Glimmering (25 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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He woke not knowing how long he had slept, or what time of day it was. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, feeling out of sorts. He stood and recalled his morning in the carriage house, Larry Muso’s sloe eyes and the small triumph of a telephone call successfully placed to Jule. With a yawn he crossed to the window.
Outside the lawn stretched grey beneath a seething sky. Rain-fed streams crisscrossed the matted grass, culminating in a boggy stretch at the bottom of the garden, where a few stolid birch trees rose from the mulch. Earlier that week he had seen figures moving down there, well within the boundaries of the estate. There was a security fence, of course, but it was an electrical fence, useless now. At night he could glimpse fires through the windows of the fallen houses adjoining Lazyland; he tried to take that for a good omen, since it meant the encamped
fellahin
were content to remain within their own broken homes and leave his alone. He leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the flickering sky.
How long has it been since I’ve seen the stars? One year? Two?
Jack’s breath left a fog on the glass. He rubbed at it, frowning as he touched the bull’s-eye left by the Fusax bottle.
Could you see the stars in Mongolia, or Japan? Was there anyplace left where you could see them at all?
Certainly not here, where the sky had given itself over to a perpetual carnival of night. Fires raging in empty towers, the waters of New York Harbor burning where freighters had released their cargoes, glowing traceries of fuselage left by jets that had failed in transit. Lightning streamed across the sky and lit upon the Palisades, crimson and violet. A wash of corrosive orange swept across the cliffs and was gone. From the darkness came a howl, a dog’s, Jack thought, but then the sound fractured into laughter.
Horror choked him poisonous as the rain gnawing at Lazyland’s ruined lawns. Horror not of the grinning refugees but of what came next, when pestilence and famine claimed them all.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
The awful laughter rose, louder and louder. Wind beat against the house, and the smell of smoke seeped through the walls, thick with the reek of burning plywood, foam insulation, paint fumes. He covered his mouth; the wind gusted and as quickly as it had come the smoke was gone. On the window where his finger had smudged the glass, he saw a darkness like fine fur: some new kind of spore or fungus, already hungrily seizing upon the warmth and dead tissue left by his touch. He felt the pulse of blood inside his veins, and knew it not for his own life but the mindless tremor of nature. He shook his head and realized that he had leaned against the window again, both hands pressed against the smooth surface. When he reared back the imprints of his fingers blackened upon the glass as though charred by an invisible flame. But it was not ash but innumerable threads of living matter: he could smell them, a whiff of foul gas. He stepped back from the window but there was no escaping it, it was all around him, a shroud woven by a tireless army.
He had gone to sleep in one world but woken to the wasteland.
 
 
Later he came to, lying on the floor beneath the window. He had been dreaming of Leonard. Leonard’s hand upon his breast, his own hand on Leonard’s cock. He gasped awake, flooded with desire and an aching sorrow as he took in the room around him and remembered: he was forty-two years old, he was ill, Leonard had fled him long ago.
A somber radiance on the eastern horizon made Jack think it must be dawn. But when he found his watch, a Cartier hermetic timepiece with radium numerals, it said 10:15. The little brass carriage clock was chiming two. He stood and gazed at a dark imprint on the window. Nothing horrible there, only the normal amount of dirt and grit and grease. He frowned. The wind blessedly had died away. Even more remarkable, the rain had stopped. It must have been this that woke him, the unaccustomed silence after so many weeks of storm.
But the air felt dank and chill. There was a cloyingness to it, a weirdly palpable sense of
vitality.
Jack turned and started for his bed.
That was when he heard her. Sobbing, faint but clear from somewhere just below the morning balcony. It made him think of his sister at play long ago, hiding in the hydrangea bush and crying because he was taking too long to find her. He waited, expecting the sound to fall into silence or flame into one of those unnerving screams. Instead it continued no louder or softer than before, frail and piteous.
He rubbed his eyes, walked back to the window, wrenched it open, and leaned outside to scan the garden below. The crying stopped. He could imagine whoever was there looking up and seeing him, a tall wraith commanding this battered ship. The crying began again, as miserable as before. The thought of someone down there gazing frightened, at
him,
was too much for Jack to bear. He hurried downstairs, pulled on boots and his grandfather’s ancient raincoat, and went outside.
The air was so still that he could hear the thrum of a single car echoing from far away, solid and portentous as the tolling of a church bell. He listened raptly as it drove off; then the sound of weeping stirred him again and he strode down toward the garden.
He had thought—hoped, actually—that whoever it was would have fled by the time he got outside, or at least fallen silent. Instead the cries grew louder and more desperate. Jack shook his head, dismayed.
“Hey,” he called softly. “It’s okay. I’m not—I won’t hurt you.”
The weeping ceased, then with a hoarse cry resumed, so close that Jack took a nervous sideways step. He looked at the sodden limbs of juniper and ilex, streaked black and shimmering in the purplish light. Water pooled about his boots, releasing a thick rank smell as of spoiled mushrooms. He was just starting for the yew hedge when he saw her.
It was the child he had seen in his vision: the child who had led the procession of horned men. The same white face and windblown hair, the same wide empty eyes, the same thin mouth opened now to weep rather than blow upon a flute. But even as he stared aghast the child turned, so that Jack saw it was not a child but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, so emaciated and frail she looked younger. Her cheeks were hollowed, touched with violet where the light struck them, her sunken eyes a vivid troubling blue. She crouched beneath a hydrangea bush, fingers curled about a handful of moldering leaves and her lips drawn back so that he could see her teeth, very white above gums that were almost black. She wore some kind of cheap raincoat, the plastic ripped and gummed with filth. Beneath it Jack could glimpse filthy white pants and a shapeless shirt, ripped so that her small breasts were exposed. As she stared at him she made a hissing sound.
