Authors: Elizabeth Hand
One of the girls was listening to something—a cue, perhaps—poised like a Balinese
legong
dancer, her hand cupped around her ear like a curved leaf. With a cry she whirled on one heel and darted across the stage, stopping to raise her head. With murmured exclamations the other two raced after her, and began somersaulting and twirling, leaping to catch one another and racing apart again, like beads of mercury skimming across the floor.
Baby Joe watched them, breathless, his heart pounding. Their bracelets slid up and down, their anklets clattered as they danced and laughed, fingers brushing their girlish breasts and curling black hair tumbling about their shoulders. It was like watching the courtship of mayflies above a stream, all slender legs entwined amidst the ghosts of wings. In and out, up and down, until their steps assumed a pattern, the sound of their bare feet a muted
tantara
that was both summons and warning, and utterly hypnotic. And there was a voice as well, a woman’s voice, so low and musical it might have been inside his head, whispering.
It is time. It is time …
Baby Joe jerked upright: where had he heard that before? He shuddered and fumbled at his jacket, searching for cigarettes. His mouth was dry; he needed another drink, but before he could signal the waitress one of the girls ran up to him and struck him under the chin, giggling, then darted off again.
“Dios mio.”
Baby Joe began to sweat. It wasn’t just her touch, those tiny fingers skimming above the loose collar of his T-shirt, or the way her hair had momentarily fallen across his face, warm and oddly tensile. He looked about, even more uneasy; as though he had remembered a dream from his childhood in another language, a garbled message he had not until this moment understood.
All around him the room looked the same—too bright, the men at the bar stupefied with drink or lust, the waitresses yawning and chatting with the other dancers. But when he turned at the stage again it was like he was in a different place. The mirrored floor broke into motes of silver and brown as the dancers whirled and leapt, feinting and dodging some unseen foe. There seemed to be other things in the air as well—flies maybe, or were they cockroaches?
No. They were butterflies, great violet-winged butterflies that floated between the girls, as though the dancers’ soft cries had somehow been made carnate. Now and then a girl would leap as though to grasp one of the lovely creatures, but their slim fingers always closed on empty air. Then it seemed they would employ ropes to snare the butterflies: Baby Joe watched in dreamy amazement as thin brown cords whipped about the girls’ heads as they pirouetted and struck at the swallowtails above them. And somehow even this bizarre capering was familiar to him; as was the smell of something burning, sweet and pungent like
katol
incense, and the echo of that insistent voice.
It is time.
“Fucking A, man.” He forced himself to look away from the dancers, tried to stand but his legs gave way beneath him. With a grunt he crashed back into his chair. Laughing, the girls darted up to him. This time all three struck him, hard enough that he gasped, then ran off, calling out to one another in words he couldn’t understand.
But if their words still made no sense, their motions did. It was like he was watching some bizarre shadow play: the three girls shades of someone else, someone he should remember, someone he knew—it should be
easy.
And why was it he couldn’t get to his feet no matter how he tried, why couldn’t he
escape
them? Because now, instead of striking at the butterflies, they struck
him,
their little hands much more forceful man you would think, their nails piercing him like tiny beaks. The cords they wielded like whips, and lashed—but gently—at his cheeks and shoulders. When he struggled to avoid their touch, they would only laugh the more, in high sweet voices. Then one might pluck at his jacket, while another would take his hand in hers and kiss it, her tongue sliding across the ball of his thumb before her sharp teeth sank into the flesh there and he cried aloud.
Baby Joe shut his eyes. His head throbbed, his heart hammered in his chest as though someone pounded him mercilessly.
“No!”
At the sound of his own anguish it all came back to him. The field, and Angelica weaving in and out among the trodden-down grasses, her bare legs streaked with dirt and sweat. He could see where her heels had left small indentations in the dust, and smell the sweetness of dried vetch and clover she had crushed in her passing. A few yards away from her the bull watched, stolid and unmoving as Baby Joe himself. But now Baby Joe knew, and understood, and surely the bull never had.
It is time.
