by A. C. Wise
Adams kept her back turned, her shoulders hunched until we were close enough to touch her. Heavy cable-knit sweater, thick rubber waders, her hair cropped jagged-short. She didn’t even look up when she spoke.
“I have a small plane,” she said. “I can fly us out anytime.”
She’d been waiting for us. Waiting while we gathered our courage. Waiting until Martinez died, the breaking point to push us into action. She finally turned, and I heard Kellet catch her breath, the smallest of sounds. Adams’ eyes were gold, the color of honey, the color of fire and the stars we’d swallowed on the ice. All this time with the dreams, and she hadn’t fought them. The blind things in the tunnels, the girl under the tree, the shadows, vast and slow moving behind the sky—they’d gotten inside her, and she’d changed.
*
The base camp Adams flew us to was smaller than the one we’d left from a year ago. Curtains divided cots set along the walls for the illusion of privacy. There was a stove, and stores, but none of us were hungry. Unlike the first base camp, the wind didn’t howl outside. Only silence, the vast stretch of snow waiting beyond the walls, and the stars pricking the darkness. The ghosts were already in the room with us, the spaces of absence carved in the shadows for Reyes, Viader, Martinez, and McMann.
Kellet and Ramone retreated to their cots soon after we arrived. I was too jittery for sleep. As for Adams, I couldn’t tell. I’d always found her hard to read. With her golden eyes and the new angles of her bones, it was even harder. Her impatience, her anger, seemed to have burned away. Instead, she was literally worn thin, almost flickering, like it took all her effort to stay in this world.
A fat candle sat on the table; its light sharpened the planes and hollows of Adams’ face and spread the illusion of wings behind her. She retrieved a bottle of whiskey, tilted it toward me in a silent question. I nodded and watched her fill two glasses. She’d been waiting for us for a year, the strain evident in her movements. I still didn’t understand why.
“What happened a year ago?” The question came out more plaintive, more broken than I intended.
Adams swallowed from her glass, lips peeling back in a grimace.
“You’ll have to be more specific.” Her honey-gold eyes pinned me, testing.
I didn’t know how to ask about the tunnels and the gathering song. I came at it sideways.
“The mission. Did we succeed?”
“You kidding?” Adams knocked back half of her remaining drink; this time when she showed her teeth, it was wholly feral. “Soldiers who feel no pain, who keep fighting even with massive wounds, or missing limbs, soldiers who can go days without eating or sleeping? The honey was never for them. I thought you understood that.”
So, she had run, when the plane came for us, and she’d never turned over the honey.
“Then why?” Why bring us on the mission at all? The map was in her head. She never needed us.
The look Adams returned was pitying. She surprised me further, covering my hands with her own. Her palms were rough, calloused, like she’d spent a year hauling nets in the cold.
“They need us to remember.” Her words sparked something, a twinge of recognition. “We need them to forget.”
Them. Where her hands covered mine, her skin hummed. Those things from beyond the stars, they’d fought and died and torn themselves apart. When the tall things from beyond the sky had come, signaling the end of their time, with the last dying breath of their civilization, they’d made a song. They’d flung their ghosts across the stars, casting their tattered remains into the void, hoping to find something for those echoes to hold onto, someone to remember. And like Adams said, we, the eight of us, had needed them in order to forget.
Those tall, attenuated creatures. Their footsteps extinguished stars, put out of the light of worlds. What did it mean that I’d seen them in the sky? Were they an echo of the past, or a glimpse at our future? Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe all that mattered was letting go.
I thought of Viader, falling, Reyes, vanishing into the night. Cities burning, a child buried under a tree. The seeds of a civilization that required blood and sacrifice to grow.
Adams reached into her pocket, and set a bottle on the table. Honey, the same color as her eyes. It sang, and my blood sang back. The harvest song, the lullaby. We’ll seal you up, but you’ll dream, and all your years of darkness will be worthwhile.
