The Glittering World (11 page)

He stood there for some time before he yanked his hand free, and in doing so toppled an open bag of flour from the counter. The powder rushed down his legs like an avalanche, hit the floor, and rose up again in a mushroom cloud of white fallout. The smell of seared flesh threaded the air, a taste in his mouth both earthen and sanguinary, as if he’d bitten his tongue. But all he could do was stare at his hand, at the burned, mutilated marrow and the shocking raw pink of his fingers as the skin there stirred, and swelled, and changed.

A few moments later, his hand returned to its familiar state.
No blood, no scarring, no sign of being burned at all. Just the persistent smell of cooked meat, and above it that of the tomato sauce, still simmering in the pan. He’d cut and burned himself in the kitchen a thousand times over—as recently as last week—but it only now occurred to him that he bore no scars whatsoever.

He wasn’t who he thought he was, not even close; he’d been wrong the entire time.

He turned to the small window over the farm sink, his reflection transposed over the branches of the pines swaying past the property.
Who are you?
He gave himself a cold, clinical look, a scientist observing a specimen in a petri dish.
Who are you really, underneath it all?

He put a hand to his face. He moved it along his cheek, slowly, in a caress, his fingers touching upon the crooked swell of his nose. It had been broken ten years ago, when he was walking Elisa to a cab and was jumped by some dudes early one morning outside the Roxy. Most of the time, though, his nose didn’t appear broken at all.

He let his hand come to rest below his right eye socket, where he hooked his fingernails into the tender area below. He grasped a fold of skin and pulled downward, tearing into himself, a narrow runnel dug along his flesh. There was no pain this time, not as he stripped away a flap of skin from his cheekbone, the tissue below exposed to light and air. He’d been wearing this camouflage for so long he must have forgotten it was a disguise in the first place.

This isn’t me.

A brackish liquid that stank of seawater squirted from the wound and left a spray of pinkish fluid across the window and the clay sink. He listed at the smell, not because it was repellant
but because it was intoxicating, exhilarating. He steadied himself, a pulsing light flashing beneath his skin, his skull surrounded by an undulating membrane of foliage, the leafy tissue interlaced in a tangled briar the color of lichen.

He continued peeling at his face. It was like deboning a fish, or prepping a chicken, something he’d done in the kitchen on countless occasions. The surrendered parts of his disguise lay strewn all about: thick hanks of black hair stuck to the sink, mealy strips of skin run down his pant legs and along the floor in wet slug paths. But as he contemplated these castoffs, the ragged bits shimmered and began to melt, thinning to dewdrop-sized particles before vanishing from sight altogether. Where he had expected carnage, he found beauty; he was beautiful, underneath it all.

I’m not human at all.

All that was left of his old face were two unchanged eyes, two white and green-lensed orbs that stared back at him from the window like a pair of hard-boiled eggs. They were what remained of the masquerade, relics of this too-bright world. And past the twin white orbs, beyond the muscle and protein and all the rest of this pretend human squander, there was his secret self, his real self. Arms sickled like the forelegs of a mantis, his fingers birch-gray branches of transmuted flesh and bone, he tensed and released as his uncovered form rippled like a wave upon the shore. He was made of this place, of the night sky and grass and the woods on the far side of the glass. He was made of this land. And he would never forget that again.

He plucked his eyes from their sockets, and everything changed.

The air went out of the room, as if the entire world had become a vacuum. His mouth fell open and a wall went up. He
was a creature caught in a net of feeling beyond feelings, all pervasive and alive, a thousand pricking needles in search of a vein. Chest pulsating with ecstatic sound and energy, he was made of lightness, and light.

The kaleidoscopic visions, refracted images of himself and the woods and the landscape that he’d glimpsed since his first night here: he was seeing out of the eyes of the others that were like him, of him, the many eyes of his kin. Others just as he was, a tribe of himself.

In a multilayered image he saw the outside of the house, through their eyes. They waited beyond the trees, as they’d waited for years, ever since he first left them and emerged from the forest disguised as a little boy. They were the ones from the woods, from the place below the world. His people.

