Among You Secret Children

by Jeff Kamen

  The old man placed his hands on his belly. As if unsure where else to put them. ‘Wings,’ he said. ‘Well, now. Heh. What kind of wings?’

  ‘They’re broken.’

  ‘Broke?’

  ‘Yes, I … I crashed in that storm.’

  ‘Flew in that storm, mister? Heh. I’d say you must’ve wanted to crash.’

  Moth said nothing, continued eating.

  The man pointed to his own forehead. ‘Looks bad,’ he said. ‘Need to get that cleaned up.’

  He wondered what the man meant at first, then on touching his brow he felt the knotted lump. The pain seemed in a dull way to flare at its acknowledgment, thudding through his skull. ‘I’ll do that.’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

  The man returned to his food. Eventually he tossed a ragged husk into the coals, and as it lay there hissing, he took up his stick and raked the embers until the husk was furred in ash. ‘Happened once before as I remember. Years back. Strange, don’t you think, mister? You never hear of anyone flying, then you hear of two of them. Two. Heh. That’s life for you.’

  Moth stopped eating.

  Stopped dead.

  ‘What … what did you say?’

  ‘Said it happened once before. Just here.’ The old man motioned seawards. ‘A fella. Just like you. Took a bad turn in the winds, they reckon. Crashed. Heh. Ended up right in the water.’

  Moth swallowed icily, taking in the words. From the cliffs he heard the gulls again, their desolate cries. Lines of heat were shimmering over the treetops, over the dusty chalk trail leading to the road. Heat shimmering between all visible terrain and the incandescent sky.

  He saw his father falling, saw him spiralling from a great and boundless height into the water. Felt white flashes go off inside him. A plummeting dark figure. No. Someone else, not him, it couldn’t be him.

  He felt like a plug had been torn from his innards, a plug he couldn’t put back again. He couldn’t get it to fit, couldn’t do it, felt himself draining away. When he looked at the old man again, he was gazing at the wrapped glider with an air of hazy recognition.

  He watched him as though from a growing distance, watched him speak:

  missed the rocks by a whisker they told me.

  poor devil.

  straight in the sea.

  heh. drowned.

  clear day as well.

  always a high wind along here.

  must have been the problem.

  dangerous as hell around here.

  came up in the tide. heh.

  didn’t see it myself.

  where was I.

  must have been out somewhere.

  anyway.

  the old boy brought him up here to bury him.

  heh. old Vlad, bless his soul.

  just there over by the cliffs.

  heh.

  strange don’t you think.

  men flying.

  mister.

  mister.

  what’s wrong?

  Moth was struggling to stand upright, struggling to breathe. ‘Where is he?’ he panted. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Mister? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Wh-where did they put him? What did the ... hold on, I’m not … ah, hold on a minute. What did he look like?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The man. I SAID THE MAN! How do you … what if he … I mean don’t you know ...’

  ‘I don’t understand. Who are you talkin —’

  ‘Who saw him? Just tell me that.’

  ‘Old Vlad’s in the ground, mister. He’s gone.’

  ‘I’m talking about the man. The man who fell. Who saw him?’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t see him. They buried him over there. Go through the trees and you’ll come out at the track. Keep on and you’ll see it. A heap of stones. Can’t miss it, it’s the only one. Mister?’

  But Moth was already lurching away, his face contorting. He could hear the man calling but the voice was faint in the dust, becoming fainter still as he entered the wiry marine pines. He went stumbling between them and before long he was at the track, a scuffed and chalky trail he followed with strange clicks and buzzings playing in his head like a broken machine. The spears of a great fount of weeds stood before him, and as he rounded them, he saw the stones the old man had spoken of.

  He slowed, limping. Going towards them with a crazed expression. They formed a long low mound, just a short distance from the cliff edge. He could hear the heavy rollers booming off the rocks below. He limped nearer, moving like someone approaching an object not to be trusted, that was in some way harmful, abhorrent to life. There was no plaque, no inscription, yet he knew it to be a grave — there was no other reason why a mound of stones should be laid out in the form of a resting body, head to the east and feet to the west, where the bloodred sun would sink at the end of every day. No other reason at all.

