The monstrous, p.6
The Monstrous, page 6
—and then he reached up with trembling fingers and shut off the light. In the succeeding blackness, sounds were magnified. The far-away drip of water became an intermittent clash of cymbals punctuated by measureless silences in which the creature’s labored respiration sounded clamorous as a great bellows stoking the furnaces of the earth.
Finally, not because he dared to smoke but because he had to do something with his hands or go mad, Burns fumbled for tobacco and rolling papers and began to make a cigarette. Even in the darkness, his fingers fell without hesitation into the familiar rhythm of the process, and the prosaic nature of the task—here in the midst of wonders—enabled him to envision Moore as he made the long trek through the heading shaft to the surface. He imagined the annoyed glance Jeremiah Holland would direct at Moore when he stepped into the cashier’s shack, could almost see the thoughtful look that would replace it when he heard what Moore had to say. Holland, Burns knew, was a thoughtful man, the kind of man who considered the angles of a thing, and could work them to his own advantage.
Burns licked the paper, twisted the cigarette into a cylinder, and slipped it into his mouth. The tobacco tasted sweet against his lips. Holland would be a good friend to have, he thought. Holland could help a man.
And yet....
He felt a flicker of doubt. Such beauty....
The sound of men crawling through the undercut came to him. A wavering light illuminated the chamber, and Burns’s heart broke loose within him as he caught a glimpse of the creature, curled fetal on the stone floor. The light bobbed into the air, and he saw that it was Moore. A second ghostly shaft penetrated the darkness, and Burns heard a metallic rattle of tools. He stood, his fingers fumbling at his cap as he stepped forward to meet Holland.
The cashier emerged from the undercut and pushed himself erect, a thin, wiry man with a battered toolbox clutched in one hand. His lean face looked hollow, even skeletal, in the intersecting beams of the cap lights, and his dark eyes returned Burns’s gaze from deeply recessed sockets.
“I hope you’re not planning to light that thing,” he said.
Burns plucked the cigarette from his mouth with shaking fingers. “I just had to do something with my hands. That thing—” Licking a moist fragment of tobacco from his lips, he slipped the cigarette into his shirt pocket.
Holland lowered the toolbox to the floor with a clatter. “Yes, that thing. Your friend wasn’t very articulate about that…thing.” He glanced ruefully at his clothing, store-bought linen several grades more expensive than the cheap flannel the miners wore, and Burns saw that the cloth was soiled with dark streaks of coal dust. “Where is it?”
Burns glanced at Moore, but the other man had retreated deep into himself.
“It’s over there,” Burns said. Almost unwillingly, he turned his head and impaled the creature on the flickering shaft of his cap light. Its breast kindled with life; wings stirred in the passing wind of a dream. Burns blinked back tears. It seemed as if each particle of the air had suddenly flared with radiance, and though in fact it did not diminish at all, Burns imagined that the darkness retreated a little.
Jeremiah Holland drew in his breath with a sharp hiss.
“I thought you ought to see it,” Burns said. “I wanted to do the right thing. I got a wife and baby and I was hoping—” He stopped abruptly when he realized that Holland wasn’t listening.
The cashier’s face had gone very white, and as Burns looked on, the tip of his tongue crept out and eased over his lips. He turned to look at Burns through widened eyes. “Have either of you touched it?”
Burns shook his head.
The cashier crouched by the toolbox, threw back the latches with trembling fingers, and withdrew a tamping bar. He stood, clutching the bar in one white-knuckled hand, and looked from Burns to Moore, who stood a few feet away, his face looking new-minted. “Let’s see if you can wake it up,” he told Burns.
Burns hesitated, and Holland lifted the tamping bar a little. “Go on now.”
His heart hammering, Burns began to creep across the room. That paralyzing ice once again edged into his throat. Blood pounded at his temples. He felt as if he had been wrapped in a thick suffocating layer of wool.
And then he was there, standing over the—
—giant, the angel.
The creature, he told himself.
