“We’re almost there,” Cosette said.
Davis nodded. “Almost where?” he tried.
“This is what we know,” Rolanda said as he pulled up in front of the abandoned bus and she began to explain.
XI
The dark, claustrophobic space in which John had unaccountably found himself made a wild unreasoning fear flare up inside him. With an effort he worked to suppress it. There was too much at stake to panic. He took a slow, steadying breath, then another.
He had meant what he’d said just before he’d lunged for Rushkin. He wouldn’t allow another to die in his place. He would prefer oblivion to walking in the same world as the monster. But most of all, he’d prefer to continue the existence Isabelle had given him and instead, rid the world of Rushkin.
But the latter wasn’t an option since he’d discovered that he couldn’t physically harm Rushkin. So when John had leapt forward, it wasn’t to attack Rushkin. Instead he was focused on his gateway painting, The Spirit Is Strong. If he could just reach it before Rushkin pierced it with his knife, John knew he could wrest the painting from the monster’s grip. He was capable of that much. It would be up to Isabelle to stop Rushkin for good.
Halfway to Rushkin he’d felt a familiar sensation – that faint buzz of something like static electricity heralding the instantaneous passage from wherever he was to his source painting. And then he’d vanished from Rushkin’s makeshift studio in the Tombs. He’d felt an endless moment of bewildering vertigo as he hovered in the between place through which he had to pass before his journey could be complete – a long confusing moment during which there was no up and no down, no before or behind, no direction whatsoever, only an endless flux of possibilities. He had expected to reappear directly in front of Rushkin, prepared to grab the painting away from the monster when he did, but the between hadn’t functioned as he anticipated. Instead of being returned to the tenement studio where Rushkin was holding his gateway painting, John now found himself floundering about in a dark enclosed space, unidentified objects pressing against him from every side.
Standing absolutely still, he reached out with an exploring hand to find that what crowded him were stacks of paintings. The darkness, he realized after a moment, wasn’t complete, either. A body length away he could see a crack of light, and as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could see a course through the paintings.
John worked his way carefully toward the light, fingers finding a doorknob. It turned readily under his hand, the door opening with a sharp creak. A moment later he was stepping out into the large bedroom of Barbara Nichols’s apartment, which doubled as her studio. Across the room from where he stood, Barb was at her easel. She was half-turned to look at him, one hand upraised and held against her breast, her eyes wide with surprise.
“This … this shouldn’t be possible,” John said slowly.
Barb lowered her hand, then wiped it on her jeans, leaving behind a smear of bright red pastel pigment. “God, you gave me a fright,” she said.
“I …” John shook his head, trying to work out what exactly had gone wrong. “I don’t understand. Rushkin’s got my painting. When I reached for it, I shouldn’t have come here.”
“I knew that guy wasn’t you.”
“What guy?”
“The one who looked just like you who came for your painting a few days ago.
Bitterweed, John thought. His doppelganger had been here before him. “But –?”
“I didn’t give it to him,” Barb told him. She walked over to where he stood and led him back toward the battered chesterfield that was set kitty-corner between a bay window and a bookshelf stuffed to overflowing with books and papers. “You look terrible,” she added. “You better sit down before you fall down.”
John allowed her to steer him to a seat. While he sat there, she left the room, coming back moments later with a teapot and a mug.
“I think it’s still sort of warm,” she said, pouring him a mugful of tea.
She fetched her own mug from its precarious position on top of the wooden box holding her pastels and filled it as well. As she returned to sit with him, John cupped his mug with both hands. The mint tea was only lukewarm, but it was still comforting to have something to hold. As was the act of drinking the warm liquid. It made him feel more human.
“I’m missing something here,” he told her. “How did you know that it wasn’t me who came to fetch the painting? And if you didn’t give it to my double, then how did Rushkin get it?”
But Rushkin hadn’t acquired it, had he? His gateway painting still had to be in Barb’s closet, or else he wouldn’t be here. Yet he’d seen the painting in Rushkin’s hands.
Barb smiled. “First, although the guy looked like you, that’s where the resemblance ended.”
“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
“Have you ever known identical twins?” Barb asked.
John shook his head.
“I grew up with a set of them. They might look identical, but once you get to know them, you can always tell them apart. Not from a distance, maybe, but up close and talking? You can’t not know which is which.”
“If you say so,” John said, doubtfully.
“I do.”
Barb regarded him with mock severity until John said, “Okay. I believe you. But Bitterweed and I –”
“Is that his name? Bitterweed?”
John nodded.
“I guess he thought the play on your own surname was clever.”
“Maybe he didn’t get a choice in the matter,” John said, feeling a little odd. As soon as he spoke the words he realized that he carried a certain amount of sympathy for his double. What must it feel like when your only reason for existence was to refute another’s?
“Anyway,” Barb went on. “You and I – we’ve known each other for a long time now. The man who came here with your face wasn’t you. And if he had been you, well he didn’t deserve to get what he’d come looking for. He’d have to lose that arrogance before I’d even give him the time of day.”
