Halcyon

by Rio Youers

  “This would explain why the pig hasn’t returned my calls,” he said. He uttered a dry laugh and stepped toward her, unafraid. “You’re stronger.”

  “I found it,” she said. “The healing place.”

  Valerie saw his eyes flash behind the mask, but didn’t give him the opportunity to respond. She brought the cleaver down in a purring arc. He stepped to one side, avoiding the attack with ease. “Silly little girl,” he said, and punched her in the eye. The strength flowed from Valerie’s legs and she fell against the wall. The tiger struck her again. She saw the flash of his Society ring and then everything went dark.

  She woke up some hours later. Kitchen sounds from downstairs. The chatter of happy diners. She waited until the restaurant closed its doors for the night, then ventured from the room. Her first stop, again, was the kitchen, where she drank water and absorbed proteins through cold meat and raw fish. She then washed herself in the sink, using a pot scrubber to get all the blood from her body. Afterward, she found some cook’s whites and a jacket and left the restaurant.

  “But I couldn’t stay away,” Valerie whispered, staring into the flames. “I needed you.”

  It was full dark now. The fire threw a dome of light but beyond was blackness. The lake ran against the beach and sighed. Behind her, the silhouettes shuffled and muttered. Eight of them now. The whole dirty gang.

  She looked at the mask in her hands, as dead as the man who’d worn it, as threatening now as the sand, as the calm water. Her mind ran with memories of the streets—weeks spent digging through garbage cans, sleeping in a cardboard box beneath an overpass. The tiger had haunted every cold dream. He’d left her alive and walked away. She hated him. She wanted his teeth, his stripes, but she was certain she’d never see him again.

  Valerie lifted the mask, turning it this way and that in the warm glow. It appeared to breathe.

  “And then I found you,” she said.

  One of the silhouettes stepped forward—a confident, arrogant stride, even after all these years. He touched her hair and she let him.

  “No,” he said. “I found you.”

  * * *

  Calm was so tired that she fell asleep on the drive from the restaurant to the hotel. Martin wasn’t sure if it was because it had been an especially long day, with its early start and the journey from Virginia, or because of her efforts in the room.

  It had taken her a full twenty minutes to detach herself from the psychic stream. They’d sat in the restaurant downstairs, sipping green tea to help calm their nerves. Sasha, meanwhile, had already removed the chimes from the upstairs landing, and tossed them directly into the garbage can. “Step one,” she’d declared, dusting off her hands. “Step two might be to sell this joint, maybe buy a nice little place on the shore.”

  “I’m sorry to have revealed all of this,” Calm had said. “I just say what I see—what I feel.”

  “I needed to know,” Sasha had replied.

  They’d left the restaurant and driven in silence, at least until Martin heard Calm’s gentle snoozing sounds. He looked at her, the city lights passing over her lined, lovely face. She flinched every now and then, but her expression was mostly peaceful. He’d planned on taking her to the Sternbridge Holiday Inn, but kept driving until he found something more upmarket in Rutherford. She’d earned the extra stars.

  “Hey, Calm.” He nudged her arm gently. “Wake up, sweetie. Let’s get you checked in.”

  She nodded, looking around, blinking her strange but wonderful eyes. “The Watermark. Oh, this looks expensive.”

  “Stay here until I come get you,” Martin said. “Either tomorrow or Saturday. I’ll be with the girls. We’ll make the road trip to Virginia together.”

  She nodded and sat up. Martin was about to exit the car when she placed her hand on his arm.

  “You were happy on the island.”

  “Very, but I always thought it was too good to be true.”

  Calm sighed. “It sounds pessimistic, but experience has taught me that few things are truly as they appear. Everything is layered, and the layers only get darker the deeper they go.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know. There are no shortcuts. No easy roads.” Calm smiled and drummed one finger against her temple. “I taught Edith how to build her own garden, but as a diversion from the bad streams, not as a permanent escape. We can’t nurture our souls from a distance, Martin. We get stronger when we overcome.”

