I have to speak to Clementine.
I FIND CLEMENTINE AT HER USUAL STATION, a hair’s-breadth from the window with her ear pressed against one of its jewel-cut panes. She seems fixed in place, inanimate, though she stood at the cellar door not ten minutes gone. A smell of sore neglect rises off her—; her hair stands in sweat-stiffened plaits, like a reef of Araby coral, at impossible angles to her skull. When it is that she sits, sleeps, or takes her meals I have no idea any longer. Delamare and I moved into more comfortable quarters as the second floor emptied, but there’s been no dragging her out of that cramped hat-box of a room. She eats flockpaper off the walls, and vermin that she picks from among her skirts—; the room has a smell to make you swear off breathing.
“Clem,” I say softly.
Her body gives a twitch, then settles. No more than that. Until today I could depend on a flicker of recognition in her eyes, however grudging—; now even that is gone. No matter. I’ll use her the same way she uses that window of hers.
“Clem,” I say again, stopping an arm’s-length from her.
She gives no reply.
“I’ve been to see Foster in the cellar,” I say. “Parson was with him. Parson means to use him as a carrier.” I study her reflection in the glass. “Perhaps ‘courier’ is a better word. For the Redeemer himself, Clem — do you understand me? When he comes down the ladder.”
The unlikeliness of what I’m saying breaks over me suddenly, forcing me to hush. But I’ve said just enough. A rustle of air escapes her lips.
“You remember about the sephiroth, don’t you, Clem? The ladder of the spirit?”
I wait for an answer, but no answer comes. I lay my hand on her shoulder. “Dodds’ holes form a pattern of sorts—; a grid. The geometry they follow is the geometry of the spheres.” I take a breath. “I’ve told you this before. Do you remember?”
Tentatively, almost imperceptibly, she bobs her head. The movement is so slight that I doubt it even as it happens. But her brow taps quietly on the glass.
“I couldn’t allow that to happen, Clem. I couldn’t just stand by. I took hold of Foster by the throat, and—”
“BALL!” she shrieks, spinning about with such strength that I’m sent tumbling backward. An infant — or a beast, perhaps — could produce such a cry. The Clementine I knew and loved could not.
“Was I wrong to do it?” I whimper. “Tell me, dearest, if you know! Was I wrong to take Parson at his word?”
She hovers in seraphic silence, violence both animating her and holding her fixed above me, as wires both direct and fix a marionette. She shakes her head slowly.
“He’s dead?” she says. “You’re sure?”
I nod. She brings a hand to her face and passes it from her brow down to her chin, as though she were closing the eyes of a cadaver. Each action she might take next flits past my mind’s eye, accompanied by its corresponding shape.
A net of yellow diamonds.
A silver cup, upended.
A ladder of eight stars, one for each of Dodds’ holes, over a blood-red field.
An instant later she’s away. The L-shaped room is empty. She has stolen down the hall, to him—: to Delamare. I can no more follow her than her bedstead could, or the peeling flock-paper, or the window she so adores. I stand in the center of the room, passive as a dust-mote, listening as her foot-steps fall away.
I’ve felt it before, this swooning of my will, this collapsing of my spirit like a spider-web in frost. I felt it when Clem was brought to 37, and on that first fatal night at Madame Lafargue’s, when she went down to Lieutenant Beauregard. It’s happened often enough — God knows! — and Clem has always had a hand in it. The feeling is not one of helplessness or bewilderment, and still less of fear—: it’s a gentleness, a modesty, a blushing cooperation in the destruction of all that I hold dear. Were I to follow Clem now — to take a single step in her direction — there might yet be some small hope.
Instead I prefer to remain as I am, dumb-struck in an empty room.
After an immeasurable length of time — perhaps a quarter-hour, perhaps much longer — I’m able at last to struggle to my feet. I find her at Delamare’s bed-side, her face dug hard into its quilts. She is sobbing madly, ecstatically—; the quivering of her body makes bright ripples in the air. Delamare seems not to see her. Clem takes up one of his hands as I enter, and passes it abjectly across her face—: without any change of feature, without so much as a sigh, he frees his hand from hers.
For three days now I’ve known it was Clem who filled Parson’s bottles for him, and that Delamare’s illness sprang from this act like a tulip from a bulb. Something in her way of clutching at him now reminds me of it.
“I hadn’t known you were so fond of Private Foster, Clem,” I say.
She answers without lifting her face from the quilts. Her voice, unlike my own, is passionate and clear.
“I’m not weeping for Private Foster. I’m not weeping for you, either, or for this boy here.” She raises her head, as if to take my measure, then lowers it again. “I’m weeping for nobody but myself.”
I move a half-step closer. A tingling has begun at the base of my skull, causing the palms of my hands to twitch—; I dig my nails into them to keep them quiet. I want to take Clementine by the hair, to scream into her tear-marked face, to drag her bodily from the room. Delamare is watching me now, his eyes full of fire, and I do not mistake his look. He means for me to free him, and so help me God I will.
I mean to take hold of Clementine, to pull her from the bed, but a timid voice, groveling and childlike, stays my hand—:
“Weep for me!”
I recognize the voice, after a brief, unwilling moment, as my own.
“Weep for me, Clem, I beg of you! I’m nearly gone—”
The laugh she gives is so giddy that I find myself breaking, in spite of my best efforts, into an embarrassed smile. Delamare groans and shuts his eyes. Clementine rolls back onto her haunches, laughing in little chokes. But when she speaks her voice is hollow as a well.
“Get the house in order, google-eye! Decorate it for a wedding! There’ll be a body in every bed, poor fool, when our Redeemer comes!”
A Single Breath
VIRGIL TURNS AND GOES, says Clementine.
A look of disgust is on his face, as I’d meant there to be. A few breaths later he is down the stairs and gone. Only Delamare is left, and he’s nearly fevered under. I’ll serve as sole witness, then, to my own passing. As the R— promised that I would.
A sound carries in from the hall—: a rasping. Parson is there in the doorway, looking down at Delamare. Virgil’s foot-falls sound on the verandah. He’s away, then. Gone out of the house. As the R— promised he would be. Parson looks down at Delamare, waiting on some sign. I’m still shivering from my fit. But Virgil is gone. It’s important that he be away, I said. Let him be gone when the R— comes down.
Promise me that, Parson. Will you promise me?
The room goes quiet as a church. Nobody breathes. Parson keeps his eyes on Delamare. What’s he waiting on? I wonder. Maybe Delamare needs to be gone, as well, for the wedding to begin.