by Peter Beagle
She got to her feet, brushing broken bits of the flowers off her skirt. She wouldn’t wait for Clym after all. She’d go home, have a shower, and put wine to chill. Then later, he’d come home and she’d let his hands and his mouth blot out the day, take her down into dark oblivion with him.
She gathered up her bags. Dust from the dead flowers clung to her dress, a thin pale sheen like the skin of a soap bubble. She shook her skirt, hoping it wouldn’t stain…but of course it wouldn’t. She was thinking of pollen. The asphodel didn’t pollinate, they were just there. That’s why they had no smell, why there were no insects, no bees, in the long grass. The meadows didn’t grow, or change—that wasn’t what they were there for—
“Stop it,” she said aloud, and her own voice made her jump. “Go home. Go home.”
She walked home fast, her heels clicking on the pavement, the skin between her shoulder blades damp with sweat. She was feeling dizzy again, as if her eyes couldn’t focus properly, as if the world were too small, then too large. At the corner of her eye things moved, shimmered—in the heat haze, that was all.
Her key slipped in her fingers as she put it into the lock, and the door swung open onto the dim hallway. Cool, definite lines, the black marble floor cold and solid under her feet. She pushed the door shut behind her, and let her eyes fall closed for a moment, breathing in the chill of the air, the scent of polish.
“Mrs Rich, are you all right?”
Candy’s eyes snapped open. “Oh, Mari—I’d forgotten it was your day! I’m fine, just hot. I’ll just get a drink and get out of your way.”
The maid, pale as narcissi in her black top and trousers, moved back against the wall as Candy went into the kitchen. Candy took a glass from the cupboard and ran water, making sure it was cold. Mari made her uncomfortable. She looked so thin, tired—it seemed wrong that she was here to do Candy’s housework, to clean Candy’s bathroom, and all Candy did was shop and have showers and prepare delicious little meals for when Clym came home.
She turned the tap off, hitched her bags onto her wrist, and turned to go back through the hall to her bedroom. “I’ll just be in my room, Mari. You carry on.” The discomfort, the edge of unreasonable guilt, made her direct a smile—slightly too wide—at the maid as she opened her bedroom door. Mari was already turning away. The hem of her trouser leg drew up over one white, bony ankle, and Candy froze.
Mari wore chains.
A metal band circled her ankle. Heavy, rough edged, splotched with rust: it was no ornament. The chain snaked down from it, then over the floor and out through the door. How did I not see it when I came in? How did I never see it before?
“Mari—” She stopped as the maid looked back toward her. Fear weighed her tongue, made her throat go cold. Mari had been the maid for the apartment before Candy came here, when it was just Clym’s. Clym knew about this.
She swallowed. “Mari, don’t worry about the kitchen. I’m going to go in there and cook and I’ll just make a mess anyway.”
The maid’s eyes widened. Before they’d just been tired, dull. But now fear came into them as it had into Candy’s voice. Too late, the thought came: She’s not here for me. It doesn’t matter if I excuse her. It’s Clym. It’s what he wants. It’s what he says.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Take no notice of me. I know you need to clean the kitchen.”
Mari ducked her head—“Yes, Mrs Rich”—and turned away again. The chain slithered along the floor after her and, as she disappeared into the kitchen, Candy realized one last thing that struck cold not just into her throat but all the way through her, numbing her fingers, making her legs feel as if they didn’t belong to her. The spots on the ankle cuff weren’t rust. They were blood.
It seemed ridiculous, now, to think she’d been afraid just of her world changing, of finding out things weren’t quite how she’d thought. Standing in her bedroom, icy fingers clasped together, Candy knew it wasn’t just that things weren’t quite right. Things were terribly wrong.
She turned her hands over and stared down at the ragged cut on her thumb. If all this had started to happen when she tasted her own blood, she could make it happen again. Would it be worse, next time? Already the skin of her beautiful world was unraveling, coming apart, showing things underneath that she’d never wanted to see—if she revealed even more, what would it be like?
