999

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Are you quite all right?” she inquired in a delightful, clipped English accent.

  “Should I be?” I asked. I wiped my eyes, which to my complete horror were leaking tears. I wanted to stop weeping but I could not. Already I missed Vav; I wanted her back. I realized that in her company for the first time in many years I had felt safe.

  “From a distance it seemed as if you took a nasty fall, but now I’m here I do believe the forest bed of oak leaves bore the brunt of it.”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was talking about. But as I got up I discovered that I was brushing leaves and detritus from a pair of jodhpurs and high black hunting boots. And not a trace of Vav’s blood which was seconds ago splattered all over me. I wept again, so copiously that I was obliged to turn away from her out of embarrassment.

  “I guess I’m okay,” I replied when I’d managed to pull myself together. I put a hand to my head. “Except for a bit of a headache.”

  “Hardly surprising, actually.” She handed me an etched silver hip flask. “Here. You look like you could use this.”

  I unscrewed the cap, smelled the familiar aroma of mescal. I felt the familiar lure, but somehow something had changed inside me and I was put in mind of a fish rising to the baited hook. I hesitated a moment more before handing back the flask. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  She nodded. “Why don’t I wait and ride the rest of the way with you.”

  I looked around. “Are we on some kind of steeplechase?”

  “Yes, of course.” She laughed, a sound like a thousand tinkling silver bells. “We’re on a hunt, William.”

  Taking up the chestnut’s reins, I slid my foot into the left stirrup. “And we would be … where?” I swung up into the saddle.

  “Leicestershire. The East Midlands of England. The Charnwood Forest, to be precise.”

  “The heart of hunt country,” I said. “The Cottesmore is run here, if memory serves.”

  “The great yearly foxhunt. Yes, indeed. But now without growing controversy.” Her eyes crinkled in the most appealing manner. “Come on now.” She dug the heels of her boots into the mare’s flanks and the horse leapt forward. “I don’t fancy missing all the fun, d’you?”

  I urged the chestnut after her and at once he broke into a full gallop. To give you a fair idea of how this woman affected me, I confess that even while I was desperately trying to remember everything I’d been taught about riding, I was studying her features with ruthless concentration. Her rosy, cream-colored skin made her seem as if she was born for the hunt—or at the very least for the misty English countryside. She had a canny intelligence about her, an insouciant air that drew me in a way I could not fathom. If at that very moment someone had warned me about her—had accused her of being a murderess, to take the extreme—I would have laughed in his face and, putting heels to my steed’s sweaty flanks, left him in the dust. Happy to be in her heady company. I had only just met her and already I felt as if I’d known her all my life. Some connection, intimate as an umbilical, bound us. She was like an unexpected present under the Christmas tree. Are you really for me? I wanted to ask while rubbing my eyes in disbelief.

  “Hey, you know my name but I don’t know yours,” I called.

  “Surely you know me, William.” She lifted a hand and I saw with a start the webbing between her fingers. “I am Gimel, the weaver of realities, the font of ideas, the headwater of inspiration. I am like my namesake, the camel, filled to the brim with resources, a self-sufficient ship even in the most hostile climates.”

  At this moment, we emerged into a wide grassy field dotted with dandelion and foxglove. The specters of solid oaks marched ahead of us on either side, and in the gathering gloom I could just make out an oft-tramped path. As we began to follow it, I soberly reminded myself that all this frothing off at the mind was nothing more than an odd kind of fantasy left over, perhaps, from the tens of thousands of hormonal fever dreams I’d had during my appropriately bad adolescence. By bad I mean spoiled, like that blackish, moldy thing you find in your refrigerator after having been away for several months.

  “I take it, then, we’re on a foxhunt of our own,” I said as I pulled abreast of her. I was so close I could breathe in her lovely scent.

  “Oh, no. I would never be after anything so beautiful as a fox.” When she shook her head her hair moved in the most provocative way. “We’re after the beast.”

