by Robert Levy
He found a lacquered wood tray on a high shelf with the words M. Benoit carved into the underside, and used it to bring the plates, buns, and orange juice to the porch. Gabe propped open the screen door with a sculpted bear’s head mask that stared up from two blank eyeholes slashed into the dark copper.
“Oh my God.” Jason rested his bun on his plate and sat back in his chair, his eyes squeezed shut as if he were pained. “Oh. Oh, Jesus, that’s good. I want to savor it.”
“Amazing,” Gabe said, and swatted at a persistent fly drawn by the buns’ honeyed odor. “You should get these on the menu. I mean, this is just amazing. I don’t want to finish.”
But they would say that. “You like?” he asked Elisa. She would tell him.
“It is beyond,” she said, and raised a glass of juice in salute.
He tried to glean her physical state, the way Maureen had. Was she chewing too fast? No, slow, deliberate. Mindful. All told, there were no overt signs she was eating for two. And how pregnant could she be anyway? A month? Two? More? Maybe she hadn’t told Jason yet, hadn’t told anyone. Maybe she didn’t know herself. He forced it out of his mind, an itch he refused to scratch, especially the troublesome thought at its center.
It was still only Sunday and he couldn’t reach the estate attorney about his grandmother’s house, so the day was all theirs. Maureen had told them about the canoes docked at the water, and after clearing the dishes they sauntered down the steep hill, bright sparkles on the stony shore cast by the early-afternoon sun that made the wet rocks appear dusted with glass shards, if not quite diamonds. Jason embarked in one canoe with Elisa at the bow; they cracked jokes and laughed as they coasted out onto the cove, before any of them had fetched paddles. Blue hurried to the dockside shed, which reeked of mildew and animal droppings. The smell reminded him of the earthy stench of the night forest, as well as his dreams. He looked down at the water, his image reflected back from a dozen different vantages.
After cruising the cove for a couple of hours they returned to the house for a late lunch. With a note that read “A few things from my garden,” Maureen had dropped off a basket of fresh vegetables, which Blue used to whip up a summer salad that was eagerly devoured. She had also included an envelope of weed and Zig-Zags. “Our very own pot fairy!” as Gabe put it, passing Blue a freshly rolled joint. Elisa and Jason abstained, which wasn’t unusual; Jason was pretty straitlaced, and she never did like weed much, probably hadn’t smoked since their club days. Still, he tried not to wonder anew about this supposed glow of hers.
They decided to go for a quick hike before it got dark, and took one of the trails behind the house. Tree branches arched overhead like a cathedral ceiling, casting distorted shadows upon the packed ground. Blue had always enjoyed the outdoors, fond memories of idle summers in which he wandered over Oregon railroad tracks or kicked rocks along gravel roads in Iowa, driftwood and shells collected beachside up and down both coasts. Alone, mostly, because he didn’t have time to make many friends before his mom would uproot him and hustle him off to the next town or city.
They walked for some time and had fallen silent with the effort, Jason at the lead while the others marched behind at a steady clip. Blue fell back, slowing further to take in a particularly glorious view of a cluster of trees bearing incongruous blood-red leaves amid the lush wall of green. Flycatchers cheeped overhead, darting in and out of the tree canopy. There was a whispering noise from back in the woods, vague susurrations in the vicinity of the red trees. He put an ear to the wind. Someone humming? Or just the dull buzzing of insect life? He started down the path again but the murmuring returned, as abruptly as it had ceased. Words, rushing past . . .
It sounded like a foreign language, every other syllable in a lofty register and accompanied by a throaty animal scratch in an ambiguous, genderless pitch. A single word jumped out at him.
home
He heard it again, twice—home, home—and listened for more.
home
home home
come home you are home
you are home
“Listen,” Blue whispered, but the others were already out of earshot. He wanted to call out to whomever it was but was afraid of scaring them off. The words beckoned him closer, attempting to draw him into the woods, and though he was frightened he felt nothing so much as seduced.