She scratched at the healing wound with her fingernail, and it twinged, a precursor of pain. She could make it bleed again—but her stomach clenched and, again, her head swam with dizziness. She was scared, scared of the pain and scared of what she’d discover.
But wait. That first time, the sudden flash of oak tree, crashing waterfall, the scent of cold damp leaves—that hadn’t been frightening. Okay, so it had opened her up to all this other stuff, the scary bones protruding through her world, but that moment, that feeling of stepping out of her life into something wonderful—and wonderfully familiar—that had been a good thing.
And you’re not really a coward.
She blinked. The thought had come from nowhere, words whispered through a space in the world. She stood here, shivering, dressed like an expensive doll in clothes her husband let her choose, ashamed to look her own maid in the eye—just as the world wasn’t the way she’d thought it, maybe this wasn’t who she really was, either.
She clenched her jaw and marched across the room to the en-suite bathroom. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she went past, she didn’t recognize her own reflection and checked, disoriented for a moment.
Clym’s razor lay by the side of the sink, its reflection like a smudge of shadow in the shining white porcelain. She shut and locked the door, then picked up the razor and flipped the head so she could remove its sliver of blade. She wouldn’t think about it, she wouldn’t look. She turned her head away, biting her lip, and drew the blade across the back of her arm. It stung, sharp and brief, and she looked down—expecting to see nothing but the faintest scratch—to find she’d cut deeper than she’d realized and blood was oozing in a fat crimson line an inch long across her skin.
It was automatic to suck the wound, and the blood was in her mouth before she’d made the conscious decision to do so. But then her stomach heaved—what was she doing?—and she had to fight against the impulse to spit it out, had to force herself to swallow it.
She swallowed, and the world changed.
Trees stood all around her—oak trees and silver birches, their leaves a rustling whisper in the air—but not close enough to prevent the sunlight streaming down onto the knee-high grass in which she stood. Real grass, tall and living, spiky with seed-heads, scent rising from the crushed stalks under her bare feet. Midges rose around her, tiny specks of life, a bee blundered past her leg, and somewhere, invisible, grasshoppers chirped.
Oh. She found herself crying, without meaning to, almost without realizing. She knew this place. It was like a bereavement, to stand here and not know why she recognized it, not know why it felt like home in a way the apartment—oh, the apartment had never felt like this.
It was the memories that made this place precious, memories she couldn’t remember, and yet she knew they were there.
Was it Clym who’d taken them, stolen her memories and left her with nothing but blankness, like looking into mist so thick it made you feel you’d gone blind? But why? And how?
She swallowed again, the taste of the blood a metallic layer in her mouth, overlaying the traces of salmon and orange juice—the food. That was how he was doing it, using the food he gave her, drugging it. Or no, that didn’t seem quite right, it didn’t seem like a drug, and it wasn’t just the food he gave her. She remembered how she’d gone into the coffee shop, panicking, needle-sharp aware of something being wrong, and how the first sip of coffee, thick with sugar and foamed milk, had smoothed down all the edges of fear, pushed her back into dreamy forgetfulness.
She drew in a long breath, trying to think, and breathed in the scent of grass and leaves and the dus
ty, moss-damp bark of the oak trees. And with the scent came clarity.
Oh Candy, you’re being stupid. This isn’t just Clym—it’s the whole world. The sky being the wrong color, the asphodel flowers growing out of something more like fabric than earth—if this was Clym’s doing, then Clym controlled a lot more than just their apartment.
She breathed in again. Grass, and bark…then coconut-scented bathroom soap, and shampoo, and bleach. The meadow blurred, like a reflection in a lake, fell apart into ripples, and disappeared.
She was back. She looked down and saw grass seeds stuck to her new skirt, solid and real, quite different from the ephemeral sheen of the asphodel earlier. And again, her shoes were missing.
Okay, Candy, think.
She sank to her knees on the bathroom floor, hands pressed so tightly against her eyes that phantom lights flickered against the insides of her eyelids.
