by Clea Simon
By the time Dulcie had washed her hand – the bite had barely scraped her skin – Esmé had calmed down and assumed a perch on the window sill instead. Silhouetted against the light of a full moon, the little cat looked quite regal. Her black fur glowed, catching the light. Almost, Dulcie thought, like . . .
‘Mr Grey?’ She kept her voice soft. It was too much to hope for. But when she felt a warm pressure against her shins, she knew she was right. Scooping Esmé into her arms, she went to join the spectral feline by the window, and for a moment the three stood there, looking out at the still city night. Dulcie felt her pulse slow to normal in the feline presence. Even Esmé seemed preternaturally calm.
‘You are troubled, little one.’ Mr Grey didn’t speak out loud, but Dulcie knew his voice. Quiet and deep, it filled her with warmth. ‘Tell me.’
‘Mr Grey.’ She paused. What she had wanted to ask him about was his silence. Why hadn’t he warned her? But he was here now, and she didn’t dare risk chasing him away.
‘It’s the nightmare, Mr Grey,’ she said instead. In truth, it had unsettled her, and in his company, with her other cat in her arms, Dulcie would dare to revisit it. ‘On other nights, I’ve seen her writing. That’s why I’ve thought she’s my author. Or maybe, well –’ there was no point in being coy around her all-seeing friend – ‘me. But she has dark hair, not like mine.’ The image of the dead man’s hair – red and gold – came unbidden. Dulcie’s curls were touched with red, but not like that. ‘I guess what I read today is influencing my dream,’ she continued.
‘She’s been writing some kind of horror scene. Something truly frightening. I mean, more so than anything in The Ravages.’ Gothic novels were filled with cheap thrills – ghouls and ghosts, and all sorts of human evil as well – but Dulcie’s favorite had focused more on the relationships between the characters. Particularly on the heroine, Hermetria, and her unfaithful attendant, Demetria.
‘At first, when Griddlehaus handed me that box and I found that page, I was thrilled. If that page really is her manuscript, maybe I can be the one to tie the book to her. To link her to another novel.’ She looked over at her pet. For all that he seemed to understand everything about her, she really couldn’t tell what he comprehended about her thesis. Did Mr Grey know about the hundreds of pages that the library held? The boxes of papers she had yet to go through? Maybe he knew, maybe he even knew where – or if – the rest of that strange horror story could be found. Cats, she knew, always seemed all-knowing. Sometimes, though, they just wanted to nap.
‘Ow!’ Esmé had grabbed her finger and nipped it again. ‘Esmé, please.’
‘Go on, little one.’ For a moment, Dulcie wasn’t sure which of them he was addressing, but when Esmé quieted down again, she continued.
‘I just always thought I had an edge, you know? I thought maybe I was dreaming of her writing that book – the missing book. Maybe it’s just such a scary work that the fear has been coming through. But tonight was different. Tonight, she wasn’t writing about a murder. She was witnessing it, as if she . . .’
She fell silent, unable to go on, the chill of the terror returning. Esmé, in her arms, twisted to look up at her, and Dulcie found herself staring into the young cat’s deep green eyes. The round little cat was warm and solid, a comforting presence. Reality, even if that reality got fur in her keyboard and left bite marks on her palm. Still, it was Mr Grey’s voice that found her.
‘You feel a connection. Something beyond what others would experience.’
She nodded. A lot of graduate students said they lived and breathed their subjects. In Dulcie’s case, the connection went even deeper – into her dreams.
‘A bond that reaches beyond time. Beyond, even, life itself.’
She nodded again. Everything he was saying was also true of her relationship with her cats.
‘Such a bond has its dangers, little one. Life has a flow, a forward pitch. For those who do not honor that flow—’
‘There you are.’ Chris stepped into the kitchen, rubbing his hand over his face. ‘Did you have that nightmare again?’
‘Yeah.’ She turned to face him. Mr Grey had disappeared; she sensed his leaving just as she’d sensed his presence. And she still hadn’t asked him why he had failed to warn her. Still, her boyfriend offered comfort of another kind. Esmé squirmed to be let down, and bounded over to rub against his shins.
