Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

I killed the flashlight and headed for the front of the house. I clutched the boat hook as tightly as I could, and edged toward the steps.

A figure stood in a pool of light by the open door.

“Hello,” he whispered.

He was a good six inches taller than me, broad shouldered and muscular, his face gaunt, clean shaven. He wore a brown tweed jacket with frayed sleeves, wool pants tucked into gumboots, a white cotton shirt pocked with tiny holes. His white hair hung in two long, tight braids to his chest. Around his neck was a heavy silver disk inlaid with turquoise and threaded on a leather thong.

He said, “Are you looking for someone?”

He had the face of an aging WASP ecstatic, with high cheekbones and deepset eyes, wide mouth, sharp nose. I felt sucker punched, not just by his beauty but by the sudden dreamlike sense that I knew him, that this had happened already and something—drugs, drink, my own slow spin into bad craziness—had kept me from seeing the obvious.

Then he lifted his head, and I knew.

He had eyes the color of dark topaz. In the left one, just below the iris, was a spray of green pigment like a tiny star.

Stephen Haselton wasn’t Gryffin’s father. Denny Ahearn was.

No one had bothered to tell me. And of course I had never asked.

“I—yeah,” I stammered. “I’m, uh—are you Denny? I’m a friend of Toby Barrett’s.”

“Toby.” He repeated the name in a whisper; a cultivated voice, less Maine than Boston Brahmin. His big hands shook in a slight palsy as he looked past me into the rain. “Is Toby here?”

“He’s—he’s on his way. He had to do something at Lucien’s house.” I remembered Aphrodite’s death, and nausea gave way to a rush of adrenaline. “We—I—have a message for you.”

“Come in out of the rain.” He held up a hand. “But you must leave your staff outside.”

He pointed at the boat hook. I hesitated, then leaned it beside the door.

“You’re a friend of Toby’s?”

I nodded. He bent over a stack of firewood beside the door, picked up three enormous logs as though they were made of Styrofoam.

“I thought he closed up the house a few weeks ago,” he said and straightened. “I wasn’t expecting him.” He stared at me, licked his lips, then whispered, “And you are…?”

“Cass.” My voice broke. “Cassandra Neary.”

“Cassandra Neary?”

His mouth parted in a smile. My skin prickled. There was a dark blue line along his upper and lower gums, as though he’d outlined them in indigo Magic Marker.

“Please, please—come in,” he whispered. He stood aside so I could pass.

Everywhere were mirrors. Big mirrors, small mirrors, beveled mirrors in gilded frames, tiny compacts and those big convex eyes you see at the end of driveways. They covered the walls and hung from every corner. Mirrors, and hundreds of snapping turtle shells. Music played on a turntable, Pink Floyd, “Set Your Controls for the Heart of the Sun.” A hurricane lamp was the only illumination.

“This is where I live.” Denny dropped the logs beside a woodstove, then gestured at the ceiling. “Do you see?”

The ceiling was covered with CDs, silver side down so that I stared at my own reflected face in hundreds of flickering eyes.

“From AOL,” he explained. “I go to the post office in Burnt Harbor a few times a year. They always have lots of them. Do you know what a dream catcher is? Those are light catchers.”

He stared at me, mouth split in that awful livid smile. He tilted his head to gaze at the ceiling, and his face reflected beside mine in those myriad eyes.

“I see you,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “I see you too.”

I crossed the room. On one wall hung a turtle shell the size and shape of a shield, painted with two almond-shaped eyes. A carefully drawn green star gleamed in one of them.

“They’re sacred,” said Denny. He picked up a small snapping turtle shell. His palsied hands trembled as he touched it to his forehead, reverently. “All turtles, but especially these.”

I noticed that the turquoise in the silver disk he wore was carved in the shape of a turtle. I said, “They—they must mean something.”

He nodded. “The turtle is the bridge between worlds, earth and sky. They carry the dead on their backs. It’s my totem animal.”

“You chose it?”

“No. It chose me.”

“Where do you find them?”

He replaced the little shell on a table covered with others just like it. All faced the same way, to where a 8x10 was propped against a piece of driftwood, a faded black-and-white photo of a beautiful young man, long haired, smiling. His arms were around a fresh-faced girl in a much-patched denim shirt covered with embroidery, her dark hair falling into her eyes. She gazed at him with such unabashed joy that I had to turn away.

“They live in the quarries here,” whispered Denny. “Lakes and quarries and swamps. They eat the dead, did you know that? So that they can be reborn.”

I glanced around. I didn’t know what would be worse—to see some sign that Kenzie had been here, or not.

There was a sofa and armchair, a few tables, an old turntable and rows of LPs. A wooden drying rack hung above the woodstove. Tucked into a corner was a propane-fueled refrigerator, a slate sink with an old-fashioned hand pump. A stale smell hung over everything, sweat and marijuana mingled with woodsmoke and the underlying stink of fish and musk.

There were lots of books. Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda, Terence McKenna. The Whole Earth Catalog, the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Photography books. A copy of Deceptio Visus . I opened it and saw Aphrodite’s elegantly penned inscription inside.

For Denny, who longs to see the Mysteries

With love from One who knows Them

There were other photography books, and numerous tomes on folklore and anthropology—including, of course, The Sacred and The Profane . I picked it up.

“You know that book,” said Denny. It wasn’t a question.

He touched the volume with a trembling hand. His fingertips were dark pink, as though they’d been dyed.

“To emerge from the belly of a monster is to be reborn,” he whispered. “The beloved passes from one realm to the next and is devoured to be reborn. When I found her they had been at her already for a week. But there is no death. You understand that. I always knew that you understood.”

He bared his teeth again in that blue-veined smile. “I told him to send you. Because you’re the girl who shoots dead things. So I knew you would come.”

He lifted a shaking hand and pointed to another book. As though sleepwalking, I knelt and drew it from the shelf.

DEAD GIRLS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CASSANDRA NEARY

The pages were soiled and worn from being pored over. I turned them slowly, while Denny stood above me and watched.

“Hannah gave me that,” he whispered. “As a present. She thought it was better than Aphrodite’s book.”

I stared at all those portraits of my twenty-year-old self, all those speed-fueled pictures of my friends. On every page, in every one, he’d effaced the eyes with White-Out then drawn another pair with a tiny green star in each.

I turned to the last page. There, beneath the Runway colophon and a small black-and-white photo of me in torn jeans and T-shirt, were three carefully formed letters in black ballpoint ink.

I C U

I fought to catch my breath. What I felt was so beyond damage it was like a new color, something so dark and terrible it left no room for sight or sound or taste.

I put the book back on the shelf and stood. Denny stared at me. His eyes shone, childlike.

“I’m a photographer too,” he said.