Rock On (12 page)

Holding my position, I felt the bass in the trembling catwalk. And there was something else, fainter but undeniable. I felt Quicksilver. He was close.

I braced myself, resisted the music’s power, trying not to get caught up in the pulsing mix. I admired it but remained detached, locked in position, focused on my craft until a new sound welled beneath the rhythm.

It came on first as a swirling chant beneath the music, rising between the punching riffs. Suddenly he was crouching in the lights, grinning at the crowd. He wore the same silver-white clothes he’d had on the night before, spotless and glowing, cutting tracers in the air as he leaped into a dervish spin. And all the while he sang, improvising over the band’s foundation, taking the jam to a place so perfect that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been planned.

The crowed danced, and in my mind—despite my efforts to remain aloof—I danced with them. My body remained as before, but my emotions soared.

Unlike the roar of the band, Quicksilver’s words passed undimmed through my earplugs . . . or maybe they weren’t passing through my ears at all. Maybe they were from someplace deeper, from inside me—as if his thoughts were singing directly into mine. The words were simple, but within them lay a coded story—an allegory of opposing entities: one intent on bringing people together, the other set on driving them apart. They weren’t metaphysical forces, though they were often depicted that way. Instead, they were physical—living things that hid in plain sight. One worked by twisting perceptions through the power of sound. The other was a shape shifter, constantly altering its form but never its intentions.

Quicksilver looked up, eyes catching the light. For a moment I thought he was looking at me, but then his focus veered back to the crowd.

Shape shifter!

My mind flashed to the previous night, to details that hadn’t quite fit together. But they did now. Now I understood.

I knew what I had to do.

I fired.

The music stopped.

I ran.

She stood outside the car, first looking toward the mill and the growing murmmer of the crowd, then toward me as I raced along the access road. “You did it!” Her voice sounded stronger than before. “I feel safer already.”

I opened the trunk, tore down the rifle, closed the case.

She took my arm. Her touch felt warm, somehow alluring. Suddenly, in the valley below us, the music started again.

She turned, momentarily confused.

I could imagine what she was thinking. If I had shot Quicksilver, stopped his song, and left his true form lying in the spotlight—why would the band be playing again, picking up right where it had left off?

“Lorcan?”

I froze, suddenly certain I had made the wrong choice. But then Quicksilver’s voice came welling from the valley, filling me with the conviction I had felt while lying on the catwalk.

“The power line,” I said, watching her face. “I shot the power line.”

Her face paled in the moonlight.

“I cut their power, but those people . . . they’re good with their hands. They must have spliced it back together.”

The color bled from her face, and with it went the wounds and swelling. Something new emerged, sharp and pale. Her grip moved from my shoulder to my neck, but my hand was already on my knife. I pulled it out and brought it up hard, driving it under her ribs, into the heart that I hoped lay slightly to the left of center.

She gasped.

The moonlight shifted, giving way to clouds, darkening her face. Her wounds returned, and with them her dark and frightened eyes. “Lorcan?” She stared, accusingly, and then her color changed again, becoming almost luminescent. “Lorcan!” She grabbed my hand, squeezing until my fingers felt ready to break against the knife’s handle. Then she pulled the blade free and shoved me away, leaving me holding the weapon, its edge bright with silver blood. “Lorcan!” She growled my name, the sound deep in her throat, bubbling through the wound in her chest. “He got to you!”

“No. The choice was mine.”

“Really?” And then she leaped away, but more slowly than last night when she had followed me from my apartment to reveal herself in the alley. She had planted that tire skid on the street, placed those bits of taillight on the pavement, and left the shredded jacket by the sewer. Then she had waited for me to find her . . . just as she had waited for me to find her in that line of traffic before the Quicksilver show. Each time, she had lured me, manipulated me, drawn me into position. I wasn’t sure how she had done it the first time, but one fact remained: “I never get lost!” I shouted as she vanished into the darkness. “Never!”

But I wasn’t convinced.

Even then, after all that I had seen and heard, doubts lingered.

I drove until Quicksilver’s song gave way to the rush of traffic and the access road’s darkness became the ebb and flow of passing headlights.