“Careful,” Holland whispered, and glancing over his shoulder, Burns saw the flesh beneath the cashier’s right eye twitch. “Do you realize—” he said, “—have you any idea what we could do with this thing?” He laughed, a quick harsh detonation, abrasive as shattering glass, and brandished the tamping bar. “Go on now.”
Burns felt breath catch in his throat. He tried to speak, to protest, but that paralyzing ice had frozen away his voice. Swallowing, he prodded the creature with his boot. Flesh gave, the thing shifted in its age-long sleep: a hush and sigh of wings in the enveloping dark, the rusty flex of ancient muscles, and all at once the creature lay prone, face turned away, arms outstretched, great wings flared across the dusty floor. Conflicting impressions of Promethean strength and gentleness swept through Burns, and—like nothing he had felt before—a swift and terrible hunger for such beauty, ethereal and mysterious.
Not until it passed did Burns realize he had been holding his breath. He released it and drew in a great draught of stale air. The ice had retreated a bit. Strangling a bout of hysterical laughter, he turned away.
“Maybe it’s hibernating,” he said, abruptly reminded of something he had heard at Rona’s church—a story of an epoch impossibly distant, when graves would vomit forth the dead. Would angels ascend from the womb of the shattered planet?
Holland had returned to the toolbox. “We can’t let it get away.”
“Get away?”
Holland stood, his angular features ashen, and extended in his left hand the shining length of a hacksaw. The serrated blade threw off radiant sparks in the shifting luminescence of the cap lights. A sickening abyss opened inside of Burns.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Burns started to say, but he let the last word trail away, for he saw that a kind of lethargic energy had animated Moore’s features. With the languor of drifting continents, half-formed expressions passed across the experience-scrubbed surface of his face.
“No,” Moore whispered. “Please…please don’t.”
Holland spared him a single dismissive glance, and then he looked back to Burns and shook the hacksaw. The blade rattled against its casing.
Simultaneously, Moore also turned to face him. The twin glare of their cap lights nearly blinded him. He raised a hand to shield his eyes as the chasm that had opened within him yawned wider still. For a single uncertain moment, he felt as if he might plunge into the chaos that churned there.
As though from a great distance, he heard Moore’s voice degenerate into sobs of desperation, saw Holland turn and strike him a single blow with the tamping bar. The glare diminished as Moore stumbled away.
Holland stepped up to meet him, the tamping bar up-raised, the hacksaw dangling in his left hand; there was no mistaking the threat implicit in his posture.
“Do it,” he hissed.
Burns moved closer to the wiry cashier, suddenly aware that he could wrest the tamping bar from the smaller man in less than an instant; in a moment of sudden clarity, he saw that Holland knew this, too. Beyond the mask of his bravado there lay a core of desperate fear. Burns saw that Holland had not perceived the creature’s beauty. He could not, for fear drove him; perhaps it always had.
Turning away, he began to move toward Moore, slumped by the dark mouth of the undercut. He hadn’t gone more than two steps before Holland spoke. “Did you say you had a wife and child?”
Burns hunkered down by Moore, rested a callused hand against his shoulder. “That’s what I said.”
“Sauls Run,” Holland said. “Not much work here, unless you’re a miner.”
“Please,” Moore whispered. “Do you know what this means? It’s true, all true....”
A fleeting image of that church story—the Rapture, Burns suddenly recalled—passed through his mind: angels, erupting by the thousands from beneath the mountains of the dying planet. True? The Lord’s with us, Moore had said, and he had replied, Lucky, I reckon.
The hacksaw clattered to the floor behind him.
“Winter’s coming,” Holland said. “Hard season for a man without a job. Hard season for his family.”
Burns emitted a strangled laugh, lifted his hand, and touched his fingers to Moore’s stubbled face. Moore’s lips trembled, and tears slid down his cheeks. Burns could smell the sour taint of his breath. “An angel,” Moore whispered, and cursing, Burns stood and turned away.
That image—angels erupting from the subterranean dark—returned to haunt him as he stooped to pick up the hacksaw; he dismissed it with an almost physical effort. Not an angel, insisted some fragment of his mind. Some pagan god or demon; a monstrous creature out of myth; an evolutionary freak, caught in the midst of the transformation from beast to man—but not an angel.
