Mortal Love Read Free Page B

as Swinburne began to walk around, small things burst and belched beneath his shoes, tiny conical caps of mushrooms, fleshy green earth tongues, red-tipped fungi that exploded with a scent of apples and kelp. There were heaps of very old brick, marbled with a soft bloom of turquoise mold. The air was sweet with a strange pervasive smell of apples, as though they stood inside an orchard within sight of the sea.
    â€œWhat is this place?” murmured Swinburne.
    Here and there odd relics could be glimpsed amid the detritus of rock and broken mortar: long, slender, smooth green stones shaped by hand, but for what purpose? Bronze arrowheads, lapis lazuli beads, lozenges of variscite no bigger than a pinkie nail. There were piles of ammonites, jet-black, malachite; a few were studded with gems like glittering barnacles.
    â€œWhat is this place?” repeated Swinburne. “Why, I certainly don’t know! Candell?”
    â€œOh, but see.” At the far side of the chamber, the painter knelt, his back to the poet. As Swinburne turned to look at him, he realized that the light that suffused the chamber did not come from Candell’s lantern at all.
    His lantern had gone out.
    â€œ Wonder! ” shouted Candell. His head was lowered, his hands pressed against the stone wall as though forcing it apart. “ Open! ”
    Swinburne crept up behind him, twittering with laughter. “Tup-penny peep! Let me by—”
    He squatted next to Candell, heedless of the damp on his bespoke trousers, and elbowed the painter aside. “Take your turn, gents, take your—”
    He fell silent.
    In the wall before them was a vertical opening as long as a man’s hand and no wider than a finger. Radiance seeped from the crack, emerald green flaring into a white brighter than the sun. Swinburne shaded his eyes. Candell leaned back on his haunches and stared at the opening, his tongue caught between parted lips.
    â€œLet me see,” whispered Swinburne. He pushed Candell away and pressed his face to the stone. “Let me—”
    It was as though someone had given him a lens that could miraculously illuminate the sea. Within a green world, prismatic things flickered and flew and spun: rubescent, azure, luminous yellow, the pulsing indigo of a heart’s hidden valves. All were so brilliant he could see nothing clearly, yet he sensed—no, he knew —that behind the wall was another world: he could hear it, cries like seabirds, a rhythmic roar of waves. He could smell it, too, an odor so fragrant and rich his mouth filled with sweet liquid. His eyes stung; he blinked back tears, pressed his face against the stone with tongue extended, trying to steal some sweetness from the rock.
    The painter just laughed and knelt beside him, knocking his forehead against the stone. When the crack closed, they never knew; only knew that the green world was gone and they had been left here, on the wrong side of the dark.
    â€œWonder,” Candell gasped, licking his dry lips. “See.”
    â€œCunt!” cried Swinburne; and, arms flailing with excitement, he staggered back to the world above.

CHAPTER TWO
    The Trees of the Garden
    T here are no secrets on an island; only ways of hiding what went wrong. That’s what Red always told me, anyway. From his boathouse he watched the lobster boats chugging out across Mandrascora Reach, watched the mail boat come and go, watched the summer people arrive first of June and leave right after Labor Day. Red knew who’d be living on food stamps and government cheese that winter and who’d be buying that new SnoCat, whose kids had to go live with relatives on the mainland after DHS made a home visit.
    â€œThere’s only one island, really,” Red said. “One island, one story, told over and over again. You just got to figure out where you fit into it.”
    Red wasn’t a Maine native. He was from away, one of those unreconstructed old hippies