by Louis Bayard
“It’s her only chance,” he growled.
And who were we to argue? Lea Marquis had ceased even to protest, and blue ponds had formed round her lips, round the very beds of her fingernails, and the only parts of her still moving were her eyelids, flapping up and down like awnings in a stiff wind.
“Hurry,” I whispered.
Artemus’ hand shook as it measured out the sections of her throat. His voice shook, too, as it called up the words of his father’s textbooks.“Thyroid cartilage,” he muttered. “Cricoid cartilage . . . cricothyroid membrane. . . .”
At last his finger stopped. And maybe his heart stopped, too, in that moment before the lancet plunged.
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “Please, God.”
Just the slightest pressure from his hand: that was all it took to drive the blade like a sounding rod into his sister’s throat.
“Horizontal incision,” he whispered. “One half inch.”
An eye of blood welled up round the blade.
“Depth . . . one half inch . . .”
Quick as light, Artemus drew out the blade and plunged his index finger into the slit in Lea’s throat. A strange gurgle rose up from inside her, like water rustling through pipes. And then, as Artemus began looking round for a tube to insert, the eye of blood slowly broadened into a pool.
No longer subsiding now, it was widening. Weeping through the wound and rolling away in a steady tide—washing over Lea’s marble skin.
“There shouldn’t be this much,” Artemus hissed.
But the blood kept coming in full defiance of man and medicine, pouring forth in fresh waves, painting Lea’s throat. The gurgle grew louder, then louder still. . . .
“The artery,” gasped Artemus. “Did I . . . ?”
Blood was everywhere, bubbling, burbling. In a rush of despair, Artemus drew his finger from the opening with an audible pop, and droplets of blood scattered from his hands like tiny pearls. . . .
“I need . . .” A sob caught him in midsentence. “I need . . . please . . . something to bind . . .”
Poe was already tearing at his shirt. I was doing the same with my own, Mrs. Marquis was rending her robe . . . and in the midst of all this thrashing lay Lea. Perfectly still, except for her blood, which came boiling up from inside, more and more of it, never ceasing, never slaking.
And then, quite unexpectedly, her mouth opened. Opened to form three words, as audible as speech.
I . . . love . . . you.
It says something about Lea Marquis, I guess, that each of us might have thought himself the beneficiary of those words. She wasn’t looking at us, though. She had found the way out—at last—and she was watching herself go, smiling as the light in her pale eyes flickered away into nothing.
We knelt there in silence, like missionaries on a foreign shore. I could see Poe driving his palms straight into his temples . . . and in that moment, my impulse was not to comfort him but to ask the question that had stuck in my head like a piece of grit. I growled it straight into his ear:
“Is it still poetry’s highest theme?”
He looked at me with unseeing eyes.
“The death of a beautiful woman,” I snarled. “Is it still a poet’s noblest subject?”
“Yes,” he said.
And then he fell on my shoulder.
“Oh, Landor. I shall have to keep losing her. Again and again.”
I didn’t even know what he meant. Not then. But I could feel the rhythmic shudder of his rib cage against mine. My hand found the back of his neck and held it . . . a few seconds . . . a few more seconds . . . and still he wept, without tears, without sobs, until everything that lay inside him had been turned out.
Mrs. Marquis, by contrast, seemed more in control of her faculties than any of us. She was filling the air with her cool, easy voice:
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She was to be a wife. . . . A mother, yes.”
That word, I suppose: mother. It sent something flying up inside her. She tried to cap it in her mouth, but it burst through her fingers. It was her own cry.
“A mother! Like me!”
She listened until the echoes had died away, and then, with a low, guttural moan, she threw herself on her daughter’s body. Pounded it again and again with her tiny fists.
“No!” called Artemus, dragging her back.
But she wanted more. She wanted to thump that body into paste. She would have, too, if her son hadn’t held her off.
“Mother,” he whispered. “Mother, stop.”
“We did it for her!” she screamed, lunging at her daughter’s still form. “All for her! And then she goes away and dies anyway! That horrible, horrible girl, what was it for? If she didn’t . . . what was it for?”
She went as far as she could go in that direction, and then, in the common way of grief, swung back hard. Pushed Lea’s hair from her face and wiped the blood from that white throat and kissed that white hand. And sank into the moat of her tears.
What more arresting sight is there, Reader, than sorrow writ so large? I gave myself over to it. Which is why, I think, it took me so long to hear the sound that was coming from above us, settling like dust on our heads.
“Mr. Landor!”
I turned my face toward it.
“Mr. Landor!”
Laughter, that was my first impulse. I was sorely tempted to laugh. For my savior had come . . . and lo, his name was Captain Hitchcock.
“Down here!” I called.
It took my voice a few moments to wind its way through the corridor and up the shaft. Then, from above:
“How do we find you?”
