by Lily Levi
The grandfather clock ticked somewhere down below. The house was so quiet.
She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out his name again, but there was no answer.
She moved silently down the hall. She’d grown accustomed to him waking her with coffee and the blood sausages that she’d slowly been growing accustomed to, but the sun was already well over the horizon and he was nowhere to be found.
She paused at the foot of the stairs and remembered how he’d helped her down them when she’d been unable to walk on her own. He’d always been there with her, in her room, his own room, the parlor, the ballroom.
She started slowly up the stairs to the third floor and her skin prickled at the excitement of discovery, just as if she were still a little girl.
She called out his name again on third floor for good measure, but there was only silence and the creaking of beams. She peered down the long hall and recalled the night he’d carried her up from the ballroom and into his own rooms. It felt good to have things to remember.
She walked down the hallway, calling his name. The further she went down the darkened hall, the deeper her curiosity grew.
The filigreed sconces sat empty and her eyes strained into the growing shadows.
She stopped when she thought she could make out the end of the hall, so far down.
He wasn’t there.
Disappointed, she turned back around. She would take a quick look on the fourth floor and then return to the room that he’d given her. It was his house, after all, and despite everything, she was still only his guest.
With a strange new guilt blossoming in her heart, she set to climbing the stairs again.
The fourth floor was no different than the floors beneath it. If anything, it felt darker and more dilapidated. Wallpaper peeled and several of the sconces sat askew, but it wasn’t remarkably different in any tangible way. It was only a feeling that made the real difference, like someone was watching her walk down the decorated carpet. It wasn’t a bad someone, just someone.
It was no one, of course.
She found her hands reaching out for the doorknobs as she passed. It was wrong, but she couldn’t help herself. If one were open, she would only take a look. She wouldn’t go inside.
Something rattled further down the dark corridor and she froze.
She heard the muffled clang of something like porcelain, followed by silence.
“Laurie?” she whispered as loud as she dared. She took another step forward and then another. “Hello?”
Silence. If Laurie was there, he would’ve answered. She couldn’t imagine him playing a trick on her unless he knew she could pick up on it faster than it started. No, it had been the wind, perhaps, pushing in the curtains and knocking something over. She could only imagine how many forgotten things sat behind the locked doors.
Her curiosity returned, though somewhat diminished, and she continued slowly and softly down the hallway, testing each locked door as she went.
Just as she decided she’d had enough of locked doors and shadowed halls, a cool knob turned in her hand. Her spine tingled in a small moment of excitement and she found herself pushing the door open at the same time something inside of her screamed to walk away.
She ignored it.
The door creaked inward and she stared inside.
The room was small, but she found herself momentarily enchanted.
Red drapes framed a single back window. The morning sun streamed in through the crosshatched panes and illuminated a heavy desk that took up the whole center of the dark wood floor. A mounted boar’s head stared over her head from across the room.
Stepping inside, some primitive instinct forced her eyes upwards.
The head of a mountain lion stared back at the boar, mouth opened wide.
She stepped further in.
She would only look, that was all.
Someone had stretched crumpled maps across the wall and pinned them at their corners. Their tops sagged with the weight of time.
She moved towards the back of the desk and eyed their captions in a perfectly lettered hand.
Peru. India. Newfoundland. The Arctic Circle.
She sat in the hard wooden chair and for a brief moment, fancied herself an explorer come home. She stared up at the mountain lion over the open doorway. An explorer and a hunter. She imagined Laurie sitting there instead of her and her heart thrilled at the picture of it.
She touched the soft leather book on top of the desk. Others sat packed in the shelves on both sides of the room. She wondered if a library was locked away somewhere in the manor. If there was a ballroom, there could be any number of other rooms.
She flipped open the book with an idle hand. She’d ask Laurie when he got back about a library, a gymnasium – her mind wandered through the possibilities. She hadn’t thought to ask him about any of it. She’d been so content that none of it had mattered very much at all.
‘Jolene’.
Her own name sprung up at her from the pages. Her breath caught and she bent over the desk. She flipped back through the book to find it.
But she stopped herself. It was his journal – what else could it be? – and she had no right to look through it.
She lifted her hand from the book and sat with both of them between her legs. She couldn’t let herself read it. It was intrusive and unfair.
She eyed the leather cover. Of course, he wouldn’t have to know if she looked, but she would know and that would be enough. He would be able to sense it. Still, to read in a private language the feelings of someone she found herself so thrilled by, it was too much.
She bit her lip.
One page. She would only read that one page.
She flipped gingerly to the middle of the book where she’d seen her name, careful not to read anything else he’d written. If it was about her, and it was, she had to have some right to know what it said.
‘Jolene’.
She held her breath and let her eyes skim over the finely decorated handwriting.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
He peered at her from behind the canvas. “You don’t have to smile.”
