by Graham Joyce
“What the fuck is this?”
“Shhh. We need to wait till the stroke of midday. When I start, don’t say anything. Open the front door and the back door and leave them open. And you’ll need your guitar.”
“What? I ain’t singing to no mice.”
“Acoustic. I need an E note when I ask you for one.”
“You’re fucked up.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “We know that already. Get your guitar.”
“I’ve got ten fucking guitars.”
“Ten? Who needs ten? Get an acoustic with a nice deep E note.”
Richie went away muttering, but did as he was told. He came back with his Taylor 914Ce, wanting to show it off to Tara, something he could never have afforded when they were together. He tried to make his face suggest that he was only playing along with this nonsense; in truth, he was intrigued. By the time he’d returned, Tara was lighting sticks of incense and some of them were already streaming smoke.
She told him again to open the front and back door and then briefed him to settle on the sofa and shut his mouth. She said that on her signal she wanted him to sound a lower E note, and to pluck it once every four beats.
“That’s not gonna sell, is it?”
“Shut up and do it.”
Tara watched the clock and on the stroke of twelve she pointed at him and he plucked the low E string. Tara squatted, putting her mouth near the foot of the fridge, and started to chant. It was a low, barely discernible chant, repeating phrases he couldn’t make out; but he nevertheless did as instructed and kept time and plucked the string.
After a few minutes Tara got up and, swaying in time to her own chanting, walked slowly around the kitchen. She made a motion that Richie should pluck harder, and he did.
A slight breeze blew through the house, stirring the streams of incense. Tara walked toward the back door, beckoning to Richie that he should follow and that he should continue to pluck his string. He did as he was told and followed Tara out of the house. She led him to the front of the house, still chanting. Richie did a quick take to see if any of the neighbors could see them. He hoped he’d got away with it, and when Tara led him back into the house through the back door he followed. She closed the door behind him and motioned for him to return to the sofa. She continued to chant, swaying into the kitchen, occasionally squatting and putting her mouth near the foot of the fridge. After fifteen minutes her chanting became softer and softer until he couldn’t hear her anymore.
She straightened her back and smiled at him. “That’s it. You can stop. They won’t come back.”
Richie looked at her quizzically. Then he laughed and his laughter completely seized him. “Haha! That’s what I loved about you! You were always doing things like that. You were always full of shit like that!”
She wasn’t smiling. “Say what you want. They won’t come back.”
“Right.”
“You don’t know everything, Richie.”
“I dare say I don’t.”
“You haven’t been everywhere. I’ve learned things you don’t know about.”
“Right.”
“Have it your way. We’ll see.”
“Right,” Richie said. “We’ll see.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
They live on cherries, they run wild—
I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.
ROBERT GRAVES
You have no idea. You can’t begin to see. You have eyes and yet you walk in the shadows. You have ears and they are stuffed with noise. You can’t take a caress without flinching. You have food and spices from all continents and nothing surprises your palate anymore. Your lips don’t even know how to speak. You shout, you mumble, you strangle your words. Right, you say to me. Right.
I am sixteen years old and in only six months I have lived more than people five times my age. If you stay at home and plug your mouth with booze and your eyes with TV have you seen anything? Stay at home. Drink. Eat fat and sugar. Mow the lawn. What do I care?
You don’t know everything. I’ve learned things while I was away. See that trick with the mice? It’s called charming. Anyone can do it. A fool. All you have to do is make the mice unwelcome and they go. You don’t have to mince them in traps or bait them with poison.
Those people, you know they don’t hate us. They pity us. They say we are clumsy, brutal, and dominating. I learned a new way to ride a horse while I was away. You don’t need a saddle, or a sharp bit. You don’t have to shred its sensitive mouth to get a horse to take you where you want to go.
As for playing with time, Richie, not even in your dreams have you been where I’ve been. And believe me, if you go there, if you have your eyes burned open, only love can bring you back, and I came back for you.
Here are some things I learned. (Look at your eyes! I know you don’t believe any of this. But it doesn’t matter.) I can levitate, if only for a few seconds. I’ll prove it when I’m ready and not before. I can make myself almost invisible. I can find great strength, the strength of an elephant. There are other things I didn’t have time to learn. I saw some of those people pass through walls. It’s true! Other things I did learn, frivolous things: I can bring a man to the point of orgasm just by looking at him if I want. Remember the woman on the kitchen table I told you about? Sex woman? Her name was Ekko. She showed me how to do that. It’s easy. Ridiculously easy.
But there are far more significant things. How to see for the first time. There are forces, Richie. You can train yourself to see them. There are sounds just beyond the range of normal hearing, and you can train yourself to hear them. But here you blunt all your capacities with greed and booze and dope.
No, it won’t stop. And once you begin to hear and see you can’t stop it. That’s what I was doing at The White Horse, if you want to know. I was doing what we used to do when we went there together. I wanted to blast myself with drink and noise to see if I could stop it. But that only works for a little while. You wake up. You blink. It’s all still there.
Sometimes I think we are asleep, that we are only a dream, that this is the dream. When we sleep we get a chance to see what life is really like. That’s it. In our daily lives we don’t know what it means to be fully conscious. And I don’t say I like it.