He tried to step back but his foot refused to rest on its heel so he stepped forward instead, into the woods. The voice magnified and distorted, words layered over one another now so he could no longer glean their meaning. Other voices joined until they formed a jumbled chorus, a static wall of noise. Blue grimaced and closed his eyes, bending to rest his palms on his knees. Right under him was an anthill, its occupants streaming out from the nest in a frenzied torrent, their movements scattered and panicked. Atop the anthill sat a single dewdrop, its domed surface reflecting back a grossly enlarged image of himself. He was all eyes.
“Blue?”
The others had stopped at a fork in the trail about thirty yards ahead. “Are you okay?” Elisa called out, but it was Gabe who dropped his pack and hurried to Blue’s side.
“Maybe we should head back,” Gabe said, placing a hand on Blue’s shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Blue said, and righted himself. “Just got a little dizzy.” He took a bottle of water from his pack and drank.
“Like last night.” Gabe’s expression was a riddle. “Last night, when I found you on the lawn, you looked the same. Staring into the trees like you were . . . transfixed.”
“I’m fine.” He tried to smile, and stepped back onto the trail. “Don’t worry about me. Okay?”
Gabe was right, though: the voices carried the very same shock of recognition, along with a powerful feeling of being battered from all sides. He could no longer recall their exact sound; that was lost to him, along with the rapturous sensation that had accompanied them. All that remained was an absence, a void, along with his painfully familiar sense of unbelonging, amplified. He wanted the rapture to return.
Jason approached, followed by Elisa. “Look,” she said, and pushed back unruly boughs to reveal a sign, faded green paint flecked inside the grooves of wood. The sign sat atop a tilted iron pole and was crafted in the shape of a lithe Tinker Bell fairy in flight, its folded-back wings and Kewpie-doll face carved in profile. The words The Starling Cove Friendship Outpost & Artists Colony, Est. 1971 were etched in script along the border. Aside the legend, the fairy’s outstretched hand pointed in the direction of the deep woods.
“Catchy name,” Elisa said dryly as she took a photograph. “Blue, is this where—”
“Yep. We seem to have found my place of birth.” Home. You are home.
“Really?” Jason said. “You were actually born here? Out here in the woods?”
“All I know is that I was born in a barn.”
“Like Jesus!” Elisa and Gabe both said, then laughed.
“Yeah,” Blue said. “But instead of three wise men they probably had a crèche full of chanting doulas. My grandmother must have been horrified.”
“So,” Jason said. “Want to check it out?”
Following an overgrown path up the hill, they came to a three-story brick building. At over three hundred feet long it was entirely out of scale, the only structure around, yes, but also the largest they’d seen so far in the cove. It looked to be an old mill, its windows devoid of glass. It soon became clear the place was burned out: half a caved-in roof, no intact windows, smoke damage visible around the casings and roofline. The few remaining clay eaves were cracked and charred, creeper vines threaded over cold gray stone and a gaping archway that must have once framed a now-absent set of doors.
Inside, a diorama of vegetation mirrored the surrounding forest, a sea of weeds carpeted by untamed grass. Water damage cratered the ceiling, warped beams yielding glimpses of the upper floors and the late-afternoon sky beyond. Webs of vines grew from the foundation and ran wild along the brick, weighing down rotted t
apestries that hung from the waterlogged rafters. Broken bottles and rusty beer cans glimmered beneath the bank of narrow window frames: the ruined structure looked to be a sanctuary of sorts, most likely for bored teens. I could have been one of those kids, Blue thought as he eyed the stretch of crude graffiti down the narrow hallway. There but for the grace of my mother.
