A Dark Matter (32 page)

Mallon said, This is it, guys, you have to concentrate and do your part. In the meantime, let’s find our spot.

And Donald led us right to it. You knew where it was, didn’t you? Right there, and your voice was full of triumph when you said, It’s here, right here, down this swale or dell kind of thing. You were so proud of yourself! I’m not picking on you, it’s just worth saying, that’s all. They had this little moment of vanity, of egotism, and it was all his—Mallon’s. Anyhow, Donald was right, of course, they were standing at the edge of this fold that went down into the meadow, and even in the bad light and everything, they could see that white circle Donald and his friend had painted, well, poured onto the ground on the right side, where it went up.

And you know what? It looked pretty good, that circle! Shining, actually shining! What was that, do you think, the reflection of the moon? Reflections of the stars? Whatever the hell that was, it worked, it made them feel like they were in the presence of something, like they were
ordained
, and right where they were supposed to be.
Come down, come on in
, that gleaming white circle was saying,
let’s get started
. Up until then, Meredith had not even noticed that Mallon was carrying this big briefcase with him. Up until then, she hadn’t even known he
owned
a briefcase.

   “He didn’t,” Don said. “Later on, he told me he ‘borrowed’ it from that kid with the red beard. ‘Everything is everything,’ remember?”

“As if I could forget,” she said.

   That group feeling, the interconnected thing, got stronger, and it was really magical, the way things felt there for about fifteen minutes or so before everybody started freaking out.

We’re on the verge of something here, Mallon said. I can sense it. Nobody say any more about that because we might jinx it.

Just before they went down into the fold in the earth, everything, everything around them, especially the moon and the millions of stars, looked absolutely gorgeous. Even the headlights of the cars moving down the highway off in the distance, like jewels but alive! Meredith hardly wanted to move along with the others, but Brett and Keith were giving her that hungry, besotted look again, the one that suggested they were hoping a runaway horse would come galloping along so they could wrestle it to the ground before it disturbed a honey-colored strand of her hair. Eel and the high-school boys, they had eyes for no one but Mallon, and Hootie, he caught Meredith’s eye once and went back to studying the Eel like before long he was going to be tested about her.

They went down in there and stood around Mallon while he got down on his knees, opened the briefcase, and passed out the candles and the matches. Then they did the thing with the ropes, looping them in front of the circle in case something happened along and they weren’t able to just jump onto its neck.

You know how you can suddenly feel that things just got kicked up a notch? That’s how it was after the ropes went down. Like the air got tighter, and the moon and stars got brighter. Like the spaces between all of them standing there shrank. Meredith’s breathing got tighter, too, as if her lungs were being squeezed.

One after another, they lit the candles and held them up. You know how they were standing, don’t you? Mallon at the center, facing the white circle. Boats and Donald stood on each side, maybe six feet from him—closer than before. To the left of Boats, Hootie, Eel, and Meredith stood together, with Hootie in the middle. Eel and Meredith didn’t want to stand side by side—when you get right down to it, they didn’t like or trust each other at all. They wound up in the same group because they didn’t want to get close to Hayward. He and his roommate were off to Donald’s right. The two of them looked more relaxed than the others.

Boats, he broke Meredith’s heart, the way he wanted so much to be Mallon’s favorite, the one to be with him when the tide rose. He would have stolen the dome from the state capitol if he thought Mallon would have applauded. Hayward, though, that boy was thinking about something else. He kept sneaking glances at Meredith.

When Mallon called for silence, even Hayward settled down. Raise your candles in your right hands, Mallon said. Concentrate on your breathing. Keep your mind empty. We will spend a lot of time emptying our minds and watching our white circle. Then I will begin to speak the words that will come into my mind. They will be in Latin, and I think, I pray they will be the right words. Those words, and what we bring, all of what all of us, bring to the meadow, this moment, will determine what happens here.

Off to his side, Hootie mumbled, They’re here again. I don’t like ’em, I don’t want ’em here.

