Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (20 page)

“I never did.”

“In your letter. You said you wished I was there.”

“You came just because of that?”

“I came because I love you.”

“You…what?”

“I love you, Gabriel,” she said, “I’ve loved you my whole life.”

I don’t know why I said this, but I began to choke a little, and a foolish smile spread across my face. “Thank God,” I said. “Thank God.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” she exclaimed, and I realized she was laughing a little.

I felt drugged, dizzy, deliriously happy. “I don’t know what I believe in anymore, but thank God that it’s me.”

“It’s all right,” she said, “go to sleep.”

“But will I see you again? We need to talk about—“

“You know where to find me whenever you need me.”

“But I—“

“Go to sleep,” she breathed. And she smiled her incredulous, iridescent smile. The smile of an angel, of a patron saint.

And because my ensnarled, uncoiled thoughts were growing dull and numb and useless in the darkness, and because her words blanketed me in a peace I had felt not once prior to this moment, I obeyed. I sunk into an unilluminated, instantaneous state of unconsciousness.

It could not have been long before a voice inside my head bleated
Wake up
! in a horrifying, throaty croak. I dashed to my feet, covered in a cold sweat. There was an unmistakable noise out there, in the woods.

And there it was again.

Gunshots.

A piercing shriek.

I screamed and hurled myself out of the bed. I grabbed a torch from the kitchen and thundered out the front door, ignoring the disturbed movements and exclamations from my parents’ room. I hurtled through the woods behind the vineyard, shining the torch from the trees to the ground and up again. “Volatile!” I shouted. “Answer me!” My feet were cut and bleeding from trampling on broken trees and sharp rocks, but I could not feel anything for the pain threatening to explode in my chest.

As I continued shouting and hurling myself through those moonless woods, I heard the rustle of wings in the air, and somehow realized that in the branches above me, flocks upon flocks of ghostly swallows had gathered. They seemed to stare down at me silently for a long moment, as if they wanted to tell me something. Finally, they began to croon with uncanny, otherworld voices I had not realized swallows possessed, and I knew then they were singing a phantasmal funeral march.

I felt arms around me and heard my father sobbing in my ear, “Come home now, my son. She’s gone. Won’t you come on home?” He supported my weight on his shoulder and with his bad leg, he slowly led me through the woods and into the house.

“But her body,” I was stammering, “I have to find her body.”

“She’s gone,” wept my father, “he has taken her.”

My Papa, as frail as he was, laid me out in my bed and poured me a glass of whiskey. I swallowed it down and he poured another one.

It was all a dream, it had to be. Tragedy like this could not happen to me. I was bone-tired, it was my imagination.

But I kept hearing the gunfire from the Winchester shotgun, and the macabre, spine-chilling song of the birds.

I needed to forget, for just a few precious hours.

I needed the memory cells to deplete, to die while I slept away the horrors of this night.

It was then that I rummaged through my possessions stacked on the bedside table for the brown jar of pills.

There was not one left.

B
ehind my closed eyelids, betwixt the right temple and the left, lies a great open plain, an entire empty world in a skull-sized radium.

The plain is white, like thick, fibrous paper from an artist’s sketchpad.

It is an unvarying, unwavering whiteness. It does not move.

But even though I am asleep, I detect a slight change.

It is silent. But as I concentrate deeply, I can hear something.

Humming.

A low drone and it is vibrating. Like what most people hear after their ears pop.

On the great, white plain a grey mark appears.

Just a spec, or just like the smallest of pebbles being dropped into a still lake of milk.

It causes ripples all over the bleached world.

And then the spec begins to grow, slowly. It is humming as it elongates into a thin line. Like a line drawn in pencil on a piece of parchment.

Other lines germinate then, short lines perpendicular to the original. They are touching each other. Strange teardrops begin to fall down like rain. They attach themselves to the grey lines. The teardrops continue to mushroom all over the canvas, all over the great white world.

Finally, I can see what has been drawn in front of my eyes. I recognize the branches of the olive tree that grows outside my window, a grey, two-dimensional, child’s drawing of reality.

I desire to see more, but I am being shaken, is there an earthquake in the white plain?

There are hot, salty splashings all over my face, is there an ocean in the white plain?

My name is being called, over and over, is there a friend in the white plain?

And then I am awake, and the white world disintegrates.

“Gabriel, it’s your mother. She’s dead.”

A
nother grey, needle-thin line begins to emerge from the corner of the white world. It sails past the olive tree branch, but it is in a hurry.

It ducks and swerves. It climbs and soars, it swoops and descends. The lines fill the entire parchment with their frenetic energy.

Suddenly, the humming stops.

It takes a moment to register what lies before me.

Volcanic tuff. Hidden labyrinths of caves and caverns. Windows in the wall and lichen covered turrets. Secret chambers. A frozen well at the bottom of a double-helix staircase. Balconies that meet with a kiss, like good friends. Old, whispering piazzas with somber, metal-colored flags. Networks of spider-thin alleys and roads that rise up to a steel sun.

Orvieto in greyscale.

I
through the new Orvieto. It is silent, and all I can hear are my own footsteps. They sound hollow in these barren streets. They echo so loudly, like thunder.

There is not a soul in this ghost town. But I can hear the hum of voices just behind the walls of the white world. I can hear them whispering. They are spirits, I decide. They are what endures of once-living memories. They are the remainders of dead hopes, of slain ambition.

I reach out my hand to touch something. A wall? A tree? It is hard to tell, with this lack of color. I expect my hand to fall through it, as if this new Orvieto was made of nothing but smoke and shadow. But it is solid. It feels like nothing my cells can recall. It feels alien.

I do not realize I am in a dream. Something at the farthest edge of my mind nudges me, willing me to remember, to realize. I wave it away like a persistent mosquito.

As I roam these streets, they slowly become more familiar. I recognize landmarks. I can find my way. And soon I reach the destination I never knew I had:
St Patrizio’s well that stands on the helm of the mountain city.

I look up at the sky. Silver stars that contain no light. And I understand the expanding feeling in the pit of my stomach. I am lonely.

I duck my head. It falls so low. It rests on my chest.

And suddenly, I am doubled over, and a pain that had always lived, dormant, inside my body breaks through, and I fall to the ground like a felled tree. I writhe. What is this agony? Why am I thrashing about?

And I let out a huge breath, as if all this time I had been underwater.

“Come back to me,” I cry. “Come back to me.”

And outside a bedroom window, on a vineyard that only sells sweet dessert wine, upon the branch of an olive tree, a little bird lands. She has eyes the color of frogs in the summer time. When she opens her beak, I hear her voice in my head even though I am still asleep; a voice I love like it is my own.

“
I thought you’d never ask
.”