The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  Gabe retracted the climbing rope, adjusted the helmet lamp’s beam, and started down the tunnel. The ground stuck to his feet. Adhesive and coated with an amber-tinged goop, the striated passageway was awash in a briny seaweed stench. Semen came to mind, but then he thought of spirit essence, of ectoplasm. He began to shuffle through the gelatinous ooze, but his leg caught on something and the sound of groaning earth made him spin around: the trapdoor to the basement above had sealed itself. His stomach tightened in a fit of nauseating claustrophobia. He wanted to scream for help, not that there was anyone to hear him, above or below. Instead he steadied his nerves and forced himself to continue down the tunnel. He couldn’t go to pieces now. And so he would make himself into The Boy Who Feared Nothing, maybe even The Man. The journey was only just beginning.

  Two more steps along the passageway and his sneaker crunched down on a waterlogged binder, cellophane pages scattered across the wet tunnel floor. It was an old photo album, leaves yellowed from age and filled with snapshots of a little boy with Blue’s face, one picture after the next. Tattered newsprint as well: articles on the first disappearance; the Starling Cove Hansel and Gretel; subsequent reports of the fire at the Colony; and more. Gabe removed a single unscathed Polaroid of a smiling young Michael Whitley and slipped it into his sketch pad, his fingertips going numb where they touched the photograph. My own special merit badge, an amulet to keep me from harm. It wasn’t Blue, but it was close. He needed to get closer.

  Gabe checked his compass and headed down the narrow throat of the tunnel. He reached for sweet memories to light the way, recollections of Blue and his shimmering features; it was a bright enough light by which to see. That day before Christmas when Gabe walked across Brooklyn to peer in the window of every storefront up and down Smith Street, fingers pressed to the snow-dappled glass until off on a side street he found the man Vinnie the Shark had been bitching and moaning about, the cidrule chef with the glittering green eyes and the magic touch. And once he had spotted Blue—at work in his open kitchen, which took up half the tiny restaurant—it was impossible to look away.

  Blue’s flawed and mesmerizing face, his nose with its slight swell at the bridge as if it might once have been broken, dark brows arched over eyes so bright they glowed. All of him seemed to glow. He was so beautiful, like a painting of Gabe’s namesake at the Annunciation, his radiance so strong that Gabe already felt himself changing. At once he needed to learn everything about this rare and exquisite creature. Indeed, Gabe had been so enthralled he had barely noticed the Help Wanted sign taped to the restaurant’s window.

  The dark passageways became increasingly erratic as he pressed forward, neither pebbles nor bread crumbs to help him find his way. Dilapidated remnants of pine-slatted staircases dangled from the ceiling of the uneven corridor at odd angles, alongside crumbling auxiliary tunnels that appeared to have been burrowed by subsurface mammals. Gabe wiped the blood from his face, pulled a candy bar from his pack, and bit it in two. As he let the sugar do its work he tried to calm himself, reassured in the knowledge that he had kept Blue with him. That he was safe, so long as Blue was near, if only as a conjured memory. It kept him walking.

  He wondered how much time had passed, down in the cool and dank and endless tunnels; Elisa was the one with the wristwatch. He told himself he was well, that all would be well, there was nothing to be afraid of, not anymore. But he didn’t feel it. Any sense of calm had evaporated, and in its place arose an anxious flood of questions about what he would find when he finally reached the root of the mountain. Would the Other Kind be as indifferent to him as Fred had suggested? Would Blue? What would Blue even be like, down in this new and unknown place? He could have changed so much that Gabe might be a stranger to him. It was bad enough how distant and removed Blue had seemed since they first arrived in the cove; the worry that he was slipping away had already weighed on Gabe’s mind even before he went missing.

  And this was something that he couldn’t bear, the very thought sending a heartsick tremor down his legs. Because without Blue, he would be just as lost up above as he was down in these tunnels. If Blue couldn’t be reasoned with, convinced that his former life was still worth living, then Gabe was sunk. That was his only plan.

  Maybe none of that mattered. Chances were he wouldn’t even make it to find out.