Gold dripped from my bones, written with history. I could taste it, curling my tongue with its sweetness so sharp it drowned everything else.
Adams touched the bottle with one finger. I shivered.
She unfolded a knife from her belt, and used the blade to nick the meat of her palm. Honey oozed to the surface. She didn’t need the cave anymore. She licked the wound, glancing at me. I pressed a hand against my chest. Under my breastbone, a hollow space waited for a hive.
Adams stood, skinning her shirt over her head. Her dog tags gleamed as she turned around. Her back was covered in raised welts, smooth and white, old scars.
“The map,” she said.
I stood, palm outstretched. The heat of her skin beat against me like a flame. Her scars met my touch, pearls stitched into her skin, the puncture wounds she’d received in Afghanistan. I traced my hands over the pattern. Stars, arranged in configurations eons old.
“It was never meant to show where we were going,” Adams said. “But where they had been.”
History, written on her skin. She guided me to one of the two remaining cots and pushed me down gently. The light from her eyes cast shadows on her cheeks. The bottle of honey appeared in her hand. Straddling me, Adams pulled the cork from the honey with her teeth. Liquid the color of a full harvest moon—ripe to bursting.
Adams dipped a finger in the honey and held it out to me. I pictured light leaking from her eyes like tears, seeping from her pores. The harvest song howled in the dark. Shadows bent over us, long fingers needle-sharp and venom-tipped, ready to stitch through skin and bone.
I sucked her finger clean.
It wasn’t sex, it was more like farewell. Adams flickered, her translucence overwhelming her solidity. My hands closed on empty air, but the memories kept flowing through me, hers and theirs.
I was in the cave in Afghanistan. Thousands of hexagonal cells covered the walls. Needle-thin legs brushed my skin, then the first stinger entered me. My body arched, my flesh trying to escape my bones. I was being torn apart, threaded back together. Adams’ map wrote itself onto me, stars burnt into my being in a pattern from before the world. But there was no pain. Bones dripped honey, skeletons embedded in the walls, but still living. They remembered. Everything. Wings beat inside the remains of their papered skin, a steady hum. A whole lost world, resurrected inside the dead, calling them—calling me—to sing.
*
There’s a certain quality of cold where temperature becomes color. Ramone, Kellet, and I walked into a solid wash of it, thick enough to feel. I’d shown them the map on my skin, and they’d agreed, we had to finish it out on the ice where it began.
We didn’t go far, just enough to be alone with the wind. Out here, we would hear Reyes when he screamed. We’d see Viader when she rose like a meteor out of the dark.
“I dream about Viader sometimes,” Kellet said as we huddled around a Coleman lantern in our tent. “Her flesh is still burning. She’s only got one eye. There are holes in her skin and she’s holding embers in her jaws.”
“Reyes came to see me,” Ramone said. His right sleeve hung by his side, his left hand held a mug filled with vodka. I’d never noticed the paler band of skin on the fourth finger before.
“He came to my bedroom window. His breath fogged the glass, so I knew he was really there. His hair was all matted. His teeth were broken, and his eyes were the color of dried blood. He tapped on my window.”
Kellet put her hand on Ramone’s knee. I could feel myself spreading in the wind. Still here, already gone.
“I didn’t know what else to do, so I let
him in. He crawled under the covers with me. I thought he’d be cold from being out on the ice for so long, but he was warm. He smelled like red meat and wet dog.
“He put his head on my chest.” Ramone touched his knuckles to the spot. “And then he just lay there, listening to my heart.”
Ramone swallowed the rest of his drink, squeezing his eyes closed.
“The next morning, he was gone. That was the first time I tried to kill myself. I took pills, but then I chickened out and called 911.”
I put my hand on his other knee. Outside, the ice sang.
“I watched Martinez kill himself,” I said, my own unburdening. I’d already given the honey Al-Raqqah, everything else I had to give. This was the last thing.
“I wish we knew what happened to McMann,” Ramone said.
