The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  “We saw the sign,” Jason said. “For the . . . community?”

  “Ah. Yes. The Colony. May she rest in peace. Folks heard ‘artists’ colony’ and thought they’d find a host of little cottages out here, but we only ever had the one biggie. Used to be an old loggers’ quarters, back when you could still do such things in these woods, before all the appalling environmentalists such as myself came along and ruined everything. I still like to come back for a little visit now and again, just to see the old girl. It was a magical place. Fairy-touched, until the end. The wife doesn’t like me to go inside in its current state, so . . .” He shook his head. “Coming up from the old logging road, then?”

  “Yes,” said Jason, who apparently had not only an innate sense of direction but an understanding of local geography as well. “Maureen said that’s where all the best trails are.”

  “Just be careful. It’s best to go in a group. Easy to get disoriented. You might not find your way back.” Donald shut his book, glanced back up the creek mouth, and stood to face them. “There’s all sorts of legends concerning these woods. A fishing captain taught me an old ditty about an Irish moonshiner the mountain was supposedly named after. It goes”—and here he sang—“Kelly dearly loved the Highlands but he couldn’t live alone. For the breezes used to whisper, ‘Kelly, boy, you must come home.’”

  The word echoed in Blue’s head. Home, home. Come home, you are home.

  Donald whistled for a moment, tried to find the melody again. “The breezes kept a-callin’,” he sang, dropping into a near whisper, “kept a-callin’ night and day. Till from the lofty mountain, they lured him far away.” He looked up at the sky. “So old Kelly went back where he came from. Though I suppose we all must, in due course. Even the queen.”

  Donald climbed the embankment and stopped to look down on them, the dog at his heels. The afternoon light dimmed over his shoulder and the treetops above the horizon, his shape a stark and dramatic shadow. “Don’t worry,” he said, the twin windows of his spectacles frosted white as he looked back at the sun. “You’ll find your way eventually. Just remember to take me when you do.” With a little wave, he was off.

  Gabe turned to Blue as they watched Donald disappear in the direction of the burned-out building. “Didn’t Maureen say he had dementia?”

  “Alzheimer’s, actually.”

  “So sad. I bet he has a lot of interesting stories left to tell.” Gabe let out a sprightly little whistle in poor imitation of Donald as they headed back to the trail.

  The temperature began dropping as soon as the sun set. Back at the house, Blue made stew using more salvaged pantry ingredients, served from a green ceramic soup tureen hand painted with bright slices of apple. Once the plates were cleared they collected logs from the rear deck and put a fire on in the living room, which infused the woodstove with a pleasant cedar smell. A halfhearted game of Celebrity followed as they fell one after the next into a collective food coma, lulled to bed by the flicker and heat from the flames. Elisa and Jason dragged themselves off, and Gabe tried to coax Blue along as well, but he would have none of it. “Go ahead,” Blue said, “I’ll be along soon,” and he crashed out on the throw pillows. Gabe placed a quilt over him before he tramped upstairs himself.

  Darkness.

  Underground. A mineshaft? Hard to tell, but the space is dank and oppressive, the smell of wet earth heavy in the air. Someone else is there with him, close by, the sensation of hot breath covering him from crown to foot. It’s not really breath, though. It’s dirt: he is buried alive. Unsure which way is up or out, he knows he should be scared but he isn’t. This is what he was made for.

  Pushing forward, his fingers knead the earth like dough. His palms flatten, they pull and massage and flatten once more. He extends a finger. Its tip pierces the wall of dirt, forms a small pinprick of light. The finger slims, lengthens, and transmogrifies to fill the breach, a skeleton key of flesh and bone.

  He makes a hole big enough to force his head through, slithering forward as if from a primordial pool. The glittering light blinds him. It stings, this shred of dawn’s brightness, burns the place where his eyes should be but are not. But still he crawls forth, until his body is birthed from the earth that is his home and shall always be, this land of emerald green and brightest blue.

