THE TOWER

Day 5 of 100

The second note was in the pocket of her cloak.

She found it on the morning of the fifth day, on the way to the refectory, when she put her hand into the lining for her gloves and her fingers closed on a square of folded paper. It was a page torn from her own notebook; she knew the ruling, and the faint blue tinge of the stock. She had not put it there. She stood on the frozen path between Corbin House and the Hall, in the thin pink dawn, with the cold biting at her ears and the frost-flowers blooming white on the grass, and read it with her gloves in her teeth.

THE OLD BELL TOWER. MIDNIGHT. ALONE.

I'LL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.

DON'T TELL THE CAPTAIN. HE'LL TAKE US BOTH.

The R in TOWER had the flourish.

Us, thought Mara.

She did not read it a second time. She had read it once with perfect attention and it had gone into her like a key into a lock, and she folded it along its creases and put it carefully back in her pocket. Then she walked the rest of the way to breakfast, and sat down beside Josie, and ate a piece of dry toast with great composure, and said, when Josie asked, that she had slept very well.

She spent the day being sensible.

She was a sensible person. She had always been. She went to her morning tutorial and took notes, and to the library and took more. She sat through a lecture on the Salem Convention with her hands folded. And in the long gray hours of the afternoon, with the writing of the tutor droning in her ears and a pen going automatically across her page, she took the problem apart, piece by piece, with the cold deliberate care of a woman dismantling a clock.

Hypothesis one: a prank. Someone with access to her room, her pen, her handwriting. A student with a talent for forgery and a cruel sense of humor. It was the likeliest. It required a motive, and there was none that she could name; and it did not account for the lost supper, or the flourish, or Josie's different, happy, or the breath at her neck on the dais.

Hypothesis two: she herself. A sleepwalking fit. A dissociative episode, brought on by stress and the unblocking of an old trauma, in which she rose in the night and wrote in her own book with her own pen. It was in the literature. It fitted the memory-leak. It would explain the writing in her hand.

It did not explain why the R was wrong.

Hypothesis three, she wrote, and stopped.

She looked at the words for a long time. Then, very slowly, she struck the line through, and under it wrote only a single word, in pencil, as one writes a thing one hopes will be erased.

Doppel.

Her hand was perfectly steady. She was distantly proud of that, as she had been on the dais. It seemed to be her only talent, this steadiness; the thing she did when the floor went out from under her was to take a firm grip on a pen.

If it is, she thought, then it is the first time in history that anyone has had the chance to ask one a question.

And that, to her own horror, was the thought that decided her.

…

She told herself it was a precaution.

She wrote a letter to Josie. She wrote it on the back of a tutorial schedule in her smallest hand, and sealed it in an envelope, and put it under the clock on the mantel in the common room of Corbin House, where Josie always looked first. If I'm not back by two, it said, go to Captain Rooke at the Warden Post. Tell him what's in my notebook. Tell him it's about the Tower. Mara. She read it over twice. She put on her thickest cloak, the black wool one with the hood, and a woolen scarf, and her old walking boots, and a pair of mittens knitted by a landlady in Cambridge in the days when she had still had a landlady. She took her lantern. She took the notebook, and her pencil, and, after a moment's hesitation, the small silver paper-knife with the bone handle that she'd used since she was twelve.

She did not take her wrist-glove.

She stood at the window of her room for a moment, as the clock in the quad struck eleven, and looked down at the white lawns and the black pines, and the long gray shape of the Hall. Beyond it, over the roofs, over the cloister and the chapel and the bare black stump of the observatory, rose the Bell Tower. It was the oldest thing on the grounds. It had been the tower of the first meeting-house, and had stood, stern and square and windowless, for a hundred and sixty years. Its bell had cracked in a gale in 1802 and never been replaced. The Academy kept it locked. It was said to be unsafe.

It was lit, tonight, at the very top.

She saw it clearly. A single small yellow light, in the arched louvre where the bell hung, burning steadily in the dark, like an eye opening.

