The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  There was something else, though. A stubborn barb that tugged at her subconscious, extracting a terrible sensation of loss. She had been down there, in the place below the world, and they had not kept her. Blue hadn’t kept her. The rejection was coupled with a whisper in her own voice—incanted from the trees, on the wind, within the flutelike cries of thrushes—all of it saying, You are still Elisa. She didn’t know who that meant anymore, only that the thought had wriggled into her mind and embedded itself there. In place of her unborn child, perhaps, the one extracted like a splinter from beneath her skin. How much of her had they kept?

  As the sun rose and the low mist began to burn off, she continued through the woods, a powerful, lodestone draw pulling her forward on bare and battered feet. By midday the peak of Kelly’s Mountain was visible through the trees, the sheltering branches throwing shadows across the forest floor. When was the last time she had eaten? She couldn’t say, only that she felt hunger as a dull void, close to her without quite being imperative. Her thirst, though, that was ever-present, and she followed the sound of rushing water to a snaking creek, where she left her camera atop a large rock at the crest of the bank. She scooped her hands into the shallow stream and brought the salve to her parched lips, as well as to her muddied face and neck, its revitalizing coolness a gift from higher ground. She washed her feet, her thighs beneath her shorts, her arms, skin glistening as she padded back up the mossy bank.

  She froze. Unquestionably, she knew that she was not alone. She took cover in the undergrowth and grabbed her camera from the rock, crouching to hug her arms around her dirty red shirt for fear it would give her away. Whether she was more afraid of the supposed believers or the so-called Other Kind was uncertain. Keep me from what I am not, she thought, and she grinned, though her flesh was pebbled with fear.

  Above the call of birds and the whirring of insects there was a rustling sound in the brush, accompanied by a stench of decay, like rotted vegetables. She covered her nose and peered through the thicket.

  An ashen, wraithlike shape lumbered through the grove. Though its pace was middling at best, Elisa struggled to track it behind the dense shrubbery. It ambled into a sunlit clearing not fifty yards away, and rested against a tree trunk, pressing itself to the bark as if to slink its way inside.

  It was a woman. She was tall and thin and nude, her skin pale white where it wasn’t caked in grime, hippie-long hair matted down in a snakelike plait against the side of her face. Elisa stepped from behind the bushes; her first instinct was to see if the woman was hurt. Once she showed herself, however, the stranger’s head snapped to the side. Elisa recoiled: the left side of the woman’s face, the one previously obscured, bore the brutal scarring of fourth-degree burns. Most of her hair was singed free from her ruined scalp, the flesh there bubbled like melted candle wax. She looked as if she might have stumbled from the scene of an accident, though there was a disturbing and unmistakable sneer upon her lips.

  She’s a slave, Elisa thought, a flare of recognition ignited inside of her. A human worker for the hive. I’ve seen her kind before. She didn’t know how she knew this to be true, she just knew that it was. In the same way she was sure there was an explanation she hadn’t been rendered a slave herself. Elisa had come back for a reason.

  The woman approached from across the clearing, skin blotchy and red. By the time they were a few yards from each other, Elisa could see her milky left eye, a dribble of yellow pus down her cheek. The fluid collected in a raised ditch of soft tissue above her exposed clavicle, bones dirty-gray against raw and bloodied meat. The burned woman shuffled toward her, but when they were about to collide she shunted past, attention drawn farther into the woods. As she wandered from her, Elisa caught sight of the woman’s exposed back: there on her shoulder was an angry red birthmark, the scarlet blemish shaped like a five-pointed star.

  “Gavina?” Elisa recognized the distinguishing mark from the newspaper clippings, though it hardly seemed possible, she had drowned twenty-five years ago.

  But no, Elisa thought, that had been a replacement. The one that had died, that was something else in disguise, like Blue. This was the real Gavina Beaton, the original one, the human girl who had wandered into the woods with Michael Whitley. Still alive, albeit injured in the recent fires, and all grown up.

  Goddamned Christ Church strikes again, one of the believers had said. Still trying to burn them out.

  The woman stopped. She slowly torqued her body with another unnerving snap of the neck that made Elisa grit her teeth.

