Behind the Moon
Page 21
“Okay.” Janice Rivington had raised her voice. “You think we could throw some light on that ceiling?”
In the shadows or inside her head Marissa thought a sound of drumming, warm broad hands slapping loose skins (skin maybe still growing on some animal’s hollow flank, not yet stretched over the dug-out wooden round of a drum). And there was light in enormous quantities, as if the hands that drummed were fanning flames, like a river of pulsing fire away down to her left, illuminating the gallery wall to the right of her and above . . . and the gallery was big, enormously hollow, huge as a cathedral hall.
On the right wall and spreading up onto the ceiling above were bison, such a stampede of bison as she had never seen (even if she was really only seeing them projected on the lids of her closed eyes), magnificent in umber and ocher, humping their weighty shoulders out of the natural curve of the rock, bigger too it seemed to her than the ordinary buffalo they’d seen in the daylight not so much as an hour before. Among them too were antlers, not deer, she thought, but elk. And they looked at her in the same way as the bear had done before (where had the bear gone, then?). The eye of each animal person was upon her, as if it knew her. Even though there were so many of them in this procession, which seemed at times perfectly orderly, as if every animal person knew and followed the same purpose, or at times anarchic as though all of them were caught up in a flood.
“The lights are too strong.” One of the archaeologists was the first to speak. “They’ll damage the painting. At Lascaux—” Then someone apparently shut him up. A hush, and the cavalcade of animals which seemed to have detached itself from the stone and to be floating, flowing in midair. Marissa heard a rushing sound, or felt a rushing in her ears.
Janice Rivington and her crew had set up a shot, but when the camera rolled the only sound that came out of her was a sort of choked mouse-squeak. After about thirty slow-moving seconds, the cameraman made a throat-slash gesture and all the machines stopped whirring. Someone handed Janice Harrington a plastic bottle of water, but when she tried to drink most of it ran from the corners of her mouth. Marissa could see her frightened face in the blaze of the too-bright lights, the muscle in her long neck working, and she saw her beginning to compose herself, wiping her mouth and dabbing the handkerchief at the spill on her lapel. Although she didn’t wait for the mic to swing in on its boom or for the red light to glow on the camera, her voice had regained the rich confident tone Marissa knew from the television.
My God. My God. Who where these people?
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As the light faded the panorama fractured, into the pattern of brightly branching dots she’d seen before, though now and then she could still pick out a horn, an antler or a clear bright eye out of the vortex. She moved beside the stream, her bare heels (what had happened to her shoes?) sinking into heel prints made by others long ago in what had once been clay. She was hurrying, before the light would fail entirely, toward another narrow opening at the lower end of this great hall, into which the animal persons also seemed to swirl, but she felt somehow certain that on the other side of the slit portal there would be a human being sprouted with horns.
Behind her there came a crackling sound. Ultimo had struck fire to his greasewood torch. Enlarged by the yellowred flickering light, Jamal’s spindly shadow splayed over her.
Where had the animal persons gone? She had seen them all streaming through the opening into this small round chamber, but now they were nowhere to be found. Marissa’s vision fractured, and the pattern of dots streamed in a spiral—she thought that the dots must be the eyes of the animal persons, who had lost their bodies but were still regarding her.
Then they were gone and her vision steadied. On the curving wall before her she did see a series of little horned heads—no, they were handprints, negative images, a black paint surrounding the pallor of the stone, so that the hands seemed to glow a little, like the phosphorescent plastic stars stuck to the ceiling above Julie’s bed at home. One print seemed to attract her hand, magnetically, the left one. There was a tingle, a thrill in her palm. When she laid it there it fit so perfectly there was no line around it. Her left hand disappeared entirely into darkness, complete as the velvet black of a starless sky; it sank a little way into soft stone.
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The stone was blue now, the color of turquoise, but soft like clay; she could move through it. She was aware of others near her, circling through the blue stone wall. Did she know them? They were shades. On one side the cave, the other the world. A pair of hands pressing symmetrically toward hers, from the other side of this giving surface.
Let me come out of this rock.
Beyond the surface was a cool, dim space, like an underwater cave. There were people there waiting, as if in a trance. A pair of hands reaching out toward hers.
The cave covered them like the dome of a tent. They were all looking down, as if waiting for something, or hoping for it. They were looking toward her, but they had not found her.
Her hands spread flat on a firm surface, solid though invisible. It wasn’t stone, like a moment before. Maybe instead some sort of rock crystal.
In the cave the handprints were framed in black, and they fit her own hands to perfection. If she kept pressing she could come through, as she had come through the stone before; the stone had softened, like wet clay. She could come out of one cave into the other.
A bright white light bore down on her, piercing, like a laser or a diamond.
Julie, Julie. . . .
So the two halves made a whole: a squashed sphere like the gibbous moon. She was back to back with herself and facing both realms at the same time, curving outward into both realms, but falling or floating from one into the other. . . . So she raised her own hands, toward the other two hands that closed around hers. Now she did know those voices calling her name, which belonged to the ones she had loved, or was going to.