I nodded, heart racing, though I did not know.
“Not very specific . . . ,” muttered Matthew. “And I thought you’d said earlier he’d gone through to a different world, the door . . .”
“Oh, give it up,” I told him, pushing the paper plate he’d set down earlier, now flimsy with grease, in his direction. I turned to Rafe. “I hope you wrote down this address.”
The Cycling of the Seasons
Lucy helps the black-eyed girl stand, walks with her around the clearing, brushes her hair from her eyes. The woodland birds have abandoned the glade, and, songs conspicuously absent, their two footfalls are the only nearby sounds: Lucy’s firm and patient, the black-eyed girl’s coltish and weak. They are on their seventh lap when the black-eyed girl falls forward. Her chest tightens. Again she feels as though she’s gone deep underwater. The blue seeps out of the sky, replaced by a glowing, celestial green. A burst of lightning. The distant sound of city traffic: car horns honking, sirens’ screams. The black-eyed girl laughs, and her own voice is of a higher pitch than she would have imagined. She lifts her chin to see a full, starlit sky.
Then the scene recedes, and the black-eyed girl is back in the clearing, aware of her breasts, a sparkling below her stomach. A new sort of wanting, urgent and deep. A hunger that starts in her groin and rises upward: a commandment to take all that she desires. To lap blood from her fingers and suck marrow from bone. To nibble earlobes, guzzle sweat from skin. To feast.
Lucy, frozen where she stands, is unable to hide her anxiety.
“Hello,” says the black-eyed girl, licking her wet lips.
17
Imagine all your life the world is green and brown and quiet. Your days pass slowly. You celebrate the sun. All magic is of trees and dappled shadows, all mountains peaked eruptions from an old ancestral earth, a ground so sacred there has been no cause to name it. The old story, told to me by Mother Farrow in the months before her death, is that in ancient times when a passerby peeled a ring of bark from a tree, his punishment was to be nailed to the stripped spot by his navel, walked around and around until his organs all uncoiled and wrapped about the trunk as its new skin.
The closer we got to the city, the stronger the signs of those ancient times’ decay. Trees had been cleared to make way for identical square houses, long paved highways, domed monstrosities that Rafe explained were factories and labs. At the first glimpse of these outskirts, it felt silly to think of my own village’s rites for early spring. Here were confident assertions of progress in action. Here steel was king, and science, and the sense that modern man might conquer all with his behest.
The road curved around to reveal the city before us—hulking, unreal, gray with smoke. I clenched the sticky edges of my seat. The land itself seemed at once barren and productive, spiked with towering buildings the likes of which I’d never seen before. Silver smokestacks coughed brown clouds into the sky. Cable-wired bridges crossed rainbow-oiled water. Pedicabs transported streams of people to and fro. I could not help but gawk. The air smelled like tar and burned biscuits.
Rafe turned back to grin at me. “The city,” he said proudly, holding out his open palms.
I supposed I saw its beauty, although it was a different sort than I had ever known. My fascination lay in all the elements behind it—the markets and machinery, the grinding gears, the cranes—more than the brick or steel or stonework of the buildings’ stern facades. I wondered what was hidden inside all those outer casings. What soft center was so precious that a steel structure was needed to protect it from the earth and air and sky? At home, I felt you saw the heart of something simply by looking; here, mystery prevailed. Like Matthew’s stoic face, the city’s harsh exterior hid its true intentions.
People were everywhere, caught up in eddies of their own collective making, carrying one another in waves across the pavement. They seemed a collection of various species: one genus of neckties and umbrellas and suits; another of sneakers and visors, sporting fold-out maps and mobile phones, weaving in and out of the more assured crowd.
We moved from the shiny, slick center of the city to an area filled with warehouses and vans making deliveries, through a neighborhood of shops and pubs and churches, to another lined with single-family homes. I was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of city there was to discover: the slivers of public parks and railways we could just see from the road, the number of stores that we drove past, mere blocks from their identical brothers, covered in neon advertisements. Eventually Rafe told Matthew to park in a crowded public lot in an older area, less glossy than those earlier streets and skyscrapers, but equally bustling. I got out of the car as if setting foot on land after a long journey at sea, my body tentative and shaking.
It did not take us long to find the last spiral’s location. We slipped through side streets and alleys, at one point even passing through the lobby of a building that Rafe told me was a bank—a cold, high-ceilinged space that smelled of grubby boots and iron—and dodged cars with angry drivers when our coordinates coincided with traffic-filled streets. I drew into myself, wrapping my arms across my chest, at times closing my eyes when the crowds around us were too dense, as if I could make myself invisible and thus escape the overwhelming press of bodies. Matthew noticed and shielded me as best he could, his eyes constantly alert to incoming throngs of people, his elbows wide to give us space. At one point his hand guided the small of my back through my jacket. I was grateful, but once we were through the worst of the crowds I shook him off. I had not forgotten our encounter by the river; the awkwardness still palpable between us.
The center of the final spiral proved to be another river, as Rafe had suspected. The last point of the triangle, south and east from the first. We stood under a bridge, toxic water lapping at our toes, and at Rafe’s explicit direction I plunged a stick into the silt, mimicking the actions of the ritual I’d recently envisioned on the moors. It sizzled, as if frying in oil, and dissolved almost instantly.
Matthew’s skepticism, never quite masked, had reached its peak, and he sighed all the way through Rafe’s recitations, which neither of us understood, but which I at least tried to honor with reverent attention.
I felt uneasy, but could not say why. Was it a result of our performance, the change in aura that Rafe claimed we had ignited? Or was it merely my continued discomfort with Matthew, the intensity of being in the city? Again, we saw no sign of my father.
“He must be at his hotel,” said Rafe once we’d returned to the car, tapping a hand against the dashboard, jiggling his leg as we stalled in the slowly oozing traffic. He repeated the address he had been given, the location where the girls by the river had promised we’d find Peter.
THE HOTEL WAS a small and unassuming building, a wedge of plain gray stone the same as others all around it, with a row of shaded windows and a weather-worn sign freshly painted to spell out the word LODGING. It didn’t seem the sort of place Peter would choose on his own—too nondescript, lacking history or character. Matthew pulled the car into a neighboring alley.
“Peter must be inside,” said Rafe, spilling out the side door and coming around to help me carry my belongings. He did not look any worse for his past hours traipsing the city, barely rumpled, certainly not irritable or dirty, as Matthew and I did.
“I’ll go in with you.” Matthew said from the front seat.