by Lily Levi
The bay was so much like ice that it thrilled him in some unspoken way to be near it. He might say that’s why he’d never left Neverpine, that he liked the strangeness of it, and that he felt like he belonged beside its waters. But that, of course, was not the truth. There was still some secret the old house held that he hadn’t been able to root out.
Maman would help him do it, if he could bring her back the way he hoped he could. But – he paused in his thoughts to check the sturdiness of the rivets beneath the dock – Maman had been dead for a very long time.
Riley barked and he shaded his eyes against the sun to find her on the shore.
She stood near the line of trees off the north end of the manor. Her long ears folded back from the top of her head and she lifted her nose as high up as she could hold it. She barked a second time in that rich, bloodhound way, and, without looking back, took off between the trees.
It was not like her.
He wasted no time wondering and hurried after her.
Reaching the line of trees, he whistled.
The yellow brush sat tired and still. Nothing moved.
He whistled again.
A songbird chirped above him and was soon joined by the under chorus of Riley’s incessant howls, moving further and deeper into the dry forest.
He stepped between the trees, over rocks, and through gnarled bushes. The hills sloped upwards and he climbed. She’d found something, but he was in no mood to deal with another mountain cat or wayward sightseer.
He cursed the trees and the tangled brush as he went. Oftentimes, he imagined what it would be like to store himself away in a penthouse of some grand, modern city. Maman had loved Paris with all of her heart. She’d only left for his father.
Perhaps he would go there, but there was also London, New York City, Buenos Aires. They would all be the same now, so it didn’t matter which. Time had a way of blending things together.
If he left the manor, he would only come out after the sun set between the glistening buildings. He would avoid people. He would shift noiselessly between the iron lamps and through the dark streets, wet with cold rain.
But it didn’t matter. He didn’t feel that he could leave the manor and the dismal bay, at least not yet.
By the time he reached the baying bloodhound, the sun had lowered itself between the trees and the sweat on his body had cooled.
He opened and closed his hands.
Riley stared up at him with her baleful brown eyes and panted in the heat. She sat calmly beside the body of a girl, pale and unmoving.
Frowning, he knelt to examine the body. Her throat was discolored, brown and blue. Her dark hair lay matted with sweat against her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were closed and her limbs flayed out from her torso.
She’d struggled.
He touched the girl’s throat with his fingertips and felt nothing at all, save the fleeting warmth that could’ve easily been imagined. No air escaped from her purple lips.
She looked so much like Elise had in the frozen ocean, just waiting to drown. The resemblance was mildly uncanny and, for an instant, his heart ached.
He raised his hand to his chest to press back the sudden pain. He’d forgotten how such memories could seize such a hardy organ and leave it painfully stunned, if only momentarily.
Still, the girl was dead. She was beautiful, and the memories she conjured were also beautiful, but she was dead.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
A warm breeze moved the smaller branches overhead. A thin cloud of gnats gathered in the orange light of the setting sun.
A dark thought, like lightning in the springtime, ran through him.
Riley whined and stepped away.
Chapter Five
June 2, 1994
A Place with No Name
Electricity prickled out from her skin like thousands of vibrating needles.
Her body was a glowing, buzzing instrument. She’d been struck by a hundred years of lightning.
The pulse surrounding her echoed in on itself, over and over, a thousand times over. There was nothing but the pulse, and even that threatened to be nothing, too.
It vibrated from both outside and inside of her. It was her and then it wasn’t her.
It slowed until it was gone, leaving behind only the stinging taste of burnt copper.
Years passed.
She grew old, but nothing happened between the years. She did not eat and she did not sleep. She did not love. There was no one to love.
There was only the dark room that felt bigger than the world, but it was still only a room. Inside, the heavy air weighed down on her old, broken body.
She could not look down on herself to see what time had done. There was only the heavy guilt of having lived for so long, for a hundred years and then a hundred more, and having no memory of anything beautiful. She could not remember the sound of a voice or what one might’ve sounded like. She couldn’t remember anything at all.
She felt for her face, but there was no face to feel. Had there ever been a face in the history of the world? Had there ever been anyone else?
She tried to remember, but there was nothing to remember because there had never been anything to remember.
She remembered nothing and she remembered it very well.
Something touched her eye. It was her hand and not her hand.
She wanted to scream beneath the sharp pain of someone – something – peeling back the thin cover of skin. She forgot the dark room and that she was old; that there was nothing to remember and that she had been no one.
There were only the stars that peered down at her, blind and uncaring.
She remembered them from the forest, in the middle of the day. The stars had been there. They’d seen it happen and they hadn’t cared.
Seen what?
She couldn’t remember.
Silver hooks threaded through her skin and the stars, the uncaring stars, pulled her towards them.
And then?
And then, and then.
She opened her eyes, she closed them. She opened them again.
She remembered the forest.
