The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

“What’s that?”

  “You’re trembling.”

  Jason raised his hand. Sure enough, his fingers were shaking, a hummingbird blur of motion.

  “Are you cold?” Gabe asked. “Do you want to sit by the fire?” He started to get up, but Jason gestured for him to sit.

  “I’m fine,” Jason said, and clamped his hand to his knee. “I feel hot, actually.” He wiped a glaze of sweat from his brow. “Wow. This is . . . unexpected.”

  “You want to get some fresh air?”

  Jason lowered himself onto the porch swing. Gabe was in silhouette against the railing, the nearly full moon bright in a cloudless sky. They sat in silence, listened to the sounds of birds and insects flitting about the cove, the low breeze in the grass, the trees. The wine warmed Jason’s skin, and he settled a bit; he’d had a few panic attacks before, and knew the symptoms both personally and professionally. That’s what you get for dwelling on the past. No wonder he preferred peering inside other people’s heads instead.

  Gabe stared off into the woods beyond the house, and soon Jason found himself following suit, accompanied by a nagging sensation that something was staring back. This place was getting to him.

  “Feeling any better?” Gabe said after a while.

  “Yes, actually. Thank you. I’m just tense.”

  “I know what you mean.” Gabe sipped from his beer, then spat over the railing. “Ever since Blue—ever since they both went missing—I’ve felt . . . different. Emptier. Like a part of me is missing too.”

  Jason tried not to look at the trees.

  “So what next?” Gabe said. “More canvassing?”

  “Couldn’t hurt. I also want to find out more about Blue’s grandmother, and what happened when he went missing. The first time.”

  “Shouldn’t we ask Maureen and Donald about it?”

  “Absolutely. It would be nice to have some light shed on all this. We should also track down the one who went missing along with Blue, the little girl.”

  “That’s going to be tough, unless you’ve got a Ouija board. According to the newsletters, she drowned a few months after they walked out of the woods.”

  “Jesus. Her poor family . . . Can you imagine, after going through all that? Well, maybe her folks are still around. I’ll ask Maureen when they come back from Halifax.”

  “What about Fred Cronin?” Gabe said. “I’m sure he has plenty left to tell us.”

  “No doubt. But that’s not the kind of path I want to travel down.”

  “Why not? I know he sounds kind of crazy, but still. If we want the police to pursue all leads, shouldn’t we be doing the same?”

  “That guy is clearly delusional. Not to mention a serious alcoholic, from the looks of it. And on top of that, he’s probably messed up from drugs as well. For all we know, he’s another one of those crankheads.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

  Jason couldn’t keep from raising an eyebrow. All this nonsense reminded him of what it was like trying to reason with his sister, in the months leading up to her institutionalization.

  “I’m just saying,” Gabe went on undaunted, “Fred’s the only one who seems to have some idea—any idea—of what might have really happened. So I wouldn’t, you know, discount everything he says just because it doesn’t fit into your worldview or whatever.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s not in my job description to indulge people’s fantasies. Quite the opposite, in fact. Especially when said fantasies involve my missing wife and, you know, mythological creatures.”

  “Well, maybe there’s something to it. Have you heard of the Green Children of Woolpit? A boy and girl in England—no one knew them—they just walked right out of the woods. A total mystery. That was a thousand years ago, but it’s the same kind of Hansel and Gretel story, only in reverse. Apparently they were both green-skinned and spoke in their own weird language. The boy died, but the girl integrated into society.”

  “So were they aliens, or fairies, or what?”

  “Exactly,” Gabe said and nodded, in a strange little imitation of Fred Cronin. “I’ve been reading up on different kinds of unexplainable disappearances, centuries’ worth. It seems the two most common types of abductees are young children and pregnant women.”

  “Well, nothing to worry about there,” Jason said, a little too quickly.

  Gabe lowered his eyes, then raised them to the woods. He opened his mouth but failed to speak.

  “What?” A shuddery image of Blue and Elisa flared behind Jason’s eyes before fading. He blinked, hard.

  “Nothing,” Gabe said, and shook his head. Jason just stared at him. “It’s just—I don’t think we should be so dismissive of Fred’s theories.”

