Blood Fable

by Oisín Curran

It was hard for me to see the farce of it. At school one day a group of anti-nuclear activists had arrived to give us a workshop in the gym. They spread a gigantic map of the earth over the concrete floor, split us into groups, and assigned each group a continent. Then they spilled bags of red tiddlywinks on each continent and proposed that we spread them out over the land masses. By the time we were done, no more than occasional specks of land showed through blood-red dots.

  Each tiddlywink, declared one of the activists, Represents the radius of destruction from a nuclear bomb. The number of tiddlywinks on this map is equal to the number of warheads in existence right now. As things stand, nuclear bombs could obliterate us all.

  In A Canticle for Leibowitz I read about a world after nuclear war, and it wasn’t hard to draw the link to the yellow-and-black sign riveted to the wall of my school’s basement cafeteria designating it a Fallout Shelter. Occasional drills sent us down there, where our teachers were tasked with trying to extract calm from a hundred children, in a confined space, with nothing to do. That school is long gone now, demolished the year after I graduated and replaced with a basement-free building (because the Cold War is over or because everybody now acknowledges the uselessness of bomb shelters?), but I can still see the cinder-block walls painted glossy beige, the steel posts positioned to support the floor above, and the crowds of shaggy-headed children in hand-me-down bell-bottoms yelling and cursing and hugging and shoving. That’s how we were to survive the bomb. I knew better. I knew only one location was safe come nuclear armageddon: underground. Under underground.

  Where we stand looking at air. Quill is gone. But I still see her there, giving me a nod like she’s going out the door.

  Then Severn runs for the edge. Rook and I tackle him before he jumps. Severn howls—I’ve never heard a sound like it: horrible, long, wretched. But Rook makes no sound at all. He lets go of Severn and rises and begins stumbling around in circles, talking to himself very fast and low and alternately clutching and violently shaking his head. I can’t stand it. I jump up and race down the hill, not stopping to look back up.

  What do I think about? I don’t think. Or I do. I think of a broken body, a crushed face, blood in sand. Or maybe nothing. Just blank water.

  I slide through the tall grass at the edge of the cliff. Between the stalks I see the bright green lagoon. I hit the beach and knife right. Far ahead of me I think I see something on the sand and slow down to put off getting there. The afternoon light begins to change. Now evening makes everything beautiful. In the last light I see the towering chalk-white cliff to my right, calm turquoise water to my left. In between a thin strip of orange sand, turning red and then black faraway where Quill has fallen.

  What will I do when I see her? Have I seen dead bodies before? Not dead but on the edge of death.

  Unbidden, one of my pictures surfaces.

  a woman, ill, in pain, in bed, reaching her arms for me, she is trying to heal, for me

  And that image makes Quill’s end worse—a cold blue death she freely chose. When I see her body I’ll fall on my knees and start hitting her like she’s a locked door.

  But when I reach the spot where she must have fallen, there is no body. There’s nothing but blank sand. She must have landed in the water and disappeared. And now that I’m here, all the anger leaks out of me and I sit abruptly on the wet beach. How can I be angry with her? I should be angry with myself. This is my fault. All my fault. I should have kept my mouth shut like Rook. This was why he wouldn’t tell Quill what I told her. So now there’s a new secret to keep. Rook can’t know what I did. If he finds out, he’ll drop me and never look back.

  A little later I see Severn sitting on the sand, staring out at the sea, Rook pacing back and forth in front of him, weeping, sometimes stopping to shout.

  Why?!

  Severn says nothing, his gaze fixed on the waves. Rook goes back to pacing, then a thought seems to occur to him and he rounds on Severn again, but this time his voice is quiet, intense.

  I know why. She found out.

  He crouches next to Severn, talking low and fast for a minute, and I can’t hear what he says but as he speaks Severn’s face seems to wrinkle and fall around his staring blue eyes. Then Rook stands abruptly and walks away fast in the direction of our camp. I trail after him, leaving Severn where he sits.