  “What beast?”

  “You know perfectly well, William, so don’t play me.” She gave me a sharp look. I saw a flinty edge inside the gorgeous emeralds of her eyes and my heart turned over. Doctor, the oxygen! Stat! “The beast of beasts,” she went on, oblivious to the arrow protruding from my heart. “There is only one so hideous, so needing of being hunted.”

  “Look, I admit to being more than slightly confused. I mean, just moments ago I was lying in a back alley of Paris with my friend’s blood—”

  “So you think of Vav as a friend? Curious. You only knew her a very short while.”

  “I’m a good judge of character,” I replied somewhat angrily. “If you aren’t also a friend of hers, you’d better declare it now.”

  She laughed. “My goodness, how quickly you jump to her defense.” Close to me now, she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek and I heard those birds chirping in my head, the ones you see in the cartoons flying around Sylvester’s head when Tweety has hit him a good one with a hammer. “Vav and I were like sisters. Closer, even, if you can imagine. Like two pieces of the same pie.”

  “I miss her.”

  “I’m hardly surprised,” she said. “You were on your way to an exhibition of paintings. It’s important you get there.” She nodded as if to herself. “Absolutely vital, one might say.”

  “You mean you know how to get me back to Paris?”

  “That wouldn’t be wise, now would it? Besides, there’s no need.” She was posting a bit so I could keep pace. Her back was straight, her shoulders squared. She had about her that almost flagrant tomboy look I find irresistible. I imagined her striding through the forest like Diana, the mythical huntress, thighs flexing, muscles cording as she notched an arrow onto her bowstring, pulling it taut as her prey came into range. “The exhibition just went up in the Manor House. We’ll get there as soon as we can. But first, we must see the hunt to its inevitable conclusion.”

  “If it’s inevitable, why bother with it?” I said. “Why not just head straight for the Manor?”

  Her brow furrowed. “One might as well ask why not exhale without inhaling first. It simply cannot be done. Laws of the universe, you know.”

  “These are the same laws that allow me to move from New York to Paris to the Charnwood Forest in the blink of an eye? Or to allow an exhibition of paintings in Paris to be here now?”

  “Just so.” She was oblivious to my irony. In fact, she appeared relieved. “I’m so pleased you and I are on the same page.”

  I groaned. A page of what strange book? I wondered.

  “Don’t worry,” she called. “I’ll get you where you need to go. Trust me, William.”

  I felt a tiny chill play against my spine, for that was just what Vav had said. At that moment, I made a decision. Spurring my horse on, I leaned over toward her. So far as I could determine, playing by the rules, odd though they might be, had done me no good at all. All change! I grabbed her reins and drew her off the trodden path.

  “What are you doing?” she said, alarmed.

  “To the Manor, wherever that is,” I said. “Let the others handle the beast.”

  “What others?” We were side by side now, our thighs touching. “William, we’re the only ones on this hunt.”

  “So much the better,” I said. “No one will miss us when we don’t go on.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  I leaned in until I was close enough to smell her hair. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  She licked her lips. At the fall of night her eyes were like cabochon jewels.
For an instant I found myself wondering idly, crazily, if she was as blind as Vav.

  “We must run the beast to ground,” she said. “Otherwise, it will never let us get to the Manor House.”

  “Why?”

  “William—” There was something in her face now, some hint of a wound so fresh, so deep it was still bleeding. “Vav ignored the beast at her own peril. Look what happened to her. I won’t make the same mistake.”

  She looked so vulnerable. I put my hand on the side of her neck. “What mistake?”

  She was trembling a little. “The paintings and the beast are intertwined. You can’t see one without encountering the other. She thought she could take you directly to the paintings, that she could somehow circumvent the beast. But she was wrong.”

  “You keep talking about a beast, but what exactly do you mean? To my knowledge there are no beasts in Leicestershire, or for that matter anywhere in England. Large predators are extinct here, as they are in most of Europe.”

