by Robert Levy
A rolling shadow across the bathroom ceiling, and she gasps. Everything slowing to near stillness as the bathwater rapidly solidifies, trapping her like a fly in amber. “I hardly remember anything,” she said.
“Tell us what you do remember.” Fred coughed and cleared his throat, expectorating into a black-and-white bandanna he discreetly produced from the breast pocket of his discolored shirt.
“Please, Elisa,” Gabe said. “We need to make sure you’re . . . okay.”
She looked away, avoiding their pleading eyes. The corkboard beside the mantel teemed with alarming images: thumbtacked sketches of insect parts that were almost perversely magnified; a photograph of the dark mouth of a cave flooded with water; what appeared to be a desiccated old fruit label, adorned with an illustration of a Cottingley-style fairy seated upon a rock. She shuddered and turned from the wall, and the sight of Gabe’s expectant face hollowed out a new groove in her chest.
Elisa didn’t trust any of them as far as she could spit, not even Gabe. But she needed them, for their knowledge if nothing else. She closed her eyes.
“I was in the bathtub. I remember . . . a face. Someone leaning over me.” Not someone, she thought, and pressed the heels of her wrists into her eye sockets.
A wide face with saucer eyes made up of smaller aspects, the compound eyes of an unclassifiable insect. A face she knows well, though stripped of its mask of muscle and pale skin.
And as she breaks the water’s surface—just before its sinewy fingers lengthen to cup the back of her skull—she sees inside it. Right through its patchwork casing, the tarnished grim birdcage of its chest where no heart beats but instead rests a heart-shaped stone, ripped from a hole in the earth. She sees right into it.
“Blue,” she whispered. Her hands moved from her eyes to her mouth, short and brittle nails tugging at her lower lip. “The thing that took me . . . It was Blue. There were others too, others like him. But they weren’t . . . He’s not . . .”
“Human,” Fred said, and nodded. “He isn’t human.”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard, took a cigarette from Fred’s pack on the coffee table and stuck it into her mouth; it took him a few moments to realize she was waiting for him to light it. It tasted awful, poisonous, but she smoked it anyway. “So what is he, then?” she asked.
“He’s Other Kind. Old-timers here, they call them the Fae. We believe your friend was a replacement. That he was swapped out for Michael Whitley, when the boy and Gavina Beaton went missing.”
“That’s crazy,” Elisa said. But her words had no conviction. Memories flooded her mind, of Blue as she once knew him. Of his fingers around her waist as she pushed him onto his unmade bed, her own hands gripping the hard muscle of his sweat-slicked arms as he bucked beneath her. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. It did make some kind of bizarre sense, though, as if Blue were too radiant a thing to be born of man. Yet they had always been a pair, an undifferentiated dyad. Shouldn’t that mean she was radiant as well?
Elisa looked up at the expectant faces of the believers. “He didn’t know what he was,” she said. “He thought he was like the rest of us.”
“Sound familiar?” Patricia said under her breath.
“Excuse me?” Elisa said.
“Put a lid on it, Patty,” Fred snapped. “You know how this is going down.”
“Don’t you talk to her that way,” Colin said.
Elisa glanced around then: at Fred, the mousy and wild-eyed Tanya clutching her angel pendant, the sardonic waitress, Patricia, and her gangly, surly son. They were all buzzing with nervous energy, their skulls in frantic motion; they resembled a band of bobblehead dolls. Gabe vibrated as well. Only the little boy was relatively still, busy mutilating his magazine by the window. The sound of his clacking scissors was hypnotic, and she tried not to close her eyes, not to let the darkness pull her back to the place below the world and its spiraling catacombs.
“The thing is,” Fred said, “we need you to take us to them. This is a real big opportunity for us. Some of us have been waiting a long time for a proper guide, and a lot more have gone before us and never returned. So basically, you’re our best chance. And we don’t have a lot of time.”
“They’re dying,” Gabe said. Patricia shot him a look. “Fred and Colin both.”