‘Hey, little girl. You on duty tonight?’ He reached down to pet her, and she stood up to shove her head into his hand.
‘She was helping me make sense of it.’ Dulcie came over for her own hug. ‘Esmé and Mr Grey.’
‘Huh.’ He put the kettle on, and Dulcie reached for the mugs. At this hour, only cocoa would do. ‘Did you come to any conclusions?’
‘He was talking about connections, about how I’m linked to the woman in the dream.’ Like a dream, Mr Grey’s words were fading. ‘There was something else, though. Something about the flow of life – about letting life progress.’
‘Makes sense to me.’ Chris sat and Esmé jumped into his lap and began to knead. ‘And you are. Moving on, that is.’
‘Well, the dream is changing.’ Dulcie didn’t want to think about the other possible interpretation of Mr Grey’s words. That he was telling her she had to let go of the past. Of him. That maybe he hadn’t come to warn her for some bigger reason. ‘Only, not for the better. Instead of writing a bloody scene, now I have her in it.’
‘You’re not seeing her . . .’ He paused, looking for the right word. ‘Her end, are you?’ Concern had overcome the fatigue in his pale and tired face, and Dulcie rushed to comfort him.
‘No, nothing like that.’ It was funny, though. They both knew that the author of The Ravages, the subject of Dulcie’s thesis, lived two hundred years before. Therefore, it made sense that she had died two hundred years before, too. ‘It’s a man, and it doesn’t look like her. In fact, this time he looked more like me. Or, really, like Lucy always tells me I was supposed to look like, with the flame-red hair and everything.’ Chris nodded. He had heard Dulcie’s mother’s rants.
‘Maybe I’m dreaming that now because of what I read today,’ Dulcie continued. ‘I mean, if the page in the Mildon is what I think it is, she first wrote the victim as a redhead, then changed it to black hair. Which is funny, because the image of blood drying is much more striking if you put it on light hair.
‘What’s also different is that it’s becoming less like a story, and more like it’s happening as I see it. Maybe that’s just because she’s writing it and it’s so vivid.’
‘Well, that’s good.’ He stroked the cat absently. Esmé, Dulcie noticed, did not react with a bite. ‘Isn’t it?’
The kettle whistled, and Dulcie got up to make the cocoa. ‘I guess so.’ She brought the mugs to the table. Esmé reached to bat at the spoon. ‘It’s just that from the way she’s looking at the scene, I think she was involved somehow. And I think, maybe, Mr Grey is trying to warn me.’
She looked up at her boyfriend. For a moment, even Esmé held still. ‘I think my author might have been a murderer.’
SIX
The phone woke Dulcie. The phone – and Esmé bounding across her stomach as if the little cat had planned to answer it herself.
‘Hello?’ Phone in hand, Dulcie reached for the clock. After nine – they’d gone back to bed around four. Chris must have let her sleep in, and after a moment of panic, she remembered it was Friday. She had no morning sections today.
‘Dulcie! You haven’t gone yet, blessed be!’
‘Lucy?’ Dulcie sat up. To deal with her mother, she needed to be a little more awake.
‘Of course, it’s wrong to intervene, but in a situation like this, with Mars in a grand trine—’
‘Lucy, would you hang on a minute?’ Lucy – Dulcie hardly ever called her mother ‘Mom’ – always talked a mile a minute. Her tendency to assume that whoever was listening had been party to whatever thoughts had come before didn’t make it e
asy to catch up. Shaking off the grogginess of her troubled sleep, Dulcie took a drink of water – and a deep breath – and prepared to engage her sole parent once more. ‘OK, I’m here now,’ she said slowly and deliberately, in a futile attempt to set the tone. ‘So tell me, where am I supposedly going? And what is the situation?’
Dulcie had chosen her questions with care. Even half asleep, she remembered that the grand trine had something to do with an astrological alignment. And she was under no illusion that Lucy’s hesitation about intervening had anything to do with her adult daughter’s privacy. If Lucy felt she could boss the planets around, her own daughter’s free will wasn’t worth taking into account. Better to get at what her mother wanted – or was afraid of – so she could calm her down, and get on with her day.
‘Because of the eclipse, of course!’
