The Green Man (24 page)

At the foot of the stairs, Lenora Linton slowly turned to face her. But, in the act of turning, she was transformed. It was as if her shadow had detached itself from the wall and taken on flesh. She grew and stretched. Her gray hair went dark as night. Her dress became a suit of black. And the face that swung to meet Emily’s terrified gaze belonged to the figure that had haunted her dreams.

The magician smiled up at her. “
How good of you to come. The show is about to begin
.” There was no movement of his mouth, no exhalation of breath, but the words resounded inside her, as though they’d been whispered from the bottom of a well.

Pain seared through her chest, more pain than she had ever felt. She gasped, and the box slipped from her hands. Her hands flew to her chest, her legs folded under her, and she felt herself tumbling like a rag doll down the stairs.

S
he fell endlessly
–
through space, through time. It was as though a bottomless pit had opened under her. And all the while, a soothing, insistent voice kept repeating in her head:

There’s nothing to fear, my child. Nothing at all to fear.

Suddenly, she was no longer falling, neither had she landed. Instead, she lay suspended in the air. Her eyes were sealed as if she were asleep, but she was not. She could hear every word the magician spoke
.

“And now, my friends, you can see that our volunteer has ascended from the platform and sleeps peacefully in the air. I will pass this hoop, like so, along the length of her body to prove there are no wires or other hidden devices holding her aloft. Nothing but magic holds her here.”

A sound of excited applause echoed through the room
.

“And now our gracious sleeper will once again descend to earth. On the count of three, she will awaken
–
and remember nothing.”

She felt herself drift slowly down and come to rest on solid ground
.

“One. Two. Three,” said the magician and lightly clapped his hands. She opened her eyes and found herself lying on a makeshift stage in a large darkened room. A magician stood beside her, smiling. His face was pale, his lips red as blood, his eyes deep and mesmerizing. She seemed to know him somehow. He extended his hand and helped her to her feet
.

Seated on the floor before the stage, their faces ghostly in the glow of the gaslight, a group of children clapped excitedly. They were dressed in the fashion of a century ago. She looked down at herself and saw that she was dressed in the same way, a child among children
.

Panic washed over her. But the magician laid his hand gently on her arm, and instantly it passed. “Take a bow, young lady,” he said
.

She looked around the darkened room, dazed and disoriented, as if she had been wrenched from a deep sleep. Yes, she remembered now, she had been dreaming, and in the dream she had been carrying something. It had been very heavy
–
her arms still ached with it
–
and somehow she had stumbled and fallen
.

But it had only been a dream. His hand resting on her arm was like her mother’s, comforting her when some night terror woke her from sleep
.

“The young lady may take her seat again,” said the magician.
“And for her kind assistance, the professor will present her with a copy of his little book.”

The book he handed her was achingly familiar. She stood looking down at it, knowing she had seen it at some other time, in some other place. She had the gnawing sense that some larger reality had slipped from her grasp
.

They seemed to be in a room in a house, a large circular room that had been made over for a magic show. In the shadows, beyond the feeble reach of the gas lamps, she could see furniture pushed back against the wall. Her eyes lingered on a set of high-backed, red-velvet armchairs, ranged against the wall beside a large fireplace. She had the feeling she’d been in this room before
.

“Well, then,” said the magician, “since it seems the young lady wishes to remain onstage, perhaps we can enlist her aid with the final attraction of the evening.” From the rear of the stage, he wheeled forward the large brazier of burning coals that had stood glowing in the shadows like a beating heart since the beginning of the show
.

“Fire,” he said as he passed his hand over the brazier. Flames leapt from the live coals. “Truly, it is one of life’s great mysteries. So beautiful to behold; so dangerous to touch. The ancients believed the salamander could survive even in the midst of fire. And now, with the aid of magic, we shall do the same.”

He suddenly plunged his hands into the brazier as if it were a basin of cool water. A gasp went up from the crowd. He
picked up a glowing coal and popped it in his mouth, like a piece of candy. Turning to the awestruck audience, he plucked an oyster from the air and placed it on the coal in his mouth. It sizzled there for a few seconds and the shell opened. He reached in and took it out, along with the coal
.

“I will ask my young assistant to prove to you that this oyster is cooked,” he said as he handed it to her. The shell was hot. On his instructions, she scooped the meat from the oyster and ate it. It burned her throat a little as she swallowed
.

The magician performed several more feats with the burning coals. “And now,” he said, “we will bestow this same power on our young assistant here
–
the power to master fire. Come along, young lady, don’t be shy.”

But she didn’t want to go to him. She could feel the heat of the fire against her face as she stood beside the flaming brazier
.

“Come, come, my child. There’s nothing to fear.” His voice was soft and soothing, but hidden beneath it was another voice as fierce as fire
.

Come to me, girl. I said, come.

He held his hand over the flaming coals as he extended it to her. It glowed red in the flames, yet remained miraculously unharmed. As she moved irresistibly toward him, she stumbled and looked down
.

The floor was strewn with books. A shard of memory cut through the scene like a knife through a painted screen. She
remembered an unbearable pain in her chest, remembered falling, books tumbling about her
.

And then it was gone, and there was only the hushed room, the beckoning voice, the bottomless eyes. As she reached her hand out slowly to him, the sight of it sent a shock through her
–
for it was the thin, speckled hand of an old woman. For a moment, some shocking truth seemed about to dawn
–

Then his flaming hand closed over hers and all thought fled. Like a tissue tossed in a fire, the room and everything in it hovered for an instant in space, then flared up and was gone. And there were only the two of them
.

Flames enfolded every part of him. His clothes were woven flame, his hair a flaming torch, his flesh tongued with fire. He
was
Fire. The sweet hiss and crackle of his voice sounded in her head
.

