Masques IV

by J N Williamson

  Nobody saw Billy pass from grade to grade like the rest. He went to some other school somewhere. Rumor had it it was a place for retarded kids. That brought more laughter.

  Only Oliver knew that couldn’t be true, that Billy had chosen some secret, magical path which kept him apart, which changed him and wouldn’t let him change again. Oliver didn’t laugh.

  But certainly Billy was losing whatever charm he had. What was fascinating at nine is okay at eleven and a bit boring at thirteen, and when the human body stays that dirty and gets older, it starts to stink. After puberty you learn about B.O. Billy had it in epic proportions.

  “Come on!” he pleaded. “I know something neat! What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

  Not even Daniel visited the fort much anymore.

  Oliver went one last time when he was fourteen. It was one of those growing-up things, like the last time you play with your electric trains. He somehow knew it would be the last.

  He had been a freshman at Cardinal O’Hara for two months. It was October, but almost as warm as summer. In the evening, after he’d finished delivering his newspapers, Oliver stood among the fallen leaves behind the Drake house at the top of the embankment, waiting, remembering; and suddenly Billy was there, as he had always been, clad in dirt and a pair of cut-offs that were ripped up both sides almost to the waist so that he looked like a jungle cannibal in a loin-cloth. He wore a necklace like one, too, of dried snakeskins and animal bones.

  “Hello, Billy.”

  The other said nothing and Oliver followed him down the embankment under the thorn-bushes and vines, trying very hard not to soil or tear the new jacket he’d gotten for his birthday a week before.

  The golf course was being torn up to build a Sears but the construction area was deserted, and skulking among the huge piles of earth and among the idle machines was an acceptable substitute for the bushes that were no longer there.

  He sat with Billy on the threshold of the fort for what must have been an hour. The woods grew dark. The first stars appeared and the rising full moon shone fleetingly among the tree trunks. Oliver zipped up his jacket, but Billy didn’t seem cold.

  Billy talked about bats, his latest fascination.

  “I like bats too,” Oliver said. “Did you see The Kiss of the Vampire where they killed the vampires at the end—?”

  But, no, Billy meant real bats, soft, warm, sharp-clawed things like mice with wings. Sometimes he would lie in his fort at night listening to the distant howling of the Blood Goblin still angrily searching for its stolen body, and the bats came to cover him up like a chirping blanket. He really liked that. It was neat. The bats told him all their secrets. He had learned their language.

  He made a chittering, whistling sound.

  Oliver shivered, laughed nervously. “You’re making this up”

  “No!” Billy leapt to his feet, towering over Oliver, his fists bunched up, his belly wriggling. “Don’t be a asshole!”

  That was how he said it, Oliver would always remember. Not an asshole but a asshole.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Billy. I mean it.”

  Billy spat and sat down, his chin on his grubby fists.

  “If you’re really sorry, you’ll look at the neat thing I got to show you.”

  “Okay, Billy . . .” Oliver was more than uneasy then, definitely afraid. He could sense the magic in Billy, the power which wanted to anchor him here, to drag him back from fourteen to nine again and keep him that way forever.

  “It’s something the bats showed me,” Billy said. “They can do it with their wings. I always wanted to see the insides of things. They showed me how.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just watch. You promised.”

  “Yeah. I promised.”

  Oliver had no idea what was to follow. He sat there watching as Billy sat very still, his hands folded, eyes closed, head down. That was the strangest thing of all. Oliver had to control his impulse to laugh. It was impossible to imagine Billy praying.

  Then Billy lowered his folded hands until the edges touched the dirt floor of the fort; and he parted them, brushing a little dirt aside. Suddenly there was an opening. Not a hole. No. He hadn’t scooped out that much dirt. It was as if the earth were scum on the surface of a pond, and Billy’s hands had broken it. The blackness suggested an infinite depth.

  “Jesus!”

  “Now look down there,” Billy said. “You promised. Just look and see what the insides of the world are filled up with.”

