Green Eyes

by Lucius Shepard

  The innkeeper proved to be a chubby young man, his eyes set close together above a squidgy nose and a cherubic mouth. He wore a tunic of coarse cloth, an apron, and carried a tray holding a chipped ceramic mug. ‘Brew?’ he asked hopefully, his lips aquiver. Donnell nodded, and the innkeeper set down the mug, jerking back his hand. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘uh, Lord, uh…’ Donnell looked up at him, and he stiffened.

  Donnell indicated the curtained niche. ‘I will watch from there tonight,’ he said, toying with the handle of his mug. Black sparks from his fingers adhered to the ceramic, jittering a second and vanishing.

  ‘Certainly, Lord.’ The innkeeper clasped his hands in an attitude of obeisance. ‘But, Lord, are you aware that the Aspect comes here of an evening?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Donnell, not aware in the least. He picked up the mug - vile-smelling stuff, fermented tree bark -and carried it to the table behind the curtain. ‘Where does he usually sit?’ he asked. The innkeeper pointed at a spot by the rear wall, and Donnell adjusted the curtain to provide an uninhibited view. He felt no need to urge the innkeeper to be close mouthed about his presence. The man’s fear was excessive.

  Over the next half hour, seven men filtered into the inn. They might have been cousins, all dark-haired and heavy-boned, ranging from youth to middle age, and all were dressed in fish-hide leggings and loose shirts. Their mood was weary and their talk unenthused, mostly concerned with certain tricky currents which had arisen of late in the river, due, one said, to ‘meddling.’ Their language, though Donnell had assumed it to be English, was harsh, many words having the sound of a horse munching an apple, and he realized he had been conversing in it quite handily.

  Another half hour passed, two men left, three more arrived, and then a wind blew open the door, swirling the sand. A man wearing the black of the Yoalo entered and threw himself down on a bench by the far wall. His face made Donnell wish for a mirror. It was a bestial mask occupying an oval inset in the black stuff. Satiny-looking vermillion cheeks, an ivory forehead figured by stylized lines of rage, golden eyes with slit pupils, a fanged mouth which moved when he spoke. Every one of its features reacted to the musculature beneath. He proceeded to swallow mug after mug of the brew, tossing them off in silence, signaling the serving girl for more. Once he grabbed for her, and as she skipped away, he laughed. ‘Trying to tame these country sluts is like trying to cage the wind,’ he said loudly. His voice was vibrationless and of startling resonance. All the men laughed and went back to their conversations. Though he was Yoalo, they accorded him only a token respect, and Donnell thought that if he was Aspect here, he would require of them a more rigorous courtesy.

  The man drank heavily for a while, apparently depressed; he stared at his feet, scuffing the sand. At length, he hailed the innkeeper and invited him to sit. ‘Anyone I ought to know about?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ said the innkeeper, studiously avoiding looking at the niche, ‘there was a trickster by last week.’ And then, becoming enthusiastic, he added, ‘He sent red flames shooting out of the wine bottles.’

  ‘Name?’ inquired the Yoalo, then waved off the question. ‘Never mind. Probably one of those vagabonds who was camped in the southern crevices. Must have stolen a scrap of power with which to impress the bumpkins.’

  The innkeeper looked hurt and bumpkinish. ‘I wish I could see Moselantja.’

  ‘Easy enough,’ said the Yoalo. ‘Volunteer.’ He laughed a sneering laugh, and began a boastful account of the wonders of Moselantja, of his various campaigns, of the speeds and distances attained by his ‘ourdha,’ a word Donnell translated as ‘windy soul.’

  All at once the door banged open, and a ragged old man, his clothes patched and holed, baskets of various sizes slung about his shoulder, came into the inn. ‘Snakes!’ he cried. ‘Plump full of poison!’ He plucked a large banded snake from one of the baskets and held it up for all to see. The village men gave forth with nods and murmurs of admiration, but claimed to be already well supplied with snakes. The old man put on a doleful face, wrinkling so deeply he had the look of a woodcarving. Then he spied the Yoalo and did a little caper toward him, flaunting the snake and whistling.

