Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “Rain,” Iris said, and the cloud contracted, as though experiencing a muscle spasm. Then she felt droplets of water land on her face. She opened her mouth and took them on her tongue. Her skin felt hot, fever-sick, and the coolness of the rain was a small relief.

  She let the cloud rain on her as she went to sleep, and when she woke, it was still drizzling, and her old mattress was soaking wet. Iris decided to throw it out and get a new one, even if she had to use the money she’d saved for new school clothes to do it.

  She didn’t really need clothes for school, anyway. The point of starting school every year with a new wardrobe was to make the best first impression possible. But when Iris looked in the bathroom mirror and took in her new image, she realized the only kind of impression she’d be making was a shocking one.

  Her hair and eyelashes had fallen out. Her scalp, where the lightning had struck her, was etched in a veiny red mark the size of her fist.

  But when Iris stripped off her wet clothes to take a shower, she found that the scar she shared with Ivan was gone, as though it had never been.

  Wearing a hoodie pulled up over her head even though it was a muggy ninety-five degrees, Iris rode her bike to the library the next day. She told her cloud to stay home, and it did, tucking itself into a corner of the room. Iris loved that the cloud did what she told it to do. At least she had control over one thing in her life. But she wanted to understand why. Why had it appeared after she was struck by lightning, and why did it obey her?

  There was a one-hour-per-person limit for using the library computers, but Iris begged the librarian for more. The librarian, a black woman with yellowing corneas and wires of gray protruding from her braids, peered at Iris suspiciously across her desk. Iris could tell she was wondering about the hood.

  “I got a really bad haircut,” Iris told her.

  The librarian’s hard stare melted into a sympathetic smile and she handed Iris another password. “I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.”

  Iris thanked her and returned to her search, reaching under her hood to touch her smooth scalp. It was not as smooth as it had been that morning. Already a light fuzz of hair had sprouted. Iris was surprised. Her hair had never grown particularly fast.

  By the time she had exhausted the librarian’s patience with her overuse of the Internet, Iris had discovered three things about lightning and people who were struck by lightning that she considered applicable to her situation.

  1. Lightning is one of the most mysterious forces on the planet, and no one really understands it.

  2. Aftereffects of being struck by lightning range from but are not limited to: death, burns, amnesia, personality disorders, blindness, deafness, learning disorders, and changes in brain function. Cases where being struck by lightning has healed a person of a virus or degenerative illness have also been recorded.

  3. Being struck by lightning sometimes leaves behind a veiny, red Lichtenberg figure on the skin. Lichtenberg figures fade shortly after a person has been struck.

  A week later, the Lichtenberg figure on Iris’s scalp still had not faded, but she could no longer see it because her hair had grown in to cover it.

  Her hair, once a drab color of dishwater blonde, was now white tinged with the slightest hint of yellow, as though she had bleached it. Her eyelashes had yet to grow back.

  Iris didn’t care. School started in a week, and she just didn’t care. Maybe she wouldn’t even go. It wasn’t like her mom would make her. Come to think of it, Iris hadn’t even seen Anita Banik in a few days. Her mom went on occasional benders like this. She’d be gone for three days or a week. In truth, Iris preferred her mom out on a drunken bender to being drunk at home. It was simpler that way, and Iris had exhausted her ability to worry about her mom a long time ago. Anita always turned up eventually, whether the twins wanted her to or not.

  At first, after Iris was struck, Ivan worried over her. He tried to talk her into going to a doctor. Iris ignored him. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually. She had more energy than she used to. She felt stronger. She hardly needed to sleep anymore. She lay awake at night and turned her black cloud on and off, letting it rain on her for just a moment, and then commanding it to stop. She directed it around the room, and it always did as she instructed, hovering here, then there. Changing shape for her. Splitting into two and then merging back together.

  But sometimes Iris touched the place on her thigh where her scar used to be, and she felt a crippling pang of loss. She wondered if there was anything she could do to repair things with Ivan. To make them like they used to be.

  Someone was at the door. Knocking instead of ringing the bell. Iris couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come to their house. Maybe Anita had lost her key.

  But when Iris opened the door, she found not her mom, but a man. A man with long white hair and clouded eyes, dressed from head to toe in white. His face was smooth and tan, and he smiled at Iris, though she doubted he could actually see her through his heavy cataracts.

  He held out a hand and Iris saw, on his palm, a veiny red marking. A Lichtenberg figure like the one etched on her scalp.

  “Iris Banik,” the man said in a voice made for radio, it was so fluid and polished. The voice of someone who’d spent most of his life speaking, and had perfected the art. “May I beg a moment of your time? I have traveled a long way to meet you.”

  Iris shook her head, confused. “Why?”

  “Because you’re unique, and I have need of you. We have great work ahead of us.”

  Her instinct should have been to slam the door in the stranger’s face. Instead, she gave him her hand and shook, and the second her skin touched his, she felt a jolt of energy surge through her and wind its way up her arm.

  When he spoke again, his lips did not move, but his voice, like a radio broadcast, was in her head, static and all.

  It is time to leave this life you’ve known. A new life awaits you. A new family.

