The Golden (24 page)

Once again he
attempted to break free from the woman in white; once again he
failed.

“Bitch!”
he cried, and hurled himself about; the woman’s nails punched
into his wrist.

He tried to reel
her in by the forearm; he clawed at her, but she blocked his hand
away. He swung his fist, and this time, instead of blocking him, she
let the blow glance off the side of her head and returned a blow of
her own. Her fist caught him flush on the temple, leaving him
stunned, dangling limply in her grasp, watching the darkness flow
past and the lights turn first into stars, and then into demon cages.
He realized now it was useless to contend with her, and rather than
wasting his energy in plotting an escape, he sought comfort in his
memories, searching for something that would ease his fear. He was
not surprised when his thoughts settled on Alexandra.

Though he had
come to suspect almost everything about their involvement, it was the
one time that he could recall since his judgment when life had
surpassed his expectations, when something untrammeled had been
attained, even if that something was mere intensity, a bright flash
of being that seemed to exist outside of time, apart from the chains
of events that bound them to a path of conflict and distrust and
betrayal. One could not, he thought, derive much hope from such a
moment. It was a freak, a sport born of lightnings that had struck
and transfigured the body of their soiled emotions. Yet the simple
fact of its existence was in itself an embodiment of hope, like a
sign in the sky presaging some miraculous advent, and as he reclaimed
those memories, tasting their flavors and wrapping himself in their
colors and sensations, he felt if not hopeful, then at least cleaner
for having them within him. He tasted Alexandra’s mouth and
heard her whisper, experienced the sly touches of her long fingers,
rocked with her again in that immense funereal bed. He grew certain
that among these glints and quivers there must be a single moment
whose purity outstripped the duplicitous origins of the act, an
instance of sheer connectivity that offered some wholesome proof and
held a promise more lasting than that of sexual delight: an exchange
of looks, a peaceful interval in which they had known some heart’s
truth. If he had the time, he told himself, to study those memories
in sequence, surely he would be able to isolate that one absolute.
But he could not sustain the images, and on opening his eyes, he
discovered the woman in white watching him, trying to blight with her
poisonous dark stare whatever solace his memory had yielded.

Each time they
approached one of the lights, they would accelerate, sweeping past it
in a dizzying rush, and every one was as the first: a bright passage
blocked by some horrid creature or another, all snapping, biting,
slashing, narrowly missing Beheim. He had the idea he was being shown
that there was no way out, that this was a pocket of death the
Patriarch had isolated and made his own. What this signified, he
could not guess, but he did not believe it augured well. They hurtled
past a scorpion prowling the innards of a blue star, a wolf raving in
crimson fire, a white sun at whose heart nestled a gigantic worm,
past a variety of deformed men and women, past a fly wearing a crown,
past twists of darkness like living flaws at the center of burning
jewels, past a shifting puzzle of glowing silver bones, past winged
rats and apes with human genitals and bloated corpse faces with
adders’ tongues, until at last, beyond the clustered lights, he
made out a wire-thin strip of dead white that bisected the blackness,
lending the illusion of a horizon to that horizonless depth. Though
it seemed bland by contrast to the terrors he had already
encountered, he believed that this was either signal or symptom of
the ultimate terror of the place: the Patriarch. He felt an eerie,
cluttered sensation in his head, as if his brain were clogged with an
overabundance of thoughts, and this developed into a mental
discordance, shards of rage, peals of disgust, interludes of gloating
joy, blasts of implacable anger, and lustful thoughts like knives, a
mosaic of impressions that together composed a unity, a whole. He
understood that in penetrating the surface of the black pool, the
country of death, he had also penetrated the calm, chill surface of
the Patriarch’s mind and fallen into the chaos beneath, into
this little death he had made of all his years of feasts and dreams
and despondencies, an inky fever in which he endlessly soaked
himself, having no better way to pass the time, no greater use for
life, for he was growing ever closer to death, and yet because of his
nature he would never die, only grow more deathlike, just as in that
schoolboy theorem, the first mathematical clue one receives of the
utter incomprehensibility of the universe, it is stated that if one
attempts to travel from Point A to Point B by going half the
distance, then half the remaining distance, then half what is left
after that, and so on and so forth, one will never reach Point B but
will continue to fall short of one’s destination by
increasingly infinitesimal fractions, and thus one is fated to travel
forever between what was once the beginning and the end, or between
the towns of Reims and Mornay, or between whatever poles one has
chosen, poles that have by now evolved into two ludicrous
abstractions. It was, Beheim thought, this capacity to withstand the
bleakest and most irrational of environments, to thrive in the
absolute negative, that neutered the Family’s will to survive,
that persuaded them to twist each hopeful strand of being into
something even darker than the darkness of their origins, and caused
them to try to destroy that which was virtually indestructible. And
now he, too, was being contaminated by these tendencies, for though
the Patriarch’s ravings were resounding in his head and he was
traveling hand in hand with a woman who was nourished by corruption
and treachery, he was beginning to adapt to Mystery—and not
merely in order to survive as he had done after receiving Agenor’s
judgment. He was coming to appreciate its qualities, to derive
sustenance from it. It was not that he had grown less afraid; it was
rather that he had acknowledged fear instead of reacting against it;
and having acclimated to this degree, he was capable of looking
without prejudice at his surroundings, of understanding that they
were not absolutely inimical.