  Furious at this interruption, the Yoalo jumped up and seized the snake. Blood spurted out the sides of his fist, and the severed halves of the snake dropped to the sand, writhing. He aimed a backhand at the old man, who dived onto the floor, and weaved toward the door and into the street. With the exception of the snake-seller -he was bemoaning the loss of his prize catch - the village men remained calm, shrugging, joking about the incident. But upon seeing Donnell emerge from the niche, they knocked over their benches and scrambled to the opposite end of the room.

  ‘Lord!’ cried the snake-seller, crawling into Donnell’s path. ‘My eldest was a tenth-level recruit of your cadre. Hear me!’

  ‘Tenth-level,’ said Donnell. ‘Then he died upon the turret.’

  ‘But well, Lord. He gave no outcry.

  ‘I will listen.’ Donnell folded his arms, amused by his easy acceptance of rank, but quite prepared to exercise its duties.

  ‘This,’ said the old man, picking up the snake’s head, ‘this is nothing to the abuses we of Rumelya suffer. But to me this is much.’

  He began a lengthy tale of its capture, half a day spent among the rocks, tempting it with a gobbet of meat on a forked stick, breaking its teeth with a twist when it struck. He testified to its worth and listed the Yoalo’s other abuses. Rape, robbery, assault. His complaint was not the nature of the offences - they were his right - but that they were performed with such vicious erraticism they had the character of a madman’s excesses rather than the strictures of a conqueror. He begged for surcease.

  The old man’s eyes watered; his skin was moley; his forearms were pitted with scarred puckers, places where he had been bitten and had cut away the flesh to prevent the spread of the poison. These imperfections grated on Donnell, but he did not let them affect his judgement.

  ‘It will be considered,’ he said. ‘But consider this. I have witnessed great disrespect in Rumelya, and perhaps it is due. But had you honored the Aspect properly, he might well have served you better. Should another take his place, your laxity will be counted a factor in determining the measures of governance.’ As he left, he heard the village men haranguing the snake-seller for his lack of caution.

  The Yoalo’s trail - rayed depressions in the sand -turned left, left again, and Donnell saw the river at the end of the street. Above the treeline on the far bank, the sun’s corona raised purple auroras into the night sky, and the stars were so large and bright they appeared to be dancing about into new alignments. The street gave out onto a grassy bank where several long canoes were overturned, and sitting upon one of these was the shadowy figure of the Yoalo. In order to get close, Donnell shifted his visual field forward as he had done on his first visit to the village. This time he noticed a shimmering, inconstant feeling in all his flesh as the suit bore him to the rear of a shed some twenty feet along the bank from the Yoalo’s canoe. The man was rocking back and forth, chuckling, probably delighting in the incident of the snake. He touched his forehead, the mask wavered and disappeared. But before Donnell could see his face, the man flattened onto his stomach, leaned out above the river and splashed water over himself. Something ki-yied deep in the forest, a fierce and solitary cry that might have come from a metal throat. Sputtering, the Yoalo propped himself up on an elbow, staring off in Donnell’s direction.

  Except for the fact that his eyes were dark, betraying no hint of green, he was the spitting image of Jack Richmond. Skull-featured, thin to the point of emaciation.

  All the man’s behavior, his fits of violence and depression, his harassment of the serving girl, his obsession with speed, clicked into focus for Donnell. He was about to call to him when the man came up into a crouch, his right hand extended, alerted by something. With his left hand, he reached inside his suit and pulled forth a construction of - it seemed - wires and diamonds,
and flicked it open. Its unfolding was a slow organic process, a constant evolution into new alignments like the agitated stars overhead. Drunkenly, the Yoalo stared at it, swaying, then fell on his back; he rolled over and up, and iridescent beams of fire spat from his hand toward a dark object on the bank. It burst into flames, showing itself to be a stack of bales, one of several such stacks dotting the shore.

  The Yoalo shook his head at his own foolishness, chuckled, and folded the bright contraption; it shrank to a sparkle of sapphire light as he pocketed it, as if he had collapsed a small galaxy into a single sun. He touched his forehead, and the mask reappeared. Then he went staggering down the bank, his hand extended, firing at the stacked bales, setting every one of them ablaze. With each burst, he shouted, ‘Ogoun!’ and laughed. His laughter grew in volume, becoming ear-splitting, obviously amplified; it ricocheted off the waterfront buildings. The fires sent dervish shadows leaping up the street, casting gleams over the carved faces on the walls, and illuminated the ebony flow of the river and the thick vegetation of the far bank.

