It was a home. It was a chapel. A shaft of light shone down at an angle through the opening and lit up all sparkly the grains of dust afloat on the air. This was a chamber of echoes that might as well have been the clattering ossuary of my own mind, and I decided it would be a place of pilgrimage for me.
When the light through the opening above dimmed with impending night, I crawled back out into the mine shaft proper and piled a few stones in front of the entrance to my private citadel so that it would not be stumbled upon by strangers.
Once outside the mine I tried to locate the place in the ground where the cistern opened to the sky, but I never could find it.
As though the avenues of inside and outside used different maps altogether.
Chapter 8
Worm Moon was wet with rainfall. You listened to the showers against your windowpanes. You imagined what it must be like to luxuriate in such a torrent, naked, and you thrilled with anticipation. Blackhat Roy came back.
I went to bed early, listening to the thunder, and I fell asleep. But my body jolted itself awake an hour after I lay down. I lurched to the window and opened it and leaped out. It was all very simple when the moon came out. All the considerations and doubts and rationalizations of the daytime were sloughed away. I wanted to be outside, and so I went outside.
It is sometimes a joy to be rained on. The chill of it against your scalp, the tickle of it down the inside of your thighs.
I ran down to the lake to see the ripples on the water and to watch the lightning fork down from the clouds. The others were already there. Some were swimming in the black water, others lay on the muddy earth. I liked looking at the bodies from the shadows of the trees. To look at someone’s naked body in the moonlight is to know that person in a new way. Lumpy humanity laid bare. A person stripped of all masks. For surely, I realized, that is what we do. We start with one pure and concentrated version of ourselves, then we modify and mold, we layer defense over pretense over convention. By the time we’re done getting dressed in the morning, there is little left of who we really are. It’s all just art. Twee and ineffectual art. Cartoon figures drawn in crayon on a paper place mat in a family-friendly Italian restaurant.
Hondy Pilt was there, gazing monklike into the downpour. Sue Foxworth was there. And Adelaide Warren. Rose Lincoln came, too, emerging from the trees with Peter Meechum behind her. Rose’s breach had gone on longer than a year. Each full moon was supposed to be her last. But here she was again.
I wondered if she and Peter had been having sex in the rain, and I thought I might enjoy killing her. But such instincts in me seemed to go straight to the brain, where violence takes seed and grows larger over time rather than permitting itself release in the moment. I would say nothing.
Idabel McCarron came up to me and pressed her slippery body to mine. I allowed it, because the sensation was new to me—and, besides, we were all a little rain-drunk.
“Did you hear?” she whispered in my ear. “He’s back.”
“Who?”
“Look.”
She pointed, and just at that moment, emerging from the lake like some mammalian vestige of prehistory, was Blackhat Roy.
He was different—I saw it immediately. He seemed larger, for one thing, a bigger, more solidified version of himself—though after just three months, I don’t know if that was possible.
Peter was also seeing him for the first time. He left Rose Lincoln’s side and approached Roy. The two stood face-to-face on the lakeshore in the rain. When they were together like that, I could see that Roy still had to angle his head up to meet Peter’s eyes. But he was bigger. I swear it. Somehow he commanded more space.
“I thought you were in Chicago,” Peter said quietly.
“I’m back.”
“Why?”
“You want to hear the whole story? It might cause you grief.”
He was different. In my mind, I tried to telegraph to Peter to be careful, because Blackhat Roy was different.
Thunder quaked in the distance. The rain unfurled sideways, like a sheet pinned to a clothesline in the wind. We didn’t shield ourselves from it.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Peter said. “You don’t belong here.”
“Really? I would have thought this is exactly where I belonged.”
“You terrorized those people.”
It seemed that Peter, along with everyone else, had convinced himself of certain fictions about that night.
“Terrorized!” Roy laughed. Then he said the word again, as though he didn’t think much of it. “Terrorized.”
That’s when Peter struck him, his closed fist cutting across Roy’s jaw. But Roy didn’t move. He put his hand up to his face—as though curious about the pain he found there. Then he raised his voice, because he wasn’t just talking to Peter—he was talking to all of us.
“Nobody cares about your noble faggotry. You want dominance? This is how you get it.”
And he grabbed Peter’s shoulders and kneed him in the crotch. Peter went down, and Roy was on top of him. For several minutes we watched as the two grappled together on the wet earth, the lightning capturing them in gaudy white tableaux, their blood, as they clawed and bit at each other, streaming together with the rain.
Peter stood no chance. There was no fairness in the way Roy fought, no reason, no daylight. He fought as though the choice were pain or death and he had made his decision years before. Peter curled himself into a ball on the shore, but Roy kept after him, crouching over him, biting through the skin of his neck, licking the blood from his lips while Peter whimpered beneath him.
A great foulness, and we all stood and watched. Some, boys and girls alike, rubbed their hands unconsciously between their legs as they observed. We had appetites back then. We knew what we felt.
*
The rain stopped. The tree branches overhead continued to drip for a while, but they finally stopped, too.
Once he was through with Peter, Roy walked away. I kneeled over Peter, trying to clean him up, but he hit my hands away.
“I’ll kill him,” he hissed. “Kill him.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“He’s filth.”