Mortal Love (16 page)

“It's not him,” she said.

Daniel whirled: he couldn't tell if Nick looked disappointed or relieved. “Hayward, what the fuck is going on?”

Juda put a hand on his shoulder. “Daniel. Please don't—”

He pushed her away and stormed toward the door, but as he did, Fancy whined. Daniel glanced down at the dog's imploring eyes and groaned.

“God! If I leave, you'll probably kill it, right? Okay—you both have one minute.”

He stood, arms crossed, and looked balefully from one to the other as Fancy walked over to lie at his feet once more. Nick glanced at Juda Trent and shrugged.

“The dog does like him,” he said.

“Thirty seconds,” snapped Daniel.

“All right.” Juda tossed her cigarette into the fireplace. “You've met Larkin?”

“
He
introduced us.” Daniel shot Nick a venomous look. “Is that what this is, Hayward? Some screwed-up intervention so I don't go out with one of your old girlfriends? Christ, how does Sira put up with you?”

“Stop,” said Juda. “Larkin is someone
I
look after. Or try to anyway. Larkin is . . .” She hesitated.

“What?” demanded Daniel. “What's wrong with her?”

“Wrong with her? Nothing. Who told you that?”

“Well, for starters, Mr. Hayward here said she's a mental patient.”

“
Former
mental patient,” said Nick.

“She's not crazy,” Juda said emphatically. “She has . . . well, let's call them boundary issues. Does she seem dangerous to you, Daniel?”

“Of course not. I mean, I don't think so. But how would I know? We just met.”

“Have you slept with her?”

Daniel flushed. “Look, I don't know where you're going with this,
Dr.
Trent, but frankly it's none of your business.”

“Because she is very dangerous, Daniel.” said Juda. “To you and—”

“If she's not supposed to be here,” Daniel broke in, “if she's going to get into trouble for being here, or hurt someone, hurt herself—why aren't you helping her, instead of giving me a hard time?”

Juda stooped to pat Fancy's worn head. “That's what I'm trying to do. But there's not much time.”

In his chair Nick slouched, until all Daniel could see was the warning glitter of his eyes. “Do you remember, Danny,” Nick asked, “how we used to wish the world was a more interesting place? Or no—wait.”

He looked at the ceiling. As if on cue, music seeped down from an upper room: a thin, hollow-sounding recording of the “Liebestod.” “Let me rephrase that. Do you remember when the world
was
a more interesting place?”

“What do you mean?”

“That night in D.C., after the Glass show at that place—what do you call it, the one with the big columns?”

“The Old Pension Building.”

“Right.” For a minute Nick sat, brooding. “But you remember it, right? How we felt?”

“Jesus, Nick, we were tripping our tits off! I almost got canned 'cause I missed my deadline.”

“That's not when I mean. I mean
after
—after the acid wore off, before the sun came up, when we were walking down by that canal there in Georgetown. It was so fucking beautiful. This time of year, too. I said it was like Regents Canal. . . .”

“No.” Daniel looked up sharply. “You said it was
exactly
like the Regents Canal. And for a minute . . .”

The room was still. Overhead the “Liebestod” had stopped. Daniel could hear mumbling voices, a man's bellicose laughter. He stared at Juda, and then at Nick.

“For a minute they were the same place,” Daniel said. “They . . .”

He stopped, recalling his conversation with Larkin. “They coincided.”

Silence, except for Fancy's wheezing breath. In his chair Nick was curled like a great amber-eyed cat, watching.

“That's right.” Juda touched the sunflower at Daniel's throat, ran a finger along his collarbone. He shivered. “It happens, Daniel. And when it does . . .”

Her finger moved into the hollow of his throat. “It's very dangerous. People get trapped. They can't get out. They can't get back.”

“Back? Back
where?”
Daniel shook his head. “Explain to me again exactly what kind of psychiatrist you are?”

He looked at Nick. “Look, I have to get back. I have work to do. And since this all seems like some kind of sick setup by you and your friends, you can tell Larkin that I've gone home.”

