Falling Idols

“I didn’t think you’d last this long,” she said. “I had a bet with myself you’d crack by day before yesterday.”

Alain masked every emotion well but surprise. She knew he was thinking it wasn’t supposed to be this way, she was supposed to be devastated. To plead. How could any woman in her right mind not? Especially her — older by nearly a decade, and getting no younger.

The truth? His youth and beauty really had been good for her ego. What she hadn’t expected was how elevating it felt to discover she could wave goodbye to all that as easily as she could a pigeon who’d eaten popcorn at her feet. Now that he’d seen that departure alone wasn’t going to ruin her, he progressed to petty jealousy.

“I thought I’d hang in London for a couple days first.” All nonchalance, holding up his cell phone. “Guess who’s in for a shoot. Andi Wexler. I called my agent earlier and got her number, so she’s … expecting me.”

Kate nodded. “When you kiss her, make sure it’s before she disappears to poke a finger down her throat. Otherwise, she might not’ve rinsed well. You knew about the bulemia, didn’t you? No? Forget it, then. Just try not to think about it.”

Low, but the only kind of parry he would understand.

She could’ve told him of the past few nights: Sixteen hours ago, in bed? In my mind it wasn’t even you. I replaced you with a stranger whose last name I don’t know and it was better that way, and it was just as better the night before when I dreamed of him, when I pulled him deeper into me than I ever did you on your best day. I did it because he smells of an earth you don’t even like to touch. I did it because he’s real. More real in a dream than you are in the flesh. Could’ve told him, but didn’t, because Alain’s comprehension stretched only so far.

As easily as that, they were done. He got a few steps away, then turned as if he wanted to say more but had no idea how it was done. As emotions went, he handled bewilderment well, too.

Amid stone and timber, fire and ale, she wished for misery but felt only relief. Misery would be proof of something, that she’d risked and cared enough to want to die for a day or two. That she’d been alive. That for the next few hours she was entitled to drink with strangers until she was stupid, and listen to their advice, their comforts, cry if she wanted.

Instead, she couldn’t even imagine tearing up his pictures after she got home because they were technically flawless. Good god, had it always been this hollow? Sometimes she thought herself cut from denser stuff than Geoffrey Blackburn had ever worked on.

She ordered a shot of Welsh single-malt anyway, and they all laughed when she told them that his name wasn’t even Alain, but Albert. He’d been held in low regard ever since loudly observing that most of the local faces seemed modeled on the potato.

She drank for an hour, then another. The fire had warmed her body, the whiskey her belly, the company her soul, and she allowed how much better this trip would’ve been if she could’ve shared it with someone who appreciated such modest provincialities.

She was achieving her latest annual drunken epiphany that it was time to change her life, when a regular came in shrugging the October chill off himself and telling of the wreck he’d passed a few miles down the road. Police already on the scene, but what a mess, some idiot driving too fast for the curves, looked like, slamming head-on into a stone fence and through the windscreen he went, straight at the curled-up edge of the smashed bonnet.

That son of a bitch, was the first thing she thought. Doesn’t drive one mile since we came here and now he takes the car? Thinks he’ll drive it to London?

For the rest of the night, the mood in the Rose & Thistle was glum. She remained by the fireside, listening to talk and awkward condolences, clutching her thick pullover sweater tightly about her, and fearing if she left the fire she’d freeze.

And by last orders, word had it that, peculiarly enough, the authorities still hadn’t recovered Alain’s head.

*

Late in the night, unable to sleep, Kate left the bed-and- breakfast before its walls grew more claustrophobic. Earth and sky and stone seemed the only things lasting enough tonight, so she walked in their company. Around her the town lay in stillness so deep it felt as though her heartbeat might wake it.

She was more than a mile along to the church before she even knew she was going there, and quickened her pace once she did. The town behind her, meadow and pasture rolling away to either side of the lane, she felt the deep age of the land as she rarely had during the day. Now and again, something would rustle, out of sight, on the other side of hedgerows and stone fences. Foxes, maybe. Once, a vigilant border collie.

Near the church she spotted a sheep, strayed from its fold, thick-shagged and four-horned, a breed she’d never seen back home. She knew in her heart that a sheep was all it was, but as it stood against the fence, munching vigorously on grass with the moonlight glinting off eyes like wet glass, it seemed less beast and more facade for an intelligence that lurked and watched, biding its time with inhuman patience.

The church’s bell tower and faces rose black against a few moonlit gray clouds as she ascended the hill. Below the eternally grinning visage of the Green Man, she used the key entrusted to her by Crenshaw. This was the first time she’d entered without a camera dangling from her neck.

Kate turned on only as much light as needed to prevent collision with anything; would’ve brought candles had she known the night would end here.

Step back, look up, and there he was, Pan in bestial glory.

“Go on. Move,” she commanded. As its maker’s descendant, who was more entitled to see this happen? “Move. Prove it. What are you waiting for?”

Nothing. Neither shift of cloven hoof, nor waggle of tongue.

Down the aisle, to the altar, to her knees. It seemed that at some point tonight she should offer a prayer for Alain, but no time or place had seemed right earlier. Now that they were she couldn’t think of what to say, or where to send it.

“Why are you crying?”

She thought she’d heard someone enter. Suspecting who it was before his voice confirmed it.

“Is that what I’m doing?”