  A new family?

  Iris waited for her scar to tingle at the idea of leaving her twin behind. But then she remembered that her scar was gone. She was no longer half of a whole. She was alone.

  Instead of the tingling along her now nonexistent scar, Iris felt a sort of humming pressure inside her mind. The man in white fixed her with his filmy eyes.

  I can give you what you desire. I can forge a new bond between you and your twin. A bond that can never be broken.

  Iris opened the door wider and allowed the man inside. When they were alone and the door was closed, he put his hands on the top of her head, and the humming pressure returned. He made everything turn white. He made everything make sense.

  After that, Iris understood what needed to be done. The man in white would help her do it.

  “There’s a storm headed this way,” the man in white told her before he left. “You know what to do.”

  “Put him in the path of the lightning,” Iris said, her own voice sounding dreamy and disconnected from her body. She didn’t feel like herself anymore. The man in white had done something to her, she realized, but not something bad. At least, she didn’t think so. He had simply made her feel calm, and cleansed, and certain of the course of action she must take.

  But a worm of doubt wriggled beneath this layer of certainty. “What if the lightning doesn’t want him?” she asked.

  “It will,” the man in white said. “God told me it would be so, just as He told me where to find you. You and your brother belong with me and mine.”

  “What about our mother?” Iris asked. “She might not want to let us go.”

  The man in white smiled and answered without speaking.

  She has been dealt with. You will not see her again.

  Iris knew she should have cared about this, but she didn’t. All she cared about now was doing what the man in white told her to do, because that would give her what she wanted.

  It would give her Ivan back.

  She couldn’t wait for Ivan to come home. What if
the storm passed before he arrived and she missed her opportunity? She called Ivan’s cell phone, but he didn’t pick up. Still, she knew where to find him. At the high school, practicing with the team he’d wanted so badly to be a part of.

  But they were about to get a new family, a new team. The man in white had promised. He had said they had work to do. Great work in the name of God. Iris had never thought much about God. She’d always believed in her and Ivan, and that was enough. But Ivan had abandoned her, and only the man in white’s God could bring him back.

  Iris brought her dark cloud along as she rode her bike toward the high school, but she commanded it to rise higher into the sky so no one would notice it following her. She searched the sky for the storm the man in white said was coming, but the clouds were as white as his hair. The only dark cloud belonged to Iris, a stain on snowy floating mountains.

  When she arrived at the high school—an institution she now knew she would never attend—she found the football players finishing up practice on the field. She parked her bike next to the bleachers and watched, trying to pick her brother out of the tangle of uniformed, grass-stained boys on the field. She spotted him quickly. He was taller than most of the other boys, even the seniors. Iris realized after only a few minutes of watching that he had talent. He could throw the ball with startling accuracy. And when he took off his helmet at the close of practice, Iris saw her twin smiling in a way he never did at home. He looked happier than she’d ever seen him, basking in male camaraderie as his teammates slapped him on the back or pounded fists with him.

  Then Ivan saw her leaning against the bleachers, and his smile disappeared. He looked around at the other departing players, and Iris realized he was nervous about his new friends seeing his freak of a sister with her lashless eyes and head of ice-colored bristle.

  Iris didn’t give her twin the option of joining the other players. She strode out onto the field and met him there. Glancing up, she saw her dark cloud trailing her, fifty feet up.

  “What are you doing here?” Ivan asked.

  “I have to tell you something,” Iris said. “Mom’s not coming home. She was driving drunk and caused an accident. She’s in the hospital now, and after that she’ll be going to jail because people got hurt. Oh, and we’re going to lose the house.”

  Ivan’s eyes grew round as she spoke. His helmet hung like a stone in his right hand, and he dropped it on the grass so he could rub his hand over his face, as though by doing so he could scrub away reality.

  Reality. The reality was that the man in white had told Iris about their mom and the house. Then, after he left, Iris received a phone call from a police officer, informing her of the accident. Iris didn’t need proof about the house. If the man in white said they were going to lose it, then they were going to lose it.

  Ivan surprised her by suddenly kicking his helmet. It flew across the grass.

  “Why can’t my life ever be good for two seconds?” he wailed. His face was red, and his eyes filled with angry tears. He fell to his knees in the grass and hung his head. His hands lay in his lap, palms facing up, as though waiting for someone to place a gift in them.

  Iris lowered herself to the grass in front of her twin and settled her hands in his. He gripped them tight and looked at her, tears streaming from his eyes. “I’m sorry for the things I said to you. I didn’t mean them. We have to stick together,” he said. “Always.”

  They were the words Iris had been waiting to hear.

  It was time for the storm she was promised.

  She turned her face to the sky, spotted her dark cloud. Saw it growing, staining the white cotton clouds that hung above them, turning them black.

  “We should go inside,” Ivan said, worry in his voice. “I read somewhere that people who’ve been struck by lightning once are more likely to be struck again.”

  He tried to rise, but Iris held him where he was, clenching her fists tighter around his. She felt far away, like a part of herself had risen with her cloud.

  “Stay with me,” she said. “Forever.”