  Even as he lopes through the forest, the insects and birds scattering from his path, he knows that he must change; that is why he has been chosen. He reaches forward with a long and sickly gray finger to pull back the branches of pine, hairs aquiver upon his elongated limbs. He was sent up from the hive to bring new life, his only purpose. Only when he succeeds will he be allowed to return.

  A field of grass, speckled with bright pink wildflowers; a distant green clapboard house, tilted upon the hill as if steeling itself against a storm; and the sound of two young children at play, their laughter circling closer and closer to the edge of the woods, where he waits for the others to arrive.

  Blue awoke with a start. He thrashed against the quilt, which had made its way up over his head, and yanked it off, scuttling crablike from the woodstove. He was soaked with sweat. From the dying embers, yes, but also from the dream; the two had become intertwined. He pulled his wet shirt over his head and threw it before the stove, an offering to the livid god of fire.

  One night back in March, Gabe, upon hearing of his recurring nightmares, had posited that Blue had died violently in a past life; it was as ridiculous a theory as you’d expect from a young man whose personal belief system was informed by the Village Voice horoscope column. But there was something about Blue’s dreams that had always held the unshakeable power of lived experience. His haunting nightmares of an underground existence had been his lifelong mystery; the woods and the house and the laughing children, though, those were all new, and spoke to him of his early years in Starling Cove.

  He still held bitter memories of an itinerant youth spent at a distance from his peers. Most children hadn’t liked him. Feared him, even, though he couldn’t understand why. There was a time he was convinced he gave off some pheromonal signal that made them walk wide of him, as if he were contagious and to be avoided at all costs. Adults enjoyed his company, however, so he would cultivate those relationships, for better or worse. It was only once he hit adolescence that his classmates began flocking to him.

  At eleven in St. Louis, Marybeth Freemont ran her Blow-Pop-sticky fingers through his downy black hair during recess before planting a wet kiss on his lips, the watermelon taste of her tongue remaining long after she’d hurried away. At thirteen in Atlanta, Ricky Barlow got into bed with him during a sleepover and sucked him off beneath his blanket before the boy climbed back to the top bunk, never to speak of the incident again. At fifteen in high school in New York, Melissa Kaufman, a senior girl, asked him to the fall dance; it was during a medley of Beastie Boys songs that she (and this was the only way to put it) deflowered him on the back stairs, where she leaned against the railing, hitched up her crinoline dress, and pulled him out of his pants and into her with a raw hunger that had shocked him.

  Apparently he’d begun giving off the right kind of pheromones. People just seemed drawn to him. His mother took notice and, calling him her “good luck charm,” dragged him along to job interviews and bingo nights at bars. On a few dates as well, a tactic so disarming that it usually worked in her favor. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she often told him after landing a new secretarial job or getting their latest landlord to forgo a missing rent payment. Eventually Blue left home and she fell sick in his absence, as if he were the root cause of all her fortune, both good and ill.

  He stepped onto the porch of the MacLeod House for some fresh air. The cove was tranquil in the muted light from the waning moon, the tower of Kelly’s Mountain vigilant in the distance. He hung the quilt over his shoulders and padded barefoot down the lawn, the grass damp between his toes. He stopped at the foot of the trail leading into the trees. The woods where the old Colony building was,
where Donald had appeared to be waiting for something, or perhaps summoning it himself.

  There was another source of light distinct from the quarter-moon: a sliver of illumination from the little shingled cabin Maureen used as a pottery studio. Blue crept across the drive to the cabin and peered through a slit in the curtains. Maureen, her back to him, was at a long, paint-spattered worktable and bent over something ridged and steely gray; he couldn’t see more than that. The mono buzz of classic rock on the radio made the entire studio hum, a comforting defiance of the immense and silent blanket of night.

  She shuffled to the slop sink on the far side of the cabin, glaze-stained latex gloves raised before her like a surgeon. Blue moved around the back to get another vantage point. By the time he made it to the opposite window, Maureen had unexpectedly turned to face him, her gray eyes bulging with alarm.

