Thousand-Mile Gaze
Our heroes meet the Moon Calves
[Welcome back to Mad Art Project! It’s been a while. This is the next-to-last story, and what a trip it’s been. We pick up immediately after In the Cellar. Jethra and Tim are in Donnie Ross’s cellar, but Donovan’s about to bust them out. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
On Cracker Island it was raised by the collective from the grave — Gorillaz, Cracker Island
If I were to write you a story about Donnie Ross, I’d use the most delicate and lurid language I could wrap my keyboard around. On the other hand, if I never see him again, it’ll be too soon.
Oh, I’m sure he’s alive. Anyone who takes a hollow point round between the eyes and another center mass, both from less than five yards, and keeps walking toward me is going to be a real bitch to get rid. But I doubt he wants anything else to do with Jethra. And me? I don’t suppose you’d believe me if I described myself as being under her protection?
You’re right. It’s a lot to take in.
And I’m certainly not going to write you a book about him. What in the world could I say? I knew him less than two months, saw him in the flesh — ah, what flesh — three times, and had a couple of hours-long conversations over the phone with him. But even if I reported on his full life, he’d sound paltry. Big fish, small pond, all that.
I’d have to parody his here-and-now titles Senior Pastor, Bethel Branch Pentecostal Church; Chairman of the Board, Southside Utility; Owner and CEO, Bad Oak River Distributing Company; President of the Board and Chief, Station No. 1, Bethlehem Volunteer Fire Department.
Might run something like this: King of the Fair Folk; Prince of the Night Wind; President of the Unseelie Court of the Tennessee River Basin.
Maybe I’d better just tell you what happened.
In back of Donnie Ross’s cellar, which was half-cave already, someone had fitted a corrugated iron door into the low, irregular space. Donnie hadn’t left us any tools to break through, of course.
It could have been something out of Tom Sawyer. You remember the cave where he and Becky got trapped? The place where they hear water trickling on the other side of the wall? Well, to get to the back of Donnie Ross’s storm cellar, you went along past a pegboard wall and worktable, neither with any tools on them, and then you went past an old-school washboard and wringer and a stack of concrete blocks and a bunch of other rubbish, then around a corner and past the mattress and mounded Red Cross blankets where Jethra had been sleeping. That’s where someone had drawn that sigil, and where I woke up maybe half an hour before, as I’ve described to you.
Then you came to an elf-town or mouse’s necropolis — Jethra’s work — with palm-sized houses and monuments made of pebbles and shards of green bottle glass. By now you were out of the light, even assuming it was broad day outside and the cellar doors were flung open. It was night now, of course, maybe about three o’clock in the morning. Well, Jethra had built her new cemetery up along the walls, leaving the way to the back door clear. By now we were both stooping. It was low in here.
We sat down near the corrugated iron door, Jethra holding the Coleman lamp which Donnie had conveniently left so she would recognize me and work her magic to heal me, I reckon. He must have done something rough to me because I was feeling pretty punky still. But I was too mad at Donnie to admit he’d hurt me and too mad at Jethra to ask for her help, even if that wouldn’t have played right into his hands. I sat there holding my tummy, my head spinning and my mouth tasting like spunk and bile, but I breathed in the cold and let it numb me up at bit.
Saltpeter, I thought. Iron.
In the silence as my head stopped pounding I heard something tentative and sweet.
“Listen,” I said.
Jethra listened and we heard a trickle of water.
“Yeah, I think there’s a little underground stream out there,” she said. “I can hear it when I lie in bed.”
True, this might have been a finger of water, a pencil of water. I wanted to ask whether it maddened or comforted her, all these long months underground, but this was no time for that. We kept listening. I felt Jethra stiffen.
“Someone’s there?”
Someone was there. As Donovan explained it to me the previous afternoon, this cellar gave onto a passage of unmapped cave known to only a few folks — moonshiners, back when, I reckon, and nowadays people with something to hide from the daylight.
People like Donnie Ross.
And Donovan Holloway.
The scraping became a grinding or groan — iron dragging dirt. The door jerked a quarter-inch away from us, then another quarter-inch. Then Donovan worked his crowbar into the gap and gave a powerful yank, breaking the latch on the other side and dragging the door another 18 inches open. That was all the clearance it had; it was now jammed open.
