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 Magdalen College (and occasionally between her flat and Tesco's, church, bookshops, and various other venues of business) with no fear of Watchers' eyes: there were no Watchers to keep surveillance over her anymore. Nor did she fear Bringers in broad daylight; she was not important enough to kill, a hypothesis that bore itself out day after long hardworking day.
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."
Part 2
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