  “Can you speak?” Elisa asked softly. “Can you?”

  She groaned in response, a wretched squall of mourning that echoed like thunder through the trees. She was weeping now as well, watery runnels carving channels down her dirty cheeks, the pain of hard labor written across her face. It was Gavina, Elisa was sure of it, the woman’s eyes wet and glazed. Stupefied in her servitude to the Other Kind, she saw things that weren’t really there. One eye was cataract pale, while the other contained a pupil that was barely discernible, almost lensless, like a pinhole camera.

  My camera. Elisa had forgotten she had it, its stiff leather strap weighing down her neck. She flicked off the lens cap and shot from her chest. Gavina flinched, and rotated her head back toward the close-set trees, followed by the rest of her blistered body.

  Through a daunting obstacle course of clustered foliage Gavina shuffled forward, Elisa on her trail and continuing to snap pictures. Gavina gained in speed, first a trot and then, despite her obvious injuries, accelerating into a full-blown gallop. Elisa struggled to keep up, the camera dropping to her chest as she raised her hands to shield her face from the trees’ lashing boughs. Faster and faster they careered into the heart of the forest, weaving their way between crowding firs, Gavina moving with the inborn grace of an animal negotiating its native environment.

  Soon, the vegetation began to lighten. The now-cloudless sky widened in broad blue patches above the thinning treetops, the ground roughening beneath Elisa’s bare feet. A whistle of wind, the smell of the sea and the smoldering forest fires, and Gavina hurtled through the tangled briar and disappeared into thin air.

  Elisa barely had time to stop. She scrambled for leverage with the help of a weathered root and managed to halt her momentum. It was only once her eyes focused in the bright and unshielded light that she saw she was perched atop a craggy precipice overlooking the bay. Far below, Gavina was in free fall above the waves. Forty feet, fifty and more, her previously unwieldy form arrowing at the last moment into the clean line of an expert cliff diver. The woman vanished into the water, the aggressive red burst of her star-shaped birthmark the last thing visible, barely a ripple left in her wake.

  Elisa stared down at the waves. Their silvery caps glittered in the wide-open light, the sun bright above the peak of Kelly’s Mountain. The mountain was suddenly so close, oppressively so, hovering over the water like a massive, glutted seabird. Down there is refuge and communion, she thought, below the mountain and sea. Gavina seemed to believe that as well, and a stab of envy pierced Elisa’s chest.

  She scaled up a tangled mass of foliage, edged herself toward the lip of the cliff, and dangled her foot out over the crashing waves. Her soles bloodied and bruised, as her feet so often were, back when she was still a working dancer. More than two months since she’d last gotten a pedicure, when she stopped into a nail salon down on Hester Street back in New York, her clear polish grown out quite a bit in the weeks since to reveal the unvarnished white crescent slivers of the lunulae beneath.

  A pedicure. A stupid eighteen-dollar pedicure. Elisa clung to the memory of it: the ladies gossiping in Chinese, the acrid smell from the dryer, the rattle and buzz of the air conditioner over the door. And that transparent nail polish, still on her feet . . . Could they—the ones that had birthed Blue, in whatever way he had been made—could they have been so subtle, so precise as to replicate a grown-out pedicure? Could they have recreated something so cosmetic, so artificia
l and mundane?

  She felt real all of a sudden. A real woman, with real memories, and all-too-human feelings. The same woman who had gotten that pedicure downtown, who had a best friend named Blue and a husband named Jason and a whole life ahead of her, with or without them. Children or no, career or no, yes or no or no. She was who she was, for better or worse; she was who she had always been. The believers had been wrong.

  Let divers dive, she thought, and stepped away from the edge. I’m not one of them, whoever they are. She knew this now.

  Elisa sat at the cliff side. She would never be one of the Other Kind, not really; she would never be made of this land. But still she wondered if she could live without what was stolen from her body, as well as the ecstatic reverie the Other Kind provided in unending supply, down in the place below the world.

  Could she live without Blue, and the state of amazement he himself had given her? So much wonder, and light.