‘Of course.’ Dulcie and Chris had visited over the summer and one of her mother’s parting gifts had been a lunar calendar. Her mother had been very excited about the September eclipse. For the life of her, Dulcie couldn’t remember why such a natural occurrence warranted an early-morning phone call. ‘Mom, did you sleep last night?’ It wasn’t yet six thirty West Coast time, and while that might not be early for some, Dulcie knew her mother was far more a Daughter of Luna than of Sol.
‘We had a circle, Dulcie. The sky was luminous.’ Well, it would be out in the woods. Dulcie realized belatedly that she shouldn’t have let her mother go off on a tangent and decided she had time to get dressed as Lucy rambled. Sure enough, even as she’d pulled a shirt over her head, she could still hear her mother’s breathless enthusiasm. ‘. . . enmeshed in the sacred oak!’
And something else – the beep of call waiting.
‘Lucy!’ She reached for the phone. ‘Would you hold on a second?’ Without waiting for an answer, Dulcie clicked through – to nothing. Well, whoever it was would leave a message. ‘Sorry, I had another call.’
‘I’m not surprised. Your planets rarely come together like this. It must be more than two hundred years since they last . . .’ Dulcie let her mother go on, the coincidence of the timing distracting her. It had to be coincidence, didn’t it? ‘Which is why I don’t want you to repeat that error.’
The unusual silence that followed prompted Dulcie to realize that some response was required. ‘Repeat?’ Before her coffee, it was the best she could do.
‘Haven’t you been listening?’ Luckily, Lucy didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You have to be careful, Dulcinea, especially in the next few days. An eclipse doesn’t just cover up a source of power, it unleashes all sorts of echoes and shadows – time past and present. It opens passageways between the worlds. We cannot foretell all the implications. Oh, that’s the breakfast chime. I’ve got to run, Dulcie. I’m blessing the chai today.’
With a final invocation to the goddess, Lucy hung up, leaving Dulcie to wonder how shadows ever were leashed, and whether anyone, even Lucy, could foretell an implication.
‘Lucy?’ Chris got up to pour Dulcie’s coffee as she entered the kitchen, still pondering. He had already fed Esmé, she noticed with gratitude. The little cat barely looked up from her corner nook, so busy was she with what looked like fresh Fancy Feast.
‘Yeah. There’s a lunar eclipse tomorrow.’
‘Ah.’ He handed her the mug. He had some first-hand experience of Lucy, and Dulcie was warmed once again by his nonchalance. ‘And it has some kind of special message for you?’
‘Oh, damn. Hang on.’ The missed call! She hit the numbers for voicemail, and snuck a sip while her new password – ESME – went through. When she heard the voice on the other line, she knew she’d need the rest of the pot.
‘Ms Schwartz?’ It was Martin Thorpe, the department’s interim head and her thesis adviser. ‘Something has come up. Something rather urgent and – ah – timely. We need to meet as soon as possible. Please call me as soon as you get this.’
‘Well, that’s interesting.’ She doctored her coffee with more milk, the easier to drink quickly. Chris looked at her, waiting. ‘Lucy called to tell me that the eclipse is drawing forth shadows, or something like that. Anyway, there are dark forces at work, and I’m not to go to “the meeting”, whatever that means. But Thorpe must have found out about the other Ravages scholar. Because he’s just as insistent. He wants to meet.’
‘I don’t think you have much choice, Dulce.’ Chris had the decency to look concerned.
‘No, I don’t,’ Dulcie agreed. ‘And I don’t think Lucy has any particular insight into Thorpe or the whole Sloane Harquist situation. I just, well, I guess I was hoping that I’d wake up and it all would have gone away. And getting a warning doesn’t make it any better.’ Especially because of the strange timing. ‘My mother even said something about this not having happened for two hundred years.’
‘Dulce, I know Lucy loves you, but I wouldn’t give too much credence to anything she says.’
‘You’re right.’ She bent to kiss her boyfriend. ‘Let me call old Thorpe back and then go face that particular dragon.’
‘May the stars align!’ Chris had the inflection down perfectly. ‘Blessed be.’
