Glimmering

by Elizabeth Hand

  Trip clutched his knapsack, trying to still the panic boiling inside him. Someone jostled his arm, a dreadlocked boy wearing a velvet smoking jacket and very little else.

  “Uh—sorry, hey man, I’m sorry—” The boy’s eyes were preternaturally wide. Sweat blackened the velvet jacket and matted the tangled hair across his forehead. “Are you—you—?”

  Cigarette smoke, and that same sharply unpleasant odor again. The boy stuttered, bewildered; then stammered something incomprehensible and shambled off. Trip watched him go, neck hairs prickling.

  And suddenly he remembered Leonard Thrope pressing an emerald ampoule against the crook of his elbow, hand splayed across his leather trousers. The smell was everywhere, Trip knew what it was.

  IZE. He was in an icehouse. All around the music soared and stuttered; someone bumped into him. Trip whirled and struck out with his arm.

  He panted, pausing to catch his breath. His heart pounded, his sides were hot and damp with sweat; he had to blink furiously to clear his vision, focus on something besides glittering pinwheels and faces like exploded blossoms. His breath caught in his throat.

  Because suddenly the smell was no longer all around him. It was in him, it filled his nostrils like rank water and coursed down his throat, coated his tongue as he felt that same liquid heat flashing through him, the same prickling of his flesh. He shuddered, clutching at his stomach; squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t see a garden of faces turned rapturously sunwise where there was no sun, hair moving like sea anemones. Even with eyes closed he saw them: disembodied arms and legs, mouths and eyes swarming like plankton; a scintillance exploding upon his flesh. And sound, too, that he felt as a thinning in his blood, skin taut between his fingers, a saline film clotting tongue and gums. A girl walked past him, laughing. Her eyes were wide and staring. Flecks of emerald glittered in their corners.

  “I’m a hive,” she said, grinning to show a cracked front tooth. “Buzz buzz.”

  Trip clenched his fists, fighting the realization that his body could be so terrifyingly free of his control. Strands of percussion and synthesizer fused into a relentless high-pitched drone. His ears ached; the bitter taste flooded his mouth again and he spit, wiping his mouth on his shirt.

  “—yo there, buddy, looks like you drank the wrong punch!” A hand clasped his shoulder. Trip looked up to see Clovis Tyner, his tattooed face creased with amused concern. “First time?”

  “Ahh—” Trip gasped and shook his head. “Nooo.”

  Clovis nodded. His eyes were wide, a shimmering blue; the pupils were all but invisible. “That can make it worse. You get the surge but not enough to carry you through. An’ all this—”

  He cocked his head to indicate the room around them—the quickening dance, speakers humming like wasps, abandoned shoes and empty bottles spinning across the floor. Within all the frantic revelry Trip glimpsed flickers of blinding white light, as though someone was aiming a laser at the crowd.

  “—it just makes it worse. Contact high.” Clovis laughed, a sound that made Trip’s skin crawl. “What you oughta do is take some more—now, before things get really crazy. Once they get the light show going—”

  Trip shook his head so fast he felt dizzy; felt again as though he were perched above the whirlpool at Hell Head. “No! Just tell me how I can get out—”

  “I told you, buddy: you’re in here now.” Clovis stood swaying at Trip’s side, his gaze unfocused. “They never open the doors till morning. Especially tonight. Cops. Can’t have all these fucked-up people spilling in the streets—that’s a bad fucking scene, man, I saw it in Austin once, and here they don’t even have anyplace to put you, I mean it’s not like they got spare room in the Tombs or something. I heard they just like, dump you in the river. Bodies wash up—But you don’t need to hear that, right? You’ve been in the scene, right?”

  Trip shook his head.

  “No? Well, shit!” Clovis whistled. “What the fuck you doing here? ’Cause I was gonna say it’s like that scene—”

  “Hive?”

