Lucia's Masks Read online

  “I think it is the archer,” she whispers to Harry and Chandelier, who flinches at the odd croaking quality of her voice. Immediately the boy is on his feet, positioning himself in front the unconscious Bird Girl. But his legs go weak when he hears a voice like an animal’s snarl, “Grimoire’s here to finish off the little whore.” Chandelier thinks he has never heard a human being say anything more terrible. How can they stop him? How? What would Snake do? What weapons do they have to hand?

  The answer comes from Harry. Calmly and quietly he tells Chandelier, “Fetch me a skull. Just go behind me and get me a whole one from the row of bones. Lucia will train the light so that you can see. Be quick and careful as you can, boy.” Chandelier homes in on an intact skull, which he scoops up with a scrupulous care and places in Harry’s outstretched hands. “Good lad. Now stand behind me, boy. And pray if you wish.”

  “Put the beam on the bastard, Lucia,” Harry instructs her. “Try to shine it right in his eyes.”

  Lucia does as she is bid. At once, a round creamy-white missile whirls through the beam of light. Grimoire moves his head just in time. The skull plunges off the ledge. They all wait with rigid nerves in a silence which pounds upon the boy’s ears like a closed fist. Lucia’s hand is shaking so much that the beam of light slips and they can see Grimoire no more.

  The tension thickens the dark and the air around them. Where is the evil man now? Chandelier wonders. He considers throwing himself on top of Bird Girl. Would the arrow also penetrate her body or would it stop in his? His teeth are gritted and the silence still assaults his ears so painfully he does not at first hear Harry’s urgent whisper. “Another one, boy. Fetch me another nice round skull.

  “More light, Lucia, and keep it steady.”

  She sweeps the beam along the ledge and just as it catches Grimoire, they hear the cave echo with the sound of the first skull hitting the water below. In the cone of light they see that Grimoire has his back pressed tight against the wall. His mouth is open and his eyes wide. He knows now, thinks the boy. He knows how narrow is the ledge and how deep the watery cavern below. There is fear in the evil man now, a fear that will eat at his courage and his sense of balance.

  “He has only one eye,” Lucia says softly to Harry.

  “Which one is missing, Lucia?” Harry sounds angry at her.

  “The right, I think. I am not certain,” she confesses.

  “Hold the beam steady.”

  Lucia complies. In the beam, which she directs as Harry instructs, they see the orange-haired man still standing frozen against the cave wall, arms akimbo.

  “Bastards!” he screams at them.

  Harry hurls the second skull. This one strikes the man on his right temple and his head and shoulders jerk forward. As he tries desperately to regain his balance, he missteps so that his right foot is off the ledge. For a moment Grimoire appears to hang in mid-air. Then he plummets. So shrill is his scream, as he goes down and down, that Chandelier puts his fingers in his ears. The scream wakes Candace, but Bird Girl sleeps on.

  “What happened?” Candace exclaims. “What? Tell me!”

  “Harry stopped a killer,” Lucia says, “the man who shot Bird Girl. Harry hurled a skull at his head and the archer fell into the chasm.”

  “Harry?” Candace keeps repeating in puzzlement. “Harry?”

  “Harry.” Chandelier confirms proudly. “Yes, Harry.”

  All four sit silently, their bodies trembling from the emotional aftershock. Chandelier senses some current of fear still moving among them, though the evil man must surely be dead. He keeps seeing the archer’s look of utter surprise, round-mouthed, at the last instant before he began to fall. This picture causes a corkscrew of pain in his gut, and the feeling that he has swallowed a vast emptiness. Is this sensation pity, he wonders. And if so, why does he pity such a wicked being? He knows he will turn this question over and over in the years to come.

  Some hours later they hear the Outpacer returning, humming to himself the tune with its thump-a-thump beat.

  “How is the child?”

  “She lives. She hangs on,” Lucia tells him.

  “But we had an interloper. The archer came into the cave, looking to kill her. Harry toppled him from the ledge by hurling one of the skulls.”

  “What!” The boy pictures the swift transformation on the warrior-angel’s face, the shadow of alarm succeeded by relief. “And I was not here to protect you. But none of you are hurt?” he asks. His words sound high-strung, as if he walks a wire.

