The Glory Hand (21 page)

God, he would do anything to be able to write music
Real
music. When he was young, creative, he mused, he had thought the problem had been whether or not to sel out. But now that he had hit rock bottom, now that he was ready - even eager - to sell his soul, he had come to the grim conclusion that nobody was interested in buying.

The fire on the hilltop across the lake, so far away that it looked like a yellow moon that had collided with the trees . . . he didn't understand that, either. The only fire he had seen here before was the nightly campfire at Casmaran, on the opposite shore. But this one had to be a good hour's trek into the forest, in the middle of nowhere. The fire, a fierce and hungry orange, must be enormous.

It reminded him of the Burning Man.

He hadn't thought of the Burning Man for months, maybe years, but he had dreamt of him often enough. It had been little more than a bad joke at first, a spot of black
humor.
In the sixties, he had been the youngest composer to have a piece performed at Lincoln Center. His moment of
g'
^or
y
had been turned into disaster by the critics, and adding to the debacle, was the protester who had chosen that evening to set himself on fire on the plaza in front of Alice Tully Hall. The corpse had never been identified -nor the cause for which he gave his life. But Felix Cruller, the most perverse of the critics, had made the most of it in the
Times,
suggesting that the self-immolation of Jake's career had been just as sudden and complete. The photo of the Burning Man had wound up next to the review, as though it were an illustration, and something had driven Jake to save it, the kneeling man engulfed by flames, as though it were a picture of himself the night he had died.

Staring at the fire burning on the distant hill, Jake wondered how it must have felt, that decisive moment when the man had set himself on fire. It had been a creative decision, he decided, and like all creative decisions, irreversible. One which for boldness, he knew he could never rival. The distant bonfire shot orange streaks into the sky, and he felt a strange certainty that it must have been the color of the fire when it had consumed the man, as though flames took on a fiercer hue when they devoured something alive. The wind rose in his ears, and he wondered if that was how the roar of the flames had sounded to the Burning Man, the last music he had ever heard, like the beating of wings.

The sudden wind bore another sound ... a sound that didn't come from nature. Its sharper edge pricked Jake's consciousness, like the shards of flint in the dirt of the clearing that caught the light of the moon.

At first he thought it was only the alcohol or the grass that had transformed the mournful sigh of the wind into
this.
Yet, as his ears filtered out the enveloping evening wind to grasp the eerie strains, he knew that it wasn't a figment of his weary imagination.

Music. Neither harmony nor cacophony, but the fusion of violently clashing notes and rhythms from deep in the night.

Melodic? No, he couldn't call it that. But hypnotic . M haunting. Terrifying, as passion, overheard, can be. Was it a celebration? A lament? He tried to analyze the components, but the alien scale, the primitive rhythms, didn't yield to reason.

Then why did he respond so intensely to it? It touched a part of him that he thought had died long ago, the part that could respond to music, not as a technique or craft, but as pure emotion. It aroused the child in him, the spark of wonder that he thought he had lost.

He tried to distinguish the individual instruments that melded so seamlessly: strings, plucked with feverish fingers, but with a timbre like no violin or guitar he had ever heard; a reed horn with a somber, ominous tone; a drum, pounding as insistently as a heartbeat. And . . .
voices'
? They seemed to be filtered, not only through distance, but also through time, echoing across hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, like a buried memory from a lost civilization. Sounds which for their purity, their power, were more intense and vivid than any music today. He knew he would never be able to imitate them on his electronic synthesizer, for all its ten thousand transistors. 1

Jake hurried inside and brought out his Nagra, threading on a tape and walking towards the edge of the clearing. He clamped on his earphones and aimed the Sennheiser microphone in the direction of the sounds, stepping lightly on the earth, as if afraid his footsteps might scare them away. But in only a few minutes, the music faded with the dying wind. He strained forward with the microphone to catch the final notes, and then they were gone, lost in the breeze taunting the pine boughs.

Something inside of him still vibrated to the music,
and
the resonance tempted him to reach deep into himself, tempted him to unearth melodies of his own. They
had
been elusive, those forest rhythms, but they had
lingered
long enough to spark a feeling, astonishing and a little bit terrifying - that he still might have something left to say in his music. All of a sudden Jake knew he wasn't going to leave tomorrow.

He guessed that it was the most important decision of his life.

Chapter 17

Robin was dead. It was crazy to think that, of course, paranoid, Cassie knew that. But it didn't make her any less certain. Back at the cabin the night before, when she had waited up to ask Sarah where they had taken Robin, Sarah had just smiled and said,
'It's a camp tradition. They do it when they need one of the younger girls . . .'

Cassie had lain awake in her bunk all night, watching the moon dissolve into the lake, thinking
they need one of the younger girls for what
? And when dawn came and still Robin hadn't come back, Cassie had started to rock, rocking with the rhythm of her mother's lullabies, the drowsy pace of the heartbeat. It hadn't put her to sleep.

Now, as she stumbled down the trail along with the others on the morning hike, she tried to remember Robin, to picture her face in her mind. It was as hard as it had been to picture her mother's face after that day at Woods Hole.

'Death Caps . . . Destroying Angels . . . Spring Amanitas .. . My God, have you ever seen so many poisonous mushrooms?' Iris scribbled the names of the species in a spiral notebook as she picked her way among them, the fleshy fungi clinging to rotting logs in their path.

Sarah was ahead up the trail, in the next stand of pines. She hadn't taken them to this part of the forest before, Cassie realized. Why were they suddenly hiking through an area where everything was so dangerous? Cassie kicked at a clump of Destroying Angels, grinding them to a yellow pulp under her heel as she passed. Death Caps pushed up through cracks in the lichened rocks, and as she stepped on them, they made a sighing noise, the scent of sour milk rising to her nostrils. She was desperate to talk to someone about what had happened last night, but Iris was hopeless.

