The Glittering World (26 page)

“I like you,” Gabe said, eyes fixed on the boat. He scratched at his arm and a bleeding sore there; bug bites stippled his arms, raised red tracks up the twin burrows of his T-shirt sleeves, along his scar-mottled hand. Now he was the one who seemed nervous.

“Thanks.” She shielded her eyes; the boat was approaching, headed in the direction of the shoal. “I like you too.”

“You said . . .” He coughed and cleared his throat. “You said we were going to find him.”

“I said . . .” The boat continued to race toward them. She looked through her camera’s viewfinder and zoomed the lens; there were two stooped figures onboard, a small bearded man in a fisherman’s cap and someone else. A woman, maybe. “What are they doing?” she whispered.

“At the hospital,” Gabe said, ignoring her. “You said that we were going to find Blue.”

Was that what she had promised? How could she have said that? She couldn’t remember why she’d done such a thing, what had moved her to such certainty. Such a grand declaration, when she no longer felt certain of anything at all.

She lowered the camera and started to back down the sandbar, only to come within inches of colliding with Gabe, who made no attempt to move out of her way. Sweating profusely now, he had a queer expression on his face, obstinate and not a little crazed. “Of course we will,” she said, trying to remain calm. “We’ll find him. We will.”

“I’m really sorry, Elisa.” It was hard to hear him over the mosquito whine of the boat’s engine. “But don’t worry, okay? Nothing bad’s going to happen to you. They promised me.”

“What are you . . .” The boat was less than twenty yards away before it slowed and turned, a wave kicked up by the wake crashing hard against the shoal. It had come for them. For Elisa. She tried once again to get past Gabe but he blocked her; there was no choice but to stand her ground. Either that or run the other way down the sandbar, the boat coming to a stop beside them. Where else could she go? Right into the bay, the water bracing even in September? Like a butterfly beneath a descending net, she could only watch as it fell.

“Get her up here.” The bearded and haggard little man at the wheel reached around the windshield and motioned to Gabe. Closer to the stern was a middle-aged woman, her head obscured by the hood of a yellow rain slicker. She stretched her hand toward Elisa over the side of the boat.

“What the hell is this?” Elisa yelled above the engine. She held herself, the camera strap wound around her arms like tefillin bands. It was an ambush of some kind, though she wasn’t scared so much as astonished.

“She doesn’t know anything,” Gabe said to them. “She doesn’t know what she is.”

“Get in, sweetheart,” the woman said, and this time she thrust her hand out with an unmistakable air of impatience. Now Elisa recognized her: it was their waitress from the other morning at the Lobster Landing, the rude one. She tried to remember the name on her plastic name tag.

“No way.” Elisa shook her head as if attempting to loose it from her neck. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“We can help each other,” the bearded man said, his eyes
steely and unreadable. “We can help you figure out where you’ve been. You’ll be safe with us.”

She turned to Gabe, and he gave her an imploring look. They wanted the same thing. If this could help find him, how could she refuse?

“You don’t have to,” Gabe said meekly. “It’s your choice.”

“Some choice.” Elisa unraveled her camera strap, slung it around her neck, and reached for the woman’s hand.

The boat’s guttural engine drowned out any attempt Elisa made to question her unlikely captors. She settled onto a hard bench at the stern and looked out at the water, tried to get her bearings in case she needed to find her way back. No words were exchanged, not until well after the boat was docked on the opposite side of the cove. They walked a single-file line along a thin wooded trail—the bearded man in front, Gabe and the waitress bringing up the rear—to a ramshackle cottage set amid a copse of diseased-looking birch trees.

The little man introduced himself as Fred Cronin, and the cottage as his house. A local ironsmith and newsletter publisher, he was a friend of Maureen and Donald’s; Elisa remembered him now from the ceilidh, and how he’d taken pictures all night, his vintage Leica almost an extension of his long beard. She stroked the lens of her own camera and thought to do the same.

