye and headed down the narrow dirt path through the vegetable garden until she disappeared around the side of the house. There was a moment of perfect silence before the screen door slammed shut, echoing across the cove like a gunshot.

Blue waited until Tuesday to call the estate lawyer in Halifax, who gave him the number of the local property agent responsible for the house sale. By the time they finally connected it was already Thursday, leaving him to wonder, with only two days left of the trip, whether it was worth seeing the house at all. What was he going to do, suddenly fall in love with the place? Not going to happen. Every credit card was maxed out, and he was three months behind on rent for Cyan. The problem was that he couldn’t keep up with demand, and had no idea how to manage costs or amortize his debts, especially his less savory ones.

Speaking of which, he had received three missed calls on his cellphone in the past few days from Vincente Castro; the fact that the loan shark had ominously failed to leave any messages made Blue’s kneecaps itch. Even if he got fifty thousand bucks back for the house after taxes—and that was optimistic—it wasn’t much of a leg up. But he had to grab it, and grab it fast. He scheduled a time to view the house the next day and would sign the papers then and there.

Meanwhile, he tried to keep himself occupied. He drove with the others to Baddeck for ice cream and strolled the boardwalk along the Bras d’Or Lake, followed by a lunch of lobster rolls and beer at the Water’s Edge; dinner at Chanterelle, overlooking
St. Ann’s Bay; the next day a trip to Joe’s Scarecrow Village near Cheticamp and a second pass at the supermarket so they could stock up on provisions for the rest of the week’s meals. More nights by the fire, and whisky and wine, though Elisa refrained; he still couldn’t bring himself to ask her why. There was more hiking as well, though not for Blue, who refused to brave the woods. His sleep was finally sweet again, free of nightmares for the first time in recent memory.

He arranged to meet the property agent on Friday afternoon while the others were out on a hike. Waiting at the foot of the drive, he halfheartedly smoked a cigarette; in the past couple of days, he’d only had two or three. The taste had become newly awful to him, as if the pack had staled overnight.
Maybe it’
s time I finally quit
, he thought, and stubbed out the butt beneath the heel of his engineer boot.

A dirty maroon Chevy Suburban pulled over to the side of the road, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust. “You Michael? Stanley Baker,” the agent said with a smile. “Ready to go?”

Dressed in a black-and-red-checked shirt, his collar crumpled beneath a frizzy gray ponytail, Stanley bore little resemblance to the pseudoslick salesmen that Blue and his mother had traipsed after into dozens of rat holes over the years. They made small talk on the short drive; it turned out he was also a licensed attorney, so they could take care of the sale as soon as Blue saw the house. “It isn’t in great shape,” Stanley warned, “but you got a decent price for it. They’re foreign buyers, from Belgium. Go figure. There’s a lot on the market just sitting, so consider yourself lucky.” He went on to offer his condolences, which Blue thanked him for, though he felt a bit of an imposter seeing as how he hadn’t seen or spoken to Grandma Flora since he was five.

Near the top of Kelly’s Mountain, the elevation caused Blue’s ears to pop. They popped again a few minutes later on the other side, where they wound their way down and then up a dirt path, the forest thickening as Portland Road snaked northward.
To grandmother’s house we go,
he thought, and grimaced.

Just before the turnoff they passed a ramshackle old church that appeared to have slid into disuse, its birch exterior peeling white with its bell tower half collapsed, the bell itself nowhere to be seen. An enormous anchor rested in the small patch of unruly grass between the church and the road, beside which stood a weathered sign, a stark black-on-white Celtic cross insignia crowning the words
Christ Church 1818 W. Macleod
. The bottom half of the sign was a changeable copy board, a verse of scripture spelled out in a stark red procession of crooked letter tiles.

AND GOD SAID LET THEM HAVE DOMINION

OVER ALL THE EARTH

OVER EVERY CREEPING THING

THAT CREEPETH UPON THE EARTH

Blue felt a tightness in his throat and covered his mouth, turning his head to cough. By the time he looked up again, the church was out of view.

Five more minutes down the road and there, across a vast clearing, was Grandma Flora’s house. He’d come to picture it as the dark stage piece behind the Bates Motel, an imposing, widow’s-walked home with a shadowy figure visible in the window, if you looked closely enough. But in reality the house turned out to be entirely unthreatening, faded green clapboard with a gabled roof. It was modest in size, akin to a Cape Cod
cottage, not sinister as much as sedate. It was the house from his dream: the one past the field dotted by wildflowers, where he had heard the sounds of children at play.

He followed the property agent up the rotted porch steps. As Stanley struggled with the key and pushed against the door with his shoulder, the wood warped in its damaged frame, Blue felt a frisson of apprehension.
Maybe this wasn
’t such a good idea
, he wanted to say, but instead said nothing at all. The door soon gave, and the agent nudged it the rest of the way open with his foot, yielding a glimpse of the foyer and the staircase just beyond.

“You coming?” Stanley said. He smiled and cocked his head toward the door.

Blue strode past him and inside. The house was musty and dark, with every window shaded, the only light from the open door. The remains of a dozen houseplants lined the hall, where they sagged upon a series of wicker plant stands, littered among an impressive panoply of cracked terra-cotta pots.

“Can we go up first?” Blue asked, placing his unreadiness to explore the downstairs at the feet of a noxious odor emanating from somewhere past the stairs.

Atop the house was an abbreviated atticlike floor, the low-ceilinged space packed with all manner of crap—boxes and busted dressers stuffed with old clothes, hundreds of moldering romance novels piled waist-high, chipped Virgin Mary figurines and other religious bric-a-brac, gold-leaf crosses nailed to the four walls. A futile dam of possessions, assembled to ward off the inevitable.

Downstairs, the makeshift bedroom at the back was dark and smelled like piss and unwashed flesh. “Well . . .” Stanley let the rest of his sentence hang in the stale air, the awkward
silence bisected by the ringing of his cellphone. “Got to take this,” he said quickly, and backed toward the living room and the porch beyond. Blue covered his nose and ducked inside the room.

Past an unmade hospital bed, two tabletops were nailed across the window frames, the legs sawed off and jammed into the extra spaces above the ledges. The almond wallpaper danced with the thin shapes of sparkle-eyed kiddies busy sledding, or sweeping; they wore wool mittens and little hats and shiny shoes, trailing sacks of twigs for kindling in their wake. In a partially rendered eatery, a cherubic little boy slyly dipped a hand into a cauldron of rich chocolate batter. Some of the children linked arms in jigging circles, while others were alone, curled up in the creases of the walls. Around the windows the wallpaper was peeled away, though thin slivers remained: a bodiless face here, a headless girl there, lending the room a disturbing air of decapitation.