by Allyson Bird
I was sure they must have left by then. Maybe they’d gone off to get that hammer. I crept back, but as I got closer to the big hole in the kitchen again, I could hear them inside, still talking and laughing.
And then the next thing I knew I was knocked off my feet. In my memory, what happened was not an explosion the way that you see it in movies, or imagine it might be. I don’t remember whether there was a loud noise. I just remember a sense of shock, falling over, and something more like a roar that engulfed me. Then somebody was screaming for what seemed like a long time.
The sky and the air around me had turned grey, and ash swirled about us like I was in a burning snowstorm. I tried to get to my feet, but they kept slipping out from under me because the ash was so thick you couldn’t see the ground, and it seemed like the sun was blotted out. The girl was still screaming. I wanted to get to her even though I was so scared. I didn’t care who I was with. I just didn’t want to be alone.
My great-granddaddy’s cabin was on fire, I could figure out that much. It was so hot, and the fire was roaring like a living thing. Surely somebody would see the smoke rising up from the woods and call 911. I started crawling in the ash and I got around the front of the house and that’s where the girl was, and as soon as she saw me she stopped screaming. I guess she was in shock. Her face and arms were covered in raw, angry welts that must have been burns, but she wasn’t hurt as badly as she’d sounded.
I tried to ask her what happened to the guys, but I couldn’t make my voice work. My whole body felt like it was full of smoke and when I tried to speak I couldn’t stop coughing. Then a chill wind blew across us and just like that we weren’t there any longer.
The girl grabbed my hand and I held onto hers tighter than I ever held onto anybody. We had been on the verge of getting burned up alive and suddenly we were not; instead, we were on a great grey bleak plain under a dim relentless sky. The fire, the shack, the woods, the hot summer day, were all gone.
The plain was broken only by enormous stalagmite structures twisting up toward that twilight sky. They were made of stone, and somehow I knew that they were made—they had not just formed that way—but whatever made them had been dead a long time, maybe for millions of years.
And then I heard my mother’s voice. She was whispering to me, but I can’t remember most of the things she said. Seven words are all I have ever remembered. She was close enough to touch, and I reached for her, but then the wind on the plains was furious, a roar that became the roar of the fire again and I was on my back on a stretcher and they were trying to jam something plastic in my mouth and saying it would help me breathe and I didn’t want anything in my mouth and I didn’t want to breathe if it meant I couldn’t go back to that place and hear my mother’s voice again.
I knew I was losing consciousness, but I also knew I needed to say the words she had said to me. If I spoke them, I would remember them forever. As I writhed and gasped for breath with smoke-wracked lungs the words were all but torn from my mouth:
“Come back to me in lost Carcosa…”
That was five years and a lifetime ago.
Nobody knew what happened to the guys. People do blow themselves up and die trying to make meth in plastic Coke bottles like they were doing, but they never found any bodies, so they guessed the guys must not have been hurt too bad, and must have run off. A couple years ago I heard they found one of them in Memphis but it turned out to be a false alarm.
I also heard the girl went crazy, but you hear a lot of stuff.
What did I care about any of that, though? I only ever went back to my granddaddy’s again one more time, to see if I could find my book. Of course there was nothing left.
So I started looking online. Plugging words into search engines, coming up against dead ends, or finding weird old pages abandoned in the nineties, or forums that seemed promising but turned out to be populated by cranks.
I kept searching. I learned about the places far below the surface of the internet, beyond the reach of search engines and surveillance tools, where all the real exchanges of information, and much darker things, take place. I got a job flipping burgers at McDonald’s after school and I saved up for a laptop. I learned how to access places on the deep web I can’t tell you about. Places where they know about the yellow symbol that was on my book. Shadowy cyber corners where you pay in darkcoin for information from people who have gone so far underground they might as well not exist.
I write letters, too, and I have a post office box in town that people use to send me photocopies of old books and ancient manuscripts they have hidden away, although I have yet to find another book like the one I lost. I’ve learned not to say too much about that, either. It excites the attention of the kind of people you don’t want attention from.
In a year I’ll be eighteen. My grandma is getting older and her health is failing. I think she thinks I am going to stay at home forever and take care of her. But the minute I am old enough I am going away, just like my mother did.
I know I will find my way back to her again if I have to spend my life searching. I have what I need most, the last words my mother ever spoke to me as the cold winds of lost Carcosa swept over us both, the words that I have never dared to speak again. They sit on my lips like fire. And I dream of that place every night now, with its blackened suns and stars and its stark and ancient landscape of dead things left by lost races.
But I am not dead, and I am only a little lost. I wish I had some piece of her, the fabrics my grandma destroyed, but then I remember that I am myself a piece of her.
The place frightens me. There was a wrongness about it, and so maybe there is a wrongness about her, and a wrongness about me. Or maybe the wrongness is the wrongness of an ordinary girl, a girl who was so lost and so unhappy she made up a story saying that her mother went away to be a queen in some blighted land. Like a sick fairy tale with no happily ever after.
Which story is real? Which story is true? How do I see past my own eyes? How do I hear what a god hears so I know what is false?