“Danny,” said Nick, “I would be very surprised if you could leave her. Larkin is a remarkable girl. The sort with hooks and talons.”

Daniel ignored him. But when he reached the wall, he stopped. Pain lanced him: a blade of longing, and he knew whose name was on it.

Larkin.

“No.” He shut his eyes.
Oh, no. Not this, not her, no.
Like an after-image of the sun against his eyelids, he saw an acorn, felt its smooth skin pressed against his lower lip, and recalled Nick's mocking words:

Someone spoke aloud. “‘We daren't go a-hunting for fear of little men.'”

It was Juda Trent.

The hairs on his arms rose. He reached for the door, was arrested by the crackle of flame and something that blurred his vision: a bright arabesque coiling and uncoiling in the air before him. He cringed, watched in horror as the shining arabesque became a rainbow-finned tail. The pressure on his mouth exploded into the taste of burned fish and honey. He felt a jolting sensation, as of a train jerking to a halt, and flailed at the air for safety.

“See or shut your eyes,” commanded Juda.

He saw.

Around him the room shuddered, the way the image thrown by a jammed projector shifts, then changes. Then the room was gone. In front of him, a fire burned; he could feel the heat, near scorching, of something in his hands. He looked down and saw that he was holding a blackened iron pot with something cooking inside it: a whole fish.

“Fuck—”

Gasping in pain and amazement, he dropped the pot, snatching his hand back to suck his singed fingers. With a cry someone caught the pot before it struck the ground, but not before the fish, flipping this way and that within, lifted its head and, gazing at Daniel, smiled.

“
Now you know,”
it said in Nick's voice.

Daniel fell to his knees, retching; the oily taste of salmon clung to his lips. Once again the world around him lurched and juddered forward. He braced himself against the ground, his nausea overwhelmed by terror. When he looked up again, the fire was gone, and the fish.

He was back in the brightly colored attic room at Highbury Fields. Before him stood a woman, Larkin, he thought, but younger and more beautiful—terrifyingly so, like a glowing figure in a stained-glass window that had stepped from its leaded frame. As he stared, she drew her hand to her lips, opening her mouth to disgorge a jewel. Its radiance hurt his eyes. The woman stared at it unbinking, then turned and held it up to him.

“
Look.”

He saw then that the gem was not perfect but marred by two flaws: a black imploded star and a jagged line of yellow-green, like sun blazing on a lake.

“
They think it must be emended.”
As she spoke, her lips did not move. “
They do not see that it is whole as it is.”

She opened her hand as though to let the gem drop. But it did not fall. Instead it hung suspended in the room before him, spinning and flickering, until in a sudden burst it exploded. Where it had been there was now a shining sphere no larger than a hazelnut, yet with every stone, every stream, every blade of grass inside it revealed to him as though beneath a microscope.

Daniel was inside that world; he knew that as simply as if he had awakened in his own apartment. But this wasn't his apartment. It wasn't anyplace he had ever been, or seen, or even imagined.

To either side of him rose the horizon, twin lines of jagged hills surrounding a wide green country under a viridian sky. Beyond the hills he glimpsed malachite seas, an emerald whirlpool like a fallen nebula, jade pools that reflected a starless firmament. There were no shadows. Everything shone with the blinding radiance of midday sun on desert sand. He stared in amazement, his breath coming too fast.

“Green,” he whispered. His fear returned, a smaller wave; he swallowed and tasted sweetness in the air. Like green apples, or the quickening smell of a spring marsh, at once honeyed and choked with decay.

With that sweetness the world behind his eyes smashed open. He saw Larkin as he had first seen her—laughing on the terrace at Sira's flat, then bent over her hoarded drawings, her mouth almost touching his and her eyes half closed. He blinked and looked around wildly.

And yes, on the rim of the green country stood a figure with the sea behind her, her naked form blazing green as the sea was green, the hills, the starless sky.

“Larkin!”

She was too far away. “Larkin!” Daniel cried again, and began to run toward her. “Larkin!”

She turned, and he saw something beside her—a rent in the horizon. The rent wavered, shifting up and down like a flame, grew darker, then flared into an emerald spire, whirling in slow eddies. Before he could blink, both figures disappeared.