“But the painting …?”
Barb shook her head as if to say, Don’t you know me better by now?
“I’ve been expecting something like this for years,” she said. “Once I realized it was all true – the gateways and the otherworld and all – and once I realized how important your painting was to your existence, I knew something like this would come up at some point. If not from Rushkin, then from some other enemy.”
“You think I have so many enemies?”
“Since Rushkin can bring you folks across, I figure you’d have as many as he painted.”
“I suppose you’re right. But even if you knew Bitterweed wasn’t me, it still doesn’t explain how I ended up here.”
“That’s simple,” Barb told him. “I did another one. I duplicated the painting Isabelle used to bring you across, and then on top of it I made a copy of mine, so that the two were exactly the same.”
“So I’ve got yet another doppelganger running about?” John asked, not at all pleased with the idea.
Bitterweed was bad enough. Though since it had been Barb bringing this other double across, he could at least be assured that it wouldn’t hold the same spiteful intentions toward him that Bitterweed did.
Barb shook her head again. “No, I thought about it before I started the new painting. With a bit of experimentation I discovered that it’s possible to make a gateway painting in which the gate will only open a bit – no wider than a crack. Enough to let the taste of your otherworld through, but not so much so that someone else can make the passage between our worlds.”
“So what Rushkin believed to be me …”
“Was only an echo of you,” Barb finished. “Or rather, a taste of the otherworld, but nothing more.”
John looked at her with open admiration. He thought of what must have happened back at the tenement where he’d left Rushkin and Isabelle. Rushkin would have cut the canvas and consumed the spirit released. He’d no
w be thinking that John was dead. He wouldn’t have fed well on what little sustenance he’d obtained from the painting, but he wouldn’t doubt that it was John’s essence he’d swallowed.
“You saved my life,” he said.
Barb flushed and looked away. “Indirectly, perhaps.”
John didn’t push it. Like Isabelle, Barb was often far too modest for her own good. He sometimes wondered how either of them got any work done since the very act of putting pigment to ground required a healthy measure of self-confidence that neither seemed to be able to muster with the same level of intensity outside the compass of their art.
Beside him, Barb took another swallow of her tea, then set the mug down on the floor. She leaned back against the arm of the chesterfield so that she was facing him, knees drawn up to her chest, chin propped up on her forearms.
“So I take it Rushkin’s back,” she said.
John nodded. “In the flesh.”
“I was hoping he’d finally died.”
Allow me immunity to whatever protects makers from attack by those of us brought across from the before, John thought, and he would be.
“So long as he can feed on us,” John said, “he’ll live forever.”
Barb sighed. John could see the muscles of her hands contract with tension and knew she was remembering her own time spent under his tutelage.
“So what’s the old bastard up to this time?” she asked.
As John explained, Barb’s tension intensified – this time in empathy to what Isabelle was going through. Just as he was getting to the moment when Rushkin had appeared in the doorway of the makeshift studio, he suddenly sat up straight, story forgotten. Through his connection with Isabelle, he felt the decision she’d come to. In his mind’s eye he could see the utility blade in her hand as it rose up to her throat.
“No!” he cried as the razor edge sliced into her skin, his voice ringing sharply in the confines of the studio.
Barb jolted as though struck. She leaned forward and gripped his arm. “John! What’s the matter?”
John’s lower jaw worked, but he couldn’t get a sound out. The enormity of what he felt left him helpless and numb. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he fell limply against the back of the chesterfield.
“John!” Barb cried again.
He finally managed to focus on her for one long moment, but before he could speak, he was taken away, drawn out of her grip with a rush of displaced air that eddied across her face, blowing her hair around her brow and temples.
Barb’s hand fell limply to her thigh. Her gaze was pulled to the door of her closet, which still stood ajar. His painting was still in there; that much she knew. But if John had been taken away …
She rose to her feet and darted across the room, suddenly afraid that for all her precautions, someone had snuck in and stolen the painting while they sat on the chesterfield talking. At the doorway of the closet, she hit the light switch, flooding the interior with a bright fluorescent glare. A few quick steps inside and she was flipping through the paintings. John’s gateway wasn’t hard to find. She picked it up and brought it back out into the warmer light of her studio, where she studied it carefully. There was no doubt in her mind that this was The Spirit Is Strong, painted over with her own deliberately crude brushstrokes to disguise it.
John had explained it all to her, how those brought across from the before could always instantaneously return to their source paintings. But that was it. The ability went no further than that one-way journey.
Holding the painting, she stared at the empty chesterfield, a deep chill settling in her chest. So what had just happened was impossible. Except John was gone. She held his source painting in her hands, but she was still alone in the studio.
“Oh, John,” she said softly, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. “What have they done to you now?”
XII
It wasn’t going to be hard at all, Isabelle realized as she put her decision into action. It felt so true, so … inevitable. Was this how it had felt for Kathy?
