“We’ll leave you these to look at.” George laid three brochures, all gloss, dark Florida tans and bright denture grins, on the coffee table. “Will you at least think it over?”
Mary told them she would. Something sat leaden and dull in her chest: despite all of her strategies, all her protests, she knew that her memory was getting worse. A lot worse than either of her sons imagined. No one knew about the long periods she spent living in her past, unaware it was not her present.
“I’ll think it over,” she said, taking the brochures and coffee cups and setting them in the kitchen.
*
She stood at the kitchen window and watched George’s expensive car glide down the drive, out onto North Road and back towards town. Her heart remained heavy as she watched the sun sink lower in the sky, repainting the canvas of forest-covered hills with a warmer palette. She couldn’t go on like this. She knew she’d have to leave her home of sixty years and would never again stand at this window, looking out over the hills and fields.
She’d phone James in the morning. Not George, James.
*
The strangest sensation came over her in the space of a heartbeat. Suddenly dizzy, Mary had to steady herself by gripping the sink’s edge. An indistinct, motiveless panic stirred as she was seized by the most powerful feeling of déjà vu she had ever experienced. Her heart picked up pace as she was gripped by a fear that she was having some kind of attack. A stroke. Closing her eyes, she took deep breaths, forcing herself to be calm.
She opened them again.
The sunset was now midday sun. So bright it hurt her eyes. Spring was now summer. She straightened up from the sink and looked out over her favorite view. It was still her favorite view, but it was changed.
It was changed back.
There were more trees and fewer fields: thirty years back, a large part of the forest fringing the road had been cleared to extend the Fisher farm and planted with alfalfa. The forest had restored itself, full and dark and complete, reconquering lost ground.
“Oh dear, no …” Mary said to the empty kitchen. She knew she was back in the past. Her condition must be getting worse and she had sunk back into distant memories as her mind slowly and inexorably folded in on itself.
But that wasn’t it. She remembered everything.
Mary remembered that James and George had just been here, that George had driven up in his fancy European car, that they had left the brochures for her to look at, and that she had decided to leave her home of sixty years so that her body could be looked after while her consciousness, her awareness of the world, slowly evaporated.
She reached over to where she’d laid down the brochures, but they were gone. The coffee pot she had bought ten years ago was gone too, and had been replaced with the old one she had used all her married life until the pale blue enamel had all but flaked to nothing. Except someone had re-enameled it and it shone like new. She looked around the kitchen. Everything had been changed: decades of replacement undone, originals returned to their place and the kitchen gleamed with new–old stuff.
This was no trick of her mind. She wasn’t wrapped up in her own memories and recreating the past. This was the past.
Mary crossed through the dining room on her way to the front door, stopping to check the ugly candlestick Aunt May had given her and Joe sixty years ago. The tarnished fleck on the neck of the candlestick was gone and the silver gleamed flawlessly. What was happening? She could understand her earlier confusion: her mind turning back time while the things around her remaining objective proofs of her true chronology; but this time it was her mind that remained anchored in reality while everything around her had changed.
This wasn’t her. This was the world. Something was happening that had nothing to do with her memory problems. Something was really happening to the world around her …
Mary heard a voice calling her name. A voice that had lived only in her head for the last fifteen years. She ran through to the hallway and made to open the door but suddenly froze, her hand on the unturned handle. The mirror was to her right.
She turned to it.
Mary Dechaud, the eighty-four-year-old woman, looked into the mirror and a twenty-three-year-old girl, slim-waisted and lithe, with thick dark-blonde hair framing a pretty, girlish face, looked back at her. Mary lifted her hand in front of her face and examined it, first the palm, then the back. Clear, unblemished, unwrinkled skin; long, slender fingers.
The voice outside called again and she threw open the door, running out onto the porch and waving to the young man with auburn hair and an easy expression as he made his way up from the road end where Dave Gundersson always dropped him off after his shift at the quarry.
It was Joe.
