IGMS Issue 44 (15 page)

She shrugged. "I don't think I bring anything to life." Her plate was clean, and she took it to the sink and ran water. "They're already in there. The shapes hold them, like . . ." She paused and wiped her hands. "If you saw something frozen. If there had been a sudden chill, a sudden frost, and you went out and saw that there was a frog frozen under the surface but you knew it wasn't dead, you'd break the ice and free it, wouldn't you?"

Hamilton was at my elbow and I dropped a few bits of egg onto the table for him.

"But how do you do it?"

She shrugged again. It was strange to see my sweatshirt draping those shoulders. I had wondered about those shoulders for a long time.

"Have you always been able to?"

She leaned over the table and touched my hand.

"I don't really run with that crowd anymore," she said, and it took me a moment to realize she was changing the topic to the party last night. "I haven't done the sort of things I did last night for a long time. I'm glad it was you that found me. I knew the first time I saw you that I wouldn't regret --"

But she obviously regretted saying too much. She wouldn't say anything else.

I didn't say anything either. I finished eating.

She did not have to work until that afternoon, so we walked downtown to the French Heritage Museum. I wasn't sure what to think, apart from the whole thing about bringing statues to life. She had spent the night at my place. She held my hand loosely as we walked. I would need some clarity here soon. For all I knew this was as Platonic for her as the forms she thought she pulled out of statues.

The French Museum was indeed in the Old Stone Barn downtown. I wondered how the city had gotten built up around it. It was one of the oldest buildings in town and had been in turn a pub, meeting hall, church, restaurant, and pub again. The wooden floors and stone walls were scrubbed and as polished as the display cases, and they seemed to have shed the years.

Carla wandered among them aimlessly, commenting on bits of the county's history. I had the vague idea that coming to a museum might give me some insight into whatever it was I was supposed to be doing for Mab, but nothing here seemed to have much relevance.

I wandered over to a corner where wooden steps led up to a roped-off second floor and sat down. There was a mop and some rope barriers in the shadows below the stairwell. They shifted as I sat.

"Dreaming about Thirteen Shades riding the Blur isn't the same as actually going to the Blur and bringing him out."

The mop lifted itself into a sitting position and filled out the rest of its form with a cobweb and some old brochures.

"This isn't a garage," I told him.

"It's a barn," he agreed. "That's what they used to call garages, before they attached them to houses again."

"So you can go back and forth between all of them?"

He waved away the question with the wrist of a dead spider.

"He said the door was locked. Thirteen Shades. He said he couldn't get out."

"It's because her eyes were closed. You were supposed to wake her with a kiss. Her eyes would have opened, and you could have walked into them, into the Blur, and brought Shades out."

"I didn't know."

He made a sound of exasperation.

"Why do you care? Are you part of this museum?"

"We're all part of it. Some pieces are just more interesting than others. I have my marching orders, just like you."

"You're daydreaming again." Carla was beside me, and the god of the garage was a pile of half-discarded work items beneath the stairs. "I wanted to show you something."

There was a display on the Native Americans who had lived in the county when the first Frenchmen came, Potawatomie mainly. A photograph showed what was supposed to be their last major gathering before most of the tribe went west into Indian Territory. There was a young man in their midst with painted arms. Another picture showed him again, apparently the same age, standing before a weathered general store. Then there was a third, a schoolmaster at a desk in a suit, but still with hands obviously painted. Placards identified them as Red Hand, Son of Red Hand, and Son of Son of Red Hand.

She pointed to the first picture. "Do you recognize where this was taken? That stone is still there, but now it has plaque on it. It's in White Town, a block from my house."

They didn't call it White Town as a racist thing. It was because back in the thirties and forties someone had relocated a bunch of houses from a dying coal town in the western part of the county to a neighborhood next to the river here, and they were all painted white. I knew the stone Carla was talking about. You could see it from the road beside the river.

"I didn't know you lived in White Town."

"Where did you think I lived?"

I was genuinely confused. "But I've walked you home. To a house a block behind the filling station."

"That's Dan's. I stay there when he's out of state."

We left the museum and walked toward the college. There was some research I should be doing, and she was heading to work.

Hamilton kept pace with us, following in lazy circles above. I wondered if people thought he was a carrion crow, marking me as he would a sick animal. I felt fine though. I felt great. Carla was beside me, though her hand had slipped from my own.

