by Trish Telep
He sees Clarice--no, her name's not Clarice. She could never be called Clarice. Isabelle. That's her name. Belle for short, or Izzy, if Matt's in the mood to tease her. She's beautiful. Her hair is black, and the light from the screen turns it into a fathomless, shimmering oil slick surrounding her white, white face.
She shouldn't be here. The Glimmerlight is a bad spot in a bad part of town, and Matt can already see Lenny Hastings, the meathead from down the block, elbowing his buddies and staring at Isabelle like she's meat and he's hungry.
Matt Edison makes the one move of his young life that could be considered brave. He sits down beside Isabelle and says "Hello. I'm Matt."
She says, "I'm sorry, do I know you?" Drawing back. Too late, he sees her pressed navy dress, the red tie at her throat, the red scarf draped on the back of her seat. Academy girl. What the hell is she doing in Old Town?
"I just ... you shouldn't be here." All the Jimmy Slater is gone. Now it's just Matt Edison again, stuttering dunce Matt Edison. "There's some bad types, and ..."
Isabelle smiles. Her lips are red as her scarf. "And you thought you'd protect me?"
Matt knows he's turning colors, can feel the blood beating through him screaming, "Retreat!" before he gets the Proctors called on himself for molesting an Academy student.
"I don't know what I thought," he admits. Isabelle turns, bold as brass, and stares at Lenny Hastings. And for some reason, rather than waggling his tongue or making obscene gestures, Lenny Hastings looks away. He folds into himself, like he's hollow. A moment later, he lurches from the theater, holding his stomach.
Isabelle looks at Matt. She smiles. Her teeth are perfect. She is perfect. She says, "Won't you sit with me for the rest of the picture?"
* * *
This is what happened:
Matt did meet Isabelle that night, except it was she who came to sit by him. He saw her hair and skin in the silver light, and he knew right then he'd write a story about her. They barely talked, whispers he couldn't recall for the life of him, and when she slipped her hand into his, it was as if his eyes were open and he could see all the corners of the universe, planets and galaxies turning like clockwork about the bright spindle of Isabelle's eyes.
He could see things he shouldn't see, like the creeping hands of Lenny Hastings under Marjorie Thompkins's blouse. He could hear things he shouldn't hear, the click and whirl of the lantern projector, the whisper of a man and a woman not his wife two rows down and five seats over.
Matt asked Isabelle, as his stomach lurched and his heart clenched, "What are you?"
Isabelle just smiled.
When Matt gets home he fishes his pens and a year-old copy of his father's Engineworks handbook out of his mattress and writes in the margins. He's never written a story like this before. It's full of blood and madness, inscrutable oracles and gods that drift through the icy reaches of the stars. There is a beautiful girl, who leads the hero to a pool in the forest, a pool that will tell him the truth. He looks in, and what he sees there causes him to throw himself in. The truth is too horrible to contemplate. Matt is awake until four in the morning. His job has him up at five. He writes. He gets a letter. It is dashed off by hand, and the ink is blue, not black. It bleeds like a water stain.
Matt,
Thanks a bunch for sending me "The Tale of the Black Pool." This is what I'm talking about. We're putting together an all-Elder Gods issue, and I'd like to run this. Pay is sixteen dollars plus a comp copy of the mag. Drop me a line if that's acceptable, and I'll put a check in the mail.
Hiram Messer
Matt Edison is speechless. All he knows, as he goes about finding a clean sheet of paper and walking to the post office on legs like stumps, is that he has to find Isabelle. He hasn't really slept since he typed and mailed his story. That was a week ago. He can't feel the skin on the small parts of himself--fingers, nose, ears. There's a constant hum in his ears. He's hungry but food won't stay down.
He goes back to the Glimmerlight, up and down every street and alley in Old Town. He wanders, feet heavy, and there's a wetness in his sock that lets him know his toes are bleeding. He's walked for hours. He doesn't dare venture into Uptown looking like this. He'll be taken for a heretic--arrested, interrogated. They'll take away his paper and pens.
