Clarissa Harlowe was willing herself to die. She sat before the coffin on which she had spent the only money she had, and she contemplated her death, imagined it, stitched it together out of thought and expectation. She would not destroy her body, for that was sinful and forbidden and, moreover, she did not want to touch or think about it long enough to calculate the delicacies of how to tie the rope, where to cut her veins. But her will had always been the most powerful weapon she possessed, and her will had not been, could not be taken from her.
She knew that she was dying. She could feel her ribs beneath ever-thinning layers of skin. Her skin was growing paler, as though the color was dripping out of it slowly, drop by drop. She had stopped eating, not from a hope for starvation, but because the thought of the food passing her lips made her sick.
She knew that she was dying. But time passed, and the dying did not end.
When the woman who owned her boarding house brought tea to her room, the smell of her skin and the sound of her breath were almost unbearable. Hunger coiled tight inside Clarissa's abdomen till she wanted to scream with it. She was keenly aware of the sharpness of her teeth against her tongue, and there was some energy inside of her, some strange force that wanted to force her into movements she did not understand, actions whose purpose she could not anticipate. She did not know what it was, except that her will could barely hold it down, barely contain it.
When the woman left, she heaved open the forbidden coffin (for, though her body may have thinned and paled, her limbs were, obscurely, as strong as ever) and curled herself within it, feeling the security of the firm walls of wood against her back, the safe closeness of this space that had room only for her own body. Clarissa had never been one of those who feared small spaces, and even her months of various confinements had not changed that. What she feared were locks.
Inside the coffin she slept soundly, for the first time in what felt like an eternity.
She dreamed that day of her own burial. She heard the nails pounding into the wood, the slap of the earth upon the surface of the coffin. In the dream, she lay still amidst this commotion. She noted easily that she could not feel her breath, or her heartbeat. This must, she thought, be what death is like.
She woke and was calm. Lightly, she touched her wrist with her fingertips. No pulse, no rush of blood. Within her skin, everything was cool and clear and silent. Something had ended, had come to its conclusion, though she did not know what that was.
It was night already. She had slept through the entire day.
She needed to move, needed to get out. The feeling was like the force that had rose within her at her landlady's presence. She was being drawn towards something, inexorably.
She readied herself, quickly, dressing, gathering up pen, ink, paper, a packet of letters. It was only by accident that she glanced into the mirror on her dressing table and saw an absence where her image should have been. Abruptly, she shivered.
Her first thought was of ghosts, of some remnant of her spirit bound still to the earth by the anger and resentment which even her own strong will had not been able entirely to eradicate. But her body was too solid for that, the air too sharp around her, the new, spiraling hunger within her too potent.
She needed answers. And, as much as she detested it, there was perhaps only one person to which she could go for them.
As her mind fixed upon what she would need to do, her body somehow answered, blurring at the edges, dissolving, until she had lost substance entirely, mist bright and white within the gleaming moonlight. Lightly, the wind carried her to Robert Lovelace.
He was not surprised as she appeared before him, limbs and hair and swirling skirts materializing out of the mist. He only stood from his writing desk and held out his arms to her. "My Clarissa," he said.
She noted, dispassionately, that his fingers were as deeply stained with ink as her own.
"What have you done to me?" she asked, hearing her voice clearer and louder than she expected it to sound. She closed her eyes so as not to look at him. "Why," she asked again, "am I not dead?"
"My love -" he began, and she felt sick.
"No endearments, Mr. Lovelace. I have come to hear your explanations, not your proposals."
He smiled, but she saw that that his clothes were rumpled and unironed, that his long brown hair was slightly tangled. The sight was mildly satisfying. "But the two are bound up inextricably together, implacable Clarissa. We are linked together now, for all eternity. You cannot die because I cannot. Beloved, you share in my curse, and in my power."
She would not scream at him. She would stand still and composed, as though she had not just travelled here as mist, of all things, as though her mirror had not suggested that she no longer existed. "Speak more clearly, if you are not too mad to do so."