  He hurried inside. “I am so sorry,” he said, mortified. “I couldn’t sleep and I just kind of wandered down here . . .” Now that he said it, what was he doing exactly? How bizarre of him to spy on her and scare her like that, dressed in little more than a quilt! Maybe he wasn’t fully awake after all, though it sounded like a poor excuse.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack.” Maureen exhaled, a hand to her chest. “That’s not nice to do to an old woman.”

  “I’m really sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking at all.” He pulled the quilt tighter around him. “Forgive me, please. And for the record, you don’t qualify as an old woman. Not even close.”

  “Well. Thanks. That does make me feel a little better.” She gestured at a stool and Blue sat at the worktable, where an oversized clay mask lay facedown upon stained newsprint. An inverted bowl with twin slits for eyes, the mask was glazed metallic gray, a prism of shadow and color refracted in its bulbous contours.

  “Very cool,” he said.

  “Isn’t it? It’s going to be a praying mantis. Love those critters. Mantises are the best bug killers around, especially for farms and apple orchards, places like that. I’d tell you it’s my spirit animal if I wasn’t worried about you looking at me funny.” She wiped a hand across her forehead, which left a faint trail of glaze. “Do anything fun today?”

  “We smoked and went for a hike in the woods.”

  “Good stuff, huh?”

  “The weed or the woods?” Blue smiled. “They were both nice, actually. Thanks.” He picked a stray splinter of firewood from the quilt. “We saw Donald out there. He looked . . .”

  “Like he was waiting for someone?”

  “Exactly.” His heart began to thrum, as if planning an escape. “It was kind of strange, actually, but last night? He said he knew me or something. He seemed pretty sure of himself too.”

  “That’s a new one. I’ll have to add it to the list.” She opened her mouth and then shut it, and was silent for a few moments before she spoke again. “He’s waiting for Barbara, by the way.”

  “His first wife.”

  “The very same. She’s going to come back any day now. Or someone like her, maybe.” She shook her head. “But who knows? A woman who died on the Isle of Skye forty years ago might just stroll on out of there yet. These are some strange woods, after all.”

  “Donald said as much. Something about a moonshiner, old Kelly, hearing words on the wind?” He paused. “I heard something out there myself. Something in the trees.”

  “Did you now?” She sat across from him.

  “I heard . . . Well, it sounded like words being whispered, but in another language. I could understand it, though . . .” He waved his hand. “Never mind.”

  “This is sacred ground, you know. From long before moonshining days. My people, the real natives from all over these parts—some of us believe this is the resting place of Kluscap. He was the first man, and also a kind of god. Not much wilder than any other creation myth, when you think about it. I still call it Kluscap’s Mountain instead of Kelly’s, just like the rest of my family. The story goes that someday Kluscap is going to wake there from his sleep, and come with the fairies out of the sea caves under the mountain. The entrance to the caverns is actually called the Fairy Hole.” Blue was reminded of the vicious fairy-looking creatures on the walls of the burned-out Colony.

  Maureen reached over and turned off the table lamp. The only light remaining was from the dull overhead fixture, so that her face was thrown into shadow. “Of course,” she said, “there’s a stranger legend about these parts, one even Mi’kmaqs don’t dare speak of. It’s about a dangerous species known to stalk the land, from early spring through Celtic Colours. Every year, you can feel them coming as soon as the snow melts, can even set your watch to it. They might even come to you at night. Watching, waiting on the other side of the window . . .” She leaned forward, elbows on the table. “They’re called the Summer People.”

  Blue swallowed, hard. “What do they want?”

  She burst out laughing, slapping a hand down on the table like a domino player throwing a bone. “Honey, that’s my idea of a bad joke. The Summer People is what we call the tourists.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He chuckled uncomfortably. “So basically you’re saying I should have knocked first.”

  “Next time.” She rounded the table and squeezed his shoulders. “Really, though, it’s nice to have the company. Like I said, there’s something about you . . . Let’s just say you don’t seem like the usual sightseer doing the Cabot Trail for the summer.”

  He wanted to tell her what they were actually doing in Starling Cove—that he was born here, and that his friends had come with him to put to rest a part of his past. But he held his tongue. All he said was, “I guess I disguise myself better than most,” and left it at that.

