Phantom (24 page)

The clearing was a small circle, perhaps
twenty feet in diameter. It was ringed by the pipe-cleaner trees,
which grew much more closely together at this spot. Ned squeezed
through them and stood at the edge of a gradual depression in the
ground. Only a few inches from his feet the clay became a deep
black pudding, from which a light mist rose. The air was very warm
and the smell of sulphur was quite sharp. Peeler was right again,
Ned thought. This was the bizarre mud bath the old man had
mentioned. In the center of the pit the steam was thicker and the
mud was at low boil. Hot bubbles the size of baseballs forced their
way up from below and broke the surface with a gruesome, gurgling
sound. Ned wondered what the temperature was there. He bent over
and tested the mud near his feet with one finger. It had a
surprisingly smooth, creamy texture, not at all gritty like
ordinary mud. And while it was hot, it wasn't too hot; about like
... well, a nice bath. Of course, it would be much hotter,
unbearable, at the center, but there was obviously plenty of usable
space. Quite a few people could slide their bodies into this muck
at any given time, if that's what they wanted to do.

Ned thought about it. Did people really come
here to wallow like pigs, as Peeler and Cloudy had said? Naked? Men
and women together? What a thing to do, and what a strange sight it
must have been. Were they young or old, or of all ages? Children
too? And what did they look like when they came out-black, coated
with mud from the neck down? There must have been showers nearby,
perhaps in one of the adjacent gardens. Or maybe they hosed down
right here, where all the pipe-cleaner trees now grew.

Looking at the pit, watching the mud bubble
and the mist swirl slowly, Ned could almost see what it had been
like. Human heads, male and female, dotting the black cream all
around like beads on a necklace. So many of them, so close together
their unseen bodies must be touching beneath the surface. It gave
Ned a bad feeling, in a way he didn't understand. There was
something disturbing about it. His mind kept going back to that
room in the spa, to the picture of the young and beautiful woman he
had seen in the magazine. Now he could see her walking into this
garden, taking off her clothes and getting into the mud with the
other people. The thought of it repelled him, and yet at the same
time he couldn't help but be fascinated by it. It seemed to be a
part of the whole basic feel of the spa—a kind of beauty that had
gone a step too far, so as to be itself and something else,
something off, something wrong.

The mud sucked and gurgled. The steam danced
on the fetid air. Was there a small breeze here? The pipe-cleaner
trees swayed one to another ever so gently, their leaves
whisper-hissing overhead. They looked different, as if they had
undergone a subtle transformation in the last few minutes. Now they
had a flat, two-dimensional quality, like a very detailed and
complex line drawing with contrived perspectives. It was a
monochromatic scene, a gray on gray variant, every line shading off
obscurely. Like one of those puzzle pictures for kids, Ned thought.
"How many animals can you count in this picture?" Or, "Can you find
all the people hidden in this picture? (Clue: There are 27!)." But
now the puzzle was life-size, and Ned was in the middle of it. The
picture was entrancing. Faces formed everywhere, fingers curled and
flexed. But if Ned tried to focus on anyone spot the image
disappeared-a face became another gnarled knot on a pipe-cleaner
tree, and fingers were just a spray of twigs. The trick was not to
focus but to let his gaze wander slowly, taking in the whole
panorama around him. When Ned did that, the effect was dramatic.
The grove of weird trees was suddenly full of implicit life, as
faces and hands and bodies insinuated themselves into the scene
with short, stop-start movements, like clouds on a weather
satellite film loop.

Don't play into it.

Ned backed away a step but the trees held
him comfortingly. He stretched his right arm out to one side and it
seemed to blend in as part of the picture. Neat! When Ned was
younger he had sometimes thought that it would be great to be able
to step through the television set into cartoon land, that magical
world. Now, being here was almost like that; not quite, but close.
He felt giddy, as if he had just discovered the key that would give
him that special ability. No one else in the world would have it.
He stood at the gateway to a land that knew only a child's
happiness, a land of mystery and adventure and high excitement, a
land of fun and eternal play, free from fear, free from pain, a
land that went on forever. It was a gateway you could pass through
only once. Ned knew dimly that if he turned around and went home,
he would never again be able to find his way back to this wondrous
threshold. It was too fantastic to lose, but ...

