Patty picked her up at her folks’ house; it was dusk when they reached the campgrounds. Two other cars were already there. They made their way to the clearing by the river where the others were nursing a small fire in a rock enclosure. The forest was dense and silent and little light filtered through; the rush of the river splashing against rocks was the only sound.
“Why’d you bring her?” John Le Croix demanded angrily, staring at Ellen.
“She’s okay,” Patty said. “She’ll stay back in the trees. I didn’t want to come alone.”
“Shit,” someone else muttered. “Anyone got any matches?”
Someone began to pass a roach around. John and Les Prell had beer, Burt Craxton and Sheila Baum were sharing a bottle, and Beverly was huddled in a blanket humming monotonously; slowly the darkness deepened until there was no light beyond the fire. The rush of water got louder as the night grew darker. Ellen didn’t know how long they had been there; they smoked and drank, some of them vanished into the woods, reappeared; there was giggling as they slipped in and out of sleeping bags. She watched the fire, frightened because it flared and roared, died to a spark, flared.
Then he was there. She had not seen him arrive, but suddenly he was standing at the far end of the group, a towering figure in a dark cloak that swept the ground. Silently he unfastened it at his neck and let it drop. She bit her thumb to keep from crying out. He was wearing a short skirt and sandals, and was covered with snakes, painted on his bare torso, on his thighs, his arms. Golden snakes gleamed on his chest, a necklace of twined snakes with emerald eyes that reflected the fire, scarlet tongues that caught and threw back flames. Golden snakes gleamed on his fingers; he was carrying a shallow bowl in both hands. She had never seen anyone so beautiful, or so terrifying.
Silently the others began to move, to crawl out of the sleeping bags, form a ragged circle around the fire. Ellen shrank back against a tree trunk. He didn’t stir until they were all motionless again, and then he melted down gracefully to a cross-legged position on the cloak. Carefully he placed the bowl on the ground, and began to move his hands over it, chanting in a low voice. She could make out nothing of what he said, neither could she turn away from the sinuous motions of his hands. The painted snakes rippled; the golden snakes began to writhe, to flex and draw back...
She forgot that her legs had started to cramp, that the tree was gouging her spine, that her eyes were burning. Then he stood up and came to her; she was paralyzed until he reached out and took her hands, drew her up to her feet. He walked her away from the others, out of the firelight to the parking area, his arm around her shoulders, guiding her, supporting her. Her gaze was on the pale disk of light that flowed on the trail before them, over stones, up and over a tree limb. At his van he stopped and opened the door, took keys from the seat, and handed them to her.
“Go home, Ms. Blair. Go home and forget all this.” He took her face in his hands and said softly, “The ceremony isn’t for children.” He kissed her forehead and half lifted her to the van seat; he reached past her to turn on the headlights and then closed the door.
Burning with humiliation, she turned the key, engaged the gear, and sped away. She stopped at the first curve in the road to wipe her eyes, and had to stop to do it again a moment later. She realized that it was not only tears making the drive seem impossible; the road was expanding, contracting to a line, expanding again... She stopped driving, started, stopped again; the ten-mile drive was an eternity.
She felt the fire on her cheeks at the memory, and turned away from Patty who was bringing two mugs of coffee to the table.
“Listen, Ellen,” Patty said carefully, as if she had been thinking hard. “There’s no point in talking about that night. Six other people involved, all brought down in the dirt... Honey, you can’t get away with that story, that he handed you his keys and you took off. It just won’t wash.”
Ellen started to protest, but Patty held up her hand. “Let’s say he drove you home and was heading back, but he picked up someone along the way. That makes sense. He would have picked up a woman, you know. And after that, God knows what happened. But it doesn’t involve you or any of us.”
“You never asked me what happened,” Ellen said after a moment. “I would have told you exactly what I’ve just said. I drove myself home.”
“You were so high you don’t know what you were doing!”
“I was high, but not as high as the rest of you, and I wasn’t drinking. What happened out there? What did you do with the mushrooms?”
Patty shrugged. “We ate them and went to sleep. Let me tell you what Les said, honey. When you two disappeared and didn’t come back, he said, so the littlest pussy swallowed the king snake. Sheila tried to climb over the fire to clobber him.”
“He was probably standing behind the trees watching you all make fools of yourselves, and laughing,” Ellen snapped.
“And walked home practically naked and covered with snakes?”
“Why didn’t you ever bring it up, ask me about it if you thought I went with him?”
“I was mad at you. Everyone else was mad at both of us. I’ve never talked about that night with anyone.”
Ellen sipped her coffee.
Patty leaned across the table and put her hand on Ellen’s arm. “One more thing, honey. We have to think this through. No one’s going to accuse you of anything, you were only seventeen, but if the sheriff thinks you went off with a naked man and your father saw him, what conclusion do you suppose he’ll come to?”
Ellen nearly dropped her mug; coffee splashed across the table. The sheriff’s son, Burt Craxton, had been one of the students. If the sheriff’s son said she left with Philip, and the others said that, the next step, she admitted, could drag her father into it.
Patty was scowling into the distance. She said, “When they investigated thirteen years ago, did anyone ask you a single question?”
“No.”
“And no one will now. Why would they? You were a kid. So just sit tight. Don’t volunteer anything. You don’t have to lie. Just keep your mouth shut, it’s that simple.”
Silently Ellen nodded. What she had thought back then was that he had returned to the group at the fire, that they had had an orgy of some kind, and afterward he had left town, left the state, satisfied. A month later, when they discovered some of his things in his apartment, she had continued to believe that; he had taken what he wanted, left everything else. She had been relieved as day after day passed without his appearance; she would have died of mortification if he had walked into the store.
She still believed he had gone back to the group at the fire, and something terrible had happened there. Of the six, Patty was the only one she had known well, who was her friend; the others were no more than acquaintances. If this was Patty’s story, she felt there was no need to ask the rest of them anything at all. She stood up. “You’d better go. Jordan’s coming over, and I need a shower.”
For a moment Patty hesitated, then she got up. “It might not even be Philip, honey, remember that.” She pulled on her coat and left without saying anything else. Ellen locked the door behind her.
She wiped up the spilled coffee and then remained indecisively at the table. She had to shower, she told herself; Jordan was coming. She wished suddenly that he had never come to Crystal Falls, that he had stayed down in California. They had met eighteen months earlier, a few months after she had returned home. Maria Cutter had told Ellen’s father about a newly vacant apartment, and Ellen had gone to Papa’s Pasta House to have dinner and ask Maria about it. Then Maria had spotted Jordan and rolled her eyes, muttering about another single. She couldn’t seat two more singles on a Saturday night, how about if they shared a table instead. Ellen had glanced at him and said, sure, she didn’t mind, and he had nodded after a slight hesitation.