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CONSTANCE

All was well in Our Heroine’s house. Jon Ymirson was snoring soundly in the spare bedroom, the wood-burning stove was successfully keeping away the snowy cold, and I—unable to quite get into the rhythm of typing up my notes—had decided to use this rare opportunity to take an innocent tour of the domestic atmosphere that had produced one of the most outstanding women of our time.

No.

Though Our Heroine’s childhood adventures with her illustrious parents have been chronicled in some detail by Magnus Valison in the famous series of novels that he adapted from Emily Bean’s true-life diaries, I am certainly not the first of her admirers to wonder about the more mundane events between adventures that helped shape her into the woman she was eventually to become. So, finding myself virtually alone in the house in which she grew up—the very model for her psychic architecture laid bare before me—how could I help but explore?

No. Too clunky. And not trite enough for my readership.

Though I have been acquainted with the Bean-Ymirson family for many years—my first encounter with them dating back to the early eighties when I was but a cub reporter, fresh out of high school and trying to make a name for myself by covering the spectacular homicide cases in which the family was prone to becoming embroiled—it wasn’t until Emily Bean met her own bitter end in 1985 that I was truly treated as an intimate, joining with them in their time of mourning for this woman who meant so much to us all. Jon Ymirson, ever stoic, betrayed his affection for me only through his silent tolerance, but Our Heroine, closer to me in both age and temperament, welcomed me into the family with open arms. I came to feel much like an older sister to her in that time. And now I was in the house that I never got to grow up in, searching out the childhood that my sister and I never had the chance to share…

Bah! Screw it.

I began my snooping in the study.

BLAISE

It is well before the dawn of this morning, and study of my wife’s journals has revealed me to be the cuckold.

I know the mind of my wife, and in her writings I can trace the manoeuvres with which she sought to hide her infidelity. I can sense the words that lurk beneath the layers of her ink that I cannot scratch away. Worse than both of these things, I can read plainly the passages where she did not seek to hide anything at all.

I can’t tell Blaise about this, for instance. Or in the places where I must seek the beginnings of her words:

Feelings of rage, guilt… I’m very emotional. My eye feels oddly raw. What happened? All the horribly evil deeds I’ve done

There is a feeling like anger and betrayal. It is like frustration. It is something interior, ineffable, and it yearns to be effed. I can only emit yells, instead.

His teeth were white as snow.

All my words shall be stallion, not a workhorse among them.

We must create incomprehensible things in order to have an analogy for our incomprehension of the universe. Obscure reality to make it more attractive. We must keep secrets, so that we may have the pleasure of uncovering them: wow.

K. It is more important that my work be marveled at than that it be understood.

Evil that we participate in freely in order to make ourselves believe that it is not evil after all.

More attractive. The workhorse and the stallion. The secret pleasure. The evil participated in freely. I have teased the meaning from each of these things.

Were she still alive I could forgive her.

The K presents difficulties of interpretation and appears often. The initial of a name would be too uncomplicated. Constant, for “Constance”? But Constance Lingus was not my wife’s lothario.

His teeth were white as snow. As white as the snows of Iceland, perhaps. It occurred during the summer that she studied Hamlet. Shirley’s words are clear in that regard. What other meaning could they hold? Less clear, however, is the identity of her lover. The identity of her murderer.

WIBLE & PACHECO

The mortal fright of Boris Baxter had recalled to our minds the first case on which we had cooperated with the Bean-Ymirsons: The Case of the Consternated Cossacks, as Magnus Valison had dubbed it in his literary adaptation of the events—the same adaptation that we had discovered in Hubert Jorgen’s store. Having found this clue in the store of Hubert Jorgen, then, we decided to proceed onward toward his house—in order to see what other clues we might find among his possessions.

NATHAN

The old guy just kind of deflated when his story was done, let his eyes glaze over and fell back where he was sitting. It was like he’d been possessed while he was telling it, but now the demon had been exorcized. I didn’t even realize who he was until way later, after I’d already caught my plane for the States and I found his face in the middle of some magazine stuffed into the back of the seat in front of me. And even then I could hardly believe that it had been him. At the moment, I just thought he seemed uncannily familiar. It kind of made me sad to look at him, like he could have been my dad or something. I shook it off, though.

“Well. How would you react if I were to suggest a walk?” the woman asked me, pushing herself halfway up on her hands.

“I’d probably say something like, ‘Yeah, that’d be cool,’” I told her. My ass was getting numb anyway. I stood and took a glance around while she sat there, still resting on her hands.

I knew it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, wandering off without my guides, but the son still hadn’t returned, and I wasn’t going to attempt to talk with the father on my own, especially since it looked like it was his turn to speak in the center of the little circle he was sitting in. I’d just have to try not to be gone too long.

“You have my immortal gratitude,” the woman said to the old guy. “I’ll be back later to discuss the matter with you further… If you’re quite certain that you wouldn’t mind.”

“Yes, it is always nice to speak with you,” he mumbled smiling up at her.

She grabbed her backpack from beneath the chair she’d been sitting in and pulled out a Maglite. “Ready?”

“Sure, where’re we going?”

She gave me a funny look, then. Squinted with her whole face, like she’d just tasted a lemon or she was skeptical of something. But she didn’t say anything; she just led me down the same corridor that the son had gone down. At least I thought it was the same corridor. It was pretty easy to get confused about direction down there.

We didn’t say much to each other, at first. We just walked. She seemed to know where she was going, and her flashlight technique was a bit steadier than the father’s had been, but she didn’t seem to think there was anything worth chatting about along the way. The walls were still pretty barren, though, so I could kind of see her point. They were pretty narrow, too. I kept a few paces behind her.

“So… Keeping tabulations on me, are you?” she said after we’d gone a decent distance. She stopped and turned to face me. Her voice sounded serious all of a sudden, but with the light pointing at me I couldn’t really make out her expression.