“Tell me why we're here, Hank.”
“Soon.” I looked at him through the blur of my sickened stomach and hot vision, and he smiled at me broadly.
“I don't want to be here,” I said.
He bounded suddenly out of his chair. “Think I'll make a sandwich.”
“Don't....”
I had trouble speaking. The ocean in my mind rolled me like a ship in a gale. I knew what the ocean was and wanted it to go away; wanted the limbs in the sea of blood to stop cresting the waves, reaching out to me, then sinking again to mingle with the screaming, dying fish below.
He stopped his retreat to the kitchen, walked slowly back to his chair, sat down.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No.”
“There's nothing I can do for you,” he said.
His smile was gone. In its place was not the dropped mask I had anticipated, the long-fanged, crazy, lustful visage of a murderer. He looked suddenly tired, and old.
“I can't help you, Rudy,” he said, and, briefly, he touched my knee with his hand.
I must have screamed, then. I saw him lean toward me, and then fire filled my eyes, boiling back into my head. The sea not only was inside me but was everywhere. I was the sea, I was an ocean of blood myself, the limbs were my limbs and I possessed all of death, possessed it because it was me. I was death itself and my own screams were the screams of all the dead, swimming in and through me.
“What have you done to me?” I screamed, and I forced my flaming eyes to see through their fire and found Hank kneeling close to me, peering into me as if I was a mirror. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”
“I'm sorry,” I heard him say. His face was so close I could feel his breath, and then he tilted his head back, giving me his throat.
Fire and blood filled me, was me, and I took his throat in my teeth and screamed. The world became red. There was another scream in my ocean of blood which was not my own, and at the end of the scream, as it became a wave of blood in my sea, I heard Hank say, in crying relief, “Thank you....”
I awoke in twilight. The sun burned weakly into my eyes through the huge A of the front window, a dying ember about to fall into the night.
I arose from the floor. There was a lamp silhouetted in the twilight, and I stumbled to it and turned it on. Its weak wattage subsumed the sun and made weak day for me in the room.
Where I had been there was blood. Hank lay with his throat torn wide open. His face was disfigured, his severed limbs scattered about, chest and bowels ripped open, pulled from the body like stuffing from a mattress. Near his shredded trousers, I saw the receipt half of the one-way ticket he had bought at the bus depot.
There was wood next to the fireplace, neatly stacked. I added kindling from a filled brass bucket and started a fire.
When I had the fire stoked to big hot logs, I put the pieces of Hank into it, feeding him to the flames as if he was wood himself. It took time, but the fire was hot enough and in the end there was just bones and ash left. The blood I cleaned up. Then I showered, scrubbing my hands and face until they were clean as a baby. Under my fingernails was blood, and I could do nothing about that.
In the bedroom I found the change of clothes Hank had left for me. There was even a golf jacket in my size. He had known it would be chilly when I left the summer house.
I had a sandwich, bologna with mustard, and a devil dog, and then I turned off the light and left. I hiked back down the hill and across the fallow field to the bus stop. It was almost eight o'clock when I arrived. The bus found me ten minutes later.
When I got home my mother was waiting frantically for me. “Oh, God, Rudy, I've been so worried about you! Have you been with Hank today?”
I told her no; that I was off hunting Indian arrow heads by myself and had forgotten what time it was.
“Thank God! It's so awful—the police found Hanks foster parents in their house today, murdered. They're sure Hank had something to do with it.” She looked at me as if she was afraid of hurting me, as if I was made of porcelain. “Oh, poor Rudy! They say he murdered his best friend and his real parents in Maine two months ago, and has been killing people ever since.” She held me close. “Oh, God! You don't know where he is, do you?”
“No.”
She continued to embrace me. “I want you to have some dinner and then go to bed.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Poor baby.”
I went to bed, and I lay staring at the ceiling, practicing my smile, and the dreams were real and they wouldn't go away. I heard my mother go to bed, and I went into her bedroom and killed her. Then I packed a bag and left the house.
I'll wander until I find my brother.
