by Quenby Olson
He returns the cup to the bedside table, and when he says nothing, I find I cannot bear the silence he’s introduced between us.
"Speak," I tell him, my voice a cracked, painful creature.
He takes the time to lick his lips, and I see his teeth appear, long enough to worry the inside of his cheek. "I was beginning to think you would never wake."
I blink again, revelling in the lightness of my eyelids. Until now, I hadn’t been aware of the heaviness that weighed upon not only my mind, but upon my body’s every movement.
"What..." I say, but there are no other words with which to finish the question. Instead, my gaze darts towards the window, seeking out the source of the incessant drumming sound. There is some light coming into the room, a pale glow that does little to reveal whether I’ve awakened to a new morning or a night.
"It rained all night," Chissick explains. And with that statement, the unfamiliar sound transforms into something like a well-known melody, forgotten for a while, but picked up again when another person whistles a few notes. "And the air has cooled some," he adds, though I’ve yet to regain enough sensation in my limbs to notice. "I had worried you might take a chill."
The blankets, of course. They are such a weight upon me, but as I attempt to shift, to move my arms and my legs from beneath them, I understand that it isn’t the covers that are holding me in place, but instead my own weakness.
My gaze sweeps in concentric circles that draw ever tighter around Chissick’s crouching form. When I settle my eyes on his face, I see that he is watching me. And I wonder if he has allowed himself to take one look away from me for the entirety of the night.
He clears his throat. "How do you feel?"
I doubt there is a language on all the Earth that would convey anything near to the riot of feelings rushing through me. "I don’t know," I say. He may expect me to continue, to add some description to this brief speech, but those few words are enough to content him. And I wonder how frail my condition must be that a single thread of speech, so insubstantial as that, will give him satisfaction.
"I imagine you’re in some pain." It is not a question, I notice, and it is also spoken with a greater amount of delicacy.
"I don’t…" I begin to repeat myself, but even the small movements I’ve made since waking have ignited a terrible ache in my side, somewhere in the vicinity of my ribcage, I think, but there is such a haze of discomfort around it that I can’t identify its source.
Once more, my attention shifts towards the window. "The fires," I say, and Chissick doesn’t seem to notice how I deflect his attention from my own damaged condition.
"I’ve not been out of doors since I brought you here." He looks away from me, a brief flick of his eyes before his shoulders roll back beneath his shirt and his gaze returns to my face. "But I can only assume that with the onset of the rain, the fires have at least diminished somewhat."
I nod slowly. Another question answered, but while I begin to learn—or at least to guess at what may be happening outside, I’ve yet to tap into any reserve of courage necessary to inquire as to what occurred before I opened my eyes a few minutes ago.
I look around the room as I become more aware of my surroundings. My room is the same, boasting the same sparse, dusty furnishings, the same refuse and debris from several weeks’ worth of daily life. And yet this scant space seems to have gained an innocuousness since the last time I laid eyes on it all. Perhaps it’s the quality of light from the windows, or perhaps everything has taken on a less suspicious air now that my every thought is no longer accompanied by its own sibilant commentary.
My gaze darts back towards Chissick, as if I expect some part of his visage to have also undergone a change since I last took the trouble to study his features. I notice a bandage on his head—a cleaner one than what he sported the last I saw him—but aside from his injury, there is nothing markedly different about his appearance. Surprisingly or not, he seems to be one of the few things to have remained static since our first introduction.
I'm still lying on the bed, though there is a tightness in my muscles, a rigidity that makes me feel as if I’m poised, ready to bound out of the room like a frightened creature. So I settle my arms more fully onto the mattress, my hands pressing down as I try to shift and pull myself up.
"No." Chissick’s reaction is immediate. He half-rises from his chair, both of his hands grasping my shoulders and pressing me back down into the pillow. "Lie still. You’ll set the wound to bleeding."
The wound.
