by Rumer Haven
“Like what?” Her appetite probably lost to Margot playing with the fat, Chloé had ceased eating and interlocked her arms, resting her elbows on the table.
“I don’t know…stuff. My moods.” She bit at the skin inside her mouth as she studied her lap.
For some reason, Margot now felt eager to divulge everything. But why to someone she’d been holding at arm’s length? Unless it was just that: Chloé wasn’t of consequence to Margot’s life going forward, so what happened in London would stay in London. And maybe if Margot turned her off just enough, they wouldn’t have to hang out again. If that was what she still wanted.
“Really, though,” she said, “he’s been a good friend to me. I’ve always been moody, but not like this.” She jerked her right shoulder forward, then glanced around at other patrons. Finally, she looked at Chloé directly to feel out whether this was safe territory to embark on.
Bobbing her head with a readiness to listen, Chloé didn’t break eye contact as she reached into her fraying satin clutch for a crushed pack of cigarettes.
She has the face of an angel, Margot thought out of nowhere, accepting the cigarette handed to her. As the rising smoke shrouded her face, she already felt calmer, and her limbs tingled.
Chloé had re-glossed her lips and now pursed them to blow wisps of smoke into the open air. She tipped her head.
On this cue, Margot let go and related everything that had led up to that horrible confrontation with Rand a couple of weeks back. She kept her voice low so others wouldn’t hear, but once she’d unscrewed that rusted tap, everything poured out in the strange warmth of Chloé’s undivided attention. After a time, Margot wasn’t even sure how long she’d been talking, only that she couldn’t stop babbling as she sensed Chloé’s awareness silkily stroking every contour of every word and practically lapping it up like honeyed milk.
“I’d just soak there in the tub,” Margot said, “with the water up to my chin, looking down at how my body looked drowned.” She zoned out on the bubbles inside her water bottle, which she twisted side to side. “Ophelia in her watery grave. Just lying there, feeling nothing and wondering what difference it would make if I died.”
The tip of Chloé’s cigarette smoldered into a fiery red dot in the corner of Margot’s eye. Snapping out of her trance with another shoulder tic, she added, “Don’t worry, I wasn’t contemplating rock-loaded pockets in the Thames or anything. I didn’t want to die. It was more like…is still sometimes like…just a really strong apathy toward dying. You know? Like, if it were to happen outside my control. Crossing the street and getting hit by a car. A heart attack. Something like that. And when I feel that way, it’s like I’m inside and outside of the experience at once.”
Chloé’s eyes twitched. “Why?”
“Don’t know.” Margot stubbed out her cigarette as she exhaled the last of her smoke. “And honestly? I don’t think I care. I strictly take showers now so Rand doesn’t freak out, but I think I’m still allowed to feel and not feel at my own discretion.”
“One thing you feel is more comfortable with me,” Chloé said as she reclined in her seat.
Margot nodded, knowing it was true without understanding why. Had she really just unloaded all that on someone she barely knew? She still hadn’t even talked to anyone back home about it.
Chloé lit a new cigarette and stuffed the pack back in her clutch after Margot declined another one. “Have you discovered any more of these writings in your journal?”
“Nothing like that, where I can’t remember writing it. I was so creeped out by that whole thing, honestly, that I don’t even write my dreams down anymore. I don’t want to remember them.”
“Are they always about the same thing?”
Margot shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless I write it down immediately, it’s out of my head.” She shrugged, and the motion made her grimace.
“Are you injured?”
“Huh?”
“Your shoulder. You seem in pain.”
Conscious of her fidgeting but hoping Chloé hadn’t been, she felt her face warm. “Oh, right. I did inflict a bit of voluntary pain on myself recently.”
“You’re hurting yourself?”
“No!” Her cheeks burned. “I’m not hurt, just healing. I did something sort of…impetuous the other day.” She glanced around before hooking her left thumb beneath the neck of her T-shirt and bra strap. Twisting her back to Chloé, she delicately bared as much as she could of her right shoulder blade, wincing slightly. “It’s still pretty tender.”
Beneath a fine layer of scaly skin, a bird blazed in reds and oranges. The feathers of its outstretched wings and streaming tail resembled a peacock’s, curling like fern fronds around eyes of sea green and violet as tongues of flame licked at each tip.
Margot extinguished the image with her cotton tee. “For once I didn’t think, just walked in and did it before I could change my mind.”
“The artistry’s beautiful. Is it something symbolic for you?”
Margot shrugged again, despite the chaffing. “I saw it on an altar cloth at Windsor. It was so striking and fiery, I guess it burnt an impression on me.”
“A phoenix.”
“Yeah. The chapel at Hampton Court had an inscription about one as well, so I took it as a sign.”
“It’s intense yet whimsical. It suits you—”
“Thanks. I’ve always loved birds.” In her excitement, Margot only belatedly realized she’d interrupted Chloé, talking over what sounded like “more than you realize.” To cover the gaffe, she quickly said, “Oh sorry, you were saying?”
Chloé merely shook her head with a cheery smile. “I was simply asking if you knew today’s a national holiday in France.”
“No, really?”
