by Milly Taiden
All the words slotted into place in his mind, lining up neatly with their meanings perfectly in tow. He understood. Why did he understand?
And he said, “Maybe once. Not anymore.”
The woman bent over him, making the front of her dress puddle on the tile floor, and a gust of sweet roses came with her. Her cheeks were pale, her lips almost bloodless. Her eyelashes dusted her cheeks as she blinked. “Now, William Davenport, why should you say that?”
Will shook his head. Were there even words for what he felt inside? He couldn’t tell her how he saw but didn’t see, how he thought but couldn’t think, how things did not happen for him one after another as they did for other people but jumped and jumbled, and even his past shifted under his feet, changing, sliding, disappearing from one day to the next. How many things he remembered that he had forgotten—and how much must he must have forgotten that he couldn’t even remember that he once knew.
“‘She walks in beauty like the night.’” Those words came to him and spilled from his lips at in a moment. The pretty girl—yes, Sister Agnes, she had a name, and right now, Will knew it. She had read that to him once, or more than once. He had remembered those words, held them in his mind and said them over and over so that he should never lose them.
They were the only words he did not mind running around and around in his head because maybe then they would stay with him. Beauty like the night. Beauty—night.
“‘Of cloudless climes and starry skies,’” said the woman, the words singing in his ears, cutting through to the memory of more. Her eyes glittered. “Why, yes, William Davenport, I do believe that Sister Agnes is right. And what would you then say if I told you I could set you free? That I could give you a chance to be whole, but that if it does not work, you would die?”
Will tore his eyes from her, looking at the ugly room, the isolation room, with its tile floor and walls and the pool for calming the mad and the morons, and he said, “I am already dead.”
The woman straightened suddenly. “So let it be.” And then she spun about, her skirts swishing behind her, and she was gone.
She walks in beauty like the night. Light and dark, day and night. The darkness that brings the light.
And the world, ever treacherous, slipped away, stealing her memory with it.
***
CHAPTER TWO
Night and day, day and night. Will was sent back to his narrow cell of a room with the high window he could not see out of unless he stood on his chair. But he did not do that anymore. He remembered one time—the last time?—his legs had forgotten how to work while he was on the chair. They had gone rigid, and he had called and called for help, but the one who screamed was yelling then, and his calls were soft, weak, and so often the wrong word. He had said many things, but not once had he been able to make his mouth say “help,” and so no one came. Fear had made his belly sick, and then everything had jumped, and he was lying on the floor, tears coursing down his cheeks with his wrist bent the wrong way.
They had wrapped up that wrist, The Doctor and the others, and taken away his chair.
Sometimes he slept when it was dark, and sometimes he slept, too, when it was light. He went into the room with the table every day, where girls in white headdresses told him to do things, but no longer did he line up with the others to take the air in the garden. There was a chair for him now, with great big wheels in the rear, for when he forgot how to make his legs work.
And there was much time spent in the room with the beds and the machines that The Doctor thought would make him better. He hated the room, with the boxes that made him sweat and the baths that made him shudder with cold, the tight wraps and jackets and the instruments that buzzed and stung, the cupping and the enemas and the poultices. His body was not his. It never had been, not as far back as he could remember. It was a rebellious animal, just like his mind. But he hated that The Doctor acted like his body belonged to them.
It obeyed them no better than it did him.
They came for him on another bad day. The smell of burning paper had not left him, and the pieces that the spaces left were jumbled, nonsensical impressions, sights with no names, sounds with no meaning. Some of those fragments were new, and they drove him so that he could not be at piece, which broke his world into even smaller pieces. Glimpses of fiery hair, of neat little shoes, and heard echoes of a throaty voice that called to something that was not quite driven out of the broken looking-glass of his mind. And they made him very, very angry, though he didn’t know why.
The men were there again, speaking and gesturing. Their faces became angrier and angrier, and Will was angry, too, because he did not know what they wanted of him. One was big, one little, and it seemed that they were moving around, jumping from place to place without passing through the space in between.
That of course was crazy, and therefore it was impossible. You are there, Will told the little one in his mind. But then he was confused. Where was “there?” And the big one—if he wasn’t there, too, where was he? Had “there” moved, too?
And where was she, the one who made even the burning paper have the faintest scent of roses, the one with the hair that was as orange as the carp in the shadeless pool?
Hands were on him, hauling him up, pushing him toward the wheeled chair. He did not want the chair, but it seemed easier to allow himself to be pressed into it when the world would not hold still as it ought. Then he was moving through the corridors, and it occurred to him that they were dark. He never went anywhere in the dark.
The woman with the ugly mouth pushed the door open to the terrace, and the men lifted him down, chair and all, until the wheels crunched down on the gravel. The sky was a black bowl, not a trace of light escaping except the pale glow in the hand of the woman, bobbing ahead, marking the way.
“Marsh gas.”
The woman’s head whipped around at those words, the first since the beautiful one had left. “Well, decide to talk now, did you? It’s far too late to change anyone’s mind. You were a troublesome one, and I for one shan’t miss you.”
