Now, as Hillary drove past our house I could see this year’s mask, a bland face with two small eyes poked above puffy cheeks and a surprised O of a mouth. My mother had draped ivy around it, carefully clipped from the back wall.
“Doesn’t it make you feel weird?” asked Jamie Casson.
“Huh?” I started. “What?”
“All this bizarre stuff…” In the front seat Hillary and Ali ignored us, continuing a longtime debate about David Bowie. “I mean; what the hell are
those
?”
Jamie pointed as we passed the cemetery. Strange stone animals stood guard over the oldest graves, their features worn away so that one could only guess their species: insect? bird? wolf? Clay masks leaned upon some of the mounds; others were extravagantly draped with wreaths of ivy. “It’s like
The Exorcist
around here…”
“I know what you mean.” I glanced at Ali, willfully oblivious to us, then leaned toward Jamie. “About Kamensic—”
I wondered if I could tell him what I was thinking. That the town frightened me, too, even though I’d grown up there; that sometimes when I drank I could see things in the faces of my friends, and hear the echo of something like distant music, the dying notes of a bell.
“It—it feels dark,” I said. “Even in the morning, it feels dark—”
Jamie stared at me, his pale eyes luminous, and slowly nodded. “
Right.
And the roads…”
He gestured at a dirt track snaking off behind the cemetery. It was marked as were all the streets in Kamensic, by a wooden fencepost topped with a long, arm-shaped signboard that ended in a pointing finger. “We came into town
that
way, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And from Kern’s place, you can
see
that road coming down the mountain.”
“Right…”
“But you don’t see
this
road—the one we’re on now. And this is a much bigger road.”
I shrugged. “Maybe the trees block it or something?”
Jamie shook his head. “No way. It’s
weird.
Like at Grand Central, you go to check out the stops up on the boards, and Kamensic isn’t even
there.
It’s not listed anywhere. Same thing with the train schedule—
nada.
”
In the front seat, Hillary glanced over his shoulder at us. “So?”
“So how the hell do people
get
here? I mean the train stops in town, right? There’s a train station, the conductor calls out the name—but if it isn’t even on the schedule, how do people know to come here?”
Ali rolled her eyes. “Oh,
please.
Anyone who needs to get here, gets here. It’s not like it’s fucking Brigadoon.”
“No! I’m right, I
know
I’m right!” Jamie jabbed at the window with one nicotine-stained finger. “Every time we come down that mountain it’s like a different road. Like when Hillary drove up before, we passed this cliff looking down on the lake. How come we’re not going that way now?”
“Because we’re going to murder you and dump your body in the reservoir,” said Ali. “Christ, where’d you move from, the South Bronx? Relax, will you? Enjoy the ride—”
Jamie sighed and leaned against the door. For a moment he looked very young: I could see where his chin had broken out, and how his fingernails were bitten down to the quick. “This is just a weird fucking place. You hear all kinds of stuff at night—”
Hillary laughed. “Those are called animals, Jamie.” He turned the car up the narrow switchback that ran along Muscanth’s southern face. “Like deer and things like that. Foxes.”
“Nothing dangerous,” said Ali. “No grizzly bears. No wolves.”
“Someone was killed here by a mountain lion,” I said.
“That was two hundred years ago, Lit.” Hillary made a face, then yelled, “Oops, there’s one now!” He swerved to avoid a chipmunk in the road.
“It’s still creepy,” said Jamie obstinately. “Plus it’s like
Hollywood Squares,
all these old actors. That weirdo lives here, the guy who’s Uncle Cosmo on
Bar Sinister
—”
Ali whooped. “Oooh, scary Unk!”
“That’s my father,” I said.
“Damn straight,” Hillary agreed heartily. “Her damn Dad. Never say a word agin’ him, Jamie—”
Jamie slumped down, defeated. “Oh, forget it. Anybody got a joint?”
“Nope,” said Ali. “Sorry.”
“Plus we’re almost at your place. There’s Bolerium—” Hillary tipped his head, indicating where the mansion’s gray walls gleamed faintly through the trees. “But I don’t remember where your driveway is, so tell me when we’re coming up to it—”
Jamie pointed behind us, at a road nearly hidden by the ruins of a stone wall. “That was it.”
“Whoa!” Hillary yanked at the wheel, frantically steering the car away from a pile of rocks. Jamie laughed.