Someone has been up there, she thought. With a lantern.

She went down the stairs.

…

It was the coldest night of the winter.

She knew it as she stepped out of the side door. The air struck her face like a slap, so dry and hard that it hurt to breathe, and her nostrils pinched shut and her eyes began to stream. There was no wind. The stillness was absolute. Every star was out, thousands of them, hard and white, crowded together over the black roofs; and the snow on the lawns glittered with a pale blue radiance, as though it had its own light. The only sound was her own boots: a thin, dry, squeaking crunch.

Twenty below, she thought. At least.

She crossed the quad. She went through the arch beside the chapel, where the carved saints stood in their niches with their noses frosted, and along the path that ran beneath the north wall. The snow was deep here, unbroken. She went carefully, holding her lantern low, and her breath hung before her in a cloud that glittered. She found, after a moment, that she was counting steps. She stopped herself. She counted anyway.

The Bell Tower stood alone at the end of the path, apart from the other buildings, on a knoll of rock. It was a sullen square pile of black stone, a hundred feet high, with no windows but the high arched openings at the top. Its door was a slab of oak, strapped with iron, set deep in the thickness of the wall. A rusted padlock the size of a fist hung from the hasp.

The padlock was open.

She stood and looked at it. It hung from the staple by one curved arm, undone, as if someone had turned a key and gone in and not troubled to lock it behind. The door itself stood a hand's breadth ajar. A thread of warmer air came out through the gap. It smelled of old stone, and tallow, and dust, and under them, very faintly, of something sweet. Vanilla.

Vanilla, thought Mara. I wouldn't have thought of that.

She pushed the door open with her mitten.

The stair began at once. It was a stone spiral, narrow as a chimney, going up and round in the dark, with a rope for a handrail slung on iron rings. The steps were worn into hollows. The air was breathless and close. She raised the lantern and her shadow leapt up the curve of the wall, long and thin, and went before her.

She began to climb.

She counted. It was a hundred and twelve steps, by the Academy's records, and she had read the records, and she wanted very much for them to be right. She went slowly, with one hand on the rope. At forty, she heard the first sound: a faint dry rustle high above, like a bird's wing or the turning of a page. At sixty, her thighs were burning. At eighty, the cold had gone from her face and she was sweating inside her cloak. At a hundred she paused and listened, and the tower was perfectly silent. No rustle, no breath. Only the slow thud of her own heart, and the small hiss of the lantern wick.

She went on.

There was a trapdoor at the top. It stood open. The yellow light came down through it in a shaft, and when she put up her head, and then her shoulders, and climbed out onto the boards, she saw the belfry.

…

It was a square room, open on four sides, floored with planks gone silver with weather. Great arched louvres let in the night. Between them, in a framework of black timbers as thick as a man's body, hung the bell: a squat bronze thing the color of an old coin, green along the lip, with a long diagonal crack running up one side from the rim to the shoulder. It did not move. A film of frost lay on it, finer than breath. Under it, on an upturned crate, stood a single oil lamp with a smoked chimney, burning low.

The wind had come up. It blew through the arches in long thin gusts, and the flame bent and recovered. Frost-dust swirled in the lamplight. And at the far side of the room, at the very edge of the floor, where the boards ended in a low parapet of stone and beyond it there was only the black drop to the white lawns, a woman stood with her back to Mara, looking out over the lake.

She wore a dress the color of red wine.

It was a deep, sumptuous, impossible red, almost black in the shadows, velvet by the way it took the light, cut close to the body and falling to the ground in a long dark swirl. It was not a dress for a Vermont winter. It was not a dress for any scholar. Her shoulders were bare, white as paper, and across them lay a mass of chestnut hair that had been put up carelessly, in a coil, and was coming down. She was tall. She was slender. She stood with her weight on one hip, her head tilted slightly back, as a person stands who has all the time in the world.

Mara stopped.

