"Good evening, Mrs. Beazley."
Jean stared at the woman who spoke to her. It was rude to stare. It was rude to greet guests in her dressing gown with her hair in rollers. But it was also after midnight and there were two strangers inside Doctor Blake's house!
The ability to speak seemed to elude Jean for the moment. She tried to understand what she was looking at. The woman was very beautiful. Young, perhaps thirty at the very oldest. Her dark hair was pinned back in a very old-fashioned manner, the way Jean remembered her mother doing for special occasions. And, come to think of it, the woman's clothing was rather old-fashioned, too. She wore a white blouse with dark embroidered details to match the dark color of her long skirt.
"Were you having trouble sleeping?" the woman asked, after waiting for Jean's response and getting none.
"Y-yes," Jean replied.
Her gaze shifted from the woman to the man she sat with. He was older. Older than Jean, even. He wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar with the sleeves rolled up. His trousers were dark and plain. Ordinary enough clothes. Not strange and old like the woman's. His clothes were strange, though, for their informal and inappropriately relaxed nature. He looked incongruent next to the very polished young woman. And it did not help that the man's mouth, hidden behind a beard, was pressed into an unhappy line. His eyes were suspicious as they regarded her closely. She could not tell the color in the dim lighting of the room.
"Who are you?" she asked. Jean's mind had found its way through the fog of shock, even as her heart continued to pound dangerously in her chest.
The man looked to the woman, waiting for her to answer. And she did. "We are not intruders into the house, I promise you. We are here most nights. Sometimes during the day. You do not need to be concerned about us," she explained.
Jean was aware enough to know that her question had been deftly evaded. "Why?" Jean asked next. She wasn't even sure what she was asking about when she practically demanded the woman tell her why. Why were they here? Why did Jean not need to be concerned? The pressing question of who would have to wait, it seemed.
The woman gave a soft smile. "This is the only place we can be together. We like to spend time together, you see."
Jean did not see.
"Perhaps another time might be better for us to get to know one another better. We both would like that very much, I think," the woman said.
She turned to look at the man, and he gave a single, slow nod. His suspicious eyes were still trained on Jean.
The woman added, "But I think that it is very late, Mrs. Beazley. You should have your rest. Come, I will show you out."
Jean watched, still standing in the doorway without ever having properly come inside the room, as the woman stood from the sofa. She turned and went around the coffee table and toward Jean. And it wasn't until she had begun to move that Jean noticed that there was a faint blue tinge to the woman. And the way the light—what little light there was—passed over her…through her…
"Shall we?"
Her voice halted Jean's wandering thoughts. She gestured toward the door. Jean turned around, not quite knowing what else to do, and started going down the stairs.
"Un moment, mon petit," the woman said behind her, presumably to the man, and closed the door.
Something clicked inside Jean's mind as the latch to the door caught. She halted and whipped around, but the staircase was empty. Her instinct was to go back and open the door and demand answers to her questions, but a cold shiver of fear crawled up Jean's spine and gripped at her heart. The panic started to well up inside her, and she knew she had to escape.
Jean hurried down the stairs and closed the double doors to the studio behind her and ran back through the house and up the other stairs and down the corridor to her bedroom, moving as quickly and silently as she could so as not to disturb Doctor Blake or the nurse. Jean finally stopped, breathing heavily through her nose as her back pressed against the door. She squeezed her eyes and lips tightly closed to keep her silent screams at bay.
She could not point exactly to what had terrified her so much. She did not want to admit it, even in her own mind. Her fears were not real. They couldn't be. Nothing she had just seen was what she thought. Her mind was playing tricks on her. She was overworked and overtired and overwrought from all the stress of Doctor Blake's condition and all it might mean for her. Yes. That's what it was. That's all it was. She needed to get a good night's rest and it would all go away.
After forcing herself to take slow, deep breaths, Jean could feel herself calm down. She blinked her eyes open to see her own little bedroom with the pink walls and the floral duvet. Everything was as it should be. She was safe. Everything was fine.
Jean removed her dressing gown and her slippers and got back into bed. She pulled the covers over herself and felt the sense of calm and comfort that always came with that simple action. It had been a very long since her mother had tucked her into bed, but Jean had long since tucked herself into bed and still enjoyed the reassurance of it.
Being back in bed and closing her eyes, Jean really did feel much better. And she felt rather silly for being so afraid.
There was nothing to be afraid of. She was safe in Doctor Blake's house. She knew this place as well as any home of her own. She was not some visitor or interloper. She lived here and had done for many years. She had nothing to fear within its walls.
Her late-night wandering had come in the midst of tossing and turning and anxious worries. She had gotten up and walked through the house alone and in the dark while her mind was ill at ease. She had scared herself, really.
Had she even actually opened the door to the old studio? Had she gone up the stairs and through the door to the sitting room? She'd never opened the studio door before, so she could have very well imagined what was behind it.
And, of course, there was no one in that room. The young woman with her accented speech and gentle voice, that had been just Jean's imagination. Jean had lived for a long time with the photograph of the late Genevieve Blake who Jean knew died forty years ago. Her mind had conjured the image of the woman brought from France with Doctor Blake to this very house. Jean had seen a few films with Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer, enough that she knew a few words of French to invent for the late Mrs. Blake to say.
The man, then, was the long-lost Lucien Blake. Jean had thought of him a lot lately. If he had been alive, Jean would be trying to contact him now to inform him of his father's condition. But Jean knew that Lucien Blake never came home after the war.
Though why had he appeared with a beard and the weariness of a middle-aged man? Jean had never seen a picture of Lucien Blake, so far as she could recall. There may have been one or two she'd come across of him as a child, but that was all. She had no reason to invent his appearance the way she had. Perhaps that was why he had not spoken in her imaginings in the studio. Jean had nothing on which to base his personality or his voice. Doctor Blake had never said much about his son, though he had said enough about his wife over the years that Jean must have internalized some sense of the woman in a way she hadn't for the son.
Jean rolled over onto her side in bed, trying to get comfortable. She wanted to stop thinking about this, but her mind was not quite tired out just yet. There was something else niggling at her, a detail she wanted to avoid but couldn't get out of her head.
The woman—Genevieve Blake—had not been entirely…solid. That was the only way Jean could think to describe it. She did not have the substance of flesh and blood. And when she moved, the shadows of the things behind her came through her body. She was almost translucent in places. The blue shade to her being may have been a trick of the light, as the only illumination in the studio was the light from the moon outside. Then again, maybe she really was faintly blue.
She shook her head against the pillow. That was a ridiculous notion. It was all a concoction of Jean's own mind anyway. It was the only explanation for it all. How else would Genevieve Blake be sitting there, talking, calling her Mrs. Beazley? Jean had invented her. She had invented them both. That's all there was to it.
At last, sleep came in to claim Jean. She paid no heed to the echo of Doctor Blake's voice in her head telling her, we all like to think that ghosts are real if only so our loved ones can be with us again.