by Robert Levy
A keening wail sounded everywhere at once, a dazzling assault so invasive that she fell once more to her knees. She struggled to right herself, afraid she might tumble over the edge to the bay below as the world spun out from beneath her. But Blue was there to steady her. He brought her away from the edge, and gently lowered her to the wet grass.
the unborn
it will
be
safe
Blue, inside her head. The sound of the words excruciating, his multilayered voice intoxicating to the point of nausea.
go
live
in this world
while you still can
you chose to leave
us
once
already
She managed to stand, but he was already bounding away toward the cliff in a flutter of dust and the lightning crack of hollow bone upon rock. The slender line of his spine, a glimpse of his gray paper-birch hide as he vaulted over the precipice as if launched from a springboard. She ran back to the cliff’s edge and watched him fall, his protean shape flickering as he crashed through the waves in an arc of bright emerald light.
Elisa placed one hand upon her stomach, then higher to where the camera rested against her chest. Too late, but she released the shutter nevertheless, in the vain hope of capturing the blur of motion through the dimming waters before he disappeared entirely.
It was midafternoon when she crossed the familiar trail that led past the Colony, the weathered sign in the shape of a light green fairy pointing the way into the woods. She resisted entering the old burned-out husk, and remained instead by the covered well out back, its bucket long since lost to nature. She recalled a fairy tale she’d once heard, about a nixie surfacing from a well; she thought it might have had a happy ending. But that wasn’t Elisa’s story. She was no fairy. Was Blue? Donald seemed to think so, didn’t he? All Elisa was sure of was that Blue was a creature born of this land and below it, a species heretofore unknown to her but as real as any human being.
And what had Blue and Elisa’s story been, after all, but a kind of fairy tale, ever since the halcyon haze of their youth? Despite all that had happened to them, that fact had not changed, not really. She and Blue were living a different kind of tale altogether, and she told it to herself as she left the trail to form her own desire line.
Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved to dance, never more so than when she was with her closest friend. But then her feet began to ache and she lost herself, out in the darkest wood. Her friend found her, though, and he brought her to live with his family made of leaf and light, beneath the waves and the land. She never felt so happy.
But down below the world they made another version of the dancing girl. A mirror girl, with her very own face, beneath the roots of the ocean in the realm of the dying Queen. The dancing girl, she grew restless, and wanted to see the light of the sun again, but she was warned she could only leave once.
And so she decided to go. But the mirror girl stayed among them. Now she was the one who cleaved to the dancing girl’s friend, and they called each other by their secret names. And still they dance to this day, in the place below the world. Never stopping, never parting, forever and ever and ever . . .
She didn’t know how to finish the story.
Elisa stepped from the forest behind Maureen and Donald’s house. As she crossed the lawn she shielded her face from the low sun magnified off the water in waves of pink and lavender and orange; she felt washed out in the vivid glare, exposed. And, in fact, watched: Jason, up the hill, was tracking her from the porch of the MacLeod House, in an uncanny reenactment of when she had wandered out of these same woods ten days ago. He didn’t run to her, but instead stepped tentatively down the porch steps. There would be no tearful reunion, no cries for help or calls of prayer to a merciful god. Not this time.
Gabe appeared on the other side of the door, its dented screen a dark veil across his face as Jason met her beside the peony shrubs. The heady scent of the flowers was overwhelmingly ripe, so much so that a powerful and erotic thrill shot through her. It all goes back to the land.
She stared past Jason, past Gabe on the stairs and up to the house; she tried to make a welcoming smile of its windows and porch but the façade remained lifeless, its appearance inert.
“Elisa,” Jason said, and she was startled by the anguish in his eyes. Something was very wrong.
“What is it?” she said. Gabe sunk down onto the porch steps, his form compressed like a crushed beer can. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Blue.” Jason’s face contorted, he was sweating now. “They found him.”
“What happened?” She steeled herself. “Where is he?”
