by John Grant
Where things were done differently.
That was how it was as we drove through the gateway the blood-red sunshine filled.
~
The blinding glare of the sunlight shattered, revealing itself to me as clouds of rusty-winged insects that fluttered away, their group interest caught by something else as I waved my arm, shooing them.
How could I have imagined they were sunlight? The sun was at its noon height in an unblemished silver sky. Tania and I were walking hand-in-hand through ankle-deep grass and little black-button-eyed wildflowers across a gently curving foothill. The flowers were mainly pink and white, though there were blues and yellows scattered here and there, as well as some distinctly more exotic colors, ones I couldn't quite find a name for. The grass was the unnatural green of Astroturf, but its fresh smell told me it was real, not plastic. There was a curious blur across the ground; it took me a few moments to realize that the tip of each blade of grass was stained a faint, airy violet, the color that ultraviolet might have if you could see it, the color of the faint breeze that both warmed and cooled my face.
And all around us there was birdsong, although I could see no birds.
My mind hopped back a pace or two.
Real, not plastic, I had been thinking.
I could feel Tania's fingers curled around mine.
I glanced down at the hand that was holding hers, then at the other.
"I'm ..." I began.
"Hush," she said quietly. "There's no need to be saying anything, Quinn."
Again her voice had changed. The precision of her non-accent had become more than it had ever been, so that I had the impression I was listening not to a voice but to pure language. At the same time there was something archaic in it, too.
I dragged my eyes away from the hand of mine that was in hers and followed the line of her bare arm up to her face. Gone were the blue jeans and the sensible striped blouse she'd put on this morning. She was wearing a dress the same color as the tips of the grass-blades, and as insubstantial-seeming. The neck of it was high, prim, so that the bareness of her arms was a near-uncanny incongruity. The hem of the dress, I saw out of the corner of my vision, brushed the grass we walked upon, and trailed out behind her like half-seen downy feathers.
She trod the ground as lightly as the feathers rustled, as if her body had given up all of its matter to the sky.
Tania turned her head slowly toward me, meeting my gaze.
These were the eyes of my wife I was looking into, of my Tania, and yet they were no eyes I'd ever seen before. I was gazing into shady green corridors that retreated infinitely far back, into places and times where I was not entirely certain I wanted to go. Her lips were thinner, her mouth a little wider, and was there a trace of an unaccustomed cruelty in the laughter lines at the corners? The porcelain whiteness of her skin had become almost opalescent. Her hair was the pale, pale shade of highly polished pure gold, where the yellowness is more of an idea than a hue. In it she wore a coronet plaited of the variously colored field flowers that sprinkled the field we walked through. Her forehead was unmarked. The eyebrows beneath it, darker than her head hair, were fine lines that seemed to have been painted on rather than grown; one was raised a little above the other, giving her an expression I might have interpreted as cold cynicism had it been on any other face.
"Who are you?" I said so softly I'm not sure I spoke the words aloud. "Where are we?"
She laughed.
"Less of your questions, questions, questions all the time, darling Quinn." She lifted my hand as if it were a plaything and skipped forward a step or two, pulling me into the dance with her. "You know you have always wanted to see my folks. Well, now you shall. They have been waiting so long and eagerly to meet my lover from the west, and to share with him the love they have for me. They have a ripe welcome waiting for you, my Quinn. But do not pester them with your questions, the way I allow you to pester me. They might not be so gracious if their tempers frayed."
Again she glanced at me. Her eyes were wide, mocking.
I suppose I should have begun to get frightened around now. Who was this stranger I'd thought I knew through and through? Where was she leading me? Who were these enigmatic people who might harm me if their "tempers frayed"? Had I entered some hallucinatory madness? Was the madness even my own?
But, gazing into those antiquity-colored, teasing eyes of Tania, I trusted her entirely – trusted her far more even than I ever had. Wherever I was, I was here because of her love for me. This world was an extension of her. I could no more come to any real harm here than she would strike me a fatal blow with her own hand.
"Watch where you're going, Quinn," she said lightly. "If you trip and fall I'm not sure if I could hold you."
Obediently I turned my head forward. The curved rim of the hillside was approaching us faster, it seemed, than the steps we took could account for.
"Where are we ...?" I started to say, then remembered her stricture.
"Stop asking," she said anyway. "There is nothing you know how to ask about. Just be, Quinn."
And then we were over the breast of the slope and looking down from its small height onto a little valley. A stream curled along the bottom. By the stream's side there gathered like idly curious spectators a collection of small stone houses with grassed roofs – they looked like pictures I'd seen of Highland crofts. A white horse grazed unfenced. Two dogs cavorted together, warring over something I couldn't see from here that floated in the air above them. A ram looked up towards us as if it had been observing our arrival, its twin horns like hard nails. Smoke coiled from the chimney of the largest of the houses, which was still small.
"The second glen on the right," I said quietly.
Just a few yards ahead of us, a notice had been stuck into the ground – a flat sheet of wood nailed to a stake. The untidily painted letters read:
ABANDON YOURSELF
All Ye Who Enter Here
There was no sign of any other human being but us.
