by Daniel Mills
“Do you see it?” the Professor asked him.
This was last February, and the end was drawing near. It pained the old man to speak but he coughed until his throat was clear. His eyes hungered. “These two figures, Virgil. They are you and me and all the others. You and me and the dark that awaits us.”
Two days later, he was dead.
In the etching, the Professor had imagined his future, the oblivion of the grave, but to Virgil, the passageway is an opening into the past, the emptiness for which he has always yearned, which swallowed his parents long ago. He should have joined them there. Instead, he was spared, baptized by chance or fate into the no-space of the present.
He has always believed this, but tonight, something is different. Tonight, the prospect of death is merely terrifying. All longing he reserves for his memories of Katherine Sutcliff—her painted smile, the basswood odors on her hair and skin—and he marvels at the road that stretches before him. Perhaps, he reflects, Vidofsky’s silhouettes are looking away from the void, rather than toward it, their faces turned to the world beyond the page.
It is the first time he has even considered the possibility.
*
Six o’clock. He dresses himself in his finest suit, unlaundered in the weeks since the Professor’s funeral. He fastens his ascot tie and polishes his shoes to a high shine. A dry boutonniere—a white lily—completes the ensemble. He descends the stairs to the corridor, where he positions his chair against the wainscoting ten feet from the doorway.
He waits. At six-thirty, the bell rings and he opens the door to her. She wears a dress of beaded black linen. Like him, she has dressed up for their meeting, changing out of her customary work clothes. With both hands she holds a piece of heavy white crockery.
“It isn’t much,” she explains, joining him in the corridor. “Merely some things we had lying about the house. But I thought of you here without a housekeeper to look after you—and you’d been so kind in lending us that book...”
He shakes his head. “Please,” he says. “It was nothing.”
“Maybe to you it was, but not to Mother. She wanted to come with me, to thank you herself, but the stairs were too much.”
“What a shame,” he says.
She indicates the crock in her hands. “I made this for you this morning. Before work. It should still be good, but it needs warming up. Where’s your kitchen? If you like, I can put it in the oven for you.”
“I—I think I would like that, yes.”
A moment passes. She regards him pointedly. Her dark hair cascades down her back and shoulders, neatly framing her oval face. Her eyes are gray and lustrous, nearly opalescent.
She prompts him. “The kitchen?”
“Ah, yes,” he says, flushing. His pulse catches in his throat, rising like a gorge. “How foolish of me. Come this way.”
He opens the door to the dining room and leads her through to the kitchen. The counters are bare. The basin is crowded with empty milk bottles left to soak.
Katherine bends over to open the oven and light the gas. Her movements are rapid, precise but efficient, and he wonders at the reasons for her haste.
“Your mother,” he says, fumbling for a suitable topic of conversation. “You said that she knew the Professor?”
“A long time ago,” she says, sliding the crock into the oven. “I believe he was her tutor? She would have been just a girl at the time. I gather something happened, and they parted ways, but that was nearly fifty years ago. Her memory isn’t all it used to be.”
She turns around. “But I expect you must know all about that, living here alone with the old Professor—and you a young man yourself. I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s like living with a child sometimes. She sneaks outside. Late at night. After I’ve fallen sleep. She goes out in her veil because she thinks she’s late for her wedding. That’s sad, isn’t it?”
He murmurs his agreement. “It is sad,” he says, distracted.
He recalls the woman he had glimpsed from his window—the same figure of whom he later dreamt—and realizes what he had, in fact, seen.
“Anyway, it’s nearly seven,” Katherine says. “I should be getting back to her.”
“No,” he blurts. “Wait.”
She tilts her head. She regards him passively.
“I thought—which, is to say, I wonder if—that is, assuming you are available—you might consent to dine with me?”
Her mouth opens, but she does not speak. Her expression flickers so rapidly he cannot gauge her reaction with any degree of accuracy. Then she exhales.
“Now really, Mr. Lodge,” she says. “I’m flattered, of course, but I don’t think that would be proper. Do you?”
She smiles, gently, tongue darting behind white teeth.
He cannot meet her gaze. “No,” he manages as he retreats toward the dining room. “I suppose not. But, perhaps, if your mother were to—”
“I’m sorry,” she says. She steps toward the doorway, turning sideways to pass him where he stands. “But as I said, I really must be getting home.”
His fists shake, useless. He thinks of the paint on her lips, the perfume she wears—not for him but for another—and the blackness yawns beneath him.
Despair seizes him, coupled with an acute stab of terror. He grabs at her desperately, a drowning man scrabbling after flotsam. His fingers close around her right arm.
She flinches. “Please,” she says, “let go—”
“Katherine,” he says, urgently.
She struggles against his grip but cannot free herself.
His nails dig into her elbow.
There is fear in her eyes, the horror of a trapped animal. Panicked, she flails wildly at him with her free hand, but he catches her wrist and presses it to his chest. He will not let her go.
“Katherine,” he repeats.
She kicks him. Her shoe-tip catches his shin, impacting the bone so that he loses his balance. Falling, he attempts to maintain his grip, but she escapes his grasp and flees through the dining room, panting, her heels clattering on the hallway floor.