A creature, nothing more.
He crossed the room without a word and knelt beside
—the giant, the angel—
—the creature. At the base of the thick-rooted wings, its flesh curled horny and tough, almost pebbled. Its back heaved with the regular cadence of its respiration. He could not bring himself to look it in the face.
Burns closed his eyes and drew in a long breath. He could hear the whispered litany of Moore’s prayers, the faraway cymbal clash of the water drip. He thought of the coming winter, harsh in these mountains, and once again, that great love surprised him. For a moment, limned against the dark screens of his eyelids, he could almost see them, Rona and the baby, shining with an all-too-human beauty. Fragile and ephemeral, that beauty was, but a man could get his mind about it. A man could hold it.
He exhaled and opened his eyes.
Nothing had changed. Winged giants slept in the earth, but nothing had changed. The world was as it had been always.
“Do it, you son of a bitch,” Holland said, and despite the fact that less than an hour ago Burns had not known that such creatures existed in the world, despite the fact that even now every molecule of air seemed to flare with a beauty so radiant that it was painful even to behold—despite all this, Burns began the terrible task.
The creature stirred when the hacksaw bit into the root of the near wing; its fingers drew into talons, its breath shuddered into a quicker rhythm, but it did not wake. Burns’s muscles tightened into the work; sweat broke out along his hairline. The hide was tough as old hickory, but at last, with a noise like wind through dry leaves, the wing fell away. Burns kicked it aside. In the pale luminescence of his cap light, the wing stump glistened like a bloody mouth. Sighing, he stepped over the creature to start at the second wing. Once again, he leaned into the saw, once again dragged it back through the thick flesh, but this time—for no reason he would ever be able to discern—he looked up, looked directly into the creature’s face.
And saw that it was awake.
The sounds of Moore’s prayers and Holland’s panicked respiration receded as Burns gazed into the creature’s eye, so blue it might have been a scrap of April sky.
He felt as if he were falling, down and down into that endless blue, but he felt no fear. A wave of gratitude that he could not contain flooded through him—to have seen such beauty, to have touched it. Once again, the entire room seemed to flare with light, and for the space of a single instant, he perceived, beyond the shabby guise of reality, an inner radiance that permeated all things. Then, as suddenly as if he had shut off his cap light, the radiance was gone, overwhelmed by a tide of wretched exhilaration. No other man had ever mastered such a creature.
Burns flung away the hacksaw in disgust.
The creature’s eye had closed. He could not tell that it had ever awakened.
A suffocating knot formed in his throat, and for the first time in the long year he had worked the mines, claustrophobia overcame him. The walls pressed inward. The entire weight of the mountain loomed over him.
Holland stepped up, his face blanched, his eyes reduced to glints far back in shadowy hollows. “Finish it,” he said.
Burns wrested the tamping bar away from him and let it clatter to the floor. “Finish it yourself.”
With a last glance at Moore, he pushed the cashier aside, ducked through the undercut and the empty room beyond, and emerged into the heading. From far down in the shaft, there echoed the din of a sledgehammer as a work crew snaked new track deeper into the planet.
He wondered what beauty they might eventually lay bare; he wondered what they would do with it.
Turning away, Burns began to walk slowly along the tracks that led to the surface. Men moved by him, nodding as they passed, and sometimes a loaded car muscled through the shaft; in the rooms that opened to either side, he heard the easy talk that came at shift’s end. He had no part in that now. Deliberately, he turned his mind to other things, to the surface, where the sky would be fading toward night. He imagined the stench of burning slag riding the high currents; imagined the tin roofs of Sauls Run, faraway in the steep-walled valley, throwing off the last gleam of evening sun.
Presently, he emerged from the earth. He paused by the cashier’s shack and fished the cigarette out of his breast pocket. His coal-smeared hands shook a little as he struck the match, and then harsh sweet smoke filled his lungs. He exhaled a gray plume and surveyed the valley below.