Inside the cottage, the smell of stale cigarette smoke hung like cobwebs from the rafters. The clutter was staggering—newspapers stacked to the ceiling, sagging shelves of books and nautical maps and heavy chunks of crystalline granite, complicated steel contraptions of unknown provenance shoved into every corner. By the door, a half dozen identical hiking packs
rested against the wall, each one crowned by a mining helmet and a lengthy coil of what looked to be rope for rock climbing or spelunking.

A jittery woman, bright red hair and about Elisa’s age, jumped up from the floor at the sight of her. “You’re beautiful,” the woman exclaimed, then covered her mouth with one hand, the other fingering a golden angel pendant on a chain around her neck. A skinny teenager with a constellation of acne at the corner of his mouth paced before the shade-drawn windows in a narrow lane cleared of debris. He reminded Elisa of her first boyfriend, but when she gave him a little nod his gaze moved from her face. Beneath one of the windows was a wrynecked boy of five or six, his eyes lost beneath a shaggy tangle of brown bangs. He took no notice of her whatsoever.

Fred directed Elisa to a dilapidated black couch. The pimply young man and the waitress sat on either side of her, Fred in an adjacent plastic chair; Gabe remained standing, while the redhead returned to her spot on the floor. Their host poured what smelled like whisky-spiked tea into a thermos lid and placed it before Elisa. “We were waiting for you to get out of the hospital. But then the rains came,” Fred said in a raw voice, and sipped straight from the thermos, sunken eyes trained upon her. He lit a cigarette with quivering hands, waved out the match and tossed it onto the coffee table’s scratched glass surface, missing an overflowing ashtray. “We have a pretty simple request. We want you to take us to the place where you and your friend were hiding out all this time.”

“I don’t remember where I was,” Elisa said. “But even if I did, I doubt I would tell you. I don’t even know who you people are.”

Fred laughed weakly. “Fair enough. But just so you know, we come in peace. Give us a chance to put your mind at ease.”

He introduced the redhead as Tanya; the Lobster Landing waitress as Patricia; and the young man as Patricia’s son Colin, and now Elisa could see they shared the same equine features. Patricia said the boy by the window was hers as well; he was occupying himself with a set of rusty-bladed safety scissors and a magazine, its pages freshly serrated and foxed with mold. Other than the little boy, they were all staring at her, rapt.

Fred dragged off his cigarette, the smoke corkscrewing heavenward from the ember’s tip. “At the end of the day,” he said, “we’re people of like mind and common purpose. I guess you could say that we’re a group of believers.”

“Believers in what?” Elisa said.

“Well, one thing we all believe in is you.”

“What’s to believe in?”

“That remains to be seen.” Fred bent over the side of his seat and rummaged along a low makeshift bookcase of bricks and boards, as Gabe looked on with unease. Eventually he surfaced with a stack of decomposing newspapers, sorted a few from the pile, and handed them to her. “Take a look at these,” he said. “I’m not sure how much you know.”

Beneath the
Cape Breton Post
nameplate and the edition date of Saturday, October 2, 1981, was the headline
LOCAL BOY AND GIRL GO MISSING
. Elisa scanned through the papers, then went back to the first article and the photograph of the boy. It was Blue’s five-year-old face beneath a mop of black hair, so young but still utterly, painfully unmistakable. She glanced up at the little boy at the window before she touched her fingers to the faded newsprint and the photo of Blue, his picture printed beside that of a moonfaced girl named Gavina, as well as a detail of the star-shaped birthmark on her shoulder.

“Blue didn’t know any of this,” Elisa said, and shook her
head. “He only found out when he was going through his grandmother’s things. That very day, before we were taken.”

“Taken.” Fred smiled, his teeth brown and decayed; one tooth flashed silver, while a few more were missing altogether. “So you do remember something.” He lit another cigarette from the end of the last. “Tell me,” he said, and leaned across the coffee table, close enough that she caught a whiff of his sour breath. “What do you remember about being taken?”

A rolling shadow across the bathroom ceiling, and she gasps. Everything slowing to near stillness as the bathwater rapidly solidifies, trapping her like a fly in amber.
“I hardly remember anything,” she said.