RED EVE
It was Red Eve. Red balloons rose. In the glass city, between the glass houses, beside the glass walkways, from the glass towers and glass highways—red balloons rose. Darkness was falling—fell. Below, through the darkening thick clouds, the earth could not be seen; in the clear high air above, the stars were sharp and cold. It was Red Eve, and winter was coming, and the children pushed their red balloons into the air to mingle with glass and stars, singing, as they always sang:
~ * ~
Red Eve, Red Eve,
The night of blood
No blood we see,
Balloons release,
The earth below is dead.
~ * ~
It was Red Eve.
In Eidolan's Palace, red balloons rose.
Red balloons bounced playfully against crystal ceilings, tapped along glass walls like soft fingers, bumped into one another. The dining hall was filled with them, rising together from some secret compartment in the floor—light-gas filled, coming to rest like a bobbing blanket against the high glass dome, blotting out the knife-sharp darkness, and the sight of thousands of other red balloons outside, all lifting to hide the burning-bright diamonds of the stars themselves.
“Where is our teacher?” Mondranie asked languidly, as he painted above the rest of them. For a moment the rising balloons obliterated his spectacle—but then secret windows in the clear palace dome swung up and open and the balloons were gone into the night air, as Mondranie's painting flowed and burst into even greater combinations, under a ceiling of ascending red.
“Yes,” said Verdigris, yawning, pausing with the thought in the middle of playing his newest composition: a thing of electric body waves with notes dancing from his fingers. “Where is she? I'm beginning to get bored.” He continued his music, his hands spitting quarter notes into the air to mix with the color beads of Mondranie's paints, forming a swirling mix of sound and color.
Darnella, courtesan supreme, daddy beautiful, only nodded her head while lifting another choice, rare meat to her red-lipsticked mouth.
They ate; they drank; Mondranie and Verdigris, finished with their pursuits, along with LaFortina, poet, who had been amusing himself by running a hand over Darnella's breasts while reciting in a whisper into her uninterested ear, joined the table.
“This year,” said Calumon, political leader, fat and hearty as a Roman, “she promised her finest lesson.” He paused to dip his thick fingers into the plate before him, lifting another bloated shrimp into his mouth.
“Yes,” said LaFortina, taking his lips from Darnella's ear, “and I can't believe she would disappoint us!”
“I don't know,” Mondranie sniffed. “The last year or two, I've found Eidolan to be a bit....” he waved a hand searchingly in the air.
“Pedantic? Tedious?” Verdigris offered, stifling another yawn.
Mondranie nodded, and Calumon, ever the diplomat, began to say, “Now, now.”
But at that moment the room darkened.
“I hope,” came Eidolan's soothing, silky voice, “you won't find me boring.”
In the darkness, great vistas rose around them: mountains and rivers, the roar of crashing water, a great round moon rising magically slow over the ceiling above.
“Wonderful holos!” cried Mond
ranie, and from the table came other cries, “Yes! Yes!”
The holographs vanished, the room lightened, and someone cried, “Eidolan!”
She appeared from nowhere, from the floor or walls (from the same hidden box that had held the balloons?), becoming emplaced near Mondranie at the head of the table. She was slim and long, hidden only by thin shifts of red silk. Her face and hands were white and unblemished, her hair deep black, her voice soft as her skin.
“Eat!” she cried. “Drink!” Her robes shifted, slitting to show perfect white breasts slimming down to a perfect flat belly. Her hands closed over her robes. “I pray,” she said, “you won't be bored.”
“Hurrah!” shouted Mondranie. He rose unsteadily to his feet, one hand with a red-wine glass. “To Eidolan—teacher par excellence—hurrah!”
“Hurrah!” from the assembly.
At the head of the table, Eidolan's red mouth smiled slightly, her perfect head bowed in thanks.
~ * ~
They ate and drank; drank; ate. The fifth course was passed and belched, the sixth devoured (tongue of bird, wing of bird, head of bird), the seventh and eight not so much eaten as absorbed through greasily wet fingers and hands. Mouths were slicked with blood and fat, wine and liquors.
