Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  The font was quite old, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Italian, of very fine blue-glazed porcelain aswarm with adipose cherubim and small flowers like violets. When his grandfather was alive, it was always filled with holy water from Sacred Heart up on Broadway. Whenever he visited Jack would take some and flick it onto his forehead; not from any sense of spiritual devotion but because it was such a heady novelty, to be in a house that had holy water. Back then Lazyland was always filled with priests, their shouting laughter from his grandfather’s study and their marvelous smell, frankincense and cigarette smoke and Irish whiskey, the crisp retort of their street shoes on the highly polished wooden floors. Whatever private sorrows and torments they endured, they had never shown Jack or his brothers anything but kindness and how to throw a football so it soared.

  But then they had failed to save his grandfather during his brief final illness. After that there were no more priests at Lazyland, except for old blind Father Warren. Grandmother Keeley drove them away, Jack’s mother said. Jack always thought of the picture of Christ driving the moneylenders from the temple: Grandmother wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails, as myriad black-clad figures fled out onto North Broadway.

  So, no more holy water. For years a fine film of dust had clung to the ancient porcelain, and Jack had been able to invoke the ghost of a scent from his childhood. Now even that was gone. Still, he couldn’t resist probing the font with a fingertip.

  Nothing, of course. He smiled wryly and began the long ascent up curving staircases to his room on the third floor.

  For most of his life he’d taken those stairs at a run. A habit carried over from childhood, when he and his brothers and cousins would race up the first set of broad golden oak steps, kept polished to a near-fatal slickness by Mrs. Iverson, and then continue in a sort of exhilarated terror up the second, darker, narrower curved stair, like the innermost chamber of a nautilus. A twelve-point elk shot by Jack’s father was mounted high above these steps, its glass eyes sanguine with the glimmering’s reflected glow. As he approached the third-floor landing he felt the same primal dread that had gripped him as a boy: that huge gray muzzle with its blackened lips, the long shadows of the elk’s tines, like dead tree limbs. Jack shuddered, heart hammering and chest tight from the effort of climbing, and took the last few steps two at a time.

  His bedroom door hung open. He bumped against it, staggered to his bed, and collapsed, one hand automatically switching the light on the nightstand as the other grabbed his inhaler. He gave himself two jolts of his asthma medication, then pulled the drawer open and scrabbled amongst his stockpile of bottles until he found the alprazolam. He took one pill, swallowing it dry, and flung himself back upon his pillow.

  After a minute the inhaler began to take effect. He breathed slowly, deeply, then opened the nightstand again and took out a bottle of over-the-counter cold medicine from Emma’s private stash—she had a huge closet full of drugs she’d been hoarding since the glimmering began. Emma had told him to use this instead of sleeping pills, and so he swallowed two capsules, chasing them with the dregs from last night’s water glass.

  Too late he wondered if this perhaps had been a mistake, one of those badly mixed pharmaceutical cocktails that would send him to Saint Joseph’s in the middle of the night. But within fifteen or twenty minutes he felt better. He could breathe again; soon the alprazolam would calm him. Maybe he was just sick (of course he was sick! he could hear Leonard shrieking); maybe he just had a cold. Without moving from the bed he nudged his shoes off and heard them drop onto the worn old oriental rug. He sighed and yawned, stretching luxuriously. The yellow light from his bedside lamp gave everything a sweetly nostalgic look: burnishing the dark arabesques of the walnut sleigh bed, showing off the cobwebs and dust filigreeing the old Indian headdress hanging on the far wall. More than a few of its regal feathers had been purloined over the years by Jack and his brothers and cousins, to be used for quill pens and darts. Other than that, nothing much had changed.

  It had been his father’s childhood bedroom, the room where Jack had always slept during childhood visits, and it was his room now. A small tucked-in spot on the third floor, catty-corner to the airy nursery attic and the other bedroom, the one where his cousins used to sleep. The walls held a framed picture of dogs playing poker, an exquisite black-and-white print of one of Leonard’s flower studies, a photo of Jack’s aunt Mary Anne, who went to California in 1967 and disappeared, a painting by the San Francisco artist/activist Martin Dionysos, who had briefly been Leonard’s lover. Beside the window hung a spavined pair of wooden snowshoes. The floor still bore round scorched scars like bullet holes, where Jack and his brothers once lit Black Cats on the Fourth of July.

  Now it was March. Outside the wind railed at the eaves. Even with the two old Hudson Bay blankets pulled up to his chin, and a nearly new down comforter (his Christmas present from Jule and Emma), Jack felt cold—Lazyland was famously uninsulated. As boys, he and Jule and Leonard had sat in this same room and watched snow sift through the walls, covering the floor like fine white silk. Things were no different tonight, save that he was alone.

  Once again he yawned, reached for the tipsy stack of magazines and manuscripts that held his bedside reading. No matter that the written word was dead (Leonard and the other mori artists had held its funeral at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where copies of The Gaudy Book, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review were ignited within a brazier, their ashes dispersed in the adjoining cemetery); hard-copy submissions for The Gaudy Book continued to arrive whenever the mail got through. Jack tried to draw solace from them—“the claustrophobic, fascistic tyranny of the written word,” some WIRED wag had called it—but it was difficult. He recalled his grandfather railing, “Don’t they teach these kids to read anymore?”