Come to me. We are one, you and I. There is no pain, nothing to fear.

He fixed her with his eyes; she could feel them searing into every part of her. He drew her slowly to him and enfolded her in his flaming arms. Such sweet pain pulsed through her that she thought she must die from it
.

His breath was like the smell of roses on a summer night, but below lay the acrid smell of smoke and singeing hair, of smoldering cloth and wool
.

Just a little sleep. A little sleep.

She felt herself spiraling helplessly down into the dark
.

T
he sun hung red on the horizon as O came round to the back of the house. As she was climbing the porch stairs, she caught sight of a figure huddled by the door. She jumped back, and then realized it was just a pile of debris. Stepping past it, she pounded on the door. The sound died into the deep hush of the house.

Suddenly she smelled fire. She looked down and saw smoke drifting out lazily under the door. Cupping her hand to the window, she looked in. The dim room inside opened onto a long hall. The far end of the hall was lit by flames. For a moment she thought she saw two figures standing in their midst. But then there was only one.

“Emily!” she screamed as the figure slumped to the floor.

She plucked a loose brick from the pile of debris and smashed the glass in the door. Smoke streamed out into the night. She reached her arm through the ragged hole
and groped for the handle. Her hand closed over what felt like a small chill hand, balled into a fist. She gave it a twist, and the door opened.

Dashing into the house, she ran for the hall. The smoke ran to meet her. It wrapped its arms around her, filling her lungs with its searing breath and blinding her eyes. She yanked her shirt up over her mouth and groped her way along the hall.

She hadn’t gone far before dizziness and nausea overwhelmed her. She couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. She no longer knew the way forward or the way back. In some impossibly calm corner of her, she thought, This is the part where you die. A dark hole seemed to open under her, and she tumbled in.

She found herself back at the Green Man, standing high on the shaky ladder outside the shop, staring into that ageless, knowing face. But the cracks had vanished, the flaking paint had fallen away, and life pulsed within the pale green flesh.

He swayed in the wind, and she swayed with him. She looked into his eyes, and he looked back. Instead of creaks, words came. He called her by name. And the vines that were his arms reached out and wrapped themselves around her. She was enfolded in them, lifted lightly up and carried.

Fresh air filled her burning lungs. She breathed in the rich dark smell of soil and leaf mold, felt the cool green dampness of the ravine against her skin as she was gently laid down.

And then there was nothing.…

When she woke, she was lying in the long grass in the backyard of the Linton house. A sickle moon shone down from a sky strewn with stars. Emily lay on the grass beside her, her face streaked with soot, her eyes shut. She looked ghostly pale in the moonlight, and for one terrifying moment, O thought she was dead. But then she saw the faint rise and fall of her chest.

How on earth did we get out of the house? she wondered dully, as she tried to piece together what had happened. The wail of sirens sounded in the distance.

The sirens grew steadily louder. Soon there were lights flashing and firefighters running about, smashing windows, training hoses on the burning house. A pair of ambulance attendants came hurrying into the yard with a stretcher. They lifted Emily onto it and wheeled her off to a waiting ambulance.

O turned and saw Rimbaud, striding from the shadows where the yard fell away into the ravine. He knelt beside her and took her hand in his. She tried to speak, but the effort brought on a fit of coughing.

“Shhh. Don’t try to talk now,” he said as he knelt by her side and assured her everything would be all right. She closed her eyes.

The attendants returned for her. As they were lifting her onto the stretcher, she asked, “Can he ride with me?” A strange look passed between them. When she turned to where Rimbaud had been, she found that he had vanished silently back into the shadows.

The firefighters were still training their hoses on the smoking building, when the attendants wheeled her around to the front of the house and lifted her into the back of the ambulance. One of them slipped an oxygen mask onto her face.

As she felt herself drifting off, she glanced out the ambulance window and imagined she saw Rimbaud standing there, as she had first seen him standing at the window of the Green Man.

T
hey sat together in the car for a long while without saying a word, each lost in her own thoughts. Emily’s bandaged arms rested on the steering wheel. Her fingers tapped out the beat of a slow tune by Bill Evans playing on the car stereo. Beside her, O sat looking out the window at the Linton house. She’d tried to talk Emily out of coming back here, but her aunt had insisted. She said something about needing to lay the ghost.

Two weeks had passed since the night of the fire. It had been a time of endless questions and few answers. The police had questioned them in the recovery room at the hospital on the night of the fire. What had Emily been doing at the house that night? How had the fire started? How had O managed to get her aunt out?

Emily insisted she’d been invited to the house by the owner, Lenora Linton, to buy a collection of books. They told her that was impossible. When she continued to insist, they passed her along to the hospital psychiatrist,
who explained to her that the house had sat vacant for over a year – since the death of Lenora Linton. In the end, they put the entire matter down to a case of mild dementia and released her.

O had her own questions. She had been praised for rescuing her aunt from the fire that night. She didn’t bother telling them she wasn’t the one who had done the rescuing at all, but a mysterious third party no one else seemed to have seen – a boy without a name, who lived in a hut in a ravine. She figured it was enough for them to think just one of them was crazy.

The trouble was, she wasn’t entirely convinced she
wasn’t
crazy. After all, she, too, had seen this boarded-up shell of a house lived in and whole. She had sat sweating with Emily in front of the fire and spoken with Lenora Linton face-to-face. On the night of the fire, she had seen two figures standing in the flames at the end of the hall. Had she simply imagined it all? And had the smoke and flames so disoriented her that she only imagined Rimbaud there?

She hadn’t told Emily anything about her trip to the ravine earlier that day, the discovery of the hut, her encounter with him there. Since the night of the fire, he had utterly vanished. And she wasn’t about to go down into the ravine again, looking for him. She was afraid of what she might find.