Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “But—my good man—don’t you think that’s somewhat excessive? I mean, suppose we were a hay wagon. Would you take half our load?”

  “Naw,” he said shortly, turning his shoulder to them and stumping back to his hut. “You’re not a hay wagon. You are what you are and that’s your toll.”

  Harry loosed a delighted yelp. “Oh, Tattersclaw,” he exclaimed. “I am in love with Tattersclaw. Of course we will pay with whatever we bring back. Half for us, half for you, is that not right? A hatful of gold, a wheel of cheese, a basket of mushrooms from that wilderness ahead. Is this not wonderful, Edie?”

  “Wonderful,” she agreed a trifle breathlessly, gazing at the green wall of mountains on the other end of the bridge. “Drive on, Thompson.”

  Indeed, the vast green seemed to loom as they crossed, become a frozen sea of massive waves rising, one after another, peak after peak stretching to a distant blue-gray upwell, to the end of the world, it looked like, and all about to come crashing exuberantly upon the heads of the innocent travelers. Even the road at the far end seemed swallowed by the waves, running a short way into shadow and vanishing.

  But Thompson made nothing of that; he plunged fearlessly into the unknown, enjoying, Edie knew, his own proficiency as he spun them around one coil of road to the next, all wonderfully ornamented with great boulders and ferns and wild streams. Harry became very quiet, infinitely soothed by the cool air, the smells of wet moss and earth, the shadows of birch and hemlock.

  “Lovely,” he breathed finally, fixated upon a little rill splashing down stones beside the road. “Lovely. But,” he added after a breath, “I wonder to what point?” Edie opened her mouth, perplexed; he enlightened her. “Where, in short, does the road go? There are no signs pointing onward to villages, no isolated houses, not even a farm readily visible, and yet this road.”

  “Patience, dear Harry, patience. We have only gone a little way. It will reveal its purpose.”

  Which it did, in the next curve, running abruptly upward on an oddly widened expanse of lane. Rough fieldstone walls appeared here and there, strengthening the steep hillside. The road continued up and up in a long, winding spiral through the forest. Edie’s fascinated eye recognized, among the still green locals, outlandish trees and shrubberies from distant countries, unexpected continents. They had been ruthlessly transported from their native soils and dropped, willynilly, into this unkempt wilderness. Remnants, she wondered, of some overgrown, long-untended garden?

  “The sign!” Harry suddenly exclaimed.

  And there it was: a wooden slat, weathered and grey, hanging from a rusty chain on a pole. Upon it, looking very freshly painted, a word: rêve.

  A black rose bloomed beneath the word. A black raven stood above it. Unlike the rose, the bird was alive, and emitted its own word, a remarkably accurate imitation of the Pope-Hartford backfiring into the trees.

  “Dream,” Harry translated. He sounded absolutely delighted. “Oh, this is beyond expectation. The bridge where we wanted it, the stump-legged toll-collector, and now—” He gestured, rendered uncharacteristically inarticulate. “This.”

  The raven flew off the sign, sailed up the road ahead of them. The car labored around a final curve and, to Edie’s relief, achieved level ground.

  Thompson stopped the engine.

  For a moment, even the raven was silent.

  They were parked on a precipice, a slab of solid rock that seemed, in its dizzying height, the pinnacle of the world. Farther below them than should be possible, Edie glimpsed a ribbon of the river, and in the distance beyond, a pale blur that might have been her own Hill House on a miniature mound of green.

  In front of them stood row upon row of blank, dark, rectangular windows above a broad, regal swath of veranda interspersed with many lofty pillars overlooking the stunning view of the world, and, it seemed, entirely empty.

  Or maybe not, Edie thought, as movement, like a thought, flickered across one of the high, hollow windows. But no: it was the raven, falling like a black tear down the face of the abandoned structure.

  She consulted the strangely motionless Harry; he gazed, engrossed, at the vision, his own face as still, as thoughtless as that many-eyed dreamer now inhabited, from the look of it, only by ravens and ghosts.

  Thompson glanced back at Edie, his brows raised, and she made a decision.

