Errantry: Strange Stories (29 page)

You asked me, “Have you noticed how you can smell things here?” We sat on the cabin steps, sheltered beneath cat firs, and watched rain spatter the rocky beach below us. “Things you never notice back there, you can smell them here. I can, anyway. Like I can smell my brother when he’s way down the path. And Annie—I went down to her place yesterday and I knew she wasn’t there, because I couldn’t smell her.”

“Can you smell me?”

You stared out at the water graying beneath the storm. “No. You smell like me.”

“The light,” I said. “That’s what’s different for me. The light everywhere, it’s so bright but I can look right at it. I can stare at the sun. Have you noticed that?”

“No. I mean, a little, maybe. I guess it’s being on an island—the water everywhere, and the sky. It must all reflect off the rocks.”

“I guess.” I blinked and it hurt. Even with my glasses on, the dark lenses—my eyes ached. I turned and looked at you. “Hold still, there’s something caught . . .”

You grimaced as I touched your tooth. “A piece of fluff,” I said, and scraped it onto my finger. “There.”

I stared at the tiny matted wad on my fingertip. At first I thought it was feathers, or a frayed bit of cloth. But when I held it up to the light I saw it was a minute clump of hair, silky, silvery-white.

“That’s weird,” I said, and flicked it into the rain.

That evening before dinner I stood on the porch at the lodge and stared out to sea. The wind so strong I wondered about the windmill, that sound like an airplane preparing for takeoff, steady thump and drone. When the wind dies, the windmill stops turning. Power fluctuates, the lights flicker and fail then shine once more. A vast black wedge of cloud loomed above the reach and sent spurs of lightning across the water. Each bolt seared my eyes, my nails left little half-moons in my arms but I didn’t look away.

“You should be careful.” Annie came up beside me, wrapped in a brown sweatshirt with yellow stripes. She pulled the hood up, her hands invisible inside the sleeves. “It will hurt you.”

“Lightning? From way out there?” I laughed, but turned so she wouldn’t see my face. Your shirt. “I think I’m okay here.”

“Not lightning.” She crouched beside me. The hood spilled over her forehead so that it was difficult to discern her features, anything but her eyes. “Oh, poor thing—”

She reached for a citronella candle in a large, netted glass holder. A brown leaf the size of my hand protruded from the opening. Annie tilted the glass towards her, wincing, then stroked the edge of the leaf.

“Polyphemous,” she said.

It wasn’t a leaf, but the remains of a moth, forewing and hindwing, each longer than my finger. The color of browned butter, edged with pale-orange, with a small eyespot on the forewing and a larger eyespot on the hindwing. The spots were the same vivid sea-blue as your eyes but ringed with black, as though the eye had been kohled. Within a sheath of yellow wax I could glimpse its body, like a furred thumb, its long feathered antenna and the other wing, charred, ragged.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “That’s so sad.”

She lifted her finger, brown scales on the tip like soot. “The eyes, when it opens its wings suddenly they look like an owl’s eyes.”

She set down the candle and pressed her hands together, palm to palm, then spread them. “See? That’s how it scares off whatever tries to eat it.”

“What’re you looking at?”

You came up the steps, stopped beside Annie and glanced down at the candle.

“It’s a moth,” I said.

“A Polyphemous moth,” said Annie.

You stared at it then laughed. “What a way to go, huh?”

You lit another cigarette. I held out my hand and you gave me the lighter. I flicked it and stared at the flame, brought it so close to my face that I felt a hot pulse between my eyes, you and Annie blurred into lightning.

“Hey,” you said. “Watch it.”

“She keeps doing that,” said Annie.

“Listen to this.”

We were in your cabin. Another night, late. We’d left everyone else by the bonfire. A meteor shower was expected, someone said; maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. No one could remember when. You sat in front of the computer and stared at your files, lines and graphs, adjusted the volume then leaned back. “Listen.”

Crickets. Outside faint laughter and voices from the fire, wind, but no insects. The crickets were inside with us.

“You’re recording crickets?” I asked.

