The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  He dropped down to the forest floor and made a run for it, deeper into the woods, until he doubled back and charted a parallel course to the trail. There was only one place he could think of to head next.

  He pounded on the cottage door a few times before he let himself inside. The front room was cold and damp and reeked of fried clams and cigarette smoke, among other things, worse things. But Gabe smelled like hell himself, sweat-soaked from fear and the frantic dash through the woods that brought him to Fred Cronin’s place before dusk, still picking splinters and shards of glass from his shoulders and arms. With the shades drawn, the living room was even darker than he remembered; he tried the light switch by the door, which did nothing. After stumbling over a disarray of toppled newspaper towers, upended furniture, and emptied beer bottles, he finally made it through the hazardous mess of an obstacle course to the back of the house, where he found Fred lying unconscious on the bathroom floor.

  “Fred? Are you okay? Can you hear me?” Is he dead? The stench was so strong that Gabe retched, a cloud of stink around the body. But the smell was an admixture of alcohol and body odor and shit, nothing worse. Eyes watering, he hauled Fred up and carried him to the bed. In the gloom, Fred was but a hazy shadow, his body even more compromised than when Gabe had last laid eyes upon him, after Jessed pummeled the diminutive man into the earth as if staking a tent pole. He was pale and desiccated, his beard dirty and knotted and grayer than ever; he looked like a shriveled wizard drained of all his power, leveled by a rival’s spell.

  Fred opened his eyes, and Gabe’s breath caught. “Fred! Are you with me? We need to get you to a hospital.” Fred slowly shook his head, his gaze trained away from Gabe and toward the far side of the room, at the single triangle-shaped window set beneath the slanted roof. Against the unwashed glass hung a dream catcher, its feathered and beaded hoop overtaken by spiderwebs; Gabe pictured the spiteful faces of all the nightmares it had trapped over the years, as well as the ones that, against hope, had managed to break through.

  “You need help,” Gabe panted, but Fred continued shaking his head, until it settled in Gabe’s direction. “Are you listening to me?”

  “Fuck the hospital,” Fred said in a gravel-dragged rasp. “Why are you here?”

  “Elisa and me. We were up at the Colony. Looking for a way into the rum-running tunnels. So we could . . .” Fred’s eyes began to close again, and Gabe squeezed the man’s arm to keep him awake. “Daniel Jessed, he showed up out of nowhere. Attacked us. Tried to burn us alive. We managed to get away, but we got separated.”

  “Got off easy. That asshole broke my leg in three places. Cracked ribs, knocked out two teeth I couldn’t spare.” He jerked his jaw, made a face as if he were laughing, though no sound emerged. He looked decapitated, his head that of John the Baptist, a soiled quilt square the platter beneath his chin. “You going after her?”

  “I have to. And I have to go now. Elisa said we needed to do it during the new moon. Donald’s field notes said the same, something about the tunnels and the tides. I only have a couple more hours.” A selfish part of him was glad Fred would never let him call an ambulance; it would make leaving easier.

  “And here you thought she was going to help you,” Fred wheezed. “I still think she’s one of them. Their kind. Did she try mating with you? You know, screwing?”

  “What? No. And you’re wrong. She’s our kind, not theirs. I can tell now. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she’s gone for good.”

  “Is she now?” Fred coughed and sent a thick spray of blood across the tattered quilt before he went limp with exhaustion, his head lolling to the side. Merlin on his deathbed. But this sorcerer, he remains clever and sage. He knows how I can find Blue.

  “Fred!” Gabe shouted, and squeezed the man’s arm again, harder this time. “I need you to tell me how else I can get down there. Okay?”

  Fred willed himself back to consciousness. He sat up a bit, all spindly limbs and jutting bones, cheeks sunken beneath his beard. Gabe bent over the bed and Fred reached for him, took a handful of Gabe’s shirt in his fist and drew him closer until they were inches apart. “That odor,” Fred whispered. His watery eyes rippled, and with an unexpected convulsion of strength he pulled Gabe on top of him. “What are you doing with that odor?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You smell of them. The Other Kind. Their scent, it’s already on you. Oh, God,” Fred moaned, and for a moment his eyes rolled back in his head. “Oh, God, that smell.”

