“You aren’t listening,” he said.
She took her time reeling her gaze in from the depths. She had darkish hair, paleish skin, eyes somewhere between gray and blue. Yet her gaze was definite. When she looked at you, you knew you were looked at.
“I am,” she said. “Well, a little bit, I am.”
“What did I say, then?”
She offered him a smile. “I’m inventing a riddle. The answer is ‘magic’, but I haven’t got the question right yet.”
“If it’s the one about the racehorse trainer and the greyhound, I’ve already heard it.”
She smiled again, but her mind was still somewhere else.
Piqued, he said, in accidental parody of a jealous lover, “If you don’t want the work, just say so. We both know you only do it for fun.”
“Fun? You mean, I don’t do it for money.”
“What for, then?”
“Well, it’s what I do. History. Research. All the delicious books, yum, yum, and reading dead people’s letters behind their backs. Lovely, malicious sense of power. Blackmailing ghosts. It’s where my money really comes from, of course.” She played at mischief with a straight face, her long-fingered hands fluttering in the air.
“All right,” he said heavily to drag her back down to earth. “But really. Why?”
She looked at him with those pale eyes, her pupils so black they never seemed to reflect any light. “All for love of you, my hero. Tell me again what you need?”
Another beer, he thought. He flipped a page in his notebook so vigorously that the thin paper tore.
For love of him? Because it’s my only talent, because it’s the only thing that marks me as something besides my mother’s daughter, because it’s the only thing that’s entirely mine. But though Graham was her friend, he wasn’t that kind of friend, so she didn’t say it. She just took a little leather-bound notebook out of her purse and made notes, to mollify him, with her little gold pencil. He was writing a series of articles on immigration. While he was talking she jotted down a few citations, reminded herself of a private memoir that she had found in the family library; thought that she probably could have written the articles herself, and knew that she would never say so. Graham needed to work for a living. They could be friends for fifty years, she thought, and he would never reconcile himself to the fact that she did not.
No, she only needed to work to live. Because, because.
Her name was Lucy Donne. Her mother was beautiful, her grandfather was rich. She had been allowed to go to university—it was one of the done things these days—but there were no advanced degrees for women. One could study, write, publish, even tutor, but one could not lecture; one could never call oneself Professor Lucy Donne. She might have done anything, really, she had her mother’s recklessness, but she had her grandfather’s self-conscious pride as well. She would not trail in her mother’s footsteps. Books would be her open doors. A drab compromise, she thought sometimes, though she tried not to think about it. She preferred the delicious books, the impossible hunt, the riddling obsession that kept her up late, night after night. Yum, yum . . . yawn.
The library was a rich man’s pride, a set-designer’s dream: a long room with a gallery and window bays, jewel-colored carpets and fat-legged tables and a globe clasped in a polished brass arm. It was real to Lucy, though, it was her province, her private realm. She knew about the mousetraps behind the bottom shelves, the silverfish like hungry beads of quicksilver, the dead moths that would fly again if you gave the curtains a good shake. She knew that in a cold winter the cavernous fireplaces could only warm the end bays, leaving an arctic space between them, and she knew that in a hot summer the very walls breathed sleep into the dusty, sun-shot air. Home.
The big clock with its gold and ivory face ticked down another hour. A brass-shaded lamp spilled its pool of light, but Lucy’s mind had wandered off into the dark, and so did her books and papers, sprawling outside the lamplight. Her chin was in her hands, her elbows on the ink-splotched blotter. An hour ago she had still been chasing her quarry. Now she dreamed, tracing the route of past hunts across the map of knowledge in her mind. Landmarks, scraps of information, raised themselves up above the horizon and fell away. Yes, she knew this. Yes, she had been there. Most recently:
. . . in the “he’s famous even if I don’t care” category, the Marshal of Kallisfane (of ancient and dull renown) returned to the capital today after a refreshing month’s holiday in the historic and terminally comfortless garrison of Denbreath. The garrison might have a greater appeal to this writer and several other ladies of her acquaintance (the Hon. Miss H. comes to mind!) if it still featured hot-and-cold running soldiers, but as the Denbreath Fortress was recently turned into a museum, one can only wish the Chief Exhibit joy of his new vacation spot . . .