“Hey, man, sorry. Watch that ditch there—”
The driveway was so narrow only one car could pass at a time. In places the dirt and gravel had been completely washed away, so that we drove on sheer bedrock. Hillary swore as the Dodge Dart scraped against stone and fallen branches.
“God damn, the muffler’s going to go—”
I squinted out the window. Twilight was falling quickly now, the autumn haze fading into a fine clear evening. To either side of the road a hedge reared, easily eight or ten feet high, a brambly mass of quince and dog roses and the tangled creepers of fox grapes. Birds darted in and out through gaps in the hedge. Winter birds: chickadees, blue jays, a raven carrying a dead vole.
“Wow,” I said. “Look—” But already it was gone.
“How much farther?” asked Hillary. “’Cause this car ain’t gonna make it…”
“Just up here.” Jamie frowned. “I
think.
Soon, anyway.”
He stuck his hand out the window and tugged at a grapevine. “Hey, check this out—”
A small explosion of leaves as the vine snapped. Jamie held up something like a plant from a Dr. Seuss book, all spiraling corkscrews and bright purple clusters.
“Cool!” said Ali. “Grapes!”
“Sour grapes, I bet.” Jamie pinched a violet bead, popped it into his mouth and grimaced.
“Yech
—”
“Let
me
try one—” Ali snatched the vine from him. An instant later she turned and spat out the window. “Ugh, that’s disgusting—”
The vine fell onto the floor, where I rescued it from between empty cans of Budweiser. The grapes were small but perfectly formed, and sticky with juice. I sniffed tentatively, inhaling their heavy, almost animal, musk; then bit into one.
“This one’s sweet.” Though the skin was slightly acrid—numbing, almost, like rubbing your lips with cocaine. I sucked it thoughtfully before swallowing it, tiny seeds and all.
“Here we are,” announced Hillary as the Dodge Dart humped over a fallen log. “Jesus, that road sucks. Can’t Kern pave it or something?”
“He’ll never pave it,” said Jamie disdainfully. “Mister Famous Director. He’s so cheap he squeaks.”
Ahead of us the corrugated drive gave way to meadow, a wide sloping expanse of knee-high grass. Patches of goldenrod nodded in the evening breeze, so bright a yellow it was as though the sun still shone in spots. Crickets buzzed softly. There was the intermittent drone of a power saw. We stepped out, blinking in the half-light, and Jamie peered into the distance.
“My father’s around somewhere,” he said as the power saw roared on again.
Ali yawned. “He mind if I smoke?”
“Hell no. My dad’s a really groovy kind of guy. A really groovy kind of asshole.”
Ali nodded. She pulled off her damp flannel shirt and tied it around her shoulders, smoothed the front of her leotard and looked around appraisingly. “Well, it’s a nice place.”
She grinned, a flash of white teeth with that odd little gap between them, and wandered away from the car. The boys started after her. Jamie said something to Hillary and Hillary laughed.
“Fuckin’ A, man…”
I hung back, shivering, and buttoned up Hillary’s old jacket. Underneath I wore a floppy white peasant blouse, intricately embroidered with long green tassels that dangled from the too-long cuffs. The blouse had seemed like a wonderful piece of exotica when I bought it at a head shop during the summer. Now it was nowhere near warm enough, and the thin cotton felt clammy against my breasts. I poked the tassels up into the sleeves, and hesitated before following the others.
Before me stretched the meadow. The scent of fallen leaves mingled with the fragrance of woodsmoke drifting overhead, and crickets chirped mournfully in the dusk. I glanced down, saw my boots coated with moisture pale and insubstantial as mildew. When I looked up again it was as though I were gazing, at the world through a fogged window. The outlines of everything were blurred. Ferns faded into a fallen rock wall, its stones indistinguishable from the trunks of trees. The trees themselves receded into a greater darkness. The wind rattled their bare branches and I stared, my heart thumping.