  “Best screech in the cove, just like you said.” Gabe pried Fred’s hand from his shirt and laid him back upon the stained pillows. “If you ever get around to telling me where to go, maybe I can bring you some of the good stuff.” How low, dangling the promise of a fix before a wilted junkie. But he was willing to go lower.

  “Tempting. But far too late.” Fred grimaced, blood at the corner of his cracked lips. “There’s a shaft to the old bootlegging tunnels down in Flora’s basement. That’s the closest entrance to Kelly’s Mountain.” It was a struggle for him to speak, and they both knew he would soon reach a point when there would be no more words at all. “The last gateway before the sea, at least according to the old maps.” He coughed again. More blood. “Be careful there are no surprises there. The bootleggers set booby traps up and down the channels to thwart the law. I also wouldn’t put it past Flora to leave some kind of nasty surprise behind herself.”

  “For Blue.”

  He nodded. “She knew it was on top of an entrance. Kept guard of it, always witching up some new way to try and get the Kind to show themselves. Finally worked.” Fred reached over and slid a cigarette from a pack on the bedside table. He tried to light it with a stick from a box of wooden matches but was trembling too much, so Gabe took out Blue’s lighter and lit it for him. He left the lighter on top of the pack as a burnt offering upon a bronze altar, though his fingers itched to take it back.

  “It’s down below the mountain you want to go,” Fred said, and Gabe could see him trying not to cough, not to breathe, all to keep the poisonous smoke inside his lungs. “That’s where they live. In the root of the mountain, through the caves below the water. Their nest.” He reached to take Gabe’s hand, which jittered upon the quilt, Gabe already plotting how fast he could get to Flora’s house. Now he was the junkie. Fred’s sunken eyes bored inside him. “He’s not going to come back with you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t believe that. I can’t.” He wished Fred hadn’t said it. Gabe couldn’t focus on that obstacle yet, only upon the journey. “Besides,” he said, “I spent my whole life hiding from the things that people told me weren’t really there. Magical things. But they were wrong. The Other Kind, they’re real. Blue is real.”

  “You’re right.” Fred smiled with sorrow. “The thing about the Other Kind, though? They don’t care about us. They can’t care about us. I get that now. The way we see ants? That’s how they see us. Something to study, maybe. But not much more.” He took a long drag off his cigarette and clenched Gabe’s fingers as if in seizure. “Take my truck. The keys are hanging from a nail by the front door. And whatever you do, for God’s sake don’t let them lay a finger on you. They’re not to be touched.”

  Too late. Gabe’s skin goosefleshed with the memory of Blue’s hands as they roamed the scars on his back, his secret wings. That night Gabe had lifted Blue’s hands from his body, but he immediately regretted it. Indeed, he’d longed for Blue to touch that sacred and shameful part of him, to quiet the scars and their ceaseless humming. “I think you’re really great,” Blue had said the next morning while they were still in bed, with what sounded like well-rehearsed words. “You’re a great person, and friend. But it’s probably not a good idea for us to be—” and Gabe interrupted him, told him it was cool, that he understood, it was fine, they were all good. But he knew that would never be true. Gabe was hooked.

  “What happened to the others?” he said as he stood beside Fred’s bed; ther
e was so little time left. “Colin and Patricia?”

  “Colin’s back in the hospital. Came down with pneumonia. It’s not looking good. Patricia, she won’t leave his side.”

  “And Tanya?”

  “I haven’t heard from her.”

  “Maybe—maybe I can carry you,” Gabe offered, his conscience interceding. “On my back. Or we can take the boat, go to the mouth of the Fairy Hole after all. At low tide there’s a chance we can—”

  “No!” Fred shouted, his face flushed from the effort. “No. I got some more life in me yet, you little shit. I’m going to finish the rest of these smokes if it kills me.” He released Gabe, thrust his hand away like an unclean thing. “So go on already. And while you’re at it, try not to drown down there. You don’t have to go through the Fairy Hole to get stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Gabe opened his mouth to speak, but Fred had already turned back toward the window and slumped down once more in the bedsheets, the cigarette still clutched in his hand. His skull smiled beneath his skin.