“I’m so sorry,” Jason said, tears at the corners of his eyes; her pain had always been his, even now. “He’s dead.”
They’d found the body eight days ago, not long after Elisa had wandered out of the woods. There had been some sort of confusion, the corpse assumed to be one of the half dozen hikers who had gone missing after the forest fires began. It was only upon performing the autopsy that someone thought to compare the samples to DNA collected from Blue’s toothbrush. Despite the incompleteness of the remains—much of the body had been carried off by predators, including the teeth—preliminary lab results showed a perfect match.
Jason volunteered to meet with the coroner, but Elisa said she wanted to join him, so she could see Blue one last time. This was patently false, as she had no intention of seeing Blue for the last time, now or ever. Because she didn’t believe it was him, not really. Such a thing as never seeing Blue again just wasn’t possible; even if he were dead she would see his face in the stars, or the mirror, at the bottom of the sea or in the spidered cracks inside a teacup. No matter what kind of thing Blue might actually be, born of man or otherwise, alive or dead, made of darkness or the light. She would see him again, in everything. The way she had seen him that very morning, on the cliff overlooking the bay.
The coroner, a cotton-haired man of seventy with cauliflowered ears and an aquiline nose, distributed surgical masks to Jason and Elisa before he slid open the steel meat locker door. The walls were finished in immaculate white tile, the floors marbleized linoleum; the space bore an eerie resemblance to the examination rooms in the medical center directly across the street, where Elisa had been kept for observation.
On the far side of the room was a morgue slab, upon which lay the body, a sheet pulled over it like a Halloween ghost. She’d been expecting the corpse to be slid out of some drawer, but no, it was just lying there, waiting. Her stomach seized up, and she put her hand upon her belly, cradled the small mound below her navel as if she were trying to keep herself together, or hold something inside.
“I have to warn you,” the coroner said, shifting around the table so the body was between them. “The remains have experienced a great deal of distress.”
It was only once he spoke and a cloud escaped his lips that Elisa became conscious of the fact that the morgue was refrigerated, and now that she noticed she grew cold, as if submerged in ice water. The tiled room was like a swimming pool, the cotton mask over her nose and mouth suggestive of a kind of breathing apparatus. “He won’t be recognizable to you,” the coroner added, and looked from her to Jason. “Viewing victims of fire . . . It can be a distressing experience.”
“I understand,” she said, but she needed to be sure. “I’m ready.”
The coroner pulled back the sheet. Jason, reflexively, squeezed Elisa’s hand.
And there it was. A muddy brown amalgam of charred bone and muscle, skin burned off so that the plate of the cranium was exposed. Both jaws were missing, with the bottom of the skull concaved, excavated. The rib cage and stomach had been opened during the autopsy. What was left of the limbs was scorched black, the right shin and foot missing, along with the right hand. Wisps of red muscle were visible along the shriveled and rutted neck, threaded through with a bluish
, veiny filament. From one of the eye sockets a single drab of yellow pus had oozed and hardened there like an amber tear. Breathe, she thought, breathe. She felt as if she were drowning.
“Wait. Please.” Elisa put her hand on the coroner’s latex-gloved wrist to stop him from pulling the sheet up, though he had made no move to do so. She looked closer. Not at the flame-corroded eye sockets, but into them, through them. The longer she looked, the more convinced she became it wasn’t him. The creature she’d seen in the woods, the one she had touched: that was Blue. This was someone else altogether.
“How?” she whispered as she leaned over the corpse. How did they do it? How had he been replicated down to the cellular level, so well it would fool a DNA test? The only answer was that this wasn’t a replica at all.
The coroner pulled the sheet up, the body shrouded once more. Jason signed some paperwork and made preliminary arrangements to return the body to New York, once the next of kin—and that could only be Blue’s mother—was notified.
