by Nina Malkin
“Well, she’s just arrived. And not that I’ve been paying attention, since I couldn’t care less, but she’s not dead, if that helps.” With a choked sob of relief, Marsh sags heavily onto Duck.
“That is helpful, so helpful,” I say encouragingly. “She disappeared from our world a few hours ago, but we don’t know why, or how.”
“Why, I couldn’t tell you,” Early says. “But how? That’s easy.
See here.” She stands—at five foot zip a tiny girl for such a whopping personality—and strolls to the fireplace, flicking ashes at the hearth. “This was sealed up as long as I lived here, and as long as I’ve been dead here, too. Now that it’s all busted up, you can tell there was a reason.”
Could the recent demolition of Antonia’s fireplace have opened a sort of passage? I join her there, stare into the blank space. At first, I see nothing. Then I blink, shift my focus slightly . . . and I see everything.
XXIX
One afternoon a few months ago, I’m folding laundry, zoning out, when I notice through the window a small flock of birds going round and round in the cloudless sky. The slant of sun, combined with the speed and unison of their choreography, creates this flickering, high-velocity vortex, a cycle of splashes in space that’s entirely organic yet appears mechanical, like an alien invention designed to stupefy earthlings like me. That’s as close as I can get to describing what confronts me in the tower-room fireplace.
Initially, anyway. Peer between the gaps in the “birds” and there’s the entire past, the pedestrian present, and the unfolding future, all in a simultaneous, spiraling stream. Unfortunately, it hurts to watch—hurts like a brain giving birth to a helix of subway trains during eternal rush hour—so I need to frame my focus on only a small slice. This also hurts to watch, but in a different way, since what I see is lives, and deaths, the lives and deaths of people who met their ends in this house.
I say something. Probably “Oh my God.” Behind me I’m vaguely aware of my friends, only no way can I acknowledge them. The people before me captivate in IMAX 3-D. There’s Antonia Forsythe—I recognize her from Sin’s description—lacing into her ill-fitting gown, sipping tea alone in a corner, seated at an escritoire in this very room . . . and writhing in flames. Here’s Earline Hampford, kicking up her heels in a manic Charleston, guzzling bathtub gin like there’s no tomorrow . . . and there isn’t. All of them, a patchwork quilt of fine intentions, broken dreams, clandestine trysts, bitter betrayals, mundane day-to-days, and occasional strikes of brilliance, valor, sacrifice, madness.
The lives are engaging in a reality-TV sort of way, but the deaths are truly five-star entertainment—if you’re a five-star sicko. Each one dripping comic-book colors. Each one bellowing hell-bound screams. Each one awful: suicide, murder, tragic accident, disfiguring disease, butchered childbirth. No one passed easy here at Forsythe Manor, and they’re all still here, none at peace. Now that I know the architecture of agony this house represents, how can I be certain it was Antonia who trapped first Crane and then Charlotte into its wretched confines? Maybe Sin’s been right about her all along; maybe her roses and her waltz weren’t seductions but warnings.
“It’s a passage,” I murmur, mostly to myself, and back away.
From this perspective the hearth is perfectly ordinary again, but it dawns on me that this is where it all began—the sparks of Antonia’s demise starting right here. Following her death, the Forsythes must have bricked it up, then quit using the wing altogether, and ultimately sold the place, defeated. In all the years since, this prime square footage lay fallow. Untill. . .
“All she had to do . . . ,” I propose, “was reach through here. . .” Needing to form the words, articulate the horror. “And snatch them.”
Now my gaze wheels dizzily around. Ruby’s done an hasta la vista (bubbly, vapid Early gone as well). The rest of my friends take turns peering at the firebox, up the flue, into the chimney.
Finally they gawp at me as if trying to pick a flattering motif for my straitjacket.
All but one. Spine curved, palms on thighs, Sin continues to examine the seemingly benign space. He’s sensitive, intuitive, just like me. Always has been, even as a kid, just like me. Marsh and Pen, Duck and Tosh, they wouldn’t see it, couldn’t. But Sin . . . ? He straightens and faces us, smacking his hands as if they’re tainted by centuries of soot and lurid death.