A howl as he struggled to get to his feet. Again the girls laughed, but there was no mockery in their voices now. Instead they were gentle, even soothing, as though they had tired of their play and were ready now for some more serious pastime. They gathered round him, their hands surprisingly strong as they grasped his arms and drew him forward. He tried to shake them away but it was no use—they were too strong, he was too drunk, too exhausted to fight. About his head the butterflies weaved their own tipsy patterns in the air. A spicy scent surrounded him, something else remembered from his childhood. Crushed coriander seeds and sandalwood and
katol
incense, the bite of sour orange pulp in his mouth. He felt himself being lowered to the floor, the girls’ hands everywhere upon his body—cheeks, forehead, arms, chest—their touch warm and smooth and dry. When he blinked the air seemed filled with snow, but then he saw that it was not snow but a sort of colored dust like pollen. His hands were coated with it. He brought a finger to his lips and tasted honey; looking down at the floor he saw that it was littered with the broken wings of butterflies, grey and colorless. Their scales filled the air, atoms of rust and violet, and settled like ash upon his cheeks.
Before him the girls knelt with arms extended. From their open hands dark cords slid to the floor, rustling. Their mouths were moving, he could not hear them but it didn’t matter anymore; he knew he was dying. And suddenly he was no longer afraid: not of the girls, not of anything, not even of those thin brown ropes, which he now saw were moving, sliding between the girls’ fingers and up along his legs. The sight should have terrified Baby Joe, but it did not. Instead he felt an odd exultation, a sense of imploding tension and release that was almost sexual. He knew he must be delirious.
Snakes, everywhere he looked there were snakes, slender brown vipers with triangular-shaped heads and tongues like split twigs dousing at the air. They slipped beneath the fabric of his trousers and flowed across his bare legs, and their touch was like the girls’, warm and dry. As though desert sand was being poured onto him, slowly and with exquisite care, as though he was himself a serpent, sloughing away an old lifeless skin and wriggling through the dust.
The girls were still there, he could see them through slitted eyes. Only they no longer looked like bull-leapers or
legong
dancers but like people he knew. Angelica was there, which did not surprise him, but he felt no rancor toward her, no rage that she had somehow caused Hasel’s death. Because Hasel was there, too, his ruddy face exploding into laughter when he saw Baby Joe—
Hey, man! What took you so long?!
—his embrace joyful as he reached for his friend. And there was someone else—Oliver, Baby Joe knew it must be Oliver though there was something different about him, he had changed somehow but it was all too much to take in, this mad exalted freedom, the sheer joy and unexpected
delight
of it all, nothing like what he had expected!
Hands were everywhere now, he could no longer see but he could feel them, pulling away his jacket and tearing open his T-shirt. Something bit at his left nipple; he shuddered and moaned at the sudden pain, and knew it must be one of the vipers. Its teeth piercing his flesh and then the slow surge of venom beneath the skin, like a wave building as it rushed through him. The pain came again at his left breast, but he was beyond that now. He was beyond them all, excepting only Hasel and the woman waiting behind him, her eyes laughing and her mouth forming his name as she took his hand and he knew at last what it was all about, there had been a mystery to it all along, serpents and bulls and a woman he had foolishly feared; but then he was lost in Her embrace, Her arms closing about him and his heart bursting with joy as She took him and he was Hers, Hers at last.
O
N THE PATIO AT
Huitaca Angelica stood. It was evening of a day so hot that all the small things of the desert had retreated to their lairs: rattlesnakes and Gila monsters and scorpions coiled beneath the burning stones like hidden treasure, with their gleaming black carapaces and jeweled eyes. Above the Devil’s Clock lightning spiked the darkness. The bolts looked like cracks in the desert sky, but only Angelica knew what lay behind them.
She was alone now. Kendra and Martin had left earlier that week, Martin to return to California, Kendra to prepare for college in September. Kendra had never gotten over Cloud’s death. Her relationship with Martin soured, she grew teary and slept too much and refused Angelica’s offers to help her attend a grief workshop. Finally word came from Bennington that she would be able to start there as a freshman after all. The next day she told Angelica she was leaving, and the day after that she was gone. Martin split the following afternoon.