There was a man getting out of a truck outside the filling station. His face broke into a grin when he saw us approaching.

"It's Dan," she said. She laughed and waved.

Then she was gone.

I lay on the floor of the lab. Hamilton looked down on me from the half-opened window with all the benevolence of Poe's raven.

There were solutions mixed, but they were not going to get tested today. It was late in the evening, and no one else would be in.

"He was real, Hamilton. Dan exists."

The bird croaked.

"You saw the way she looked at him, right?"

The long rows of plastic cuvettes watched me mutely. The solutions inside winked beneath the lab's fluorescent bulbs. I could not remember the various concentrations I had mixed the day before.

"You found Red Hand," Hamilton finally said, as softly as the crow could manage.

I sighed. "Yeah, it was him. Clearly the same guy in every picture. An old Indian who doesn't age and keeps posing as his own son. The stuff of local legend, alright." I pulled myself into a sitting position. My stomach felt like lead. "Perfect for Mab's museum."

"Lives in the state park."

I looked up at him.

"If you knew that, why didn't you say something when Mab mentioned him the first time?"

He fluttered down to the table beside the solutions. "Didn't know it was him. But know what he looks like now, knew where I had seen him before."

"How did you know what he looked like?" Every time I moved or tried to speak, it was around a shard of ice in my chest. She had sort of melted into him, there in the parking lot beside his truck. I guess he came back early to surprise her. When she introduced us and he shook my hand, I was surprised it had not come off in his own, the way a snake's discarded skin falls to powder when you touch it. "You weren't in the barn with us."

"God of the garage told me."

"You're all in cahoots." I lay down again and passed a hand over my eyes. "If you guys can figure this all out on your own, why do you need me?"

He said nothing, and I lay like that for a long time, waiting for an answer. When I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

There was a storm that night, and a gust of wind blew my window open, though it was not the kind of window that opened like that. If the wind had been that strong it should have just shattered. But it didn't. It opened and Mab spilled in like a piece of the Blur's sky poured through an open mouth.

"There was a man who was made of crows," she said, crouched for a moment at the foot of my bed. "Every morning when he woke up he was a man again, but in the evenings he dissolved into a murder that flew off in a hundred directions and winged over the town until dawn."

The thunder was coming, but I could hear her voice clearly. She stood and ran her hands curiously over the things beside my bed -- watch, wallet, cell phone, spare change -- turning them this way and that and leaving a thin sheen of rain over everything.

"Each morning they folded their wings against the coming of the sun into the contour of a man who thought he had a name and a collection of memories. But each day it grew harder to hold them together, until he found even by daylight tiny beaks and eyes and wings opening and shutting along the backs of his legs and his hands."

I realized suddenly that the stories were her greetings. Where you or I would simply say hello to start a conversation, in order to acknowledge and begin a social exchange, Mab had to offer a story.

She was a thing of stories. They were all she had to give.

"Until one day he met a woman with bone-white skin who each night became a swamp oak that stood in the fields beyond the town. 'Find me,' she told the man made of crows, 'and you can rest on my bone-white branches.' 'How will I know where you are?' the man asked. For a moment his cheekbone wavered as a wing lifted. The woman smiled. 'I will tangle the moon in my branches,' she said."

The thing was, she never finished the stories.

I had not moved as she spoke. It was hard to move in Mab's presence. It must be a bit like what a wounded bird feels at the approach of a serpent, or someone staring out the window at an approaching funnel cloud. It was hard to breath, though when I did draw breath I smelled the strong, clean, somehow steely smell of rain. Mab was leaning over me, and the rain was still coming down off her hair in waves, spotting my chest and sheets.

"You have found Thirteen Shades and all of the gripe water and the Red Hand." She smiled, and it was a jagged line of lightning beyond the window over the trees. "I do not chose among you often, but when I do I always choose well." She was leaning closer, and in her eyes I saw no blurring at all. I saw the trees bowing in the wind and the stars through cracks in racing clouds. Her fingers were on my chest, spreading like the roots of a hungry tree. "Kiss me."

The phone on the table beside me flashed faint and blue. I reached for it, afraid of this moment, afraid of what was happening, fumbled to flip it open, and heard a tinny voice report that I had missed one call and had as many voice mails. I stabbed the menu and heard Carla's recorded message.