“
Larkin!”

He stopped, panting. In the distance were nothing but willow-green cliffs falling to the sea and a sky the color of absinthe.

Absence.

He had scarcely thought the word when the green country faded. Color drained from it like water from a cracked bowl. A warm breath came into his ear:
See or close your eyes.

“
No—”

He tried to cry aloud but could not. Neither could he flee: he was as immovable as the hills. Which he saw now were not hills at all but something else, two endless and opposing lines of figures. One line was formed of men and women, dressed in every kind of clothing—suits and gowns and tunics, robes and trousers and even pelts. Some of them were naked. They had presence, but, gazing at them, Daniel knew they had no real power. They were an irruption upon the green world, as he was.

It was the others who terrified him.

They were nothing but light, an awful confusion of refracted rays, green blue gold, dazzling and horrible. The light had a sound, a deafening retort like an electrical discharge. Daniel doubled over, sickened. Yet almost immediately his nausea passed. The wordless song grew more refined—he could discern notes within it, a rising and falling scale that echoed inside him. The bones of his hands quivered; he could feel his skull's plates grinding together like teeth.

Unmaking,
Daniel thought.
It is unmaking me.

Yet as he felt himself splintering into motes of light and heat, another sound echoed across the plain. A word, a command. He could not then or later determine what the command was, but that did not matter as much as that it
was
a word. Like the music, the word went on and on, and Daniel was held within its sound—within both sounds, suspended as the jeweled world had been suspended, his Being momentarily the focus of two great wills. It was a dreadful immurement: eternity without light or thought or reason, the annihilating weight of those opposed powers pressing upon him until Daniel himself was nearly extinguished. They did not perceive him at all; he was nothing but a space between, to be crushed and erased in eternal mindless striving.

The voice cried out again. This time Daniel understood its meaning:
No more.
The roar of conflict faded. Light jabbed at his closed eyelids; he opened them to see a cold fireplace with three empty chairs before it. Sweet liquid filled his mouth as he drew a hand to his face. Somewhere within the house, a woman's clear laughter echoed. There was the sound of a bell tolling and another sound, strange to hear indoors—birdsong, the
cheet cheet cheet
of a wren.

“Daniel. Daniel, do you hear me?”

With an effort he turned and saw Juda Trent's hand extended to him. The steel-blue sheen of her fingernails seeped toward her knuckles. He stared at her, uncomprehending, then at Nick beside her with the dog Fancy at his feet.

“No.” Daniel choked on the word. “No.”

He lunged for the door. Before he could reach it, Nick grabbed him from behind, yanking Daniel's arm behind his back.

“Oh, fuck,” Daniel breathed. From the corner of his eye, he saw Nick withdraw his pocketknife, then felt its cold edge against his windpipe.

“You can't go, Danny.” He spoke calmly. “I'm sorry. You have to stay now.”

Daniel held his breath. The blade scraped against his Adam's apple.

“Don't go,” whispered Nick. His gaze flickered from topaz to green. “Don't leave me.”

Daniel waited a heartbeat, felt the hand holding the knife relax. He shook himself free, pushing Nick away.

“All right.” He pointed at Nick, his hand shaking. “Just ... tell me . . .”

“It's her.” Nick looked down at the knife in his hand, then at Daniel. His eyes were wide and helpless. “Larkin. Do you remember, Danny? Did you see? Look at this.”

He threw off his anorak and yanked up the T-shirt he wore beneath. “See, Danny? Do you see?”

Daniel sucked his breath in. Nick's chest was mapped with scars, whorls and streaks of red and white and blue-green. Some were edged with pinkish lappets like fringed petals; a few were deep enough to thrust a finger inside. Daniel stared, repulsed not just by Nick's ravaged torso but by the patterns of the scars themselves, which seemed to shift and dart like specks of light behind his eyelids.

They meant something.

He looked away, but the lines floated across his vision, tangled roots or branches, dendrites, rivers, roads. That scorched, sweet taste came again, a wash of spectral green across his vision.