Everything—the sky, the smell, the flash of sunlight against the tin roofs of town—was just as he had imagined it. Nothing, nothing had changed. Drawing in another lungful of smoke, Burns started down the mountain to Sauls Run, to Rona and the baby. High above the painted ridges, the day began to blue into darkness, and a breath of autumn wind touched him, chill with the foreboding of winter.
THIS DAY AND this night are a coin. Flip it, and in rapid succession first one thing and then the other, in constant, indecisive revolution. I am standing at the bottom of a steep paved road where the eastern edge of the cemetery meets the dirty slate-colored river, the Seekonk River, and it’s a cold day in early May. As a lifelong Southerner, only recently transplanted to New England, that’s a concept I’m still not comfortable with, cold days in early May. Standing here, looking out across the choppy waters of Bishop Cove, across almost four hundred yards to the opposite shore, the day seems even colder than it is, the wind sharp enough to peel back my skin and remind me how terrible was the winter. How terrible and how very recent and how soon it will return. The wind rattles the branches all around, and I reluctantly button my cardigan and hug myself. I look up into the stark face of the wide carnivorous sky, squinting at all that merciless blue, not a brushstroke of cloud anywhere at all. What sort of god permits a sky like that? It’s a question I would ask in all seriousness, were I not an atheist. The trees sway and shudder in the wind like unmedicated epileptics. The new leaves are still bright, their greens not yet tempered by summer and inevitable age. This is the face of the coin, this afternoon at the edge of the cemetery. I’m not alone. There’s a young woman sitting only a few feet away. She sits on the hood of her car and smokes cigarettes and talks as if we are old friends, when, in fact, we’ve only just met and only by the happenstance of our both having arrived at this spot at more or less the same time on the same cold, windy day in early May. She’s at least twenty years my junior, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, not even a sweater, as though this is a much warmer day than it is. There’s a big padded camera bag on the hood beside her.
There are swans in the water.
“You teach?” she asks me, and I say that yes, I do.
“But I’m not a very good teacher,” I add. “I didn’t get into science to teach.”
“You’re at Brown?”
Around us, the trees sway and creak. The river laps against the shore. The swans, hardly even seeming to notice the wind, bob about on the waves and dip their heads beneath the water, foraging in the shallows. I notice that their long necks are dirty from all the sediment stirred up by the waves and the currents and by their hungry, probing bills. Their white feathers seem almost as if they’ve been stained with oil.
I point at the birds and ask the girl, “Is that why it’s called Swan Point?”
She shrugs, stubs her cigarette out against the sole of her boot, then flicks the butt towards the river.
“You shouldn’t do that,” I tell her. “They’re poisonous. Birds and fish eat them. Fish eat them, and then birds eat the fish. In experiments, the chemicals from a single filtered cigarette butt killed half the fish living in a one-liter container of water. Plus, they’re made of nonbiodegradable acetate-cellulose. Every year, an estimated 1.6 billion pounds of—”
“Jesus, yeah, okay,” she says and laughs. “This isn’t a classroom. You’re not on the clock, professor.”
“Sorry,” I say, not meaning it, not sorry at all, but I’m embarrassed, and so I apologize anyway.
This is the face of the coin.
The coin is in the air, turning and turning, ass over tit.
“I don’t know why it’s called Swan Point,” the girl says, and she lights another cigarette. For only an instant, a caul of grey smoke hangs about her face before the wind takes it apart. “I never bothered to ask anyone. I just like coming here. I’ve been coming here since I was a teenager.”
The wind, blowing up off Narragansett Bay, smells like low tide on mudflats, like sewage, like sex, primordial and faintly fishy. It roars across the water, ruffling the feathers of the swans, and it roars through the trees, giving them fits. I dislike the wind. Not as much as I dislike that blue sky hanging above me, and not as much as I dislike the cold, but enough that I wish I’d waited on a less blustery day to wander down to this spot I’ve glimpsed on other drives and walks through the cemetery. One of the swans turns its head towards me, seeming to glare with its tiny black eyes, such tiny eyes for so large a bird. It only watches me a few seconds before turning its attention back to feeding, and maybe it was only my imagination that it was ever watching me at all.
