Lucia's Masks Read online

  Now I see that time has come, as the three who circle me in the field press in closer. The metal of their scissors and razors flash in the sunlight. My stomach churns. I upbraid myself again for my stupidity. If I had not been daydreaming, I would have smelt them, spied them, or heard them. I am now at a perilous disadvantage, with two of them advancing speedily toward me, their limbs powered by their obsession, and another coming up behind me.

  I draw my dagger and whirl about with it, keeping it close to my body for I have no desire to harm them if I can avoid it. All I want is to appear violent enough to frighten them off. But they keep coming. So I begin making lunging motions in the air, miming a fatal strike with my knife.

  “Kneel, sinner, and be shorn,” the one behind me cries out in a voice so quavering and high-pitched it seems to come from the cutting instruments they brandish. The piagnoni are so close now I can see the multitude of tiny crosses incised on their noses and cheeks.

  I do not want to hurt them but neither do I want them to overpower me, lop off my braid and shave my head raw. This is not just for vanity’s sake but also because I am sure my hair still holds some remembrance of the warmth and shape of my mother’s hands, brushing, smoothing, and plaiting the thick strands over the years. As if this thought conjures her up, I hear my mother’s voice at the instant I must either act, or fall at the wailing women’s feet and submit. “Feign madness,” she instructs me. “Become the very devil they fear.”

  I drop my knife between my feet. I bare my teeth. I growl. I undo the knot of my shawl and lift my arms so that the cloth spreads about me like black wings. I swoop at them, all the while pumping my arms up and down. I begin to laugh, in the way I had heard hysterical women do: a spiral of sound that was sometimes a bitter song.

  The one who was behind me comes round to join the other two. They back away and huddle together, murmuring. I shriek and swoop; yet still they hesitate.

  What I do next astounds me, and I have no idea what prompts my action. Undoing the buttons of my blouse, I bare my breasts to them.

  “Whore. Devil’s spawn,” they call me. And indeed I feel a hot rush of shame at exposing myself in this way.

  But it works. I see them tremble and stumble as they flee through the long grass. I do up my blouse again, while keeping my eyes fixed on their receding figures until they have disappeared. They ran toward the west. And so I determine to go on straight ahead, but chastened and unfailingly cautious. I must never again let my guard down so carelessly.

  While keeping low to the ground, I raise my head just enough to peer through the tips of the long grass. Directly ahead is a scene so unexpected I fear for a moment I am hallucinating.

  Behind a low stone wall, inset with a metal gate, is a two-storey house of matching stone. I have little knowledge of stone. This one is a dark grey, verging on black, blended with a lighter shade people still call dove grey, even though no one I know has ever seen a dove. The stones themselves have been cut in large rectangular blocks, mortared one atop the other so that they appear knitted together, like a resilient fabric.

  The house has two windows upstairs and two down, and a central wooden door which stands open above a stone slab that serves as a stoop. There is a narrow chimney on the right side of the pointed roof. I can easily imagine smoke rising from the chimney, making a union of roof and sky. I drew pictures of such houses as a child, with an adult suggesting the squared windows, a chimney, and a tail of smoke. These details, as indeed the shape of the snugly self-contained house itself, resembled nothing in my known reality. Yet I found making the drawing satisfying as if I had fashioned a place of safety that would help in some small way to protect us from all the wolves of the world.

  Now, of course, I know the truth. There is nowhere that is safe.

  I stand up slowly, keeping my right hand close to my knife. I whistle softly. Then I call out: “Hello?”

  The sound of my voice rises and falls, swallowed up by the surrounding field.

  The forlorn character of the house suggests it has been long abandoned. Nevertheless, I draw my knife and stride forward, pushing open the metal gate in the stone wall. It is off the latch and swings readily to let me through. I proceed, keeping my eyes fixed on the door which still stands open at exactly the same angle as when I first observed it. The smell of cut hay is much stronger now, and something else — a vinegary odour that makes my nostrils prickle.

