Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  How long has it been since I’ve seen the stars? One year? Two?

  Jack’s breath left a fog on the glass. He rubbed at it, frowning as he touched the bull’s-eye left by the Fusax bottle.

  Could you see the stars in Mongolia, or Japan? Was there anyplace left where you could see them at all?

  Certainly not here, where the sky had given itself over to a perpetual carnival of night. Fires raging in empty towers, the waters of New York Harbor burning where freighters had released their cargoes, glowing traceries of fuselage left by jets that had failed in transit. Lightning streamed across the sky and lit upon the Palisades, crimson and violet. A wash of corrosive orange swept across the cliffs and was gone. From the darkness came a howl, a dog’s, Jack thought, but then the sound fractured into laughter.

  Horror choked him poisonous as the rain gnawing at Lazyland’s ruined lawns. Horror not of the grinning refugees but of what came next, when pestilence and famine claimed them all.

  We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

  The awful laughter rose, louder and louder. Wind beat against the house, and the smell of smoke seeped through the walls, thick with the reek of burning plywood, foam insulation, paint fumes. He covered his mouth; the wind gusted and as quickly as it had come the smoke was gone. On the window where his finger had smudged the glass, he saw a darkness like fine fur: some new kind of spore or fungus, already hungrily seizing upon the warmth and dead tissue left by his touch. He felt the pulse of blood inside his veins, and knew it not for his own life but the mindless tremor of nature. He shook his head and realized that he had leaned against the window again, both hands pressed against the smooth surface. When he reared back the imprints of his fingers blackened upon the glass as though charred by an invisible flame. But it was not ash but innumerable threads of living matter: he could smell them, a whiff of foul gas. He stepped back from the window but there was no escaping it, it was all around him, a shroud woven by a tireless army.

  He had gone to sleep in one world but woken to the wasteland.

  Later he came to, lying on the floor beneath the window. He had been dreaming of Leonard. Leonard’s hand upon his breast, his own hand on Leonard’s cock. He gasped awake, flooded with desire and an aching sorrow as he took in the room around him and remembered: he was forty-two years old, he was ill, Leonard had fled him long ago.

  A somber radiance on the eastern horizon made Jack think it must be dawn. But when he found his watch, a Cartier hermetic timepiece with radium numerals, it said 10:15. The little brass carriage clock was chiming two. He stood and gazed at a dark imprint on the window. Nothing horrible there, only the normal amount of dirt and grit and grease. He frowned. The wind blessedly had died away. Even more remarkable, the rain had stopped. It must have been this that woke him, the unaccustomed silence after so many weeks of storm.

  But the air felt dank and chill. There was a cloyingness to it, a weirdly palpable sense of vitality. Jack turned and started for his bed.

  That was when he heard her. Sobbing, faint but clear from somewhere just below the morning balcony. It made him think of his sister at play long ago, hiding in the hydrangea bush and crying because he was taking too long to find her. He waited, expecting the sound to fall into silence or flame into one of those unnerving screams. Instead it continued no louder or softer than before, frail and piteous.

  He rubbed his eyes, walked back to the window, wrenched it open, and leaned outside to scan the garden below. The crying stopped. He could imagine whoever was there looking up and seeing him, a tall wraith commanding this battered ship. The crying began again, as miserable as before. The thought of someone down there gazing frightened, at him, was too much for Jack to bear. He hurried downstairs, pulled on boots and his grandfather’s ancient raincoat, and went outside.

  The air was so still that he could hear the thrum of a single car echoing from far away, solid and portentous as the tolling of a church bell. He listened raptly as it drove off; then the sound of weeping stirred him again and he strode down toward the garden.

  He had thought—hoped, actually—that whoever it was would have fled by the time he got outside, or at least fallen silent. Instead the cries grew louder and more desperate. Jack shook his head, dismayed.

  “Hey,” he called softly. “It’s okay. I’m not—I won’t hurt you.”