I blink up at him, and I know he must read the confusion on my face. And then it returns to me, all of it at once, so that there’s no need for him to hold me down since the memories are more than enough to sap what little strength I possess.
There is the pain in my side, and as I shift, I feel a thickness around my middle, and I realise it must be the bandages that have kept me from bleeding to death.
"Miss—" he begins to say, but a quick flutter of my fingers is enough to stop him. "Thea," he finishes, and I close my eyes.
"What happened?"
When he doesn’t reply, I look at him. His face is illuminated by the faint morning light, his whiskers taking on a ruddier hue in the pale glow.
"Julian?"
Now it is his turn to shut his eyes, while his mouth appears to work over something, but instead of speaking, he swallows it down and turns his head away. "What do you remember?"
It might be a glimmer of hope I hear in his words, that I won’t recall anything that happened once he arrived at my family’s former home, that I don’t still hear the click of the revolver’s hammer beneath his thumb, or the agony in my aunt’s voice the moment the bullet pierced my skin. And I could give him such a gift, to lie to him and tell him that I’ve no memory of anything and allow him to tell me only what he would wish me to know. But I fear we’ve gone beyond that point, and that any prevarication on my part would only harm us further.
"I remember everything," I say, and watch as he flinches. "Everything until the moment after you shot me, that is."
I hear his sharp inhalation, and the next thing I expect from him is an apology, but I’m surprised when his gaze shifts, his eyes flitting towards some indiscernible point behind me. Only for a second before his attention returns to my face, his features carefully arranged into a pattern designed to prevent me from reading anything displayed there.
"It was…" He shakes his head, his teeth again working at the skin inside his bottom lip. "You fell, and the woman—"
"My aunt."
"Y-Your aunt?" I suspect I could’ve declared myself Defender of the Faith and not received a more baffled reaction from him.
I nod. If he expects a more detailed explanation than that, he will have to wait until I'm capable of drawing in a breath that doesn’t make me wish to cry out in pain.
"Well, your aunt, she began to scream." He pauses, long enough for a shiver to pass through him. "The sound of it was like nothing I had ever heard before. It was inhuman."
I gesture for the cup of water, and grateful for the distraction, he raises it to my lips and slips his other hand behind my head as I drink.
"It was after that, couldn’t have been more than a few seconds later, everything went dark. The entire room…" And again, he’s shaking his head as he turns the cup of water between his hands. "No, it was as if the entire world went black." A flick of his fingers, and I can sense the panic that must have overwhelmed him. "But it didn’t last for longer than a moment, hardly longer than it took me to blink. And it was over, and the woman—your aunt—she was gone."
"Gone?" I feel myself start to rise up, but the sudden flash of pain sends me back down onto my pillow. "She left?"
"I thought that. I even went out after her, into the street, but there was nothing." He shrugs, returns the cup to the table, and settles his elbows on his knees. "I couldn’t find any trace of her."
I turn my face up toward the ceiling. If I were to close my eyes, I’m sure
I would remember the way the shadows writhed across my aunt’s skin, or the way her face possessed an illusory quality, her features as insubstantial as a cloud of smoke. But I don’t close them, and in this way I hope the memory will lose some purchase, if only a little.
There is more, I know. But Chissick remains silent for several minutes, his hands clasping and unclasping before he takes to thumping his knuckles on the edge of the mattress.
"When I returned inside, you were right where I had left you." I hear the guilt in his voice, and I wonder how much his own conscience has abused him for abandoning me—if only for a moment—in pursuit of my aunt. "I never realised quite how small you are, until I saw you." His knuckles continue to strike out an uneven tattoo on the bedside. When his hands still, his eyes seek out mine. "Your heart had stopped," he says, and nothing more.
I draw in a breath, and at that moment, I'm overwhelmed with the thought that for a time, as brief a one as it was, there was no air sliding in and out of my lungs. And then I remember the rhythmic pressure on my chest, and the voice that begged so urgently for my return.
