IGMS Issue 44

by IGMS

  I took a step backward.

  "They will mostly find you," she repeated, and then she was gone.

  I wrote the names down on a piece of paper and put it on the refrigerator so I would not forget them, and then I promptly forgot them. This was difficult to do because I still had a bird that spoke, and he would perch on the top of the fridge and crane his neck to look down at the list.

  "Good list!" he said. "Good things!" His vocal range seemed to have decreased again now that he had explained what he needed to about Dresden and the museum.

  "Sure." I mixed equal parts orange juice and cranberry juice against a coming cold.

  "Find them!" He cocked his head so I knew it was a question, and I shrugged in response.

  "She told me they'd find me."

  I was taking Carla to a movie that evening. She was still engaged, and I still had not met her fiancé. The stories about him always seemed to change. Now it appeared he was working on an offshore drilling rig. I did not want to meet him when he came home, if he even existed.

  Nor did I want to see Mab again.

  I did not get either wish.

  "Thirteen Shades lives in the Blur," the god of the garage told me.

  "I don't care."

  "You should."

  The god of the garage -- I could not get him to explain if he was the god of all garages or simply the god of my own -- had pulled himself together from a gasoline can, some rags, an old sheet, and gardening tools that still had caked dirt from the summer before. When he spoke, some of the dirt fell from his lips. He smelled of gasoline and mowed grass.

  "Why should I care?"

  I had stepped into the garage to find something -- the air gauge for my bicycle tires, I think.

  The god ticked items off on a hand formed from a bent metal rake.

  "People -- and I use the term here loosely -- are using you. The Blur is beginning to leak. Thirteen Shades can help you find the rest of the lost items."

  I shook my head. "Mab said they would find me."

  The god sighed. He climbed up to an old metal shelf and sat on it like it was a throne. Perhaps it was. One of his eyes was a broken piece of an old bottle; the other was the metal lid of the gasoline can.

  "They'll find you if you're in the right place. Anything will, really."

  "Okay." I shrugged. "Okay. What is the Blur?"

  "It's a sort of place."

  "What kind of place?"

  "It was a big place once. Big and important. Now it's settled down beside this place, tucked into corners where things are lost."

  I waited, but it was clear that was the only explanation I would get. "Where is it?"

  He pointed in a direction I could not see.

  "But you can't get to it that way. You've got to slip through where it comes close." He paused, considering. "What's today's date?

  I told him.

  He muttered something, then nodded. "Good, good. There will be a gathering tonight in a garage two blocks over. You'll find it easily enough. Go late, when the dancing is nearly done and the alcohol consumed. There will be a girl there. The Blur is behind her eyes."

  I stared up at him. "That's it?"

  Oily rags shifted as he shrugged.

  "That's the closest it will be for a while, though your neighbor's dog goes there every night in its dreams. You can't get in that way though."

  I recognized some of the music coming from the garage two blocks away. It had been a party, spilling out into the alley and the houses beside. Kids my age and a bit younger were still coming and going, though mostly going by this time. I caught a few drunken stares, but no one said anything. Inside the garage (carpeted and with furniture) there was a couple on a couch making out disinterestedly. A few bodies were sleeping or passed out on other chairs. I found Carla in a corner, curled up by a turntable.

  "You didn't even ask me to come along," I muttered as I bent and lifted her. She was even lighter than she looked, as though she had wilted in sleep. Her breath was heavy with beer and something sharper.

  As we left the garage she mumbled a question.

  Back at my place I put her on the sofa. She began snoring before I even had a blanket over her. I stood there for a moment, looking closely at her eyelids. They were lovely but seemed to hide nothing out of the ordinary.

  That night I dreamed of stormy blue spaces, and Thirteen Shades rode up and down the plains on his demon horses. His lovers were the winds, and they whipped around him and screamed like harpies. I told him it was time to come home and he stopped and turned all his faces towards me.

  "The doors," they said. "The doors are not opened."

