THEY HAD GROWN to hate shoes, and none of them wore them, except Julia who, before she went home, put on a pair of old gray sneakers, broken and threadbare, which she kept hidden in the trash under the hallway stairs. Otherwise her mother would scream and beat her, though the beating usually came anyway, barefoot or not.
“Shoes! No shoes !?”—shrill, strident: “what are you, a gypsy? Do you want some lousy prick of a cop to arrest you for vagrancy? Do I have money for that?!”
And clothes were a bother, too: somehow repellant, uneasy to touch, unpleasant next to one’s skin; except for worn T-shirts, and Levi’s so smooth and thin from repeated washings thick with lye and bleach, you could actually see through the denim.
Strong light had begun to hurt their eyes—at least, that is the way Jamie explained it, as if all five simultaneously had contracted a rare ocular disease. No one believed him, including himself, yet all agreed to it. Somehow each was ashamed to admit that “the change,” as they first called it, which had so subtly begun to transform them (into “what” initially remained as inexplicable as the “why”) had made them simply “like” the night-time hours. They felt more alive then, their senses more alert, their nerves sharpened.
But sleep they must and they had taken to doing so in the daytime when they could, together if possible, and it was not unusual, since none could do so at home, for two or more, sometimes all five, to curl up in a tangle of closeness and intertwined limbs in the small, cool secret cave Angel had found high up in a remote, mountainous part of the park where a shaft of immense rock jutted out over a stream.
It had been difficult to climb at first; one exposed wall flat and almost sheerly perpendicular for several yards, with only small natural niches in the rock to cling to with fingers and toes.
The girls, Kathy and Maria, had fallen initially, and Julia on the second try, to hoots of derision and laughter from Angel and Jamie, even though they could have been seriously hurt were there not two feet of muddy water below to break their fall. But it had been spring then, and now, after a summer’s practice, all of them could leap and scramble up over the wall as nimble and sure as mountain goats.
Another thing—
And this, at its discovery, was greeted with shrieks and shocks of laughter and surprise: Jamie’s eyes now shone in the dark, so the others said!—at least sometimes, and they were forever crowding him into dark corners to see if it would happen, each curious and concerned about himself, half-longing for, half-dreading the moment when their own eyes, like Jamie’s would flash glints of green-to-orange fire, becoming glowing coals in shadow and darkness.
And something else—
Perhaps the oddest of all—
They seldom talked to each other anymore. Decisions were made, meanings communicated and explored, questions asked—and answered—but through the intimacy of touch and sign: the flicker of an eye, a slight smile or nod; even less, even nothing discernible—as if they had all become as speechless as Angel, with tongues so twisted they could no longer form proper words. But so becoming, they became, like him, even more subtly articulate, observant, and sensitive, sharing an instant community of feeling.
So they touched, and nodded, and smiled, and made signs no other mortal could decipher, adding soft murmurs, grunts, occasionally a bewildering, deep-throated sound that, so strangely, if it came rumbling up from one’s own throat, seemed an incipient growl, and with this came . . . came. . . .
But memory was not yet whole, or connected, if ever it would be, and the ravenous howl in the night, the chase, the rending cry of the kill remained, for now, subliminal, and so without reality: only the barest hint of it grazing consciousness, glazing a child’s eye for a stricken moment, or slackening his jaw.
If Angel, whose sensibilities and memory were keenest, “remembered” kneeling in the shallow water at the edge of the lake washing away with the others the drying blood that covered them, so thick and clotting it was a gelatinous slime, he was remembering a “dream,” or a small facet of one dream’s madness, quickly blurred, then forgotten.
What emerged from memory as totally real, was the “forest”—the swiftness of his own feet which, flashing below him, seemed like the flight of two white birds . . . and the rustle and rush of leaves splashed silver-wet with moonlight . . . or the whiplash of wind and rain crashing against his grinning face, stinging his shoulders and thighs . . . or the fog, like one’s winter breath, settling in the tortured paths that wound through an intricate maze of trees and rocks, so thick in patches by the lake he could actually kick it, and roll in it, while he laughed, and shouted, and howled with the others who, as naked as he, played out their games.
Like him, they had escaped—for a few “dreamed” hours, for a blessed night. “How” they had done it remained unknown; but it had “happened” now, several times, each time with more power and surrender, when they became creatures reborn, rather—new to an ancient, buried life; and they would learn the secret.