“Le quartorze juillet. As you might know it, Bastille Day. Though in France, la Fête Nationale means much more.” She proceeded to explain how the holiday went beyond the French Revolution as a celebration of national pride, finishing with, “We must go to Paris. Have you been?”
“My ex and I always said we’d go during one of his business trips but never did.”
“Ah, but I’m certain you’d have spent all day in the Louvre. I can show you my Paris.”
“That would actually be perfect to coordinate for when my friend Sylvie visits.”
The corners of Chloé’s lips tugged down, but she didn’t say anything.
“Versaille’s near there, right? Sylvie’s fascinated with Marie Antoinette.”
Chloé’s forehead creased. “Well, that’s really for tourists.”
The cooling air of the clouds pressed on Margot’s brow, and as soon as her eagerness to talk and plot travels with Chloé had infused her, it fled. She felt tired. As usual. But trying to make an effort, as this was her new thing these days, she asked if there was anywhere else Chloé wanted to go after the café.
Drawing an ornate silver pocket watch from her clutch, Chloé declined. “I really must be somewhere. I’d almost forgotten.”
“No worries,” Margot said, not certain whether it was disappointment or relief that tickled at her ribs.
There was still something weighing about Chloé’s presence, almost penetrating, that sucked a bit of Margot’s life force from her, yet a new energy also streamed through their connection. Worried now that she might’ve succeeded in putting her classmate off, Margot air-kissed Chloé’s cheeks with an eager “Call me” in her ear.
Her friend nodded back, and Margot walked onward alone, feeling hollow. With no destination in mind, she let her inner divining rod guide her as she meandered for blocks, looking at people and places but not really seeing them.
The sun parted the clouds but left her in shadow. The wheat-like weeds were gilded with gold, yet she remained gray, shunned by the light.
Just out of the sun’s reach, the stone woman was a pitiful sight. Margot had been watching her for the last half-hour, ever since wandering to the cemetery after lunch with Chloé. The spell b
roke when a black-and-white pigeon swooped to her feet.
After letting the bird peck near her toes for a while, she finally rose from the bench to stand eye level with the statue. A vine spiraled down the lady’s form like a fluttering green boa, and from that sorrowful stone face, Margot imagined tears cascading down the ivy, trickling leaf to leaf.
And then one did; an obsidian black drop crawled out from the corner of one frozen, downcast eye. It eased its way down a track of stem, and Margot squeezed her bag strap.
No. Just an insect. She relaxed.
But then the sunlight fell away from her, too. Pulling on the pilled gray cardigan that had practically become her uniform, she set off down the path. As she walked, her gaze ambled over the lumpy bed of ferns that smothered the headstones beneath them. Feeling a little short of breath herself, she stopped to turn around and nearly stepped on the pigeon. She sidestepped it to continue on her way.
After a few yards, the hairs at the back of her neck stood on end, and she had a strong feeling she was being followed. Still walking, she peeked behind her to see it was only the pigeon.
“I don’t have food,” she told it.
Ten yards or so farther, though, she looked over her shoulder again. The pigeon was still in pursuit, so she stopped and flashed a pair of jazz hands so it would finally believe her about the food and go away.
It seemed to work as the bird diverted its search to the grass. But when Margot started up again, the pigeon circled back into the walkway, treading lightly in her wake.
Ookaay…
She turned onto a narrower, grown-over footpath. The pigeon rounded the corner as well. Twenty yards deeper into the cemetery, Margot stopped again, waiting for her feathered stalker to catch up, its sooty markings making it look like a white dove fallen from grace.
Again, the bird closed in on Margot, but once at her feet, it strutted off the path and then took flight. All view of it disintegrated into a blaze of sun.
Margot squinted and looked back down to the ground while circular afterimages of solar light reverberated against her retinas. Opening and closing her eyes a few times, she finally focused on where the bird had stood—right on the grave of none other than Charlotte Pidgeon.
Well, fancy meeting you here! What a coinc—
Her chest squeezed, and the hairs prickled at the back of her neck again. The bird was gone, but Margot still didn’t feel alone. More than that, she sensed she was being watched. Stumbling back a pace, she spun to see a massive cross mounted on a pediment about a meter high. Behind that, something hid.
She held her breath, taking notice of the few curls of hair and slim sweep of a gown sticking out just to the right of the cross. Sprouting out from either side of the vertical beam were two immense slabs of feathers.
Angels would make poor spies. Wings were the dead giveaway, she joked to herself, but other strange, distorted thoughts appeared in her mind’s eye as if she were writing them on the pages of her diary.
Yet this wasn’t a dream, and it couldn’t be real either. She prayed it was only the pulsation in her vision that now made the angel’s wavy locks appear to draw up its rigid shoulder. Nauseated, Margot watched the granulated curls ease along and imagined the angel twisting around the cross to glare back at her.
A crow cawed from a branch directly overhead, and a woodpecker’s drill rattled with the low growl of a jungle cat.
The acid in her stomach churned, prickling her face and arms, and her heart squeezed. She didn’t understand what was happening but gulped dizzily and stepped backward off the pavement until her calves backed into a headstone.
