Glimmering (16 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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“How do you think it feels?”
 
 
He sang himself hoarse, his face growing red and damp as he hunched over the keyboard. To Jack the words sounded like prophecy, or a threat.
“How do you think it feels?
And when do you think it stops?”
 
 
Whatever secret horrors fed Leonard’s vision, Jack had always believed his friend wanted nothing more than this: to make everyone else see what he saw: corpses rotting in a suburban bedroom, the husks of butterflies drained by spiders, naked men trussed like cattle in darkened basements.
And now we know,
thought Jack. His gaze fell upon his friend’s ravaged face, the death’s-heads tattooed and branded and scarified across his wiry arms and the arc of glowing chips above his left eye. Nothing was left of the smooth-skinned boy Jack had loved except his eyes, which had never been boyish at all. The rest Leonard himself had smelted away, leaving bones and scars and unruly pockets of flesh; the only things that had ever interested him, anyway.
“Fifty years,” whispered Leonard. “You know what he was like? Have you ever seen a picture of Padmasambhava?”
Jack made a face. “Not in Yonkers. Not recently.”
“Really? Well, here, look—” Leonard rummaged in a knapsack until he found a battered leather wallet, opened it, and flipped through its contents. “
This
guy,” he said, holding up a little rectangle like a trading card, its lurid colors tempered by a crosshatch of tears and folds. “Padmasambhava. He’s a Tibetan magician, this legendary yogi. Anyway, that’s who Dr. Hanada looks like.”
Jack took the picture. It showed a demonic-looking figure with madly rolling eyes standing on one leg. In his left hand he clutched a staff almost twice his height, impaled with human skulls.
“Right,” said Jack. Very deliberately he placed first the picture and then the vial of Fusax into Leonard’s hand. “You know, I don’t think I want to hear any more about any of this, Leonard. Thank you all the same. And I’m pretty tired, so maybe we could see about getting together some other—”
“It’s the cure, Jack.”
Jack gaped at him. His friend stared back, his expression withdrawn, almost hostile, then Leonard dropped the picture of Padmasambhava. It wafted across the floor and beneath the bed.
“The cure.” Leonard held up the vial so light from the window flowed over it, gold and green. “A miracle, Jackie.”
Rage swelled inside Jack. “
What?
”
“You heard me, Jackie.” Leonard’s eyes glittered. His mouth stretched into a grin as broad as it was merciless. “All that other stuff they’ve been giving to us all these years? It’s
bullshit
, sweetheart.
Bullshit
—
“This is it. This is the cure. For AIDS, for petra virus, all of it. This is what’s going to change fucking human history. Fusax.”
Jack stared at the corona of light around Leonard’s hair, the little bottle in his hand like a bright grenade.
Then, “You fucking son of a bitch,” said Jack.
And he decked him.
“
Hey
—!”
Leonard crashed to the floor. Jack heard the crack of his friend’s skull against wood and felt his heart start joyously, as though a lover had called his name.
“
What the fuck?
” Leonard flung his arms across his face, the bottle rolling toward the wall. “WHAT THE—”
Jack ignored him. He walked over to where the vial had come to rest against the leg of his father’s old desk. He picked up the bottle and eyed it warily.
FUSARIUM APERIAX SPOROTRICHELLIA
FUSAX 687
 
