Halcyon

by Rio Youers

  32

  The lake was milky silver and the sound of it lapping the shore mirrored the calm she felt inside. It was a calm she knew would soon be spoiled, but that was okay. Her meeting with the animals was necessary. When it was over and they’d returned to whatever dark space they’d crawled from—forever, this time—the calm would return, and would never be spoiled again.

  Valerie closed her eyes and clutched the ring tighter. She heard footsteps only moments later, descending from the bushes that fringed the cove. One set of footsteps, crunching first over leaves and cones, then scuffing through the sand.

  “I knew you’d come,” she said.

  “We’ve never been far away.”

  It was the pig. She knew this before he even spoke—could tell from the wheezy, slobbery sound of his breathing. He lingered at the edge of the firelight, blending with the cheerless evening air.

  “We’re not at the Lantern?”

  “You seem surprised.” Valerie opened her hand, looked at the ring. She’d been clasping it for minutes now but it was still as cold as a pebble plucked from the lake. It would never be warm, she realized. She could hold it over the flames for an hour and it would remain a chip of icy darkness. “This meeting is on my terms, Pig. I’m in control now.”

  He squealed laughter and the sound carried through her. Ironically, he hadn’t squealed when she’d killed him, which is when a pig should squeal. He’d screamed in a very human way. He’d groaned and gurgled, then he’d pleaded and died.

  Wonderful sounds.

  Valerie recalled waiting for the first of them to arrive, hunkered in the corner of the room, the sharpened chopsticks clutched to her breast. She was wound so tight with anticipation that she froze the first time the chimes jangled on the landing. It was only the fat restaurateur, though. He cleaned away her plate (didn’t notice the missing chopsticks—good) and her poop, then grunted at her and left. An hour or so later the chimes rang again and this time it was the pig. She looked at him over her shoulder. A hefty man in a business suit and red power tie. He called her a worthless bitch and kicked her in the thigh. When he drew back his leg to kick her again, she whirled from her crouched position and drove one of the chopsticks into his balls.

  He pulled away sharply and the chopstick snapped. Judging by the three-inch piece of wood in Valerie’s hand, she surmised he had at least five inches buried in his groin. He hit the floor on his knees, pig-head thrashing, both hands cupping his dirty pig balls. She saw blood well brightly in the cracks between his fingers and it was the first blood she’d seen in four years that wasn’t her own. He screamed in agony and Valerie hushed him by thrusting the second chopstick beneath the shelf of his jaw. It went in easily—and deep, too. He gurgled and fell, taking the chopstick with him. The back of his suit jacket had rucked up, though, and Valerie saw the knife strapped to his belt. She removed it from its sheath and stabbed him in the back of the neck. He groaned but didn’t die. She stabbed him again and he still didn’t die. She stabbed him twice in the face through his pig mask and blood spurted. “Please,” he said. “Pleeeaaa…” He pissed himself and still wasn’t dead—not quite—when she heard the chimes on the landing once again.

  Knife in hand, Valerie reeled across the room and hid behind the door. It opened. The dog walked in. He stopped cold when he saw his fallen comrade. “What the fuck?” he said. Valerie came up behind him and thrust the knife into the top of his skull.

  The dog had a meat cleaver strapped to a holster beneath his jacket. She hacked at him with it. His chest and arms and face. She dragged him behind one of the sofas where he wouldn’t be seen from the doorway. She dragged the pig—dead at last—behind it, too.

  Blood everywhere.

  Knife in one hand, cleaver in the other, Valerie crouched behind the door.

  She waited.

  * * *

  “I see the blood, of course. It’s on the walls, on the floors. I can’t not see it. But it’s not the story. The pain is. A globe of pain that revolves and evolves. It’s so colorful, so complex. Beautiful, in fact. And the girl … it’s like she died a hundred times and each death made her stronger. She discovered something, some new belief, inside her, or beyond her, and then she rose. Not a broken girl but a blazing phoenix of a woman. A phoenix with blades. And I see her now, right here, where I’m standing, looking at this lantern and praying for … a flower? A tree? I’m not sure, but her heart is a bundle of glowing wires and the dead are scattered around her.”

