It took Jim a minute or so to come fully awake. Or as awake as he appeared to be capable of. Throughout our conversation that day, I felt that Jim was looking beyond me into some dream that never quite finished for him.
“Hello, Betsy,” he said after I repeated my name again for him. “How’s tricks?”
“Life’s good,” I told him. “Living in a big house these days with parrots and an English butler to look after everything. I even have a conservatory but not as pretty as this one.”
Jim nodded at me with another fleeting smile, but his eyes slid to the open windows, looking at something I could not see. After disappearing on the day of the fire, he stayed lost for years until someone found him wandering the road near a town called Kingsport. According to the hospital reports I had read over and over again, he’d been completely incapable of speech during his short hospital stay. Also of sleeping without the aid of considerable narcotics. Several doctors expressed worry about the amount of sleeping drugs it took to stop Jim from climbing out of his bed and wandering the hallways, always in search of a mirror or reflective surface. When Jim found a mirror during his nighttime stroll, he would stand in front of it, silently regarding his reflection until fetched back to bed.
Ghost catchers, that’s what my mother called mirrors, and she always veiled them when there had been a death in the family. Dangerous was what my friend Jeany believed, and she had banned all mirrors from her home after a stay in Arkham.
But what actress can live without mirrors? I spent far too much of my life looking at myself, first as a dancer and then as an actress in the movies. Mirrors were a necessary part of the trade. A mirror in the studio showed you how your body moved or how your face looked to the audience. I needed mirrors, but I never feared the reflections I saw.
Jim’s distraction that day was a frustration. I wanted to pelt him with questions, but at the same time I didn’t want to frighten him. From every report I had read, he became most agitated when pressed about the missing years and where he had been. I needed a way to lead the conversation around to the topic without too much fuss.
“How about a stroll?” I asked Jim, glancing at the nearby Nurse Roberts. She nodded encouragingly at me.
“I suppose,” replied Jim with no great enthusiasm. He’d been a bit player when we’d first started at the studio. He was also a man without any ambition as far as I could remember. Jim’s greatest talent, said one director in my hearing, was his ability to stand or sit perfectly still for hours. Apparently that predilection had not vanished, no matter what had happened to him in the past few years.
With some gentle nudging by Nurse Roberts and myself, Jim stood and wandered toward the door of the conservatory. He even offered me his arm as we walked into the rose garden.
“He’s been quite the gentleman during his stay with us,” remarked Nurse Roberts as she followed us through the garden.
“His mother will be so glad to hear that,” I said over my shoulder. As far as I knew, Jim had no relations. At least, the detective I hired never found any after Jim made his reappearance. Still, it would have been awkward to tell Nurse Roberts that and more awkward still would be to explain why I was murmuring questions to Jim about his friend Max.
Not that Jim had much to say. He’d never been a talker, not like Max, who could talk for hours about his plans and dreams for the future. But I didn’t remember Jim as being this silent. Jim responded, although very slowly, to any direct question I asked, but the answers he gave were vague in the extreme.
“So, Jim,” I said, deciding at last to force the issue, “where exactly have you been?”
Jim looked down at me with a puzzled frown. “Not here,” he said as we paced slowly on the gravel path that wove round and round the rosebushes. The crunching of the stones under our feet was almost louder than Jim’s reply.
“No, not here,” I agreed. “You only came here a few months ago. But where have you been?”
Jim heaved a great sigh as we passed a fishpond set in the center of the rose garden. He paused to peer down into the murky water, seemingly fascinated by our wavering reflections. Overhung with rose bushes, a few petals and dead leaves floated on top of the water. If there were any fish in this artificial pond, they were in hiding.
“I don’t think it is very nice,” Jim said to me after several minutes of silent contemplation.
“The pool?” I said, gesturing at it. The brackish water reflected the clouds chasing across the sky. Peering into it, the ornamental pool seemed fathoms deep with twists of seaweed impossibly long and entangled filling its depths. I blinked again and it was only a small fishpond in the center of an overgrown garden, desperately in need of a good gardener with a rake.
Jim sighed again, perhaps at the futility of trying to explain his thoughts, and shook his head. “Where I was,” he said. “It always smelled wet. Like the ocean.”
We were not far from the sea. In fact, the cliff was on the other side of a tall and neatly trimmed evergreen hedge. Even in this sheltered rose garden, I could smell a faint whiff of brine and seaweed. Very faint but clear, I could hear the boom of the surf as the ocean met the rocks at the base of the cliff hidden by the hedges. But how had Jim gotten himself from a burning house on French Hill to someplace near the ocean?
