Jack Be Nimble: Gargoyle (43 page)

Mercedes wiped a hand along her forehead. Leave it to her luck to pick the worse set of stairs to run. Her hand came back slick, soaked in perspiration. The run up the stairs had taken more out of her than she realized, and she knew the easy descent would give her climbing muscles a sort of rest. Thanks to her self-inflicted torture-by-exercise, she was resistant to shin splints, and–

Another chime, faint but insistent from somewhere up the unlit path.

Without another thought, Mercedes turned and jogged away from the stairs, off the bright landing and into the dark.

She had to slow almost immediately in order to pick her way along the animal track. What was she doing? She hated following these trails, anyway. Deer paths always disappeared after a few dozen yards. She paused, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the dark. Couldn’t have been even a sliver of moon in the sky, could there?

It never occurred to her to fear the darkness, the lightless undefined order of the woods. The time she’d spent photographing wild animals in their own territory had given Mercedes a healthy respect for the habits of predators, and she’d even been stalked once by a cougar on a shoot in British Columbia. Then as now, she’d found safety in trusting her instinct. “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” she whispered to herself. Most injuries and nearly all fatalities in the timberlands resulted from stupidity. There was nothing on this particular mountain that would hurt her, unless she inadvertently strolled off a cliff or into a tree.

After at least a minute of stumbling upwards in the gloom she paused near a yellow bed of evening primrose. The chime had grown louder, closer to the actual toll of a bell. Around a curve of the ridge her wide pupils picked out a soft gold-red glow against the trees. Emboldened, she continued towards it. The ringing had taken on a vicious tone, still bell-like but harsher; strike after strike close together now, almost overlapping. An indistinct, constant roar accompanied the urgent knell.

Mercedes left the fading path and clawed up a mossy bank that came away in her hands. Raising herself up, she saw a natural clearing, framed by granite boulders and smaller, smooth stones left behind by the last ice age. At the center of the bowl-like space, a fire was raging in the mouth of a man-sized furnace, dwarfed by the shadows leaping off the blocky figure that stood before it, swinging a hammer.

She hesitated, then stood and began circling the clearing. An oversized bellows rested near the man, and from time to time he took it up and coaxed the embers before him until they were white-hot. He wore a thick, stiff apron and a faded work shirt, scorched and holed by many hours in front of his anvil. Mercedes noticed his rough appearance from behind was due partly to his thick clothing, though he was an enormous, broad man. His graying hair and beard came nearly to his collar, wild and singed, and his eyebrows were full, heavy, and black. The effort rolling through his wide shoulders reminded her of Grandpa Max splitting firewood.

Mercedes slipped cautiously from boulder to stone. The giant–he swung the hammer with hairy arms that bulged and swelled with each stroke against the steel–seemed completely intent on his work. She couldn’t think of him as old, for the portion of his face she could see was smooth, and he wielded the hammer and bellows with immense strength and an almost casual control, despite the quick pace he sustained.

A single piece of steel occupied the anvil before him, and again he brought the sledge down in a gloved hand, full force. The metal sang, and Mercedes heard–felt–the peal from the hot, red-gold iron.

She halted across the anvil from the young-old man, watching him work for several moments. He glanced up from time to time, noting her presence with the hint of a smile but staying focused on the long steel before him.

Heat washing off the furnace dried her perspiration quickly.

The man’s smile grew. He paused a moment and seemed about to speak, recognition evident in his face and posture, but then just chuckled and shifted his grip on the sledge. As he returned to work, the man grinned at her almost sheepishly and raised his eyebrows, as if possessing a special secret he wanted to share with her, a mysterious truth. Affection and tenderness shone in his eyes every time he looked up. Again she thought of her grandfather; though she knew the smith couldn’t be Max, she had the feeling she should recognize him, that she
did
know him, and that their relationship was somehow more precious and infinite, and—
familial
than she was capable of comprehending.

And she could almost remember it.

