by Martha Faë
Beatrice doesn’t answer. It takes all of her concentration just to cope with the shifting wind. She holds tight to her veil and dress to keep them from floating up. Morgan goes on grumbling. A gust of wind lifts her mass of dark hair and whips it around over her head, turning her into some kind of frightful demon.
“And could you tell us what will happen if the stain doesn’t disappear?” shouts Morgan over the noise of the wind. Sherlock doesn’t answer. “Right, we’re not worthy enough for our dear Dissie to explain it to us.”
I make myself as small as I can. At times like this I wish I weren’t so tall, I wish I could just go unnoticed. I walk along with my eyes locked on the ground, unwilling to meet Morgan’s deadly gaze. In some ridiculous way I feel as bad as I would if I had upset Laura or Marion—like I’ve betrayed a friend. The sound of Morgan’s forceful footsteps is deafening. I can see her boots coming nearer. It’s not so ridiculous, the way I feel... Morgan has become a friend. I appreciate her joyful moments, and I understand her weaknesses, even though I don’t share them. A secondary role doesn’t work for her at all. Protagonist or nothing—that’s Morgan.
6
Two days and nights were all it took to prove that my hunch wasn’t crazy. The stain on the handkerchief that we found behind the monk’s chest never disappears. When it was my turn to watch it I took the opportunity to hold the cloth up to my nose, and to my surprise and satisfaction, the smell was still there. The idea that had been going around in my mind has become theory. But I’ve learned from my mistakes—I’ll wait until I’m more certain of a few things before I say anything to the others.
Ever since we were all on the beach and I brought up the possibility that it might be a permanent stain, Morgan hasn’t said a word to me. She has said several times to Sherlock that there must be a reason that the stain doesn’t disappear, and she’s determined to find it. She’s been going through the role records all morning.
“It will be Morgan who finds the solution,” she said early this morning, using, in her wounded pride, the third person. “I will find that Spherean whose role includes a permanently stained handkerchief—just wait and see.”
And here we are, in Sherlock’s house, waiting for Morgan to come back with the results of her investigation.
“The window!” Sherlock bursts out, for the millionth time.
Beatrice has tried to close it several times already, never remembering that that’s usually how Morgan gets inside. Just seconds after Sherlock shouts, Morgan comes in, stirring up a slight breeze. She lands and smooths down her hair before saying anything. She doesn’t look terribly happy. She walks straight toward me, and I sink back into the sofa, hoping to dodge whatever’s coming next—a slap, an accusation. But Morgan just sticks out her hand and waits for me to shake it.
“I’ve gone through the records of every role in the Sphere, line by line. There is no one who needs a permanently stained handkerchief. You win.”
“It wasn’t a bet, Morgan,” I say, without shaking her hand.
“It doesn’t matter. You still win.” Her hand is still waiting in front of me, stiffly. Finally I shake it. “I know how to admit when I’m wrong, too. I dug through thousands of scrolls containing role specifications. There’s nothing in the entire Great Script.”
Sherlock, sitting on his worn armchair, picks up his violin and begins to toy with the strings, his eyes closed. Now, after so much time in the Sphere, I know that this is just his way of putting his thoughts in order. He nearly always reaches surprising conclusions with this method, but this time the wandering melody stretches on for longer than I would have expected.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, I’ll be going,” says Morgan brusquely.
“Wait,” I say, getting up, “I’d like to talk about something with you.”
“With me?”
Sherlock and Beatrice both whip their heads around to look at us. I wait for them to object, but they consider us for a minute, and remain silent. Sherlock’s fingers move nervously over the neck of the violin. His other hand has dropped the bow.
“Yes. I need to talk to you alone.”
Morgan grimaces. She isn’t happy about the request, but she doesn’t say no. We leave the living room and make ourselves comfortable in Sherlock’s kitchen.