  “Tea,” she said. “On those steps, I think, leading up to the porch. Can you put us closer, Thompson? Perhaps there is a caretaker of some sort who can explain this marvel to us. Does that suit you, Harry? Harry?”

  But he was already out and gone, as quickly as his patient bulk would permit, every step across stone and weedy drive in an unhesitating line for the broad, elegant stairway leading up to the pillared veranda and the entryway, whose doors were shut as tightly as the mouth of a housekeeper over the secrets of the house. His attention never swerved, even when Thompson passed him to park discreetly to one side of the steps, so as not to intrude upon their view.

  Harry went up the steps, opened the doors, and vanished.

  Edie felt a word, dark and harsh, try to fly from her lips; she put her hand over them quickly. The imperturbable Thompson spoke, sounding shaken.

  “Should I unload the picnic basket, Mrs. W.? Or should I go after him?”

  “I’ll go,” Edie answered quickly. “Why should dear Harry have all the adventures?” She rose to let herself out. “By all means unpack the basket. There’s tea, there are sandwiches, and some blueberry tarts. If we get captured by desperate mountain folk living inside, find a way to let Ned know so that he can pay the ransom.” And hope, she thought, that he’s having one of his better days. She smiled cheerfully, for Thompson was looking dubious. “I’ll be out shortly, I promise.”

  She gained the top of the rigorous ascension of treads, and crossed the veranda, empty now of the long lines of white wicker lounges and sturdily slatted rockers upon which guests must have once perched to admire the stunning view. Midway, time shifted, it seemed; the moment merged with memories, like layers of torn wallpaper, revealing earlier broad verandas, and piazzas in far-flung places across the sea: ancient lights slanting across them, hues of sky mirrored in rain puddles on cobblestones, great clouds of pigeons or doves startling upward, and then wheeling, adrift, behind spires, between towers, over palaces centuries older than this naïve place, barely past its callow youth before it had hollowed out.

  The high double doors opened easily. She left them open to reassure Thompson, who still watched her from the bottom step, and entered.

  “Harry?”

  There he was, reflected in a great, gilt-edged mirror at the end of the passageway. He receded; she quickened her pace, and saw the raven again, swooping in and out of the mirror behind Harry. It cried once, but soundlessly, as though only its reflection had made a noise, and only Harry’s might have heard it.

  Someone else appeared in the mirror then, passing it noiselessly. The caretaker? Edie guessed, and hurried to catch up. She had the vague impression of a suit, black, hair, also black, and longer than now stylish, but this was country after all, remote, indeed aloof, and even time took a while to get there.

  She reached the end of the passage and passed in and out of the mirror herself, as she pushed wider the door angled open beside the mirror.

  The man in black, tall, with a long, youthful step, seemed preoccupied with matters as he strode the length of a large, airy, completely empty room. A dining room, it might have been, or a ballroom with windows on three sides overlooking the immensity of space and light around it, the river far below, the distant horizons, mountain slopes, a waterfall plunging endlessly over what looked like the edge of the world.

  “Excuse me?” Edie called as the man opened doors in the inner wall at the far end of the room. He did not hear her; he disappeared again as he closed them quickly, competently behind him. Where could he be going? she wondered as she pursued him. What business could compel him so thoroughly in this deserted place?
His dinner?

  And where was Harry?

  She flung open the doors to what must have been the reception room, with its high ceilings and pillars imitating those on the outer veranda. Neither the stranger nor Harry was anywhere in sight. Corridors and stairways to other rooms and floors branched away from this room. She called again through the accumulated silence of seasons, of years: “Harry?”

  She heard faint, rhythmic footsteps above her, and she headed for the stairs.

  At the top, a corridor of doors stretched the length of the entire building. Some were open, spilling afternoon light moted with golden dust onto the bare floorboards. Others were shut. She walked slowly, noiselessly down the hall, listening; light, shadow, again light filled her eyes. Ancient afternoons flickered past her from a time when every room was full, every window golden, and every door was closed.

