Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

Maybe he should get up, walk around. Maybe that would help. Or maybe he should just sit and talk. Talking seemed to steady him. “I bet,” he said, “I bet it’s beautiful, y’know. Panama. Green mountains, jungle waterfalls. I bet there’s lots of birds. Macaws and parrots. Millions of ’em.”

“I suppose so.”

“And hummingbirds. This friend of mine was down there once on a hummingbird expedition, said there was a million kinds. I thought he was sort of a creep, y’know, for being into collecting hummingbirds.” He opened his eyes and had to close them again. “I guess I thought hummingbird collecting wasn’t very relevant to the big issues.”

“David?” Concern in her voice.

“I’m okay.” The smell of her perfume was more cloying than he remembered. “You get there by boat, right? Must be a pretty big boat. I’ve never been on a real boat, just this rowboat my uncle had. He used to take me fishing off Coney Island, we’d tie up to a buoy and catch all these poison fish. You shoulda seen some of ’em. Like mutants. Rainbow-colored eyes, weird growths all over. Scared the hell outta me to think about eating fish.”

“I had an uncle who…”

“I used to think about all the ones that must be down there too deep for us to catch. Giant blowfish, genius sharks, whales with hands. I’d see ’em swallowing the boat, I’d…”

“Calm down, David.” She kneaded the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He pushed her hand away; he did not need shivers along with everything else. “Lemme hear some more ’bout Panama.”

“I told you, I’ve never been there.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, how ’bout Costa Rica? You been to Costa Rica.” Sweat was popping out all over his body. Maybe he should go for a swim. He’d heard there were manatees in the Rio Dulce. “Ever seen a manatee?” he asked.

“David!”

She must have leaned close, because he could feel her heat spreading all through him, and he thought maybe that would help, smothering in her heat, heavy motion, get rid of this shakiness. He’d take her into that hammock and see just how hot she got. How hot she got, how hot she got. The words did a train rhythm in his head. Afraid to open his eyes, he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Bumped faces, searched for her mouth. Kissed her. She kissed back. His hand slipped up to cup a breast. Jesus, she felt good! She felt like salvation, like Panama, like what you fall into when you sleep.

But then it changed, changed slowly, so slowly that he didn’t notice until it was almost complete, and her tongue was squirming in his mouth, as thick and stupid as a snail’s foot, and her breast, oh shit, her breast was jiggling, trembling with the same wormy juices that were in his left hand. He pushed her off, opened his eyes. Saw crude-stitch eyelashes sewn to her cheeks. Lips parted, mouth full of bones. Blank face of meat. He got to his feet, pawing the air, wanting to rip down the film of ugliness that had settled over him.

“David?” She warped his name, gulping the syllables as if she were trying to swallow and talk at once.

Frog voice, devil voice.

He spun around, caught an eyeful of black sky and spiky trees and a pitted bone-knob moon trapped in a weave of branches. Dark warty shapes of the huts, doors into yellow flame with crooked shadow men inside. He blinked, shook his head. It wasn’t going away, it was real. What was this place? Not a village in Guatemala, naw, un-uh. He heard a strangled wildman grunt come from his throat, and he backed away, backed away from everything. She walked after him, croaking his name. Wig of black straw, dabs of shining jelly for eyes. Some of the shadow men were herky-jerking out of their doors, gathering behind her, talking about him in devil language. Long-legged licorice-skinned demons with drumbeat hearts, faceless nothings from the dimension of sickness. He backed another few steps.

“I can see you,” he said. “I know what you are.”

“It’s all right, David,” she said, and smiled.

Sure! She thought he was going to buy the smile, but he wasn’t fooled. He saw how it broke over her face the way something rotten melts through the bottom of a wet grocery sack after it’s been in the garbage for a week. Gloating smile of the Queen Devil Bitch. She had done this to him, had teamed up with the bad life in his hand and done witchy things to his head. Made him see down to the layer of shit-magic she lived in.

“I see you,” he said.

He tripped, went backward flailing, stumbling, and came out of it running toward the town.

Ferns whipped his legs, branches cut at his face. Webs of shadow fettered the trail, and the shrilling insects had the sound of a metal edge being honed. Up ahead, he spotted a big moonstruck tree standing by itself on a rise overlooking the water. A grandfather tree, a white magic tree. It summoned to him. He stopped beside it, sucking air. The moonlight cooled him off, drenched him with silver, and he understood the purpose of the tree. Fountain of whiteness in the dark wood, shining for him alone. He made a fist of his left hand. The thing inside the hand eeled frantically as if it knew what was coming. He studied the deeply grooved, mystic patterns of the bark and found the point of confluence. He steeled himself. Then he drove his fist into the trunk. Brilliant pain lanced up his arm, and he cried out. But he hit the tree again, hit it a third time. He held the hand tight against his body, muffling the pain. It was already swelling, becoming a knuckle-less cartoon hand; but nothing moved inside it. The riverbank, with its rustlings and shadows, no longer menaced him; it had been transformed into a place of ordinary lights, ordinary darks, and even the whiteness of the tree looked unmagically bright.

“David!” Debora’s voice, and not far off.

Part of him wanted to wait, to see whether or not she had changed for the innocent, for the ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and he set out running once again.

Mingolla caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side, and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those gleams it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high school, sex, and drugs, growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again, and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its process demystified and explicable. He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been dissolved, and nothing supported him: he was falling through the dark zones of the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of blood red and lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts. The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the wooden rail, just to feel something solid.

At the Club Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was lounging by the bar, staring into her drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of lavender smoke; when he walked up to the whore, she put on a professional smile and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off. “Where’s Gilbey?” he shouted. She gave him a befuddled look; then the light dawned. “Meengolla?” she said. He nodded. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. “Ees frawm Geel-bee,” she said. “Forr me, five dol-larrs.”