Suddenly the
black silence and the false stars and the cold rang a familiar change
in him, as if he had scented an old friendly smell or had of the
place a sense of commonality such as long ago—not so very long,
he thought, barely two years—he might have taken from a row of
plane trees standing sharp against a milky dawn near his father’s
house outside Irun, a white mist blanketing a potato field, the
powdery green burst of a myrtle bush, things that have seated
themselves so firmly in our hearts, we no longer notice them, but
that, when we are brought hard upon them after a lengthy absence,
cause a tremor in our souls. Things of home. That, he realized, was
the secret call of this darkness, the thing that softened his dread:
the knowledge that his birth could no longer be considered to have
occurred in Irun. Mystery was now his birthplace, the soil from which
he had sprung on his day of judgment and to which he would always
hereafter return. This emptiness, this abandoned well with its demons
and lights and torments had supplanted the spicy odor of his
grandfather’s venison stew, the purring of a favorite cat, the
tinkling of his mother’s piano with its ill-tuned high C
souring a Schumann waltz. Understanding this harrowed him, yet it
also gave him strength, attached him to a mooring that made his fall
seem less precipitous and in the end provided him with a ground on
which to stand, from which to wield whatever lever he could carpenter
against fate.

They were
nearing another golden light, one at whose center there capered a
scrawny, red-eyed old man with unkempt, shoulder-length gray hair,
all rags and fangs and bony, clutching fingers. Beheim, who had lost
confidence in the notion that the nature of his mission would assure
his safety, devised a plan. He engaged the eyes of the woman in
white, floating superimposed upon the black backdrop like an angel of
death and desire, her flesh showing sleek and gleaming through the
rips in her gown like the skin of a succulent. He beckoned to her
with his free hand, inviting her into an embrace. “I’m
frightened,” he said. “Let me come close for a moment.”
He knew that she would not be afraid of him, certain of her physical
superiority, and though she would suspect his actions, she would
delight in teasing him with the prospect of hope. He concentrated
with all his might on presenting an image of fear and entreaty.

She let him pull
her close but did not relax her grip. Her hips settled plushly
against him. Seen at that intimate distance, her face dissolved into
a pale blur dominated by those compelling eyes—to avoid being
mesmerized by them, he drew her into a kiss. Her lips tasted of stale
blood, and when she probed his mouth with her tongue, it felt thick
and clammy and snail-slow, like those mindless things one finds
half-alive in a spadeful of turned-up dirt. Yet that soiled kiss
claimed far more of his attention than he had wanted, and he had to
remind himself to keep watch over her shoulder as they closed on the
golden light with its aged sentinel, knowing he would have to time
his actions perfectly. Beyond the light, the strip of whiteness
strung across the void was lumping up in spots and acquiring the
lineaments of a smashed-thin face, a stretched toothy mouth flanked
by slit eyes with inflamed rims and notched pupils, like a monster
peering out from a corner of flatland that it was busy prying up.
Beheim forced his mind back to the woman in white and the old man,
but could not stop picturing the white thing taking shape in the
distance.

