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Chapter 63
Gabriel
San Francisco — 1985
Delicate Dust
The world is one-quarter colored for Gabriel.
In the mornings, if he wakes beside the dust of a beautiful stranger, he knows he’s drained the world of a bit of color, a bit of beauty, however deadly. He doesn’t like these new observations coloring his world with empathy. He wishes for the black and white order of his heart. He wants to shut his eyes to the light, to stop from listening to the cries in the night, but he cannot.
Part of him is captivated by the burgundy of his wine, the maroon in an orchid’s throat, the rich red of a stranger’s lips. Longer and longer waves of red light populate his world with shades of diversity. He is still divided, shades contained neatly inside hard lines. But bit by bit, light wave upon light wave, he is becoming helpless. He is becoming human.
Chapter 64
Jim
Greene, NY — 1985
Blood Money
That weekend, Jim drives to Greene Village. Greene is not a major tourism destination, nor a major transportation route. Still, lying between New York and the Catskills, it has roads leading to both. It’s a peaceful town with a lovely old historic central square, a pleasant day trip from the city and a nice place to linger en route to the mountains. Greene and the surrounding environs offer enough knick-knack and antique shoppes to provide Jim markets for his totems.
“I spent a summer near here when I was younger than you are now,” Ryo’s voice says, blowing warm against Jim’s face. “I was following a girl, but it didn’t last. Never did, with me.
“Still, every adventure adds a page to the book of your life. I can tell you all about this place, the truth behind the stories, and the stories behind the truth.
“The town was named in honor of General Nathanael Greene, ‘The Fighting Quaker.’ He’d been raised pacifist but converted to combat during the Revolution. Greene is revered, a hero, the blood he shed washed away, leaving honor behind.
“Just across the square is The Greene Page Seed Company, started in 1896. It’s still a family business. Each spring, crocuses emerge around it, green as hope. And they always paint it that same bright hyacinth blue. The place looks just like it did when I was here last, over thirty years ago.
“The Three Sisters’ Silk Mill on your left—now that is quite a story. The mill was founded in 1894 by three spinsters. Sisters, they said they were, although they couldn’t have looked more different.
“Smoke rose from the mill every winter, but no one ever saw them gathering wood, or heard them engaging a boy to deliver logs.
“They were odd and stand-offish, never mingling in the village courtyard, attending summer festivals, or winter sledding fetes. They hired no one, preferring to do all the weaving themselves.
“They vanished one night, leaving the doors of the mill ajar. When, two weeks later, Mr. Leon Aram Najarian walked through the open door, he found a large room containing thirty-two looms. Each loom had already been threaded; the woof measured out. Both warp and woof were of unique fineness and sheen. Although Leon searched high and low, no records of purchase could be found. The thread’s origin could not be traced. And although the Najarian Ribbon Mill continues to weave fine cloth, it’s never managed to match the strength and beauty of that original thread…. Now that I’m gone, I wonder more than ever about those sisters, wonder who or what…”
“Don’t you know?” Jim whispers to the voice in his ear.
“Being dead doesn’t mean you know everything,” Ryo says. “In fact, there are things that you can only know when you’re alive: the fragrance of a flower, the taste of snow on an outstretched tongue, the feel of someone breathing beside you in the night. Most of the senses survive only as memory.”
“But wouldn’t you know about the sisters who owned the mill?” Jim asks. He wonders when life became so peculiar that it feels normal to have conversations with ghosts.
“The sisters are something else altogether,” Ryo says. “It would take more than a lifetime, or a death, to understand that fabric.”
As Jim makes his way through the historic square, the wind ceases its chatter. The Greene library rises from the village square like a remnant of ancient Greece. It’s flanked by marble pillars. Inside, intricate wooden pillars tower above mosaic floors. The denizens of Athens would have felt comfortable here, but Jim does not.
“In 1901,” Ryo says, “Rachael Beckwith Moore purchased the land for the library where it now stands. But, before she could heft a stone, or turn a page, she died. Rachael’s sons, William and James Moore, built the library as her memorial. They could well afford to satisfy their mother’s whim for culture. William, an attorney and financier, had won his place among the foremost financiers, Robber Barons, of the 19th century.
