by Robert Levy
He navigated blindly in the dark. But when he stopped thinking so hard he could sense the path’s design and he followed it, spiraling out toward the base of the mountain. Once his route was free of auxiliary tunnels and passageways, it became one clean trail propelling him straight up and through the land, and he could do this, he could do this, it was only another way out of the dark, what was one more escape to pull off? Gabe ran in silence, with only the sound of his panting breath to keep pace.
Eventually there was a slender thread of light, just beyond the watery mouth of a cave: the Fairy Hole, leading out onto the bay. He scuttled toward the opening but the gap was flooded, driftwood obstacles tided through the breach. There was no other way out.
Gabe pulled off his sneakers and peeled away the shredded remains of his clothes in the crisp air, exposing each and every scar he’d tried so hard to keep hidden. He discarded his waterlogged pack and the remaining supplies, Donald’s journal and his own sketch pad along with them. The pad fell open and swelled with water, black ink blurred and running from drawings of snarling griffins and upside-down hanging men, sharp-toothed boys and rain clouds of blood. His memories. Dislodged and floating in the dimly lit water at his feet was the Polaroid of little Michael Whitley, who Blue never was, not really. And Gabe would leave this behind as well, his final keepsake. That was okay now; for better or worse, Blue was still with him. Written upon his skin, his heart, every place that he had touched. And there he would remain, so long as Gabe still lived.
Lungs bursting with breath, a silent prayer to a distant god, and Gabe dove into the arctic current. His body shot forward like a harpoon from a gun, the water colder than cold, but he wouldn’t let it numb him. Everything was feeling now. And that was what scared him most of all: that he would make it to shore and would still be so raw and new to the world, the very world that had tried so many times to wipe him from the heel of its boot.
The impenetrable cold. So cold! It wanted to swallow him up, to make him its own, every part of his body seized with the shock of its angry sting. But still he swam. A cloud of silt enveloped him, and he pictured the scars on his back frosting over as he flailed desperately for the cave mouth, fingernails scraping at rock and moss and mud. His most dreadful scars, the ones he pretended were wings, they sang out to him, urged him forward in waves of empathy. The old pain, it wants me to live! And in doing so the pain became exalted.
The scars, they sang in Blue’s voice; he was singing Gabe’s suffering away, even now. Blue and the rest of his kind, their tribe burrowing far, then farther beneath the earth.
live
Gabe heard them sing on his way. His entire body vibrated.
live
live
Even their dead Queen sang to him. The fires had fatally wounded her, and so her people had consumed her in transubstantiation, enshrining her as an ever-present part of the hive; it was their very own form of communion. She would be reborn in the new place, where a new queen would be birthed from the old, as was the nature of their design.
His lungs ached, twin bloated balloons filled to their skirts with pebbles. He was sure he was going to pass out, but then he remembered the marks Jessed had left upon him, the fresh gills on his neck in the shape of fingers. They helped him to breathe.
Finally, his hands found the lip of the Fairy Hole. Gabe lunged through the cave mouth and hit a wall: the bay was frozen over. Eyes bulging with fear and disbelief, he beat his fists against the ceiling of dark ice, rapidly losing consciousness. Through narrowing eyes he watched in amazement as his burn-scarred hand shimmered and reshaped, fingers webbing into a sharp-edged spade with which to strike. A hidden source of deep strength emerged from within, one he hadn’t known existed. In a mad surge of concentrated panic, he reared back and thrust his hand against the hard surface, and the ice shattered in a splintered spray of hoarfrost.
He sucked at the glacial air rushing above him, and let himself bob for a while in the bay’s frigid rime-dusted seawater, every pore in his body gasping for oxygen as its own tiny mouth. Finally, he pulled himself up and out of the crude hole and lay on his back across the ice. He opened his eyes.
Stars. They were everywhere, the night sky a pinpricked sheet above snowcapped Kelly’s Mountain and the bay, a total absence of moonlight. Gabe heard the song of his scars in the cold, their song his song as it rose into a heavenly choir. Exaltation, exaltation. He was alive.