  I stand a moment on the stone stoop. With my knife raised, I enter the house with all the stealth I learned in my City life. Immediately, I check behind the door. Here there is only angled space, empty of everything but shadows and the balls of dirt some people call sluts’ wool. To my right, I see a chaotic room, with chairs upturned and cushions awry. Every surface is covered with a fur of dust. And here I find the source of the scent of hay. There are six squared bundles of it, bound with twine and scattered about the room.

  I move next to the kitchen. On the table top dust lies so thickly I am able to trace a visible X with my forefinger. I have to hold my nose when I come near a jug whose contents have sprouted a dense yellow fungus. Everywhere there are signs of deliberate damage or of hasty departure and abandonment. Broken dishes, shards of glass, and mouse droppings cover the floor and the wooden counter surrounding the sink.

  I wonder if the piagnoni have been here and done this damage in one of their fits. Knife at the ready, I open the cupboards and a door that looks as if it might seal a pantry. My mood lifts, for inside the cupboards all is neatness and order and amazing bounty. Stacked in regimented rows are many more cans of food than I can readily count: kidney beans, chick peas, corn, tomatoes, even olives.

  Next, I try the hand pump beside the sink. If it works and the water tastes sweet I can fill my bottle and flask and return to the others right away.

  I push the handle up and down with a silent prayer on my lips. There is a whine, a hiss, and a gush of clean-smelling water issues from the spout. I roll a drop or two on my tongue, and find it good. I drink more and fill the bottle and the flask I have with me and put them carefully back in my pack.

  There is no time to investigate the upper floor before I leave. The house seems weighted in its own silence. I can hear nothing but the steady thump of my own heart.

  Would it ever be possible, I wonder, to bring life back to this old stone house, to lift its burden of sullen silence and see smoke rise from its chimney, uniting roof and sky? Personally, I hope the others will not elect to stay here, even for a short time. I sense something angry and surly haunting these rooms. Once Candace is recovered and we have renewed our supplies, we must press on to the North without delay. We must not falter. I have a great dread of what might happen if we linger here.

  I shoulder my pack and go out into the yard, then stop to sniff the air. Nothing seems untoward in that sultry world, and so I decide to risk running through the field, following the track I made earlier when I crept on my hands and knees.

  I have water with me to revive Candace and an apparently abundant source to which I can lead the others. I have found a house with plenty of food where we can rest a day or two. I have managed to repulse the wailing women without causing them physical harm. For the moment, I feel blessed by circumstance and I run along in the happy belief that chance has enabled me to do my duty well. I hope that when Candace recovers, she will have forgotten the panic she experienced before she fainted and the devils she saw in her delirious state. I hate the idea that we distressed her, and resolve to be kinder and more forbearing in future.

  I picture as I run the poet’s wise and dreaming face, and as ever, draw strength from the knowledge I carry his likeness in my pack. If he were one of our group, I do not doubt he would be far more tolerant and forgiving of Candace than I have been so far. His empathy was finely honed and well practised.

  As I near our encampment, I recall his poem about the Lamia, with her glittering serpent’s body and a woman’s lips and feelings. The Lamia falls in love with a mortal man,
and Keats describes her anguish in such a way that my heart moved for her. It occurs to me that John Keats, with his extraordinary empathy and magnanimous soul, would probably even feel sympathy for a Rat-Man. I know that if I ever have the misfortune to encounter one of these monsters face-to-face, and with no means of escape, I am unlikely to feel any pity for it whatsoever. But this is obviously not a situation I ever want put to the test.

  As usual, the very idea of the Rat-Men and the revulsion they inspire in me sharpens my senses. I think too of the man with the marble eye whom Bird Girl fears, and the other one with the slit nose, which I imagine looks like a fungoid growth feeding on his face. I swear I will never lapse into oblivious reveries again. The encounter with the piagnoni was my harsh lesson that the City follows us — not just in nightmares and loathsome memories, but in the flesh.

  I run on swiftly and soon I can smell the charred remnants of our campfire and a whiff of something noxious and perturbing. It comes to me that this is the lingering odour of Candace’s panic attack. I send ahead my most earnest hope that she has now been purged of her fear, and has forgotten whatever unwitting part we five played in her distress.

