by Rumer Haven
“What mews?” Rand asked Chloé. “What bedroom?”
“I don’t know.”
Rand laid his palm over Margot’s knuckles. Feeling his thumb rub across the ripples of her fingers, she clasped his hand, then shook her head at her lap.
“Chloé, I think I understand what your concern is. I do, and I appreciate it. But I’m going to ride this thing out. Whatever happens today”—she looked into Rand’s eyes—“is meant to be.”
“I’ll stay with you tonight,” Chloé said, “To look over—”
“No. You can best help me by going home.” She held on to Rand more firmly.
With her lips downturned and nose slightly crinkled, Chloé watched their hands.
“It’s him, then,” she said.
“Hm?” they both asked.
“Yes, it isn’t you; you were quite right about that. She is him. She comes between us there, and here it will be him.”
Margot’s grip on Rand fossilized.
Tick-tick-tick… The watch keeps time that I can no longer follow.
Our lips meet, their youth preserved in their softness. Yes, soft at first, then hardening and spreading, more slippery with each contact. Together we begin to swell and ebb, lunging against our mutual provocation, and everything that has ever occurred before this passes before my closed eyelids like a magic lantern. Dancing shadows, and nothing more.
“It’s still you and I that are connected, but he—”
“Stop it,” Margot said.
“But can’t you feel how—”
“Stop. God’s sake, my ‘attached spirit,’” she said with exaggerated finger quotations, “didn’t share a cubicle with Rand’s, too.” Margot’s laugh was a direct echo from the Catacombs. “What are the odds, Chloé?”
Chloé’s eyes blazed as her voice shook. “Why is this so difficult to believe? Why any more than how we three have come together from different lands divided by seas? Until now spinning separate lives around our centers. So many seemingly independent actions and relationships, continuing on until suddenly they appear so clearly interconnected, like the threads of a spider’s web glistening in the sunlight when, just at another angle, they were invisible. These are ties dictated by an order that has crossed our paths not only now, but perhaps infinite times before. And not necessarily before or even after, but side by side. Right now, in this space, in this house, in her house—”
“So it is Charlotte’s house. Can you tell for sure?”
“It is and it isn’t. There’s another who—”
“The lady has asked you to stop.” Rand was already at his feet, walking toward the door.
“Rand,” Margot refereed.
“But what if these aren’t spirits that have attached to us but our souls themselves?” Chloé cried. “Reincarnated identities, from a past that’s somehow wrapped around our present, maybe our future, too, and is still happening. The three of us together again…and now in this house. How could we not sense them? And if Charlotte dies tonight! If she shares her soul with—”
“I don’t suppose I ever mentioned,” Rand said as he opened the unit door, “how Gwen was robbed this summer.”
“What does…?” Margot sighed. “Chloé, it isn’t that I don’t believe something supernatural is happening here. I just don’t understa—”
“No?” Rand continued, stepping into the doorway between the living room and foyer. “Well, it so happened that she made the acquaintance of some—‘French slag’ is how I believe she endearingly phrased it, who’d seduced her into her confidences, then got her high and tried to cuckold me in an underground stable of all places!” He laughed in his silly high pitch.
Chloé’s spine straightened as the muscles in her jaw clenched. So did Margot’s.
“Well,” he said, looking directly at Chloé, “as far as I understand, Gwen spurned the advances, but it seems the little tart didn’t go away completely empty-handed. She’d nicked an antique pocket watch, the one Gwen had purchased at auction as a gift for me and was carrying that day to obtain estimates for repair. I suppose the whole incident was humiliating for her; I had to persuade her to file a police report. Never did find the culprit, though the report was detailed enough with physical features.”
Chloé stared intently ahead. Margot watched her.
“She seems to want nothing more to do with this woman,” he said, “even at the expense of that watch. So I wonder if things went further than she’d let on, whether she’d wanted them to or did it just to get back at me, and, in confusion or guilt, omitted some details she did know. Perhaps a surname or actual first name…or where the girl was enrolled in classes.” He leaned exaggeratedly to look at Margot. “Or indeed any mutual acquaintances. I presume Gwen distrusted them as much by association. I see, that does make sense now. And the scoundrel probably counted on as much, figuring she could go on unrecognized.” He stepped out of Margot’s sight toward the unit door. She could hear the knob wobbling loosely on its screw, probably strangled in Rand’s hand. “But, well, it was a good story, anyway. I apologize that I never shared that one with you.”
He remained standing there, waiting for Chloé, who said nothing but collected her clutch purse and crossed the room to the sofa where Margot sat. Unless Rand leaned over again, they were both out of his line of sight. He didn’t, and Chloé bent to kiss Margot on the forehead, dropping something into her lap as she did so.