  She heard a murmuring, maybe doves, maybe at last a human voice, behind a door, and reached out to it quickly, opened it.

  She had a confused, startling vision of color, of opulence, before she began to recognize what she saw: gold and blue velvet drapes, satin sheets edged with lace tumbling to the floor, a woman’s face turned quickly away from the interloper, her youthful skin the color of cream, her chestnut hair unbound, loose across the satin. Her gown, ivory white and peach, tossed among the sheets, was sliding toward a dark, lovely carpet strewn with tiny red roses upon which her silver-buckled shoes lay where they had been tossed, and another shoe had just fallen.

  The dark-haired man sitting among the bedclothes, gazed at Edie. He had not finished undressing. He was shirtless but had not yet taken off his trousers. His shoulders glowed in the gentle light behind the sheer inner curtains pulled loosely over the windows so that hawks and the heads of mountains could not peer in at them. The hair on his chest, a fine, soft dark, seemed as neat and carefully arranged as a garment. Half-naked, he still seemed clothed, exquisitely so, in his own body, his long, perfect bones, the muscles delineated with such precision under his gleaming skin that Edie’s fingers longed to trace them, feel that hard warmth glide and shift under them.

  The man, his young, comely face surprised, asked very politely in French, “Is there some way I can help you, Madame?”

  Edie opened her mouth to answer.

  Then she felt herself on fire, every inch, every pore of her, with horror and embarrassment. What had she almost said, what had she wanted to do? Ned had never inspired her fingertips; she had never felt his skin before she touched it. She had never seen, he had never, she had no idea, even naked, he or she, how such things could be, how wildly different, if. . . .

  She answered, babbled, something back, and found herself in the hallway again, the door closed before she realized it, feeling as disheveled, mentally, as if she had been with them in that rumpled bed.

  She drifted then, not seeing much, forgetting even Harry, until, eventually, she wandered back into the reception room and saw him there.

  She looked at him across a distance, as though they had not seen, nor even thought of, one another in many years, and for a moment, she could not remember. . . .

  Then she blinked and recognized the expression on his face: he seemed as bemused, as stunned, as she.

  “Harry?”

  “My dear Edie.”

  “You vanished so quickly—I was searching—”

  “I thought I saw—” He hesitated. “I did see. In the end.”

  “What?” she breathed, astonished that he might tell her. She had no intention of revealing her own vision. Not, at least, to him.

  “I thought I saw someone inside. A face, looking out at us as we drove up. At me. Someone I thought—I thought I recognized. So I followed.”

  “You left us,” she reminded him, “without a word.”

  “No. Surely not. I distinctly remember saying—”

  “No.”

  “Maybe it was something I heard,” he said enigmatically. Even then, he scarcely saw her, she realized; his eyes were wide, haunted by his own vision. “So I went to find this man I thought I knew.”

  “And—” Her voice failed her again. “Did you?”

  “He was always ahead of me, always just closing a door when I opened one, climbing stairs before I reached them, showing himself in mirrors when I thought I had lost him. I scarcely saw his face, just a quick profile, a half-turn, never anything so profound as an expression, and never his eyes.”

  Yes, she thought. Until the end.

  “But every time I glimpsed him, he changed—”

  “He—”

  “In some small detail. In some strange emanation, as though in the air around him, or in his shadow. I could sense the changes, feel them. He never entirely disappeared, you understand, he stayed always within my glimpse, and yet—” He paused, drew a breath so full, so profound it might have been his last. “With every glimpse, I felt him grow farther and farther away from me. He made changes in himself that in the end I did not understand. As though we had ceased speaking the same language, and had never known each other at all.”

  “Who was he? Harry?”

  He finally saw her again, his eyes clearing, yet strangely sad, mourning something he had never known.

  “He finally let me see his face; he turned deliberately to look at me. He was myself. If I had taken a different path, made other choices, above all known that I had choices, and the strength to choose.”

  She stared at him wordlessly; he smiled, faintly, ruefully. “And you, my dear? What did you see?”

  The choice, she thought. She answered simply, “Much the same.”