  Amid a welter of spear-shaped leaves, Donnell saw the movements of low-slung bodies. But, he thought, the truly dangerous animal wore a suit of negative black and roamed the streets of Rumelya without challenge. A vandal, a coarse outlaw. Yet though he despised the man’s abuse of privilege, he was captivated by the drama of the scene. This maniacal warrior with the face of a beast howling his laughter, taunting the lie-abed burghers and fishermen; the rush of dark water; the auroral veils billowing over the deep forest; the slinking animals. It was like a nerve of existence laid bare, a glistening circuit with the impact of a one line poem. He filed the scene away, thinking he might compose the poem during his next period of meditation. Half in salute, honoring the vitality of what he had witnessed, half a warning, he sent a burst of his own fire to scorch the earth at the Yoalo’s feet. And then he lifted his hands to engage the fields and returned to Maravillosa.

  The sky was graying, coming up dawn. One of the bushes near the veve was a blackened skeleton, wisps of smoke curling from the twig ends. He sat down cross-legged on, the ground. Within the fields, he thought, he was a far different person than the one who now doubted the validity of the experience. Not that he was capable of real doubt. The whole question was basically uninteresting.

  ‘Hey, monkey!’ The Baron waved from the hilltop.

  The wind must have been bad. An avenue had been gouged through the undergrowth, and he could see a portion of the house between the hills. Gables, the top of his bedroom window. Jocundra would be asleep, her long legs drawn up, her hand trailing across his pillow.

  ‘Man,’ said the Baron, coming toward him. ‘You got to control this shit!’ He gestured at the battered foliage.

  Donnell shrugged. ‘What can I do?’

  The Baron sat down on the veve. ‘I don’t know, man,’ he said, sounding discouraged. ‘Maybe the best thing can happen is for it to all blow away.’ He spat. ‘You got another nosebleed, man.’

  Donnell wiped his upper lip. Blood smeared and settled into the lines of his palm, seeming to form a character, one which had much in common with a tangle of epiphytic stalks and blooms blown beside the veve: fleshy leaves, violet florets. More circuitry ripped up from beneath the skin of the world. Every object, the old man had said, is but an interpretation of every other object. There is no sure knowledge, only endless process.

  ‘When you first come here, man,’ said the Baron, ‘I thought you was sleaze like Papa and them other uglies. But I got to admit you unusual.’ He coughed and spat again. ‘Things is gettin’ pretty loose up in the attic. You and me should have a talk sometime ‘bout what’s happenin’ ‘round here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Donnell, suddenly alert to his weariness, to the fact that he was back in the world. ‘Not now, though. I need some sleep.’

  But a few days later Otille sent the Baron away on business, and by the time he returned things had gone beyond the talking stage.

  Chapter 18

  September 15 - September 19, 1987

  Ordinarily they would have been asleep at three o’clock in the morning, but for some reason Jocundra’s adrenaline was flowing and she just tossed and turned.

  ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ she suggested, and since Donnell had also been having trouble sleeping, he was agreeable.

  It was creepy poking around the house at night, though not seriously so: like sneaking into a funhouse after hours, when all the monsters have been tucked into their niches. These days it was rare to see anyone walking the corridors of Maravillosa. Clea and Downey had moved in together and were busy - said the Baron with a wink -‘lickin’ each other’s wounds, you unnerstan’?’ Simpkins, as always, kept aloof. Only two of the ‘friends’ remained, a chubby man and, of course, Captain Tomorrow, whom Jocundra had come to think of as a ragged blackbird perched on a volume of Poe stories, pronouncing contemporary ‘Nevermores.’ And Otille never ventured downstairs. Jocundra imagined her wandering through her ebony shrubs, quoting Ophelia’s speeches; and that set her to remembering how, during the early days of the project, Laura Petit had labeled certain of the patients ‘Opheliacs’ because of their tendency to babble and cry. Jocundra had had one such patient, a thirtyish man with fine, pale red hair, fleshy, an academic suicide. He had licked the maroon stripe of the wallpaper, and at the end, unable to speak coherently, he had tried to proposition her by making woeful faces and exaggerated gestures, reminding her of Quasimodo entreating Esmerelda. She had nearly quit the project after his death.