‘Blessed be yourself.’ Dulcie found herself smiling, despite everything that awaited. Neither of them noticed that Esmé had stopped eating as Dulcie spoke. And that the little cat’s back was now arched in horror – her fur rising, as if size alone could ward off an attack.
SEVEN
‘I knew you should have been writing more quickly. Should have been sending papers out for review, for publication last semester. Last year, even. I blame myself, really.’
From the way Martin Thorpe was fretting, Dulcie almost believed him. Her adviser made another circuit of the small, worn rug, muttering about journals and opportunities missed. Dulcie had never seen him so upset. ‘I shouldn’t have let you lollygag so. Lost essays, a lost novel . . .’ He shook his head, which even in the bad office light was visibly glazed with sweat, and mopped it with a handkerchief. ‘Wildgoose chases.’
‘Only they’re not.’ After twenty minutes of Thorpe’s nervous pacing, Dulcie was getting dizzy. It was worth interrupting him, if only to make him hold still for a moment. ‘Wild geese, that is.’
Thorpe stopped short, right on the carpet’s fringe, and stared at her. Dulcie swallowed. The balding scholar might be tightly wound, but he was her adviser – and the interim head of the department to boot. And, despite his words, Dulcie knew that if one of his tutees failed to produce a publishable thesis, he wasn’t going to shoulder any of the blame. No, he would place responsibility for this debacle squarely on her.
‘I did identify some previously lost writings, and I got one good paper out of them already.’ As Dulcie spoke, she gained a little of her confidence back. ‘I think I’ll have more soon, too.’
He looked up, beady eyes quizzical behind his glasses, and Dulcie faltered. She hadn’t had a moment to check her laptop, to see if Chris’s software had uncovered any similarities between that one passage she’d copied down and any of her author’s known writings. She couldn’t now. Thorpe didn’t know about the program, and this wasn’t the time to introduce it. He already thought she was lacking as a scholar. ‘I mean, if I weren’t on the trail – if there wasn’t a lost manuscript – well, then why would this Sloane Harquist person want to go into the Mildon? I figure she must have found something referring to additional work.’
Without revealing her secret, it was the best argument she could make for herself – and for her thesis. And so she sat back, blinking, and waited for her sweaty adviser to pronounce her fate.
‘It’s not that simple.’ He was prevaricating also, she recognized the signs. At least he had stopped pacing, freeing her to breathe almost easily. ‘I did sign off on your current semester.’
Dulcie looked up at that. She knew her adviser had approved her continuing work, but she’d thought that was automatic. After all, in addition to last month’s paper, she had produced rough drafts of several chapters. Th
ere was more going on here than she’d originally thought.
‘I started writing last spring.’ Five years wasn’t that long for a doctoral thesis. Not in the humanities. ‘It’s just that when I found those letters and then the page from the book, I thought it more important to start searching . . .’
‘Yes, yes.’ He waved her to silence. ‘New material. A potential breakthrough.’
‘So—’ She stopped herself. This was not the time to ask Thorpe why he was so worried. Clearly, there was something else going on. Something political, she suspected. Something about that new dean.
She did have another question for Thorpe, though. One that her adviser might be able to answer. ‘Assuming this visiting scholar is on the track of the lost book . . .’ She hated to even voice the question out loud. However, she had to know. ‘Do we know if she found any of it?’
‘Maybe she found a complete copy.’ Thorpe shrugged, making him look a bit like a damp vulture. ‘Maybe she is simply seeking confirmation.’
Dulcie sank back in her chair. That was a possibility she had not even had a nightmare about. ‘You don’t know?’ she managed to squeak out.
He shook his shiny head, staring down at the open folder on his desk with an air of concentration that made her curious about its contents. She leaned forward, but all she could see was the university letterhead.
‘This is all very hush-hush,’ Thorpe continued, pulling the paper toward him. ‘Dean Haitner himself signed off on everything. She has, I have to say, unprecedented access and support. I gather he sees her as a potential addition to the faculty. He’s already talking about establishing his legacy with scholars like her.’ He looked up at her and blinked. His eyes seemed to soften. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Schwartz. These things happen, you know. It is why I’ve been pushing you.’
