by Robb, J. D.
She laughs wickedly.
Like television means shit. I took care of that. Me. The woman who you chose to toy with and throw away like she was garbage. You had no idea what it felt like to be treated that way until I came along and put you in your place. She calms suddenly and smiles. Because who cares about you now, huh, Michael Prince? Michael “The Money” Prince?
She’s right, nobody cares. A few people might remember—for example that stupid moniker, The Money, I had for a while—but nobody cares about me. They have no idea there’s a “me” left to care for. I have become what all people who are gone become—forgotten.
“People have done me wrong, too, you know,” I say, my voice shaking with rage. “But I never cursed someone out of my own injured pride. I never got my feelings hurt and blew apart somebody else’s life.” I stride toward her, hot as a blowtorch.
Her eyes shimmer and I half expect her to start flying around setting things on fire like she did last time. But instead she is preternaturally calm, looking at me with all the passion of a shark settling on dinner.
I stop moving.
You think that’s what this is about?
Her voice is chillingly amused.
My feelings? Your pathetic little love life?
“That’s the thing, Deirdra,” I say, struggling to keep from throwing what would end up an impotent punch. Never let them see you sweat. Not that I could sweat if I wanted to. “I don’t have a clue what this is about. Never have. I don’t know whose authority you’re acting on, if you have some kind of contract with God or Satan or whoever, or if you’re just a spoiled fucking fairy who didn’t get what she wanted. But if there’s a point to this purgatory, I want to know what it is. Now.”
My outrage flares again, and perhaps foolishly on the last word I fling a hand out toward a blue flowered vase of Cassandra’s. To my astonishment it flies across the room, shattering into a thousand pieces against the opposite wall.
I stare at it, mouth agog.
I’ve moved things before—the grease pencil, the rosette, just to give two examples—but never like this. This time, I felt it. It was hard and cool against my fingers, the pads of my palm. It almost hurt.
Deirdra begins to laugh. It starts low, then grows high and hysterical.
Look at you! So shocked! You never knew what power there was in feeling something, did you?
I look at my hand. “I did feel it. I touched it and I felt it.” I stare at my fingers, half expecting to see a bruise, a cut, actual blood. Have I got form now? A body?
Not the vase, you imbecile.
Her lip curls again and she whirls. A tiny, fiery cyclone erupts, then disappears behind her.
I told you he didn’t get it, Astrid. What am I doing here?
She flings up her hands and stalks away on spiked heels.
Asta’s sparkling form appears by the mantel.
Give him a chance.
Deirdra turns back, hands on her hips, red fingernails stark against her white jeans, and looks at me in disgust.
A chance for what? To do something unpredictable? To act against his own deplorable little nature? I don’t know why you still believe in this cretin, Astrid, but he seems to have his hooks in you, too, just like all those other bimbos.
Asta’s sparkling grows brighter, bathing the room in light.
You’re not getting it, Deirdra. Give him a minute.
She scoffs.
He’s not getting it. That much is obvious. But all right. I’ll humor you and give him another chance. Go ahead, Mikey, touch something else.
She says it sweetly, raising her eyebrows and looking exaggeratedly expectant.
See how it feeeeeels. Show us you have feelings at all, because frankly I find it doubtful. You didn’t in life and I’d sure as hell be surprised if you found some in death.
Like a kid on a high dive being taunted for cowardice, I run headlong into uncertainty. Cassandra’s farmhouse table is the closest thing to me and I grab the edge, feeling with my newly functional fingers the icy-slick top, the substantial heft and weight of it.
Behind me Deirdra hisses. It’s like fingernails on a blackboard.
I boil over. With my hands under the long edge, I flip it up and over like it’s made of foam. The thing crashes through the chandelier, glass flies everywhere, and hits the wall next to the kitchen. But it’s so damn solid there’s barely a mark on it, despite the broken light and a dent in the wall.