“Howdy!” Donovan’s voice said, not loudly but eagerly.
“Here!” I answered, also low. He put his hand through the gap and Jethra scrambled forward to seize it.
She spent a couple of breaths pressing her cheek to the back of his hand, and I suspected he was crying on the other side of the door, but he wasted no time. “Come on, squeeze through,” he muttered.
It took some time, and the Jethra I remembered could never have fit through that gap, but this one managed it. Of course, my size is negligible. In five minutes we were hurrying along, stooped almost double, in the only direction we could go — slightly downhill, with a sheet of water thin as gauze shimmering down the wall beside us.
“How long?” I asked Donovan. I’m the type who likes to know the worst.
“Two hours,” he answered. I didn’t feel like I could go for two hours. My legs were shaking. Water, rock and lamplight spun around me when I moved my head, and I was sicker than ever. Of course feel like didn’t have anything to do with it. If I had to, I would.
I never caved much, even as a boy when my foster brothers used to go in for it. But now I remembered or learned again how, after a few hours of tramping down a tunnel with walls close at either hand, I would start to feel as if my legs were taking me nowhere. Instead, a grainy movie scrolled in front of my eyes, dim yellow-brown stone always varied, always the same, indistinguishable from the walls and floor 12 yards back, or 25, or 100.
But gradually, things changed.
We could walk upright now. In front of me, Jethra kept pace with Donovan, who was in the lead, holding the big lamp. I couldn’t tell much about her, and after a couple of hushed exclamations and hugs for Donovan, she didn’t talk. The young man was all business, getting us out as quick as possible, and Jethra seemed stunned somehow. Her soot-gray man’s cardigan hung past her knees. Over bare feet she wore those slip-on sneakers you buy in a Dollar General. I caught sight of a hole in the sole.
I didn’t know who or what she was, except the cherry-red girl who had frustrated and enchanted me 20 years ago had vanished. I had fallen in love with my idiot imaginings, and now those imaginings proved false — well, what did I expect — yet the love remained.
And she loved me back. That sunk her a lot in my estimation, I can tell you. I had pretended or hoped she’d grown beyond me somehow. But she’d dwindled, far as I could tell, or maybe refined herself down to bone and sinew. How could I know? This was no place to talk. The woman trudging silently in front of me was a cipher.
Of course, I should have stayed alert. But I’d had a long night, had probably been given a roofie, and had definitely been ensorcelled. The dregs clung to me, thick as pot liquor, protecting me a bit from my bitter thoughts and aching legs. Also, of course, they rendered me pretty much useless for any immediate purpose.
I was mourning for Jethra, sure, but almost without emotional content, if that makes any sense. The volume had been turned down near zero on joy and sorrow alike. What I felt was more like nausea.
As my thoughts retreated from the passage leading us down to the mouth of Way-Crazy Cave, the evening’s memories welled up to fill the space. Hands, eyelashes, forearms — don’t get me started — velvet skin, mellifluent baritone, broad chest, curling black hair. An embrace like Old Spice, breath like Bananas Foster.
Of course, the man himself. Donnie Ross.
I had one aim when I walked in his door earlier that evening: to get to Jethra. To that end, I would do anything. And because time was short, and because I wanted Donnie Ross to suspect me of a different — but oh-so-true — motive for offering to be of use to him, I didn’t play patty cakes about it.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
This time, though, he didn’t give me any speeches or long requests. Just sat there catty cornered to his kitchen table, forearm draped over the open red-letter KJV he’d been studying. It was a big one, worn, leather-bound, old-womanish, with funeral home cards and slips of notepaper and four-leaf clovers and who knows what rubbish drifting out of it. My eyes are sharp; I saw he’d been studying Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.
He followed my gaze and ended up looking me in the eye. His look drew some parallel I couldn’t make out.
“Foolish changeling,” he said. “You already have.”
Had he outsmarted me? Surely not. But my face must have showed my disadvantage. His lips parted in a smile. Or perhaps a wolfish look not unlike the one I later saw on Jethra’s face. I wasn’t sure until his eyes creased as if he was gently laughing at me. Being laughed at with kindness is perhaps the greatest pleasure one can feel — I don’t know how to explain it — and Jethra used to laugh at me just so sometimes.