  “Yeah, man. ’Cause of the ice. I mean, you’ve done it, right? You know what I’m talking about. Contact high. Contact…”

  Clovis repeated the word under his breath, as though he’d never said it before. “Contact—yeah, that’s what I mean. Like X, you know? You get that rush…”

  His voice drifted off. The music shifted, channeled into a familiar backwash of guitar chords and feedback and gongs, a shrieking dub version of a song Trip recognized but couldn’t name. His skin yawned open, his mouth filled with saliva, salt; the scent of roses and lilacs. A girl’s breathy voice plucked at his spine—

  And she was there, her kingfisher, her small hands pressed against him, her fingers icy as they kneaded his skin, her breath hot and coming in quick bursts.

  “Marz—” He tried to pull her to him, felt her hair between his fingers like water. “Marz—”

  She was gone. Another girl stood in front of him, long dark hair whipping around a heart-shaped face, eyes carefully outlined in kohl and gold dust. Skin glowing as though doused in flame. She was singing, and as she sang her arms threw off birds like sparks. There was an odd perturbation in the air around her, a cloud of grey and white that was like a hole. Trip could see through it and glimpse the ruined library, flailing shadows. The dark-haired girl laughed, a sound thick with the scent of burning grass, and reached for his hand. He felt her fingernails drag across his palm and shook his head, took a shuffling backward step as she sang.

  Her body shimmered. He could see vines tattooed upon her bare arms and a tiny green lizard skittering down one leg. Her voice rose into a howl as she twirled into a thicket of flame. Behind her another figure knelt, a black-skinned man coaxing a blaze from something on the floor, smoke and scorched metal. Trip swallowed as it all came together, words and music and a movie he’d seen once in a hotel room. For an instant the man raised his head. His eyes were yellow, like a cat’s. Iridescent green beetles crawled inside them.

  Then a shaft of brilliant white light ripped through the air. The dark-haired girl and the kneeling man blinked from sight, then back again. Feedback echoed. Streamers of lavender and lilac threaded down through the crowd. The dark-haired singer stared right at him, her eyes flexing like wings.

  She began to dissolve into blobs of yellow and orange and chartreuse. People were cheering and shouting. Where the girl had been fiery letters traced across the air, like the tracks left by sparklers on a summer night.

  HALEY OZ

  “PROPHECY”

  MUDFISH MUSIC

  Above him ripples of green and gold and violet lashed the air. There was a brilliant pulse of orange in one corner of the room, a sound like low thunder. Then it was as though the ceiling were torn away. Trip blinked, staring into the prismatic sky. The room grew still, voices hushed, feet shuffling impatiently. There was a smell of the sea; there was the scent of lilacs. Something damp pressed against the palm of his hand, like an open mouth. He jerked backward, saw more words spinning in the air.

  WHEN THE WHEEL OF TIME SHALL HAVE COME

  TO THE SEVENTH MILLENNIUM, THERE WILL

  BEGIN THE GAMES OF DEATH.

  Small teeth tried to pierce his skin. Warmth probed his ear, a woman’s voice that made him go rigid.

  “Enticing magicians are performing; fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga. Enticing magicians are performing…”

  Something began to spin in front of Trip’s face: a golden pyramid no bigger than an insect. As he watched it began to grow larger. Beams of light played across it, a clamor of gongs and bells where they intersected. The sky was gone, and the hive of stoned dancers. There was only that monolithic golden shape, and within it a pulsing core that resolved into a vast irradiating eye, its iris sky-blue. The eye wheeled away, growing smaller yet more brilliant, until it hung like a tiny perfect star upon the brow of a boy with glowing blue eyes and sinuously moving hands.

  “I possess the keys of h
ell and death,” he sang, “I will give you the morning star: the end of the end…”

  It was the icon. Face tilted upward as it sang, eyes staring into the shattered sky as it danced. From its head reared a glittering ornament like a pagoda that sent forth dazzling sparks of aquamarine and ruby and emerald green.

  Fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga

  Fear the end of the end.

  Trip felt the same stirrings of bewitchment that he had in the studio at MIT. The icon grinned. It was real. Between the crowd of dancers and the earlier image of the girl singing there had still been a veil, the blinkered effect of senses struggling with what was before them.

  This icon was different. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was all but unrecognizable as an analogue of Trip Marlowe, even to Trip himself: if he hadn’t experienced it before, if he hadn’t remembered writing the words and melody it sang, would he have known it wasn’t real? He wasn’t sure; and the uncertainty terrified him. His entire body yearned for it, even as some spark of his consciousness recoiled.

