Lucia's Masks Page 5

  The only landscapes the boy knew growing up were the murals decorating the maze of corridors connecting the various functional areas inside the dome. He walked through the wet lushness and serpentine vines of a painted rain forest on the way to his bedroom. He saw the shimmer of a tranquil silver sea (outside his mother’s dressing room); and the sharp visual clamour of granite cliffs thronged with gannets (the wall of his father’s library). He knew too the melancholy stubble of a newly shorn hay field, the bales heaped and rounded, and rimmed with heat. He imagined their warmth when he traced the thick yellow of those bales with his fingertip. He touched the blue-painted swathe above the mown field and said “sky” to himself.

  But “sky” remained an abstraction for the child. Until that fatal day when the dome of the fortress cracked like a fissure in a gigantic ice-floe, and he was flung into the world by the force of an enormous explosion. The Egg was built to withstand floods and all types of poison gas and germ warfare. Its entrances and exits were so well concealed that not even a master engineer or a genuinely gifted psychic could spy them out. But the boy’s father had neglected to consider the brute force of dynamite. He was so besotted with the uncluttered form of his creation that the possibility of its wanton destruction never occurred to him.

  Just before the blast, the boy was well into his morning run around the track built right inside the Egg’s perimeter. He had the good fortune, or supreme misfortune as he often thought afterwards, to be much farther away from the main force of the explosion than were his parents. First he heard the wall beside him shatter. Next he was briefly aware of flying beyond the Egg’s confines and up into the air. Then he plunged down into the lake whose waters had supplied the basic plumbing needs of the Egg. He immediately began to swim, using the strong breaststroke his father had taught him. His lungs felt like small bellows that had been set on fire. The smell and taste and look of the world — all so alien — dizzied and disoriented him.

  He flew out of the smashed Egg and survived, brimful of knowledge. Over the course of his fourteen years, living in total seclusion with his parents in their fortress, he had absorbed vast amounts of fact and wisdom from his father’s libraries. He held in his head much of the best that human beings had thought and written down over thousands of years. But at that instant on that dire morning, with his parents and the only home he had ever known blown to pieces, he could not even recall his own name.

  In the lake, whose frigid cold assaulted his flesh, he kept swimming, urged on by his body’s desperate need to survive, despite the ominous questions that throbbed in his head. What had happened? Where were his parents?

  By the time he reached shore, he was exhausted and disoriented. He looked up, dazed. The sight of the endless blue vault above him made his gut coil in on itself. The boy saw the sky and vomited and then could look no more. He crawled on his belly. I am Snake, he thought. Snake.

  Of all earth’s species, the boy loved reptiles and amphibians best. He had virtually to heart all the volumes of his father’s library devoted to lizards, snakes and tortoises. He had never seen an actual snake or a lizard or a tortoise. But he identified instinctively with a belly that constantly kissed the earth in what he saw as a holy embrace; and a hugging tight to the ground on which all human life began. I am hugging tight, he thought, as he propelled himself on his elbows and knees toward the open door of a rusted Quonset hut. I am Snake, he told himself. Snake making his way toward his hole, where he can wrap himself in that soft, waiting gloom. The shadows will soothe my hurt. Snake will be healed in the darkness.

  He kept his eyes squeezed shut against the mass of hard sapphire above him. Sky, he thought. And then tried not to think. Sky still watched him, pinned him to the ground with its tack-sharp brightness. And tried to swallow him. Yes, swallow him with its boundless hunger. The boy had tasted infinity and found it vile. Later it was Snake who helped him cope with this aversion too. Or rather, an image of Snake that the boy pulled up from the deep well of story-pictures stored in his spine. Salvation came through Snake-as-Circle. Snake-with-his-tail-in-his-mouth. Snake had many marvellous shapes.

  The boy slept some hours in the Quonset hut. He woke sporadically and felt his body swoop sickeningly. There were stars in his head and he understood these to be the close companions of his pain because they flashed simultaneously with the jabs and spasms along the edge of his nerves. Then he willed Sleep to come: sweet-faced Morpheus in his swirling cloak of scented smoke, who pressed crimson poppy petals to his lips and eyelids. Morpheus, who had never yet failed him, sent him drifting down into a yielding oblivion.