  Little hooklets clicked and nicked. Unpicked. Unpicked.

  His father approaching the lens. Eyelids heavy with grief.

  For M. I hope you understand ...

  He fell upon the stones with his hands spread like claws. Panting, clutching insensibly, looking over the mound in dry harsh terror, the look in his eyes both glassy and in some way enraged. He removed a stone. Then another. The next few handfuls of stones he tossed away, leaving them to roll along the trail and stop before the weeds. Others he scattered aside, raking them clear, searching for the proof of a lie, proof that it hadn’t happened.

  He worked faster, worked frantically, breaking through the layers with unthinking energy and purpose, the stones gathering in a pile behind him. Before long the chalky dust was coating his face, his dark locks streaked with sediment.

  Moth he scare, so scare. His clap-claps working without him.

  The stones were cool at the bottom, and as he cleared them away, he came to the lid of a long wooden casket. He swept off the dirt and stood a moment, contemplating his next move. Gathering the will.

  Insects were scurrying from the sunlight, burrowing mindlessly through the rubble.

  Then he felt along the lid’s edge, and with a hoarse grunt he pulled. The wood squeaked, splintering around the rusted nails. He pulled again, and when he’d got his fingers well underneath, he yanked savagely. As the lid came up, he flung it back on its hinges so that it clattered against the stones.

  To find himself looking down at the dry and faceless body of a corpse. The air that arose was cool and dank, sour-smelling.

  Mummy daddy mummy daddy no no no …

  The corpse was gnarled and brown and shrivelled, nested within a faded uniform. Withered and bony hands clutched at its faded cerements, the fabric soiled like a butcher’s smock. He could not breathe.

  Seeing his father lifting him as a child, walking him to junior classes at the Academy; welcoming him home.

  His father sad, crying with frustration. Talking at the table, discussing something with his mother, passing a plate.

  A figure deep in thought and alone at a half-lit desk in his laboratory as he burst in and surprised him.

  His father greeting him with a smile at a forgotten doorway. Ripples of his quiet laughter.

  He held his head, crushing his eyes closed, clawing at his skull. Waiting. Holding on tight.

  The sun was pounding at the sky and on his head. Pounding on the waves, the terrible choppy waves. Screaming at him the image of dry figure lying trapped for all eternity. Head swinging in despair; a baying mouth of dust.

  He held on as tight as he could, but his hold was slipping, and when he raised up again he resembled a powdered wolf, eyes glittering with madness. He lifted his face to the light, saying, ‘Please no ... please no, not this, not this ...’ then forced himself to study the skeletal form again. There was a withered bag tucked in next to it, a dry gourd he pulled out and looked at and dropped aside. Then he turned to the thin rags of leather stuck to the wrists and ankles. He studied them, studied the fixed empty grimace of the claylike yellow skull. He noticed the skin
still stretched in small untidy patches as if the heat or the salt air had preserved it, kept it whole.

  He told himself it was a stranger, that the man lying in front of him was someone he didn’t know. He stared blankly, drooling, sniffing. Flies were gathering in the stale air, crawling on the wood. His eyes swung back to the skull and he saw tatters of blondish hair that was not his father’s hair. Then he noticed the absence of a beard on the caved leather cheeks — hair that would have long remained. Hope grew inside him like a pale and monstrous child. Gaped inside him, growing talons, muscle. Even though he knew how easy it was to change hair colour if someone wanted to go unrecognised; even though he knew how sensible it was to shave in such dreadful relentless heat.

  ‘Please no,’ he whispered, rocking, ‘please no please no …’

  The hooklets had all unpicked. Began to rip.

  Even though he knew these things, knew it all, he reached with shaking hands to touch the stained grey tissue of the overalls. Sobbing, he averted his eyes from the ghastly holes and tears in the fabric that led down to airy shadow. That led to darkness and cold. There was only one way to finally know. He had to. Had to.

