by M. L. Rio
“Thanks.” I nodded at her and went the way she’d indicated. The foyer was dark and empty. Wind rushed against the front door, rattled the panes in the transom window. The bathroom door was closed, but a light peeked out underneath and I opened it without knocking.
The scene there was even stranger, more unsettling than the one in the library. James leaned over the sink, his weight on his fists, the knuckles of his right hand split and bleeding. A huge fractal crack in the mirror stretched in jagged lines from corner to corner, and a long black streak on the counter led to the tip of an uncapped mascara wand. The tube had rolled onto the floor and gleamed against the baseboard, a flash of metallic purple. Meredith’s.
“James, what the hell,” I said, pins and needles prickling down my spine. His head jerked up as if he hadn’t heard the door, didn’t know I’d come in. “Did you break the mirror?”
He glanced at it, then back at me. “Bad luck.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ve got to talk to me,” I said, distracted by the drumming of my pulse in my ears and the mismatched thud of music through the wall—persisting, unimpeded. “I just want to help. Let me help, okay?”
His lip was trembling and he tucked it behind his teeth, but his arms were quivering, too, like they couldn’t support his weight. A crack split his face into four different pieces in the mirror. He shook his head. “No.”
“C’mon. You can tell me. Even if it’s bad, even if it’s really bad. We’ll find a way to fix it.” I realized I was begging and swallowed hard. “James, please.”
“No.” He tried to push past me, but I blocked him in. “Let me go!”
“James! Wait—”
He threw his weight against me, drunkenly, heavily. I braced myself against the door with one arm, caught him around the shoulders with the other. He shoved harder when he felt my hand on him and I crushed him against me, fighting to keep him from knocking me aside or toppling both of us to the floor.
“Let me go!” he said, voice muffled where his face was caught in the crook of my arm. He strained against me for a moment longer, but I had him in a strangely solid grip, his arms trapped between us, hands pushing futilely against my chest. He seemed so small all of a sudden. How easy it should have been for me to overpower him.
“Not until you talk to me.” My throat tightened, and I was afraid I would cry until I realized James was crying already, sobbing even, huge clumsy breaths making his shoulders shudder and jerk in my grip. We wavered in what had somehow become an embrace until he lifted his head, found his face too close to mine. He writhed away from me, then stumbled out into the foyer and said, with a child’s petulant anger, “Don’t follow me, Oliver.”
But I pursued him blindly, idiotically, like a man in a dream compelled by some great mysterious force to move forward. I lost him in the press of people dancing in the dining room, the lights hazy and indistinct, blue and purple, electric shadows moving dizzily from wall to wall. I pawed my way between dancers, searching for James’s face in the blur of people. I caught a glimpse as he slipped into the kitchen and followed close on his heels, almost falling in my haste to catch up with him.
Wren, Colin, Alexander, and Filippa had joined the third-years. James looked over his shoulder, saw me, then grabbed Wren’s arm and pulled her away from the others.
“James!” she squeaked, tripping after him. “What are you—”
He was already dragging her out of the kitchen, toward the stairwell tower.
“Don’t—!” I said, but he talked over me.
“Wren, come up to bed with me, please.”
She stopped dead, and we all froze around her, watching. But all she could see was James. Her lips moved soundlessly and then she stammered, “Yes.”
He looked over her head at me, something strange and bitter and vindictive in his expression, but for only a split second. Then he was gone, pulling her out of the room behind him. In disbelief I tried to follow them, but Alexander caught me by the shoulder. “Oliver, no,” he said. “Not this time.”
He and Filippa and I all stood staring at one another, while the silent third-years stared at us. Music surged on obliviously behind us, and the wind roared outside. I stood paralyzed in the middle of the room, too dismayed to speak or move. To notice, at first, that Meredith was missing.
SCENE 3
I woke up alone in Filippa’s room. After James disappeared into the Tower with Wren, I’d spent the night wandering the Castle in a daze, wondering where Meredith had gone and more worried than I would confess to anyone. By the time the place emptied and everyone else was in bed, I came to the unnerving conclusion that she wasn’t coming back. At half past three I knocked on Filippa’s door. She opened it wearing an oversized flannel shirt and wool socks pulled halfway up her calves.
“I can’t go up to the Tower,” I told her. “Meredith’s gone. I don’t want to sleep alone.” Finally I understood the feeling.
She opened the door, tucked me into bed, and curled up in a ball beside me, all without saying a word. When I shivered she shifted closer, draped one arm over my side, and fell asleep with her chin perched on my shoulder. I listened to her breath and felt her heart beat against my back and tricked myself into thinking that maybe, when we woke up, everything would be back to normal. But what kind of normal did we have to go back to?
In the morning, everyone was gone. I didn’t know where, but they’d be expecting to come home to a Castle cleaned and scoured, all evidence of the party washed away. I needed distraction like a drug, something to occupy and exhaust my mind, to keep it from wandering back into the memory labyrinth of the previous night. So I spent hours on my hands and knees, dizzy from the smell of bleach, my hands raw from scrubbing. It seemed to me that the Castle hadn’t been cleaned properly in years, and I attacked the grime that had settled into the grooves between the floorboards, possessed by the idea that I could purge the place, baptize it, absolve it of its sins and make it new again.
