by Robert Levy
“Don’t,” Gabe said. It was all Jason needed to hear.
Gabe sat him down on the bed and rubbed Jason’s back, his shoulders, his neck, how a parent would soothe a young child. And Jason couldn’t help but wonder whether he would ever have a child of his own to comfort, to care for the way his father had failed to care for him. Now that Elisa was gone, now that he’d been left so alone in the world, he had lost the foundation of this hope. He would have to try to rebuild it in another place, at another, unknown time. And so the world had to move on as well.
He was shivering now. Gabe made him lie down and pulled the blankets up and over Jason’s shoulders, fetched an extra down comforter from the top of the closet to cover him. “Get some rest,” Gabe said. “Just rest.” The boy perched himself on the foot of the bed, where he remained, motionless, until Jason began to calm.
After a few more minutes Gabe rose and turned off the lamp, the only light from the full moon beyond the curtained windows.
“Wait,” Jason said, fear edging his voice. “Don’t go.”
“It’s okay. I’m here.” Gabe stretched out on the bed beside him, against him, and Jason could smell the woods on his skin, a damp and earthy musk. And also another scent: that of Blue, his bittersweet sandalwood fragrance rolling off the boy in irradiated waves.
“I’m here,” Gabe repeated as Jason drifted off to sleep, the boy’s breath brushing the back of his head, the words a soothing lullaby. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.”
A weight presses down on him in the dark. He cannot open his eyes, cannot even breathe. He can only listen as Blue’s multilayered voice, soft yet insistent, whispers its way through his ears and inside his skull.
We tried to explain it to you, and then we tried to warn you away. But you don’t seem to want to listen.
A creeping dread crawls up Jason’s legs, along his chest and arms. The sensation is relentless, as if he is being overtaken by an army of ants.
We were here before the first traveler, here with only the sound of rushing wind and buzzing bees, and insects that burrow and bite. Do you know what we are? We are inevitable.
Pressure upon his face and cheeks, and Jason squirms as his eyelids are lifted against his will. He catches a glimmer of fractalling light, a passing shadow between himself and the night sky, the moon full to bursting overhead.
You still don’t see.
Blue is close enough to touch, the words everywhere at once.
You can’t see us with these eyes.
At once, a stinging sensation eclipses him; he tries to wriggle free but cannot move, his body cocooned in a web of total paralysis.
We can help you with that . . .
Unseen tendrils dig into Jason’s eye sockets, slender and probing fingers taking hold of the fragile eggs that are his eyes. He tries to scream, tries to wake, anything but this. Anything at all.
His eyes are plucked from him with a rending of tissue and skin, the slippery wet worms of his optic nerves snapped back inside his skull. He cries out but all is silence, and he falls farther into the nightmare, further inside himself. Move on, he mouths, move on, and finally he hears, the words a steady drumming of horse hooves through his otherwise disintegrating unconscious.
Jason awoke in the tartan room. Judging by the muted light outside, it appeared to be dawn. Gabe was asleep on the bed beside him. He got up carefully so as not to wake the boy, and eased the door shut behind him. Once downstairs, he made a quick beeline for the bathroom and the shower. It ran cold as usual but he turned the tap colder: he needed the water to rouse him, to help reassure him of his fundamental wakefulness. He had to keep himself together if he was going to leave without causing a scene.
His mind began to race with the logistics of how he was going to extricate himself—from the investigation, from Gabe, from this entire country. The fragile membrane that had kept at bay the voices and dreams of madness—the inheritable condition that was his family legacy—it had nearly been permeated. He had to go, and do it fast, before this place finally rose up to consume him entirely. The land was the one that held the power here, and always had; the only difference now was that Jason was finally ready to admit it.
He went upstairs and dressed, filled the outside pocket of his suitcase with the remainder of his dirty clothes. There would be phone calls to clients regarding rescheduled sessions, and to Elisa’s parents and the police as well, who would surely want to know he would be leaving for the States. He told himself he was going to speak to the authorities in New York, formally hire on that private investigator, contact his congresswoman and other representatives to get them involved. He could always come back, but for now he was moving on. He couldn’t stare into this heartless forest forever.