She stopped because the back was a back she knew. She had seen it in the mirror every morning of her life. It was the line of the neck; it was the set of the shoulders, a little narrower on the left; it was the way the hair grew at the nape in a small point, like a bird's beak. It was her own.

She had expected to be afraid. She had imagined this. She had lain awake in the dark and run through it, a dozen times, a hundred, in a hundred different shapes. But she had imagined horror. She had expected a thing out of a lantern-show, a ghoul, a double in a winding-sheet. She hadn't thought it would be so—

Elegant, she thought.

"You came," said the woman at the parapet.

The voice was hers.

It was her own voice, exactly, with the faint scratch in the lower register that she hated, the way the vowels flattened on came. But it was another thing in another mouth. It was warm. It was low and amused and unhurried, with a husk in it, a sort of smile; a voice that had never in its life been afraid of being overheard. It floated across the belfry like smoke.

"I wasn't sure you would. I put it at four to one. I thought, she's a careful girl, she'll go to the Captain, she'll make a diagram." The woman laughed softly. "But you didn't. You came."

"Turn around," said Mara.

"Oh, you're going to be stern."

"Turn around."

"Of course."

She turned.

It was Mara's face.

It was every bone of it, every line: the high clear forehead, the straight nose, the dark brows. The wide mouth. The gray-green eyes. It might have been a reflection in a glass that had been, some way, brought to life and set free. But the glass had lied. The mouth was not held still. It curved. It curved at one corner in a slow knowing smile that Mara had never in her life produced, a smile with a dimple in it, a smile for the secret of a joke; and the eyes were not wary, but bright and wide and brimming with a kind of delighted interest, as though the whole world were a little play put on for her entertainment, and she had just been handed a front seat.

She was beautiful. Mara had never thought of herself as beautiful. She saw now, with a sort of cold clarity, what her face could do when it was not afraid.

"Hello," said the woman. "At last. You took such a long time."

Her left sleeve was pushed up. On the inside of the wrist, white against the skin, glowed a snowflake.

It was Mara's snowflake: three-armed, six-pointed, delicately branching. But it was red. A deep clear amber-red, the red of a banked coal seen through a window. It burned steadily, without the flicker of a flame. And there was no crack in it anywhere.

…

"What are you?" said Mara.

Her voice was steady. She was aware of that, as one is aware of a floor beneath one's feet. She had set the lantern on the boards, and her right hand was in her cloak, closed on the cool bone handle of the knife. She did not draw it. She wasn't a fool. It was a paper-knife.

"You know what I am."

"I'd like to hear you say it."

"A Doppel." The woman put her head on one side. "That's what they'll call me. The Bureau. The newspapers. I think it's rather vulgar, myself. It sounds like a kind of pastry." She stepped away from the parapet and strolled, with an easy swinging grace, across the boards, trailing a gloved hand along the bell. It gave out a thin dull note. "I would rather you called me by a name. But I haven't chosen one yet. I've been trying them on. Isabel. Cordelia. Vesper, last night, in the bath. I liked it. It means evening. It means the star that comes before the dark."

"I'm not going to name you."

"No. I understand." She smiled. "It's an awkward thing, to name the person who's about to take your place."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me."

"I'd like you to repeat it."

"I'm taking your life, Mara." She said it quite gently. "Not all of it. I'm not a monster. Just the part that's lived in. The room. The friends. The name. The little brown book." Her glance flickered to the notebook under Mara's arm. "I'm going to be you. I've been practicing. I do the laugh rather well, don't I? Josie couldn't tell. I ate the tart. I wore the blue dress. I stood up at supper and made an absolute fool of myself over a goose."

"You were at the refectory."

"Oh, I've been in a good many places." She was circling, slowly, in the lamplight, and the red velvet whispered on the planks. "I've been in your room every night. I read your journals. I know that you cried in the second year over a boy named Edmund who didn't deserve it. I know that you were frightened of the dark until you were eleven. I know about the buttons." She tilted her head. "I know about the lake."

