by Paul Monette
Dawn, thought Iris, would be another story.
She rose and stepped to the open door. The moon was huge, the whole earth silver. What was she going to do now? She stepped from the tower, blank and shaken, like someone released from a spell. She had never been so alone. Why, she wondered with a bitter smile, had she not locked herself in, too? Then Michael came out of the trees, walking toward her across the park. The moon made him seem to float. His outstretched arms took in the whole of everything. When he crossed the circle, he seemed to sway as if to a native dance. His skin was aching white. The tip of his tongue snaked out at the corner of his mouth. He was getting hard. He was only fifteen feet away.
She waited like a bride.
IX
AS THEY MADE THEIR WAY up the moonlit street, she saw that the final houses were being pulled apart. A crew of six or eight had been assigned to each, and they worked with such intensity that none looked up, even for approval, when Michael passed. She felt a strange thrill of pride in walking with him as an equal. She gladly let him hold her hand and lead the way. It wasn’t a matter of power: he was heading the way she would have gone herself.
Through the open door of the church, the drunken dancing had dwindled down to writhing on the floor. The bodies rippled wall to wall, like the surface of a stream. Michael and Iris went on by and through the cemetery gate, to the grove of firs where the deep-etched stones no longer held the years in place. Still she felt the weight of generations, though they didn’t clutch her heart. As long as she and Michael walked together, all the horrors were on the other side.
They came out onto the meadow ledge, where the high grass shimmered in the cliff-top breeze. A frog and a rabbit leaped out of the path, as if they had been in league together. The crickets played over and over a one-note song. The fireflies winked like Stardust. Michael and Iris stopped. The seethe of life was everywhere, as they sat on an egg-shaped boulder slumped to its hips in the crumbling ground. The edge was a bare two feet away, with the long fall to the shining sea. She wasn’t afraid. No one was going to get thrown off.
“What happens now?”
“What do you want?” he retorted casually.
“I want to go home.”
“You are home, Iris,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m the one from another planet.”
“Will you take me with you?”
He tilted his head and shook it, as if to quell a ringing in his ears. He looked at her, puzzled. “Too late for that,” he replied quite gently.
“Will you let me go?”
“Go.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked off out to sea.
Just on the lip of the north horizon a full-rigged ship cut across the trough of the moon. It was slowly veering back to pick him up, having tried one last time to find a break in the Oregon fog. Like the cities of gold, the Northwest Passage stayed just out of reach. The ship would land in the harbor below at twenty minutes after nine tomorrow morning. Before it could anchor, he meant to row out and run up the rope ladder and order them back to sea. He wished it were tomorrow night. By then they’d have made it to San Francisco, easy.
“I love you, Michael.”
“No you don’t.”
“Let me try.”
His face went faintly crimson, though the moonlight kept it hidden. He did not move a muscle when she put her arms about him. As she lay her head on his shoulder, he watched across the water.
“If only we had more time,” she sighed.
Without a moment’s pause, he lifted his hand and pointed at the moon. It had already dropped to his lap again, before she could be certain what he wanted her to see. She searched the near air for birds and falling bodies.
“What did you do?”
“Stopped it.”
She looked up into the nervous sky, where the moon lay dead and done with. For a moment her mouth hung open, weary and dumb and hopeless. Somehow the night no longer moved. For a thousand years her dearest wish was that all the years should stop. Now she saw the canker in the rose. Time would only stand like stagnant water, slicked with a film of green, rife with maggots and insect eggs.
“No, don’t,” she pleaded, clutching his arm.
His face lit up with a milky smile. It seemed to make him happy just to have her watch him. He pointed up again.
She could feel the scum break up in the brooks and puddles and tidal pools. She began to breathe again. She thought it was his passiveness that made him hold the gesture. Or perhaps it took a deeper spell to undo what he’d done. She had no idea he’d gone on to another trick, till she saw his arm moving in an arc. The pointing finger inched along like the hand of an ancient clock. He might have been tracking the flight of some vast invisible bird.
