I dropped it immediately. “Don’t be alarmed,” I said as gently as I could. “I mean you no harm.” I put a hand on her shoulder. “On the contrary.”
I could only see the right side of her face, which was heart-shaped and strong-featured. She had long dark hair that swirled about her like the currents of a very deep pool. She had on a pink shantung silk blouse and moss-green trousers of the same material. Her feet were bare and I saw tattooed on the instep of one a crescent moon and a circle.
“Are you all right?” I asked again.
“Bring a candle over,” she said. When I had complied and had lighted it for her, she took another look at me. “William, it is you.”
“Do I know you?”
“My name is Daleth,” she said. “I am the door, the moist leaf that protects and provides.”
“What happened here?”
She rose up and turned her full face to me. I recoiled with a small cry I could not help but utter. The entire left side of her face was a raw pulp, newly burned by naked flame.
“My God,” I whispered. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“You found your way here, William,” she said as I helped her up. “I wanted to meet you, to guide you here, but—” She collapsed against me and her head lolled on my chest without leaving an imprint of blood.
I helped her to the divan and arranged her on it. Her breathing was heavy, as tortured as the ticking of the old clock downstairs.
“It has come,” she said. “The beast is already here, you see. It has violated the rules, which means that you must have done the same.”
I immediately thought of my willfully changing the course of the hunt in the Charnwood Forest over Gimel’s warning.
“I suppose I have,” I said. “But I had no idea of the consequences.”
“No,” she said. “But that’s just it, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“All life has consequence, William. All life has value.”
“Not this beast. It’s already killed two people, and now look what it’s done to you.”
She regarded me from out of pitch-black eyes. “The beast—it’s still here. Somewhere. Waiting to come into the light.”
I retrieved the carving knife and hefted it. “This time I’m ready.”
“What will you do?” she asked. “Pierce its skull as you did with the crocodile?”
I started. “How did you know about that?”
“How did I know your name?”
I stood up, shaking. “Who are you? Who are any of you?”
“I told you. My name is Daleth.”
“You’re termagants,” I cried, “sent to torture me!”
She drew herself up. “Are you so undeserving of torture?” I was too stunned to answer. Possibly she never meant me to answer, because almost immediately she went on. “If so, then why do you torture yourself?”
“What … what do you mean?” I said hoarsely.
“Oh, you know perfectly well what I mean, William, sitting day after day in that bar, hiding yourself away from the world, losing your soul in that bottomless pit inside yourself.”
“Hey!” I shouted. Now I truly was terrified. I’d told no one about that bottomless pit, not Donnatella, not Mike the bartender, not Ray my accountant. No one. “What in the name of holy hell is going on here?”
That was when she cocked her head and her black eyes opened wide. “You hear it, don’t you, William?” The sound she was referring to came again, echoing eerily in the bowels of the house. “The beast is on the move again. It is coming out of the shadows.”
“Fuck the beast.”
“Yes"—she nodded—“fuck the beast, indeed.” She cocked her head. “On the other hand, you cannot ignore it. And you can no longer run away. This is your last chance. Here is where you make your stand.”
I could hear it now, and somehow the sound of its movements sent fresh shock waves of terror running through me.
“Tell me what the others didn’t,” I said. “Tell me how to kill it.”
She looked up at me with something akin to astonishment. “It cannot be killed. I thought you knew that much.”
“Damn you!” I cried. “Damn all you to hell!”
“Too late for that.”
I turned and ran from the room. I held the knife in front of me, but I was sweating so profusely the hilt felt loose and slippery in my grip.
“Oh, God,” I moaned in despair, “what is going to happen to me?” There was nobody to protect me, nobody to save me. Vav was dead, so was Gimel, and this one, this Daleth, was of no use at all. She had already proved that she couldn’t stand up to the beast. That left me and only me.
You can no longer run away, she had said. To hell with that. I flew down the staircase and hurtled to the front door. It wouldn’t open no matter how hard I pulled and pushed. I ran into the living room, ripped aside the heavy drapes and tried to open the window. It wouldn’t budge. I looked at the storm-swept night outside and found even that preferable to remaining here. In a fit of rage, I picked up a chair and threw it at the window. I gaped in astonishment as the chair bounced off the pane of glass. I beat at the glass with my fists to no avail. Daleth was right, I couldn’t run away.
This is your last chance, she had said. Did that mean I had blown my first two chances in Paris and Leicestershire? Chances at what?
“Hey!” I yelled at no one and everything. How could I play the game when I didn’t know the rules or the object? “Dammit, this isn’t fair!”
“Of course it’s not fair,” Daleth said, coming into the room. She seemed to have regained a good measure of her strength. “Whatever is?”
“But you know what this is about!” I shouted.
“I know everything.”
“Then, for the love of God, why won’t you tell me?”
She came close to me and I turned my head so I wouldn’t have to see the horribly maimed side of her face. “Won’t you look at me, William?” she said softly. “Don’t you find me beautiful?”
She was beautiful, at least most of her. But what the beast had done to her had altered her forever. “Don’t make me answer that.”