"And?" I prompt him, because I can’t allow him to linger over such a remembrance.
"There was blood, so much of it, but I needed to help you, and I didn’t know how to go about it."
The rain on my face. "You carried me."
His mouth opens and closes without sound.
"You carried me here," I tell him, so sure of the memory that he can make no argument against it.
"Yes." The word slips out of him, accompanied by a slow nod. "And I sent your Mrs. Selwyn out in search of Trevor."
"Mrs. Selwyn?" This revelation, more than all the others, is nearly enough to bring me fully upright in the bed. Chissick even reaches out to my shoulder, prepared to push me back down, but I settle back into the bed, wincing at the twinge of pain that radiates out from the wound in my side. "I can’t remember her ever having left the house."
A slight smile, the first since I’ve woken, twitches at the corners of Chissick’s mouth. "For the right amount of coin, I believe she would take herself all the way to Chowringhee and back." His face resumes a more serious cast. "It was Trevor who patched you up, staunched the wound as best he could. There was nothing left then but to wait and see if you would open your eyes."
I press my head back into the pillow, my gaze skimming over the same ceiling I have spent countless hours examining, the warped and greasy boards having been my anchor in this world as the voices—such cruel and venomous creatures—called out from the next. But now, it is nothing more than an assembly of wood and nails, laced with the abandoned webs of spiders, the droppings of mice that chewed their way between the boards. My head is quiet, my thoughts trickling at a sluggish pace, lonesome and without commentary.
"I should let you rest," Chissick says.
I nod in reply as my eyes continue to pick out the dips and shadows of the room. And I realise the musty darkness that clings to the corners, that huddles beneath the furniture and inside every chink and crack in the walls, no longer holds any threat to me now.
Chapter Twenty-Five
* * *
* * *
I watch Trevor’s hands as they move across my skin. His palms are as broad as meat pies, his fingers as blunt as sausages about to split through their casings. But his touch is gentle, his movements laced with an assurance in his own skills. He draws my attention to his work and secures it without any qualms, though it is my own damaged flesh I’ve been given leave to study.
"No sign of infection," he mutters to himself. His thick forefinger prods a puckered bit of skin at the edge of the wound. "Seepage?"
I admit, a moment must pass before I realise this question is directed at myself.
"Some, but not for days. And nothing putrid."
He nods, his gaze never leaving the nascent scar beneath my rib cage. I experience the same suspicion as with each previous examination, that my injury holds more interest to him than the person in which it resides.
As he applies the fresh dressing, my stomach lets out an ill-timed rumble of discontent, and I'm no longer left to ponder why my mind conjured images of various edibles as he poked and prodded at my abdomen.
All of my senses have been rendered more acute during the length of my recuperation. Hunger, especially, is often so keen I think no amount of food will dampen it. And my hearing as well seems to have improved in clarity. Or maybe it is the lack of conversation in my head that allows me to now hear other sounds more clearly.
Trevor stands up, washes his hands and arms up to his elbows in a basin set on a chest of drawers beside the window. The basin is new. To me, I should add, considering the amount of chips in its rim and the crack in the pitcher’s mud-brown glaze. The chest came from Chissick’s house, a piece of furniture he declared hadn’t been used since the previous tenants had inhabited the house, and was in need of nothing more than an afternoon of strenuous waxing to return it to its former glory.
With Trevor’s back turned, I pull my blouse down over my abdomen and readjust the waistband of my skirt. Every morning, for the last four mornings, I have forced myself to dress, to brush and pin my hair, to achieve some sense of routine; though I have yet to set foot outside of the room since Chissick brought me here, bleeding from a bullet wound to my side three weeks before.
"I shouldn’t need to look in on you again," Trevor announces as he rolls his shirtsleeves back down over his forearms, still dripping with water. "You’re healing well, and since the bone doesn’t appear to have been nicked."
I place my legs over the side of the bed and as my heels touch the floor, there is a tentative knock on the door. Trevor shakes out his cuffs and looks up as if he could see through the wood that surrounds him.