It had only just been early afternoon, she remembered that, and now, the night was so dark that she could no longer make out the trees.
But maybe that was a thousand years ago. Maybe there were no more trees. Maybe there had never been a forest.
A soft howl, like an exhausted ghost, flew over the imagined treetops.
She struggled to her feet, only there was no struggle at all. She was already standing.
Chapter Six
June 2, 1994
Neverpine, California
The sinking of steel had sounded so much like the death throes of an antediluvian beast. He could still hear their oars, striking down into the frigid sea. He could still feel the icy clip of dark water.
Elise.
If only he’d been able to raise her up from the depths and see her as he saw this dark-haired girl now. If only she’d lain where this girl slept, deep inside of death.
But Elise was lost forever. Her body had been interned beneath leagues of frozen salt and water, thicker than earth. She had grown bloated and white. The fish had eaten her. She’d been everything to him and nothing to the scaled, unthinking things. They couldn’t have known what a beautiful creature they’d destroyed.
But she was gone now.
Laurie moved the girl’s wild hair away from her neck and ran the back of his hand against her skin. The bruises were dark and mottled. She’d suffered gruesomely.
Elise had suffered, too. Maman had suffered. He had suffered and he would always suffer until he could let himself feel that his life was over. But when would that day come?
“We all suffer,” he said to the quiet room. What could the girl hear? What could she know?
Riley whimpered at his feet. She raised her eyes to meet his. Her jowls drooped sadly up at him.
He nodded his chin down at her. “All of us suf
fer, my dear. Don’t you?”
Riley lowered her head back down onto her paws and shut her eyes, as though she weren’t keen on witnessing the thing he were about to do.
Laurie lifted the girl’s bare arm from the sheets and held its dead weight. Despite all he knew, death was still a most uncertain state. He remembered the stars, of feeling very cold, and then of feeling nothing at all. But what could be remembered after that?
The rest of his time on this earth had sped violently forward, pausing only for Elise, and then racing onward after her death until he could no longer bear it. The weight of three hundred years was more than he’d imagined it could ever be.
He would not last another hundred.
Men were not meant to live. They were meant to die and anything that happened in between birth and death was merely a byproduct of having been born.
He frowned at Riley, already asleep on the carpet at his feet. The bloodhound would inevitably die without him, that much was certain. She could forage on her own, of course, but how long could she possibly last?
He closed his eyes and brought the girl’s wrist up to his lips. He took in the earthy scent of her skin.
This girl, with her wild hair and pointed nose like some half-formed pixie, didn’t belong in Neverpine. He could smell it on her somehow. It was the ‘outside’, the ‘far-from-here’; it was the world he didn’t like to go into anymore.
No, beyond the slight resemblance to Elise, he’d never seen her face or remembered knowing it in anyone else. She was from somewhere else entirely. Perhaps she was a tourist of some brand. Maybe she’d just moved to Neverpine. Possibly, and most likely, she was only passing through.
Nevertheless, it didn’t matter what she was or who she was. It didn’t concern him.
Her broken life, though, that was a thing of value.
He would bring her back, if it could be done, and use her as a blueprint for Maman’s resurrection. It would be beneficial for him, for her, and certainly for Maman.
He stared down at her face, puffy with death. Truly, if anything could be said, he was doing the girl a favor. She’d been murdered, it seemed. It could not have been how she’d imagined the end of her life.
He’d give her something more.
Unable to help himself, he pressed a sharpened nail against her wrist and slit the skin open.
She bled slowly. There was no pulse.
He allowed himself the scent of her blood. Pig’s blood had always been enough. Human blood was no delicacy. It was distasteful and burnt. He didn’t want it, yet he was still faintly drawn to it in some inexplicable way.
Disgusted with himself, he lowered her hand back down onto the bed. He reached into the leather bag of medical supplies from another life and carefully bandaged where he’d sliced her open.
Taking his seat beside her, he fumbled with the needled syringe. It was not his favorite part of the process, but it was necessary.
He drew up the arm of his shirt and slid the long needle beneath his own skin. Looking upwards, he drew his own blood into the glass vial and examined the faded gold intricacies of the ceiling.
The dead spider had needed a single drop. The dead cat had required only a thimble. He would give the girl more and then a little more after that, just to make sure.
He drew the needle from his skin. With one hand, he moved the hair away from the side of her bruised neck and slipped the silver point into a small green vein. He pushed down on the top of the syringe with his thumb. In a way that could only be considered satisfying, he imagined how his blood mixed with hers.
When he finished, he leaned back to admire the girl, the thing he had presumably created.
Her dark hair framed her small, heart-shaped face. Her eyes were shut – he had shut them himself – and long lashes lay flat against her blackened sockets. Her lips were chapped and caked shut with a horrible mixture of saliva and bile.
But she didn’t move.