“Well?” I demand.
“Like a small flock of birds in a certain slant of sun.” Exactly. Precisely. Absolutely. Yes.
“A fissure torn between the mortal and spectral planes.”
Okay, sure, that sounds good—official.
“And? Sin, what are you saying?” Marsh is in no shape for this, and it shows.
“Dice called it a passage; I see it more as a gate—a gate that swings both ways.” He looks at me as if this might be the very reason he returned to Swoon, then over to Marsh in answer. “I do believe that Crane and Charlotte were taken via that gate.
And I consider it my duty to go after them.”
XXX
“Not without me,” I tell him. Naturally, I expect an argument.
Naturally, I get one.
“I won’t permit it,” Sin says with irritating finality.
Rather than splatter our spat all over the others, I tug his arm, and we retreat to the rounded alcove that rises above Antonia’s garden. “Your duty?” I say. “Mighty noble and all, but I’m the one who’s obliged to Marsh. Plus, two can cover more ground than one, and we don’t have time to screw around. Crane and Charlotte are human beings—remember those? They like food, water?”
“You needn’t lecture me on mortal frailty—these last few days, I’ve seen my share. What I don’t know and cannot predict are the perils beyond the gate.” He looks out the window and back at me. “This isn’t a matter of receding in time, as we did last fall, but stepping into time itself. Anything that ever has or will transpire in this house might lie behind any door. You’ve glimpsed some of the atrocity from the safety of this side. Dice—” Sensing I’m about to interrupt, he takes my elbow firmly, pins me with his stare. “I won’t let you expose yourself to such danger.”
Why not? I wonder. Is it simply that, should something befall me there, he wouldn’t want it on his conscience? Has he got one of those these days? Or is it more? The depths of his eyes remain oblique, but I’ve got the audacity of stupidity to let myself believe it’s love. Of its own volition my head bows in reverence to that love, and I feel the warm storm build behind my eyes. With intent I lift my chin, raise my gaze, and his is still upon me. Like it never left. Like it never will.
“Oh . . . ,” he says with a softness he rarely allows. “Dice. Please. Don’t. Cry.”
“I’m not crying.” I sniff; I brave a smile. “Look, Sin, unless you’re prepared to physically restrain me, I’ll only follow you through the gate anyway. I’m not afraid—no, hear me out: As long as we encounter events that already happened, we’re safe. I mean, nothing bad ever happened to me here, or to you, right?
It’ll be just like an amusement park spook house—scary but harmless.”
A slow nod of concurrence. Not that he knows what an amusement park is.
“As long as we’re careful not to disrupt anything,” I pound the point, “no matter how heinous; as long as we stay in our lane, scope Crane and Char and yank them back through the fissure, we should be okay.”
“And if we encounter things yet to happen?” he asks.
“Potential futures that involve you and I?” There is that risk. How could we not attempt to fiddle with the future? “We make a pact, here and now,” I tell him. “No matter what, we slam the door; we walk away.” Rubbing the muscles at his neck, Sin knows when he’s licked. “Agreed.”
We both look toward the hearth, our friends assembled there. Marsh and Duck like two trees struck by lightning that fell on each other and found support. Next to them, Pen and Tosh, heads bent, seeming so . . . civilized. That’s a first.
>
Pen says, “So you’re going?” as Sin and I approach.
“Because we were thinking,” Tosh jumps in, “maybe you should each tie a rope to your ankle, and we’d hold the other end—sort of the surf-leash concept?”
Logical, in a Poltergeist kind of way, but this isn’t the movies. I smile at him, then her—realizing they came up with it together.
“That’s an idea,” I say, “but I don’t think so. Don’t worry.” I glance at Sin. “We’ll check for each other.” How we’ll do that when we split up, I’m not sure, but I keep my game face on.
“We’d best get started,” he says.
I steel myself for the ride to anywhere.
“Wait a second.” It’s Tosh. Reaching into his shirt, he removes the necklace I noticed the night of the mass skinny-dip. “Dice, do me a favor—wear this.”