I came to a bridge, drove partway across, then parked in the emergency lane and got out to stand against the rail. I was shaking, too unmanned to drive.

The river below me caught the lights from the bridge, drawing them into long shimmers against the black water, and not for the first time in my life I felt caught between things vast and unknowable.

Or maybe they were not completely unknowable, for on one level the creatures that had called themselves Quicksilver and Ariana had one distinctly human trait.

They get others to settle their differences. Keeps them from having to take out their own kind.

I got back into my car, dialed in a classic rock station, and for a long time I just drove, going nowhere, riding the rhythms, trying to lose myself in the pulsing darkness.

Lawrence C. Connolly
’s music projects include
Veins: The Soundtrack,
an ambient-rock CD featuring soundscapes inspired by his novel
Veins
(2008); and
Songs of the Horror Writer,
a one man show that he performed for Reggie Oliver’s Gaslight Music Hall at World Horror in 2010. His collections
Visions
(2009),
This Way to Egress
(2010), and
Voices
(2011) collect his best stories from
Amazing,
Borderlands,
Cemetery Dance,
F&SF,
Twilight Zone,
Year’s Best Horror,
and other sf/f/h magazines and anthologies.
Voices
was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award. Connolly blogs about storytelling, performance, and music at LawrenceCConnolly.com.

The Erl-King

Elizabeth Hand

The kinkajou had been missing for two days now. Haley feared it was dead, killed by one of the neighborhood dogs or by a fox or wildcat in the woods. Linette was certain it was alive; she even knew where it was.

“Kingdom Come,” she announced, pointing a long lazy hand in the direction of the neighboring estate. She dropped her hand and sipped at a mug of tepid tea, twisting so she wouldn’t spill it as she rocked back and forth. It was Linette’s turn to lie in the hammock. She did so with feckless grace, legs tangled in her long peasant skin, dark hair spilled across the faded canvas. She had more practice at it than Haley, this being Linette’s house and Linette’s overgrown yard bordering the woods of spindly young pines and birches that separated them from Kingdom Come. Haley frowned, leaned against the oak tree, and pushed her friend desultorily with one foot.

“Then why doesn’t your mother call them or something?” Haley loved the kinkajou and justifiably feared the worst. With her friend exotic pets came and went, just as did odd visitors to the tumbledown cottage where Linette lived with her mother, Aurora. Most of the animals were presents from Linette’s father, an elderly Broadway producer whose successes paid for the rented cottage and Linette’s occasional artistic endeavors (flute lessons, sitar lessons, an incomplete course in airbrushing) as well as the bottles of Tanqueray that lined Aurora’s bedroom. And, of course, the animals. An iguana whose skin peeled like mildewed wallpaper, finally lost (and never found) in the drafty dark basement where the girls held annual Hallowe’en seances. An intimidatingly large Moluccan cockatoo that escaped into the trees, terrorizing Kingdom Come’s previous owner and his garden-party guests by shrieking at them in Gaelic from the wisteria. Finches and fire weavers small enough to hold in your fist. A quartet of tiny goats, Haley’s favorites until the kinkajou.

The cockatoo started to smell worse and worse, until one day it flopped to the bottom of its wrought-iron cage and died. The finches escaped when Linette left the door to their bamboo cage open. The goats ran off into the woods surrounding Lake Muscanth. They were rumored to be living there still. But this summer Haley had come over every day to make certain the kinkajou had enough to eat, that Linette’s cats weren’t terrorizing it; that Aurora didn’t try to feed it crème de menthe as she had the capuchin monkey that had fleetingly resided in her room.

“I don’t know,” Linette said. She shut her eyes, balancing her mug on her stomach. A drop of tea spilled onto her cotton blouse, another faint petal among faded ink stains and the ghostly impression of eyes left by an abortive attempt at batik. “I think Mom knows the guy who lives there now, she doesn’t like him or something. I’ll ask my father next time.”

Haley prodded the hammock with the toe of her sneaker. “It’s almost my turn. Then we should go over there. It’ll die if it gets cold at night.”

Linette smiled without opening her eyes. “Nah. It’s still summer,” she said, and yawned.

