Roses and Rot (12 page)

I clicked on my light to make myself more visible, and began to retrace my steps. The hoofbeats grew louder. All around me branches bent and cracked—sharp, shotgun breaks. My hair stood on end. The air pressure shifted, the sky turning green, as if there were a storm snapping at my heels.

I ran faster, no longer watching for the path, just running headlong, the fox before the hunt, gasping breath and panicked heartbeat.

Branches whipped at my arms and feet, and I slid on the ground, skinning my palms and knees. My lamp cracked and went out. As I was scrambling to my feet, the horse ran in front of me, close enough that I could feel the heat of its body. I flung myself backward.

Not just one horse. An entire parade of them—black, brown, grey, white. Masked riders. Galloping through the forest on some great rade. Lights like fireflies hovered around the heads of the horses, and of those who rode them.

The riders were impossible, unreal. Horned and feathered and winged, with eyes like the limitless dark. My mind gave them familiar faces—Gavin, Evan, a woman with eyes like rose petals. Impossible things. Too much to believe, or to bear.

It probably took less than a minute for them to pass in front of me, but I was shaking when they finished. From cold, and from something between exhilaration and terror. I stayed where I was, crouched in the undergrowth, until the sound of the hoofbeats faded, until I was certain they wouldn’t turn back and pursue me.

I fled home like a hunted thing.

Once there, I ran to my room, locking as many doors behind me as I could—the door to the house, then the door to my room, then the door to my bathroom, where I set the shower running. Stood, holding myself up on the sink, breath rattling like chains through my lungs.

I looked like a wild woman in the mirror—arms and legs scratched and muddy, black hair tangled in knots down my back and snagged with broken twigs and leaves, skin so pale my eyes looked black, too. Smudges on the sharp lines of my cheekbones and jaw. Visibly shaking.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been.

A rattling at the door.

I bared my teeth in a hiss, lips curling back as I flattened myself against the wall.

“How was your run?”

Marin. My sister. Her voice.

I wheezed out air in response.

“Imogen?”

I cleared my throat. “Good. Just getting a shower now.” Bent over, my head between my knees, until the shaking stopped.

“Sounds good. You forgot to text, so I wanted to be sure you got in all right.”

“Fine.” I stepped into the shower, watched as blood and dirt ran down my skin and into the tub.

No. It had been real. Very real. Horses from a nearby farm and a nighttime ride for a party. The moonlight and shadows blending to make it strange. Real things. Things that made sense. I was fine.

Just fine.

Instead of sleeping that night, I stood at the window, looking for the shadows of pursuing horses, waiting for them to run past. I watched until the sun rose.

A couple of days after Helena burned her notebooks, I had sent an email to Janet Thomas, her mentor. I’d hesitated, as it seemed like tattling, a betrayal of Helena, somehow. But I couldn’t let it pass without saying anything. Helena was obviously stressed, yes, but we all got stressed. Dealing with bad days and doubts were part of life.

Helena’s stress had caused her to build a fire on our front lawn. A housemate who thought “burn it down” was a good solution to her problems was not someone I could comfortably live with.

Janet had emailed back this morning, and told me she had an opening this afternoon “to discuss the situation.” Exhausted from standing at my window all night, I’d suggested a different time. She countered with her suspicion that perhaps I wasn’t concerned about Helena at all if I could so cavalierly reschedule, and that she would speak to me today or not at all.

So here I was. Her house was small, and closer to the forest than the other mentors’ houses, like it had quarreled with them and then picked up its foundation and walked away in a huff. Its grey stones pressed tight to each other. There was a weeping cherry planted near the front door, and a yew tree opposite it. Over the door was a panel of stained glass, a woman in a green dress riding a white horse.

I knocked, and the door swung open. “Come in.”

Janet was tall—about six feet, I thought, and in low-heeled brogues. Lean and silver-haired, eyes the same green as the tweed
suit she wore. Both the shoes and the suit seemed from a different era, but her gaze was as sharp as her gestures.

“I haven’t told her that I had plans to speak with you. I’m not certain if I will. Helena sees you as a rival, and the fact that we are speaking might upset her,” she said.

Not exactly the most promising opening.

“If my being here is going to upset her, then I should go.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I think you should stay.”

“Why?”

“Curiosity.” She handed me a plate of cookies, thin and peppery.

“What do you want to know?” I set the plate down on the table next to me.

“Why do you care if Helena burns her work? Do you not draw lines through your own writing, hit delete when it is necessary, consigning the words to the ether? How are those losses any less to be concerned about?” She sat so straight in her chair her jacket might have been corseted with steel. Her speech was somehow off—too precise, like she was counterfeiting a posher accent than she actually had. Everything about her seemed calculated, but I couldn’t parse the desired effect. It was just . . . weird. Uncomfortable and weird, and I was beginning to understand why Helena had felt so desperate that she had burned her work.

“When I delete something, yes, it’s gone, but that’s part of the writing process, not something angry or destructive. The purpose of doing so is to improve the work that remains. And even if I were to erase an entire file, hitting the delete key doesn’t risk the other people I’m living with.”

“So, had Helena torn years of work to pieces while sitting quietly in her room, you would not be here.” She gave a small nod, confirming something to herself.

