The Mirrors (part forty-eight)

The Mirrors

(part forty-eight)

She was in the garden. Charleton’s feeble grip yielded to Godfrey’s, that will to live, in defiance of all mischance, all misery. Godfrey shoved at his cousin, Charleton staggered, and both figures flashed through her living self…

The thunderclap as before, boom, and boom.

But she turned unharmed, a ghost unpresent to the men. They stood in a low-voiced, tooth-gritted argument. At the wall, where the dandelions bloomed. Godfrey, in disgust, wanted Charleton to take back the gun. He prodded his cousin’s belly; he struck him in the face. He tried to, at last, frantic, press it into Charleton’s hand.

Charleton with both hands crushed Godfrey’s and drew the fingers up, inch upon inch…his strength suddenly jacked, the passion of suicide in it. Charmante could not hear the shot. But Charleton fell, and the gun fell, landing where the dead hand slackened. This time she stepped away, and Godfrey’s charge indoors came at closest view…

Soon he was gone to the surgery below.

The theft played like music, in notes of metal and glass. The story was ending, and its Guide moved her to what must now be shown. Godfrey driven by a jealous whim to pry, to the top of the house. Bottles buttoned inside his shirt, his music accompanying him, one, two, three flights. Charleton’s bedroom littered with books and papers, on the floor around his chair. A discarded sweater and a pair of slippers. Heavy dust, garden dirt on the rug. Clyde, prohibited from entering, from touching, has foisted on Dr. Dumain a carpet sweeper. It lies with its long handle prone, stretched flat like the body below.

That Clyde will have to discover.

Godfrey goes to the firescreen. Something foul has been burnt on Charleton’s hearth. Or…he finds with a sniff…something chemical, a thing of cloth and gilded wood. Oil and varnish. Lil.

This is far madder than he’d have credited his cousin…

Smiling, he scoots back the screen, draws out a scrap.

But the eye animates. She is his mother, Polly.

In panic he trips, falls, flings away the bit of canvas. He gathers the bottles spilled from his shirt, flies, rakes back the front door, runs to his grandfather’s house. He never looks to see the consequence, the smolder in a stack of paper. The back door at 1912 Dumain Godfrey has locked, done by habit, a thief buying time.

One vision more.

A garden, that of the institute. Charmante might have stood peering through the devil’s iron gate, nameless as any nightcrawler, but not daring this. To put a foot on his property. To sleep there, sheltered under a shrub. She sees Godfrey lurch to the well’s coping, in terrible pain. His running all this distance has torn his lungs…his clutching looks a declining agony, an end. The breathing sounds sieved in blood.

But Godfrey wants the drugs. The light at the center shines a little stronger.

She sees him watched, her first direct sight of Old Dumain’s face. Coming white from shadow, it rests victorious. Intent.

Weathered, where all quizzical furrowing, all mockery…

All decisions taken: to not rescue, not excuse, not forgive, not alter a punishment for the pathos of the one punished, not withhold condemnation for tears or pleading, for illness, for injury inflicted by his own hand—

Where all this has drawn its history. Vital…and ageless, for an intelligence so old.

“Charmante.”

He looks at her as though she stands visible—and his speaking of her name is like a physical touch, grotesque. Then he steps closer to his grandson, and lands a blow between the shoulder blades.

94

The Mirrors

The Mirrors (part forty-nine)

(2020, Stephanie Foster)