  Years and years ago the two of them, high on ketamine, had stumbled early one morning out of the Roxy and onto the hot summer pavement. As they tried to hail a cab, a group of soused frat boys stumbled past and one of them reached over and pinched her hard on the ass. She yelped, and Blue, barely able to stand, spun around to confront them. “What the fuck?” he’d said, staggering forward. “You got a problem?”

  “Yeah, you, faggot,” a second one said and sucker-punched him in the face. Down he went, and before the bouncers could intervene they had piled on and gotten a few kicks in him as well, though Elisa had tried her best to beat them back. Blue was badly shaken, and as they sat on the curb to collect themselves she watched his nose begin to swell.

  “You okay?” she asked, and rubbed slow circles upon his back.

  “Sure,” he said, “sure I am.” But when he brought a hand to his nose it came back red. Blue stared down at the blood and his eyes went wide: the wet stain on his fingers was interlaced with a thread of prismatic material. The shining fluid was denser than the blood surrounding it, and seemed to move of its own volition, the iridescent strand writhing eel-like inside a dark scarlet pool. Elisa’s throat caught. Her heart heaved, along with a lust so powerful the whole of her body shook. She opened her mouth, but couldn’t speak.

  A moment later, the luminous substance shimmered and melted into the red smear upon his fingers, disappearing from sight. They stared at his blood-slicked hand in silence.

  “Did you see that?” he eventually said. She was about to nod, but when she met Blue’s gaze she was shocked to find his nose had contracted to its regular size. But then it swelled again, and just as quickly shrunk once more, as if deciding whether or not to appear broken. It was the drugs, it had to be. What else?

  “See what?” Elisa said, the coward’s route. But it couldn’t be unseen.

  They sat on the curb until Blue’s fear receded, and she had tamed her own panting breath. And then a rat scurried past them, and she screamed, and he cackled hysterically as he got down in the gutter on all fours. “Go get those fuckers, Ratsy!” Blue shouted, and suddenly she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe.

  Could she live without Blue? Look what happened to his mother, Elisa thought, and shook her head. The moment he’d left her home, the poor woman began wasting away. Was that Elisa’s fate as well, to die alone and apart from both Blue and her own not-yet-a-child, the one they had made together? And if she were to return to the Other Kind, what would that make her? A mother to her child, or a slave, like Gavina? She had no way of knowing.

  She turned back toward the woods, and the air before her rippled, like heat off a tar road. The trees lurched, fearfully, though all else was still; even the ocean fell quiet. The hair on her arms stood at attention, as if she’d crossed into a field of static electricity. The silence was pierced by a rumbling cacophony, a ferocious braying fused with a rapturous buzzing that lashed the branches and sent a startled squirrel scrambling from its burrow. Everywhere at once there was a charge of movement, as the forest widened its mouth and screamed.

  An onslaught of assorted figures crashed through the verdant foliage. Partially nude men, their clothes tattered and burned, one with his foot clomping inside a laceless hiking boot; soot-stained dogs, their hides singed by fire; a scatter of red foxes, a small black bear, a pair of hawks, a large gray cat; and more. They were running from the fires, or perhaps from something else. Slave workers all, a wild hunt of living creatures that had fallen under the Other Kind’s spell. They came in such a rush that Elisa barely had time to drop to her knees and cover her head with her arms. In and among them was a swarm of green lights, a rush of blinding incandescent forms flittering about as the stampede of life surged past her, over her, a dazzling migration tumbling over the cliffs in a wave. Will-o’-wisp before them went, sent forth a twinkling light . . . Donald’s lovely melody battered her as she was nearly swept off the precipice herself, the sound of whistling wind and bodies pelting the water below.

  The land fell silent once more. She dared to lean over the edge, the rippling water illuminated by fading contrails of brilliant green. And soon she saw the fairy bands all riding in her sight. Her heart raced, it sung; she was terrified, but also strangely, powerfully high. She stood to watch the fading web of radiance dissolve beneath the waves, like a school of diving jellyfish.

  Elisa waited for some time before she turned with reluctance from the cliff. But still she wasn’t alone. A figure formed in her path, a sparkling beam of light birthed out of nothingness, from an incision slashed through the air. Something had stayed behind.