  “I just wanted my girls to see a different America. One where they didn’t live in fear—and where I didn’t have to be afraid for them.”

  “But fear has its merits. It’s like pain. It can galvanize. It can show us who we really are. You looked for your own garden—really no different from what I told Edith to do. But I also told her not to go so deep that she couldn’t find her way home. I think that’s where you were. It’s a good job you took a step backward when you did.”

  Martin nodded, remembering how bewildered he’d been when he returned to the mainland. Part of that was the six weeks he’d spent in the clean, open air. Most of it was Mother Moon getting into his brain with her talk of clocks and grind. Another six weeks and he might have been halfway up the ladder to Glam Moon.

  Like Shirley, he thought, and shuddered.

  “Maybe that’s the real reason Valerie doesn’t want people hopping on and off the island,” he said. “They’d realize the hold she has on them and wouldn’t want to hop back on. That doesn’t apply to me, of course, because my girls are still there. She knows I’m coming back.”

  “Sounds plausible,” Calm agreed. “Or maybe she has other secrets that are at risk if people come and go. There is more to this. I can feel it.”

  “Well, she found the tiger. Found him and killed him. Must have, because she has his mask. His ring, too, I assume.”

  “I don’t know what happened when she left the restaurant,” Calm said. “But yes, I think you’re right. And she’s holding on to the mask for the same reason she keeps returning to that room. She can’t let go. Her ordeal, the animals, Glam Moon … it’s all a part of who she is.”

  Martin shook his head. He wished he could hit the rewind button to that moment of uncertainty he’d felt before stepping onto Nolan’s boat. Or better yet, to the last time he saw Laura, when he came close to pulling her between the bed sheets with him, keeping her there.

  “You’re leaving the island.”

  Martin looked at Calm. He wasn’t sure if this was a question or a command, but his response was the same. “You’re damn right. Nolan’s picking me up tomorrow afternoon. Only reason I’m going back is to get my girls.”

  “Word of advice: keep what you know to yourself.” Calm pointed a no-nonsense finger at him. “Don’t ruffle any feathers. Just get the hell out of there.”

  “I’ll play it cool,” Martin assured her.

  “Cool is good.”

  They got out of the car and walked toward the hotel’s revolving doors. The light inside was copious and wonderful.

  33

  He sat down on the other side of the fire and she saw his face through the flames, as handsome as ever, a wisp of blond hair covering one eye, his smile all but indiscernible beneath a bushy brown mustache.

  “Hey, sugargirl,” he said.

  “Hello, Pace.”

  The other animals shuffled closer. They didn’t sit like Pace and their masks stayed on. All these years later, Pace’s was still the only face she knew.

  “My mask stinks,” he complained, pointing at it in Valerie’s hands. “Did you piss on it?”

  “Twice,” Valerie replied, holding it up like a hunter’s trophy. “It holds no power over me.”

  There were snorts and growls among the animals. The dog stepped forward.

  “What’s this about?” he barked.

  “It’s about the end,” Valerie said. “I don’t need you anymore.”

  “Sugargirl,” Pace said. “You couldn’t get rid of us if you tried.�
��

  A few of the animals nodded in agreement, while the others appeared uncertain. They muttered and lowered their heads. The rooster scrunched his hands into fists.

  “We should be at the Lantern,” he said.

  “The island has energy, too. And memories.” Valerie looked at Pace. “Doesn’t it?”

  “It does.”

  The spiel that Valerie gave new islanders—how she’d looked after Victoria Platt-Mellor and inherited the island after the old lady died—was only partly true. Victoria did indeed move to the island following her husband’s death, and lived out her days there, but she’d willed Halcyon—Gray Peaks Island, as it was officially called—to her youngest child, Pacifico, not knowing that he would only outlive her by five months.

  Pace had told Valerie and the other girls about Gray Peaks over breakfast one morning. “How would you like to live in a place that very few people know exists?” he offered, and revealed how he’d summered on the island as a child—two hundred and seventy acres in the middle of Lake Ontario, accented by granite outcrops and towering pines. His mom lived there now, but her health had deteriorated in recent years and she needed looking after. Pace said he visited her once every couple of months, but it wasn’t enough.

