In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  The hallway was empty, the only reflections in the mirrors his.

  “Billy?” he called.

  He heard no answer save the muffled thrum of the music next door, the distant rise and fall and rush of the midway. He turned to make his way out of the maze.

  A hand—small and hard and fierce—fell upon his shoulder.

  He screamed and whipped his head around and saw the pale, soft face of a beautiful woman staring down at him. She wore a white dress and her hair hung in crimson ringlets and her eyes—a bright, mad green—met his, and though she smiled, there was something horrible behind it, something monstrous.

  No, no, you can’t be here you’re gone, gone with Travis in his camper, he said so—

  Her hand slipped from his shoulder to his throat, and the smile on her face turned down into a hard, flat line. “Sweet Sandy,” she said. She began to squeeze.

  Sandy gasped, felt the air rush out of his throat.

  “Shh,” she said, squeezing.

  Colors and lines and shapes in the room and the face of the woman and her many reflections began to stretch and bend and fold as bright purple spots bloomed in his vision and Sandy shut his eyes against the thing he saw in the mirrors, the monster-woman-thing he had seen in the camper, smiling at him now from the glass.

  Momma, mommy—

  The woman let go of his throat, as suddenly as she had seized it.

  He lied Travis lied he lied he lied—

  She dropped to her knees and took his hands in hers, even as he stood coughing and gasping, sucking in great hoarse lungfuls of air.

  She traced a finger along his throat. Her thumb found his pulse and stayed there against his artery, her sharp nail pressing a groove in the flesh. Her other hand moved down his arm and settled over the spot where his heart was pounding in his chest, and there they stood, the pretty woman-monster-thing and the boy.

  “Be still now,” she whispered, lips pink and full. “Shh, be still.”

  He grew still, though his mind was racing: what do you want what do you want oh leave me alone leave me alone—

  Her left arm lashed out and struck the mirrored wall, sending three long cracks through the glass.

  Sandy wanted to run but he could not move, could not summon an ounce of will. He felt as if he had been bitten by a pale and deadly spider and was now, slowly, being cocooned in its web.

  The woman-thing seized a long shard of glass from where it had fallen on the floor, and Sandy felt the point of it touch his throat, which was already red and swelling. He felt hot tears flood his eyes and spill down his cheeks. He wanted to beg, to cry for his mother, to call out for someone to save him, but he couldn’t force the air out, his chest was hitching and heaving so—

  She ran her other hand like a snake down the front of his shirt and over the buttons of his corduroys, around his hip and down his leg. She snatched up his trouser leg and went into his cowboy boot, where she touched the hilt of the long Ka-Bar knife in its leather scabbard. “Naughty little man,” she said, lips curling in a hungry, eager smile. “What would your mother say, sneaking around with this?” She pulled the scabbard free of his boot and slapped it against Sandy’s chest.

  He took hold of it with both arms, a reflex, and held it there, just as he had held it when Travis had given it to him on the farmhouse porch.

  “Take it out,” she said.

  Sandy’s hands began to move, but they moved slowly, sweat popping out all over him as he tried desperately to resist. No, no, I won’t!

  “Take it out, you little shit,” she snarled.

  He felt the tip of the shard sting his throat as she pressed harder.

  His bladder let go.

  Warm urine ran down his leg and filled his boot—

  baby, baby pissed his pants, baby pissed his pants, check his diaper maybe he shit em, too—

  as he unsnapped the scabbard and drew out the knife. It wavered in his hand, heavier than it had ever been, impossible to hold straight. In his other hand he clutched the leather scabbard against his chest.

  The woman twined her fingers in his hair.

  “Put the blade against your throat, right here,” she said, and she took the glass away.

  Arm trembling, weight of the blade heavy and treacherous, Sandy held the knife against his throat.

  The woman drew closer, closed her fist over his, steadied his hand.

  “Like this, little man,” she whispered.

  Sandy shut his eyes.

  Suddenly, Calhoun called his name from around the corner.

  The woman let go, and when Sandy opened his eyes, she was gone.

  Sandy saw Calhoun and was helpless to drop the knife, to move, to do anything more than cry and breathe.

