Glimmering (6 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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Ba
dum
ba dum, ba
dum
ba dum . . .
He opened his eyes: nothing. Whatever light there was seemed to come from the veil of snow covering the floor, and from the window overlooking the lawn. As he stared the window shuddered, though there was still no wind. The sound of the recorder grew louder, as though whoever was playing it was moving slowly, and with each step drew nearer to the house.
“Shit.” Jack swore beneath his breath, shivering. He had had dreams like this: waking dreams, walking dreams. All his life he had been plagued by nightmares. But there was no comfort knowing that, because with dreams there came dream logic, inexorable and dreadful. And so he found himself sliding from bed and walking to the window.
Beneath his bare feet the snow was dry and fine as dust. The window’s pallid glow grew brighter, even as the music grew louder. But always it was a sere lonely music, the echo of another song like the echo of ice booming upon the great river.
At the window he stopped. His entire body shook with cold, so that he had to brace himself as he leaned forward to look out.
Below him the lawn shone with a dull blue gleam. Dead grass pierced the new snow, black spines like scattered bones. Overhead the glimmering showed through the cloud cover: grayish waves chased by crimson flares, an occasional burst of brilliant orange. Now and then the sloping hillside would be slashed with iridescence, like the glimpse of gold within a pocket, and though the snow had stopped, the air glittered fiercely. The piping music seemed to come from everywhere, the way the wind sounds during a hurricane.
Jack shuddered. Dread clenched his bones like grippe. His eyes watered from the caustic light, and there was an acrid taste in his mouth, a smell like wet ashes. He was backing away from the window when something on the lawn began to move.
From the tulip trees and overgrown sumac at the bottom of the garden a figure crept. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing only some kind of loose dark trousers and clutching something in one hand. Jack could not tell if it was a boy or girl. As it stood it raised its hands before its face. Wisps of white-blond hair fell across its eyes.
“Hey,” Jack whispered. “
Hey
—”
It did not seem to notice the cold at all. It stood up very straight—unnaturally so, like a child in a wedding party. Then, with exaggerated slowness, the child began to pace across the lawn. Its feet left no mark upon the snow, and while the scraggy trees cast wavering shadows, the child had none at all.
The haunting music swelled. Its echoes filled the room like water filling a sealed-off chamber, and the monotonous notes inundated Jack, driving out breath and blood and matter until, with a grunt, he slid forward, his hand smashing against the window.
Dull pain shot through his wrist. He cried out and found that he could breathe again. He brought his wrist to his mouth and nursed it, lifted his head to gaze outside.
On the lawn the child still marched and played its reed pipe. Beneath the poplars something else moved. Another figure emerged, much taller than the child; then another, and another; until there were six in all.
They were men; they had once been men. Tall and emaciated and naked in the snow, so thin the glimmering washed across their pale flesh like rain. Each bore within his hands a huge pair of antlers, raised so that they seemed to spring from his skull. They moved in an awkward stooping walk, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of those great horns. As Jack watched they followed the child across the lawn, until the child stopped. The six men bowed to it, each in turn, forming two rows of three with their antlers raised above them like tree limbs, and began to dance.
It was like nothing he had ever seen. A weird loping dance, the two rows moving backward and forward, heads alternately raised and bowed so that it seemed the horns must tangle and be wrenched from their skeletal hands. And yet the antlers never touched, their bodies never touched. Their feet left no sign upon the snow, and their movements made no sound. The motions were grotesquely childlike, almost crude; yet at the same time so terribly, horribly
real
that Jack felt as though he had never seen dancing before; as though this was
The Dance
from which all others had been wrung. The music of the reed pipe spiraled and wailed, the child stood as though frozen; the horned men moved back and forth like the shuttles of a loom. Above them the antlers curved like the spires of some unearthly cathedral. And like light falling from a cathedral window the flesh began to fall from their bodies, in small bright blades of gold and green and red, until only their bones remained, unearthly white and unconquerable, moving across the snow.
In his room Jack watched. Terror and beauty ravaged him; he could feel the boom of blood in his head and a softer throbbing in his chest, as though the child played him as nimbly as its flute. Still they danced, the horned men, with steps careful and measured as automatons. They might have been part of some infernal timepiece ringing the changes.
But then, very slowly, he became aware that the music was diminishing—he sensed rather than heard it, like warmth stealing back into his hands. He leaned forward and saw that the dancers had paused. The child bowed its head. Then, as slowly as it had arrived, the child turned and retraced its steps, pacing back across the lawn. When it reached the shadows of the trees the skeletal dancers followed. They moved now with a more somber grace, no longer rocking back and forth beneath the weight of those heavy racks—it seemed that the antlers had somehow grown and become part of them. All their bestial power had fused with the frail bones of men. Light clung to them, light falling from the sky or rising like mist from the ground. When they reached the shadows of the tulip poplars they were clothed in it. They did not turn their heads or look back to where Jack sat and watched them. And yet he knew that
he
was the reason they had come here: vision or dementia or the exalted remnant of a dream, they had come for him.
The last shining form dipped its head beneath the branches and disappeared. The music died away. Alone in his room stood Jack, robed in light and burning with fever, his pale eyes huge and glittering with the glory and horror of what he had seen. He was still there next morning when the housekeeper came to see what had kept him from breakfast.
“Jack? What is it, Jack? Are you sick? Good Lord, he isn’t—”
And he shook his head, unable to tell her No he was not dead nor even sick, but burning, burning, burning.
CHAPTER THREE
 
