Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

She grinned at me then, and crossed her eyes, and the tortured child fled and she was Glynn again, and it was all right.

“Don’t you know enough to genuflect in the presence of a saint?” she said.

“If you’re going to develop temperament before they even shoot this thing, I’m snatching you out of here,” I said, laughing.

She made a pantomime of gagging, putting her forefinger into her open mouth, and Caleb Pringle laughed, too.

“The whole course of history might have changed if little Joan had had the wit to do that to the Dauphin,” he said. “You ready? Molly, Mrs. Fowler is going to wait and see the final on the monitor. Take her and give her some coffee and a sweet roll, will you? I’ll send for you when we’re done.”

The last thing I saw before the door closed behind me and Molly Shumaker was Caleb Pringle bending intently over my daughter, who sat with her face raised to him and her eyes closed. In the white light flooding down on her she looked again unearthly and ephemeral, doomed. But he said something to her and she smiled. I let the door swing shut.

“I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” I said to Molly.

“You’re great,” she said over her shoulder. “You ought to see some of the mothers we get. The poor kid who was in Right Time ; God! We got to the point where we were seriously thinking about drugging his mother’s coffee. She was a terror.”

The time seemed to drag torturously, though in actuality it was only a little over an hour when Laura came for us.

“How did it go?” I said, following her back through the maze of corridors.

She gave me her three-cornered kitten’s smile over her shoulder, the one she had always worn when she knew a secret or had been into something forbidden.

“You’ll see,” she said.

They were waiting for us in a tiny studio with padded swivel seats and a large, incomprehensible control board and banks of television monitors mounted overhead. There was a large central screen, and Caleb Pringle was sliding a tape into a slot on the board below it. He turned and gave me an enigmatic nod. Glynn sat in the back row of seats, hunched over, her fists knotted, one atop the other. She had been crying, and would not look at me.

“What is it, sweetie pie?” I said, sinking into the seat beside her and glaring up at Laura. Laura—why did I listen to her? I always ended up coming to some sort of grief when I let her persuade me to do something my instincts cried out against. Why had I thought that would change?

Glynn did not reply. She shook her head. She still would not look at me.

“It was pretty intense,” Laura said. “I had no idea she could tap into that so soon. It took me months to learn to do it. These are just release tears, aren’t they, Punkin?”

She ruffled the bangs on Glynn’s forehead. From the machine, Caleb Pringle said, “This is quite…extraordinary. See it before you decide to report us to the child abuse squad.”

I sank back against my cushion, squeezing Glynn’s cold hand, and waited. I had every intention of giving my sister and her lover as fierce a tongue-lashing as I could muster. But I would, in fairness, wait until I had seen the test.

The screen flickered with light and numbers rolled past and a voice I did not know said, “Test for Glynn Fowler, Arc , June 1995. Take three.” There was a bit more flickering, and then there was Glynn, sitting on a wooden stool against a stark, shadowy backdrop. She sat with her knees together and her hands loosely clasped on her lap, and her head dropped onto her chest. Light fell on her from above, as from an opening in a ceiling; otherwise the set was very dark. The camera came in on her, very slowly, until I could see only her head and shoulders and the great cross lying against her tunic. The angle of her head was heartbreaking. She did not move.

From off camera a woman’s voice whispered, “Joan. Little Joan,” and Glynn raised her head slowly and looked in the direction of the voice. I drew in my breath. It was not Glynn who sat there, but someone who had taken her over, moved into her body. The feeling it gave me was terrible, near nausea but not quite that. This was what possession must look like.

The voice spoke again, louder, and I recognized it as Laura’s, but her voice as I had never heard it: low, caressing, sly, somehow as evil as the hiss of a snake.

“What do your voices say now?” Laura’s corrupted voice said.

Glynn dropped her eyes back to her hands. Slowly they picked up the great cross and caressed it, a soft, unconscious, washing motion. The camera moved in further, as slowly and softly as fog.

“Nothing. They say nothing,” she whispered.

I had never heard such sorrow in my daughter’s voice, never such bewilderment. Never such despair, but despair as quiet as a sigh, or a little wind.

She lifted her face again, and the light caught it, and the camera came on. Her face filled the screen now. Her eyes looked out as if at empty space, and they were blind. Her face was awful, beautiful, lost. I held my breath.

“They say nothing,” she said again. I felt tears spring into my eyes. Glynn’s hand tightened in mine, but I could not look at her.

“There is another way,” Laura’s low, dreadful voice said. “There is another voice that will speak, if only you will listen, and your heart will sing with it, and your body burn.”

Without moving her eyes, Glynn said, “All my life it has been my passion to serve France and my Lord. Only these. But now my voices tell me nothing and my Lord is silent and my passion is cold in this cold place. If there is another voice to make my heart sing, for sweet Jesus’ sake, Lady, tell me it.”

Two great tears gathered in her eyes, and her lips trembled suddenly, and she looked down. The tears slid from beneath her lashes and tracked down her face. She sat silent. Laura’s voice was silent, too.

Very slowly Laura’s white hand came into the frame and reached over. Her finger caught a tear that trembled on Glynn’s chin, and so slowly that it seemed to take whole minutes, her finger traced the tear over to Glynn’s lips, and brushed the wetness across them. Glynn’s lashes dropped still; they shuttered her eyes, but the slow crystal tears continued, one by one.

“You hear it now,” Laura said.

The camera froze on the closeup of Glynn’s face with Laura’s finger on her lips, and then the screen went blank.

For a long moment no one spoke. I could not find the breath to breathe, much less to speak. The little moment was heartbreaking, terrible, and so pregnant with both innocence and evil that it did not seem to me there could be words for it. I hated it. I felt horror and terror and furious rage; how dare he make this of my daughter? How dare Laura? But even as I sat paralyzed, trying to find breath and words, I knew that the test was, as Caleb Pringle had said, extraordinary.

The lights came up and Caleb said, matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a first test like it. She is incredible. You do see that, don’t you?”

“I see it. I also see that it is depraved, and evil, and if I had known it would be like this I would never on earth have—”

“But that is just how it should be,” he said softly and patiently, as if he were talking to a child. “She has caught completely that awful innocence at the moment of corruption; seen the snake as it enters Eden. If she were not your daughter you would see.”

I knew he was right. If I had seen this moment in a theater and not known Glynn, I would have been struck silent with its sheer power, instead of with horror and rage.

I took a deep breath and looked at Glynn. She was looking back at me with a simple, whole-souled desire to please; it was a look I saw practically every day at home.