From the kitchen I moved through the downstairs bathroom, the dining room, the foyer. There was nothing I could do about the broken mirror—I’d have to contact the custodial staff at the Hall—but I wiped away the red smear of James’s blood, the black slash of Meredith’s mascara. The tube was still on the floor. I picked it up, pocketed it, wondering when I’d have the chance to return it to her.
I crawled up the stairs, rag and polish in hand, and by the time I reached the second floor, my knees were aching. I couldn’t fix the burn mark on the library carpet, so I left it as it was. I cleaned the bathroom, mopped the floor in the hall, wiped down bedroom windows, and tidied where I could without disturbing anyone’s things. I made the bed in Filippa’s room. The sight of Wren’s bed, smooth and unslept in, made my stomach wind up in a tight little knot. I closed her door, didn’t venture in. Alexander’s room was such a mess that I couldn’t do much. I glanced under his bed and through his drawers, checking for drug paraphernalia, but didn’t find anything. (He’d learned his lesson, I hoped.) Meredith’s room looked exactly as we’d last left it, cluttered but not chaotic: books piled on the desk, empty wineglasses on the nightstand, clothes thrown across the foot of the bed. I didn’t see her dress from the night before.
When I emerged again, Richard’s door seemed to be watching me from the end of the hall. Someone had closed it after he died, and as far as I knew none of us had opened it since. I blinked, unable to even really remember what his room looked like. Without realizing I had made the decision to move, I found myself walking down the hall, turning the handle. The door opened without protest, without so much as a squeak. Early evening light, touched with the pink of sunset, streamed in through the window and lay decadently across the bed. The rest of the room stood in quiet gray-blue shade, patiently waiting for night to fall. So many of his things were still there; hardback books, naked without their dust jackets, were stacked on the shelf above the bed, and his watch (I knew without wanting to know that Meredith had given it to him for
his birthday, third year) lay discarded on the desk. A pair of brown leather boxing gloves hung over one corner of the closet door, and inside I could see a row of hangers, the white undershirts he’d liked so much hung up beside button-downs that might actually wrinkle. An old, forgotten affection stirred and I looked away, searching for something to remind me why I’d be a fool to regret for one minute that he was gone. A collection of wooden chess pieces stood like a row of soldiers awaiting orders on the windowsill. They were all upright except the white horsemen, one of which had fallen sideways. The other was missing from the place where it should have stood. Wondering if it might have toppled off the ledge, I crouched down to peer underneath the bed, and felt the tiny muffled voice of my conscience cry out. A pair of shoes lay crookedly where he’d last kicked them off, laces plucked at and tangled. I knew him well enough to know he never would have left them that way if he’d thought he wasn’t coming back.
Grief seized me so suddenly I thought I might black out. He was there, in that room where we’d tried to lock him up, shut him out of sight, with all our deadly sins to keep him company. I staggered to my feet, blundered into the hall, and slammed the door.
I climbed the stairs to the Tower, unsure of what I would find but desperate to put as much distance between myself and Richard’s room as possible. At first glance, it looked like it always did, and for a moment I stood swaying in the doorway, hoping to find comfort in its tame familiarity. Our little attic room, with its two beds, two bookshelves, two wardrobes. When my legs felt steady enough, I wandered in. My own messy bed I made with meticulous care, delaying the inevitable cross to James’s side of the room. When I could find nothing else to straighten, nothing to fold, nothing to hide in a drawer or tuck out of sight in the wardrobe, I moved from my corner into his.
I straightened the books, shook the dust from the curtains, picked up a pencil that had rolled off a shelf and onto the floor. James was unfailingly neat, always had been, and there wasn’t much to keep me occupied. Finally, I reached for the bedspread, pulled it and the sheet beneath it flat against the mattress, trying not to think of him and Wren and how each wrinkle and crease had been pressed into place.
A corner of the sheet was hanging out from under the mattress. I crouched down to fix it, but paused when I felt something unexpectedly soft between my fingers. As I lifted my hand a tuft of white floated away from my palm and settled on the floor again. I tugged the corner of James’s bedspread loose and found another little cluster of cotton tufts gathered around one leg of the bedframe, as if they’d been gradually swept there by careless passing feet. I folded the blanket farther back. If there were bedbugs, or a spring was poking through, I’d need to add a new mattress to my list of requests for the real custodial staff.
I pulled the fitted sheet up off the foot of the bed. There was a jagged rip in the end of the mattress, like a grinning mouth six inches long. I checked the footboard for a nail, a protuberant splinter, but didn’t find anything that could have torn through the fabric. The split gaped, laughed at me, and I didn’t realize I was leaning closer until I saw the narrow red smudge on the edge of the tear, like a dash of lipstick. I sat staring at the mattress for a moment like I’d been fused to the spot. Then I reached in through the hole.