While her lips lingered at Margot’s hairline, her low-hanging collar exposed her small breasts, and Margot could smell a citrusy yet grassy perfume drift off them. Then, with hesitation, Chloé’s lips slackened and started to travel lower, brushing down the bridge of Margot’s nose in slow succession until…
Their lips met. Soft at first, then hardening and spreading, more slippery with each contact.
With a wince in her throat, Chloé detached, her taste buds slowly filing against Margot’s teeth as she withdrew. Standing up straight, she bit her lower lip, fused her gaze to Margot’s, and then walked toward the open door. Margot didn’t hear Rand click on the stairwell light for her before slamming the door to his property shut.
Margot flinched at the impact and raised the silver pocket watch from her lap.
“Something she stole from you?” Rand asked as he reentered the room. If he’d just heard their interaction, he didn’t reveal it.
She pressed her lips, running her tongue along their inner seam to taste the sweet, nicotine-steeped saliva that had glossed them, before sighing in exasperation. “No. It’s hers. Well, yours, actually.”
“Ah, the taker is a giver.”
“Rand.” She was exhausted.
“Margot,” he imitated. “She’s deceived you. And to think she’s been round here before without either of us knowing. Nothing but a common thief.”
She fingered the wet stain left by a teardrop Chloé had also dropped onto her thigh. “With highly uncommon means, don’t you think?”
“Theft, fortune-telling, and seduction are all very old practices.”
“Look, I’m not defending her, all right? I have no fucking clue what went down with Gwen,” and it could’ve been Chloé who wrote all that weird shit in my diary while she was over here, including today, “but that would’ve been one hell of an elaborate ruse just to snatch my purse.”
“Or snatch your snatch.”
Okay, so maybe he had heard. She snorted in spite of herself, unable to refute that Chloé was at ease with her physical appetite if not her psychic ability.
Staring down at the watch’s frozen hands, Margot felt the impetus to move on its behalf, to go as far as packing her things and booking the next flight to Chicago. But she just sat, thinking.
“When two souls are connected,” Rand eventually repeated in her silence, “what do you suppose happens…” He squinted. “I don’t understand what, ah, you and Chloé had been…” He moved to the sofa and sat beside her, taking the watch away and setting it on the coffee table to hold her hand again. “I mean
, why she wanted to watch over you. I don’t know what to expect, what may or may not happen, but regardless…”
Heat radiated into Margot’s hand from his palm, and she gave a gentle smirk.
“Stop stalling, Englishman,” she said softly.
Rand released his grip to caress his fingertips to and fro along her forearm.
“Well, if you’d allow it, I’d like to stay with you tonight.”
And so, acting oblivious of the fears Chloé had planted in their minds—the fears of what consequence Charlotte’s death that day could possibly have on Margot’s life that night—Margot and Rand shared a small mezze platter dinner and talked late into the evening.
Staying in their day clothes, they eventually moved to her bedroom, where they lay on her mattress and continued talking to exhaustion, running the gamut of ordinary topics like work, school, religion, politics, and family as they tried to stay awake. Margot tucked herself under the sheets as he, ever the gentleman, reclined above them. But after a while, he curled an arm over her, holding her peacefully, and she soon heard his sleep-deepened breathing as her memories of the day veered and collided and shattered into the speckled blackness of an emptying mind…
Until, with a jerk, his grip on her forearm tightened.
His breath seized, and she opened her eyes to seek his in the dark.
I peer through blackness and cease respiration as I behold the pale contours of her bobbing form.
Rand shuddered and gripped Margot closely, his face wet against her neck. He caught his breath so suddenly that Margot whirled out of her half-sleep to look at him, alarmed at his rigidity and fearing he’d had a seizure.
“Sorry. I-I’m all right,” he finally uttered, out of breath. “I must’ve, been dreaming, stopped breathing…like, I was drowning.” Margot rubbed his back as he gasped against her. “Like my lungs were collapsing…and then this heaviness, on my heart…” He curled his head back down to her chest and sobbed.
Margot wrapped her arms around him tighter and stroked his hair as she pressed her cheek to the top of his head. For everything she’d experienced that summer, this was the most frightening, and she just tried to comfort them both with her embrace.
But soon she felt it, too. Not a drowning sensation, but a hybrid of emotion that penetrated her breast profoundly.
Crying out, she heaved and twisted to clutch him.
“No. No, no!” I cry, and my scream shrills through my bones. I clutch at her body and bury my face into her wet neck.
Dampened in perspiration, they panted as they clung to each other, holding fast and quivering as a single entity.
Drenched, I cling to her, vibrating into her with all my trembling, a tragic union of two bodies, with but one soul left between us.
“No!” Margot screamed as she woke with a jolt.
Rand pulled her back down and smoothed her hair, unusually calm now for the terrors that had plagued him through the night. She stretched out her limbs and rested on her back, out of breath. He wiped her eyes, and she opened them to look at him, see him softly lit from behind by the rising sun. Gently, she laid her hand on his, where it rested beside her face.