Crunch, crunch, crunch. The gravel was loud under the wheels and the feet. They went down the path, and Will bid the fish farewell in their pool as he passed the chuckling fountain. There were more shadows in the darkness, things Will knew but could not name, and the feet kept up their noisy progression, taking him along in the body that would not listen to anyone.
Then there was a light ahead, a small one. It was in a window—and that meant the thing that was behind must be a building. The door opened as they approached, and she was there.
Lady Darnley. That was the name, the one that had left when she did. It was back now, as if it had never gone at all, as if he were incapable of forgetting it. Her hair lay in fiery waves down onto her shoulders and across the frilled front of her dress. A dress, a special kind of dress, a strange one, Will thought, but it was only as he arrived at the doorstep that the word came to him.
Dressing gown. Yes, it was a fine lady’s dressing gown, and she was in an outbuilding on the grounds of the sanitarium, dressed as if for bed. Her forearms, white and soft and ever so slightly plump, were bare in the gaslight of the room.
The world must have broken again…and yet it was not. He could see her there and could give everything a name—door, paraffin lantern, doorknob, knocker, step, window, sky, wall.
“We’re well rid of you, William,” the ugly-mouthed woman said. “Go on, now.”
The wheeled chair jolted as it came to a stop and the man behind put on the brake.
Will stood, and his muscles listened and balanced him.
“Come inside,” said the lady then. She had eyes only for him, sparing the others not a glance, and when she looked at him, her lips parted slightly.
And he did come inside, up the doorstep and over the threshold, as she melted back into the interior of the building.
She closed the door behind him, shutting out the men in the caps and coats and the woman with the ugly
mouth. The room was warm, yellow, glowing with gaslight and the fire in the grate, shadows as slim as fish dancing in the corners. Will stared at it, the dancing flame, the heat that it sent into the room to kiss his face. And then he stared at her, the fine lady who stood so close, her hand still on the doorknob behind him.
“You are not afraid,” Will said. It was easier to speak with her, as if she marked for him all the forking paths of his mind so he could find his way to the words.
“Afraid?” She looked up at him with her luminous eyes. “Whatever is there to be afraid of?”
“Me.” The moron, the madman. Afraid of the missing moments, of the things he would shout, of how he would strike out and then have no memory of it.
She laughed, the sound as crystalline as the fountain. “Oh, no, I’d never be afraid of you, Mr. Davenport.”
“Will,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Will? Then you must call me Elizabeth. Lady Darnley is so tedious. And it’s getting old, anyhow. People will begin to notice soon, and I need a new one.”
Name, name, same name. The fire burned suddenly bright, catching his attention. What’s in a name? His name was Will, but he had no will of his own, not one that stayed constant from one moment to the next.
His gaze slid over. The woman was there, the same woman. The lady. She was still there, wasn’t she? Not there again—she hadn’t left and returned—but there still. Waiting for something. For him? People were always waiting for him, though he could rarely puzzle out what they wanted.
And she smiled, and the world steadied again.
His name was Will. And hers was Elizabeth. A long word—too long to try on his tongue, which played such cruel tricks on him.
He stood, watching, waiting to find out what she was waiting for. He was good at waiting. He’d spent most of his life that way—waiting for a fit to come, waiting for it to pass, waiting for the sense of something he’d just seen or heard to come back to him. And, of course, waiting for people who were waiting for him.
“I understand now why little Sister Agnes is half in love with you,” the woman Elizabeth said. “You really are clever inside there, somewhere, aren’t you? You’ll never get out, though. Not in this lifetime. But I could give you a chance at another. How would you like that? To trade your life for another? No more fits. No more prison, inside your head. Would you like that?”
Will just nodded stiffly. She was talking nonsense now, taunting him, like the one with the ugly mouth.
“But you will have to give up one thing. Your pretty little Sister. You can’t have her—not in this life, and not in the next.”
Will had nothing to say to that.
“I wonder what kind of man you are, inside. That’s what I never know, taking men from here, rescuing you from your sad lives. Are you generous or mean? Kind or cruel? And exactly how clever are you? All the others died, so I never found out. If you don’t die, I wonder what you’ll be.”
And Will understood. The words flooded into his mind, striking none of the barriers that usually rose to present themselves, shunting down no side paths. The words dropped into his mind and assembled into structures redolent with meaning.
He sought to reply, furrowing his brow with effort, trying to assemble the sentence from nothing. It wasn’t just a reply, with words rearranged—it was the fabrication of something new, trying to tell a story. And that was harder.
“The cat tried to take the fish.” Yes, it had tried, and Will had sent it away in a spray of gravel. One of the men in a soft cap had shouted at him, but Will had disregarded him because the cat could not be allowed to catch them in its cruel claws, the poor fish that had nowhere to hide in their shallow cement square.
“Hmm,” she said. “I’m not sure whether that reply was exceptionally clever or exceptionally dim.” She laughed again, and this time the crystal-brightness was not like water at all but more like glass. It seemed to cut.
She walked past Will to sit on the bed that dominated the room. It was not a bed like his, hard and narrow. It was wide and so soft that she sank deeply into the blankets and featherbed, the eiderdown billowing around her.
