She stood on the porch for a long moment trying to pinpoint exactly what it was she was feeling. Her senses seemed to have expanded, assuming far more intensity than normal, and it was getting hard to concentrate on any one thing.
Don’t go all stupid now, she told herself and walked over to the far end of the porch to rescue Alan from the attention of Denise Martin. Denise was a second-year drama student at Butler U., a beautiful, lanky eighteen-year-old with flowing blond hair that was tied back in a French braid tonight. Ever since she’d been introduced to Alan at a party last year, she’d had a mad crush on him, which wasn’t reciprocated.
“I like her well enough,” Alan had confided to Isabelle and Kathy one afternoon when they were having a picnic in Fitzhenry Park, “but I just can’t relate to her on a romantic level. She’s just so young. We don’t have anything in common.”
“A seven-year difference in age isn’t exactly a May-December kind of thing,” Kathy had told him.
“So you go out with her.”
“She’s not exactly my type,” Kathy had said, and they all laughed.
Denise drifted away when Isabelle showed up and put her arm in the crook of Alan’s. As they talked, Isabelle looked across the farmyard to where Kathy and Jack were standing. Kathy was leaning with her back against the clapboard of the farmhouse. Jack was in front of her, one stiff arm supporting his weight against the wall as he leaned in close to talk to her. Kathy looked more bored than uncomfortable, but Isabelle decided to go over to them anyway.
“I think Kathy needs rescuing now,” she said.
She gave Alan a quick peck on the cheek and crossed the farmyard. The walk seemed to take forever. Every single thing her attention happened to fall upon was intimately distracting. When she realized that she’d slowed down so much she was almost motionless, she gave her head a quick shake and purposefully closed the distance between herself and the place where Kathy and Jack were standing.
“Come here,” she told Kathy. “I’ve got somebody I want you to meet.”
Kathy gave Jack a regretful look and happily followed Isabelle back across the farmyard. They paused when they saw Jack head off toward the cove.
“Well, I thought you and Jack were getting quite close there for a while,” Isabelle teased.
“Oh please. Do you know why he and Sophie broke up?”
“Well, I suppose it’s because they don’t really have that much in common,” Isabelle tried.
“Think again. It’s because all he ever wants to do is tattoo you.”
Isabelle laughed. “So what was he going to do for you? A rose on your ankle?”
“Would you believe a dragon on my inner thigh?”
Isabelle laughed even harder. “Serves you right,” she finally said when she caught her breath. “The way you were going on about faeries and ghosts.”
“But there are mysterious presences on the island, ma belle Izzy.”
“Touché.”
“It’s not like I –”
“Oh, wait,” Isabelle broke in. “There’s that guy again.”
Before Kathy could say anything, Isabelle bolted after the figure she’d glimpsed walking off behind the barn. Kathy started to follow, then shook her head and went into the farmhouse to get a beer, instead.
“Hey, wait up!” Isabelle called as she rounded the corner of the barn, but when she made the turn, no one was there.
Isabelle leaned against the side of the barn, brought up short by a sudden spell of vertigo. She stood there for a long moment, eyes closed, but that only seemed to make things worse. Weird patterns of light played against the backs of her eyelids, making her dizzier than ever. She staggered away from the barn, stumbling through the wild rosebushes until she had to lie down in the grass.
She might have lain there among the shadows of the rosebushes for minutes, or it might have been hours – she had no idea which. Time had ceased to feel linear. She looked up through the crisscrossing branches, thick with buds, into the night sky. The stars tugged at her gaze, trying to pull her up among them, or she was pulling them down to her. She was on the verge of some great discovery, she realized, but she had no idea what it was, what it related to, whether it even had anything to do with her at all.
Was she a participant, or an observer? Did the world center around her, or could it carry on quite easily without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rosebushes.
“Hello, Isabelle,” Rushkin said.
Isabelle thought she should feel alarmed at his appearance, but she found it too hard to concentrate on being concerned. Rushkin shifted slightly on his heels and she saw that he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood another figure and for some reason, she could make him out perfectly clearly. It was the old-fashioned stranger she’d been chasing before whatever had happened to her. He stood there, long-limbed and handsome, with a half-smile on his lips, watching her.
“This is Benjamin,” Rushkin said. “He’s an old friend of mine. His origin dates back to before I lost the ability to bring his sort across.”
So he was a numena, Isabelle was able to think. Only not hers, and not one of Rushkin’s new protégé’s either.
“We’re having a wonderful time here,” Rushkin went on. “Truly we are. But it’s time for us to go now and we were wondering where you’d put the party favors.”
Isabelle looked blankly at him. She heard what he was saying, but when he’d shifted his position earlier, it had let the moonlight fall upon his features and she was utterly bewitched now with how the light played across the road map of his wrinkles. When Rushkin fell silent and the silence dragged out, she finally realized that he was waiting for her to speak. She cast her mind back through the bewildering snarl of her memories. It was impossible for her to track anything down in a linear sense, but through random access she eventually stumbled upon a fragment of what he’d been saying.