Elisa stared at Fred in disbelief. The man turned toward Colin, whose eyes were fixed upon the floor. Fred reached out and clapped his hand to the teenager’s shoulder in an affectionate gesture, a surprise considering they were just at each other’s throats. “We’ve got cancer,” Fred said. “I got it in both lungs. Final stage. Colin has lymphoma.”
“They’ve given me two months.” Colin shrugged the shrug of any teenager. He was hard to look at in that moment, his vibrant glow so deceptive that Elisa wanted to cry.
“There’s always been talk about the Other Kind,” Patricia said, her voice tender for the first time. “Them and their healing properties.” She swallowed, hard. “They can change a person. Make a new version of them, a better version, body and soul. No more disease, no more pain, no nothing.” Patricia peered at her son with adoration. “We thought that maybe, since you were . . . with them, then . . .” She let her thought hover in the air.
“Then what?” Elisa said.
“Then maybe we could be with them too. Then Colin and Fred, they could be changed. We could all be changed, if we wanted.”
“Changed?”
“Yes. Like you were.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, girl,” Patricia said, her harsh tone returned. “No need to pretend, not with us. We’ve seen your kind before. All the signs are there.”
“You’re different now,” Gabe said. “Admit it. You’re obviously different now.”
“If not actually one of them,” Colin added.
“I’m not one of anybody,” Elisa said. “I’m only of me.” Go, a voice inside her said. Just go. Make a run for it. And never look back.
“That’s what Blue thought, though,” Gabe said. “Wasn’t it?”
Fred coughed, sudden and violent, then gathered himself. “Is there anything else you remember, about how you left? When you went, was it down inside the Fairy Hole beneath the mountain? Or through the old rum-running tunnels, maybe?”
“It’s hard to say.” She shook her head. “They took me through the woods, I don’t remember where. But when we got there I could smell smoke. Something was burning . . .”
“Goddamned Christ Church strikes again,” Patricia muttered. “Still trying to burn them out. Every time the Kind show their faces, some Christer reaches for his torch. When are they gonna learn?”
“When we get them all off the force, that’s when,” Fred said. He returned his attention to Elisa. “Go on, then. Tell us what else you remember.”
She stared at him. Past him, through the walls of the battened-down house and all the way into the woods, the swaying trees a gate through which she could pass at any time. She forced herself to focus and looked down at the floor, her bare feet, took a final and deep drag off the cigarette, which made her light-headed. The last remaining dirt cleared from the coffin of her memory, and Elisa prized open the lid.
“There . . . There was something I left there,” she said quietly.
Beneath the ground, in the place below the world. Down here the earth is cool, the dirt moist from their excretions, like wet dough between her fingers. The sound of heavy dripping, of movement nearby. She tries to lift her head but it’s fixed to the vertical bed of shale beneath her, a striated shelf adorned with petrified boughs of knotted birch and carved with arcane sigils.
The ones that brought her gather around, elongated faces rendered as dark shadows along the cavern walls and lit by their own bioluminescence. Their hands upon her, feeling her. And where she suffers their touch she is anesthetized, numbed by a thousand injections of paralyzing venom.
Branchlike fingers upon her belly, her thighs, creeping tendrils moving
up inside of her . . .
“Oh, Jesus.” Elisa doubled over and retched. She tried to expel the feeling—the appalling sensation of invasiveness beneath her skin—but all that came up was a bilious strand of saliva and mucus that stank of seawater.
“They took it,” she said, her mind racing. Her unborn child, it was still alive. There was no question in her mind. “They took it out of me . . .”
“What is she saying?” Colin said. “What does she mean?”
“A baby,” Patricia said. “She’s talking about a baby.”
“I told you,” Gabe snapped. “I told all of you. She really was pregnant.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Fred said. “If there was a baby, it was never really hers.”
“What are you talking about?” Elisa rose to her full height and stared them down, bored holes inside each and every one of them, Gabe included. “Whose was it, if not mine?”
“The girl you replaced,” Fred said. “Elisa Howard. Not you.”