  Moonlight laid jagged patterns of light and shadow over the downstairs corridors, casting images of windows and blinds splintered by the wind. They had considered walking outside, but it started to drizzle and so they stood on the porch instead. The rain had a clean, fragrant smell, and its gentleness, the steady drip from eaves, gave Jocundra the feeling of being a survivor, of emerging from a battered house to inspect the aftermath of a storm. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw something gleaming out along the drive. A car. Long; some pale colour; maybe gray.

  ‘Company,’ she said, pointing it out to Donnell.

  ‘No doubt Otille has found solace in a lover’s arms,’ he said. ‘Or else they’re delivering a fresh supply of bats to the attic.’

  ‘I wonder who it is, though.’

  ‘Let’s go to the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I’m hungry.’

  But on the way to the kitchen, they heard voices from Otille’s office.

  ‘I don’t want to get involved with her tonight,’ said Donnell, trying to steer her away.

  ‘I want to see who it is,’ she whispered. ‘Come on.’

  They eased along the wall toward the office, avoiding the shards of window glass.

  ‘… does seem that the hybrid ameliorates the tendency to violence,’ said a man’s voice. ‘But after seeing him…’

  ‘It’s not his fault he’s the way he is,’ said Otille. ‘It’s probably mine.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ said the man patiently. ‘We’re not ready for live tests. Look. If your family’s problems do result from a congenital factor in the DNA, and I’m not convinced they do…’

  Jocundra recognized the voice, though she found it hard to believe that he would be here.

  ‘I’m so sick of being like this,’ said Otille.

  Jocundra pushed Donnell away, shaping the man’s name with her lips, but he resisted.

  ‘Have you been taking your medication?’ asked the man.

  ‘It makes me queasy.’

  ‘Evenin’, folks,’ said Simpkins. He was standing behind Donnell, an apple in one hand, a kitchen knife in the other; he gestured toward the office with the knife.

  Donnell hardly reacted to him. ‘Ezawa!’ he said, and brushed past Jocundra into the office. Simpkins urged her to follow.

  Otille was standing against the wall, distraught, her hair in tangles, a black silk robe half open to her waist. Jocundra had not seen her since the night Donnell first used the veve, an
d she was startled by the changes in her. All the hollows of her face had deepened, and her eyes seemed larger, darker, gone black like old collapsed lights. Ezawa was behind the desk, his legs crossed, the image of control. He ran a hand through his shock of white hair and said to Otille, ‘This is unfortunate.’

  ‘It was inevitable,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, Yoshi. I’ll take care of it.’ She leaned over the desk and pushed a button on the intercom. A man’s cultivated voice answered, and Otille said, ‘Can you come meet my other guests?’

  ‘Oh?’ A rustling noise. ‘Certainly. I’ll just be a few minutes.’

  ‘Do you need any help?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll be fine. I’ve been looking forward to this.’

  ‘The Rigaud Foundation,’ said Donnell suddenly; he had been staring at Ezawa. ‘They’re funding the project.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ezawa.

  ‘And I’ve got the family disease. Christ!’ He turned to Jocundra. ‘The new strain. They dug it out of her damn graveyard. Right?’ he asked of Ezawa.

  ‘Half right.’ Ezawa peered at Donnell, then settled back, building a church and steeple with his knitted fingers, tapping his thumbs together. The harsh lamplight paled his yellow complexion, making his moles seem as oddly shaped and black as flies, and despite his meticulous appearance, he looked soft, inflated with bad fluids.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the entire project is a creation of the Foundation, of Valcours Rigaud specifically. He spent most of his later life trying to create zombies, and amazingly enough achieved a few short-lived reanimations. His method was clumsy, but there was a constant in his formulae - a spoonful of graveyard dirt placed in the corpse’s mouth - and so I was led to my own researches.’ He sighed. ‘You, Mr Harrison, were injected with bacteria bred in Valcours’ grave, as were Magnusson and Richmond. But…’