  Chapter Six

  The Unveiling of Lola

  THEY ALL WAIT SILENTLY FOR LUCIA, despite their prickling thirst. Candace has stopped convulsing, much to the Outpacer’s relief. He curses the fact he is unable to remove his hood and examine her more closely for her lips still seem to him to have a blue cast. He is grateful Bird Girl continues to be so attentive to the stricken woman.

  Harry appears to be napping, his beaked nose occasionally bumping between his drawn-up knees. He seems a resilient old chap, the Outpacer thinks admiringly. He knows he is unlikely to live so long himself. The boy as usual is at Harry’s side, sometimes watching the old man’s mouth, sometimes staring into space — not vacantly, but as if he shapes some kindly living forms that might augment their company.

  The Outpacer chides himself. Is he becoming stupidly fanciful in his new guise? But it is so many years since his mind has run cleanly of its own accord, without artificial stimulants. He is continually surprised at the intense pleasure he derives from this quicksilver mental play with its unexpected turnings, cross-connections, and sudden tugs back to childhood scenes he had thought lost long ago. So long too, since he has considered the word “play” in anything but a lubricious sense: those things one did between silk sheets or against silk-covered walls; on top of or under tables; or in the crypts of abandoned churches (twice); or in rooms equipped with the devices and substances that ensured he was in a constant state of arousal, and his desire never quite sated.

  This was the drawback to the mind’s free-ranging. It inevitably returned him to the lewdest scenes of his personal sexual theatre. These are scenes that now make him flinch in self-disgust and yet can still arouse him, which makes him detest himself even more.

  As Lucia arouses him when she bursts into their midst, breathless and so hot that a visible steam rises from her skin. She stops, panting deeply, her hands on her hips, and leans forward. For the merest instant, her open-necked blouse reveals her breasts, quite naked and absolutely unbound, swinging a little as she bends from the waist. He only just catches sight of her long, brown, pointed nipples. Like pyramids of chocolate. And despite his thirst, his tongue moves in his mouth with desire, and under the full skirt of his monk’s gown his flesh yearns for the long-legged forager.

  He has to turn away to stifle a moan. Yet is this a more natural lust than anything he has felt for many years? A lust free of perversion. Is it possible? And if possible, is it permissible that he entertain such feelings? Perhaps it is, although he will have to constrain his desire, which will be an arduous test of his resolve.

  Every aspect of his present life seems to be a test. His bleeding feet. His hunger. Candace’s cheery nostrums. And now the forager whose delectable nipples he longs to stroke and make hard with little jabs of his tongue. It comes to him with a jolt that he wants to give her pleasure. This is not a practice he has much cultivated. Rapacity, certainly. Whenever he had engaged in seduction, his object was solely to prolong his own anticipation. His appetite — his own engorging greed — was paramount. He had given little thought to his sensual partners, except to demand their adoration or worshipful attentiveness.

  He’d had female partners in particular who abased themselves only too willingly. How soon he had tired of their fawning and their besotted looks. Their fixation became loathsome to him. As a result, he had no choice but to humiliate them so completely that their love turned acrid, the stone in a fruit they must spit out, or else choke.

  He shudders to recall the details of the degrading scenarios he devised for them: orgies in which he scripted their every move, with partner after partner or several at a time, while he looked on, and most crucially, they saw him looking on. They must witness the entire gamut of his reactions, which at least had been genuine. His titillated curiosity soon turned to indifference, and finally to disgust. He would pointedly turn his back on them. It was imperative that they witness his departure, preferably through a slammed door. He left them to their fate, which was sometimes a hatred of him so extreme, he was forced to double his complement of bodyguards.

  He cannot imagine the Lady Forager so debasing herself, even if love tormented her piercingly. She would never grovel or forsake her dignity. It strikes him, and not for the first time, that she is protected by some invisible armour. He has no idea what this armour might be — only that it seems to deflect any prurient thoughts. He is gripped by the notion that Lucia has some inevitable part to play in his fulfillment of his penance, but he cannot even begin to speculate how this might come to pass.

