Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  To herself, so privately that none of it showed on her face, she kept remembering her dream.

  Outside, rain fell heavily onto the street, flooding the gutters, hissing like hail off the roofs of the cars, muffling the noises of traffic. Dispirited by the gray air and the wet, she tied a plastic bandana over her head, then walked past the security guard (who ignored her, as usual) and out through the revolving doors into the downpour.

  With her head low and her concentration on the sidewalk, she moved in the direction of the mission where she worked.

  Without warning, she seemed to hear the horns again.

  Involuntarily, she stopped, jerked up her head, looked around her like a frightened woman. They weren’t car horns: they were wind instruments such as a hunter or musician might use. The chord of their call was so far away and out of place that she couldn’t possibly have heard it, not in that city, in that rain, while rush-hour traffic filled the streets and fought the downpour. And yet the sensation of having heard the sound made everything she saw appear sharper and less dreary, more important. The rain had the force of a determined cleansing; the streaked gray of the buildings looked less like despair, more like the elusive potential of the borderland between day and night; the people jostling past her on the sidewalk were driven by courage and conviction, rather than by disgust at the weather or fear of their employers. Everything around her had a tang of vitality she had never seen before.

  Then the sensation faded; and she couldn’t possibly have heard rich horns calling to her heart; and the tang was gone.

  Baffled and sad, she resumed her sodden walk to work.

  At the mission, her day was more full of drudgery than usual. In the administrative office, seated at her desk with the ancient typewriter crouching in front of her like a foul-tempered beast of burden, she found a message from Reverend Thatcher, the old man who ran the mission. It said that the mission’s copying costs were too high, so would she please type two hundred fifty copies of the attached letter in addition to her other duties. The letter was aimed at most of the philanthropic organizations in the city, and it contained yet another appeal for money, couched in Reverend Thatcher’s customary futility. She could hardly bear to read it as she typed; but of course she had to read it over and over again to get it right.

  While she typed, she seemed to feel herself becoming physically less solid, as if she were slowly being dissolved by the pointlessness of what she did. By noon, she had the letter memorized; and she was watching in a state that resembled suspense the line of letters her typewriter made, waiting for each new character because it proved that she was still there and she couldn’t honestly say she expected it to appear.

  She and Reverend Thatcher usually ate lunch together – by his choice, not hers. Since she was quiet and watched his face attentively, he probably thought she was a sympathetic listener. But most of the time she hardly heard what he said. His talk was like his letters: there was nothing she could do to help. She was quiet because that was the only way she knew how to be; she watched his face because she hoped it would betray some indication of her own reality – some flicker of interest or concentration of notice which might indicate that she was actually present with another person. So she sat with him in one corner of the soup kitchen the mission ran in its basement, and she kept her face turned toward him while he talked.

  From a distance, he appeared bald, but that was because his mottled pink skin showed clearly through his fine, pale hair, which he kept cut short. The veins in his temples were prominent and seemed fragile, with the result that whenever he became agitated they looked like they might burst. Today she expected him to rehash his latest letter, which she had already typed nearly two hundred times. That was his usual pattern: while they ate the bland, thin lunch provided by the kitchen, he would tell her things she already knew about his work, his voice quavering whenever he came back to the uselessness of what he was doing. This time, however, he surprised her.

  ‘Miss Morgan,’ he said without quite looking at her, ‘have I ever told you about my wife?’

  In fact, he hadn’t, though he referred to her often. But Terisa knew some of his family history from the previous mission secretary, who had given up the job in defeat and disgust. Nevertheless she said, ‘No, Reverend Thatcher. You’ve mentioned her, naturally. But you’ve never told me about her.’

  ‘She died nearly fifteen years ago,’ he said, still wistfully. ‘But she was a fine, Christian woman, a strong woman, God rest her soul. Without her, I would have been weak, Miss Morgan – too weak to do what needed doing.’

  Though she hadn’t considered the question closely, Terisa thought of him as weak. He sounded weak now, even when he wasn’t talking about his failure to do better for the mission. But he also sounded fond and saddened.

  ‘I remember the time – oh, it was years ago, long before you were born, Miss Morgan – I was out of seminary’ – he smiled past her left shoulder – ‘with all kinds of honors, would you believe it? And I had just finished serving an assistant pastorship at one of the best churches in the city.

  ‘At the time, they wanted me to stay on as an associate pastor. With God’s help, I had done well there, and they gave me a call to become one of their permanent shepherds. I can tell you, Miss Morgan, that was quite gratifying. But for some reason my heart wasn’t quiet about it. I had the feeling God was trying to tell me something. You see, just at that time I had learned that this mission needed a new director. I had no desire for the job. Being a weak man, I was pleased by my position in the church. I was well rewarded for my work, both financially and personally. And yet I couldn’t forget the question of this mission. It was true that the church called me to serve them. But what did God call me to do?

  ‘It was Mrs. Thatcher who resolved my dilemma. Putting her hand on her hip, as she always did when she meant to be taken seriously, she said, “Now don’t you be a fool, Albert Thatcher. When Our Lord came into the world, he didn’t do it to serve the rich. This church is a fine place – but if you leave, they’ll have the choice of a hundred fine men to replace you. Not one of those men will consider a call to the mission.”

