For a moment there was a tug-of-war between her hands and the hands that held her to the water.
Francesca pressed her palms to the stone and leaned forward until just her feet were in the water. Then with a roar she pulled her feet free of the water and rolled onto her side.
She spat up canal water and laid her forehead to the cold lettering of the street name embossed in the stone.
The cries she’d heard were gone. The hands she’d felt—Francis would never believe her—they no longer dragged at her. All was quiet.
She lay for a while in the cool of the dripping water and the cold moonlight, the lettering beneath her pressing into her temple.
Then at last she lifted her head and read the words embossed into the street.
And she cried for all the lost children for whom this street—Riva di Biasio—had been named.
Glasskin
Robert G. Cook
My lover comes to me at night.
He rises before me, coalescing, a bright star cooling into visceral flesh. But though his body is a transformed sun, the mind that moves it is, I think, of a more feminine cast. She teaches me about myself, even as he moves me to learn the glacial, melting contours of bodies met and wed.
He is always gone when I wake. My attic room faces down the alley to the old fishermen’s docks, and as the sun rises far behind Tallinn over the hinterland, the roof’s shadow shrinks towards me along the cobbles and I watch mist burning off the water in rising mandalas. Salt tangs in my nose and I taste copper. In my window’s frost of salt stains I see fractured snowflakes, cancerous stars, each crystalline shape slipping in and out of the fog I breathe on the thin pane. I make tea, but watching my hands move carefully through the process of lighting the stove and pouring the water and stirring the leaves, I find myself remembering their movements in the night, their course across the smoothness of his body, the fingers splaying and contracting as her words speak his movements inside me; and the glass stands untouched in its baroque silver handle on the small folding table by my bed, the caramel liquid shifting with the movement of the floorboards and sending up curlicues of distressed steam as the tea steeps and cools.
By mid-morning the waters of the Finnish Gulf reflect an umbral green that is almost black, but by then I am downstairs in the workshop, the glory’s heat tightening the skin on my cheeks and forehead while my grandfather leads the daily throng of tourists through the furnace-room to the temptations of the showroom and the gladdening ring of the bell on the old wooden till.
“The first oven is the crucible, the hottest of the three.” My grandfather walks around to the other side of the furnace and opens the crucible’s door with a set of insulated tongs. The billow of heat is fierce and instant, and the small crowd steps back almost as one. “Inside is the source—a pot of pure molten glass, our basic material.” He swings the door gently closed. “The others are the glory, where my apprentice is working to reheat a piece between stages of work—” I look up briefly and raise a gauntleted hand in welcome, but don’t bother smiling beneath the heavy visor “—and the annealer for gradual cooling and tempering, so there are no cracks in the finished work.”
“Do you ever make mistakes?” someone asks. Someone always does.
“The artistry of the glasswright is as much in the use of extraneous materials as in the handling of the elemental glass.” My grandfather smiles beneficently, apparently glad as ever to answer the same old questions. “We use many different formulations, gasses, acids and so forth. Rare essences, as it were. Fragments of time, distillations of the soul.” His audience is rapt, the magic of his charm as potent now as when he opened this place half a century ago. He walks the length of a shelf along the far wall, brushing fingertips on vials and stoppered bottles. Stops and takes one in his hand, a small flask half-full of a moon-blue viscous liquid. “These do not always work as planned, though the end results are rarely uninteresting, as we’ll see.” He replaces the flask, gestures towards the heavy oak door at the far end of the foundry. “Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you some of our finished work.”
Our house, which is also our workshop and our showroom, is an old Lutheran church, a high, narrow antique of a building crammed indelicately between warehouses and processing plants and flanked along its ancient cobbled laneway by darkened empty cafes and half-abandoned tenements. My bedroom used to be the belfry, the long-gone bell still echoing faintly in the cross-beams. The vestry now houses the furnaces, a dying Saviour in a stained glass window the only sign of the room’s former use, though the window backs onto a courtyard that has long been overshadowed by high-rise blocks and the only light the Saviour gets now is weak and stained itself. The showroom and shop inhabit the nave, its stone walls warmly yellow and the high rafters vanishing up into the night-black vaults. The showroom’s shelving is made from artfully rusted iron rods and sheer glass flats, each shelf underlit by a high-watt bulb set into the stone floor. The wall lighting is gentle, directed: atmosphere to set off the floor lights’ glare. And caught in the centre, filled with light, overflowing and bursting with luminescence as if it were liquid, is the glass.
Some days, the show-and-tell is my job: these are the off days, the other days, when my grandfather is feeling especially cantankerous, days when he objects bitterly to the whole notion of tourists and commerce and just about anything warm and human. Usually, days when he has been working at the furnaces in his cellar workrooms through the preceding night and into the dawn. On these days I know without asking that the daily round of babble and bauble is mine to perform, while he stays locked away from the world in his inner sanctum, his private workshop in the basement. I’ve never seen his workshop, though he has promised me any number of times.
I don’t mind these days at all. Whenever he’s a no-show, his small legend seems to swell a portion, and I’m free to embellish and provoke: the great Illar Kroos, glasswright extraordinaire, reclusive genius of the blow-tube. The showroom is my favourite part of the tour.