  But of course now they didn’t. After all these centuries, children finally had shaken off the yoke of inauspicious words and replaced it with whatever it was they did with their goggles and retinal implants and drugs, so many drugs even Leonard couldn’t keep up with them. Jack preferred not to know. Jack preferred to hide within the failing fastness of Lazyland and muddle through his manuscripts, waiting to die.

  Which it didn’t seem he was to do this evening. The alprazolam kicked in, its sedative effect boosted by antihistamine. He felt a pleasantly perverse sensation-of febrile drowsiness. Emma, who had done time as a freelance chemist working with local motorcycle gangs before attending medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon, had explained to him once how the drug worked.

  “These gates in your brain, the gates are on the neuronal membranes, and the Xanax, I mean the alprazolam, it closes the gate on one of these neuronal channels, and that causes a, a hyperpolarization of the postsynaptic neuron. So that neuron doesn’t fire, d’you see?”

  Emma got very excited, talking about how psychotropic drugs worked; especially since Emma and Jule’s daughter, Rachel, had been killed by a drunk driver three years before. It was like listening to a recovering addict rave about Narc-Anon. “And all across your entire brain, that particular neuron doesn’t fire—it’s like a pinball game, think of it like a pinball game: it’s all about gates, gates opening and closing, so only certain balls can get through, only certain perceptions get through…”

  Right now Jack felt as though all the balls were at rest. He had a disturbing momentary glimpse of them as eyeballs, the reflected sheen of falling snow upon their moist curves; but then that, too, faded. He dropped the unread manuscript upon the nightstand and within minutes was asleep.

  Much later he awoke. A sound had disturbed him, but he waited to open his eyes, uncertain if he was asleep or dreaming. His various antidepressant and antianxiety drugs had an odd side effect on Jack. They made him feel curiously detached from his dreams, the emotions he experienced while asleep weirdly inappropriate, almost fetishistic, so that he would find himself being aroused to orgasm by the sight of a stone, or moved to tears by the smell of lighter fluid. Sometimes these bizarre
emotions would carry over into his first waking moments. So Jack had learned to lie in bed and purge his mind of whatever strange fragments it had acquired during the night.

  He was sure that he had heard something. The wind, maybe, nudging around the chimneys. He had almost drifted back to sleep when he heard it again and was shocked to full wakefulness, as though someone had yanked the covers from him.

  It was a flute. No, not a flute. Something more primitive, a wooden instrument like a recorder or panpipe. He could hear the faint intake of breath between the notes, and the notes themselves, rich and plangent and somehow solid in a way that other sounds were not, rising into the air. The tune was simple, almost childish—four notes played over and over again, with a sweet refrain.

  Yet for all its simplicity there was something terrifying in the music. It was like a recessional, like the subdued yet ominous tolling of a bell sounded at the end of the Latin Mass. With a muffled cry Jack sat bolt upright.

  The room was still. The sound of wind had died, and the rattling gutters; but the piping music went on. Jack snatched at the bedclothes. The air was so cold he could feel his lungs tighten; he grabbed for his inhaler and sucked at it. After a minute or two his breathing eased. He shut his eyes and tried to slow his heartbeat, but it was keeping pace with those four notes—

  Ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum…

  He opened his eyes: nothing. Whatever light there was seemed to come from the veil of snow covering the floor, and from the window overlooking the lawn. As he stared the window shuddered, though there was still no wind. The sound of the recorder grew louder, as though whoever was playing it was moving slowly, and with each step drew nearer to the house.

  “Shit.” Jack swore beneath his breath, shivering. He had had dreams like this: waking dreams, walking dreams. All his life he had been plagued by nightmares. But there was no comfort knowing that, because with dreams there came dream logic, inexorable and dreadful. And so he found himself sliding from bed and walking to the window.

  Beneath his bare feet the snow was dry and fine as dust. The window’s pallid glow grew brighter, even as the music grew louder. But always it was a sere lonely music, the echo of another song like the echo of ice booming upon the great river.

  At the window he stopped. His entire body shook with cold, so that he had to brace himself as he leaned forward to look out.

  Below him the lawn shone with a dull blue gleam. Dead grass pierced the new snow, black spines like scattered bones. Overhead the glimmering showed through the cloud cover: grayish waves chased by crimson flares, an occasional burst of brilliant orange. Now and then the sloping hillside would be slashed with iridescence, like the glimpse of gold within a pocket, and though the snow had stopped, the air glittered fiercely. The piping music seemed to come from everywhere, the way the wind sounds during a hurricane.

  Jack shuddered. Dread clenched his bones like grippe. His eyes watered from the caustic light, and there was an acrid taste in his mouth, a smell like wet ashes. He was backing away from the window when something on the lawn began to move.

  From the tulip trees and overgrown sumac at the bottom of the garden a figure crept. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing only some kind of loose dark trousers and clutching something in one hand. Jack could not tell if it was a boy or girl. As it stood it raised its hands before its face. Wisps of white-blond hair fell across its eyes.