Jolene licked her lips and relaxed into the chair. “I know,” she said. “Are you sure this is my good side? I’m pretty sure it’s the other side.” She was talking too fast and he’d be able to sense that she was uneasy.
He set the wooden palette in his lap and reached for a clean brush. “All sides are your good side.”
She gave him the best version of a smile that she could muster. “Are we near a city?” she asked, trying to sound innocuous. It was a question she could’ve asked long ago, but she hadn’t cared at the time. It hadn’t mattered where she was. But now, after having seen his book and the strange things he’d written about her, it seemed like the most important question in the world.
“Oh my sweet Lord no,” he said, picking up the brush again. “Nothing like that.”
Jolene’s heart sank. “No?” she asked, as if that might change the reality of where they were.
“No,” he said. “I’d call it a town, but even that might be too generous a thing.” He looked at her and she couldn’t tell if he was studying her for the portrait or to know her thoughts.
“There’s a highway through the trees,” he said at last. She thought she could sense a kind of deep reluctance in his voice. “It’ll take you wherever you want to go, assuming there’s somewhere you want to go.”
She couldn’t tell if he meant ‘you’ as in herself or ‘you in the general sense, so she said nothing.
She looked out over the cold bay and shivered at the sight of it, at its flat gray color and cold, choppy waves. Even with the burning August sun, it had never looked as forlorn as it did now.
She turned her eyes back to him and watched how he mixed the paints with his expert hand.
‘Jolene’, he’d written.
Dead an hour or less. He was mistaken, of course. She hadn’t died.
Strang
led. She’d sat with that word for a long time. He’d told her she’d had an accident and that he’d found her, but he hadn’t told her anything about being strangled. She remembered how her throat felt sore for days after she’d woken up in that strange room, but she didn’t think much of it at the time.
She hadn’t been able to and she hadn’t cared to try.
But if that part was true, who strangled her?
She watched how he examined the slope of her neck for the portrait he was painting. If it had been him, if he’d done it to her, that wouldn’t explain how attentive and concerned he’d been since the moment she’d opened her eyes.
Unless he was entirely mentally unstable.
He was eccentric at the very least. Perhaps he was mourning the loss of his family and was unable to let go. He didn’t like people, though he seemed to like her well enough. This had made her feel special.
Then, of course, there’d been her favorite excuse of them all: that it simply didn’t matter. And maybe it didn’t.
Still, what he wrote about her certainly did matter, didn’t it?
Sleeps like the cat, he’d written, only she hadn’t seen any cats. The sentence was in the past tense and the comparison made no sense at all. If he’d done something similar to a cat, she couldn’t know.
Could he have strangled a cat?
She couldn’t begin to imagine it, but what did she know?
She hadn’t been able to read much else. The front door had echoed all the way to the fourth floor where she’d sat in hid cloistered study. She’d shut the book and hurried back to the room he’d given her.
She couldn’t let him know what she’d read, not if her worst fear was true.
What are you afraid of?
She stared at him, at his creased brows, his chiseled jaw, and the piece of dark hair that fell into his face with the breeze. It couldn’t be true. More so, she didn’t want it to be true, but true or not, it sat like a heavy curtain between them.
Laurie lowered his brush from the canvas. “What is it?” he asked her.
She frowned at him, startled from her thoughts. “Nothing. I was just thinking.”
“Remembering?” he asked. He set the palette at his feet and stood. “Would you like to see what we have?” He turned the easel to face her.
She stared at it.
The painting didn’t just look like her. It was her. For the smallest moment, Laurie’s journal slipped from her mind.
“It’s incredible,” she whispered, leaning closer to make out the smaller, ornate embellishments in the portrait.
He’d captured the hair lines in her face and the creases in her lips. If he told her that he’d counted and painted every single eyelash, she would’ve believed him. Most fantastic of all, it even seemed that he was able to paint her thoughts by the detail he gave her eyes and the turned lines against the left side of her mouth.
Still, the finest detail in the portrait was the hesitation he’d painted into the irises of her eyes. She could almost see the pages of the leatherbound book reflected in them.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
The August sun beat down on the dock and, despite the salty breeze off the top of the gray waves, it was suddenly too hot to bear.
The concerned look that spread over his face reminded her of the dark nightmare. It had felt so real. A decrepit monster watched them from the hallway and there was nothing she could do. She’d been sick and he’d tried to inject her with blood.
“Yes,” she said, shaking the nightmare away. “I like it very much.”
He turned the easel back towards him. “Are you all right?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, yes.” She crawled unsteadily up from the chair.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s just too hot out here. Do you mind if I go back inside?”
His face opened in surprise. “No,” he said. “Of course I don’t mind. I’ll be here if you should need anything at all.”
She forced a weak smile and crossed to the end of the dock before he could say anything more to her. She was afraid the longer she sat in front of him, the clearer it would seem to him that she’d seen something she shouldn’t have. She couldn’t know how he would react, and if her worst fears were true, she didn’t want to find out.
