The Glory Hand (27 page)

She gestured at the stub of a joint in the ashtray. 'What kind of grass have you been smoking?'

'And there are voices . . . I've heard voices, Barbara, singing.'

'Jake, this place isn't good for you. Come back to New York with me.'

'I can't. The music that comes from out there ... I need it.'

'The music's in your head.'

it's
not\
It's out
thereV
He shot a finger towards the door. Then his eyes locked with hers. 'You don't believe me, do you? Christ, I shouldn't have expected you to understand. How could you?'

'Help me understand.' She glanced at the tapes scattered on top of the MoQg. 'Play me what you've done.' She waited, watched him weighing the decision. For years it had been a ritual with them - she'd beg him to let her hear his work-in-progress and he would resist at first. But he had always given in, grateful for her support.

'No,' he said. She reached for a tape, but he snatched it away.
'I said noV

'All right.' She backed off, confused. She had learned to deal with Jake's self-hatred, but not this . . . obsession.

'I want you to go now, Barbara.' He took her arm and opened the door for her. For a moment, she thought that his look was one of pleading, that this time he needed her to leave as much as he once might have needed her to stay Her eyes were brimming with tears as she felt his lips brush against her cheek. Without returning the kiss, she ran from the porch towards the car. In the three steps it took her to cross the clearing, the cicadas surged louder. Switching on the ignition, she glanced back towards the cabin, hoping he had changed his mind, hoping that he had run out onto the porch to call her back. But he was busy connecting the microphone cable to the Nagra. She gunned the Chevette up the dirt driveway, the evergreens a blur through hei tears.

When she lost sight of the cabin in the rearview mirror she pulled the tape from the folds of her skirt. '7/30, yesterday's date, was written across it. She wondered how long it would take Jake to realize she'd stolen it.

Listening to Jake's music on the tape .' . . Barbara wa convinced it would be the only way to understand what wa going on inside of him. As she nosed the car onto State 34C to Bangor, she hoped to God that the tape wasn't blank.

Chapter 23

The two girls embraced in the light of the campfire on the beach. Cassie watched them from where she stood, con cealed on the edge of the forest: Abigail, kissing one of the girls from Lakeside, the younger girl's face hidden a Abigail embraced her, and plunged her tongue into he mouth.

Their torches planted in the sand, the seniors surroundec the girls from Lakeside, who watched the ritual with the same obedient silence that they had watched Miss
Grace
You chose the right time to be away at the ice house, Cassie thought. At least you escaped the Spinning. But who
had
they chosen? Against the fire's glare it was impossible to recognize which of Cassie's bunkmates Abigail embraced.

And then Abigail withdrew her lips, and Cassie recognized the frail girl in her arms. 7ns.' Cassie barely mouthed the name, but in the silence, it carried so far that the girls at the campfire turned towards her. She stepped out from the trees, onto the sand.

'Cassie!' Iris' usually somber eyes shone with a radiance Cassie hadn't seen in them before. 'I can't believe it. They picked
meV

'You don't have to go.' Cassie tried to remain calm. 'You don't have to, Iris.'

'We only ask once,' Abigail said to Iris. 'That is, if we ask at all.'

'They can't make you go, Iris.' Cassie's voice had a dull ring.

'But don't you see?' Iris reached out to Cassie with both hands, in a sweeping, self-confident gesture. 'No one's
making
me do anything. I mean, they really
want
me!'

Cassie understood enough to know that it would be pointless to argue with her. It was clear what Iris was feeling:
My whole life I've wanted to belong somewhere. I can't pass up the chance now.

But
Iris
? The girl the seniors had tormented more than any of the others? Why Iris? it's bullshit,' Cassie said. 'You know they don't give a shit about you.'

Robin stepped closer to Iris. 'You're just jealous.'

'You wish we'd chosen you,' Abigail laughed.

iris . . . please . . . don't . . .' Cassie could hear herself begging, and she realized that she must look like Iris had looked when she had arrived at camp, small and scared and strangely old.