Well, even a god may be deluded or insane. So may I, by virtue of the company I keep if nothing else. My correspondents and informants speak in riddles; they believe in purity by way of corruption, of madness on the road to enlightenment. I pretend like I care about their crazed and glorious ideals but I don’t. I only care about her, and finding her again.
One other question troubles me: if she is the queen, mustn’t there be a king?
When I ask this question, my informants fall silent. They retreat. Sometimes they never respond to me again at all. But I know he is out there as well, because sometimes I can feel him pressing at the borders of my dreams about her. I do not know whether I am afraid of her, but I know I am afraid of him; yet do I not mean what I say to her with I would die for you?
This is what I tell myself when I wake sweating and sobbing from the dreams; when she has held me close and I have tasted her contaminated skin; when I have tried to burrow back inside of her and I feel her wretchedness consuming me: that I will sacrifice myself for her willingly, gladly, unceasingly. I will die for you, Mother. I will.
My greatest fear, and my unspeakable conviction, is not that she will reject this offering.
It is that she will embrace it.
EXPOSURE
BY HELEN MARSHALL
“Did you bring the sunscreen?”
The boat was unsteady, hurled up the height of the enormous waves cast off in the wake of the cruise ships heading to more popular destination, sliding down with a lurch that made Serena feel like fucking hurling. Not her mother, though, no, Serena’s mother had a smile like a clenched fist.
“The sunscreen, Serena. Did you bring it? It’s important, I told you it’s important.”
Nothing.
“Serena, I asked you a question: did you bring the sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mom—jesus!—I brought the sunscreen!”
A long pause. Serena squinted. The glare of the ocean was bleak
and blinding. It should have been beautiful, being out on the ocean like this, it should have been glorious—but then, Serena should have been on one of the cruise ships, she should have been wearing a neat little black bikini, should have been sunbathing on the deck, should have been staking out the side of the pool and working on her tan.
Should have been.
“That’s it, it must be, in the distance, Serena, don’t you think that must be it?”
“I guess.”
“You guess? You guess? Ha, she guesses.”
Serena rolled her eyes, and her mother ignored it for once, too fucking happy to be here, too fucking happy to be part of the crowd of tourists. Not that there were all that many of them—there wouldn’t be, would there? Really, only a handful, German, Italian, English, American—all middle-aged men with bald patches, bulbous sunburnt noses—fucking gross. Some of them clutched at guidebooks and cameras. Her mother didn’t have a camera. Her mother didn’t want anything as crass as a camera. Whatever she wanted, she wanted to see on her own.
Serena didn’t understand it. This had never been her thing, this had always been her mother’s thing. When Serena was twelve her mother had dragged her to Athens. Last year it had been Istanbul. And, okay, maybe those places had a certain charm. Maybe there had been something to the Acropolis, watching the marble changing from gold to rose to white to pale blue as it reflected the last glow of the twilight—maybe that had been just a little bit nice—but then it got back to the way things always were between them, her mother screaming at her for forgetting the sunscreen, her mother freaking out when she talked to anyone for even ten seconds. Like the hotel concierge was some pedophile. And he wasn’t, of course he wasn’t! It was just cultural, right? It was just how they were in Greece!
Fucking Carcosa.
She could have gone to Venice.
She could have gone to Barcelona. Or Paris.
Carcosa was nothing but rocks, ruins—no one went to Carcosa, not now, not anymore. A few outcroppings, a few standing pillars. Once, Serena had read, the place had been beautiful. Once they had written about the towers. They had written about the Lake of Hali.
Dim Carcosa. Lost Carcosa. Strange the night where the black stars rise.
That’s what the guidebook had said.
But what was left of it now? Rubble. An ancient junkyard. No looming towers. No Aldebaran. No Hyades. No Alar. No Hastur. No Hali. A hundred years ago the French team of archaeologists had drained the fucking thing, and why? Malaria! The Lake of Hali had been breeding fucking malaria-infested mosquitoes!
“The sunscreen,” her mother reminded her, this time her voice was sharp, cutting.
Serena looked over her shoulder at the cruise ships heading for Mykonos—the white sand beaches she’d been staring at for months in the brochures—and tried desperately to discover the secret of self-teleportation, to will herself onboard that ship and not this one, not this dinky little boat fighting the waves, the sailors all dark-haired and dark-skinned, speaking whatever fucking language they spoke, and the tourists with their cameras primed and ready—like Carcosa really meant something to them, like this was it, this was it, this was fucking Carcosa!
Fucking losers, Serena thought.
Quiet now.
Blessed, fucking peace.
Serena walked along the shoreline. Her mother was somewhere—anywhere—not here, and thank God for that. Their split had been predictable: the spilled sunscreen, her mother scrubbing away at the oil-slick sand to find something usable, rubbing gravel and who knows what else into her arms until they glistened and blistered at the same time. She was mad, absolutely mad! Serena had been ecstatic to see her storm off, arms and legs crusted like a panko chicken breast, with a trio of tourists from Germany.
Five hours, she had been told. That was all.
