The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  You’ll find your way? he thought, but suppressed his unease. “But see, that’s the thing . . . Maureen said the tunnels aren’t constant. That they change. Donald confirmed as much in his journal, when he gave up trying to map them in the sixties.” Gabe dizzied a bit, and canted his head, which made him see dark spots. He fumbled in his pocket for the remainder of the candy bar. “Even if you could figure it out, I still don’t see how we can get down there.”

  Elisa opened her hand. “Maybe this will help.” In her palm rested a slender and ornate iron key, strung from a thong of Tibetan prayer beads that tangled in her fingers like a rosary. “Donald just slipped me this. What do you think it’s for?”

  “A door.” Gabe reached for it and pointed the key skyward, the beads tightening between them. “And I think I know which one.”

  They went off-trail and across a field of tall grass spotted with purple lupine, the sky lit up by parti-colored rays from a picture-book sun overhead as Gabe watched the brilliant orb whiten from bright yellow like a dandelion forming a seed head. He stole a glance at Elisa, who stared forward, dark bags heavy under her eyes. Over the past few days she had spent her nights screaming herself awake, as Blue once had. She claimed not to remember what her nightmares were about, but she needn’t have bothered, really. Because Gabe knew she dreamed of the place to which they were heading. Compelled in her sleep to travel the unmapped terrain beneath the mountain, follow the winding path to the dark place where she had been violated, her unborn child ripped from her womb. He couldn’t begin to imagine that forfeiture.

  But there was something else. Another loss Elisa had alluded to beyond Blue and the child, some other, unknown entity she couldn’t bring herself to remember, or fully relay.

  The past three nights he had stayed up to watch her, no trace of the scintillating energy she first exuded upon her return from the realm of the Other Kind. Still, she remained the closest thing he had to Blue. So he kept near. Last night he’d forgotten to sleep altogether, and stayed up watching Elisa until he swore he could see into her dreams, pictures of restless clouds rolling and unrolling in the dark, accompanied by the low growl of faraway animals. When wolves are heard howling before sunset, expect the rains to come soon. But the storm was only inside her head.

  On the other side of the field they reentered the woods, and soon the crumbling chimney of the Colony appeared in the distance through the ragged scrim of branches. Elisa caught Gabe staring and she looked away, her hands gripped tightly to the straps of her pack, black cotton frayed at the elbow of her sweater. Just then Gabe had the uncomfortable feeling that she was going to bolt. Is she going to leave me behind? She did have the key around her neck, after all, and claimed to remember her way through the caverns. What does she need me for?

  But that was ridiculous. Why would she run from him, when they were in this together? We both want to bring Blue back.

  Unless she didn’t want to come back at all.

  Since they’d headed into the woods, he and Elisa had hardly exchanged a word. It was easier for him to keep his mouth shut and follow her, focus instead on the Colony building rising before them. The former loggers’ quarters and its charred brick walls looked different now that he knew it was Maureen who had set it ablaze, the wounds fresher, maybe. There had likely been other fires since, however, a succession of desecrations that had contributed to the building’s current state of ruin. The same way the MacLeod House had burned over and over across its long history, and the forest fires that seemed to occur whenever the Other Kind reared their heads. Fire hides all traces and tracks, and he fingered Blue’s lighter again, rolling the thumbwheel the wrong way until the flint sparked. Fire cleanses all.

  Once they entered the Colony’s burned-out shell they headed for the inner sanctum, its remarkably well-preserved walls adorned with the elaborate and phantasmagorical murals. Though Gabe had ventured inside many times over the last month to take in the vivid and complex illustrations, he viewed them now through new eyes. The once-inscrutable images, they told the story of two peoples, human and otherwise. The collages weren’t chronological or even directly representational, but he could follow parts of the story nevertheless. It was a secret history of this place, the alluring darkness beneath the land and the promising half-light of the world above.