“He’s probably waiting for us,” I gestured at the tent flap.
Kellet reached for my hand across Ramone’s knees. She tangled her fingers with mine, and our joined hands covered Ramone’s one good hand. My lips brushed the corner of Ramone’s mouth. He closed his eyes again. We went soft, slow, all three of us together. It still wasn’t sex. It was a map, a shared history, a surrendering of our pain.
When they left in the dark, I didn’t hear them go.
*
I cut a bottle of honey from my veins, bled it into the glass, then drank it whole. Burning like Viader, I walked out into the cold.
My body is going up in flames, bits of me flaking away to ash. Martinez is here. I can see the stars through the hole in his skull. Reyes lopes beside me. Viader is an angel. Adams’ footsteps crunch through the snow, getting farther and farther apart. Ramone and Kellet, even McMann, they’re all here. We’re separate, but together, strung across vast distances, never alone.
There are tall, vast shapes moving across the sky. They have no faces. Their skin blushes like the aurora borealis, studded with stars. They are the beginning and the end. They harvest the honey; they sing the song. The wind dies down, and it’s the only thing I can hear. History, writing itself onto my bones. The dead being reborn.
Harvest. Gather. Change.
Open your bones, they sing. Make space inside your skin.
Let us in.
The Secret of Flight
The Secret of Flight
Written by Owen Covington
Directed by Raymond Barrow
Prologue
Act 1
Scene 1
SETTING: The stage is bare except for a backdrop screen showing the distant manor house.
The lights should start at 1/8 and rising to 3/4 luminance as the scene progresses.
AT RISE: The corpse of a man lies CENTER STAGE. POLICEMAN enters STAGE RIGHT, led by a YOUNG BOY carrying garden shears. The boy’s cheek is smeared with dirt. The boy points with the shears and tugs the policeman’s hand. POLICEMAN crosses to CENTER STAGE and kneels beside the corpse. BOY exits STAGE RIGHT.
POLICEMAN puts his ear to the dead man’s chest to listen for breath or a pulse. His expression grows puzzled. POLICEMAN straightens and unbuttons the dead man’s shirt. He reaches into the corpse’s chest cavity and withdraws his hands, holding a starling (Director’s note: use C’s, already trained). POLICEMAN holds starling out toward audience, as though asking for help. Starling appears dead, but after a moment stirs and takes flight, passing over the audience before vanishing. (Director’s note: C assures me this is possible. C concealed somewhere to collect the bird?). POLICEMAN startles and falls back. (BLACKOUT)
*
LEADING LADY VANISHES!
Herald Star—October 21, 1955
Betsy Trimingham, Arts & Culture
Last night’s opening of The Secret of Flight at The Victory Theater will surely go down as one of the most memorable and most bizarre in history. Not for the play itself, but for the dramatic disappearance of leading lady Clara Hill during the play’s final scene.
As regular readers of this column know, The Secret of Flight was already fraught with rumor before the curtain ever rose. Until last night, virtually nothing was known of The Secret of Flight save the title, the name of its director, Raymond Barrow, and of course, the name of its playwright, Owen Covington.
Raymond Barrow kept the play shrouded in mystery, refusing to release the names of the cast, their roles, or a hint of the story. He did not even allow the play to run in previews for the press. Speculation ran rampant. Was it a clever tactic to build interest, or was it a simple lack of confidence after the critical and financial failure of Barrow’s last two plays?
Whatever Barrow’s reasoning, it is now inconsequential. All that is on anyone’s lips is the indisputable fact that at the culmination of the play, before the eyes of 743 witnesses, myself included, Clara Hill vanished into thin air.
For those not in attendance, allow me to set the scene. Clara Hill, in the role of Vivian Westwood, was alone on stage. The painted screen behind Hill was lit faintly, so as to suggest a window just before dawn. As the light rose slowly behind the false glass, Hill turned to face the audience. It appeared as though she might deliver a final soliloquy, but instead, she slowly raised her arms. As her arms neared their full extension above her head, she collapsed, folding in upon herself and disappearing.