She mounted the marble landing outside of the house and crossed into the cool entryway. She needed to think.
The grandfather clock ticked steadily somewhere in the dark. She crossed through the entryway and into the foyer. She passed beneath the silver chandelier and took the stairs two at a time. Her legs were her own again.
She found her room on the second floor and shut the door behind her. The more she thought about the book and what he’d written, the heavier it weighed on her and the less she trusted him.
She locked the door.
When night fell, Jolene pulled the curtains open to let the cooler air filter into the dust-heavy room.
Below, the bay glistened beneath the moon, dark and cold. She half-expected to find Laurie still out on the dock with his white linen shirt rolled up to his elbows, a cigarette in his mouth, looking out over the water and glancing now and again up at her window.
But the dock sat empty. Nothing moved except for the water and smaller branches of nearby pines. There was nothing to see.
She paced back to the bed and lowered herself into it. She would decide what to do in the morning. She would think of something.
Or perhaps she would just leave. Maybe she didn’t need to think. Maybe she was wasting time.
She placed her head onto the pillow. She willed the warm white noise of forgetfulness to wrap around her again, but it was nowhere to be found.
She stared at the gilded ceiling for a long time. The moonlight played off of the gold inlay.
An hour passed or no time passed at all.
She heard the front door open and close. In the distance, she heard the startling hum of a motor. He was going somewhere without her.
She closed her eyes and waited for sleep to find her.
Where are you, Jolene?
The man wavered between the dark trees and reached out his hand. I’m waiting, Jo-Jo. Where are you? C’mon. Let’s go home.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He stopped the car on the ridge.
Riley watched him expectantly.
Nothing moved except for the slowly blinking stars, cold and distant. Surrounded by dark pines and rising hills, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes against the world.
Something had upset Jolene, but he couldn’t have said what that thing was. He replayed their recent days together and found nothing. Perhaps she was tiring of him, or it was entirely possible that she was regaining lost memories from her first life and didn’t wish to share.
He’d been selfish to keep her from the rest of the world, but she wasn’t like the rest of the world anymore. Like him, she would need to be constantly renewed. And now, he would need to keep her alive until she understood what her body demanded, but how to tell her?
It was a question that had no palatable answer. Still, she would have to understand. If she didn’t get enough foreign blood into her own dead body, he would be forced to perform a third transfusion and then a fourth and a fifth.
Tired of his own thoughts, he reached into the dark cubby below the dashboard. He produced a rolled cigarette and a yellowed matchbook.
The small flame obscured his vision of the night for a short moment. A world gone up in flames. He wondered if he could find the strength to watch the end of days, whenever that end came.
He only hoped he wouldn’t have to watch it go up in flames alone, but if he did, he would rest easy knowing that he deserved to be alone in the raging fires of the end.
He stepped out from the car and stepped towards the ridge. Riley jumped out from the passenger’s side and followed him.
Any given night was ten times more beautiful than the brightest day. Time faded to gray and the day, no
matter how beautiful, was forgotten. Even the year might be uncertain. If the moon was absent, following the hour proved difficult and so no one followed it at all. Shadows were scarce. Things melted into themselves rather than out into the world. The shapes of things wavered; first they were themselves and then nothing like themselves at all. Real and unreal, so much like everything else.
He let out a hot lungful of smoke over the trees below.
And then there was Maman. Her request was impossible and he had told her so. Monsieur Marteaux had been turned to ash and perhaps he slept, even now, in a dark urn, his name forgotten.
The true cause of death was ultimately unknown, but Laurie wagered that his old tutor had died from a broken heart. In what world did years of stolen glances and letters passed when they thought no one was looking not equate to some kind of love? It was a miracle his father never noticed and if he did, it was no surprise that he didn’t mind.
No, after their homecoming from the frozen wastes, his father never minded anything ever again.
What happened?
Maman would ask him this, still only a boy. There was never an answer to give her because he didn’t have one. He didn’t remember. He would’ve gladly relieved her of her horrible wondering, but there was nothing to say. How could he have told her that he’d died in the snows? It would’ve been as unbelievable to her as it was to him.
But then something had changed. She’d learned something and she’d stopped incessantly asking.
But he’d learned nothing. All he had was the dream-like memory of yet another memory.
He remembered the stars and then there was sleep. He’d had a dream that still flitted hauntingly through his mind from time to time. He remembered the close, ice-packed walls; pieces of flesh encased in ice; and a giant of a man who looked out at him from the mawed head of a great bear. He had no eyes and blood ran from the corners of his mouth.
Perhaps this vision after death was real. Perhaps it was not.
But when the dream ended, he woke in the dark hold of a frozen ship. A storm thundered down on them and threatened to break the wooden vessel into great shards of timber. His father wailed, a horrible sound to remember.
