by Brian Hodge
And by last orders, word had it that, peculiarly enough, the authorities still hadn’t recovered Alain’s head.
*
Late in the night, unable to sleep, Kate left the bed-and-breakfast before its walls grew more claustrophobic. Earth and sky and stone seemed the only things lasting enough tonight, so she walked in their company. Around her the town lay in stillness so deep it felt as though her heartbeat might wake it.
She was more than a mile along to the church before she even knew she was going there, and quickened her pace once she did. The town behind her, meadow and pasture rolling away to either side of the lane, she felt the deep age of the land as she rarely had during the day. Now and again, something would rustle, out of sight, on the other side of hedgerows and stone fences. Foxes, maybe. Once, a vigilant border collie.
Near the church she spotted a sheep, strayed from its fold, thick-shagged and four-horned, a breed she’d never seen back home. She knew in her heart that a sheep was all it was, but as it stood against the fence, munching vigorously on grass with the moonlight glinting off eyes like wet glass, it seemed less beast and more facade for an intelligence that lurked and watched, biding its time with inhuman patience.
The church’s bell tower and faces rose black against a few moonlit gray clouds as she ascended the hill. Below the eternally grinning visage of the Green Man, she used the key entrusted to her by Crenshaw. This was the first time she’d entered without a camera dangling from her neck.
Kate turned on only as much light as needed to prevent collision with anything; would’ve brought candles had she known the night would end here.
Step back, look up, and there he was, Pan in bestial glory.
“Go on. Move,” she commanded. As its maker’s descendant, who was more entitled to see this happen? “Move. Prove it. What are you waiting for?”
Nothing. Neither shift of cloven hoof, nor waggle of tongue.
Down the aisle, to the altar, to her knees. It seemed that at some point tonight she should offer a prayer for Alain, but no time or place had seemed right earlier. Now that they were she couldn’t think of what to say, or where to send it.
“Why are you crying?”
She thought she’d heard someone enter. Suspecting who it was before his voice confirmed it.
“Is that what I’m doing?”
Jack allowed her her space, coming no closer than the first congregational stall and sitting inside. “Saw you from the trees. Thought I’d pop in.”
“Don’t you ever sleep in a bed? Or anyplace with a roof?”
“Not if I can avoid it.”
“Well, you can’t for much longer. In another month you’ll freeze to death out there.”
“Won’t I just,” he said, with his broad merry grin — vagabond, madman, whatever he was. “But, death … its longevity? Exaggerated a bit, you ask me.”
“Not in my experience.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. What a sight she must’ve presented, no longer feeling capable of even seducing the village hobo.
“Why are you here, Kate?” he wondered. “Not tonight, I don’t mean tonight. Not even asking you, really. Just … Blackburn’s granddaughter: Why her, why here, why now?”
If there were reasons they were beyond her, beyond Jack too, but the faith he held in their being was touching. He left the oaken stall to wander, hands trailing over wood and stone, caressing each surface as though an immortal beloved.
“I’ve seen a lot of Britain,” he said. “Seen it thrive, seen it fall. Rise, fall again. One group taking it from another, ‘til they lose it themselves. What it is now? A ghost of someone’s old dead ideas of glory. But no matter who’s mucking about on top, it’s always been the land itself that holds the magic. Can’t kill a thing like that, now, can you? Drive it deeper underground, maybe, but never kill it.”
He’d done it so smoothly, she nearly missed the way Jack had begun talking as someone who’d witnessed more history than was one person’s due.
“Don’t know much of America. I know it’s there,” he said. “I’ve wondered if any of you ever look this way and realize it’s your own future, too. Are you that far along yet?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We just pretend we don’t notice.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He began moving closer. “Let me tell you a story. Used to be an island, there did. Full of forests so deep and thick, you could drop in something big as London is now, never find it again. Not everything that lived there stuck with either four legs or two. Good days, those. But nothing stays the same forever. People come in, they bring their own ideas along, chase out the old if they don’t murder it first.
“What you had here over six centuries ago were amongst the last people to remember the forests as they’d been. Put yourself in their place. Got no use for any pale dead god all the rest are only too eager to kill you for, if you don’t convert. Not when the forests gave you all the gods you’d ever need. Gods that were old before that pale dead one was even born. So what do you do?”
Was he insane? Or merely eccentric?
“Hide in plain sight?” she said.
“Now you’re thinking like a wily pagan. If the Church steals the faces of your gods and turns them to devils, who’s to say you can’t steal them back, and right under the Pope’s nose.
“But they didn’t stop there. When time came to build, they found themselves a likeminded man who knew stone so well it was said he could talk it into making room for a soul. So that’s where the old gods went.” He lifted his hands as if to seize the church and wrap it around him. “Geoffrey Blackburn sealed them in, on every side.”
It made a fine story. Now, if only it were true.
“Why bother with that?” she asked, because it was fun to play along, and meant she didn’t have to think of Alain. “Why couldn’t the gods take care of themselves?”
