Каарон Уоррен - The Lowest Heaven

I didn’t really know how to think about any of this. We weren’t used to thinking in the future tense.

We drove home without speaking, nothing to say to each other, not needing to. It was taking everything I had not to go over the speed limit, in any case.

The house was unlit and felt so quiet as we entered that my heart cramped again in terror.

Jan called up the stairs, “Daisy?”

Then we saw that there was a light on in the house after all; a dim, amber-pink glow, like a child’s night-light, or a Jack-o’-Lantern.

Daisy was standing in the living room. She was still wearing the nightdress we’d last seen her in. For a moment I began to be angry◦– what the hell was Emma from next door thinking, leaving her alone, not even getting her dressed?

Beside me, Jan gasped.

The light was coming from under Daisy’s skin. Light padded the cruel spaces between her ribs, limned the bones of her limbs, glowed softly from between her vertebrae.

She looking out of the window. She was so still she might have been there for hours. She didn’t, for several long seconds, seem to notice we were there. Then she looked at us. The light was a faint warm shimmer in the sparse flesh of her cheeks, the hollows of her throat. She smiled.

The light was noticeably brighter by the time we got her to hospital. Her fingers were like filaments. Her skull was a hot coal.

One of the physicists from the lab we’d robbed came to see what we’d done. Jan glowered defensively at her as if she was somehow the one to wrong us. The woman was too fascinated by Daisy to notice. She didn’t have, or didn’t feel the need to exercise, the capacity for masking astonishment that the doctors had. She clapped a hand to her mouth at the sight of our daughter and whispered “ God .”

Daisy didn’t mind. Daisy, who used to whine heartily about being poked and prodded by doctors, who always used to look away when they stuck her with needles, didn’t so much as wince as they drew vial after vial of glowing blood; just sat and smiled gently into space as if she didn’t feel it.

Or stood and smiled, rather. She’d sit down when asked to, but with an air of faint puzzlement, and when left alone she’d quietly rise again like a helium balloon that had been briefly held down. She’d stand, motionless, silent unless spoken to. (Sometimes unless spoken to several times). Sometimes she’d raise a hand in front of her face and stare at it, enraptured.

Blood tests were about all that was even possible. The light inside her blinded x-rays, MRIs, endoscopes.

“The light seems to be treating her cellular structure as a lattice,” said the scientist from the institute, somehow almost reverent and a little sour at the same time. “It goes without saying this wasn’t an anticipated effect.”

All of which only served to confirm what you could see with your eyes; Daisy’s flesh was turning into solidified light.

“But can you stop it?” Jan asked, breathless.

Daisy looked away from the square of blue sky outside the window for the first time in an hour. She asked, “Why would you want to stop it?”

We agreed to leave her in hospital overnight. We drove home; not speaking, and it occurred to me that for once I didn’t know what Jan was thinking.

The hospital rang at three in the morning in an apologetic panic. Daisy was gone. She’d had to be coaxed back into bed several times after being found standing motionless at the foot of her bed. Then when the nurses’ backs were turned, she’d wandered out.

“For God’s sake, how hard can she be to find?” I demanded, terrified at the thought of our horribly frail sixteen-year-old wandering the streets in nothing but a hospital gown. “She glows .”

But it wasn’t until eight in the morning that the police did find her; Daisy had walked out of the fields onto a motorway eighteen miles from the hospital. She had caused a car crash in which thankfully no one was seriously hurt.

The police wrapped her in blankets which Daisy unobtrusively pushed off, and drove her back to us.

“What on earth were you thinking?” Jan shouted at her. “Don’t you know how worried we were?”

Daisy stood serene as architecture.

“Say something, for Christ’s sake! The nerve of it, just standing there!”

“I didn’t need to be there,” said Daisy. “I’m not ill any more.”

“Where were you going, Daisy?” I asked.

Daisy smiled, the brightness of it self-contained and private. “Home.”

But she’d been walking east and we lived in the opposite direction.

The light began to exude from our daughter’s skin, leaking like sweat from her pores. When she was at home she left smudged fingerprints glowing on walls and banisters. Light soaked from her skin into her bedclothes and wouldn’t wash out.

There were even streaks of light in the toilet bowl, for God’s sake.

Her hair fell out. She didn’t care. The light poured from her naked scalp.

She stopped wearing clothes. You could see her body through them anyway and she never felt cold.

(Jan found the daisy-chain necklace, stained with light, discarded in a corner. )

It was no longer possible to see her expression. She didn’t◦– of course◦– cast any shadow.

It was the brightest day of the summer so far. Daisy was, as she said she had been that first day, standing in the garden. Between her and the sun I could barely see a thing. The concrete tiles blazed white. Squinting, I could make out that Daisy’s arms were still raised above her head; she’d been holding them like that for impossibly long, utterly still, without even a tremor.

“What are you doing?” I asked, but she didn’t seem to notice I’d spoken.

I rubbed my eyes and tried to look at her again.

Her face was upturned, her lips parted in that secret rapture. Her eyes open.

“Daisy!” I grabbed for her. “You’ll blind yourself◦– !” I tried to clap my hand over her eyes, but her skin was so hot I let go.

“I’m not blind,” said Daisy, dreamily. “I can see everything.”

I went back into the house. Black spots danced in front of my eyes, after all that light.

I heard screaming. Jan, yelling my name, and Daisy –

“No. No, you can’t. No!” Daisy sounded◦– almost◦– like her old self in a tantrum, screaming, stamping, slamming doors. Though actually, the one who was acting like that was Jan, who as I ran into the room was in the act of elbowing Daisy out of the way so as to slam the French doors shut, before trying to wrestle her onto the sofa and contain her in the duvet from her bed.

“Close the curtains!” she roared at me.

“What?”

“Close them!”

I did. I knew, really, what she was thinking, felt the same surge of furious hope that perhaps it would work.

Daisy wailed.

“The more you’re out in the light the more you change!” Jan shouted. ”What’s going to happen when there’s nothing left of you but light? You need darkness .”

“You can’t!”

“Help me get her upstairs,” said Jan grimly. “We’ll have to fit shutters on the window.”

“You can’t,” sobbed Daisy, although it wasn’t exactly sobbing, I don’t think she could cry by now. “I’ll get out! You know I’ll always get out!”

I looked at her, her face invisible in the light, her body glowing dangerously through the duvet.

I thought of the mud she tracked through the house when she was ten, twelve; the diaries she bought and didn’t write in, how small she looked when she first caught a bus by herself.

I didn’t let go of her but I loosened my hold a bit. “Daisy” I asked. “Would you go back to the way you were before◦– not when you were ill, of course, but before that?”