Abigail held a silver pendant out to Iris, the chain dangling from her fist, it's yours.'

Instead of taking it, Iris clutched the crucifix around her neck and squeezed it, the way she squeezed it when she was afraid. She understands, Cassie thought - Iris knows I was speaking the truth. She must be holding the crucifix so tightly to summon her strength.

Then, with a violent twist of her wrist, Iris snapped the thin gold chain and threw the crucifix into the fire. The flames leapt higher, and Cassie backed away from the heat There had never been a prayer of stopping Iris, she could see that. What Abigail offered, Iris needed too desperately to refuse.

Slowly Abigail opened her fist and held out the silver pendant, like a prize. Iris slipped the necklace over her head, and in the glimmer of the firelight, Cassie saw it.

To shut it out of her mind, she turned and ran. But her labored breathing, the pounding of her feet on the sand could not block out the awareness: A tiny silver hanc dangled around Iris' neck, a silver hand with sharp pointec fingers, like the hand on her mother's ring. Glinting in the light from the fire, the sharp fingers had seemed tipped with claws of flame.

The screen door banged shut behind her as Cassie ran into her cabin, and she glanced over at the bunk: Iris' footlocker was gone, her mattress stripped of its sleeping bag anc pillow. They had left only one of Iris' belongings behind the crucifix on the wall. The way it hung there, gray in the shadows, it reminded Cassie of the mounted animal head in the dining hall, something that had once been alive, now dead.

And then she saw something else, on the floor under the bed: a Kotex wrapper. So it had finally happened - the change Iris had been both dreading and eagerly awaiting Suddenly it struck Cassie - that was why the seniors hac chosen her tonight.

And Robin?

The first night of the Spinning, when they had picket Robin, hadn't Robin been sick? Hadn't she seemed to take pride in some secret pain? Cassie tried to recall if that pride had been on Iris' face tonight.

When you become a woman. That's when they want you. That's when they get you.

Waves were lapping at the pilings beneath the cabin,
and
Cassie remembered the riptides off Nantucket, the way the
_wa
ves had a pull of their own that nothing could stop. She
_w0
ndered if the tide that had taken Robin's body, and Iris',
would
take hers too.

Stop thinking.

Her arms and legs ached from the day's punishment: the
tumble
down the chute into the ice house, and the weight of the rusty blade. Her mind ached like her muscles, with a gnawing pain that she doubted would ever heal.

She lay back on her bunk and when she closed her eyes she saw her mother, the frightened girl in the photo on Miss Grace's wall. Had Ann Cunningham become a woman at Casmaran, too? Had her soul undergone the transformation that was even more drastic that the one that had seized hold of her body?

She became one of them, and she wanted you to become one of them, too.

Impossible.

Borne on the wind, music filtered into the cabin from somewhere in the forest, and Cassie was certain that she knew its source. The Spinning, reaching its secret climax.

You've got to find out what they do there. What they did to your mother. What they want to do to Iris.

Stop them.

Laughter outside the cabin window. Cassie jumped down from her bunk and looked through the dusty windowpane. The campfire had burned to embers, and her bunkmates were coming across the beach towards the cabin. Without taking time to pull her jeans on over her leotard, she slipped into tennis shoes, and eased open the door. Crouching low, she darted down the ramp and across the lawn, around the back of the lodge. As she picked her way among the headstones in the graveyard, the moon diseased the lake in its glow, transforming the trees, the grass, her body, into marble.

The music. It drifted out of the forest to meet Cassie like a swamp mist. Usually, with a dancer's love of movement, she let music sweep her along. But not tonight. Her legs defied the rhythm, deliberately ran against it, the way she

g.h.-g
might have avoided wading across a river with a treacherous current. Cautiously, she followed the music up the
slope
towards the seniors' cottage.

