Excerpt from the Journals of Erik.
There is another creature in this world who is like me.
If should live to be old, unlikely as that is, I will want to experience this moment again. I will want to take out this account. I am doing now as I did when I bought that raw, young port wine—not to drink now, but to lay aside against the future.
They trapped her in the water closet. Vicious little biches.
I wasn't really watching. I merely happened to see. I was using a feather to oil the new hinges on my private door into that particular hallway, and the view slit was right before my eyes.
One of the girls had a wad of chewing chicle-gum distending her cheek. Some American opera-goer had brought a large box of it as a present to the ballet girls. Most of them had immediately taken to chewing the gum, like so many heifers with their cuds—only less cleanly.
They were leaving sticky lumps of it all over the opera house, in the oddest places. I had already been inconvenienced by the stuff, and I resolved to send the managers a note to the effect that chewing chicle-gum was forbidden anywhere inside the Opera environs, on pain of my great displeasure.
The girl with the gum in her mouth tiptoed up to the door of the washroom, plucked that foul gob from her mouth with thumb and forefinger, and jammed it deep into the keyhole. Then she fluttered back to titter with her nasty little coven over her own cleverness.
"Serves the Jewess right." said one, out loud.
"The smelly kike," agreed another, "Let's go."
At that moment, none of it made any particular impression on me. There was an aggravating splinter of metal adhering to the edge of one hinge, right where it could snag on my clothing. I pulled out my smallest rasp, and set to work as silently as I could. I could hear water running. Presently, I heard the door to the water closet rattle as the occupant tried to leave, and found she couldn't.
An indignant "Hey!" came from inside.
I knew the voice, of course. The girl who wasn't afraid of disembodied voices, or of the dark. The girl who answered back with a sharp provided wit, and made me laugh. The American.
The dancer, Katherine Pryde.
(Merely writing her name is a pleasure. Katherine Pryde. My name is there in her name, hidden, transposed. KathERIne. A fanciful conceit. I must remember that, make something of it later.)
She shook the door, banged on it, and called out, "Is anyone there?" She struggled with the door again. There came a thump as if someone had given the door a good hard kick—and then she swore, fluently, in Russian.
That was amusing. Wherever could she have picked up those particular phrases? The passage was deserted. I was about to step out into the hall and pick the chicle out of the lock. My mental fingers would be of little help with that, as I couldn't see what I was affecting, but I could then keep the door closed until I was back in the wall…
When I saw something white emerge from the dark wood surface of the door, something that wriggled like a pale fish in dark water, something very like a hand.
It was, I realized, very like a human hand because it was a hand. Her hand.
She grappled with the doorknob and felt around for a key or a latch, but found none. In frustration, she spat out another very bad word— and this time, in Arabic.
(What kind of education has she had, I wonder? Multilingual profanity suggests a more varied one than most young ladies.)
Then—and again, the imagery that springs to my mind is of water—her face welled up out of the door, as if from the horizontal surface of a pond. She glanced left, then right. Seeing no one, thinking herself unobserved, she stepped through the door into the hall.
I had stopped breathing. My heart was pounding, I could feel it in my temples, in my throat, in my wrists. The dull roar of my blood sounded in my ears, and pains, like that of a limb fallen asleep, stung me all over.
It was not an illusion. It was not a trick. Illusions and tricks are meant for an audience.
I had to force myself to start breathing again. I made a sound, and she whipped her head around, faster than a cobra's strike, to shoot a wary look across the hall in my direction.
If she could see through walls as easily as she could pass through them, she would have seen me in the full glory of rough laborer's clothes, begrimed with grease, dust and sweat, my fingers dripping with oil, an old and not-too-clean scarf covering—what I hide, and, I fear, the expression of a gaffed fish on my face. Such as it is.
It was not the moment to make myself known to her.
She could not see me, and, after a moment turned back to the door to investigate. She peered into the blocked keyhole, poked her fingers back into the door, and withdraw them, revealing a stringy mass of chicle-gum that clung like a small, noxious jellyfish.
"Eeh!" she articulated. "Disgusting." She found a scrap of paper, put it to use, and went back in to wash her hands again, opening the door and closing it. I could hear the water.
(I should have seen it at once, when I first spoke to her. Strong men have pissed themselves and wept when I doused their lights and spoke to them out of the darkness. Why should she be so unafraid? She is half my size, and delicately built. And lovely. The top of her head would barely reach my lower lip. But what can one ghost have to fear from another ghost?)
She paused when she came back out. For a moment, her head drooped on her shoulders, and she slumped in a pose of weariness and despair. A sound that was half sigh, half sob escaped her.
Of course; here she was, young, away from home, and alone, alone in ways I understand too well. Insulted and harassed—well, I shall do something about that! That will be the first thing I can do for her. And for the second….
For some reason, chapter 4 turned out to be all Erik!
Hi, Ellen—This one's almost writing itself. Already, the chapter where Kurt comes by is taking shape in my imagination—and I also have to settle the question of whether or not Logan has ever been to Mazenderan.
OK—any comments, folks?