The Glittering World (34 page)

“Do you see any way down?” Elisa asked, but he shook his head, the beam of his flashlight disappearing into the opening’s hungry black mouth. There were no means by which to lower themselves, no way of knowing how far the drop was or what might greet them at the bottom. He longed for Fred Cronin’s
guidance, not to mention the man’s elaborate assortment of supplies from the botched believers group expedition.

“Maybe we could go back to the house and grab some sheets,” Gabe said. “Tie them to something heavy and then ease our way down?”

“Sounds good. After that, I should be able to get us the rest of the way there.” Her quiet confidence buoyed him. All he had to do now was stay as close to her as possible.
She will show me the way
.

There was a nearby crunch of feet on broken glass, followed by the sound of heavy boots mounting the waterlogged remains of the back deck. Elisa and Gabe exchanged panicked looks before they scrambled inside the closet to perch upon the edges of the hatch, facing each other over the yawning hole. He reached out and plucked the key from the outside lock, easing the door closed as he killed the flashlight, the darkness bisected by a slender shaft of muted light through the keyhole.

Gabe struggled to hold his pack as he scrambled for balance. Floorboards groaned down the long hall, accompanied by the hollow clink of beer cans and other detritus being kicked aside as the footsteps swiftly approached. He fumbled to fit the key into the keyhole, this time on the inside of the door, and barely managed to engage the lock before the knob was jerked from the other side. Elisa gasped.
The stranger has arrived.

“Come on out of there.” The words muffled through the blocked keyhole, but still recognizable as belonging to Daniel Jessed, his voice as authoritative as it was menacing. The big bad wolf had come to blow their house in. “You two are making a big mistake.”
You two.
Had he been watching them? Following them? Gabe reached to take Elisa’s hand, their arms a bridge over the hatch; if one of them jumped, the other would fall as well.

“You’re one of their kind, aren’t you, girl?” Jessed said from the other side of the door, his words redolent with scorn. “Maybe you both are, now. Like Flora’s grandson. The both of you turned devils.”

“Your sister, she isn’t dead,” Elisa called out, and Gabe squeezed her hand but she didn’t quiet. “I saw her, out in the woods.”

“Liar! Devil!” He struck against the steel, the sound violent as cannon fire.

“Detective, please,” Gabe said. “We’re not bad people. Just let us be.”

“That . . .
thing
,” Jessed said. “The one that came back wearing my sister’s body. No one thought it was so bad either.” A chilling silence, until he spoke again. “Funny, isn’t it? How people around here talk about the Other Kind being from nature. But what’s so natural about taking the place of a little girl?”

“Listen to me,” Elisa said. “The real Gavina, she was hurt in the fires but she’s still out there. She’s grown now. They kept her alive all this time.”

“My sister’s dead!” he shouted. “They killed her. You killed her. Your kind . . .”

“She’s alive,” Elisa said. “I swear to you, she’s alive.”

“I’m going to give you five seconds to come out of there.” But barely a moment elapsed before Jessed threw himself against the door, the reverberation so loud that Elisa slipped from the ledge.
Little pig, little pig, let me in
 . . . Gabe grabbed her and managed to pull her over to his side of the hatch. Her breath was irregular, heartbeat a bass drum against his chest and the hair on his
chinny chin chin.

“I finally found where they’re all hiding, though,” Jessed
said. “You know that? Took a mighty deep borehole, but I got them.” He slammed against the door again, harder.

Elisa’s probably never had someone come at her like this
, Gabe thought.
But I have.
His father’s crazed eyes blinking through the dark of the closet, like so many dark places he’d known. So he did what his mother had taught him to do when he was set upon by his father: he lowered his head, and he furiously prayed.

Our father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven . . .

Gabe held his breath and looked up through the dim. The door hadn’t budged, and for a single, stupid moment he let himself think they might be safe, that they would get to Blue after all. Then, a scraping sound, and something pinged against the wall next to him. Donald’s key, pushed through the keyhole, followed by an arc of liquid traveling up Gabe’s side. An acrid gas station smell hit him, and Elisa’s grip upon his torso tightened with alarm.

“Oh no,” she whispered.

Lighter fluid squirted over them in a violent arc, the angry Cyclops eye of the keyhole illuminated once more as a red plastic spout moved from the opening.

“Go!” Gabe hissed. He forced the flashlight into Elisa’s hand and pushed her down through the hatch. A moment later he followed, just as a stream of heat and light pierced the darkness, fire erupting through the keyhole in a chemical torrent of blue and yellow flame.

The smell of burned hair trailed him as Gabe half staggered and half slid down the muddy chute, Elisa a rush of air below. He fell in her wake, the echoing sound of metal upon rock as he brushed her arm with his fingertips but she slipped away, his trajectory suddenly blocked. Scrambling to reach her, he met only earth; it was as if the ground had opened up for her and quickly closed, shutting him out. Chunks of dirt pelted him. Bits of rock forced themselves under his fingernails as he continued to slide, until the back of his head slammed against hard stone.

He was momentarily stunned, slapped to life again by a root that caught hold of his heel and twisted him sideways so that he was no longer sure whether he was facing up or down.
Unhand me, sacred trees of the ancients,
visions of snarled branches clawing at him as Gabe shook his leg to free it from the root’s grasp.
Who so shall release me, for him I will open the hoards of the earth.
He dropped a dozen more feet before he crashed into wood and glass, his vision going white with agony.

It took him some time to force open his eyes. He’d landed in some kind of silo-shaped storage room below the Colony, on top of a stack of decomposing lobster crates packed with glass bottles. He didn’t understand how he was seeing all this, until he noticed the flashlight he’d handed Elisa lying on the dirt floor and illuminating part of the room. He sat up and frantically
patted at his hair to make sure it wasn’t on fire, a lingering stench of bitter combustion.