  The weeping ceased, then with a hoarse cry resumed, so close that Jack took a nervous sideways step. He looked at the sodden limbs of juniper and ilex, streaked black and shimmering in the purplish light. Water pooled about his boots, releasing a thick rank smell as of spoiled mushrooms. He was just starting for the yew hedge when he saw her.

  It was the child he had seen in his vision: the child who had led the procession of horned men. The same white face and windblown hair, the same wide empty eyes, the same thin mouth opened now to weep rather than blow upon a flute. But even as he stared aghast the child turned, so that Jack saw it was not a child but a girl of fourteen or fifteen, so emaciated and frail she looked younger. Her cheeks were hollowed, touched with violet where the light struck them, her sunken eyes a vivid troubling blue. She crouched beneath a hydrangea bush, fingers curled about a handful of moldering leaves and her lips drawn back so that he could see her teeth, very white above gums that were almost black. She wore some kind of cheap raincoat, the plastic ripped and gummed with filth. Beneath it Jack could glimpse filthy white pants and a shapeless shirt, ripped so that her small breasts were exposed. As she stared at him she made a hissing sound.

  “Hey,” whispered Jack, and backed away. The girl watched him with eyes empty of anything but raw fear. If he extended a hand to her, he was certain she would bite, and he knew what that bite would bring: plague, pestilence, death.

  But then, without thinking, Jack did reach for her, palm up as he would approach a strange dog. The girl’s gaze wavered between his face and his hand, as though weighing which held the greater threat. With a low cry she lifted her head and stared unblinking into his eyes. He stared back and saw hatred, dreadful hunger, and an unassailable fear; but mostly fear.

  And so he knelt before her, awkwardly pulling at his raincoat as he murmured, “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you, come here, come here…”

  The coat billowed about her shoulders and he reached clumsily to straighten it, but it was like cloaking a bare scaffold: he could feel nothing but the dead stalks of hydrangea. He drew back, forcing a smile.

  “There. Are you better now? Warmer?”

  The girl looked up at him, her lusterless hair like dead grass. She seemed not to understand, but finally she nodded.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. She had a vaguely European accent.

  “You’re welcome.” He stood and he gazed down at the girl, torn between his desire to hurry back inside and the burgeoning awareness that, having started something, he couldn’t leave it unfinished.

  “Shit,” he said. The girl began to weep again, silently, tears fine as needles streaking her gaunt face. Not just the act of cloaking her but the coat itself had given something of humanity back to her. For a cruel moment Jack cursed himself for not going out in his pajamas.

  “Come on, then.” He sighed. “I can’t leave you out here to die on the fucking lawn.”

  Once again he stretched his hand toward her. The girl crouched, then with a shiver stood on unsteady feet. She ignored his hand and stumbled forward, slowly at first, then faster and faster, passing from grass to broken tarmac as she hurried up the drive. Jack hoped she would break into a run and flee Lazyland. But when he reached the top of the drive she was waiting, clutching his grandfather’s raincoat around her narrow shoulders.

  Jack’s resignation burned into soft despair. “The front door.” He gestured at the house. “Don’t worry, I’m coming.

  “Now listen,” Jack said as he pulled the outer door shut. She smelled like rotting leaves. “My grandmother lives here, she’s very old and frail, and I don’t want you—bugging her.”

>   The girl stared as though he had barked like a dog. Jack elbowed past her toward the inner door, calling out.

  “Grandmother? Grandmother, there’s someone here, don’t—”

  He stopped and glanced back at the girl. I must be fucking crazy. What was he thinking, telling her about his grandmother? Some insane little bitch planning to rob them in their sleep, or waiting to signal her cronies to break into Lazyland and kill them all…

  His grandmother appeared at the foot of the stairs.

  “Yes, Jackie?”

  The girl made a low mewling sound, and with surprising strength, pushed past him.

  “Grandmother.” Her grim little face contorted. Jack edged forward protectively. The girl looked up at Keeley, ran a hand self-consciously through her filthy hair, and smiled.