  I asked him what he meant.

  "There is no entry without the gate and no gate without the doors and we all went forth and we all were lost and the doors were closed."

  When I woke up, my head felt as though it was stuffed with sand. I lay in bed for several minutes wondering what I was hearing, what river was rushing behind my eyes and ears, before I realized the shower was running. Carla was singing, though I could make out no words. I moaned and buried my head in the pillow.

  When I finally rose, strangely unsteady and with a pounding behind both temples, she was in the kitchen, scrambling eggs in my skillet and wearing a pair of my pajama pants and sweatshirt.

  "I had the most amazing dreams last night," she said by way of greeting. I grunted and fell into one of the chairs.

  Nothing seemed right. She should be hung-over, not me. Yet whatever chemicals should have been clogging her head this morning had apparently been poured into my own. I could hardly move.

  "I was a cloud. Or a bird. Whatever it was, I could fly."

  "Could you make statues come to life?" I asked. The sand slid from my head to my mouth.

  She shook her head.

  "How was the party?"

  She paused in stirring the eggs, as though she had forgotten for a moment the events of the night before. Then she shrugged.

  "Fine, I guess. Some of Dan's friends were back in town and they wanted to get together."

  The supposed fiancé. I still had not met him and was becoming more and more doubtful of his existence. She had slept on my couch, after all, hadn't she? She was making breakfast in my damn pajamas, in my kitchen.

  He could not exist. Fate could not be so cruel.

  Carla opened the window, and Hamilton dropped onto the sill.

  "I'm supposed to be collecting pieces from a museum," I said, "but I think I have to unlock the doors before I can put the pieces together."

  Carla sat down opposite me and pushed across a plate of eggs. "Sounds fairly simple."

  "It's not. It doesn't make any sense."

  "To you," she corrected. "It doesn't make any sense to you."

  I looked at the eggs. Their mangled edges made me think about the weird blue and grey clouds that tore across the skies in my dream. Those clouds did not stop at the horizon; they marched down and beat against the ground like surf.

  "Apparently there were pieces of a museum here. Someone's museum." I had been about to say Mab's, but Hamilton shot me a warning look. "Someone had collected things or built things, and then they all scattered. I think this was before we were here. I think they left when we came."

  "The French Heritage museum just opened up in the Stone Barn downtown. I've been meaning to make it over there."

  "I think this was before the French."

  I trailed off, watching her eat. It was hypnotic. She took small, precise bites. There was something that sparked at the ends of the strands of dark hair that fell over her face as she ate, something that caught the light of the silver fork.

  "How is it that you brought those statues to life?"

  "Which ones?"

  "Which ones?" My eggs were untouched, but the pounding in my head was beginning to recede. I sipped the orange juice she had poured. "The lions in front of the library. That cow creamer I had. Those porcelain birds that had been my grandmother's."

  He
r eyes lowered for a moment. "I hoped you hadn't noticed those. I felt bad."

  I waited.

  "Does this have something to do with your museum?"

  "I don't know. Does it? A god in my garage told me where to find you last night." I was suddenly angry. "Nothing like this has happened to me before, and I'm fairly certain none of it is normal. But you seem normal enough. But then you do this thing where you bring statues to life."

  She shrugged. "I don't think I bring anything to life." Her plate was clean, and she took it to the sink and ran water. "They're already in there. The shapes hold them, like . . ." She paused and wiped her hands. "If you saw something frozen. If there had been a sudden chill, a sudden frost, and you went out and saw that there was a frog frozen under the surface but you knew it wasn't dead, you'd break the ice and free it, wouldn't you?"

  Hamilton was at my elbow and I dropped a few bits of egg onto the table for him.

  "But how do you do it?"

  She shrugged again. It was strange to see my sweatshirt draping those shoulders. I had wondered about those shoulders for a long time.

  "Have you always been able to?"

  She leaned over the table and touched my hand.