“No.” Your brow furrowed. “I don’t know what the fuck happened. These are the files—”

You tapped the monitor, columns of data with initials beneath them, words and numerals. “Those are my edits. But something got screwed up. I played them back this afternoon and this is all I get.”

A steady line moved across the screen as crickets sang. You stood abruptly. “Come on, let’s go look for Annie. I want to see if I can find her in the dark.”

We walked into the woods. Behind us the sound of crickets faded into your cabin. The dull orange glow from the bonfire disappeared behind the trees. It was cool, autumn weather not August. Wind brisk with salt and the scent of rugosa roses in bloom along the beach. Sky filled with stars, so many stars; a lake that holds a burning city.

Annie’s rock was on the far side of the island and faced the open sea, a narrow spur of granite like a pointing finger. A fissure split its center, water pooled there and the pinpoint reflection of stars. You took my hand so I wouldn’t fall. Twisted birches grew between the rocks, their leaves black with salt. Even in the dark I could see them.

But we couldn’t see Annie. You called her name, quietly at first, then louder. At our feet waves lapped at the rocks; behind us, in the ferns, crickets. I heard bats ricochet and whine above our heads. You kissed me and we fucked on the rocks, my hands and knees soaked and bloodied. Your nails broke my skin, everything hurt so much that lights flashed behind my eyelids. I blinked and the lights were still there, streaking down the sky, a soundless eruption of green and crimson.

The voices by the distant bonfire softened into insect song.

The wind died, the windmill, the sound of a falling plane silenced. You held me and we were completely still. Neither of us came. In the trees above us the muted flutter of wings and two round eyes, green not blue; a soft flurry as it lifted from the branch and something soft fell and caught between my teeth.

“That was an owl,” you whispered. “I think it was Annie.”

You laughed. As we walked back to the beach we heard a low wailing from the other side of the island, one voice then another, and a third. Coyotes. Everyone was gone. The bonfire had burned to embers. You gave me your lighter and I started the fire again, fed it birch bark and twigs and red oak logs until the flames rose. In the sky above the sea things fell and burned. I watched as you walked along the beach, the red tip of your cigarette as you danced and swayed and sang. In the darkness something swooped above your head.

You should be careful,
she whispered.

I held my hands in the flames until they glowed.

The Return of the Fire Witch

Insensibility, melancholia, hebetude; ordinary mental tumult and more elaborate physical vexations (boils, a variety of thrip that caused the skin of an unfaithful lover to erupt in a spectacular rash, the color of violet mallows)—Saloona Morn cultivated these in her parterre in the shadow of Cobalt Mountain. A lifetime of breathing the dusky, spore-rich air of her hillside had inoculated her against the most common human frailties and a thousand others. It was twelve years since she had felt the slightest stirring of ennui or regret, two decades since she had suffered from despondency or alarm. Timidity and childish insouciance she had never known. There were some, like her nearest neighbor, the fire witch Paytim Noringal, who claimed she had never been a child; but Paytim Noringal was wrong.

Likewise, Saloona had been inoculated against rashness, optimistic buoyancy, and those minor but troubling disinclinations that can mar one’s sleep—fear of traveling beyond alpen climes, the unease that accompanied the hours-long twilight marking the months of autumn. Despair had been effaced from Saloona’s heart, and its impish cousin, desire. If one gazed into her calm, ice-colored eyes, one might think she was happy. But happiness had not stitched a single line upon her smooth face.

Imperturbability was an easy emotion to design and grow, and was surprisingly popular with her clients. So it was, perhaps, that she had inhaled great quantities of the spores of impenetrability, because that was the sole quality that she could be seen to possess. Apart, of course, from her beauty, which was noted if not legendary.

This morning, she was attempting to coax an air of distinction from a row of Splendid Blewits, mushrooms that resembled so many ink-stained thumbs. The blewits were saprophytes, their favored hosts carnivorous Deodands that Saloona enticed by bathing in the nearby river. She disabled the Deodands with a handful of dried spores from the Amethyst Deceiver, then dragged them up the hillside to her cottage. There she split each glistening, eel-black chest with an ax and sowed them with spores while their hearts still pumped. Over the course of seven or eight days, the sky-blue sacs would slowly deflate as the Splendid Blewits
appeared, releasing their musty scent of woodlice and turmeric.

