It is almost a disappointment. I say almost, because just then I have the strangest feeling. I suppose one might say it is like dreaming while still being awake, though how such a thing should come about I do not know. I cannot say whether I am naming it right or not, and opening my eyes to ask seems like the very worst thing to do.
Everyone will think I am a buffoon—the others are so quiet and settled! And Mr. Hartley doesn’t say a word, so this must be what the device is intended for. To make you dream while you’re awake, on seas of such vivid color that I almost gasp.
I am in a great, green maze the likes of which I have never actually witnessed, and all about me each leaf curls perfectly, each twig or blade of grass stands out as bright as the sun. My own mind has never conjured up such vitality—I’m quite aware of that. And as I traverse this half-dreaming world, I see a sky above me, of a different hue than it is naturally.
I see a hundred things that do not occur naturally and yet seem so real and right that for a moment my breath is stopped. There are trees at the heart of the maze, and they have veils for leaves, and at the very center of all of this is a gleaming spire that reaches up to the violet-shot sky.
I fervently hope that none of the others have opened their eyes. If they were to, I’m sure they would wonder why a tear has found its way down over my cheek. In truth, I am wondering why a tear has found its way down over my cheek too, because there is nothing all that wonderful about a spire and the trees with leaves flowing like air and my heart, oh my heart.
How dull the world seems, next to this dreaming place. I want more than anything to open my eyes and thank him, for creating something so lovely out of something so smoke driven and mechanical, but I fear I will make a fool of myself. Perhaps this is all only my imagination and not his device at all. Perhaps I am simply not thinking clearly, because then everything in the scene melts away like a painting running, and suddenly I am in a corridor made out of tapestries.
I walk through it all—the blood reds and the swirling greens and everything so lush, so lush, and at the very end all is darkness. I cannot see a thing. But then a match is struck, a single match, and I see Mr. Hartley standing there in this pitch-black alcove, his eyes burning so bright a blue it’s like the heat at the center of a flame.
“What are you here for?” he asks, and oh, I have no clue. I cannot bear to know. He takes my hand just as he did all those years ago, and I feel it in the exact same way I did then. As though the electric current comes from him, not some steam-powered machine.
My body heats all the way through—all the way from my too-red face, right down to the tips of my toes. I can feel each finger he’s touching exactly, and when he moves closer to me I do what I would never dare to in real life. I sway closer to him, as though we’re magnets and metal. As though I cannot help it, and I suppose that is true.
I cannot. I want to edge closer to him, and feel every word he speaks with that mean mouth—because he says so little and yet I am certain he says so much. He is the ghost who tries to speak without a mouth, he is the center of my maze, the gleaming spire, oh, lord why am I thinking any of this?
Perhaps he is making me, I consider—yes, perhaps. It could be that the very purpose of his machine is to fit strange images and fantasies into a young woman’s mind, then have his wicked way with her. And yet I do not believe so, I cannot believe so, it could not be true, could it? What, by god, would a man like him ever want with a woman like me?
And he would never imagine something so simpering and lovelorn, I know it. If this were real life, he would not say, “I know why you are here.” He would not blow out the match and gather me up in his arms like he would a swooning maiden; he would not kiss my lips with such soft pressure that I am quite undone.
My heart beats slow and thick, now, as though the entirety of my insides have been coated in syrup. I cannot see where I begin or this waking dream ends, though I know I do things that I would never. I am practically a spinster now—these things are not for me. I should not let him unlace my nightgown and pull it from my shoulders, so that he might kiss each one.
And yet I do, I do. I tell my mind that is just a dream, and let the warm waves of whatever this is flow over me, one after the other. I think of kissing—oh, how I have always wondered what it would be like—and lo and behold, here it is. Here is how it would feel exactly, perfectly, not like a dream at all but rich with sensation. The fine shimmer of something touching my lips, the way it forms a web that spirals out through each muscle and nerve in my face, my throat, my body. The heady sensation of something slick against a part of myself and then the pouring knowledge that it is someone else, another person.
In all my days I have never experienced such a thing—this feeling of someone else longing for me and wishing to touch me. It heightens every little thing—even something as innocent as two hands on my bare shoulders.
Though I suppose such a thing is hardly innocent at all. It isn’t innocent to be bare in front of a strange man—one you’ve barely uttered a word to. We’ve shared no more than three sentences in all the time we’ve moved in the same circles, and yet when he runs those fingers I so hoped for down my spine—the one that isn’t mine but the machine’s, the machine’s—I tremble. My body aches in a way I am sure it has never done, and I feel my nipples stiffening beneath the softness of my chemise, the rough edge of my corset.
It is how this dream body feels and reacts to things, I know, but still I feel it in my real self, too. I sit on this little chair in his dark parlor and thrum with a new kind of heartbeat—one that beats hardest between my legs. It is something that I’ve only previously encountered privately, in some idle and obscure sort of way, but here it is strong and rich and oh, how shameful, in front of all these people.
How awful, that I want to press myself tightly against this mean little chair and have that sensation swell and blossom—though really I have no need of physical action. When his mouth touches my throat in this dream state, my whole body sings like a string that’s been plucked. My sex grows slick and plump—I know it does. I know of these things and I hardly want to turn them away at all.