  "I don't really run with that crowd anymore," she said, and it took me a moment to realize she was changing the topic to the party last night. "I haven't done the sort of things I did last night for a long time. I'm glad it was you that found me. I knew the first time I saw you that I wouldn't regret --"

  But she obviously regretted saying too much. She wouldn't say anything else.

  I didn't say anything either. I finished eating.

  She did not have to work until that afternoon, so we walked downtown to the French Heritage Museum. I wasn't sure what to think, apart from the whole thing about bringing statues to life. She had spent the night at my place. She held my hand loosely as we walked. I would need some clarity here soon. For all I knew this was as Platonic for her as the forms she thought she pulled out of statues.

  The French Museum was indeed in the Old Stone Barn downtown. I wondered how the city had gotten built up around it. It was one of the oldest buildings in town and had been in turn a pub, meeting hall, church, restaurant, and pub again. The wooden floors and stone walls were scrubbed and as polished as the display cases, and they seemed to have shed the years.

  Carla wandered among them aimlessly, commenting on bits of the county's history. I had the vague idea that coming to a museum might give me some insight into whatever it was I was supposed to be doing for Mab, but nothing here seemed to have much relevance.

  I wandered over to a corner where wooden steps led up to a roped-off second floor and sat down. There was a mop and some rope barriers in the shadows below the stairwell. They shifted as I sat.

  "Dreaming about Thirteen Shades riding the Blur isn't the same as actually going to the Blur and bringing him out."

  The mop lifted itself into a sitting position and filled out the rest of its form with a cobweb and some old brochures.

  "This isn't a garage," I told him.

  "It's a barn," he agreed. "That's what they used to call garages, before they attached them to houses again."

  "So you can go back and forth between all of them?"

  He waved away the question with the wrist of a dead spider.

  "He said the door was locked. Thirteen Shades. He said he couldn't get out."

  "It's because her eyes were closed. You were supposed to wake her with a kiss. Her eyes would have opened, and you could have walked into them, into the Blur, and brought Shades out."

  "I didn't know."

  He made a sound of exasperation.

  "Why do you care? Are you part of this museum?"

  "We're all part of it. Some pieces are just more interesting than others. I have my marching orders, just like you."

  "You're daydreaming again." Carla was beside me, and the god of the garage was a pile of half-discarded work items beneath the stairs. "I wanted to show you something."

  There was a display on the Native Americans who had lived in the county when the first Frenchmen came, Potawatomie mainly. A photograph showed what was supposed to be their last major gathering before most of the tribe went west into Indian Territory. There was a young man in their midst with painted arms. Another picture showed him again, apparently the same age, standing before a weathered general store. Then there was a third, a schoolmaster at a desk in a suit, but still with hands obviously painted. Placards identified them as Red Hand, Son of Red Hand, and Son of Son of Red Hand.

  She pointed to the first picture. "Do you recognize where this was taken? That stone is still there, but now it has plaque on it. It's in White Town, a block from my house."

  They didn't call it White Town as a racist thing. It was because back in the thirties and forties someone had relocated a bunch of houses from a dying coal town in the western part of the county to a neighborhood next to the river here, and they were all painted white. I knew the stone Carla was talking about. You could see it from the road beside the river.

  "I didn't know you lived in White Town."

  "Where did you think I lived?"

  I was genuinely confused. "But I've walked you home. To a house a block behind the filling station."

  "That's Dan's. I stay there when he's out of state."

  We left the museum and walked toward the college. There was some research I should be doing, and she was heading to work.

  Hamilton kept pace with us, following in lazy circles above. I wondered if people thought he was a carrion crow, marking me as he would a sick animal. I felt fine though. I felt great. Carla was beside me, though her hand had slipped from my own.

  There was a man getting out of a truck outside the filling station. His face broke into a grin when he saw us approaching.

  "It's Dan," she said. She laughed and waved.

  Then she was gone.

