Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.
Nursery Rhyme
Leocadia remained calm.
Like any sentence of death, she did not believe it.
Even after she had taken up her new life, her food and music and drink supplied, books delivered, as she wished, paints and canvas, drawing materials, notebooks, clothes, powder, everything, even then in the hermetic environ of her prison she did not believe in it. Not wholly. Not with her mind.
Was that, after all, a form of madness, then?
Even after she had sorted the pieces, grasped the plot. Accepted that her very calm itself must come from minuscule tasteless particles in her food, and in the air itself, which did not restrain her creative flair or her energy, or ability to concentrate, but which must be controlling her. Not even then.
And as she went to and fro from her room in the daylight summer hours, having found she might, and met in the corridor and garden other inmates of the Residence, who were genteel and well-mannered, sometimes bemused, excitable, but never abusive, loud, or agonized, not then either.
Until in the end even her mind knew, and it was too late, she had accepted it.
For, though powerless, she should have resisted. In some fashion, however oblique or useless.
Her asides to the doctors – I’m anxious to leave, I’ll tell visitors how you torture me – were not protests or shields, let alone missiles. It was almost a repulsive flirtation, her acid quips, their smirking refutations.
And how did her life differ? She did much as she had always done. She spent a vast amount of time alone. She painted. True, the elegant dinners were gone, but had she ever really enjoyed them? True, she had no lovers, but surely it might be possible, if she were desperate, to seduce some person or other, their bizarre quality or nasty appearance offending her not at all in the onslaught of needy lust. And then again, if she could not be bothered with such unappetizing creatures, this must mean her sexuality burned low, she had had enough.
She missed walking in the City. But then, too, months had sometimes passed without her venturing more than two streets from her house.
Now she did not explore the asylum grounds. A low fence lay across the grass and trees the far side of the gravel walk, beyond the broken hothouse. It was easy to climb the fence, and now and then some inmate might scramblingly do so. But they returned from wandering among the old buildings of the madhouse disconsolate, once or twice crying.
It occurred to Leocadia that she kept the blocks of the madhouse in reserve, making of them something mystical and bad, against the ultimate rainy day of terrifying ennui.
“Oh dear, you’re too late, I must go down now,” Mademoiselle Varc had said to Leocadia when Leocadia first left her room and found the white woman in the corridor. “If only you had come sooner.” And then she scurried to the elevator.
Leocadia then did not see Mademoiselle Varc for several weeks.
Instead she confronted Thomas the Warrior, who might once have been a wealthy old soldier, that in his youth had conceivably seen action in some small foreign war, tanks and carrier planes, and the threat of worse. Now he puffed about a flowerbed he was in charge of, below the summerhouse. It was a wonder of blooms and stone slabs, on top of one of which stood a stone head of Medusa poking out her tongue.
Thomas was elderly, thin and stooped. He paid Leocadia no attention, only speaking to his flowers. Doctor Saume had informed her of his name.
Three or four more went about the garden regularly, and some of the other older ones would bask nervously in the summerhouse. Males and females, they were sad and frequently decrepit, moaning with stiffness that even contemporary medication had not been able to alleviate.
The most immature of those she saw was a young man, possibly twenty-five years old, who crouched along like a dismembered spider. He frowned at unseen things, but meeting humans he usually brightened for a moment, telling them how well and lovely they looked. But of Leocadia he seemed afraid, and ran away and hid behind objects as she approached, even behind Thomas the Warrior and his Medusa, if nothing else were available.
Only Mademoiselle Varc actually greeted Leocadia, now thinking her her maid, her niece, her nurse, and once or twice some kind of empress or queen that she had perhaps been introduced to long ago. On these latter occasions Mademoiselle Varc curtsied, and Leocadia had felt a sudden compulsion, in case Mademoiselle Varc fell over. This was the first compassion Leocadia had ever experienced for a being other than an animal. And so Mademoiselle Varc amused Leocadia, and Leocadia was careful, in her contrary way, always to attempt to be the one she was mistaken for.