“You want me to, like, recommend someone to take my place?” He leaned across the hood of his Jeep, his white-blond hair falling into his eyes. “I mean, it’s probably not so cool for you to be out here all by yourself, Angelica. That cougar could still be around—”
Angelica smiled. “Sunday will be here.”
“Sunday!” Martin snorted. “Like
Sunday’s
gonna save you if something happens—”
“Nothing’s going to happen, Martin,” Angelica said soothingly. She tousled his hair and let her hand rest on his shoulder. He was so beautiful, beautiful things always made her yearn to possess them and it would be so easy, just a few moments alone and then …
Martin sighed. He took Angelica’s hand in his and squeezed it, then grabbed her in a bear hug. “Well, I better go. But I’m gonna miss you, Angelica.”
She laughed, her bronze hair falling across his. “Oh, you’ll see me again, Martin. Don’t worry.”
She hadn’t asked him to stay on. She knew he would refuse. The truth was that she no longer needed bodyguards. She no longer needed anyone. The house at Huitaca would be closed after tonight. Despite what Angelica had told Martin, Sunday would not go to Huitaca alone, so Angelica had given the housekeeper an envelope with a month’s wages and a false promise that she would call her when she returned in the fall.
And that was that. She had already turned off the water and notified the electric and telephone companies that she was canceling their services. The oriental lilies and freesia that had been slowly deteriorating in their Waterford vases were gone, tossed into a patch of ocotillo outside. Before leaving, Sunday swept the floors clean of sand and cactus needles, folded Angelica’s linen shifts and the embroidered camisoles of honey-colored silk, and set them inside drawers among little muslin bags of sandalwood and dried orange peel. Angelica had seen to the last bits of tidying up, putting back on the proper shelves the notebooks containing so much of her work. Translations of the Sybaris tablets that she had made at the National Museum in Naples, with their invocation of the Queen of the Underworld. The copy of the
Demœric Hymn to Othiym
from Keftiu, where night after night she had sat bowed over her desk, bathed in the light from a smoky clay lantern, its wick a calyx of false dittany floating in olive oil. One by one she had transcribed the cuneiform tablets, and returned them to their resting place in the tombs beneath the house. Hand-lettered sheets and Xeroxes of parchment pages, drawings she had copied from vases and rhytons and frescoes, from forgotten temples within the rain forest and subway platforms near the great necropolis in Paris: all of them would now be carefully interred at Huitaca, to be given over to whatever priestess next claimed them. For Angelica herself, they had no further use.
Looking over all her things for one last time, Angelica sighed. For nine days now she had been fasting, as the ritual commanded. She had grown so thin, and her skin had taken on an almost luminous translucence: as though her blood was already fleeing her, as though whatever strange raptures she had given herself to had purged her flesh of color and sinew and bone. When she gazed into the mirror her uncle had given her so long ago, the face that gazed back was no longer her own, but that of a caryatid or
kouroi
—beautiful, ageless, inhuman. For a long moment she stared at herself, touching the heavy mass of her bronze curls and seeking in vain for a grey hair. Letting her fingers brush against her cheeks, the skin smooth and cool as faience, unlined, unscarred. To look at her, one would never think that she was a grown woman with a grown son; but neither would one see anywhere within her the memory of the girl who once upon a time had astonished her friends with her explosive laugh.
“It was so long ago,” she whispered, and set the mirror back amongst the curling photographs and antique silver frames, the papery nautilus and cowries and rose-colored sea urchin. As she removed her hand something fell. She heard the chime of breaking glass, and with a low cry reached to pluck a photo from a sad heap of shivered crystal.
It was a picture of herself and Baby Joe and Oliver, Baby Joe smiling for perhaps the only time in front of the camera, Angelica in the middle and Oliver at her other side. His arm was draped across her shoulder, his eyes were so bright they might have been lit from within by candles, like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Oliver.” She bit her lip and blinked tears from her eyes. “Oh, Oliver …”
She thought of the poem that Sweeney Cassidy had liked to quote back at the