When my grandfather does the tour, he tends to wax lyrical. “We have a way here of making glass live,” he says, “of making it breathe and laugh and weep and cry out in great gouts of colour and light. Estonian glassware is unmistakeable. It is a manifestation of dream, of bitter history, of triumphant spirit. It is visceral, it throbs with the dark joy of Northern blood.”
When it’s my turn, I prefer to stand back and watch in silence as the tourists wander through the displays, and I answer their hushed, reverent questions in the lightly bored and patronising tone of a museum guide. But it’s a game, a fake jadedness: every time, seeing it through the eyes of others, I am as awed by my grandfather’s art as I have ever been.
There are bottles, bowls, vases, drinking glasses: standard receptacles, certainly, but fashioned as if from dream-stuff, from faerie spells and princess magic, and always I find it hard not to laugh in delight at the sheer fantasy and trickery on display. The stoppered bottles are swirling full of richly veined smoke; others are subtly misshapen, surreally leaning. There are vases that look like columns of mist, jugs with handles and spouts that have an oddly pleasing intestinal quality to them; there are some unsettlingly phallic paperweights, others that look like weaponised prisms. There are half-dissolved plates, sea-green pyramids with melt-pools at one corner, pearl spheres cracked at the top like Halloween mouths. A dinner set is centred around a plate massed with droplets of bruised earthy quartz, like tender buttons of raw meat, and a carafe with the contours of an inverted human face.
And then, as ever, there is the mirror.
There is, I have found, an inevitable process to this—the moment of panic, the sharp look back over the shoulder, the jumping and waving of arms, the delighted laughter. The questions:
“What is this?”
“How does it work?”
“Are we all vampires?” (This usually from a child.)
“Is it for sale?”
“That’s a blind glass,” I say. “It�
��s an arrangement of micro-facets in a highly complex system, so that almost every reflective surface points away from the viewer. No,” I smile down, “it has nothing to do with vampires. It’s a trick, that’s all. And no, I’m sorry, it’s not for sale.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s the only one of its kind. My grandfather made it almost by accident, and hasn’t made another one since. So it’s essentially priceless.”
When it’s over for the day, and the last stragglers have wandered out through the arched doorway into the wet daylight, I always stand for a few moments before the blind glass, and wonder about the provenance of a mirror that cannot see you. A myriad of tiny, deliberate imperfections calculated (or as my grandfather insists, randomly fused) so that, for an average viewer standing at an average distance from the glass, it will reflect the viewer’s background and surroundings but will leave a lacuna where the viewer would normally see themselves. It’s a fairground trick taken one step further—you’re not just fat or thin or tall or squat, you’re not an impossible reflection of someone familiar but other; you’re a reflection of no one. For the time that you look into the mirror, you’re not there at all. Or you’re there, but there’s nothing to you.
But as with all tricks, it’s easily tested. If the viewer is larger than average, for instance, or stands closer or further away, there will be a hint at the edges of the abyss, a barely discernible ghost image that is enough to warrant doubt and waive the spell.
For myself, I can never look into the blind glass for longer than a few seconds, a clutch of heartbeats. I can’t bear what I can see.
* * *
You know there are things he’s not teaching you.
My lover told me his name the first time he came to me, and every night I cry it aloud. Mikus, and as though it’s a signal there comes a shift in mass, in form, in meaning, and while he lies inert beside me she grows inside my mind and ablates my senses.
He told me his name, but she does not tell me hers.
“I think he’s teaching me plenty.”
Not me. You know what I mean. You want to be as great a glasswright as he is, and he knows it.
“He’ll teach me when I’m ready.”
You’ve been ready all your life. That’s one of the things he’s not teaching you.
“He’s my grandfather. He’s a lonely man. I think he just doesn’t want me to leave too soon.”
He doesn’t want you to leave at all.
I shake my head, try to find a point of slippage, of free space.
“How are you here? Why do you come here?”
For you.
“Where do you come from?”
She answers by receding, by folding herself away into an answer I cannot know.
That’s something you should ask him.
* * *
“Too slow.”
Illar’s tone heralds the start of another off day, brittle and sharp.
“You won’t get the colour all the way through how you want it if you’re that slow in the shaping.”
“How do you know how I want it?” It’s a reasonable question, I think, and asked in a reasonable tone; but either the visor muffles my voice, or he just doesn’t hear me. Or he pretends not to.
“You’re too slow, I said!”
“I heard you.” I sit back and raise the visor, dawdling the blow-tube in my gauntleted hand. “But I don’t want the colour all the way through. I’m trying something new.”
The air in the foundry stinks with heat, tinged with sulphur and burnt metal. Sitting at the large marble-topped bench in the middle of the room, I feel a flare of pride that I know is only arrogance, and revel in it nonetheless.
Illar stoops over me, tall and lean, long dark hair turning to grey, a slight beard. Skin leathered, eyes bright: he is young-old, a man in his long prime and in his element, even on a bad day.
“I’ve told you before, you learn the old ways first before you try anything new.”
“So teach me.”
“I am teaching you, for Saulė’s sake!”
“Well you’re teaching me too slow.”
