Glimmering

Below him the lawn shone with a dull blue gleam. Dead grass pierced the new snow, black spines like scattered bones. Overhead the glimmering showed through the cloud cover: grayish waves chased by crimson flares, an occasional burst of brilliant orange. Now and then the sloping hillside would be slashed with iridescence, like the glimpse of gold within a pocket, and though the snow had stopped, the air glittered fiercely. The piping music seemed to come from everywhere, the way the wind sounds during a hurricane.

Jack shuddered. Dread clenched his bones like grippe. His eyes watered from the caustic light, and there was an acrid taste in his mouth, a smell like wet ashes. He was backing away from the window when something on the lawn began to move.

From the tulip trees and overgrown sumac at the bottom of the garden a figure crept. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Barefoot, shirtless, wearing only some kind of loose dark trousers and clutching something in one hand. Jack could not tell if it was a boy or girl. As it stood it raised its hands before its face. Wisps of white-blond hair fell across its eyes.

“Hey,” Jack whispered. “Hey—”

It did not seem to notice the cold at all. It stood up very straight—unnaturally so, like a child in a wedding party. Then, with exaggerated slowness, the child began to pace across the lawn. Its feet left no mark upon the snow, and while the scraggy trees cast wavering shadows, the child had none at all.

The haunting music swelled. Its echoes filled the room like water filling a sealed-off chamber, and the monotonous notes inundated Jack, driving out breath and blood and matter until, with a grunt, he slid forward, his hand smashing against the window.

Dull pain shot through his wrist. He cried out and found that he could breathe again. He brought his wrist to his mouth and nursed it, lifted his head to gaze outside.

On the lawn the child still marched and played its reed pipe. Beneath the poplars something else moved. Another figure emerged, much taller than the child; then another, and another; until there were six in all.

They were men; they had once been men. Tall and emaciated and naked in the snow, so thin the glimmering washed across their pale flesh like rain. Each bore within his hands a huge pair of antlers, raised so that they seemed to spring from his skull. They moved in an awkward stooping walk, shoulders hunched beneath the weight of those great horns. As Jack watched they followed the child across the lawn, until the child stopped. The six men bowed to it, each in turn, forming two rows of three with their antlers raised above them like tree limbs, and began to dance.

It was like nothing he had ever seen. A weird loping dance, the two rows moving backward and forward, heads alternately raised and bowed so that it seemed the horns must tangle and be wrenched from their skeletal hands. And yet the antlers never touched, their bodies never touched. Their feet left no sign upon the snow, and their movements made no sound. The motions were grotesquely childlike, almost crude; yet at the same time so terribly, horribly real that Jack felt as though he had never seen dancing before; as though this was The Dance from which all others had been wrung. The music of the reed pipe spiraled and wailed, the child stood as though frozen; the horned men moved back and forth like the shuttles of a loom. Above them the antlers curved like the spires of some unearthly cathedral. And like light falling from a cathedral window the flesh began to fall from their bodies, in small bright blades of gold and green and red, until only their bones remained, unearthly white and unconquerable, moving across the snow.

In his room Jack watched. Terror and beauty ravaged him; he could feel the boom of blood in his head and a softer throbbing in his chest, as though the child played him as nimbly as its flute. Still they danced, the horned men, with steps careful and measured as automatons. They might have been part of some infernal timepiece ringing the changes.