The City of Mirrors (The Passage 3)

Nessa pauses, then asks, “What about your father?”

“My father was a simple man. Straightforward would be the term. If he had a religion, it was horses. That, and my mother. He loved her a great deal, even when things got bad. When they married, according to him, she was just like anybody else. Perhaps a little more devout than most, but that wasn’t so unusual in these parts. It wasn’t until later that she started having spells. Visions, episodes, waking dreams, whatever you like to call them.”

“Was the piano hers?”

Nessa has correctly intuited this. “My mother was a country girl, but she came from a musical family. From an early age she was quite good. Some people said she was a prodigy, even. She could have gone on to a real career, but then she met my father, and that was that. They were very traditional in that way. She still played sometimes, though I think she had mixed feelings about it.”

Logan takes a steadying breath before continuing: “Then one night I woke up and heard her playing. I was very young, six, maybe seven. The music wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Incredibly beautiful, hypnotic almost. I can’t even describe it. It swept me up completely. After a while, I went downstairs. My mother was still playing, though she wasn’t alone. My father was there, too. He was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands. My mother’s eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at the keys or anything else. Her face had a kind of erased blankness to it. It was as if some outside force was borrowing her body for its own intentions. It’s hard to explain—maybe I’m not telling it right—but I knew instinctively that the person playing the piano wasn’t my mother. She’d become someone else. ‘Penny, stop,’ my father was saying—pleading, really. ‘It’s not real, it’s not real.’ ”

“It must have been terrifying.”

“It was. There he was, this proud man, strong as a bull, completely helpless, shaking with tears. It rocked me to the core. I wanted to get the hell out of there and pretend the whole thing had never happened, but then my mother stopped playing.” Logan snaps his fingers for emphasis. “Just like that, right in the middle of a phrase, as if somebody had thrown a switch. She stood up from the piano and marched right past me like I wasn’t even there. ‘What’s happening,’ I asked my father, ‘what’s wrong with her?’ But he didn’t answer me. We followed her outside. I didn’t know what time it was, though it was late, the middle of the night. She stopped at the edge of the porch, looking out over the fields. For a little while nothing happened—she just stood there, the same empty look on her face. Then she began to mutter something. At first I couldn’t tell what she was saying. One phrase, over and over. ‘Come to me,’ she was saying. ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me.’ I’ll never forget it.”

Nessa is watching his face intently. “Who do you think she was talking to?”

Logan shrugs. “Who knows? I don’t remember what happened after that. I suppose I went to bed. A few days later, the same thing happened. Over time it became a kind of nightly ritual. Oh, Mom’s playing the piano again at four A.M. During the day she seemed fine, but then that changed, too. She became harried, obsessive, or else wandered around the house in a kind of daze. That’s when the painting started.”

“ ‘Painting’?” Nessa repeats. “You mean, pictures?”

“Come on, I’ll show you.”

He escorts her upstairs. Three tiny bedrooms, tucked under the eaves; in the ceiling of the hallway is a hatch with a cord. Logan pulls it down and unfolds the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the attic.

They ascend into the cramped, low-ceilinged space. Standing a dozen deep, his mother’s paintings line nearly a whole wall. Logan kneels and draws the protective cloth aside.

It is like opening a door onto a garden. The paintings, of various sizes, depict a landscape of wildflowers, the colors burning with an almost supernatural brightness. Some show a background of mountains; others, the sea.

“Logan, these are beautiful.”

They are. Bound up in pain, they are, nevertheless, creations of stunning beauty. He takes the first one and brings it to Nessa, who holds it in her hands.

“It’s…” she begins, then stops. “I’m not even sure how to say it.”

“Unearthly?”

“I was going to say haunting.” She looks up. “And they’re all the same?”

“Different viewpoints, and her style improved over time. But the subjects are identical. The fields, the flowers, the ocean in the background.”