Molyneaux’s hanging arm swings once and—points.
A silver hint from underneath a gray stock brick. Pryor lays down the painful weight—Molyneaux twitches, tries to cough—and takes the key and thrusts it in the lock. Something has warped, worked loose; Molyneaux is lying at his feet in the spring mulch, leaves glossy-dark as patent-leather shoes, his body thin and starved but smooth, like some young chief not yet committed to his passage grave, waiting for earth and chalk to wrap him round.
Inside the pavilion, above the daybed, glows a deer’s skull. Pryor shivers. He didn’t see it there before, although it’s bright as Sirius in Canis Major, Procyon, or Capella. And by an optical effect (the angle of the moon), his own reflection peers out from the animal’s long head, which grunts and stares.
The animal he has become inspires him to charge. He butts the door. It falls open, a clatter of springs and uncorked wood. A lightning crack divides my pane and I see everything faulted and thrown.
Pryor lifts Molyneaux, somehow, onto the bed, though Pryor himself is exhausted. Molyneaux’s quiet, his eyes fixed on the goal of survival. Their nakedness a fact, the boys seek warmth, a cave, some rest. The furnishings feel alien and obvious—three blankets with a herringbone pattern, the striped provisional mattress, cushions to make a body comfortable.
When he has put a chair against the door, Pryor climbs into bed and pulls the blankets round them both. Facing the wall and held, Christopher Molyneaux grows no colder. Nothing is said. No more is done. The armor of his chest unfastens in the presence of his friend, whose nervous heat is life.
“I’ll give myself up,” Pryor says, eyes closed, at dawn. “I’ll go back in a minute. To fetch help. Don’t worry, I’ll say it was all my fault.”
The words are whispered into Molyneaux’s white shoulder. Neither body moves. The lake has dried on them.
An hour later, Pryor wakes again and leaves the nest. Molyneaux stays, watching the paint acquire a faint color.
Pryor unhooks the deer’s skull from the wall above his still-curled-up companion. Examines it. Not a good specimen—the back half of the lower jaw’s missing, a gap that, with the open cranial cavity, makes room enough for Pryor’s head.
He puts it on.
Molyneaux rolls over to see a creature in the doorway of the summerhouse. Behind it stirs the morning mist, to which the creature’s breath patiently adds, and behind that a boat greeting the island’s little stage—the stage the two boys missed last night.
Appalled voices. The creature flinches at the sound. Its chimerical head jerks five degrees, returns to gaze at Molyneaux as all around them trees explode with donnish crows and exclamations from the shore.
A step farther inside the house. The creature bows its head to Molyneaux’s shy hand, offers itself. Its skin is rough, a blanket-hide, its scent the tea of wintered leaves, its eyes deep-set and warm.
“And she was miles from anywhere in Indochina, in the hills. Not even there…”
The woman with the Colonel wears a matron’s uniform. Their clothes, put on in haste, look tight, uncomfortable. “Are these things yours?”
It’s an irrelevant question, like asking, “And what sort of time do you call this?” Into the answering silence pours the questioner’s self-doubt, his powerless pride. Stallbrook’s mouth overworks, wet with dismay. He nods toward Matron, who holds the dressing gowns and shoes. “I know—” he starts. “Good God, Pryor, this little escapade—have you no care? Did you not think what it might do? Your father, he and I… ought we to be ashamed of you?”
“My father’s dead.”
“Day he was born…” Matron whispers. (He has turned out exactly as she thought he would. Just look at him! See how the boy has wrapped himself in standard issue, like those poor souls in the newspaper! But he is touched, whatever Colonel Stallbrook says. Who could forget the way he came to Wargrave, on the first day of the General Strike, on foot, without a change of clothes? “I am Pryor. I ran from Southampton.” And what is that the little monster has upon his head? Who does he think he is?)
“Who do you think you are?”
“I am the Red Lady of Paviland.”
“He has gone mad.”
“Put these back on at once.” Stallbrook advances, throws the dressing gowns and pullovers at Pryor’s feet, and points, enraged, at the wide door and cracked window. “Trespass. Breaking and entering.” His arm outstretched, his brow sweating. “You’ve no idea, the fix you’re in.”
The adolescent shaman doesn’t budge an inch. A stillness holds them all, a pause before the sun appears. Without a class of witnesses, without the rows of small believers with their small beliefs, the master and his pinafored attendant are like empty postboxes, waiting for purposes to visit them.
The other boy, Molyneaux, where is he? The thought occurs to Stallbrook as the morning sun strikes through the island’s poplars, lights the raspberry canes and apple trees, the Bath stone of the squat pavilion, its gray interior.
As if he hadn’t heard a thing, or understood or cared, Christopher Molyneaux lies back, one arm behind his head. He’s gathering his strength. A different kind of silence enfolds him. He knows that punishment awaits, though beyond that he cannot know, only dimly suspect. For now he rests, an incommunicable warmth supporting him. He coughs, arches his back, casts off the blankets Pryor spread last night upon the bed. His other hand drifts over his belly and down, pushing the wool farther away, idling. There is about his self-examination and arousal something suddenly fearless, a little menacing, and true.
When I look back, out of my struck portal, at Pryor, half-incorporated with the skull, the sun is both brighter and differently hued.
It passes overhead, swiftly. Night falls. Another sun rises and sets. Its arc across the sky pivots, days shudder into weeks and months. Colonel Stallbrook and his helpmate dwindle; they’re blurred by age and pulsing skies, the lantern-flicker of advancing years. With a wild look, as if at last conceding something known but never said or confronted, they see reflected in the shaman’s eyeless abstraction of self the confirmation of their loss: fan-deltaic wrinkles, white hair shriveling, the skin sucked back, a humbling that now accelerates. Stark, for perhaps one full second, two skeletons—their jaws unhinged, their bones dancing slowly apart—illuminate the onset of a longer night. The lake freezes. Ice calls to ice and Pryor’s raised and summoning hand is frosted black.
No trees, no distant school, a greenstick whine as cities pop, scatter. Another order of significance arrives. Air thickens with the charge of glaciers. The former gas solidifies, the mirror plane of my glass eye is crushed, and I am fractioned, like a mote among the asteroids. Only the world’s ship-like trembling, its great pistons concealed, attests the passage of eons, time brakeless and unpeopled. Then, as fast as they arrived, faster, the glaciers recede, the waters rise, anoxic bile that boils away at Pryor’s still, unvoiced command—and I am either glass again, or obsidian, axe flint, my face upturned and refashioned.
The veil of night draws back. The sun comes close, colossal in the sky. A pale hand hangs me on a wall that rises from the desert’s fiery sands.
Other wan shadows brush the lens clear of disaster and I find I’m in a room from which new, old, and reassuring forms emerge—the shelves of books, the desk, the built-in cupboard, and the bed.