“Because their time was up. For a while, at least.” Jack’s furrowed brow creased deeply. Was it only poor lighting that he looked worse than he did before? “The other day, I told you of the Celts, their reverence for the severed head? One of the women from those final days, she could work a real magic with heads. They’d talk to her. Sing for her. See where she couldn’t — even into the future. They saw what was coming. Had two hundred years of bloody Crusades by then, and they’d already come home to the west. Wasn’t a time to be clinging to gods that would get you killed, and the gods of the woods loved their followers too much to let that keep happening to them. Rather sleep than see it happen. So sleep they did. Waiting for a better time to wake again.”
It was such an Arthurian notion, she thought, the once and future king become once and future gods. Again, if only it could be true.
Kate was about to excuse herself, time to go back to the B&B, when Jack straightened to his full bearish height and smiled down at her, such a peculiar smile, protective and courtly and wistful.
“I should be saying goodbye to you now, Kate Blackburn. I’m glad I have the chance. Didn’t expect I would. You don’t mind if I call you by that name instead?”
She told him of course not, asked where he was off to. Jack turned at the waist to gaze toward the narthex and doors.
“Autumn, nearly over. Winter, nearly here. Said it yourself already, Kate. Time for me to find someplace to freeze.”
She went to him, near tears again, gripping him by shoulders stout as oak boughs. For one night, for one lifetime, she’d seen enough of delusions and death. She hit him, cursed him, trying to beat sense into him, then he pulled her close to still her arms, like a child, and stroked her hair. She breathed in the scent of him, so rich and green and woody it had to come from someplace far deeper than the shabby fibers of his clothes.
“I watched you from those same trees, when you were a wee girl,” Jack whispered. “‘She’ll be back,’ I told myself. ‘She’ll be back one day.’”
Then his mouth was upon hers, with a kiss that tasted of time and seasons, loss and renewal, and if her intellect yet
resisted, her body knew, and her blood. These obeyed the cycles of the moon already, didn’t they? They knew that if she plunged into him, and he into her, there awaited for her wonders of which she could scarcely conceive. And conceive she would, if the time was right.
But not tonight. When he pulled his mouth away it broke her heart.
“No,” he said. “Not as I am now. Not half-dead.”
Half-dead? Even now he was more alive than most she knew. “Then when?”
“Come spring. When I live again.”
So easy for him to say. He would be the one for whom those months meant nothing. What a long, terrible, cold winter hers would be.
“I’ve one more thing needs doing,” he said. “You won’t like it. I’d rather you not watch.”
She wouldn’t be dissuaded. He could do no worse than she’d seen already.
Solemn, Jack left the church a moment. When he returned she understood his concern, and despite her resolve, she still had to avert her eyes. Mangled by glass and steel, yes, it was, but the head was recognizably Alain’s.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’d be a fool not to,” Jack said. “But he did lose it by accident, nothing more. I’ll not be a fool, then, and waste it.”
The head was bled clean by now, and he set it aside while grappling with the altar. He struggled, strained, and with a deep grinding of stone it shifted, tilting up and to the side. If doubts still lingered, this did them in. No one man could lift this hollowed limestone block.
Beneath the altar was concealed a round cavity, a shallow well. When he dropped the head inside, she winced at the rattling of its moist heft against dried old ivory domes and mandibles. Jack heaved the altar back, the shadow of its base sliding slowly across Alain’s upturned face like the fall of his final night.
Jack nodded out over the menagerie of spirits. “To give them dreams,” he said. “To strengthen them against the winter, ‘til I see them again.”
In the narthex, as the doors swung wide into the moonlit dark beyond, she wanted to cling to him, possess him, to know more and listen to everything he could tell her about … well, where she had come from wouldn’t be a bad start.
“Why you?” she asked instead. “Why did you get the job of staying up to watch so much of it die around you?”
While it seemed a hideously lonely vigil, if he regarded it that way, you’d never know it. Could he even feel such a thing as loneliness?
“Who better?” he said. “Who else tracks time the way it was meant to be measured?”
Just past the doors, he stared up at the pattern of leaf and hair and face carved above them centuries before, by bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh.
“Not a very good likeness, really. I’m much better looking.” He laughed with her, and in that moment she knew that, no, even a god was not beyond loneliness. Else why had he told her any of this, and who else could he have told?
“Called me Jack-o’-the-Green, too, they did. And I think, deep in his heart, Crenshaw knows exactly who I am … and that’s what scares him so.”
He drew his pitiful coat about him, looking to the sky, to the vast ocean of stars. Above them, Orion, the Hunter. It was his season. She could always find Orion.
“Best go, luv,” he said. “Not nearly as much forest as there was once. And I have to go deep, where I’ll not be disturbed.”
She imagined him in sacred hibernation, fetally curled or regally prone, beneath a blanket of brittle leaves, hair and beard dusted white with frost, snowflakes clinging to his eyelashes. Waiting for warmth.
He drew a huge breath, held it, let it out in a noisy gust and broad grin. “I’ve a splendid sense of smell, Kate. And I smell a great wildness coming. Maybe not next spring. Nor the spring past that. But it’s coming. The land always takes back its own.”
He left her soon after, a bulking shape made smaller, darker, with every stride toward the treeline. She lost sight of him even before he entered. Heard the crack and crunch of his passage, then even that was gone.