  “You know what? It’s getting late.” Jason stretched his hands over his head. “I should catch some sleep. See you in the morning?”

  “Sure.” But Gabe didn’t look at him. He only stared off the porch at the trees, until Jason eventually stood and went back inside the house.

  Darkness.

  On the lawn in front of the MacLeod House, a spiteful wind blows across the moonlit cove. Jason feels eyes upon him: there’s something out there, watching from the woods. A magnetic pull draws him closer to the trees, his feet on the tips of their toes and stuttering forward against his volition. The pines sway, dull gray bristles swept beneath the starry cupola of nighttime sky, the stench of smoke heavy in the air. How could this be a dream, when he can smell the forest fires from the mountain, when his senses are so alive and everything is so very real?

  The curtain of branches draws back, and Blue steps naked from the woods. Body youthfully slim and taut, cock flaccid yet impressively sized, his musculature accentuated by an irradiated cobalt glow. He is lit from within.

  “You’re letting yourself go,” Blue says. His mournful gaze travels Jason’s body, and now Jason sees that he is naked himself, suddenly so cold in the crisp Maritimes night. He looks upon his own sagging and distended skin through the younger man’s eyes and is ashamed. “You’ve stopped walking the old paths,” Blue says, “stopped searching the hidden places. You’ve given up . . .”

  “No,” Jason says, the frigid air burning his lungs. “Not at all. We’ve been pursuing every avenue. But all we’ve found are fairy tales.”

  “Some fairy tales are true.” Blue circles him in a close ring. “Doesn’t seem quite right, how we disappeared, does it? Sorry for cutting out on you like that.” His voice drops to a halting whisper. “But once I opened our eyes and saw, really saw . . .”

  “Where are you? Where’s Elisa?”

  Blue stops in front of him. “We’re fine. For now. As long as we can hold back the flames. Harder this time, since they made it all the way down to the locus of the hive. As above, so below. And so it goes.”

  “I didn’t ask how you are, I asked where you are.”

  “That’s really the same thing, though, isn’t it.” A halfhearted smile, and Blue commences his circling.

  “Don’t get philosophical,” Jason says. “I asked you a simple question.”

  “A simple question,” Blue echoes, his voice so doleful and tremulous that it causes Jason to quiver. “We’re in Tír na nÓg. In Elphame. Beneath the Great Mound, under the roots of the ocean. But we are not of the Mound. We are of the Hive Queen. And we are birthing anew. Does that sound simple to you?”

  Jason tries to laugh but his chest is too heavy, too packed with ice. “So you’re in Fairyland, huh? How do we get there? Second star to the right and straight on till morning? No, wait, of course . . . I’ll never be invited because I don’t believe.”

  “That’s sarcasm.”

  “Yes. That’s sarcasm.”

  “I remember what that is.” Blue grins. “Wouldn’t you say it’s something of a defense mechanism?”

  “That should be my line.”

  “You can let down your guard with me. We’re safe here. For now.” Blue cuts the air with his finger, makes a sound or maybe it’s
a word, an utterance in a guttural, incomprehensible language before he speaks again. “You should be honest. Tell me that you only want Elisa back, that you want me to stay gone. Go on. It won’t hurt my feelings.”

  “That’s not true.” The air grows colder still, and Jason holds himself, assurance of his essential corporeality. “I would kill to get you back. Both of you. Even after what you did.” Why am I trying to reason with him? Jason thinks. It doesn’t matter what he says, what I say. This is just a dream.

  “There’s no such thing as just a dream,” Blue says. “Only nothingness. And surrender. And communion.” He stops once more. “And reproduction.”

  The sound of water running. Elisa’s cellphone ringing. The receptionist’s voice. Will you be coming too? Just make sure Mrs. Howard gets back to us.

  Jason winces. “You ruined my life,” he says, and how good it feels to finally say it out loud. “Do you know that? She’s my wife, you little shit. And you fucked her. You, what, impregnated her? And then you took her away from me. Why?”

  “I couldn’t help it.” Blue lowers his head. “It’s what I was made for.”

  “To breed,” Jason says, using Fred Cronin’s word.