“Tell us what you do remember.” Fred coughed and cleared his throat, expectorating into a black-and-white bandanna he discreetly produced from the breast pocket of his discolored shirt.

“Please, Elisa,” Gabe said. “We need to make sure you’re . . . okay.”

She looked away, avoiding their pleading eyes. The corkboard beside the mantel teemed with alarming images: thumbtacked sketches of insect parts that were almost perversely magnified; a photograph of the dark mouth of a cave flooded with water; what appeared to be a desiccated old fruit label, adorned with an illustration of a Cottingley-style fairy seated upon a rock. She shuddered and turned from the wall, and the sight of Gabe’s expectant face hollowed out a new groove in her chest.

Elisa didn’t trust any of them as far as she could spit, not even Gabe. But she needed them, for their knowledge if nothing else. She closed her eyes.

“I was in the bathtub. I remember . . . a face. Someone leaning
over me.”
Not someone
, she thought, and pressed the heels of her wrists into her eye sockets.

A wide face with saucer eyes made up of smaller aspects, the compound eyes of an unclassifiable insect. A face she knows well, though stripped of its mask of muscle and pale skin.

And as she breaks the water’s surface—just before its sinewy fingers lengthen to cup the back of her skull—she sees inside it. Right through its patchwork casing, the tarnished grim birdcage of its chest where no heart beats but instead rests a heart-shaped stone, ripped from a hole in the earth. She sees right into it.

“Blue,” she whispered. Her hands moved from her eyes to her mouth, short and brittle nails tugging at her lower lip. “The thing that took me . . . It was Blue. There were others too, others like him. But they weren’t . . . He’s not . . .”

“Human,” Fred said, and nodded. “He isn’t human.”

“Yes.” She swallowed hard, took a cigarette from Fred’s pack on the coffee table and stuck it into her mouth; it took him a few moments to realize she was waiting for him to light it. It tasted awful, poisonous, but she smoked it anyway. “So what is he, then?” she asked.

“He’s Other Kind. Old-timers here, they call them the Fae. We believe your friend was a replacement. That he was swapped out for Michael Whitley, when the boy and Gavina Beaton went missing.”

“That’s crazy,” Elisa said. But her words had no conviction. Memories flooded her mind, of Blue as she once knew him. Of his fingers around her waist as she pushed him onto his unmade bed, her own hands gripping the hard muscle of his sweat-slicked arms as he bucked beneath her. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it. It did make some kind of bizarre sense, though, as if Blue were too radiant a thing to be born of man. Yet they
had always been a pair, an undifferentiated dyad. Shouldn’t that mean she was radiant as well?

Elisa looked up at the expectant faces of the believers. “He didn’t know what he was,” she said. “He thought he was like the rest of us.”

“Sound familiar?” Patricia said under her breath.

“Excuse me?” Elisa said.

“Put a lid on it, Patty,” Fred snapped. “You know how this is going down.”

“Don’t you talk to her that way,” Colin said.

Elisa glanced around then: at Fred, the mousy and wild-eyed Tanya clutching her angel pendant, the sardonic waitress, Patricia, and her gangly, surly son. They were all buzzing with nervous energy, their skulls in frantic motion; they resembled a band of bobblehead dolls. Gabe vibrated as well. Only the little boy was relatively still, busy mutilating his magazine by the window. The sound of his clacking scissors was hypnotic, and she tried not to close her eyes, not to let the darkness pull her back to the place below the world and its spiraling catacombs.

“The thing is,” Fred said, “we need you to take us to them. This is a real big opportunity for us. Some of us have been waiting a long time for a proper guide, and a lot more have gone before us and never returned. So basically, you’re our best chance. And we don’t have a lot of time.”

“They’re dying,” Gabe said. Patricia shot him a look. “Fred and Colin both.”

Elisa stared at Fred in disbelief. The man turned toward Colin, whose eyes were fixed upon the floor. Fred reached out and clapped his hand to the teenager’s shoulder in an affectionate gesture, a surprise considering they were just at each other’s
throats. “We’ve got cancer,” Fred said. “I got it in both lungs. Final stage. Colin has lymphoma.”