  “Sandy? What in the name of Christ—”

  Calhoun knelt and put his hand around Sandy’s wrist, drew the knife from his throat. But the hand sprang back and Calhoun had to catch the boy’s arm. A trickle of blood ran beneath Sandy’s collar. “Let me have it, son,” he said, his voice firm, and something in the word startled Sandy—

  son

  —and his fingers relaxed just enough for Calhoun to pry them loose.

  The two were alone save their myriad reflections.

  Sandy tried to speak, but he couldn’t. His breath was stolen.

  Calhoun set the knife on the floor at Sandy’s feet. He put both hands on Sandy’s arms and spoke the boy’s name as if it were a plea. He shook him.

  Sandy wanted to answer, but the spider had wrapped him in her web.

  Calhoun stared at the boy, his big hands working Sandy’s arms. He pulled him against his chest and hugged him fiercely.

  Sandy felt a tingling in his arms, as if they were waking. He opened his mouth—

  And the woman-thing reared up behind Calhoun and drove her shard of mirror into the big man’s throat.

  Rue watched the man fall sideways against the wall, then roll over and sit staring at her in what looked like genuine puzzlement, glass jutting from his neck. He reached up, slowly, and touched it, and a torrent of blood gushed around the shard and over his hand, seeping into his shirt. Rue smiled at the boy, who stood with his mouth open, clutching the scabbard to his chest. He made a funny little sputtering sound, the most scream he could manage. Rue reached for the glass in the big man’s throat. His hands went up, defensively. He tried to push her away. She took his wrists in hers and held them together, pressed her thumbs there, knelt and folded his hands in his lap. His eyes glazed, no longer wide and fearful. His left leg twitched. He did not fight her now as she reached out and yanked the glass free.

  Blood jetted across the floor and the mirrored wall.

  Rue put her face under the flow, her mouth open, and she drank the man’s blood. She drank with her eyes open and stared, hungrily, at her own reflections, which were endless and beautiful in the silver maze. His life flowed into her, racing like fire, new blood feeding old, her own blood becoming new again, sluicing out what she had taken from Travis, which was tainted now, having passed through the empty, burned-out temple of his heart, and him, she thought, now, somewhere near, dying in the lights of the midway, fading like an old star collapsing, she herself a thousand Rues burning across an infinite silver sea, eyes shining with eternal light, mouth open and eating, eating, eating, eating worlds in the dying man’s blood. The boy and his mother were next. She would take them. The boy, who stood by helpless now, then his mother, and how fine it would be to eat them both, the ones for whom her foolish, poor Travis had loved and longed and lost.

  Sandy’s eyes were fixed on Calhoun dying and he heard the woman-thing’s thoughts because she was still inside his head making him slow and stupid—

  I will take you both, you and your mommy

  —and he was afraid, so afraid, and he saw his mother who had fainted earlier that evening on the straw-packed concrete near the rabbits, strangers knocking over cages in their haste to help her, and he, just standing there, a blank space where a person should
have been, the prospect of a life without her like a great black void—

  I’m sorry, Momma, so sorry I could not stop her, I could not help him

  —and now he saw Roscoe Jenkins with his hands around Sandy’s throat beneath the big oak tree atop the hill, kids and teachers far away, and Roscoe was squeezing and Sandy was crying—

  fuckin baby piss your pants you little baby

  —and there, at his feet, was the knife, as Calhoun bled and bled and bled and the woman-monster-thing drank and drank and drank—

  son

  —and here he stood, helpless, as in the dream when the wolf came down out of the hills and the rabbits, they were gone, Travis was gone, his daddy was gone, and he was next and then his momma, and this he could not comprehend—

  look out for you and your momma, you reckon you’ll remember your friend Travis now

  —and because of this Sandy was looking down at the knife at his feet, and his fingers loosened from the scabbard and he was bending, bending down.

  Reaching.

  Gripping.

  No.

  Something was wrong.

  Something bad was happening.

