Authors: Augusta Li
As he searched the rooms, Cole realized just how little of Darius Thorn the house contained. He possessed no photographs, subscribed to no magazines. None of his belongings felt personal. It was more like they’d been chosen by a decorator than by the home’s owner. Cole’s golden-brown fingers skipped over folded mint-green placemats and copper-bottom cook pots as he made his way through the surreal dim silver of the kitchen toward the enclosed porch. It felt more like perusing a department store than a person’s residence. Nothing, not even the expensive overcoat swaying on the brass hook, held any of the essence of Cole’s teacher.
In the cold of the mudroom, among the hedge trimmers, broken flower pots and plastic watering cans, Cole unearthed a large cardboard box hidden beneath a moldy black tarpaulin. Opening the lid, he discovered a collection of old objects that looked like they’d been through a fire: bits of ceramic charred black, old brocade fabric, dry-rotted and singed at the edges, odd-shaped lumps of melted silver, confetti of crumbling, scorched paper, and even the head of a porcelain doll with its chin cracked, its white skin sooty, and its hair melted. Inches of ash and charcoal waited beneath the rubble. Cole filled an empty fertilizer bag with several handfuls of the debris and then returned the box to its original location.
The walk to the cabin took Cole three hours. When he arrived, the sky had turned to a soft blue that bled to champagne pink along the tops of the mountains: a spring morning. A pile of things he’d left behind, books and clothing, mostly, sat at the foot of the porch steps awaiting the garbage truck. For a moment Cole considered rifling through the stack, to see if he’d find anything he might like to keep, but in the end he walked past. Inside he found his table, his dishes, and his bottles of liquor gone. A layer of dust covered the countertops, floor, and the top of the woodstove. The old couch remained in front of the hearth, and its presence triggered a flash of images in Cole’s mind: glistening naked bodies entwined in pleasure. The stab he felt surprised him, unused as he was to the sensation. He paused a moment, his palm on the plaid upholstery, before continuing back down the hall to the bedroom.
As he’d known he would, Cole found a wooden chest behind a loose board. He brought it out, knelt, and flung the lid open. Carefully he lifted a blue-and-white nylon jersey from within. Unfolding it, he read “Forester” above a large embroidered “34.” He lifted it to his face, inhaling, hoping for a ghost of Bobby’s scent, but found only a slight mustiness. Next he removed a newspaper article that read, “Local High School Production Earns Attention of Big-City Talent Scouts.” There in black and white was Cam, his perfect adolescent body swathed in a tight, sequined leotard as he portrayed Ariel in
The Tempest
. Cole couldn’t resist petting Cam’s paper cheek. His finger smudged the ink. Beneath the paper, he found one of the peacock feathers that had adorned the young actor’s locks during the performance. Last of all, he picked up a ream of paper held in a red plastic binder: the draft of his first novel.
Returning to the fireplace, Cole set his things and Thorn’s on the floor by his knees. He opened the iron stove door. The cabin’s owners had removed the wood and kindling, but Cole no longer needed fuel to conjure a flame. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, a lemon-colored blaze roared to life. The fire grew, embers spiraling up the chimney. Cole heard a scuffling, and chips of creosote rained down a moment before a brown bat, no longer than his thumb, crashed on the floor of the stove, disturbing the pyramid of fire, making the flames fan out like a flower opening. The creature screeched. Without thinking, letting his intuition reign, Cole reached into the inferno and plucked the bat up in his fist. Fur smoking, it beat its wings feebly against its bonds. With a hard, quick squeeze, Cole slayed it. Blood splattered and pooled on the floor, and with his opposite pinky, Cole copied the symbols flashing through his mind onto the limestone hearth in scarlet. He worked furiously, his fingers flying, the way an inspired mathematician scribbled equations across a board. Panting, he returned his sacrificial victim to its pyre, where the little corpse sizzled and smoked.
Since he had only the roughest outline of a spell planned, Cole let his thoughts go quiet and his body fall still. Soon the magic filled him and his limbs moved and his lips spoke without his intent, directed like a marionette on a string. First he held the candles over the fire, softening the wax into a single, soft, malleable lump. He worked it in his hands, forming a ball. Then he began to knead the scorched things he’d found in the box into the mixture: the sharp pieces of broken crockery, the bits of metal and scraps of paper and cloth. Black ash colored the putty, turning it from sallow cream to murky, inconsistent gray. When he’d finished, Cole set the bizarre batter on the iron top of the stove, so it would remain warm and pliable.