What other things could he do? I think, but the dream does not require logic or sense or questioning. Everything just happens as though it is real, in a way I could never think of—as when he puts that mean mouth to my breast and kisses me there, too.
I am quite sure that I would never think of such a thing. I certainly don’t know what it would feel like, until his lips part over the bud of my nipple—so loosely covered by a flimsy nightgown—and then pluck and pull at it.
Like kissing, I think, only not on the mouth.
And it feels so…correct, too. I know it does. If one were to kiss a lady in such a way, the material of her nightgown would grow damp and every sensation would seem doubled, because of the chafe of the material and the slow spread into slickness.
All of which I feel, even in this strange dream state. I can feel the moisture and feel the heat of his mouth, and when he pushes one hand between my legs I can feel that, too. Oh, he is wicked, Mr. Hartley. So very wicked and quite improper—though really, what does it matter, here?
I suppose I should feel even more ashamed now, with images of him almost kneeling before me, his hand between my legs and his mouth on my breast—and yet curiously I do not. With each passing moment my shame slips away, and a new sort of idea takes hold of me.
Go ahead, this new idea tells me. Ask him to do more.
And though I hardly think I can, my dream self grasps at the opportunity well enough. My dream self lifts her nightgown and implores him to continue, and when she does he looks up at her with those cold eyes—only now they are very far from cold. Now they seem bright and fierce with some strange, lost sort of emotion, and that fire in him only intensifies when he slips his fingers over my bare flesh.
I part my legs and he follows me exactly, probing my sex in a tentative way, at first. But then after a moment I can see he wa
nts more of me, and in truth I want it too. I want to feel what it is to have a man stroke through those slippery folds, and uncover my little hidden bead and the waiting hollow of my sex. I want to feel it and he does not deny me, rubbing over things I had long forgotten, parting and fondling and oh, dear, oh, dear, I cannot tell if I have gasped aloud in the dream, or in reality.
I strain to hear if anyone else is making a single sound, but it is far too complicated to experience one world while trying to know things in another. All my attention needs to be in this place, this place where I am kissed and loved and spread over the bed.
I believe I am naked, now, but the idea does not seem to concern me. Mr. Hartley is naked too, but that hardly concerns me, either. He is as strong and firm as I imagined him to be—broad shouldered and silky smooth in places I thought he might be coarsely furred. I run my hands down over his bare chest, and a great pang goes through me to think I will never know whether this is real or not.
I will never know the real Mr. Hartley. This is just a dream-demon, perfect in its feel and shape, passionate in his kisses that he lays on my throat, my breasts, my mouth. I kiss him back with as much ardor as I can muster, because there is one benefit of this dream state, if nothing else.
It does not matter what I do. All of it may not be real, but it does not matter what I do. I have real freedom here, for the first time in my life, and I use it to taste the hot, wet insides of his mouth, the curve of his shoulder, the firm smoothness of his chest—and to my delight, he gasps when I do. Mr. Hartley, who in life is as stoic as a block!
Oh, what an invention he has made here. What a delight! I kiss him and kiss him until he is quite wild with it, until—even better—he takes my hand in a kind of frantic clutch, and pushes it down between his own legs.
Ah, he is a wanton, I think, and love him for being so. I want to touch him as he touched me, and I do so with an abandon I don’t actually possess. I circle my hand around that thick, stiff pole he has, and feel its exact shape and size. I feel how it gives beneath my touch—only slightly—and how he bucks into my grasp when I tighten it.
And then I thank Mr. Hartley, for letting me see and feel all of this. I could never have created it on my own, never. I would hardly know how to begin with something like this—even the smoothness of the shaft is a surprise to me. So many things about it are a shock to my own half-held imaginings, and most of it comes from Mr. Hartley panting that I should not stop.
When he looks at me with his suddenly heavy-lidded eyes, his body all strung tight like a bow and his mouth so close to my own, I am sure I would do anything for him. I do not know why he even feels the need to demand—in truth he does not need to.
I want to give him everything he wants. I tell him to.
“Take me,” I say, and he covers my body with his own.
How great he seems, how heavy and all encompassing. I shrink beneath him, and yet it hardly takes anything to spread my legs around the hard push of his body. It is more difficult for me when he looks into my eyes and won’t let me turn away, then asks me if I have ever known how much he has wanted me. How much he longs for me.
I cannot answer. It is splitting me in two, this lie inside myself. This truth inside myself—that I have always thought so much of him. That is, after all, what this device is for. I can see it clearly—it is intended to draw out the viewer’s deepest fantasies. Their most closely held desires.
And here is mine, in all its slow, sad, rawness. My love for Mr. Hartley is like a hand, reaching out to clasp at nothing.
“I love you, darling Elspeth,” he says, and I know that isn’t true because Mr. Hartley would never say such a thing. Not ever—not even when naked and entwined with his lover.
Still, I feel it strongly when his stiff shaft slides through my folds and finally, finally pushes deep into that empty hollow inside me. I think I cry out, though this time I do not care if it is dream or reality—it feels so different and so lovely compared to the thing I had expected that I am sure no one would care.
