Burnt Mountain (31 page)

The two men left and the stage lights dimmed until it was totally dark. There was no light at all except the cold, pouring
light of the full moon and the faint, glowing bubble that was Atlanta. There was no sound except for the monotonous non-noise
of faraway traffic and a muffled kind of thumping that sounded as if it was coming from behind the stage. There was hardly
any whispering in the crowd. We simply sat in the dark and waited for Aengus.

One spot came on over the lectern. A dense ray of light in which dust motes danced. It looked solid enough so that one might
climb it. No one stood in it. And then, from offstage far right, a great drum began to beat. Long beats, thundering, echoing.
Very slow beats. To me, up in mid-audience, they sounded muffled and unreal, but they filled the amphitheater and the woods
and sky around it. A march, I thought, my neck hair prickling.

A death march.

Oh, Aengus, no. No,
please.

As though it had manifested itself out of the sound, a figure came onto the stage, slowly, walking in time to the drumbeat.
It was tall and oddly luminous, a very faint presence walking through darkness on the echoing vibrato of a drum.

He stepped into the light and there was a great exhalation from the crowd. It was not wonder and perhaps not quite shock;
it was something older: a tribe catching sight for the first time of a being that might or might not be one of its gods. All
I could think was that it was a waiting sound. I could hardly hear it over the slow throat hammering of my heart.

He wore nothing but a sort of one-shouldered singlet that looked as if it might be made from the hide of some pale animal.
Where on earth would Aengus get such a thing? It came to the tops of his knees, and the shoulder that it left bare was gilded
with some sort of thin wash… ink? Paint? His legs were gilded, too, and he wore short, soft boots that folded over, of the
same skin. Around his neck was, what I knew now, a gold Celtic torque; this one did not look to be my necklace. His hair was
pale and stood up in thick spikes, and he had a pale gold mustache. Aengus? Who was this gilt man? He was a wild thing, a
wild man; he had no ken with my world or this place or even this or any other century that might easily be recalled. If I
could have articulated it, I think I would have said that my husband gave off such a huge and potent spoor of pure otherness
that there was nothing to do but regard him with silence and fright. He must have known this. How could he not? What would
he have us do, this audience of his friends and fellow Atlantans and travelers from so many countries of the modern world?
Aengus on this night called to no other world that could have been named. We all felt it. I know that as surely as I have
ever known anything.

The last coherent thought I had was, Not even Carol could laugh at this.

Aengus’s Irish brogue was never stronger: “Here,” he almost sang, “at the foot of Ben Bulben lies the Stone Age cemetery of
Carrowmore. Here the ancient Celtic hero Oisin met Saint Patrick, to lament the loss of lusty pagan Ireland, and here, under
a great cairn, lay Maeve, the Celtic warrior
queen of Connaught. And here, on these heights whipped bare by wild Sidhe, the wind off the ocean, also dwelt Niamh, the pale
nymph who rode away with Oisin to Tir Na Nog, the Land of Forever Young, beyond the sea.”

He paused for a moment; the great drum continued. Then he threw back his head and closed his eyes, lifted his arms to the
sky, and chanted in a queer, trilling, flutelike voice:

As he chanted, the drum quickened, and from the wings, one by one, four crude chariots with round wooden wheels came, drawn
by what I supposed to be the camp’s ponies,
hung with tinkling trinkets and tossing their heads, on which appeared to be crows’ feathers fastened in their forelocks.
In the small painted wooden chariots, two boys stood back to back. They were all gilded and torqued like Aengus, and as the
front one handled the reins the one behind raised a great shield painted with golden runes and shook a long lance. By the
time Aengus had finished his chant and dropped his head, all four chariots had stopped in a line onstage and the boys stepped
out to face the audience. They, too, wore tunics, and torques, but unlike Aengus, they were barefoot. They stood in a perfect
line before their chariots while the bored ponies stamped and flicked their tails, looking off into the distance above the
audience. The drum stopped. No one spoke. I did not hear a single person in the audience even draw a breath. No one moved.

Then the drum gave one last tremendous, echoing boom and the boys all drew from their chariots and held up to the audience
four dripping, severed heads.

Even in the last row, you could have told they were papier-mache. No human had ever walked the earth wearing heads like these.
Nevertheless, they were… horrendous. The boys held them by long strands of blood-gummed black hair. Empty, hollow eyes stared.
Open mouths screamed silently; half-severed tongues lolled out of them. Blood or ketchup or whatever—it did not matter—spattered
the floor of the stage and pooled there. Still the boys and Aengus did not move or speak. My eyes registered that the two
boys in the last chariot were Chris and Ben Partridge, even though my mind did not until the next day.

High up above me a woman took a deep, rattling breath and screamed, a long, terrible scream. Several others followed. A great
general noise like a gust of wind started up in the crowd.

I jumped up out of my seat, nearly tripping over several people, and ran as hard as I could to my car out in the parking lot.
There under the cold, clean, high-riding moon I vomited until I almost fell to my knees. I heard no more sound from the audience
far behind me. When I stopped the car in our driveway all I could hear was the monotonous, heat-thickened sound of the cicadas
and my own breath, sobbing in my chest.

