MIDPOINT — THE FLICKER

Day 40 of 100

On the fortieth morning, Mara woke with a sound in her head like a kettle just off the boil, and could not feel her feet.

She lay on the cot in the little room off the loft and looked at the ceiling. A watery light came through the slit of window. Somewhere below, Okafor was frying something, and the smell of it came up through the boards. She wiggled her toes. She could see them move beneath the blanket. She could not feel that they did.

It will pass, she told herself.

She said it every morning now. It had become a kind of morning prayer, and like most prayers it had stopped being believed some time ago. She sat up. She swung her legs over the side. She stood, and her knees held, and the floor, when she put her weight on it, was a long way off.

The calendar on the wall of the Post said Friday, the thirtieth of April.

Sixty days.

She dressed in the dark. She put on the gray gown, and the spectacles, and the white ribbon, tied twice around the left wrist beneath her cuff. She did her hair in the glass without looking at it. She had stopped looking at the glass a week ago, after a morning when she'd caught, at the edge of her reflection, the far wall of the room showing through her cheek.

Count something, she told herself.

One. Two. Three. Seven buttons. There are seven buttons on a gown. You have counted them.

She went down.

…

The Post had been strange all week.

The Director had gone on Sunday, in his bruise-colored car, with a wave of his stick and a pleasant word for the station-master. The Captain had given him a letter at the platform: three lines, in a hand like a ruled seam. Unable to determine at present. Inquiry continues. Rooke. Halloran had put it in his breast pocket without reading it. He had smiled his sad priestly smile. I'm sure it does, he'd said.

But he had left Dr. Calder behind, with the black Mirror in its crate in the cellar of the Faculty Hall, and two of the porters to sit on it. And Calder came every day. She did not come to the Post; she was too clever for that. She came to the Academy, and sat in the library, and took tea in the Dean's study. She was never anywhere in particular. And wherever Mara went, in that wet gray week, she had the soft feeling of a hand on the back of her neck.

She had seen the doctor three times. Once in the Athenaeum, in a corner, reading Paracelsus, with a pair of gold pince-nez on her sharp nose. Once at the post office, buying a stamp. Once on the road to the Falls, in a hired gig, driving slowly past. She had not looked at Mara. She had not needed to.

She is looking for the fade, thought Mara. She knows what to look for.

And the Captain's own man, Pip, has noticed that I'm not eating.

It was a bad week to fall apart.

…

The stair to the archive was dark at the top and dark at the bottom, and the gas had been out since Tuesday.

She took a candle. She had the Hollis ledger under her arm, wrapped in a shawl; she'd been carrying it up and down for three days from the cellar to her room and back, afraid to leave it, afraid to be seen with it. Today she meant to put it back for good. It was a stupid risk. It was the only one she could think of. If Calder came to look for what she'd seen, the ledger had better be where the Wardens expected it.

One flight. Twelve steps. Worn in the middle. Worn like dishes.

She had gone down seven when the feeling came.

It started in her hands.

A prickling, first. A kind of fizzing, as when a limb has been slept on and the blood comes back. She looked down at the candle and saw it shake, small and bright, like a star in a puddle, and then the shaking became a buzzing and the buzzing a roar, and she thought, quite clearly: Oh. This is it.

The stair went dim.

It was not dark. It was something else: a thinning, as though someone had turned down the intensity of the world. The candle-flame paled to a pencil-mark. The walls drew back. She had the oddest sense of lightness, of a rope slipping through the hand. She was standing on the seventh step, and she was also standing nowhere, and the two were not in disagreement. She heard her own heart go on, once, twice, three times, very far away.

I'm going.

Not now. Not yet. Not on a stair. Oh, please.

She looked down at her hand holding the ledger and saw, through the shawl, through the leather, through the hand itself, the worn step beneath her feet.

And from the top of the stair, behind her, a voice said, "Miss Fenwick?"

…

She would never be able to say, afterward, how long it lasted. It might have been two seconds. It might have been five. Time was not behaving as it should. She stood with her hand held out in front of her, a perfect glass shape with a ghost of a book in it, and turned her head, very slowly, and saw him.

He was at the top of the stair.

He had come through the iron door without a sound, as he always did. He had his coat over his arm, and a folder in his other hand, and the pale cellar light behind him; he had stopped, with one foot on the first step, in the act of speaking. He was looking at her.

She knew what he saw. She could read it in his face as in a book.

He saw a woman on a stair. A gray gown, a shawl, a candle. And then he saw the gown fade. It paled from the edges inward, the way breath fades on a pane. The face went last. He saw the spectacles hang a moment in the air, two small circles of steel in nothing. He saw the candle, floating, burning on its own. He saw the wall of the stair shine clearly through the place where her body had been.

And behind it, in the midst of the emptiness, he saw her eyes.

They were still there. They were the last of her to go. Gray-green, enormous, fixed on his, and in them such terror, such sorrow, such a naked plea, that she felt it as a hand felt on the heart.

Cal, said the eyes. Please. Please.

The ledger slipped through her arms.

It fell with a slap. It struck the step, and the next, and rolled down the stone in a flutter of loose pages, and came to rest at the bottom on the flags. And the sound of it, so solid, so very real, hit her like a gong.

She came back all at once.

It was like being dropped. The cold rushed into her, and the weight, and the pain; every nerve screamed; she staggered, and caught at the wall with both hands, and heard her own breath come out of her in one long ragged sob. Her gown was a gown again. Her hands were flesh. She was shaking from head to foot.

"Captain," she whispered.

He did not answer.

…

He stood at the head of the stair, quite still.