“Favors?” she asked.
It was interesting listening to the way her voice modulated, she thought. She’d never thought about it before, but there was a world of meaning tangled up in those two syllables.
“The paintings,” Rushkin said. “I’ve come for the paintings. There’s no need to get up and fetch them for me. Simply tell me where they are and Benjamin here will help me deal with them.”
While she couldn’t muster alarm for herself at Rushkin’s appearance here on the island, her numena were another matter entirely. At Rushkin’s mention of them, she caught hold of his sleeve and pulled herself up into a sitting position. She felt as though there were bits and pieces of her mind lying all over the lawn, and she made a huge effort to gather them together and focus on the moment at hand.
“You. Can’t. Have. Them,” she said, carefully articulating each word.
“Now, that’s plain ungratefulness,” Rushkin said. He looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you think, Benjamin?”
“I would never have thought it of her,” the numena agreed.
Benjamin has such a wonderful voice, Isabelle thought. So resonant. John had had a wonderful voice as well. Maybe it was something particular to numena.
Rushkin sighed, returning his attention to her. “And after all I’ve done for you, too.”
“What … what …” Isabelle began, but then she lost track of what she was trying to say. The word continued to echo inside her head long after she’d spoken.
“I certainly didn’t come empty-handed,” Rushkin told her.
“She probably doesn’t appreciate your gift,” Benjamin said.
Rushkin peered a little more closely into Isabelle’s face.
“Yet she certainly appears to have sampled it,” he sai
d. His breath was warm on Isabelle’s cheek and smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Potent, isn’t it, Isabelle?”
Isabelle. That was her name. She was Isabelle. Fine. But what did cinnamon and numena have to do with … with …
The thought was confusing enough to begin with and she simply couldn’t hold on to it any longer. She watched it flicker away, past Rushkin’s head, past where Benjamin stood, up and up, in among the stars, until it suddenly winked out like a snuffed candle, a faint glow remaining before it, too, faded and was gone. When she looked back at Rushkin’s face, his moonlit features strobed. From the farmyard came the sound of voices raised in alarm. She could hear what they were saying, but it took the longest time for anything to make sense to her.
“… so it must have been in the punch.”
“… oh, shit …”
“… had three glasses …”
“… thought I was having a flashback, I was getting so …”
“… spiked with …”
“… I know acid, man, and I’m telling you this is …”
“… feeling too weird …”
“… cut with some serious speed …”
“… this sucks …”
“… if I find the asshole who …”
“… I think he’s freaking out …”
“… oh, man, I am gone …”
“… somebody hold her …”
The strangeness inside Isabelle ebbed and flowed. From only being able to see Rushkin as a light show, she slipped into a long lucid moment where she clearly understood what was going on. But that was almost worse. Raw panic swept through her once she realized that it was Rushkin who had brought the jugs of punch spiked with LSD, which she, along with God knew how many others, were now tripping on.
“You can give the paintings to me,” Rushkin was saying, “or I can make you give them to me, Isabelle. The choice is yours.”
She looked at him in horror. “How could … how could you do this to us …?”
He shrugged. “It’s a party. I thought you’d appreciate a little excursion into an altered state of consciousness. Quick now,” he added. “I haven’t all night to waste on this.”
“Maybe we should take another look around,” Benjamin said.
Rushkin shook his head. “No. They’re here, they’re close. I can feel them. But she has them too well hidden.”
His face pressed up close to hers again. “Isn’t that so, Isabelle? You thought you could hide them away from me?”
“You … you … monster …”
Isabelle’s moment of lucidity was rapidly slipping away once more. Rushkin’s features began to distort, distending and receding at the same time. When he pushed a box of wooden matches into her hand, she tried not to take them, but found herself gripping them tightly all the same.
“They’re in one of these buildings,” Rushkin said. “I know that much.”
In the distortion that passed for his face, his eyes seemed to glow. Isabelle couldn’t take her gaze from them. She felt cut loose from her body, adrift except for the grip of his gaze on hers.
“Tell me which one,” Rushkin said, “and we will take what we need and go.”
It took all the effort Isabelle could muster to shake her head.
“If you don’t,” Rushkin warned her, “I will make you destroy them. Your hand will set the fire that will feed me.”
Isabelle dimly remembered something Kathy had told her once about a bad acid trip she’d taken.
“The only thing you can do,” she’d told Isabelle, “is let yourself go. Fighting it just builds up the pressure. If you let go, you just pass out and lose a few hours of your life. If you fight it, you could lose your mind.”
She glared at Rushkin. “I won’t,” she tried to say.