  Calm snapped momentarily from her trance. She looked from the lantern to Martin and Sasha, both of whom took an involuntary step backward. Sasha shook her head. “No,” she whispered, but Martin had seen it before—in the black and white photograph that he and Laura had used to call Calm back in May. He’d thought it a photographic aberration, but no, it was real: Calm had two irises in each eye. She blinked and they coalesced into one, like colored contact lenses sliding into position.

  “Jesus,” Sasha gasped.

  Calm took a deep breath and said with chilling clarity, “She wanted the tiger most of all.”

  * * *

  Valerie waited several hours. The light outside faded. She sat in the darkness listening to the flies gather on the corpses, the dim tinkle of Han folk music, and the thrum of conversation from the diners in the restaurant downstairs. She drifted into sleep but the bamboo chimes woke her. The door opened. A hand—the Society ring glimmering on the third finger—reached for the light switch and she used the cleaver to chop it off.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the dark but the rabbit’s had not. She dragged him into the room and slammed the door. “My hand,” he whimpered. “What happened, what happened?” His rabbit shape—long quivering ears—stumbled in the gloom, and she hacked at it mercilessly from every direction, as if there were twelve of her. He went down and curled himself into a shuddering ball and she didn’t stop until he was dead and had been for some time.

  The ox and goat arrived together the following afternoon—two on one, but the element of surprise stacked the odds in Valerie’s favor. She was able to weaken them both before they knew what was happening. Indeed, the goat fought for a period of time (only five seconds or so, but it felt much longer) with the cleaver lodged in his skull. It looked like a joke Halloween prop. Then he fell against the wall and the impact popped the cleaver loose. Blood jetted from the top of the mask and he died in spasms.

  Valerie picked up the cleaver and wheeled on the ox. He had several knife wounds across his upper body but he also had the knife, which he’d pulled from a hole in his chest. “I’m going to kill you, bitch.” His mask was comically askew. The knife trembled in his hand. “You’re so fucking—” He took two swipes at her and the knife missed first time by four inches and second time by only one. His ox belly wobbled. A third swipe and this time the blade flashed across her left breast, cutting her close to the nipple. They circled each other for a time. The ox bled and weakened. Valerie waited for her moment and it came; his right leg wobbled and he slumped. She sprang forward, cleaver raised, and brought it down across his forearm. The ox shrieked and dropped the knife. He stumbled away from her, heading for the door, but his legs couldn’t hold him. He hit the floor with a thud and Valerie—exhausted and hurting—was on him. She hacked as many times as she was able but the cleaver was blunt and it was tough work. She stopped for a rest. The ox snorted and bled and crawled toward her. “Keelooh … fuggha beeeeeeesh.”

  The chimes sounded.

  Valerie groaned and staggered to her strike position behind the door, not sure if she had the strength for another fight. This might be it, she thought, looking at the blunt cleaver. The best that I could do. It was the restaurateur, though, who never came while the animals were here, doing their thing. Valerie could only assume the loud noises, not to mention the fact that five animals had shown up and none had left, had earned his interest. The door opened a crack and he poked his head inside.

  “Glurrgh,” the ox said from the flo
or, reaching with one bloody hand. “Geelp neeee.”

  The restaurateur yelped twice with surprise—first when he saw the carnage, and again when Valerie lifted the cleaver to his throat. She slotted it firmly between two greasy folds and eased him into the room.

  “I should cut your fucking throat, too.”

  His eyes were tiny glowing lanterns.

  “Guilty by association.”

  “No. They made me. Please.”

  “Fuck you.” Valerie kept the cleaver to his throat as she ushered him toward the large chest against the side wall. She flipped the lid open with her foot. The stench of her own sweat, piss, and suffering wafted out. “Get in.”

  He shook his head. He was sobbing now.

  “Get in.” She exerted pressure with the cleaver and pushed against the back of his head. “Don’t make me ask you again. Get in the box, you fat fuck.”