“I am her!” she shouted, more afraid than anything that she wanted them to be right. No. They’re wrong, they must be. They’re all insane. “I am Elisa,” she pleaded, if only to herself. “Have you lost your minds?”
“They probably have her right now,” Fred said. “Sent you out into the world as her double. Just like they did with the kids.” He spoke with tenderness, real sorrow in his eyes. “You need to get back there, though, don’t you? Find your friend. And this baby.”
“They took it out of me,” Elisa whispered; it was all she could think of to say. She was sure of it, defiance solidifying her judgment, fueling her sense of violation as well. She was sick at the thought, all else rendered insignificant by comparison. How could Blue have helped them do that, no matter what he had become?
The matters of these supposed believers no longer held meaning. She needn’t prove herself to them, didn’t need them for anything whatsoever. Fuck Blue. Fuck them all. Below the earth, in the place below the world, was something that had belonged to her, and had been stolen. A child. Her child.
But there was something else she’d lost beyond the child, beyond Blue even. The inability to give voice to it made her increasingly despairing, and furious.
“Show us, then.” Fred’s face flushed red, and he brought it close to her own. “Go on. You can do it. Take us under the mountain.”
“Just do what he says, sweetheart,” Patricia said, agitated to the point of twitching. “This doesn’t have to be difficult. Just do what he says.”
“She will.” Fred seized Elisa by the arm. “Even if it takes a little convincing.”
He hauled her toward the door, and Patricia and Colin jumped out of their seats. They were all standing, all of them yelling. Neither Fred nor Elisa paid attention to the others. Fred focused only on her, while Elisa went inside herself, to that faraway place beneath the land and waves.
“You’re going to take us there,” Fred said, and threw open the front door with his free hand. “And you’re going to do it now. Colin, get the gear.”
“Get off me.” Elisa yanked her arm loose, her hands bending into claws. “You touch me again and I’ll kill you. I will fucking end you.”
“Leave her alone,” Gabe said. He made a move toward Fred, but Colin pushed him toward the middle of the room. Gabe stumbled and fell in a dust cloud of newspapers before he sprung up, a feral glint in his eyes. Patricia leapt in front of her son to protect him, but Tanya yelled, “Stop it, just stop it!” and jerked Patricia sideways by the hood of her slicker. The waitress snagged Tanya by her hair and pulled her yowling back down to the threadbare rug.
Is it me? Elisa took in the chaos unfolding around her. Am I the root of all this? She felt her emotions radiating out from her in viral pulsations, her wrath and righteousness a boiling wave of anger burning whomever it touched; her fury had spread to the others. It was what had happened at the Lobster Landing, only this time instead of a frenzied delirium she was channeling a white-hot rage, powerful enough to scald. All she could see was flames.
Fire. Choking smoke. Scorched catacomb walls and the throne room aflame as the warning blares through the hive and the warrens. Protect the Queen, protect the Queen . . .
Elisa trembled and covered her face with her hands. Another crashing wave, another transmitted message, a signal sent by collective command. Go. Just go. Run.
“Are you okay?” Gabe, at her side.
“I think . . . I think I have to go.” She moved so quickly she fell against the screen door as she bolted onto the porch.
“Not so fast,” Fred said, already upon her. He grabbed her by the wrist and twisted, and she dropped to her knees, her camera slung over one arm so the strap dug into her bare shoulder and tangled in Fred’s iron grip. The world listed around her, the cracked eaves and crumpled rain gutter and the darkening sky beyond, her stomach churning like a storm-tossed ship. She shielded her face with her free arm, and something moved in the corner of her vision. She turned in its direction, the scattered motion coalescing into the shape of her husband as he ascended the porch steps.
Fred, exposed in the doorway, released her as Jason reached forward with both hands. He took hold of Fred by his stained plaid shirt, and in one graceful, balletic motion, swung the little man over the porch railing. Fred crashed through the overgrown hedges with a cry of pain laced with shock. Elisa crab-crawled back and flattened against the cottage’s vinyl siding, a queasy thrill of delight roiling her.