I grab it by the legs, imagining myself whirling the whole thing in a circle and taking off Deirdra’s head with it, and the truss-like legs break off in my hands with a sharp crack. I twist, hurling the pieces at her.
She sidesteps them neatly, her eyes narrowing.
Oooh . . . She coos, but she’s flushed and angry and that makes me feel good. He’s so strong! She adds this in the voice of the bimbo I once knew her to be.
I turn back to the table, thinking to grab the other legs to continue my assault, but I’m stopped cold by the carnage before me.
The table isn’t new, in fact it’s mostly old, made from repurposed barn wood and solid workbench trusses. It’s heavy and rustic and beautiful, in its way.
Or it was.
The middle plank of the table’s surface is split down the middle. The raw inner wood of the plank shows through, stark white as it meets air for the first time in history. Long splinters jut out at lethal angles. It looks like someone has taken a hatchet to the thing.
Deirdra laughs.
You hated that table, didn’t you? That horrible country-bumpkin table in your fancy formal dining room. It didn’t belong. Just as she doesn’t belong. I bet she leaves now!
I look from the table to Deirdra, gloating, her arms over her chest. My tormentor, my captor, my jailer.
I look at Asta, her sparkling form turning multicolored, trying to cheer me, trying to lessen my shock at what I’ve just done. But it’s no use.
I think about Cassandra’s face when she talked about getting that table. Nobody else thought it was a good idea, but she wanted it. It meant something to her—it meant believing in herself. I bet when it arrived she circled it again and again, looking happy and satisfied and sure.
I glance at the paint samples on the wall behind it. A half-dozen rectangles of color painted near the table for her to decide what goes best. Something that isn’t my decorator-inspired gold-leaf wallpaper that she obviously had steamed off at some point.
Vaguely, from somewhere behind me, I hear Deirdra chastising Asta for being fooled by me, but they are both unimportant to me now. Because what’s suddenly obvious is what I’ve done. I’ve destroyed something important to another human being—a woman I actually care about. I’ve done exactly what I bragged to Deirdra that I’d never do: I hurt someone for my own ends.
I didn’t just break Cassandra’s table. I did something that’s going to frighten and dishearten her. And Deirdra’s right, she might actually move. She’s going to take this as a message, a sign, a threat. She’s going to think somebody did this to her. On purpose. So that she won’t live here, won’t do what she wants, have what she loves.
My suddenly somatic knees give out and I sink to the floor next to the ruined table. I picture Cassandra’s face, the fear and heartbreak it’ll wear when she gets back from wherever she is to see this: what I have done to her.
Regret falls on me like an anvil. I am flattened by it. Devastated. As if I’ve killed someone I loved.
It doesn’t matter that I felt the damn table, that the release of all that rage and energy felt good. It doesn’t matter that I was goaded into it by Deirdra, that I didn’t mean to do it. All that matters is that what I’ve done is suddenly, clearly a mistake. A horrible, hurtful mistake.
And because of it I might lose Cassandra altogether.
Asta says something gentle that I don’t catch. But Deirdra’s voice, dripping with incredulity, penetrates.
Is he crying?
CHAPTER FIVE
Cassandra
unlocked the front door of the house and stepped inside, flipping the light switches for the front porch and foyer lights at the same time. She stood for a minute in the lit hallway, inhaling the scent of her home—a combination of old wood, furniture polish, and scented candles.
Every time she walked through the door she smiled, feeling as if she were returning to a cocoon, the safest place on earth, the place she’d been destined for since childhood.
It was a peculiarly satisfying thing to feel that she was exactly where she should be.
She looped her purse over the newel post at the base of the stairs and unzipped her jacket. The house felt chilly, with November bringing the first real cold of the season, so she headed toward the dining room thermostat.
As she neared the room something glittered on the hallway floor and trepidation blossomed in her gut. Something was wrong. Her eye caught first one glint, then several, and after a frozen second her mind put together that what she was seeing was broken glass.
