Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  Gently Long eased him over a log. “No princes here, my lad,” he whispered, while he peered carefully back for further sign of movement from the house. Long yanked up the back of Pádraig’s oxford shirt to find the white skin pocked with shallow holes, in which something was embedded. He touched a piece of it and Pádraig cried out like a dog.

  “Salt,” said Long aloud. “Rock salt in a shotgun. That’s a mixed blessing. At least it will dissolve.” He dragged Pádraig over to Marty. “Keep her here, if you can. No matter how bad she… how bad it seems. No matter the pain. Keep her here until I return. Or until someone comes to help you.”

  Pádraig turned his head with difficulty, for the back of his neck was lacerated and his scalp laced with blood. “You can’t, Mayland. They’ll kill you.”

  Long used a tree to get him to his feet, keeping the trunk between himself and the house. “Shall we crawl away into the woods then, Kerryman? Bleeding and with a child whose mind is—is stolen? Someone or something must answer to me for all this.” Pádraig stole a glance at Marty, shuddered, and cried with the pain of his movement. When he looked back, Long was gone.

  The window of the van was dirty. The gas was down to less than a quarter of a tank.

  “… we got in fairly early Friday morning,” Martha was telling her daughter. “She hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and was cranky on the drive down, and a little carsick, I think. Then when we got in, Elen’s friend Sandy volunteered to baby-sit while we settled in and set up.

  “That was probably a mistake, because Sandy hauled her around all morning, visiting and doing errands. Showing Marty off, maybe. She hated it.”

  “Maybe that’s where she met this Judy character,” offered Elizabeth, as she leaned against the window and watched River Street pass by.

  Martha nibbled thoughtfully at her upper lip. Stopped for a long light.

  “Possible. But if so, she sure made an instant impression, for they weren’t gone that long. And when she was asked about her morning, Marty just got testy.”

  “I wish people would realize that you can’t baby-sit and do other things at the same time,” said Elizabeth with a great deal of spleen. “It isn’t fair to the child.”

  Martha gazed coolly at her daughter and wondered if Elizabeth would realize the implication of what she had said. And what she had asked of her mother. But she did not, and the light finally changed.

  “This was the last place he called from,” said Martha, slowing the van beside the kiosk at the corner of Highway 1.

  Elizabeth opened the window, as though a better view of that ordinary telephone on its stand could help her understand. “Well, they’re not here now”

  Martha listened to the tension in her daughter’s words. A honk sounded from behind them and a man driving a Subaru swerved around them, furious at being trapped in the intersection at change of light. Pushed by traffic, Martha drove on.

  “I can’t think she went up here,” said Elizabeth, with her head out the window. “There’s almost nothing to see. No sidewalk, no houses, and—phew—a tannery right by the road.”

  Martha pulled over beside it. The old van rocked to a stop on its loose suspension. “Nothing to attract an adult, perhaps. Most adults, that is. I was here once before, and I found the tannery very attractive. Not just the furs and suedes, but they have a garden.” She jumped the high step down from the driver’s seat, leaving the door unlocked, and walked down a series of steps. Elizabeth had to follow.

  The tannery was quite neat and the garden pretty, but neither of the clerks at the outlet store had seen a little girl. They had been asked that question already that day.

  This was not news of the highest, best kind, but it meant that they were on Long’s tracks, anyway. Martha and Elizabeth returned to the van and continued along the way they had come.

  “This is terrible, Mother. This is out-and-out wilderness! Not a house anywhere. Surely Marty wouldn’t go in here, even if she could walk this far.”

  Martha smiled tightly. No matter how nature-affirming a person might be, she reflected, times of danger would spark a desire to be surrounded by walls. Even in a Californian. “Well, I can’t turn around here. Bear with me.”

  Highway 9 wound like a string dropped by chance. It was very narrow and at times without shoulders. Cars swept by them at frightening speed. Elizabeth cursed as every bend opened before them, revealing more deep forest and no place to turn the bulky van.

