The Glittering World (32 page)

“Ready.” Gabe stuffed the book into his pack as they stepped outside. “Just doing some last-minute thinking.”

“Try not to do too much of that.”

He glanced up to find her watching him, her expression unreadable. Was it one of wariness, or concern?
Let me inside your head
, Gabe thought.
Let me see what you’ve seen, so we can see it all and together as one.

“We’re going to bring him home,” Gabe said. “Right?”

“That’s the plan.” Elisa dropped her pack to the porch steps and grasped Gabe by the shoulders. “Listen, if anything goes wrong, I want you to turn back. There’s no point in both of us . . . dying.”

“Now who’s thinking too much?” he said, but she only stared at him. “Of course. The same goes for you. Okay?” He said the words, but in truth he had no intention of leaving her side, aboveground or below. She was the one who was going to show him the way to Blue.

Maureen and Donald’s red Toyota rumbled up the drive. They’d closed the house down and were on their way to Halifax for the winter season, the car packed to overflowing, with a plastic storage container strapped to the roof. As Gabe watched the car climb the hill he wiped a black fly from his face with the sleeve of his Liquid Sky shirt, the ratty one with the cartoon
alien on the front. Blue’s shirt, once, its smell sweet with burned cedar. Seventy-three hours had passed since Jason had left, seventy-three hours spent sleeping in front of the woodstove, Gabe and Elisa sharing Blue’s old mattress from the tartan room, which they’d dragged downstairs and positioned before the fire to combat the crisping air. They both wore Blue’s clothes now: to bed, out in the woods, while they cooked over the range in the kitchen. Their hands upon the same spice jars as Blue’s hands once were, the same pots and pans and spoons he used—anything that might act as camouflage. They took on everything of him they could.

Gabe ambled down the hill to the idling car, the morning sun voided behind the clouds over Kelly’s Mountain. “Hey there,” he said, once Maureen lowered the windows. “Is this it for you two?”

“Indeed it is.” She wore her cheery smile like a mask. “We just wanted to say good-bye.”

He rounded to the passenger side and peered inside at Donald, who held his hands tightly to his chest, as if trying to submerge inside himself. He smelled of shoe polish and chicken soup, and looked nothing so much as shrunken. A little like a young child as well, his eyes watery and wide, the reflection of the treetops swaying in their milky depths.
He sees things I can’
t. What he’s seen, it can fill volumes.

Gabe leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Donald’s temple. He tried to look inside the older man’s daydreaming mind, but all he could conjure were images of the surrounding woods, of lush foliage, the forest for the trees. Still, it was something.

“Thank you, Donald,” Gabe whispered, and bowed his head in a formal salaam. “See you again soon, I hope.”

Maureen sighed and looked away, let her fingers dance briefly atop the steering wheel before she turned back to her husband. “Darling, I’ll be right back, okay?”

Donald didn’t respond, no reaction as Maureen turned off the engine and got out of the car. He only stared out the windshield and into the woods as Olivier tried to settle in the back-seat among the suitcases and cardboard boxes. Gabe gave the dog a good scratch behind the ears, then trailed after Maureen as she made her way toward the woods; he tried to steal a glance at her wristwatch, but couldn’t catch the time. A dozen yards across the property and she stopped at the border of the lawn.

“Listen, hon,” she said. “Donald’s not coming back.” She couldn’t look at Gabe, only at the forest, the water, the mountain high above the cove. “I’ve booked him into an assisted living facility. Once I get the paperwork done and the doctor signs off on it, he’ll be admitted, down in Halifax.”

“Oh, wow,” Gabe said lamely, though he couldn’t feign proper surprise.
He’s departing the Summerlands for the Autumnlands. And after that it will truly be winter.
“I’m really sorry.”

“Me too.” She smiled, but there was no joy in it. “Things have gone downhill pretty fast. No matter how bad he got, he always used to enjoy Olivier at least, and hiking on the trails. Not anymore.”

“I tried to get him out more.” And Gabe really did. But it was no use; he’d have sooner moved a mountain, or the world. Donald’s deterioration, by all accounts a gradual one, had rapidly accelerated in the past few weeks, the same weeks that had passed since Blue’s disappearance. Everything was slipping away.

