I kept my eyes closed in the field when She came; you keep your eyes closed now. But you can only be selfish so long, sister.
Mrs. Whitcomb’s skeleton hand slipped further down to rest lightly over Sidlo’s hidden, fluttering heart.
This world is full of terrifying things, yes—far more than we ever thought; things that make us want to run, to hide, to dig ourselves deep and pull the earth up over, a child under blankets. But being a mother must put paid to all that, don’t you find? It’s like being born again, your heart on the outside of your body.
It all sounds so simple, because that’s how I’m making it seem—so glacially paced, when it actually went by in a drunken rush, a neural pop. Because when one mind touches another, even through the medium of a third mind, things happen at absolute top speed; essentially indescribable, even when you struggle to. Particularly then.
Be bold now, Lois—for Clark’s sake, if not your own. Please.
(A classic fairy tale instruction, with its provenance daylight-clear: the sign over Mister Fox’s murder warren, that grim den of bones, warning unwary potential brides away. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, Lest that your heart’s blood should run thick with cold.)
“What do I have to do?” I made myself ask.
What are you willing to do?
“What’s necessary?”
I meant it as question, but she took it as a statement. And there she was, all of a sudden—closer yet, engulfing Sidlo, who gasped in pleasant pain: Oh yes, oh thank you. At last. Her shrouded face pressed up to mine, teeth to lip, so near my nose almost fit the hole where hers should have been.
Listen to me, she repeated—a whisperless whisper, so strong I felt my whole head resound. She is not here, not yet, but soon; call me Her harbinger. She shone her light on me and I became her reflection, her crooked shadow. But I am not even one-tenth of what she is—a ghost, not a god. You would always rather deal with a ghost than with a god.
“I—yes, yeah. I agree.”
And the reason She is coming is you. Accept that. Because you wouldn’t turn away. Because you kept going when everything—when I—told you to stop.
“I understand,” I admitted, not wanting to.
You made a door for Her, and it will open, unless you close it. Or the only control you have left will be over where She arrives, and who She shows Herself to.
Time to do the unselfish thing, in other words. Unlikely as that was.
Mrs. Whitcomb’s ghost looked down then, or seemed to—hard to tell without eyes. In Dzèngast, when I asked the Kantorka how I might yet escape, she laughed at me. As she was right to. What she told me was this, and I have remembered it ever since, though I never wanted to believe it: “Only do your duty and you will not be chosen—that is Her promise. Unless She decides your duty is to be chosen.”
I cleared my throat. “Will you leave them all out of it if I do?”
Yes, sister. To the best of my ability.
“Will She?”
I cannot know. No one can.
No surprise there.
So I bent my head in the dark, not daring even to pray. “Show me,” I told her.
I opened my eyes. I saw.
I was seen.
And like my self-proclaimed “sister” before, I knew I would never again be un-seen.
The blinds behind her were sealed back together now, narrowly bisected, daylight threaded. I saw images spill across them, flaring like a plume of steam—memory as movies, pulled straight from her head through Sidlo’s, black and white and silver burnt all over. Reflections in the mind’s eye of a long-dead woman.
The images were constantly oscillating, rendering them impossible to understand for a few seconds, till I recognized a particular pattern of rhythmic blur: the way sunlight flickered through the GO Train windows when we took it down to Mississauga on a summer afternoon so Clark could spend time with Gran and Granddad, Simon’s folks. Which, in turn, snapped everything into focus, an optical illusion flipping from nonsense to meaning.
A dark-panelled train compartment with cushioned benches, smaller than any I’d ever travelled in—Victorian, Edwardian maybe. One
door, one window; a cream-gloved hand (mine?) pushed in the last of a series of pins fastening a sheet across the already-drawn blinds, shutting out the last of the popping, scratching, flickering outdoor light. But the haze around me wasn’t all darkness—there was something else in my way, a sort of swaying scrim, lightly floral patterned. Cream too, or even white, dimmed down to dirty grey.