Probably the strangest time had been when Mademoiselle Varc had taken Leocadia for an old schoolfriend, and both women had then seemingly become adolescent girls. They had sat under the summerhouse in the shade of the trees, and Mademoiselle Varc had confessed she had no idea what a man and a woman did together. Leocadia had told her a carefully constrained amount, and Mademoiselle Varc had giggled girlishly, even blushed, though Dr. Duval had revealed that Mademoiselle Varc had borne six children.
When she had returned from the sun-fallen garden, kindly driven in with Mademoiselle Varc by the warden in his dark uniform (before the trees could come alive and eat them), Leocadia stepped into the dusk of her room and heard the door shut with its final click, which meant her little freedom was gone until tomorrow.
There was autonomy in the way of lamps, and she switched them on in the sitting area of the room, and going to the refrigerator, she drew out a bottle of white wine and a narrow glass.
Then she moved into the painting area and turned on the working lights.
On its easel, the picture of the ship, the beach, the spillage of oranges.
Leocadia studied it coldly.
Was it some response to the other thing upon an easel? Asra, raped and choked with orange paint, her bare flesh adorned by islands.
The doctors who had oozed charm over this painting had seen it as such; they must have done.
But she, what had she been doing?
The ship was not Asra, and yet the ship was feminine. And the sea had split her, and she … bled.
Leocadia drank her wine. A swirl of panic rose deep within her like a beast in a bottomless lake. How long before it would reach her surface?
She tossed the glass against the wall, where it broke. Later the wall would suck up the bits.
But not quite yet.
So interesting, the knives for her food, the glasses that might be smashed.
Leocadia went close to the painting. Yes, it could well be seen as some expression of inner horror at Asra’s murder, which murder she had performed, and then forgotten.
Massed sky, the vessel with its snapped wing. And the little shells she had added. And there – what was that?
She leaned nearer. She could not make it out. Something white on the sand, a small distance from the shells. But not a shell.
She had not painted it. She did not know what it was.
Then again, it was done in her style, in tiny feathering brushstrokes, half its curve delineated as if cut.
Of course, they could copy her.
Leocadia crossed the room and turned about the two paintings she had previously executed here.
One a scene of a mountain, smoking over a peaceful valley. The other, a road leading into a wood. Both were dark, lowering, sinister. Neither contained a hint of orange, or any image she did not recall putting into them.
Leocadia dreamed not of distant bells but of screaming. It was full-throated and savage. It echoed and swerved through the building of the Residence. On Thomas’s stone the Medusa poked out her tongue farther.
Leocadia woke up, and got out of the bed, which squeaked its incontinence plastic at her.
She went to the worktable and picked up a tube of orange paint, which she had employed without thought, as if to prove her innocence.
She uncapped it, and squeezed.
The tube screamed.
It screamed in her hand.
Leocadia kept hold of it. As her fingers relaxed, the scream stopped.
She put it on the table and pressed down on the tube with her whole hand.
Now the scream came vivid and awesome, rocking the room, dizzying her ears.
As it faded, she heard an afternote, like the boom of a massive organ in the Temple-Church twenty miles away.
Not me, Leocadia thought, concisely. It was the drugs in the food and drink, and in the light and sound and air. Or could it even be some other trick, like the orange that bled, the white ball entered in her painting?
“Or is it me?”
She seemed to stand above herself on a height, looking down into her soul, not with brief compassion, as she had gazed at the curtsying Mademoiselle Varc, but despisingly, as if at an expensive, once-reliable machine, which failed.
“Come along, Lucie,” cried Mademoiselle Varc. “I’ve found such an interesting place. It’s rather dirty, but you won’t mind, will you? You’re always braver than me.”
Leocadia had been sitting on the hot lawn near the empty birdbath, and now Mademoiselle Varc came up and filled the bath with cold tea from her breakfast pot.
Lucie was the adolescent friend, but she and Mademoiselle Varc seemed to have grown even younger.
Leocadia was not in the mood now for role playing.
“Not today,” she said, as if to a fractious infant.
But Mademoiselle Varc took no notice. She put down her alabaster hand and caught Leocadia’s arm.
“Come on. Before they catch us.”