I
let myself into the house with fingers that shook so badly that I dropped my keys twice. I did not turn on any lights. I
stopped in the kitchen, trying to think where to go. My mind took a frantic, scrambling tour of the house, but I could think
of no place in it as sanctuary, no place that was mine alone, nowhere that I could not see Aengus also. Aengus with his false
yellow hair and lilting, inhuman voice, Aengus and his warrior children with the dripping heads…

I walked through the dark kitchen, my heels clicking on the beautiful river stone floor, and up the stairs and into our bedroom
on the third floor, with the silver-blooming stars and the cold moon pouring their radiance down through the skylight onto
the wide bed. Its pale bronze comforter was rumpled; I remembered I had sat there to pull on my unaccustomed heels. I stepped
out of the shoes, slumped down onto the bed, and drew myself into a tight ball. This way,
I thought, nothing could pierce me through my heart or stomach.

I thought that I would cry, sob, wail aloud, scream out my grief and sheer disbelief, but I did not. I lay still and contorted,
my face pressed into a pillow. I could only manage small, quick breaths, and I could not move except to shake my head very
slightly back and forth, my lips rubbing the silky fabric, whispering, “No… no… no… no….”

The phone rang and I let it ring itself out. When it rang again I reached over and took it out of its cradle. Its insistent
buzzing intermingled with the night-drowned throbbing of the cicadas outside the open windows, and after a while both faded
into a kind of rhythmic, primal undersound, like the beating of a heart in a body deep in coma. The sound of life. The only
sound of life.

I didn’t fall asleep, but gradually my clenched-shut mind opened just enough to let the memory of the night seep behind my
eyes. I found that I could not banish the images. I thought that I would have them forever, perpetually bobbing over and above
anything else that came into my mind.

I will have to die, I thought, because I cannot tolerate that. That cannot be what I see when I think, Aengus. Of course I
would think of Aengus; I would see Aengus every day; how could I not think of him? I would see him tomorrow night or the next;
we would go about our lives; we would go to the beach, he had said we would do that…. We simply had to get past this night
first, and then we could go back to being us, Thayer and Aengus….

The tears came then, wild torrents of them. I knew that
I did not think we could get past this night. Not and still be us. I did not know who I would be when I got up off this bed
again, and I had no idea on the living earth who Aengus would be. Had I ever known?

“I want my mother!” I cried aloud, in the sort of extremis of grief of a devastated child. It is an old cry, as old as the
world, a cry of utter loss, of howling helplessness: “I want my mother!…”

I knew that I did not want my mother, that my mother was the indirect architect of this anguish. I even knew that under any
other circumstances I might have laughed at the sheer incongruity of it. But now it was not funny, only terrible, a cry for
surcease where there was none.

I curled back into my ball. Over my ragged sobbing I heard Carol’s voice, as clear as if she stood there: For God’s sake,
Thayer, it was only a skit. It was only one of Aengus’s damned Celtic myths. Granted, it was pretty ugly to see, but…

Is that all it was? Can it be that that’s all people thought it was? I begged her silently, desperately.

No, Carol said, her voice darkening. That’s not all it was. It was… beyond human. It was an obscenity.

I began to cry again. A lassitude deeper than any fatigue I had ever felt weighted my body. I wanted to get up, to run out
of the house, to run, run like the wind, down the street and to the river, to the cold, swift-running river under the bridge.
I wanted to plunge in and be cleansed…. But I could scarcely move. I could only cry.

A weight sank down on the bed beside me and two arms
came around me, lifting me up, pulling me in. I tried to tear myself away; how could he even think of touching me after what
he had shown me?

“Thayer,” Nick Abrams’s voice said into my hair. “Thayer. Come here, baby. Come here to me.”

I began to cry, sobs torn from deep in my belly, a weeping like vomiting. It was past midnight when I finally lifted my face
from his shoulder. The salt weight behind my eyes began to lessen. I knew the time because, somewhere in the storm of my grief,
I had heard the midnight whistle at the paper mill far downriver. It was faint, but you could hear it on still summer nights
like this, with only the cicadas for competition.

The last time I heard it I had been lying in other arms. Except for inarticulate murmurings of comfort, Nick had not spoken
to me again. Now he brushed my wild, damp hair back from my wet face and said, “Is he coming here tonight?”

“No,” I said thickly. “He’ll be at the camp tonight and probably tomorrow night, too. We… we were going to drive down to the
beach on Saturday….”

“Not on my watch, you’re not,” he said, drawing me back into his arms and resting the side of his face against mine. He kissed
me softly on my forehead and cheek and rocked me gently, as you would rock a child.

“We need to talk about this, Thay,” he said into my wet hair. “I don’t want you to be around him right now. I’m not really
sure he’s sane. I’m not quite sure what to do about it, but if you’ll let me I want to—”

“Nick, no,” I said feebly. “He’s not… That simply wasn’t him. I don’t know what’s happened to him. That business tonight wasn’t
the Aengus I married. It was… I don’t know… his interpretation of one of his Celtic things. He’s always said the boys love
them; I think he just… lost sight of where he was and who he was performing for—”

“I think he’s nuttier than a fruitcake and bloodthirsty as a tick. You left; I saw you go… you don’t know what went on afterwards.
The crowd just went crazy. Women were crying, and you could hear the booing to Peachtree Road, and Big Jim and the mayor both
stood up and tried to smooth it over, and then your sainted Aengus came running out on the stage and let out this… I don’t
know, war cry or something… and shook his javelin at the crowd, and drew that dirk thing out of its sheath and you could hear
the boys crying offstage, and one of the ponies got loose and took off up the hill toward the highway, and that chanting of
his got higher and higher…. Security came and led him offstage, but by that time the audience was pouring out of the exits….
They didn’t take him to jail, I heard later, but there are some pretty pissed parents around here, I can tell you. I thought
you’d be here, and I didn’t want him coming home to you, so I… well, anyway, I let myself in. Your back door wasn’t locked.”