“Do you remember the fire?” I said. Jim screwed up his face as if he’d bit into something sour but remained silent. “How did you escape the fire?” I pleaded, hoping Jim’s answer would give me a clue to Max’s own possible route to safety. But that apparently was the wrong question.
Rather than answering me, Jim took off in long strides, startling both Nurse Roberts and myself with his sudden quick action. We followed him as he headed back into the conservatory. Jim continued without pause through the room and up a narrow staircase. This one lacked ornate steps or mahogany banisters, probably once built for the servants needed to keep such a large house running smoothly.
“Where is he going?” I said to the nurse, annoyed with myself for setting Jim off. I knew he didn’t like being questioned, and I scolded myself as we loped after him. With his long legs, Jim took a considerable lead.
“I think,” the nurse panted a little as we crested another flight of stairs, “he’s returning to his room. He will do that sometimes when he’s agitated.”
Sure enough, Jim turned into a room near the top of the stairs. He walked across the room to yank the curtains closed and then lay down on the bed. Nurse Roberts fussed forward and removed his slippers before he could get any marks on the clean white coverlet. She pulled a light blanket from the cedar chest at the end of the bed and spread it across his legs.
“I’ll fetch his tea,” she said to me. “He will feel much better after a cup and short nap. Won’t you, Mr Janson?” she said to Jim.
Jim nodded into his pillow.
“Can I stay with him?” I asked her. “Until you come back? Then I’ll talk to Dr Hughes.”
Nurse Roberts looked a little uncertain but apparently came to the conclusion that since we were in the twentieth century, perhaps I could sit with my cousin in what amounted to his bedroom. “But keep the door wide open,” she said to me as she bustled out.
“Of course,” I said. I pulled a straight-backed wooden chair closer to the bed and repeated the question I had asked earlier in the rose garden. I knew it bothered him, and I pledged silently to make it up to him in the future. But I had to know. “How did you escape the fire, Jim?”
He kept his eyes closed and his face turned into the pillow away from me. But after a few minutes, he whispered an answer.
“Please, Jim,” I said as gently as I could. “I cannot hear you.”
I hated pestering Jim so. What if my questions undid all the good the doctor had accomplished over the past few months, I worried. But what if Max was lost somewhere “not nice” and needed to be rescued? How else could I find him?
Then Jim raised himself up on one elbow and looked directly at me. “I walked through the mirror,” he said with absolute conviction and clarity. I was so astonished by this statement I couldn’t form another question.
No sooner had Jim spoken, Nurse Roberts returned. She carried a tray with a steaming cup of tea that appeared distinctly green and smelled quite unlike any tea I had ever encountered. I would have called it a sulfuric odor, not unlike rotten eggs or, more probably, boiled seaweed. It also unpleasantly reminded me of the way Innsmouth had smelled. And the scent rising from the boxes at the warehouse by the river.
With professional efficiency, the nurse swung a small table next to the bed and placed the tray on it. She then helped Jim to sit up in bed and supported his trembling hand as he sipped the tea. Neither of them seemed bothered by the smell, so I held my breath and didn’t say anything.
“There now,” said Nurse Roberts quite kindly as Jim slid back down in the bed. “Have a nice nap. We’ll see you downstairs for supper this evening. Maybe we can even listen to the radio for a bit.”
Jim murmured some agreement.
“We have a new radio,” Nurse Roberts said to me with a bright smile. She also nearly pushed me from the room. I guessed visiting relations were not supposed to see the patients slide backward on their climb to socially acceptable behavior. “We hear lectures broadcast almost nightly from the university. There’s dance music on Saturday nights sponsored by the Purple Cat. Our guests enjoy the entertainment.”
I resisted her efforts to remove me from the room. I needed to know Jim was all right. As he drifted off to sleep, I asked Nurse Roberts if he was still being dosed with sleeping drugs.
“Oh, no,” she said, sounding a little shocked. “Dr Hughes tries to avoid such medications whenever possible. Mr Janson has been sleeping quite naturally for several weeks.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said. I reached over to touch Jim’s hand, giving it a light squeeze in the way that I used to wake my grandmother when she dozed off in the evening.
“I have to go,” I said to Jim. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine. I’ll take you home to California as soon as I can.”
Jim stirred and turned his head toward me. “Oh, Betsy,” he said without fully opening his eyes. “Are you going to help Max? Some nights his shouting is so loud in the mirror.”