“Do you want us to contact her?” the coroner said. “The police will want to notify her directly, but in terms of the burial plans—”
“That’s okay.” She stared straight down, still fixed on the withered corpse beneath the sheet, the contoured hollows of its abbreviated shape. “We’ll deal with it ourselves.”
Jason thanked the coroner and stepped toward the door; she could sense him waver there, unsure of whether or not to leave her alone with the body. She remained beside the slab, incapable of looking away from the sheet’s snow-white topography, and what lay beneath. Not Blue, she thought. Not Blue Not Blue Not Blue. No matter who said it was him, no matter how many times. It wasn’t Blue. And if he was still alive, that meant she might still be able to return to his world.
“How are you doing?” Jason asked. He returned to her side and placed an arm around her shoulders. “You hanging in there?”
“Trying,” she said, a little nod as she pulled the cotton mask from her face. She was too distracted to focus, her head buzzing with possibilities as she forced herself away from the slab and down the hall to the waiting room.
When Gabe saw them he leapt from his seat. There had been no talk between them of Gabe having lured her onto the sandbar, of the believers meeting and the ensuing struggle, Jessed beating on Fred Cronin with Jason looking on. Elisa remembered her promise then, the one she had made to Gabe in the hospital and then repeated out on the sandbar. It was true; she knew that now for certain. They were going to find Blue, or die trying. And she was going to find what she had left of herself, as well as what had been taken.
“Is he . . .” Gabe couldn’t finish his sentence. He ran a hand through his matted blond curls, darker and thicker than when they’d first arrived in Cape Breton a lifetime ago.
“Do you want to see?” she asked. Gabe recoiled.
“Elisa,” Jason said, a warning.
“What? I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea. He doesn’t look like anything anymore.”
“I don’t want to see him,” Gabe said, eyes welling up. He looked exhausted. “I want to remember him the way he was. Just . . . Blue.”
“Smart,” Jason said, a gleam in his eye. Elisa knew this look well. It was triumph, perseverance in the face of irrationality; illogic always was Jason’s most enduring opponent. She wished she could let him have this one victory, not only for his sake but for the sake of their marriage as well.
She turned to Gabe. Distraught as he was, a charged current managed to pass between them. She would have to trust him with her secret knowledge, maybe all of it; he was the one who would believe.
Gabe’s face brightened and he drew in his breath, his eyes widening in expectation. “Elisa?” he whispered, his voice that of a little boy. Perhaps he already understood.
“It’s not him,” she said. “Blue. It’s not him.”
“Don’t,” Jason said. His face crumbled as he yanked the surgical mask from around his neck. “Elisa, don’t. Please don’t do this.”
“I mean it.” She knew she was going to lose Jason, but Gabe would understand; he’d have to. She’d come this far, seen things she never thought possible, and now there was no turning back. “I know they say it’s him. But you have to believe me, it’s not.”
“He’s gone,” Jason countered, though Gabe was focused solely on her. “I’m sorry. Really, I am. I know Blue’s not with us anymore, but you have to—”
“No.” She dug into the word like a boot heel into fresh soil. “I’m not talking about his spirit leaving his body. I mean, that body in there was never his to begin with.”
“I believe you,” Gabe said. He wiped away tears with a dirty sleeve, his wan appearance warming under the bright halogen lights. “I do. I believe you. I do.”
“Listen, you two are grieving,” Jason said. “Don’t let your emotions cloud reality. This delusional kind of thinking, it’s very dangerous.” He looked as if he were about to vomit. “You’ve been talking too much to Fred Cronin. Both of you. Blue wasn’t some kind of alien creature. He wasn’t a fairy, or a changeling, or—”
“I know it’s hard for you to trust me,” Elisa said. “I get that, and I’m sorry. I am. For everything I’ve done to hurt you. But that body in there? That’s not Blue. Because I saw him, earlier today. I saw the Blue we know. I held him, out in the woods.” She took Gabe by the shoulders; now they were the ones who were joined, with Jason boxed out. “He’s still alive,” she said. “He’s different now, yes, but it was him.”