My sister has spoken often of the pain, the pain, but there is no pain here. It feels instead like I have a fist tight around something, something that needed pressure and firmness in a way I had never thought about. And when he ruts against me, rough and completely shameless, great ripples of pleasure run through my body.
I can hardly believe it. I don’t believe it. This is not real, I think, then cling to him anyway, rocking hard against that delicious sensation so that when I am old and gray I can remember it. I will have it always now, this thing, this memory of sex-that-isn’t-quite-sex, and oh, Mr. Hartley I am so grateful to you for that! I do not care what your intentions are, I do not care what this machine was built for.
I only care that you have given me this, this feeling of someone hard and good in my arms, his mouth on my upturned throat and the sense of him inside me, rubbing against nerves that feel like stars, bursting.
“I love you,” he tells me, over and over, and I cling to him as tight as I can. I try to absorb everything—the feel of his skin when my nails bite in, the taste of him, so salt-sweet. The climactic reaches of that final sensation as it pulses through me, and the sound of him groaning as he takes his own measure of it.
It is almost like being wrung out, to have to come back to reality. In the background I can hear the machine winding down, but for a long moment I don’t want to open my eyes. The images are gone, but I don’t want to open them.
If I do, perhaps I will forget what all of that was like.
“Elspeth?”
Kitty has put a hand over mine, so I suppose I must look. One cannot remain with one’s eyes closed forever—though it is even more of a disappointment than I had dared to think of, when I finally open them.
No one has even noticed what went on inside of me. They are all twittering amongst themselves about the elephant they saw in their heads, or the memory they had reenacted that they had believed was long forgotten.
And I suppose I should be grateful for that. I should be grateful that the device truly is about drawing forth a person’s most secret wishes, and that I have not shamed myself in some way with strange noises or movements or any other such thing.
I should, but I am not. I stand quite reluctantly and then just stare at Mr. Hartley’s turned back. He is fiddling with his machine, now, and hardly seems to register that people are leaving—though he asked them to, not a minute since.
Of course they all obey, because Mr. Hartley is a genius. Mr. Hartley is a cold, reclusive genius, and we must all put up with his odd ways if we want to be asked back.
Though when I think about it, something about that attitude seems very unkind. It is, after all, steeped in the assumption that I had of Mr. Hartley only a few short minutes ago—that he is cruel, and unkind, and worst of all…miserly.
And this thought gnaws at me so hard that I wait, I wait and wait until everyone has left his parlor and it is only him, standing by his machine. When he turns, I am fairly certain he believed everyone had gone—the look on his face says as much. It is naked, briefly, and quite full of that same aching loneliness I had felt, upon realizing that I would never experience anything like that in reality.
“Is everything quite all right, Miss Havers?” he asks, and for a second I wonder if he knows. But then the second passes and that urge wells up in me again, that urge to correct my long assumptions about Mr. Hartley—even though he cannot know I have them.
“You are so very generous, Mr. Hartley,” I say, because that is the truth. “You are so very generous to share an invention like that.”
Of course I expect him to dismiss me in some way—or laugh, perhaps. But he does not. Instead he takes my hand quite suddenly and all the electricity in the world pours through him, to me. And then he says, with his eyes flashing fierce and bright—just as they had in my dream—
“I did it for you, Miss Havers. I made dreams come to life for you.”
A DEMONSTRATION OF AFFECTION
/> Elizabeth Coldwell
I was deep in the heart of the windmill’s mechanism, wrench in hand, when someone banged the knocker down hard on the front door.
“Get that, would you, Smithy?” the professor called, raising his voice above the faint hum of machinery. The fact that I must crawl out from a tightly confined space while all he had to do was step down from the low wooden platform on which he stood did not seem to occur to him. The professor never answered his own door, not when he had an assistant to act as a buffer between himself and the outside world.
I didn’t complain, even as I scraped my knee against a jutting piece of metal in my haste. I had known about the man’s many infuriating habits from the day we met, yet I was prepared to overlook them all for the honor of working alongside him.
The heavy iron knocker slammed against the door again, more insistently this time.
“Coming!” I yelled, speculating as I did on the possible identity of our unexpected caller.
We almost never received visitors. The professor had chosen to live in such a remote location deliberately to discourage anyone who might interfere with his work. Only those with the most urgent need to see him would trek down the rutted cart path that led to the windmill.
Or, I realized as I opened the front door, someone with a financial investment in the professor’s many projects. Standing on the threshold, shaking drops of water from her heavy black umbrella, was his current benefactor.
“Lady Portway, how pleasant to see you. Do come in out of the rain.”
“Thank you, Miss Smith.”
As I ushered her inside and helped her to remove her overcoat, I felt as ungainly and awkward in her presence as I always had. Not only did I stand a head taller than her, even with her in dainty boots that laced to the knee, but there were smudges of engine grease on my face, grime under my fingernails and a button missing from the front of my overalls. Lady Portway, in contrast, despite the length of her journey from the metropolis, looked sweetly feminine and fresh as a daisy.
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