Because suddenly I wasn’t looking across a twilight field, but into a pool, black and depthless beneath a haze of mist. I no longer saw my friends moving in the distance, but only their reflections on the water’s surface, flattened images stirred by a cold wind that made the hair on my arms rise. Within the dark reaches other creatures moved, recognizable by their shadows: the flash of a tail beneath the surface, the flicker of something like a wing. The hum of insects faded into the ripple of water on stone. I took a deep breath and tried to focus on something familiar: Hillary’s jacket chafing at my neck, the way my boots pinched…
It was no good. Dizziness swept over me. The meadow’s autumn incense gave way to another smell, the dank odor of standing water, rotting wood. My mouth grew dry, my tongue hard and swollen. Something horrible seemed caught in the back of my throat, a viscous strand of water hyacinth or old-man’s beard. I coughed; the putrefying smell grew stronger, moist tendrils thrusting against my tongue as I struggled to cry for help. In front of me the air billowed, liquiscent.
I screamed then, but it was like screaming underwater. In the distance three bright shapes shivered and disappeared. I blinked. In front of me shone an unwavering sweep of pure blue, so beautiful that my eyes filled.
Because I recognized that color: it was the blue that shades the sky sometimes in your dreams, the blue you see when a kingfisher dives and for an instant everything before you coheres into one thing, bird lake sky self: and then is gone. That is the color I saw then, and somehow I knew that this was
the
sky, a truer sky than I had ever seen, and that I was gazing up into it from the bottom of the deep and troubled mere that was our world.
But before I could fully grasp this, or wake to find myself drowning, something moved above the surface of the water.
I thought it was a falling tree, its branches clawing at the sky. But it moved too slowly for a falling tree, and when it seemed almost to touch the water it halted. No leaves grew upon its tangled limbs, and I realized that they were not branches at all. They were monstrous antlers. What I had at first perceived as the tree’s grotesquely gnarled bole was a head—not a stag’s head, but a man’s. His staring eyes were huge, the irises strangely variegated. Tawny yellows, moss-greens, the murky brown of leaves at the bottom of a lake; the colors radiating from a pupil that was ovoid, like a cat’s. His mouth was parted so that I could see the moist red gleam of his inner lip and the tip of his tongue. As he gazed into the water I trembled, afraid that he would see me there.
But after a minute passed a deeper dread filled me—because he did not see me at all, and surely he should? Surely it was impossible that something so huge would not notice another creature scant feet in front of it?
Yet it did not, and as this realization grew in me, so did my terror. That I could be so insignificant, that it was possible for me to move through the world and have my presence as unremarked as that of a spider spinning its web in the tall grass. And like the spider I could be casually destroyed, my passing neither mourned nor noticed by this monstrous being. An arm’s-length away from me the horned man dipped his head closer toward the water’s surface, as though he would drink there. He did not, but hesitated an inch or so above it. The surface remained smooth, the glassy air untroubled. Only those daedal eyes moved very slightly within its great head, as though it gazed questioningly upon its own image.
I shuddered. Because there was something horrible in that gaze, a sort of mindless potency that made me think of water lilies choking a pond, infant voles squirming in their nest of cast-off hair. The odor of fetid water melted away. A sweetly aromatic smell filled my nostrils, oak mast and burning cedar, grapes warming in the sun. The immense figure swept its head from side to side, and I could hear its antlers slicing through the air. I was terrified it would catch my scent, but instead the creature turned. I saw it clearly against that elysian sky, its speckled eyes ravenous as an owl’s. Then it stepped away, moving in an odd, stilted manner. I caught a glimpse of its torso, arms smoothly solid, legs and chest and buttocks well-shaped as any man’s. Save only between its thighs, where its phallus mounted, grotesquely large and rigid as though hewn from wood. Once, Ali and I had found an image like this in one of Hillary’s books—an ithyphallic carving from ancient Greece, its face worn away to nothing save the faint indentations of eyes and lipless mouth; armless, legless, only its ludicrous member intact.
“Ooh, Daddy, buy me one of
those
!” Ali had squealed. But seeing this creature now I felt only horror, and panic lest it turn and catch sight of me.
It did not. Its long legs swung stiffly through the underbrush, its antlered head swung back and forth as slowly it receded from view. For one last instant I glimpsed its silhouette fading into the trees, and could almost have believed I imagined it: a strange manlike pattern formed by leaves and shadows and darting birds. But then I recalled its eyes, at once empty and devouring. I took a deep breath, as though struggling to wake from a dream, and stepped forward.
Around me the evening air shivered. I could feel it sliding like cool water across my face, and once more smelled fallen leaves, damp earth. In the distance an owl hooted. Something struck my upper leg and I looked down to see a cricket tumbling into the shadows at my feet.