  “We’ll relocate there,” he’d said, looking at Iris, Agnes, Amy, and then Valerie. “All of us. We’ll look after my mother, and then, after she dies, the island will be ours. We can establish Halcyon, bring more people in. We’ll harmonize and find the Glam.”

  The offer was met with great enthusiasm, and the group moved to Gray Peaks in the spring of 1991. It was the life that Pace promised, a new kind of freedom. They spent their days loving, swimming, fishing, and farming. They stored food for the winters. They built tall fires and huddled like bears. The only real work was the old lady, who became more demanding as her dementia deepened. Pace had expected her to live only a few months, six at the most, but she had no interest in meeting her maker so swiftly. She lived another three and a half years, and might have lived three and a half more if Pace hadn’t finally smothered her with a pillow—the humane thing to do, he’d reasoned, and considering Mrs. Platt-Mellor had spent her final days smearing shit all over the walls and conversing with the ghost of Joan Crawford, it was a hard point to argue. Pace shipped her body back to the mainland, and from that point on the island was theirs. It became Halcyon.

  It wasn’t long before they tried DMT for the first time. They found peace through meditation, pleasure through sex, but Pace wanted to take it a step further. DMT, he said, would broaden their spiritual pathways. It wouldn’t transport them to the Glam, but it would condition their minds to become more accepting.

  Valerie’s trips were sun-drenched. She never flew, but she walked on air. Sometimes her legs were vines with healthy leaves sprouting from the joints. It wasn’t Glam Moon, though. Nothing like. The other thing she observed: Pace rarely took the drug himself. He was a watcher, and he usually watched her.

  “What are you seeing, sugargirl?”

  “Just … bright and … my legs feel…”

  The other girls ran naked and sang. They danced and cried. Pace often carried Valerie to his bed. He was rough on those occasions. “Show me,” he’d demand, one hand around her throat, banging into her body. “Show me.”

  Until that point Valerie’s life had been marked by a series of sudden, startling turns: running away from her home in Michigan to live in New York City; being held and tortured in a room for four years; escaping that room in a blaze of blood and glory; living on a remote island in the middle of Lake Ontario. It turned again after she overheard a conversation between Pace and Agnes. They’d been walking through the woods and didn’t know that Valerie was gathering firewood nearby.

  “The DMT is a trip,” Agnes said. “But we should take Rhapsody. We should simulate the Glam.”

  “Rhap is extremely hard to come by,” Pace replied. “It’s available to only a select few—those in the upper echelons of society.”

  “Then we should make it ourselves. It’s synthetic, right? Man-made?”

  “Right, but the key ingredient … you need to be a goddamn quantum physicist to distill it.”

  “And what is the key ingredient?”

  “Pain, and a lot of it.”

  They were silent for a moment. Valerie followed behind, keeping low and silent.

  “Why pain?” Agnes asked.

  “Because it’s a gateway,” Pace replied. “Always has been. When pleasure is denied, the channel to new possibilities, and alternate experiences, becomes broader.”

  Valerie had heard those words before, those exact words, but it was the way he spoke them—with a touch of arrogance, a tiger-like regality—that drove the air from her lungs and the strength from her legs. She fell with a soft thump and for a long time could not make a thought. When she could, her first was that Pace’s hands appeared infinitely kinder without the ring on his finger.

  A week later she and Iris traveled to the mainland for supplies. Once there, she “lost” Iris and took a Greyhound to Green Ridge, New Jersey, where Pace maintained a residence. She’d never been there, but had seen the address on various documents, including his driver’s license. It was a small house with trash in the yard and dirty windows, one of which—the bathroom window, around back—slid open when she tried it. She stood on a crate, hoisted herself up, and wriggled inside. Dust coated everything. The rooms stank of mold and sourness. There was a different aroma in the bedroom, faint but familiar: of cologne, peppery, yet sweet. It induced a stream of nightmare memories. She found the bottle—it was called “Mountain” by Jaume Cadenas—in the top drawer of the dresser. The closet was full of dress shirts and zippered suits. Valerie recognized some of them. Tiger clothes, she thought. She found the mask in a shoebox in the attic. It took her longer to find the ring. It was in an inside pocket of one of the suit jackets, tucked into the corner. She’d missed it first time she checked.