I groped through a tangle of springs and cotton and foam until I felt something severely, indisputably solid. It didn’t come easily—something at the end kept catching—but with one good yank I wrenched it free and let it clatter to the floor. It looked alarmingly wrong lying there—anachronistic, almost Gothic, stolen out of time from a darker age. In the back of my brain I knew what it was, really: an old boat hook, curved at one end like a claw, snatched from the long-forgotten rack of tools at the back of the boathouse. The talon and pole had been hastily wiped clean, but blood still clung to the crevices, cracked and flaking away like rust.
My lungs struggled for air. I grabbed the boat hook off the floor and fled the room, one hand clapped over my mouth, afraid I might vomit my heart out onto the floor.
SCENE 4
I sprinted through the forest to the FAB like I had only a few weeks before, then with a scrap of fabric clutched in my fist. I ran with the boat hook at my side like a spear, feet churning the earth to a pulp. When the building was in sight I realized my mistake—I’d forgotten the time. People were already lining up outside to see the show, playgoers in their evening clothes, talking and laughing and clutching glossy programs. I dropped into a crouch and crept along the bottom of the hill, head bent low.
The side door to the stairwell opened with a crunch. I caught it when it tried to slam behind me, let it shut more softly, then took the stairs down to the basement so fast I almost fell. Sweat prickled on my face as I shoved my way through the mass of furniture piled up in the undercroft. After three harrowing minutes I found the room with the lockers again, the open padlock glaring at me like a single Cyclopean eye. I dragged the trestle table aside, removed the lock, and threw the door open. The mug was sitting there, untouched, that guilty bit of fabric stuffed in the bottom like a crumpled napkin. I thrust the boat hook in beside it, slammed the door and kicked it until it latched, heedless of the sound. The lock scraped as it slid back through the loop, and I pushed the shackle toe into place without hesitating. I staggered back, stared for a moment, then scrambled out to the stairwell again, panic rising from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head in a hot, delirious rush.
I ran down two backstage hallways, the clatter and murmur of the audience seeping through the walls. In the crossover, two second-years hurried past me to get to the wings, pointing and whispering as I charged by. I flung the dressing room door open, and everyone looked up at once.
“Where in the fuck have you been?” Alexander demanded.
“I’m sorry!” I said. “I just—I’ll explain later. Where’s my costume?”
“Well, Timothy’s fucking wearing it because we didn’t know where you were!”
I turned on the spot to find Timothy (a second-year who usually played Cornwall’s mutinous servant) already on his feet, looking green, a script clutched in his hand.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “Tim, give me that.”
“Thank God,” he said. “Oh, thank fucking Christ, I was trying to learn your lines—”
“I’m sorry, something happened—”
I threw my clothes on as he pulled them off, struggling with my boots, sword belt, coat. The audience chatter from the overhead speaker crackled and died out. A small gasp rippled in from the house and I knew the lights had come up on Lear’s empyreal palace.
Kent: “I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.”
Gloucester: “It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most, for equalities are so weigh’d that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.”
Kent: “Is not this your son, my lord?”
I glanced down at Alexander, who was on his knees lacing my boots as I fumbled with the buttons on my waistcoat. “Is James already onstage?” I asked.
“Obviously.” He jerked on my laces so hard I nearly lost my balance. “Hold still, damn you.”
“And Meredith?” I reached for my cravat.
“In the wings, I assume.”
“So she’s here,” I said.
He stood and started feeding my belt through the loops. “Why wouldn’t she be?”
“I don’t know.” My fingers were clumsy, unsteady, unable to form the familiar knot. “She stayed out last night.”
“Worry about it later. Now’s not the time.” He buckled my belt too tight and grabbed my gloves off the counter. I glanced in the mirror. My hair was wildly disheveled, sweat glistening on my cheeks. “You look awful,” he said. “Are you sick?”
“I am sick with working of my thoughts,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Oliver, what—”
“Never mind,” I sai
d. “I have to go.” I slipped out into the crossover before he could speak again. The door closed heavily behind me, and I waited with my hand on the knob, forced to stand still by the enormous concentration it took—in that moment—just to breathe. I closed my eyes, mind blank but for inhale, exhale, until the last line of Scene 1 brought me back to life. Meredith’s voice, low and resolute: “We must do something.”
I made my way to the wings.
I stumbled along the line sets in the merciless dark backstage until my eyes adjusted to the cool glow of the work lamp in the prompt corner. The ASM spotted me and hissed into his headset, “Booth? We have a live Edgar. No, the original. Looks a little worse for wear, but he’s dressed and ready to go.” He cupped his hand over the microphone, muttered, “Gwendolyn’s going to have your balls, friend,” and turned his attention back to the stage. I wondered briefly what he would say if I told him that Gwendolyn was the least of my worries.
Onstage, James stood with his head bent in deference to his father.
Gloucester: “We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund—”
James’s mouth twitched, and I remembered his unsettling repetitions of the previous night. Gloucester finished his speech and strode across the star-strewn floor toward the opposite wing.
“This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!” He looked heavenward, made a fist, and shook it at the stars. A laugh blossomed from his lips and rang in my ears, bold and unabashed. “An admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!” He raised one finger, pointed out a single constellation among a hundred, and spoke more thoughtfully. “My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s Tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.” He laughed again, but now the laugh was bitter. I shifted my feet on the spot, every hair on the back of my neck standing on end. “I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—”