Yes, and:
From our provincial correspondent: Two teachers at the Palton Grammar School were dismissed yesterday after a recent outbreak of hysteria among the students forced authorities to close the school. The school will reopen next week and school governors say they will not be bringing charges against the teachers, saying the two women demonstrated “poor judgment rather than criminal intent.”
And what has the one to do with the other? Nothing at all, except that Palton is only ten miles from Denbreath as the crow flies. What tales did the teachers tell? What tales did the children claim to encounter on their way home from school? What would the crow see as it launched itself from the highest steeple in Palton and flew over the winter-dark woods of Breadon How?
Up over the haunted trees, up over the bare brow of the hill where the Cold Hounds were once said to lair, out along the stony ridge where Denbreath Castle sits as it has for six hundred years, a fortified shell for its silent master, the Exhibit, who is older still. The breeze carries the crow to the deep sill of an archer’s window, where it folds its wings and cocks its head to stare inside. A stony room. A man, or the shape of a man, stiff as a mannequin waiting for the curators to put its armor on.
The clock clunked and whirred, preparing Lucy for the mellow gong of the hour. One, two . . . Lucy waited for the rest, but the clock had said its piece. She rubbed her face, made a token gesture towards putting her notes in order . . . impossible, it would take a week . . . she put out the lamp and went to bed.
She dreamed the dream in which her house dissolved into a muddled realm of college rooms and hospital corridors. There were a lot of doors, a lot of odd corners twisting the known world out of true. It got harder and harder to find her way, but the harder it got the closer she was to something important, some vivid presence at the heart of the maze. This anticipation was as familiar as the dream, but as the dreamer did not know she was dreaming she could not say, as she would when she woke, “Ah! This dream!” But she could recognize the feeling for what it was, and that recognition opened the final door. There were the heavy stones of the wall, the arch that opened out onto nothing but the air. There was the bright clear light, the taste of autumn, the memory of trees. And perhaps the dreamer woke a little in her dreaming, because when she saw the man who stood looking out on the world, she thought or said, “Maybe this time I will see his face. Maybe I will. I will.”
An obvious dream; a biographer’s dream. But there was nothing stale about the brightness of her will to turn him. Oh, she wanted to see! He knew she was there, he stirred. Her heart leapt. She would wake now, she always woke now and was now awake enough to know it. She held on to the dream with both hands.
And then it seemed that the dream turned and grabbed on to her. The brightness in the air was gone, there was only a warmth as oppressive as a stranger’s breath. He stirred, and she no longer knew why she wanted to see his face. “Don’t,” she said, and the catch of sound in her throat drew her farther out of sleep.
The dream followed her.
He turned. He saw her, and she fled, a bird dashing across the room—the window was there again, his dark figure like a door—she fled, he pluck
ed her from the air. She was a sand-colored dove between his hands, his flesh pressing her flesh as if he grasped her bare ribs, her naked arms. She cried out and woke.
She was still held.
She tore herself free from the bedclothes, flung herself from the bed to fall on her hands and knees. Awake, yes, and dreaming, yes, and still held. Her heart beat its wings. Sweating, trembling, she launched herself from the floor and caromed into the wardrobe across the room like a bird battering itself against a windowpane. Wood bruised flesh, a banged elbow barked, and she woke, finally, truly woke, with the wardrobe door swinging open and her nightgown clinging to her skin.
With a deliberate, practical gesture, Lucy reached out and swung the door closed. The latch snicked, and held.
Her room was dark except for the pale rim around the curtain’s edge, and the house was quiet, although it seemed to Lucy that the reverberations of her thumps and cries still hung in the air. She stood and listened as if the house might mutter a response—
As if, far below, the street door might open and booted feet might begin to climb the groaning stairs.