It was Joe smiling and waving as he came home.
*
When it was over, when the déjà vu subsided, the sky darkened and the world – and her reflection in the mirror – restored itself to the present, Mary sat in the living room and thought about what had happened. She didn’t try to make sense of it, just thought about the experience itself. The wonder of it.
After an hour or so, Mary Dechaud picked up the phone and called James. She told him gently and calmly that she had decided she was, after all, going to stay in her own home. She would remain there until the day she died; the day she would be with their father again.
Once she had hung up the phone, Mary tried to remember why it was she was in the dining room. It must have been because she meant to dust the photographs on the dresser, because she couldn’t remember the last time she had dusted them.
She started with the silver frame with the gilt edging.
12
JOHN MACBETH. BOSTON
Corbin phoned Macbeth the next day, relaying the information the police and the hospital had given him. After further extensive surgery, the priest was back in ICU — it was by no means certain that he would pull through and his survival thus far had been attributed to Macbeth’s actions at the scene.
“By the way,” said Corbin, “the jumper … his name really was Gabriel. Gabriel Rees. He seems to have been some kind of academic high-flyer. Shit …” Corbin cursed his clumsiness. “I didn’t mean it like that. Poor bastard.”
“I know you didn’t. High-flyer in what?”
“Particle physics. Doctoral postgrad at MIT. Isn’t that your brother Casey’s field?”
“Yeah,” said Macbeth. “Maybe Casey knew him. I’ll ask when I see him later today. Did the police tell you anything else?”
“Just that he’d no history of mental illness or drug abuse. Not on record, anyway. Exceptionally bright, though. Superhigh IQ; but there again, that’s pretty much par for the course in that field.”
“I guess,” said Macbeth, thinking about how his brother shared his IQ, but had been gifted with an infinitely more elegant, more graceful mind.
There was a pause then Corbin said tentatively, “Listen John, what I told you last night … about the house … do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, of course not. What you experienced sounds like the same thing patients have been presenting, just like you said. Maybe it really is viral in origin.”
They chatted for a while before Macbeth rang off with a promise to keep in touch. He hung the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on his hotel-room door and lay on his bed for most of the afternoon, staring up at the ceiling, trying not to listen to sounds from beyond the room or think much about anything, and least of all about the events of the previous night.
Eventually his tiredness overcame him and Macbeth fell asleep.
“This is a dream,” a voice he recognized told him, even though he couldn’t see who had spoken.
“I know that,” he replied, unconcerned. “I know I am dreaming. I always know when I am dreaming.”
Macbeth found himself standing outside a house and he knew he was in Beacon Hill. It was one of those grand five-story Colonial terraced townhouses with the bay fronts and white stucco around the doors and
windows. Louisburg Square … he was standing in the street at Louisburg Square. Behind him, he knew without turning, was the little manicured private park with the small statues of Christopher Columbus and Aristides the Just.
He dreamed he stood outside the house on a cobbled street empty of cars. There was a surreal calm to the day and the unmoving air around him felt more indoors than outdoors. Walking up the steps to a front door that swung open at the slightest touch of his fingertips, he entered the main hallway. The house was still a single dwelling, not divided into condos the way many had been over the years. Macbeth knew where he was: the house that Corbin had bought. He also knew when he was: a different time, long before Corbin had bought the house.
Stopping at the bottom of the stairs, he rested his hand on the mahogany pommel on the handrail post, the wood feeling warm, as if alive beneath his touch, the hall bright around him.
Macbeth smiled as she came into view at the top of the stairs. Marjorie Glaiston.
She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, just as Corbin had said: slender and elegant and her gathered-up hair was a rich gold color. She wore a pale cream ankle-length dress detailed in lace and with a peacock’s-eye brooch at her throat. The swirl of emerald and turquoise in the brooch complemented the dazzling blue-green of her large, beautiful eyes. She smiled at Macbeth as if she had been expecting him, her cheeks dimpling, and started to make her way down the stairs.