  Maureen finished straightening up and killed the light before they walked out onto the lawn. “Hey,” Blue said. “Thanks for letting me hang around.”

  “Come back another night, a bit earlier, and I’ll teach you how to throw clay on the wheel. It’s especially fun if you’re a bit toasted.”

  “It’s a date. If I can get you back, that is. Maybe I can cook you a meal?”

  “Lovely. I heard you have the touch, after all.”

  “Listen,” he said once they neared the drive. “What you said about Elisa, having ‘the glow’? Did you mean you thought she was pregnant?”

  “Who’s been whispering in your ear?” she said, a sly smile creeping across her lips. “Good night, Michael. Sweet dreams.”

  “Blue,” he said. “Blue,” but she didn’t hear him, only waved good-bye and headed down the narrow dirt path through the vegetable garden until she disappeared around the side of the house. There was a moment of perfect silence before the screen door slammed shut, echoing across the cove like a gunshot.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  Blue waited until Tuesday to call the estate lawyer in Halifax, who gave him the number of the local property agent responsible for the house sale. By the time they finally connected it was already Thursday, leaving him to wonder, with only two days left of the trip, whether it was worth seeing the house at all. What was he going to do, suddenly fall in love with the place? Not going to happen. Every credit card was maxed out, and he was three months behind on rent for Cyan. The problem was that he couldn’t keep up with demand, and had no idea how to manage costs or amortize his debts, especially his less savory ones.

  Speaking of which, he had received three missed calls on his cellphone in the past few days from Vincente Castro; the fact that the loan shark had ominously failed to leave any messages made Blue’s kneecaps itch. Even if he got fifty thousand bucks back for the house after taxes—and that was optimistic—it wasn’t much of a leg up. But he had to grab it, and grab it fast. He scheduled a time to view the house the next day and would sign the papers then and there.

  Meanwhile, he tried to keep himself occupied. He drove with the others to Baddeck for ice cream and strolled the boardwalk along the Bras d’Or Lake, followed by a lunch of lobst
er rolls and beer at the Water’s Edge; dinner at Chanterelle, overlooking St. Ann’s Bay; the next day a trip to Joe’s Scarecrow Village near Cheticamp and a second pass at the supermarket so they could stock up on provisions for the rest of the week’s meals. More nights by the fire, and whisky and wine, though Elisa refrained; he still couldn’t bring himself to ask her why. There was more hiking as well, though not for Blue, who refused to brave the woods. His sleep was finally sweet again, free of nightmares for the first time in recent memory.

  He arranged to meet the property agent on Friday afternoon while the others were out on a hike. Waiting at the foot of the drive, he halfheartedly smoked a cigarette; in the past couple of days, he’d only had two or three. The taste had become newly awful to him, as if the pack had staled overnight. Maybe it’s time I finally quit, he thought, and stubbed out the butt beneath the heel of his engineer boot.

  A dirty maroon Chevy Suburban pulled over to the side of the road, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust. “You Michael? Stanley Baker,” the agent said with a smile. “Ready to go?”

  Dressed in a black-and-red-checked shirt, his collar crumpled beneath a frizzy gray ponytail, Stanley bore little resemblance to the pseudoslick salesmen that Blue and his mother had traipsed after into dozens of rat holes over the years. They made small talk on the short drive; it turned out he was also a licensed attorney, so they could take care of the sale as soon as Blue saw the house. “It isn’t in great shape,” Stanley warned, “but you got a decent price for it. They’re foreign buyers, from Belgium. Go figure. There’s a lot on the market just sitting, so consider yourself lucky.” He went on to offer his condolences, which Blue thanked him for, though he felt a bit of an imposter seeing as how he hadn’t seen or spoken to Grandma Flora since he was five.

  Near the top of Kelly’s Mountain, the elevation caused Blue’s ears to pop. They popped again a few minutes later on the other side, where they wound their way down and then up a dirt path, the forest thickening as Portland Road snaked northward. To grandmother’s house we go, he thought, and grimaced.