  Here was a spent book of matches clutched in the hands of a voluptuous young woman, her eyes milky gray behind a praying mantis mask rendered in aluminum foil. Other figures circled her, including a man masked as a bear, a woman as a fox, another as a coyote—all huddled around a spent box of hypodermic needles, the syringes gone cloudy with use and age. Farther down the wall, a black-eyed boy was sketched in charcoal, his hands holding down a saucer-eyed child beneath a shellacked and ridged fiberboard relay of waves. Gabe put a hand to the mural but drew it away as if scalded, a faint trace of energy emanating from the brick.

  The Gavina replacement, she made all this. Which meant she knew she was going to drown by her false brother Daniel’s hands.

  Elisa moved toward the hallway, and Gabe hurried to keep up. Down the dark passage were the pair of steel closet doors they’d discovered upon their first visit to the Colony, one door propped open with a cinder block to reveal the ongoing mural. He shined his flashlight inside. A dull bit of metal glimmered on the ceiling: a gold ring, embedded in the wood. It was part of the mural as well, a halo for a painted red angel whose dark red wings crossed the ceiling in two scarlet slashes. Beneath it was written the words Borealis the Mother was sent up from the Heavens of the Faraway World to bring comfort to the New Children of the Screaming Places. It wasn’t a biblical angel, the kind that Fred’s believer friend Tanya prayed to over her woodland altar, begging the heavenly hosts to bring back her husband, dead in a car crash three years past. This was another kind of angel altogether.

  He swung open the closet door and watched as a desiccated rag fell from a nail and landed with a dull paper thump. A stranger is coming. He recognized the omen from one of his books. The other door remained shut with its burned brass knob locked tight, though the scorched floor below it showed through in a sweep of blackened ash.

  Elisa removed Donald’s key from around her neck and inserted it into the keyhole, worried it until it caught. When she pulled the knob the door belched open like a crypt, the humid smell of wet earth thickening the air. Gabe pointed his flashlight through the opening. He had assumed the mural would continue inside this space as well, and was surprised to find the closet’s interior was in fact a steel chamber, akin to an elevator car. The space was barren, save a spattering of residue at the corners, dried mud splashed halfway up the walls. Blue and the Gavina replacement, they weren’t allowed inside here.

  He got on his knees and ran his hands along the corrugated iron flooring. It wasn’t until he found a notch on the back wall and slid his hands inside the gap that he snagged a piece of loose metal on his finger. It was a ring, the same size and golden color as the angel’s halo embedded in the ceiling of the other closet. He took it as a sign, and tugged on it. In a cloud of dust and ash the floor began to rise, and Gabe continued to lift what he now saw was a cleverly disguised hatch door that spanned the length of the closet and opened onto a rough hole, no wider than two feet across and dug directly into the earth. The open gates to the underworld, without a Cerberus in sight.

  “Do you see any way down?” Elisa asked, but he shook his head, the beam of his flashlight disappearing into the opening’s hungry black mouth. There were no means by which to lower themselves, no way of knowing how far the drop was or what might greet them at the bottom. He longed for Fred Cronin’s guidance, not to mention the man’s elaborate assortment of supplies from the botched believers group expedition.

  “Maybe we could go back to the house and grab some sheets,” Gabe said. “Tie them to something heavy and then ease our way down?”

  “Sounds good. After that, I should be able to get us the rest of the way there.” Her quiet confidence buoy
ed him. All he had to do now was stay as close to her as possible. She will show me the way.

  There was a nearby crunch of feet on broken glass, followed by the sound of heavy boots mounting the waterlogged remains of the back deck. Elisa and Gabe exchanged panicked looks before they scrambled inside the closet to perch upon the edges of the hatch, facing each other over the yawning hole. He reached out and plucked the key from the outside lock, easing the door closed as he killed the flashlight, the darkness bisected by a slender shaft of muted light through the keyhole.

  Gabe struggled to hold his pack as he scrambled for balance. Floorboards groaned down the long hall, accompanied by the hollow clink of beer cans and other detritus being kicked aside as the footsteps swiftly approached. He fumbled to fit the key into the keyhole, this time on the inside of the door, and barely managed to engage the lock before the knob was jerked from the other side. Elisa gasped. The stranger has arrived.