A man appeared on the landing behind her. Large, broad-shouldered, with massive, ugly hands, his complexion ruddy and his auburn hair and beard framing his face with dark red fire. There was a cruel, hard handsomeness to his features and something terribly dark and violent lurked in his expression. Just as he had known the woman was Marjorie Glaiston, Macbeth knew that the man he was looking at was Geoffrey Morgan.
He wanted to call out – to warn Marjorie as Morgan started to take slow, purposeful steps down the stairs towards her, carrying his dark fury with him – but he found he could not. Unlike his experience at Christian Science Plaza, where he had worked on the injured priest and had felt himself completely detached from the experience, Macbeth felt totally involved with this reality he knew wasn’t true reality. Yet he stood frozen, his hand glued to the handrail post, his voice lost to him, as Morgan closed the distance between himself and Marjorie, his huge hands lifting from his sides and reaching towards her.
“You know what’s coming, don’t you?” The voice he had heard before spoke again into Macbeth’s ear and he turned to see standing behind him the naked, broken-crooked body of Gabriel Rees, the man who had jumped to his death. Gabriel smiled and Macbeth noticed that one eyelid was still half closed. “Just like you knew what was going to happen on the roof – the only one other than me who knew – you know exactly what is going to happen here, don’t you?”
Macbeth nodded and turned back to see Morgan seize Marjorie. He screamed a scream that made no sound, that failed to part his tight-sealed lips, as Morgan’s heavy fingers closed on Marjorie’s slender neck. It was as if she hadn’t noticed: she still held Macbeth in her unwavering gaze as subconjunctival hemorrhages turned the whites of her beautiful eyes blood-red; her smile for him remained, the dimples still there in the fair cheeks while petechial spots bloomed purple-red as capillaries ruptured under the skin.
Morgan let go an inhuman scream as he crushed and twisted the life from his unfaithful lover: a long, roaring, animal cry of fury and pain and despair. When he let her go, Marjorie tumbled like a rag doll, lifeless and loose, down the stairs and came to rest at Macbeth’s feet.
“How real does this seem to you?” asked Gabriel, conversationally. “You’re dreaming, but it seems more real than when you’re awake, doesn’t it? Do I seem more real to you than I did on the roof?”
Macbeth still had no voice to answer Gabriel; instead he raised his silent, accusing gaze back to Morgan, who stood where he had killed Marjorie, his brow dappled with sweat, his eyes still burning, the huge murderous hands hanging at his sides. Then, moving slowly, Morgan reached into the pocket of his tweed waistcoat and pulled out a small derringer pistol. Taking each slow, deliberate step as if his feet were made of lead, he came down the stairs, holding the palm gun at full arm’s stretch until he stood in front of Macbeth, towering over him. Morgan pushed the cold, hard steel of the short barrel against Macbeth’s forehead.
And pulled the trigger.
*
Macbeth found himself again looking up at the ceiling of his hotel room. His awakening had been swift but not sudden and something of the dream lingered, as if Morgan’s brooding malevolence loitered in some corner of Macbeth’s waking world, for a few moments. But he was not afraid. No sweats, no shaking. Despite its horrors, the dream had left him strangely calm.
Corbin sounded surprised to hear Macbeth on the phone so soon after their last conversation.
“The house in Beacon Hill you’re doing up …” asked Macbeth. “Is it in Louisburg Square?”
Corbin laughed. “Louisburg Square? How much do you think they’re paying me at Belmont? I know I told you Joanna’s folks were rich, but they’re not the Rothschilds. Our place is on Garden Street. Why are you asking?”
“I thought I’d look into the Marjorie Glaiston story,” lied Macbeth, not wanting to tell Corbin about his dream.
“I see,” said Corbin. “You’ll find stuff about Marjorie Glaiston on the Internet; that’s where I found the story.”
“And you’re sure you didn’t see a picture of Marjorie before the episode?”