Rays of light
fingered them. What had appeared to be a star now became a golden
tunnel with a Devil at the bottom, and as they fell toward him Beheim
saw that the old man’s red eyes were not eyes at all, but
empty, bloody sockets, and his cadaverous cheeks were covered with a
dead man’s growth of stubble, and his tongue was bloated, dark
red, looking as if a slug had crawled halfway out of his mouth, and
his hands opened and closed, opened and closed with the spasmodic
reflex of someone freshly killed, and what he had taken for capering
was in reality a palsied jitter like the dance of a hanged man.

Beheim locked
his hands behind the woman’s back and deepened their kiss. She
pressed against him, apparently unsuspecting, still consumed by her
own treachery. A few seconds before they were to sweep past the grasp
of those groping, gray fingers, he doubted the wisdom of his plan,
perceiving its potential pitfalls and reversals; but there was no
time left to deliberate, and as they reached their closest point of
approach, using all his strength, he spun them about, going with the
pull of the woman’s hold rather than against it, changing their
course by a fraction, sufficient to bring her in range of the old
man’s right hand. His fingers hooked her shoulder, yanking her
away from Beheim. Shock hardened her face into a white mask. She
clutched at Beheim, but he fended her off, letting his momentum carry
him onward along their altered course, and slung himself toward the
heart of the light, catching sight—as he twisted and flailed—of
the two of them tangled together, biting and clawing, their fangs
bared, shining, disfiguring blood spreading everywhere. And beyond
them, blurred into an indefinite shape by sprays of light, something
huge and pale was coming fast.

Fear was so
bright in him, he felt it leaping up inside his body, like a cat
leaping from a burning window, adding its force to his straining
progress. Fresh doubts assailed him. What if there were no portal at
the heart of the light? What if some even more terrible guardian had
been set to block his path? Someone screamed behind him. Man or
woman, he could not say. Only the pain was indisputable. He surged on
blindly into the light, powering upward with the crude strokes of an
unschooled swimmer against the current that would have swept him back
into the void, reaching for something that might not exist, an edge,
a mortared rim, a projection of rock . . .

He had it!

His fingers
curled around a knob of stone, squeezed it for his life.

His other hand
touched a flat surface, then a crack. He inserted three fingers into
it, dug for a solid hold.

And then he was
hauling himself up and out of a pool into flickering torchlight, onto
cool rough stone. As he lay gasping he saw that he was lying in a
corridor, ranged in both directions by iron-mounted torches. He did
not recognize the place. It might be anywhere in the castle; it could
lead to a world of terror. But no terror, he thought, more profound
than that he had just escaped.

If, indeed, he
had escaped.

The thought that
the chase might not be over put a charge in him. He scrambled up and
was dumbfounded to see drips of blackness slither from the creases of
his clothing and plop onto the stone, where they rolled about like
animated punctuation, then combined, first into a puddle, then into a
rivulet that went flowing back to merge with the surface of the pool.

He started along
the corridor, choosing a direction at random, but had not gone three
steps when there came a ripping sound behind him, as of heavy fabric
being torn down its seam. He turned to see the woman’s head and
shoulders emerge from the pool. Her hair was slicked back, negative
droplets spilling like beetles across her skin. Her eyes, black and
vacant as holes in a bedsheet, fastened on him; her mouth opened.
Whether to speak or gulp in air, he did not know. Then a hand, an
incredibly long-fingered white hand attached to a pulpy arm, reached
from beneath the surface, caught the top of her head—as a
normal hand might surround an orange—and yanked her under.