  Back at the camp Rook prepares a meal for me without speaking. His movements are automatic, sharp, stunned. Once he stumbles slightly and then sits down hard on the sand and can’t seem to move after that. I find a blanket and drape it over him and without looking up he pulls me down next to him and wraps the blanket around us both. Do I say I’m sorry? Does he shush me? I don’t know because I’m falling asleep.

  Then, on the edge of sleep I remember the sudden fear that froze me at the top of the cliff just before Quill fell. What was it? Not Severn’s hand reaching for her or the look she gave it.

  The nod.

  It makes me shiver again to think of it. Because she looked at me as she tilted her head and stepped into nothing. And now I know why, and where my fear comes from.

  When I walked with Quill in the woods, she was happy. But I was not and so I decided to change everything by telling her the truth. It was a truth everybody knew, and Quill must have known it too but didn’t want to believe it. And when I made that impossible, she ran to Severn to make him deny it, but he couldn’t deny it so she ran again.

  Running, her mind came apart. At the top of the cliff there was nothing left. And where there’s nothing, something can move in. When she nodded to me, it wasn’t her. It was another. It was a greeting. My Follower. It caught up to me. It took her over the cliff. It’s here.

  Tragedy? said Iris. Does there have to be a tragedy? Isn’t there’s enough sadness in the world already?

  It’s what happened, I said. There’s nothing I can do about it.

  And this seemed true. More and more my story was making its own way forward, and I was starting to fear that interior force it was gathering. I still didn’t know what to make of the appearance of those images in my life. The images from her—my—invented past.

  Well, that’s tragedy in a nutshell, said Iris, laying her head back down on the couch where she was stretched out under a blanket.

  Was my mother recovering, or was she not? To her great frustration, she appeared to be hovering in some indeterminate zone, in danger of becoming a permanent invalid. And with every passing day the money that she was not earning piled up on the wrong end of her mental scale, adding to her worry. This, in turn—according to her doctor—delayed her recovery. At one point I remember her declaring to Myles that there were thirteen dollars and sixty-seven cents in the chequing account and ten in savings and somehow he would have to buy groceries for the week from this amount, and Myles muttered that the car needed gas as well. Also the electric bill was due. Not to mention the impossible enormity of the medical fees. The money raised by Willard’s concert paid not even a portion of a fraction of a segment of the amount required. Iris’s composure stalled and broke down. What, she wanted to know, her voice rising to such a pitch that it nearly passed beyond audible range, Were they going to do? To which Myles, with an abrupt bark, said what could he do? Now that house-painting season was over, he was driving a boat for a scallop diver. He rose at 4:00 a.m. every day, came back at three, did dishes, prepared dinner and tended to Iris. And yet the few dollars that he earned bled from the bank account at an inexorable pace.

  From this discussion I absented myself and went upstairs to my room, and although their bitter voices rose clearly through the sizable gaps in the floorboards, within minutes I could no longer hear them, for I was lost in the depths of my old costume box.

  To call it a box is an exaggeration—actually, it was a large broken-down basket piled full of old hats, masks, bolts of threadbare muslin that served as capes or togas, or flying carpets, as the case demanded
. It had been some years since I had largely abandoned that basket for books, but late October had come and Halloween was that very night and I was unprepared.

  Halloween meant a great deal in our neighborhood and its rituals and repetitions over the years gave it special gravity.

  We would gang up, Artemis and Apollo, the blond twins Rinzai and Soto, and half a dozen others, at my house, for it was at the bottom of the road. Haunting westward through the dark frost and rags of snow, we would pass the empty farmhouse where the gibbous moon wobbled in old window glass, and reflected too off the slick ice coating the mud flats as we crossed the bridge. And on we would troop, over the brittle, half-frozen gravel, performing our costumed parts even between houses as we walked.

  That night Artemis and Apollo planned to be two of the three musketeers, while Rinzai and Soto were to dress as elves. There was also Poe, who would paint on a goatee and wear a dented tin pot on his head at a rakish angle, his wheelchair would be Rosinante and every house that we approached a windmill. His older brother, Herbert, an aspiring actor, liked to make himself up as a ghoul—fetid flesh drooping and peeling from his ghastly jowls. Their sister, Emilia, was always a scarecrow.