She was found.
It was a dream, she told herself with the sweat still wet on her face. Only a nightmare version of a dream she had been dreaming since she was a little girl.
She had been hunting him since girlhood. She had finally come near enough to be noticed.
Him.
. . . the Marshal of Kallisfane (of ancient and dull renown) returned to the capital today . . .
The Marshal of Kallisfane, the Dead Lord, the Revenant, the Living Ghost, Empire’s Bane: Him.
The Marshal of Kallisfane returned to the capital today.
She was found.
Lucy pried herself away from the wardrobe and crept up to the window. One finger opened a crack between curtain and frame. A gray dawn, the garden in the square still more turned earth than green, the windows in all the houses still dark. No deathless warrior on the pavement, no Nameless Regiment pulling up in big black motorcars. No one at all, in fact, except for a few sparrows and a cat digging in a flowerbed. Logic, late in waking, said that even if he had found her by some arcane process in her dream, a dream does not shout out a name and an address. Her heart was still thumping, her skin still clammy, and Lucy was not reassured. Sick with fear, she walked with increasing haste down the hall to the lavatory and vomited out the residue of the dream.
Pipes thumped when she flushed the toilet and sang when she ran water to rinse her mouth, guaranteed to wake half the household. But the prosaic was reassuring and nausea imposed its own earthy fatalism. If the Revenant really had found her where she lived then she was already doomed, and if he had not, then . . . Then she hardly knew what. The need to do something was beginning to assert itself, but what the something was, was still obscure. Bathe, Lucy thought, smelling the fear-sweat like bile on her skin.
She washed, found a skirt and jacket in sensible tweed, and put on the most sensible shoes she owned, which weren’t very. Dull, ordinary, please-don’t-notice-me clothes. She pinned up her hair, powdered her face—in the mirror her hands shook—put a few practical items in her pocket book. She paused on the landing, but there was no sound from behind the family’s doors. Her mother’s door. Would her mother still hold her after a bad dream, envelop her in warm silk and cigarette smoke and perfume?
Lucy shook herself back into motion. Down the stairs to the grand entry hall, and did she scurry across the marble floor, wrench open the bolts, flit like a sparrow out into the square? That was the motion of her heart, but she hesitated at the stained-glass window by the door, peering through a red rose into the square. A yawning domestic was airing a pair of leashed dogs. Still no living statue (ten feet tall? lichened armor? pigeon-stained helm?) and no ominous black cars. Do what, Lucy? Go where? Seized by a sudden impulse, she left the hall and struck out for the library.
No one had been in yet to open the drapes. She pulled them open as she walked down the main room, letting in daylight the same color as the dust she shook from the brocade. The farthest bay held her table like a ship in its berth, a ship still laded with the cargo of a years-long journey: books, clippings, diaries, letters; notes sorted and unsorted, re-sorted, scribbled over, lost. No one tidied Lucy’s desk, Lucy least of all. The order was all in her head, a tangled complexity that, taken all in all, built a structure as simple as a tombstone. Lucy sifted through the top layer of papers, shifted a book from one stack to another, and failed utterly to discover the source of her panic. This was scholarship. It had only been a dream.
Then the panic said: This is evidence.
At first she read her notes over with an eye to organization, but she gave that up almost immediately. The clock chimed the half hour and her whole skin shivered. She crammed papers into whatever folder would hold them, shook out the books and scrabbled to gather up the snowfall of torn envelopes and old letters and receipts from the dressmaker with her elegant scrawl on the back. She liberated a large portfolio from an ancestor’s anatomical sketches and tied her papers inside with a faded ribbon. She took up armloads of books and scattered them about the shelves, almost dancing as she moved in and out of bays, up and down the gallery stairs. It would take her days to find them all again, these books with their damning marginalia, but it would take a stranger weeks. Finally, swiftly, she disposed of the anatomical sketches behind a rank of foreign dictionaries, tore the blotter from her desk pad and tossed it burning into the fireplace, snatched up the heavy portfolio and her pocketbook and fled for the door.