“Hey,” whispered Jack, and backed away. The girl watched him with eyes empty of anything but raw fear. If he extended a hand to her, he was certain she would bite, and he knew what that bite would bring: plague, pestilence, death.
But then, without thinking, Jack
did
reach for her, palm up as he would approach a strange dog. The girl’s gaze wavered between his face and his hand, as though weighing which held the greater threat. With a low cry she lifted her head and stared unblinking into his eyes. He stared back and saw hatred, dreadful hunger, and an unassailable fear; but mostly fear.
And so he knelt before her, awkwardly pulling at his raincoat as he murmured, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you, come here, come here . . .”
The coat billowed about her shoulders and he reached clumsily to straighten it, but it was like cloaking a bare scaffold: he could feel nothing but the dead stalks of hydrangea. He drew back, forcing a smile.
“There. Are you better now? Warmer?”
The girl looked up at him, her lusterless hair like dead grass. She seemed not to understand, but finally she nodded.
“Thank you,” she whispered. She had a vaguely European accent.
“You’re welcome.” He stood and he gazed down at the girl, torn between his desire to hurry back inside and the burgeoning awareness that, having started something, he couldn’t leave it unfinished.
“Shit,” he said. The girl began to weep again, silently, tears fine as needles streaking her gaunt face. Not just the act of cloaking her but the coat itself had given something of humanity back to her. For a cruel moment Jack cursed himself for not going out in his pajamas.
“Come on, then.” He sighed. “I can’t leave you out here to die on the fucking
lawn.”
Once again he stretched his hand toward her. The girl crouched, then with a shiver stood on unsteady feet. She ignored his hand and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then faster and faster, passing from grass to broken tarmac as she hurried up the drive. Jack hoped she would break into a run and flee Lazyland. But when he reached the top of the drive she was waiting, clutching his grandfather’s raincoat around her narrow shoulders.
Jack’s resignation burned into soft despair. “The front door.” He gestured at the house. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.
“Now listen,” Jack said as he pulled the outer door shut. She smelled like rotting leaves. “My grandmother lives here, she’s very old and frail, and I don’t want you—
bugging
her.”
The girl stared as though he had barked like a dog. Jack elbowed past her toward the inner door, calling out.
“Grandmother? Grandmother, there’s someone here, don’t—”
He stopped and glanced back at the girl.
I must be fucking crazy.
What was he thinking, telling her about his grandmother? Some insane little bitch planning to rob them in their sleep, or waiting to signal her cronies to break into Lazyland and kill them all . . .
His grandmother appeared at the foot of the stairs.
“Yes, Jackie?”
The girl made a low mewling sound, and with surprising strength, pushed past him.
“Grandmother.” Her grim little face contorted. Jack edged forward protectively. The girl looked up at Keeley, ran a hand self-consciously through her filthy hair, and smiled.
“Well.” Keeley’s hands tightened on her gold-topped walking stick. “Is this a—friend? Of Leonard’s?”
“Umm, well, no—” A smile broke across Keeley’s face.
“Lunantishee, ”
she said. “
A cailin a vic O!
What are you doing here?
”
The girl’s smile faded. She glanced over her shoulder at Jack. He forced himself to smile reassuringly—for Keeley’s sake, not the girl’s. “She was outside in the cold, I just thought we might let her in to dry off, and then—”
“Of course,” said Keeley. She continued to gaze at the girl, but the wonder drained from her faded blue eyes; whatever she saw now, it was not the
lunantishee.
“Bring her in, she can sit by the stove”—she raised her walking stick and motioned toward the kitchen—“I’ll have Larena find something for her to wear. Go on now—” This to the girl, in the same brisk tone she’d used on generations of animals and children. “Go on.”
The girl clutched at her torn clothes, walked down the dark hallway toward the kitchen. Jack turned to his grandmother, but Keeley was already standing at the foot of the staircase, thumping her walking stick.
“Larena! Larena dear—”
With a sigh Jack headed for the huge kitchen, the most modern room in the great shaky pile that was Lazyland. His grandfather had renovated it shortly before his death in the early 1970s, as a gift for Keeley; all the original woodwork had been replaced with shiny blond cabinets and turquoise Naugahyde.
Now the fluorescent bulbs had long since flickered out. The electric range was covered with ancient outdoor gear dredged up from one of Lazyland’s subbasements: a blackened Coleman stove and tiny white gas-driven heater that boiled water and scorched rice. The refrigerator was unplugged, the occult pantry with its folding doors and lazy Susans sadly underutilized. Still, with the vivid light falling through its windows, the kitchen was the brightest room in the house, and Larena Iverson kept it scrupulously clean.
Certainly the ragged girl was impressed. Jack found her standing beside the stool where younger cousins had been wont to take their afternoon cocoa, her expression somewhere between suspicion and awe.
“This your
house
?
”
“Yes,” said Jack. “I mean, my family’s,” he added, trying to evoke a vast hidden clan that dealt speedily and fatally with all intruders. “Look, we’re pretty busy right now, maybe I can find you a towel or something, you can dry off, and then—”
Behind him there was a soft wheeze and the pad of slippered feet. “Oh, poor thing! Look at you, soaked to the skin, what was your mother thinking?”
Mrs. Iverson struggled across the room, burdened with heavy wintry-looking clothes and a pink appliquéd bath towel. The girl looked up, confused. “Mother?”
“Wait till I have a word with her,” Mrs. Iverson went on. “Look at you, a skinny wretch, what were you thinking, get into the bathroom now! Right this
minute
—”
The housekeeper began herding the girl back toward the dark corridor. A moment later Jack heard the bathroom door creak shut, the gasp and blast of water surging up through the recalcitrant pipes. Mrs. Iverson’s voice rose and fell, and after a minute or two he heard the girl laughing.

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