REPLACEMENT

Odessa Pell brought him the file herself.

She did not do that as a rule. In nine years of brokering the Gilded Hour she had sent her candidates up in the ordinary way, by courier, in black folders, and let Margaux do the sorting. But on the ninth day of February, at four in the afternoon, she walked into the Tower unannounced in a crocodile-collared coat and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, and asked the receptionist on forty-one for ten minutes with Mr. Draycott, and said that she would be glad to wait.

She did not wait long. He had not been refusing visitors; he had simply stopped being asked.

"Odessa."

"Callum." She sat in the chair he did not offer her, crossed her ankles, and laid a slim black folder on the desk between them. "I understand the Callaghan girl has gone."

"Who told you?"

"Nobody told me. It's my business to know when a house is empty." The gold rims caught the light as she tilted her head. "I'm sorry. I did not think she'd be the one to run. I thought it'd be you."

"It is not a matter for discussion."

"Of course not." She smiled her sharp small smile. "I merely wished to say that I have a girl. A particularly good one. Twenty-eight, an actress, a dancer once, she has a gift for what you like. Three years in the program in Los Angeles. Excellent references." She tapped the folder. "I thought that you might like to see her."

"No."

"She is beautiful."

"I'm sure."

"She is not afraid of the dark."

He raised his eyes.

It was the one thing she should not have said. She knew it the instant it left her mouth. He saw her know it: the small tightening round her glasses, the barely perceptible stillness of a woman who has put a foot on a stair that isn't there. For nine years she had sold him fear. For nine years she'd been exact.

"No one is afraid of the dark," said Callum. "That's the difficulty."

"Callum—"

"Leave the folder."

She hesitated. She looked, for an instant, almost sorry. Then she rose and drew the coat about her, and at the door she turned and said, in a different voice, low and dry:

"You know, I've been doing this for a long time. I have sent you forty-one women. You looked at them all as one looks at a very large clock. And then in October a girl walked into my office in a gray Ohio coat and sat down and said, I'd like to buy the most dangerous thing you sell. I took her fifty thousand dollars and I thought, She'll be back in a week, sick, with her tail between her legs."

"She wasn't."

"No." Odessa's mouth moved. "She was the only one I have ever sent who wasn't afraid of anything. And I ought to have known what that meant. But I'd got used to thinking the world was the way I sold it."

She went out. She closed the door with great delicacy, like a woman leaving a sickroom.

He looked at the folder for the rest of the afternoon.

…

Her name was Sloane Whitmore.

The photographs were good. They were meant to be. There was a head-shot, soft-focus, in a cream sweater, with a heavy fall of chestnut hair and a pair of very large, very bright, very trusting brown eyes. There was a second, in black, with her chin lowered and her mouth slightly open, in which the trust had been replaced by a kind of practiced invitation. There was a resumé, which he skipped. There was a medical clearance, and a psychological assessment signed by a Dr. Marcus Reyes, and an NDA, and a form in which she had indicated, in a firm round hand, in the box marked Limits, the single word None.

None.

He read that and a muscle moved at the side of his jaw.

They all say none, he thought. Win said none. Win said it flat, with her hand on the table, like a woman signing for a delivery. And she'd meant it; that was the thing; she had meant it with every cell. It was the only honest none he had ever read. And these other women wrote it as one writes no allergies on a form.

He turned to the last page.

Under Reason for participation there was a single line in the same round hand. I love the feeling of being completely out of control.

That's fine, he thought. That's honest enough.

He closed the folder.

Close the folder. Send her away. Go home.

He did not. He sat with his hand flat on the black cardboard and the watch open on the blotter, and listened to the hum of the building. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had seen it in other men, in a dozen boardrooms, in the faces of those who had lost a partner or a patent and set about replacing it, quickly, with whatever was nearest. It was not grief. It was not even appetite. It was simply the instinct of a mechanism to put something into the place where something had been.

It's a test, he told himself. A control experiment. I will do exactly what I did before. If it is the same, then the thing in October was the game. If it is not—

He did not finish the sentence.

He picked up the telephone.

"Margaux. Draw up the agreement. The same one. Twelve clauses, the original text."

A silence on the line, of a particular and recognizable texture.

"The original text, sir?"

"Yes."

"Including eleven?"