Leocadia guessed correctly from this expression that although it was not in fact barred to them, Mademoiselle Varc wanted to go over the fence to the madhouse.
“No.”
“Oh, yes. Oh do. It’s really fascinating. There’s all sorts of things there. I found it last week, but I didn’t tell.”
“No one will prevent you, if you go,” said Leocadia.
“But they will. They’ll spank us. It’s an awful place. You know something terrible happened there. You’re not scared? I dare you, Lucie.”
“Of course, something terrible,” said Leocadia. “What else, there?”
The old lunatic asylum. Not like the modern Residence. There had been a story about it, but then was that not the other story about the shells – that the sea had washed in over the building? No, this could never be right.
Leocadia got up as Mademoiselle Varc tugged at her like a ferocious moth.
They hurried by the summerhouse, passing Thomas the Warrior. The young spider man was creeping along and raised his face in delight to Mademoiselle Varc, saw Leocadia and lolloped away.
They rushed across the walk, and over the grass. Oak trees and gray cedar towered above them. Then there was the dilapidated fence.
It was like a boundary in a dream. But Leocadia reasoned she had perhaps already, the previous night, crossed whatever boundary there was.
Mademoiselle Varc tottered over and sat abruptly in the uncut grass the far side, but laughing.
Leocadia followed more easily.
The sun burst on the ruined hothouse and the raisin vine, black, as if mantled with bursting tarantulas.
“We have to go among the old buildings,” said Mademoiselle Varc.
“Very well.”
Marigolds grew wild in the long grass (and Leocadia thought of the marigolds in ice, which had prevented nothing) and pure white daisies.
Mademoiselle Varc stumbled, but she was a little girl again, only about ten, and she made nothing of it.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked Leocadia. “If you look at the windows you might see them. Even by day. Women in a row.”
Leocadia shrugged. She raised her eyes to the foul blank windows, seen closer now than ever before, but they were dead as ever, the optics of corpses.
Pipes thick with rust coiled from the walls of the buildings like flexible bones which had pierced the skin.
They came onto a paved place sprung with weeds. The buildings loomed above.
“This way. Down here.”
Mademoiselle Varc led Leocadia toward a sort of alley between the light biscuit walls.
There was no sound. That was, one heard the sizzling chorus of cicadas, and the tweets of passing birds; insects buzzed among the rogue flowers. High, high in the sky, a plane purred almost silently over, a silver cigar with fins. All these ordinary noises. And yet, it was like the loud singing in the ear of utter soundlessness. And everything so still, as if, rather than stunned by heat, the area had been frozen.
The alley was drowned in shade.
Mademoiselle Varc darted along it in quick marsupial spasms.
Above, the ranks of corpse windows, black with grime and weather and time. From the pipes hung cakes of filth.
The alley opened in a square, around which the buildings of the madhouse reared and onto which the windows continued to stare without sight. Three big doorways seemed shut like the gates of hell.
And in the center of the square was a great heap of rubbish, stretching up five meters or more, as if constructed over some more solid base.
“See – see –” Mademoiselle Varc sprang at the garbage mountain eagerly.
Noises were fainter here, and though the sun splashed in between the roofs, it was like being in a new block of bright, thick atmosphere.
Mademoiselle scrabbled at the grisly pile.
“There!”
Leocadia observed.
She saw Mademoiselle Varc was holding up a gleaming rope of syrup, a necklace of amber beads.
How bizarre. How could such a delicacy have been overlooked? Unless Mademoiselle Varc herself had deposited them here, in order to “find” them.
Leocadia glared into the coalescence of rubble. And as she did so, she felt the eyeless windows watching, as if sudden specters had gathered behind their masks.
A pile of garbage. Old newspapers, a destroyed chair raised high as a throne. And lower down, slabs of tin and wool and corrosion.
“Look!” squeaked Mademoiselle Varc.
She raised a wooden doll with jointed arms and legs and black cotton hair.
How was she finding these things? She must have placed them here, her treasures.
“Here’s another,” said Mademoiselle Varc, and pointed Leocadia into the heap of debris. A wooden limb poked out, and sure enough another wooden maiden emerged into Leocadia’s hands. This one had flax hair and cool glass eyes.