  “Yes. To breed.”

  Elisa and Blue, running off to have a baby together; it’s as close to his worst nightmare as Jason is willing to go. That vivid imagined film flares before his eyes, the scratchy conjured images of the two of them in bed, limbs tangled in a mad dance of lust. Between them a spark of life begins to pulsate, a light so small, but one that nevertheless manages to brighten like a steadily fanned flame . . . All because Jason wasn’t man enough to keep her.

  “It’s not your fault,” Blue says, each word an aching thrust. “She was compelled.”

  “I didn’t say it was my fault.” But of course he’d thought it, hadn’t he?

  Blue steps closer, inches away. “It didn’t happen the way you think it did, for what it’s worth. But now that I’ve returned to the hive, there’s no going back.”

  Roaches check in, but they don’t check out, Jason thinks, and this makes Blue laugh. Jason tries to laugh too, to ignore the creeping tendrils of dread and frost that make his teeth chatter, even as his lips stick together.

  “It’s okay to hate me,” Blue says, inside Jason’s head now, his icy blue lips no longer bothering to move. “For my betrayal. But don’t hate Elisa. It’s not her fault, any of this. She’s going to need time to adjust. You too. Everything’s different now. So be kind to yourself. For once in your life.”

  How does he know me? My hidden self? Jason curses his unconscious. The dream is deteriorating into the worst therapy session of all time.

  “I don’t think you should still be here,” Blue says then, shaking his head. “Maybe it’s for the best that you move on, get gone. Move on,” and the words echo in Jason’s head. Move on, move on, move on.

  “Please,” Jason says. “Please get out of my head.”

  “But that’s the hive mind. We’re all inside of one another, and we dig deep. Besides, that’s what you’re good at, aren’t you? Getting inside people’s heads. So go on, then. Dig deep, get inside a few heads. If you’re ready to hear the truth, that is.” He places a blue palm on his flat blue stomach and grins. “I have to say, there are things you don’t seem ready to hear.”

  “I asked you a question before,” Jason says. “There are things you don’t seem ready to answer.”

  “Okay, then. You want to know where we are?” He shrugs, sadness in eyes. “That’s easy. We’re under the ground.”

  “Under the ground?”

  Jason pictures a grave. His mother’s body in the earth of Flushing Cemetery in Queens, her bleach-white skull and bones inside her pine coffin. “My mother. She’s dead,” Jason says dully, and shivers. Ghostly vapor issues from his lips, as if he’s releasing his own spirit into the air.

  “If she was really dead to you,” Blue says, “you wouldn’t still be searching for answers. But I can tell you what you want to know. I can do that for you now. Get you inside her head.”

  Blue’s glowing expression is drowned in grief as he moves his hand from his stomach to the side of his face. Jason knows what he’s about to do, but he can’t manage to look away. Not even as Blue digs a long and sharpened finger against his very own head and burrows a bullet-sized hole inside his skull, a round and winking and bloodless tunnel to an unknown world.

  “She’s sorry for leaving you and your sister,” Blue says. “She doesn’t want you to worry, not anymore. She’s in a far different place now. Can you see that, the way we can see?”

  “Where is Elisa?” He grabs Blue’s arm and yanks it out of his head; it’s like plunging his hand into ice water, impossibly cold. Jason’s teeth crack, he shakes. “Where is my wife?”

  “I told you. She’s down in the ground.” Blue smiles, his toothless mouth its own gaping rift, though his eyes remain haunted and fearful. “Just like the rest of us.”

  Jason stirred, his sleep disturbed by a great clatter downstairs. The sound of the refrigerator door slamming and empty bottles rattling atop it, followed by the tinny buzz of music from the kitchen radio. Dream residue floated inside his head, and he tried to dislodge it, all that his self-sabotaging mind had conjured. He rolled over and folded the pillow in a crescent to cover his ears, but he was already wide awake.

  He shoved the dream back down as best he could. Forgetting was an act of divine mercy. Sometimes it felt like all he had left.

