Alabaster
Page 9
With the impatient wind at her back, hurrying her along, Dancy stumbles on ahead, helpless to do otherwise.
She finds the camp just past a line of high granite boulders, men and women huddled together in the lee of the stones, a ragged, starving bunch wrapped in bear hides. She smells them before she sees them-the soot of their small, smoky fires, the oily stink of their bodies, the faint death smell from the skins they wear. She slips between the boulders, sure-footed, moving as quietly as she can, though they could never hear her coming over the wind. The wind that blows her own scent away, and she crouches above them and listens. The men clutching their long spears, the women clutching their children, and all eyes nervously watching the white-out blur beyond the safety of the fires.
Dancy doesn't need to understand their language to read their minds, the red and ebony light coiled tight inside her head to translate their hushed words, their every fearful thought, to show her the hazy nightmares they've fashioned from the shadows and the wailing blizzard. They whisper about the strange creature that has been trailing them for days, tracking them across the ice, the red-eyed demon like a young girl carved from the snow itself. Their shaman mumbles warnings that they must have trespassed into some unholy place protected by this spirit of the storms, but most of the men ignore him. They've never come across any beast so dangerous it doesn't bleed.
Crouched there among the boulders, her teeth chattering, Dancy gazes up into the swirling snow. The light leaks out of her nostrils and twines itself in the air above her head like a dozen softly glowing serpents.
They will come for you soon, it says. If you stay here, they'll find you and kill you.
"Will they?" Dancy asks, too cold and hungry and tired to really care, one way or the other, and Yes, the light replies.
"Why? I can't hurt them. I couldn't hurt them if I wanted to."
The light breaks apart into a sudden shower of sparks, bright drops of fire that splash against each other and bounce off the edges of the boulders. In a moment, they come together again, and the woman from the Gynander's trailer, the woman in the yellow raincoat that she knows isn't a woman at all, steps out of the gloom and stands nearby, watching Dancy with her green eyes.
"It only matters that they are afraid of you," she says. "Maybe you could hurt them, and maybe you could not, but it only matters that they are afraid."
"I killed you," Dancy says. "You're dead. Go away."
"I only wanted you to see," the woman says and glances down at the camp below the boulders. "Sometimes we forget what we are and why we do the things we do. Sometimes we never learn."
"It won't make any difference," Dancy growls at her, and the woman smiles and nods her head. Her raincoat flutters and flaps loudly in the wind, and Dancy tries hard not to look at the things writhing on her bare chest.
"It might," the woman says. "Someday, when you can't kill the thing that frightens you. When there's nowhere left to run. Think of it as a gift."
"Why would you give me a gift?"
"Because you gave me one, Dancy Flammarion," and then the woman blows apart in the wind, and Dancy shivers and watches as the glittering pieces of her sail high into the winter sky and vanish.
"Is it over now?" Dancy asks the light, and in a moment it answers her. That depends, it says, and Is it ever over? it asks, but Dancy is already tumbling back the way she's come. Head over heels, ass over tits, and when she opens her eyes, an instant later, an eternity later, she's staring through the darkness at the ceiling of the Gynander's root cellar.
* * *
Dancy coughs and rolls over onto her left side, breathing against the stabbing, sharp pain in her chest, and there's the box sitting alone in the dust, its lid closed now. The dark, varnished wood glints dull in the orange light from the hurricane lantern hanging nearby, and whatever might have come out of the box has been locked away again. She looks up from the floor, past the drooping, empty husks on their hooks and the Gynander's workbenches, and the creature is watching her from the other side of the cellar.
"What did you see?" it asks her, and she catches a guarded hint of apprehension in its rough voice.
"What was I supposed to see?" Dancy asks back, and she coughs again. "What did you think I'd see?"
"That's not how it works. It's different for everyone."
"You wanted me to see things that would make me doubt what the angel tells me."
"It's different for everyone," the Gynander says again and draws the blade of a straight razor slowly across a long leather strap.
"But that's what you wanted, wasn't it? That's what you hoped I'd see, because that's what you saw when she showed you the box."
"I never talked to no angels. I made a point of that."
And Dancy realizes that the nylon ropes around her ankles and wrists are gone, and her knife is lying on the floor beside the box. She reaches for it, and the Gynander stops sharpening its razor and looks at her.
"Sinethella wanted to die, you know. She'd been wanting to die for ages," it says. "She'd heard what you did to them folks over in Bainbridge, and down there in Florida. I swear, child, you're like something come riding out of a wild west movie, like goddamn Clint Eastwood, you are."
Dancy sits up, a little dizzy from lying down so long, and wipes the rusty blade of her carving knife on her jeans.
"Like in that one picture, High Plains Drifter, where that nameless stranger fella shows up acting all holier than thou. The whole town thinks they're using him, but turns out it's really the other way round. Turns out, maybe he's the most terrible thing there is, and maybe good's a whole lot worse thing to have after your ass than evil. Course, you have a name-"
"I haven't seen too many movies," Dancy says, though, in truth, she's never seen a single one. She glances from the Gynander to the wooden box to the lantern and back to the Gynander.