  ‘So I came here,’ he concluded. ‘Mrs. Thatcher didn’t care that we were poor. She only cared that we were doing what we could to serve God. I’ve done that, Miss Morgan, for forty years.’

  Ordinarily, a comment like that would have been a prelude to another of his long discussions of his unending and often fruitless efforts to keep the mission viable. Ordinarily, she could hear those discussions coming and steel herself against them, so that her own unreality in the face of the mission’s need and his penury wouldn’t overwhelm her.

  But this time what she heard was the faraway cry of horns.

  They carried the command of the hunt and the appeal of music, two different sounds that formed a chord in her heart, blending together so that she wanted to leap up inside herself and shout an answer. And while she heard them, everything around her changed.

  The soup kitchen no longer looked dingy and worn out: it looked well used, a place of single-minded dedication. The grizzled and tattered men and women seated at the tables were no longer reduced to mere hunched human wreckage: now they took in hope and possibility with their soup. Even the edges of the tables were more distinct, more tangible and important, than ordinary formica and tubed steel. And Reverend Thatcher himself was changed. The pulse beating in his temples wasn’t the agitation of uselessness: it was the strong rhythm of his determination to do good. There was valor in his pink skin, in the earned lines of his face, and the focus of his eyes was so distant because it was fixed, not on futility, but on God.

  The change lasted for only a moment. Then she could no longer hear the horns, even though she yearned for them; and the air of defeat seeped slowly back into her surroundings.

  Filled with loss, she thought she would start to weep if Reverend Thatcher began another of his discussions. Fortunately, he didn’t. He had some phone calls to mak
e, hoping to catch certain influential people while they were taking their lunch breaks; so he excused himself and left her, unaware that for a moment he had been covered by glamour in her eyes. She returned to her desk almost gratefully; at her typewriter, she would be able to strike the keys and see her existence proven in the black characters she made on paper.

  The afternoon passed slowly. Through the one, bare window, she could see the rain still flooding down, drenching everything until even the buildings across the street looked like wet cardboard. The few people hurrying up and down the sidewalks might have been wearing rain gear, or they might not: the downpour seemed to erase the difference. Rain pounded on the outside of the window; gloom soaked in through the glass. Terisa found herself typing the same mistakes over and over again. She wanted to hear horns again – wanted to reexperience the tang and sharpness that came with them. But they had been nothing more than the residue of one of her infrequent dreams. She couldn’t recapture them.

  At quitting time, she put her work away, shrugged her shoulders into her raincoat, and tied her plastic bandana over her head. But when she was ready to go, she hesitated. On impulse, she knocked on the door of the tiny cubicle Reverend Thatcher used as a private office.

  At first, she didn’t hear anything. Then he answered faintly, ‘Come in.’

  She opened the door.

  There was just room in the cubicle for her and one folding chair between his desk and the wall. His seat at the other side of the desk was so tightly blocked in with file cabinets that when he wanted to leave he could barely squeeze out of his niche. As Terisa entered the room, he was staring blankly at his telephone as if it sucked all his attention and hope away.

  ‘Miss Morgan. Quitting time?’

  She nodded.

  He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t said anything. ‘You know,’ he told her distantly, ‘I talked to forty-two people today. Thirty-nine of them turned me down.’

  If she let the impulse which had brought her here dissipate, she would have that much less reason to believe in her own existence; so she said rather abruptly, ‘I’m sorry about Mrs. Thatcher.’

  Softly, as if she hadn’t changed the subject, he replied, ‘I miss her. I need her to tell me I’m doing the right thing.’

  Because she wanted to make him look at her, she said, ‘You are doing the right thing.’ As she spoke, she realized she believed it. The memory of horns had changed that for her, if nothing else. ‘I wasn’t sure before, but I am now.’

  His vague gaze remained fixed on the phone, however. ‘Maybe if I call her brother,’ he muttered to himself. ‘He hasn’t made a contribution for a year now. Maybe he’ll listen to me this time. I’ll keep trying.’

  While he dialed the number, she left the cubicle and closed the door. She had the impression that she was never going to see him again. But she tried not to let it bother her: she often felt that way.

  The walk home was worse than the one to work had been. There was more wind, and it lashed the rain against her legs, through every gap it could find or make in her coat, past the edges of her bandana into her face. In half a block, her shoes were full of water; before she was halfway home, her sweater was sticking, cold and clammy, to her skin. She could hardly see where she was going.

  But she knew the way automatically: habit carried her back to her condo building. Its glassy front in the rain looked like a spattered pool of dark water, reflecting nothing except the idea of death in its depths. The security guards saw her coming, but they didn’t find her interesting enough to open the doors for her. She pushed her way into the lobby, bringing a gust of wind and a spray of rain with her, and paused for a few moments to catch her breath and wipe the water from her face. Then, without looking up, she headed toward the elevators.