  I lay on the floor of the lab. Hamilton looked down on me from the half-opened window with all the benevolence of Poe's raven.

  There were solutions mixed, but they were not going to get tested today. It was late in the evening, and no one else would be in.

  "He was real, Hamilton. Dan exists."

  The bird croaked.

  "You saw the way she looked at him, right?"

  The long rows of plastic cuvettes watched me mutely. The solutions inside winked beneath the lab's fluorescent bulbs. I could not remember the various concentrations I had mixed the day before.

  "You found Red Hand," Hamilton finally said, as softly as the crow could manage.

  I sighed. "Yeah, it was him. Clearly the same guy in every picture. An old Indian who doesn't age and keeps posing as his own son. The stuff of local legend, alright." I pulled myself into a sitting position. My stomach felt like lead. "Perfect for Mab's museum."

  "Lives in the state park."

  I looked up at him.

  "If you knew that, why didn't you say something when Mab mentioned him the first time?"

  He fluttered down to the table beside the solutions. "Didn't know it was him. But know what he looks like now, knew where I had seen him before."

  "How did you know what he looked like?" Every time I moved or tried to speak, it was around a shard of ice in my chest. She had sort of melted into him, there in the parking lot beside his truck. I guess he came back early to surprise her. When she introduced us and he shook my hand, I was surprised it had not come off in his own, the way a snake's discarded skin falls to powder when you touch it. "You weren't in the barn with us."

  "God of the garage told me."

  "You're all in cahoots." I lay down again and passed a hand over my eyes. "If you guys can figure this all out on your own, why do you need me?"

  He said nothing, and I lay like that for a long time, waiting for an answer. When I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

  There was a storm that night, and a gust of wind blew my window open, though it was not the kind of window that opened
like that. If the wind had been that strong it should have just shattered. But it didn't. It opened and Mab spilled in like a piece of the Blur's sky poured through an open mouth.

  "There was a man who was made of crows," she said, crouched for a moment at the foot of my bed. "Every morning when he woke up he was a man again, but in the evenings he dissolved into a murder that flew off in a hundred directions and winged over the town until dawn."

  The thunder was coming, but I could hear her voice clearly. She stood and ran her hands curiously over the things beside my bed -- watch, wallet, cell phone, spare change -- turning them this way and that and leaving a thin sheen of rain over everything.

  "Each morning they folded their wings against the coming of the sun into the contour of a man who thought he had a name and a collection of memories. But each day it grew harder to hold them together, until he found even by daylight tiny beaks and eyes and wings opening and shutting along the backs of his legs and his hands."

  I realized suddenly that the stories were her greetings. Where you or I would simply say hello to start a conversation, in order to acknowledge and begin a social exchange, Mab had to offer a story.

  She was a thing of stories. They were all she had to give.

  "Until one day he met a woman with bone-white skin who each night became a swamp oak that stood in the fields beyond the town. 'Find me,' she told the man made of crows, 'and you can rest on my bone-white branches.' 'How will I know where you are?' the man asked. For a moment his cheekbone wavered as a wing lifted. The woman smiled. 'I will tangle the moon in my branches,' she said."

  The thing was, she never finished the stories.

  I had not moved as she spoke. It was hard to move in Mab's presence. It must be a bit like what a wounded bird feels at the approach of a serpent, or someone staring out the window at an approaching funnel cloud. It was hard to breath, though when I did draw breath I smelled the strong, clean, somehow steely smell of rain. Mab was leaning over me, and the rain was still coming down off her hair in waves, spotting my chest and sheets.

  "You have found Thirteen Shades and all of the gripe water and the Red Hand." She smiled, and it was a jagged line of lightning beyond the window over the trees. "I do not chose among you often, but when I do I always choose well." She was leaning closer, and in her eyes I saw no blurring at all. I saw the trees bowing in the wind and the stars through cracks in racing clouds. Her fingers were on my chest, spreading like the roots of a hungry tree. "Kiss me."