 
He pondered the indecipherable Japanese characters above the Latin name. But of course they had nothing to tell him, good old dependable Jackie-boy. Mysterious doctors never shared their secrets with him, and the only demon Jack had ever known sprawled on the floor, moaning and cursing.
“. . . fucking
nuts
, Jackie, you know that? Fucking . . .”
Jack continued to stare at the vial, giving it this last chance to redeem itself. At last he turned, facing the window with its rippling carnival light, and with all his strength hurled the bottle from him.
“JACKIE!
NO
—”
He had expected it to shatter against the pane. Instead the vial shot right through the glass, leaving a surprisingly small neat opening, like a bullet hole. Jack walked over and examined it.
“
Wow.
” He crouched down and eyeballed it, shaking his head in wonderment at a hole the size of an old-fashioned silver dollar. There was no radius of cracks, no broken glass. Just that perfect bull’s-eye. “I was
sure
it would break.”
Behind him Leonard stumbled to his feet and limped to the window. Jack flinched, but the other man seemed not even to notice him. Leonard put his hands upon the glass and pressed his face close, his breath fogging the pane as he peered at the lawn below. A bruise was already darkening his left cheek. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Me neither.” Jack glanced at him warily, but his friend only stared outside. His dark eyes were filled with tears.
“Oh, shit.” Jack’s bravado melted into remorse. He’d only seen Leonard cry once before, at Rachel Gardino’s funeral. “Leonard, I’m—oh, Jeez, Leonard . . .”
“I can’t
believe
it. I was only trying to—trying to—”
Jack shook his head. “You’d better go,” he said. His knuckles throbbed from where he’d struck Leonard. He felt like he was going to burst into tears himself. “Okay? I just think you’d better go.”
Leonard turned.
“I know why you did that.” He rubbed his bruised face almost lovingly. “
Jackie.
You really need to get over it. You’d be a lot better off if you learned how to deal with your feelings for me, you know that? All that rage? It’ll kill you, Jackie-boy. But this—”
He gazed out the window, to where the lawn shimmered beneath the golden sky. “—this,” he repeated, his voice starting to shake. “You may really have fucked up this time, Jackie.”
Jack stared. Was Leonard
threatening
him? But then Leonard laid his hand upon Jack’s shoulder.
“I have to leave now,” he said. “And I’ll be gone for a while. I’ll call you when I get back.”
Leonard’s grip tightened, his fingers digging through Jack’s robe until they fastened on a cord of muscle. Jack writhed and let out a small moan.
“
Ow
—”
“You
better
‘Ow.’” The placebit in his front tooth sent out a ruby flare. “Pissing off Padmasambhava like that.”
With a smile he let go of his friend. Jack fell back against the bed. Leonard picked up his bags, then headed for the door. In the hallway he stopped.
“I’m not angry, you know, Jackie.” He hoisted a bag over his shoulder, bones and mirrors clattering. “Believe it or not. I really
do
understand—”
He cast Jack a sly look, then, grinning, began to recite.
Prince, when I took your goblet tall
And smashed it with inebriate care,
I knew not how from Rome and Gaul
You gained it; I was unaware
It stood by Charlemagne’s guest chair,
And served St. Peter at High Mass.
I’m sorry if the thing was rare;
I like the noise of breaking glass.
 
 
He grinned wolfishly. “Watch your back, Jackie-boy—”
And with a soft clatter upon the stairs he was gone.
 