"I just want you to understand that she wasn't no two-bit, backwoods haint," it says and starts sharpening the straight razor again. "Not like me. I just want you to know ain't nothing happened here she didn't want to happen."
"Why did you untie me?"
"Why don't you try asking that angel of yours? I thought it had all the answers. Hell, I thought that angel of yours was all over the truth like flies on dog shit."
"She told you to let me go?"
The Gynander makes a sound like sighing and lays the leather strap aside, holds the silver razor up so it catches a little of the stray lantern light. Its stolen face sags and twitches slightly.
"Not exactly," it says. "Ain't nothing that easy, Snow White."
Dancy stands up, her legs stiff and aching, and she lifts the hurricane lantern off its nail.
"Then you want to die, too," she says.
"Not by a long sight, little girl. But I do like me some sport now and then. And Sinethella said you must be a goddamn force of nature, a regular shatterer of worlds, to do the things you been getting away with."
"What I saw in there," Dancy says, and she cautiously prods at the box with the toe of one shoe. "It doesn't make any difference. I know it was just a trick."
"Well, then what're you waiting for," the thing whispers from the lips of its shabby patchwork skin. "Show me what you got."
* * *
The fire crackles and roars at the night sky lightening slowly towards dawn. Dancy sits on a fallen log at the side of the red dirt road leading back to Waycross and watches as the spreading flames begin to devour the leafy walls of the kudzu tunnel.
"Well, I guess you showed me what for," the blackbird says. It's perched on the log next to her, the fire reflected in its beady eyes. "Maybe next time I'll keep my big mouth shut."
"You think there's ever gonna be a next time?" Dancy asks without looking away from the fire.
"Lord, I hope not," the birds squawks. "That was just, you know, a figure of speech."
"Oh. I see."
"Where you headed next?" the bird asks.
"I'm not sure."
"I thought mayb
e the angels-"
"They'll show me," Dancy says, and she slips the carving knife back into her duffel bag and pulls the drawstrings tight again. "When it's time, they'll show me."
And then neither of them says anything else for a while, just sit there together on the fallen pine log, as the fire she started in the cellar behind the trailer burns and bleeds black smoke into the hyacinth sky.
Alabaster
The albino girl, whose name is Dancy Flammarion, has walked a long way since the fire in Bainbridge, five nights ago. It rained all morning long, and the blue-grey clouds are still hanging sullen and low above the pines, obscuring the wide south Georgia sky. But she's grateful for the clouds, for anything that hides her from the blistering June sun. She's already thanked both St. George and St. Anthony the Abbott for sending her the clouds, because her grandmother taught her they were the patron saints of people suffering from skin diseases. Her grandmother taught her lots of things. The damp air smells like pine straw and the fat white toadstools growing along the side of the highway. Dancy knows not to eat those, not ever, no matter how hungry she gets. Her grandmother taught her about toadstools, too.
She stops, shifting the weight of her heavy old duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, the duffel bag and the black umbrella tied to it with hemp twine, and looks back the way she's just come. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the voices she hears are only inside her head or if they're coming from somewhere else. The highway glistens dark and wet and rough, like a cottonmouth moccasin that's just crawled out of the water. But there's no one and nothing back there that she can see, no one who might have spoken her name, so Dancy turns around and starts walking again.
It's what you don't see that's almost always the worst, her grandmother told her once. It's what you don't see will drag you down one day, if you ain't careful.
Dancy glances over her shoulder, and the angel is standing in the center of the highway, straddling the broken yellow dividing line. Its tattered muslin and silk robes are even blacker than the wet asphalt, and they flutter and flap in a fierce and holy wind that touches nothing else. The angel's four ebony wings are spread wide, and it holds a burning sword high above its four shimmering kaleidoscope faces, both skeletal hands gripped tightly around the weapon's silver hilt.
"I was starting to think maybe I'd lost you," Dancy says and turns to face the angel. She can hear the wind that swirls always about it, like hearing a freight train when you're only half way across a trestle and there's no way to get off the tracks before it catches up with you, nowhere to go unless you want to fall, and that sound drowns out or silences the noises coming from the woods at the edge of the road.
And there's another sound, too, a rumble like thunder, but she knows that it isn't thunder.
"If I went any slower," she replies, "I'd just about be standing still."
The thunder sound again, and the roar of the angel's scalding wind, and Dancy squints into the blinding light that's begun to leak from its eight sapphire eyes.
"No, angel," she says quietly. "I ain't forgot about you. I ain't forgotten about any of it."
The angel shrieks and swings its burning sword in a long, slow arc, leaving behind bits of fire and ember, ash and cinders, and now the air smells more like burning pitch and charred flesh than it smells like pine trees and summer rain and poisonous toadstools.
"Oh, I think you can probably keep up," she says, and turns her back on the Seraph.