“I wonder what else we shall get?”
It was a festival. It was a barrel of goodies into which you must plunge your fingers.
Something was dislodged from higher up and swiveled down the rubbish with a frantic sound.
It fell at Leocadia’s feet.
“Oh just see. It’s given you something.”
Leocadia bent down and raised the artifact.
It was an old brown bottle, curiously shaped, square, with a four-sided neck and a four-sided mouth. On the front, a label. It showed clearly a weird landscape of ice and glaciers, and before them a black and white penguin with a marigold flash beside its beak. Above, the name. Penguin Gin.
Leocadia examined the bottle in a trance. It was very old. It was clean, and bright. The penguin pleased her, for it was realistically portrayed, and into her head came the thought: I have a model now. I can paint penguins.
“Yes, I’ve heard of it,” said Mademoiselle Varc, peering over. “There was a slogan for that gin.” She held a wooden doll in either hand, the amber beads about her neck, along her whiteness. “Penguin Gin, it eases pain.”
“Not in your youth, surely,” said Leocadia.
“Oh no. Long before. Long, long ago.”
Something shuddered in the pile of rubbish. A thin black smoke uncoiled from it.
“That’s enough,” cried Mademoiselle Varc. “We must go.”
She sprinted back into the alley.
Leocadia turned slowly, watching the deadly walls above. Nothing was in the windows.
But she would take the bottle. She would paint penguins.
Someone knocked on the door to Leocadia’s room, the way the female attendant did when she brought a hot meal.
“Yes,” said Leocadia.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the doctors, when they came, arrived at five in the evening. Yet here was Van Orles, all alone.
“What do you want?”
“Why, to see you, mademoiselle.”
Leocadia wore her cream housedress, which had so generously been sent to the asylum for her. She had no makeup on. She had been about to don her working smock and prepare a canvas.
Van Orles looked at her insidiously.
“Here I am, as you see,” said Leocadia.
“Well, shall we have a little talk?”
“If we must.”
“Always so bristly!” merrily chided Van Orles, and he came bouncing into the room. He wore another of his pasty cravats. Sitting down on the couch he lit a pipe. Leocadia opened the second window. “You never ask for cigarishis,” said Van Orles. “Don’t you miss them?”
“I seldom bothered with them. They had no effect on me.”
“Yet still you drink.”
Leocadia propped up a canvas on her table.
“And you began to drink when you were eleven years old, I understand.”
When Leocadia did not reply, Van Orles puffed away at his pipe as if considering her silence an answer.
Leocadia was irritated. She did not like to work with anyone near her, as all her lovers had soon discovered. She went to the dressing table and began to brush her curling hair with harsh strokes.
“What a lovely girl you are,” murmured Van Orles. “Don’t you miss other things? Companionship? Dalliance?”
A faint livid light was ominously blooming up from nowhere. She tensed. The distasteful man seemed to be making a pass at her. Leocadia swung slowly around and smiled at him. Van Orles appeared taken aback. Leocadia lifted the brown bottle off the dressing table where it had lain through the afternoon and night.
“Look at this, Where do you think I got it?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“In a junk heap in a yard of the old building.”
“Which building is that?” he inquired innocently.
“The madhouse.”
“Ah. How quaint. The lunatic hospital. Really, that place should be walled off. The masonry isn’t safe.”
“Don’t you think it’s a pretty bottle?” said Leocadia. “Quite old itself, I should say, from its shape.”
“Very likely.” Van Orles got up carefully and came to stand over Leocadia. “And you are interested in such items?”
“Oh, yes. Why don’t you tell me about the madhouse?”
“Now, we shouldn’t call it that. They were awful days. The poor sick people weren’t treated well. Sometimes they were even displayed to the public, to make others laugh. Immorality and disease ran rife –”
“But what happened?” said Leocadia.
“How do you mean?” Van Orles crouched closer.
Leocadia hit him quite hard on the hand and stood up. She moved away.
Van Orles looked happy. He presumably thought he was being teased, a preliminary.