Five hours to kill.
Serena kicked a rock. It rolled lazily for a moment, crushing the tiny shells that littered the beach. Serena had examined them earlier, strange spiralled things, flat, gleaming shards in the shape of fans, and amongst them the petrified husks of insects. It sent a shiver up her spine, the thought of what might be wriggling in the waters.
Serena did not like the waters. They were not blue waters as they should have been, but purplish like a fed tick. The algae she had read. Something like that. And the light here was different. Too bright, but somehow thick, like mist, substantial—you could never see too far. The black stars, a trick of that same light, because they weren’t black, not really, not stars really—something to do with the atmosphere, some sort of dust in the air, like how the northern lights could make the sky seem alive and crawling, the black stars were like that, except they made the sky seem dead, they made the sky seem like a giant bloated corpse crawling with flies…
How the black stars seemed to move.
Serena didn’t like it.
She remembered the bus ride they had taken to the harbour city. Bouncing along on broken vinyl-covered seats, padding spilling out, her mother ignoring her, staring at the guidebook, not letting her see.
“You don’t care, Serena,” she had said, “so just fucking sit there, would you?”
So Serena had been staring out the window, watching the lights of the villages they passed. They were high up. The island was mostly mountainous, mostly volcanic rock, she remembered being thrilled by the heights when there had been daylight, looking out at the red rock beneath them, the tiny houses clustered together on sharp, improbable plateaus.
But then the storm blew in—sudden, furious—and it frightened her how high up they were. How the roads had gone slick and Serena could feel the back of the bus beginning to fishtail as they took the curves. She experimented with news headlines in her head: Two Americans Dead or No Survivors in Tragic Crash. Began to see if she could make them feel real to her, if she could envisage that future—but it all sounded too senseless. Prosaic in a way that made it ridiculous. Those kinds of stories didn’t involve Americans. It was always people from somewhere else—India, perhaps, or China. It couldn’t happen to her. She watched the lights of the villages like constellations below her. If they were there, she knew she would find her way home.
And then abruptly, terrifyingly, the lights were gone.
For a moment Serena fumbled for her mother’s hand—a moment, that was all it was, a single moment of desperation, a single moment of wanting her mother to hold her and tell it would be okay.
“Jesus, Serena,” her mother had said at last, rolling her eyes, “the drivers do this all the time. They know the way.”
Whatever.
She fucking hated it here.
The sun was lower now. The pillars cut jagged lines into it, brightness spilling out all around.
Boarding time, thank god. Serena waited by the boat. It bobbed up and down lazily. The sailors were moving around cargo containers. Two of them leaned against the rail, smoking a single cigarette between them that stank something fierce.
“Hey,” Serena called. That one looked up—the one that, maybe, no promises, she would like to fuck. He had the cigarette between his fingers. “Hey—can I?”
He shrugged. He smiled at her, and held up the cigarette.
“That’s right. Yes, a smoke. I can—good, okay.”
She walked up the ramp, and he caught her around the waist when she stumbled in the unstable rhythm. His grip was strong. It lingered. She didn’t shake herself free but instead casually plucked the cigarette out of his hand. The smell of it made her choke, but she liked the way the smoke curled in the air like a cat’s tail. She liked the way the sailor had held her around the waist.
“Well, Nameless,” she said, passing the cigarette back with a smile. “You seem alright.”
“Alright,” he intoned.
“Some English then?”
He shrugged, and smiled around a second cigarette.
“This is such a crock, isn’t it? Carcosa. Fuck.”
He sucked on the cigarette casually.
“Ah,” he said, “the island.” He shrugged. “Haunted?” Then gave a lazy wink.
“But you don’t believe that, do you? Ha, if you do.”
“Ha,” he said. The cigarette dangled precariously off his lower lip.
Just beyond them now a small crowd was forming on the pier. They all wore a look of irritable disappointment—not at leaving, but having ever have arrived in the first place. In Athens, they had that look, in Venice, in Barcelona. In Paris, they had it too but they were all too afraid to show their true feelings: instead, everyone had exclaimed over the buttered croissants, the quality of the wine all the while doing their best to pretend the Seine hadn’t stunk with urine. They had snapped pictures. God, they loved taking pictures, even though they hated whatever they were looking at, even though it disappointed them so hugely. What were they snapping pictures of? A bunch of broken rocks? Whatever they thought they had captured, someone else had been there first. If there was anything Serena had learned, it was the endless disappointment of the already discovered. The great glories of the past—gods and poets, conquerors, angels, artists, all the filthy, dangerous romance of the world—had drained away like water through a sink hole.
The crowd grumbled. Weary men, sunburnt and angry, their flab a glistening mound under their cotton shirts. Women fanned themselves with brochures, their faces still twisted into unnatural shapes from smiling into the sun.
Serena sniffed delicately, plugged away at the cigarette, as Nameless the sailor and the others began shuffling these cows onboard. They huddled together in little clots.
Where was her mother?
Nameless clicked a little tally with every tourist who stepped on board. Click, went the tally. Click, click, click. Each numbered and accounted for.