  “Come on out of there.” The words muffled through the blocked keyhole, but still recognizable as belonging to Daniel Jessed, his voice as authoritative as it was menacing. The big bad wolf had come to blow their house in. “You two are making a big mistake.” You two. Had he been watching them? Following them? Gabe reached to take Elisa’s hand, their arms a bridge over the hatch; if one of them jumped, the other would fall as well.

  “You’re one of their kind, aren’t you, girl?” Jessed said from the other side of the door, his words redolent with scorn. “Maybe you both are, now. Like Flora’s grandson. The both of you turned devils.”

  “Your sister, she isn’t dead,” Elisa called out, and Gabe squeezed her hand but she didn’t quiet. “I saw her, out in the woods.”

  “Liar! Devil!” He struck against the steel, the sound violent as cannon fire.

  “Detective, please,” Gabe said. “We’re not bad people. Just let us be.”

  “That . . . thing,” Jessed said. “The one that came back wearing my sister’s body. No one thought it was so bad either.” A chilling silence, until he spoke again. “Funny, isn’t it? How people around here talk about the Other Kind being from nature. But what’s so natural about taking the place of a little girl?”

  “Listen to me,” Elisa said. “The real Gavina, she was hurt in the fires but she’s still out there. She’s grown now. They kept her alive all this time.”

  “My sister’s dead!” he shouted. “They killed her. You killed her. Your kind . . .”

  “She’s alive,” Elisa said. “I swear to you, she’s alive.”

  “I’m going to give you five seconds to come out of there.” But barely a moment elapsed before Jessed threw himself against the door, the reverberation so loud that Elisa slipped from the ledge. Little pig, little pig, let me in . . . Gabe grabbed her and managed to pull her over to his side of the hatch. Her breath was irregular, heartbeat a bass drum against his chest and the hair on his chinny chin chin.

  “I finally found where they’re all hiding, though,” Jessed said. “You know that? Took a mighty deep borehole, but I got them.” He slammed against the door again, harder.

  Elisa’s probably never had someone come at her like this, Gabe thought. But I have. His father’s crazed eyes blinking through the dark of the closet, like so many dark places he’d known. So he did what his mother had taught him to do when he was set upon by his father: he lowered his head, and he furiously prayed.

  Our father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven . . .

  Gabe held his breath and looked up through the dim. The door hadn’t budged, and for a single, stupid moment he let himself think they might be safe, that they would get to Blue after all. Then, a scraping sound, and something pinged against the wall next to him. Donald’s key, pushed through the keyhole, followed by an arc of liquid traveling up Gabe’s side. An acrid gas station smell hit him, and Elisa’s grip upon his torso tightened with alarm.

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  Lighter fluid squirted over them in a violent arc, the angry Cyclops eye of the keyhole illuminated once more as a red plastic spout moved from the opening.

  “Go!” Gabe hissed. He forced the flashlight into Elisa’s hand and pushed her down through the hatch. A moment later he followed, just as a stream of heat and light pierced the darkness, fire erupting through the keyhole in a chemical torrent of blue and yellow flame.

  Chapter Eleven

  * * *

  The smell of burned hair trailed him as Gabe half staggered and half slid down the muddy chute, Elisa a rush of air below. He fell in her wake, the echoing sound of metal upon rock as he brushed her arm with his fingertips but she slipped away, his trajectory suddenly blocked. Scrambling to reach her, he met only earth; it was as if the ground had opened up for her and quickly closed, shutting him out. Chunks of dirt pelted him. Bits of rock forced themselves under his fingernails as he continued to slide, until the back of his head slammed against hard stone.

  He was momentarily stunned, slapped to life again by a root that caught hold of his heel and twisted him sideways so that he was no longer sure whether he was facing up or down. Unhand me, sacred trees of the ancients, visions of snarled branches clawing at him as Gabe shook his leg to free it from the root’s grasp. Who so shall release me, for him I will open the hoards of the earth. He dropped a dozen more feet before he crashed into wood and glass, his vision going white with agony.