“I didn’t mean the thing about the stain as a challenge. We’re a team.” I try to look her in the eye, unsuccessfully. “It was just a hunch. Now that it’s confirmed, it gives me the foundation for a theory I have about what happened to the missing Sphereans.” I can see interest mixed up with doubt and suspicion in Morgan’s face. I take a deep breath and continue: “I need your help.”
“Why don’t you go to Sherlock? His preference for you is clear enough.”
“No, I can’t go to him. It’s him I want to discuss...” I search around for the right words—I guess the best thing is to cut right to the chase. “How long has he been in love with Beatrice?”
Morgan raises an eyebrow and gives me a sidelong glance. “I don’t give advice on matters of the heart. If you want a love potion, go ask Merlin or somebody.”
“Exactly! Merlin. That’s precisely my point. Merlin and you belong to the same role group. Sherlock should be interacting with the Sphereans from his group, and Beatrice with hers. But you’re all together. Why?”
Morgan’s surprise is obvious.
“I don’t have any idea,” she says, lowering her voice. “I’d never thought about it.”
“That’s what I meant when I asked how long Sherlock had been in love with Beatrice.”
“It’s very unlikely that what they have is really love...”
“Whatever, that’s not the part I’m interested in.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod, trying to hide my discomfort at all the insinuations about the two of us. I can’t ignore the fact that Sherlock does seem to have a thing for me. And someone as skeptical as Morgan... But I don’t want to get into that, at least not right now.
“Forget about Sherlock,” I say. “Beatrice and Heathcliff—since when?”
“I suppose she began to take an interest in that awful brute about the same time I started working with Holmes. Of course, before that I had no interaction with her, so I couldn’t say for sure.”
“All right, it doesn’t matter. We can assume that your paths began to get mixed up at about the same time. You started working with Sherlock, he started to be interested in Beatrice, and she started falling in love with Heathcliff.”
“The breakdown of role groups,” says Morgan, as if to herself. “The breakdown of the Great Script.”
“That’s right. Or what amounts to the same thing—my world and yours getting mixed up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think your intuition wasn’t wrong when you saw me the first time. I haven’t been published.”
Morgan swells up with pride—she can’t help it. Sherlock comes into the kitchen, looking offended.
“Might one ask what is taking so long?”
“All set,” I say. “We’re all set. We’ve discussed everything we needed to.”
Morgan rocks back and forth, satisfied, while Sherlock waits for an explanation that neither of us offers.
“All right,” I say after a minute. “Don’t get mad. Let’s go back to the living room and I’ll tell you about it.” Sherlock hangs back a little, but eventually follows us into the living room. “I have a theory,” I say as I sit down, “but I needed to check some information with Morgan. Look. I haven’t been published; I’m not a Spherean.” Sherlock and Beatrice nod. “I come from a world with very different rules from this one. I think that somehow my world and yours are mixing together.” My voice trembles a little. It makes me nervous to see Sherlock watching me so carefully. “Something has broken through the membrane, or whatever the thing that protects the Sphere is called. That’s how I was able to get in—not on purpose, but I still got in. The thing is, if our worlds are getting t
angled up together, it might be useful to think about our case from the point of view of the rules of my world.”
“Of course—all the glory for you!” Beatrice bursts out. We all stare at her, our eyes bulging with surprise. She would never use those words, much less that tone of voice.
“Bice...” I can’t believe her reaction.
“I’m sick of everything revolving around you.”
“And what do you propose?” asks Sherlock, ignoring Beatrice.
I would love to have the level of mental control that Sherlock does. How can he keep from getting upset? How can he keep from worrying about Beatrice? I look down at my hands for a second—they’re shaking a little. I swallow hard, and try to keep going as if nothing had happened.
“Well, in my world things don’t go backwards like they do here. The cycles don’t repeat.”
“You have no roles?” Beatrice asks, astonished. She’s back to her usual naïve self.
“No. We have personality—a habitual way that we behave. But when something happens it’s never undone. Just like the stain on the handkerchief.”
Sherlock gets up from the armchair, giving his spot up to me. The others look at us in surprise. I stand up hesitantly, and slowly sit down.