A small silver medal—an angel with a sword and shield; a slew devil, belly-up, at his feet. With deft digits Tosh fastens the clasp at my nape. “Saint Michael,” he whispers deliberately, and I sense him looking past my cheek. “Protection from demons.” Demons beyond the gate? Or the one I’m traveling with? What do I know from saints? For that matter, despite my experience, what do I really know from demons? I pat the pendant, warm from his skin, against my absence of cleavage. It’s not so much the Saint Michael but the mojo of Tosh I’m taking with me.
Turning to him, my palm cupped on his shoulder, I say, “Thank you.” Then I plant a kiss—it’s a print, not a peck, but I put it on his cheek, where I know it belongs. Then I step away from him. The step that takes me to Sin’s side.
Navigating the fissure proves tricky. Since as soon as we walk toward it—that flock of birds in a certain slant of sun—it vanishes from view. I put out a hand and touch only air, then stone. We try different angles, looking up, looking down—our friends eyeing us with polite discomfit—and then stand back.
“Any ideas?” I ask Sin.
He mulls. “We’re being pedantic. Here, give me your hand.” I don’t know where he’s going with this, but I give it a shot.
“Look for the fissure; tell me when you see it.” I find it; I tell him.
“Good. Close your eyes and forget it. Instead, see the gate.” The gate I see is the gate Sin built, the gate to Antonia’s garden.
“Now we climb it . . .”
With my free hand I grasp the iron bar. Right foot onto the rung, then left. Sin, beside me, does the same. Together, we swing.
Passing through feels like swallowing a melon seed. A mistake. A mistake we make on purpose. Even though it’s the fissure that does the swallowing, Sin and I the seed, once I reach the other side, I wonder about the wisdom of this journey—what mutant fruit might result if our seed were to take root.
XXXI
Here we are, again and still, in Antonia’s room. It is her room.
Furnished with her stuff. Canopy bed with downy coverlet, tall bureau, dressing table. There’s a washbasin and pitcher with pastilles of soap in the shape of roses; I pick one up, inhale the scent. In the alcove overlooking her garden sits the small writing desk, elegant stationery set upon it. The mantelpiece bears but a single vase with a single bud, no other curios, dolls, or mementos a girl might collect.
Sin stands rigid in the middle of the room, heels together, hands clasped at the base of his spine. Sinclair Youngblood Powers, ill at ease in a lady’s boudoir? Unlikely, unless previous insinuation of immodesty still has him smarting. Or maybe he just wants to get on with it.
Yeah, well, me too. “So how do you want to do this? We each take a floor?”
“I suppose,” he says. “Time is of the essence. Let’s do the wing first, since we’re here. I’ll go downstairs.”
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll split the second floor, and move on to the main house if we have to.” At the door I pause, survey his face. “I want to thank you for doing this, Sin.”
“No need,” he says curtly, and descends.
Alone now, I let my fingers trail the wall. The manor seems grand enough without this superfluous addition. Archibald Forsythe compensating for a small penis? Lady Anne nostalgic for some palace from her youth? I creak open a door—dark emptiness inside. Then I remember: The east wing was Antonia’s domain. Had it been built exclusively for her? Were the Forsythes ashamed of their dimwit daughter, locking her away where fancy guests and their own sensibilities wouldn’t be offended? Soon as the thought occurs, I hear her waltz.
Distant, beyond this hall, beyond this floor. Quickly I check the remaining rooms—all blank voids—and hit the stairs.
Though Sin and I planned to reconnoiter on the second floor, I blow past the landing, sure that the wing is a washout. I need to pursue the music.
It beckons, louder now. Also different, the way it plays.
Before, I’d heard my own voice in my own head; now it calls from outside with an eerie, hollow quality . . . an organ? I scope around at the foot of the steps, rush toward the great hall. Only once here, Antonia’s tune is displaced by a tuxedoed figure at a piano—a turbulent composition, Tchaikovsky or some fellow mad Russian. A small assembly leans forward in upholstered chairs, enthralled, and I’m taken in too, ducking for cover behind the potted palms that decorate the hall. From here, I note the high collars and puffed sleeves of the ladies’ attire—very Victorian.