  He did not know then that his power to summon mythic presences was rare. He was a chordate, and the mythic beings slumbered in his spine. He knew them to be that close. His father had taught him how to exploit this most human capacity

  When he woke, sky was a trumpet. Someone, he thought, had set an orange ball on fire and rolled it across Sky. This blazing orange was trumpeting. A blast in his head harsh and fierce. An arrow in his eye. Sky, he saw, had many guises. Sky would always ambush him with some new and frightening face.

  He crawled out of the Quonset hut on his belly, under a sky that was now a heaped and angry pyre concentrated in the east. I will be thrown upon that pyre, he thought. I will be consumed. I will crumple like ash. So he moved faster, still on his hands and knees, back toward the wrecked dome that had once been his home. The stench over the remains of the fortress burned his nostrils and made his eyes water. For this reason he did not at first recognize the clammy object his fingers brushed against as he groped through the rubble.

  When his vision cleared he saw the white, once-living thing for what it was. The jolt that went through his body was every bit as brutal as when the blast had hurled him out of the Egg. He knew this thing and he did not know this thing. It was a severed human hand, ragged and red around the wrist, like bleeding meat. The top two joints of the middle finger were missing, the knuckle healed over in a puckered stump. This was the shape of his father’s hand as the boy had always known it.

  He retched as a sick fear swept from his belly to his brain. He put his head to his knees and dug into the hot earth. He flinched as his fingers encountered something hard and smooth and instinctively he gripped the thing and pulled it out of the debris. He studied the object in his hand, with its base of pale green stone mounted with a little metal paddle, and saw that it was streaked with blood. He realized the blood was his father’s and that this was probably the last thing in life his father had touched. But the boy could no longer remember what this tool or instrument or artifact was. He could not fathom its purpose. He knew only that this thing belonged to his father and that he must keep it safe. So he thrust it deep in his pocket.

  He forced himself to look again to his left, where the dismembered hand still lay. And in a spot where the reeking smoke had cleared, he saw what no child ought ever to see: the headless corpse of his father.

  The shock left his mouth dry. He felt his testicles shrink and retract inside his body. Then his legs went numb. He was overcome by foolish, childish thoughts. I will search for the pieces of his body and put them back together, he told himself. I will breathe new life into him. A part of his brain recognized that these notions were completely mad. And then a new anxiety assailed him, that he might be driven insane by what he saw here. This had happened to his mother long ago, when her sanity had been undone by evil-doers in the world outside the Egg who hurt her so badly that parts of her froze inside. So his father had explained to him his mother’s apparent coldness and self-absorption. In the Egg, she spent most of her time immersed in her Renaissance art books with their colour plates and tiny script. His mother could not touch him. She did not like him to touch her. His visits with her often left him unbearably sad. Was that why this awful thing had happened to them?

  The boy was aware that the sight of his father’s corpse had muddied and slowed his thoughts and that he was probably in the state known as “shock.” His
mind must be in turmoil, he told himself, compounded by grief and extreme fear. He was trying to be stoical and rational, as his father had taught him. The boy also knew he must seek his mother, regardless of what he found. She might still be alive, although he had no idea how he would cope or help her if she were badly wounded. He could strip off his clothes, he thought. He could make a tourniquet. He could call on Snake.

  He got up slowly and quietly and surveyed the devastation to his right. What he saw brought him to his knees and shaped the word “horror” in his head. Only that single word, with its two vowels yawning like the gulfs of hell. In books in the Egg the boy had seen enough depictions of Hell’s busy landscapes to know what the monsters did to their victims, the proddings and roastings and unholy meals. His father had reassured him that these visions were not real. But the boy knew his father lied. He had a natural gift for spying out the comforting untruth. He understood that such lies enable humans to endure what is unendurable.