Matt knows if he could just touch Isabelle again, all of it would stop. The very Earth would stop on its axis, and he'd be well.
And then like a ghost, she's there, coming out of a hat shop on Blackinton Close. Matt tries to call to her, but his throat has dried up. Still she turns. Sees him. Says, "I'm so sorry, Matt."
He says again, "What are you?"
Isabelle dips her head, and under the shadow of her new school hat her eyes are infinity, starlight on deep water. "I'm sorry, Matt."
"What did you do to me?"
Matt can see Isabelle wants to run away very badly. Her feet shift and her fingers twitch and her lithe, white body sways. "You did something to me," he whispers, because talking scrapes his throat raw. "I wrote about you, but I can still see you."
Isabelle makes her decision, moves, and takes his hand. Matt knows at that moment he needs Isabelle, will always need her, and knows also--because he's not as stupid as his father thinks--that he was a marked man that night in the Glimmerlight. A schmuck, sitting alone, watching a stupid adventure serial when he should have been out sneaking drinks and picking up girls, like Lenny.
Matt decides he doesn't care. She came back, and now the stories bursting out of his head can be born. He can almost hear another voice, entirely separate from his own, coarse and gravelly like Slater's.
The drowning girl came in his dreams, and dragged her warm wet finger across his lips. She whispered, and told him everything he never wanted to know.
His fingers start to itch and he needs to write, needs to replace his blood with ink on paper.
"Come with me," Isabelle says, and leads him from the crush of Old Town down to the rotted parts by the Erebus River, where nobody lives anymore. Not since the Proctors burned the ghouls and critters out of Lovecraft with their great machines.
"I can't answer you," Isabelle says when she reaches the last house before the river, its bulk leaning to the left, a turret spiking a rusted finial into the sky. "You asked what I was and I can't tell you, but I'll show you."
She opens the door, and the last thing Matt Edison hears before he's forever lost to the noises of the wide-awake world is the ticking of great, hungry clockwork.
* * *
This is what happened:
Matt Edison doesn't die, not right away. He did not meet Isabelle by happenstance but found her waiting for him on his stoop when he stumbled home, finally--feet bloody and fever raging through his bloodstream.
He's not so happy to see her. "What the hell did you do to me?" he demands. Still, he can't help but notice she's beautiful, pale and dark at the same time, and that her eyes are so deep, like that black pool in the story he's just sold that morning.
Isabelle looks at her shoes. "It's complicated."
Matt has never had a girl interested in him, never mind one on his front stoop. He's fifteen. Isabelle looks even younger, but at the same time, he knows that she's already older than he'll ever get. She moves as if the air parts before her, like she could leap across distances and hit her mark effortlessly.
He's mad as hell, but she's still beautiful. Matt is human. He notices.
"Uncomplicate it," he says. His throat is on fire and he's coughing up globs of green and blood. There's no money for a doctor, and he's not sure he wants one anyway, because they'd make him explain the things he's been seeing, and then he'd get carted off to the madhouse. Just another victim of the necrovirus. Madness in the blood, the cause of all the world's ills. So the Proctors say.
Isabelle is at his side, as if she never moved. She looks him over, and she's not beautiful in that moment. She's hard, searching. "Can you walk?"
"Been walking, ain't I?" Matt says. Horrible gramm
ar, and in front of a girl--a well-bred girl at that. That should show how sick he is.
"You weren't supposed to run out of the theater," Isabelle says, and she takes him by the coat and gets him moving. "You were supposed to offer to walk me home."
"I got nervous," Matt admits. "You're ... you're out of my league."
"You have no idea," Isabelle agrees, and they walk.
To the rotting house. To the front door. Where Isabelle turns to him and says, "I'm going to show you something very few see. I don't bring people home."
Even her way of speaking is old, her accent melodious, and Matt is gripped by the story-voice all over again, only this time it's the inhuman whisper of cold space and deep oceans.