The ice groaned beneath him. He shot up and scrambled for the shore, bare feet slipping on wet frost. He heaved forward and threw himself down on the shoreline as the frozen bay cracked open in his wake, a jagged line zagged across the ice like a lightning bolt sent from above. The chilled night air extinguished the fire of him, blanketing him in the breath of a Norse giant. His lungs filled and emptied and filled again, and he waited for his speeding heart to calm as frigid water lapped at his shins, legs as unsteady as those of a newly birthed calf. He rolled over, but wouldn’t let the sea have him; some other day perhaps, but for now it had taken too much. Supported by the ice-caked stone, he pushed himself up, on hands and knees at first but then to his feet, where he crouched tentatively upon the rocks.
It was the dead of winter. As impossible as it was unmistakable, the white bay spread out before him like an unfurled scroll. The faraway lights from discrete houses twinkled and winked as their own set of infrequent stars, while wisps of smoke wound from stout brick chimneys, in and among the trees. Was this the winter that was fast approaching, or rather some far-flung season, in the future or even the past? Time will tell, he thought, unless it no longer did that either. But he was going to find out. He needed to find a new place to put all his love, after all. Blue couldn’t be the only one out there.
Gabe shivered and held himself, though beneath his skin he felt extraordinarily warmed. It was a newfound awareness, one that told him that the cold, like so much else, was only another illusion. How much had changed during his days in darkness, his absence from the great and glorious world above?
All was silent. Even his scars, the rended angel wings quieted after all these many years. Gabe reached behind him with a groan of pain and felt at his skin’s surprising glossiness, droplets of seawater dappling his shoulder blades. The wet dewy film along his straining muscles glowed like birch bark through the dim of night. It was hard to see in the dark, but it was only once he looked at his exposed and red-raw back that he could really know.
My scars.
They were gone.
Not only the recent ones from these past unquantifiable hours and days, but the oldest scars as well, the wings on his back given to him by his father’s belt. He raised his hand in front of him and turned it this way and that, his burn-mottled fingers now smooth and unblemished, his skin shaded yellow in the starlight. All the markings of violence that he had carried with him, that made him who he was. All gone.
But I’m still me.
He stumbled up the embankment, the pines and firs and spruces and birches all stripped of their leaves, everything deadened in the Maritimes frost but still alive, still alive.
Gabe made his way through the trees that were as naked as he was, holding on to the trunks and their rough bark to steady himself as he weaved his way up the mountainside in the direction of the main road.
He emerged from the woods and waited until he could stand on his own. And then he headed north.
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Acknowledgments
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My parents, family, and friends; my teachers and colleagues; my son and daughter; and the residents of Cape Breton, whose local geography may have shifted during flight. You are my true Friendship Outpost and Artists Colony.
The Summer People: Sarah Kelly and the Starry Heaven workshop, where the good vibes began. Special thanks to my full readers Brad Beaulieu and Greg van Eekhout.
The missing hikers: Rebecca Brown, Sam Zalutsky, Sebastian Dungan, and Barbara Wally, who looked at early pages and told me I was
n’t crazy when I most needed to hear it.
The believers group: Liz Hand and my fellow residents at the Atlantic Center of the Arts, where I finished my first draft. Love and blessings.
My fairy godmother, Tricia Boczkowski, who always has my back. If you ever need to hide a body, I’m just a phone call away.
The hive queen, Livia Llewellyn, cofounder of the Vipers of Self-Relevance Writers Group. Until we are protected by the ejaculation of serpents. :F
Jen Bergstrom, Stephanie DeLuca, and the entire Gallery team. Especially my editor, Adam Wilson, who awes me with his powers of perception. I would dive into darkness and follow you beneath the earth.
My enchanting agent, Luke Janklow, and his ever-astounding assistant, Claire Dippel. You guys are better than screech, and without the delirium tremens.
And most of all, to my very own Other Kind, Dan Sacher. You make everything possible, and magical, and sane, and right. You are the new frequency.
There’s a piece of you all in this book. Endless gratitude.
ROBERT LEVY is a writer of stories, screenplays, and plays whose work has been seen off-Broadway. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, he lives in his native Brooklyn near a toxic canal and can also be found at TheRobertLevy.com. The Glittering World is his first novel.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Robert Levy
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
First Gallery Books hardcover edition February 2015
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Interior design by Robert E. Ettlin
Jacket design by Laywan Kwan
Jacket photograph © Felicia Simion / Trevillion Images
Autor photograph by Colin Douglas Gray
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.
ISBN 978-1-4767-7452-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-7453-4 (ebook)