  Rue had seen it in a far and distant reflection, there in the mirrors—

  they always tell the truth

  —a dimming, a flickering of one of her million faces, and at this she drew back to stare, the big man’s blood dripping from her jaws. Just over his shoulder, she saw the landscape of her face change, her beautiful white skin cracking. One crack, two. Beneath her eye, the ridge of her cheek, like fissures across a frozen lake.

  No.

  The cracks met. Skin began to flake away like snow. Ashen roses bloomed beneath her collarbone, the flesh there sinking, caving.

  Travis, she thought.

  He was almost gone. She could sense it, his heart slowing, slowing. As it had the night she first took him in her arms. Only now, he was not beneath her, not between her.

  Not inside her.

  She was becoming—

  only the blood makes us

  —un-real.

  And in that instant she understood: he was gone.

  And so was this face, this form.

  In her grief, her distraction, she never saw the boy find his courage.

  She never felt him coming.

  Sandy picked up the knife and ran at the woman where she knelt, stricken.

  He drove the blade deep into her.

  Into an old white scar between shoulder and throat.

  Through flesh and bone and whatever else she was made of.

  The blade severed the little gold chain of the locket she wore around her neck.

  She fell back from Calhoun onto the floor, and the locket fell in her lap. She reached up and gripped the knife’s handle and pulled the Ka-Bar from her throat, and blood went spewing, arching from the wound across the mirrors and the floor and catching Sandy in the spray.

  The knife clattered to the floor.

  She tried to scream, but the blade had gone through to her windpipe. She fell backward and scuttled away from the boy, around a corner, into shadow, her mouth wide open in horror and gushing red.

  Sandy snatched up the Ka-Bar and ran for the mirrored corridor to the right.

  For a door marked Exit.

  He plunged out into the screaming fair.

  Travis limped out of the mermaid’s tent, pressing his hand against his stomach through his jacket. He sat on a bench across from a booth where a dollar got you three darts to pop balloons. He sat there for a while, watching people get hustled. Behind him was the lake, across it the girl singing old country songs in her sweet, plaintive voice. He closed his eyes and listened. He thought of Rue, how he had opened his eyes in the bar and first seen her, how she had moved with the eerie grace of a dream, dropping her quarter, holding the edges of her dress between her fingers.

  He was still thinking of her when he felt a great pain rip through his neck, and he had a vision of her white face crumbling away, and he opened his eyes and gasped. He knew, then, that she was gone from him. Too much blood lost between them, their strange bond severed. With his left hand he touched his throat where she had savaged him, brought back fingers red and gleaming. She is bleeding, too, now, he thought. And she is no longer real. He unhooked his jacket and looked down at the blood wet and bright. The wadded strips of shirt he had stuffed there sodden. We are becoming un-real together, he thought. He closed his coat.

  When he looked up, he saw the boy, weaving through the crowd like a panicked fawn. The boy saw him, too, and he stopped. He held Travis’s knife at his side, and the knife was bloody and the boy’s pants were stained darkly at the crotch. He was pallid and wide-eyed, his face streaked with tears and speckled red.

  Bodies moved all about him, oblivious in their own currents.

  Travis, each breath a long, ragged shudder, lifted his hand and waved.

  Annabelle went at a brisk pace past the ticket booths and stopped near the 4-H pavilion, where a scarecrow contest was underway. There were fifty or sixty scarecrows set up on broomsticks in hay bales, and the courtyard was packed with children and parents and judges. She stood on a bale and looked above the crowd for Sandy and Calhoun. She saw the funhouse and got down from the hay and went through the big lighted archway and onto the midway where the water balloons and duck pond and shooting galleries gave way to rides and tents, and the crowd parted and she saw her boy sitting on a bench beside a cowboy in a black straw hat.

  Travis Stillwell sat holding her son’s hand.

  She remembered her dream and saw the blazing light of the motel behind Stillwell, now the long horizon of the fair, he and the boy.

