Yes, she thought now, it would have killed her. If she had made friends and found contentment in the life her mother wanted for her it would have killed her soul. She would never have written. She would have felt no need to escape.
She looked at Victoria’s pinched, sourly hopeful face. Victoria was trapped, even if she didn’t know it, but Sheila had escaped. She could afford to show a little kindness.
‘It’s a very nice room,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to show me your designs in the morning . . . not right now because I’m too tired to appreciate anything but bed.’
‘Oh, silly me! Of course you’re tired – I forgot how late it is. It’s just that I’m so excited.’
Sheila decided she liked Victoria even less when she was giggly and excited, but there was no escape from her now except into silence and herself: the same old thing.
‘It’s like being a kid again, having someone spend the night,’ Victoria said in the darkness. ‘Didn’t you used to love going to slumber parties?’
Sheila had been to only one slumber party, attending under pressure from her mother. She did now what she had done then and pretended to sleep. But she lay awake for what seemed hours, listening to Victoria’s adenoidal breathing and hearing, behind it, her mother’s voice: Think you’re better than all the other girls? Too good to talk to them? You think you’re different?
She knew she was different. She knew she was better. The hard part was to hang on to that knowledge, and resist all those who tried to make her ordinary.
Sheila woke feeling as exhausted as if she had been struggling rather than sleeping all night, and when she saw herself in the bathroom mirror it was clear that she had lost the struggle.
There were days when she liked her face, but this was not one of them. Makeup didn’t really help, and her hair was hopeless. Confronted with the change in atmosphere and the dry, gritty wind of West Texas, it seemed the permanent had given up, leaving her with a lank, lifeless, mousy brown mop.
Her clothes, which had looked so fresh and fashionable in California, now looked drab and badly cut. They were wrinkled from having been packed, and they no longer fitted: the fabric of the skirt stretched unattractively tight across stomach and hips, while the blouse simply hung on her. Sheila had the eerie feeling that she had changed shape overnight. She sucked in her stomach as hard as she could and turned away from the mirror, not ready to face Byzantium, but having no other choice.
Daylight revealed what had been hidden by the night: towering above ordinary frame houses and scrubby trees was a vast, looming presence, a rugged brown peak.
‘What’s that?’
Victoria smiled disbelievingly. ‘What do you think? It’s the mountain.’
She was finding it hard to breathe – probably the effect of holding in her stomach, but it felt as if she was afraid. Of the mountain? That was silly. ‘I just didn’t realize there would be a mountain here.’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘No, really. I thought this part of Texas was all flat.’
Another hard look from Victoria. ‘But it’s the most famous thing about Byzantium, our mountain.’
That made Sheila laugh, despite her unease. ‘Look, no offense, but “famous” is not a word I’d use about Byzantium! I’d never even heard of your town until you wrote me.’
‘Really? And you’ve never been here before?’
‘Never.’
‘Well. That is a surprise. I’d better show you why. We’ll go up where you can see it all . . . why don’t you close your eyes until I tell you to look? It’ll be more impressive that way.’
Most of the drive was a gradual ascent – too gentle to be up the mountain, and it seemed to Sheila that the car was travelling away from the peak. It was not long before the car pulled to a stop and Victoria said, ‘You can open your eyes now.’
They were outside of town, up on a ridge, in a roadside parking area created especially for the view: there were coin-operated telescopes there, and a map mounted behind plastic, with the state highway department seal on it. Sheila took in the view mechanically, eyes scanning the distance, the hazy blue sky and a line of faraway mountains, then, just below, on the flat valley floor, the town of Byzantium, buildings clustered around the single peak rising like some rough, hunched beast furred brown and green.
And then she saw what she was seeing. She knew this landscape – she had been here many times before. She had invented the town, the mountain, and the wasteland beyond. She had written it into existence.
‘You see?’ said Victoria. ‘You had to come here.’
The Ramada Inn had what they called a conference centre, and it was there – a detached, windowless, concrete building on the other side of the swimming pool that the First Byzantium Science Fiction Convention was held.
When Sheila and Victoria arrived, they found Grace sitting behind a table near the door, with a cashbox and a list of names.
‘We’ve had fifteen people so far,’ she said, looking apprehensively up at Victoria. ‘I think that’s pretty good for the first hour.’
‘How many are you expecting?’ Sheila asked.
‘A lot,’ said Victoria. ‘Science fiction is big business these days, and there’s never been a convention in this part of the state. I’m sure it’ll be a big success. Here, put this nametag on. I designed it especially, so people can pick you out as the Guest of Honour.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘This evening you’ll judge the costume contest. Until then, just enjoy yourself. Give the fans a chance to talk to you. Be friendly.’
Sheila felt tired and uncertain of herself. She wanted to retreat, having seldom felt less like talking to strangers. But she had agreed to come and must make an effort. She moved away from the registration desk to begin her tour of the convention.
The conference centre consisted of the small reception area where Grace sat, three small seminar rooms, and one big hall. In one seminar room Sheila found four boys and two girls huddled in a circle with dice and notebooks, playing Dungeons and Dragons. They didn’t even look up when she entered, too involved with their fantasy to notice her.
The next seminar room contained eight or ten dark shapes gazing at a large television screen upon which flickered an episode of The Prisoner.
The main hall had a podium and microphone set up at the far end, unused. At the near end several tables had been set up and people were selling used paperbacks, comics, posters, little clay and metal figurines, and other paraphernalia. Some artwork was displayed, and Sheila recognized the paintings as Victoria’s work.
People of both sexes, most of them apparently in their teens or early twenties, milled around the room. Sheila noticed a very fat man in a kilt, with a plastic sword belted at his side, and a skinny young woman in a black knitted mini-dress, who might have been attractive beneath the layer of green paint she wore over all exposed flesh. But even the people not in costume – the boy reading a paperback novel on the floor, frowning in fierce concentration; the acned young man whose shirt-pocket bulged with different coloured pens; the girl talking into a tape-recorder – seemed to exist in some other, private universe, and even if she had found any of them the slightest bit attractive, Sheila could not have approached without feeling herself an intruder.
‘Excuse me, are you Sheila Stoller?’
Sheila turned to see an ordinary-looking teenager, a girl in blue jeans and a pink T-shirt, holding up a copy of Moonlight Under the Mountain in much the way that people in horror films presented crosses to vampires. She smiled with relief and pleasure. This was what she was here for, after alclass="underline" to be the author.