“You’re here,” she said. “Now.”
He grinned. “So I am. So are you.”
V
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
(it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate,
chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become
not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass— you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
~ Walt Whitman (1900)
Interlude
She I Was Seeking
19th-Century London
WE HAVE BEGUN ANEW. We have, haven’t we?
No one need scorn, after all, for no one need know, with the exception of ourselves, whom we can mutually trust will take the past year’s events to our very graves, one of us already having done so…
Ah, but my story is not yet complete. To tell it full is to return to the woman of my bedside, she who strengthened what a child had tormented with premature death and a doctor bled dry…
Following my miscarriage in April of this year, Mama, in her way, did in due course seek to bring relief to my weakening state. She had therefore compelled Victor toward her conviction that a séance would be just the solution to break this dreaded curse shrouding our house. He morosely consented; I believe he did it more so to make a spectacle of my failure than because he ever really thought such an event would bring about the desired outcome. I was humiliated, but in my weak condition could do nothing but comply.
And thus we sat late evening, outside the protection of sunlight, at the oval table in our parlor as the five-shilling medium presided with his planchette. Mama had tired of table-tipping, finding its efficacy lost after the time it had unsettled her wine, so this alternative method of divination would surely perform as prescribed.
The servants were dismissed to their quarters, all but my lady’s maid, my friend, whom I demanded remain. This I declared with my eyes leveled at Victor’s. He remained mute on the issue thenceforth, though did his eyes speak volumes as they flickered from her to myself. Regardless, she remained, seated at my side and Mama’s. For good measure (Mama would not rest until we had acquired eight participants in sum), my brother, his wife, and a woman of Mama’s acquaintance were present as well. When all were settled, the gaslights were dimmed.
After a failed attempt to contact Papa, the medium availed to summon a spirit that could bring us tidings of the future, or tap directly into the malevolent being responsible for our unhappiness, such that its influence could be dispelled.
As the planchette swept and swerved across the table, I did not observe any details of relevance. A spirit—revealed only to us as “M”—appeared mildly receptive to our entreaties. “She,” according to the medium, exuded an aura of sadness, uncertainty, weakness, yet gained more power the more we communicated with her… So much so, that she began to turn the tables, so to speak, in directing questions at us. The medium began scribbling on a slate the messages he claimed to receive directly from “M” and could only presume were intended for me, the pathetic focus of this distasteful exhibition, who was then to compose my responses through the planchette.
The questions were posed: my age, when I was born, and when I died. My mood became increasingly obstinate toward this sensational exploitation of my frailty, ever more so when the same question was repeated and Victor could not contain his smug laughter.
Meeting his eyes directly across the table in the low light, I asserted, “I live!” with a pound of my fist upon the table.
“May I, Madam?” my friend asked, releasing the planchette from my hand and gallantly laying her own calloused fingers upon it in my stead. She closed her eyes as though in deep concentration, yet her hands did not move, shuddering, rather, in place, enough so to vibrate the full surface of the table. Even in the dampened light, I could see the glint of her tears. Victor snorted.
“My dear,” Mama said to her. “If it is too much…”
Slowly, she opened her eyes, though kept them lowered to her lap. She turned her head gradually toward me to say just quietly, “The dilemma is, Madam, that I cannot…”
I knew it horrified her to validate what shortcomings in education we all surely expected, yet to have it floating on the air to meet
our ears; ah, my poor dear. It was courageous.
I released my own fingers from wringing in my lap and returned their tips to the planchette surface, just beside hers. “Let us spell the responses together,” I said and then whispered my thought into her ear.
Her eyes illuminated with inner moonlight at this, and, together, we spelled out the emblem of our friendship—the brooch of pearl and indigo stones—to communicate to this “spirit” all that mattered to either of us anymore, regardless of what came of my condition. We did so swiftly, before any of the rest could decipher it for his or her own amusement.
“Shall we provide our signature?” I said in mockery, to which she replied:
“Let it be my name, Madam. For your protection.”
Not being superstitious, I consented and, slowly through our fingers’ dance, revealed to her the symbols that spelled her own identity. And so it was that we signed off in the name of Charlotte Pidgeon and sealed a private contract that we had made with one another.
I do not know whether it was the emotion of it or the closeness of the room, perfumed now with verbena and made hazy with the low-burning gases that glowed bronze and rippled the burgundy velvet surrounding us—but I began to swoon, and Charlotte caught me in her arms as I fainted.
Our bedside friendship continued to meld and purify into something precious as through wonders of alchemy, and, in the weeks to follow, nothing unsettled my mind until one morning she did not readily come to me.
Feeling stronger and already having left my bed to walk about the floor several days thus, I tested my energies in ascending the stairs to the third floor, where my friend slept when not at my side.