He gently lifted the piece of crumbling newsprint with hands steady with purpose and flickering with power. With a last look at Cam’s youthful, smiling face, Cole whispered, “Baby, where are you?” before crumpling the article into a ball and surrendering it. For all Cole knew, he might have beheld the image of his friend for the last time. He ripped a strip of fabric from the sleeve of Bobby’s football uniform and wrapped it snugly around the wrinkled paper. Lastly, he ripped a few pages from the beginning of his manuscript and looked down at the block letters, remembering the worlds he’d forged, the people birthed from his mind. They’d meant so much once. Now he shredded the pages into strips, securing them around the other relics he’d saved only to obliterate.
Holding the wad of memories in his fists in front of his heart, Cole closed his eyes. It hurt giving these things up, hurt like his heart being wrenched from his chest, but as Thorn had shown him, sacrifice held great power. Cole also knew that by relinquishing these articles, he was giving up a large part of himself. When he set them to burn, as he would do very soon, he would burn away much of his identity, of the Cole who loved and created. But he would rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes, a new and different being, stronger, harder, a diamond from coal. He would sacrifice his former self to his evolving self, cull away the mortal pieces, and offer them up to his god-form. Conjuring the fire in his belly, Cole directed it up the sides of his waist and down his arms, while at the same time squashing the clump of fabric and paper between his palms. In his mind’s eye, he saw a sphere of black flame surrounding his hands as he concentrated on his endeavor, losing awareness of the walls around him, the floor beneath his legs, the world outside, the past and the future.
After a span of time that Cole couldn’t calculate, he opened his eyes and looked down. The bits of paper and scraps of nylon had not been incinerated, but transformed. The materials had compacted into a hard round mass the size of a golf ball. Veins of shimmering color, like blue gray and pink striations in marble, covered the surface. A faint but constant heat radiated from the small orb.
Quickly, Cole folded the sooty wax from the top of the stove over the sparkling ball, covering it. Then he sculpted the concoction into a lumpy cylinder, vaguely human-shaped, and placed the desiccated doll’s head on the top. Visually his model looked nothing like Thorn, resembling more a primitive canopic jar or a grisly Russian nesting doll with a fat belly and wide base. But in essence he had made Darius Thorn. The blackened ceramic jutted out along the sides in prickly triangles, just like his teacher’s dark aura. All of the spirit of Thorn had been unmistakably encased in the clumsy-looking portrait. Satisfied, Cole lifted it, noting the deadly heat pulsing inside, and carried it back to the bedroom. Before he placed what he’d made safely behind the loose board, where the curse would be undisturbed by the cabin’s future tenants, he lifted it level with his face and kissed the doll head’s cracked and misshapen lips. Tenderly he stroked the crinkled hair and whispered, “Good-bye, my love.”
O
VER
the next several weeks, Cole watched as Thorn appeared to melt. First the flesh at the corners of his mouth sagged, and soon after that his lower eyelids grew as thin and wrinkled as crepe paper. They hung down from his black irises, revealing the veiny, pink crescents below yellowing orbs. The once-firm muscles of his chest drooped like empty bags, until his nipples pointed downward. His stomach, while no fatter than it had ever been, swayed above his groin, resembling a girl’s dress folded in half to carry apples. All of his skin seemed intent upon creeping toward his toes, dragged down. Everything that had been sharp grew rounded and dulled, like jagged rocks eroded over millennia by wind and rain.
Near the end of a particularly cool and damp April, Cole knew it would be only a half a moon at most before Thorn would die, liquefied in his bed. The awareness evoked no more joy or sadness in Cole than the realization that summer must follow spring. He’d almost hoped it would hurt more, leave a scar that might spark remembrance. Had he grown so steely hard, tempered by the flame of his power, that his surface could no longer be scratched? The possibility intrigued him, and he considered it as he lifted Thorn from the kitchen table and his untouched porridge.