From the center of the clearing a woman
beckoned to him. She seemed to be wearing only a filmy veil of
mist. She had a most beautiful smile, and her arms were an open
embrace.

—
Child.

She spoke without sound, directly into his
mind. Who are you, he wanted to ask. The woman in the magazine?
Yes. No—his mother? Ned's heart ached with uncertainty.

—
Child of mine.

The thought-words, a sweetness, a light that
glowed within him. Just run to her, a few steps only, and lose
yourself in her love and goodness for all time in the magic realm
beyond the gateway.

—
Child, child, come to
me.

Now and this once, never to know fear or
pain again. This is what you have been looking for, this is what
you came to find. Ned moved forward hesitantly, his feet sinking
into the hot mud.

—
Child, you will be mine
again this day.

The words detonated like depth charges in
his brain. Ned froze, eyes widening in terror. You will be mine
again—he knew those words. They had been written in the dust on the
floor of the spa. They meant he had to get out of here, fast. He
stepped back, but the trees seemed to jostle him and press him on
toward the woman.

Her smile was gone now, replaced by a look
of anguish and rage. A face that had been beautiful but was now tom
by elemental conflict. Again Ned pushed himself back, but the trees
were a puzzle picture of hands and faces and bodies gathering
around him, a phantom army that would not let him go. Steam
bellowed up from the center of the pit, a scalding rush that
engulfed the woman. The boiling mud roared at her feet. The leaves
above, rippling from the force of the blast, made a noise like a
crowd laughing obscenely. Ned couldn't turn away from the woman's
eyes. They were burning with sorrow and loss, and they cut into the
boy accusingly. It's my fault, he thought. I'm the one to blame for
this, I'm doing it to her.

The spring vented. A searing jet of steam
shot fifteen feet into the air. Ned was spattered with gobs of hot
mud and sulphurous water, but he hardly noticed it. The woman was
turning bright red before his eyes, and then her skin began to peel
away as her flesh sizzled and popped.

—
Child, why?

Ned screamed.

—
Child, why are you doing
this to me?

Ned turned, tore his way through the ring of
pipe-cleaner trees and ran.

—
Child, why are you leaving
me again?

Her words, a weeping in his brain, a cry of
emotions so great and unexpected that it reduced the boy to raw
confusion. He had no defenses left, no final pocket of sense or
understanding to draw on. All he could do was run, full of shame
and self-hatred. When he came to the way out he didn't stop to
think, but instantly scrambled up the ramp of saplings, pulling
himself like a frenzied monkey.

Suddenly he was standing there, in darkness.
Everything had changed. He had reached the top of the wall and it
was a thin, luminous ribbon at his feet. The wall fell away a
million miles below into endless space. All was blackness around
him, utter night. The pale, glowing strip he stood on was his only
foothold. He ran as fast as he could, never missing a step,
following the line as it unrolled in front of him. Tears streamed
down his face, tears for the woman he had left behind. She had
burned and died, and he had done nothing. Nor had she died alone.
More, so much more, had gone with her. A chance he would never have
again. A secret, a truth he would never know. The feeling was
beyond words for Ned. All he had left were useless tears and a
vacuum within.

The ribbon ran out and Ned was flying before
he realized it. Then: whump! Stunned, blinking, .he rolled on his
side and looked around. He was in the clearing. There was the
terrace and the spa building. He was lying on soft field grass. The
wall was just behind him. He had jumped out of the void and back
into daylight.

He cried bitterly.

