Mark Newton - The Book of Transformations

The voice, a blur, came from all sides: ‘What, you don’t remember me?’

‘What the fuck is going on?’ he spluttered. ‘Where are you? Who are you?’

‘I’m insulted,’ the voice said, and laughed. ‘I’m in the bathroom.’

Fulcrom stumbled across his room, guided more by memory than vision. He could feel his pulse racing. He placed his shoulder to the door frame, and glanced around for an object: there, on the shelf, the candlestick. He cautiously lifted the heavy brass object and brought it in front of him.

Tentatively, he eased the door open…

Even in this small room, Fulcrom could see no presence, no figure, just the metal bath and a small white cupboard. The grey and red tiles were cold underfoot. A chill went through him.

‘I… I can’t see anyone.’

‘Try the mirror, sugar.’ Another chill, this one deep in his core. He recognized this voice, or at least he thought he did. It’s not possible… For a long while he didn’t turn around.

Eventually he forced himself to look and there, in the wide, circular mirror a person stared back at him — and not just any person.

It was Adena, his dead wife.

Dumbly, Fulcrom dropped the candlestick, and it smashed one of the tiles, but he wasn’t distracted from gaping at the image in the mirror. ‘You’re… you died.’

Almost completely white-skinned, with lank black hair and a heavy fringe, and with a wound at her neck that must have come from the crossbow bolt that had hit her on the day she was killed, Adena didn’t look particularly alive. Seeing her now confirmed just how much Adena looked like Lan — or would have done if Adena was, in fact, alive.

‘I did,’ Adena said.

‘So how come…’ Fulcrom gestured wildly at the mirror. ‘How come you’re here? Is this still a dream?’

‘For you? I don’t think so. For me, I have no idea. It kind of feels like I’ve woken up from a really long dream though.’

Fulcrom struggled to believe what was happening. He stormed out of the room, flung open a window to let the bitterly cold air wake him even further. Clouds of his own heavy breath drifted away into the evening. After a moment he turned and walked hesitantly back into the bathroom, confident that the phantasm in the mirror would be gone.

Adena was still there, smiling meekly. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Still here.’

Fulcrom snapped into full analytical mode.

On a closer inspection, she was glowing, ever so slightly, as if washed in moonlight. She wore thin white rags, and her skin seemed a little blue and unhealthy. There was nothing behind her save the reflection of some items in his own bathroom. She was just there, in the mirror — an apparition. He questioned whether or not he was dreaming, whether or not he had been drugged or taken hallucinogens, but he didn’t think so.

‘She seems nice, the new girl,’ Adena declared. ‘I like her.’

‘Lan?’ Fulcrom spluttered, feeling a sudden and irrational bout of guilt. ‘How could you possibly know about her?’

‘Oh, well… You can kind of see stuff when you’re in this state. But, I guess you are allowed to see other women. I mean, I am dead after all.’

‘How did you get here, in the mirror?’

‘The priest set us free. I don’t know what he did exactly, but after the priest’s visit, some of us seemed to be able to get out of there.’ She gestured down below. ‘Though, it has to be said, most couldn’t be bothered — they’d had enough of the living — it was those who just wanted to come back with unfinished business, that kind of thing. You’re looking well by the way, sugar.’

‘The priest,’ Fulcrom said.

‘Yes, Ulryk,’ Adena replied. ‘Nice man, if a little silly when he gets excited. He means well though.’

Ulryk… how is he behind this? ‘I don’t understand. You were killed, not put in some gaol — so how could he free you?’

‘I wasn’t burned, remember?’ Adena said. ‘The authorities thought I was a criminal. They thought I was in on that robbery and refused to burn me. They buried me — you must have watched them lower my corpse into the ground? Don’t you remember?’

‘Well, yes, I…’ Fulcrom perched on a stool and pressed his face into his hands, recalling the faces of the mourners and the rain splashing on the mud as her coffin was lowered into the earth. After a moment he looked up again. ‘I did try to explain to them that it was a misunderstanding — even tried to pull strings behind the scenes.’

‘I know, my love.’ Adena’s face was serene, if a little ethereal. Very faintly the texture of her skin altered, tiny patterns moving just beneath the surface.

‘What happened after that?’ Fulcrom asked.

‘My soul was trapped beneath the city, just like every other soul who wasn’t burned on a pyre and set free.’ She chuckled. ‘I suppose it means the Jorsalir priests were right about something. And you know what, there are a surprising number of us down there, and not just criminals who aren’t allowed to have their souls freed — although even most of them say they were innocent anyway. So we are all there, underneath Villjamur, doing what we’ve done for as long as any of us can remember, and Ulryk manages to gain entrance to wherever it is we were… I want to say living, but that’s not quite right, is it?’

Fulcrom was amazed at how light-hearted she was taking all this. She never did take anything seriously, even when she was still alive — Snap out of it, idiot. This doesn’t prove anything.

Adena continued. ‘Ulryk gave his best religious mumbo-jumbo to set us free, but I think he meant to some kind of heaven. He did some spells, I think, from a book which he was carrying, and I’m not sure what happened, but we all just followed him right out of the underworld and through some strange passageways and up to the city. It took us a while, but previously we’d never been able to leave the underworld. All of us were trapped there, somewhere under Villjamur.’

Fulcrom tried to process all of this, trying not to laugh at how ridiculous it all sounded. Worst of all was that he was inclined to believe her.

‘I came straight to see you,’ Adena said, ‘though at the moment I only appear in mirrors. Some of the others are able to move about the streets — I’m hoping maybe I can, too. So then, tell me all about Lan.’

Fulcrom turned away. ‘I don’t want to talk about Lan.’

‘Why not? She’s important to you, and you’re important to me.’

‘I just don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Oh, come on, I don’t want us to argue on my first night back. That’s all we used to do towards the end.’

Fulcrom was hurt. ‘We did not.’

‘You probably don’t remember, burying yourself in your work. My memories are preserved, once they returned to me. They say, in the underworld, that the living have a habit of killing reality. As soon as something’s happened, it’s distorted from what it used to be.’

Maybe she was right. He was always forgiving her for something or other, always letting her get away with whatever she wanted. He was a pushover, and he remembered now.

‘Are you just stuck there, in the mirror?’

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘For now I can’t go any further than this. You don’t just appear back in this world, apparently — you make slow transitions. Perhaps I can take more of a physical form soon.’

‘And who exactly gives you such information?’ Fulcrom asked, exasperated. ‘Is there a clinic you all go to where you have a nice chat about coming back to life?’

‘Now don’t be sarcastic, sugar. You were always a perfect gent when I was alive.’

Again a sigh, again staring at the floor, the wall, anywhere but at the girl he’d tried hard to let go of for all these years. Eventually he faced her only to say, ‘I need to sleep.’