  He got in the box and hunkered down. The lid closed, but only just. It would be very uncomfortable in there for him. Valerie dropped the latch but there was no padlock so she retrieved the knife from the floor and ran the blade through. The ox grabbed at her on the way back but she stepped over him as she might a spider. She then left the room for the first time in four years, pausing at the top of the stairs, listening for sounds from the kitchen or dining area. There were none. The restaurant was empty. She continued down. The front doors came into view and, like some long-ago dream, she recalled the eighteen-year-old girl who had stepped through them—a girl who was dead now, replaced by a raging demigod bound for the promised land.

  She pushed through double doors into a large kitchen. There were two refrigerators, each the size of a walk-in closet. She found fresh fruit and slices of cooked meat and ate until her stomach throbbed. A large clock read 3:37 p.m. Kitchen staff would arrive for the evening shift soon. Valerie wiped away her bloody prints with a cloth, placed the blunt, sticky cleaver in the back of a huge dishwasher, then selected a replacement—sharper than the first—from a knife rack on the counter. She passed through the dining area on her way back upstairs and paused at a display where two Chinese sabers hung either side of a ceremonial shield. They were dull and blunt, just for show, but Valerie thought she would appear all the more imposing if she were brandishing one when the last three animals arrived. Any edge, even a psychological one, was worth exploiting.

  Valerie grabbed one of the sabers and went upstairs. The ox was still alive—he’d almost made it to the door. The saber had a blunt edge but a sharp tip and Valerie punched it through the ox’s skull. It went deep enough that she had to wiggle the sword this way and that to pry it free. Blood poured out of the mask like water from a broken bucket. She grabbed the ox by the ankles and dragged him behind the sofa with the other animals.

  * * *

  Calm continued to circle the room but her movements were less erratic. She was clearer, more in the present than in whatever terrible history she was tracking.

  “This place is sacred to her,” she whispered, and looked at Sasha. “It’s why she didn’t kill your uncle. She knew, even back then. He’s a link to this room, and this room is a link to…” She trailed off, one hand positioned in front of her face, as if shielding her eyes from a bright light. “To the flowers…?”

  “Glam Moon,” Martin said.

  Calm lowered her hand and frowned. He felt her inside his mind, gently picking, still deep enough in the psychic flow that her instinct was to reach for an answer rather than ask a question.

  “Her version of Eden.” Martin flipped Calm’s jacket to his other arm and shrugged. “She claims to have been there once, many years ago. Her followers on the island believe Glam Moon is real and that she’ll lead them there.”

  “Sounds like cult bullshit,” Sasha said.

  “But it always felt harmless to me, not so different from Christians believing in heaven.” Martin sighed, a bitter hiss of air that leaked from deep inside him. “So that’s why she comes here? Because it’s her link to Glam Moon?”

  “That explains the Rhapsody,” Sasha said, then elaborated for Calm’s benefit. “It’s a drug. Valerie calls it Rhapsody, but it’s actually DMT. A hallucinogen.”

  “I know what DMT is,” Calm said. “Dimethyltryptamine. One of the most potent psychedelics on the planet. Some theories suggest it’s produced in the brain—in the pineal gland—and that small amounts are released during sleep. It’s what gives us our wacky dreams. Another theory claims that we get a massive shot of DMT when we’re breathing our last, which accounts for the near-death experience phenomenon—the so-called light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “She nearly died here,” Martin said.

  “Or she did die, and came back.” Calm nodded, as if she believed this to be the case, as if such a thing happened all the time. “Now she’s using the drug, and the room’s energy, to recreate the experience.”

  “Not anymore,” Sasha said. “I won’t allow it.”

  Calm touched the air again, then circled the table once more. Martin wondered what else she would reveal, although it didn’t matter anymore. Mother Moon had survived an unthinkable ordeal, but she was still a confused, dangerous woman. He wanted nothing to do with her.

  “She kept this so well hidden,” he said. “If I hadn’t found that ring…”

  “It’s messed up,” Sasha said. The amusement had drained from her expression. Only fear and bewilderment remained. “One woman. She killed them all.”

  “Not all,” Calm said. “The tiger got away.”

  * * *

  She gathered more wood and fed the fire, aware of the silhouettes watching her. Five of them now. They stood at the edge of the firelight. Valerie tossed on the last piece of wood and sat with her back to them.