  “Hey,” Jack whispered. “Hey—”

  It did not seem to notice the cold at all. It stood up very straight—unnaturally so, like a child in a wedding party. Then, with exaggerated slowness, the child began to pace across the lawn. Its feet left no mark upon the snow, and while the scraggy trees cast wavering shadows, the child had none at all.

  The haunting music swelled. Its echoes filled the room like water filling a sealed-off chamber, and the monotonous notes inundated Jack, driving out breath and blood and matter until, with a grunt, he slid forward, his hand smashing against the window.

  Dull pain shot through his wrist. He cried out and found that he could breathe again. He brought his wrist to his mouth and nursed it, lifted his head to gaze outside.

  On the lawn the child still marched and played its reed pipe. Beneath the poplars something else moved. Another figure emerged, much taller than the child; then another, and another; until there were six in all.

  They were men; they had once been men. Tall and emaciated and naked in the snow, so thin the glimmering washed across their pale flesh like rain. Each bore within his hands a huge pair of antlers, raised so that they seemed to spring from his skull. They moved in an awkward stooping walk, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of those great horns. As Jack watched they followed the child across the lawn, until the child stopped. The six men bowed to it, each in turn, forming two rows of three with their antlers raised above them like tree limbs, and began to dance.

  It was like nothing he had ever seen. A weird loping dance, the two rows moving backward and forward, heads alternately raised and bowed so that it seemed the horns must tangle and be wrenched from their skeletal hands. And yet the antlers never touched, their bodies never touched. Their feet left no sign upon the snow, and their movements made no sound. The motions were grotesquely childlike, almost crude; yet at the same time so terribly, horribly real that Jack felt as though he had never seen dancing before; as though this was The Dance from which all others had been wrung. The music of the reed pipe spiraled and wailed, the child stood as though frozen; the horned men moved back and forth like the shuttles of a loom. Above them the antlers curved like the spires of some unearthly cathedral. And like light falling from a cathedral window the flesh began to fall from their bodies, in small bright blades of gold and green and red, until only their bones remained, unearthly white and unconquerable, moving across the snow.

  In his room Jack watched. Terror and beauty ravaged him; he could feel the boom of blood in his head and a softer throbbing in his chest, as though the child played him as nimbly as its flute. Still they danced, the horned men, with steps careful and measured as automatons. They might have been part of some infernal timepiece ringing the changes.

  But then, very slowly, he became aware that the music was diminishing—he sensed rather than heard it, like warmth stealing back into his hands. He leaned forward and saw that the dancers had paused. The child bowed its head. Then, as slowly as it had arrived, the child turned and retraced its steps, pacing back across the lawn. When it reached the shadows of the trees the skeletal dancers followed. They moved now with a more somber grace, no longer rocking back and forth beneath the weight of those heavy racks—it seemed that the antlers had somehow grown and become part of them. All their bestial power had fused with the frail bones of men. Light clung to them, light falling from the sky or rising like mist from the ground. When they reached the shadows of the tulip poplars they were clothed in it. They did not turn their heads or look back to where Jack sat and watched them. And yet he knew that he was the reason they had come here: vision or dementia or the exalted remnant of a dream, they had come for him.

  The last shining form dipped its head beneath the branches and disappeared. The music died away. Alone in his room stood Jack, robed in light and burning with fever, his pale eyes huge and glittering with the glory and horror of what he had seen. He was still there next morning when the housekeeper came to see what had kept him from breakfast.

  “Jack? What is it, Jack? Are you sick? Good Lord, he isn’t—”

  And he shook his head, unable to tell her No he was not dead nor even sick, but burning, burning, burning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Trip Takes a Fall

  He would die at Hell Head.

  Trip Marlowe knew that was how the obituaries would begin. Never mind that no one from away knew that Hell Head was where you always went to die, if you were from Moody’s Island. For sure it was where you went to die if you were a Marlowe. It was where his father had gone when Trip was s
ix years old, and blown his brains out with a thirty-aught-six; where Trip’s mother had gone a year later, to dive into the whirlpool and never be found. Hell Head was where the island children went on Halloween, daring each other to stare into the black water at low tide and glimpse the bones there, the bones he had never seen but they were there, for sure Trip knew they were there. Trip Marlowe knew all about bones.

  He was twenty-two years old and the Voice of the Last Generation. That was what some flack on Radium had called him, after Trip’s first album—the one that originally came out on Mustard Seed, the one that got him six Dove Awards and an Emmy and his face on a zillion home pages and the cover of OUR magazine—was bought and rereleased by a Xian subsidiary of GFI Worldwide early in 1998. The album was called LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA. Trip stole the title from an old banned book in the hard stacks at Olive Mount Bible College. His best friend, Jerry Disney, had found the novel; God only knew how it got there. Trip never read the book—Trip didn’t read, except for the Bible and furtively hidden copies of Matrix comics—but he liked the title, and he knew how to use it. Even as a child on Moody’s Island, where he sang in the choir at the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church, he had always possessed what the people at GFI called marketing savvy. For instance, it had been Trip’s idea that alone of all the children in the choir, he should wear red when they performed.