  He pulled on a sweatshirt and pajama bottoms and went to the top of the steps. An old country song was playing on the radio downstairs, a woman singing something about hurtin’ words, and above it he could hear the faint susurrus of whispers. He peered over the railing. Gabe was stretched out on the floor in front of the fire in the woodstove, a beer beside him and the cordless telephone cradled on his shoulder. As usual, the boy was drawing in his sketch pad as he quietly spoke.

  “It’s getting cooler, though,” Gabe said, oblivious to Jason crouching on the stairs. “It’s almost September.” A tapering spiral was forming beneath the tip of Gabe’s pen, the page darkened by a churning storm of feverish scrawling, a swirling black hole of images and words. Jason thought of Dream Blue, how the naked man had encircled him like a tightening rope or a coiling snake, and the passageway carved inside his skull.

  “I’ve seen a few signs, yeah,” Gabe said into the phone. “Well, more than a few. No. Not during the day. At night, when I’m alone. Traces. Tracks, maybe. Out in the woods.” He took a swig of his beer. “I feel them out there, you know? It’s so strong here. It really is.” A long silence. “Right. Right. Well, yeah, I tried talking to him about it, but he wouldn’t listen. Right. I will. I’ll be there. Please, just wait for me, okay?”

  Jason crept from the stairs and back across the landing to the front bedroom, where the other landline sat on the windowsill. He brought the receiver to his ear and waited for Gabe to continue his conversation. Instead, he heard the screen door slam downstairs, followed by the sound of footsteps across the porch and down into the dark pool of night.

  “Hello?” Jason whispered into the receiver. “Is anyone there?”

  For a moment he thought he could make out the sound of someone breathing. After a long minute in which he heard nothing else, however—only a hollow vacuum of noise, devoid of texture and tone—he decided the line was dead.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  When Gabe finally awoke the next day and came downstairs around noon, Jason asked when he’d be ready to leave for their daily canvass. Gabe begged off, saying he was going to hang around the house, as he wasn’t feeling very well: something he’d eaten the previous night that hadn’t sat right with him.

  “I can handle it,” Jason said. “Rest up, okay? We need you at full strength.” He said good-bye, headed out to the car, and started down the drive. Maureen’s red Toyota was parked across the lawn in front of her studio; she and Donald must have returned from
Halifax sometime in the night.

  When Jason reached the bottom of the hill, instead of pulling onto the main artery he took the small dirt road that led into the woods. He parked a hundred yards in—past a meandering bend that rendered the car undetectable from the property—and walked back on foot, sticking to the trees so he couldn’t be seen from the house.

  He waited. Gabe appeared twenty minutes later via the rear deck, a six-pack of beer cradled like a baby in his arms. The boy walked toward the rear of the MacLeod House and through the tall grass, where he disappeared into the stand of firs skirting the lawn. Jason let another minute pass before following, and trailed after Gabe through the brush.

  After some time Jason heard the sound of voices and slowed, crouching to peer through the foliage. He spotted Gabe sitting cross-legged on a patch of packed grass beside the creek; it was where they had come across Donald their second day in the cove, directly behind the burned-out remains of the Colony. This time instead of Donald it was Fred Cronin in his place, the little man perched upon a rock with a walking stick thrust into the ground beside him like the stylus of a sundial.

  Through the tangled briar, Jason made out a small arrangement in the center of a circle of stones: an apple, a loaf of barmbrack, a black-and-white bandanna tied in a knot, as well as a plate of half-devoured meat, bones jutting from decomposing flesh. It had the appearance of an abandoned picnic, or some kind of offering. A lure, perhaps, for an animal. The circle was laid out close to where the pair sat, though its placement gave the distinct impression of separation. Jason couldn’t hear what they were saying, only an occasional word as it floated on the wind like a dandelion seed. Daylight. Indigenous. Essence.

  As he leaned in for a closer listen, a dog began barking from the opposite bank of the creek. Jason stumbled back, broke into a trot as he moved quickly through the bracken, and kept running after he hit the path. He jogged for a mile or more, brooding over Fred Cronin and Gabe’s secretive meeting. It had probably been Cronin on the phone last night with Gabe, filling the boy’s head with more talk of the Other Kind. Grimm tales of swapped children and glowing lights, all the legends that only a fellow local could either corroborate or contradict.