Doing what, Lucy?
She seemed to be discovering that as it got done.
Going where, Lucy?
She would likely discover that as well.
But it was only a dream.
The same pub, too early for a crowd.
Resentful at being called away from his typewriter, Graham sat at a table under the small-paned window, scribbling on a tablet of ruled paper: real work this time, distilling interviews into news. The midmorning sun fought through thin clouds and thick, old glass to raise a gleam from the polished table. He didn’t notice. He did notice the brewer’s dray that creaked to a stop outside, its high sides painted with the brewer’s slogan—Our Best Bitter is Better! Barrels rumbled off the tailgate, enormous horses stamped iron-shod feet, and he experienced one of those hiccups in time, a flash of his childhood when horses were everywhere and motorcars were rare. Change, he thought. Would we dread it so much if it didn’t sneak up on us from behind?
“What do you do,” she said, “if you have a story no one will believe?”
“Don’t write it.” He rescued his notes from the descending bulk of a leather-bound portfolio. The thump of its landing was lost in the grumble of barrel rims being rolled across the stone floor. “You could have asked me that over the telephone.”
She sat down and drank from his glass. It was an unprecedented intimacy and he watched, astonished, the tilt of the glass and the long swallow. The bitter made her grimace even as she sucked the dampness off her upper lip. Oh, Lucy, he thought. What is this, now? A barman materialized, wiping his hands on his long white apron.
“Brandy, please,” she said.
“She means the real stuff, Jock,” Graham said. “In one of those fat glasses that spill all down your chin.”
“A snifter, sir, yes, thank you, sir,” said Jock, his accent refined to the point of sarcasm. But he came back with the brandy and another pint for Graham. Graham finished off the old pint and then looked at Lucy. She was shivering from too harsh a swallow—Our Best Brandy Isn’t Better—and put the back of her hand to her mouth, a fascinating gesture, but they all were, her gestures like a private conversation between Lucy and herself, and she had such beautiful hands . . . Graham gave his second pint a wary look and pushed it away. Trouble, he thought. And then looked at her again and woke up to her pallor and bruised eyelids: trouble indeed.
“But what do you really do?” she said, and lowered her hand.
>
He had to retrieve her initial question. “Really don’t write it. What would be the point?”
“What if people should believe it? What if they need to know?”
Graham hooted with laughter. “There is no such story. Listen, love, you can’t tell the glorious public anything for their own good, not unless you’re in advertising. One of the great mysteries of life. Tell them snake oil cures warts and they’re happy to pay a shilling an ounce. Tell them the Country Hospital Fund requires property taxes to increase by a shilling next year and consider the outrage!” He drank from his beer, then remembered and set it aside.
“Maybe outrage cures warts,” she said with a smile that made him feel she was looking at him for the first time.
“Maybe snake oil does. What’s your story that no one will believe?”
“Maybe magic does.”
“Cut a potato with a silver knife and bury it by the light of a full moon.”
Her smile grew lighter, questioning.
“Magic,” he explained. “To cure warts.”
“Shhh.” She reached across the table and touched her fingers to his lips. “Not so loud. He might hear you.”
She wasn’t smiling now. He knew what he was supposed to ask, but it took him a moment, seduced as he was by a touch that lingered after she had taken her hand away. What is this, Lucy? What the hell?
“Who might hear?”
She didn’t answer him directly. “Do you believe in magic?”
“Do I believe in . . . are we talking philosophy? History? Curing warts?”
“Magic,” she said, as if it were a perfectly sensible thing to say in an empty pub on a day in early spring. “Here and now, curing warts, whatever you like.”
“No. Never tell me that’s your story.” His eyes wandered to the fat portfolio between them on the table. “What is that, dispatches from a thousand years ago? Or is all this just leading up to something else?”
“Magic is real. Here and now. And I can prove it.”
At the Edge of Waking Page 11