  Shuddering, he opened the frayed lapels, exposing the vertebrae. Then he peered around the bones in search of the nametag. He gave the material a tug and then he stopped, hearing a clicking sound. Just then, the skull turned aside and broke from the spine. It rolled backwards until the jaw struck the wood, making a hollow crack that tore his heart away.

  ‘No,’ he begged, recoiling, for he was looking straight down. And under his terrible and distorting gaze he could see the letters of a name. One that knifed at him from the threshold of eternity:

  MATTHËUS. K.

  He threw himself backwards, covering his eyes, bawling, howling, but the image would not go. From his throat there came a noise like a soul being cast into a fuming red ocean ...

  And then the fuming red ocean turned to fire.

  Chapter 71 — A Secret Told

  As the night gets underway, a great unruly pageant of figures clad in cloaks and claws and antlers present themselves before the seated judges. Gifts are handed to the winners, and as the dancing begins, a long round of drinks is served in their honour.

  The lead fiddler comes forward from the troupe, his chin clamped down on his instrument and his eyes closed, and the dancesteps quicken and the river of beer flows and flows and everyone is on their feet, and before long there is no space remaining in the square. Tables are pushed away or stacked together as the shadows arch and turn. She dances with Anya, with Staš. Dances with her pupils and their parents and some of the hunter clan and people she scarcely knows at all. She finds Sandor drinking at a table and sits with him while old Martha is helped up onto a bench with her huge bust heaving, ready to take requests for bawdy wedding songs. Martha then wheezing and cackling through the verses until people start throwing streamers at her, shouting with laughter. More drinks appear and she is dancing again and the pipes squeal and blare and it’s as if she is part of the music, twirling recklessly and pacing back and forth with her face painted and her stitched wings fluttering high upon her back, crossing the flamelight with any that offer their hands, letting bygones be bygones, laughing and embracing people.

  She catches him watching her from the shadows between the huts. His teeth glint and he has to be smiling, and she blows tender kisses his way and spins off again and people are throwing leaves at the newlyweds. Looming towards her in masks of bark and reeds are the dragon men, the leering bushy-haired bear faces and the strange loping minstrels, and she is twirling with the music and around her are cups of fermented drink and the huge shaggy heads of long-extinct animals and birds. The glow of the flames adding a strange depth to their features, like pumpkins filled with merrily glittering eyes.

  We come from the sky. From the fire of the sun and the water of the rain. And we are earth, and are the mud we live upon, and are quick to return to it. All things that rise must also fall, and once again must grow. All things. The corn from the dust, and our descendants through our veins ...

  The merrily glinting eyes and the faces of violet and orange and the deer slit along the belly stuffed with sauces and grains and the smoke rolling off the logs, sawing upwards, and the laughter the laughter and the young couple at the centre of it all and they are dancing beside and around her, and she asks how it feels to be married, and the young bride giggling helplessly says, I’ll tell you in the morning, and the couple sweep by and she thinks to herself, no regrets, you can’t let it hurt you, and the night warping like the toffee panes of lantern glass, reflecting deep and hollow…

  Time in a blur, finding herself back again, Martha unsteady on the tabletop, wheezing and cackling and calling for a jig, a jig jig jig, and the huge gnarled logs whooshing into the fire and the sparks scurrying up the cliffs and the attendant horns and antlers trembling in sight of it all.

  With our blessing, this is your moment of joining the succession. Do it willingly we say, for the laws that we are most subject to are not our laws, but that of a stranger justice ...

  Staš with his eye on her across the square and the mumbled words as they dance together, one of them saying something about the changes, wanting change, yes I’d like that, and what you said earlier, in the service, it was beautiful; wanting it so much for herself. Beer after foaming beer, too much to drink, everything swarming in her mind, everything unstoppable, and she is running fast downhill and Sandor is coming up behind her, a dark shape barefoot and horned and with a tail like old Leschi’s, leaping, pouncing, and she crashing under his weight, rolling and squealing beneath him, then panting and rising again. Dragging him into the darkness, falling into the warmth, laughing and scrambling, the two of them making breathless fumbling love on the hard rasp of her floor ...