“The brothers had formed Nabisco Bakery, owned the First National Bank, Continental Fire Insurance Company, Western Union Telegraph Company, American Cotton Oil Company, and Bankers Trust as well as nine Railroads.
“William, in partnership with J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, conquered Andrew Carnegie to create US Steel.
“The history of the steel mills is pretty ugly. More than once, molten metal spilled onto workers, searing flesh from bone, coating skeletons with steel. Machinists often got caught in rapidly moving belts, which jerked arms from sockets.
“Henry Frankel, aged twelve, was decapitated by spinning blades, which also severed both his arms and legs. His tiny lifeless trunk was hurled fifty feet before hitting a wall, splattering the workers with a fine rain of blood, muscle, and bone. Of the five-hundred and twenty-six deaths in 1907, only thirty-seven percent of the widows and children received any benefits.
“Today, the Moores are revered in Greene as large-hearted philanthropists. In time, the blood of working men has washed off their money. It’s now as fresh and green as the land once was.” Ryo’s sighs rustle the pages of a book lying open on the table.
“No Moore has ever visited the library. No one has told them that on warm summer nights, the temperature often drops below zero, causing books to freeze and wooden pillars to crack. No one talks of the shadows that wander at night.
“The residents of Greene pretend they don’t see the frost and snow piled round the building on sunny days or smell the scent of burning flesh that rises on cold nights.
“When I lived here, two high school boys, Kyle, and Sam, hid overnight in the library on a dare. In the morning, they were discovered by the librarian, Ms. Beachwood, huddled in a corner, pale as ghosts.
“Kyle’s sandy hair had been bleached white. Sam’s thick black curls had dwindled into thin ash-grey wisps. Forever afterward, the boys suffered bone-crippling bouts of arthritis even on the warmest of nights. They’d both been great athletes, but now their joints crackled like old men’s if they moved faster than a walk.
“Kyle and Sam had always been bullies, but now they couldn’t bear to see a fly swatted or a beetle stepped on, even in the summer when June Bugs made everyone crazy with buzzing.
“They wept at the genocide of grasshoppers, even though if left unchecked, they’d defoliate every rosebush in town.
“When the school got infested with large brown spiders whose bites were deadlier than poison nightshade, Kyle and Sam tenderly cajoled them into cups, jars, and baseball hats, and walked three miles into the woods before releasing them.
“They covered lamps with the jackets of their best Sunday suits so that night insects wouldn’t fly into them. Even though the boys had never studied entomology, they knew that moths navigated using the moon as their guide, long before fire and light bulbs. They knew that the bugs never expected to reach the light in the darkness. They never anticipated that the light would burn.
“Kyle and Sam didn’t mind the dark, but they shivered constantly, even on the hottest days of summer. And when they read history, tears ran down their cheeks unchecked. The past can hit you that way when it becomes real. Our salvation is that it so rarely does.
“I wonder what ever happened to those boys…” Ryo’s voice fades into pages of the rustling books.
Chapter 65
Gabriel
San Francisco — 1985
Yellow
Gabriel has made a delivery to the sisters. He both longs for and dreads the land of dreams he knows will follow. When he gets home, he does something he’s never done before: he drinks coffee at night. Gabriel is a creature of routine, constant and unchanging. He has coffee in the morning and wine at night. But now he dreads the night. Now he knows fear. Now he feels regret.
That night in his dreams, he hears a man screaming and sees him falling drained and lifeless onto a golden field. A boy is running through the field, his hair the color of foxtail, his mouth open in a silent scream.
In the morning, the light of the sun, which has always been white, is yellow. He sees the color of a golden field, the color of mortality.
On his window, the prism teeth shoot arcs of red and yellow around his room, tinting it in hues of blood and sunshine.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: In the night shadows of trees, shunning the moonlight, a man waits. It is Kristjan, taller than Jim remembers. He is nearly naked, covered only by a wolf skin. In the night, his eyes glow red. As Jim looks at him, unable to turn away, something dark slips beneath Jim’s fingernails, flowing like a shadow into his blood.
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.