He leaned over the bed and put his ear close to her mouth and nose, half expecting to hear a quiet gasping for air.
But it was either too soon or it was impossible. There was no way to tell just yet.
Resurrecting a spider had been a simple thing. The cat had proven somewhat more difficult. It had been unable to walk for nearly three days and had slept more than any cat he’d known. A human being would demand more time, more care, and more of his blood.
Impatient and uneasy, he moved a cherry wood easel into the room and idly mixed his paints. Painting seemed to be the only thing that eased his mind anymore. Over the years, it had grown from pastime to passion to obsession.
In the beginning, when he was still a boy, he’d painted Riley. His first attempts were unfortunate and laughable for many years. Now, he was capable of painting his own portraits in perfect detail. He could set two portraits beside each other and tell the effects of aging over a mere number of weeks. He aged, he grew young, but always he painted. It was an obsession he admitted freely to himself and to none other.
And now, he painted the girl as he saw her. If her body aged forwards or backwards in any metric in the coming days, he would know. Brush and paint captured so much that lens and light missed. It was the intricacies of emotion, of youth, and the effects of bitter time that made the painted portrait so much more accurate than any photograph. It was the eyes, mostly; the lines in the face, and the curve of the lip.
He drew the short line of her chin. He would paint her exactly as he saw her. When she woke – and suddenly he was sure that she would wake – he would let her heal and then paint her again. He would study what time did to her, if it did anything at all.
The first night passed and then the next. When the third night drew itself darkly over the earth, he stepped away from the bed with the finished portrait in his arms.
Riley waited for him in the hall. She followed him up the dark flights of stairs. They climbed slowly. There was no rush. Only the dead waited for them and even then, they couldn’t have known that they waited.
The fourth floor sat shadowed and quiet as it had when Maman first passed from the earth. No windows opened out onto the floor. There were only the backs of doors as far down as the eye could see, until it was caught in the heavy drapes at the end of the hall.
He stopped at the gallery door. One day he would burn the entirety of it, but that would not be for a very long time. He wasn’t ready yet.
He set the easel and canvas inside of the gallery. His own portraits watched him from the walls.
He blinked back the sight of them, stepped back out from the gallery, and locked the door behind him.
The floorboards groaned beneath his weight, but the door to Maman’s bedroom opened without a sound.
Inside, she lay in the massive bed that seemed to swallow her whole. He thought this every time he entered the room. It was strange that her frame was so small when all he had were memories of her taking up so much space. She’d always demanded, very quietly, to be seen. But now, she demanded so little.
He took his accustomed chair beside her and reached out to take her hand in his. How small it was. If he squeezed only a little, he was sure it would break off from her bird-like wrist and fall to dust in the worn carpet.
Carefully, very carefully, he turned her weathered head against the pillows to face him. “What do you know?” he asked.
Her dark, beaded eyes seemed to search his and he looked away.
He reached for the contraption of wires and tubes and continued the solemn work of building her a usable heart. All it would need to do was pump the pig’s blood, mixed with his own, through her mummified body. The blood didn’t need to flow forever, it only needed to fill her with the life she’d lost so long ago, long enough for him to ask and for her to answer.
Chapter Seven
June 5, 1994
A Place with No Name
Jolene stood there for a very long time, alone in the dark. Unable to think or to remember, she let herself settle into a soft white noi
se. It surrounded her and she welcomed it.
She remembered the forest and that she was in it.
She took a step forward, only it was impossible to tell if she moved at all. She reached out her hands and touched nothing because there was nothing to touch. She lowered her arms and waited, but she didn’t know why she waited. It didn’t seem to matter.
Light pricked the sky, only it wasn’t light more than the gentle glow of an unknowable color’s hue.
She struggled for the name of the color, but there was no name for it. It was a color she’d never seen before, but that didn’t seem right, because she couldn’t remember ever seeing color at all. Still, it didn’t matter, because the color was there, lighting the domed sky over the curved horizon.
She remembered the forest, only there were no trees. There were no rocks or yellow grass – yellow, yes, she could remember yellow – and there were no pine cones littering the earth.
The ground beneath her was broken red mud – red, red, red – hardened by a sun that she couldn’t see.
There was nothing else and there had never been anything else.
Only that wasn’t right because she remembered a forest. She thought maybe she’d grown up there and now, she was not there. She had no family and no friends and no feelings about any of this. She could remember no one and when she turned the gaze of memory onto herself, she found no one there, too.
There had never been anyone.
She stepped forward and she knew she stepped forward because the mud floor moved beneath her. She remembered a forest. She’d lived in the forest, and now she was here.
She walked steadily forward if she walked at all. When she closed her eyes, the same red mud stretched forward forever and ever. She opened her eyes and the world, if it was a world, was the same.
For hours she walked, for days, and for years. Maybe she’d only walked for a handful of minutes. There was no time. Time had never been.