Once they entered the inner chamber, they paused to take in the scene: a series of cracked and peeling but surprisingly intact murals, corner to corner and floor to ceiling along the four walls. Blue crossed the space to the shadowed end of the room, while the others stood in the entryway, painted as the snarling mouth of a coyote. In the dim light he could make out a life-sized illustration of what appeared to be a Russian Blue cat in flight, its wings actual tree branches protruding from its silver-gray fur as it soared majestically toward a sneering yellow-faced sun overhead. He leaned in closer for a better look. The animal wore a tuxedo jacket and ruffled shirt; otherwise it was pantless, with a singed photo of an erect penis decoupaged between its legs, shellacked along with the rest of the mural. The cat thrust forward a rusty corkscrew in its paw; like the tree branch wings, this too was collaged, a real corkscrew affixed to the drawing with its tip protruding from the wall, inches from Blue’s eyes.
He snapped his head away and almost knocked into Jason. “Fascinating stuff,” Jason said. “Pretty compulsive, wouldn’t you say? It looks like, what do you call it, outsider art. Am I right? Hey, wait. Is that a flying cat with a dick?”
“Looks like.” Blue put out his arm. “Watch out. You’ll stick yourself.”
“Yeesh.” Jason touched a finger to the side of the corkscrew. “This place isn’t exactly childproofed, is it? Was it like this when you were growing up?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, I think I would remember all this.” He was beginning to get the feeling that his lack of memory had been necessarily adaptive.
Beneath the cat was a water-damaged illustration of a swirled banner like a map legend, upon which Fluffy Gray Mirrorcat of the Otherfolk, Fortifier of the Place Below and Protector of Our Queen was written in delicate cursive. A few feet down the paper’s length the cat reappeared; here he bore neither tree branch wings nor human erection but a leash fashioned from a leather shoelace and led by an unseen hand. It was some kind of continuing story, told not only in pictures and words but in associations and archetypes, an ongoing narrative leading from one wall to the next. Alongside the illustrations were passages written in unfamiliar symbols and languages, Gaelic perhaps among them. The images made Blue uncomfortable on a visceral level.
And they were everywhere. His eyes couldn’t rest on a single unmarked surface: the walls caked in grime to the dirt floor, the crumbling chimneys all illustrated with honeycombed beehives and diving trout and a tarantula driving what looked to be a police car, frolicking manticores, a nude woman with a red star on her back, the flowering roots of swollen tubers. Though faded by time, the murals were crafted with expertise, broadly characterized but with the precise exactitude of Matisse paper cuts. Images a child might have chosen, but rendered by the assured hand of an adult. All of it was life-sized and perfectly to scale.
Elisa called to them from the stone steps leading upstairs. Blue went to follow, but stopped short of a decrepit kitchen, the relics of an old stove and washbasin blackened with soot. Beyond the kitchen were two battered metal doors. The first was shut tight, but the second was slightly ajar, a dried-out rag hanging from a nail on its back. The dim light from the gaping windows barely penetrated this far inside the building, but through the exposed rafters he caught a faint glinting past the cracked door, a reflective wink in the darkness. With the toe of his boot Blue teased the door open, obscuring what little light he had. He retrieved his plastic lighter from his pocket, its modest flicker illuminating the inside of a closet decorated with the illustrated narrative that had spread throughout the building like mold.
In the center of the left wall was a string of yarn-haired paper dolls, made to resemble children. Hands fused one to the next, their eyes deep pools of charcoal, the children ran from a battalion of what appeared to be fang-toothed fairies, their tissue paper wings afloat like lengths of shed snakeskin over an uneven topography of flaking paint. On the opposite wall was a near mirror image, only here the children appeared gleeful and maniacal, and chased the fairies instead. Their needle-fanged prey, alarmed, fled in the direction of the open door, two of the children shepherded in their midst.
I’ve seen this before, Blue thought, and stepped inside the closet.
He held the lighter up to the ceiling. A red-skinned angel, expression beneficent with eyes closed in either ecstasy or solemnity, was painted on the scratched boards overhead. Flowing white robes draped the angel’s chest like a toga, its red wings aloft in massive crests, cellophane traced through with fine pencil mimicking gold leaf that reminded him of a butterfly’s wings. Spiraled in cursive beneath the figure was written Borealis the Mother was sent up from the Heavens of the Faraway World to bring comfort to the New Children of the Screaming Places on a curled banner scroll; the words that followed trailed off the ceiling into illegibility.