“But it’s an important question. Vital, one might say.” Why did each termagant keep repeating what the others had said? How was it even possible? She kept moving to try to bring her left side into my line of sight, and I kept turning with her. “Don’t you think it deserves an answer?”
“Don’t do this, I beg you.”
“You must answer, William. In your heart you know you must.” She was right. “You were beautiful, once,” I blurted out. “But not now.”
She was circling me like a hyena scenting the death throes. “Now you have no interest in me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Nipping at me like a termagant knowing her job was almost done. “Now you won’t protect me.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth!” I screamed.
She spread her arms wide. “Time to make your stand, William.”
“How can I when I don’t even know what I’m fighting for.”
“Oh, you know.” She leaned in as she whispered. “It’s your soul, William. Your very soul.”
“Then I was right. I am dead!”
“No. Death is easy. This isn’t.” Now she was right up against me and I didn’t even bother to turn aside. I stared at both sides of her, the beautiful and the horribly disfigured. And now something began to take shape in my mind. Something terribly, intimately familiar. “You know this beast, William. You know it very, very well. As I said, this is where you make your stand.”
“But you said it couldn’t be defeated.”
“No.” She gave me a penetrating look. “I said it can’t be killed.”
“Wait a minute. What are you saying?” Something familiar here—emotions or possibly a certain dynamic, I didn’t know for sure—had triggered a memory I had long suppressed. I had misled myself; a long time ago I had told
one person about the bottomless pit inside myself because in the frenzy of detonating teenage hormones it had become unbearable to keep it to myself. “You … it …” And then I knew. I knew it all. She saw it on my face and she smiled. It was a beautiful smile, a magnificent smile, a smile for the ages. “You and Vav and Gimel, you’re all one, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Just different aspects.”
I just stood, staring, unable to make a move.
“Go on, then,” she whispered. “Time for you to root out the beast.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” I said.
“If that is what you want,” she answered me, “then you won’t.”
“But I have to know. … Is it also what you want?”
“It’s what I’ve always wanted.” She smiled that beatific smile. “But then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” I could barely speak, my throat was so clogged with emotion. “I guess I always did.” I held out my hand. “Come on. I’ll protect you, but I won’t leave you again. Not ever.”
She gave me a sad look, but she took my hand and I squeezed it hard. Together, we went out of the living room. In the study, I tried the wall switch, but the chandelier remained dark.
“I’m afraid that’s one of the drawbacks of this place,” she said. “The electricity is unreliable.”
I found a suitable length of wood on the cordwood pile next to the hearth and twisted some old newspaper around one end. I stuck it into the fire. When it was burning well we went up the stairs. I held it before us, lighting the way.
We went along the hallway. Once again, I opened the door to each dark room. This time, the makeshift torch illuminated the interiors. I suppose at this point I wasn’t surprised to see Vav’s paintings hung on the walls. At last, I’d reached the art exhibition. I went from room to room in wonderment.
Each one was as clear as ice; they pierced my heart with bittersweet poignancy. “These are scenes from my childhood,” I said as I studied the paintings. “Here are the forests where I hunted with Dad; here’s the field where Herman and I used to play Tag and You’re It; here’s the lane that led to our house; and here’s where …” I turned to my companion. “Here’s where I slapped you.” I put a hand up to her cheek. “Lily, will you ever forgive me?”
“I’m here,” my sister said. “I brought you here with the power of my mind. It’s all the power I have, you see. All the energy that would have gone into talking and walking and running, playing tennis and making love and … all the things everyone takes for granted, has been channeled into my mind. It had nowhere else to go.”
“But why did you wait so long to do this?”
“This reality I built for myself takes a tremendous amount of energy—to bring you into it required a superhuman burst. I knew I could only do it once, and not for very long. So I waited until near the end.” She smiled and touched my cheek in return. “Mom was right, you know. She could see underneath it all. I cared about you like no one else.”
“But I was so cruel to you.”
She pointed to the far side of the last room of the exhibition. “Regarde ça,” she said in Vav’s warm voice.
I let go of her long enough to cross the room. There was a brick fireplace, soot-blackened, above which ran a carved oak mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece was a small, battered black-and-white photo, faded now with time. I peered at it. It was me, as a young boy. The sun must have been in my eyes for I was squinting. There was an expression on my face I knew well and didn’t much care for. At first, I thought this was what Lily wanted me to see, but then I heard something stir. I looked down but could see nothing. I thrust the sputtering torch farther in front of me and I saw a dark figure huddled against the blackened firebrick. Good Christ, I thought. It’s the beast! Instinctively, I brandished the carving knife, but it appeared to no longer be a threat. The face, when it raised its head, did not seem at all hideous. In fact, it seemed as familiar as that alleyway in Paris down which Vav had led me, as familiar as the Charnwood Forest glade where I had stopped with Gimel. I glanced back up at the old photo of myself, then back down at the beast. There was no fear inside me now, no loathing. I reached out to touch it and its darkness ran up my arm, its essence turning to ink that sank into my skin. In a moment, it had vanished with a faint pop. Astonished, I turned back to Lily. “The beast was me, wasn’t it?” I said, though in truth I needed no real confirmation from her. “At least it was a part of me.”