  Her eyes searched mine. “Vav didn’t explain?”

  “If she had I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?” I said softly.

  “It’s an exercise in futility. You won’t believe me, I promise you.”

  I kissed her cheek. “You mean you won’t even give me the chance?”

  This seemed to give her pause. I could sense that she was coming to a decision she would rather not make. “It’s best if we keep moving while we talk.”

  I nodded and let go of her reins, following closely as she veered at an acute angle across the cool blue grassland into the inky shadows of the forest.

  “The beast is a creature born of chaos,” she said at last. “It hardly thinks as you or I know it; you can’t reason with it or come to a compromise, but its reactions to stimuli are appallingly quick. It is pure evil.”

  “It attacked Vav before I could even take a breath.”

  “Poor Vav. She didn’t have a chance,” Gimel said in an odd tone of voice, as if she were speaking to herself. Then her gaze met mine across the short distance between us. “As I said, I won’t make the same mistake.”

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but all at once, inside the forest, everything changed. I don’t mean the oak trees, or the coolness of the evening, the rich earthy smells or the very strong sense of being in this place. I don’t quite know how to say this, but it was as if from the moment I had run out the back of Helicon I had been balancing on a taut wire. Now that wire had broken, and I was falling. Not literally, you understand. But figuratively I felt as if I were tailing from one reality—or rather my perception of reality—into another. A bubble had burst and I suddenly found myself beneath the skin of the universe. I was inside looking out at the surface—the bright, shiny, all-too-familiar shell—of every mundane thing we take for granted. Now everything looked different to me. And with that feeling came a ripple of recognition, like the déjà vu of a vivid dream, of the unfinished paintings I’d seen in Vav’s atelier. For just the briefest instant I glimpsed beneath their conventional Impressionist surface to what they were about. It’s nothing to do with me, Vav had said in speaking about the exhibition. I hadn’t understood her then. How could the exhibition not be about her? I had wondered in Paris. She was the artist. And yet now I was beginning to understand what she had meant. The paintings were what was important. Who had painted them was in a very real sense of no import.

  “Wait!” I called out to Gimel. “Hold on a second!”

  She whirled her horse around. “What is it?”

  I was already dismounted. “There’s something about this place … something familiar.”

  She jumped off her horse, and as it turned I saw attached to one side of the saddle an old-fashioned longbow—not one of those space-age-material composite bows hunters use nowadays—and a quiver of arrows. She came toward me with a pronounced limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Then I saw that her left leg was narrower and smaller than her right, withered like a dried stalk of wheat.

  “Perhaps you have been to this part of the Charnwood Forest before.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never been outside of London. But even if I had, that isn’t what I mean.” I was walking around the small glade. “What I’m feeling … It isn’t as simple as that.” She regarded me calmly, albeit with a certain degree of curiosity. “Do you think it’s possible to know a place—I mean know it inside and out—without ever having set foot in it?”

  “If one looks at only the physical world, no, of course not.” She strode across the glade in her peculiar lopsided gait to stand in front of me. “But the universe is so much more than that, isn’t it?” In the tone of her voice I could sense that she was asking something else entirely.

