Apricot brandy (24 page)

Because, from the moment of my picturing the deed that Black proposed, it was as if I stood already there, at the rim of that big watery grave, which held a thousand years of dead in its silty bottom. It was as if I stood there already and I felt its cold green breath welling up around me. More than this, felt in that breath, a consciousness, an awareness of me. As if some huge living thing within the cenote summoned me.

Do you see the strangeness of it? I had only to hear Black’s description, a word-sketch of a bizarre homicide, and I was seized— heart, spine and mind.

I’ve told you how I love our acres, how the feeling of my father’s land beneath our feet seizes hold of me sometimes, as I walk between the trees at dusk. I have always felt it in our soil, a kind of sleeping earthquake of life-to-be, a might and majesty older than Man.

Our last night-march brought us to the cenote just before midnight. With every step, I felt that I moved already through the giant’s flesh, that every leaf of this jungle was a nerve of him, and the very darkness was his blood.

The dank smell of trapped water reached us long before the sight of that great gulf opened suddenly to our eyes: a yawning stone throat, an eighth of a mile across, its black water seventy feet below the rim. Stepping to its brink was stepping into an awe as old as Man.

We advanced onto a narrow limestone shelf overhanging the abyss. Perhaps it was the ancient platform of sacrifice. I knew only that to stand here was to stand outside myself and, though the private plans I had made for this moment were dim and vague, I executed them ecstatically, flawlessly. Moving back from my partners’ position on the rim, I touched my automatic’s muzzle to Black’s nape and my machine pistol to Jack’s. Saying, “Dead still, boys. Not a twitch.” And to the prisoners I said in Spanish to take the key, unshackle themselves and go. The old man seized it and the pair of them fled.

The instant the jungle had swallowed them, I said to the great black floor of water far below us: “Take my offerings!” And squeezed my two triggers.

The brief thunder of the rounds hid the report of snapping rock, but not the fact that the shelf we stood on had broken and that I, too, was falling with them into the cenote.

The black water seized us and grappled us under.

But Emily, it was not water! It was a liquid flesh, a green-black smoke of countless generations. Those living dead poured through my skin, and the giant who had taken them poured into me with them.

This machine clatters under my fingers, I am raving. I have been filled with a Titan as cold and slow as the Ice Ages, as unrelenting as the spreading jungles that have broken Earth’s stony hide and blanketed her equator time without end. In me now is that Will that seizes the sunlight and binds it to the lifeless soil and raises the hosts of life.

I have sworn to myself to hide nothing from you and I still cling to the hope you will not think I am insane
…

As I climbed my slow way up those walls, I became aware of two other shapes, inching their way up other crevices. Their progress was no more halting than my own, though the moonlight here and there fell directly enough on one of them to show me that he had but half a skull, the top of his cranium a ragged ruin.

I don’t know what has touched me, but even with this horror in my mind, I long to hold you again, to hold our precious little daughter, to come back into the circle of our love, where time can wear away this nightmare I have entered. Emily, I beg you not to leave me. You are my sun and my stars, you are my open sky. Only your love can keep me from sinking completely and forever into the darkness of the earth.

Soon I will be demobilized, debriefed. Before I come any closer to home than this, I will contact you again, my precious love.

Your Jack

Under a night-sky still paved with stars, though the east had just started paling from black to indigo, Karen emerged from her room. She thought she had cried all that was in her— for her father, for Susan— but it seemed there were more tears yet… .

But there were deeper things than tears. Things stirring down in the cellar. A skull-blown corpse climbing the wall of a jungle chasm. Dad down in a crypt as garishly colored as any jungle, crushing her wrist in his fingers… Susan… Wolf.

For the first time she stood in fear of the very earth beneath her feet. For the first time, the stars had become an abyss she might fall into.

Her hand throbbed, her body and her heart ached, but she knew that she must go home. Would she find herself alone there? Would Kyle have returned?

Kyle liked sleeping in his truck bed. It was small, like his bunk in his cell, but it was roofed by the whole open sky and had wheels, 350 horses tucked under the hood. Lying in the bed of his truck was like lying in an anti-cell, curled on a magic carpet. He felt cozy, naked in his sleeping bag, the restless wind now and then nosing down into his warmth.