  The drive back to Hill House was very quiet. Somehow Thompson found his way out of the tangled forest and back to the bridge where Edie, out of habit, stirred from her trance and felt for her handbag. Absently, she proffered coins to the short, hairy figure who stumped out of his booth to stop them in the middle of the bridge. He seemed somehow less fantastical than he had been that morning. Or perhaps, she thought, her world had shifted, expanded, to let the fantastic in.

  He huffed a snort at the coins in her hand, his mustachios fluttering in his breeze. “We agreed on half. Half of what you’re bringing back.”

  “But that’s all I’ve got—”

  “Hah!” His eyes, dark as the water now and shrewd, almost seemed, in the last glow of light, to smile. “I want the other half of your stories.”

  Speechless, Edie dropped the coins back into her bag. She glanced at Harry, found his own eyes narrowed, half-dreaming, already beginning to calculate his half.

  She felt the quickening in her own mind, the bloom of possibilities, the shift of image to word to structure, of dream awakening to true. The toll-collector swept the great hat off his head and stepped aside with a flourish.

  Thompson drove on down the suddenly unfamiliar road.

  Alien

  my grandmother Abby was sixty-nine when she got sucked up into the bowels of an alien spaceship and thoroughly examined. My grandfather had died a couple of years before, which we—her children and grandchildren—felt pretty much explained the incident of the alien, while at the same time illuminating what none of us had any desire to think about: the sex lives of our elders.

  “Loneliness,” my Aunt Sabrina decided.

  “Dementia?” my husband, Gage, guessed tentatively, reluctant to let the word in the door in case it stuck around, refused to leave, became part of our family.

  My sister Miranda’s cute and icky boyfriend, Wallace, balancing precariously on the back legs of his chair, brought the front legs down with a thump. “Drugs,” he declared officiously. “She taking anything new? My mom’s on something that makes her see elephants in her bedroom. Sometimes an albino buffalo.”

  We looked at Beau and Sabrina, Abby’s children, for that one. My parents hadn’t arrived yet. My father, Abby’s younger son, had laughed himself silly over the phone when he heard the news. So far that was the only opinion I’d heard from him. While my aunt and uncle sorted their thoug
hts, I heard the battle raging in the living room between Jedi Knights and the Evil Empire, punctuated with outraged accusations.

  “You’re dead!”

  “Am not!

  “I shot you!”

  “You missed!”

  None of us sitting around the kitchen table with beer and seven kinds of roasted nuts wanted to deal with that. But when my one-yearold, Bertram, tottered like a drunken caveman into eyesight, his diaper drooping, his plump, milky body naked but for one sock, a look on his face of pure primal merciless focus as he stalked across the doorway, raising the plastic green baseball bat in his hands, I guessed I’d better take notice.

  “Bertram!”

  I joggled the table jumping up. Wallace’s beer fell over and drained into his lap. He was up again on two chair legs; trying to go forward to right himself and get back away from the cold wet at the same time unbalanced him completely. He toppled back against the wall with a cry, echoed piercingly in the living room by the object of Bertram’s attention. Miranda loosed an appalled “Shit!” The space war went suddenly silent; curious warriors slunk toward the doorway, avoiding the ruthless tangle on the floor of my two sons, both scrabbling for the bat and howling at the top of their lungs.

  My husband sighed as he rose to the occasion. “So she got abducted by aliens. Does that mean she can’t babysit anymore?”

  We were supposed to be having our yearly family reunion. That meant RVs, tents for the kids, mountains and trees and lakes to absorb their relentless energy, while we watched in leisure from camp chairs, propping our feet on the beer coolers. My grandmother, materfamilias, was the still point of our gyrating lives, the one dot on the timeline from which the family radiated. We fretted over her after my grandfather died, wondering how, after forty-five years with him, she could survive without. She could and did, though to my youthful eyes she grew smaller, more vulnerable; even I had glimpsed the enormity that loomed over us all. She smiled and teared more easily, rarely criticized; she seemed genuinely grateful for the genial chaos we provided for her, as she sipped her single bottle of beer through the day and contemplated the distant peaks.