“You don’t!” I called back. “ We will find you!”
I put my hands round Poe’s shoulders and drew him to his feet. “Are you ready?” I asked.
Dazed with pain, scarcely remembering where he was, he peered at the oily sheen on his arm. “Landor,” he mumbled. “Might I have a bandage?”
I stared down at my shirt sleeve, dangling by the merest of threads. It was the bandage I had meant for Lea, but it would do quite as well for him. I wrapped it round his wound as tightly as I dared. Then, draping his other arm round my shoulder, I began to walk him toward the door. The only thing that could have stopped us now was this voice, soft and beseeching.
“Do you think . . .”
It was Mrs. Marquis. Pointing in abject humility toward the stone altar, where Artemus was now sitting.
Not by himself, no. He had dragged Lea’s body there with him, and he was cradling her head in his lap, and he stared back at us with a challenge all the wilder for being unspoken. His mother could only turn her face toward mine with a mute entreaty.
“We’ll come back for Lea later,” I said. “I must get Mr. Poe to—”
A doctor. The words caught in my throat like the beginning of a joke, and the joke seemed to be taken up at once by Mrs. Marquis. I had never seen that smile of hers quite so brilliant. Which meant only that it was fueled by every human feeling—by such a blast of feeling I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her teeth melt.
“Come, Artemus,” she said as she followed me and Poe into the corridor.
He watched her with hollow eyes.
“Come, darling,” she repeated. “You know, we can’t—we can’t do any more for her now, can we? We tried, didn’t we?”
Even she must have realized how weakly her words sounded, but no matter how she coaxed and wheedled, he made her no reply.
“Now, listen to me, darling, I don’t want you to worry. We’re going to speak to Colonel Thayer, do you hear? We’re going to explain everything. He understands all about—all about misunderstandings, darling . . . why, he’s one of our oldest and dearest friends, he’s known you since you were . . . he would never . . . do you hear me? You’ll still be graduated, darling, you will!”
“I’ll come directly,” he answered.
There was in his voice a curious lightness—a light is the better word— and that was, I s
uppose, the first signal. The second being this: instead of preparing to rise, he settled himself more thoroughly where he was. Drew Lea’s head closer toward his chest. And only then did I see what he’d been hiding from us. The lancet that had so lately been carving open his sister’s throat now lay embedded in his side.
Who knows when he did it? I never heard so much as a grunt from him. No speeches, no flourishes, no slash across the neck . . . no fuss of any kind. He wanted simply to be gone, I think. As slowly and quietly as he could effect it.
Our eyes met then, and the knowledge of what was happening passed between us in a current of fellow feeling.
“I’ll be there directly,” he said in a fainter voice.
Maybe a man, in his final minutes, attends more closely to the world around him. I only suggest it because Artemus, for all his distress, was the first of us to lift his eyes to the ceiling. And even before my eyes had followed suit, I was smelling it. Unmistakable: the odor of burning wood.
This was, in a way, the biggest surprise of all, that such a room, carved out of rock, should have something so prosaic as a wooden ceiling. Who knew what it had been in the old days? A holding cell? A root cellar? A tap room? It’s safe to say it had never held such a grand and glorious fire as the one the Marquises had fashioned. For its builders would have known that fire can be no friend to wood.
And now that wooden ceiling, tortured by the brazier’s flames, was charring and snapping—and giving way. And as the beams cracked open, the strangest weather began to fall from the sky. Not snow but ice. The entire contents of the West Point icehouse came dropping down.
Not the tinkling cubes that went into Colonel Thayer’s lemonade, no, these were slabs, fifty-pound blocks, with the weight and sound of marble, falling slowly at first, but falling with purpose, gouging the stone floor with each collision.
“Artemus . . .” The slightest edge had crept back into Mrs. Marquis’ voice as she stood watching from the safety of the corridor. “Artemus, you must come now!”
I don’t know if she even understood what was happening. She took a step back into the room and was making as if to drag him out by his heels, when a huge chunk of ice landed just a few feet from her. The shattered crystals flew into her face, temporarily blinding her, and then another block landed, even closer, forcing her to take a step back. And as I grabbed her arm and pulled her back out of the room, all she could do at first was utter his name, in a tone that smacked almost of resignation.
“Artemus.”
She was thinking, maybe, the ice would stop. Thinking, maybe, her son was safe where he was. The next wave of ice showed her how wrong she was. The first block clipped the side of his head—a brief blunt concussion—and threw him onto his side. The next caught him midsection, and the next crushed his feet. He was still alive enough by then to howl, but the sound lasted only as long as the next installment of ice, which made a bull’s-eye of his head. Even from twelve feet away, we could hear the crack of his skull against stone. And then we heard nothing more from him.