His review had gone well. Even though the acne-scarred old mick did nothing but scowl and sneer, he’d given him a late Friday interview, so Kyle had the whole weekend free. His case file revealed the injustice of the seven years he’d done and the man saw it.

He watched the trees rock and sway. The wind was what he’d missed most in prison, the way it stirred things to life, the way it seemed to blow the stars brighter, as if they were live coals it fanned.

If only he hadn’t had to leave Karen. He hoped that right now she was safe in some motel far out of Gravenstein. What a heart she had! That soulless loser broke her hand and pinned her down and still she blew his foul life right out of him, saving her own when she did it, because Wolf would have killed her.

Kyle.

“Karen!” Bolt upright, he scanned around him, the blown trees and bushes. The blazing stars, but nothing else.

Kyle.

It wasn’t so near this time. Somewhere out among the trees her voice shaped his name. It came to him, a leaf dancing on the wind and touched his ear like a caress. A moment after, something soft and warm touched his lips lightly and vanished.

His heart was an anvil hammered by desire and fear. He stood in the truck bed. Then wind parted the dark foliage of the nearest oak and within that shadowy opening, Karen stood. Terror and desire played across him.

What was happening? He did not
have
hallucinations.

Her phantom roused him to anger at his rebel senses. He bent to where his jeans lay in the bed and took his knife from the pocket and slashed a cut across his forearm. The stab of pain was as real as the wind and stars, and the salt tang of his blood was no dream when he tasted it.

There— moon-white and unclothed— her hair snaking in the wind, stood Karen in the crux of the tree, its branches a riot around her, but not one leaf touching her.

“It wants to kill us, Kyle”— her voice as close as a mate’s in bed, for all the gale that blew between them. “Come and hold me and our love will break its power.”

Leaping out of the truck he went towards her. His sex seemed a lifted rapier in a war they must fight. And it astonished him, the power of this feeling, that they were in a battle. That the enemy, whatever it was, was all around them, merciless and dire. That he and Karen must cleave to one another for all they were worth.

He climbed into the tree and stood on the great bough before her. She came into his arms, giving him a shock of wonder and recognition as they touched. “Brace your back against the tree. It can’t hurt us if we love.” Kyle straddled the bough, his back to its bark; she straddled him, her breasts soft against his face. Moving as if within a sky-filling melody, the music of their hearts beat in cadence with the singing wind.

Kyle woke shivering. His sex was wet and cold and a scab had formed on his arm. Seated cross-legged on the roof of his truck was a small white-haired figure in a black coat and fedora. She spoke quietly, yet he heard her as if they stood face to face.

“Hombre. You must go through fire and fury to find her, mi hijo. You are not her lover, but you love her and must protect her. Sleep for an hour or two, my friend. You will need your strength. Go to Gravenstein, not to the orchard, for she is not there. Get to Gravenstein by sunrise and be ready to fight.”

In the deep of night Marty rocketed his cruiser down the Gravenstein Highway towards Jack’s acres. His face itched with its new pox of piercings, while jubilation twined with terror climbed his spine, like a clinging vine. Jack was
with
him, had been, since his immersion in Rabble’s pond. In waves of imagery and understanding, the sequence and reasons of Marty’s task had been revealed to him.

He summoned the night-shift’s cruisers to the station and let the men know that at their shifts’ end they must return to the station for extended assignment. Next he notified the day-shift troops— for troops indeed all the deputies were, an army that Jack now called to fight the witch’s army. Marty commanded some to duty at first light and some to stand by during the night “for special ops.”

With these redeployments in place, and the whole force poised for muster just after dawn, Marty saddled up his cruiser and headed out to Jack’s orchard, with his heart divided between delight and dread. And how not? The aura of this place had ruled his spirit since he was a boy and now, as Jack’s living will unfolded in his body, blooming before his inner eye, the feeling was equally of slavery and power. He wore his master’s mantle and wielded his might, but his every move was commanded from under the earth by this Master.