Calumon leaned back into his pillows and cried, “Ah!” as the desserts arrived. There were airy whipped froth things, red-cherry topped, crimson chocolates delicate as bone china, confections so light they melted reaching the mouth. Second dessert came and went; third dessert— parfaits, red creme with redder creme, redberry tarts—came and went, and then there was more—apple, red apple, essenced, milled, liquored.
“This is by far the finest meal—” Calumon began, but he was interrupted.
“Now!” LaFortina said, lifting himself unsteadily to his feet with the unsteady help of his neighbors. He spoke in a blur. “Give us your finest lesson—now!”
“Hurrah!” came a slurred chorus behind him. Others tried to rise from their cushions, hampered by drunkenness and gluttony.
“As you wish.”
Eidolan's fingers fluttered, and the hologram moon overhead brightened to almost painful intensity. It was brown and white, artistically cratered; not the gray, pale, distant, bomb-blasted circle they knew, outshone by some of the stars, night-silent, dead. This moon tugged at them, at their eyes, their hearts—made rhythms in their blood.
“This,” said Eidolan, “is my lesson.” Her voice was the voice of this moon, pulling at them, making them hers. For a moment the moon blinked out, leaving them with a gasping view of the red balloons still playing out through the clear-glass walls from the other palaces surrounding them—a black-night sky waltzing with rising balloons.
The moon blinked back on; the ceiling, the night, disappeared. “This,” Eidolan said in a gentle hush, “is my story—”
LaFortina pushed himself up, pointed a finger at Eidolan, at the moon. “Your finest,” he insisted. “You promised!” Swaying slightly, he turned his finger downward, pointed through the crystal table, the glass floor, to the roiling, dark, sickly yellow clouds that hid the Earth. “This year you promised your best—better than this moon! We're tired of the same old Red Eve lessons! We're sick of the Vampire Wars, of dead Earth below, poison gas, proton bombs, stakes through hearts, screaming men! We're tired of bogeymen with fangs, reflectionless images, children hung like beef for living blood, the battles for the moon—it doesn't entertain us! We're bored with the thousand-year-old histories, the slaughter in Asia, the Night of a Thousand Impalements, the building of the Crystal Sphere, the Deadly Climb to Life, the story of the Last Stake! It's old! And tired! Children's stories, for a children's holiday! We're tired of this tedium and we want better! We want—your finest lesson!”
“Yes,” Mondranie demanded. “Your finest!”
“Here! Bravo!” added Verdigris.
Eidolan regarded them with a hurt look. “My friends,” she said, spreading her hands, smiling slightly, “did I not promise?”
“Hurrah!” Calumon shouted. “I told you she would please us!”
“Please us, now!” LaFortina demanded.
“Yes!” Mondranie added, and he was joined in chorus by the others. “Now! Tell us!”
Even Calumon's fat face flushed with demand: “Tell us!” Eidolan bowed.
“Of course.”
The world went dark.
The moon returned, young as a baby. It pulled at their limbs, at the very earth. They were in a valley at the base of a black, cave-mouthed hill. Green, wet forest carpeted away from them to fanglike mountains in the distance. The air clung like hot, wet skin. Wolf shapes crawled close to the land, watching with guarded eyes.
There came a chanting in the air—it was their own music, all of them: Mondranie and Calumon and LaFortina, the damsel Darnella bare breasted at their lead, face blackened, arms rising and dropping hypnotically in time with Verdigris's drum.
A bonfire roared up before a cave mouth. Its heat lashed out; by its light they regarded one another's savage faces.
They were possessed. They followed as the wild Darnella circled the bonfire once, twice again. A wolf howl skipped toward them over the craggy line of mountains. The woods shimmered like stick men dancing, throwing shadows, orange and black.
Darnella halted.
The music ceased.
The drums became silent.
Even the fire did not dance.
Darnellas hands went high—her nipples stood out like pointing fingers.
“The last beast,” Darnella sang.
The bonfire leapt, licked at the air once more. They rose, bearing torches, and Verdigris began to beat his drum.