  The ox: “What are we doing here?”

  The rabbit: “Did she stage an event? Did I miss something?”

  The pig: “She called a meeting. She says she’s in control.”

  The fire swelled. Valerie wasn’t concerned that one of the islanders might see the light, or the smoke, and mosey down for a look-see. Jake Door had made the mistake of interrupting her earlier, before the pig arrived. “This a weenie roast?” he’d asked jovially, and she’d barked at him like a dog with a toothache. “Oh my crows, sorry-sorry,” he’d whimpered, hot-tailing it out of sight. Valerie knew he’d tell the others that Mother Moon was on the beach, and that they’d best give her a wide berth.

  It was perhaps ill-advised to snap at him like that, but what difference did it make? Island life, as they all knew it, was history. She didn’t need their faith anymore. Thinking about that filled her with a rush of excitement, but there was also disdain: that the islanders would follow her across the Skyway, despite doing nothing to earn their place in the Glam. Nolan was an exception; he’d been her faithful attendant for many years. She’d let him feel the sun on his face for a couple of hours a day. But to think of the others—those fucking freeloaders—swimming in her lake, eating her fruit …

  Valerie picked up the tiger mask and ran her hand across its beautiful face. “We’ll just have to see about that.”

  “What? What did she say?”

  “Shhh, she might say something else.”

  “What are we even doing here?”

  This last was the snake, who’d emerged from the shadows and joined the group. Valerie saw his thin silhouette from the corner of her eye and sneered. She recalled how he’d slithered into the deathroom all those years ago—took her by surprise because he’d slunk silently past the chimes. She’d been dozing on the sofa and suddenly the door opened and he was there, hammer in hand. It took him a moment to compute what had obviously transpired, and another to choose between fight or flight. He chose fight. Valerie was on her feet by this point, saber raised, the cleaver clutched in her other fist. “Let’s fucking do this,” the snake said, and they did it. They went back and forth, swinging wildly with their weapons, until Valerie realized that the snake’s mask limited his peripheral vision. She adapted qu
ickly—timed her strikes. The snake weakened and eventually fell. She drove the saber into his lower back.

  “Crawl,” she said.

  He crawled.

  He’d got some licks in, though. He broke several of her ribs with the hammer and maybe dislocated her jaw. Not serious injuries, but they made her fight against the rooster more challenging. He arrived after the snake died and she leaped at him from behind the door. Her opening attack was well-timed but she was weak and it irked more than hurt him. He deflected her second attack, then grabbed her by the throat and threw her to the floor. She crawled over bodies and through the blood until he grabbed her leg and yanked her backward. She flashed the saber but its blunt edge did no damage. The rooster whipped it from her hand, rolled her onto her stomach, and slapped the flat of the blade across her bare ass. “Naughty girl,” he squawked. “Naughty naughty.” The cleaver trembled in her hand but she didn’t have the angle to strike. He slapped her ass again, then she managed to roll away from him. She threw the cleaver like a tomahawk and it caught him in the thigh. He yowled and hobbled backward. Valerie saw the hammer next to the snake’s arm. She crawled toward it, grabbed the handle in both hands, and smashed it against the rooster’s knee. His leg went out from under him and he hit the floor hard. Valerie retrieved the cleaver, and with one accurate strike the fight was all but over. Like the ox and pig before him, the rooster took a long time to die. But die he did.

  Valerie waited two days for the tiger to arrive. The restaurant opened and closed its doors. The staff and diners came and went. She wondered how long it would be before the stench of the dead, or the fact that Mr. Fat Restaurateur hadn’t been seen all week, prompted the more inquisitive staff members to venture upstairs. Or maybe they’d just call the cops. Whatever, Valerie knew she was running out of time.

  He came when she was on the verge of giving up. It was early morning. The sound of a key rattling in the front door lifted her from a weak sleep. Moments later she heard footfalls on the stairs, then the hollow knocking of the chimes. Valerie sat up, alert, heart galloping. She picked up the cleaver and saber and started toward her strike position but the door opened before she reached it. The tiger swept into the room. He did not falter when he saw the bloodshed.