  “Shaken and wary, but well enough,” Lucia tells him.

  “We are all in your debt, Harry,” the Outpacer says.

  “And here is an ironic consolation for us. When we go out again, we need not fear another ambush. That is one clear advantage of the destruction the fireball and red rain caused. There is such utter devastation out there, no one could find anywhere to hide for a covert attack.”

  “Utter devastation?” Lucia asks.

  “Yes. You must prepare yourselves.

  “But we will be safe, I think, if we wear the masks the doctor gave us, and if we make haste. If we hurry, we can reach terrain untouched by the fireball by nightfall perhaps.

  “We must be resolute,” he urges them. “Try not to be downhearted by what you see.”

  They stand and stretch. Chandelier helps to raise Bird Girl’s head while Lucia slips the girl’s gas mask gently over her face. Then she puts on her own.

  The boy watches Candace put on hers. Then he and Harry help each other to fix the filmy masks carefully over their mouths and nostrils.

  They set off with the Outpacer in the lead, bearing Bird Girl in his arms. Inch by inch, they make their way along the perilous ledge, trying to accustom themselves to breathing normally with the masks in place.

  When at last they exit the cave, Chandelier’s eyes begin to smart. He might as well cry, he thinks, and so blur to some degree the appalling ruin all around them. There is nothing left; not the least skeleton of a leaf. The air has a nasty orange tinge. They tread carefully, trying to avoid spots where the ash is still dangerously hot. Chandelier is especially cautious, not wanting to burn his woven silk boots.

  It is a good thing that the masks make it so difficult for them to speak and hear each other clearly. For what could they say about this infinitely sad, immolated ground? To look at it, to think about it for any length of time, makes a hole in his brain into which twisted fiends rush, with faces he does not want to look upon.

  “Be resolute and of good cheer.” Whose voice does he hear? Harry’s? The Outpacer’s? Or is it Snake?

  Who would say — “Be of good cheer”?

  The boy begins to sing to himself under his mask as he walks, his hand beneath Harry’s elbow. He makes up his song in which the words “speranza” and “good cheer” intertwine. It seems to him sometimes, on their long trudge northward, that Snake sings along with him.

  Towards dusk, he hears the Outpacer cry out. “Just below us, in the valley — there, look. It is safe now. You can take off the masks.”

  Looking down where the Outpacer points, the boy sees his first fir trees. Their compelling shapes, like slope-shouldered beings with full bell-like skirts, make him want to laugh. This is the beginning of the north, he tells himself. He takes off his mask, wanting to speak this idea out loud and find out if he is right. But his lips are still numb, and he cannot make his mouth move properly. A wonderful scent fills his nostrils, which somehow makes the air brighter and wider. It is like an emerald song, he thinks. Essence of green. Snake will like this.

  “Only a little further,” the Outpacer encourages them. They move on, hungry and foot-sore, yet heartened by the sight of many more coniferous trees ahead. At last they reach a spot that the Outpacer judges to be safe and sheltered enough. Together they scoop up cedar boughs on which to lay Bird Girl. She is so unlike herself the boy does not like to look at her for long. An unmoving and silent Bird Girl is like Nature undone. He thinks again of
Snake, who had been present at the birth of time, and yearns for his guidance. But Snake does not come.

  Nor does Snake return when Chandelier assumes his turn at the night watch, sitting cross-legged at the girl’s side. Every few moments, he puts his ear near her mouth to assure himself she is still breathing. Whenever he hears a sound, he looks up, his muscles tensing, his hand ready to take up the thick cudgel that lies by him. He hears the Outpacer’s soft whistle which reassures him it is only their protector making his circuit.

  Chandelier feels the girl stir. She sits upright and looks about her wildly.

  “Lola!” How sore her throat sounds, he thinks. He offers her water, but she pushes his hand away. “Where?” she demands.

  He gets to his feet, intending to waken Lucia whom instinct tells him will be the better comforter. But Bird Girl grabs his wrist with a grip as forceful as it is unexpected. Her eyes lock on his and will not yield.

