He unrolled the parchment. We each sat with crossed legs facing the Peacock God with the thirty-seven statues behind us. We each held an egg in our left hands as Dr. Mortlake read the spell. If this was just an extra-terrestrial’s secretion I don’t know why we needed a spell. His voice echoed oddly in the chamber. Our normal voices didn’t echo and certainly not with a delay or slight changes in provocation. It was probably my imagination, but I felt as if the bulbs dimmed while he read. Then it was done and plunk! Plunk! Plunk!
The Peacock Milk was thick and oily and gaggingly bitter. My grandmother had been a big believer in castor oil, so I had swallowed something with that texture. But as to the bitter flavor, no experience on earth had prepared me for that flavor. I’m sure the diluted flavor in Dr. Mortlake’s drink was quite awful, judging from his expression and the fit of coughing that immediately manifested. Angela had a deep, serious look on her face. I don’t know that I had ever wanted a thing as much she wanted the miracle of the Peacock Milk.
Dr. Mortlake smiled as his coughing stopped.
“You’ll feel the effects almost immediately. Sadly, you won’t be able to communicate them to me. It would have made a nice ending for my article.”
I started to stand, but found my legs were locked. I turned toward Angela and saw fear in her eyes. I tried to speak, but couldn’t open my mouth. I felt my face freeze into a terrible grimace.
“How nice you’ll spend eternity looking at each other,” Mortlake said. “I only asked that you love me with your whole heart. Was it that hard? I’ll be gone in a month. I’ll barely have time to finish my article. The cult prepared initiates to have such strength of mind they could continue their meditations forever. The Neanderthal-looking yogis are in fact Neanderthals. The sutra says they’re still conscious. Apparently, their thoughts are slow, after a few centuries the god starts to talk to them. You’ll probably go mad in a few months. How dreadful staring at each others’ faces in the gloom. Of course, after my death others will seek out the cave. Maybe if they move slowly enough you’ll notice their presence. I hope they don’t wind up taking you out of here — it would be so sad if you were in different museums, wouldn’t it?”
He leaned over Angela. “I guess you carved your X with the diamond on the massive ring I gave you. So romantic! You could have waited just months — months to be super-rich. I even (unintentionally) found a handsome, brave man that you could love. Both of you could’ve had everything! So stupid in your lust, not even to question who these humans are. The drug, the secretion, helps with the long reality of extraterrestrial flight. The poor Peacock Momma crashed here and couldn’t get the quickening drug. Her mate died; he secreted the quickening drug.”
His voice became more and more shrill, more and more fast. Then it was gone. Then the bulbs went out. In an instant, I could tell he had left the cave. The gloom changed to darkness to gloom to darkness faster and faster.
For a while I counted the days. Then others came for a while and lit up the cave. Then another group. Then a group that wrote in Chinese.
Now the gloom/darkness changes so fast I can’t tell which is which.
And now I am beginning to hear the god. The lamenting one speaking of her dead mate and of lost worlds, very non-human worlds.
I do not like it.
(For John R. Fultz)
The Private Estate JAMES CHAMBERS
Tonight, nearly fifty years after my big brother leapt to his death while fleeing a giant cockroach with the face of an old woman, my long-lost childhood sweetheart, Maggie Delano, knocked on my front door. I hadn’t seen Maggie since she vanished from New York City in the summer of 1973 while helping me investigate Dennis’s death. Now on this warm, placid night, there she stood, exactly as I recalled her, as if birthed into existence from my memory, aged not a day although the gravity in her eyes hinted at decades of experiences unimaginable to me.
“Hey there, Richie-Rich,” she said.
The sound of my old nickname, spoken by her voice, eroded my doubts about her identity. When she guided me through the childish secret handshake we’d invented in middle school, she erased them completely.
What else could I do but invite her in and listen, speechless, to her story? Her presence incited in me a paralyzing riot of emotion and anxiety that only deepened as I grasped her words. They ignited as many new questions as they answered, and by the end of our all-too-short visit, my mind boiled over with jigsaw fragments of the past, present, and future. Only the invitation Maggie extended to me stuck firmly in my mind, a shocking offer she allowed me a single night and day to consider before she promised to return tonight for my answer.
Though I yearn for the moment I’ll see her again, a day provided hardly enough time to organize my thoughts — but I have struggled, sleepless, the entire time to make sense of what she revealed to me. I don’t know what’s real anymore or what I believe. I’ve dug deep into the past to my nineteen-year-old self’s stunted effort to explain Dennis’s death, the last period in my life when I sought the truth.
In those days, only Maggie stood by me when my family refused any support. Strict and conservative, the entire Hendricks clan had disowned Dennis for his drug abuse and involvement in a counterculture movement called Wicca, advocated in New York City back then by a modern witch named Raymond Buckland. Dennis, being Dennis, climbed those Neopagan ranks until he met Redcap, a man who ran a Greenwich Village coven inspired by the work of Keziah Mason, a 17th-century witch now acknowledged in rarified circles as an early, misunderstood mathematical genius. Redcap almost certainly caused my brother’s death, though neither I nor the police could prove it. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, however, all so ashamed of Dennis, didn’t care to know either way and remained content to see him buried and move on with their lives. Only Maggie and I cared to do otherwise.
We had grown up thick as thieves next door to each other in the Long Island Bay town of Knicksport, fifty miles outside the city. At age five, we promised to marry in that way little kids innocently do, but as adults, we remained platonic, the bond of brother and sister, which made losing Maggie in 1973 all the more difficult. The one warm, ever-present constant in my life, a caring woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor — gone. And when we had come so close to grasping the hidden facts of Dennis’s death.
Based on statements to police from neighbors who witnessed his panicked dash from his second-floor apartment to the rooftop from which he plummeted, we knew Dennis had raved about the cockroach creature as he ran, that he had talked about it stalking him for days. The cops chalked it off to hallucinations instigated by drug use, an easy enough explanation. Except that the story resonated for me. Five years younger than my twentytwo-year-old brother and my head filled with the strange things he’d told me, I wondered what if there were more to his fatal mania than psychedelic derangement. I couldn’t shake myself loose from that question.
In the aftermath of Maggie’s visit tonight, I’ve retrieved an old shoebox from the back of my closet. In it lie all my notes and photos from that time, materials I never mustered the courage to revisit or discard. And with them my 1968 Carry-Corder 150, which, astonishingly, still works with fresh batteries despite storage for all the intervening years.
The cassettes still play. The voices still speak.
Maggie’s. That dirtbag pusher, Squirrel’s. Mine, younger and deeper.
My brother’s.
The city street noise hums like a background theme. The morning of August 8, 1973, outside a brownstone apartment on East 4th Street, a moment kept alive magnetically.