“YOU BROUGHT HIM HERE,” it said to her.
She knew who he was now, but not why or how. She wanted to talk to him. Not just this night, but every night and forever. She wanted him to be the only person she ever talked to.
But he was not a person. He was a thing.
“When do you change?” she said to him. “When are you one of us?”
“I am always one of you,” he said desperately. “How could you have brought Christo? How could you betray me?”
“I would never betray you. I love you.”
He released her, and the rough granite of him scraped her painfully. There was more red now under the moon: her rubies, her cheeks, and her one drop of blood.
“Go!” he breathed. “Go. Convince him I am not.”
Convince him I am not.
Not what? Not who?
She was alone now between the lakes and Christo was trying to join her, his large feet clumsy on the tilting ice and snow. “I’m coming, Christo!” she said, and ran toward him, but she was clumsy now, too. Her partner of the silence and snow was gone; her choreography failed her.
She slipped first, and Christo slipped second.
They were a yard apart, too far to touch, too far to catch.
At first she was not afraid, because she knew that even falling through the ice, the creature would save her, lift her, carry her out.
But the sharp tiny heel of her silver shoe punctured the ice at the same moment that Christo’s big black shoe cracked it, and as the frigid water crept up her stockings, she realized that the creature would not save her, any more than it had saved the hunters. What mattered most to it was being unknown, and being untouched, and being safe itself.
Christo and I will drown, she thought. We will fall as far beneath the black water as the hunters fell in the black shaft. We will die in ice and evil cold.
She thrashed desperately, but that only made the hole in the ice larger.
Christo said, in a normal high school boy’s voice, “I can’t believe I have done anything as stupid as this. Don’t tell anybody, that’s all I ask.” He was crouching at the water’s edge, having pulled himself back. He grabbed her hand and waist and yanked her unceremoniously to dry land. “Let’s get out of here before we get frostbite.” He hustled her along the straight path and back into the woods and back around the boulder.
Nicoletta was afraid the boulder would roll upon them, would crush their wet feet beneath its glacial tons, but it ignored them. Back in the van, Christo turned on the motor and then immediately the heat, with the blower on high.
After a moment he looked at her, reassessing what had happened and who she was.
He knows now, thought Nicoletta. He knows who I love and where I go and what matters most.
But he did not know. People in love seldom do.
“You,” said Christo finally, “are not what I expected.” He was laughing. He was thrilled. Nicoletta had proved to be full of well-kept secrets, a girl whose hobbies were not the usual, and he was even more proud of being with her than he had been at the dance.
Christo started to list the things they would do together—things he probably thought were unusual and exciting. To Nicoletta they sounded impossibly dull. They were of this world. They were commonplace.
Nicoletta had a true love now, from another world, a world without explanation or meaning, and she did not care about Christo’s calendar.
The light was on in the bedroom Nicoletta shared with Jamie when Christo pulled into the Storms’s driveway. Jamie had definitely not gone to bed. Her little face instantly appeared, and she shaded the glass with her two hands so that she could see into the dark.
Christo grinned. “We have to give your little sister a show for her money,” he said.
No! thought Nicoletta, shrinking. I can’t kiss you now. I’m in love with another—another what?
Man? Boy? Rock? Thing? Beast?
Or was she in love with a murderer?
She thought of the two men falling to the depths of the cave.
Where are we going? they would have said to each other.
Down.
Down forever, down to certain death.
He could have prevented the hunters from dying, she thought.
Then she thought, No, he couldn’t. They would have killed him first, shot him, it was self-defense, in a way.
Her thoughts leapt back and forth like a tennis ball over a net.
It came to her, as black and bleak as the lakes in the dark, that she had forgotten those two men. They had fallen out the bottom of her mind just as they fell out the bottom of the cave.
Love is amoral, she thought. Love thinks only of itself, or of The Other.
There is no room in love for passersby.
Those hunters. They had passed by, all right.
Did they have wives? Children? Mothers? Jobs?
Nobody will ever find them, thought Nicoletta. They will never be buried. They will never come home. Nobody will ever know.
Unless I tell.
“Good night,” said Christo softly. He walked her up the steps, dizzy with love. Together they stared at the blank wooden face of the door, at the bare nail where last December a Christmas wreath had hung.
Christo’s kiss was long and deep and intense. His lips contained enough energy to win football games, to sing entire concerts. When he finally stopped, and tried to find enough breath to speak, he couldn’t, and just went back to the car.
Behind Nicoletta the door was jerked open and she fell inside, her heart leaping with memories of caves and black lakes, of dancing in front of rock faces that opened like the jaws of mountain spirits.
“Ooooooh, that was so terrific!” squealed Jamie, flinging her arms around her sister. “He really kissed you! Wow, what a kiss! I was watching through the peephole. Oooooooh, I can’t wait to tell my friends.”
Nobody could ever accuse a little sister of good timing.
“Get lost, Jamie.”
“Forget it. We share a bedroom. I’ll never be lost. Tell me everything or I’ll never let you sleep. I’ll borrow all your clothes. I’ll get a parakeet and keep the cage over your bed. I’ll spill pancake syrup in your hair.”
“Go for it,” said Nicoletta. She walked past her pesky sister and into the only room in the teeny house where you were allowed to shut the door and be alone. In the bathroom mirror she stared at herself.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
There were answers behind the silvered glass. If she could only look in deeply enough, she would know.
I didn’t look deeply enough into the cave either, she thought.
I have to go back.
Further down.
Deeper in.