"Including eleven," said Callum, and heard how the words sounded, and put down the phone.

…

They did it on a Friday at Halcyon House.

He had given orders that nothing should be changed. It was the same room, the long pale chamber in the east wing where he had once lowered a black silk band over a woman's eyes; the same chair, the same cool stone floor, the same single candle in its iron sconce. The same cello on the speakers, a low line of sound like a vein of water under ice. He had even, God help him, ordered the same oysters.

They were on the table when he came in. He did not look at them.

She was waiting by the window. She wore a short black slip, and her hair was loose, and she stood with her arms at her sides and her bare feet apart and her face turned toward him in the candlelight, shining with an eager, delighted, expectant light. She was as lovely in the flesh as she had been in the photographs. She was a little taller than he'd thought. She was trembling very slightly, in a way that was clearly intended to be seen.

"Mr. Draycott."

"Miss Whitmore. You've read the agreement."

"Every word." Her voice was warm and low. "I've been looking forward to this for weeks."

"You understand the safe word."

"Harbor." She smiled. "It's very pretty."

It's not pretty, he thought. It's the last word in the world I wanted to hear from you.

"Say it at any time," said Callum, "and it ends. I want you to be certain."

"I'm certain." She took a step toward him. "I'm not afraid of you at all."

…

He did what he had done before.

He had thought it would be mechanical. That was the horror; it was. He knew the order of things. He knew the weight of the blindfold in his hand, and the exact distance from her shoulder at which to stop, and the half-second pause in which a person understands that she can no longer see. He knew the places where the voice should go low. He knew how a hand could rest at the nape of a neck, so lightly it might be a breath, and what that did to a person's breathing.

He had known all of it for nine years. He had been, in his way, an artist.

She gave a soft gasp, as the silk came down.

"Oh," said Sloane Whitmore.

It was a lovely sound. It came out round and breathy, with a catch at the end, and was followed by a little shiver that went the length of her spine. She had exquisite timing. She turned her head, as if toward a noise. She drew a quick shaky breath, and he heard her hands open and close against her thighs.

"Mr. Draycott?" she whispered. "I can't see."

"No."

"I'm— I'm a little frightened."

"Are you?"

"A little." The voice had gone small. "Is that all right?"

It's what you want, he thought. It's what you came for. Say yes.

"That's the purpose," said Callum.

He moved around her. He walked a slow circle on the cold stone, and she turned her head to follow him, wide-eyed beneath the black silk, quivering. He spoke quietly, in a voice that grew out of the dark like a root. He told her what he would do. He did not do it. He had always understood that the thing itself was nothing. It was the interval before it, the stretch of dark in which a human being, alone with her own imagination, builds the fear herself, brick by brick.

She built it beautifully. He listened to her do it. Her breath came quicker. A tear started under the silk and ran down her cheek. She cried out, once, a clear high shuddering cry, and said, "Please," and said, "Oh, God, I don't know what you're going to—"

It was perfect. It was word for word.

It was exactly what he had heard in the first week, on the first night, from a woman on this stone floor with her chin raised and her pulse going in her throat like a trapped wing; and it was nothing at all like it, because that woman had said no.

I'm not afraid.

She had said it at the moment he thought she would break. She'd said it flat, steady, in a hoarse clear voice. I'm not afraid. Do your worst. And her hands, he remembered, had been perfectly still.

He stood in front of Sloane Whitmore in the candlelight and felt nothing.

It was an extraordinary sensation. He had expected the old tide, the cold pale pull of the thing that had always risen in him when another person's terror came up the dark. He had expected it so confidently that he took a half-step forward to meet it. But the tide did not come. There was only the room, and the cello, and the sound of a young woman performing, with great skill, the sound of being afraid; and in the middle of it, absolutely quiet, like a stone in a field, himself.

She is afraid, thought Callum. She is really afraid. Her hands are shaking. She's crying. It's all true.

And I feel nothing.

He took another half-step. She flinched, and gasped, and made a small broken whimper. He listened with the whole of his attention for the thing that had always answered, in the pit of the chest, to that sound.

It did not answer. It had been given, he understood, to someone else.

…

"Mr. Draycott?"

He had stopped.

He did not know for how long. The candle had burned down a quarter-inch. The woman before him was shifting her weight from one bare foot to the other, and her head was cocked, listening, and a line of confusion had come between her brows under the black silk.