The smith returned fully to his anvil, driving and folding the iron into an ever smoother, more resilient form. He turned the metal and renewed the pressure, intensity creasing his face. Pounding. Battering. Hammering his own strength down into the metal with every resonant stroke.

Mercedes drew closer to the singing steel.

“Careful,” said the titanic blacksmith, pausing. “It’s going to get much hotter before he’s ready.” He rolled his shoulders and turned back to the steel.

Mercedes abruptly awoke, rolling into motion, astonished to find herself in bed. “Jack,” she said, startling herself further.

Her silk sheets lay in disarray, twisted by her dream of the night run, kicked from her. Back in her Studio City bungalow. Her arms were still warm, as if actual heat had washed off the furnace onto her skin.

The night around her held pure with silence. The dim darkness beyond the three walls of glass was quiet, cool. It was the time of night Mercedes usually loved best. No birds, no breeze, nothing to mar the stillness before the new day was born. There was something almost holy in these calm hours.

She folded her arms over her knees and sat like that for a long minute, thoughts awhirl. The dream had been so vivid. She hadn’t had a dream that sharp and clear since—well, in years. Bizarre. Eerie.

Jack?

Good thing sleepwalking hadn’t been a part of her imagined run. Mercedes couldn’t imagine what the neighbors would think of her dashing around the block in her underwear. Then again, it
was
California.

Softly, not wanting to break the quiet of the night, but also partly because she wanted to keep the dream as intact as she could, Mercedes slid out of bed and walked to the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of water.

But— “‘Jack’?” she said, rubbing her arms. A car passed by out in the street, and from the darkness she watched it flicker past her wrought-iron gate.

Still several hours until dawn.

As she walked down the hall to her darkroom, Mercedes tried a yawn. No good. She’d be lucky to fall asleep again before the paperboy came, and she wasn’t going to spend a couple hours tossing and turning, pretending to rest. Working on the pictures of the baby eagles would help shake off the weird dream.

Since her first day at college—almost since her first real camera—Mercedes hadn’t used a photo-processing company. Under the amber light in her darkroom, she could make magic. The slow, sometimes painstaking process of developing her own pictures always made her think of alchemy, conjuration, creation. She loved the esoteric equipment, the chemicals, and the sheer ritual of making a picture.

Three of the prints of the eagles feeding were amazing, and amazingly flawed. Sunlight falling through the tops of the trees had cast uneven shadows over the birds, and the part of the nest on the left-hand side of the picture was overexposed, not too murky to be distinguished but enough to throw the picture out of balance. Mercedes frowned and crumpled the prints into the waste can. Returning to the enlarger, she prepared to re-expose a sheet of paper to a negative. The negative was still in the negative holder, set to the correct focus. She put a sheet of eight-by-ten-inch printing paper into an easel, and checked the timer on the enlarger lamp. This portion of the spell was always accomplished through trial-and-error, determining the exact amount of time necessary to achieve the proper contrasts of lights and darks and density of detail. Light shining from the enlarger lamp through the negative would paint the picture onto the printing paper. The timer had been set for twenty three seconds, just right for most of the picture but enough to overexpose the left-hand side.

Mercedes again set the timer for twenty three seconds and activated the lamp, but this time, when the timer reached seventeen seconds, she slowly waved her left hand between the paper and the negative, preventing the enlarger lamp from projecting onto the left-hand side of the print for the final five seconds. By lessening the exposure over that area, she was able to bring out the detail, almost beckoning it out of the paper. The gesture of an alchemist.

When the sheet was fully exposed, Mercedes set it into the developing tray and watched the image reveal itself. Then she transferred the print to a tray filled with stopping solution. She gently moved the print in the solution, careful to rotate it from top to bottom to make sure the chemicals touched it evenly. Finally, she shifted the print to a tray filled with chemicals that fixed the image on the paper, making it permanent. Again she gingerly rotated the print, then placed it in a tray filled with slowly running water that would rinse the chemicals from it.