“The part you had to face,” she said. “I told you it couldn’t be killed—not without killing yourself, anyway. But you found the means to defeat it.” She came toward me. “Understanding and forgiveness, Billy.” She put a hand on my arm. “If you can face me, if you can love me now then surely you can forgive yourself.”
“But you terrified me.”
She put a hand against my mouth and I found myself trembling. “And yet you fed me when you had to, you held me and rocked me even when I vomited all over you. Herman never went near me. He loathed me, just like Dad did.”
“But that afternoon—I hit you.”
“Yes, and I loved you all the more for it.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple, Billy. I struck you and drew blood.”
“But you couldn’t help it. It was just you spazzing—” I broke off, shame flooding me anew.
“It’s all right, Billy.” She caressed me. “Don’t you see, you reacted as if I were a normal person. You treated me like you would anyone else who had struck you. Even Mom, who loved me so desperately, couldn’t have done what you did, because she pitied me so. You never pitied me, so when you reacted you did so from your true being. For that I was so grateful, Billy, I cannot begin to tell you.”
“Oh, Lily—” Bitter tears of remorse and self-loathing slid down my cheeks. “I never suspected what was underneath. That you had—” I gestured at the paintings.
“But you did, Billy.” She took me over to a painting of a forest glade drenched in sunlight and in something intangible that, just like this reality she had created, was so much more. “That afternoon when I drew blood and you hit me back was our connection, our communication. Before then, I was plagued by bouts of despair and black thoughts of suicide. You reaffirmed for me my right to exist, my own humanity.” She smiled. “Vav, Gimel, Daleth—they’re all pieces of my personality and they all love you unconditionally.”
I was overcome with shame. “My God, I never imagined—”
“How could you?” she said gently. Now she seemed to be holding me as, moments before, I had been holding her. “That was okay, you see. Because I could see underneath your facade. I knew what was there.”
“But I never came to see you.”
“And yet we never lost touch, did we? Because Donnatella would tell me all about you.”
“She’d talk to you about me?”
“You were all she talked about, Billy. And she was so good at it, it was like having you in the room with me.” Her dark eyes looked into mine. “She never stopped coming, even after the divorce.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“She’s here now.”
I looked around. “In this house?”
Her voice grew soft as a candle flame. “No, at my bedside. The moment has come, I’m dying, Billy,”
“No!” I pulled her close to me, wrapping my arms around her. “I won’t let it happen. I won’t lose you now, after I’ve just found you.”
Lily shook her head. “We all have our time, Billy. Mine has come and gone.”
“Then we’ll stay here, in this fantastic world you’ve conjured. I’ll keep you safe here. Nothing can harm you.”
“Oh, Billy.” She shook her head as I took her back out into the hallway. But I recoiled as soon as I looked over the banister. There was nothing below us. The entire ground floor had vanished into an odd kind of pearly-gray mist.
“What the hell—?”
“It’s going, Billy. I’m
growing weak. I can’t maintain this world any longer.”
“Then, teach me how to rebuild it,” I said. “I’m strong. I’ll do whatever it takes.” Already I could see the mist curling up the staircase. Everything it touched instantly melted into it. It reached the second floor and the entire right wing vanished. I took Lily’s hand, and we raced down what was left of the hallway. “Quick! Tell me how to rebuild this!”
“It won’t work, Billy. You can’t cheat death.”
“But I don’t want you to die!” Behind us, the rooms with the wondrous paintings of our childhood were one by one being devoured in the mist.
“And I don’t want to leave you,” Lily said as we reached the master suite, “but I must.”
“There must be something you can do,” I implored her.
Now it was she who led me inside. “Close the door and lock it,” she said. When I did what she had asked, I saw that she was very pale. She collapsed into my arms, and I carried her to the huge canopied bed. As I laid her gently on it, she looked up at me and said, “All my life I’ve wanted to sleep one night in a bed like this.” She glanced up at the canopy and I could see her artist’s eyes taking in every nuance of color, form and texture. “It’s heavenly, isn’t it?” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s just what it is. Heavenly.” Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and upper Up. “Lily—”
She turned her eyes on me. “Yes?”
“I love you.”
“I know, Billy. I know.”
I put my head on her stomach and we held each other for a long time. Then, very weakly, she said my name. I could feel the vibrations go through my entire body.
“Don’t wish for Donnatella to love you any more than she does,” Lily whispered. “Don’t regret what you had with her.”
“But it’s over.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “It’s over. But look to what lies ahead.”
“I don’t know what lies ahead.”
“Yes,” she whispered in a voice that had become all but insubstantial, “but that’s the point, isn’t it?”
I wept then, for her and for me—but also for us, for what we had had so briefly that was now gone. Gone without my being with her at the end. How I envied Donnatella! How I appreciated her anew for the good and loyal friend she had been to Lily!
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