“I mean,” said Leocadia, “something curious took place, didn’t it? The madhouse was suddenly closed down.”
“Oh, there is some story – a warder was killed, and someone disappeared. Perhaps the inmates attacked the staff for their brutish treatment. But one shouldn’t set too much store by tales.”
Leocadia held the bottle labeled Penguin Gin up to the window. For a moment a screaming and contorted face seemed to writhe inside it, but it was only the action of sunlight and the shadow of ivy on the wall.
“Is that all you know, or all you’ll say?” asked Leocadia.
Van Orles chuckled. He seemed to think Leocadia’s prurient intriguement was a form of foreplay. Gruesome details of the lunatics might arouse her.
“There was a rumor of a ghost. A great dark thing. Very tall, gliding through the corridors. And something about a bad winter. I can’t recall.”
“Then,” said Leocadia, “I think I’ll go out for a walk.”
“Now, now, not yet. I must perform a small check on your physical well-being.”
Leocadia turned from her worktable, the palette knife in her hand. The glare of light was around him like a halo, the warning phenomenon that had come before.
“But I am violent,” she said. “And I might not care for this small check.”
“Ah –” Van Orles stepped away. He was still smiling, the smile a daisy left behind by a retreating tide. “Now, Leocadia –”
“If you touch me,” said Leocadia, “if you come in here again alone, I will set on you.” She was tepid, easy. She had had to threaten others. Generally they accepted her terms. And so did Van Orles.
“You are being most unreasonable, Leocadia. Merely because I can’t satisfy your ghoulish curiosity about the lunatics.”
“But I’m a lunatic,” said Leocadia. “How can you trust yourself with me? What would the other doctors say if they knew?”
Leocadia walked to the door ahead of Van Orles and opened it. She went into the corridor. Van Orles stood lost in the middle of the room. Leocadia threw the knife back there, so it whirled past his head. He yelped and ducked low, and his pipe fell on the floor.
“I shall have to report this,” said Van Orles.
“And also, of course, that you came to me by yourself, for how else did it happen?”
She did not want to leave him in her room, and sure enough, when she stood right back, he came hurrying out.
“You’ve turned nasty, Leocadia.”
He hastened away.
Probably, she had been ill-advised. She was not free now, and doubtless to make such an enemy was unwise.
Outside, it was hot, the sun going up to the zenith. In the summerhouse the old ones lay like spoilt seals. Thomas was not at his garden. No one was anywhere.
Leocadia looked across the grass and gravel, between the trees to the buildings.
Cries in the night – of course. The sheer misery and abjection of that place had been recorded in its stones. But she, had she now come to the hiatus, the point where she must, even physically, pass over into her new life? The low fence symbolized this.
She could kill herself. They must mean her to, leaving all the handy knives and glasses for her. But first, there was the landscape with the penguin to paint.
Leocadia walked along the fence, not crossing it.
Large chestnut trees arose, and under their canopy she came upon the spider man sitting, looking where she looked, toward the madhouse.
Seeing her, he jumped up.
“Wait,” snapped Leocadia.
He gave a wild cry. He ran, not like a spider now but a wounded hare. He rushed at the fence and sprawled across it and charged on toward the madhouse walls.
Leocadia got over the fence also, and holding up her long skirt, she ran after him grimly. Her legs were long and slim and strong; she was soon close.
“Stop,” she commanded, but he shrieked and bolted away.
He chased along the paved space under the windows.
Swearing, she caught him in both hands, letting her skirt go.
He hooted, went down, and crawled at her feet.
“I won’t,” he said. “I won’t.”
“You will,” she said. “Why are you afraid of me?”
“Weasel,” said the young man. He touched Leocadia’s sandaled foot, tore back his hand as if she burnt.
“I am not a weasel. I wish I were. Or are you supposed to be? You’re a spider.”
He glimpsed up at her face. He said, experimenting, “You look well today.”
“I am. Tell me something about that.” And she pointed at the madhouse.
“All gone,” said the young man. “They went in a night. All the doors were locked. A great wave.” He got up and bowed to Leocadia. “Your highness is so powerful. Do take care,” he said. Then he flung himself off again, racing back at the fence, away from the buildings.