And then there's only the dead, violated emptiness and the terrible silence that the angel always leaves behind when it goes. Very slowly, by hesitant degrees, all the murmuring forest noises return, and Dancy walks just a little faster than before; she's relieved when the high pines finally fall away on either side of the road and the land opens up, changing once more to farms and wild prairie. Pastures and cows, barbed-wire fences and a small service station maybe a hundred yards or so farther down the highway, and Dancy wishes she had the money for a Coke. A Coke would be good, syrupy sweet and ice cold and bubbling on her tongue. But at least they won't charge her to use the toilet, and she can wash up a little and piss without having to worry about squatting in poison oak.
She doesn't look back at the woods again, the trees standing straight and tall on either side of the highway. That part of her life is over, lived and past and done with, one small stretch of road she only needed to walk once, and, besides, she knows the angel won't come to her again for days.
After the rain and the Seraph's whirlwind, the afternoon is still and cool, and her boots seem very loud on the wet pavement. It only takes her a few more minutes to reach the service station, where an old man is sitting on a plastic milk crate beneath a corrugated tin awning. He waves to her, and Dancy waves back at him, then she tugs at the green canvas strap on her duffel bag because her shoulder's gone to sleep again.
There's a big plywood billboard beside the road, but it's not nearly so tall as the faded Texaco sign-that round placard dangling from a lamppost, a perfect black circle to contain its five-pointed red pentacle, that witch's symbol to keep out some great evil. Dancy already knows all about pentagrams, so she turns her attention to the billboard, instead; it reads live panther-deadly man eater in sloppy whitewash lettering.
She leaves the highway, skirting the edges of a wide orange-brown mud hole where the Texaco's parking lot and driveway begins, crunching across the white-grey limestone gravel strewn around the gasoline pumps. The old man is standing up now, digging about in a pocket of his overalls.
"How ya doin' there, sport?" he asks her, and his hand reappears with half a roll of wintergreen Certs.
"I'm fine," she says, not smiling because her shoulder hurts too much. "You got a bathroom I can use?"
"You gonna buy somethin'?" he asks and pops one of the Certs into his mouth. His teeth are stained yellow-brown, like turtle bones that have been lying for years at the bottom of a cypress spring.
"I don't have any money," she tells him.
"Hell," he says and sits back down on the plastic milk crate. "Well, I don't guess that makes no difference. The privy's right inside. But you better damn flush when you're done, you hear me? And don't you get piss on the seat."
Dancy nods her head, then stares at him until the old man leans back and blinks at her.
"You want somethin' else?"
"Do you really have a live panther?" she asks him, and the man arches both his eyebrows and grins, showing off his yellow-brown, tobacco-stained smile again.
"That's what the sign says, ain't it? Or cain't you read?"
"I can read," Dancy Flammarion replies and looks down at the toes of her boots. "I wouldn't have known to ask if I couldn't read."
"Then why'd you ask such a fool question for? You think I'm gonna put up a big ol' sign sayin' I got a live panther if I ain't?"
"Does it cost money to see it?"
"You better believe it does. I'll let you use the jake free of charge, 'cause it wouldn't be Christian to do otherwise, but a gander at that cat's gonna set you back three bucks, cold, hard cash."
"I don't have three dollars."
"Then I guess you ain't gonna be seein' my panther," the old man says, and he grins and offers her a Certs. She takes the candy from him and sets her duffel bag down on the gravel between them.
"How'd you get him?"
The old man rubs at the coarse salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and slips what's left of the roll of Certs into the bib pocket of his overalls.
"You some kind of runaway or somethin'? You got people out lookin' for you, sport? You a druggie?"
"Is he in a cage?" she asks, matching his questions with a question of her own.
"He's a she," the old man grunts. "Course she's in a cage. What you think someone's gonna do with a panther? Keep it in a damned burlap sack?"
"No," she says. "How'd you say you caught him?"
"I didn't."
"Did someone else catch him for you?"
"It ain't no him. It's a she."
"You're some kind'a albino, ain't you," the old man says, and he leans a little closer. He smells like sweat and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, old cars and fried food.
"Yeah," she says and nods her head.
"Yep. I thought so. I used to have some rabbits had eyes like yours."
"Did you keep them in cages, too?"
"You keep rabbits in hutches, sport."
"What's the difference?"
The old man glares at her a moment and then sighs and jabs his thumb at the screen door. "The shitter's inside," he grumbles. "Right past the Pepsi cooler. And don't you forget to flush."
"Where do you keep him?" Dancy asks, looking past the old man at the closed screen door and the shadows waiting on the other side.
"That ain't exactly none of your business, not unless you got the three bucks, and you done told me you don't."
"I've seen some things," she says. "I've seen black bears, out in the swamps. I've seen gators, too, and once I saw a big ol' bobcat, but I've never seen a panther before. Is it the same thing as a cougar?"
"You gonna stand there talkin' all damn day long? I thought you needed to take a leak?"
Dancy shrugs her narrow shoulders and then looks away from the screen door, staring north and east down the long road to the place it finally vanishes, the point where the cloudy sky and the pastures collide.
"If any police show up askin' if I seen you, don't expect me to lie about it," the old man says. "You sure look like a runaway to me. No tellin' what kind of trouble you might be in."
"Thank you for the candy," she says and points at her duffel bag. "Is it okay if I leave that out here while I use your toilet? It's heavy."