It worked. Mercedes realized she was smiling. Technically it was a good shot. Crisp. Composed well, yet there was something else. They’d made a picture together, she and the mother eagle. The mother gently coaxed her babies to take the strip of meat, held daintily in her fiercely hooked beak. Under the curve of her wings the baby eagles, jostling, straining to stand on tiny legs, demanded life. This was more than mere existence. The picture seethed and beat with something elemental.

Mercedes found it hard to look away. At last she washed her hands and wrists, then padded down the hall to her office.

She tried another yawn.

In contrast to the overstuffed style and form of her bedroom, Mercedes always picked very spartan furniture for her office—it wasn’t an uncomfortable room, but she felt the less distraction she had about while doing the paperwork, the better. A few tiny art prints, a bird-of-paradise plant, and a palm-sized glass globe of the world, which she rolled into her hand as she sat at her desk and woke up her computer.

There was an email from Eric and Sara Jensen, excited about the pictures and their forthcoming thesis. They wanted her opinion about some of the text they’d written to accompany the pictures.

She hadn’t known that golden eagles usually mate for the first time when relatively young, at around four years old, and paired with the same mate for their entire fifteen- to twenty-year lifespan. Mercedes thought about the mother eagle, and the wild, warrior expression in the creature’s eyes. She found herself wondering what sorts of things attracted one eagle to another.

Mercedes looked through half-a-dozen invoices, checking dates and payments, then logged into her bank account. Everything was fine, set to go smoothly next month when she moved the last of the paperwork needed to completely regain her last name. By mid-summer—near the end of celebrity wedding season--she’d be sending out invoices with her own name--Mercedes
Adams
--on the letterhead. The next few months would be a lot of work, and maybe she could go ahead and hire a fourth photographer. There were two kids she had in mind, both recent grads from UCLA who had great eyes for shadows and light. Better, she had to admit, than she'd had a few years ago, right out of school. Why not hire both and take a little break?

She sat back, wrapped her hand around the frosted globe, and smiled. A few birds were stirring in the trees outside her window. Dawn still hours away. When the stores opened she could do some shopping for her next shoot.

What was a dream, anyway? Fantasy? Fear? A psychic tease--or scraps of self-doubt, wrapped in something familiar and intimate, say, a memory? This last explanation made sense. The subconscious demands order, meaning. Mercedes worked very hard to keep an even tenor to her life, a routine, a dependable arrangement. Who’s to say her subconscious wasn’t engaging in a little housekeeping, tidying up bits and pieces of misfit information? Groping to find order in barely perceived sensory data. Sure. That feeling of heat on her arm as she drew close to the fire? Nothing. Dreams mean nothing.

Tell that to Joseph in Egypt.

What did Thoreau write? She affected a British accent, purely for the fact that it made her sound more intelligent than she knew she deserved. "Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." There, that was profound. Mercedes firmly believed all dead intellectuals sounded most credible when quoted out loud in BBC English.

But
this
dream, in particular, meant nothing. She might still be half-asleep, the way it hung before her mind’s eye.

Jack.

She found herself surfing over to the Internet Movie Database and typing his name into the site search engine.

It was her favorite site to check out basic movie info—Mercedes often clicked through to Amazon (usually to buy the book the movie was based on, get right to the source of the goodness). The section on actors was sparse, giving basic info like date of birth (which in this case she knew already), a list of movie titles and television appearances, and occasionally a snippet of biographical data.

As far as she knew Mercedes had seen all of Jack’s movies, some on cable, though the only one she’d ever bought for her own collection was one of his first, a Dean Koontz miniseries called
Strange Highways
. She’d caught the beginning on TV with no idea who was in it, and Jack had scared the hell out of her. The sight of his familiar face was chilling, but the performance! He played the part of the protagonist’s older brother, a local sports hero, the laureled golden boy—and thorough psychopath.