Her steps slowed until she stood just outside the entry to the dining room, one hand on the high-gloss paint of the molding. Her gaze ran from the few silvery shards of glass in the hall light to the multitude scattered on the dining room floor. Then her eyes took in the table, standing tall on one end, leaning against the far wall and split down the middle. One half skewed outward as if someone had plunged an ax down the center of it.
She gasped. The legs on one side were still attached, holding the lower end of the table together, but the other legs were . . .
She shrieked.
The figure on the floor looked up, startled.
Their eyes met. Cassandra’s world tilted. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase on the molding by the door, but it was too narrow. She felt her fingernail break as she stumbled backward, her head spinning.
Her back hit the wall underneath the rising staircase behind her, but her eyes remained riveted on the man who knelt in her dining room. In his hands were the other set of legs from the table, as if he had been trying vainly to press them back together.
Now, though, he was looking at her, and as his arms lowered, the pieces of wood hit the ground with a thud.
He moved his lips as if speaking, but no sound emerged.
A wave of recognition washed over her. He was the Night Prince—he was the man who disappeared—he was the man who’d tried to kiss her in her dream. He was a man who did not exist.
But he was more. He was someone she knew. She felt it clear down into her bones, and in the back of her mind the echo of distant music played. A waltz, or a minuet. Something archaic, and impossibly familiar. She knew the feel of this man’s arms around her waist; she knew the heat of his gaze looking into hers, piercing her soul.
“Who are you?” Her voice was high and shrill.
A sane person would have run for the phone to call 911, but she couldn’t. She knew him. At least a part of her did. It was like she was two people simultaneously: the woman she’d been for twenty-nine years who wouldn’t hesitate to call the police; and another woman, a shadowy memory, who’d been secure and well-loved by the spirit that inhabited this man.
His mouth moved again, his eyes anxious and pleading, but she heard nothing.
“Stop that!” she cried, panic warring with excitement within her.
He couldn’t be who she thought. He was here in her house. An intruder. Maybe he was a crazy person. Maybe she was a crazy person.
“What did you do? Why? Wh-why?” It was all she could get out, so she thrust her hands in the direction of the table. Her beautiful, unique table, reduced to kindling.
The man rose slowly to his feet, and if she’d thought he was frightening before by virtue of his being in her house and looking like the Night Prince, she now realized that something else was dreadfully wrong.
He wasn’t . . . quite . . . solid. Rather, he shimmered, appearing intermittently insubstantial. Though he was tall and well built, he seemed to fade and blur, then come back into focus, like a hologram.
And he made no sound. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t talking, but as he rose his clothes didn’t rustle, his knees didn’t crack, his shoes made no shuffling sound on the floor as he moved his feet apart.
He looked around himself, as if searching for something. Then patted his suit pockets like he was looking for his wallet. His expression went frustrated and he strode to the sideboard—again, making absolutely no sound. He opened a drawer. Inside was Cassandra’s grandmother’s silver.
The twenty-first-century woman took over.
“No!” She held a hand out and he spun back toward her. She recoiled. “Never mind. Take what you want. Whatever you want, just take it and go. Please go. I won’t call the police, I promise.”
But even as she promised she knew that the statement was ridiculous. This was no regular burglar. This was no regular man.
He held his hands palms-up, extended toward her, like a magician saying, Nothing up my sleeve. His brows were raised, his eyes still anxious. She paused, licked her lips, wondered how incredibly stupid she was for not just grabbing the phone and dialing 911. But she stilled, and after a moment he gave a grim smile, his eyes still holding hers, and mimed writing on his palm.
She stared at him dumbly for a moment—a mute, transparent trespasser wanted to write her a note?—then she sidled out of the room, backed up the hall to the newel post where her purse hung, and dug her hand inside. Her fingers scrabbled frantically as she kept one eye on the door to the dining room, ignoring the checkbook and hairbrush and lipstick that fell out of her bag to the floor, until she found her pad with the pen stuck inside.
