Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

In Martin’s truck, they found a coil of nylon rope, a wrench, a hammer and a large tarp. Lily knew these discoveries meant nothing. A handyman was bound to haul tools around with him, and yet when she reached for the tarp, her fingers touched something cold and wet, and she withdrew her hand as if it had been bitten.

Mabel was standing with her back to Lily, staring down the embankment that led to the creek. Under the road was a culvert, and Lily listened to the water resounding inside its metal walls. A train whistled in the distance, and cars hummed on the highway, but there was no sound of a person moving in the brush. Had Martin been close, Lily felt sure they would have heard him. Every cough, every stick that broke underfoot would sound in the relative stillness. Lily stood beside Mabel and looked down at the creek, where moonlight shone in hundreds of broken pieces on the moving water. It was light enough to see the fallen tree that crossed the creek like a bridge. That was where the water curved, and the bank was steep enough to make climbing difficult. The entrance to the caves lay a hundred feet beyond the fallen tree, and if you walked along the bank another quarter of a mile, you would wind your way to the Bodlers’, to where Lily had buried the shoes. It all seems so remote now, like I dreamed the whole thing, Lily said to herself, and looked down at Mabel whose sober face was lifted to the sky. “Orion,” she said and pointed.

Lily nodded and turned her head in the direction of her old house. She hadn’t been to look at it since the new people moved in. The man worked at 3M and the wife was a secretary at Grundhoffer and Lundqvist. They had three kids.

“Lily.” Mabel’s voice had an awed inflection. “What’s that?” She was pointing toward the creek bank, and when Lily looked, she saw that about a hundred yards away, not far from the fallen tree, a white form was floating slowly toward them. Exactly where it began and ended was hard to tell, because it trailed gauzy appendages that made no human sense. “What is it?” Mabel whispered.

Lily stared and shook her head. “It’s too far away.” But the impossible thing continued to come toward them, and in the seconds that followed, Lily shuttled between belief and disbelief. She saw an angel, and she saw a ghost, and she saw some mad version of the Holy Spirit floating in the woods, but as soon as she had named each one, she dismissed it and told herself it must be something else. She wanted to look at it, and she wanted to run from it, but when the thing emerged from the black shadows of the trees and stopped beside the creek in a place where the moon shone down on it, and Lily saw wings, huge transparent wings like an insect’s, she grabbed Mabel’s hand and pulled her across the road and down the bank to the other side of the culvert. She felt she would be safe inside the big metal tube and still be able to look at the creature. Lily dropped Mabel’s hand, grabbed the metal ribs of the culvert and sought a toehold with her boots on the large metal screws just above the waterline.

“I’m going in. You stay here,” Lily said to Mabel. Inside the culvert, the noise of the moving water echoed terribly. Her cowboy boots slipped twice and Lily could feel water seeping through the leather soles.

Mabel spoke behind her, and her voice bounced off the walls. “It’s Martin, Lily. He’s carrying something.” The echo came as a series of three repetitions, each fainter than the one before — but Lily knew even without seeing it clearly for herself that Mabel had to be right. Leaning forward to peer through the round opening of the culvert, Lily identified Martin’s pale hair and oval face in a cloud of white netting. Because he was much closer now, Lily could see that the four wings must have been part of Cobweb’s costume. They were so thin that they shook slightly in the wind. Then Lily understood that what had looked like an interruption in his body was a long, dark bundle he was carrying in his arms. She heard Mabel breathing behind her and turned her head. The woman had slid into the culvert herself and was half standing, half sitting against its curved wall. She held herself there with shaking arms and legs, and because she didn’t dare to let go, she motioned violently with her head toward the outside bank where they had come in. But Lily ignored the signal and turned back to Martin. He stepped into the water, and as he crossed the creek with his burden, his features took on an eerie definition in the light — his eyes stood out and his lips seemed unnaturally red. And then through the tarp or blanket Lily recognized the limp form of a person, the shape of knees over Martin’s arm, sagging buttocks and a covered head falling backward over his other arm. She choked back a cry and heard herself grunt instead, and that gagging sound echoed. Martin stopped. He looked straight into the culvert. He sees us, Lily thought. He must see us. Her hands slipped then, but she caught herself and saw Martin wiggle his shoulders to adjust the body in his arms, and the blanket slipped. In that second, no more than a second, Lily saw the girl’s head uncovered, her small, beautiful face and her long, dark hair falling over Martin’s arm. The stillness of that body was absolute, and Lily screamed. The echo was terrible, and while it was still reverberating off the walls, Mabel fell. When she heard the splash, Lily lost her footing and slid down the ribbed wall of the culvert into the cold creek water. She stood up, slipped again on the wet metal bottom and screamed again. The sound bouncing inside the walls was like a third person in there with her, a shrieking lunatic, and then Mabel was shrieking, too. Lily lunged toward her. She could see Mabel’s head above water moving downstream. Lily planted her feet on the culvert floor and braced herself. The water was only thigh deep, but the current pushed her forward, and she struggled to keep her balance. There was no question of swimming. Mabel had been dragged outside the culvert now, and Lily was forced to walk toward her at a maddenly slow pace, but once she found herself out of that tunnel, she threw herself toward Mabel. Her knee hit a stone on the creek bed and she cried out as she grabbed what must have been Mabel’s elbow, reached for the woman under her arms and pulled her up. “Lily,” Mabel said. Lily pulled the woman onto the bank, and with Mabel’s small, heavy head against her chest, Lily listened to the sound of Martin driving away in his truck.

Lily gasped for air. The wind felt cold on her wet clothes and the tall grass made her arms itch. She heard the high noise of mosquitoes in the grass.

“My ankle,” Mabel said. She bent over and pulled up her pant’s leg. Lily noticed that Mabel was wearing little ballet flats with no socks. The sky had darkened, and even when she bent close to Mabel’s leg, she couldn’t see enough to figure out what had happened to it.

Every movement Lily made after that seemed to occur in another kind of time. Seconds, minutes, hours went haywire. She couldn’t begin to guess how long it took to get from one place to another. But she helped Mabel to the car, settled her into the passenger seat and examined the ankle with the door open for light. A bloody gash ran from the ankle bone up the shin, and the joint had already begun to swell and discolor. Mabel’s face had turned gray-white, and her lips were tinged with blue. Lily had never seen Mabel with wet hair plastered against her head, and the absence of the familiar light wisps of hair that softened the old face gave her the appearance of another person. Shivering uncontrollably, Mabel said, “There’s a blanket in the trunk.” Her teeth chattered audibly. Then she said, “This is ridiculous,” and laughed. “Absolutely ridiculous.” When Lily looked at the woman’s glassy green eyes, she wondered if Mabel was about to go into shock.