His mother, though, chose that moment to find her voice again. And there I was, Reader, thinking she had already spent her grief, when in fact she had many rooms more inside her just waiting to be emptied. The only thing that could have made her pause, I think, was the sight of something so unexpected that no grief was equal to it. Through the falling ice, we saw a figure slowly rise.
Artemus, I remember thinking, hauling himself up for one last stand. But Artemus lay where he’d fallen. And the figure that drew itself up—like a barroom brawler peeling himself from the floor—this figure wore not a uniform but a priest’s cassock.
Two feet planted themselves on the stony ground. Two legs tottered toward us. We saw pale arms and chestnut hair, we saw rouged cheeks and blue eyes, startled into light. We saw Lea Marquis rise and walk.
No mere apparition. Flesh and blood—blood. One hand was reaching for us, the other was clasped round the slit in her throat. And from her shredded, strangled body came a cry such as no human or animal has ever made.
It found its match, though, in Poe. Together they made a perfect anthem of horror—a rising, rasping wail that woke the bats from their beds and sent them bouncing off the walls and skidding through our legs and scrabbling through our hair.
“Lea!”
Weakened as he was, Poe did all he could to go back to her. He tried shoving me to one side, and when that failed, he tried to get round me, and when that failed, he tried to get over—yes, he tried to scale me! Anything, anything to get to her. Anything to die with her.
Mrs. Marquis, too: she would have done the same, she cared nothing for the danger. It was me who held them both back. Without ever asking myself why, I locked my arms round their waists and dragged them away. In their depleted states, they were no match for me, but by dint of struggling, they did succeed in slowing our progress. So that even as we passed down that corridor, away from that cursed chamber, we could see, framed in the doorway, the vision of the woman we had left behind.
“Lea!”
Did she even know what was happening? Did she know what was slamming her against the hard stone—piling on top of her with such grim purpose—grinding her down in the very minute of her rebirth? Nothing in that voiceless cry of hers gave any sign of understanding. She was being crushed, that was all. Crushed as surely as the bats that came squealing past her—dozens upon dozens of then, slammed between ice and stone, screaming all the way to Death’s door.
And still the ice came dropping like thunderbolts, block after block . . . swallowing the torches and candles and tapers . . . splitting open Lea’s head and hammering her cassock . . . striking her again and again, in a hard bleak fury that she met with nothing but a soft bare open body.
So hard did it come, so fast, that before another minute had passed, the doorway was impassable, and the ice had begun to spill into the hall. And all the same, we lingered there, scarcely able to believe in such vengeance. For the ice was still falling. Falling in heavy choirs. Falling in shivers of mist. Falling on the Marquis lineage. Falling like death.
Narrative of Gus Landor
40
December 14th to 19th
Here, I suppose, was the final miracle. The ground above us never so much as shook. Not a single alarm was raised, not a single cadet was jarred from his sleep. Not a kink was thrown into the Academy’s daily routine. At the first hint of dawn, as on any other morning, the Army drummer stepped into the assembly area between North and South Barracks and, at the cadet adjutant’s cue, brought his sticks down on the drumhead, in a cadence that grew and blossomed until it was echoing across the Plain, pulsing into every ear—cadet, officer, soldier.
Until I saw that sound being made, I don’t think I’d ever tied it to a human being. For me, hearing it from my room in Mr. Cozzens’ hotel, it had always the air of an inner prompting, a stir of conscience, maybe. But conscience had kept me here for the remainder of the night, here in the North Barracks guardroom, briefing Captain Hitchcock and then writing down, as best I could, everything that had happened. Almost everything.
It was the last text I would ever give Hitchcock, and he received it with all due ceremony. Folded it in half and tucked it inside a leather pouch, to be forwarded in due time to Colonel Thayer. Then he gave me a slow grave nod, which was the closest he would ever come to saying, Well done. And with that, there was nothing left for me to do but go back to my hotel.
Except I had a question. Just one question, but it needed answering.
“It was Dr. Marquis, I suppose?”
Hitchcock gave me a look of civil blankness. “I don’t follow you.”
“The one who told you where we were. I’m guessing it was Dr. Marquis?”
He shook his head softly. “I’m afraid not. The good doctor was still sitting by the icehouse when we got there. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, very little information.”
“Then who . . . ?”
The tiniest of smiles crept o
ver his face then. “Cesar,” he answered.
Well, if I hadn’t been so distracted at the time, maybe I’d have figured it out myself. I’d have wondered why a mess-hall steward was gadding about on the Plain at such a late hour. But would it have occurred to me that this same Cesar—so kindly, so courteous—was the agent who’d been tasked with following Artemus Marquis? That after tracking his quarry to the icehouse, and then seeing me and the doctor follow close behind, he’d take himself straight to the commandant and sound the alarm?
“Cesar,” I said, chuckling and scratching my head. “My, but you’re a deep one, Captain.”