“Please,” Jason said, his voice firm, as if she were an obstinate child refusing to dress for school.
“The body in there, it’s the original,” she went on, breathless. “It’s the real Michael Whitley. He and Gavina, the two five-year-olds, they were taken in and replaced by Blue and a new Gavina.”
“He is one of them!” Gabe cried.
“Yes. They can make themselves look human, right down to their DNA. The kids, Michael and Gavina, they were raised by the Other Kind, but as their slave labor. Gavina’s still out there, I saw her with my own eyes. There’s a whole bunch of others too, animals even, they all raced off the cliff into the bay. I think they were running from the fires. That must be how Michael died.”
“Please,” Jason said one last time, an anguished cry of desperation, and defeat. “I can’t,” he said, “I can’t.”
And then he said it again, kept saying it over and over as his voice gradually lowered, the words reduced to muttering, an incoherent mantra.
Jason turned on his heel, dropped his mask to the tiled floor, and marched down the corridor to the elevator.
It wasn’t until after sunset that Elisa finally knocked on the door to the pink room and slipped inside. Jason, facing the window, barely looked up at her from where he sat motionless on his side of the bed. He opened his mouth to speak but she shook her head, closed the door behind her, and went to him. She kissed him. Tenderly at first, then with passion; he resisted her, but only for a moment.
She pulled her dress over her head and helped him with his shirt. She had missed the softness of his skin, the power in his broad shoulders and muscular arms. If only they could have shaped themselves together from the start, instead of pretending their unlikely and fully formed selves were some kind of perfect fit. Only then might they have lasted.
Jason laid her out on the bed like one of his old pinstriped suits. He paused for a moment, and she could tell part of him didn’t want to do this, could already read the regret on his face. But he relented. He kissed her neck and shoulders, her breasts and navel, lowered her underwear and moved down to the darkly thatched mound of her sex. She gasped and held her breath, squeezed her eyes shut so she saw a Milky Way of shifting stars, followed by pure darkness. Why had she gone so long without feeling this way? Why had she withheld these tremors, this gratification, not only from Jason but from herself? And why now, on this day of horror and awe?
; Jason’s tongue moved inside her. She arched her back and grasped his hair, which over the past weeks had grown longer than she knew he liked to keep it. Dust motes sparked in the twilight glow from the twin windows, neither branch nor leaf visible from where she lay. Only the night sky unfolding at dusk, wide open above the vast expanse of the cove. She scarcely had time to catch her breath before she felt him hard against her thigh, that part of him that always seemed to act as its own separate animal. The pungent and perfumed scent of decaying peonies wafted from the vase on her bedside.
She rolled on top of Jason and eased him inside. In the narrow channel between discomfort and pleasure, she thrashed against him. She wanted to bite down on his shoulder, to draw blood; she wanted to cut into him with her cracked nails and peel back his skin. She longed to tell him she was sorry one more time, that she understood why he was going to leave her, just as she hoped he would understand why she needed to stay.
But she remained silent, pressed against him as he surged in and out of her. Elisa pictured invading hands, hollowing her out so they could take her unborn child. Down in the underground warrens, through the passageways she could now conjure in her mind’s eye, not by sight but by touch. Down there. Her fingers made their way up Jason’s sides, the way they had felt their way out of the caverns, surfaces slick with humidity and excreted life. That was where she would return.
“I’m—I’m going to come,” Jason said, and sat up, still inside of her. “Do you want me to—”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay,” but he pulled out anyway, ejaculating onto his stomach. They both knew there was no real healing in this.
A few minutes later, sweat cooled on her skin as they held each other across the worn down comforter, Jason focused on a lock of her hair as he twirled it between two fingers. By the time she worked up the courage to tell him she wouldn’t be going back home, it was obvious he already knew.