  Curious how these moments of transition came upon me. Once again, I found my consciousness cast back in time. The image of Donnatella, slightly drunk, stood before me. I had met her in Mexico, where she had come with her husband and sister for a vacation. While her unconscionable husband was romancing her sister, Donnatella and I sat in quiet, leafy Oaxacan squares and drank mescal. This had the effect of keeping the stifling heat at bay and also of arousing us to seizures of unbridled passion. Thinking now about those erotically charged moments in her hotel room or in mine I could for the first time see where it all went wrong. They were fierce, those sexual encounters, yes, but—and it hurts so much to admit this—they were also essentially joyless. It hurt because it showed me how little we really had, what small people we were together. It occurred to me that with Herman, Donnatella was a better person—and that hurt as well. To say all of this hit me with the impact of an express train was something of an understatement. Up until that moment I was absolutely certain we had loved one another, even after she and Herman ran off together. But now I knew better. Our love, like a billboard with a half-naked model, had been nothing more than wishful thinking. The sad truth is that Donnatella and I coupled for all the wrong reasons, and we married for them as well. Twelve hours after her divorce came through, wham, it was done: we were married. It was a seductive but poisonous start we made for ourselves, sitting sprawl-legged, drunk on mescal and each other, groping moist flesh beneath the plank table, under the somnolent, watchful gaze of the Mexican waiters. To this day I hear the soulful strum of a Mexican guitar and my eyes glaze over. But I suppose the truth is that all the while Donnatella was pleasuring me she was thinking of her husband and her sister, and of revenge.

  No, we never loved one another. Our personal flame wasn’t even passion so much as rage—a rage at everything around us. And this rage—this demonic passion—made us safe. For a time. And then it vanished. You couldn’t even say our relationship was over, because it had never really begun. I curiously never stopped liking her. With Lily she was a saint, going to see her almost every week when I never would. She and I had the most god-awful fights about that. She’d often say it was a mortal sin, my ignoring my sister, and who knows, perhaps she was right. Then again, being Roman Catholic, Donnatella was consumed with all the conflicting quirks and superstitions that go along with the religion. I often wondered how she rationalized two divorces. Once, when I asked her, she told me with a curious kind of contempt that her uncle knew the Pope and had managed to secure for her some form of dispensation. To this day. I have no idea whether or not that was true. Anyway, I’m not sure it matters. She was certainly kinder to my sister than she was to her own sister, but how can I fault her for that? I can’t. I won’t. She’s a unique person and in the end I’m glad we met, even if I got to know her too well and too late. But when you come to the quick of it—when you strip away everything that doesn’t matter—she was never mine, and the deepest pain comes from the years of self-delusion that she once was.

  The enormity of these revelations made me sick to my stomach. It was as if the world had turned to ash, as if memory like some terrible swift scythe had mown down a shining field of illusion. My illusion. Now all at once Donnatella, the languorous, leafy Mexican square, the sweaty f
urtive couplings, the plangent guitar music outside the cracked hotel window wavered and grew insubstantial like a djinn vanishing into his lamp.

  I was back in the Charnwood Forest in the ethereal darkness of the glade. Gimel was still close beside me. I could smell her slightly spicy scent.

  “What were you just thinking?” she asked. “I could feel your tension.”

  “I was recalling my life,” I said truthfully. “And, sadly, it occurred to me that it hasn’t been what I’d thought it was.”

  “What is?” Her eyes were shining in the dark. “Whatever we can immediately know must be of poor value, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know you.” I gripped her more tightly. “Not at all.”

  “Am I precious, then?” Her eyes danced as she smiled wickedly at me. “Is that your meaning?”

  A cool stillness seemed to banish the rest of the world to a dim and hazy daguerreotype. Did the breeze cease to stir the oak leaves; did the birds cease their evening songs, the insects their nocturnal Morse code? It seemed that way to me. In Mexico, Donnatella had once told me that when she was with me nothing else was real. “Existence, it is the tip of the flame,” she had said in the endearing way she had of reparsing the English language in her own image. “When I am in your arms I am in the flame, can you understand this?”

  With Gimel I felt I was inside the flame, as if all existence resided in the minuscule space between us. But, in the end, the outside world intruded like a clammy and inauspicious wind. In the instant that my memories had overtaken me I had missed something, perhaps something crucial.

  I was at once filled with apprehension. The smile had frozen on her face. I could see the skin on her arms had broken out into goose bumps.

  “What’s happened?” I said.

  Then I heard it, too. Something quite large was making its way through the forest. As we stood without moving a muscle, straining to interpret the sound, I could tell it was heading directly for us.