“You and me both,” Maureen said. “I’ve known this day would come, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”

Gabe slapped his thighs in an erratic drumbeat. They fell into an uncomfortable silence, neither willing to cut the final cord between them, that binding golden thread. Yet there was something Gabe still needed to make right. “Wait here a minute,” he said after a while. “I have something for you.”

He ran back to the porch of the MacLeod House, where Elisa was rifling through her backpack. “Donald’s being put in a home,” he blurted out. “I’m not sure he knows, but . . .”

Elisa made a pained face, then dusted off her hands and headed down to the Toyota. She had gone down the hill the previous night to see Donald, and he had invited her inside his cabin. They hadn’t spoken, according to her, only listened to opera on his record player, as well as the jumbled sounds of faraway strangers over the ham radio. But after a couple of hours she could no longer visit with him. She developed a niggling cough, followed by a splotchy rash along her fingers and a sore throat; slowly but surely, Elisa’s allergies had returned.

Gabe rustled through his pack until he found what he was looking for, and trotted back to Maureen. “Here,” he said, and held out the book. “This belongs to Donald.”

She looked down at the scarred cover. “His old field notes,” Maureen said. “Where did you find this? We were looking for it everywhere.”

Gabe opened his mouth to tell her he found it out by the old Colony building, which was the lie he had prepared. But when he tried to speak nothing came out. “I took it from his cabin,” he eventually said. “I was going to return it . . .” But that’s how it always was with Gabe, until it was too late. By taking the book he had triggered Donald’s fit, which in turn led to Elisa’s allergy attack.
And that’s what took me away from Blue. Maybe forever.
The thought had haunted him ever since.

Maureen looked confused as to how to respond, but then an answer colored her face. “You’re a thief,” she said matter-of-factly. And Gabe could do nothing but nod in agreement.

Because it was true; he stole things. He couldn’t help it, it was simply what he did, had always done, since he was a magpie of a boy.
You and your sticky little fingers
, one of his foster mothers had said, right before she put him back out on the street (though she’d called him a lot worse by then). Fred Cronin said the Other Kind crept up and stole things too—laundry off the line, recycling from the garbage, bright shiny objects that glittered like dew in the early-morning sun.

Turns out I am more like them than I thought. Which means that I’m more like Blue.
He fingered Blue’s plastic lighter in his pocket; it was one of his favorite keepsakes.

“Well.” Maureen refused to meet his eye. “Thank you for giving it back.” He handed her the journal but couldn’t quite let go of it, and they held it between them. The message Donald had scrawled in the book’s margin, though—the secret that Gabe had deciphered last week—it needed to be let loose.

“You’re the one who set fire to the Colony all those years ago,” he said. “Isn’t that right?”

Maureen pulled the field notes free. She shivered and huffed, then squinted out toward the distant sky, the journal disappearing into the folds of her quilted jacket. “Well,” she said. “Well.”

“There’s this whole passage in there about how some experiment ended when the subjects of the sessions were compromised . . . But later Donald jotted something down next to it. He said it ended because of the fire, that someone who lived there named Barbara had burned the place down.” Now that he had spoken, he couldn’t get it all out fast enough. “When I checked the list of Colony members and saw there was no
Barbara, I realized that he must be talking about you, only by the wrong name. I heard him call Elisa that too, right before her allergy attack.”

Maureen, her face turned from him, took a long time to respond. “I suppose that’s the problem with swearing someone like Donald to secrecy,” she said, her voice wistful. “It’s always a race to see which he’ll forget first, the secret or the swear.”

“Was it the Other Kind? Did they make you set the fire?”

“No, no. It was all Maureen. Uninfluenced, for better or worse.” She held her arms as if chilled, and looked at Gabe at last. “The People of the Wood, as we referred to them back then . . . We thought we’d called them up, even though my own kin have talked about them for generations. Everyone knew there was something about their sort that gave you a good buzz, so we figured hey, why not see if we could bring them around. Lots of namby-pamby ritual work, baby pagans playing at forces we didn’t understand. So stupid, and not a thought to the cost. My father would’ve skinned me alive for messing with them, God rest his soul.”

