Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Turning, she took a few steps, then stumbled and fell, suddenly hidden in the shadows of the bay.

“Wait, Anna!” I cried. I shoved the headband into a pocket and rushed after her. I knelt at her side, turning her body so that she faced me. Moonlight fell from a window in the granite wall above us, a thread of fine white light across her face.

But it was not the face I had seen an instant before. As I held her the broken skin rippled and then grew smooth and pale, her eyes blinked open and stared up at me with an expression of faint derision.

“Franca!” I cried.

She pulled herself up and shook her head, the hair whipping across her face no longer tawny but silver-fair. The eyes staring at me from behind that gossamer cloud were green as unripe apples.

I staggered back. Without thinking I crossed my hands in front of me, but He only laughed.

“Raphael Miramar!” He scolded. He reached for the rope about my neck and tweaked it teasingly, pulling me near Him. “You saw how little protection that afforded the Saint-Alaban in the cloister.”

I dropped my hands. “But you were not in the cloister,” I stammered.

“Oh, but I was,” He replied. He looked at the bit of rope, let go of it and settled back upon His heels. He seemed heedless of the freezing stone floor, for all that He was naked as an egg. “I am with you always, Raphael. With all of them: Franca and Anna and Dr. Silverthorn, Margalis and Oleander and yes, your little friend Fancy—”

“Fancy? She is alive, you know where she is?”

I tried to grab Him, torn between rage and hope, between wanting to rend Him or embrace Him if what He said was true. But as my hand closed about His a burning pain shot through it. I snatched it back.

“Not yet, Raphael,” the Boy murmured, a note of menace in his voice. “You should wait until you are invited. Soon enough, darling boy, soon enough.”

His tone had deepened to the Aviator’s soft drawl. I looked up, then stumbled to my feet. Because the Aviator stood there, staring down at me with pale mad eyes.

“Did you kill her?” he asked. He stooped, took Anna’s corpse by the hair and yanked it so that her head lolled backward, gazing at him blindly. I stared in disbelief, then glanced around the tiny bay. Her scars were unhealed, and she was certainly dead. And the alcove was empty, the Boy gone. The chink in the wall showed a fingerlength of pale gray, bright enough that I knew it must be morning.

He let go of the girl. Her body fell back to the floor with a thud. He stood, continuing to stare at me with that knowing smile, his eye bulging.

“Your little friend,” he said. “Fancy.”

I felt as though he had driven a knife through my stomach. “Yes,” I said at last.

The Consolation of the Dead extended his hand, took the end of the cord about my neck and tugged it.

“Come,” he said, as though promising wonderful things. “She is in the cloister, waiting to see you again.”

Without a word I rose and followed him.

It was not until we reached the cloister that I saw a tendril of living vine had clasped itself like a green finger around the hempen rope that bound me to him.

SHE WAS HANGING FROM a metal spike protruding from one of the columns in the center of the room. Her throat had been slashed, ripped from chin to breast, the blade wrenching through flesh and sinew all the way to her backbone so that her vertebrae were exposed, a necklace of twisted coral. The stone basin that had been dragged beneath her was half-filled with blood. Her face was a color I had never seen before: the color of a winter sky scraped of sun, so utterly bloodless that the whites of her eyes seemed blue in comparison. Her mouth twisted as though she had tried to scream, an expression of such unrelieved torment that I could only imagine she had been alive when the knife tore through her.

I walked up to the basin, reached to touch one of her bare feet. The blood had thickened where it dripped from her toes in a blackening stalactite. A spider clung there, uneven threads marking the beginning of a web strung from one foot to the other. I stretched my finger to caress her foot, the skin white and glistening, striped with crimson like an overripe fig. When I dug my nail into her heel the flesh split as though it were a sheet of parchment. As I withdrew my finger the spider scurried away. I turned and fell to the floor.

Many minutes passed before I opened my eyes. Darkness seethed around me, waves of black and scarlet. I was sick again, and again; felt a burning in my bowels so that I squatted and defecated upon the stones, then stumbled until I found another column and embracing it slumped to the floor. I lay with my face pressed against the cool stone, weightless, feeling nothing but darkness and cold, as though my skin had been flayed from me and my bones had become part of the stone blocks of the Cathedral. An immense and mindless relief flooded me, an emptiness more soothing than any lover’s touch, a wakeful void that held more promise than an aeon of undisturbed sleep. I felt the very stones of the Cathedral melt away; I saw the sky above me, brilliant, limitless, glazed with a multitude of stars. Then the stars began to wink out, one by one, until whole patches of the vast firmament stretched dead and black across my vision, and the horizon itself disappeared. I hung suspended in that void, watching as the last points of light flickered and went out, until finally there was nothing there, nothing at all. It was then that the Voice began to speak.

— You have seen Me, it said.

—I see nothing, I replied. I tried to move my hand before my eyes. Nothing: no hand, and no eyes to see it. I am dead, I thought; and the thought was comfort.

— But that is Me, it said: Nothing. You see now that is all there is: only this and nothing more.

I waited but it was silent. Finally I had a thought.

—There is something, I said. There is an Enemy.

It replied, You know that there is.

I said, What is its name?

I saw something then. A hand, or something like a hand; a flame like a smaller tongue of blue ice rising from its palm.

— Her name is Anat, it replied.

— Her name, it went on, is Tiamet, and Astarte, and Isis, and Maria, and Ariadne, and Aphrodite.

— Her Name, it said, the blue flame leaping, is Wendy.

— Her Name, it said after a long moment, is Hope.

The Voice fell silent then. The flame licked at the emptiness and was gone. The echo of that last word hung in the air for hours, a hissing venomous breath that meant to extinguish me, the sound the stars made as one by one they died.

Then gradually I began to feel something, gradually I began to feel cold, as though drop by drop every atom of my body had been replaced by slivers of ice. My head ached; my cheek felt bruised. When I opened my eyes I saw not black but gray, the surface of the Cathedral floor, granite slabs fitted together so that the cracks between them were no wider than hairs. I raised myself, coughing at the stench of my own body, my own filth and that which surrounded me.

“He is awake,” whispered the Consolation of the Dead. He lay at the other end of the cloister on a pallet strewn with rags. At his feet lay the white jackal and the aardmen Blanche and Trey, and half-hidden behind him squatted Oleander.

I stood. I felt weak, but no longer ill. I felt as though I had crept from a husk that lay behind me, a shapeless thing with gray eyes and tawny hair and a beating heart now stilled. I looked back but only my gray robe lay there. When I glanced down at myself I saw that I was naked, wearing only a length of green vine that hung from my neck to my thighs, a living vine the rich deep green of summer.