  Now that she was no longer walking hard, she began to feel chilled. There was a wall mirror in the elevator: she took off her bandana and studied her face while she rode up to her floor. Her eyes looked especially large and vulnerable against the cold pallor of her skin and the faint blue of her lips. So much of her was real, then: she could be made pale by wind and wet and cold. But the chill went too deep for that reassurance.

  As she left the elevator and walked down the carpeted hall to her apartment, she realized she was going to have a bad night.

  In her rooms, with the door locked, and the curtains drawn to close out the sensation that she was beneath the surface of the pool she had seen in the windows from the outside, she turned on all the lights and began to strip off her clothes. The mirrors showed her to herself: she was pale everywhere. The dampness on her flesh made it look as pallid as wax.

  Candles were made of wax. Some dolls were carved of wax. Wax was used to make molds for castings. Not people.

  It was going to be a very bad night.

  She had never been able to find the proof she needed in her own physical sensations. She could easily believe that a reflection might feel cold, or warmth, or pain; yet it didn’t exist. Nevertheless she took a hot shower, trying to drive away the chill. She dried her hair thoroughly and put on a flannel shirt, a pair of thick, soft corduroy pants, and sheepskin moccasins so that she would stay warm. Then, in an effort to hold her trouble back, she forced herself to fix and eat a meal.

  But her attempts to take care of herself had as much effect as usual – that is to say, none. A shower, warm clothes, and a hot meal couldn’t get the chill out of her heart – a detail she regarded as unimportant. In fact, that was part of the problem: nothing that happened to her mattered at all. If she were to die of pneumonia, it might be an inconvenience to other people – to her father, for example, or to Reverend Thatcher – but to her it would not make the slightest difference.

  This was going to be one of those nights when she could feel herself fading out of existence like an inane dream.

  If she sat where she was and closed her eyes, it would happen. First she would hear her father talking past her as if she weren’t there. Then she would notice the behavior of the servants, who treated her as a figment of her father’s imagination, as someone who only lived and breathed because he said she did, rather than as an actual and present individual. And then her mother—

  Her mother, who was herself as passive, as nonexistent, as talent, experience, and determination could make her.

  In her mind, with her eyes closed, Terisa would be a child again, six or seven years old, and she would hobble into the huge dining room where her parents were entertaining several of her father’s business associates in their best clothes – she would go into the dining room because she had fallen on the stairs and scraped her knee and horrified herself with how much she was bleeding, and her mother would look at her without seeing her at all, would look right through her with no more expression on her face than a waxwork figure, and would make everything meaningless. ‘Go to your room, child,’ she would say in a voice as empty as a hole in her heart. ‘Your father and I have guests.’ Learn to be like me. Before it’s too late.

  Terisa had been struggling to believe in herself for years. She didn’t close her eyes. Instead, she went into her living room and pulled a chair close to the nearest wall of mirrors. There she seated herself, her knees against the glass, her face so near it that she risked raising a veil of mist between herself and her reflection. In that position, she watched every line and shade and flicker of her image. Perhaps she would be able to keep her reality in one piece. And if she failed, she would at least be able to see herself come to an end.

  The last time she had suffered one of these attacks, she had sat and stared at herself until well past midnight, when the sensation that she was evaporating had finally left her. Now she was sure she wouldn’t last so long. Last night, she had dreamed – and in the dream she had been as passive as she was now, as unable to do anything except watch. The quiet ache of that recognition weakened her. Already, she thought she could discern the edges of her face blurring out of actuality.

  Without warning, she saw a
man in the mirror.

  He wasn’t reflected in the mirror: he was in the mirror. He was behind her startled image – and moving forward as if he were floundering through a torrent.

  He was a young man, perhaps only a few years older than she was, and he wore a large brown jerkin, brown pants, and leather boots. His face was attractive, though his expression was foolish with surprise and hope.

  He was looking straight at her.

  For an instant, his mouth stretched soundlessly as if he were trying to shout through the glass. Then his arms flailed. He looked like he was losing his balance; but his movements expressed an authority which had nothing to do with falling.

  Instinctively, she dropped her head into her lap, covered it with her arms.

  The mirror in front of her made no noise as it shattered.

  She felt the glass spray from the wall, felt splinters tug at her shirt as they blew past. Like a flurry of ice, they tinkled against the opposite wall and fell to the carpet. A brief gust of wind as cold as winter puffed at her with the broken glass, then stopped.

  When she looked up, she saw the young man stretched headlong on the floor beside her chair. A dusting of glass chips made his hair glitter. From his position, he looked like he had taken a dive into the room through the wall. But his right leg from mid-calf down was missing. At first, she thought it was still in the wall: his calf and his boot seemed to be cut off flat at the plane of the wall. Then she saw that the end of his leg was actually a couple of inches from the wall.

  There was no blood. He didn’t appear to be in pain.

  With a whooshing breath, he pushed himself up from the floor so that he could look at her. His right calf seemed to be stuck where it was; but the rest of him moved normally.

  He was frowning intensely. But when she met his gaze, his face broke into a helpless smile.

  ‘I’m Geraden,’ he said. ‘This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.’