Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Aya,” I said, and spun around onto my knees.

Russell put his hand on my shoulder, holding me down.

The girl began to heave, blowing forcefully from the back of her throat as though trying to clear it, until a glow became visible inside her mouth. I watched in horror as the glow became brighter and the brightness became defined, a single point. The Light emerged slowly from her mouth and hovered inches from the fleshy cave. I’d never seen one so close before, and I was terrified, appalled. No bigger than a pea, it seemed to be spinning, seemed to be composed somehow of even smaller swirling lights. I leaned away from it, from them, and looked over at Russell, whose entirely flat affect made me wonder if I was hallucinating.

“You see?” he said.

The Light receded back into Aya and disappeared, and within seconds the girl had closed her mouth and opened her eyes, and she stood there as though nothing had happened. I looked back at Russell. Everything had changed.

“They came to us,” he said. “They are detractors, and they’re on our side. We’re working together, do you understand? They’re risking everything to be here, and we let them in willingly. I have one inside me too.”

“Prove it!” I shouted.

“I wish I could. They won’t emerge until they trust you’ll let them back in. Children are easier to trust, it seems. Mine has not yet left me, but I’m working on it. I think we’re close.”

I stood up too quickly and felt lightheaded.

“You’re crazy,” I said. “You’re both crazy!”

I crouched down, steadied myself with a hand on the ground. And that’s when I saw them. All the kids I’d seen the day before now standing inside the room, some crowded at the door, watching. It was silent except for the birds, the water, the sound of a braking car.

“Please don’t be upset,” Russell said. “You’re with friends.”

I looked at the dirty children. I looked at Aya, at Russell. I looked across the water toward Ballard, toward my mother’s house, toward the writing room where I’d spent so many days staring out the window, daydreaming. My eyes filled with tears. My entire body was filled with a cold, clammy hatred, and on its heels an acute sense of relief flooded through me, flushing out the anger I’d felt a moment before. A prick of heat was born in my chest, a disturbance that vibrated muscle and bone, breathing life into me, whispering and whirring inside me like a tiny engine. It was keeping me alive. I was dead, and it was keeping me alive. Alice had been right. Fearless as a ghost, I reached up and began to unzip my mask.

A murmur swept through the crowd inside the house. Then shouts could be heard. A moment later, people were spilling out of the door and filling the yard, and from their midst emerged a man, spinning slowly, a pistol in his hand.

It was Mitch.

“Stay the fuck back, you vampires!” he yelled. “I won’t fucking hesitate to blow you cocksuckers away.”

Russell leapt up and grabbed Aya, pulling her behind him and taking a step back.

“Please don’t shoot,” he said. “We’re peaceful.”

Mitch walked up to Russell and put the gun in his face. “Peaceful people don’t kidnap, and they don’t fucking force aliens into other people’s bodies. I should blow you away.” But he didn’t. Instead, he looked at me and said, “Did you see a Light enter you?”

I was so startled it took me a moment to understand that he wanted a response.

“Did you actually see,” he said, “a Light physically go into your body?”

“No,” I said.

“Then don’t take off your suit.”

I dropped my hand.

“Now come with me. We’re getting out of here.”

I looked at Russell, whose face was still prepared to take a bullet, then took a step forward, stumbled, and Mitch reached out to offer me his arm. I grabbed it and walked with him through the throng and into the house, then slowly up the stairs and out front, where his car was still running. He opened the passenger door and helped me in. Moments later we were speeding back along the narrow roads leading to the Ballard Bridge.

Though alcohol pumped through my veins, I was buzzing from the terror of what I’d been through, the shock at realizing how close I’d come to surrendering myself. How quickly and easily I’d fallen under Russell’s spell, and under Aya’s — his secret weapon, his muse and perhaps even master. I felt profoundly embarrassed. What I’d mistaken as inevitable only moments before had been revealed to be nothing more than a cheap trick, and I had not even been involved in the revelation. I was as much a victim of salvation as I’d been of imminent demise. I rolled down the window and tried to vomit, but nothing came.

“Where are we going?” I managed to ask.

“Your mother will know what to do,” Mitch said. “She’s beyond the reach of those limp-dick hooligans, trust me.”

My mother. I thought of the sacrifice she’d made to get me in to see Blake and felt a swell of anger. Had I once, I wondered, been anything other than a nuisance to her since the evacuation? Had I done anything other than be another thing to worry about, to take care of? As we got closer I tried to picture her expression as I entered the house; I pictured her looking us up and down, noting Mitch’s lack of protection, noting my drunkenness; I saw her reaching for her phone to call in another favor. We turned onto 64th Street and in the distance I saw someone standing out front of my mother’s house. He was fully suited up but I could tell right away it was Kent.

“Stop the car,” I said.

Mitch pulled over. “Who is that?”

“It’s my brother. God damn it! My mother asked him to come rescue me.”

“Well, you could probably use the—”

“Let me think.”

As we sat there, some words from the poem I’d heard in my hallucination came back to me, came to me with a force I hadn’t felt when first hearing them through the liquid door: Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred . Yes, I thought, but to what did these portals lead? Did they lead to revelation or to destruction? And as one came closer to understanding their nature, was there still time to decide, to reverse your passage? My mother, I realized, was wrong. The power here was not in the not knowing, it was in the potential for action. Mitch was undoubtedly right: she would know what to do. My brother, too, would know what to do. But I was suddenly determined not to ask either one of them.

“I don’t want to get them involved,” I said. “Don’t you know anywhere else?”

Mitch looked at me askance.

“Well,” he said. “I’m headed north. But I can’t promise it’ll be safe.”

“Perfect,” I said, and I leaned my head against the window.

We drove through Ballard and through more remote Seattle neighborhoods and then suburbs and then exurbs and finally we were in farmland. Mitch was keeping off the highway, though it would have been faster, and I wondered if people would actually be looking for us. Did Russell have that much reach? Or was he working with Weyerhaeuser after all? I thought about our conversation, his insistence that we could escape the truth, the certainty in his voice, but before long the booze and the heat and the exhaustion caught up with me and my thoughts turned to images, and the images became indistinct, became colors, impressions, the soft sounds of the road. The important thing was that I was getting away from the Lights, away from Russell and his child wife, away from Alice and Zane, away from Blake, away from my mother and Kent — the important thing was that I was getting away from Seattle.

MY MASK was OFF when I woke up. We were driving through mountains. It was dawn. I hadn’t been this far from Seattle in years, so long that it seemed amazing to me that it was even possible. That you could simply decide to leave. I’d expected barricades, border control, a wall. To be turned back. A road like a Möbius strip that led to the underside of itself, until you traveled it again to arrive where you’d begun. Instead the city had released us, and this filled me with optimism about the journey ahead. Mitch too seemed to be in a good mood — his window was rolled down, his elbow jutting into the cool, thin, high-elevation air — and in the pregnant silence I even had the notion that he’d only moments ago been whistling. Sensing me awake, he looked over and winked.