Mara's breath caught.

"What do you know?"

"Everything. I have your whole head, my dear, all the rooms, all the corridors. I woke up with it." Her voice dropped. "It's like being handed a house you've never seen, and finding it full of your own furniture. Some of it very ugly."

"Then you know I won't let you."

"I don't think you've got much choice."

"There are other ways. If you're what I think you are, there are procedures. The Bureau—"

"The Bureau," said the woman, "will put us both in a cellar for the rest of our lives."

She said it quite flatly. The smile did not leave her mouth, but it ceased to reach her eyes. For an instant, under the wine-colored velvet and the amused drawl, Mara saw something else: something raw and quick and very young. Then it was gone, and the woman had stopped in front of her, an arm's length away, and was looking down into her face with those bright, familiar, terrible eyes.

"They'll find out," said Vesper. "You know they will. You've read the Act. Where it cannot be established which of two is the original. They'll lay us side by side and they'll look, and they won't be able to tell. And then the Captain will take his coat, and his gun, and put us in a hole in the mountain with the others. I've done the arithmetic. It's the only possible outcome." Her voice was soft. "Unless one of us is gone."

"You mean you."

"Do I?"

"Or me."

"Yes," said Vesper. "Or you."

…

"I don't want to kill you," she said.

They stood looking at each other. The wind had dropped. In the sudden stillness the lamp-flame stood straight up, a small steady gold tongue, and the belfry smelled of frost and tallow and vanilla.

"I want that clear. I think it's important. I've given a great deal of thought to the question, and I find that I'm not able to." She spread her hands. "I should like to. It would be the simplest course. But I'm not made that way. I'm made of you, you see. And you wouldn't hurt a fly. You catch them in a tumbler and let them out of the window."

"What do you want?"

"I told you. To borrow."

"Borrow."

"Your life. For a while." She smiled again. "Just until I'm strong enough to stand alone."

"That's not a loan, that's a theft."

"Is it? You're not using it." The words were light. They struck like a switch. "Look at you, Mara. Twenty-four years old and you've never danced at a ball. You keep a list of your windows. You've had one lover, a boy who read poetry at you in a punt, and you were so relieved when he went away. You're afraid of everything. You shelter in your footnotes like a snail." She leaned closer. "I'd have such a time. I'd wear red. I'd let someone kiss me on a stair. I would stop counting buttons and start spending them. And you could — go somewhere. Be tidy. Be safe."

"I'd be dead."

"Not necessarily."

"Where would I go? Where would a woman with no name go?"

"I haven't worked that out." For the first time the voice faltered. "I haven't, to be honest. I came to the notion rather late. I thought—" She stopped. "I thought you might have a suggestion."

It was so absurd that Mara nearly laughed. She stood there, shaking with cold and fury and fear, with a paper-knife in her fist, and the creature in front of her was asking, quite seriously, for advice.

"This is madness," said Mara.

"Probably."

"I'm going to the Wardens."

"No."

"You can't stop me."

"I can't," said Vesper, "but I would ask you not to."

"Why?"

"Because they'll put you in the Vault, too."

"You've said."

"Because I'm not lying."

"I don't believe you."

"You don't have to."

And she moved.

…

It was very fast. She had thought she was ready. She had her right hand on the knife, her left on the notebook, and her back to the stair. She had been counting the distance to the trapdoor, five paces, six. But the figure in red did not leap or lunge. She simply raised her left hand, the one with the glowing wrist, and opened the fingers, and the air in the belfry went solid.

It hit Mara in the chest like a wall.

She had never felt force like it. It was not the pressure of a blow but the weight of the whole night, all the cold and stillness of it, concentrated into a single shove. She flew back. She struck the boards on her shoulder and slid, her lantern spinning from her hand, the flame wavering and going out; and the paper-knife skittered away across the planks with a bright thin ringing. She heard the notebook fall.