“Well, when I was in the cemetery I thought... you see... what if the missing people aren’t anywhere?”
“By all the quills of the Creator—what are you trying to say!”
“Maybe they aren’t hidden. Maybe they’re dead... like in my world.”
Morgan stands up. She walks slowly across the room:
“You’re talking about a permanent death?” she asks, intrigued. I nod. “Some time ago Merlin told me of an old story; something that most people thought of as just a legend, and yet something he suspects is real. It is called textual death—the total and permanent disappearance of an entire group.”
“That’s nothing but blasphemy,” shouts Beatrice, frightened. “It is impossible.”
“Not according to the old wise ones. It’s rare, but not impossible. On a very few occasions the permanent destruction of all of the members of a role group occurs.”
“And who would do that?” Sherlock asks.
“I don’t know,” answers Morgan, “the information about this phenomenon is very scarce. I don’t think even Merlin himself knows.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t know who could be doing it, either,” I interject, “but I suspect that someone is killing some Sphereans, and that’s why we haven’t been able to find them.”
“Enough!” howls Beatrice, utterly livid. “I will not hear such sacrilegious words uttered in my presence. This time you have gone too far, Eurydice. I always accepted your differences, but you cannot cast doubt on the existence of the Creator like this.”
“I didn’t say the Creator didn’t exist...”
“You did, implicitly. The Creator would never permit horrors like what you’re suggesting. The destruction of his own work! It is unthinkable. There is no room for something like that in a perfect world. The Sphere is sacred, perfect—do you not understand that? Have you all gone suddenly mad?” she says to Sherlock and Morgan. “How can you listen to such rubbish?”
“Rubbish or not, we are in no position to rule out any hypothesis.”
“I agree with Holmes,” says Morgan. “Though there is something that doesn’t quite seem to fit. If this were a case of textual death, it would mean the disappearance of all the members of the role groups that Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Doctor Jekyll belong to... that is, we would have more missing people.”
“I see,” I say thoughtfully. “I could be mistaken.”
“Of course you are!” groans Beatrice.
“I don’t want to throw away the hypothesis,” Sherlock says, looking intently at me. “If they had suffered a permanent death, where could they be?”
“If things were like they are in my world, in the cemetery.”
“In the cemetery?” Morgan asks. “But there’s nothing there. Everyone knows the tombs are empty.”
“Maybe. Yes, according to your rules. But have you opened them recently?”
Sherlock and Morgan exchange a look.
“Agreed. We’ll go today,” says Sherlock. “Tonight we will open up some tombs. After that we’ll investigate who or what has broken the membrane.”
Beatrice faints, which both the detective and Morgan interpret as confirmation of my theory. Things are changing. The worlds are mixing. Beatrice’s role doesn’t include any fainting, and yet, between this and the time that Heathcliff hit her, she’s done it twice now.
Once midnight passes we get ready to go to the cemetery. Even though we all tell Beatrice to stay home, she insists on coming with us.
“I don’t understand it,” I say quietly to Morgan as we walk down North Street. “Why is she coming if my theory bothers her so much?”
“I think deep down she suspects you might be right.”
“And her Creator?”
“I don’t know where her Creator fits in with all of this, but I think even she is starting to doubt that things are working properly... That, or she’s losing her role.”
The streets are deserted. Even though no one needs to sleep in the Sphere, at night almost all the roles call for staying at home. There are hardly any people out in the streets, and anyone who is out is hanging around the taverns, or the theaters, or dark alleys in bad parts of town. We make it to the cemetery without being spotted, but the next problem is how to distract the gravedigger, whose role calls for patrolling the tombs at night.
“What do you have a gravedigger for if no one dies?” I ask.
“No one dies permanently, but there are plenty of roles with death, and some of them include the burial. You know, with the tears and the laments and all that. So we’ve got a gravedigger,” whispers Morgan.
“And they put them inside the graves?”
