Glimmering

But no one appeared. The planetarium show continued without interruption. Someone on the other side of the room loudly blew his nose, and children giggled. He heard the muted hum of a child monitor, the clash of cymbals accompanying a nova bursting overhead. Finally he started to grope his way back into his seat, but stopped when he saw the girl already there, gazing at him.

“Oh man,” he said, and sank back down. She looked so tiny, sitting there. So goddamn young.

She’s just a kid, you know.

Shame like a fever surged through him; he thought he might pass out, as his stomach churned with guilt and fear. Had he gone insane? John Drinkwater’s face loomed in the darkness before him, and Peter Paul Joseph’s plump pale hands, holding Trip’s morality contract and the results of a lab test.

For the lips of a strange woman drip as a honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

Trip ground his knuckles against the rough carpet. He knew nothing about her, but Nellie Candry had the scars from petra virus, and the girl had come from some foreign place… He could die now, as surely as if he had walked into a radiation chamber; bones and blood poisoned, and all his magic gone, that clear white veil he had carried about himself for twenty-two years torn beyond hope of repair.

Woe is me! For I am undone: because I am a man of unclean lips…

Yet as he groaned he could feel once more the girl’s moist warm skin, the lilac musk of her hair seeping into his nostrils, and her small mouth pressed against his. The stars shifted in the sky above him, the astronomer’s voice purred on.

“… along with the glimmering an increase in the sightings of other previously rare phenomena, parhelia or sun dogs and the refracted moonlight called paraselenae which sometimes appears in the darkness…”

He forced himself to look at the girl. Her sweater had slipped from one thin shoulder, and he could see a small bruise there, like a dark thumbprint. Otherwise, she seemed utterly composed. He had expected her to be angry, or scared. Instead she hunched down into her seat. Her eyes opened wider than he would have thought possible, and it seemed they held neither iris nor pupil, only an awful empty whiteness.

Trip’s hands grew cold, his cock shrank to a damp spot between his legs. He glanced away, then back again. Still she stared at him, her expression unchanged. The stars faded, and with them the reassuring recorded voice of the planetarium’s narrator. For an instant the room was absolutely black, save for the dull crimson lozenge of an EXIT sign. Trip could hear snorts and nervous laughter from the schoolchildren, their teacher’s loud hush. In the silence the air-conditioning’s breath became the sound of waves receding from an infinite shore. He stared at the darkness where the blond girl sat, trying to muster up some memory of what he had felt just minutes before. But his desire was utterly gone. In its place he felt a desperate queasiness, a growing certainty that if he were to extend his hand to her chair, he would find it empty. He felt like an idiot, but that’s just what he did, willing his hand to be steady as he groped tentatively at the seat.

There was nothing there. His neck prickled as his fingers ticked along the edge of the chair, the plush cloth like cool skin, but she was not there, she wasn’t there, and in a horrible moment of clarity he knew that she never had been there. He looked around frantically. Could she have left without him seeing? Had she crawled over the back of the seat and fled? His fingers clawed the soft velvet as he pulled himself up. His mouth opened to call out when he saw in the darkness before him two pale glowing orbs. At first he thought they were astral images projected upon the wall behind the rows of seats. But then they moved closer to him, and he knew that they were her eyes.

“No,” whispered Trip.

He had no hint whatsoever of a face or body. Two deathly white globes. A bit of nonsense spurted into his consciousness, something he had heard or read in school—

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
Who is that on the other side of you?

—and then the air was split by the ringing thunder of a gong. The dome blazed white and gold, the constellations suddenly visible in all their primal glory. Superimposed across this radiance was an immense rotating wheel and the words AS ABOVE, SO BELOW.