Chapter Text
A trickle of lighting
I knew before I heard
I felt in my skin
- Glass Animals, "Domestic Bliss"
Henry was a curious boy, and he wasn’t afraid of anything.
Alice cried if a cricket hopped too near to her pastel skirts. Mother was deathly fearful of mice. Even Dad had his strange fits, his murmuring nightmares. Often he sat in his easy-chair with his hands clenched like claws, staring at nothing.
The War, Mother said, with a smile pinching her lips. It’s always the War. You needn’t worry, Henry.
Henry wasn’t worried. He was bored.
In Massachusetts, the streets of their town had been too cold, too gray for Henry to pass his lonely winter afternoons exploring them. In Nevada, there was no winter. It was an endless desert world of summer and light.
Only in the caves could one find shadows.
Almost certainly, there were spiders in the caves. Henry loved spiders: their neat orb-like bodies, their spindly legs, their pronged fangs. He liked their venom, though he was careful to avoid it: a brown recluse could make your flesh rot, and a black widow could kill you.
He loved black widows the most.
There was nothing to fear, in the desert. Crickets, snakes, scorpions—deadly only if you didn’t understand them. There was nothing to fear for a curious boy, a cautious boy.
Overhead, the sky was the crystal-shining blue of an open eye. Under Henry’s feet, the earth stretched out sandy-colored, rock upon rock, nothing left alive without a fight.
Ahead, the cave grinned blackly, a dark cavity in a wall of red stone. He’d seen it when Dad took them all on a drive one Sunday, and he’d known, in his secret heart,
I have to go back there.
If Mother knew about the caves in the desert hills, if she knew the secrets of the desert walls, she wouldn’t let Henry explore them. She would pin him to the dead-grass yard of their clapboard house, like an insect whose wings could no longer flutter to frighten Alice. An insect pinned to board, to memory.
(Mother didn’t know about the caves.)
Dad had taken a job surveying land for the government. That was why he’d moved them here. Dependable money, he said. And why Nevada, instead of anywhere else? Why, it was a land of all sorts of promise. Scientists were interested in naturally occurring electrical phenomena, for which they were developing better and better means of detection. It was less boring than working in a bank in Massachusetts, but Henry liked his science to correspond to things that moved, that could be felt beneath his hand, or if not, inspected through his spyglass.
Lightning was electric, and nobody could catch lightning no matter what the songs said.
They had sold their wireless when they left the East. That meant no more music, except for the car radio. Dad talked about getting a gramophone, just as soon as he was paid enough.
Dependable money.
Loss upon loss. Dad couldn’t promise anything, and really mean it.
If it was Henry’s for the doing, someday there would be a big house with many rooms, with red walls and creaking steps, with windows that looked on nothing and windows that showed the whole world.
The cave showed nothing. Up close, its mouth loomed high and broad, an entrance through which a man could walk.
Henry was only a boy.
He stepped beneath the frowning red arch. Darkness blinded him for an instant. Then he turned his back on the shadows and looked again towards the light. The outside world looked small, but very bright. It was like color television. It was like a painting, flattened under the strokes of a paint brush.
Behind him, the darkness moved.
Someday a man will rise from a different darkness and know Henry for what he is, what he has become. That man will mark Henry and claim him, not from the Shadow but for it. That man has already stood within this cave, pressing the wall between worlds. When he returns, he will find what is left of Henry: only a spyglass, an all-seeing eye.
That man counts children like wealth.
He will count Henry first.
Henry fell backwards, his hands empty, his head swollen with an ache that hummed like a pulse, singing slow and steady in his veins. The cave had spat him forth, the cave had answered him, or he had answered.
I will help you.
I… you.
The voice that had spoken from his throat was not his own. The form that had peered through him had no eyes, only a shape that was darker than the darkness.
It had seen and held him, filled and drained him.
Now he lay on the dry ground, hot as a blaze. Sun-scorched and bone-bruised, the red wall climbing up—up—up—shearing through the farthest blue edge of sky—
Henry was afraid.