  In a space where the smoke cleared, the boy saw three beasts doing something to his mother’s body that his mind simply could not bear. The sight sent a burning wire sizzling through his brain. Then a darkness mushroomed inside his skull. All he could see was a branching path in his head, flashing its urgent message. Fight or run. Could he fall upon the three monsters and save his mother? He was a slender boy of fourteen, only recently emerged from the Egg. He was unused to this world’s air which drained the strength from his limbs. His nerves calculated his chances. He swallowed the vomit in his gorge and ran.

  Then Snake was with him again, whispering his urgent counsel. “Go,” Snake urged him. “Back to the hut!” The boy ran, a greedy self-love driving him on. In the rush of adrenalin that his lust for survival unleashed, the image of those dark figures at their foul work was for the moment obliterated.

  Once again inside the Quonset hut, he collapsed and curled in on himself. He wanted oblivion and it eluded him. Part of him wanted death. He could not understand why he had been spared. Rational thought was agony but so too were the wounds that grief and wretchedness had torn open in his soul. He wanted to answer that sharp-toothed grief by tearing out his hair, and by wailing. Yes, he wanted to howl. Like the old king in Shakespeare’s play, half-naked on the heath, cursing the very mould that made the human form. An adolescent boy just out of the Egg, he understood — as he had thought never to understand — why an absolute hatred for humankind was justified. This must, he thought, with mounting dread and self-loathing, include himself. To be human was to be complicit in the deeds of those murderers who now crept and poked through the ruin they had made. What option had he but to howl, or slash at his face and chest with his nails? But even as he parted his lips to wail (which was an effort, because already they were parched and sore), Snake was at his ear. “Be silent,” Snake whispered. “Be silent, or you too will die.”

  There was a split second when the boy’s decision hung in the balance. Why not embrace death? Why not join his mother and his father?

  You still have me, foolish boy. Now do exactly as I say.

  What Snake told him was to eat some clay from the dirt floor of the Quonset hut. The boy followed through, absurd and unsavoury as the instruction seemed. He dug into the earth with both hands and let the clammy substance ooze out between his fingers. Then he did as he was bid, squatting on his haunches in the half-dark. He ate of the clay, sparingly as instinct dictated, and the business of chewing and tasting soothed him and kept him silent. He fancied too, there was a power in the clay, telluric and mysterious, that steadied him and neutralized his rage and craven panic. Was it also a soporific? — for against all reason, he slept.

  When he woke some hours later there was a bitter taste in his mouth and an unpleasant grittiness between his teeth. He got up and peered out the hut’s one window. As he counted the columns of smoke, the boy understood what a filthy temple the evil-doers had made. While he slept the fire had reduced his entire known world to ash. A thin blood-red line kept pulsing in his brain as he tried to absorb the fact he was now an orphan, cut off forever from the roots of his own flesh. He fell to his knees, with his face pressed into the clay floor.

  “Eat,” Snake prompted him. So the boy chewed and spat, and chewed and spat, and the repetitive action comforted him a little. He began to weave himself a tale, to dispel fright and beguile time, as he had so often done in the Egg. He told himself he was new-made (for what other choice did he have?); that he was forged like the first man and first woman in stories of the world’s beginnings. He knew he needed a life myth to drive him on, and to protect him from the brazenly cruel beings who would see him as tender and untried, ripe for tormenting, or for murder. I am new-made, he told himself, as he stripped off his clothes and coated his entire body and face with a layer of clay. Then he stood in the centre of the Quonset hut, arms stretched out and legs wide apart, letting his new skin dry.

  He dressed again slowly, to keep his clay covering intact and because his hands were trembling. “Time to run,” said Snake.

  Sheer act of will got the boy to the hut door and beyond. Once outside, his eyes smarted. His knees buckled despite his best efforts. “Quickly,” said Snake. “Hurry!” Snake’s tongue lashed inside the boy’s ear to spur him on, far from the demons who still rummaged amongst the ruins. Were they cannibals? The boy was unsure. Snake said, “Do not look. To look would drive you mad.”

  In this way the boy eluded madness and certain death. The wet clay of the earth and his loyal companion, Snake, were his saviours.