  A burst of rain spattered them. “Seriously, Iris, we need to—” That was all Ivan had a chance to say before lightning split the air and found him.

  Iris was still holding her brother’s hands when the lightning entered his shoulder. She felt their skin go molten like metal and fuse them into one being, the way they’d been born. The way they were meant to be.

  Some stories live with you gently, and ripen after sane and steady work. Others rage out of the forest and cross your threshold and sink their teeth into your leg. “Nocturne” was of the latter sort.

  I was living in Cali, Colombia; my first novel was still no more than a collection of voices; my movements were hampered by the violence surrounding the city and the epidemic of kidnapping-for-ransom that made travel a high-anxiety affair. I suppose all sorts of things were high-anxiety then: my career, my marriage, my day-to-day life in that beautiful, mad boomtown.

  Then one night I dreamed “Nocturne,” or at least its climax: a shockingly detailed and specific dream that left me astonished and afraid. For the next month my life grew simpler. I had to tell this story. It would not relax its jaws until I did so.

  I wrote obsessively, and revised with patience, and then (alas) slipped “Nocturne” into a box. I never sought to publish the story. What was I waiting for? Perhaps a signal as clear and certain as the original impulse to write the tale? If so, that’s what Shawn has provided, and for this I’m very grateful.

  — Robert V.S. Redick

  NOCTURNE

  Robert V.S. Redick

  There are windows we struggle not to look through, scattered among all the houses of our lives. Here is one: a boy slick with chilly sweat, skeleton-thin, tube-trussed, mouth opening and closing like a fish on a pier. His eyes, somewhere unfathomable; his room filling with flowers.

  Perhaps he sees the great aunt at his bedside, frail and silent, fighting to keep the blanket about his chin. Perhaps he stares into delirium, into the dream from which he cannot wake: a fat man has hooked him through the gills, and laughing cheerful murder, reels in his prize. The man’s face changes minute by minute; his laugh and his absolute power do not.

  You are forgiven if you doubt the next hypothesis; the author himself has been drawn to it as reluctantly as the boy to that unattractive brute. Perhaps minds cleansed of the film of rationality do sometimes sharpen. Perhaps that’s all it takes.

  Consider a window in a deep stone wall. Gaping, glassless, big shutters banging in a storm. Lean inside. A cavernous room, rows of steeple-backed chairs, moonlight on a lustrous floor. Moist tongue of wind uncoiling room to room, odor of bloodwood and marsh myrtle, blackness, a threshing of waves. And kneeling before a lifeless hearth, a young man, shivering: Anton Cuza, alone in Tchavodari Palace.

  He is in command of the situation: for indeed, despite the squalor of the moment, he also commands the palace. A very mixed blessing, he thinks. Christ, but my hand is cold!

  The hand, his left, fishes for wood chips in an iron urn. The urn is slippery with kerosene, painfully cold. His mind swims with the vapors, until a sharp pain shocks him awake. The fuel has touched a scratch on his wrist. He spits and curses, but in fact he is almost grateful for the pain, its clarity and warmth.

  He thinks: I must get warm like that, now, all over. Oh damn this wood! For the logs are green, and shrug off flame with sharp cat hisses. Anton is slight, shallow-chested, and mortally afraid of the Spanish influenza, its death march through the Romanian lowlands.

  The Great War is over; much of Europe is electrified. Women in Bucharest cook on iron coils that blaze red at the twist of a dial; even the Turk dangles a bulb from his ceiling. But no cables have yet braved the Danube marshes, and the truck that brings gas and food to the palace has gone south with the Magar and his army, prowling the Bulgarian frontier.

  “That damn fool Ionel!” their commander bellows at each return, failing to find his palace bathed in a twentieth-cent
ury glow. “Does he want the Second Division maintained like a levy of serfs forever?” These are theatrical rages, destined to be gossiped up and down the coast, reminding everyone that the Magar may speak with contempt, if he pleases, of the Unifier of Greater Romania. Some say he and Bratianu are friends; others that they are bitter rivals, that the Magar could take Bucharest if he chose. Whatever the truth, last year his tantrums won him a telegraph wire, threaded apologetically over the swamps from some distant terminal in the Carpathian ice. No one but Anton ever uses it. Forever left behind (consumptives are easy prey for Bulgarians), he taps a midday report to the capital, boils wheat grist with ham, paces to keep warm.

  The logs wheeze, exude a yellowish steam. He wrings his hand at them; drops of kerosene cry pff!—accomplishing nothing. Disgusted, he pulls together the last wood chips and stuffs them into the iron cradle of his torch. With his clean right hand he strikes a match. The torch bursts to life, a gag bouquet from a magician’s sleeve.

  “Hooray!”

  Anton does not mind shouting, even at foolishness. He is at home.

  Somewhere above, wind scours the chimney. Moonlit ash rises like some otherworld snow; his torch trembles. Anton cradles it to his chest.

  “A storm tonight. Just our luck.” He presses the torch into a wall mount. “Not to worry. We’ll fix things, won’t we?”

  Of course he will, but only by fastening shutters against this crazy wind: a tedious job. “No choice about it, though. That’s all right.”