  “Where is Lola?” He hears the animal urgency in the question, and is frightened by the invisible claw marks her other hand tears in the air. How can he refuse her an answer when she so burns to know? Then he thinks: what if the answer kills her? But such a truth did not kill me that fiendish morning, he reasons. And Bird Girl is stronger than I.

  He kneels beside her and put his lips to her ear. He believes it will be less cruel to whisper Lola’s fate. As he breathes the words through the tendrils of Bird Girl’s hair, he feels her body stiffen. He is not ready for the inarticulate sounds that issue from some deep cavity inside the girl’s body. “Oh. Oh.” He recognizes his own voice weaving with hers in a plaintive song.

  Her head strikes him repeatedly in the chest. She pummels his back with her fists. He puts his arm round her, and she writhes against this offer of comfort, writhes against him as he too grimaces, his jaw clenched and his eyes screwed shut. She writhes and coils and strikes inside his grip as Snake might writhe if he were caught.

  And then he is there. “Kiss her,” Snake hisses. “Kiss her full on the mouth as you would kiss me if I were in agony.”

  The boy grasps the girl hard in his arms and does as he is told. Her lips are so dry, they rasp against his. He manages to moisten her mouth with his tongue. His tongue touches hers, and there is Snake. Chandelier recognizes his mesmerizing electric charge.

  And that is enough — Chandelier knows it was enough — to spell her into quietness for a time.

  She gestures for water and he raises the bottle to her mouth. She asks him to hold her.

  “Talk to me,” she pleads, as he hugs her tightly. “Tell me a story to stop me thinking for a while.”Chandelier tells her the story that is always foremost in his mind. He describes the Egg and why his father built it and what happened on that fateful morning.

  Bird Girl listens and asks only: “Why did your father call it the Egg?”

  And so Chandelier recounts the myth of origins that had captivated his father when he was himself a boy: “Night and the Wind made a cosmic egg, and out of that Egg came Eros, the god of Love, who carries the seeds of all things in his body.”

  Bird Girl does not laugh mockingly as the sewer people had when Chandelier told them this tale. They had held a knife to his ear lobe and throat. “Tell us a story, pale fright,” they said. “Amuse us, or we’ll cut you now.”

  He had told them and immediately felt unclean. Now the story seems to have found its right shape again. There is a gleaming place in his mind where it lives.

  “And the god’s wings?” Bird Girl prompts. “What were his wings like?”

  “They were as glorious as the tail feathers of the male peacock and as wide as world,” he tells her.

  She nods, as if this response makes perfect sense and is exactly what she expected. And she sleeps, her hand still clutching his.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Harry Finds a Theatre Box

  HARRY SLEPT BADLY, A WEIGHT OF doom upon his chest that was at times the Ancient Mariner’s slain albatross out of Coleridge’s poem, and at others the inert form of young Bird Girl. He woke often, a startled cry stopped in his throat, the smothering weight of the slaughtered bird of his nightmare hampering his breathing, its blood soaking through his shirt, making a gruesome band round his rib cage. This wetness was, he recognized on shaking himself properly awake, the sweat of fear. And because the night sky was coal-black without the least glint of starlight, and his every joint pained him, that pressure of doom upon his chest seemed to him the inescapable fate of all the world’s innocent creatures. The blood-stained, snowy white breast. Harpoon-struck. Arrow-struck.

  Although he is overjoyed to learn the girl spoke during the night to Chandelier, he still worries about the lingering effects of the poison. She is such a delicate-looking child. He yearns to pray. But because he has never been a conventionally religious man, he lacks the strict forms. He has done true obeisance only to the spirit of that place he cherishes most on earth: his beloved Antarctica of the Emerald Heart. So each time he wakes, it is her spirit he invokes: his Great Queen of the Southern Pole. He peers through the dark, to the spot near the fire where Chandelier sits, his thin frame taut as a bow, watching over the wounded girl. Harry whispers: “Is all well, boy?” And through the dark, catches the murmured “yes” he yearns to hear.

  Now, as the light of a new day breaks, and the pressure on his bladder grows intolerable, Harry realizes anew just how much he has come to rely upon the boy. Most particularly in the mornings, when the pain in his limbs rankles and his vision fogs, Harry finds Chandelier’s aid indispensable: the strong, young, supple body that bends so fluidly to help an old man to his feet; the willing hand cupped at his elbow as a gentle guide and reassurance; the sharp eyes that help him steer through underbrush and tangled branches to some place private enough where he can empty his bladder without indignity.