  All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Gabe’s ears rang, and he began to tremble as he walked. He had to get to Blue, or he was going to unravel like a corn dolly and fall the fuck apart. Just keep going, he thought. Keep going.

  The light on his helmet started to dim, so he switched it off and traveled in darkness; he still had the flashlight in his pack, for when he really needed it. He began to tire, and after a while his knees started to clack against each other, so he curled into a ball and slept. His dreams were threaded with dark and fitful nightmares of Blue and his kind, which he dreamed of as cartoon aliens, each of them taking a separate piece of him in their wiry fingers and pulling until only scraps remained. Blue, he pleaded, Blue, but the only response was the rattle of a thousand cicadas, and dirt thrown into his eyes.

  Gabe was startled awake; something had crawled over him. But there was nothing there. And it was only then that he realized there was nothing else down there at all: no rats or moles, no bats or voles, no ants or bees or hornets. I’m the only living thing around. The only one that dares. He reached for another candy bar and hungrily devoured it, as fetid drabs of water fell on him from the ceiling. God and our hearts are crying together, and he wiped the dirty liquid from his face.

  He counted his steps, guessed how many he might make in a minute (a hundred?), then an hour (five thousand?). He decided to break for food and a drink of water every five hours, but he lost count so many times that eventually he stopped only when he couldn’t go on any longer.

  After a day or so the water from his canteen was drained, and he finished his meager ration of candy bars from his pack. How much farther did he have to go until he reached the root of the mountain? He began to feel queasy, accompanied by the disturbing sensation that the tunnels were shifting around him.

  The ground grew soft beneath his sneakers, and he tensed as a slippery current of muddy water steadily rose from the cave floor. He figured the tide must be coming in, seawater seeping up through the earth. Either that or it was groundwater, soon halfway up his shins. It leveled off, however, then receded, heat surging from the earth in the dark water’s wake. It rolled over his skin and drenched him with sweat, until he feared he was going to pass out. He swallowed back waves of nausea and persevered.

  After another hour or more of wet air choking his throat, the stinging sensation turned strangely pleasurable, an incongruous and ecstatic rush upon inhalation. As with the ambrosial moonshine stashed beneath the Colony, the giddy smell of sweet jam and juniper berries, wild lilac and gingerbread reminded him of nothing so much as Blue. Gabe’s spirits raised, and he dizzied with joy, led forward by his nose more than anything else. The pleasing aroma turned, however, lifting him out of his reverie. The air soured, and he almost managed to stop himself, just before he stepped forward into nothingness.

  Gabe’s stomach dropped out, the rest of him along with it. He was falling, falling, plunging ten feet, twenty feet and more, into a honey-thick liquid that filled his mouth with the suffocating finality of grave dirt. He wanted to scream but couldn’t, the taste of rot and decay unnervingly tempered with the fecund scent of the Other Kind. He was dazed until he broke the surface and gasped for air, his backpack newly heavy upon his shoulders and threatening to drag him under. Then he did scream, a lonely howl into pitch blackness that savaged his strangled throat and forced him back into silence.

  I’m going to die here, alone.

  He fought against the syrupy fluid, scrambled for the side of what he took to be some kind of pit. It was like being back at the bottom of the well outside the Colony, only this time without any rungs to climb, the wi
de hole slicked and smooth to the touch. He began to force his way around the circumference, an arm extended in search of the mining helmet loosed from his head. He pushed his way through the ooze and took hold of a clump of seaweed, its ghostly strands tangling in his fingers. The drenched mane of a slumbering kelpie, perhaps, who could awaken at any moment and trample him underfoot with its mighty hooves.

  When he pulled his hand back he dragged something against him, and he froze. What he took for seaweed was in fact human hair. There was someone else down there with him.

  “Elisa?” His heart sped, the sound of his damaged voice an eerie, unrecognizable thrum off the sides of the pit. He moved his hand along the body, which was facedown, drowning or drowned. The hair felt too long to be Elisa’s hair, the wrong texture (but it’s wet), limbs bloated (oh God) like plastic trash bags overstuffed to the point of rupture. Gasping, he tried heaving the body over to see if it could still be alive, if he could do anything at all but drown here himself, down in this dark hell. So long, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen, good night.