Hiero couldn’t be with me always. He had work to do. They grow their own food. They are fruitarians. They eat only fruit, nuts, and seeds, and won’t have anything to do with cooked food. And when Hiero was away, Silkie, the handsome man from the lake, came creeping around.
He was quite sweet. In fact, it was him who taught me the mouse-charming trick. But I just kept him at arm’s length. At first Hiero didn’t seem bothered about Silkie hanging round: Hiero said if I wanted to do anything with Silkie, then that was my decision, no one else’s. He assured me that neither Silkie nor anyone there would force themselves on me. That wasn’t their way with women.
But then one day Ekko, the woman who was fucking on the kitchen table, sex woman, came to me and said that Silkie was pining for me and becoming ill. She asked me to fuck him, as a favor to her.
“Please,” she said. “It’s beginning to get on everyone’s nerves.”
“What?” I told her. “You want me to have sex with him just because he’s got a long face?”
She was quite put out. “Look at how thin he is! You can see it’s making him unwell! He hardly eats, pining for you. Just lie down on the sand with him for half an hour, what on earth is the problem with your kind?”
I told her that my kind were not in the habit of lying down on the sand with every Tom, Dick, and Silkie who wants it. I told her that my kind had a habit of saving it for people we care about a great deal.
“I’ve heard of that,” she snapped back at me, “and it’s just preposterous. Preposterous and ridiculous. It’s completely against nature and it’s not surprising to see what a desperate mess your kind have made of everything.” Then she started shouting at me. “It affects us, too, you know! We have to sh
are this place! It isn’t yours to do what you want with!”
I told her I didn’t care what she said, I wasn’t going to make a slut of myself just because it suited her. She stormed off, and I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.
I tried to keep to myself when Hiero wasn’t around. There were wonderful things to discover. I would walk in the woods or by the lake, marveling over some of the plant life I had never seen before. There were colored fungi growing amid the roots of trees—I mean blue toadstools and red mushrooms—and there were other miraculous plants.
There was a flower of stunning beauty, large, the size of a football, and it was pink and yellow, made of tiny flower heads, and it seemed to be illuminated from within. I sat gazing at it. I was so absorbed I never heard anyone coming up behind me. Then I realized that Silkie had quietly settled down beside me.
“You like this one?” he asked me.
“Oh, yes.”
“We call it charnas, something like ‘group mind’ in your language. Watch.”
He leaned across to the flower and gently pushed his finger into it. Immediately I realized that it wasn’t a flower at all but a thousand bugs that flew up, disturbed. Each bug was like a tiny glittering fleck of pink or yellow light. They flew up in a cloud. I gasped.
“Watch,” he said.
After a few moments of frantic fluttering the cloud of bugs started to resettle together in the same place. Within a few minutes they had composed exactly the same flower, all over again.
“They are communing with each other,” Silkie said. “They draw strength from the hive mind.”
“But are they bugs or are they a flower?”
“They are both!”
“It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Yes. It’s what we do when we all have group sex. It’s the same thing.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” I shouted at him. I stood up. “How to kill a wonderful moment!” He looked hurt, regarding me with confusion etched into his handsome features. I marched away, angry, not even looking back to see if he was following me.
Things came to a head the next day when Silkie approached me and said that he wanted to tell me his real name. I didn’t know what this meant, but later I learned that this offer had shocked the entire community to its core. When I told Hiero that Silkie had said this, he turned quite pale. He asked me if it was something I wanted. I asked what difference could it make if Silkie wanted to tell me his real name.
You see, their real names are not names at all. They are sounds, secret sounds that when spoken set up an eternal vibration between two people. Disclosing your secret name is like giving someone a gold ring. To speak your name is to offer a binding promise.
“The difference,” Hiero said, “is that I now have to fight him.”
I was shocked but I had no say in the matter. Nothing I said made any difference at this point. Hiero went off and issued a formal challenge to Silkie and the challenge was formally accepted. Naturally, I was appalled, but Hiero didn’t seem unduly anxious. In fact, he seemed to look forward to the whole thing. I pleaded with him not to let this go ahead, but to no avail. I went to Silkie and told him that it should be stopped, but he just smiled sadly at me. Even Ekko was of no help. She told me I’d started it just by being there, and the men would finish it. I told her to tell the pair of them that they were acting like fools, and that I wanted neither of them and that as soon as I could get out of that place I would be gone.
She laughed in my face. “Tell them yourself,” she said.
There was great excitement in the community. People I’d never seen before poured out of their dwellings around the lake and came down to the sandy beach, bringing food and drink and blankets on which to sit, all as if it were a gala day. They chattered and made bets on the outcome as a fighting ring of hemp ropes was constructed near the water’s edge. I was told that the fight would take place at dusk.
I refused to watch. I went back up to the house. But I could hear the laughter and the excited chatter. I looked out the window and they had brought flaming brands to stick in the sand at the water’s edge. I closed my eyes and covered my ears, but it was too much. I went back down, determined to stop it somehow. But the sky had changed. It had gone the color of burgundy, and the lake was the dark blue of a damson. The flames danced off the still surface of the water, and as I walked down I passed a couple who were openly fucking against a tree. The woman was hugging the tree while the man had her from behind. Another couple were shagging in the long grass. There was no shame. These perverts were fucking openly, obviously wound up by what was going to happen.