  The boy ran for hours until at last he fell gasping at the foot of a massive oak, his small lungs aching, his breath like flame in his throat. As soon as he collapsed, the Hell-scape of the ruined Egg returned to torture him again. He saw his father’s dear, severed hand, and the villains’ obscene use of his mother’s body. He answered this torment in the only way he knew how; by grinding his forehead into the bark of the oak, lacerating his cheeks, and rubbing his chin raw. He wanted to flay himself, send up a bloody prayer and expiate what he feared was his cowardice. He yearned to find a way to lament all he had lost, including his innocence.

  The oak was the first tree of substance he had ever encountered, and he saw it as the instrument of his punishment. Later, as he made his way through the living forest, begging Night to smother the pictures in his head, he believed he loathed all these tree-things with their insidious whispering leaves and rocking boughs. Mocking him. Their mesh of branches raked and twisted, stirring the air to create a song that struck him as both cruel and deranged. He feared this mad song of swishing branches and air would undo his struggle to stay sane. He recognized the source of this song. It was the question that would have the power to torment him all his life. Was she already dead? Was his mother dead when those devil-men did those things to her?

  He willed himself to walk rapidly through the swirling wood. All the while the blood oozing from his wounds congealed. By morning he made a piteous sight. A woman who saw him screamed. She was one of the nomadic People of the Silk who named themselves for the tents in which they lived, made of parachute silk. They cherished this silk. If ever it was ripped, they experienced the rent as a sharp pain under the breastbone. This was why the Seamstress was the chief of their tribe. Her stitching had the delicacy of a moth’s wing. She healed wounds in silk.

  The boy’s first sight of the row of tents was at dawn. The sheer fabric drank down the sunrise’s amber and ashes of roses. So tautly was the silk fastened to the frames and to the ground that the fabric vibrated in its confinement. He saw the triangular tents as live, pure forms, rimmed in palest fire. Briefly he was lifted aloft on their dazzling points. They danced in his mind’s eye and he with them. The dance cleared a blessed space. There was, for a moment, no ruined Egg and no horrific spillage.

  Until a woman screamed. What she saw was a refugee from that Hell-scape he had fled. He was white as paper, streaked with gore. The woman saw a death’s head who came as a harbinger of plague.


  A second woman appeared: Miriam, the camp’s healer. With her was a huge man who made the boy think of the stories of Goliath and of Enkidu. This giant came at him, shaking his fists and growling. The boy had no strength to run. Kill me, he thought. I am emptied now of everything. Then he felt the woman’s arms around him and he began to shake. He heard her shouting, but not at him. She was telling the giant to go away.

  Miriam took the boy into her tent, where he still could not stop shaking. His teeth struck each other so sharply she feared he was having a fit. She lay down with him, and drew him in toward her so that his head was cradled between her soft breasts. She was happy to cradle him and bring him comfort.

  In her City life, Miriam had been a midwife, and had forsaken her profession because twice she had to kill the life she helped to deliver. She had acted swiftly, pressing a cloth soaked in chloroform to what would have been a face, had the child (but was it a child?) had features. In both cases, there were no eyes, no ears, no nostrils. Miriam was a woman of finely honed compassion. She told herself it was mercy guiding her murderous hand. She imagined the life these beings would have, and knew she had no choice but to save them from their own futures. She buried the bodies with same dispatch she had extinguished their breath and told the mothers comforting lies of stillbirths. Then she turned her back on the City forever. She walked until her feet bled. Her guilt was a rancid stink that clung to her. She was distraught and near despair.

  One morning she had come upon the clean array of the tents, with their luminous membrane-thin silk shuddering in the breeze. The flap of the central tent was pinned back. Miriam was drawn to the enfolding dusk of its interior. It was as if she were mesmerized by the heart of a jewel. In this tent the Seamstress was waiting. Miriam bowed at her feet. When the Seamstress’s hands cupped her head, she felt the full force of a blessing that cancelled her guilt. When she stood up, she had no doubt as to her role. She would be the camp’s healer. Her skills would flower among the People of the Silk.