"Is— is something wrong?"

"Take it off."

"I'm sorry?"

"The blindfold. Take it off, Miss Whitmore."

"But we haven't—"

"Take it off."

She did. She pulled the silk away and blinked, and stood there in the candlelight with her hair tumbled and her eyes red and shining, looking up at him with an expression of pure bewilderment. For the first time her face was unarranged. He saw how young she was. She was twenty-eight, an actress, from a town in Ohio he could not have named, with a mother who sent her a fruitcake at Christmas. She had her whole life ahead of her, and no wish at all to be hurt; she had a wish, as most of them did, to be held in the idea of it. She had come here from sheer loneliness. He knew that. He'd always known. It was only that, until a month ago, he had never been lonely enough to see it.

"Did I do something wrong?" she said.

"No."

"Was I— I thought I was—"

"You were excellent."

"Then why—"

"Because it isn't you." He heard his voice, flat and cold and civil, and hated it. "It was never you. I want you to understand that. It's an entirely different matter."

"Is it— was there someone?"

He didn't answer.

"There was," said Sloane Whitmore, softly. She hugged her bare arms. A flush rose in her face, and a kind of dawning pity came into her eyes, which was the worst thing yet. "Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't— the other girls said you were—"

"What did the other girls say?"

"That you didn't have anyone."

"That was true."

"And now?"

"The agreement is void," said Callum. "You will be paid in full. You will have the use of the car and the house tonight, and a driver in the morning. You have my apology." He took a card from his pocket, a plain white one, and laid it on the table beside the oysters. "If you have any difficulty with anything that has happened here, you may call this number at any hour. It is not a lawyer's. It's a friend's."

"Mr. Draycott—"

"Good night."

He went out.

…

He walked a long way, in the dark.

It was a bitter night, with a gale off the Sound and a moon like a cut coin. He went across the lawn without his coat, down the steps cut into the cliff, to the narrow strip of shingle at the bottom where the surf came in white and loud against the rocks. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves, with the wind whipping the cloth against his ribs, and looked out at the black water.

I have done it, he thought. I have run the experiment.

It was not the game.

The truth arrived as such truths do: not with a shock, but quietly, with the flat, exhausted clarity of a figure at the foot of a column. He had always supposed that he was a man who could be moved only by fear. That was the diagnosis. He had made a life out of it; he had built a house and an empire and a mythology on the proposition that he felt nothing except when another human being was frightened of him. He had called it his affliction. He had called it, in the secret places of his mind, his gift.

But it wasn't that. It had never been that.

She is afraid, and I feel nothing, thought Callum, standing on the stones with the spray on his face. She cries, and trembles, and begs. She does everything right. She gives me every single thing I thought I wanted. And there is nothing there.

Win was not afraid. She stood in front of me with her chin up and said "Do your worst." She told me I couldn't frighten her.

And I felt everything.

The surf broke and drew back and broke again.

He saw it all then. He saw the terrace at Halcyon, and the girl with her arms out, and himself catching her by the ankle; he saw the glass floor, the cold sea, the cellar. He saw a woman look at him across a table with those level gray eyes and say you're the only one who isn't looking at me. It had never been the fear. It had been the one person who looked at him and was not afraid, and so made him, for the first time in twenty-two years, afraid for her.

That was the whole of it. That was the secret at the bottom of his life.

I don't want to frighten anyone, he thought, with a kind of astonishment. I want to be seen by someone who isn't frightened.

And I let her walk out of my house, because I had written a clause.

He put his hand into his pocket. The watch was warm, from the heat of his body. He took it out and held it in his palm in the moonlight: the silver lid, the groove worn by his own thumb, the tiny scratch near the hinge where an eleven-year-old boy had dropped it on a dock. 4:17.

He did not open it.

Behind him, high on the cliff, the windows of Halcyon House shone yellow in the dark. In one of them, a long way up, a woman in a black slip was standing with her arms wrapped round herself, looking down at a man on the beach. He could not see her face. He did not need to. He knew what she was thinking, because it was what he had thought, on the first night, in the first week, about the girl in the gray coat.

What is he looking for? And why does it hurt to watch?

"I'm sorry," said Callum, to the sea.

The sea went on turning, black and indifferent, and the wind took the words away.