The Glittering World (8 page)

Blue retreated to the living room and its wood-paneled walls, the floor covered in water-stained carpeting. A ratty orange couch sagged behind a scuffed coffee table, its scratched glass surface a murky window over shelves crammed with papers. He sat beside the table and removed a pile, sifted through bills and circulars, tax documents and aged coupon clippings, many older than himself. An entire life, reduced to a pile of papers. What would his own paper trail look like, were his life to end today? The never-ending letters from creditors, faded flyers from his club days, old report cards and loan applications . . . Better to burn it all.

As he returned the papers he noticed a large black binder on the bottom shelf, and dusted off the cracked leather cover. A photo album, filled with pictures of him, younger than he’d
ever seen; all his mother’s photographs were from their time in America. The first few pages showed him as a chubby-cheeked baby, and later as a boy, sunburnt and giggling at three or four in a field of purple lupines, the colors seventies saturated and overexposed in brassy photo corners. Occasionally his mother would fall into the frame: half of her alarmingly youthful face, or a drape of her brown and iron-straight hair, a bent arm around him or a knee upon which he rested. But it was clear the subject of the photographer’s gaze was the little boy named Michael, who would one day become Blue.

He turned the page. There were leaves of yellowed newspaper taped inside the album, pages of them. He unfolded the first to find the front page of the Friday, October 2, 1981, edition of the
Cape Breton Post
, the headline
LOCAL BOY AND GIRL GO MISSING
. Below the headline were photographs of two young children, a boy and a girl; his own face was the boy’s face, which stared back from beneath a crooked bowl cut, a goofy smile upon his lips.

Blue’s eyes narrowed before going wide, then wider, as he read.

Starling Cove—A search was under way Thursday for two five-year-old Starling Cove children, according to police.

The girl, Gavina Beaton, and the boy, Michael Whitley, were last seen at about 10:30 a.m. playing in the yard of the house where Whitley often visits with his grandmother, Starling Cove resident Flora MacKenzie. “We’re doing everything we can to locate them,” said Staff Sgt. Lewis Connolly of the Cape Breton Regional Police.

Police later confirmed no clues were found, though
the investigation has been hampered by the unseasonable forest fires.

Late Thursday afternoon members of Cape Breton Ground Search and Rescue and regional police’s K-9 unit searched the area where Beaton and Whitley were last seen.

The ground search also turned up no clues. A door-to-door canvass is under way.

Michael’s heartbroken mother, Yvonne Whitley, along with Gavina’s mother, Tessa Beaton, remained at the Portland Road home on Thursday night surrounded by friends and family members and hoping for good news. Both families are residents of the Starling Cove Friendship Outpost and Artists Colony, a communal living collective.

“I’m devastated,” Ms. Whitley said. “This is a feeling no one would ever want to have. It’s not like these kids to wander off, so we’re just really scared for them. We’ll keep hoping and praying every minute they’re gone.”

“You’ll know her if you see her,” Ms. Beaton said of her sociable daughter, and added that she has a distinctive birthmark on her right shoulder in the shape of a star (see photo at right).

Mrs. MacKenzie was too distraught to comment.

Blue flipped forward and found another headline:
ONE WEEK LATER, STILL HOPE FOR MISSING CHILDREN.

The sound of creaking footsteps on the porch shocked him to attention, and he quickly shoved the binder into the crook of his arm. He looked up at the discolored ceiling, the crumbling plaster, anywhere but at the album.

“So, that’s about everything,” the agent said from the other side of the screen door. “Still want to sell it?”

Blue nodded and stood, not really listening; he was in another place now. The unwanted knowledge seeped into his pores, traveled his veins, coiled around his stomach, where it contracted and clenched like a fist. A flood of awful scenarios washed over him: he and the other child must have been abducted, or otherwise had some sort of ordeal, the slate of his memory erased by whatever horrors he’d endured. He felt a sudden and overwhelming sadness, not for himself exactly but rather for the boy he’d been, the boy who had to forget. Also for the little girl, Gavina; who knew what had become of her? Maybe he would learn from the clippings. And now that he began imagining what might have happened, he could never unconjure the images of violation.

I don’t have time for this shit.
It was just too much. Not when his business was falling apart, when there was so much else to push through.
Not now. Not now.

“You want to take a minute?” Stanley said, studying him through the screen door. “I can wait outside if you’d like . . .”

“No. No, that’s okay. I’m ready.” The agent disappeared down the porch, and Blue went to follow him. But then he stopped, and turned.

Directly facing him was a four-paneled door, paint peeling and padlocked, with three two-by-fours nailed across the frame.
The basement
, he thought, the space a distant half memory. Something inside him—his rib cage? his heart?—reached out for the tarnished brass knob, like metal filings to a magnet.

“Excuse me,” Blue said through the porch screen. “Do you happen to have the key to this door?”

It was only after prying the boards off with a crowbar Stanley had fetched from his Suburban that they found the padlock key on the agent’s keychain. As soon as the door opened, the smell hit Blue at once: an earthy, fetid stench, mixed with another scent, a heavy musk that was not altogether unpleasant. The pungent blend of rotten vegetation and heady perfume was jarring, and was touched with a tangy iron flavor, like blood. It was oddly familiar. The agent pleaded a bad knee and headed back outside, while Blue lingered at the top of the steps and stared for a long while down the open throat of the stairway.

“Hello?” he called into the dark void, almost expecting a response. His footsteps echoed as he started down the stairs, feeling his way with one hand on the splintered plank railing while the other searched in vain for a light switch, the black album of photos and clippings clasped beneath his elbow. As he descended it struck him that he was in a waking dream, one of his characteristic nightmares but spun in reverse. And then he knew why the peculiar basement smell was so familiar: it was from his dreams as well.