And how glad he was. How thankful that they’d waited with such patience, and his heart, near bursting, swelled with joy. There were no doubts, not anymore. He no longer belonged to this wasted aboveground landscape of iron and greed. His people, they would teach him how to shed the remains of his disguise once and for all, to let go of who he had once believed himself to be, Michael and Blue both. They would show him how to return to all he had forgotten: his real family. And now he would go to them.

Out and down the porch steps, a cold wind whistled over his newly exposed face. The crisp evening air was tinged with the smell of smoke, the acrid odor an affront to his new consciousness that reached him through someplace other than the blunt, barklike coating where his nostrils used to be, but no longer were. And with the recognition of the smoky scent came low whisperings, accompanied by a new spectrum of light visible in the darkness, past blue to bruised purple and darker. He pored
through every color now, all the way down beyond black. He saw, really saw, for the first time since he’d left their side.

One was there, by the edge of the property. Its branchlike arms were extended, prehensile bristles tugging back snarled leaves to peer over a hedge. And there was another, high up in the tree canopy, its hind legs curled like snakes around the slender bole of a pine. One more flat to the ground by the peony bushes, with two more beside it, erect and slimmed to the narrowest of widths. They watched him watch them watch him, all with the same honeycomb eyes.

They greeted him in his language, and he in theirs; they shared the same tongue. They shared the same mind as well: a hive mind, alive with unified intelligence.
Here with only the sound of rushing wind and buzzing bees, and insects that burrow and bite.
He was of another kind, like his not-grandmother had said. This was who he was, finally and at last. They called to him by his secret name. And so he went.

He crept toward the woods, then stopped.

The mind of the tribe drew his attention back toward the house and the whining electric glow from the bathroom window upstairs, its artificial light a glaring impurity against the moonless nighttime sky.

There was another. Like him, or rather soon to be. He wasn’t the only one they had come for.

Jason, hunched over the farm sink, scrubbed at an egregiously burned frying pan with a shred of steel wool. He’d tried making scrambled eggs, but the result was a brown-and-yellow hash that tasted like a salt lick, its remnants unyielding in their death grip upon the skillet. He was afraid of scratching the bottom—couldn’t damaging the coating cause minute fragments of metal to leach into the food the next time the pan was used? Better to tread lightly, delicately, make smooth, circular gestures and coax the pan clean. Maybe he’d go down the hill and use Maureen’s internet connection to find out the proper way to clean vintage cookware. Vinegar? Baking soda? Or a simple soap-and-water solution?

Jason’s hands started to shake. He placed the pan down carefully in the sink, a tinny reverberation of iron against clay. Ten days gone since they were supposed to be back in New York. But that was another lifetime ago.

Car wheels on gravel and Jason tried to keep his breath steady as he strode to the door; he refused to allow himself to imagine who might be coming up the drive. “Come on, come on,” he said, and stopped, startled to hear the words spoken aloud.

A Cape Breton Regional Police patrol car crept toward the house, and his heart drummed inside his chest. It was Detective
Jessed, one of two first responders that night. This time he was unaccompanied and in uniform, a shallow smile and a raised hand behind the windshield.

Only a smile and a wave
. Jason’s stomach churned, then settled, a dog jerked on its chain.
That means they haven’t found them.

“Good morning,” the officer said, mounting the porch steps. The air was thick with smoke from the forest fires, still visibly raging along a crooked ridge high on Kelly’s Mountain. “Do you have a few minutes?”

Jason invited him inside and offered Jessed a seat at the table while he fetched them both coffee. He wanted to give the detective a minute to survey the room—he’d straightened it up late last night—to show that he had nothing to hide. Of course he would be open, and amenable. He would be beyond reproach.

“Here we are,” Jason said, and set down two mugs, along with a small ceramic pitcher of cream and a matching bowl of sugar cubes. “I take it nothing’s turned up?”

“Unfortunately, no.” The officer removed his black leather gloves and blew across the surface of his coffee, a little whistle of air before he sipped at it, catlike, with a slight dart of the tongue. “Obviously we haven’t had the resources to recanvass on foot, but we are still searching by air.”

