by L. Inman
Elisabeth never
dreamed about her death. It had
happened, as so many important things did, without the distraction of those
fiddly causal ties, and Elisabeth’s dreams were always about fiddly causal
ties. She dreamed about her old jobs,
her old school, her old jobs at school: personages from her past flitted in and
out of doorways, scolding her.
When she woke there was rarely any
detritus to clear from her mind except what might prove distracting to the
day’s work. But it wasn’t her remembered
dreams that were most likely to distract her.
She walked to and fro between her
flat and
But her thoughts as she traversed her
days were oppressed not by work but by the memory of a night when her refugee
lover had broken quietly into her flat and asked her, from the darkness of the
corridor, for help. It was better she
didn’t know day to day where Rupert was, or what he was doing.
Occasionally, when she was very
tired, she saw things out of the corner of her eye: the turn of a back
belonging to someone she thought she knew—the flip of a familiar skirt—the
sudden sense of eyes she knew from somewhere peering from behind library ranges
or greengrocer’s carts. Elisabeth
dismissed this as brainfag and moved on.
Her dreams did not change.
*
She had seen it
all coming, of course; the visits. She
had warned Rupert to stay away, had told him that it was better they worked
together separately on what would become the new apocalypse; but she knew he
would come to her eventually.
And he did; but Robson showed up
first. On her doorstep on a grey day in
Michaelmas term, a young girl at his side, her eyes darting here and there
nervously.
“Did you bring your Potential for
protection?” she asked him, with pleasant venom.
Robson glanced around as warily as
his charge. “I need to speak to you,” he
said, not meeting her eyes.
Elisabeth folded her arms. “And why should I give you the time of day?”
Robson lifted his eyes to hers at
last. “No reason you should.”
In his face was plain appeal, and
Elisabeth relented. She stepped back and
let him and the girl come inside.
What Robson wanted, of course, was
Rupert. Where was he?
Elisabeth didn’t know, by common
agreement.
Would she get a message to him?
Elisabeth couldn’t do that.
Then could Elisabeth please, please,
keep these books for him? It wasn’t
much, but it would help Rupert if he ever came looking for them.
Elisabeth explained that she and
Rupert had agreed he wouldn’t come near her; she couldn’t guarantee Rupert
would ever find the books if Robson left them with her.
But Robson insisted and now
Elisabeth had three unprepossessing volumes added to her occult library.
She saw Robson out her door with an
unsmiling wave and a faint, “Godspeed.”
She tried not to look at the girl at all.
*
She had decided
Rupert wouldn’t come, once a week or two had passed and Robson’s clandestine
visit had not provoked fate to send Rupert to her door.
But one night she woke from a sound
sleep with her heart beating furiously.
There had been a sound; hadn’t there?
A slight click out in the darkness of the main room. Elisabeth waited: there was no other sound, but with each
passing second her alertness grew in response to…she knew not what.
As silently as she could, she slid
open the drawer of her night-table and drew out the stake she kept there,
carefully honed for any emergency. She
considered briefly turning out the bedside lamp, to gain visibility into the
darkness beyond the half-open bedroom door—but it would be a dead giveaway to
her intruder, and she wanted the jump on him if she could possibly get it.
Slowly she slipped her feet to the
floor and rose from the bed, stake at the ready. Yes, there it was, the sound of a footstep.
And then a soft, sandpapered
voice. “Elisabeth.”
She almost dropped the stake. “Rupert?”
“Shh! Yes, it’s me.”
She put the stake back into the
drawer and shut it without troubling to be quiet, then hurried out to where he
waited in the shadows of her livingroom.
He drew back as she reached him in
the darkness, so that her outstretched hand did not touch him. “Rupert,” she said, “where are you?”
“Shh! I don’t have much time.”
“What are you—” She swallowed the
question. She knew what he was doing
here.
“I apologize,” he whispered, “for
breaking into your flat.” He was moving
again; she followed his tall shadowy outline toward the couch.
“You—? Oh.”
Elisabeth tried to shake the sleep from her head.
“I’m regrouping,” Rupert said,
answering the question she had swallowed.
“I don’t want anyone to know I came here, so I didn’t knock you up. Sorry to wake you like that.”
He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t sound anything.
“Have you eaten?” Elisabeth said.
“No.”
“Then I’ll get you some—”
“No! Don’t turn on any lights.”
“I wasn’t going to,” she soothed
him.
“Right,” he said. In the darkness she could read nothing except
his voice: flat, with the faintest coil of tension beneath the surface. She suppressed a shudder.