Without taking her eyes off the angel, she gingerly stepped over the shallow marker and sank into the overgrowth behind it. Sitting, she then leaned her shoulders down to the earth. With the weeds tickling her ears and nose, she pushed her heels against the back of the stone. Her hair caught in the dry grasses as she eased her spine along the dirt, burrowing deeper within them until consumed from view.
The overhead bellow of airplanes faded into white noise behind the sounds of insects and Margot’s breathing, lulling her to sleep as ferns caressed her cheeks and words whispered in her ears with delicate pops:
thou Eye among the blind…
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind…
we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave…
“A presence which is not to be put by
To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie.”
I recite these words, and though they embody my heart’s sorrow as I look upon the love lost, I cannot help but rejoice in the love found.
No, it is not the frivolous fabrication of artistic dispositions, suckled like a sweetmeat and reserved for those with the foolish propensity to devour it sooner than a climbing boy would his ration of bread; no, it exists, as real as my heart, could I cut it out for those palms to cup on this instant. Yet we are not alone here, and must practice caution.
With a start, Margot woke up to a rustling sound just a few feet away. She darted up from the weeds, remembering where she was.
Both groggy and alert, she looked over at the twitching grasses making all the racket—just in time for a small fox to step out of them and pad onto the moonlit pathway. For a second, it cocked its head up, ears stabbing upward and rotating to catch their radar signals. Margot stayed as still as possible; Rand had told her there was no rabies in the UK, but she still didn’t want to attract a wild animal’s attention. Before long, though, the fox lowered its head and trotted away.
Left in peace to find her bearings, she scanned the graveyard from where she sat. What the dark had pillaged of the sun’s gold, the moon had re-plated in platinum. The moon was full and bright enough, in fact, that she could see everything for what it was.
Her winged stalker was still there yet looked not only disinterested but like…rock. Rock that had been chiseled by a person to look like something it wasn’t.
And there was no woman crying because there was no woman. Just another rock carved by a living person to look like someone else who was living but wasn’t.
At dead of night when graveyards were supposed to be their most alive—it was not.
An eerie calm fell over her as she got practical and looked for her way out. The farthest she could see through the mercury-licked tendrils of grass was the black silhouette of catacombs at the cemetery’s west border. She gazed along the wall, her night-vision squiggling and squirming all the way, until the front gate came into view. And then she realized…
She was locked in.
Margot swallowed and thought through her options. There weren’t any, really, unless she figured out a way to scale the walls. But even then, she could end up on rail tracks or trapped in a private garden. Closed-circuit TV cameras would probably catch her, too, if she hopped out onto one of the roads at either end, and she might get in as much trouble if she tried to find a night guard within the cemetery. So that settled it: she would have to remain interred out of sight until sunrise.
But this overgrown grave was getting itchy. She stood up and cut a diagonal across the grass toward a blackened mausoleum. She’d walked by the structure a few times before in the daylight, knowing it had an open doorway and no coffins inside. It was just an aging shell supported by scaffolding. A few calculated steps and contortions got Margot through the framework of pipes to the mausoleum’s center, where she sank cross-legged on the gritty floor like a little girl in her backyard playhouse. She ran her palms against the ashy ground surface and, for company, tried to conjure Derek and Sylvie on either side of her, just like the last time all three had been together playing a silly board game.
A silent wind picked up. Though the dead leaves around her didn’t stir, Margot felt the chill sharply, and she pulled her cardigan tighter. Drawing her knees u
p into her chest, she concentrated on happy thoughts to see her through the night.
Chapter 9
Reckoning
SHE SAW A SWIRL OF COLORS, a flickering of light—then, with a rustle of muslin, she stepped around an easel to run her finger down an ivory neck. She caught her breath and exhaled in ecstasy.
And then she woke up to the door flying open.
“Margot!”
Uncurling and rolling over to lie on her back, she could do little more than raise her eyelids to Rand’s pallid face, lit by the daylight. He’d already crossed to the bed and sat at its edge.
She remained limp, like her muscles were in atrophy. Easel? she questioned, but her dream-thoughts were interrupted.
“When? Where?” Rand was too flustered to articulate, yet Margot, now fully awake, understood.
“Eight or so, I think. Once the cemetery opened.”
“Cemetery!”
She was too tired to be anything but frank. “I fell asleep there.”
“Fell asleep!”
“It’s fine! Don’t worry. I accidently got locked in, but I’m okay.”
“How did you not make it out in time? Were you alone?”
She answered his full line of questioning as rationally as she could. She owed him that at least, especially after learning he’d stayed awake all night waiting for her to return, had phoned the police to no avail, and must have only just nodded off in his armchair less than an hour ago.
“It was stupid, I know, and I’m so sorry and embarrassed I worried you. I’m just tired, and you must be, too. Seriously, don’t worry about me, just get some rest.”
He’d been sitting next to her with a fist jabbed into the duvet on her other side. Now, his arm softened as he lowered onto his elbow, bringing him inch-by-inch closer to her. His gaze zigzagged in all directions about her face; her eyes followed his, eventually rolling up to watch him pluck a few dried weeds from her hair.