The drowning girl will rise at the end of the world and tell you everything you never wanted to know.
Not a bad opener, as far as they go.
Matt Edison knows one certainty--that Isabelle is not a girl, and that he will follow her into that house because he can't not follow her. He needs her now, needs her touch to awaken the story voices. On a much deeper level, needs her touch on his skin, on his scars. Needs to touch her in return--that pale smooth ivory that has no human tissue or veins beneath it.
Needs. Needs. In a way that he thought only existed in the stories he wrote and read.
Isabelle says, "It's dark. Hold my hand."
Matt Edison steps over the threshold. The house smells bad, the acrid stench of dry rot and the choking damp of mildew in his nose. Everything is wrapped in sheets, and the walls are massively cracked and patched. Dust is so thick the air is yellow-gray before his face.
Isabelle is a vapor in the near dark. All he sees is the glow of her skin.
When Matt touches her hand, he gets a rush, a rush of blood and a rush of whispers in his ears, whispers that cannot possibly be real, because he and Isabelle are the only people there. He feels that if he doesn't write down some of the snippets of phrases and babbling, his skull might explode.
He tries to just breathe, and Isabelle takes him into the kitchen. It hasn't been used in recent memory. Thick furry mold creeps black out of the sink drain and the icebox stands with the door hanging open. A few rusted tins of wartime rations linger on a dusty shelf, but that's it in the way of comfort. Someone has cut cardboard and propped it in all the windows, so only the thinnest razors of light leak in to slice designs on the filthy, encrusted tile floor.
"It's not much," Isabelle says, "but it's my home."
"I think it's swell," Matt lies gamely. "You get to live here all by yourself?"
She looks at the toes of her shoes. She reaches for his hand again, but before she touches him, Matt feels a pain in his back teeth, like somebody's blowing a dog whistle. Isabelle looks up at the water-stained plaster, fallen away in chunks, making a map of a world nothing like their own.
"I have to go upstairs," she says, and for the first time her face is something other than perfectly serene. "Matt, you have to stay here. Promise me you'll sit in a chair and you won't move from this spot."
"I ..." Matt starts, and she grabs his shoulders. He can see all of her small, white teeth, as she grimaces in panic.
"Promise me."
"I promise," he says. Truthfully, Matt is baffled. This place, this dirty house, Isabelle's panic--it's not what he imagined for a beautiful creature like her.
Isabelle disappears up the stairs, and Matt sits, listening to the clock above the coal-fired stove ticking off the seconds, then the minutes, then the hours.
* * *
This is what happened:
It was pretty much as Matt wrote it. Although the whispers weren't as ethereal as he makes them out to be. In the part of his mind that didn't balk at the idea, he was pretty sure that the whispers were coming from other rooms, directly to his ears, like voices over the aether waves.
And Matt is a teenage kid. He doesn't stay put for more than eight or ten minutes after Isabelle leaves. He starts with just poking around the kitchen, looking in the cabinets and finding only chipped plates and cups, the occasional bent spoon or a fork missing half its tines.
He remembers thinking, What does she eat?
He doesn't want to go back down the dark hall, where wallpaper peels and hangs like dead moss from the branches of trees. He waits. He taps his foot. It seems like a long time, but really, it's seconds.
Matt knows he's going to open the door before he actually does so, the door that Isabelle had gone through, the one that leads up dark stairs to a cramped hall lit only by the orange of a single oil lantern. The house is so old it's not even got aether piped in for light and heat and all the things a person needs to live.
A person, Matt thinks. But not Isabelle.
His footsteps creak and crack, but nobody opens any of the thin, water-spotted doors to scold him. None of the rusty knobs turn. The house is silent, even of whispers.
In the manner of all old houses built across decades, the hallway veers. A thin pair of double doors greet him. Matt knows he shouldn't snoop, should turn around and leave while he still can, but even then he's not sure he could find his way back, out onto the street and to the places he's known before as "real."