The place reeked of sex and blood scent.
When I got down to the sand I could barely break through to see what was going on. Hiero and Silkie were standing naked, hands on hips, staring at each other. Silkie, baring his teeth, was the taller of the two, but Hiero had a much stronger build and smiled confidently. I thought they were going to fistfight, but another man entered the ring with two cruel blades, like machetes, and he stuck them both in the sand in the middle of the circle. Before I knew what was happening I heard a blast on a horn and a great cheer went up from the crowd, and the two men ran full pelt toward the blades, arriving at the blades almost at the same time.
Hiero, being a split second behind, went in sliding, kicking up earth, and sweeping Silkie to the sand. Hiero was on his feet first, and he swept his heel up into the air before bringing it down like an ax on Silkie’s face. I heard a sickening crunch and already Silkie’s nose was mashed and bloody. A huge cheer went up from the crowd.
Hiero reached for a blade and brought it down where Silkie was lying, but the younger man rolled clear, backflipping with miraculous skill, like a lithe animal, so that he landed crouched and set, waiting for the attack. Hiero now stood between him and the second blade. Silkie lunged, but it was a feint and Hiero made the mistake of trying to finish his opponent with a sweeping blow from the machete. All he sliced was air and it left him off balance. A backfist punch to the ear sent him staggering, and another cheer went up, this time in Silkie’s favor, and in that moment Silkie picked up the second blade.
I saw Ekko in the crowd. Her eyes were gleaming, yellow, like a cat’s. She was sweating with excitement and the light from the flames ran across her skin like amber beads. I begged her to stop it.
“Stop it?” she called, baring her teeth at me in a terrifying smile. “You can’t stop it. One of them has to die.”
“Die?”
She waved me away, eager to watch the combat in the ring. Again, the firelight shone in her yellow eyes as she shouted encouragement to the fighting men. She was avid for it, a beautiful woman made ugly with bloodlust.
Silkie kicked high and caught Hiero on the side of the head, but Hiero countered with a swipe of his blade. Silkie folded his body expertly and the blade missed opening his guts by a quarter of an inch; but it gave him the advantage and he grabbed Hiero by the wrist, twisting him round. Hiero fought back by spinning hard into Silkie’s embrace and striking a stunning blow from his elbow into the other man’s bloodied jaw, but miraculously the younger man maintained his wristlock. They were bonded in a lethal embrace now, each with a free knife hand but no room to make it count. Without warning, Silkie dropped to the floor, and in that moment I saw Hiero’s undoing.
Silkie collapsed all his weight into a squat, and, suddenly released, was able to spring back upright, dragging his blade upward in a single gutting action. Hiero felt his belly spring open, and he swayed, already knowing it was over. Their eyes met as they stood off each other for a moment. Then Silkie hacked his knife at Hiero’s throat, and Hiero crumpled.
There was no cheer. The crowd watched in silence. I was screaming at them to let me through but I had to beat against a wall of backs. By the time I fought through to Hiero, two men were already dragging him away by the legs. His blood soaked the sand. I could see the wide-open wound in his belly. I cried at them to let me
go to him, tears scalding my cheeks, but I was bundled away. They wouldn’t let me go to him. No one else seemed to give a damn. It was vile, vile and evil, and no one seemed to care.
But then Ekko pulled me away. “Let them do what they have to do,” she shouted at me, pulling me away. “You don’t understand our ways. It’s over.”
“No, I don’t understand,” I wailed at her. “How could you let this happen? It’s like it’s all sport to you. You’re all twisted. Twisted and perverted.”
“And you’re very young,” she said. “And you’re now under Silkie’s care.”
I ran back up to the house. I would have left immediately but I knew there was nowhere to go. At the house I flung myself on the bed, weeping and trembling with the shock of everything I’d witnessed. After a while I recovered enough to look out the window. Down by the lake they had lit a huge funeral pyre and I could see they were hoisting a body onto the pyre. I let out a wail so loud I saw people turning and looking back toward the house. After a while someone came in. But through my tears I couldn’t even tell who it was. It didn’t even seem like a complete shape, more like fragments of a wispy garment coming toward me, and then I realized it was Ekko and she was speaking to me, chanting words I didn’t understand, and she reached out with two bony fingers and closed my eyes and all I know is I fell into a swoon.
I woke up in the morning to birdsong, with the sunshine streaming through the dusty windows, illuminating cobwebs in tender beams of light spilled across the room. I knew I had to get out of that place. I knew I had to try again.
I wanted an end to the madness. I wanted home. I wanted you, Richie. I wanted Mum and Dad.
I went out. There were snoring, naked bodies lying on the sand near the house. It looked like the aftermath of a carnival or an orgy instead of a ritual killing. I went to the stable and I took the white mare again and threw a blanket across her back. I didn’t care how long it took me. There had to be a way home and this time I wouldn’t give up.