  “Well.” Keeley’s hands tightened on her gold-topped walking stick. “Is this a—friend? Of Leonard’s?”

  “Umm, well, no—” A smile broke across Keeley’s face.

  “Lunantishee, ” she said. “A cailin a vic O! What are you doing here?”

  The girl’s smile faded. She glanced over her shoulder at Jack. He forced himself to smile reassuringly—for Keeley’s sake, not the girl’s. “She was outside in the cold, I just thought we might let her in to dry off, and then—”

  “Of course,” said Keeley. She continued to gaze at the girl, but the wonder drained from her faded blue eyes; whatever she saw now, it was not the lunantishee. “Bring her in, she can sit by the stove”—she raised her walking stick and motioned toward the kitchen—“I’ll have Larena find something for her to wear. Go on now—” This to the girl, in the same brisk tone she’d used on generations of animals and children. “Go on.”

  The girl clutched at her torn clothes, walked down the dark hallway toward the kitchen. Jack turned to his grandmother, but Keeley was already standing at the foot of the staircase, thumping her walking stick.

  “Larena! Larena dear—”

  With a sigh Jack headed for the huge kitchen, the most modern room in the great shaky pile that was Lazyland. His grandfather had renovated it shortly before his death in the early 1970s, as a gift for Keeley; all the original woodwork had been replaced with shiny blond cabinets and turquoise Naugahyde.

  Now the fluorescent bulbs had long since flickered out. The electric range was covered with ancient outdoor gear dredged up from one of Lazyland’s subbasements: a blackened Coleman stove and tiny white gas-driven heater that boiled water and scorched rice. The refrigerator was unplugged, the occult pantry with its folding doors and lazy Susans sadly underutilized. Still, with the vivid light falling through its windows, the kitchen was the brightest room in the house, and Larena Iverson kept it scrupulously clean.

  Certainly the ragged girl was impressed. Jack found her standing beside the stool where younger cousins had been wont to take their afternoon cocoa, her expression somewhere between suspicion and awe.

  “This your house?”

  “Yes,” said Jack. “I mean, my family’s,” he added, trying to evoke a vast hidden clan that dealt speedily and fatally with all intruders. “Look, we’re pretty busy right now, maybe I can find you a towel or something, you can dry off, and then—”

  Behind him there was a soft wheeze and the pad of slippered feet. “Oh, poor thing! Look at you, soaked to the skin, what was your mother thinking?”

  Mrs. Iverson struggled across the room, burdened with heavy wintry-looking clothes and a pink appliquéd bath towel. The girl looked up, confused. “Mother?”

  “Wait till I have a word with her,” Mrs. Iverson went on. “Look at you, a skinny wretch, what were you thinking, get into the bathroom now! Right this minute—”

  The housekeeper began herding the girl back toward the dark corridor. A moment later Jack heard the bathroom door creak shut, the gasp and blast of water surging up through the recalcitrant pipes. Mrs. Iverson’s voice rose and fell, and after a minute or two he heard the girl laughing.

  “Great,” he muttered, and crossed over to the stove. A Thermos held what was left of the morning’s brew. He poured himself a mug, grimacing as he picked out bits of dandelion root and grounds, and stared unhappily out the window. The kitchen telephone sat on a shelf there beside a ragged copy of the Yonkers telephone book. He thought of picking up the receiver to see if there would be a dial tone today, checking in the Yellow Pages for whatever defunct agency had once dealt with circumstances like this. Child Welfare? New Hope for Women? Emma would know what to do. He could call her, arrange for Jule to hydroplane down the Saw Mill River Parkway and take the girl to an appropriate shelter somewhere.

  Oh please! He could just hear Leonard’s derisive laughter. Shelter? Where’s your sense of Christian duty, Jackie-boy? Throw her back to the wolves!

  Oh, fuck off, thought Jack, and reached for the receiver. He’d long ago stopped trying to find any sort of pattern in when the phones would work, just as he had stopped trying to find a reason for the power outages. It’s just the Way We Live Now! Leonard would cry gleefully, but more than the outages themselves it was the constant uncertainty that maddened Jack.

