The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

bells; it offered no anthropomorphic detail whatsoever. An ordinary brown rat, the bearer of plague, in a trap large enough to allow it to run. Its eyes black pinholes into nothing; they stared relentlessly forward along the continuous curve.

    There’s only one way out of this.

    What I mean to say is that no story matters. Not even the tales we have told of the gods. In two billion years the sun will have burnt this world into cinders. What I mean to say is there’s nothing but this. This. Nothing. This.

The black knife was our secret and our treasure. We never showed the blade to either of our parents. The Mom-thing would have taken it away for fear we’d harm ourselves, we thought, and Dad would have wanted to sell it as a rarity.
    It had come a long way and both of us knew it. Terrell, ordinarily no scholar, went to the library and boned up. The stone might have come from volcanoes out west, the Sierra Nevada or Medicine Lake. Points and blades like the one we had found were traded by Indians all over the continent. But Terrell liked to think ours came from South America. Had maybe been used, on top of some Aztec ziggurat, to carve out a living, beating human heart.
    Terrell carved a handle from a stub of deer antler he’d squirreled up in the loft above the garage since he’d found it in the woods a year or so before. At the library he looked up diagrams that showed how the Indians had set about it. He was a long time filing a tight notch in the yellowed bone, and binding blade to shaft with strings of fresh, wet hog gut. I watched him, studied him while he worked. A rare thing to see him so absorbed. He had the same precisely focused attention as when he pulled the wings off flies. That rapt and ravenous concentration he always gave to hurting me. I bit my lips and held the stone blade while he did it. Sometimes there’d be a hairline cut across my palm when we were done. It helped me take the pain, and to withstand the pleasure that was braided with the pain.
    Blade and bone were perfectly balanced. The warty curve of antler seemed to fit my hand exactly, the butt of my palm resting snug against the spreading base where it had once sprung from the skull of the buck. Terrell, possessive of most of his things, shared this weapon equally with me. The blade was a glossy smooth black, like glass, and if we turned it at a certain angle to the light, we saw flecks of gold drifting deep down inside it, like warm stars in a faraway galaxy.
    Walking in the woods one day I came across the flayed cat in the fork of a tree. Eviscerated, a flat cat, reduced to the merest profile of itself. Its hide so dry it had grown harder than the bone. The shrunken skin pulled back the jaws and bared the needle teeth in what appeared to be a silent scream.

O—— pursued Eerie across the Styx and raised her up from her bier of death and led her back, for a little while, to the light and the warmth of the sun. But Eerie had eaten the food of death, and so she was bound to return to the shadows and the cold, there to remain forever …
    ! O—— wailed then. … That was her secret name. The same four syllables I still hear sometimes, crying in the desert.
    After O—— had lost Eerie once and for all, he sang to us that we should kill our parents. But we had already done that, my brother and I—we killed them with our actions.

“I think you’re hung up on your brother,” D—— told me as soon as Laurel had left the room. It surprised me that he’d say that—it really kind of set me back. His usual line with the girls was that they had a father hang-up. An easy con—you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to suppose that most of the ragged company of runaways D—— was gathering to himself had had some problem with their fathers, somewhere along the way.
    I’d been with the People for two or three weeks—among them though not entirely one of them. Laurel delivered me to D——’s room in the lodge herself. I suppose I