Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

by Amanda Downum

  HE WASN’T ALONE in the abyss. Voices whispered to Blake as he sank. Alien voices, rising in song. Words he couldn’t understand, though he thought he might soon. They didn’t sing to him, but to something else that shared the darkness with him. Something waiting at the bottom of the bottomless deep.

  Other voices were familiar, the ghosts of memory. Rainer’s voice, Alain’s, distorted echoes of himself.

  I don’t like the storm.

  Do you still want this?

  The cruelest word in the world was want. But he had said yes. He’d nearly trained himself out of it, once, beaten it down with every betrayal, every loss. But first Liz and then Alain had won their way through his defenses, and he’d relaxed. Weakened.

  He thought he heard Liz amid the echoes, calling his name. He’d meant to call her, hadn’t he? Before... Before what?

  His closest friend for years. The only person before Alain to make him feel safe, even when he’d known better. Life wasn’t safe, and no matter how you warded against it, it always won. You always let it win.

  He heard her voice again, louder. Not a memory. The sound of his name penetrated his drowning lassitude. A hand closed on his, an electric shock after so much emptiness. He pried his eyes open, remembering Alain with him as the water closed over his head. But it was Liz’s pale face hanging beside him now. She opened her mouth, but the abyss swallowed the sound.

  Then she was gone, and a different darkness enfolded him, warm and velvet-soft.

  Not yet.

  Liz! But he had no air to speak. Already the sensation of touch faded, leaving him numb once more.

  She’s searching for you. Trying to save you. Amusement veined the voice. But first you have to save yourself.

  How? Where was he, that Liz was trying to rescue him? Where was Alain? He sank faster, down through the endless dark. Toward the heart of the abyss and the vast thing that brooded there.

  Hold on, the voice whispered, already fading. It will be worse than this before the end, but you won’t be alone.

  The darkness wrapped Blake in its coils and pulled him down.

  It swallowed him whole.

  7

  Masks

  FRIDAY EVENING LIZ stood in front of the mirror, watching the self she recognized slowly disappear. She felt like a child playing in grownup clothes as she zipped herself into her new dress.

  The reinforced bodice closed over her ribs and chest like armor, compressing her into a sleek crimson hourglass. Silky lining was cold against her skin. The color was more daring than anything she would have chosen on her own, but it brought out the green in her eyes and made the upswept twist of her hair even paler. Above the strapless neckline, her collarbones flared with unfamiliar elegance. Whatever secrets Antja might be keeping, the woman knew how to shop.

  Liz had winced at the price tag, but her credit cards were already bleeding for this trip, so what were a few more drops? Aunt Evie would send a Christmas check soon, anyway, one of the biannual guilt offerings that translated to, I’m sorry I didn’t have time for you. Her aunt was convinced that her poor parenting had doomed Liz to a life of dusty academic spinsterhood.

  Her mother’s voice whispered to her as she leaned toward the mirror; Liz could almost see her in the glass, brushing out her long red hair. “Remember your Chomsky, Elizabeth. Simple and elegant—it works for more than just language.”

  Liz swallowed against the tightness in her throat and began to put on her makeup, hiding the bags under her eyes with cream and powder. A stranger’s face regarded her when she was finished. No more pale rabbit girl—the reflected Liz was bright and bold and collected, all the cracks hidden beneath a glossy finish. This Liz wasn’t crazy with nightmares and helpless worry. This Liz wasn’t afraid.

  Alex waited for her in the other room. He was half a stranger, too, his usual jeans and dusty peacoat replaced by crisp black and white, his hair pulled back to show off the angles of his face. He watched her as she collected her purse, eyes hidden behind the white reflection on his glasses.

  “Is my lipstick smeared?” she asked.

  “No.” He unfolded himself from the couch and handed over her coat. His dry, spicy cologne tickled her nose. “You look lovely.” Now she could see his eyes, and he was just Alex again. The boy who’d traveled across the continent with her, who recited Beowulf to help her sleep. Her cheeks warmed beneath their weight of powder.

