The Glory Hand (19 page)

His smile faded. 'Cassie ... the thing with your mother. I'm sorry. Jesus, it must have been horrible for you.'

She said nothing. There had been too many such expressions of sympathy, and they had stopped meaning anything months ago. She nodded at the synthesizer. 'Play me something you wrote . . .'

'Are you sure?' He studied her, as if trying to judge her sincerity.

'Please?'

'Why not?' he sighed. 'Somebody has to have the rare opportunity to be the first to hear my "work in progress." '

'I'm sure it's great.'

He pulled an eight-track tape from a stack of them and threaded it on a Nagra tape recorder above the Moog. 'Electronic music is actually a composite. You make as many tracks as you want: different sounds, rhythms. Mix them together on a master. Then you add new sounds on the keyboard, live, to give it spontaneity. Kind of like a duet with yourself.'

He switched the tape recorder to 'playback' and his fingers started to fly over the keys. Harsh sounds reverberated from a pair of speakers, the notes jarring, clashing with the electronic bleeps and grating chords on the tape. The discordant notes sounded cold, metallic, as devoid of emotion as if they'd been generated by a computer, and Cassie squirmed. When the tape finally ran out and he raised his hands from the keyboard, he took a deep breath. 'Well. . .?'

Cassie forced a smile. 'It was very interesting.'

As he cut the power and the electronic hum faded, his own energy seemed to ebb, too. He slumped forward and stared at his hands. 'Was it thait bad?'

'All I meant was,' she backpedaled, 'well, you couldn't exactly
dance
to it.'

'What the hell has dancing got to do with it?'

Cassie shrank back from his outburst. 'I don't know. I just guess I like music I can dance to.'

He stared at her for a moment, then his voice softened. 'You're right. It would be a real pain in the ass to have to dance to
that:
He picked up the butt of a cigarette in an ashtray and lit up. 'Let's face it. It's even hard to
listen
to it.'

'But I mean, there are some very interesting sounds . 3 Unusual. . . really.'

'Making "unusual" sounds is a far cry from making music. You know what the fucking music critic of the
Times
said about the last piece I was able to get an audience to sit through?
A study in cacophony ... an affront to the auditory nerve endings
..." You throw the bad reviews away . . . burn them. But those are the ones you remem ber. Word for fucking word. Funny . . .' For the first time since she had met him, the humor was gone from his voice. 'Christ, I compose, mix it . . . shmeckle until I think its perfect. Then when I play it back, I wonder if God had intended us to stick to making music with our lips and our hands.' Brutally he pushed the two keyboards back into the console, then removed the reel from the tape deck anc paused, as if he were debating whether to throw the tape in the trash. 'Anyway, I don't know what possessed me to ask
your
opinion.' His voice took on an insulting, defensive edge. 'I mean, what the hell do you know?'

'You're right,' she said. 'What
do
I know?' She hoped it would make hirn feel better, but she could see from the hurt on his face that he cared terribly about what she thought.

He stood up and tried to drain a final swig from a beer on the console. The can was empty, and he mashed it with his fist, then hurled it towards a carton filled with garbage. It missed and clattered across the floor. He gestured to the darkening sky outside. 'Aren't they going to send out the bloodhounds if you don't get back soon?' He was pouting, like a little boy, she thought. Or a self-centered artist.

it must take a lot of dedication to come up here for the summer alone . . . just to work.' He didn't answer. Maybe he didn't believe her admiration was genuine. Her mother would have respected Jake, she thought. Her mother hac had great respect for artists, maybe because she had been a failed one herself.

She stepped to the door, but hesitated, wanting to comfort Jake, the way she had wanted to comfort her father when he had been wallowing in the same kind of self-pity. And she was tempted to touch him, in a way she had never touched her father. But she stepped out onto the rickety porch instead. Through a latticework of trees at the far side of the clearing, she saw the lake. Her feelings were intense, but out of focus, like the campfire at Casmaran on the opposite shore that shimmered on the water, like a sudden flaring of
scorpaena.
Without another word, she jumped down from the porch, and ran towards the woods.

Jake ... It had been a delicious fear, the clumsy goodbye, the compulsion to reach out to him ... to kiss him? . . . that she had fought to conceal. It made her giddy with an excitement that she hadn't felt since the night she had kissed Todd, what seemed years ago.

When she found herself enmeshed in the bramble thicket, it struck her that she should have asked Jake to walk her back. She started to run towards the cabin, but stopped. She didn't want to take the risk that he would refuse her. Besides, it seemed terribly important that he not see her as a little girl. She smiled as she broke into a run. Jake's music was the
worst.
He was smelly and sweaty and hairy and
Jewish
, and certainly drunk, and most likely all washed up, too . . . Maybe he was even crazy. She hoped to God that she'd see him again.

And then she saw the procession of torches coming towards her through the woods.

Chapter 15

The torches flared through the thorn branches, tipping the tiny spines with barbs of flame, as the procession snaked towards her. Abigail led the seniors, and though their firebrands must have been heavy, they held them high as they marched with an eerie silence through the woods. Cassie could smell the torches - rags dipped in kerosene -and the smell brought back the straw men, and the way the fire had breathed them to life the moment before they burned.

What were those bitches going to set on fire tonight? she wondered. Or whom?

She hid behind a boulder at the edge of the trail, pressed her body so tightly against it that she felt the coarse texture of the lichen on her cheek.

They were close enough to her that she could see that Abigail and the other seniors had painted their faces a ghostly white. She was certain they would see her too, that she would be trapped in the flare of their torches. She held her breath.

And yet they didn't see her. They looked right through her as they neared, passing only yards away. Their eyes seemed drugged, glinting darkly in the torchlight like thorns.