As he’d done for many days, Cole helped his tutor to the chair in the parlor and opened the curtains to provide a view of the street, now verdant and sparkling with droplets from the last storm. Cole hadn’t stored any of the abundant spring rain. Cruel precipitation, the icy pellets that ripped living leaves from their branches, might aid his future work, but he saw no use for the flower-nourishing, blood-warm showers that turned the neighborhood from gritty gray to emerald.
“Thank you,” Thorn said, his lower lip hanging down, showing bottom teeth like a row of crooked tombstones.
“The fever is bad today,” Cole said, laying his knuckles across Thorn’s forehead. The skin had become so thin and translucent that the skull beneath was horribly evident.
“Bring me spearmint tea,” Thorn said, and then, grasping Cole’s wrist in his bony fingers, he added, “You’ve become so strong!”
“Yes, I have,” Cole agreed, without apology or pride.
“I’ve promised not to leave you,” Thorn continued.
“You have.”
“I won’t see Midsummer Day, Cole.”
“Yes, Darius, I know.”
Their gazes locked. Thorn searched Cole’s face with the confusion displayed by the very elderly. It almost looked as though he didn’t recognize his apprentice. Then he looked livid, clenching his teeth for a second before the effort exhausted him and he slouched. “What will you do?” he wheezed. “After?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Cole answered truthfully.
“Go back to those boys you loved? What were their names?”
“Bobby and Cammy?” Cole said. “No. Not to them.”
“No,” Thorn concurred. “They’d never accept you as you are now. You’ve relinquished them entirely. You’re not the man they knew. Not Cole. Not anymore.”
“You’re probably right.”
“You’ll be alone. Have you thought about that, Cole?”
“I’m used to it.”
With a great effort, Thorn propped himself up, resting his gaunt elbow on the arm of the chair. He looked down at his hands, skeletal and covered in age spots, as he said, “I shouldn’t have split you up. They kept the stopper in your poison. I never knew it was so potent.”
“You always wanted to see all of my power. Well, what do you think of it?”
Thorn looked into his face, his features regaining a touch of their vitality. A smile of deranged pride twisted his mouth. “What does one think of lightning? A volcano? An earthquake? Beautiful! I depart this world knowing I have released into it a serpent, an angel of death!” He crumpled back against the chair, too weary to hold up his head any longer, and whispered, “Bring my tea.”
Cole went into the kitchen and looked out the window over the sink. The abundance of rainfall had made the hedge roses in the backyard go crazy. They knotted into the prickly, shining leaves of the holly, the strong fronds of the rhododendron and the lilac twigs, pregnant with blossoms, forming an impenetrable wall of flora. Morning glory vines crisscrossed the entire hedge, like a net draped over the top. The grass rose to knee-height, and the leaves of the hosta were as broad as elephant’s ears. The branches of the weeping willow in the yard behind theirs hung over the fence, reaching almost to the ground. The slender silvery leaves obscured everything behind them. Cole snapped his fingers at the kettle, and a ribbon of steam twisted from the spout. He spooned some herbs from a canister into a mug and poured the hot water over them. Behind him, the oatmeal that neither of them had eaten congealed in beige-gray lumps. While the brew steeped, he returned his attentions to the lawn.
Though it had showered the night before, the morning was clear and bright, the colors of the vegetation simplified to the jolly primaries of a child’s drawing. The world teemed with life, while death hovered above the chair in the parlor, waiting like a carrion bird above Thorn’s shoulder. Cole shrugged, watching the willow boughs sway back and forth in the slight breeze. In no time autumn and winter would strip them bare.
Then the curtain of pale green parted, and two men stepped from behind. One was tall and tanned, wearing brown shorts that exposed powerfully muscular calves. He held a staff in his right hand. The other, a blond in a heather-blue sweater too warm for the day, moved across the yard with the same grace as the daffodil stems bending in the wind. Cole sighed, closed his eyes, and waited for the phantoms to dissipate from his mind. This happened from time to time; he saw them. Maybe Thorn sent the hallucinations. Maybe Cole’s own mind conjured them to torment him. Though his affection had ebbed, his guilt was tenacious.
Cole opened his eyes, but Bobby and Cam hadn’t faded into the recesses of his memory where they belonged. Instead, they’d walked closer to the house and now stood beside the steps to the back porch, as solid and substantial as the maple tree or the concrete birdbath. Cole walked through the mudroom, where he’d found the burned debris and the doll’s head, and went out through the screen door into the glaring light.