  Gabe retrieved his pack from the floor, backed out of the bedroom, and headed through the labyrinth of filth and debris to the front door. The car keys were there as promised, as well as the abandoned hiking packs for the believers group descent. He rummaged through them, and set aside a mining helmet, spelunking ropes, and a pair of rock-climbing spurs, as well as an energy bar, which he eagerly consumed. Gabe envisioned the sugar flooding him with warmth, and with light, all the bright good feeling he would need until he was at Blue’s side once more. He inventoried his own pack, bloody fingerprints left upon his flashlight and the underground maps from the Gaelic College archives, the hard and cracked leather cover of Donald’s field notes, the aerial photographs of the cove, the compass, and finally his own sketch pad, filled with his special drawings.

  And then he left the wizard’s cottage, releasing Fred in turn.

  Gabe drove the dingy white pickup truck to the far side of the mountain. He raced the entire way, and instead of ruminating about Fred dying alone he prayed, mostly that he didn’t get pulled over. He didn’t have a driver’s license, never had one, and even if he did, the sirens in the rearview were liable to be Jessed’s. And then it was game over. He felt Jessed’s eyes on him, the detective inside his mind, poking around in there. The huntsman meditates upon his prey. Trying to figure us out, and where we’re headed. But Jessed’s attention, like Gabe’s, was ultimately on Blue and the others like him. He wanted to kill each and every one of them, the devils that had haunted him since his little sister walked into the woods and something else came back. Fire cleanses all.

  Gabe pulled into Flora’s empty dirt-track driveway unaccosted. He put on the mining helmet, grabbed his pack from the passenger seat, and ran up to the house. Alone, it seemed, though there was a muddy road that made its way around the back of the house and into the woods that might have had recent tire tracks, he couldn’t be certain. He scooped up a rock to break a window, but when he reached the porch he found the front door unlocked, as opposed to when he and Jason had attempted to search the property on their canvass. One last look around—at the sun already setting behind the mountain, firs like arrowheads piercing the sky, thin ribbons of water visible through the branches—and then, afraid he’d spot the faint gleaming of a star if he waited too long, he slipped inside the house.

  The interior was dark and unpleasant, but it was a different unpleasantness from Fred’s cottage. Here everything was astringent, the air heavy with the smell of cleaning solvents. The place had been cleared out since he and Jason had peered through the windows, the doors all thrown wide open, including the one that led to the basement. He turned on his helmet lamp and started down the basement steps, the light an ever-dimming circle as he descended. I’m coming for you, little bunny. And I will find you.

  A draft gusted over the back of his neck. He tried to turn, but he was shoved from behind and sent hurtling down the stairs. His helmet flew off, and he collided with the hard dirt floor, sparks scattered behind his eyes. Gabe peered back up, and in the square of light from the open doorway he caught a glimpse of a dark silhouette as it leapt down the last of the stairs, lowering itself upon him like a spider from its web. He attempted to stand but couldn’t even get to his knees before an arm crooked around his neck and stanched the flow of oxygen, pinpricks flaring all over him as he choked on the stinging scent of aftershave.

  My father, he’s hunted me down at last. All the way to this dank basement, where no one should ever be found.

  He couldn’t move backward, so he pitched himself forward instead, his father along with him in a windmill of motion, head over feet over head as they rolled across the floor. Gabe was pinned down, and he was so much smaller, gloved hands fixed around his throat. He batted at his father’s face, no use as the boy’s air was choked away, thick fingers pressing into his flesh like a potter molding clay. They might as well have been back in that attic in New Jersey, just another lightless place among many.

  There was a bit of light, though, barely: the subdued glow from the mining helmet, its dull beam shining upward from the spot where it had landed under the stairs. And in this light Gabe’s sister Eve appeared, a damned expression upon her face. It was a look he knew well, the one that said Gabe better keep his mouth shut and stop struggling, that they’ll both be killed if anyone found out what their father does to them up in the attic. So he went limp, just as he always had, every time.