There had been a woman once, at the big house, the madhouse, shaped like a potato in a ragged brown dress. She had scrubbed the privies and hauled away the ashcans. And when the other ones hadn’t been looking, the sisters in their white winged caps and the men in their soft gray ones, she had taken Will into his room in the daytime.
She had put her hands into his pants, laughing, and pulled out his member, and she had pet it with her rough hands until it was hard and then had pulled him down on top of her. Her breath had stunk, her body doughy, her hair and the nails that played across his back dirty. But she had been hot and wet and warm, and her laugh haunted him.
“Me pretty mute,” she had called him. “Me loverly crackpot.”
How many times had that happened? The memories didn’t fit together quite right—it must have been more than once, more than twice, because he remembered being afraid and he also remembered being eager. She had taught him names, naughty names for all his bits and hers. He remembered her pulling him down, and he remembered pushing her back on his hard bed and throwing up her skirts to drive into her. He remembered her placing his hand on her breast, in her curls, and he remembered seizing them without asking. He remembered that she had mocked him, and she had also begged for him.
And he remembered that one day there was a new woman, old and bent and as dry as a twig, to collect the bins and clean the privies. And he had gone into his room in a fury and had shut the door with such force that it had echoed up and down the corridor, and he’d taken himself in his hand in a weak solace for the pleasure he had lost.
This woman did not smell of lye soap and stale, bitter sweat. Her hair was a radiant cloud, her figure narrow-waisted but abundant. He wanted her to laugh under him—to beg and moan, her eyes rolling back. The images merged, the potato-woman’s with this one’s, until he half thought that he had taken her before….
“I don’t know why I talk to you. I always think that talking will make it better, somehow. That I will take less from you, or that an evening of a lady’s conversation, treating you just like anyone else, would do some good.”
She stopped. Will waited. How long? He didn’t know. Time fragmented, shifted under his attention.
Speak. He thought he should speak. What should he say, then? The woman, Elizabeth—she was waiting, too, he felt. Waiting for him? Waiting and waiting. He was tired of waiting. He wanted to press his lips to hers, not use them for speaking.
The light gilded her soft cheek, the wings of her eyebrows shadowing her black eyes. Cheeks too pale, lips too pale, like ivory, but there was life in the mass of red hair, and it danced in the firelight as if it, too, was burning. At the same time, she seemed like darkness inside the light, and the glitter of her eyes seemed to look straight through his skin and catch something inside him.
He wanted—like so many times when he had looked at Sister Agnes, he wanted her to understand him. But he didn’t understand himself. So what did that mean?
The world slid away. He tried to hold it still, but there was music in his ears, a child’s sing-song rhyme, and then it was all nonsense, shapes and light and dark and noise.
And then his mind snapped back, to her, the woman on the bed, and he remembered who she was, where he was, and everything was hazy and slow, but it was back in the present again.
“You poor thing,” the woman Elizabeth murmured, leaning back on her hands. “You haven’t any idea what I am talking about, do you? Come on, then. There is nothing to be gained through delay.”
“No,” Will said.
Elizabeth sat forward, her gaze so bright her eyes seemed to catch the light. “Oh? Tell me now, what is that supposed to mean?”
“Not poor. Not a thing,” he said.
“Not a thing.” She stood, the skirts of her dressing gown rustling. “Not a poor thing but a man. Is that it, Will?
Are you a man?”
He stepped forward, toward her. “Yes.” The word hissed between his teeth.
“Then, Will-the-man, show me what a man does with a woman.” And her hand went to the pale blue silk bow at the high neck of her white dressing gown. She tugged, and it loosened, falling open to reveal a line of smooth skin from her throat, down between her breasts, to the springy red curls and pale thighs below.
Will closed the space between them. His hands reached out, touching her shoulders where flesh met fabric. Her wide eyes looked up at him, searching his face as if she sought to read his soul.
He didn’t know if he had one or if it, too, had broken. He pushed the gown from her shoulders, and it slid down those plump white arms to fall at her bare feet. She reached out, cupping his cheek with her hand, tilting her head back and parting her cupid-bow lips, and a madness went through him, straight into his head.
Will needed no guide. He bent down, taking her mouth with his own.
A jolt shot through him, almost like pain, his balls tightening against his body as his cock went hard, setting his lips to tingle, sharper and sweeter than the devices The Doctor had tried to cure his fits. And she invited him into her mouth as she teased his with her tongue. Delicious—it tasted of everything both forbidden and desired, cool honey to his hungry touch.
Her hand slid down, into his trousers and pants beneath, teasing, stroking, pushing him toward the final climax so quickly that he could hardly catch his breath.
But that was not what he wanted. Instead, he pushed her back toward the bed, and she gave ground easily, though he somehow knew that she need do no such thing. He pushed her down, into those billowing blankets, and she looked up at him with those big eyes that seemed capable of swallowing his very soul.
“You are most definitely a man,” she said, rising onto one elbow with her full breasts rolling to the side as he stripped off the hated shirt and trousers, the uniform of the deficient. A smile played at the edges of her lips. “I thought to give you some little pleasure before your end, but it seems I offered nothing you haven’t had before. In that case, let me offer you instead not your first night but the best one.”