  “Thank you,” she said, trying to fit everything she meant into two syllables. She could read half a dozen languages, trace words back hundreds of years, but so many things were still impossible to express. She stretched to kiss him, and prayed it was enough.

  A CROWD MILLED in front of the gallery, cigarette embers winking like orange fireflies. Liz and Alex gave their names and coats to the girl at the door and followed the trickle of guests up the curving iron-railed staircase. Liz felt conspicuous as a bloodstain as her heels clacked on the polished tiles, poppy-red against the stark white walls. But the girl whose face she wore wouldn’t mind, she reminded herself, and kept her chin up.

  She looked for Rainer or Antja as they reached the landing, but saw only strangers. The flow of the crowd carried her and Alex through an arch into a long narrow room lined with paintings. Guests drifted from picture to picture like flocks of dark-plumed birds; the room hummed with their chatter. The air was thick with perfume and champagne.

  “Shall we mingle?” Alex asked, sounding none too enthused with the idea.

  “Unless you brought the magnifying glass and fingerprint kit with you.”

  He made a show of patting his pockets. “Damn. It’s in my other coat.” One-handed, he scooped two glasses of champagne from a table and passed one to Liz.

  Jokes felt brittle on her tongue. The lights were too bright, the room too full of strangers. Even too far away to see the paintings, the colors unsettled her—angry reds, bruised shades of green and yellow and purple, black and dull greys.

  The first scene she stopped to study did nothing to ease her misgivings. Maenads danced in the foreground, eyes glazed and wild with fervor. Blood smeared their hands and mouths, bright as pomegranate juice on pale skin. Behind their writhing limbs, a man’s body lay torn on the ground. In the background, at the edge of a shadowed wood, a yellow-robed, ivy-crowned man watched the carnage with dispassionate dark eyes.

  Not so dispassionate, she decided. A smile played on the edges of his mouth, lush and cruel. Liz could nearly smell the blood. She took a hasty sip of champagne to clear her head.

  “Look,” Alex said, moving on. “Here’s one of Blake’s.”

  The painting was a sickly monochrome, not quite sepia. It showed a homeless man leaning in the mouth of an alley, a wine bottle in one hand, the other raised—in invitation or warning she couldn’t decide. His eyes were empty sockets, and the veins in his cheeks snaked black as tar beneath his skin. The King of Rags.

  The old man was Yves. The stars will burn your eyes out. Only the glass in her hand kept Liz from hugging herself.

  “Not my favorite of his,” Antja said as she stopped beside them, “but it’s still lovely. In a morbid sort of way.” She shrugged and silver pins flashed amid the dark coils of her hair. Her dress was bronze, liquid and metallic, and amethysts sparkled at her ears and throat.

  “That’s one word for it,” Alex said.

  Painted lips curled. “Lovely, or morbid?”

  “Take your pick.”

  Rainer appeared behind her, and Antja stepped aside to make room. She was the taller in her heels.

  “Good evening,” he said. “I’m glad you could come.” The cut of his jacket flattered his shoulders. The purple shirt beneath it matched Antja’s amethysts and picked up answering slivers of violet in his eyes. He shook Alex’s hand, and reached for Liz’s.

  And froze as he took it. His pleasant grip tightened and he raised her hand as if he meant to kiss it. Instead he met her eyes, and Blake’s ring gleamed between them.

  Stupid. Stupid, care
less girl.

  He squeezed her fingers and let go. The ring felt three times as heavy as her hand fell to her side. It was all she could do to keep her head up, her mask in place.

  “Blake has a ring just like that,” Rainer said, his voice deceptively light.

  Alex stiffened beside her. Her pulse throbbed in her throat and butterflies hatched in her stomach. She thought of lies, some of them even plausible, but discarded them—she didn’t need lies when she had her mask.

  “This is Blake’s.”

  Rainer’s eyes narrowed. “He was wearing it—” He stopped on the brink of admission.

  “I found it by the lake.”

  Rainer’s shoulders tensed. Liz caught Antja’s blink out of the corner of her eye. “By the lake?”

  “Carroll Cove. It was tangled near the shore. He must have lost it when...”