  For my part I found little inspiration in my old costume box and went rummaging in my parents’ closet, where I discovered a hooded cape of dark purple velvet. Throwing this on I went back to my room and dug out a wire-mesh fencing mask given to me by my aunt Olive along with a rapier and white gauntlets. With hood pulled up over the mask and the cape draping to my heels, I was a blank spectre so anonymous I frightened myself when I looked in the mirror.

  While I waited for my friends, I walked out to the road to test the costume. My vision, although slightly impaired by the mask, was fine under the bright moon. I walked a little way down the road and felt myself more curiously embedded in the night than when in ordinary clothes. No longer a human superimposed upon the inhuman world of invisible beasts and silhouetted trees, I was a creature of the night, more frightening than anything with tooth, claw, or root. Up the hill I saw headlights appear and then the hum of an engine as a vehicle came down the road. Feeling myself newly hostile to that other world of machines that now intruded so noisily on our chill and quiet phantom wilderness, I froze myself into immobility on the shoulder of the road and waited, a hooded stone, a faceless tree, a being from a sphere alien to the headlights that now suddenly lit me. The headlights slowed briefly, as though the driver had temporarily lifted his foot from the accelerator in shock before slamming it back down. The truck jumped forward and shot down the road. Pleased with myself for having run off the intruder, I strolled farther down the road, enjoying the renewed silence as the engine noise died away.

  But not for long. Moments later I heard it slow and as I turned to look, the headlights pulled into the driveway of the empty farmhouse. Then the truck began to reverse onto the road, and I realized it was coming back for me. The tables had suddenly turned, and before those monstrous headlights could touch the road again I fled deep into the trees. Stock-still behind a trunk, I hid and watched the slow wheels roll by, the headlights plying the dark, lighting the shoulder where I had lately stood. It went by and carried on back up the hill, and I sagged with relief against the tree. But only for a moment. Just as I was working up the nerve to venture back out, I heard the truck once again turning around. Panicked, I retreated even farther into the woods, the half-frozen moss giving way reluctantly to my step, twigs dragging across my mask. I moved fast, protected by my disguise, invulnerable to the woods but a soft target for the shotgun I imagined racked behind the driver’s head. Deer-hunting season was about to begin. Then I froze, for the truck was driving by again, more slowly than before. It stopped exactly where I’d been when the headlights first lit me. And it crouched there, wheels immobile, engine vibrating, clouds of exhaust curling into red brake lights. Blood-fog. I waited for the door to open, for a giant, angry hunter to step out with his powerful jacklight and fell hounds who would come eagerly baying for my blood and corner me and loudly, joyously call for their master to shoot me down and prove ghosts didn’t exist.

  But nothing happened. The doors remained sealed, the windows black, the driver as anonymous as I behind my mask. For all I knew there was no driver, or he was himself a phantom who had little patience with the play-acting of hippie kids. Then the truck revved again and shot away up the hill.

  Moments later I heard the ruckus of my friends come between the trees and I bolted out to meet them. Their hubbub died at the sight of me but I was tired of being frightening. I ripped off my mask and showed my face.

  Once they had congratulated me on my costume and I admired theirs and joined their fantastical society, my earlier dread faded—I donned my mask and got down to spooking the neighbours. House by house up the hill we ghosted past Emily Marco, who, once she’d terrified us by emerging from her chicken coop as a very authentic-looking witch with a candle under her long face newly ornamented with warts and blackened teeth, proffered cookies; past the brightly lit miniature home of Herman and Susan Bojanowski, both sporting frizzy wigs and clown noses as they maintained a slapstick patter and handed out fudge squares individually wrapped in wax paper; past Willard’s, where he allowed us to take wormy apples from a basket while he inspected and approved or disapproved of our costumes with a joviality inspired by vodka, judging from his breath; past the home of Rinzai and Soto, whose father sang “Over the Rainbow” to us as his wife fed us teacups of chocolate mousse; past the sophisticated and strange-angled domicile belonging to Celestine Francoeur and her husband, Theo, the documentary filmmaker, both dressed in skin-tight black leather from head to toe and linked to each other by fur-lined handcuffs as, with their free hands, they loaded into our bags gory chocolate eyeballs imported, I later read on the foil wrapping, from Lichtenstein; and finally we arrived at the house in the swamp wherein Artemis and Apollo dwelt.