Her heavy beaded dress was left on the stage. In her place, a column of birds—starlings, I believe—boiled upward. Their numbers seemed endless. They spread across the theater’s painted ceiling, then all at once, they pulled together into a tight, black ribbon twisting over the heads of the theater patrons. You can well imagine the chaos that ensued. Women lifted their purses to protect their heads, men ineffectually swatted at the birds with their theater programs. There were screams. Then there was silence. The birds were gone. Vanished like Clara Hill.
Was it all a grand trick, a part of the show? The stage lights snapped off, the curtain fell abruptly, and we were ushered out of the theater, still dazed by what we had seen.
As of the writing of this column, neither Barrow nor any other member of the cast or crew has come forward to offer comment. Dear readers, as you know, I have been covering the theater scene for more years than I care to name. In that time, I have seen every trick in the book: Pepper’s Ghost, hidden trap doors, smoke and mirrors, misdirection. I can assure you, none of those were in evidence last night. What we witnessed was a true, I hesitate to use the word miracle, so I will say phenomenon.
Prior to last night, no one save those directly involved with The Secret of Flight had ever heard the name Clara Hill. Last night, she vanished. Her name will remain, known for the mystery surrounding it, but I do not think the woman herself will ever be seen again.
*
Personal Correspondence
Raymond Barrow
December 18, 2012
Dear Will,
I know it’s absurd, writing you a letter. But a man my age is allowed his eccentricities. 88 years old, Will. Can you imagine it? I certainly never intended to be this old. The young have a vague notion they will live forever, but have any of them thought about what that really means? To live this long, to outlive family and friends. Well, since I have lived this long, I will indulge myself and write to you, even though it’s old fashioned, and there’s no hope of a response. Forgive an old fool. Lord knows I feel in need of forgiveness sometimes.
It’s been 57 years since Clara disappeared. Aside from you, she was my only friend. I wish you could have met her, Will. I think you would have got along—comrades in your infernal secrecy, your refusal to let anyone else in, but somehow always willing to listen to me go on about my problems.
I’m all alone now. The only one left besides the goddamn bird, the one Clara left me. It’s still alive. Can you fucking believe it? Starlings are only supposed to live 15, 20 years at the most. I looked it up.
Rackham. That’s what Clara called him. I didn’t want to use him in the play, but Clara insisted, and now I’m stuck with the damn thing. He’s not...natural. He’s like Clara. I don’t think he can
die.
I’m ashamed to admit it, maybe you’ll think less of me, but I’ve tried to kill him—more than once. He speaks to me in Clara’s goddamned voice. Starlings are mimics, everyone knows that, but this is different. I tried to drown him in a glass of brandy. I tried to wring his neck and throw him into the fire. Do you know what he did? He flapped right back out into my face with his wings singed and still smoking.
To add insult to injury, he threw my own goddamn voice back at me, a perfect imitation. He said, “Leading ladies are a disease. You breathe them in without meaning to, and they lie dormant in your system. Years later, you realize you’re infected, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. You spend the rest of your life dying slowly of them, and there’s no such thing as a cure.”
Do you remember? I said that to you, years ago. At least it sounds like the kind of pretentious thing I would say, doesn’t it? I was probably trying to be clever or impress you. Did it work?
Pretentious or not, it is true. I’m infected, and Clara is my disease. She’s here, under my skin, even though she’s gone. Everyone’s gone, Will. Even you.
Well, goddamn you all to hell then for leaving me here alone.
Yours, ever,
Raymond
*
Items Displayed in the Lobby of the New Victory Theater
1. Playbill—The Secret of Flight (1955)—Good Condition (unsigned)
2. Playbill—Onward to Victory! (1950)—Fair Condition (signed—Raymond Barrow, Director; William Hunter, Marion Fairchild, Anna Hammond, cast)