Tam. Tam.
They entered the cave.
Rock walls narrowed, widened. Their shadows danced.
“Follow,” Darnella whispered, and they moved deeper.
Verdigris's drum: Tam. Tam.
At the rear of the cave, marked with bones and the head of an animal stripped bare, its horns pointing at them, was the path they followed. Warmth assaulted them. The walls were alive with drawings—headless men and animals, dancing bones, bodiless fanged mouths devouring children and women, dark, winged shapes. They angled down. There were symbols on the path, bones stacked one atop the other, crossed branches. As the path sloped steeply, the walls became infested: every inch drenched with etched bloody eyes and claws, genitals, severed limbs, hands and fingers, heads with stiff, bulging tongues. The floor was sanded white with bone dust, splinters of bone. Faint sounds—low laughter, the cries of birds—echoed, flew away.
The earth swallowed; they went down.
Down.
Tam. Tam.
“Stop,” Darnella hissed.
A sudden opening pushed them into a low, wide room. There were rough, sagging rock walls, black with age and gravity, a ponderous ceiling heavy as the moon outside, a floor bleached and rough as ash bark, covered with grinning skull jaws.
Darnella whispered in awe, “The . . . last beast.”
Tam—
Verdigris stopped hitting his drum.
In the center of the room, within a circle of guttering torches, sat a pallet holding a bound figure. Twig-thin arms strained fiercely against the leather thongs binding it. Long, naked legs were thin almost to the bone; the toes on the feet showed rubs of bone at the ends. The waist and chest were sunk into its body, giving a hoarse bellow of breathing. The bare, hairless skull head showed the permanent wild hollow stare, rictal grin, of starvation.
They approached. The thing on the pallet whipped its head around, hissed, opened its foul-smelling mouth, showed its thin forked tongue, two frighteningly long and white upper incisors.
“The last...beast,” Darnella whispered.
The others, gathered close behind like children, repeated her chant. Verdigris beat weakly at his drum; they slowly encircled the body. The thing on the pallet screeched, beat against its bonds, tore its bone-long fingers at the air. Its eyes bulged from its head.
“The last,” Darnella said, bending down close.
The thing snapped at her, hissed, cried.
“Now,” Darnella said, reaching behind.
Mondranie stuffed the head of his torch in the floor, broke it in half, handed it to Darnella, who gripped it in both hands, raised it high.
The thing on the pallet shrieked, tried to move its sunken chest aside.
“Now,” Darnella said.
Verdigris beat his drum hard—tam tam—as Darnella brought the stake down to the heaving chest of the thing on the pallet.
It sank in, and through.
The body convulsed. The mouth opened impossibly wide, the head arched back. A cry escaped, the eyes straining for something unseen, the fingers clutching at oxygen, bone ends meeting, clicking together.
Tam Verdigris stopped beating his drum.
The thing on the pallet expelled breath, sank into itself.
Darnella and Calumon, Mondranie and the rest, reached in to tear at the heart.
Darkness came, covering all around them.
“And then,” Eidolan said gently, “a thousand years went by.”
Darkness retreated, leaving them elsewhere. The moon was back over them. There were clouds, light and high as blankets, scrolling across it, making it peekaboo.
They were on a street of houses. The night was sharp and cold as a cut apple. Street lamps made trees dance with night colon leaves, brown, gold, apple red, spun down like parachutists, filling the gutters, dervishing the sidewalks, whipping like racers onto porches, circling jack-o'-lanterns before settling with a sigh.
The air was filled with shouts and growls. They were howling, costumed beasts on a sidewalk, their ankles brushed with leaves. They ran, keening, waving paper bags with handles, down the length of the street. Their faces were beast masked.
The moon winked down at them. Something hot was in their veins—a dim memory of fear, a tapped source of the night and season—and they whooped, and jumped, and watched the leaf-shrugging trees and grinning pumpkins.
They ran in the costumed night—and then someone reared up from behind a tree, a tall black shadow with wings. They drew up short and dung to each other, gasping.
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