  They were beside a trestle and the road was more narrow than ever. Martha squeezed through, almost touching the outer guardrail. They bumped over tracks.

  “There’s a railroad here?”

  “Tourist train, I seem to remember,” replied Martha. “Little one: a remnant of the days when these hills were stripped to rebuild San Francisco. I always have meant to ride it some summer.”

  A mile into the park, they found a turnaround, and were almost hit broadside by a Mercury Cougar coming in the other direction. They left the park more shaken than they had been at entering it.

  “Turn here.” Elizabeth pointed left away from the road. Martha did so, not asking why. Hoping no one would hit them from around the blind corner.

  It looked like a driveway, surrounded by mounds of spirea that almost met over the dry dirt surface, but the sign called it a private road.

  “At least it doesn’t say ‘Keep Out,’” said Elizabeth to her mother. “And I think this is the sort of thing Marty would want to explore. A drive between banks of flowers.”

  There was silence. “Don’t you, Mother?”

  Martha was occupied with holding the steering under control through a fearsome set of ruts. She considered her daughter’s statement, and her mind filled with a memory of Marty’s bright, overly precocious voice, saying, “I’m not having any fun today: in case anyone wants to know.” Marty who had run away from her. Twice. Whose face went gray and blank. Who was looking for Judy. “I don’t really know what Marty would want to explore,” she said, very sadly.

  There was dry grass to the left. Dry grass and thistles to the right. Away to the right, to the south, the ground fell away and the town of Santa Cruz could be seen, all brown roofs and stucco against the blue water. Then the redwoods closed in on both sides.

  A drive opened to the left, going up toward the park where the trees were thicker. FLAGER read the hand-painted wooden plaque. It also said PRIVATE. The holes in that drive were much worse.

  “What was that?” Elizabeth, not content with leaning out the window, opened the door and leaned out that.

  “A backfire?” Martha hazarded. Elizabeth slammed the door again and her face was sweaty. “Up there, Maw. Go!”

  Elizabeth had never in her entire life called her mother “Maw.” Martha stared sidelong at her, but turned the van’s stubby nose. It gave three lurches, slid into a rut, and emitted a whine painful to hear. The air smelled of burning rubber and they went nowhere at all.

  Mayland Long stood as still as the trees, half-hidden by them. He looked and listened for anything that might come.

  The window through which Pádraig had been shot was still open, but he could see into the darkness well enough to know no one was behind it. The wind was down and there were no birds calling, except a solitary, dull-sounding jay. After two minutes, he stepped forward into sunshine which brought him no warmth.

  There was something in that trim little chalet that was horrible. Long could see it, and smell it and feel it through his skin. I am not psychic, he said, under his breath. I am not a thing of sorcery but a natural beast, bound only by the honest rules of nature. He shook all over, like the beast he had named himself, and took another step. The unhappiness increased.

  Not bagpipes, not gulls: it was a voiceless, angry lamenting. It was not sound at all but a cloud of misery that washed over Long. His knees weakened and his stomach went into a knot. He stumbled and hit the earth with knees and hands, gaping in surprise at his own weakness. Propped on one hand with his white-trousered
knee on the grass, he felt his balance failing in an awful vertigo. Had he had food in his stomach, he would have vomited.

  Was he getting sick, he asked himself: suddenly and violently sick with any of these thousand ills to which men were liable? Of course he was sick, came the answer. With a cold.

  People with no claim to personal power got colds, and they did not fall to the ground because of it. Ordinary people did not stay home from their labors because they had a cold. Ordinary people, who lived for a handful of years and then died without protest: they took such discomfort in their stride.

  What made them ordinary, then?

  “I am not sick!” said Long aloud, and he stood up again.

  Now the sun was bright, with all clouds rolled away, and his balance had improved. Ignoring the disorders of his body, Long took two more steps, and then he heard crying.

  He looked over his shoulder, but it wasn’t Marty he was hearing. Marty was sitting on a log, her head sullenly down, and Pádraig had her hand. The poor fellow sat beside her, hunched with pain, and he watched Long intently.