Everything decelerated into slow motion. Alan’s movement seemed like a series of quick sketches from a life drawing class. He took forever, plunging toward her through air gone suddenly thick and syrupy, a look of desperation and horror etched on his face. They both knew he’d be too late. By the time he reached her, knocking the utility blade away from her throat, the edge had already sliced through the flesh of her throat. A wash of warm blood flooded down onto her shoulders and chest.
Alan was still moving forward, unable to stop his lunge. Over his shoulder, she had a momentary glimpse of Marisa’s shocked features. Then the force of impact as Alan rammed into her knocked the back of her head against the wall behind her. The sharp pain of the blow was the first pain she’d felt since cutting herself.
She felt Alan’s hands gripping her shoulders, slipping on the bloodied fabric of her shirt. She heard him shout something, but there was a loud humming in her ears and she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
She didn’t really try. A vast pool of darkness welled up inside her and she let herself fall into its depths.
There was no pain there. No Rushkin. Only peace.
Only peace.
But she fell through the other side of the pool. It was like an hourglass with a top at either end. On the far side of the darkness her eyes flickered open and she swayed dizzily. The pain was still gone, but so was the throat wound. She stood in a place so familiar it hurt.
It was night, here on the far side of the darkness. Snow fell thickly about her. She stood up to her knees in white drifts and would have fallen from the vertigo, except there was a cast iron gate in front of her on which she was able to catch her balance. Beyond the gate was a backyard. Rearing above it was the back of a house, a familiar house, the one that had held the apartment she’d shared with Kathy all those years ago on Waterhouse Street. As she lifted her head, she saw the colored ribbons tied to the fire escape outside her window, fluttering in the wind-driven snow.
Dying had taken her back into the past, she realized. Dropped her into a piece of memory, one of the few that she’d never distorted or forgotten. But then how could she ever forget this night? It would be easier to forget how to breathe.
She looked for Rushkin and Paddyjack, but she couldn’t see either of them. Had she arrived before or after the cloaked figure of Rushkin arrived with his crossbow? She listened for the tappa-tap-tap of Paddyjack’s fingers dancing upon his wooden forearm, but all she could hear was the wind. Her gaze returned to the fluttering ribbons, then dropped when another movement caught her attention. Under the fire escape she saw the receding back of a figure as it made its way down the laneway that ran alongside the house.
She forgot how she got here. Forgot Rushkin and pulling the blade of the utility knife across her own throat. Her entire being was focused on that receding figure and the idea that if only she could call him back, this time everything would change. She was being given a second chance, she realized, a chance to undo all the mistakes she’d made the last time. She could still rescue her numena from the fire. Still save Kathy’s life. But it all depended on her not letting John walk out of her life this time.
She hauled herself over the gate and fell into the snow on the far side. “John!” she cried as she struggled to her feet.
The wind took the sound of her voice and tore it into tatters too small to carry. She forced herself forward through the snow.
“John!” she cried again.
XIII
Oh, Jesus!” Alan cried as Isabelle’s blood washed over them both.
He’d managed to knock the utility blade out of Isabelle’s hand, but he’d been too late to stop her from cutting herself. His forward momentum knocked Isabelle into the wall behind her, cracking the back of her head with enough of an impact to dent the plaster. As she started to slide down, he grabbed her shoulders, fingers slipping on the bloody fabric of her shirt. He let go one hand to support her head and slo
wly lowered her dead weight to the floor.
All her muscles had gone slack. When he finally had her on the floor, her head lolled to one side. The blood was making his stomach do flips. He stared numbly at the horrible sight, gaze blurring with tears.
“She … she … she …”
She really did it, was what he was trying to say, but the words locked in his throat, corning out only as sobs. He stared at her, feeling more sick by the moment.
Behind him, Marisa finally broke her paralysis. She grabbed clean rags from the worktable and hurried to his side, feet almost sliding out from under her on the polished wood floor as she rushed.
“We’ve got to stanch the flow of blood,” she said. “I’ll hold these in place while you try to get through the door.”
Alan gave her an anguished look. “But … but she’s …”
“She’s not dead,” Marisa said, shouldering him aside. “But she will be if we don’t get her some help soon.”
“All this blood …”
Marisa swallowed thickly. “I know.” She swabbed at Isabelle’s neck with one of the rags. The white cloth immediately turned crimson. “But look,” she added, pointing to the actual wound on the side of Isabelle’s throat. “You deflected her aim enough so that all she cut was the fleshy part of her throat. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“It’s … not?”
“The door.”
Still numbed by shock, Alan turned to look at it.
“It’s not that thick,” Marisa said. She didn’t look at him, concentrating her attention on Isabelle. “See if you can’t ram something through one of its panels. Or even the walls – Christ, they’re only plaster.”
Alan turned back to look at Isabelle. A shudder ran up his spine. “But she’s so still,” he said.
“I think you knocked her out when you banged her up against the wall.”
“Jesus. I never meant to –”
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