"Does he ever go home?" he asks, and pinches at a button with a peculiar amount of ferocity.
"Not at first, no." I reach up and pick a pin out of my hair, twist an errant piece of hair around my finger, and secure it back into place. "He does leave now. Every night, and for several hours each day."
I can’t say that I'm comfortable around Trevor. I understand he is Chissick’s acquaintance, and there seems to be some history there I’m unable to ascertain, but I always feel unwelcome in his presence, especially as pertains to my connection with Chissick, leaving me with the overwhelming sensation that I have trespassed across some invisible boundary no one took the care to demarcate for me.
"Your business," he says, his tone taking on an additional layer of gruffness, the closest thing to a whisper of which I assume he’s capable. "What he came to see you for? It’s finished now?"
There is no way I can answer this, or at least, there is no answer I can think to make that will resemble anything even close to the truth. I look away from him, my fingers fiddling again with the pins in my hair, with a button at my collar, at anything that will prevent me from having to acknowledge the gaze he fixes on me. "As much as it can be."
"So you’ll be sending him on his way?"
My hand pauses over the smoothing of a pleat in my skirt. "I think you overestimate the power I exert over where Chissick chooses to spend his time."
A puff of breath, followed by a curse, before Trevor snatches his coat from the back of a chair. "He’s damaged, you know."
There is something in the way he says this that shapes it into a warning about my own safety, but it is only Chissick’s safety he cares about, and the threat he must believe I pose to it.
The conversation is at an end when Trevor crosses to the door, opening it with a sharp tug I think could remove the entire slab of wood from the hinges, if given leave to do so.
"Jules." There is a nod, a lift of fingers to where the brim of a hat would reside if he were wearing one, and Trevor excuses himself, leaving Chissick alone to scuff his heels in the narrow doorway.
He waits until I acknowledge him. A lift of my eyebrows is all that is necessary, and he enters the room, his hat in his hand, his gait so much as it was on
that fateful afternoon—could it have been only a few weeks ago? I admit, I'm reluctant to apply such a short amount of time to all that has occurred over the course of it. And yet here we are: I, seated, waiting for him to state his business, as it were. And Chissick, still unsure of himself, still performing something of a dance, I think. A few steps forward, and then a slight retreat before he builds up the confidence to move forward again.
"All is well?" He tilts his head towards the door, the hall and the stairs and surely the street beyond having already borne Trevor well on his way away from us.
I straighten my shoulders, give myself a subtle check that all is tucked and pinned and fastened back into place. My posture, I hope, is erect enough as I sit on the edge of the bed that no one ignorant of my recent history should be able to guess I still harbour a bullet in my torso, an inch beneath my bottom left rib.
"I believe Trevor is eager to see me retire my role as his patient," I announce, as diplomatically as I can manage.
"So you are healed?"
"I am healing," I amend for him. "As I trust I will be for some time to come."
And then there is nothing but silence between us. I'm torn between wishing to stand, to brush the imaginary flecks of dust from my skirts and test the full ability of all my muscles and various appendages. But as long as I remain where I am, I find I’m better able to hold everything else at bay, and there results no need for me to depart from this room and come face to face with the destruction I know lies beyond these four walls.
But a compromise must be reached, and so I brace my hands on the bowed edge of the mattress and begin to rise. Chissick stays where he is, offering no help towards my effort to find my balance. This is a change in his behaviour that unnerves me, how he watches me as I struggle to my feet, my hands seeking the next piece of furniture as my equilibrium threatens to desert me.
I move along the wall, marvelling at the sound of my footsteps—a sound, I learn, that is taken for granted when the parameters of a small bed become one’s entire universe—on the bare floor. When I reach the window, I allow myself to lean forward until I grip the sill to prevent myself from toppling further, and I press my forehead against the glass. A soft exhale escapes me, and a fog of steam erupts on the pane.