  There was no strange yellow boy. Gabe was startled by the revelation even as his life leaked out of him. He’d wished the monstrous boy into the attic as a sacrifice, a replacement his father could violate instead of him. There was only me up there, me and a book of matches. It was just as his mother had said; he’d started the fire himself, because he was trying to make it stop, to make the nightmare end once and for all. He’d wanted to see that house of horrors burn bright, for his father to suffer the way he and his sister had for so very long. But instead, he had run. He had stayed alive.

  Gabe turned from his father’s glowering face in feigned surrender. He reached along the basement floor until his hand found his backpack, fingers worming their way inside the front pouch, where they tightened around a ball-bearing chain. It was attached to a pen, the ballpoint one he’d nicked from the pharmacy in Baddeck the night of Blue’s disappearance. That night the pen had shone with the frequency, which meant it was important, so he’d slipped it from the clipboard and pocketed it. And now I know why.

  He curled the chain around his hand, grasped the pen in a tightened fist, and thrust it up toward heaven.

  The pen made a squelching sound inside his father’s neck, and he went rigid, his hold on Gabe’s throat slackening and moving to the wound. Gabe gasped for air and coughed violently, his hand still firm on the plastic pen barrel. He leaned in and forced it further inside. His father groaned, guttural and hoarse, blood spattering across them both as he floundered for the pen. But Gabe kept grinding it forward, a pestle inside mortar, and pushed himself off and away, the man falling beside him like an exhausted lover. He crawled retching over to the stairs, reached through the wide plank steps to fumble for the mining helmet until he seized it and swung it around, ready to use its hard metal casing as a weapon.

  And there he was. Not his father after all, but Daniel Jessed. The detective was in plainclothes, facedown and spread-eagle in a cloud of dust that settled upon him like a shroud, the pen still buried deep inside his neck. Blood was everywhere. Warm and wet over Gabe’s hands and face and clothes, in an uneven stain soaked into the dirt floor, as a dark red caul upon the man’s face. And still it flowed, still pumping from the wound and Jessed’s dying heart.

  Gabe, dizzy as hell, felt at the stinging lacerations on his own neck, the newest marks of violence to brand his skin. And should they scar, then I shall shift my shape, use these fresh welts as gills to swim away from here. Just as he once used the scars on his back as wings to fly from his father’s nest.

  It
didn’t take long to find the entrance to the bootlegger tunnels, an open spring-loaded trapdoor onto a wide hole dug into the middle of the basement floor. He placed the mining helmet back on his head, and shined the light at the crude hole, upon what looked to be a square box hanging from the joists above. As he approached, however, he saw it was in fact a cage, big enough for a large animal or a small person. Blue’s cage. The one Gabe had sensed that, metaphorically or otherwise, must have been here all along. Closets, bathrooms, attics, cellars, armoires even—because Gabe had been kept in his own cages, he recognized that in Blue as well. The way only someone who had lived such a life can smell a child’s fear, from knowing it firsthand.

  Draped from the bars of the cage were two knotted gauzes, swaying in an updraft from the pit. For a moment he thought they resembled a pair of hands, holding on for dear life. But they were only cobwebs.

  Gabe’s breath slowed, and once it steadied he took hold of Jessed beneath his armpits. With a great deal of effort, he hauled the body over to the pit and shoved it over the rim. It plunged like the dead thing it was, landing with a sickening thud somewhere below. And now I’ll use Blue’s cage to escape. He hooked the carabiner and rope to the bars of the cage and lowered himself into the hole. The cage held, and, after twenty or thirty feet, he touched down atop Jessed’s lifeless form. He unhooked himself from the carabiner and glanced up at the cage in the basement high above, steel shining in the light of his helmet lamp before he turned back to face the corpse at his feet. Gabe thought to cover him in dirt but soon abandoned the notion; he had neither time nor energy to spare. Jessed would rot in the dank hole’s wet air, where eventually he would be discovered. Until then, feed the land. Do us all some good.