“Elisa?” he whispered, then said again with more insistence. The only response was his own voice, echoing off dirt and rock. He hauled himself off the crates, grabbed the flashlight, and aimed it up at the shaft that had ejected him. He could barely make out the curving mouth of the chute, and wondered at what point above Elisa had been separated from him. There must have been a fork in the path, or perhaps she had deliberately shaken Gabe off, as he’d suspected she might. Maybe the underworld had simply accepted her, while he was jettisoned to land in this improvised storage room.
I am Orpheus, who must venture farther below, lest I fail to bring my love back to the world.
Only Elisa wasn’t his Eurydice. And Blue was no Eurydice himself: he was more like the Runaway Bunny, having left of what was likely his own volition.
So I’ll turn myself into a bloodhound, little bunny
.
And I will find you.

The flashlight trembled, and Gabe saw that he was shaking. The hatred in Jessed’s voice rumbled in his ears, the terror of countless childhood beatings as a shudder of fear wracked him, having waited until now to fully blossom. The antiseptic smell of his father’s aftershave, the whistle of the belt before it lashed him, blood spotting the underside of his parents’ bathroom sink: all of it returned in an unrelenting wave. But not the hurt itself, never that; only the constant low hum of his scars, the twin red channels up and down his back that anchored his invisible wings, the ones that had allowed him to fly free. That’s where he kept his old pain now.

Something else came to him as well: Blue’s captivating scent, the one beneath all the spices and kitchen grease and cigarette smoke. It was all around now, and it was strong, so much so that
Gabe listed. He ran the flashlight beam across the dirt floor and stone walls, a long-neglected gin still in a far corner.

“Blue?” he called out, and held his breath.

The smell was coming from the lobster crates. Or rather from the bottles inside, a few of which had shattered beneath him when he crashed to earth. His racing heart began to race faster. He looked closer, and now he could see the bottles’ faded labels. Each one bore the image of a dainty-looking fairy perched upon a rock in the water, the mouth of a cave visible on a distant shore. It was the hidden remains of the Colony moonshine, what Fred and Maureen had referred to as screech, laced with the remainder of the Other Kind’s essence.
Donald’s secret recipe, the best in the cove.
Vision clouding with desire, Gabe had to pry himself away from the crates.

It was time to find a way out, and to keep his cool while doing so, turn his panic into a little mouse that was really nothing to be afraid of at all. He retrieved a plastic compass from his pack, lifted it to his chest with the reverence of a holy object, and raised his head up high.
Spirits of the East, Spirits of Elemental Air
, he beseeched,
sweep through like a proud eagle and bring forth the sky so that I may spread my own wings and take flight!
High above in another corner of the room was a sliver of light, dim but discernible all the same. He shined the flashlight upward, upon iron rungs welded to brick casing. It was the sealed-off well behind the Colony, slits of daylight visible through the slatted cover. A covert escape route, fashioned by the old rum-runners perhaps, or maybe by the Colonists themselves. And it would be his deliverance.

Gabe packed up his compass and flashlight, threw on his rucksack, and climbed, the rungs cool against his bloody and sweat-slicked palms. He waited at the top, and remained there
for what seemed an eternity: listening for Jessed, for any sound but those of the natural world, its whistling birds and rustling leaves. Finally, he said a little prayer and pushed on the rotted wood cover.

One of the planks gave way, then another, and a third, creating an opening large enough for him to get his head and shoulders through. He pried off the remaining pieces of wood and peered over the rim of the well; he was farther from the rear of the Colony building than he would have imagined. After summoning his courage, he raised himself out of the cold stone cylinder, the air soothing his red-raw skin with a velvet touch. For a brief moment it smelled as sweet as the screech had, and he trembled with delight, the brightness of day rendering the trees an emerald city against a swollen backdrop of blue.
This is the forest primeval
, Gabe thought, and now he was Evangeline, in search of a very different Gabriel.

He dropped down to the forest floor and made a run for it, deeper into the woods, until he doubled back and charted a parallel course to the trail. There was only one place he could think of to head next.

He pounded on the cottage door a few times before he let himself inside. The front room was cold and damp and reeked of fried clams and cigarette smoke, among other things, worse things. But Gabe smelled like hell himself, sweat-soaked from fear and the frantic dash through the woods that brought him to Fred Cronin’s place before dusk, still picking splinters and shards of glass from his shoulders and arms. With the shades drawn, the living room was even darker than he remembered; he tried the light switch by the door, which did nothing. After stumbling
over a disarray of toppled newspaper towers, upended furniture, and emptied beer bottles, he finally made it through the hazardous mess of an obstacle course to the back of the house, where he found Fred lying unconscious on the bathroom floor.

“Fred? Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
Is he dead?
The stench was so strong that Gabe retched, a cloud of stink around the body. But the smell was an admixture of alcohol and body odor and shit, nothing worse. Eyes watering, he hauled Fred up and carried him to the bed. In the gloom, Fred was but a hazy shadow, his body even more compromised than when Gabe had last laid eyes upon him, after Jessed pummeled the diminutive man into the earth as if staking a tent pole. He was pale and desiccated, his beard dirty and knotted and grayer than ever; he looked like a shriveled wizard drained of all his power, leveled by a rival’s spell.

Fred opened his eyes, and Gabe’s breath caught. “Fred! Are you with me? We need to get you to a hospital.” Fred slowly shook his head, his gaze trained away from Gabe and toward the far side of the room, at the single triangle-shaped window set beneath the slanted roof. Against the unwashed glass hung a dream catcher, its feathered and beaded hoop overtaken by spiderwebs; Gabe pictured the spiteful faces of all the nightmares it had trapped over the years, as well as the ones that, against hope, had managed to break through.