A flash of light beamed over them: the red and blue spray of a police siren from a CBRP vehicle parked in the drive. Jason, his eyes narrowed with determination, marched down the porch stairs. Another man was waiting there, a uniformed police officer. It was Detective Jessed, the one who had interviewed Elisa at the hospital; he and Jason must have arrived together in the patrol car. Jessed dragged Fred up from his knees, only to drive him back down with a blow to the side of the head. He followed with a second punch, and a third, Fred trying to push away, to protect his face. The entire scene felt unnervingly removed. It was as if she were watching a nature documentary, one about predatory birds, perhaps, bright flashes of plumage masking talons and beaks. Gabe and Patricia and the others spilled onto the porch and froze, all of them silenced by the sight of Detective Jessed whaling on Fred, until Gabe screamed, “Stop it! He’s going to die!”
Jason, startled to attention, looked at Gabe in bewilderment, then to Colin’s little brother in the doorway of the cottage. The boy just stood there watching, the shredded remains of his magazine clutched in his hand. Jessed relented and let up on Fred, only to push Jason back toward the porch, as though he were the one doing the beating.
Gabe knelt at Elisa’s side. “I am so sorry,” he said. “Please, are you okay? Elisa?” But he didn’t seem sure of what to call her.
Fred spat a mouthful of blood onto the wet grass, as well as what looked to be a blackened tooth. “You attacked me,” Fred gargled through swollen lips, and glared in Jessed’s direction. “Right here, in front of everyone. They all saw it.”
“Save it, Cronin.” Jessed thrust forward an admonitory finger, his hand sheathed in a menacing leather glove that matched his shark-black eyes. “Not another word out of you. Not one.” He cast a sideways glance at Jason, daring him to speak.
“We know you’re special, no matter what you are.” Tanya, no longer able to contain herself, threw herself before Elisa, a supplicant kneeling at an altar. “We need you,” she said, and began to weep. “We meant no harm. None at all. Don’t judge us too harshly. Please.” Tanya choked back sobs, closed her eyes, and pressed her hands together. “We look upon the people of the mounds and see only God’s face in their design. We see only his merciful angels . . .”
“Jesus and Mary,” Patricia said, rolling her eyes. “Here she goes again.”
Jason stepped back onto the porch. “Did they do anything to you?” he asked Elisa. “Did they hurt you?”
She shook her head fiercely; not in answer, but because his wor
ds no longer had meaning. All their words were meaningless, as was the sentiment behind them. Who were these people, coming to blows over her as if she were chattel, a prize offered up in a contest? She belonged to none of them, to no one in this world. She only belonged to herself.
“Please,” Jason said, “Elisa,” and he reached for her, his fingers inches from her face. A trap. All of it just another trap to keep her tied to this wearisome place, where she could only be wife, or daughter, or mother. Who knew how long ago it had been set?
She rose and backed down the porch steps. One step, then another, and a third, bare feet on wood, then gravel, then grass. And then she turned and ran, the camera strap flung over her shoulder, the Konica case thumping against her with every stride. Jessed called out for her to stop. She heard footfalls behind her but she kept running, straight for the trees at the back of the house.
Elisa crashed through the bracken and into the woods, and instead of resisting her the branches parted, limbs clasping shut in her wake as if to protect her. The sound of those giving chase echoed through the brush. Despite the rains, she could still smell the burned musk of the forest fires smoldering in the distance, and the bitter scent enlivened her, awakening her senses. She felt free, for the first time since she’d returned.
These woods, they could be her home now, and perhaps they had always been, only waiting for her to accept their verdant embrace. She knew how well the dark forest would hide her, if she asked in its own language. If only she asked, she would never be found again.
Chapter Nine
* * *
She awoke in the woods before dawn, the cloud cover bruised violet with diffuse moonlight. Back arched like a cat, she stretched on all fours and ran her hands along the forest floor, across pine needles and beetle shells and acorns, rocks and wet leaves and muddy clumps of dirt, as well as the hard cracked leather of her camera case. She curled into a ball and pushed herself into child’s pose, the earth beating beneath her in a slow and steady pulse that echoed across the tree canopy.