  He felt sick and feverish; revolted. The icon commanded desire and adoration and awe: it danced upon an invisible plane several inches above the library floor, and its dance made that unseen stratum more real than anything else. Something crashed beside Trip. He wrenched his gaze from the icon and saw a weeping girl sprawled beside him, her eyes huge and black and staring, though it was not Trip they saw. She had tried to follow the dancer, and fallen.

  I will give you the morning star…

  The icon spun and flashed. Trip could hear people talking to themselves, whispers of recognition; cries of grief. The music roared on, bells and gamelan; but now Trip could hear how insignificant the song was. Too clumsy, with its words and trumped-up tracking; too corporeal. Like the girl pawing pathetically at Trip’s feet: an ugly reminder that, despite the IZE, they were all still bound to earth by filaments of muscle and meat and memory. They were all still flesh, inherently flawed.

  And the icon was not.

  He glanced down, saw the girl had been sick. The icon shimmered. There was a break in the image, a subtle rippling that for an instant distorted its eerily beautiful face. Trip felt a brisk clarity at the foul smell that rose from the floor behind him. He shut his eyes, but the impulse to see the icon was irresistible.

  “Make it stop,” someone cried out. “Oh God make it stop…”

  Trip swallowed. Fear nudged at him; too late he tried to wrest his gaze from the icon, one leg drawn up beneath it like a heron’s.

  Fear the end of the end…

  Whirling stars swept across its eyes, green trees and blue water, a rippling brown mat of living creatures racing across an emerald plain. The icon opened its hands. Within its palms golden-eyed frogs crawled, throats bubbling as they sang. They leapt into the air, forelegs extended so that he could see their tiny toe pads, their glistening skin. Where they had been an egg trembled in the icon’s cupped hand, its shell a color that Trip had forgotten he ever knew. Cracks appeared upon the shell, the clawed nub of a minute beak. Something pushed its way free until it sat with lidless glaring eyes. Something like a tiny feathered dragon, eagle’s curved beak and claws, pointed ears that flattened against its skull as it hissed at him.

  Trip’s flesh prickled. With all his will he forced himself to look away, to stagger in the other direction; and directly into Leonard Thrope.

  “Trip…” Trip looked up to see the slight man standing somewhat unsteadily. “Trip Marlowe?”

  Trip swung at him. Leonard moved backwards as a hand grabbed Trip’s and yanked him sideways. “Oh, hey, Trip, nice to see you too—”

  Flash of crimson as he smiled; another flash as someone struck Trip on the side of the face. He cried out, looked up through watering eyes to see a blond woman a full head and shoulders taller than he was, her body sheathed in pink latex, face hidden behind a Barbie mask.

  “Check him, Mikey,” said Leonard.

  Within the mask a mouth opened, showing white teeth filed to a point and tipped with gold. “Okay,” she said to Trip. “C’mere, you—”

  She spun him to face her, ran her hands expertly up and down his sweater and pants; found the wallet Martin had given him. She glanced inside, with a shrug handed it to Leonard and reached for his knapsack. At Leonard’s admonitory glance she set it down. “Nothing on him but that.”

  As she stepped away Trip slumped to the floor. His cheek throbbed where she’d hit him, his head felt as though it’d been pumped full of Novocain. He stared murderously up at Leonard Thrope, who only grinned and took the wallet. He opened it, raising his eyebrows at the amount of cash; then screwed up his face to examine the driver’s license. “Old enough to drink yet, Trip? Let’s see.”

  Leonard frowned. Then his appearance changed, melted from malign amusement into something Trip had only seen once before, when his mother received the news of his father’s suicide. An utter void of expression, lines smoothed away, eyes blank. He looked at Trip, then at the license. He perused it for a good minute, thumbed through the rest of the wallet, examining business cards, photographs, whatever was in there. Leonard held the driver’s license between two fingers and stared at it, finally slid it into a pocket of his leather jacket.

  “Where did you get this, Trip?”

  Trip glared at him sullenly. He thought of lying, of saying he’d stolen it. Instead he got to his feet, squaring off with his fists at his sides. The Barbie Amazon edged closer to him. “He gave it to me.”