She returned inside the church, intending to lock up, and got as far as turning out the lights before she knew its floor was all the bed she would need tonight.
And swaddled by spirits, she did not sleep alone that night, dreaming of longer days and the fall of empires, while warmed by the breath of goats.
As Above, So Below
“If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid
my angels will take flight as well.”
— Ranier Maria Rilke
In the beginning was the word; in the end, not even that. But words are small things anyway, trivial and puny and weakened by limitations. They are, like flesh and bone, inadequate to hold the full measure of what they struggle to contain. Like blood and lymph, they run when the skins that confine them are pricked.
In a world where word could become flesh, this was not the flaw, Austin knew.
It was the folly.
*
Let me tell you about loss.
Let me tell you about lies.
Let me tell you about disappointment and heartache and betrayal, o my.
Better yet, just let me tell you about pigs and mud. Take a lot less time and it’s the same thing, isn’t it? The mud’s filthy, it’s unsanitary because it’s mixed with shit, gets all over everything, but the pigs wallow in it just the same. End result? Only the happiest swine you ever saw.
I used to have the wallowing part down, at least.
You’d think the rest of it would’ve been easy.
I. Terra Firma
At the most unexpected moments she would think she’d seen him. He came when he had no business at all in her head, Gabrielle on one side of her life and Austin so far on the other it was a wonder she could even remember what he looked like.
But this was something more insidious than fond recollection. These were not memories, spawned by similarities in the faces of strangers, over which she would write his own. His face could not have remained the same, not the way he was living. Where Austin had been headed, these last eleven years would’ve cut and carved and eroded him, remade his once-sublime form into a degenerate parody of itself. No, these were nothing at all like memories — Gabrielle was, however briefly, seeing him as he must look now.
To a point, there was a logical explanation: New York was a dynamic and sinister place; he would be at home here. Austin McCoy would seek its pulse and wade through its chaos. If she thought she’d glimpsed him on Fifth Avenue it was only because he would have business there. If she saw him standing on a platform during a trip out to Long Island it was because trains had always appealed to him. Likewise subways — so why shouldn’t she see him beneath the streets, when the flashing of lights far along those grimy tunnels could strobe his half-shadowed impression anywhere on the other side of the window.
But why now, after eleven years? Whatever the reason, time-delayed pangs played no part in it.
I don’t miss him, Gabrielle told herself. I don’t miss him and I quit worrying about him years ago.
And when he called, how could she ever have told herself that she wasn’t, deep within, expecting it?
The talk was small at first and Austin did most of it, asking how she’d been, telling her that her name looked good up front in the magazine’s masthead.
“What are the offices like, the staff?” he asked. Remarking on the loose layouts, the splashy graphics. “Doesn’t seem like it’d be a very stodgy place to spend the day. Like Apple versus IBM, and you’re all fruit-pickers, right?”
She told him it wasn’t button-down, if that’s what he was driving at, then she heard him laugh.
“Corporate but ashamed, gotcha,” he said.
Gabrielle clenched the phone and lowered her voice to an edgy whisper. “If you had to call, then why didn’t you call me there? Why at home? Why call at all, Austin? Do you want to cause me trouble?”
How nearby was Philippe, anyway? Twenty feet? Twenty-five? The stereo on but not loud. He’d’ve heard
the phone, but if she was lucky, nothing she was saying. She could lie afterward.
“You always did have a pretty pedestrian idea of trouble, didn’t you?”
“I’m hanging up now.” Empty threat. They both knew it.
After eleven years Austin’s voice was a dire peculiarity, something familiar made foreign by time. But she got past this quickly enough, that voice and its rasp remembering how to find its way inside her, slipping defenses and caressing memories she didn’t realize had been left so exposed. Austin had a magic and knew it, and eleven years doubled around on itself, the snake gulping down its tail. She had gone nowhere.
“I know you’ve been thinking about me lately,” he said. The rasp had roughened over the years. Like honeyed gravel now. “That’s my fault. It didn’t seem right to ring you up without getting you ready first. I hope I didn’t startle you.”
“You’ve got nothing to say that I want to hear.”
“I’m in Utah. Why not book a flight? Technically it’d be work-related, I really think you’re going to want to see this.”
“Oh god, Austin,” she whispered. “What have you done now? Or what do you think you’ve done?”
“Should I send you a picture? Maybe you should close your eyes for this one.”
“Don’t,” she told him. “Just don’t.”
“All right. But it’s not so much what I’ve done as what I’ve found. A hint — would you like that much?”
Two worlds: Philippe in the next room with his day planner for tomorrow and his watered-down excuse for jazz music; Austin in her hand, on the far side of then and now and always. She could hear laughter in the background and knew it had nothing to do with him. From her hesitant silence he divined the go-ahead.
“Think back to when we were kids,” he said. “It doesn’t have wings and it doesn’t have horns. Its voice isn’t anything special, either. But it’s got a sense of history like you can’t imagine.”
*
Let me tell you about hope, middle child in a family of bastard triplets, trapped between faith and charity.