  “What else did you find out there?” The full electric force of his stare settled on her, and Liz felt like a very small animal indeed.

  “A lot of empty houses,” Alex said before she could think of a reply. He tossed back the last of his champagne. “What were Blake and Alain doing there, anyway? We thought it was private property.” Liz wanted to kiss him, to reach out and squeeze his hand. She cupped her glass more firmly instead, letting it warm to her skin.

  Rainer hesitated. “They were staying at my cabin. They wanted a weekend away.”

  Liz bit her tongue. Part of the truth, at least. As much as she’d offered. “What happened?”

  Rainer shook his head. “I don’t know. I lent them the key, and the next thing I heard was the call from the hospital.”

  “The doctor said something about drugs,” Alex said, all innocence. “A hallucinogen?”

  “Oh.” Rainer’s narrow lips thinned further. “That doesn’t surprise me, I suppose. Mania, it’s called.”

  Antja laid a hand on Alex’s arm and inclined her head toward the far end of the room. “You should see the rest of the exhibit. The best pieces are further in.” Alex’s eyebrows twitched, but he accepted the change of subject.

  “Antja is right,” Rainer said. “Let’s enjoy the show. It seems the least we can do, under the circumstances.”

  PARTITIONS SECTIONED THE gallery into a labyrinth of twisting rooms and corridors. Antja and Alex wandered ahead, and after a few turns Liz had lost sight of Alex’s head above the crowd. A few more and she wished she’d brought breadcrumbs.

  “Where’s Ariadne when you need her?” she muttered. Rainer chuckled. “Abandoned on Naxos.”

  Liz shot him a startled smile; it was a rare occasion when strangers got her jokes. “I’m sure she would have reminded Theseus to change his sails. Assuming, of course, that his forgetting wasn’t contrived to get rid of Aegeus.”

  He laughed again. “Assuming that, yes. But Ariadne met Dionysus on Naxos. I think she traded up. Blake said you were a student. Are you a classicist?”

  “Technically my Masters is in Comparative Linguistics.” She pulled out the self-deprecating little smile she used whenever she talked about her degree.

  “What will you do with that?”

  “I don’t really know,” she admitted. “Find a Ph.D. Program, I suppose. But grading freshman essays has cured me of any desire to teach, and there isn’t much call for mercenary translation these days. Sometimes I wish I’d become an adventurer like my parents.” She was talking too much, but it seemed to go with the face she wore. Rainer had the knack of looking interested and encouraging.

  “What do they do?”

  “My father was an archeologist, and my mother was a linguistic anthropologist. They did a lot of fieldwork—Indonesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka. I spent most of my childhood following them around.”

  His eyebrows rose. “More interesting than most. Have they retired?”

  “They died when I was eleven.”

  “Oh.” The chatter around them filled up the pause. “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged, a rote response by now. “It was a long time ago.” She paused to study the nearest painting, wishing for the glass of champagne she’d abandoned several rooms ago.

  A man lay on a sandy seabed, dappled with filtered blue-green light. Dark hair floated in a weed-tangled cloud. One half of his face was handsome and proud, the other eaten to the bone. A pearl gleamed in the empty eye socket. Spidery crab legs left indentations in his flesh as they crawled over his cheek. Razored barnacles crusted one hand.

  “‘Full fathom five thy father lies’,” Liz whispered. “‘Of his bones are coral made—’”

  Rainer took up the verse. “‘These are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing about him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change—’”

  Into something rich and strange.

  Was that what was happening to Blake, as he sank into the abyss?

  Liz took an unsteady step backward and nearly collided with a passing couple.

  “Are you all right?” Rainer asked.

  “I’m fine.” She drew a deep breath, blinking against a sudden disorientation. The painting was only a painting—it wasn’t Blake’s face there. “I just… I’ll be right back.” She turned away before he could answer, heels beating a nervous tattoo on the tiles.

  In the ladies’ room she ran cold water over her wrists, trying to shed some of the heat suffusing her skin. A pair of sleek-gowned women stood by the floor-length mirror behind her, adjusting curls and lipstick and necklines. The sibilance of their voices and the liquid shimmer of the lights made Liz’s head swim.