He trusted that he’d reached the last step, and indeed the sole of his boot touched ground on the hard dirt floor of the basement. Just as he knew a sagging series of shelves was lined up against the cracked plaster wall behind him, and that a sump pump was installed in the far corner, opposite the boiler and the water heater. Everything in his mind’s eye was oriented from the middle of the room, so that’s where he shuffled, a hand held out in front of him. He felt for the pull string of an overhead bulb, but even as he did so he knew there was none to be found.
There never was any light down here
, he thought, and shuddered violently.

After a few steps he put his foot down onto an unstable section of the floor that gave way in a rapid relay, the sound of shifting planks.
A trapdoor.
He jerked back, a large hole exposed in the center of the basement, where the hard dirt floor had only just been. He’d almost stepped right into it. Even in the dark he could somewhat discern the pit—by dawning memory instead of true sight—and got down on his hands and knees to feel his way around its circumference, a good ten feet across, and dug right into the floor. He placed the album beside the hole, dislodged a rock the size of a Ping-Pong ball from its edge, and dropped the rock into the pit. There was a thump of stone on wood and then mud, deep below the house’s foundation.

On his stomach now, he leaned over the pit and inhaled. The uncertain smell was stronger here, much stronger. The wet, bountiful aroma entered him, and he pictured himself drawn into the hole; he was surprised to find the thought appealing. At once he hungered for its unknown depths, and knew with complete certainty that he would be welcomed down there.

Home
, he thought,
home, you are home
, the words chanted in his head like a mantra. Not in English, but in that atavistic, alien language from the woods. Had he found his home? Not in this land, or this basement or house, but beneath it all, in a place below the world.

He stood too quickly and nearly toppled into the pit, everything a dizzy rush as he tried to right himself, and banged his head
hard
against something suspended from the ceiling—a light fixture? An electrical box? It swung away but arced back, slamming into him again. Blue stumbled forward and inadvertently kicked the photo album into the hole, a thud, then a squelch against the chasm’s dirt and rock walls. He put his arms up to protect his face, and managed to catch hold of the hanging
thing, much lower and larger than he had imagined. His fingers curved around it, and he held tightly to the cold metal of its vertical rails.

A cage.
My cage.

And now he is inside of it, looking out at the dank basement through the interstices between the iron bars. His grandmother is at the bottom of the stairs, emaciated and wild-haired, almost feral. She holds a wooden slop bucket in the bent claws of her hands.

“Please!” he cries, but his voice isn’t his own, it belongs to a child, a little boy. “Grandma Flora, please!”

“Don’t call me that!” the maddened woman shrieks. She hauls the bucket over to the hole and the cage suspended above. “You’re no kin of mine.”

She lifts the bucket and douses him with water like Dorothy undoing the Wicked Witch, and this water scalds just the same. Boiled, he knows instinctively, on the kitchen stove right over his head. It burns like fire, eats away at his flesh, and he screams.

“Mama!” he gets out through choking sobs, the pain excruciating. His melted skin bubbles and bursts, his tiny hands blistering on the bars of the cage, fingers reduced to angry tissue and bloodied bone. “Mama!” he cries out again, and “She’s no kin of yours neither!” his grandmother shouts back.

“You are the other kind.
Fae
,” she hisses, the word dragged out like a rusty nail across wood. She drops the bucket and works her hands over the surfaces of the cage, applying a sap-sticky ooze to the iron, the phosphorescent substance reeking of blood and musk. The whole world is burning now, everything raw and blackened in a blinding curtain of agony.

“How are you doing down there?”

A voice, from above. His mother? No, a man’s voice.
What is it saying?
“Hello? Mr. Whitley? Everything okay?”

I’m okay
, Blue thought, and, “I’m okay,” he called out, his hands fixed to the cage bars. Not from the inside, he was surprised to see, but from without. “Everything’s fine!” he shouted, more to himself than to the man upstairs, whose voice he now recognized as belonging to the property agent.

When he tried to remove his hands from the bars, however, he found that he could not, his skin fastened to the iron like a mouse stuck to a glue trap.

leave this place

A voice in the unknown tongue, the alien language, spoken in the otherwords. His words.

go now

go

He focused on his hands. His attention telescoped, and he ignored the mounting dread that accompanied the enervating force from the iron. It was like being incrementally murdered, how a lobster must feel in a gradually boiling pot. He concentrated his strength, suppressed a scream of pain and terror, and pulled away.

With a wet squelch he lifted his hands, the skin of his fingers and palms sloughed from muscle and tendon like braised meat. Stuck to the bars were the outer layers of his hands and forearms, left behind like a discarded pair of ladies’ evening gloves. All this he could see, in this black hell; he could see everything down in the dark. And still the alien voice rang in his head, his own secret voice. And it said

go

leave now

go

go

Blue staggered to the stairs, his hands and arms a mess of
bloody cartilage and pulp. As he climbed the steps, though, his fingers twitched, and they glimmered as if threaded with gold filament. He watched in shock as his hands began to change, skin muting from angry red to rose to pink. One last glance at the cage and it really was there, suspended like a noose over the pit in the middle of the room, the flayed skins of his arms draped there as well, as if hung out to dry. Those too began to shimmer, and they faded into the darkness.

By the time he threw himself through the basement door, his hands were as he knew them. His familiar alabaster pallor restored, neither bloodied nor scarred: he was whole again. He wanted to lay his hands on the property agent to see if they’d leave marks on his shirt, but instead Blue barreled past him, nearly falling through the screen door as he tried to get it open.