  He couldn’t tread forever. So he dragged the body toward the side of the pit and attempted to find a handhold, some way of keeping his head above the surface. The effort had exhausted him, and he struggled to open his sodden pack. Once he grasped his flashlight, he held his breath, wiped a sleeve of sludge from his eyes, and turned on the beam.

  As soon as he saw the bright red color of her hair, he knew it wasn’t Elisa. It was a woman, yes, but one who had surely been dead for some time. Her columnar neck was marbleized and distended, flesh a fishy blue-gray gone white where Gabe’s forearm bore down beneath her chin. A necklace was stretched to near breaking against her rubbery skin, the slender chain intertwined with a tangle of eely red hair. Delicate gold links shimmered under the flashlight’s watchful beam, which lit up a dangling charm on a penny-size loop. An angel pendant, hovering upon the surface of the amber ooze like its own drowned corpse, the W shape of its wingspan depressed into her swollen cheek like a brand.

  Tanya.

  Gabe let go of her and swallowed the bile rising from his stomach. The dead woman floated lazily across the pit, her bulging eyes pitched up at the black void above. His legs were tiring, and if he didn’t get out of there in the next few minutes, he would meet the same bleak fate. Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you.

  He fumbled inside his pack for the climbing spurs, fitted them to his hands like brass knuckles, and plunged the metal spikes into the siding above his head. Spirits of the North, Spirits of Elemental Earth, give my body the strength of a scarab, for we are kith and kin. The spurs carved out a notch in which to dig in his fingers, and his grip held. Embedding the other spur a foot higher, he hauled himself from the sludge, arms quivering until he could properly tense them. He used Tanya’s body for leverage to gain ground against the wall of the pit, and he rose. Soon the notches left by the spurs above became footholds below, and in this way he began to make real progress. The earth. It’s holding firm for me! This dark and merciful land, it wants me to survive. He continued to climb in gratitude, humming a little tune as he went; though it felt like his larynx was going to rip open, he’d heard enough of the silence.

  A few minutes later he had climbed out of the fluid. He clung to a fossilized tree root, his arm crooked around its knotted length, and he rested for a while. Then he continued to climb. When he finally reached the top of the hole and hoisted himself out, he was more tired than he’d ever been, and knelt in the wet muck of the tunnel. He placed his pack and flashlight beside him and swallowed air in great big lungfuls.

  His adrenaline began to subside, and soon the welts on his neck began to tingle. He grew light-headed and unsteady, and the hair stood up on the backs of his arms and legs, as if he’d passed through a field of static electricity. He was standing now. But why don’t I remember getting to my feet? His lips stung, the inside of his mouth heavy with the taste of the honeyed biofluid he swallowed in the pit, and he licked his shirtsleeve to try to rid himself of it. But the tarry liquid had already leached into him, penetrating his consciousness. In a newly perceptible light, a procession of volatile shadows appeared to march across the cavern ceiling; the sound of skittering legs filled the air; the earth bubbled like lava beneath his feet, though there had been nothing but firm ground a moment before. Am I losing my mind?

  But that wasn’t it. The land was changing, him along with it. He was sensing things differently, yes, but his perceptions were no less accurate than before. He was feeling the new frequency, indeed he was swimming in it, its current stronger now than he had ever known. He was becoming magical himself, and wasn’t that what he had wanted all along? To be part of the swirling life force that was the frequency, the numinous current threaded through every magical thing that bound them together in a golden glow? And yet. He clicked on the flashlight, his only remaining source of illumination outside his own visions.

  I’ll never really be part of it, though, will I?

  Gabe shined the beam down into the pit. Tanya watched him from below, her wide eyes reflective and shocked bleach white, in awe. He wondered if, in her final moments, the poor woman had drowned in fear, or rather felt something closer to grace. Whether she finally got to see the heralding angels she believed so strongly were with her all along, and only just out of reach. Maybe at the end she felt the frequency too, and he switched off the flashlight. Godfather Death had snuffed her candle out.

  Gabe said a wordless prayer and turned toward his destination.