Mallon said, Nothing is with us yet, Hootie, please hold your silence.

That crazy little Hootie, he said,
Must I sink down there, and die at once?
If memory serves.

Silence, Mallon said.

Little Hawthorne, said Hayward.

Shut up, Mallon said. Please.

You may close your eyes, Mallon said.

Meredith did as he said. The silence went on a long, long time. Funny thing, after a minute or two, inside her head Meredith could
see
them all with total clarity. But the way she saw them, they were all, all, close together, and she could hear their breathing, and there was this rank, terrible smell that was Keith Hayward’s skunky breath. In her head, she could see Hootie clamping shut his beautiful little rosebud mouth and forcing himself to stare at the gleaming circle; and she saw the Eel open wide her eyes and open wide her mouth and tilt her head back and bend her spine so that she was gazing not at the white circle but the blazing stars above, the Eel
watching
, and Meredith thought,
What’s that brat watching, and why can’t I watch it, too?;
and inside her head, where her vision was true, she saw the Eel gradually straighten up and stare forward, not at the white circle but about nine, ten feet to the right of it, at some nondescript part of the rise that was half dirt, half grass all baked and brown, and even that getting harder to see as the light faded and dimmed; and Hayward, breathing fumes as he stood with his candle jumping and his eyes gently shut upon some spectacle that made his mouth flicker into a smile; beside him Milstrap, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes as if contemplating some curious phenomenon that had just appeared before him; and Mallon, precious, treacherous, Mallon with his candle aloft and tears rising in his amazing eyes, his total handsomeness like a charged field around him, lifting his beautiful magician’s head and preparing to speak or sing.

The world changed in that endless moment before Spencer Mallon began to chant in Latin, that time during which the glowing words embedded in the unreeling chant hovered near as pure possibility, spoken though as yet unspoken, present nonetheless. In the suspended silence, Meredith could feel the change in every element of the world present to her: the simultaneous tightening and relaxation of the air, now revealed for the first time as an actual membrane wrapped about them all, here loose and yielding, there firm and ungiving. In the long, long moment when Mallon hung fire and waited for his deepest self to give him words, Meredith felt the ground quiver under her feet, then immediately began to smell the fragrance trails of something raw, hot, sweet, and sexual. Crushed mandarin oranges, cane sugar, sliced habañero peppers sizzling in a pan, the flesh inside the juicy lower lip of Bobby Flynn, her first serious boyfriend, new blood spurting from a wound, sweat, thick white lilies, semen, a freshly sliced fig, all these odors and fragrances and stinks coiled around each other, rubbed flanks and floated toward them from the expansive, greedy world Meredith sensed behind the membrane of the air itself, a world she wished both to flee and to embrace.

In that long moment, Meredith still saw them all: the high-school kids beside her radiant now with terror (no, that was just Hootie, whose fear she could smell, separate from the sexy hot pepper/lily/Bobby-Flynn’s-lower-lip odor building up behind the bulging membrane that wrapped them round), Hootie charged with terror and little Eel for some reason radiant with, well,
radiance
, a phenomenon Meredith Bright found striking, more than that, more than striking, yes, amazing, with her eyes wide open, her soul visible to any who cared to look, a tomboy on fire, which, more than striking as it was, Meredith chose to behold no longer just at the moment it began to change and darken; poor Boats staring at the circle as though his life would pour through it, also as though he suspected he would one day have to steal that, too; then Mallon with the words beginning to spill into his throat from his mysterious inner source, eyes clamped shut, candle aloft like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, Mallon higher than a kite, higher than a
cloud
, so excited the guy had a hard-on, every vessel and nerve in his body quivering with anticipation, alive with the sense that everything was about to change
now, now
the moment before the moment, the most beautiful, the last drop and essence of
what had been
, of everything that was to be lost—