Then she saw that the moon was moving too.
“Stop!” she cried, tugging his arm from the air to break the spell. “What are you doing?”
He drew his pointing finger off the moon and brought it down and touched her lips, as if to call for silence. “Perhaps if we had less time,” he said, with an antic lift of his eyebrows. Then he laughed like a little boy, stood up and took a great gulp of air.
The moon had ceased to drift. Iris sat alone on the boulder, huddled as if she’d taken cold. She stared at the disk of light. She had no power to match him. All she could hope to do was break his heart, but somehow the night had gone awry. She wondered how much time they lost when he beckoned the moon and raced it. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour?
“I stole those pearls myself,” he said with a puff of pride. “There’s a pyramid, way, way up in the mountains. It never stops raining. I went to the deepest room and tore them off her—just for you.”
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“You had to be,” he replied with a shrug. “For I am the light of the world.” Then, as if the formal language touched a nerve, a merry grin lit up his face. Very lightly he went on. “My kingdom come, my will be done,” said Michael gaily.
“Not till tomorrow,” corrected Iris. She knew that he used his power to keep her out, but also saw it had nothing to do with her. Desire itself was what he feared. All she had to do was draw him into a carnal situation.
Yet there must have been something else in her: some dream of letting go. Whatever it was, she suddenly stopped shaking and smiled. She cocked her head as she watched him fondly, standing tight on the last steep foot of land. Her nicer instinct told her what was missing. No one had ever shown him any tenderness.
She stood and stepped to his side. They were so close to the verge that his toes curled over the lip of the cliff. As he grinned at the long flat sea, he bounced up onto the balls of his feet so that he balanced on a knife-edge. She turned him a quarter turn toward her, without struggle. His eyes were glazed, and he would not bend to meet her. She had to tiptoe up to reach his mouth. It was odd to kiss him while he grinned like that, but she persevered. She bit his lip and thrust her tongue against his teeth till he opened up.
The force of her own passion shocked her. She’d meant to dole it bit by bit, but this was like a hurricane. She wrapped her arms about his neck and let her body sway. One hip swung out over the nightmare drop to the rocks below. The only breath she allowed herself was what breathed out of him. As soon as she felt him take a taste himself, she sucked his tongue so he couldn’t draw back. She swung her legs and straddled him, locking her feet behind his back as if she would pull them over.
Moon or not, she was going to win, because he made no move to stop her. He stood there like an idiot—rigid, unschooled, a bit prissy—but stood there all the same. It went on and on, like a happy ending. Soon they were murmuring vows. The past went up like the last dead house at the bottom of the lane. Five minutes vanished before she dared pull back and look into his laughing eyes. Surely this was better than all the talk of who they used to be. She opened her mouth to say so—and realized she couldn’t speak.
She had no grasp of what was pent up in him. The drug was in his blood now. She had had n
o dose, not even tea, and she hadn’t lived as the others had, with the sea breeze blowing it in from the skull. His spittle was the first she’d ever tasted it. She had no idea of the strength. Still, it was nobody’s fault but hers: she should have just had him and tossed him off the cliff.
It hit her like paralysis, starting in the limbs. She felt her motor functions disengage. Her feet fell away. Her hands seemed palsied. Michael held her tight against him and sobbed with longing. She was limp and light as a sloughed-off skin. She had no more substance. He seemed to be drawing the life right out of her.
Except she was so full of life inside. She could feel the world begin to go—the moon snuff out, the surf go dumb—and she didn’t care. She had not had a dream in a thousand years, compared to this. Her last clear thought was not to be afraid. The sun was not the hardest thing to lose. Her true home was here in the caves of the unfathomed night. Hadn’t the prophet said as much?
