Some Kind of Fairy Tale (23 page)

Richie composed himself in the driver’s seat. He wound down the window.

“I admit it, Officer,” Richie said. “I’ve had a cigarette in a public place. Line up the firing squad.”

“Don’t I know you?” said the officer.

It was the same officer who had both detained him after Tara had disappeared and who had interviewed him at the hospital that very morning. “Oh, Christ, yes,” Richie said. “We’re dear old pals.”

H
iero put me on the horse and fetched me back to the house all over again. This time he led me most of the way, and we went in silence. He walked in front of the mare, and I could see the vicious weal I had laid on him with the riding crop.

It wasn’t the last time I tried to ride out of there. Over the next few weeks I tried to find my way out many times, either on the back of that white mare or just by walking away. In the early days Hiero would simply follow me. Or he would catch up with me and let me know he was following me, and he would tell me to let him know when I was tired so that he could lead me back. Then he wearied of the game and he stopped following me, and off I would go, sometimes sleeping out in the fields and waking with the cold
dew on my face. Then if I got tired I would mount the mare and because she knew the way I would just let her take me back.

Hiero promised me he wasn’t lying. I would find my way back after six months, he said, but not before. He told me that these things had to be done according to strict rules of physics, rules I didn’t understand, rules pertaining to the time of the year and the time of the day and the position of what he called the celestial machinery, which I took to mean the moon and the stars, but which he said was something else altogether.

After that first time I tried to leave he took me back to the lake and to his house. The sex-crazed woman and her lover were eating at the table when we returned. She got up from the table and, seeing his wound, went straight to him.

“She did this to you?” When Hiero didn’t reply she said, “I can’t believe you allowed her to do this. It shouldn’t go unpunished.”

“My business,” was all Hiero said. “My business, my portion.”

I said I wanted to go out, that I wanted to talk, so we left the woman and her lover and we went to the edge of the lake, where we sat down on the glittering, quartz-rich gray sand.

“I don’t like that woman. Can’t you get rid of her?”

“Look, I told you, it’s not my house.”

“Is it her house?”

“No. We don’t own things. Around here, everything belongs to everyone.”

“So if I take the horse again tomorrow,” I snapped back at him, “no one is going to stop me?”

“No one is going to stop you.”

“So you’re like communists or something?”

He had to suppress a smile because he knew it would enrage me for him to look amused. “Not exactly.”

“Is it a commune?” I’d heard of a place near Quorn, not far from the Outwoods, where the people ate only macrobiotic food and slept freely with one another and smoked dope until they pissed their pants.

“Of a kind.”

I looked across the lake. Everything was so vivid that it still seemed to graze my eyes, as if something was gently scraping my retinas. It occurred to me that the lake had changed color since
the day before. Where it had been a blue black it was now much more of an aquamarine, as if the light itself had changed. But it also seemed to me that the shape of the lake had changed, and that where I had previously looked at an elliptical body of water it was now like a long cylinder. There was something unsettled and unsettling about the earth and the landscape in that place. As if it were remolding itself all the time.

But I had other things to think about.

I was still demanding to know why I couldn’t go home and all he would say was that there was no road, no way, no possibility. The crossing opened again in six months, and even then you could slip by only at the precise hinge. When I complained that I didn’t understand anything he was saying he told me there were four hinges to the day: dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight. These, he said, opened up the crossing, but only at certain times of the calendar. “Tara, the world is more complicated and beautiful than you people have ever understood,” he said.

“You people?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking my hand. “I didn’t mean it to come out like that. But you can’t fight it. The thing to do is to make the best of it while you’re here. Learn things. See things with different eyes. I’ll make sure that you come to no harm and that no one touches you.”

I didn’t much like the sound of that.

He looked into my eyes. “My dearest hope,” he said to me, “is that you get to like it here, and I’m sure you will if you can only stop pining for your old life. Things are different here. But if after six months you’re not happy then I’ll make sure you go back safe and sound. That’s a promise.”

But I still couldn’t accept any of it, and then while we were talking I felt a slight tremor in the earth. Hiero’s eyes bulged.

“Did you feel that?”

“Yes,” I said.

He leapt to his feet. “Quick, into the water,” he said. I watched him as he stripped off his clothes. “Get naked,” he said.

I didn’t see why I should. I sensed some kind of emergency but I didn’t see how taking off my clothes would help. Then sex woman and her lover both came running pell-mell from the house,
and they were both shrieking. They were trying to tear off their clothes as they ran, stumbling, running, still screaming.

The pair were joined by others who emerged from houses and cottages further along the bank of the lake. Strange-looking creatures all of them, lithe figures running in a state of half undress, trying to rid themselves of their clothes as they ran toward us.

“Into the water, Tara!” Hiero shouted. “Into the water!”

I felt frightened. By now we had been joined by maybe fifteen or twenty other people, all of whom were either stripping off their clothes on the sand or splashing into the water as they did so. They shrieked and screamed and I could hardly hear Hiero above the noise.

He was still shouting and beckoning me on and I felt a wave of terror, until I saw that he was smiling, and though all these other folk were shrieking they were also laughing. Bewildered but still in my clothes, I waded out to him and he grabbed my hand, and just as our hands touched I felt the water fizz and foam and crackle, and a current pass through the water to our bodies, and then there came an almighty thump that flung us over in the water.