  The cowboy’s eyes turned on her, and they were dull and yellow like a greasy flame. She saw the blood seeping through his denim coat, the blood on the hand that held Sandy’s—he had removed a leather glove, she saw, and it, too, was bloody on the bench beside him—the knife in the boy’s lap, bright crimson bandages at the cowboy’s throat. She saw these things and remembered. She remembered the bloody bootprints on her porch and in her living room. The camper in the farmhouse drive. The sounds of women laughing and the sting of opened flesh and two small white rabbits in a cabinet, dropped in her lap from the jaws of a grinning creature, a ragged woman-thing—

  Oh God.

  “Sandy!” she cried.

  The boy looked up and met her gaze, and Annabelle clapped her hands to her mouth when she saw that his eyes were his own: bright and wet and blue, no trace of the silver veil that had shaded her own. Sandy let go of the cowboy’s hand and ran to his mother, leaving the bloody knife upon the bench.

  Stillwell’s hand dropped flatly beside it.

  Annabelle swept her son into her arms and smoothed his hair. “I love you,” she whispered. “Oh, I love you. I love you.”

  Over by the funhouse, someone screamed, and the crowd on the midway slowed and shifted as one body toward the commotion. Annabelle realized that whatever had happened—the blood, Stillwell, the knife—might still be happening. She held her boy against her, looking all around. Where is Calhoun? He isn’t here.

  Sandy pulled his face away from his mother’s blouse, though his arms remained around her neck. He was looking at the cowboy on the bench, who was swallowing thickly, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Annabelle, too, saw that Stillwell was trying to speak, his lips forming words that were lost in the carnival din.

  “Fancy,” Stillwell said, staring vaguely at the ground. He coughed wetly. “Fancy a ride on yonder wheel,” he said. He swallowed, and blood coursed out of his neck. He closed his eyes and opened them again. He looked up at the boy. “Reckon,” he said, “I could bum one of them tickets?”

  Sandy looked down at the sheaf of tickets sticking out of his left corduroy pocket. In a small voice, the boy said, “It takes four.”

  “Four,” Stillwell said.

  Annabelle saw that his breathing had shallowed. His eyes were dimming, and the blood seeping through the coat at his
stomach was darker now, the stain ever-widening.

  “You all go with me,” Stillwell said, “if it suits you.”

  Annabelle was about to tell her boy to come away with her, they had to go find Calhoun—there were raised voices now around the funhouse, a man yelling “GET A DOCTOR, IS ANYONE A DOCTOR?”—when Sandy pushed out of her arms and dropped to the ground and ran to Stillwell. Annabelle lurched after him and pulled him away by the shoulders, but not before the boy had lifted Stillwell’s bloody hand and pressed four tickets into his palm. Sandy folded this hand over the cowboy’s stomach, away from the knife, which lay on the bench now like a dead fish upon a shore. The boy was crying when Annabelle scooped him up again. She held him as she had not since he was a toddler, kissing the top of his head and telling him, once more, that she loved him. She said the words over and over as she carried him away from the bench, the funhouse, the crowd.

  The commotion was loud, almost as loud as the midway itself.

  Sirens distant.

  A woman screaming.

  Travis closed his eyes and listened for music, any music. He thought he heard a snatch of something. One last song, though he could not make out the words. The smells of mustard and vinegar drifting from a nearby waste can. He opened his eyes and looked down at his stomach. The string of tickets fluttered there in the breeze like flowers on a grave. He saw his Ka-Bar knife on the bench beside him, where the boy had left it. He closed his eyes. Opened them. Closed them again.

  I will take these tickets, he thought. For my passage.

  Without music, he drifted—

  into the wide, covered gondola with the woman and the boy, who sat across from him, and as the carriage made its slow, halting climb toward the top, passengers getting on, passengers getting off, the woman put her arm around her boy, and the boy peered over the side, and the wheel turned, the gondola rising, stopping, sawing gently. A buzzer sounded somewhere on the midway below, then laughter, then the pop of a balloon, and the three of them sat suspended in the dark sky at the top of the wheel, where all the way to the horizon, night had wrapped the world

  —away from the bench, where the world was dim, the sounds of the wheel and the fair fading, the bright carnival lights all a-dimming. I am going to not die now, Travis thought, because it is so much worse than dying for the thing I am become, and so he sat up as straight as he could manage—