The Glittering World (36 page)

And there he was. Not his father after all, but Daniel Jessed. The detective was in plainclothes, facedown and spread-eagle in a cloud of dust that settled upon him like a shroud, the pen still buried deep inside his neck. Blood was everywhere. Warm and wet over Gabe’s hands and face and clothes, in an uneven stain soaked into the dirt floor, as a dark red caul upon the man’s face. And still it flowed, still pumping from the wound and Jessed’s dying heart.

Gabe, dizzy as hell, felt at the stinging lacerations on his own neck, the newest marks of violence to brand his skin.
And should they scar
,
then I shall shift my shape, use these fresh welts as gills to swim away from here.
Just as he once used the scars on his back as wings to fly from his father’s nest.

It didn’t take long to find the entrance to the bootlegger tunnels,
an open spring-loaded trapdoor onto a wide hole dug into the middle of the basement floor. He placed the mining helmet back on his head, and shined the light at the crude hole, upon what looked to be a square box hanging from the joists above. As he approached, however, he saw it was in fact a cage, big enough for a large animal or a small person.
Blue’s cage.
The one Gabe had sensed that, metaphorically or otherwise, must have been here all along. Closets, bathrooms, attics, cellars, armoires even—because Gabe had been kept in his own cages, he recognized that in Blue as well. The way only someone who had lived such a life can smell a child’s fear, from knowing it firsthand.

Draped from the bars of the cage were two knotted gauzes, swaying in an updraft from the pit. For a moment he thought they resembled a pair of hands, holding on for dear life. But they were only cobwebs.

Gabe’s breath slowed, and once it steadied he took hold of Jessed beneath his armpits. With a great deal of effort, he hauled the body over to the pit and shoved it over the rim. It plunged like the dead thing it was, landing with a sickening thud somewhere below.
And now I’ll use Blue’s cage to escape.
He hooked the carabiner and rope to the bars of the cage and lowered himself into the hole. The cage held, and, after twenty or thirty feet, he touched down atop Jessed’s lifeless form. He unhooked himself from the carabiner and glanced up at the cage in the basement high above, steel shining in the light of his helmet lamp before he turned back to face the corpse at his feet. Gabe thought to cover him in dirt but soon abandoned the notion; he had neither time nor energy to spare. Jessed would rot in the dank hole’s wet air, where eventually he would be discovered.
Until then, feed the land. Do us all some good.

Gabe retracted the climbing rope, adjusted the helmet
lamp’s beam, and started down the tunnel. The ground stuck to his feet. Adhesive and coated with an amber-tinged goop, the striated passageway was awash in a briny seaweed stench. Semen came to mind, but then he thought of spirit essence, of ectoplasm. He began to shuffle through the gelatinous ooze, but his leg caught on something and the sound of groaning earth made him spin around: the trapdoor to the basement above had sealed itself. His stomach tightened in a fit of nauseating claustrophobia. He wanted to scream for help, not that there was anyone to hear him, above or below. Instead he steadied his nerves and forced himself to continue down the tunnel. He couldn’t go to pieces now. And so he would make himself into The Boy Who Feared Nothing, maybe even The Man. The journey was only just beginning.

Two more steps along the passageway and his sneaker crunched down on a waterlogged binder, cellophane pages scattered across the wet tunnel floor. It was an old photo album, leaves yellowed from age and filled with snapshots of a little boy with Blue’s face, one picture after the next. Tattered newsprint as well: articles on the first disappearance; the Starling Cove Hansel and Gretel; subsequent reports of the fire at the Colony; and more. Gabe removed a single unscathed Polaroid of a smiling young Michael Whitley and slipped it into his sketch pad, his fingertips going numb where they touched the photograph.
My own special merit badge
,
an amulet to keep me from harm.
It wasn’t Blue, but it was close. He needed to get closer.

Gabe checked his compass and headed down the narrow throat of the tunnel. He reached for sweet memories to light the way, recollections of Blue and his shimmering features; it was a bright enough light by which to see. That day before Christmas when Gabe walked across Brooklyn to peer in the window of
every storefront up and down Smith Street, fingers pressed to the snow-dappled glass until off on a side street he found the man Vinnie the Shark had been bitching and moaning about, the
cidrule
chef with the glittering green eyes and the magic touch. And once he had spotted Blue—at work in his open kitchen, which took up half the tiny restaurant—it was impossible to look away.

Blue’s flawed and mesmerizing face, his nose with its slight swell at the bridge as if it might once have been broken, dark brows arched over eyes so bright they glowed. All of him seemed to glow. He was so beautiful, like a painting of Gabe’s namesake at the Annunciation, his radiance so strong that Gabe already felt himself changing. At once he needed to learn everything about this rare and exquisite creature. Indeed, Gabe had been so enthralled he had barely noticed the Help Wanted sign taped to the restaurant’s window.

The dark passageways became increasingly erratic as he pressed forward, neither pebbles nor bread crumbs to help him find his way. Dilapidated remnants of pine-slatted staircases dangled from the ceiling of the uneven corridor at odd angles, alongside crumbling auxiliary tunnels that appeared to have been burrowed by subsurface mammals. Gabe wiped the blood from his face, pulled a candy bar from his pack, and bit it in two. As he let the sugar do its work he tried to calm himself, reassured in the knowledge that he had kept Blue with him. That he was safe, so long as Blue was near, if only as a conjured memory. It kept him walking.