Over his protests she turned on the
stove lamp in the kitchen and began to heat him a cup of soup by its weak
light. After a moment she heard him
brave the light to come into the kitchen; with her back to him she stirred the
saucepan on the stove and absorbed every dusty, travel-weary nuance of his
scent. He had established that he didn’t
want to be touched, which was just typical, because her senses were coming
awake in his presence. If he stayed very
long she would begin to betray herself wanting him, whereas if he left
quickly…she would merely be left to want him in the silence of her own bed.
“You’re not staying?” she said,
though she knew the answer.
“…No,” he said, belatedly. “I have a flight out of Heathrow in a few hours. Before daylight.”
She nodded, half to herself.
When the soup was hot she poured it
into a battered insulated mug, snapped the cap over the top, and turned to
him. “Here. Drink this.”
He reached out and took the mug from
her hand; one of his fingertips brushed hers, and she turned to busy herself
with the rest of the soup and pretend that a wave of longing had not just
engulfed her.
He was the same, and not the same:
slightly unkempt and not too recently shaven, hurriedly clad in jeans and a
shapeless canvas coat, a faint smeared spatter on his broad forehead that might
have been—probably was—blood.
She turned to him again and took the
soup from his hands. “You have time to
wash,” she said. “Go in the
bathroom. I’ve got an extra razor and
some foaming cleanser. The soup will
keep hot.”
He obeyed without a word; not a good
sign. Quietly Elisabeth washed out the
saucepan and put it away, then went to see how he was doing.
He had hung his coat on the bathroom
doorknob. She peered inside; he was
shaving, quickly and carefully, with a pink disposable razor. He had washed his face clean of whatever had
spattered it. He raised his eyes in the
mirror and met hers.
“Robson left you some books,” she
told him quietly.
He returned his eyes to his task. “Did he.”
“I’ll get them.”
She went and retrieved the books
Robson had left. After a brief search in
the darkness of the livingroom she found the small canvas bag which was all
Rupert had brought in with him. No
provisions, no change of clothing.
Elisabeth thought a moment, then went to the closet and dug out her old
army pack, the pack that had seen her through several states of the Union and
two dimensions. She felt it over
carefully, shook out some crumbs, and took it over to the couch, where she
packed it with Robson’s books and the materials Rupert had brought in his
little bookbag. She went to the bedroom
and dug through a few drawers before she found the sweatpants and jumper Rupert
had left behind the last time he’d spent the night—eons ago by any reckoning
except that of calendar time. She packed
them too. In the kitchen she emptied out
her box of granola bars, raided her stash of fruit leather, and stuffed the lot
into a freezer bag. She grabbed a few
more freezer bags and returned to the livingroom, where Rupert was shrugging
back into his coat and rubbing at his jaw.
The faint light from the kitchen picked up the gaunt line of his face as
he reached for the flap of her backpack and fingered it briefly. “I’m not using it,” she said, her voice light
as if he had asked, and moved deftly around him to pack the food. He lifted his head; she did not wait for him
to speak, but instead bustled into the bathroom with one of the freezer bags to
pick him out some travel-size soaps and gels, which were left languishing in a
drawer from her vagabond days. She added
a cheap plastic-wrapped toothbrush for good measure, sealed the bag, and
returned to him, to pack it.
Rupert was still just standing
there. “Don’t forget your soup,”
Elisabeth said, and went to get it for him.
He still didn’t move when she held
out the cup to him. Finally he made a
small gesture in the darkness, and lifted his head to meet her look.
“They’re all dead,” he said in a
whisper.
She reached out, found his hand, and
curled it softly around the warm cup.
“They won’t be the last to die,” she said, her voice as low as his.
They said nothing else after that.
Rupert downed as much of the soup as he could take, then silently handed
Elisabeth the mug and shouldered the pack.
He held still while she adjusted the straps, which were stiff and
stubborn after many years of being used to the shape of Elisabeth’s shoulders.
At the door (he had picked the lock
without breaking it), they paused together just before he went out. Their faces were mere inches apart in the
darkness, their mutual gaze nearly obscured.
She drew in a breath and moved ever so faintly toward him: it was all
the goodbye kiss she would attempt. He
returned the gesture with a brief closing of the eyes, and then the moment was
over and he was out the door and down the unlighted steps.
“Godspeed,” she mouthed into the
darkness, and closed the door without watching his retreating back down the
silent street.
*
He was on her
mind often after that, sidling into the edgespaces between tasks, with her as
she beat feet on the pavement, to and fro.