  Oliver looked, and suddenly felt Billy’s hands grab him by the shoulders of his jacket, yanking his head down; and then Billy was on top of him, heavy and fat and hot, breathing hard, his stench almost unbearable. He forced Oliver’s head down into the hole and held it there.

  “Look! Dead people! The world is full of dead people! Look! There’s your grandmother! Isn’t that neat?” He laughed, squealed, grunted like a pig, shaking Oliver, pressing him down, down—Oliver opened his eyes in the darkness, flinching from the expected dirt, but there was none. He seemed to be hanging in a dark space . . . and then he saw the dead people, like pale bubbles suspended in the black fluid of the night, the array of them extending into infinite distance, their faces and naked skulls glowing like stars, like dim moons. They were all somehow aware of him, angry that he had intruded upon them. They froze him with their terrible gaze, those shrivelled corpses, those skeletons, those heaps of scraps and darkened bones. Nearby, an ancient lady in an old-fashioned dress, lying with her hands folded over rosary beads, glared up at him.

  She opened her mouth as if to speak. He shouted, “No! Go away!” But she was not going away and there was no sound. Her voice, he knew, would be the most horrible thing of all, and he would never stop hearing it.

  But she said nothing. There were only wriggling worms.

  “Isn’t that neat?” Billy whispered.

  He let go and Oliver broke free, running through the darkened woods, tripping over vines, tearing his precious jacket among the thorns. Once he fell and landed face-down in a stream.

  At last he came to the edge of the woods, where two holes remained of the old golf course. Alice, his girlfriend, lived nearby. He had planned to visit her tonight. He was late and a mess but he didn’t think he would make it all the way back to his own house. He would be safe with her.

  “What happened to you?” she said, giggling when she saw him.

  “I fell,” was all he could say.

  Afterward, Oliver glimpsed Billy only at a distance once or twice, crouched under a bush, watching. He was almost able to deny him, to convince himself that he had never been fascinated with the things Billy considered neat. Almost.

  Alice was succeeded by Marlene, who was succeeded by Janice, then Jeanne, then Dora, and that took him to the end of high school. College was more a matter of books, then computers. All that talk about spaceships was rapidly turning him into an astro-physicist.

  But he dreamed of Billy Porter at the oddest times. Once he seemed to doze off in a lecture hall, and someone nudged him on the shoulder; and there was Billy beside him, naked and dirty, garlanded with dead leaves. He followed Billy out of the hall while the professor droned on and no one seemed to notice he was going. Outside was not the corridor that should have been there, but the deep woods where the wind rattled branches and heaved vines, and the trees were alive with presences which welcomed Billy and rejected Oliver. They came to the fort and Billy squatted down before the fire, then lifted his head off until his spine and entrails dripped in the air. Oliver let out a cry and awoke back in his seat in the lecture hall. The students around him turned to look, and a couple snickered, but the professor didn’t seem to have noticed.

  At twenty-three, he began graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and, after that was done, moved to Princeton. There he met and married Eileen. For several years, that looked like the best idea he’d ever had, and for several more after that, the worst.

  He couldn’t begin to say precisely
when the marriage went bad, but it did, with the glacial inevitability of a mansion built on an unsound foundation, tottering to a fall. The petty bickerings started, continued, became almost constant, over just anything—who was right in El Salvador, whether or not flying saucers exist—anything. It didn’t matter. They weren’t really fighting over the ostensible topics, Oliver wearily concluded, any more than the people of the Middle Ages really fought wars over which way you make the sign of the cross or whether the spirit flows from the Father and the Son, or from the Father alone. It was all ego, authority-turf, conquest and humiliation, territorial squabbles in that most personal of personal spaces, the mind.

  At the end, he suspected Eileen had a lover. He didn’t care. Fine and good-riddance, he told himself.

  But she wouldn’t let him off so easily. She was going to make it messy. At the very end they found themselves screaming at one another, and before he knew it he’d raised a silver candlestick like a club.

  “Go on, you stupid fuck,” she said, her voice even, contemptuous and not at all afraid. “Go on and kill me. That’ll solve everything.”

