CYTHERA: What particular kind of hell?
ERASMO: The kid started screaming bloody murder. I thought for a moment he was going to blink out again, to get away from Severin, but she held him still. Held him while he shrieked and shook and clawed at her. Like that girl in the story. Who holds onto Tam Lin ’til the wicked fairies have all marched by. What’s her name?
CYTHERA: Janet.
ERASMO: [chair squeaks] That was quick. Under other circumstances, I think you might be an interesting person to know, Cyth. Janet. She held him like Janet, and at the same time the sound roared up again, nothing like the night before. Loud—and I mean marching band-loud. It was absolutely mechanical this time. Machine noise and voices. We didn’t recognize them at first. We couldn’t begin to understand words out of all that junked-up static—skipping, popping, screeching feedback, looped back on itself, the timbre fucked from top to bottom. But somewhere in there we could hear…voices. We were all pretty freaked out—but that kind of freaked out where you’re excited and alive and so fucking curious your curiosity could punch a hole in the ground.
CYTHERA: Can we discuss the boy’s hand for a moment?
ERASMO: [loud sigh] After all this time I still don’t know what to say about his hand. It was disgusting, I can say that. I couldn’t see it clearly, not right away. He was still hollering his head off. His eyes were absolutely wild. I saw a horse bolt during a fireworks show once. When the gauchos finally tracked her down, she was lying in a lake of her own sweat, panicked entirely out of her ability to stand on her own four legs. And her eyes, her poor eyes, looked like Anchises’s eyes. Irises spinning in their whites.
Anchises held up his hand—the hand—to Severin like he meant to strike her, but she didn’t recoil. I was so proud of her. I would have flinched. All I could think was: He has a mouth in his hand. But it wasn’t a mouth. Later he let us all examine it as much as we liked. With gloves and masks, mind you. We didn’t just shove our thumbs in. He had a gash in his palm that didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t heal, and the gash was full of horrid squirming bits of flesh, like tiny tentacles, but so fine. Silky. Wet. Greenish-bronze. And alive: they moved by themselves, stretching out of him. Severin just kept telling him how everything was fine as paint. Giving him her best Face Number 124: Adoring Mother. Instead of hitting her, he touched her cheek with that ruin of a hand. It was such a tender gesture, so…adult. And when he touched her it all shut off. He stopped screaming and the static stopped screeching and he let her scoop him up in her arms. She carried him away from the Memorial and then Margareta conducted her examination while Rinny cradled him in her lap.
Anchises slept in our tent for the next three days. We tried to get him to talk, but he wouldn’t. Just clung to Rin like she was something new to circle round. We sat by the fire singing all the songs we could think of to the kid. Maximo took him for walks and kept up this constant patter, hoping he’d do the primate thing and start trying to mimic the big monkeys.
CYTHERA: If we could step back for a moment: What steps did you take to investigate the source of the static? Did Dr Nantakarn suggest that you might have been hallucinating? It seems that all of you freely indulged in drugs and alcohol…
ERASMO: Oh, please. Don’t patronise us. Retta heard it, too. So did Aylin, and neither of them touched a drop of anything even the slightest bit altering. We did what you’d expect—strip that sound equipment, son! Get into those Edison innards. But it was all fine. Mariana kept saying, “It’s perfect, it’s perfect.”
CYTHERA: The rest of the night passed without incident?
ERASMO: Reasonably. We decided not to try to get anything out of Anchises yet. He slept like he’d died. At breakfast the next morning—
CYTHERA: This is December third?
ERASMO: Sure. Who cares? At breakfast I offered him some eggs—he wouldn’t eat solid food yet, but I made him a plate just in case. Max had taken him walking on the beach earlier in the morning and the boy seemed almost cheerful. I offered him eggs and he opened his mouth and static came pouring out of it—but inside the static we heard something else.
Mariana. Screaming.
It was only a coincidence; he wasn’t making the sound. It came from everywhere—from the sky, from the Qadesh—but he opened his mouth in time for it to look like a cue. Mariana’s scream was clear as bleeding daylight, and we all knew it was hers. Mari lost it. You have to understand, she wouldn’t have suffered the indignity of getting certified on Edison gear if she didn’t have a delicate ear and love that mixer on her hip like a child. She screamed in harmony with herself, holding her hands over her ears, yelling over the sound of this other staticky voice we didn’t recognize yet, garbled, warped, followed by a lot of audio vomit. From then on, it never stopped.
You understand, we didn’t know what it was saying then. Afterward, Cristabel and I played back Mariana’s tape in the studio on the Clamshell and cleaned it up. Only then could we get at the actual words.
CYTHERA: Which were?
ERASMO: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown, and what strength I have’s mine own, which is most faint.”
Billy Shakes, my dear. The Tempest. But it was just growling then. Growling, and that vicious, shrill screaming. It never stopped after that. None of us could sleep in that invisible static mess, listening to shredded voices coming from nowhere. It just swallowed Mari up. She spent the morning banging on her temples to make it stop. Moaning, rocking back and forth, clutching her mixer to her chest.
CYTHERA: Alfric struck the boy, correct?
ERASMO: That is so entirely, utterly irrelevant. Yes, she slapped him, that morning when I gave him a plate of eggs and he gave us the hell’s loudspeaker. When it looked like the sound was coming from him, she slapped the scream off him.
CYTHERA: Was that the only time she made physical contact with him?
ERASMO: I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe.
CYTHERA: Varela said he argued with Severin on the night of December second.
ERASMO: I think everyone argued with everyone on the night of December second.
CYTHERA: Do you know what they argued about?
ERASMO: She said it was nothing. She and Varela had a thing when they were kids—really, just kids. So they couldn’t just disagree on what gels to use, it was always the wrong gel and you broke my heart a million years ago. I usually tuned it out. But Mari was still an absolute wreck and the static kept rising and falling like waves, hitting us over and over, and it wouldn’t stop, it never stopped. Max was worried about Severin. Maybe that was it.
CYTHERA: Was there a physical altercation?
ERASMO: She wouldn’t have told me if there was. I’d have slammed his face into a tree so hard he’d have had to live there. And she liked his face.
We were all on edge. Sleeping in that ghost town, in the middle of all those shattered houses and wreckage and misery, feedback sawing on our ears every minute of every hour and the sun never coming up or going down and this poor helpless kid with the monster in his hand…By the fourth hour, I wanted to slide out of my own skin and return to the invertebrate sea. I would’ve been thrilled to hit something. Anything.
You want to know how bad it was? I can sum it up for you. That night, after eight or nine hours of that horror show ripping through the air, Severin curled up next to me and hauled my arms up over her body. She was hiding in me. And do you know what she said?
CYTHERA: What?
ERASMO: Miss Severin Lamartine Unck said to me, “Baby, I’m so scared.”