  Harry loathes the ignoble disguise of old age, and daily enumerates its most humiliating aspects to himself as a mantra that keeps his anger fierce, and his will primed.

  I hobble (on the best of days).

  I limp (on the worst).

  I stink.

  I dribble.

  I drool.

  My eyes exude gum like the amber sap of a fir tree.

  I am sometimes beset by tremors.

  I do not recognize my own flesh, which has grown thin and spotted.

  It hurts to piss.

  My spirit is not at home in this fumbling carapace.

  I did not think it would be like this.

  It hurts to piss.

  I am not this.

  I am not this.

  Once, he had a young body, lean and hard. On land, he was a runner. He had been a fighter too. He had to be. He abhorred sensualism. He did not eat the flesh of animals. His stomach turned at the sight of charred steaks, and plates piled high with pink-tipped ribs. Throughout his life, Harry had remained true to his own moral imperatives. He thought it wrong to slaughter beasts in order that he could eat. His vegetarianism is likely one of the chief reasons he is still alive. His years make him an oddity these days. He is eighty-eight. There are few in this apocalyptic time who make it to fifty.

  In the City, the most pitiless of the young had found his seamed face an affront. (Was there ever a time when to be old warranted respect? Was even to imagine such a time an old man’s folly?) In the urban streets, he had crossed paths with the Vigilantes for Beauty. They were succinct, these glossy, perfect children. He would grant them that. “Your ugliness offends me old man,” their leader said. He had prodded Harry’s chest with an iron bar.

  “It would please me to snuff you out,” the vigilante captain said. “You’re grotesque. Useless as a two-legged dog.”

  “Snuff away,” replied Old Harry. And there was the worst of it, his recognition that he would welcome immolation at the hands of this cruel and beauteous youth. Indeed, that he would welcome death at anyone’s hand.

  Even the young man’s gasoline can was an objet d’art. Against a background of black lacquer, d
ogs with sinuous bodies and long narrow heads sank their teeth into each other’s flanks. These dogs, Harry noted as the young man waved the can in front of his face, had all their legs.

  Harry closed his eyes and gritted those teeth he had left, readying himself for the pain. The first touch of flame, he speculated, might well stop his heart. He waited for the stench of the flung gas; the sound of the struck match. Which did not come. When he opened his eyes, the young vigilantes had gone.

  At that instant, Harry realized just how pathological was the City’s influence, and how his own will had sickened, exposed to this heartlessness. He had come to the City to seek a pension. He knew he was deserving. He had done long and faithful service, even if his employers had constantly ignored his findings. But by the time his savings ran out and he arrived in the City, he could not locate his former employers at all. Did such a department in such a ministry still exist? Was there indeed a government of any kind? And if there was not, then what agency was it that erected the sky-screens? Who was it that operated the omnipresent mechanical eyes that scrutinized every public toilet and alleyway, and the underground parking lots where hundreds slept nightly? Harry had taken shelter in one of these concrete bunkers where the concept of privacy was as archaic as the virtue of kindness. The stench of these places was unspeakable, but what could one expect with no running water and no means to dispose of human waste but purloined buckets?

  The irony was that he had come to the City in an effort to preserve his dignity. With a pension, he could purchase false teeth to replace those he had lost. He would be able to bite again into the tart-sweet flesh of apples, and chew properly the coarse-grained bread he loved. He wanted to purchase a cane, a sturdy companion with a hook carved to fit his hand and a stout rubber tip. He had reached that time in his life when he would soon require three legs in order to make his way through the world. The devastating confrontation with the Vigilantes for Beauty decided him. He would use what strength and mental acuity he had left to walk and keep on walking. He wanted to perambulate, to perform a plain and decent human act. This would help him exorcise the worst of the City’s malign influence, which had so undermined his spirit he had welcomed the chance to die. He could still walk, albeit slowly, and with pain as his constant taskmaster. He would make a decent progress toward the bracing north, and perhaps see again a silvery stand of birch.