In his room Jack watched. Terror and beauty ravaged him; he could feel the boom of blood in his head and a softer throbbing in his chest, as though the child played him as nimbly as its flute. Still they danced, the horned men, with steps careful and measured as automatons. They might have been part of some infernal timepiece ringing the changes.
But then, very slowly, he became aware that the music was diminishing—he sensed rather than heard it, like warmth stealing back into his hands. He leaned forward and saw that the dancers had paused. The child bowed its head. Then, as slowly as it had arrived, the child turned and retraced its steps, pacing back across the lawn. When it reached the shadows of the trees the skeletal dancers followed. They moved now with a more somber grace, no longer rocking back and forth beneath the weight of those heavy racks—it seemed that the antlers had somehow grown and become part of them. All their bestial power had fused with the frail bones of men. Light clung to them, light falling from the sky or rising like mist from the ground. When they reached the shadows of the tulip poplars they were clothed in it. They did not turn their heads or look back to where Jack sat and watched them. And yet he knew that he was the reason they had come here: vision or dementia or the exalted remnant of a dream, they had come for him.
The last shining form dipped its head beneath the branches and disappeared. The music died away. Alone in his room stood Jack, robed in light and burning with fever, his pale eyes huge and glittering with the glory and horror of what he had seen. He was still there next morning when the housekeeper came to see what had kept him from breakfast.
“Jack? What is it, Jack? Are you sick? Good Lord, he isn’t—”
And he shook his head, unable to tell her No he was not dead nor even sick, but burning, burning, burning.
CHAPTER THREE
Trip Takes a Fall
He would die at Hell Head.
Trip Marlowe knew that was how the obituaries would begin. Never mind that no one from away knew that Hell Head was where you always went to die, if you were from Moody’s Island. For sure it was where you went to die if you were a Marlowe. It was where his father had gone when Trip was six years old, and blown his brains out with a thirty-aught-six; where Trip’s mother had gone a year later, to dive into the whirlpool and never be found. Hell Head was where the island children went on Halloween, daring each other to stare into the black water at low tide and glimpse the bones there, the bones he had never seen but they were there, for sure Trip knew they were there. Trip Marlowe knew all about bones.
He was twenty-two years old and the Voice of the Last Generation. That was what some flack on Radium had called him, after Trip’s first album—the one that originally came out on Mustard Seed, the one that got him six Dove Awards and an Emmy and his face on a zillion home pages and the cover of OUR magazine—was bought and rereleased by a Xian subsidiary of GFI Worldwide early in 1998. The album was called LIVE FROM GOLGOTHA. Trip stole the title from an old banned book in the hard stacks at Olive Mount Bible College. His best friend, Jerry Disney, had found the novel; God only knew how it got there. Trip never read the book—Trip didn’t read, except for the Bible and furtively hidden copies of Matrix comics—but he liked the title, and he knew how to use it. Even as a child on Moody’s Island, where he sang in the choir at the Fisher of Men First Harbor Church, he had always possessed what the people at GFI called marketing savvy. For instance, it had been Trip’s idea that alone of all the children in the choir, he should wear red when they performed.
“It’ll make me stand out.” He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt: he had already dyed his white choir robe deep scarlet, using a packet of Rit Dye from the Moody’s Island beach store. “You know. When I sing.”
“You already stand out,” said John Drinkwater. He was the choir director. A skinned stick of a man who wouldn’t allow his own kids to use the computer in the broken-down trailer that was the island school. But he sounded amused. “But sure, okay. We’ll try it.”
It was August the first time Trip wore the red robe. They were singing at the Grace Fellowship Baptist Church over to Jonesport, not a long drive; otherwise, probably he would’ve passed out from the smell of Rit Dye. Deep scarlet came off on Trip’s hands, his skinny freckled arms and chest, and even his face. But it was so hot inside the church, the choir’s singing so pure and exalted, that no one at Grace Fellowship even noticed.
“Probably they just thought your face was all red and you were goin’ t’ pass out.” Jerry Disney fanned himself with his own crumpled-up robe and stared out the bus window at rows of boarded-up gas stations and abandoned shopping malls. “I sure thought I was.”
After that he always wore the red robe. When Trip grew out of it, John Drinkwater had his wife sew him another one, with fabric that came all the way from Bangor. And when Trip grew out of that one, John Drinkwater had his wife make him a dozen, in various sizes, “So’s you won’t ever have to be without.”
He’d been Trip Marlowe then, a golden star in heaven’s crown, for sure the star of the Fisher of Men Children’s Choir. Summer and winter they traveled inland, to Bangor and Caribou and Presque Isle, and up coastal Route One to Calais, which was practically Canada. Twenty-four children and their chaperones crammed into the church’s old blue school bus, where the stench of ethanol vied with that of squashed peanut-butter sandwiches and the Dignam twins, who always had to go to the bathroom. John Drinkwater sat in front behind Mrs. Spruce, who drove, and even after they sang themselves hoarse at church suppers and Christian Coalition fundraisers, country fairs and weddings, funerals and baptisms; even at twelve midnight, when the littlest children were so tired they lay across their mothers’ laps and wailed, John Drinkwater made them sing some more.
Exhausted as they were, the children sounded beautiful. Outside might be nothing but ravaged forests left by bankrupt paper companies, or the potato-field wasteland of Aroostook County; but inside the bus it was heaven. Even the poor bleary-eyed mothers would take a break from rummaging in paper sacks full of moldering apples and bottles of Coke, to lean back in their seats and smile and clap in time.
When the hymn was done they kissed the children, smoothing the boys’ buzz-cut hair and adjusting the girls’ dirty pink headbands, and told everyone how wonderful they sounded.
“Like angels, now then, hush, let’s try and get some sleep.”
That was what the mothers said as the bus jounced over the bridge to Verona Island, or as it sat with the engine turned off in Bath, waiting for the foot traffic at the ironworks to clear.
But later, when the children finally passed out in their mothers’ laps, those chaperones who were still awake would turn to each other and nod toward the back of the bus where Trip always sat.