  Lucia draws a glistening bottle from her pack. Even through the forest’s gloom, he can see the water’s silvery sheen and his saliva glands contract at the sight. In his former life, he would have seized the bottle from her and satisfied his own thirst first. Or would he? Is it possible he has begun to judge himself more harshly than even he deserves?

  Bird Girl steps forward to grasp the bottle by its neck. She takes it to Candace, uncorks it, and lifts it to her patient’s lips. They all avert their eyes as Candace splutters, drinks deeply, and makes a mewling sound that reminds him of a kitten someone had thrust into his arms when he was a boy. Involuntarily he shudders, recalling how the sponginess of its soft-boned body repulsed him, and how he had struggled with a distressing urge to crush the helpless creature between iron hands.

  He observes that Bird Girl does not drink. She takes the bottle next to Old Harry, who seems barely to wet his mouth before giving the bottle back. Bird Girl passes it to Chandelier, who demurs, shaking his head so that his wonderful corkscrew curls seem to float and catch at what light there is. The boy goes into one of his fluid mime shows, his right index finger symbolically closing his lips, his left hand next covering his mouth. Finally, he makes Bird Girl a slight bow, his upturned open palms inviting her to drink. All this is accomplished in a second. The Outpacer wants to applaud but resists, for the harsh sound would spoil the lingering tracery of gesture Chandelier has written on the air.

  And so Bird Girl drinks, and then Chandelier. The bottle passes again to Lucia, who is panting still. He drinks last, and sets the bottle down beside him. He marvels at how civil they all are. And wonders what it might take to smash that civility to bits. He thinks of how the bottle had moved — from weakest (for the moment) to strongest (likewise).

  An image of startling clarity bursts upon his brain. He sees six glass beads, of various colours and sizes, strung on a wire. Here we are, he realizes, separate entities yet ready to slide and touch. Or indeed, to clash and crash, if tilting chaos sends us there. How long can they maintain this obliging separateness, he wonders. With the exception of Candace, they are still all so careful not to intrude on each other. They have somehow tumbled into a tolerant, resilient looseness. They are not tightly bound. He foresees this state cannot last.

  Lucia
is finally able to summon the breath to speak clearly. At first he cannot grasp her meaning. It is so long since he has heard the word she utters, it remains for some seconds an empty cage of sound.

  “House,” Lucia repeats. “I found an abandoned house.

  “There is food there,” she tells them. “And water.”

  “House,” Chandelier repeats to Harry, who is apparently having problems hearing. “Food and water.”

  Is it a morning for miracles? The Outpacer has never heard the boy speak so many words consecutively.

  Only Harry does not appear surprised. “Yes, boy,” he says. “This is good.”

  Bird Girl has skipped up to Lucia, her skimpy skirt bouncing on her slender legs. The Outpacer makes himself look away until she stands still again, on her tiptoes, in order to whisper something in Lucia’s ear.

  How pleasing it is to gaze on these two women standing together. One blond. One dark. One sinewy and small. One strong-boned and muscular. His former self would have automatically imagined their heads touching on a pillow, their naked limbs tangled for his delectation. Now he finds the mere idea of their sexual juxtaposition distasteful. He decides this is a good indication of how far he has come.

  He is curious, however, as to what Bird Girl has whispered to Lucia.

  He sees Lucia slowly shake her head and Bird Girl take a step back, momentarily dejected. But not for long, for she is soon summoned to Candace’s side.

  Candace is obviously agitated. She struggles to sit up, plucking Lucia’s bundled shawl from under her head impatiently, and tossing it at her feet. Candace’s gracelessness irritates him. As the woman draws her knees up to her chest, readying herself to stand, he has to turn his head away. He has no wish to see her exposed upper thighs where her shorts bell out unbecomingly. He judges this aversion must have more to do with Candace’s character than her physicality. At the height of his philandering, he had bedded plenty of well-rounded women.