Above the angel’s head, a tiny halo: an actual gold band, like a wedding ring, embedded in the wall. He’d seen this ring before as well. He was sure of it. Could it have belonged to his mother? His grandmother? Or was it always right here, stuck to the closet ceiling?
On the floor was yet another illustration, this one painted across the wooden slats. It was similar in manner to the angel, wings spanning the cramped space from edge to edge. Only this was no angel. Naked skin chalk white, its bright honeycombed eyes stared out from a tapered and sunken face, jagged teeth bared like an insect’s mandibles. The wings were leathery like a bat’s wings, wide and capped by elongated fingers that ended in serrated claws. Blue squatted and brought the increasingly warm lighter closer to the rendering. The creature’s nails and teeth were tiny rusted staples riveted directly into the floorboards, its eyes hollowed-out copper filings hot-glued inside the dark spaces between the slats.
There was a legend beneath this one as well, but it was written on the floor behind him. He stepped out of the closet for a better look when a hand grabbed his arm.
“Do you hear that?” Gabe said, head cocked.
They crept down the hall. Blue thought of the words from the woods, spoken in that unidentifiable yet achingly familiar tongue. The shifting wind through the open windows made any sound difficult to place, and he wasn’t sure if his imagination was getting the better of him.
“I think so,” Blue said. “Someone whispering?”
“Someone whistling.”
Elisa and Jason stole down the stone stairs. They all heard it, a lilting little tune carried on the air, soft and then softer, depending on the direction of the wind. They went out back—not much there but an old covered well, along with some sodden kindling and planks—and stood silent for a few moments, trying to pinpoint the sound. There was a crunch of leaves farther out in the woods, and Jason stepped forward, placing a protective hand in front of Elisa. “Hello?” he called out. “Is someone there?”
The whistling stopped. Another sound now, softer but no longer masked: water, close by and babbling. Jason tiptoed off the path into the trees with Blue behind him, while Gabe and Elisa hung back.
About ten yards into the woods there was a break in the foliage where a small creek wound its way downhill. Beside the water a man in a checked flannel shirt and nylon waders crouched upon a rock; a book was laid open across his lap, but he stared into the distant trees.
“Donald,” Jason called out. The older man raised his head and smiled, then returned his attention to the spot where the stream disappeared into the woods. “How are you doing today?”
“Not terribly,” Donald said. “Just out here looking. Dry summer . . .”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Not yet.”
Elisa and Gabe made their w
ay down the embankment, and Donald tracked them, shielding his eyes from a shaft of sunlight penetrating the leaves. “There’s four of you,” he concluded. “Bridge numbers.” A loud rustling sounded behind him and a large brown dog scampered from the underbrush. “This is Olivier. He was trained as a bird dog, which I grew up calling a pointer. He’s a rescue dog. My wife got him for me to ‘better my mood.’ ”
The dog made a beeline straight for Elisa, who tried shooing it away until Jason stepped in and lured it back toward the creek with a branch. “Sorry, doggie,” she said by way of apology.
“She’s allergic,” Jason explained. He tossed the stick a great distance; the dog disappeared back into the brush only to reappear a moment later, branch in mouth and begging for another go. “We once stayed at a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont and she had an attack. After landing up in the emergency room we found out that a dog had been in our room. It was scary. She could barely breathe.”
“Actually, it was a cat,” Elisa said. “But dogs aren’t so great for me either.”
“Barbara is just the same,” Donald said, and peered at her through his Coke bottle lenses. “She’d never let us have a dog, even though the boys begged for one.” His words were punctuated with reverence, as if his former wife and Elisa shared some rare and magical trait. Blue’s stomach tightened, and he thought of Maureen.
“Where are you all heading from?” Donald asked, and ran his hands over the dog’s hide, dirty fingers dug deep into brown fur.