He had not moved. His hand, holding the folder, had gone white at the knuckles, and the folder had begun to slide. It fell. Papers spread out on the stone at his feet and he did not look at them. He was looking at her with an expression she had never seen on any face, living or painted: not horror, not wonder, not anger. It was something plainer. It was the face of a man who has been struck on the head and does not yet know that he is bleeding.

"Captain Rooke."

"Don't."

"I can explain—"

"Don't."

It came out of him like a stone. She flinched. He drew a breath that shook, and let it go, and when he spoke again his voice was low and flat and strange.

"The Bureau holds that a Doppel is unstable," he said. "That it has no root. That it is a creature of light and will, held together by the fear of its own maker, and cannot long be sustained. That in the first fortnight it begins to flicker. To fade. To—" He stopped. "That it goes out."

"It isn't true."

"I have never seen it. I have read the digests. I have said, in your hearing, that I did not believe them. That the Act is built on a guess." His eyes did not leave hers. "I was a fool."

"No—"

"I was a fool, and I have been kind, and I have been a coward." The flat voice cracked at the end like a plate. "I have been sitting in a room for forty days with a woman who is not a woman. And I did not see it. I looked. I told myself I looked. I saw the half-light, and the lean, and the thread, and I called it a family weakness. I called it a wound."

"It is a wound."

"It's a seam."

He came down a step. Another. She saw how his hand shook on the rail.

"You are a Doppel," said Callum Rooke.

…

It was so quiet, the way he said it. That was what she would remember. There was no accusation in it, no triumph, no cruelty. It was the voice of a man reading aloud a verdict he had been hoping, for six weeks, would be found in his own favor.

"No."

"I saw you go through the wall."

"Yes. And you saw it, and you've drawn a conclusion. And it's the wrong one." Her voice was shaking so badly she had to stop and begin again. "I'm not what you think. It's the other way. It's the one who goes out who is — it's not the copy. It's never been the copy. Captain, there is a report, Hollis, in the cellar, sixty-seven cases and in three of them—"

"I have read Hollis."

"Then you know—"

"I know that a clerk of the Burlington Office wrote an angry letter in '93, and that it was never forwarded, and that its author is dead."

"Dead?"

"He died in the winter. Of pneumonia." He paused. "Quite suddenly."

She felt the floor tilt.

"They'll say that," she whispered.

"Who will?"

"Whoever's — whoever's wrong. Whoever has something to lose." She put out her hands. "Don't you see? It's a perfect trap. Anything I say sounds like the thing a Doppel would say. I am the real one. It's she who's false. You'd hear it from her, too. If you asked her. She'd say it, and she'd mean it, and you couldn't tell."

"I know."

"Then—"

"That is why I have not asked her."

He had come all the way down. He stood on the step above hers, near enough to touch, with the candlelight moving over his gray face. And she saw that his eyes were wet.

He was not weeping. He would have died before he wept. But they shone with it, in the dark, a bright and terrible gloss, and the muscle in his jaw jumped. And what she saw in them was worse than anything she had braced for. It was grief. It was a grief so naked and exhausted that she would have given anything, anything in the world, to take it back.

He believes it.

He has looked at me, and seen me fade, and believed what he was taught. And it's killing him.

And I cannot make him see.

…

"Cal," she said.

She had not meant to. It was out before she could stop it, and she saw it go through him like a spear. He closed his eyes.

"You have called me that four times," said Rooke. "Did you know?"

"Yes."

"No one has used it in ten years."

"I know."

"Where did you hear it?"

"I—" She stopped. The truth stood in her throat, huge and solid as a wall. From you. On a dock. I was fourteen. I do not remember it, and I do. "I can't tell you."

"No." He opened his eyes. "I did not think you would."

"Please—"

"You have a face you borrowed. A name you made. A hand that is not yours." The words fell, very quiet, one by one. "A memory of mine that I never gave you. And a body that goes out like a candle in my sight. You are everything the Bureau told me you would be, and I loved you before I knew it, and I do not know how I am to live."

The cellar was entirely silent. Somewhere far down the passage, water dripped.

"You what?" whispered Mara.

He did not repeat it.

He turned his head away. He stood with his profile to her, and she watched a tear slide down, slowly, to the corner of his mouth, and stop. He did not wipe it. He did not seem to know it was there.

"I am a Warden," he said. "I have taken an oath. I have signed a hundred and seven warrants. I have stood in the doorway of the Vault and watched them close." He drew breath. "I should take you upstairs now, to my desk, and write your name. I should send to Burlington for the escort. I should do it in the next ten minutes, before I think."

"Then do it."

"I cannot."

"Why not?"

"I don't know," said Callum Rooke.

…

The candle on the step guttered. It had burned down to a stub, and the light went red and small.

He bent. With a slow, careful, awkward movement, like a man picking up a child, he gathered the Hollis ledger from the flags, and its loose leaves, and squared them, and held them out to her.

"You'll want this."

She took it.

"I give you ten days," said Rooke.

She looked up.

"I will not report what I saw. I will not say a word to Okafor, nor to Calder, nor to the Director. I will go on as before. You'll keep your desk. You'll take your tea." His voice was perfectly steady now, as steady as a ruled line. "And at the end of ten days, on the tenth of May, you will tell me who you are. And who you were. And what you mean to do. You will tell me the truth, Nell, or whatever name it is. All of it."

"And if I do?"

"Then I will decide."

"And if I don't?"

He looked at her then, directly, for the first time since the stair.

His eyes were gray, and quite dry, and the last warmth had gone out of them. They were the eyes of a stranger in a doorway.

"Then," said Rooke softly, "after that, I shall have to do my duty."

He turned and went up the stair. The iron door closed behind him with a faint, final click.

She stood on the step with the ledger in her arms, and the stub of candle burning out at her feet. And as the dark came down she lifted her hand, the right, the one that held the book, and held it up before her face, and could not see it.