"I bear," he said, "a poison in my blood, which both corrupts and grants power. It takes me out of the realms of the human, out of the dominion of God and death. I have given it to you, in order that we might always be together. There are folktales that tell of such creatures as we are, old words - vampyr, nosferatu. We flourish in night and gain our nourishment from human blood." He laughed, cruelly. "Religious symbols bar our path. We are stronger than humans, and, as you have already learned, posses powers of which they cannot dream. You cannot imagine, Clarissa, how beautiful you are now, in the moonlight, how white, how strong. You are even more glorious than in life."
She wished at first that he was truly mad, or lying, but the heady feeling of turning to mist was still so close, and Clarissa Harlowe uprooted self-delusion wherever she found it. Faintly she remembered, out of the blurred haze which was his drug-aided assault upon her, a gleaming knife and a bloody wrist. Coaxingly - Open your mouth, my darling. The iron taste of blood.
She thought she was going to faint.
"You must rest," Lovelace said, "you are still so young in your undeath. And you must be hungry, my love." He guided her to a chair that she recognized well, and she did not yet feel able to resist, though his touch against her skin, even through the fabric of her dress, made her want to tear at the smooth surface of his face. He went to the door and stuck his head out of it, "Polly," he called, "come here for a moment."
The young woman was there quickly, and she smirked to see Clarissa, who refused to react. She still easily remembered Polly and Sally visiting her when she was imprisoned and friendless, talking of how much she was missed at Mrs. Sinclair's house, how much her flight had grieved them. She had not returned; that was not what this was. This was not Lovelace's triumph.
Lovelace was taking the woman in his arms, bringing her to Clarissa. "Bare your neck for us, there's a good girl." Polly did - her low bodice left that part of her anatomy easily available. Lovelace held her out to Clarissa like an offering (for the first time, she noticed how his arms showed no strain, even bearing the entire weight of Polly's body), saying, "Here, my love. Take your fill."
For a moment she was confused, until she saw the interlocking bite marks on the woman's neck, both fresh and scarred over. In her mouth, her teeth felt sharp, as though in answer to the sight. She felt Lovelace's words resonating within her, echoing against the new silence of her ribcage, her perception of herself falling into place, reshaping itself around the new definitions she had been given.
She was terrified.
She stood, pushed him and languorous Polly aside. She wanted to say something cutting and clever and dignified, something that would finish their prolonged correspondence as perfectly as the ending of a novel, but there were no words that could possibly suffice.
She fled.
"Anna," she whispered at the window, "please let me in."
Clarissa had imagined, somehow, that she would have been able to slip in through the keyhole or under the door, as she had entered Mrs. Sinclair's house, but it was as though Anna's home was walled away from her with a protection gleaming and golden.
Bleary with sleep, Anna opened the window, and Clarissa poured in, mist and cold and damnation. As she brought herself to solidity before her friend (it was easier and smoother this, the second time) she watched Anna's eyes open wide in confusion, felt her reach out her hands to stroke Clarissa's cold skin. The hunger made itself known again. Clarissa winced.
"Clarissa?" Anna asked softly, "Am I imagining this? What has happened?"
For a moment, Clarissa paused, and considered her position. She should go. Whatever Lovelace had done to her, however he had changed her flesh and blood and soul, Anna should have no part in it. Though she had felt her new body primarily as clean, clear and cold and unfamiliar, Lovelace's words about corruption and the feel of her teeth sharpening against her lips at the sight Polly Horton's bare neck were twisting uncomfortably within her mind. She should not taint Anna with this. She should leave this quiet bedroom and alone untangle the mysteries of her new state, tease out its limits and its vulnerabilities, learn how she might contravene Lovelace's purpose in this, as she had in all else.
But, she realized, she did not want to be alone. In her dying, she had desired solitude more powerfully than anything else. But she could not die. She could not die. That had been taken from her, another of her rights that Lovelace had pillaged. And if she was not to die, then she wanted Anna beside her, wanted a listener, a recipient, a companion.
"I need your help," she said.