The door flies open, and she is lost to him forever.
He goes to the window, shin throbbing, and looks out at the street.
A younger man has come to Katherine’s aid. He holds her in his arms as she shakes and sobs and points toward Virgil’s house. Her rescuer nods, solemnly, and walks her to the door of the tenement before tearing away down the street, shouting for the constables.
*
The time is short.
Virgil slips out the backdoor and flees through the garden, splashing through puddles of muck, ruining his best clothes. At the back of the garden, he vaults over the low fence and lands in the adjoining alleyway.
He starts to run. He makes his way westward, following side-roads and alleys until he reaches Depot Street. The smell of sex is on the air, breathed from bud and blossom—more pungent now for the falling dark, the dusk which pours from the east, plunging the city into night. The moon rises over the lake, swathed in black and violet.
He descends the hill to the waterfront. His coat tails fly out behind him, the wind filling his jacket like a sail and driving him onward. Shouts follow him, cries of startlement or alarm, but he is not listening. From somewhere far off comes the shriek of a constable’s whistle, the clangor of a bell. He urges himself to greater haste. The wind howls in his ears.
Past the warehouses, he crosses the railroad tracks and leaps onto the disused platform. The station roof has caved in. The windows are broken. He dashes to the platform edge, where he pauses with his hands on his knees, lungs heaving. He does not dare to look behind him.
The whistle sounds again. He leaps from the platform and pelts down the tracks, gasping as he runs, unable to breathe for the force of the blood surging through him.
Half-a-mile from the station, the lake chill settles over him, freezing in his lungs. Weariness engulfs him. His legs buckle, pitching him forward into the weeds.
His head strikes the ground. Bright specks dance into his vision, blinding him. The stars, invisible, bore into him like eyes.
The world returns gradually, re-casting itself from shades of twilight, pieces of dusk. Twenty yards ahead of him, the tracks enter a tunnel, a place halfway. The interior is unlit. The opening seethes and pulses, exuding the blankness of nightmare, the no-life for which he has always been fated. He may have escaped it once, but it will come for him in the end—as it did for the Professor, as it does for all men on this earth. He has to keep moving.
He lurches to his feet.
Night withdraws from the tunnel mouth, opening to admit him, so that he thinks of a woman’s lips, poised in the moment before speaking, before she spreads her arms in embrace. Damp air surrounds him, seeping into him like breath—her breath—gathering him into her skirts as he staggers forward, with arms thrust out, because he cannot see.
Inside, the walls hum with refracted sound. The clatter of footsteps. The screech of vibrating metal. Ahead of him, the blackness churns and judders. The earth rumbles underfoot. The walls quake and shed plumes of dust.
And then—from out of the darkness—a paralyzing light—
LOUISA
The ball was over, the night far spent. The bells of Trinity Church tolled three times, rupturing the calm of early April. The final bell circled the rim of my empty wineglass, producing a faint vibration that ceased at the touch of my finger. Three o’clock: the hour known as the wolf’s hour, the time at which most children are born and at which most men die.
I was tired. I remember that clearly. In those days, I was not a regular ball-goer, being somewhat reserved and predisposed to melancholy. Since the death of my parents two years before, I had lived alone in the family house with only my manservant for company. I would never have thought to attend a society ball had my friends not suggested it. By three o’clock, however, my companions had left. I had remained not for the dancing, but because I simply could not bear to return to the cold and dusty townhouse I once thought of as home.
Quite by chance my gaze settled on a young woman across the room. She must have arrived late as I had not seen her before. The dress she wore was high-necked but flattering and clung to her body in a manner that accented her slim figure.
But it was the color of the dress, rather than its cut, that so arrested me. In color, it was green, but there was something indefinably sickly about the shade, something putrid, and I thought of red cedar, which I have seen planted in many cemeteries, and the smudged, slightly dirty quality of its needles. But even this comparison is not entirely accurate.
The woman stood by the bar, wineglass in hand, while the other ball-goers passed to either side of her. I watched her for some time, my weariness forgotten. She half-turned, sensing my gaze upon her, and caught my eye. She smiled. Taking one sip from her drink, she placed it, nearly full, onto the table behind her and began to walk toward me, making a direct line for me through the dispersing throng.
She shimmered. There is no other word for it. Candlelight moved across her dress in the same way that sunlight glimmers on a wave, and more than a few heads turned as she passed. Her complexion was pale and exceedingly delicate, while her hair was curly, honey-blonde. Her eyes appeared to be of the same indescribable color as her dress.
Two yards away, she halted and faced me without speaking. I was nervous. Sweat dribbled down the inside of my jacket.
“Good evening,” I said.
She presented me with her ungloved hand, the gesture of a lady expecting her due. I stooped and planted a kiss upon the knuckle. Her hand was unexpectedly warm, as though hot with fever. A damp, musky smell—strong but not unpleasant—clung to her skin.
I introduced myself. “Andrew Todd,” I said. Unsure of how to continue, I fell back upon convention. “At your service.”
“My service?” she murmured, teasingly. Her voice was soft, girlish, but her speech was refined. “In that case, I could do with another drink.”