Jason carried the suitcase into the hallway and stopped outside the tartan room door, a hand pressed to the rough-hewn pine. He would leave Gabe a note explaining his need to leave, for the sake of his clients’ well-being. He would take the rental car to the airport and book his ticket there—Gabe wasn’t insured to drive the car anyway, let alone the fact that the boy had no license to begin with. Gabe could hold on to Elisa’s things, reliquary them the way he had everything Blue had left behind. It made sense to leave—completely logical, unremarkable sense. That was the only thing he could tell himself.
He took the suitcase downstairs, retrieved a pad and a red felt-tip pen from beside the telephone, and began to write. Gabe, the note began, but he stopped there. Jason stared at the four letters and their succeeding comma, which stared back at him, the venous ink severe and accusing. A dull pain flared behind his eyes and he pressed them shut; this was followed by another, sharper pain, as well as a ringing sound in his ears, as if the air pressure in the room had precipitously dropped. He faced the front door and the adjacent windows, the morning sun’s radiance abruptly swelling to pierce the fog over the cove.
But there was something else. Another sensation, a wholly foreign one. It was like seeing a new color or tasting a new flavor, but it was also entirely placeless, unattached to any specific sense. Jason left his suitcase and stepped onto the porch to scan the sky, the water, the rolling lawn down to Maureen and Donald’s house. A placid breeze rustled the tree canopy and the grass, rocked the power lines above the road; the stuttering cry of a kingfisher sounded from far off in the woods. He waited. And then, he saw.
A hundred yards down the hill a shape emerged from the trees. It stepped tentatively onto the dewy grass before it continued, its gait awkward and unsteady. For a moment it looked like an animal, stooped and feral, but once Jason squinted he could see that the figure was upright. It wasn’t an animal; rather, it appeared human in design. A tremor of fear seized him, eyes watering as he crouched behind the porch railing. It must be what Fred Cronin was talking about, an alien life form or maybe one of Donald’s fairies, whatever it was that haunted these godforsaken woods. We should never have come here, he thought. I should have listened. His instincts commanded him to take flight, but to where? I never should have come.
The thing stopped, a brown stain against the lush greenery as its neck craned to face the mist-padded cove. A living shadow, it had a thick, ropy mane that disappeared into jutting shoulder blades. Its back arched down to a rounded posterior, where Jason expected to see a tail, though there was none. Was it covered in scale or bark or flesh, reptilian skin or the matted fur of a mammal? The creature faced him, and cocked its head; it appeared to detect his presence, smell him, perhaps, rather than sense him by sight.
It began a staggered procession up the hill, arms limp at its sides as though it had no real use for them, its limbs rendered vestigial. Jason wanted to scream for his life but was struck silent. Instead he stood frozen, digging his fingernails into the porch railing until they scarred the wood. The thing gained in human likeness the closer it came; he could see the whites of its eyes, though they gleamed blood red. The way it moved was both terrifying and fascinating in equal measure, patches of putty-colored stain
s visible upon its dark and meaty surfaces. His stomach dropped out. He could no longer remember how to breathe.
The creature was passing Donald’s cabin when Jason’s world went negative. It wasn’t a creature at all.
“Elisa?” he whispered. Air returned to his lungs with the single uttered word.
He rushed forward and fell from the porch stairs. Now he was the wild animal, loping down the hill fast, faster. The branches sang as the wind whistled through the trees, his feet an erratic gallop-stamp on the uneven grass. “Oh God, Elisa?” he screamed, mere yards from her. Her eyes were closed beneath a mask of dirt, hair knotted around her shoulders. But for the mud caking her skin, she was naked.