Unable to resist the shock wave, everyone went over together, and I felt the foam of the water pass through me, tingling and vibrating, and it seemed to pass inside my veins, making my blood buzz and vibrate. The shock of deep pleasure made me laugh out loud, and for a minute I was helpless with laughter, involuntary laughter, just like all the other people who had been turned over by the shock wave.

They were all laughing like hyenas or chattering monkeys, and I was, too.

I got to my feet and now everyone was holding hands. Somebody grabbed my hand—not Hiero, for I’d lost him in the water. Another hand enclosed my free hand on the other side and everyone stretched out in a long, linked line just before a second shock wave tipped us over. This time the pulse was stronger and I felt the communion of all those bodies as the power surged through the line. The laughter reached a scary pitch, a hysteria moderated only by a feeling of health and well-being, as if my blood had been emptied out and replaced by a transfusion of silk. I looked at the water and it had become an iridescent pool, sparkling and roiling
with color. The light overwhelmed me and made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

Hiero, laughing his bloody head off, came staggering toward me through the water.

“What’s happening?” I shouted, as he grabbed my hand.

“Hahaha tee hee hee nanana it’s an ejaculation is what it is, Tara! Hahaha hahhheee—”

“A what?”

“Tee heee hee
ejaculation
!”

And then another throb of energy struck us and we were thumped sideways. I felt both the benign energy of the water and the shock of power from Hiero’s hand flutter through me, and I knew in that moment how he loved and adored me, and the detection of unselfish love passing from him to me transmitted in a wave to the stranger holding my hand on the other side. And I was laughing again even though there were tears of sadness running down my face, a mixed-up folly of mirth and sorrow.

I think the jolts—the ejaculations—came seven or eight more times, and then stopped suddenly, and at last the laughter and shrieking died down, though everyone remained hand in hand in a long line for a good while afterward, catching their breath, hoping for another jolt, not knowing if the earth would deliver more.

But it was over and the moment had passed and eventually the folk moved out of the water, returning to wherever they had come from. Only a few diehards remained in the water, desperately hoping for another shock wave.

We lay on the sand, Hiero and I, recovering from the hysteria, I in my soaking clothes, because I was the only person who hadn’t taken them off, and for which modesty I now felt a bit foolish. I asked Hiero what had triggered these seismic movements and he looked at me blankly.

“It’s the gift of the lake,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s what lakes do.”

“Not where I’m from they don’t. I’ve never seen that.”

“Oh, yes, you have. But your people don’t know how to notice it. It’s what the lake does when it’s pleased.”

“Oh, come off it,” I said, laughing at him.

He looked at me seriously. “Really.”

“I mean,” I said, “it’s not like the lake is a living thing.”

This was perhaps the worst thing I could have said. He looked suddenly alarmed. He put a hand, sticky as it was with gray sand, over my mouth. “Hush, darlin’ girl! Hush! The lake hears your every word and knows your every thought.”

I made to answer this nonsense, but I saw further alarm in his eyes and he pushed his hand further onto my mouth, forcing grit onto my lips. Only when he felt I wouldn’t say any more on the subject did he take his hand from my mouth.

“The lake listens,” he said quietly. “The lake watches. The lake knows everything.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. I had no chance to reply because one of the diehards who had been standing in the water long after most of the others had gone came striding out of the shallows, his muscles running with glistening droplets of water and light, and he spotted me.

“Yum yum!” He was strong and handsome, with very tanned skin and hunter’s eyes, gray and green. He had his long hair tied at the side and the water was still dripping off his hair and sluicing down his body. He smiled at me, showing a row of strong white teeth, with one missing at the corner of his mouth.

He leaned down quickly and through my wet blouse he gently squeezed a nipple between a thumb and forefinger. Hiero grabbed his wrist and twisted it away. “Not for you, Silkie,” he said firmly. “This one’s not for you.”

The man called Silkie stepped back. “Possessiveness? I would have thought that decision was up to her.”

“It is up to me,” I snarled, “and I don’t want you touching me again.”

The man looked nonplussed, as if no one had ever spoken to him like that before. “You’ve brought a ghost into the camp, Hiero.” Then he looked at me. “Your loss,” he said. He turned and walked back up the beach toward the farther houses.

“A what into the camp?”

Hiero grunted. “You might find that the men here aren’t used to being rejected. And the women never so.”

“He was a creep.”

“It takes some getting used to.”

“I don’t plan to get used to that, thanks.”

“No. You don’t have to.”

Something I was soon to discover about the commune was its rampant sexual permissiveness. The people who lived there fucked openly, frequently, and—it seemed to me—indiscriminately. The boys fucked the girls and the girls fucked the boys and the girls were the most persistent initiators. Plus, the girls fucked the girls and the boys fucked the boys, and often they all did it to one another in a daisy chain.

Maybe you find that erotic. I didn’t. I don’t. In fact, quite the opposite happened, and I soon realized that I was the only person there who wasn’t sexually active, with the exception of one person. That was Hiero. He was saving himself, it appeared, for me, if ever I decided I wanted him. Most of the women in that place expressed astonishment. They regarded him with concern and pity, in the same way you might have sympathy for someone with a broken leg. They brought him fruit and made conscious efforts to cheer him up when he protested he didn’t need cheering up.

It was all the fault of the
ghost
he had brought into the community. A
ghost
, I later discovered, was to these people someone who had died a virgin.

I didn’t try to tell anyone that I wasn’t a virgin. Meanwhile, there was no shortage of offers from those who wanted to relieve me of the burden of virginity.

And that, in the end, was what led to Hiero being killed.