“So I’ve heard.” Every day the cove was buzzed by a low-flying prop plane of the
North by Northwest
variety. It wasn’t solely for their benefit, however: the authorities were also searching for a missing group of hikers and on high alert due to the fires still blazing up on the mountain. “I appreciate that.”

“Anything we can do.” Jessed uncrossed and recrossed his legs, ankle over knee. Upon his last drive-by, he had implied
that Blue and Elisa would owe the department one hell of an explanation if this turned out to be a misunderstanding. Search and Rescue was having enough trouble with the forest fires as it was.

The detective produced one of the flyers Jason and Gabe had been distributing, the word
Missing
in red boldface above enlargements of Blue’s and Elisa’s passport photos. “I see you’ve been conducting your own canvass.”

“Yes, well, we thought it might be useful.”

“You should coordinate with our office. More efficient that way.” Jessed placed the flyer facedown on the table without taking his black eyes off Jason. Though he probably had a couple of years on the detective, Jason couldn’t help but feel patronized. “I’d like to ask you again about what happened that night when you got back from the pharmacy,” Jessed said, “if that’s okay by you. Standard procedure and all that.”

“Please.” Jason smiled and considered opening his palms but decided the pose was too pious. “I completely understand.”

“Now, you said the downstairs lights were on when you pulled up. Did you see any other lights anywhere?”

Jason thought about the moment he’d cut the ignition and opened the driver’s side door, the sound of Gabe crunching gravel beneath his sneakers, the paper drugstore bag as it crinkled in the boy’s hand. They went up the porch and it was dark, but not terribly so; he pictured smoke wisping beneath the light. But that was an inserted memory: he hadn’t seen or smelled the not-so-distant forest fires until much later that night, closer to dawn.

“Just the porch light,” Jason said, though he wondered as to its importance.

“Okay. Now, you came up the front, is that right? Not
through the side and the door there, where your car’s parked now. Why is that?”

“I parked near the front of the house that night. Normally I would’ve pulled the car around, but because my wife wasn’t well I felt more of a sense of urgency.”

“But Mr. Peck had the bag with the EpiPen in it. Not you.”

“That’s right.” The pharmacist had handed over a clipboard with a signature sheet that Gabe scooped up and signed before taking the bag, which sat on the dash during the drive.
That goddamned EpiPen.
She hadn’t even wanted it.

“And you came right home, without stopping. Is that right?”

“Yes. We were worried.”

“Both of you.”

“Well, no,” he said, thinking back. “Actually, Gabe was fairly blasé. Though that might have been because he was trying not to alarm me. You’d have to ask him.”

“And Mr. Peck is . . .” Jessed leaned over in his chair to take in the staircase.

“Still in bed.” Jason shifted in his seat. “This hasn’t been very easy for him. For either of us.”

“Understandably.” Jessed nodded slowly, his gaze penetrating. Jason understood that he was—at least in part—being interrogated. Although who could blame them? Jason had seen countless television shows, police procedurals and docudramas, all of which played the same refrain: when an adult woman goes missing, look to her personal life, especially her significant other. And here they were, hundreds of miles from home . . . What other explanation was there? But there was one, and it had to be found.

“So tell me,” the detective said. “What happened next?”

Jason told him once more how they’d come through the
door, and the first thing he’d felt was an immeasurable vacuum of stillness and silence. It was as if the entire house had become a hermetically sealed vault, with the flat, long-buried smell of a subterranean tomb. He told Jessed about the cinders flaring in the woodstove, and the pan overheating on the range beneath a swelling crest of bubbling red foam, the evaporating remains of tomato sauce. The unmanned rudder of a wooden spoon had fallen over the burner, dangerously close to the flame.

In front of the oven, a toppled bag of flour was spilled across the terra-cotta tiles, a topography of whitecaps upon a shellacked orange sea. Through the spray of powder, a set of shoeprints shuffled toward the sink and continued in the direction of the door. Blue’s boot prints, obviously. Whose else’s would they be?