She sagged in his arms and dangled over the edge. All he had to do was raise his hand and bless the world, and Iris would have slipped away. He froze with his tongue in her mouth, and when she went unconscious, it was like feeding on death itself. He cried out into her throat as if to revive her with his outrage. Then like a fool he threw back his head and roared at the sky, but the curses died in his throat. The sky had nothing to do with it. At last he loved her, all on his own. There was no higher power to appeal to. Only the two of them could come to the end of it now.
He swept her away from the cliff and around behind the boulder. He lay her down in a bed of clover, begging her to wake. He wept freely as he chafed her hands and crooned her name. Somehow he’d lost her the moment he found her. He had it in him to spin the planets and call together the creatures of the earth, but he had no power to take this back. He could only hold her, even as he knew it was his touch that was the weapon.
Of course, it wasn’t fatal. She’d wake in a couple of hours and the next time wouldn’t even faint. It was probably just as well to give her a couple of slugs before morning. Then it wouldn’t be quite so hard to enter the new world waiting on the other side of the sun.
But he wouldn’t take comfort. He knelt there crazed as if she were dead. If she had been, he’d have killed himself in a minute and joined her. She lay far off in the sweetest sleep, and he gnashed his teeth and groaned and tucked his hands in his armpits so he wouldn’t be tempted to stroke her and deepen the spell. For a while it seemed he would wait out her return, no matter how long it took. His moaning was like a song.
Soon, a few of the beasts came silently out of the woods to see what filled him with such agony. The oryx, the camel, the leopard, the skunk. They came up close and stood in a ring, and when they saw it was Iris, they bared their teeth as if they would tear her limb from limb. Michael turned with a look of horror and then began to shriek them back. He leaped up, stepped to the leopard, and smashed its nose till it spouted blood. He kicked the skunk out of the path, and though it landed on its back and flailed the air, it spilled not a drop of scent.
The big ones shrank as he picked up stones and pelted them, as if they and not he had let her slip away. None turned to run till he was finished. They seemed to understand that this was all they could do for him. He thrashed them and beat them and tore at their hair. They stood impassive. Only when he’d had enough and turned to weep for Iris did they hang their heads and lope away.
So time had trapped him at last. He who had never noticed it—never felt the quick of it, never longed for more—had nothing now to measure it by. Because he’d never clocked the night, he hadn’t a clue how long it was. He gazed at the star-shot sky without a notion which was which. He snapped his fingers angrily, and the moon winked out like a streetlight. It had all been just a trick. The real moon, new and masked, lurked somewhere at the dim horizon. He had thrown up the other only for effect.
And even as the minutes spilled, like blood from a gash in the seam of things, he saw her drifting further and further off. He was mad to join her, jealous of every limpid smile that rippled across her haunted face. He knew he had to put himself to sleep. If he didn’t curl his body close about her she would wake tomorrow far ahead. They would never stand again on the same still point in time which was each other.
He gathered her up in his arms and stumbled across the grass toward the trees. He kept his face away from her, breathing out of the side of his mouth as if he had the plague. He was glad of even this much of her, anything he could get, so long as she wasn’t dead. He only had to keep her safe for another eight, ten hours, and then she would never die at all. It was only fitting that he should have to pass one night protecting her. It wasn’t supposed to be easy.
When he reached the cemetery gate, he could already hear the babble through the walls. It filled him with irritation, as if he’d forgotten they weren’t alone yet. He went around and up the steps. The sound inside began to seethe with longing. The moment he stood in the doorway, they scrambled to their knees, bowing their heads toward him.
“Get out of here,” he whispered into the silence.
Without a word of protest they rushed to do his bidding. For a second, as they shuttled past, he almost took it a step further. Why not send them out to the cliff and get the whole thing over with? All he had to do was say it.