* * *

21. Mother and
Child

Two days later Ned still didn't know what
had happened to him at the spa. Had he really survived the final
encounter he had sought, or was it merely a hallucination? Had he
stood at the door to heaven, or hell? Was the woman in any way
real, or was she just a fantasy? But the most important question
was whether it was over at last, the haunting he believed he had
been going through? Somehow it still felt unresolved, but he had no
way of knowing whether there was anything even to resolve. How good
it would be if he could write it all off as the fearsome antics of
a boy's imagination, but Ned knew that you cannot willfully take
shelter in ignorance or innocence.

He was not apprehensive, but
subdued. His body felt as if all strength and energy had been
drained out of it. He had spent the two days sitting around the
house listlessly. He couldn't get past one page of any book he
looked at. He watched television, napped, said little to his
parents. Mostly he brooded over the incidents at the spa. Some
things continued to amaze him. He couldn't remember climbing up the
saplings, for instance, and yet he must have done it. And then
being able to run along the top of the wall—
run
—in a moment of crisis when it
seemed as if he hap been transported to the black reaches of
deepest space. His guardian angel was that part of the brain which
had kept control and functioned automatically, delivering him from
... whatever.

The second night, Ned went to bed after
staring without interest at the television for a couple of hours.
He put on his light pajamas and sat by the window. The sky was dark
enough, and very clear. Ned pushed the screen up and brought his
telescope to the open window. It was not an expensive or
sophisticated instrument, like some in the Edmund Scientific
catalogue, but it could bring him a reasonable glimpse of Saturn on
a good night. He had seen planets, the moons of Jupiter and plenty
of stars, but one of these days he would have to get a book that
would enable him to properly identify other objects in the night
sky. Like pulsars, or those baffling quasars. In a school magazine
there had been an article about quasars; it said that astronomers
didn't know exactly what they were—and that pleased Ned. There were
some things grown-ups could see and study, but not explain.

Ned found the Pleiades. Distance was such a
tricky business. To look at this star group you would think they
were all bunched closely together. But Ned knew they were actually
separated by hundreds of millions of miles, vast gulfs of space.
The sizes and distances involved were almost more than the mind
could comprehend.

And what if this whole universe were nothing
but a speck on a microscope slide, being examined by a boy in
another universe, the same being true of his universe, and so on,
and on .... Talk about giants! Hello, up there. Was there any way a
phantom could fit into this scheme of things? Ned had to admit that
it seemed silly. But, who knows—maybe one of those boys in another
universe had a similar problem. Size and distance would mean
nothing, when it came to that. Hope he's doing better than I am,
Ned thought.

He heard someone in the hall. As he turned
to look around, his mother's face appeared in the doorway.

"Ned?"

"Hi, Mom."

Linda came into the room.

"Can't sleep?"

"In a few minutes. There's a good sky
tonight."

"Are all the stars where they're supposed to
be?"

Ned smiled. "I think so."

Linda sat down on his bed and leaned back
against the wall.

"Come on over here with me for a minute,"
she said.

Ned pulled the telescope in and lowered the
window screen.

He started to get up onto the bed.

"Oh—want me to turn the light on?"

"Don't bother. Just get close to me."

Ned sat next to his mother. It was a very
bright night, and they looked like ghostly figures in the dark.
Linda put her arm around the boy and hugged him, resting her head
on his. Ned snuggled closer, luxuriating in her warmth, the clean
smell of her and the feeling of love she always gave him.

"Are you okay, Ned?"

"Sure."

"Anything bothering you?"

"No .... "

"Anything at all, you just tell me about
it."

"Uh-huh."

"The reason I mention it is, you've been in
a funny mood lately. Know what I mean?"

"Well ... " Ned let the word fade away and
gave a small shrug.

"It seems that way to me," Linda went on.
"Just a little."

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"How old do you think you'll be when you
die?"

"I don't know, hon. Nobody knows that about
themselves. Why? Is that what's bothering you?"

Another shrug. "I don't know."