without her input? Looking up at those stars, feeling the embrace of their light as it enfolded her, she felt both small and large, as though everything mattered and nothing did. When someone crouched down beside her it took years for her to turn her head to see who it was. All she could make out was a dark shape, a vague outline of head and shoulders silhouetted against the stars, the rest of the body lost in the shadows of the rosebushes.
“Hello, Isabelle,” Rushkin said.
Isabelle thought she should feel alarmed at his appearance, but she found it too hard to concentrate on being concerned. Rushkin shifted slightly on his heels and she saw that he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood another figure and for some reason she could make him out perfectly clearly. It was the old-fashioned stranger she’d been chasing before whatever had happened to her had happened. He stood there, long-limbed and handsome, with a half-smile on his lips, watching her.
“This is Benjamin,” Rushkin said. “He’s an old friend of mine. His origin dates back to before I lost the ability to bring his sort across.”
So he
“We’re having a wonderful time here,” Rushkin went on. “Truly we are. But it’s time for us to go now and we were wondering where you’d put the party favors.”
Isabelle looked blankly at him. She heard what he was saying, but when he’d shifted his position earlier, it had let the moonlight fall upon his features and she was utterly bewitched now with how the light played across the road map of his wrinkles. When Rushkin fell silent and the silence dragged out, she finally realized that he was waiting for her to speak. She cast her mind back through the bewildering snarl of her memories. It was impossible for her to track anything down in a linear sense, but through random access she eventually stumbled upon a fragment of what he’d been saying.
“Favors?” she asked.
It was interesting listening to the way her voice modulated, she thought. She’d never thought about it before, but there was a world of meaning tangled up in those two syllables.
“The paintings,” Rushkin said. “I’ve come for the paintings. There’s no need to get up and fetch them for me. Simply tell me where they are and Benjamin here will help me deal with them.”
While she couldn’t muster alarm for herself at Rushkin’s appearance here on the island, her numena were another matter entirely. At Rushkin’s mention of them, she caught hold of his sleeve and pulled herself up into a sitting position. She felt as though there were bits and pieces of her mind lying all over the lawn, and she made a huge effort to gather them together and focus on the moment at hand.
“You. Can’t. Have. Them,” she said, carefully articulating each word. “Now, that’s plain ungratefulness,” Rushkin said. He looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you think, Benjamin?”
“I would never have thought it of her,” the numena agreed.
Benjamin has such a wonderful voice, Isabelle thought. So resonant. John’d had a wonderful voice as well. Maybe it was something particular to numena.
Rushkin sighed, returning his attention to her. “And after all I’ve done for you, too.”
“What ... what ..... Isabelle began, but then she lost track of what she was trying to say. The word continued to echo inside her head long after she’d spoken.
“I certainly didn’t come emptyhanded,” Rushkin told her.
“She probably doesn’t appreciate your gift,” Benjamin said.
Rushkin peered a little more closely into Isabelle’s face.
“Yet she certainly appears to have sampled it,” he said. His breath was warm on Isabelle’s cheek and smelled vaguely of cinnamon. “Potent, isn’t it, Isabelle?”
Isabelle. That was her name. She was Isabelle. Fine. But what did cinnamon and numena have to do with ... with ...
The thought was confusing enough to begin with and she simply couldn’t hold on to it any longer. She watched it flicker away, past Rushkin’s head, past where Benjamin stood, up and up, in among the stars, until it suddenly winked out like a snuffed candle, a faint glow remaining before it, too, faded and was gone. When she looked back at Rushkin’s face, his moonlit features strobed. From the farmyard came the sound of voices raised in alarm. She could hear what they were saying but it took the longest time for anything to make sense to her.
“... so it must have been in the punch.”
“... oh, shit ...”
“... had three glasses ...”
“... thought I was having a flashback, I was getting so ...”
“... spiked with ...”
“... I know acid, man, and I’m telling you this is ...”
“... feeling too weird ...”
“... cut with some serious speed ...”
“... this sucks ...”
“... if I find the asshole who ...”
“... I think he’s freaking out ...”
“... oh, man, I am gone ...”
“... somebody
The strangeness inside Isabelle ebbed and flowed. From only being able to see Rushkin as a light show she slipped into a long lucid moment where she clearly understood what was going on. But that was almost worse. Raw panic swept through her once she realized that it was Rushkin who had brought the jugs of punch spiked with LSD, that she, along with God knew how many others, were now tripping.
“You can give the paintings to me,” Rushkin was saying, “or I can make you give them to me, Isabelle. The choice is yours.”
She looked at him in horror. “How could ... how could you
He shrugged. “It’s a party. I thought you’d appreciate a litde excursion into an altered state of consciousness. Quick now,” he added. “I haven’t all night to waste on this.”
“Maybe we should take another look around,” Benjamin said.
Rushkin shook his head. “No. They’re here, they’re close. I can feel them. But she has them too well hidden.” His face pressed up close to hers again. “Isn’t that so, Isabelle? You thought you could hide them away from me?”
“You ... you ... monster ...”
Isabelle’s moment of lucidity was rapidly slipping away once more. Rushkin’s features began to distort, distending and receding at the same time. When he pushed a box of wooden matches into her hand, she tried not to take them but found herself gripping them tightly all the same.
“They’re in one of these buildings,” Rushkin said. “I know that much.”
In the distortion that passed for his face, his eyes seemed to glow. Isabelle couldn’t take her gaze from them. She felt cut loose from her body, adrift except for the grip of his gaze on hers.
“Tell me which one,” Rushkin said, “and we will take what we need and go.”
It took all the effort Isabelle could muster to shake her head.
“If you don’t,” Rushkin warned her, “I will make you destroy them. Your hand will set the fire that will feed me.”
Isabelle dimly remembered something Kathy had told her once about a bad acid trip she’d taken.
“The only thing you can do,” she’d told Isabelle, “is let yourself go. Fighting it just builds up the pressure.
If you let go, you just pass out and lose a few hours of your life. If you fight it, you could lose your mind.”
She glared at Rushkin. “I won’t,” she tried to say.
The words only came out as muffled sounds without meaning, but it didn’t matter. She stopped trying to control the drug, stopped fighting it. Instead she let herself fall into its embrace. She could still hear the wild uproar that rose from the general vicinity of the farmyard. She could still see Rushkin’s distorted features, pressing up against her own, his cinnamon breath clogging her nostrils. She still held the box of matches in her hand, squeezing it so tightly that the cardboard was caving in along the sides. And then it all went away. She was swallowed by an