My wrist, she thought.

She brought up her left arm, the cracked one, with the thin snowflake on it, and willed it to burn. Everything she'd ever read came into her head at once, the theory and the diagrams, invocation of the tri-radial form, concentration at the pulse-point. She felt the sigil pulse. A faint cold blue light came up through her sleeve. It spread; she drove it out of her palm; a flicker of silver-blue frost spat across the air—

And died. It struck the red light and guttered. It was like throwing a cup of water at a furnace.

"Oh, don't," said Vesper, kindly.

She was standing over her. She had not hurried. The wine-red hem lay on the planks beside Mara's face. Above her the amber sigil blazed with a clean steady heat, and in that glow Mara saw the face she wore, upside down, bending, and it was no longer smiling.

"You can't," said Vesper. "It's not a question of will. I've got the whole of it. You've got half. I'm sorry. I truly am. I've been trying to make it gentle."

"Let me up."

"I can't."

"Please."

"I'd love to," said Vesper. "But I want to live."

She reached down. She took Mara by the front of her cloak, in a grip like a smith's, and lifted her. It was effortless. Mara's boots left the planks. She kicked, she clawed at the woman's arms, and her nails slid on the velvet as on water; and then her back was against the parapet, and the cold stone was biting into her spine, and she felt the whole weight of the dark pulling at her heels.

She looked back.

It was a hundred feet. It fell away from the rim into blackness, with the stars hanging in it, and at the bottom, far down, pale and soft and unspeakably clean, was the snow. It lay in a great smooth drift against the foot of the tower, a bed of untouched white, where the wind had piled it since November. She could see it. She could see it quite clearly, in the starlight.

It's deep, she thought. It's very deep. It might—

"I'll tell you something," said Vesper, close to her ear. "As a gift. I looked at it earlier. It's about nine feet. It might even be soft." Her breath was warm and smelled of vanilla. Her hand shook, very slightly, on Mara's cloak. "I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing it because there isn't room. For both of us. Do you see?"

"Don't."

"I'm sorry."

"Vesper."

It was the first time she had said it. It came out of her like a cry, and she felt the woman start, a small convulsive flinch against her body, as though she'd been struck. For an instant the hands loosened. For an instant the face, so close, with its bright, desperate, terrified eyes, was not the face of an enemy but of a girl, a lost child in a red dress, standing at the edge of a drop and weeping.

Then the hands tightened.

"Thank you for the name," said Vesper, in a whisper. "It's lovely."

And she let go.

…

She did not remember falling.

She remembered the stars. They wheeled once, enormous, and rushed upward, and the tower went by in a long black streak. She remembered the wind in her face, a screaming wall of it, and that her mouth was open and no sound came out. She remembered a feeling of immense, absurd surprise.

She remembered that she'd left her notebook on the boards.

Then the snow took her.

It was like being struck by a wave. It closed over her head, in one soft, dense, silent explosion, and the world went white and then black. She sank. She felt it packing against her face, her throat, her ears. The cold went through her cloak and her dress and her skin like a knife through paper, and all the breath went out of her in a single dull thump, and she lay on her back at the bottom of a hole in the drift with a white ring of sky above her, very small, very far away, and thought: Oh. It was soft.

She tried to move. Her left leg would not obey. Something in her side had gone hot and bright. She tried to call out, and her lungs refused. The ring of stars above her dimmed and swam and began to shrink, like a coin sinking in a well.

She saw a face.

It leaned over the edge of the hole, a long way up, pale against the black, with its coil of hair coming down and the wine-red velvet showing at the shoulders. The amber wrist glowed in the dark like an ember. It must have come down the stair. It must have run. It was breathing hard, and crying; she could see the tears on its cheeks, shining. It looked down into the pit, into her eyes, and she saw it see her, still alive; and she saw its mouth shape the words, soft and broken, a whisper across the snow.

I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

I want to live.

The ring of stars narrowed, and narrowed, and went out.