Around the edges of the room are open crates of various powdered substances: sands in a multitude of colours, silicate, crushed quartz. Arrayed on stands and smaller tables around the central bench are an infinite variety of blocks, jacks, paddles, tweezers, shears, sheets of paper. One stand holds nothing but blow-tubes; another holds two baskets, one of coloured glass rods of different thicknesses, the other of uniformly thick rods cut at different lengths and showing patterns in the cross-sections.
Illar straightens, rubs his back, paces over to the beaten metal bookshelf that is stacked like a tower puzzle with textbooks and monographs on glass art and glass-working, chemistry, materials science.
“Maybe it’s you who’s learning too slowly. Eh? Did you think of that, smart-arse?”
I look down at the bubble of yellow glass on the end of the blow-tube as it falls in a slow stretch towards the sawdust on the stone floor.
“Yes, of course, grandfather. It’s my fault.”
“I didn’t say it was your fault.” For the briefest of moments there is gentleness in his voice. “And stop wasting materials, for Saulė’s sake!” Instinctively I jerk the blow-tube up and the elongated sphere of semi-molten glass folds into itself on the metal like a collapsing balloon. “It’s not like you manage to sell enough of that crap out there to keep us in bread, never mind in glass.”
He crashes through the connecting door into the showroom and I hear him grumbling aloud as he heads for the other door, the locked door, in the side-chapel. Then he’s gone, the door sealed behind him, down into his private kingdom. He’ll come back up later, for spiced tea and black bread, but we won’t talk much. We never do on days like this. There’s too much to say.
* * *
I have become a slave to injured sleep.
Glass can be like flesh. Mikus’s voice is thick with desire. Warm, supple, even yielding. Visceral. His fingers curve and press where I am tender. Strong as a prison, or frail as skin.
“That hurts. A little.”
It’s all right. You won’t break.
“Are you sure?”
I won’t break you.
His own flesh is blue and translucent. Through his arm I can see his torso, an outline of sinew and muscle in empty skin. My hands glide along the surface of him, find drops of thick moisture on his back, strands of tangled fragility in his hair.
“Mikus.” Not a cry this time, though, and he stays with me, moving and ever urgent.
You like my name.
“What if I didn’t? Do you have another name?”
His movements slow perceptibly, and he shifts his head to look at my face, and for the first time I look directly into his eyes. The effect is unnerving, like looking into the eyes of twin hurricanes, and I realise with a twist in my gut that through a blue gyral mist I’m looking at the inside of the back of his head.
She hasn’t told you hers, then. He smiles, and his lips sound out a soft grating, a susurration of glass on glass. Not to worry, my little love. She’ll tell you when you’re ready.
Angry heat blooms in my chest and in my face, and I twist sharply under him and push out. He rolls off but won’t let go, and tries to pull me on top of him with the momentum. He has one cold smooth hand around my wrist; I raise my arm over my head and hit it down onto the iron bedstead. I hear a crunch and his grip is gone. I push at his shape and I am pushing at the bedclothes, waking up with a breathless and indignant shout.
Before I wake again, to the bitter light and the thin plane of ice on my window, the last thing she says to me is this:
Ask him about your grandmother. Ask him about Saulė.
* * *
The first round of tourists have gone for lunch and beer and sightseeing, to the King’s Garden and Fat Margaret Tower or for a fake interrogation at the old Russian prison at Patarei. My grandfather is using an acid process to etch a
design of nude female figures into a clear wide-flared vase—their bodies are a frosted flowing white, swimming upwards, arms outstretched and suppliant, faces subtly contorted with grief. While I sit at his side, the dutiful student, and marvel at his artistry, I also wonder at who might want to buy such a beautiful, terrible thing.
“No hesitation, you see. That’s key to your success.” He scrapes delicate contours into the surface, strands of hair, striations of muscle. Each stroke of his hand is solid and flowing, not the least tremor, each movement a smooth fragment of a greater line. “You can’t stop and think about it while you’re doing it. If you haven’t thought it all through beforehand then you’ve no business putting hand to glass in the first place.”
“Illar.”
“What? Are you watching? You’re supposed to be watching, not talking.”
“I’m watching.” I’m watching the minuscule eyes take shape in one of the undine faces, dark hollows above high cheekbones that catch an unearthly, invisible light. There’s a photo on the mantel in his bedroom that has hints of that face in it, that face smiling beneath a bright summer hat and shards of light off Lake Harku in the background. “Who is she?”
The line doesn’t falter, but at the end of that stroke his hand pauses and he flexes his arm out and back before starting on the next pass.
“You know perfectly well who she is.”
“I don’t know that grandmother would have liked to be imagined as a grieving nymph.”
“Maybe not a grieving one, no.” There is a sly grin on his face. “But Trüde was always only too happy to model for me.”
He stretches his back, takes the acid pen into his left hand and reaches around to the wine cooler with his right, extracts the gothically moulded stein from the puddling ice and takes an enormous draft of clear cold water down his parched throat. Even on a winter’s day with the crucible only idling and the other furnaces cold, the foundry is still the uncomfortably hottest room in the building.
The Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2013 Page 44