The pianist finishes with a flourish, and one woman leaps from her seat, applauding with passion. Scornful faces disapprove—such a display inappropriate in this prim and proper age. Naturally, I’m thinking along “you go, girl” lines when a sickening wave seizes me. I’d seen this woman earlier, peering through the fissure, and now the room shifts and I’m spying on that same scene again, up close and personal, for real. They’re alone in the room, maestro and devotee. He—mustachioed, nose like a pump handle, eyes ice blue. She—honey-haired, bosomy, screaming. With one hand he holds her torn chemise, with the other he beats her viciously, and though she screams, screams for her life, her eyes maintain that same rapture as when her abusive beloved pummeled the keys.
I stumble out, and as I reel into the foyer, in front of the main stairs, Antonia’s teasing melody comes again. I chase along a familiar hallway, but barge into a room I’d not been inside before. Mucho macho—massive leather chairs, a desk the size of Texas, mounted game staring glassily from the walls. Behind the desk a military man, shoulders like cinder blocks, looks straight at me.
“Close the door, Private.”
It’s an order, so I obey. The soldier motions for my approach.
He’s got the neck and nostrils of a bull, but the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.
“You know, Private, I never wanted to join this man’s army.” Where are we, time-wise? I can’t tell. A uniform is a uniform.
“I wanted to be an actor. Do you find that strange?” I need to reply. I go with “No, sir.”
He grins. “It seems as though I’ll finally get to play my scene.”
I note the decorations across his chest, the pistol on the blotter before him, the brisk, professional manner in which he inserts the gun barrel and pulls the trigger, adding an abstract pattern to the drapes behind him. It elicits a scream. From me.
The soldier has nothing to scream with anymore.
Out of there, out of there, out of there. Toward wherever, wherever, wherever. The studio, as it happens. Although now it appears to be a salon, an intimate alternative to the great hall, where a patron of the arts could entertain in style. Fine furniture, gilt-framed paintings, sculpture on pedestals, an elegant harp, and, against one wall, some kind of small keyboard.
Except forget the decor, I’m far more interested in the room’s animate objects: Antonia Forsythe and Sinclair Youngblood Powers. She in pleats, ruffles, the ubiquitous fichu of mid-eighteenth-century fashion; he in breeches and frock coat.
Weird, since Sin told me his acquaintance with the adolescent mistress had been confined to the garden. If he wasn’t outright lying (which I’ve never known Sin to do), t
he scene I’ve burst in on is currently unfolding or lies ahead. Either way, a singeing dry-ice sensation courses through me—the cold of exclusion, the burn of betrayal—but I can’t do a damn thing about it, only sidestep to observe from the shelter of a panel screen.
There is no music now. Nonetheless, they dance. And how happy Antonia seems. Not that she’ll be landing any Aquafresh commercials, but she’s overcome her reluctance to smile, and her porcelain skin glows. Maybe she hums to him; he certainly holds her close enough to hear as he sweeps her expertly around the room. Totally innocuous, I tell myself, trying to shed my eavesdropper’s anger. On their next swing around, Antonia molds herself to Sin, nesting in the curve of his neck. Hers is a posture of utter surrender, his of entitled command, as his steps become broader, deeper. Now encompassing more of the floor, he pilots her deftly around tables and chairs, statues in silent testimony to this increasingly giddy waltz. With a panther’s grace and a lion’s pride, he takes her for a ride, twirling and dipping, her head and shoulders ultimately arching as her pelvis implants to his center of, among other things, gravity.
Around again, ruling the room, Sin practically brushes the panel screen that I now stand beside, rather than behind.
That’s right, in plain sight, hands on hips and, quite possibly, blowing steam out of both ears. Close enough to smell them, close enough to smack them, for that split second until they glide off.
“Never was any good at ‘look but don’t touch’ myself,” comes a haughty voice behind me. And then a haughty giggle, if there is such a thing. “Especially when ‘touch’ is a euphemism for scratch her eyes out.”
XXXII
Peeling my attention from the SYTYCD wannabes, I find Earline Hampford at my elbow.