'I mean, I've seen poison oak and poison ivy before.' Iris slipped her finger into the notebook to keep her place. 'But can you believe it?
Brain Gyrometra.'
She poked a
tiny
mottled green fungus on a tree stump with her pencil.
'Its
cap looks just like a human forebrain, see? There must
be
hundreds of them, thousands . . . enough to wipe out
the
entire summer population of Maine.'

There was something poisonous about this place, Cassie brooded, the camp, the lake, the woods. There had to be to take her friend from her. Robin only came here to keep you company, Cassie thought. Were you really the one at fault? You should have held onto Robin, just like you should have held onto your mother . . .

The others had hiked far ahead, and Cassie didn't have the energy to catch up with them. She slumped down on tree stump, and Iris joined her.

'Do you realize that ninety percent of all the people who die from eating poisonous mushrooms in the US die from those in the Amanita family?' Cassie didn't answer. 'Look if you're not interested . . .'

'I'm not.'
Why don't you just shut up
? Cassie wanted to say to the girl with the long-winded scientific explanation' that never explained anything. Why did she always have tc try to impress you with how much she knew? Since Robin had gone, Iris had stuck close to her, the way those mushrooms stuck to the logs, Cassie thought. As if she hac inherited her friendship from Robin. Cassie resented it. She didn't want the other girls to lump her in with the weirdc from South Boston.

Iris held up a pink flower that poked up between the toadstools. 'This is windflower. It likes to live among the poisonous fungi. In the Middle Ages, they used to brew tea from its leaves to induce menstruation.' She crushed the petals between her fingers and threw them to the ground.

God, I need Robin.
Robin had always been able to tel her when her anxieties were full of it. How could Iris pu her heart to rest? Cassie thought, Iris, who blew things ou of proportion.

'This forest. . . It's positively lethal! Maybe we could ge it in the
Guinness Book of World Records
or something.' Iris edged between two clumps of red-tipped poison oak. 'It must be the soil. . .' She laughed nervously and dug her toe into the black volcanic dirt. 'Something decaying here that makes this weird stuff grow . . .' She took a few more steps and froze.

Cassie bumped into her. 'What is it now?
The Mushroom That Ate Cleveland?'

Iris pointed towards a clump of blackberry bushes. 'God . . . He's got a gun!' She ran up the trail, towards Sarah.

Cassie peered cautiously into the bushes. When she saw who it was, she broke into a smile. Jake. The 'gun' he held was a shotgun microphone - she'd seen TV crews using them at her father's speeches. In her eagerness to reach him, she crashed through the bushes.

A flock of blue birds exploded from a tree.

'Jesus Christ!' He pulled off his headphones. 'You scared the goddamn meadowlarks away.'

'Those weren't meadowlarks.'
It was Sarah, with Iris and the other girls at her side. 'They're bluejays. And they sound like hell.'

The birds fluttered back to roost in another tree, and broke into a hoarse, grating cackle. Sarah's eyes met Jake's and both of them laughed. They stood there, looking at each other without talking, Cassie noticed, the way two people do when they have never seen each other before but want to know each other. Cassie could have killed them both.

'I guess my experience with wildlife never got much past Central Park.' It annoyed Cassie the way the moment he laid eyes on Sarah he turned on the charm. He was staring at Sarah's body and Cassie could see why: with the light falling behind her, Sarah's breasts were clearly visible through the flimsy cloth of her Indian blouse.

Sarah gave a toss of her head and her blonde hair shimmered. 'So what's your excuse?'

'Excuse?'

'You're trespassing on camp property.'

'Shame on me.' He smiled. 'I was just, you know,

recording some sounds to put into this piece I'm working on

»

'Piece?'

'Electronic music. I'm a composer. I thought some bird song . . .
real
birds . . . might work well in the thing I'm putting together.' He gestured towards the tin roof of his cabin, visible through the trees. 'Want to come by and hear it? We could have a beer . . .'

The sonofabitch. He didn't offer me a thing.
Cassie, glanced around at the other girls: Melanie, Chelsea, Jo, even Iris . . . They were eating it up, gaping as if they'd never seen a man before. She bit her lip.
If they realize you're jealous . . .

'You know you're not supposed to go any further than the edge of the clearing,' Sarah said, but she was smiling. 1

'I've got criminal tendencies.'

Sarah had come here deliberately today - there was no question in Cassie's mind now - just to meet him. How could she have been so stupid not to see it coming?

'Well, now that you know where I am,' he said to Sarah,! 'drop in any time . . . while the kiddies are taking a nap.' He took all the campers in at a glance, and Cassie could see that he hardly recognized her.
You were dumb to think anything else.

Sarah toyed with the whistle around her neck, it's against the rules, of course.'

'I think I'm going to puke,' Cassie whispered to Iris, then turned abruptly and headed back towards camp.

God, it hurt to walk out like that, Cassie thought. It wouldn't have been so bad if she'd had Robin to confide in, but without her, she felt totally alone. She stumbled as she took a shortcut through the woods. She hated herself for her adolescent awkwardness, her little-girl body . . . hated herself for having a crush on Jake, even though he obviously didn't know she was alive.

Iris caught up with her. 'I suppose they'll probably copulate,' she said, with as much distaste as she had described the poisonous mushrooms.

'The word,' Cassie murmured icily, 'is
fuck.
Well let them.' Iris nodded. At least she had
her
fooled, Cassie thought.