Once Elisabeth went with friends on
a rowing party, something she had always wanted to do but never quite got
around to. The sky was cloudless, the
air perfect with the sharp tang of autumn that matched the sparkle of sun on
the water’s surface. The spirit among
her party was carnival, frivolous, giddy and chattering. And yet none of this could shake Elisabeth’s
sense of a great calm before a thunderstorm, as if the sparkle and the chatter
and the light plash of water could be rolled up like a windowshade at any
moment—
There. Who was
that, dangling her bare legs over the pier?
Elisabeth turned, to get the
attention of one of her friends, who were all laughing at a joke someone had
made. But by the time she got it, the
girl on the pier had vanished.
Elisabeth shook her head, to clear
it, and joined in the laughter.
*
Elisabeth
stopped dreaming altogether; her nights gathered themselves up into a pressured
underwater silence.
*
Christmas came
and went: Elisabeth zipped the lining into her burberry and walked faster when
she went out. She ate Christmas dinner
with Brian, who was moodily avoiding his parents. “Are you all right?” he asked once as he
topped up her glass of nog. “You seem a
little distant.”
She blinked in surprise. “I’m fine,” she said.
*
She heard
nothing from Rupert. There was no need
to worry about this, and she didn’t: but it was uncanny the way she seemed to
see things in her peripheral vision whenever he came to her thoughts. Elisabeth threw herself into her work.
*
Her thesis was
shaping up: a towering (or so it seemed) work on the role of fairytale in genre
and literary theory. Elisabeth had spent
arduous hours in various libraries narrowing her focus, first so far, then
farther, choosing authors, dates, specimens for close reading; themes. Doppelgangers, the quest narrative, the dream
narrative, the suspension of morality and empirical certainty, all waited under
her fingers like chords on a piano. And
always, under the surface, a dissonance she couldn’t tease out.
The first time it truly happened, it
was silent, almost meaningless. She was
crossing Radcliffe Camera, and as she moved she saw to her side, across the
way, a mirror where she had seen no mirror before. The image of herself was there; then gone, in
a flash as of an altered reflection.
Elisabeth actually went ten steps before stopping and returning to the
spot where she had seen it.
Of course there was no mirror. Her mind was playing tricks on her
again. Elisabeth faltered a step or two
toward the empty place; then shook her head and forced herself to resume her
original course.
But the uncertainty had begun. It remained, even when days passed and
Elisabeth saw nothing else. Distressing
memories rose for her when she looked up from her work, of the bad days when a
week-long episode began with the hallucinations—dark spots, shadows in her
peripheral vision, possible bugs or spiders or malignant people, gone in an instant,
never quite real enough to frighten her completely, just real enough to make
her check and relax, check and relax, until she was tired and the episode took
over.
She had enjoyed the best health
she’d ever known, these years since she crossed dimensions. There was no reason to suppose that these
flickers were anything but the last debris of worry about Rupert and the coming
apocalypse.
Days passed, and nothing else
happened. There was no news, there were
no hallucinations. But Elisabeth slept
badly.
This, too, could be taken in stride.
*
It was, in a
sickening sort of way, almost a relief when it began in earnest. The silence in her flat had grown thick and
oppressive, her mind tired from attending to her peripheral vision and seeing
nothing.
She broke off from her work one cold
evening and went into the kitchen to make herself some soup and a grilled
cheese sandwich. She was buttering the
first slice of bread as the pan heated, when a voice spoke into her homely
silence, where no voice should be. A
voice she knew intimately, a voice she had heard every day of her life. Of both her lives.
“Whatcha makin’?”
Elisabeth went hot and cold. Slowly she forced herself to turn to the side
and look at this violation.
Herself to the life: the glasses,
the soft blond down on her arms, the whimsical stance, the
half-academic-professional, half-comfortable-at-home clothing; the awkward
straggles of her pinned-up soft brown hair.
Another hallucination, Elisabeth
thought desperately. But she knew better. Shakily she reached and turned the heat off
under the now-smoking pan. Then she
stretched forth a hand to touch her mirror image, with a feeling almost of
curiosity. Her counterpart made no
effort to elude her touch, but her hand made no contact, as how she would touch
an optical illusion. Elisabeth drew back
her hand. There was nothing there; so
why did she suddenly feel as if her soul were irreparably dirty?
Her mirror image raised an ironic
eyebrow. Elisabeth had had no idea how
insolent that gesture looked on her face.
She swallowed dry-throated and spoke
into the full silence, looking herself in the eye.
“I know you,” she said.
Her mirror image softened into a
smile of distressing intimacy.
“Yes,” she said, “you do.”
*