The words only came out as muffled sounds without meaning, but it didn’t matter. She stopped trying to control the drug, stopped fighting it. Instead she let herself fall into its embrace. She could still hear the wild uproar that rose from the general vicinity of the farmyard. She could still see Rushkin’s distorted features, pressing up against her own, his cinnamon breath clogging her nostrils. She still held the box of matches in her hand, squeezing it so tightly that the cardboard was caving in along the sides. And then it all went away. She was swallowed by an eddying vortex that took her past the amplification of all her senses to a place where there were no sights or smells or sounds. To a place where there was only silence. And darkness.
And then nothing.
XXVI
May Day, 1980
Isabelle awoke lying on her back in a grove of birch trees on the north part of the island. A wide open field edged the grove, spreading away from the trees until it went tumbling down into the lake in a series of ragged cliffs. From where she lay Isabelle could hear the sound of the lake as its waves lapped against the rocky shoreline. The sunlight burned her eyes and there was an incredibly foul taste in her mouth. She rolled over onto her stomach and felt it do a couple of slow, queasy turns before it settled down again. There was a distinctive odor in the air, but it took her a few moments to realize what it was: the charred smell of an old campfire.
Recognition of the smell ignited her memory process and it all came back to her, the whole awful train of events that had begun with her chasing Rushkin’s numena around the side of the building, to finding out that she’d inadvertently ingested God knew how much acid.
She sat up very slowly and looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were smudged with soot as though someone had taken a stick of charcoal and scribbled with it all over her body. She had no idea how it had gotten there. She could remember nothing from after she’d taken Kathy’s old advice and stopped fighting the drugs. When she let the acid take her away, her ensuing unconsciousness had swallowed all subsequent recollection.
Although not exactly, she realized as she thought a little harder. At some point she’d slipped from the oblivion of the drugs she’d ingested into a dreaming sleep. Her dreams had been horrible. The farmhouse had burned down, taking with it all her paintings. And then the numena had begun to die – frail burning bodies dropping in the farmyard, their ghastly remains lit by the roaring inferno that the farmhouse had become. She remembered taking them in her arms, trying to ease the pain of their dying, her cheeks streaked with tears, her heart breaking. She’d been unaware of the people around her, but then most of them had been stoned as well and paying little attention to either her or the dying numena, everyone so far gone that the farmhouse was long past saving before anyone could think to fight the fire …
A deep coldness entered Isabelle and everything went still inside her. She looked at her hands again.
If that had been a dream, then why were her hands and clothes all black?
Slowly she made her way from the birch grove and looked south. On the far side of the island she could see a thin tendril of smoke rising up above the canopy of the forest. The coldness penetrated her, settling deep in her chest so that she felt her heart and lungs were encrusted with frost. She floundered in the general direction of the farmhouse, not wanting to go, but unable to stop herself from moving toward it. When she reached the meadow where the Maypole stood, she took a moment to rest. The beribboned pole looked so forlorn. There was no breeze and its streamers hung limply along its length.
Maypole.
For May Day.
Mayday. SOS.
She remembered Rushkin and his numena finding her behind the barn. Remembered Rushkin demanding she give him her own numena paintings. Remembered him pressing the box of matches into her hand.
I will make you destroy them. Your hand will feed the fire that will feed me.
She shook her head. No. She couldn’t have done it. Even messed up on drugs, there was no way she could have done it.
She stumbled on, away from the Maypole, along the familiar forest path that wound through the trees and up to the hill where the farmhouse stood. Her progress was slow and halting, but eventually
she emerged from the cover of the trees. She stood there in that borderland between the wild wood and the cultivated gardens that surrounded the farmyard and stared bleakly at the ruins of her home. The fieldstone chimney of the farmhouse, its stones blackened with soot, was all that remained. Everything else had been reduced to charred timbers and ashes. The smell of smoke was cloyingly thick here.
Numbly, she looked around the farmyard, but there was no sign of the dead numena. There were only her friends, standing about looking as shaken as she herself felt. A red-haired figure detached herself from one group of muted onlookers and ran up to her.
“Oh, ma belle Izzy,” Kathy said, putting her arms around Isabelle’s shoulders. “I’m so sorry.”
“I … I didn’t do it,” Isabelle said.
“Do what?” Kathy asked.
Isabelle pointed a trembling hand toward the ruins of the farmhouse. “He tried to make me, but I swear I didn’t do it.”
“Who tried to make you?”
“Rushkin.”
“Did he spike the punch?” Kathy asked.
Isabelle nodded.
“I’ll kill that bastard,” Kathy said. “I swear I will.”
All Isabelle could do was stare at the smoldering ruins of her home. The farmhouse had always been there, so far as she was concerned. It had stood there before she was born and she’d always assumed it would still be there long after she herself was dead. It seemed inconceivable that it was gone. The farmhouse and her paintings.
“The … the numena paintings,” she said, gaze locked on the charred timbers that lay in front of her. Had that been one of the rafters? Had that been the carved wood of the mantelpiece? “Did anyone save the paintings?”
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