Trip Takes a Fall
He would die at Hell Head.
Trip Marlowe knew that was how the obituaries would begin. Never mind that no one from away knew that Hell Head was where you always went to die, if you were from Moody’s Island. For sure it was where you went to die if you were a Marlowe. It was where his father had gone when Trip was six years old, and blown his brains out with a thirty-aught-six; where Trip’s mother had gone a year later, to dive into the whirlpool and never be found. Hell Head was where the island children went on Halloween, daring each other to stare into the black water at low tide and glimpse the bones there, the bones he had never seen but they were there, for sure Trip knew they were there. Trip Marlowe knew all about bones.
He was twenty-two years old and the Voice of the Last Generation. That was what some flack on Radium had called him, after Trip’s first album—the one that originally came out on Mustard Seed, the one that got him six Dove Awards and an Emmy and his face on a zillion home pages and the cover of
OUR
magazine—was bought and rereleased by a Xian subsidiary of GFI Worldwide early in 1998. The album was called LIVE FROM
GOLGOTHA
. Trip stole the title from an old banned book in the hard stacks at Olive Mount Bible College. His best friend, Jerry Disney, had found the novel; God only knew how it got there. Trip never read the book—Trip didn’t read, except for the Bible and furtively hidden copies of
Matrix
comics—but he liked the title, and he knew how to use it. Even as a child on Moody’s Island, where he sang in the choir at the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church, he had always possessed what the people at GFI called marketing savvy. For instance, it had been Trip’s idea that alone of all the children in the choir, he should wear red when they performed.
“It’ll make me stand out.” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt: he had already dyed his white choir robe deep scarlet, using a packet of Rit Dye from the Moody’s Island beach store. “You know. When I sing.”
“You
already
stand out,” said John Drinkwater. He was the choir director. A skinned stick of a man who wouldn’t allow his own kids to use the computer in the broken-down trailer that was the island school. But he sounded amused. “But sure, okay. We’ll try it.”
It was August the first time Trip wore the red robe. They were singing at the Grace Fellowship Baptist Church over to Jonesport, not a long drive; otherwise, probably he would’ve passed out from the smell of Rit Dye. Deep scarlet came off on Trip’s hands, his skinny freckled arms and chest, and even his face. But it was so hot inside the church, the choir’s singing so pure and exalted, that no one at Grace Fellowship even noticed.
“Probably they just thought your face was all red and you were goin’ t’ pass out.” Jerry Disney fanned himself with his own crumpled-up robe and stared out the bus window at rows of boarded-up gas stations and abandoned shopping malls. “I sure thought I was.”
After that he always wore the red robe. When Trip grew out of it, John Drinkwater had his wife sew him another one, with fabric that came all the way from Bangor. And when Trip grew out of
that
one, John Drinkwater had his wife make him a dozen, in various sizes, “So’s you won’t ever have to be without.”
He’d been Trip Marlowe then, a golden star in heaven’s crown, for sure the star of the Fisher of Men Children’s Choir. Summer and winter they traveled inland, to Bangor and Caribou and Presque Isle, and up coastal Route One to Calais, which was practically Canada. Twenty-four children and their chaperones crammed into the church’s old blue school bus, where the stench of ethanol vied with that of squashed peanut-butter sandwiches and the Dignam twins, who always had to go to the bathroom. John Drinkwater sat in front behind Mrs. Spruce, who drove, and even after they sang themselves hoarse at church suppers and Christian Coalition fundraisers, country fairs and weddings, funerals and baptisms; even at twelve midnight, when the littlest children were so tired they lay across their mothers’ laps and wailed, John Drinkwater made them sing some more.
Jesus is my friend and always will be
Jesus walks beside me every
day
. . .
 
 
Exhausted as they were, the children sounded beautiful. Outside might be nothing but ravaged forests left by bankrupt paper companies, or the potato-field wasteland of Aroostook County; but inside the bus it was heaven. Even the poor bleary-eyed mothers would take a break from rummaging in paper sacks full of moldering apples and bottles of Coke, to lean back in their seats and smile and clap in time.
Don’t expect me to cry
For I will never die!
Jesus is the sun who shines for me
. . .
 
 
When the hymn was done they kissed the children, smoothing the boys’ buzz-cut hair and adjusting the girls’ dirty pink headbands, and told everyone how wonderful they sounded.
“Like angels, now then, hush, let’s try and get some sleep.”
That was what the mothers said as the bus jounced over the bridge to Verona Island, or as it sat with the engine turned off in Bath, waiting for the foot traffic at the ironworks to clear.
But later, when the children finally passed out in their mothers’ laps, those chaperones who were still awake would turn to each other and nod toward the back of the bus where Trip always sat.
“Isn’t he cunnin’, that one? When he sings! If only his mother could’ve heard him. He could be a star, you know. He really could be a star.”
It was Trip they spoke of, of course. He heard them and tried not to be proud, and it wasn’t so hard, because he didn’t
feel
proud, not really. It wasn’t like the way he felt at school, when someone told him he’d done a good job with an assignment he’d spent too many hours trying to understand. Because he
worked
at that, he
worked
at school, even though he knew it was useless. He was smart, he knew that, he wasn’t like the Dignams. But reading was difficult for him, and there never seemed to be a point to it.
So he just kept on singing. When he outgrew the children’s choir he joined the church’s praise and worship band, part of the youth group for teenagers. He was seventeen when John Drinkwater told him he might be able to go to college on a music scholarship. That was before John Drinkwater realized that there wasn’t anywhere Trip Marlowe
couldn’t
go. Not with a face like that; not with a voice like that.
Because if you were to take a cruse made of ice and drop it, the sound it would make, the sound of cold and crystal shattering—that would be the sound of the children’s choir. That would be their voices.

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