  She met her reflection’s eyes. The mask was slipping, fear leaking around her eyes. She had to keep it together—scared little mice wouldn’t make it through this maze.

  As she watched the glass, one of the women tilted her head and dripped clear fluid into her eyes. Her companion caught Liz staring and turned.

  “Want some?” she asked, holding up a tiny glass vial. The woman smiled, white and sharp. Beneath a veneer of makeup, her face was sallow and hollow-cheeked, her eyes black and bright as glass. Like the maenads in the painting. Liz’s pulse sped. “Wait,” the woman said, leaning closer. “I’ve seen you—”

  The door opened before she could finish and Antja stepped in. She frowned when she saw the women. At her glare, vials and droppers vanished back into purses and the pair fled.

  “Are you enjoying the show?” Antja asked. Her smile was thin and tight, and strain showed in the set of her shoulders. She was fighting to keep her own bright face intact.

  Liz nodded, swallowing against the desert in her throat. She ought to say something polite; she ought to ask about the mania. She couldn’t find the words for either. Her courage broke and she retreated with a mumbled excuse.

  Rainer was waiting for her by the drowned sailor, and she didn’t see Alex or Antja again as they spiraled further into the labyrinth.

  They passed through a narrow room that was a sculpture of its own. White plaster arches lined the space, joined by sharp-edged vertebrae overhead. A leviathan’s ribcage. Crabs and starfish clung to the ribs, and smaller paintings were carefully hung between them. Light fell between the bones in bright stripes. The effect was striking, but Liz had no desire to linger in the belly of the beast. She quickened her pace until Rainer had to hurry to keep up with her.

  Her breath slowed when she turned a corner into the safe planes and angles of another room, and she surreptitiously dried her palms on her purse. She’d never spent much time worrying about being swallowed alive before, but after the last few nights’ dreams it seemed all too possible. If Rainer noticed her nerves, he was tactful enough not to show it.

  She searched for something clever to say, something funny and light, but found nothing. Then they turned another corner and she saw the painting waiting in the heart of the labyrinth, and forgot everything else.

  At first it was simple: a picture of a door. Anticlimactic after the rest of the exhibit. But the longer she looked, the more it grew. The door and its wall were stone, or ivory, or b
one. Rough-hewn in places, in others polished and carved in elaborate reliefs: vines dripping fruit, cavorting figures; faces transfigured in passion or horror. The more she studied it the more she found, some of it changing when she tilted her head, details emerging from and vanishing into brushstrokes with every glance. Which were real and which pareidolia she couldn’t say.

  But more unsettling than the changing stone was the space beyond. The door stood ajar—swinging open, not closed; of that she was certain. The view through the handspan gap was dim, out of focus, blurred by clouds or distance. Liz saw a suggestion of towers through the haze, ivory spires against a plum-black sky. Inky waves broke on the shore beneath them. Winged shapes circled in the clouds.

  Liz’s vision greyed and the room dipped and swayed around her. Static filled her ears as a sour metal taste washed over her tongue. She took a step back and regretted it as her narrow heels wobbled. Her right hand was numb to the wrist.

  She was about to faint—the idea left her strangely calm, even as her knees buckled. She waited for the impact of the floor.

  It never came. When the fog rolled away she found herself pressed against Rainer, his arm tight around her waist, her hands knotted in his jacket. Her face had gone cold with shock; embarrassment seared it now.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, cutting off his worried questions. She unclenched her hands, putting a few vital inches between them, but he didn’t let her go.

  “What happened?” he asked. Their faces were unnervingly close, thanks to her heels.

  She swallowed, scrambling for an excuse. Dizziness. Too much champagne. But when she opened her mouth, what came out was, “What is that place?” She felt curious stares as other people drifted into the room, but couldn’t pull away.

  His electric eyes narrowed, calculating. “Carcosa.”

  She stiffened. Rainer’s arm slipped off her waist, but his gaze held her all the same. The cold had spread from her hand through the rest of her limbs. “Blake is there.” She’d meant it as a question, but certainty filled her when she said his name.