Jack looked at her with a serious expression on his face. ‘Then it’ll be no good.’
She reined in, trying to read his mood. He looked away, thoughtfully, his profile lit from behind by the sun shining through the trees. ‘I tried to write for a long time before I gave up. A historical novel, Durham County. About my neck of the woods at the turn of the century. There were pans of it that I thought were fine.’ He paused. ‘It was pretty awful. It was difficult admitting it at the end, because enough of my friends kept encouraging me that I thought it was good for a long time. I don’t know. You just have to do it, I guess.’
She sighed as she patted the horse’s neck. Her dark hair fell down, hiding her face, as she said, ‘Still, you don’t have two writers for parents. My mother’s won a Pulitzer and my father was nominated for an Oscar. All I’ve managed is some dumb poetry.’
He nodded, then turned his mount and began riding along the trail. After a long silence he said, ‘I still think you just have to do it.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ she answered. ‘Look, did you keep any of the stuff your friends told you was great?’
With an embarrassed smile, he said, ‘All of it. The whole damn half novel.’
‘I’ll make you a deal. You let me see yours and I’ll let you see mine.’ Jack laughed hard at the school-yard phrase and shook his head. ‘What’s the matter? ’Fraid?’
‘No,’ Jack barely managed to croak as he continued to laugh uncontrollably.
‘Scaredy-cat,’ Gabbie mimicked, plunging Jack into deeper hilarity.
Jack finally said, ‘Okay, I give up. I’ll let you read my stuff … maybe.’
‘Maybe!’
The argument continued as they crested a small rise and vanished behind it. From deep within the woods a pair of light blue eyes watched their passing. A figure emerged from the underbrush, a lithe, youthful figure who moved lightly on bare feet to the top of the path. From behind a bole he watched Gabbie as she moved down the trail. His eyes caressed her young back, drinking in the sight of her long dark hair, her slender waist, and the rounded buttocks as she held a good seat on the horse’s back. The youth’s laughter was high-pitched and musical. It was an alien sound, childlike and ancient, holding a hint of savage songs, primitive revelries, and music-filled hot nights. His curly red-brown hair surrounded a face conceived by Michelangelo or a Pre-Raphaelite painter. ‘Pretty,’ the young man said to the tree, patting the ancient bark as if it understood. ‘Very pretty.’ Then, nearby, a bird sounded a call, and the youth looked up. His voice shrilled with inhuman tones, a whistling whisper, as if a mockingbird imitated the call. The little bird darted about, seeking the intruder in its territory. The youth shrieked in glee at the harmless jest, as the bird continued to search for the trespasser. Then the youth sighed as he considered the beautiful girl who had passed.
High above, among the leaves, a thing of blackness clung tenaciously to the underside of a branch. It had watched the two riders with as much interest as the youth. But its thoughts were neither merry nor playful. An urgent need arose within, halfway between lust and hunger. Beauty affected it as much as the youth. But its desires were different, for, while lust was the youth’s driving motivation, to the black thing under the tree branch beauty was only a beginning, a point of departure. And only the destruction of beauty allowed one to understand it. The fullness of Gabbie’s beauty could be realized only by a slow journey through pain and anguish, torment and hopelessness, ending with blood and death. And if the pain was artful, as the master had taught, such torment could be made to last for ages.
As it contemplated its alien dark thoughts, musing on the simple wonder of suffering, the black thing realized a truth. Whatever pleasure the girl’s destruction could produce would be nothing compared to the elation that could result from the destruction of the two boys. Such wonderful children, still innocent, still pure. They were the prize. Lingering terror and pain given to such as they would … The creature shuddered in dark anticipation at the image, then stilled itself, lest the one below take notice and make the black thing feel just such pain in turn. The youth stood another moment, one hand upon the tree, the other absently clutching at his groin as he held the image of the lovely human girl who had ridden past. Then, with a move like a spinning dance, the man-boy leaped back into the green vegetation, vanishing from mortal sight, leaving the small clearing empty save for the reverberations of impish laughter.
The black thing waited motionless after the youth vanished into the woods, for despite his youthful appearance, he was one to be feared, one who could cause great harm. When it was satisfied he was gone, and not playing one of his cruel tricks, it sprang with a powerful leap away from the tree. Its movements through the branches were alien, the articulation of its joints nothing of this world, as it hurried on its own errand of dark purpose.
‘What’s your mother doing?’ asked Jack.
‘I don’t know. Last I heard she was off someplace in Central or South America, writing about another civil war or revolution.’ Gabbie sighed. ‘I don’t hear from her a lot, maybe three letters in the last five years. She and my dad split up when I was less than five. That’s when she got caught up doing the book on the fall of Saigon.’
‘I read it. It was brilliant.’
Gabbie nodded. ‘Mom is a brilliant writer. But as a mother she’s a totally lost cause.’
‘Look, if you’d rather not talk about it …’
‘That’s okay. Most of it’s public record. Mom tried writing a couple of novels before she and my father moved to California. Neither of my folks made much money from writing, but Mom hated Dad’s getting critical notice while she was getting rejection slips. Dad said she never showed much resentment, but it had to be one of the first strains on their marriage. Then Dad got the offer to adapt his second book, All the Fine Promises, and they moved to Hollywood. Dad wrote screenplays and made some solid money, and Mom had me. Then she got politically active in the antiwar movement, like, in ’68, right after the Tet Offensive. She wrote articles and pamphlets and then a publisher asked her to do a book, you know, Why We Resist.
‘It was pretty good, if a little heavy on polemics.’
Gabbie steered her horse round a fallen dead tree surrounded by brush. ‘Well, she might have written bad fiction, but her nonfiction was dynamite. She got her critical notice. And a lot of money. Things were never very good for them, but that’s when trouble really began and it got worse, fast. She’d get so involved in writing about the antiwar movement, then later the end of the war, that she’d leave him hanging all the time. Poor Dad, he’d have some studio dinner to go to or something and she’d not come home, or she’d show up in a flannel shirt and jeans at a formal reception, that sort of stuff. She became pretty radical. I was too young to remember any of it, but from what my grandmother told me, both of them acted pretty badly. But most folks say the breakup was Mom’s fault. She can get real bitchy and she’s stubborn. Even her own mother put most of the blame on her.
‘Anyway, Dad came home one night and found her packing. She’d just got special permission from the Swiss Government to take a Red Cross flight to Vietnam, to cover the fall of Saigon. But she had to leave that night. Things hadn’t been going well and Dad told her not to bother coming back if she left. So she didn’t.’
Jack nodded. ‘I don’t mean to judge, but it seemed a pretty special opportunity for your mother, I mean with Saigon about to fall, and all.’ He left unsaid the implication that her father had been unreasonable in his demand that his wife remain at home.
‘Ya. But I was in the hospital with meningitis at the time. I almost