With a deep breath, she crept back down the hall to the dining room, unsure whether she hoped the man was still there or that he was gone. If he were gone it could mean she was crazy, that he’d never been there, the shimmering, intangible man. Or it could mean that she was a fool and he’d escaped through the kitchen and out the back door.
That was what she should have been hoping for, but when she got back to the dining room doorway she was relieved to see he was standing where she left him, his anxious eyes looking for her.
He smiled when she reappeared and her heart gave a flip. She had a momentary impulse to throw herself into his arms. But she didn’t. That would be truly absurd.
There was an appealing array of light crow’s-feet by his eyes, and deep dimples. His eyes were blue—very blue. Just exactly like those of the Night Prince. The man who’d nearly kissed her.
Before she could dwell further on this, he moved toward her, holding out a translucent hand.
For the pen, she realized. She shoved it toward him, letting go before he could take it. It, at least, made a reassuring clatter as it fell to the floor. She watched, fascinated, as he bent down and the pen—ten times denser and more corporeal than he was—rose in his implausible grip. He looked up at her expectantly. She slapped the pad of paper down on the sideboard and stepped back, nodding toward it as if she couldn’t speak either.
He inclined his head in thanks, and pulled the pad toward him, flipping the pen into writing position in his hand. Then he stared at the page a long moment, two lines of consternation between his brows.
His gaze flicked toward her—self-consciously, she thought—then he started writing. A moment later he turned the pad toward her and stepped back.
My name is Michael Prince. I’m sorry about your table. I’m not here to scare you.
She looked up at him. He was introducing himself? This was not exactly the information she’d expected, but then, what had she thought he’d say?
“Prince?” she asked, incredulity bathing the word.
He appeared to laugh, wryly. Yes, like the singer. Or the Fresh Prince. Or whatever other joke you care to make. I’ve heard them all.
She noted that he didn’t mention The Night Prince.
“Did you break it?” She once again gestured toward the table.
His shoulders sank as he read what she wrote. Then he glanced up, made
a rueful face, and shrugged.
Anger shot through her. “Why?”
He wrote, It’s a long story.
On the heels of confusion, she registered amazement that she was not feeling sheer terror. What was wrong with her? She was conducting a conversation, of sorts, with a transparent man.
“What are you?” she breathed.
She thought he might have sighed—his chest rose and fell once—then he wrote again. I’m sort of a ghost. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t die, I was . . . taken. Turned into this. You are the first person ever to see me.
He turned the pad toward her, tapping the pen point at the end of the last sentence a few times imperatively. He watched her read, then swiftly turned it back and wrote, What do I look like to you?
“You look . . .” She swallowed. “Kind of halfway invisible. A little shimmery. Glittery.”
He frowned. Do I look like a person? A man?
She laughed, then pressed her fingers to her lips. She had to be cracking up. This was bad.
“Yes.” Her voice shook. At his look of alarm, she added, “You look like the Night Prince. From the storybook.”
He appeared momentarily stunned, then a smile broke onto his face. She caught her breath at the brightness of it.
He wrote, You did find the picture!
She nodded. He nodded back, smiling eagerly, as if they’d just found friends in common.
He’s called the Night Prince?
“Yes, it’s an old book. From the thirties, I think. You don’t know it?”
He shook his head. Then wrote, I saw the picture you found. The first one.
“He . . . he looks like you,” she said, realizing that it wasn’t just the picture he’d drawn, but the original that looked like Michael Prince.
The coincidence unnerved her. She took a step back. “I’m afraid I’m going crazy. This . . . this isn’t . . . how . . . ?”
He stepped toward her, hands out again as if telling her to calm down, be quiet. He looked so alarmed that she stopped.
He turned back to the pad and wrote furiously, PLEASE DON’T GO.