“Do you mean before I saw her on the stairs?” said Corbin. “No, like I told you, it was after. The pictures I found were a match for the person I saw … imagined I saw … on the stairs. But what you said last night made sense: I couldn’t have seen an accurate image of her in a hallucination before having seen what she looked like in real life. I must’ve seen her picture somewhere before without remembering it.”
“It’s the obvious explanation,” said Macbeth, not wanting to share that he had put a face to Marjorie Glaiston in his own dream. “Anyway, I’ll check it out. Let me know if you hear anything more from the cops about Gabriel or how the priest is doing.”
*
Macbeth was annoyed that he was relieved.
Not the Marjorie Glaiston he had dreamt about. He looked at the face on the screen of his laptop and knew it was not the face he had seen in his dream. The real Marjorie Glaiston had had raven-black hair, not blonde, and although her outstanding beauty was equal to that of the woman in his dream, it was of a different kind: dark, arch, smoldering; vaguely wicked. The image he had found had been a portrait painted by her murderer, Geoffrey Morgan. Another picture – a grainy, primly posed black-and-white society photograph – confirmed the accuracy of Morgan’s canvas capturing of lover and muse. Macbeth could see that this Marjorie Glaiston had been the kind of woman to drive men out of their senses with lust and envy.
What the hell had he expected to find when searching the Internet for an image of Marjorie Glaiston? Proof that he had developed some kind of psychic link with the long-dead? Even if the face had been the same, it would simply be, just like with Corbin, a case of cryptomnesia – a forgotten memory unconsciously remembered. He was a psychiatrist, after all, and knew that there were few mysteries that could not be answered by looking at the one-hundred-billion-neuron-packed, three-pound-weight human brain: each individual brain a complete universe of inexplicable complexity.
But the picture Macbeth found of Geoffrey Morgan did shake him. It wasn’t quite the face of the murderer his sleeping brain had invented, but there were distinct similarities: a broad, pale brow above darkly brooding eyes and framed with thick hair and beard. And although his hair looked black in the photograph, the description in the text told him that Morgan had, indeed, possessed a head of dark red hair. But, Macbeth told himself, it was not a stretch to imagine a violent, brooding Irish painter with some kind of accuracy.
*
Afte
r he showered and dressed, Macbeth sent an SMS to Casey to confirm their meeting at seven and got an almost instant reply.
During his stay in Boston he had spent as much time with his brother as possible; Casey had, of course, made the offer that Macbeth could stay with him for as long as he was in Boston, but they had both known that Macbeth would say no: his environment had to be of his choosing.
Macbeth felt good that he was seeing his brother that evening: he was still tired and emotionally drained by everything that had happened in the previous eighteen hours, but Casey always managed to brighten his moods. Looking through the hotel-room window, Macbeth could see that a warm, bright day had taken shape beyond the glass and he decided to take a walk to shake off his lethargy.
*
The cab dropped him at the Tremont Street entrance to the Common. Macbeth knew he had come here for more than a stroll in the park: Louisburg Square was less than a three-minute walk away on the other side of the Common. Again he became angry at his own folly, knowing he would end up standing in the spot he had stood in his dream, convincing himself … convincing himself of what?
Getting out of the taxi, Macbeth felt the effects of stress and lack of sleep take the form of a vague but pervasive déjà vu. It was a feeling he had experienced a lot, throughout his life, and he hated it, mainly because it often preceded one of his episodes. He shook it off and headed into the Common.
A small, rectangular box of a building stood at the Common’s entry, looking like some Art Deco mausoleum. It was actually the exit from Boylston T Station and housed the head of the stairwell that led up from the subway. As he passed, Macbeth saw workers in Transit Authority uniforms using brushes and a spray tank of cleaning solution to scrub off a graffito that had been sprayed onto the side wall of the usually pristine station building. The words, in a deep red impervious to the workers’ chemicals and scouring, were still legible on the building’s flank.
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