“Oh, Jesus.” Jason grabbed her, held her, gently lowered them both down to the grass. She was cold, so cold, and as he kissed her forehead and her neck he breathed hot air upon her face, willing her back to him. “You’re okay,” he said, “you’re okay. It’s going to be okay.” He aimed for a tone of reassurance, but it wasn’t convincing; he sounded panicked and frightened, a little boy lost in the dark.
Her head lolled back as he stroked her, brushing dirt from her eyelids with the tip of his thumb. “Are you with me?” he said. “Are you here?” There was no response.
“Help me!” he screamed, giving in to the fear, his neck craning wildly as he shouted in the direction of the MacLeod House, then toward Donald and Maureen’s, up the hill and down, at the trees and the road and the sky. He didn’t want to move her or leave her for a single moment, not yet, not after she’d been gone for so long. “Someone help me, please!”
She cracked open her eyes, and gazed so fixedly over his shoulder he couldn’t help but turn.
On the porch of the MacLeod House, in the same spot at the top of the stairs where Jason had just been, stood Gabe. He was wearing Jason’s NYU sweatshirt, one Jason was sure he had packed away in his suitcase, along with the rest of his belongings. The boy had the sleeves rolled up, the hood pulled over his head; the sweatshirt was so large on him that it hung halfway down his thighs.
For a solitary moment from this distance downhill, and despite all their many differences, Jason had the unnerving sensation of mistaking Gabe for himself.
Part Three
* * *
ELISA
Chapter Seven
* * *
“Open your mouth, please.”
She did as she was told. The stainless steel scraper rooted past her lips and slid between her teeth. Though the tool was unblemished, she nevertheless tasted rust against her tongue.
“Just take a deep breath, and hold it,” the doctor said.
She winced. His voice was pitched to salve but his dark eyes were eerily void, like polished stones. The whole of her had become specimen.
“There we go.” He slipped the instrument from her mouth, the sample collected. The doctor made a show of wiping the scraper’s tip with a square of cotton mesh and tossed the square with a flourish into the metal waste bin, the lid clattering shut when he released the foot pedal. “All done now. In another few minutes, you should be good to go.”
The doctor smiled and vanished from the sterile and windowless examination room. Jason, the man she called her husband, took her hand and stroked her fingers atop the hard table and its roll of disposable sanitary paper. The touch of his flesh, of metal, of paper: it was all unfamiliar, every point of contact a fresh pinprick. It was as though she had been lifted from suspended animation, ripped from a place where nothing could touch her at all. Everything would have to be relearned.
Jason massaged her palm, her wrist, her forearm. She shuddered and tucked her hands beneath her elbows, where her jagged nails caught on the starchy fabric of her hospital gown. How many had worn this very same gown before her? How many of them now dead? You’re lucky to be alive, they kept saying. But she wondered.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s nothing.” She shrugged, her voice unfamiliar, hoarse from either misuse or neglect, she wasn’t sure which. “I’m just cold.”
They sat in silence. She reminded herself that she knew Jason, and knew him well. And to a lesser extent Gabe, the young man in the waiting area down the hall, his baby face gone chapped and bearded blond in the two weeks since she’d been gone. She watched Jason watching her. His mind was somewhere else, though, hands held fast to the arms of his chair, fingers tensed as if eager to be put to use.
He thinks he wants to take care of me, she thought, but really he’s the one who craves comfort.
Not a recollection exactly, more like a truth she’d learned over many lifetimes, from a hundred different angles. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, reflexively, for the first time since she had come out of her daze two nights prior.
Earlier, the attending physician had told them there were no signs of sexual abuse, nor had the preliminary blood work indicated sexually transmitted disease or pregnancy; there was no indication she’d ever been pregnant at all. “Thank you,” Jason had said with relief, as though it were the doctor’s doing. He turned then to look at her plaintively, and she saw in his expression that he knew what had happened between her and Blue. The hurt in his eyes was unambiguous, along with a secondary flare of fire, of pride, perhaps. Or maybe it was affirmation, that what had happened was a terrible mistake the universe had seen fit to undo, having blighted her with some kind of karmic miscarriage. And that was that. She couldn’t argue with a blood test, could she? So she grimaced and turned away, curled into a ball, and held herself with her knees tucked under her chin, in—fittingly—the fetal position.