After a week, she could harvest the spores. These became part of an intricate though commonplace formula usually commissioned by men with aristocratic aspirations—in this instance, a dull optimate of middle years who sought to impress his much younger lover, a squireen who favored ocelex pantolons that did not flatter him.

It was no concern of hers if her clients were vain or foolish, or merely jaded by a terminal ennui that colored their judgment, much as the sun’s sanguine rays stained the sky. Still, she needed to eat. And the optimate would pay well for his false magnificence. So: arrogance and feigned modesty; a dash of servility to offset the stench of self-love . . . a few grains from the Splendid Blewits, and the physic would be complete.

But something was wrong.

Yesterday evening, she had unrolled nets of raw linen fine as froghair, arranging the filmy cloth beneath those indigo thumbs to catch the spores they released at nightfall. Morning should have displayed delicate spore-paintings, the blewits’ gills traced upon the nets in powdery lines, pollen-yellow, slate-blue.

Instead, the gauze bore but a single bruised smear of violet and citron. Saloona bent her head to inspect it, holding back her long marigold hair so that it wouldn’t touch the cloth.

“You needn’t bother.”

She glanced aside to see a Twk-woman astride a luna moth, hovering near her head. “And why is that?” Saloona asked.

The Twk-woman tugged at the moth’s antennae. It fluttered down and settled on one of the dwarf conifers that kept the fungus garden in shade.

“Give me salt,” she said.

Saloona reached into her pharmacopoeia bag and handed the Twk-woman a salt pod, waiting as she lashed it to the moth’s thorax. The Twk-woman straightened, adjusted her cap, then struck a pose like that of Paeolina II in his most well-known execution portrait.

“Paytim Noringal came here at moonfall and shook your spore-net. I watched unobserved. The resulting cloud gave me a coughing fit, but my leman swears I appear more distinguished than this time yestermorn.”

Saloona cocked her head. “Why would Paytim do that?”

“More I cannot say.” The luna moth rose into the air and drifted off, its bright wings lost amid the ripple of jade and emerald trees crowding the hillside. Saloona rolled up the spore-net and set it with those to be laundered. She was neither perturbed nor angered by Paytim’s action, nor curious.

Still, she had to eat.

She had promised the optimate his physic two days hence. If she captured another Deodand this evening, it would be a week before the spores were ripe. She secured the spore-nets against rain or intruders, then walked to the paddock beside her cottage and beckoned her prism ship.

“I would see Paytim Noringal,” she said.

A moment where only dappled sunlight fell through the softly waving fronds of cat-firs and spruce. Then the autumn air shimmered as with heat. There was a stinging scent of ozone and scorched metal, and the prism ship hovered before her, translucent petals unfolding so that she could spring inside.

“Paytim Noringal is a harlot and a thief,” said the prism ship in a peevish tone.

“She now appears to have become a vandal as well.” Saloona settled into the couch, mindful that her pharmacopoeia pouch was not crushed. “Perhaps she will have prepared lunch. It’s not too early, is it?”

“Paytim Noringal will poison you in your sleep.” The ship lifted into the air, until it floated above the hillside like a rainbow bubble. “If you’re hungry, there are salmon near the second waterfall, and the quince-apples are ripe.”

Saloona stared down at her little farmstead, a pied checkerboard of fungi, cerulean and mauve and creamy yellow, russet and lavender and a dozen hues that Saloona had invented, for which there was no name. “Paytim is a very fine cook,” she said absently. “I hope she will have blancmange. Or that locust jelly. Do you think she will?”

“I have no opinion on the subject.”

The ship banked sharply. Saloona laid a hand upon its controls and made a soothing sound. “There, you don’t need to worry. I have the Ubiquitous Antidote. It was a twenty-seven-year locust jelly. It was generous of her to send me some of it.”

“She means you harm.”

Saloona yawned, covering her mouth with a small freckled hand. “I will sleep, ship. Rouse me when we approach her enclosure.”