  “Who gave it to you?” Leonard asked.

  “He gave it to me.” Trip said defiantly. He stuck out his hand. “Martin Dionysos. Can I have it back?”

  “Martin Dionysos gave this to you.” Leonard glanced at Mikey. He nodded and she backed away to lean against a wall, eyes blank as pewter, her body giving off the scent of rubber and vanilla.

  Leonard turned back to Trip. “Where, Trip? Here? In this club?”

  Trip shook his head. The other man seemed uneasy, staring back at Trip with an intense, fearful hunger. Trip felt a sting of poisonous exultation: so Leonard Thrope could be afraid of something!

  “No.” He grinned disarmingly. When Leonard ventured a wary smile back, he snatched the wallet from his hand, ducking as Mikey lashed out at him.

  “You little fucker—”

  “Mikey—no!” Leonard shouted. Like a snake she drew back. “Leave him…” Quickly he turned back to Trip, who had grabbed his knapsack and was breathing heavily. “Is he here? Martin—is he in the city?”

  Trip shook his head. “No. It was back in Maine. At a place called Mars Hill…”

  Leonard nodded, eyes distant.

  “Though actually, he did give me this here”—Trip held up the wallet, then shoved it into his front pocket—“on his boat.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday—” Trip frowned. “No, this morning.”

  “What were you doing with him?”

  Trip hesitated. “He saved me. I—I tried to kill myself, up there. At home. I jumped into the water to drown. But I was washed up on shore. Martin found me.”

  Leonard’s gaze shifted from whatever far-off thing he had seen to Trip’s face. “This is after I saw you. After we made the recording.” Trip nodded. “Lucius said you’d do that—he said you’d split and go back to Maine. He thought you’d freak out on tour. He said you wouldn’t be able to handle it—he said you’d go home. Nellie thought you took off with her foster daughter.” Leonard nibbled his lip; a ruby spark flared and died. “That’s what I thought, too. But you didn’t?”

  “No. Do you know where she is?”

  Leonard shook his head. “No,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  He sighed, ran a hand through his long mass of greying curls. He tugged at an intricate braid of gold and leather and tiny mirrors until it stretched before him; stared into the spectrum of tangled glass and metal as though divining something there. He raised his eyes to Trip’s. “You said Martin gave you his w
allet, here in the city. He left Mars Hill, then? He came with you? Where is he now?”

  Trip shrugged. He had lost his balance: Leonard Thrope had moved his hand and once again the world had shifted under Trip’s feet.

  “Where is he? ” repeated Leonard.

  “He left,” said Trip. The words tore at his heart. Because suddenly he saw the blond girl again, a shaft of bright pink disappearing through a revolving door.

  “To where? Did he tell you?”

  “I don’t know. He had his boat—we sailed down here, we left about two weeks ago—”

  “But why did he leave?” Leonard’s tone grew anguished. “He was so sick! The only thing keeping him alive was that he stayed up there—why would he leave?”

  “Well—he brought me here. I mean, I asked him to,” Trip said; then, with slowly dawning astonishment, “You know him?”

  “I’ve known Martin Dionysos for twenty fucking years. We were at RISD together, I left my goddamn high-school sweetheart for him. Then Martin dumped me. We ended up at different galleries—”

  He laughed harshly. “—we had, oh, different views about art. Among other things. He hasn’t left that place up in Maine for years, now.”

  “But he wanted to—” Trip’s voice rose defensively. “I mean, I didn’t, like, force him or something—”

  Leonard stared at Trip.

  “Didn’t you know how sick he was?” he asked. “Couldn’t you tell? You stupid fucking kid.”

  “No! He wanted to do it—”

  “Of course he wanted to do it!” Leonard grabbed Trip’s arm and shook him. “Look at you! Little blond piece—he fucking fell in love with you, you little prick! Christ, he thought he saved you? Martin spent his whole life looking for stray dogs! You fucking asshole!” Trip saw tears glowing in the basilisk eyes. “Didn’t you notice anything? Didn’t you see he was sick?”

  “No.”

  For a long moment he held Trip’s gaze. The boy stiffened, sure that Leonard was going to strike him. Instead he shook his head and glanced over his shoulder.