  Because if you knew there would be no electricity for, say, the next fifty years, you could Just Make Do. Remember the Depression? Remember Sarajevo? Some people live like this all the time!

  But when the power popped back on at 3 A.M., there was always the same insane rush for lights and a hot shower, the cappuccino maker, the computer, and the television. It made no difference that this just made it all worse. Jack himself knew that when faint music rose from a forgotten radio, he would find Mrs. Iverson struggling downstairs to the washing machine and his grandmother rolling pie crust in the kitchen, even as Jack made a beeline for the stereo.

  Jule told him that in the city it was even worse. Brokers and traders camping out on the floor of the Exchange, so as not to miss that instant when its black cavernous reaches suddenly burst into light and life; the wealthy pouring from their luxury towers and commandeering hansoms for impromptu parties and lightning visits to restaurants, nightclubs, galleries that opened only by electric light. People addicted to the new interactive drugs rushed to the electric avenues where they could sate themselves. Musicians and club kids filled streets and warehouses and tunnels, and for a little while life began to take on some of its old contours: trains running, businesses operating, people complaining about jobs and missed flights instead of the search for bottled water and fresh produce.

  But sooner or later it would all come crashing down again. And an entire secondary industry had sprung up around that—people who made it their business to handicap whether or not the NYSE would be open on a particular day, or when the Tokyo Exchange would kick in. Jule—who had many friends, if not clients, and occasionally still ventured into the city with them—told of watching a beautifully dressed young woman decapitate a black rooster on the floor of the Exchange, while her partner collected international currency and more useful offerings—chocolate, coffee, a small strand of black pearls—from a crowd of commodities brokers.

  So it was with mild trepidation that Jack lifted the telephone from its cradle. And yes, there was a dial tone and the familiar recording that warned of delays.

  “…constantly working to improve our service to our customers…”

  “All right, dear!” He started, replacing the handset as Mrs. Iverson’s shrill voice heralded the opening of the bathroom door. “Let’s go stand in front of the fire and get warm—”

  Jack listened to the soft parade of footsteps going from hall to entryway. Was there a fire today? He certainly hadn’t made one. But when he got to the living room he found the girl crouched in front of the blazing hearth, wearing clothes that were much too big for her.

  “What was her mother thinking?” Mrs. Iverson demanded of Jack. “Make sure she stays warm while I take care of those—” Her eyes narrowed, fixing on the pathetic mound of tattered cloth she’d dropped in the hallway. “We should call the doctor, too,” she added v
aguely, and toddled off.

  At the word doctor the girl shot Jack an alarmed look.

  “Don’t worry. There’s no doctor. Not unless we bundle you off to the hospital.” He crossed his arms, trying to strike a pose between beneficence and menace. The girl looked so puzzled that he gave up and sank into an armchair. “Oh, screw it. So what’s your name?”

  The fire’s crackling all but drowned her reply. “Marz.”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Marz. Marz Candry.”

  “Marcie?”

  “No. It’s short for Marzana—Mary, in Polish. Just call me Marz, okay?”

  “Polish, huh?” That would account for the accent, also the starved-refugee look. “Mary, that was my aunt’s name. Mary Anne. I never knew her, really,” he added, as though she had asked. “She disappeared when I was a kid.”

  He drew himself up in the chair. “As a matter of fact, those are some of her clothes, I think.”

  He pointed at the heathery pink sweater that billowed across the girl’s chest, the voluminous folds of a dirndl skirt that spread about her like a pool of melting wax. “Let me see, move over here…”

  He tugged at the sweater until it grew taut as a tent flap in front of her, smiling when he found what he was looking for: the remains of an embroidered monogram.

  “Mary Anne Finnegan. See?” He shook his head. “No one knows what happened to her. She ran away to California in the sixties and never came back. A couple of people told me some character in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was actually her. Probably she just OD’ed somewhere. But weird, huh?”