  It took him some time to force open his eyes. He’d landed in some kind of silo-shaped storage room below the Colony, on top of a stack of decomposing lobster crates packed with glass bottles. He didn’t understand how he was seeing all this, until he noticed the flashlight he’d handed Elisa lying on the dirt floor and illuminating part of the room. He sat up and frantically patted at his hair to make sure it wasn’t on fire, a lingering stench of bitter combustion.

  “Elisa?” he whispered, then said again with more insistence. The only response was his own voice, echoing off dirt and rock. He hauled himself off the crates, grabbed the flashlight, and aimed it up at the shaft that had ejected him. He could barely make out the curving mouth of the chute, and wondered at what point above Elisa had been separated from him. There must have been a fork in the path, or perhaps she had deliberately shaken Gabe off, as he’d suspected she might. Maybe the underworld had simply accepted her, while he was jettisoned to land in this improvised storage room. I am Orpheus, who must venture farther below, lest I fail to bring my love back to the world. Only Elisa wasn’t his Eurydice. And Blue was no Eurydice himself: he was more like the Runaway Bunny, having left of what was likely his own volition. So I’ll turn myself into a bloodhound, little bunny. And I will find you.

  The flashlight trembled, and Gabe saw that he was shaking. The hatred in Jessed’s voice rumbled in his ears, the terror of countless childhood beatings as a shudder of fear wracked him, having waited until now to fully blossom. The antiseptic smell of his father’s aftershave, the whistle of the belt before it lashed him, blood spotting the underside of his parents’ bathroom sink: all of it returned in an unrelenting wave. But not the hurt itself, never that; only the constant low hum of his scars, the twin red channels up and down his back that anchored his invisible wings, the ones that had allowed him to fly free. That’s where he kept his old pain now.

  Something else came to him as well: Blue’s captivating scent, the one beneath all the spices and kitchen grease and cigarette smoke. It was all around now, and it was strong, so much so that Gabe listed. He ran the flashlight beam across the dirt floor and stone walls, a long-neglected gin still in a far corner.

  “Blue?” he called out, and held his breath.

  The smell was coming from the lobster crates. Or rather from the bottles inside, a few of which had shattered beneath him when he crashed to earth. His racing heart began to race faster. He looked closer, and now he could see the bottles’ faded labels. Each one bore the image of a dainty-looking fairy perched upon a rock in the water, the mouth of a
cave visible on a distant shore. It was the hidden remains of the Colony moonshine, what Fred and Maureen had referred to as screech, laced with the remainder of the Other Kind’s essence. Donald’s secret recipe, the best in the cove. Vision clouding with desire, Gabe had to pry himself away from the crates.

  It was time to find a way out, and to keep his cool while doing so, turn his panic into a little mouse that was really nothing to be afraid of at all. He retrieved a plastic compass from his pack, lifted it to his chest with the reverence of a holy object, and raised his head up high. Spirits of the East, Spirits of Elemental Air, he beseeched, sweep through like a proud eagle and bring forth the sky so that I may spread my own wings and take flight! High above in another corner of the room was a sliver of light, dim but discernible all the same. He shined the flashlight upward, upon iron rungs welded to brick casing. It was the sealed-off well behind the Colony, slits of daylight visible through the slatted cover. A covert escape route, fashioned by the old rum-runners perhaps, or maybe by the Colonists themselves. And it would be his deliverance.

  Gabe packed up his compass and flashlight, threw on his rucksack, and climbed, the rungs cool against his bloody and sweat-slicked palms. He waited at the top, and remained there for what seemed an eternity: listening for Jessed, for any sound but those of the natural world, its whistling birds and rustling leaves. Finally, he said a little prayer and pushed on the rotted wood cover.

  One of the planks gave way, then another, and a third, creating an opening large enough for him to get his head and shoulders through. He pried off the remaining pieces of wood and peered over the rim of the well; he was farther from the rear of the Colony building than he would have imagined. After summoning his courage, he raised himself out of the cold stone cylinder, the air soothing his red-raw skin with a velvet touch. For a brief moment it smelled as sweet as the screech had, and he trembled with delight, the brightness of day rendering the trees an emerald city against a swollen backdrop of blue. This is the forest primeval, Gabe thought, and now he was Evangeline, in search of a very different Gabriel.