She felt instinctively that they were hunting for her, but that awareness didn't set her mind at ease. Wherever they were heading in their strange trance - whatever their goal -she sensed she would feel the after-shock.

Once the torches dissolved into the forest, night trapped her in its web. She groped her way down the gully, towards the trail that led back to camp. When she emerged on the playing field, she glanced over her shoulder: the torches had not followed her.

Or maybe they had. The stars seemed to burn as brightly as the torches, a confused procession across the sky. Insteac of heading directly to the campfire by the beach in the distance, Cassie doubled back through Lakeside, so tha Sarah and the others would think that she had been there al afternoon.

When she reached the campfire, a wind from the lake wa fanning the blaze, so that the campers were forced to retreat back from the first row of split-log benches facing the firepit, to escape the flames that leapt out at them. On the second row of benches, Sarah was strumming a guita and singing 'Tom Dooley.' The campers joined in, boister ously offkey. Sarah had a pleasant, lilting voice, Cassie thought. She sang as effortlessly as she danced. When Sarah winked at her, Cassie started over to tell her about Jake.

But something held her back. It wasn't that Sarah migh bawl her out for going off-limits. It was the other girls. She
could
imagine what their teasing would be like if they overheard. She glanced around the campfire: Chelsea was giggling, Melanie and Jo toasting marshmallows and stuffing them into graham-cracker sandwiches with squares of Hershey Bar. If they found out where she'd been . . .

She edged to the far end of the bench, and sat down between Robin and Iris.

'Where were you?' Iris asked. Cassie didn't answer. Instead, she popped two marshmallows from the cellophane bag into her mouth, realizing that she had missed dinner. 'We needed you. They were going to
drown
him.'

'Drown
who'V
Cassie glanced uneasily towards the fire as a blazing log spat out a shower of hot coals and collapsed into ashes.

'Him.' Iris opened the front of her jacket to reveal a white kitten curled against her T-shirt. 'The cook's cat . . . that big black Manx that's always prowling around . . . She went into labor right in the middle of dinner. I mean, it was gross . . . She would give this kind of shriek, and then a kitten would come popping out. She would barely have time to lick it off before another was born, and then another and another.' Cassie stroked the kitten's head. 'There were seven of them, each one pure black,' Iris continued, 'And then this one.' The white kitten opened its mouth to mew, but no sound came out. 'The mother cat wouldn't lick this one off like the others . . . wouldn't let it near her milk. It was like she didn't want it to live. That's why they decided to drown it.'

'Who's they?' Cassie knew the answer, of course. They had very nearly drowned
her
today. She took the kitten from Iris and pressed its tiny body against hers. She could feel its heartbeat against her chest, as fragile as a butterfly's beating wings.

'"Put it out of its misery," Abigail said. Can you imagine? And the seniors were all hot to go along with her. So before they came back, I grabbed him.'

' YouT
Cassie was surprised at Iris' boldness.

'I didn't have any choice.' There was pride in Iris' voice. 'Robin wasn't any help. She's been totally out of it . . .'

Cassie realized that Robin hadn't spoken a word,
and
turned to her. 'What's up?'

'I needed you,' Robin said. There was an accusing edge to the past tense, as if she felt that Cassie had abandoned her.

'Tell me . . .' Robin didn't answer. 'Here.' Cassie held the kitten out to her. 'Whatever it is, he'll make you feel better.'

Robin leaned closer to take the kitten. Even in the ruddy glow of the flames, she looked terribly pale. She cradled the kitten as gently, it seemed, as she wished someone would cradle her.

'Come on . . . what's wrong?' Cassie asked again. No answer. Just a look of acceptance on Robin's face, as if she were somehow taking pride in what was causing her pain. 'You're not going to tell me?'

'Not this time.' A strange smile crossed Robin's lips.

'I don't get it.' This was the way things were supposed to be, wasn't it? The way Robin had wanted it. Robin the dependent one, Cassie the rescuer. Only Robin wasn't playing by the rules. 'Look, if you're sick, Robin, I'll take you back to the cabin.'

But Robin's eyes had focused on something in the forest, something emerging onto the lawn. The torches.

Above Sarah's voice singing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,' a chant drifted towards the campfire.

"Who will it be tonight?

Whose turn will it be?

Who will be the lucky one?

The Spinning holds the key.'

'The spinning.' There was a quaver in Chelsea's voice.

'Spinning?'

'Jesus, Cassie.' Chelsea rolled her eyes and smoothed out the wrinkles in her satin Dodgers jacket. 'Don't you know anything?'

'Who will it be tonight?

Whose turn will it be?

Who will be the lucky one?

The Spinning holds the key.'

Sarah stopped strumming the guitar, and the voices of the girls around the campfire faded. The marshmallows that they had been roasting were suddenly forgotten, left to char among the coals. The seniors glided through the dark towards them, their eyes reduced to hollows in their chalk-white faces, their heads seeming to hover, disembodied in the air.

Cassie stood up. She wasn't going to take another one of Abigail's sadistic games, and she intended to tell Sarah so. But Sarah and the other counselors had left, distant silhouettes heading up the lawn towards the lodge.

Cassie grabbed Robin's arm. 'Let's get you to the infirmary.'

'You can't split,' Jo said.

'Why the hell not?'

Chelsea shot out a manicured hand to stop them: 'Everybody stays. Everybody
has
to.'

'Screw it. Robin's sick.' But Cassie could feel the hot breath of the torches on her neck.

'Who will it be tonight?

Whose turn will it be?

Who will be the lucky one?

The Spinning holds the key.'

The seniors planted their torches in the sand, then joined hands to surround the girls from Lakeside, circling faster and faster around them. The Spinning, Cassie thought. Whatever it was, she didn't want to be there when it ended.