  It was difficult to see in its entirety—indeed, it was impossible. Relatively human in shape, it was a shadow that lacked concrete form, one that used the surrounding landscape to delineate itself. About half a foot taller than her, slit-thin while still manifestly solid, it was a murky, reedy creature that stank of semen and saltwater, of mulch and rancidity and putrefaction. Its lean appendages hung like felled branches at its narrow sides, like Gavina’s lank and ravaged arm.

  This is no dream, Elisa thought, and wiped both sweat and tears from her cheeks. This is a thing of terrible beauty.

  She shuddered, and the being stirred as if in response, raising its left arm in a stilted gesture. She mirrored it, raised her right one in imitation. Its spindly arm tapered and concaved into a rough sickle shape; this she mirrored as well. It slunk forward and conversely became harder to discern, but for the pronged shapes its feet left on the damp moss. She glided in its direction, an arm cupped before her as if preparing for an embrace.

  It’s just like dancing. Like Madame Farber’s ballet class in fourth grade, when she first learned how to move with a partner. As the creature shifted closer, its swampy reek sweetened, citrus tanging the air. And then its face appeared, gleaming and moist. The outline of its wide domed eyes emerged, almost as an apparition, along with the shape of its scooped and bisected mouth. Elisa swayed on her feet like a stubborn leaf, a seagull in an updraft.

  The thing trembled before her, nearly indistinguishable from the shifting ferns in its wake, green fiddlehead patterns a thousand fingerprints smudged upon bright sea glass. Elisa reached out, and it reached back, a nebulous motion that brought them within inches of each other. Was it mirroring her now? Impossible to tell, only that they seemed to move as one. Heat radiated from its body of bark and bone, a throb of white starlight that washed over her in a wave that tasted of plant sap.

  Another pulsation and it was a razor’s breadth away. She could feel it examining every inch of her, inside and out. She still could not see it exactly, but it was here just the same, right here, made up of things from the wood. And as with the forest, Elisa felt renewed in the creature’s presence, the way a lost soul must feel when it is saved. Never before had she sensed the presence of God, or anything close to divine grace. Never, except when she was with her best friend, the only person she had ever belonged to without question.

  She wrapped her arms around it and placed her hands on its back, where she took up
flesh of dew-damp bark and frayed quill, as well as a sticky ooze beneath her cracked nails, her fingers roaming the same way they had explored the forest floor upon waking. Everything in this moment was real, everything wild. She could feel it all, right down to the bone.

  “Blue,” she whispered.

  Her eyes widened, and for a split second she saw him, the old him. Gorgeous and flawed with his crooked wry smile, yes, but more as he was when she’d first met him—younger and fuller of face, a curtain of home-dyed hair draped across his cheek in a crest of blue and black. As soon as she locked on to his eyes, however, the familiar bottle-green ones that had held her so long in their sway, she found herself gazing up at the tree canopy instead. He had slipped from her grasp, her arms still cradled in front of her as if in a pas de deux. But it was him.

  “Blue?” she called out. Where has he gone?

  Movement a few feet away, along the edge of the cliff. She carefully tread along the lichened rocks and followed a vague impression of his retreating shape, his tracks like two fork hoes in the grass and accompanied by a scritch-scratch sound of pen nibs on stiff parchment.

  “Wait!” she cried. “What about our child?”

  Blue froze by the edge of the cliff. Before she could help herself, she hurried forward and reached for him. She grasped his arm, and a convulsion of energy surged through her.

  A nimbus of pulsating light, drawing her deeper into the throne room. High above, the wounded Queen deteriorates in her nest, the sound of her fire-damaged wings thrumming through the catacombs and punctuated by the crackling of embers. Fleshy and swollen tubers hang from the ceiling, discolored opalescent grubs that should be beating with emergent life but are instead puckered and scorched black with decay.

  Below the nest is Blue, his flint-gray arms cradling something that looks like a woman, though one that is made of birch. They sway, as if dancing. Its face is Elisa’s face, its womb her womb, and inside of it, inside . . .