He wondered how much time had passed, down in the cool and dank and endless tunnels; Elisa was the one with the wristwatch. He told himself he was well, that all would be well, there was
nothing to be afraid of, not anymore. But he didn’t feel it. Any sense of calm had evaporated, and in its place arose an anxious flood of questions about what he would find when he finally reached the root of the mountain. Would the Other Kind be as indifferent to him as Fred had suggested? Would Blue? What would Blue even be like, down in this new and unknown place? He could have changed so much that Gabe might be a stranger to him. It was bad enough how distant and removed Blue had seemed since they first arrived in the cove; the worry that he was slipping away had already weighed on Gabe’s mind even before he went missing.

And this was something that he couldn’t bear, the very thought sending a heartsick tremor down his legs. Because without Blue, he would be just as lost up above as he was down in these tunnels. If Blue couldn’t be reasoned with, convinced that his former life was still worth living, then Gabe was sunk. That was his only plan.

Maybe none of that mattered. Chances were he wouldn’t even make it to find out.

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Gabe’s ears rang, and he began to tremble as he walked. He had to get to Blue, or he was going to unravel like a corn dolly and fall the fuck apart.
Just keep going
, he thought.
Keep going.

The light on his helmet started to dim, so he switched it off and traveled in darkness; he still had the flashlight in his pack, for when he really needed it. He began to tire, and after a while his knees started to clack against each other, so he curled into a ball and slept. His dreams were threaded with dark and fitful nightmares of Blue and his kind, which he dreamed of as cartoon aliens, each of them taking a separate piece of him in
their wiry fingers and pulling until only scraps remained.
Blue
, he pleaded,
Blue
, but the only response was the rattle of a thousand cicadas, and dirt thrown into his eyes.

Gabe was startled awake; something had crawled over him. But there was nothing there. And it was only then that he realized there was nothing else down there at all: no rats or moles, no bats or voles, no ants or bees or hornets.
I’m the only living thing around. The only one that dares
. He reached for another candy bar and hungrily devoured it, as fetid drabs of water fell on him from the ceiling.
God and our hearts are crying together
, and he wiped the dirty liquid from his face.

He counted his steps, guessed how many he might make in a minute (a hundred?), then an hour (five thousand?). He decided to break for food and a drink of water every five hours, but he lost count so many times that eventually he stopped only when he couldn’t go on any longer.

After a day or so the water from his canteen was drained, and he finished his meager ration of candy bars from his pack. How much farther did he have to go until he reached the root of the mountain? He began to feel queasy, accompanied by the disturbing sensation that the tunnels were shifting around him.

The ground grew soft beneath his sneakers, and he tensed as a slippery current of muddy water steadily rose from the cave floor. He figured the tide must be coming in, seawater seeping up through the earth. Either that or it was groundwater, soon halfway up his shins. It leveled off, however, then receded, heat surging from the earth in the dark water’s wake. It rolled over his
skin and drenched him with sweat, until he feared he was going to pass out. He swallowed back waves of nausea and persevered.

After another hour or more of wet air choking his throat, the stinging sensation turned strangely pleasurable, an incongruous and ecstatic rush upon inhalation. As with the ambrosial moonshine stashed beneath the Colony, the giddy smell of sweet jam and juniper berries, wild lilac and gingerbread reminded him of nothing so much as Blue. Gabe’s spirits raised, and he dizzied with joy, led forward by his nose more than anything else. The pleasing aroma turned, however, lifting him out of his reverie. The air soured, and he almost managed to stop himself, just before he stepped forward into nothingness.

Gabe’s stomach dropped out, the rest of him along with it. He was falling, falling, plunging ten feet, twenty feet and more, into a honey-thick liquid that filled his mouth with the suffocating finality of grave dirt. He wanted to scream but couldn’t, the taste of rot and decay unnervingly tempered with the fecund scent of the Other Kind. He was dazed until he broke the surface and gasped for air, his backpack newly heavy upon his shoulders and threatening to drag him under. Then he did scream, a lonely howl into pitch blackness that savaged his strangled throat and forced him back into silence.

I’m going to die here, alone.

He fought against the syrupy fluid, scrambled for the side of what he took to be some kind of pit. It was like being back at the bottom of the well outside the Colony, only this time without any rungs to climb, the wide hole slicked and smooth to the touch. He began to force his way around the circumference, an arm extended in search of the mining helmet loosed from his head. He pushed his way through the ooze and took hold
of a clump of seaweed, its ghostly strands tangling in his fingers. The drenched mane of a slumbering kelpie, perhaps, who could awaken at any moment and trample him underfoot with its mighty hooves.

When he pulled his hand back he dragged something against him, and he froze. What he took for seaweed was in fact human hair. There was someone else down there with him.

“Elisa?” His heart sped, the sound of his damaged voice an eerie, unrecognizable thrum off the sides of the pit. He moved his hand along the body, which was facedown, drowning or drowned. The hair felt too long to be Elisa’s hair, the wrong texture (
but it’s wet
), limbs bloated (
oh God
) like plastic trash bags overstuffed to the point of rupture. Gasping, he tried heaving the body over to see if it could still be alive, if he could do anything at all but drown here himself, down in this dark hell.
So long, farewell. Auf Wiedersehen, good night.