  Back on the island, the snow melted and spring whispered into the air—the buds showing green at their tips, peepers croaking in the woods. Pace returned from a short trip to the mainland to find Valerie waiting for him on the dock. She threw her arms around him when he stepped ashore and kissed his whiskery chin.

  “Hey, sugargirl,” he said.

  “I’ve something to show you.” Her eyes danced. She led him up the steps and through the burgeoning sumac and primrose, then through the evergreens. When Pace asked where the others were, she told him they were waiting. They cut through their orchard of saplings and past a half-built storage shed, and continued to the main cabin. Pace said he’d never known the island so quiet. He reached for her hand but she skipped away from him—dashed the last few yards, onto the porch and into the cabin.

  “What are you playing at?” he called. His voice was full of mirth. Valerie heard his boots clomp up the porch steps, then the door creaked open. It was dim inside the cabin; Valerie had pulled all the blinds. Pace reached for the light switch, flicked it …

  “For you,” Valerie said.

  She didn’t know how he’d react. Would he be Pacifico, who’d shown ceaseless love, or would the tiger appear, with his dead soul and indifference to suffering? She watched his face as he absorbed the scene, knowing it didn’t matter which version appeared; she’d kill him anyway. Twice, if she had to.

  “My girls,” he said, his jaw trembling.

  Iris, Agnes, and Amy were tied to wooden chairs in the kitchen area. Their throats had been cut and their eyes dug out. Each wore a sign written in blood. Iris’s read THE. Agnes’s read END OF. Amy’s read PLEASURE.

  “My girls.”

  Pacifico, then, meaning peace-loving. His throat worked, his penny-brown eyes swelled with tears. He ran his hand across them and looked at Valerie. She’d never seen him so frail. His body language announced some question she couldn’t decipher. Why did you do this?, maybe, or How did you know? The answer to both—to any question he might ask—was the same: Valerie re
ached into the armchair beside her and pulled the mask and ring from behind one of the pillows. She held them up so he could see. Her hands were remarkably steady. Pace’s were not. He wiped his face again and nodded stupidly.

  “I told you once,” she said, stepping toward him, “that if this isn’t real—if you’re not real—that I would break all over again.”

  “You did.”

  “You had fair warning. I mean, you knew what I could do.”

  “Yes.”

  “I loved you, Pace. I trusted you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I was counting on that.”

  Pace had joined his father’s investment banking firm fresh out of college, and used his good looks and charm, rather than his family connection, to work his way up the corporate ladder. Money interested him, he said, but people interested him more. He spent his days underwriting deals and assisting acquisitions, and his nights hobnobbing with Wall Street high rollers. He claimed that 80 percent of new business came by way of the social scene.

  As his reputation grew, his social scene narrowed—became more elitist. He was invited to private functions, and found himself drawn to the most debauched of them: the extreme kink and pain parties. “It started out with autoerotic asphyxiation and body suspension, and escalated from there. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen.”

  “Oh,” Valerie replied. “I think I would.”

  Pace frequented this underground scene for a few years, then he and a small group of his “high society” associates started driving around the city, following a police radio to sites of shootings, car wrecks, fires, gas explosions, whatever—if there was pain, they were there. Members of this odd group came and went, but a core eight formed, and this eight became the Society of Pain.

  “There are versions of the Society all over the world,” Pace said. “They follow—and sometimes instigate—disasters to fulfill their … their urges. For some the pain is the focus, a source of arousal. Symphorophilia, it’s called. A relatively new term. For others, it’s that shot at Glam Moon.”