"Everyone's inside," explained Tania before I could break her rules again. "They're preparing for us."
"No need for them to dress up specially," I said, making a joke of the remark's inadequacy.
"Oh, but they will, they will," she assured me. "Come on, Quinn. Time to meet the folks."
~
Much later, although it was still noon, there were nine of us crammed into the only room of what I was told should properly be called the Bothy. In Tania's absence, her sister Joanna and her brother had both wed; they had brought their spouses. Meanwhile Alysson, the unmarried sister, was showing a generous bulge; she proudly informed us the baby was due in under four months. We'd had plenty of beer to drink as we ate what seemed to be an entire sheep, with potatoes and a coarse kind of beet called a turnip. The air was thick: everyone but me was smoking the cigarettes Tania had brought with her from the States. The noise level was getting high. Faces were getting red. Eyes were getting bloodshot and watery.
I'd expected Tania's family to be as ethereal as she herself had become while we were approaching this place, but instead they were of big-boned, broad-shouldered country stock, as assuredly physical as an ox. And Tania herself was no longer the unworldly creature she'd seemed to be on the hillside. As we'd descended into the valley she'd shed her strangeness like steam; by the time we reached the Bothy she was the same Tania who'd long ago seduced me, then married me. But perhaps not the same Tania who'd left America with me, for this one bore smiles that seemed to come all the way up from the soul.
The only thing left of the hillside Tania was her dress, which was made of a fabric that fascinated me. As I sat on the floor at her feet, leaning against her knees – there weren't enough chairs to go around, and we'd eaten off big wooden plates on the floor – I repeatedly, however hard I tried to stop myself, took a fold of the garment's hem between my fingers and rubbed it back and forth. It felt as if it were made of woven water. I couldn't decide if it was the peculiarity of the f
abric's texture that drew me again and again, or just the fact that I had fingers against whose skin I could feel it. Her calves beneath the cloth were slender and smooth and cooler than they should have been in the heat of the room. Whenever I thought no one was looking I'd covertly caress them, making her stir in her seat.
Outside, it was still broad daylight. Inside, it was night, and we depended on the guttering flames of half a dozen oil lamps placed strategically around the room. We could see the sunshine through the Bothy's half-open door and its three or four small grimy windows, but it seemed to be unable to penetrate more than a few inches into where we were, as if the air itself snuffed out the brightness.
Tania's family all called her by one of those affectionately derogatory nicknames families often use among each other. In her case it was Loachy. I knew there must be a tale behind the name, but somehow I never thought to ask her for it. Soon enough, I found myself using the name myself, sometimes. A love-name.
For the third time that evening I needed to go take a leak. I was apparently the only one of the company who had any such requirement, but earlier Tania's father, James, had pointed out a tiny stone shack, like an upright sarcophagus, inside which I'd sure enough found an earth privy. The pit was perfectly clean, when I glanced down into it. My guess was it had been specially dug for me just a few hours ago.
Explaining quietly to Tania, who was busily occupied in laughing at one of brother Alan's more ribald jokes – my scatologies earlier in the car had been as nothing compared to the stuff this family regarded as commonplace – I hauled myself to my feet, marvelling yet again at the way my hands obeyed the commands I gave them. Taking exaggerated care not to trip over the bakelite telephone which sat anachronistically in the middle of the floor, or the flex that snaked off from it into an unexplored corner, I made my way haphazardly out into the daylight. I'm sure they all of them knew of my going – knew precisely which muscles I'd moved and the number of breaths I'd taken – but not one of them gave the slightest sign of registering any change. Indeed, there was something quite unnatural about the way the hubbub of excited chatter and laughter stayed totally unaltered, I thought woozily as I shut the door behind me and made my way to the privy. It sounded somehow ... orchestrated, somehow pre-recorded, like the laughter track on a bad television sitcom. What were they really thinking, these people? What were they communicating to each other under the cloak of smutty jokes and oddly un-pin-downable reminiscences?
What did they truly look like?
Tania had told me they'd been preparing themselves for my arrival, and I'd assumed they were putting on finery, adding final touches to make-up or hair. But that most certainly hadn't been the case. The men were in farm-soiled loose trousers, James's held up despite the overhang of his belly by a piece of hairy string knotted around his waist; their shirts were coarsely woven cotton. The women were in smock-like dresses with torn hems and cooking stains. If any of them had brushed their hair – or their teeth – in a week there was no evidence of it. All the men needed a shave, and, although I'd never dream of saying a word about this to Tania, so did her mother.
If they'd not been dressing up for me, was it conceivable they'd been dressing down? Could it be that Tania's family, in their natural state, resembled the loved, the lovely, yet the in some measure terrifying creature who'd accompanied me across the grassed hillside to reach here? Had they donned solidly corporeal bodies, convincingly detailed right down to Alysson's pregnant swelling, in order to make me feel less of a stranger?
Or might they have had some other motive for adopting their guises? Was their intent, less benevolently, to deceive?