 
It took Jack forever to fall asleep that night. His fever was back, his hand ached, he felt guilty and ashamed and generally overstimulated. An hour-long search of the grass beneath his window had failed to turn up anything except for a few rusted malt liquor cans and an IZE ampoule. He didn’t find so much as a shard of glass. When evening fell he had Mrs. Iverson bring dinner to his room, canned beef bouillon and a glass of tepid water. Exhausted, he fell into bed before nine o’clock, and proceeded to toss and turn until eleven-thirty, marking the hours by the chiming of Lazyland’s clocks. He finally resorted to his grandfather’s remedy and crept downstairs to warm some milk on the Coleman stove, adding a shot of Irish whiskey from his grandmother’s precious hoard. By the time he’d mounted the stairs again to the top floor, he was yawning and feeling pleasantly high. He sank back into bed and soon was breathing deeply.
Just before midnight he awoke. A sound had broken his sleep. A familiar sound, beloved though only half-heard, so that for a few moments as he lay drowsily beneath the heaped quilts and down comforter, Jack felt utterly at peace. He was just drifting off to sleep once more when he heard it again. And froze.
It was a tread upon the stairs: a slow, purposeful step. Jack could hear the creaking of the wide oaken floorboards, the softer echo of feet upon the second-floor landing below him. Two more steps and silence; then a nearly inaudible
click
. Jack held his breath. The footsteps resumed. He tracked them as they went from the landing into the next room, the one that had been his aunt Mary Anne’s when she was a girl, before she disappeared. He could not hear what went on in there, but he knew, he knew. His heart was pounding so hard it was a wonder he could hear anything at all, and he almost laughed aloud, crazily: he no longer had any doubt but that he was losing his mind. Because this was how it had always been when he was a child, this was how it was supposed to be.
He was hearing silence at midnight, when all the clocks should be alive. The preternaturally loud ticking of the grandmother clock outside the linen closet had been stilled, and the gentle
nick-nick
of the old Dutch regulator. There was no loud clatter from the captain’s clocks in the living room; no hum from the little ladder-back clock with the white mouse that climbed until it struck one. Only that slippered tread, stopping here and there like a nurse checking for fevers; and after each pause Lazyland grew more still, its burden of silence increased as one by one the clocks were stopped.
In the great house beneath him his grandfather was walking. Room to room, floor to floor, always aware of midnight looming, when if they were not silenced, all the clocks would strike at once. Pausing a dozen times or more upon each landing to gently open countless glass faces, then to lay a finger upon the hands to halt them. As he had always done when Jack or any of the grandchildren stayed over, quieting each clock in turn, so that the song of all those chimes would not awaken them.
It was the last sound Jack had heard every night at Lazyland, when he would awaken to that patient tread. Lying in bed confused by twilight sleep, hoping to catch a glimpse of his grandfather as the old man mounted the last steps to the top floor, where the old nursery clock on its oaken library table gently ticked off the hours. In all those years Jack had never once seen his grandfather on his errand; only awakened each morning to the smells of coffee and bacon and cigarette smoke drifting up from the kitchen, sunlight in neat yellow squares upon the floor, and a triumphant cascade of chimes echoing through the house as all the clocks struck seven.
Now Jack lay rigid in bed. He could hear the steps move from his Uncle Peter’s old room into Aunt Susan’s, the room where Mrs. Iverson now slept. There the thick oriental carpet muffled all noise. But after a minute the tread sounded once more. It moved into the tiny corner room, that held only a cobbler’s bench on which sat a cottage clock.
Snap
as the casing was opened;
snick
as it closed again. Creak of the door pushed shut. The footsteps hesitated at the bottom of the stairs, then began their final ascent.
Jack listened spellbound. His dread was gone. Instead he felt anaesthetized, almost giddy; because surely this was what it was like to die? Didn’t loved ones sometimes arrive to take you to the other side? A thought lodged like a stone at the bottom of his consciousness told him that this was just a dream—he had often dreamed of his grandfather in the years since his death—and yet that did nothing to mute his exhilaration. He tried to sit up, but his arms and legs were paralyzed. This, too, happened in dreams, you tried to move and could not, struggled in vain to open eyes weighted with stones and earth; but he only fought harder, writhing beneath the covers. The footsteps came more slowly now—it was a long haul up all those steps—but Jack was ready, his heart thundered, and his breath came faster, he was almost gasping with joy. He would see him, finally, all those fruitless nights of waiting up would be redeemed; all those mornings waking to find that it was just a dream, Grandfather was really dead and the world not as it had been when Jackie Finnegan was a boy.
And now he heard the solid thump of Grandfather’s foot upon the landing, then another as the old man pushed himself forward, one hand lingering upon the banister to keep his balance. The door to Jack’s room flew open. A breath of cool air wafted inside, followed by a close warm smell, cigarette smoke and Jameson’s, the scent of starch on a white cotton shirt. Jack opened his mouth to cry aloud but gaped within a sudden airless void, the scents of tobacco and whiskey sucked away.

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