  Was Pádraig an ordinary man? Long signaled to him with a wave of the hand which was, unintentionally, gallant.

  The weeping was coming from the house, along with the waves of sick nastiness. Though his legs felt rubbery, Mr. Long increased his pace. Then, up on the second-floor balcony of the house, a door opened.

  “Go away! I’ll shoot you!”

  A woman. Long recognized the voice, or thought he did, through its hysteria. There was something prodding through the blackness of that doorway. A gun barrel.

  Long darted to the right, so the door itself blocked her aim. His knees felt stiff and he was cold all over. Fear was running over him like water, but it was not fear of the gun. He stepped into the shadow of the house and shivered, his mind filled with wailing. Perhaps it was his own.

  What was the prayer Pádraig had uttered, coming down the hill, and which Long had so casually rejected? That had been a very bad act, and it was only justice that the prayer would not come to him now when he was willing to welcome it, nor any other words of aid. Instead a voice within his head said to him that he might die here now, never knowing what this violence had been about.

  Or what anything was about. Life had been such a long night, and the meeting with Martha only the beginning of awakening. Five years. Five good years: almost no time, to his standards, but time enough to gain understanding, if he were going to.

  The nausea returned, and tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes. No one can teach a person what he does not already know, Martha had said. What Long recognized inside himself at this moment was a huge emptiness.

  Mayland Long came to the door and he put his hand on it. He could smell the reek of sickness from within. Here was confusion. Error. Vacancy.

  He felt a shameful identity with it and he pleaded—with what he did not know—that he might not have to go in.

  But cold and sick as he was, he was still Mr. Long. He had an old habit of finishing things. And under the wailing and beyond all the foul winds in his mind he was still curious. He wanted to know what was going on here. He opened the door onto blankness. Not blackness but blankness. Perhaps he had gone blind. Long heard his own voice, crying shrilly like a cat. He tried again for Pádraig’s prayer.

  Form does not differ from emptiness. Emptiness does not differ from form.

  The words came by themselves to him. He heard them in a surprise that tightened his face.

  It was the Prajna Paramita Sutra. Uncomfortable scripture. Nihilist, he had always thought. It had never particularly attracted him.

  That which is form is emptiness.

  It was all he could think of, so he whispered it to the blank, empty air: Mr. Long’s own dry, uncomforting prayer of protection.

  There. He could see again. Perhaps his eyes had merely needed time. He light resolved into pattern: a floor and a ceiling. Lines drawn from top to bottom became the juncture of walls.

  A hallway. It was fairly empty, as the sutra claimed, and it certainly had form, for the sun reflected off Mexican tile. And not quite empty after all, for there was a terracotta tub with a jade plant. Blinking at the little green thing (neither as thick or as healthy as such a plant might have been) Mr. Long began to weep, not knowing why. He touched it and was faintly surprised that it did not die at his touch.

  No death said the Sutra, and also the jade plant in the tub in the hallway.

  The stench was stronger in here, and it was not a thing of the mind alone. Long put his arm up to his face and tried to breath through the fabric of his shirt sleeve. He found himself staring down the blue-black barrel of a shotgun.

  And also no extinction of death… said the Sutra, lest he be overconfident.

  “Put down the gun, Sandy,” said Long quietly. “I’m only Martha’s road manager. You can’t want to kill me.”

  The young woman’s arm holding the shotgun was shaking so hard that the barrel swept in wide circles. Her hand on the trigger was trembling. She peered up at Long from honey-colored, frizzy hair.

  “Oh, Jeezus! It’s you, she said, and the tip of the barrel broke a piece of the floor tile as it fell. She dropped the gun entirely. “Oh, Jeezus. Oh, crap! I’m so glad you’ve come.

  “I… tried, but I’m no good at this!” Sandy sat down on the cold tiles and put her head in her hands. Her brightly colored dress bore large stains and wet spots, and it rode up to the middle of her thighs.