I shivered as I creaked the privy's wooden door open. For a while up there on the hillside I'd been certain that the place to which Tania was leading me was Fairyland, and I still wasn't sure this conclusion had been too far askew. The face I'd gazed into on the slopes, the face with the eyes of a lost and ancient time, could have been the quintessence of La Belle Dame Sans Merci. At military school we'd studied Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as one of our few concessions to culture, and I'd learned enough to know that fairies weren't the cute little bundles of mischief the Victorians had turned them into. They had cruel ways with mortals who strayed into their realm.
Again, I should have been frightened, but I wasn't. Wasn't Tania here? In both of her guises, I knew, she loved me. She'd not let grief befall me.
When I returned to the Bothy and pushed on the door, the sound of raucous laughter was cut off abruptly. The daylight followed me as I slowly entered the room, which was now as silent and empty as if it had been deserted for decades by all except spiders. The dust on the floor showed no foot-trails except my own. The air smelled musty and disused; all trace of cigarette smoke had vanished. What had been gravy-streaked platters just a couple of minutes ago were now loose boards warping up from the floor's level. The picked bones of the sheep's carcass had become a grey skeleton so desiccated it looked as if it would collapse into dust if I trod too heavily.
Where the quaint heavy old telephone had sat, the chrome of its dial mottled by the corrosion of at least one generation's fingertips, there was a glass bottle, with the hipflask shape and about the size of a pint of liquor. The bottle's shoulders were the only thing in this room that still gleamed. I moved to pick it up, pausing reflexively for a moment as I bent toward it and then remembering that here, in this land of Tania's, I had the fingers with which to grip it.
It felt chilled in my hand.
I took the bottle out into the full sunlight and held it up. The contents were that pale straw color that denotes either one of the finest single malts or a healthy urine specimen. I had a suspicion they weren't the latter.
The bottle didn't have the usual liquor screw-top but a cork not unlike a champagne cork, fastened in place with a splotch of hard red wax. There was some kind of hieroglyph on the seal, a logo, but the wax had squished around it so I couldn't make out any of the details. For a label, the front of the bottle bore what seemed like just a scrap of paper torn off a larger sheet and hurriedly stuck on. Handwritten on it was one of those long, complicated Gaelic words that make you think the monkey's been at the typewriter again. I hadn't the remotest idea what it meant. Probably DRINK ME.
I broke the seal and squeaked the cork out, sniffed. Decidedly not a urine sample.
"Quinn!"
I looked around, then up. At the top of the slope down which we'd come, Tania was standing, waving at me. The breeze was pressing her dress flat against one side of her body; on the other side the dress's long feathery tail was blown out like a flag, becoming progressively less discernible the further it was from her until finally, I could see, it was the gauziest of clouds in the silver sky.
She saw that she'd caught my attention, and beckoned.
Quickly, touched by an irrational guilt, I wormed the cork back in and started to put the bottle down by the Bothy door, but she gesticulated wildly with her arms that I should bring it with me.
Relieved that my beloved was still here, in whatever form she might now be bearing, I almost ran up the gentle grade, arriving beside her hardly out of breath. One glance as I approached her was enough to tell me that the slightly tipsy giggler of the Bothy was gone, replaced by the severe monarch whose eyes held too many years.
I almost tripped over the little wooden sign in the grass. Someone – Tania? – had turned it around, so that now it faced the valley, and myself. I hesitated briefly, expecting the wording to have been altered, but it still read
ABANDON YOURSELF
All Ye Who Enter Here
For a moment it struck me that the message had it wrong this time – I was, after all, not entering but leaving – and then I shook my head. The sign was perfectly correct. I was entering a world that was far smaller than the one I'd been visiting. Yet, for all that, the instruction made little more sense than it had the last time. How could I abandon myself? Why would I want to? Had I abandoned myself in the valley an
d not realized I'd done so? Was it myself that I had to abandon, or my self – my selfhood?
I opened my mouth to ask Tania, but then I remembered the stern way she'd told me I should stifle my questions, just be.
But human beings aren't really human beings unless they're inquiring about everything around them. Without realizing it was a question, I said:
"Where are James and Ellen, Alysson, the others?"
I expected a snapped response, but instead Tania smiled.
She reached out and with a long fingernail, almost a talon, tapped the side of the bottle I held.
"They're in here," she said. "Where they've always been."
What she'd said didn't seem to have any meaning, but I didn't dare push my luck and probe further.
"Now, Quinn, it's time for us to go back to a place where this day can end."
She turned away from the valley. Somehow her dress shifted on her body so that it was still the same as before, one side close against her and the other petering off infinitely into the sky.
I took the hand she held out to me, and kept pace with her as she half-walked, half-skipped away across the field full of violet-tinged grass and multicolored flowers. Yet again we were surrounded by birdsong and by the little rusty insects we'd first encountered when we'd driven into the sun. Was it these insects, not unseen birds, that were the ones chirping and trilling? Or were they not insects at all but the actual bird calls themselves, visible and tangible in this land of Tania's?
We tore across the grass, far more quickly than our legs could actually be taking us. I felt as if I were the camera strapped to the front of the express train in one of those old sped-up movies they used to show to impress small children, me among them. Faster and faster we went, until the low hills in the distance became little more than purple blurs, even though the grass-blades and the starry flowers on the ground beneath us were perfectly clear.