I felt as if I were sitting for an exam, one that I was failing, even though I had a cheat sheet right in front of me. I wasn’t going to use it. “No. I wouldn’t. I probably wouldn’t have even known that she had done that. As you said, she doesn’t like me. She doesn’t confide in me. We’re not friends. I’ve never read her poetry, but even if I had, it wouldn’t be my business if she tried to destroy it, and I seriously doubt she would have told me if she did.

“Our house has a fireplace. I’m guessing Helena has a trash can. But she burned her notebooks outside. In front of the house. It was really hard to miss. So I think she wanted someone to know, and to stop her. Maybe even for someone to be concerned about her, because setting things on fire strikes me as an extreme reaction to a bad day’s writing.”

“Indeed,” Janet said. She ate a cookie, and then another. “You really should have one. I find it’s always best to take a gift when it’s offered.”

She wasn’t offering Turkish delight from a winter sledge, but I was pretty sure the cookies would still have tasted of betrayal. “I’m still not sure what I’m doing here. You talking to me about what I think about hitting the delete key doesn’t do Helena any good.”

“And that keeps you from eating?” She shook her head. “As I said, I was curious. Now, I am less so.

“The structure at Melete, or lack of it, prevents me from monitoring Helena. She has no obligation to me as a student, nor do we have the kind of professional relationship where I might call upon her socially. She does not, I believe, like me very much either. We are not close, and we don’t need to be. I am her mentor, not her friend, and my duty is to her art. All the same, thank you for telling me of her distress.”

“Is there anything else?” I asked.

“No,” Janet said.

“Then I’ll see myself out.” I did not have a cookie.

I was sorry I had gone, and fairly sure that nothing I had said to Janet would be used to help Helena. All I could do was hope that I hadn’t made things worse.

“Well, that is a little unusual,” Beth said, after I had described the meeting with Janet. “I know I would feel very awkward and inappropriate discussing you with any of the other fellows. In fact, I wouldn’t do it at all, unless something dire had happened.”

“Janet didn’t act like she thought it was dire. More like it was something she thought was curious, and she wanted a closer glimpse of the event.” Like she was a child with a magnifying glass. I wasn’t sure if I had been the ant smoldering beneath, or if Helena was.

“Do you know her at all?” I asked. “Janet, I mean.”

Beth sipped her tea. A different cup this time, with some sort of spidery-looking purple flower, and a matching saucer. I remained deeply grateful that she offered me coffee, and solid mugs to put it in, when we met. “A bit,” she said.

“We’ve spoken to each other at events for Melete, of course, and she’s always been perfectly civil to me, but I find her very affected. She strikes me as someone who is both extremely snobbish and trying to hide something she’s insecure about. To be frank, what you’ve said about this situation with Helena makes me wonder whether she should be allowed to be a mentor anymore.” Beth shook her head. “That’s beside the point for now. It’s far too late to assign Helena to another mentor.

“How is your work going? You haven’t lit anything on fire recently, I hope.”

I forced out a laugh, using the reaction to cover up the shudder that ran through me, the ghost pain that sparked through my hand. “No.”

I didn’t want to say it, to jinx myself by speaking the words, even
to Beth, but things were going well. After a few false starts, and some pieces I would fix in revision, I had found the voice of my stories, and the themes that would unite them into a whole, a novel, rather than just a collection. It was the best work I had ever done, and writing them felt like running a full-out sprint along a tightrope. I’d be fine as long as I didn’t look down.

“Good. Destruction of your work is rarely the solution to difficulties with it.”

“Have you ever hated your writing that much?” I asked.

“That I wanted to destroy it?” She shook her head. “There are things I would write differently, were I to write them now. That’s not embarrassment, that’s simply the nature of the profession. I’ve been at this for more than thirty years, and it would be dishonest to say that there’s nothing I’d change, that I wouldn’t be able to say things better now, than I did when I originally wrote them.

“And there are works of mine I prefer not to look back at, because remembering the time when they were written, the person I was when I was writing them, is not pleasant.”

She paused, collecting herself, and I looked away from her memories.

“That doesn’t mean that I would destroy those works, or that I’m not proud of having come out the other side. Our past art makes our present art as much as our past life makes us who we are now. In the end, if the art stands up, that’s what matters.

“Which reminds me.” She stood. “I have something for you.”

“You do?” My eyes immediately went to her bookshelves.

“There is a secondary award system here at Melete, once you’ve become a fellow. Mentors nominate particular people whose talent they feel is exceptional, outstanding even for here. You’ve been chosen as one of them.”

“I have?” I pressed my hand hard against my chest, as if that could keep my fizzing heart closed behind my ribs.

“The stories you sent me, when I was so rude as to break our bargain and ask you for pages, were spectacular. Even in draft. It was my honor to recommend you. Here.” She handed me a tiny box, wrapped in paper embossed with the Greek letter
mu
, the first letter in Melete. Inside was a necklace, an hourglass pendant on a silver chain. “I hope you’ll forgive me now for breaking our agreement and demanding to see your work. I needed to judge where you were, and have something to turn in with your nomination.”

Overwhelmed, I nodded, then blinked away the tears that threatened. “I do. Of course. Thank you.”

“It gives you extra time here, if you want it. You can stay through the summer, in addition to the nine months of your original fellowship. There are other benefits as well, so wear the charm while you’re here.

“I’m so proud of you, Imogen.”