There had been a flush of embarrassment, followed by a more acute feeling of unmitigated shame. She yearned then for the comforting touch of Jason’s firm hands upon her shoulders, the soft cadence of his voice, the consolation one might provide a child. But his touch didn’t come until later, and he left her in that moment the way she had left him: alone. And maybe she deserved no better.
All this in front of a police detective named Jessed, whose presence made Jason noticeably anxious. When the doctor added that she showed no particularly troubling symptoms of dehydration or malnourishment, the detective lit up, as if this helped prove some hypothesis she wasn’t yet privy to.
“Is there anything you can remember?” Detective Jessed had asked, yet again, for what seemed like the dozenth time.
“No,” she answered. “Nothing. I think I fell asleep in the bath . . .”
In truth, she actually remembered quite a bit, if only in flashes. Just not in the way they meant, not in a way she could properly communicate. It was as if that which she did recall needed translation—not so much from another language, but through a second set of senses, resembling the usual ones yet altogether different. A dark light washing over her that tasted like tangerine; the smell of fire as it bled bitter in her swollen eardrums; the touch of frenzy and morning and moon. And a shadow that resembled a face in the dark, one so blinding and bright it was impossible to truly see, yet so beautiful she couldn’t dream of ever looking away.
For two days she’d been forced to listen to specialists (Jason included) volley theories back and forth across her bed like some kind of diagnostic Ping-Pong match: dissociative fugue, amnesia, depersonalization, PTSD . . . The word alienism came to mind.
How could she tell them that none of their assumptions applied to her? Her experience was not of the real; it was of the otherreal.
She no longer belonged to their world of words. Now she belonged to the ones below the land.
The doctor popped back inside the examination room to tell them she was free to go. “Back to her room?” Jason asked.
“Back to her life,” the doctor said. “We’re discharging her.”
She allowed Jason to help her from the examination table, his hand beneath her elbow as he walked her across the hall to the bathroom. She locked the door behind her, stood in front of the mirror, and stuck out her tongue, which was caked in a layer of liche
n-colored film. Her olive complexion was starkly pale under the fluorescents, hair scrubbed clean but lifeless, a dull brown frame for her round face. She brushed a stray lock behind her ear and the light caught the metallic clasp on her hospital bracelet, her name typed in the space between her date of birth and a scannable bar code.
Howard, Elisa. Her last name first, by all rights that of her husband, followed by the name her parents had given her (the parents she made Jason convince not to rush to her side, that she would fly home right after she was discharged). Her date of birth, her sex, the date she was admitted to the hospital, the name of the medical center: all the essential data, printed beneath the clear plastic band. All of it equally meaningless.
She met her own gaze in the mirror. Her eyes were lighter than she remembered; weren’t they darker, once? Now, instead of deep pools of brown, the irises were flecked with sparks of green, similar to the oxidized color of the scum coating her tongue. The pregnancy had changed her body in ways large and small, but of course that wasn’t the entire story; she’d been changed in other ways as well. She looked away, down at her torn fingernails and the chipped lip of the sink, everything the same unhealthy shade of green.
She washed and dried her hands, and paused for a deep breath before opening the door. Jason was waiting on the other side.
“Everything okay?” He put his hands upon her waist, and she tried not to flinch.
“Sure.” Now smile. She smiled. “Let’s get going.”
Jason, never more than an arm’s length away, followed her down the hall and into the waiting room. Gabe spotted them and stood. He appeared disoriented, as if roused from a vivid dream. “How are you feeling?” he asked, and wiped at his bleary eyes with the backs of his hands, which clutched his spiral sketch pad and a pen that dangled a ball-bearing chain.