Her forwardness took me by surprise, the more so since I had watched her leave her glass behind. “Wine?” I stammered.
“Gin.”
I went to the bar counter and returned with a pair of tumblers. I took my gin straight, but to hers I added a splash of soda. We clinked our glasses together.
“A toast,” she said, speaking with the same soft, impossibly alluring voice. “I drink to you, Andrew. And to new friends.”
She raised the glass to her lips.
“But I don’t even know your name.”
“Louisa.”
She drained her glass in a single swallow. The color came into her cheeks, further emphasizing her preternatural pallor, and for a moment—only a moment—her features appeared haggard and sunken, her eyes red and horribly bloodshot.
By now the ballroom was nearly empty. The floor was clear and only a few stragglers haunted the shadowed margins of the room. It was the darkest hour of the morning, a time of loneliness and reflection, but that night I was conscious of nothing but the woman who stood before me. In her presence I heard no foreboding in the door which banged hollowly against the wall, nor did I see anything of sadness in the nightly duties of the old attendant, who ascended a ladder beneath the chandelier and proceeded to snuff the lights.
“It is late,” she said.
“It is.”
“Much too late for a woman to be out on her own. It isn’t decent.”
“No?”
“Nor is it safe,” she added playfully.
“I quite agree.”
“But I trust you,” she said. “Will you take me home?”
She peered up at me.
I faltered, unsure of myself. I was taken aback by her earnestness, if only because it seemed so unnecessary. She must have known—how could she not?—that I would not deny her anything.
“I would consider it an honor,” I replied. “Where is home?”
“Anywhere you would like it to be.”
After that, we did not speak. I offered her my arm, which she took. Her fingers settled into the crook of my elbow, and I became conscious again of her incredible warmth. Even through the fabric of my jacket I could feel the heat of her body, which seemed to pulse and flare from her fingertips as with the beating of a heart.
Together we crossed the dance floor, passing the attendant, who sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, the doubter across his knee. Of the chandelier’s two dozen candles, only a single wick remained ablaze. It was the last light of any kind in the room, and the servant polished the silver snuffer by its faint illumination. Somewhere nearby a woman cried out, as though in pain, only to be shushed into silence by a man—and I saw the two of them moving together in the shadows.
We stepped outside.
Snowflakes whirled on the northern wind, spinning down from a cloud-black sky, visible to us only where they billowed about the streetlamps. It was a beautiful sight—perhaps the most beautiful I have seen—but it was a spring snow, the last of the season, and I knew it could not last. Behind us, the doors to the ballroom groaned shut. The noise caused me to turn round. Through the diminishing crack between door and frame, I watched as the attendant ascended the ladder, extended his doubter, and snuffed the final light.
*
We began to walk. Arm in arm, we proceeded down the boulevard under naked trees that swayed and rattled. Points of snow rained down around us, glittering in the void of space like the stars they hid from view. The road led us to the river and across the bridge.
From there we made our way to my house—or to my father’s house, as I still thought of it then. Stevens was abed, and I escorted Louisa up the creaking staircase to the upper hall, where the curtains admitted a coppery light from the courtyard outside.
I remember: I halted on the top stair to look back at her, straining my eyes to discern her shape in the darkness. In that gas-lit twilight, she appeared half-present, a ghost in amber. Shadows writhed on the wall behind her, sweeping down across her
face with the gusting wind.
When we reached the bedroom, she preceded me through the doorway.
Snow light poured into the room through the open curtains. She walked to the window and there turned to face me, the falling snow mirrored on her features in a procession of flickering shadows. Her gaze betrayed a bottomless longing, a suffering beyond the ability of a man—any man—to understand.
“Please,” she said, and then nothing more, as if to say: think not of me, think not at all. I am yours or I am nothing.
I went to her and surprised myself by taking her in my arms. She shivered once and then grew supple. She did not protest when I removed her dress. The fabric slid from her shoulders with a serpentine ease and she wore no corset underneath.
An enormous scar ran the length of her left side. From breast to hip, the skin had knitted itself into an uneven ridge that sloped to a bone-white troth. A few black hairs were visible where they pushed like grass from the colorless flesh. I leaned in to kiss her. Our lips met and my eyes strayed to the window at her back, where a frosted web had formed on the glass: a delicate tracery, numinous and insubstantial like the lives of the unnumbered dead.
*
I woke up alone. The bed beside me was empty. The clothes were flat and un-rumpled, as though they had not been slept in at all. I leapt to my feet, taking time only to don my nightgown before dashing into the hall. I met my manservant on the stair. Stevens carried a tray with my breakfast. The odor of boiled eggs turned my stomach.
“The young master was out late.”
“Never mind that. Did you see anyone go out?”
“Go out, sir?”
“Just now. Did you see anyone?”
“No, sir. Assuredly not.”
I sat down at the top of the steps.
“Would the master like his breakfast?”
“No,” I said. “Leave me in peace.”
“Very well, sir.”
I rubbed at my eyes. My temples pounded from the after-effects of the alcohol. My thoughts formed themselves slowly and only with great effort.