  He walked out of the house, got in his car, just started driving. He had no idea where he was going. Just going. He joked to himself that he’d always thought that driving your emotions away with a car was a California trait, but no, they do it in New Jersey too. Driving, on and on like a record that’s come to the end but the needle won’t lift, so there’s nothing left but an empty rasping noise.

  An hour passed, more. His mind was on autopilot. Autopilot took him across the Ben Franklin Bridge into Pennsylvania. Autopilot turned west on the Schuykill Expressway and exited at Gulph Mills. His motions were as mindless as the orbits of asteroids—

  “My God,” he said aloud. “St. David’s PA.”

  His mind cleared somewhat as he recognized the old neighborhood, or what was left of it. The Sears which had replaced the golf course was itself gone, turned into a corporate center. Across the street a B. Altman’s had come and gone, the building empty. He didn’t turn left to see if the parking lot had obliterated Cabbage Creek Woods. Instead, he continued on, turned right into Cambria Court, his old street, parked, and got out to walk.

  He wanted to proceed slowly. He wanted to touch and feel and hear, not just to glance from a moving car. More than that, he wanted to put off the time before he’d have to inevitably go back and face Eileen. He wanted this moment to last forever.

  It was dusk on a long summer evening like so many he’d known here. He walked past the house with the arched gateway over the path where he’d come that Halloween when he was fourteen, the very last time he’d ever gone trick-or-treating, and the man had said, “You’re getting a little tall for this, aren’t you?” Not old, tall.

  He knew these places, every tree, every stone, for a child can trespass into any number of back yards without being noticed or driven away. Now he could only stand in the street and look.

  The upper court was hardly recognizable. An apartment building had wiped out his own family’s old house and the empty lot behind where, when he was very small, a Victorian pile had burned to the ground amid screaming sirens, flashing lights, and thick smoke. It was his most vivid memory from the beginning of his life: the firemen dragging hoses across the lawn, the snapping as the sparks and cinders flew into the air. He remembered standing in the driveway holding his mother’s hand while his father hurried to pile valuables into the car in case the fire spread and they had to leave.

  Now he could only look for traces of that former place, what was his whole world then. Yes, there was one twisted dogwood tree at the edge of the street which had been in their yard, but that was all.

  As he stood there, as the evening shadows deepened, he was able to imagine what it had been like. But the scale was all off. Things were smaller: that dogwood tree, even though it should have grown, was no longer the labyrinthine tower of wood and leaves it had been. It was just a tree. And across the street, behind him, was a walnut atop the rising ground at the edge of the Drake property. He remembered crawling up that little hill on his hands and knees, resting beneath the tree. Now it was no more than a foot above the road surface. He could take the journey in a single step.

  He leaned down and picked up a walnut, its green and black shell peeling to reveal the nut inside. Nobody ever ate them, but he remembered the strong, almost sweet smell which got on your hands and stayed for hours.

  “Hello.”

  He turned, still holding the walnut. “I used to live here,” he said quickly.

  “I know.”

  He took the other for a handyman of some sort, a stocky fellow dressed in a dirty, dark uniform of the sort filling-station attendants sometimes wear. But there was something about the way the man moved, some unforgotten tone in his voice that made him hesitate. For just an instant, he felt a touch of the old fear again. That he recognized unquestionably.

  Then he saw the face clearly. A face as it ages is like a waxen mask slowly melting, stretching. The basic pattern remains for a long time.

  “Bil-ly?”

  “Hey old pal, wanna see something neat?”

  It was so easy, so utterly effortless to follow Billy through the hedge and into the Drakes’ yard, even as some voice in the back of his mind said, Wait a minute. We’re grown men, we’re trespassing on these people’s property. He crawled down the embankment, under the arching forsythias, through the thorns, and it was much easier than he thought it would be. He followed, even as he thought again, How could you possibly know I would be here this particular night? and Billy seemed to answer in his mind: You thought of me and I waited. You were the very last one to come to my fort, and I waited.

  Billy took him by the arm, led him along the tracks. He cringed at that, because everyone knew that trainmen went by and took pictures of people who walked along the tracks.