Something slipped. I reached to catch myself on the back of the chair. This will only work, I told myself, if you give yourself up.
“Sit down,” he said, nodding at another chair pulled out ready for me. “Sit down and drink with me.”
So far was I in my reverie that I only slowly noticed the light dimming. I had a pocket flashlight Donovan had passed me. He’d been walking ahead with the big hand lantern and a headlamp. He’d brought a lantern for Jethra, too, but it seemed to have gone out. Jethra, moony as I was, trudged ahead of me.
What had happened?
No light but the one I carried, which was making Jethra-shaped shadows scream up the flowstone ahead of us.
No Donovan leading the way.
Would Donovan come to rescue his own mother, then leave her behind?
How had we lost him?
We hadn’t seen a fork in the tunnel, no side passages or pits, but — would either of us have noticed? Donnie Ross had been more present to me than —
Well, there it was. Still bewitched.
And I’m not joking; some illusion had led Donovan away without us, and kept us walking without noticing he had gone. I took a quick inventory. A small flashlight, the candles and matches Donovan had given me in my pocket. Donovan had also handed Jethra a canteen; she still had that. I had my handgun. For a moment I wondered what madness had possessed me to bring a firearm to a conjure man’s house. But he hadn’t searched me. I suppose he imagined I was so limp I wouldn’t go armed.
No point in going back. Witched or not, we’d better keep moving forward, I thought.
We walked along, Jethra and I, until we saw them crawling out of the walls.
Not walls, really. The thread of damp trailing the floor beside us had gathered force and was now a real stream, perhaps a few fingers wide, between the uneven floor and the rough wall of the tunnel angling up and toward us to where, I suppose, it met the other wall to form the apex somewhere in the gloom. I couldn’t have told you how deep the stream was, but the play of water was so crystalline I had assumed it was maybe a couple of inches deep, just a cold ribbon of water tinkling along between breakdown and flowstone.
Glancing around, trying to assess whether my memory held any gaps (that might hide, for instance, us coming to a fork in the passage) I saw something bobbing along the little channel. Hodag, mushroom, stray glow-in-the-dark Waffle ball? None of those. The luminous sphere rose and fell sporadically in the water as the little swimmer — I saw a ripple of sleek back now, and what might have been paddling paws — drew abreast of us and passed us, quickly tumbling downstream out of the light.
Another followed. A third.
I took a long stride to catch up with her and touched Jethra’s shoulder.
She jumped.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
The face she turned on me was phosphorescent white, echoing the glow of those water babies with the bulbous heads.
And thinking that, I realized what they were.
“Jethra,” I insisted.
She stared at me. She didn’t answer or blink. Her wolfish features seemed to radiate a full-moon light. The same light, I realized, illuminated the wriggling swimmers from within.
“Do you see that?” I turned to search for another swimmer approaching and instead saw one crawling down the passage. It was indeed a human form, or more like Kewpie-doll form, bigger than the ones in the stream, maybe the size of a half-grown cat. Its skin was translucent and its wide-set eyes, perfectly round, sat in its head like enormous dewdrops. They looked black until, as it dragged itself nearer the flashlight beam, they shone like blood agate.
The breakdown rock had torn its knees and the heels of its hands. In fact, as I looked, I wondered it could trundle along so briskly. I’ve never liked babies — and now this looked like a true baby, a human infant, in its vulnerability, in its small curled fingers and delicate wrists and thousand-mile gaze — yet I dropped to one knee in consternation. That gaze still held mine, but I glanced away to note the damage: torn knees and hands; a thick lacy scar along the right side of its skull; an ear dangling by the lobe; an irregular bluish lump under its left eye like a drowned mosquito ; a long loop of bloody something that might have been intestine and might have been umbilicus trailing off behind it.
Overcoming my natural antipathy, I reached for the baby. For once in my life my aversion to infants did some good. As I gingerly wrapped my fingers and thumbs around its ribcage to lift it, blood welled through its skin. If I had gripped tightly it might have come to pieces in my hands.