The food—the food of this whole world—that was what made her forget, overlaid her memories like the haze of smoke over glass. And when she’d swallowed some of her own blood…she ran her fingers up into her hair, hard against her scalp, as if trying to force her thoughts to the surface of her mind…it had cut through the haze, shown her gleams of hidden memory.
But why? Why blood?
Her fingers stilled against her scalp. Of course. It wasn’t because it was blood—it was because it was the only thing that didn’t belong to this world, didn’t carry Lethe’s power.
What’s Lethe? Never mind. Think. Think about the food.
Oh. For the first time anger crashed down through her and surged up again, boiling. That was why Clym had kept refilling her glass last night, why, this morning, he’d fed her melon and eggs and toast.
She got to her feet, the anger filling her, simmering. Spoon-feeding her, calling her baby names—it wasn’t love, it was control.
From back through the apartment, the front door slammed. All Candy’s muscles tightened, pulling her upright. He was back, and she was supposed to have cooked dinner. She was supposed to eat dinner. And the moment she did…What if she lost this new awareness? What if she went back to that dreaming, cloudy existence where she was nothing but Clym’s wife, his baby doll, his little docile sweetheart?
“Candy?”
He’d come into the bedroom—she heard the wardrobe door open and the clink of him unhooking a hanger for his suit jacket.
She relaxed her hands—up until this moment she hadn’t realized they were so tightly clenched her nails had left deep crescents in the skin. “Coming!” she called through the door, and then drew in a breath, trying to let it flow through her body, trying to force the tension down so it wouldn’t show.
She unlocked the door and stepped out.
There was the strangest moment, then, as Clym turned, smiling, from the wardrobe—tall, dark, handsome, utterly familiar, the husband she’d lived with for a year—and she looked at him with no more feeling than if she were seeing a statue.
She had loved him—or she had thought she loved him. She’d slept with him and teased him and begged to go to work with him; had glowed with pleasure when he’d bought her something cute to wear or taken her out to dinner or shown her off to his friends.
And now she looked at him and didn’t even feel pain at realizing their whole relationship had been false, or regret at what had never really been. Not even disappointment that she’d thought she was in love and found that that was false, too.
She did feel anger, though. Oh yes, she felt enough anger to make up for the lack of everything else.
She smiled at him, teeth hidden behind her lips, deliberately crinkling her eyes so he wouldn’t see the fury in them. “I’m so sorry, Clym. Dinner’s not ready. I was shopping, then I walked home through the park, then I got distracted looking at my new dress.”
He was staring at her, and sudden fear iced over her anger. Could he tell? Did it, after all, show in her eyes, in her tone of voice? She stood still, not daring to speak.
He pushed the wardrobe door and it shut with a slam that would have made her jump if she hadn’t been holding herself tight against any betraying movements. He didn’t speak, just dropped his gaze to her feet.
Oh no—her shoes. Again.
She forced herself not to look down, not to react. Relaxed, calm, her stomach in knots, she strolled across to the bed and reached into the bag for the shoes she’d bought that afternoon. Pulling them out, she turned back to Clym.
“Look, aren’t they beautiful? They go perfectly with my dress.”
His voice was heavy, cold as stone. “And yet you’re not wearing them.”
She smiled again, rolled her eyes a little. “Well, of course not. Didn’t I say—I walked through the park, my feet were all dusty. These shoes”—she dangled them at him—“they’re not having anything but sparkly-clean feet in them.”
His gaze lightened a little. Not much, but Candy instantly felt her muscles sag as some of the tension left them. “You have slippers.”
“Yes, but I can’t wear them when I’m washing my feet!” She sat on the bed to slip the shoes on, fastened the slim golden ankle straps, and then smiled up at him. “I wasn’t going to parade up and down the hall barefoot, honestly, Clym.”
“Okay.” His face relaxed into a smile. “So, no dinner, huh?”
“I’m sorry. It’ll only take half an hour—”
“No, baby, it’s just as well. I thought we’d go out for supper—I told Dem and Adriano we’d meet them at Nino’s in an hour. Fix your face, doll, and we’ll go.”