  She sat up sharply, taking deep breaths, adjusting to the dark, to the quiet sound of Radjík sleeping. Once certain she knew where she was, she crawled to the sleeves and opened them. Then she climbed out in the lightweight shift she was wearing and walked away.

  A warm wind was blowing. She stood hugging herself, listening to the waves breaking somewhere below the cliffs. It was the third or fourth time in a week she’d had the dream and it was making her fear for what was happening. Making her feel like she’d gone back several steps and had never known the benefit of her treatment under Nina. Why Sandor? Why now? Hadn’t her time away helped at all? Hadn’t Pétar helped to create some distance?

  Then she thought again. Recently, she and Radjík had started to talk more openly about the night he’d died. It had been hard at first, for both of them, neither wanting to return to the agony of that time; yet through talking, sometimes in tears, they’d made progress in understanding his frame of mind, and in trying to make sense of his actions, they’d taken comfort in agreeing that nothing about it had been deliberate on his part; that it had simply been a dreadful accident.

  But it hadn’t all brought comfort. In bringing up this subject, they’d started to talk about other matters bound up in the dark past that Radjík’s mother had inhabited, as well as the childhood that Radjík had shared with Lajos. They’d discussed this at length, she reminded uncomfortably of Anya’s warnings throughout; and as Radjík had talked through her memories, she’d felt an unpleasant picture complete itself: one of young lives showered upon by Sandor’s raw and savage light; the light he’d cast upon all those he knew and came in contact with.

  ‘He weren’t always bad, though,’ Radjík had said on reflection, and had gone on to recount a tale he’d told her as a child: ‘About the ice girl. Know it?’

  ‘Don’t think I do.’

  ‘Yeah, she lives in this big waterfall. She comes alive in the winter, same every year. You know, when it’s frozen. She just sort of hangs there, in the ice, lookin round. Then she jumps off. She goes across the land, walkin, meetin people, things like that. Then when you think she’s met the one she loves, she dies. Because it’s the spring, see, a
nd she’s melted. Anyway, you’d have to hear him say it. He was always tellin em when we were kids.’

  ‘I like that one.’

  ‘Yeah, you should write it down. Tell it to the kids back home.’

  ‘I will. I’ll do it tonight if I remember.’

  ‘Think you’ll ever have kids? I aint sure sometimes.’

  ‘Kids? That’s a tough one.’

  ‘Why? You’d be good at it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Why d’you say that? You’d be a great mum.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Course you would.’

  ‘Come on, change the subject.’

  ‘No. You’d be really good. I can just imagine it.’

  She turned her face to the night breeze. In calming herself, she tried to think what Nina had said to do if things got difficult; yet even as she went through a list of phrases and processes, a part of her was already thinking of the tin.

  Before long it was all she could think about, and surrendering, she returned to the cart, going carefully in her bare feet, and she was back inside, rummaging through her pockets, when she heard Radjík stir, asking if all was well.

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said, then as she reached the tin, she paused, tired of her thoughts, and tired all the more of covering them up. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m not okay. I’m ... I’ve been having some strange thoughts recently. Something’s getting to me.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She sighed. She thought she might be able to take a pill without Radjík seeing, then realised there would still be the noise to account for — when the questions would start for sure. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have this dream. Your father’s in it.’

  She heard Radjík sit up. ‘Go on, then. Tell me it.’

  She slid the tin back inside the pocket. ‘It’s just about the past. You know how dreams are, it’s not always clear.’

  ‘Well, is it good or bad?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not bad as such ... it’s just that it keeps coming back, and I’m not sure what it ...’ She hesitated, seeing in her mind the pair of them howling, screaming in the old woman’s cave. ‘What it is,’ she finished, and somewhere in the presences a low collective groaning seemed to well up and wash away, plangent with pain and recognition. ‘Listen, have we got something to drink?’