  He noticed that Billy was barefoot and his clothes were rags.

  He climbed down the second embankment to the stream, clumsily, sliding amid a shower of sticks and gravel. Billy was ahead of him somewhere, in the trees perhaps, moving swiftly, easily; then waiting for him by the stream.

  They walked out onto the deserted St. David’s Golf Course in the deep twilight, and fireflies rose from the green earth; and a part of his mind said, There’s been no golf course here since JFK was president. And a part of him thought it odd that he marked time that way, since JFK, not since he was in the sixth grade; and he reflected how each of us matters so little against the larger pattern of events. But the whole of his mind did not listen to those voices and they receded to a nonsensical whisper.

  It was so easy. A downhill slide away from pain, where Eileen could not follow.

  They came to the clump of trees behind the clubhouse, where some kid or other supposedly found a Spanish-American War sword once. Oliver wondered if Billy had that sword now, among his collection of neat things.

  In Cabbage Creek Woods, among the skunk cabbages, the soft mud was almost frigid between their toes.

  And, finally, the two of them crouched in Billy’s fort before a smoldering fire, dirty, almost naked, clutching stone-tipped spears, hooting and howling into the night.

  (Like the kids in Lord of the Flies, that other voice said. But he didn’t understand. No, this is all wrong. You’re thirty-five. For Christ’s sake what happened to your clothes?)

  “Isn’t this neat?” Billy said.

  Shaking, sobbing at some memory he could no longer quite define, Oliver said, “Yes. Neat.”

  “Here. Let me show you something.”

  Billy folded his hands, then brushed his own bare, mud-streaked chest, splashing away the skin like scum on pondwater, and Oliver could see Billy’s ribs clearly, his lungs inflating like bags, his heart beating deep inside.

  “My God—”

  For an instant Oliver remembered. He struggled back into himself like a drowning man reaching for the surface. He remembered that he was a full professor at Princeton, that he
’d parked his car over in Cambria Court. But he looked down at his slender, hairless legs, at his muddy knees and feet, and he wept and thought, This can’t be real. What is happening to me?

  “Neat, huh?” Billy laughed, like a kid who’s just chewed up some food but not swallowed it, and opens his mouth in order to be deliberately disgusting.

  It was so easy to stop weeping, to sit with Billy, to try to be just like him, to listen to his stories of the Blood Goblin and of the wild Indians who lived in these woods once, and what terrible tortures they performed on their enemies. If he listened very hard, if he stared intently out into the darkening woods, he could hear the tom-toms and the screams, far away.

  Something moved furtively among the nettles by the stream, ruffling them.

  “Billy,” he said slowly. “I want to stay here. I want to learn to see everything you see. I want you to teach me.”

  (No! his adult self screamed within, like a prisoner in a cage being wheeled to execution. He tried to remember science, equations, the names of stars.)

  Billy stood up. He opened his arms wide and the whole forest was transformed. It was utterly dark now. The bird-calls were exotic screeches. Something huge, like a giant on stilts, stalked among the trees, its bestial head glaring. Below the fort, by the stream, a huge serpent coiled, its scales gleaming with their own light. Its face was that of a bare human skull. Its tongue flickered between the rotting teeth like a thin knife.

  “Just like me,” Billy said, putting his hand on Oliver’s shoulder in what had to be a gesture of acceptance at last, of genuine friendship. The master of the forest had accepted an apprentice.

  (No! the buried, adult Oliver screamed from within his head. I don’t want to be like you. I’m not like you. I grew up! You never did!)

  “You’re exactly like me,” Billy said aloud.

  And the two of them crouched inside the fort. Oliver, looking up for Billy’s approval first, leaned down, placing his folded hands in the dust.

  It was so easy. He didn’t have to be forced. He looked down into the hole as if peering through a ceiling from the floor above, and he saw Eileen there, lying on the kitchen floor in their house back in Princeton, blood pooling around her throat. She gasped softly. Her fingers opened, closed, opened, were still.