Baby. Doll. She clamped down on a shudder—how weird, only this morning she hadn’t minded him calling her that—and got to her feet, balancing on the high golden heels. “Of course, Clym. I’ll get ready.” Halfway into the bathroom, she checked, biting her lip against another shudder—this one for a very different reason. “Did you notice, has Mari gone?”
He nodded. “By the time I came in. Do your make-up in the bedroom, okay, darling? I want a shower.”
The restaurant stood in a loop of the river, surrounded by a veranda of clean, white stone flags. Squat amber candles burned on the tables, a tiny shimmer of heat haze rising from each one.
Dem and Adriano had turned into Dem and Adriano and Ebon and Calla, plus Hy and Phira and Gray who turned up halfway through the meal. Tall, elegant people with long fingers and beautiful angular cheekbones, who tore heads off prawns and stabbed up olives on cocktail sticks and opened bottle after bottle of wine.
Distracted, still confused, Candy felt as if her head were swelling with the need to be alone, the need to think. She made a show of sipping her wine, put a few olives on her plate and pushed them back and forth. How much could she eat before all her thoughts would get wiped out again? And how long before they would come back? She was terrified of going back into that state of vague, unfocused fear—and even more terrified of going back to two days ago, when she hadn’t been afraid, hadn’t even known she should be afraid.
“Candy, sugar, you’re not eating. Aren’t you feeling well?”
It was one of the tall, dark, beautiful women. Calla? Adriano? Candy forced her face into a smile, hoping Clym hadn’t heard.
“I’m fine. I am eating.”
“But you’re not. Clym, your little wife—she can’t be feeling well.”
From across the table, Clym looked at her. “Candy?”
“I’m fine. I am eating.” And to prove it, she posted one of the stuffed olives into her mouth. Her throat closed, her body—now it knew what the food would do—reacting against the threat. She’d never be able to swallow it. But now half the table was looking at her, and she had to.
She made herself swallow it, and immediately felt her body relax—forced relaxation, like being swaddled, like being held down. No. Oh no. But she had no choice. Someone passed her the bread, someone else scooped salad onto her plate. And Clym was watching. She didn’t know yet exactly what was wrong, but she knew it came from him, and she knew there was danger, and
he mustn’t find out that she knew.
Slowly, her hand heavy, her throat choked with fear and anger, she spiked tomato and cucumber and feta cheese, put it into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, felt the sweet, floating lethargy take her. She smiled across the table at Clym—and realized she wasn’t entirely acting. Under cover of the table she dug sharp fingernails into her thigh. Stay awake! Don’t let this happen.
The evening ground onward. Candy tried, unobtrusively, to eat as little as possible. She talked a lot, deferring to Clym, directing others’ attention to him as he liked her to do.
Memory ebbed and flowed. Sometimes, she couldn’t remember why it was so important not to eat, couldn’t remember why her fingernails were biting through her skirt. Sometimes, it all came back to her in a shuddering rush that turned her stomach upside down, and which she had to conceal.
After one of these moments, cold with sweat, she slipped away from the table and escaped to the toilets. Inside one of the cubicles, she sat down and let her head drop into her hands. It swam with jumbled thoughts, flickers of disconnected memory. The food sat like poison in her stomach, and she felt her throat pulse with the urge to vomit.
Her head jerked up. She listened. No one had followed her in, no one would hear her. Maybe, if she could expel the food, some of this woozy, cloudy feeling would clear. Maybe she’d get through the rest of dinner without feeling terrified she was losing her mind again.
She stood up, lifted the lid of the toilet and leaned over it. Her stomach heaved but the food stayed down. And, once again, familiarly, horribly, her mind started to cloud. What was she doing here? What was she thinking? And—oh—she felt awful. Why did she feel so sick?
Her sense of balance went askew. She swayed heavily sideways, knocking into the cubicle wall. She clutched the hard cold metal of the toilet-roll holder, all her thoughts vanishing as nausea and dizziness overwhelmed her.