The windows of the white clapboard cabin were dark, and the embers of the firepit where Abigail and the others had begun their procession for the Spinning smoldered greenish-blue. More like ice than fire, Cassie thought. The ashes smelled strange . . . foul . . . and among them were remains of something charred. Cassie wondered what Abigail and Robin and their friends had fed to the fire before they had abandoned it.

The music called to her much more clearly here, as if it were beamed directly towards the hill, and she plunged into the forest, towards its source. The music came in waves, like the chanting of the cicadas, taunting her, luring her down one trail, only to weaken again in volume, as if it were coming from another direction entirely. The music was like a cunning, breathing thing, she thought, deliberately deceiving her, leading her through a maze of paths to conceal its lair. And in the game of hide and seek, she found herself being led into a part of the forest where she had not been.

In her haste, she lost her balance. Her heels slipped off the edge of the trail and she tumbled down a rocky slope. When she hit bottom, she stood up and wiped the dirt anc pebbles from her hands. She listened. The music was playing a cruel joke. It sounded farther away now than i had from the porch of her cabin.

She turned slowly to get her bearings. The moon hac slid out from behind the clouds to reveal a gigantic silhouette looming in the darkness. The Hanging Tree? She approached it slowly . . . Wasn't it in the opposite direction from the trail she had just taken?

It can't be.

The thick trunk with gnarled roots that buckled the earth . . . The canopy of leaves . . . She reached out to run her fingers across its scarred bark, to touch, for a moment, the initials her mother had carved there.

But instead of feeling wood under her fingertips, she touched an arm, an arm reaching out from behind the tree
_trun
k, clawing suddenly out of the dark to grab her. She
staggered
backward, and her mind skidded
wildly:
the ice men? The ice men again?

Runpleaserun . . .

Now that she needed it, the steely moon abandoned her, smothered by the clouds as though a dark hand had concealed its face. Groping blindly, she stumbled head-on into . . .

Another man.

Powerful arms reached out to clutch her, and she tried to fight free, the moon knifed out again: the sunken cheeks, the beaklike nose, the slicked-down black hair molding his skull, like the feathers of a bird of prey . . . The man from the ice house. The man she had escaped once.

But not this time. He slid a flashlight beam down her body, the circle of light descending in a slow, lascivious caress.

'No!' The word came out in a groan, an admission of defeat, for she knew she couldn't fight free of his grip.

'Let her go:

The man who had emerged from behind the Hanging Tree was walking towards her, his face still in shadow, his footfalls heavy on the pine needles. Even before he turned his flashlight on his face, the smell of stale sweat and Old Spice told her who it was. The crewcut... the small, ferret eyes. The square jaw massacring a wad of gum.

'Runt?'

Seconds after that shocked moment of recognition, everything would change more drastically, more horribly than any of the three of them standing beside the Hanging Tree could have imagined. Soon Runt would realize that he didn't really have everything under control at all. But up until then, Wayne N. Runtledge and his partner, Len Ryan, had had things pretty much their own way, ever since Senator Clayburn Broyles had sent the two of them into the Casmaran Woods to make sure that no kidnappers or assassins - and certainly no reporters - interrupted the tranquility of his daughter's summer at camp. It would have been a lot easier, Runt had argued, without the secrecy But the Senator had given his word to Cassie that she cou](] go to camp without her least favorite chaperone. And Ij^ any dedicated politician, Runt judged, Broyles felt the need to preserve appearances, even while breaking a promise.

It had been a royal pain, camping out in the woods, forced to live off freeze-dried stew, with so much meat-on-the-hoof walking around, just asking for it.
They
could have bagged God knows how many good-sized bucks, except that a single blast from Runt's Walther would have blown their cover. Still, in its own way, it beat being assigned to a limo detail in Washington: one hand on their binoculars, the other on their dicks, watching the teenybop-pers at Casmaran changing into and out of their bikini undies. (The counselors weren't so bad, either.) No, Runt had to admit, there were worse ways to spend the summer than getting paid a hundred bucks a day to jerk off.