Then he wondered what Iris would say, and the mere thought of her stopped his tongue. He let the naked bodies funnel by him left and right. As he held her close and sniffed her hair, he relented. He began to wish that all of them would have a lovely night. They had a few hours yet. If they worked at it, surely they could fill their heads with something. Get the stars by heart, perhaps, or drift among the menagerie and put the animate world to rest. Nobody ought to die stupidly. It even crossed his mind to hope they’d all had a chance to love someone.
Now the place was empty. No one had paused to touch his arm or smile at him, but the group seemed to harbor a secret calm, to see him with the enemy dead in his arms. After all, it looked as if he’d conquered her. There was no glint of love in his face while the crowd was there. He made a point of hiding it.
He carried her up the aisle and laid her out on the linen cloth that draped the altar. If he found the whole moment growing more and more like a temple high in the Andes, it wasn’t a conscious choice he made. He didn’t see her as holy, no more than he saw the church that way. No more than he saw himself. He only meant to leave her here while he was out, and he only chose this place because he knew his people wouldn’t touch her. The mystical tableau was most convincing. It didn’t look like a lover’s trick at all.
He turned and ran outside again. As he thundered down the street, lithe and sleek as the deer who’d crossed the earth to find him, a few of the villagers stared at him as they huddled in groups of three or four. They may have felt a lilt of triumph when he passed, but they kept it well in check.
He had no time for anyone. He was seized by his mission. At first it looked as if he was going out to the light, to check some final detail of the ritual ahead, but he forked and raced downhill to the harbor. A flood of blood-red blossoms had bloomed out of nowhere, cascading down the hillside. Perhaps he was going to pick her a beach rose. Or maybe a shell and a bit of driftwood, for now he headed off the path and scrambled down the rocks to the strand, avoiding the way to the pier.
If his ship had been where it used to be, careened on the brackish sand for the space of a whole summer, he might have been going to fetch some treasure from his cabin. Another string of something flawless, perfect as the pearls.
But there was nothing there as he ran the rock-strewn beach, making for the water. The surf still boiled, gray and fat with the winter rains. He slapped in, running full-tilt, and nearly tripped before he got the hang of how it swelled. He ran up the curve of a wave and leaped off the crest to the hollow behind. Though he landed firm on the surface every time, he sent up a splash at each footfall. It wasn’t the same as walking across the calm and leaden surface of a sea. Not that he’d ev
er tried it, but surely that would be more like gliding. You could almost bring it off by floating in a mist above, sort of hovering along.
Not this. This was work. Especially on the uphill slant, it was like walking in powdered sand or through a lot of snowdrifts. He couldn’t see the skull ahead, the waves were far too mountainous. He wasn’t even sure he was going toward it. He tried to keep the pier on his right, but the current was running the other way, and he ended up further and further out. He stood for a moment to get his bearings, and the bay rolled under him, sending him up and down as if he were on a trampoline.
It seemed no queerer to him than dry land. His stomach didn’t flutter once. Nevertheless, he started to sink. These things could only be taken so far. They had to be done on the run or not at all. He was up to his knees when he saw the line of seabirds sleeping along the rim of the skull. He slogged toward them. With every step, the water got more and more solid. By the time he reached the rock, he was exhausted. The hard heart of the sea was never sick of trying him.
He ducked beneath the overhang of the skull’s mouth and jumped up onto the landing of the cavern. The stillness of the floor beneath his feet made him dizzy. He didn’t want to get near Joey, so he started to cast about on the far side of the room. There was hardly any fungus left. With his fingernails, he was able to scrape up a little, patting it into a lump in his hands. If he really meant to put himself to sleep, he needed a cupful. Though he saw shreds of it in the crevices, he didn’t dare lick it out, for fear he would fall asleep here and never get back in time.
There was nowhere else to go but the body. He moved toward it stealthily, as if it might jump up and scream. The fungus hadn’t been gathered yet from the bench where Joey lay. Michael could see it gleaming softly underneath him. He drew his breath against the stench and crouched and began to brush up the spores. There was barely going to be enough, but only if he moved the corpse and got the stuff that was under it.