I snatched my fingers back and frantically wiped its blood on my trousers.
“Jethra!” I said, my eyes locked on the infant’s again. “Are you seeing this.”
No answer.
My touch had raised welts on the porcelain skin. The red stripes closed under my gaze.
This time I looked around for Jethra’s attention.
“Look!”
She had in fact turned and was staring down at me. She realized my urgency, I saw, but didn’t understand it. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
She couldn’t see the Moon Calf at all.
Four others whirled down the stream. Another one, half the size of the first, lurched in slow motion into the light. One leg was dislocated at the naked hip and dragged behind it. Crimson tears, I saw, were trickling from its eyes. But its face was serene, its gaze steady ahead into the dark. Passing its companion, it struggled onward.
My boot heel would cover its head. My body moved ahead of my thought: Crush it, put it out of its misery. I only failed because Jethra grabbed my hand, pulling me off balance.
“Oh, be careful!” she breathed.
“What is it?” I asked her, relieved to tears, “What do you see?”
“I don’t know … ”
“Nothing crawling, swimming?”
“Nothing, no.”
But she clung to me and I pulled her close, wrapping my arm around her waist, hoping to spare her from hurting a Moon Calf as she had spared me. Together, surrounded by an increasing crowd of Jethra’s pallid progeny, we picked our way down the tunnel.
After a while we could no longer pick our way among the breakdown rock. We had to clamber over it. The stream grew in strength and now flowed around us, glistening here and there under the rock. I hadn’t noticed such a current before when Donovan and I checked out the cave mouth. We’d climbed over some boulders, sure, but far as I noticed it has been dry underneath, with just a stream alongside.
Now, though, the current strengthened, carrying the Moon Calves along around and sometimes beneath us. They seemed to like swimming, which they did like dogs, paddling with their heads aloft.
Then the channel flowed off to the side again, over and under the rocks, and we saw ahead of us a paler darkness, tired-indigo-colored, maybe, that gradually took the shape of a great dolman arch with a stream in flood pouring away to the right and out down the draw and a high, smooth shelf of dry rock up to our left out of the flood.
We had come to the mouth of Way Crazy Cave, but we’d have a risky wet time getting out, climbing over those rocks in a rushing current on a dark night, that was sure. It must have rained, I thought. I tried to gauge whether the water was rising but couldn’t tell.
“Come on, sit up here with me,” I said to Jethra. I remembered Donovan and I had sat on the shelf above the entrance maybe 18 hours before, watching the sunlight filter through hanging roots and leaves into the cave mouth. There had been evidence of other cavers, some long gone—a folding chair, beer cans, mattress springs, a hand winch with no cable. No Moon Calves up there, I saw. I was relieved. I couldn’t figure where they had gone, but I hoped they had all washed out of the cave and off away somewhere.
Jethra and I sat together on the dusty rock. Drifting a bit, I pictured those crimson eyes gazing into mine. An infant holds a universe in its gaze, do you know that? — of course you do, I’m the only asshole who hates babies. I closed my eyes for a few seconds, remembering the Moon Calf’s eyes.
Then I shook my head. They were gone now, if in fact they weren’t a hallucination, an after-effect of Donnie Ross’s sorcery. I wished them all a quick death. What else could I hope for them?
“We need to move,” I told Jethra, jostling her head up off my shoulder. She mumbled something, but rolled forward into a crouch to stand. I had forgotten her ready athleticism. We’ll be all right, I thought. I blinked my eyes open.
Then I saw that we would not be all right, would never be all right again. Donnie Ross stood in the opening of our shelter, between us and the stream, flames lighting him from behind as if he had summoned them up out of karst and damp.
By daylight Donnie Ross is impressive enough — not tall, but broad and swarthy and beautiful. Part preacher (I had thought earlier that evening with my cheek on his thigh) part mafioso, part carnie barker.
In a cave by night with a blaze behind him, smoke swirling around him and water roaring behind that, he might have been the Prince of Hell himself.
He spread his arms. “Changeling, I’m obliged to you,” he said. “If you hadn’t come along, I’d have had to drag her all this way myself.”
And the conjure-circle, barely concealed under cave-dust, danced into flame and encircled us.