Haley frowned. She moved her back up and down against the bole of the oak tree, scratching where a scab had formed after their outing to Mandrake Island to look for the goats. It was early August, nearing the end of their last summer before starting high school, the time Aurora had named “the summer before the dark.”

“My poor little girls,” Aurora had mourned a few months earlier. It had been only June then, the days still cool enough that the City’s wealthy fled each weekend to Kamensic Village to hide among the woods and wetlands in their Victorian follies. Aurora was perched with Haley and Linette on an ivied slope above the road, watching the southbound Sunday exodus of limousines and Porsches and Mercedes. “Soon you’ll be gone.”

“Jeez, Mom,” laughed Linette. A plume of ivy tethered her long hair back from her face. Aurora reached to tug it with one unsteady hand. The other clasped a plastic cup full of gin. “No one’s going anywhere, I’m going to Fox Lane,”—that was the public high school—“you heard what Dad said. Right, Haley?”

Haley had nodded and stroked the kinkajou sleeping in her lap. It never did anything but sleep, or open its golden eyes to half-wakefulness oh so briefly before finding another lap or cushion to curl into. It reminded her of Linette in that, her friend’s heavy lazy eyes always ready to shut, her legs quick to curl around pillows or hammock cushions or Haley’s own battle-scarred knees. “Right,” said Haley, and she had cupped her palm around the soft warm globe of the kinkajou’s head.

Now the hammock creaked noisily as Linette turned onto her stomach, dropping her mug into the long grass. Haley started, looked down to see her hands hollowed as though holding something. If the kinkajou died she’d never speak to Linette again. Her heart beat faster at the thought.

“I think we should go over. If you think it’s there.
And
—” Haley grabbed the ropes restraining the hammock, yanked them back and forth so that Linette shrieked, her hair caught between hempen braids—“it’s—
my
—turn—
now.”

They snuck out that night. The sky had turned pale green, the same shade as the crystal globe wherein three ivory-bellied frogs floated, atop a crippled table. To keep the table from falling Haley had propped a broom handle beneath it for a fourth leg—although she hated the frogs, bloated things with prescient yellow eyes. Some nights when she slept over they broke her sleep with their song, high-pitched trilling that disturbed neither Linette snoring in the other bed nor Aurora drinking broodingly in her tiny shed-roofed wing of the cottage. It was uncanny, almost frightening sometimes, how nothing ever disturbed them: not dying pets nor utilities cut off for lack of payment nor unexpected visits from Aurora’s small circle of friends, People from the Factory Days she called them. Rejuvenated junkies or pop stars with new careers, or wasted beauties like Aurora Dawn herself. All of them seemingly forever banned from the real world, the adult world Haley’s parents and family inhabited, magically free as Linette herself was to sample odd-tasting liqueurs and curious religious notions and lost arts in their dank corners of the City or the shelter of some wealthier friend’s up-county retreat. Sleepy-eyed from dope or taut from amphetamines, they lay around the cottage with Haley and Linette, offering sips of their drinks, advice about popular musicians and contraceptives. Their hair was streaked with gray now, or dyed garish mauve or blue or green. They wore high leather boots and clothes inlaid with feathers or mirrors, and had names that sounded like the names of expensive perfumes: Liatris, Coppelia, Electric Velvet. Sometimes Haley felt that she had wandered into a fairy tale, or a movie.
Beauty and the Beast
perhaps, or
The Dark Crystal.
Of course it would be one of Linette’s favorites; Linette had more imagination and sensitivity than Haley. The kind of movie Haley would choose to wander into would have fast cars and gunshots in the distance, not aging refugees from another decade passed out next to the fireplace.

She thought of that now, passing the globe of frogs. They went from the eerie interior dusk of the cottage into the strangely aqueous air outside. Despite the warmth of the late summer evening Haley shivered as she gazed back at the cottage. The tiny bungalow might have stood there unchanged for five hundred years, for a thousand. No warm yellow light spilled from the windows as it did at her own house. There was no smell of dinner cooking, no television chattering. Aurora seldom cooked, Linette never. There was no TV. Only the frogs hovering in their silver world, and the faintest cusp of a new moon like a leaf cast upon the surface of the sky.