He wouldn't turn back in one of his stories. Wouldn't even think of it. And what good now is the real Matt Edison? He's a dumb kid, a coward who can't even tell his own father to lay off him, who can't talk to beautiful girls. He'd do better to become one of his stories, to disappear into that world where men are brave and women need rescuing and everything always works out in the last paragraph.
Matt pushes open the door. He thinks the room might have been a library once. There're empty shelves and snowdrifts of yellowed paper and empty moth-eaten book spines. The light here is that pale yellow-green of approaching storms; a kind of light he's only seen once before, when a hurricane was blowing up the Erebus River from the Atlantic.
That sound, the one that caused his teeth to ache, comes again. Matt can see the source now. The room is taken over with clockwork. It spews and sprawls and climbs up the walls, in every crevice, every crack. Gears and rods bite into plaster, bolts gouging out large chunks of masonry. The entire room is a great device, and he sees clear glass pipes running amongst the iron. In the center, suspended from delicate wires so thin and silver they are nearly white, is a glass globe large enough to house a small child in the fetal position.
The globe is half-filled with viscous pale-green fluid, and within the cradle of glass and gear and effluvia, something moves. The shriek grows and blossoms in Matt's skull, and all he can think of are words, too many words, that spill from his brain until he's worried it will be more than words, that it will be him, lost to the howling creature suspended in front of him.
Matt falls on his knees and a square nail bites into his flesh. He bleeds, from his skin and from his ears, and while he bleeds he sees a warm place, a place where such creatures float in a primordial sea, sharing only their thoughts with one another. He understands this one is very old, and trapped here in Lovecraft. He hears its story, and it terrifies him, that it has survived this long, built this contraption from the bones of a house to sustain itself. He understands they lure the susceptible, the ones they can touch in dreams, to the shores of the sea to drown and feed themselves.
He understands it is not a sea, but a graveyard, populated by scavengers.
Matt understands all this before he runs from the house, bleeding and half-deaf, but alive and sane. He will meet a girl, he will dance with her, and he'll write Isabelle off to a nightmare, though for years after he'll write stories about a dark-haired, pale-skinned woman, always bad, but never quite bad enough to stay away from.
* * *
That isn't how it happened.
Matt does run, and when he comes home, his father--in a voice betraying a small amount of actual concern--asks where he's been and why he's all bloody.
"You look like hell," Mr. Edison says. "Eat something, why don't you?"
Matt realizes he can't have seen w
hat he saw. Clockworks don't masquerade as houses, do they? Things suspended in glass bulbs don't talk? Only in your mind, they do.
Isabelle must be playing a joke on him. Maybe in league with those guys from the neighborhood. They found some old flophouse and decided to play with his mind.
So he writes a quick, choppy, nasty story about a neighborhood bully who gets his just desserts from the jaws of a night-jar, one of those predatory, viral creatures who crawl around Old Town. He mails it off to the magazine, even though he's dizzy and feverish and can barely make it to the post box.
Two days later a letter arrives.
Matt, I thought we were through with the kid stuff. Try again. M.
Matt tries again. And again. Writing spikes pain through his skull. When he sleeps, which isn't often, all he sees is the room in the rotting house, and all he hears is the grinding of gears and the hiss of the life-giving fluid through the pipes. Where does it come from? Who does it come from?
On the sixth night of no sleep--food turning sour the moment it touches his tongue, and stories refusing to come from his pen in any form other than dull, trite, and broken--Matt sees Isabelle standing in the street below.
There is river fog around her ankles, and she wears a black dress that bares her arms and throat even though frost has crawled all over the windowpanes. He breathes clear a circle of glass and stares down at her. Isabelle lifts her hand and beckons. Matt feels his guts roil and hears the familiar whispers.
He goes to her. He has no choice.
Isabelle doesn't try to touch him. "You ran away. I told you not to move."
"What was that?" Matt doesn't waste time. Has no time to waste. Just being near her makes him feel as if he's on fire. He'd do anything to touch her, to recreate what he felt the first time he laid eyes on her.