“Of course. That’s why we had to wait to come. Once night comes, the people who were buried come out and get ready to do it all over again. Some come out later than others, but by this time of night all the tombs should be empty.”
“I see...”
Per Sherlock’s orders we wait for a while at the cemetery gates. The spires of the cathedral pierce the thick fog and vanish into the sky. The small flash of the gravedigger’s lantern is clearly visible, swaying from side to side as the man walks unhurriedly along. It doesn’t seem like his route has any particular direction.
“The best thing is for me to go in and distract him,” says Sherlock. “I’ll try to draw him off toward the far end of the cemetery. Meanwhile, you inspect all the graves you can—we can’t rely on just opening a few of them.”
Morgan nods, satisfied. We watch as Sherlock walks off with the gravedigger, and then we go inside to the first tomb. Morgan lifts her hands, closes her eyes, and pronounces a few unintelligible words. The huge stone covering the tomb trembles a little and floats upward. I have to pull Beatrice over to hold the light for me so I can see inside while Morgan holds her hand high, keeping the stone up.
“It’s empty,” says Beatrice, letting out a great sigh.
In her relief Beatrice drops the lantern and it shatters against the ground. The grass under our feet catches fire. Morgan quickly puts the stone back on the tomb and lowers her hand to create a layer of frost. Our breath comes quickly and we all glance back at the other end of the cemetery. The gleam of the fire might have caught the gravedigger’s attention. Beatrice is standing stock-still, staring at nothing. I wave my hand in front of her face but she doesn’t even blink. I wonder if Morgan could be right. Is she losing her role?
7
Back at Beatrice’s house I slump down onto the living room sofa, defeated. The Sphere’s sun is just starting to peek through the windows. We worked all night, despite the incident with the lantern. With no source of light, we had to improvise a little torch that Morgan lit with magic, but luckily the gravedigger didn’t notice anything. We continued in
specting the tombs, and as the night wore on, our moods moved in opposite directions. As Beatrice grew happier and happier, Morgan and I felt more and more disheartened. We checked every single tomb. They were all empty. Sherlock seemed pretty disappointed, too. At the dead end where we are now, finding something in a tomb would have given us some hope. A terrible solution, I know, but at least some kind of hope, something to move the case forward.
“I’ll make tea,” says Beatrice, humming as she disappears into the kitchen.
“It can’t be!” I moan. “I was convinced we’d find something.”
“But you saw—there was nothing!” Morgan answers. “I told you all the tombs here were empty.”
“I guess I owe you all an apology...”
“Don’t be too quick to apologize,” says Sherlock. “I have great hopes in your intuition.”
“You’ve got great hopes in all of her,” murmurs Morgan.
“Pardon?” asks Sherlock.
I don’t understand how he can be so sharp with his observations and still somehow not notice that Morgan is having fun at our expense.
“Nothing... I thought it was a pretty good idea, too.”
“Sherlock!” I leap to my feet. “We have to exhaust all the possibilities... Don’t you think we threw in the towel too soon when we stopped trying to find where they might have hidden the missing people? We were more concerned with figuring out what the winged creatures were and who their leader was than checking all the hiding places. After we visited the monastery we just gave up the search.”
“It’s true,” admits Sherlock. “There are certain private places that we have not gone into... There are also inhabited places we haven’t even considered.”
“I could fly over the entire Sphere right now,” Morgan says, enthused. “From a height it will be easier to identify suspicious places.”
“Good thinking,” says Sherlock.
Beatrice comes in with the tea.
“Now let’s drink a little tea, have a rest, and set aside all these wild ideas about permanent death and the broken membrane. I’ve been thinking: surely the Creator will bring back the missing people; after all they are his children, he would never abandon them. Tomorrow we should all go together to the church to ask forgiveness for our actions and pray for him to restore order,” Beatrice pours the tea daintily and passes around the cups. “If he sees that we are truly repentant everything will go back to normal. Do you promise? Will you go to church with me tomorrow?”