  Long’s mouth twitched. “I don’t know if I’d agree. You scored a solid hit on poor Pádraig.”

  She stared, uncomprehending. A wave of nausea crossed her face, and Long’s as well. Once again the wailing began. He raised his head and stared at the wall beside him, for it was from that direction it came. Not a thing of the mind alone.

  “Pádraig? Pat? No, it wasn’t Pat. It was… coming at me.” She made a despairing gesture toward Long’s outstretched hand. Her face was screwed up like an infant’s.

  “I was told not to let anyone in. They’ll be looking everywhere. I’m so scared. So scared. Let her down again and again. Now it’s all turned bad!”

  All dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear nor disappear. They are neither tainted nor pure.

  Long sat down beside the woman. He wanted to repeat that to her: all dharmas are marked with emptiness. Neither tainted nor pure. He watched her rock back and forth on the hard tiles, and he touched her head. “Things do not turn bad” is what he said to her. “Neither events, nor apples, nor lives.”

  “Lives, especially, do not go bad, Miss Flager.”

  Two meager fists balled and Sandy shook her head. “Look at the kid and tell me that again! Oh, Jesus, I’m no good at this.”

  Long frowned. “The kid? Marty?” Sandy glared up at him, and her eyes were gray and perfectly round. “Not Marty. The kid. You know.”

  She pointed beyond the wall of the passage, to the room beyond.

  Mr. Long stood and regarded that wall, while the sun slanting through the doorframe warmed the back of his head. On sudden impulse Long pulled the door all the way in, so that light and wind filled the passageway. “Go out now,” he said again to Sandy, and he drew her to her feet. Blinking against the light, she obeyed him, leaving the black shotgun on the tiles. Long himself walked down the hall and into the house alone.

  The living room was lighted like a church, for all the blinds were drawn on the windows, and the only light came in through the Gothic arch of the glass wall, eighteen feet tall. The central room had very fine paneling, a pale shag rug, and a stereo and VCR in an oak stand in the corner. There was little furniture and that was of wood and pillows, carefully finished by hand. It smelled like a shambles.

  In the corner opposite the oak stand, wrapped in filthy blankets and propped with hand-embroidered pillows, was the demon source of all the misery and confusion that had been hurting Mayland Long.

  It was white and it had a bulging forehead. Its eyes were almost as m
ilky as its skin and its mouth had a shade of blue to it. Its hands were large and it held them like paddles, with the fingers at odd angles. It rocked back and forth, hitting its frightening head against the wall. It was a child, perhaps eight years old, and its face was smeared with shit. Feeling Long’s presence before it, it howled.

  Long stood above the child, buffeted by the winds of its misery. The smell choked him; he coughed into a tissue.

  And it wrinkled its nose in sympathy, and it rubbed a dung-covered forearm over its nostrils, which made things worse. It retched, as Long had done in the yard outside, and like Long it lost its balance and fell against the stained cushions. Its breath made noises.

  Mr. Long was fastidious. He abhorred smells. He disliked ugliness as much as he did philosophical error. Perhaps more.

  No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue …

  It sounded like the child was choking, there on the floor. He pushed his sleeves up and took hold under its armpits, straightening it in place. It wrapped him round the elbows with its paddle hands. He got away with difficulty.

  No cognition …

  This thing was error itself: without hope of remedy. Long’s mouth pulled to a fine line.

  No woman with eyes the color of sky could wake this child from its nightmare. It was hopeless. It was the substance of hell itself, and it called to Mayland Long.

  Here, the emptiness and confusion he would never, never excise from his imperfect soul. Here, locked in self, was self-loathing. So it had been before Mr. Long was born, and would certainly be after both he and this poor damaged, dangerous thing died. It was pain and it could not be exorcised for once and all.

  But perhaps it could be mastered.

  Long rose again and considered things. Fear and anguish seeped up from the floor; he snubbed them. The waves of confusion could not obscure the fact that there was simple work to do here. The dharma of action. He regarded the heap of suffering wrapped in blankets and turned aside all pity.