He rolled down the long drive, past the black-windowed house— past the vandalism of toppled plum trees, but did not pause— down the lane and into the night army of spiderish branches he went, the trees all gesturing in the starkness of his headlights. At the lowest border of Jack’s plantation, he knew the task he was summoned to.

The lights were on in Jack’s still shed and he stepped inside, into a gasoline stench. He gazed around at an interior he had beheld only once before, summoned here four years ago, the night he had become a man and seized the reins of power from Rabble. Jack had admitted him that very night, only then had he fully unfolded to him the coming mystery and Marty’s role in it. Told him of his power-to-be and the vista of the immortality that was to be his prize. He’d been so proud that night!

Now, knowing what he was about to do, awe was dominant— so much so that he had to struggle to find his breath, to master the galloping of his heart, and wrap his will around the hugeness of his mission here. Now, wirecutters and a hatchet… . With trembling hands he tucked both in his belt, and faced the kegs. So many of them! Awkward rather than heavy for his new-grown strength. He found he could hug two at once against his chest.

Out of the shed with them and around the huge compost heap. That black shape seemed like a shrouded giant with something of Jack’s power coiled within it. Marty only sensed this without understanding it; some seed or scion of his departed master lay dormant in that fecund mass. He hastened to the acres’ barbed wire border. Setting down the kegs, he cut through the wire, resumed his burdens and carried them down a rough and overgrown slope to the bank of the stream that skirted Jack’s land. And on this bank, wielded the hatchet, broaching the first cask in two blows and tilted a gurgle of brandy into the stream. Brandy’s breath scenting the night air.

A long labor lay before him. Near a hundred kegs remained to be transfused into the valley’s water-table. A long labor and a great terror to be subdued in the doing of it, to be bent to his will as he worked, because Marty understood what he was feeding here, understood he was, with this endless libation, awakening monsters from the earth, summoning the green god’s army of conquest to the battlefield this valley would become.

But bubbling up beside his terror rose a devilish merriment, a mocking glee for the powerless enemy he knew rode above him, riding the air even now, cruising like a night-hawk or a great white owl. That white-haired bitch-witch whose leafy phantom had mocked him. She cruised up there, but dared not dive, oh no, for there was a guardian giant in this earth. Jack Fox himself, and one greater than Jack even deeper, and she dared not strike Marty, dared not try to kill him as she had surely killed the still-missing Haynes.

So Marty mocked her as he toiled, as he went back and forth trucking kegs, splintering them, disgorging them— mocked her with a work-chantey as he poured the pungent brandy in the stream:

“Here goes the brandy into the creek that flows to the swamp that drains to the stream that runs to the river that goes through the town that
Jack
killed!”

When the moon had reached its zenith and its light suffused the night sky with the power she needed, Quetzal called her gathered ghosts close around her around her and spoke to them. “Now you must come into me, mis Queridas. Stretch these old bones, this old flesh with your spirits. Ayuda me. Help this old monkey-body of mine take the shape we need.

“Our enemy’s fortress is under the earth, there is a gate, a door he keeps open. It’s the door he’ll use to draw his servants down below. It’s the door he’ll use when he comes out to harvest every human life on earth. Help me find this portal from the sky. Then, if we can pass through it, we can go down and free your sisters and brothers taken before you. Come into me, you spirits of the air, y den mi alas! Make me wings!”

She took off her coat and her coarse-knit sweater and tied them around her waist. Her chest— lean, indeed, as a monkey’s— with her breasts like winter apples, wore the moonlight on their Mayan darkness. She spread her arms and the ghosts around her let their leaf-and-flower-petal flesh fall from them. Then the moonlit air round Quetzal’s skinny axis grew iridescent, the witch’s skin rippled and dimpled like dark water. Her chest began to expand like a ribbed cask, her arms began to thicken and to sprout… and moments later, a gaunt little form in a black fedora rose up on wings mightier than a condor’s, but of a plumage so richly tinted that even pale moonlight showed its emerald hue as she hung beneath the silver lunar disc, a huge disc, one night from full.