“So you believe in them. The Other Kind. They’re real to you?”

“Oh yes. They’re as real as we are.” She exhaled, drawing it out, and for a flickering moment a whisper of condensation escaped her lips. “And they’re out there. Through the deep woods behind the Colony, beneath the water and the land. Back then, they would come right to the edge of our property. And like the fools we were, we bought into the illusion of our own power, having ‘summoned’ them. We started to take advantage of them, their energy . . . There was a lot of dope going around too, so naturally we were reckless. Then we turned
them
into our drug. We tried pulling back from the brink, but it was no use. We were hooked on their vibes.”

The new frequency
. Maureen and Donald had trod the very same primrose path. He buzzed with a thrill of recognition.

“We thought we were using them,” Maureen said, “but
they
chose
us.
I couldn’t see it at the time. A couple of years passed before they took the kids away, replaced them with their own kind like a pair of cuckoo eggs . . . And it was like it didn’t even matter to anyone. Not even to Yvonne! She preferred the new boy to her own son. It was once we took in Michael and Gavina—the
new
Michael and Gavina—that stuff started getting real scary.” A tear rolled down her cheek, and she made no attempt to wipe it away. “I began to see things. Terrible things. Faces under the ground, in the trees. Always watching. Waiting. Even on the good days, I knew it had to stop.”

It hasn’
t stopped for me.
Gabe stared up into the sky at a flock of geese traversing the cove, and watched as the birds arranged themselves into musical notes that played a lilting little song in compound time. The cove still radiated with the frequency, if the right person was looking.

He hummed along quietly, and Maureen eyed him as if she were sizing up his mental state. “Once upon a time,” she said, “we swore we would leave them be. So much for good intentions.” She winced as if pricked, and he was reminded of the dirty syringes affixed to the Colony murals, the spent needles jutting from the wall and pointing in the direction of the darkened hallway.

“You shot yourselves up,” Gabe said. “Injected some part of them inside you. Just being around them, it was never enough, was it?”
We’re all so greedy, willing to trade in riches for the promise of more. And then all we’re left with is an overgrown turnip of regret.
Was he going to make the very same mistake?

Maureen stared at the ground and scanned its broken surfaces,
a divination of dirt. “There was an essence inside them . . . Something that was like the holy grail of highs. Donald thought maybe it was pheromonal, or reproductive. Something about
collateral vein
s. The thing was, we could only get the stuff out of them when . . . when they . . .”

The geese had stolen across the sky, the lost meter of music along with them. “They only excreted it,” she said, “when we kept them in the dark.”

“Aw, Maureen, no.” The thought was almost too much to bear, and he shook his head until it burst with a galaxy of stars. “What did you do?”

“I stayed away from them, mostly,” she said, but he could tell by her haunted undertone that she didn’t believe it herself. “After we took in the new kids, we would keep them inside, cover all the windows, which usually did the trick. If it didn’t, well, we sealed the whole place up, trapped all of us in until we got what we needed. Could be days, but over the winter we shut ourselves inside the Colony for two months straight, living off whatever we could. Turned ourselves into a compound, like a bunch of crazy end-of-the-worlders, with the two kids locked behind the thickest door we had. We couldn’t help it. We were out of control. And oh, how they would scream to be let out! Like a pair of starving dogs, scraping against that metal door—needing to be part of the earth and the forest, like their kind do.” She sighed. “We were no better than Flora, I can tell you that much. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I managed to wean myself off them. God, if only you knew how tough that was for me. Even now, once you all came to the cove. How hard it was for me to be around Michael, and how good it felt all the same.”

He knew.

She looked at him and her face smoothed, though only
slightly. “So I freed them, and used the fire as an excuse. I figured everyone would think the church folk had done it, but of course Donald found me out, he always did. After the fire everyone had to go cold turkey, and it was a good thing we had other vices to occupy us. Not that anything else came close. Donald did manage to distill some of the essence into the screech, but eventually that ran out. Even then, no one could bring themselves to leave the cove. Most of us still can’t.”