“Too soon, too soon,” she sighs. “And now swallowed into the void Poor Wendy wanders alone now …”
“No!” I try to follow the faint spark of her consciousness as it soars and plummets through endless canyons. “Don’t leave me! Help me, Dr. Harrow—”
“Help you?” In my mouth a faint sweetness as of old apples. “You killed me, Wendy —”
“Not me!” The sweetness roils into norepinephrine’s cloying honey. She leaps into flame, white and blinding. I start to cry out, to press my face into a pillow so that I will not see the room and wake to lose her again. “The Boy, Dr. Harrow—who is that Boy?”
“Ahhh
Two Voices now, two bright flecks in my spinning firmament.
“My brother— ”
“My sister— ”
Faint as first light the Boy’s bleak consciousness touches the rim of my temporal lobe. I groan in disappointment and terror. Already I can feel Dr. Harrow’s retreat into my corpus callosum, those gray mountains.
But Dr. Harrow lingers a moment longer. Axons whip and slash against the Boy’s first firings. I derive a numb solace from her presence, unclench my fingers from the pillow and draw a deep breath. Something had stirred her to wake me; something she would warn me of. A moment longer and she will be gone and only the Boy will remain to torment me.
“Dr. Harrow—”
A sigh echoes through the gray chasm. “Wendy,” it breathes. “Oh Wendy it is cold, He is so cold …”
I shiver at her anguish, but another urgency forces me on. “A brother, Dr. Harrow. Do I have a brother?”
Her consciousness wavers. A pulse of noradrenaline. Emerald novas burst to send her spinning into the shadows. A last cry soars through my mind’s abyss and I shout in pain as a blocked pathway erupts into crimson flame.
“There is a Boy, “she cries at last. “Our brother — Baal —”
My head pounds from the effort of trying to hold her another moment. Who is Baal? my mind shrieks. Aidan? Raphael?
Her consciousness a crimson streak as she spirals into the void—
“He is our brother, the dying god — we woke Him and now there is no peace until He is slain —
“ ‘But oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t
A brother’s murder!’
“Find him, Wendy— ”
She is gone. I am alone with Him, the One she woke, the One who slumbers within my tangle of dendrites and neurons and axons: the One who uses me as a flail to reap His harvest, His tribute of souls. The God in the Tree, Dionysus
Dendrites. The Gaping Lord. My hands pummel the bedcovers as He strives with me. My fingers curl helplessly, then flex and open as the blood pumps into them.
I feel Him, the cold and iron pressure of His limbs within mine, my blood streaked with the raw fluids He has released within my brain. A roaring as of some vast beast freed from its prison. A cry that I know is Justice’s as he wakes, as I claw and scream and tear at the sheets.
“No, Wendy!”
I do not see Justice as I fight Him, try to keep Him from seizing Justice like an animal, until finally I fall back onto the bed, grunting as I rip the comforter into shreds.
“Find him, Wendy!”
Her last words echoing as above me Justice hovers, in his hands some heavy object that smashes against my forehead. I hear a howl of frustrated rage, and plunge into unconsciousness.
Somehow Justice and Miss Scarlet engaged palanquins to bear us back to the theater. Justice pleaded I was ill. I recall only Gower Miramar leaning over me in our small chamber, and a fleeting impression of sunrise striking the minarets of the House Miramar as the elders carried us off.
I slept fitfully through that entire day and night, waking often from terrible nightmares. Like shades flickering in a cinematoscope the faces of Justice and Miss Scarlet would reveal themselves to me, first one and then the other as momentarily I awakened, struggling to lift my head before collapsing back upon my pillow.
When finally I did wake it was late morning. Sunlight bloomed upon the peeling wallpaper of my tiny room. I turned to see Miss Scarlet sitting primly upon a child’s rocking chair she had dragged from the prop room, her lips moving as she read silently from Mrs. Fiske’s Memoirs.
“Miss Scarlet,” I whispered. When I touched my forehead I felt a bump there as big as Miss Scarlet’s fist, and recalled Justice’s face as he struck me in the Miramars’ chamber. I tried to raise myself, and knocked against a half-full pitcher of water on the nightstand. Miss Scarlet caught this before it could fall. She put it back upright, carefully reserved the place in her book with a tattered strand of velvet ribbing. With a sigh she set the volume upon the nightstand.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Awful.” I flinched as she brushed the hair from my forehead. She nodded, poured me a glass of water, and waited until I drank it before saying anything more.
“You could have killed that child. You could have killed yourself,” she said at last. I shut my eyes and started to turn from her. “No!—listen to me, Wendy!”
I opened one eye, then shrugged. With a groan I pulled myself up to stare back at her angry face. “I’m listening,” I said.
“Perhaps you do not care about putting yourself in danger; but you have no right to endanger our lives as well. That child was hysterical. Justice was hysterical. He thought he’d killed you. He had to lie to the suzein about what happened, else Miramar might have taken action against us all because you harmed the child.
“That was ill-conceived, Wendy. You heard Miramar: Ascendants have crossed the river. They might be looking for you. A strange, cold young man resembling a Paphian favorite, driving a Paphian child to the edge of madness—this may sound too much like a runaway empath who caused the suicide of the Ascendants’ most renowned researcher.”
“They think I’m dead,” I protested weakly.
The chimpanzee trembled with indignation. “Being dead doesn’t excuse it! You could have killed her—”
“I don’t care,” I said, exhausted. I pressed my palms against my eyes. “Please let me sleep—”
“Dammit, Wendy!”
In her excitement she had climbed onto the seat of the little rocker. It swayed precariously as she swung her arms to punctuate her sentences, bits of the decayed fabric of her dressing gown pocking the air with flecks of oriental green and black, “You have to care!” she exclaimed, one long arm plucking at my bedcovers. “You must care, about everything; else how will you become a Great Artist? How will you become Truly Human?”
I groaned. “I don’t want to become anything right now. Right now I’d like to sleep, or maybe eat. Where is Justice?”
She blinked painfully, as if she had been slapped. “Not care?” she repeated, as if she had not heard me. “Not care?”
I rolled my eyes and turned onto my side. I could hear her breathing deeply (“from the diaphragm,” she would say) as she sought to calm herself. I pretended to be asleep, although I knew this would not fool Miss Scarlet, who declared she could smell sleep, and daydreams when one should be preparing for one’s entrance.
But perhaps she decided it would be better to wait for this imperfect vessel to knit itself back together before attempting to fill it again. The bedstand shook as she brushed against it, retrieving her book. Then I heard the soft rustle of a page being turned. She cleared her throat.
“‘Great acting, of course, is a thing of the spirit; in its best estate a conveyance of certain abstract spiritual qualities, with the person of the actor as medium. It is with this medium our science deals, with its slow, patient perfection as an instrument. The eternal and immeasurable accident of the theater which you call genius, that is a matter of The Soul’”