  After some time—three hours, or maybe five—there was a faint suggestion of brightness ahead of him. Daylight? Starlight? His imagination? But no, it was none of those things. An internal radiance flickered from the cavern walls, shining with bioluminescence as if he were approaching the innards of a massive glowworm. All was calm, nothing bright save the iridescent pulsation from the walls and floor and roof of the tunnel, bearded with moss. Gabe reached out his hands and placed them against the opposing walls, his fingers ablaze with green and yellow phosphorescence. An electric thrill surged through him, the same thrill he had felt that first night outside the ceilidh, when he came upon Blue staring into the night forest.

  Gabe had stood watching him for what felt like forever, but must have only been a few minutes. He tried to see what Blue saw, to glimpse whatever profound vision his friend was experiencing, so they could share it together as one. It was only meant for Blue, though, and perhaps those of his own kind. Still, Gabe could feel the energy coursing out of the forest, out of his friend and the cove and the verdant life all around them, the dark sky and wet ground and the very air itself. All of it humming. After, Blue rubbed Gabe’s head, and it had felt like a holy hand, his touch so powerfully charged that Gabe had to pull away. They headed up the hill to Elisa and Jason, the four of them laughing as they ascended, their own different kind of happy family. The vivifying flow in the air that night, it wasn’t just the singular frequency he had sought for so long; it was also the feeling of requited love.

  Another mile down the curling passageway and Gabe reached a narrow cavity, a hollowed-out spiral like the inside of an ammonite shell that echoed with rising sound, the roar of air or water and punctuated by a steady dripping. The trail constricted and wound further, a maze of wet dirt and rock and puddled fluid that stank of secreted life.

  He moved through the attenuated gap, forced to push his backpack and flashlight ahead of him and slide in a commando crawl. As he progressed, the tunnel altered around him, the walls fleshing from hard earth into the supple texture of sweat-soaked cotton or foam. It became harder to gain traction, and he had to shimmy along the newly padded surface, the hidden depths of which appeared to roil from within. Soon the tissued lining of the canal began to tug at him with what felt like tiny mouths, nickel-size pockmarks ringed with thorny protrusions. Each time he made progress, his movements seemed to tear a new rend, in either his clothes or the flesh beneath. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing sh
all be well. He stifled his cries of pain.

  His backpack dropped down ahead of him. He edged forward and became a lowly worm, crawling its way through the earth. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out . . . He pushed himself from the barbed duct and landed before a slim cleft in the stone that throbbed with light. He saw it as a shimmering doorway, an invitation to an enchanted realm that had appeared only for him. He gathered his pack and wriggled forward, slithering through the new opening. A big green worm with rolling eyes crawls in your stomach and out your eyes. After negotiating walls coated with gypsum and barite crusts slicked with mucus, he found himself inside a wider channel, the walls backlit by a series of irregular pulsations. Gabe fell silent, only to hear a wailing cry in the distance, like that of a demented loon. He shuddered.

  “Elisa?” he called out. “Elisa, can you hear me? Blue?” He slipped out of the passageway and into a dim chamber within the mountain’s immense black heart. His spirits began to soar, he’d made it so far! He was almost there, almost there, the last hour of school before summer vacation and Christmas Eve and next in line for the Ferris wheel, all at once. He risked a smile, and straightened to his full height.

  In a fluttering of what sounded like torn sails, something dropped from the ceiling. It landed behind him with a wet squelch, its faint shadow rising as the figure lengthened and extended. Before Gabe could react, a cold hand sheathed his mouth, its touch as forceful and damp as the flowstone of the cave. His vision went black, then white, then black again, and he dropped the flashlight. A strobe of liquid sensation washed through him, over him, pleasure, pain, satiety, ecstasy, more. He felt everything.

  An icy respiration drew across his ravaged neck, a fast-spreading rash accompanied by the scent of the sea, rolling in, out, in. For God’s sake, don’t let them lay a finger on you. They’re not to be touched. His panic mounted, and he feared he was breathing his last breath. Help me! he wanted to cry out. God in Heaven above or benevolent spirits below, fearsome creatures of the land and air, angels or demons or anyone listening, I beg of you!