  It had been transformed into a chateau fit to accommodate musketeers and their allies. The doorways were newly arched with meticulously sculpted cardboard. And cardboard unicorn tapestries draped the interior walls, crenellated battlements silhouetted the windows. We toasted each other with tankards of frothing cider, and the games began; one room was populated with lifesavers suspended from strings, and we could only pass by chewing our way through ten of them. Next we were obliged to bob for apples before identifying, by feel, slimy organs recently extracted from a fresh corpse.

  But through all the games we looked forward anxiously to the final show, when the lights went out and by the low radiance of a single candle Artemis and Apollo’s mother, Bernadette, read to us a horrifying tale of a murderer loose in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. And just as the protagonist had wound our nerves to their breaking point, just as the wax statue of the killer may or may not have blinked in the dim gaslight of the deserted museum at midnight—from the next room a blood-curdling scream tore our ragged nerves, and we screamed as well.

  The front door slammed, we heard pounding footsteps, Bernadette leapt to her feet as Bill rushed in, red hair on end, eyes receding into their hollows as he whispered in her ear, she seemed to collapse, but unlike Bill who was turning into crumpled paper, Bernadette’s face darkened as she grew smaller, as though her energy, compressed into a tighter space, threatened to explode. She snapped her book shut and moved from the room, and an instant later we heard the front door slam again. As we milled, hopped up on sugar and speculation, our various parents showed up—the Bojanowskis’ their clown wigs askew, face paint smeared from weeping; the Francoeurs, their handcuffs unlocked and limply hanging; Myles, uncostumed, grim, and distracted. In the car on the way home, he broke his silence only briefly to explain that Pierce had been badly injured.

  Will he die? I asked remotely, because in the wake of Shadow’s death and Iris’s illness I was beginning to expect the worst. Myles said that he might, and then he stopped talking. At our driveway he paused long enough for me to get out a
nd then said he was going to see Pierce at the hospital.

  I found Iris huddled and weeping next to the stove in which unseasoned alder logs were feebly smouldering as their sap bubbled at the edges. The house was cold; the plastic windows snapped in and out with the rising wind. Iris held me tightly in her arms for a time, but when I pressed her for more information she could not, or would not, say more than what Myles had told me.

  In bed that night I thought of Pierce and thought that I felt nothing at all. It seemed strange I’d tried so hard to suppress my grief over Shadow and yet here was a member of my species, and one I liked, in mortal danger and I seemed immune to sadness. I didn’t yet understand that stowing away sadness can lead to habitual grief-storage so immediate it’s packed and stashed before you can feel it. But though I didn’t grieve, or didn’t think I did, I felt heavy and I wondered. And thoughts of injury, thoughts of death, led me down with my sinking feelings underground.

  Two days after Quill’s death, Rook and I set to sea. When I look back as we tack out of that lagoon, I see Severn building himself a hut where our camp had been. He doesn’t look up to watch us go.

  Somewhere close, very close, my Follower is hiding. Maybe it’s in a fish under the boat. Maybe one of the gulls above. Why doesn’t it just dive and take me like it took Quill? It makes no sense. Unless it plans to break the expedition apart—first Nolan, then Chisolm and half the crew that split off. Now Quill. And Severn staying behind. Only Rook is left to complete the expedition. Yes. That must be it. It’s getting rid of my crewmates. It wants me alone, unprotected. But why?

  We need to keep moving. If I can get to the city, I’ll be safe. Not sure why, but it’s true. Rook doesn’t argue when I push to go. He’s in pain and wants to leave the pain behind, if possible. We have enough smoked fish and fresh water to go far, even though I know it’s close.

  In the following days Rook and I barely speak. We sit alone on either side of the boat, Rook broken by grief, me stabbed with guilt. I want to confess but don’t dare, and I can tell there’s no point telling him what really happened. How could he believe me if I say my Follower took her? In the silence between us, I take my little picture fragments from the box in my mind and look them over.