Then you, Donald, with her eyes closed Meredith saw you, so handsome, attending to Mallon the way the Secret Service attends to the president, with your secret hopes sizzling in your heart and those talents you didn’t know you had just beginning to come into bud, poor thing, and a few feet beyond, the frat boys over there, so unappealing—how in the world had Meredith for as much as a second found Keith Hayward appealing?—looking trapped, looking uncertain, no conviction in the way they held their candles aloft, Hayward cutting his eyes toward Meredith, his dull animal lust so ugly when stacked against the weird strange sexy sweet power beginning to barrel toward them from some distant point beyond the coiling membrane of the air, the distant point which had just now snagged doomed Brett Milstrap’s attention and curiosity, and which he was now really doing his best, his damnedest, to make out and peer into, his neck bent, his head tilted, and a little sweat leaking out of the dark sharp point of his widow’s peak …

Only then had Meredith fully taken in the oddness of being able to see in such detail with her eyes clamped shut.

So, at the exact moment that Mallon’s words began to pour from his throat, at the very moment she heard his beautiful voice and realized that he was
singing
, and what’s more singing
in Latin
, she opened her eyes and beheld what was taking place in that meadow.

It wasn’t anything like one thing, that was what first struck her. Little dramas, each of them in equal parts deeply disturbing and completely fascinating, were taking place all over that low rise in front of them. The circle could hardly be seen, and the ropes, Meredith saw, would be useless. You couldn’t tie down these visions, you couldn’t
bind
them. They weren’t solid, not really, and they were more like scenes than mere beings or creatures. The only one she could see clearly, however, was the one playing itself out before the Eel, Hootie, and her. In front of their little group, an old man with a long beard and an old woman leaning on a cane (but it wasn’t a cane, whispered a cool voice in her mind, that length of wood was called a
staffe)
stood on dead-white soil before a great juniper tree. An enormous pig and a small, scaly dragon with drooping wings lolled on the white earth beside them, staring with hooded, suspicious eyes at Mallon, as if awaiting instruction. As soon as the old couple saw that they were being observed, their heads revolved to reveal at the backs of their heads second faces with long, beaky, inquisitive noses and shimmering eyes.

   “Wait,” Don said, his voice a velvet bruise. “You actually saw all this shit? What about the dogs, you know, the dog-things?”

“Can’t you be patient enough to hear what I have to say? Anyhow, the dogs weren’t important, no matter whatever Mallon deigned to share with you.”

“Of course they were
important,”
Olson said, a little too loudly.

   Could she continue? A little bit along the rise, and in front of Boats, it looked like a big, red-faced man in bloody rags was waving a sword, but Meredith couldn’t see him very well. Some kind of animal was rearing behind him. Maybe a deer, too, with antlers. These things, they were like on the other side of a plate-glass window, all of these scenes were like that, separated from them by big windows, so the students couldn’t hear them. Each scene had its own weather. Lightning kept flashing behind the big guy with the sword, but Meredith’s people, that horrible old couple, they came from a completely white world disturbed by a strong wind that twisted the man’s beard and tore at their hair.

In front of Mallon she glimpsed a naked woman, isn’t that a surprise, but only for the moment it took her to see that the naked woman was a greeny whitish color. He had an animal, too, something weird, she couldn’t tell what. A dove was lurching through the air all around the white-green woman, that woman the color of a corpse …

Do you know, when she thinks about this now, it’s like they were in a museum? These scenes were like dioramas in front of them, only the dioramas were alive, and the things in them moved. All she could see, way off to the side where Don and the frat boys were stationed, was this crazy world like a wild party. A king was riding on a bear, waving his arms and thrashing every which way, and a queen, an angry queen, was shouting and pointing here and there with a long stick—the Bear King and the Roaring Queen, Meredith called them. They had a big dog, like a hound of some kind, and all of them were made of shiny silver, or something like that, and none of them had faces, just these smooth shiny liquid surfaces. In back of them all sorts of other figures were cavorting away, and you knew it was really noisy in that world—