Leocadia looked up at the rows of dead windows. They were now familiar. She thought she could hear a bell ringing somewhere, but perhaps this noise was only in her ear.
The crickets were silent, and the birds. The marigolds had scorched in the grass and the daisies withered.
Gone in a night. A great wave.
Shells left behind, but that was the other story.
What had gone on here?
Leocadia turned down an alley between the buildings. It was not the way she had come with Mademoiselle Varc. Yet the alley looked just the same, the deep shade, the walls and pipes.
And sure enough, the alley led into a courtyard. Here there was a stone block. It was featureless and gave no indication of its use. Three doorways (hell gates), as before.
Leocadia crossed the yard, which had no rubbish heap, climbed a short stair, pushed at the black door. It was shut, forever.
The madhouse of Paradis.
Something fluttered on the edge of her eye.
Leocadia turned and stared up. Above, in a window, stood a feminine form with bright marmalade hair.
Leocadia’s blood seemed to sink through her. A great wave … it hit her feet and vertigo made her drop her face into her hands. Then it was gone, and looking furiously up again, unsteady and sick, she beheld the window empty.
As she came back over the gravel, Leocadia saw Thomas the Warrior sitting under his Medusa, in the flower bed.
“Wait, mademoiselle.”
“Everyone talks to me now,” she said.
“You have been there.”
“There. Where?”
“What did you see?” asked Thomas. He was elderly and gnarled and his voice was cracked.
“What could I see? Some deserted buildings.”
“Once full,” said Thomas the Warrior.
“Gone in a night,” said Leocadia.
Did she imagine it? Was the tongue of the Medusa longer?
“You must understand. In your great-grandfather’s time. The doors were all shut. The inmates packed in for the night. But in the morning, all the lunatics had gone.”
He stopped. He looked like old men from her childhood. This annoyed her. She said, “Aren’t we all lunatics?”
“Oh, no, mademoiselle. You are only mad.”
“What’s the difference?”
“One day you’ll know. Or perhaps not.”
“Tell me anyway,” she said, “about the madhouse.”
“They vanished,” he said, “But not the warders. There were twenty of those. I can see them now – in my mind. All were found dead. Some were in corners and some pressed up against the ceiling like flies, stuck fast. Can you see it, too?”
“Dead,” she said.
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“How?”
“They drowned. And they were drunk to a man. Drunk and drowned.”
“But meanwhile,” she said, “these may be lies. Why did you tell me?”
“You asked.”
“That’s no reason.”
“True. I told you so that you can see all the way around the great circle, of which you are now a part. My congratulations. Now you’re one of us.”
“No,” said Leocadia.
“Then,” said Thomas, “what are you?”
He rose and came to soldierly attention as she walked away.
The new canvases were gone. That must be the doing of Van Orles, his repayment.
The rest of her equipment – paints, brushes, knives, and rags – were still there. Even the easel. Even the brown bottle with the penguin.
Penguin Gin, it eases pain.
Nothing to paint on.
Her frustration was boiling and immense.
In one of her notebooks – on the surface of which it would be impossible to apply paint – she wrote down what the spider man had said to her, and the words of Thomas. But not what she had seen in the window, the maiden with orange marmalade hair.
Penguin Gin, Penguin Gin, drink it up –
She poured vodka slowly.
The walls of the Residence seemed to be breathing. The gray screens of them must try to shift, and other barriers pass behind them, through them …
Beyond the window, in the sunset, the madhouse flamed.
Drunk and drowned.
She could hear the screaming, and it was night. And she knew, if she left the bed and walked to the door, it would be open. An oversight, an act of malice.
As she went across the cool floor, she was surprised that she heard the screaming still, and yet she thought, It’s not me. I’m not mad. I hear only what is.
She went into the corridor, belting her night robe as she walked, and got to the elevator. It worked soundlessly. Had someone fixed everything just so? Was Van Orles lying in wait? And if he was, would she kill him?
But the lift went down to the garden and no one was there.
The night was soft and fragrant, without lights except for a few vague glims high up about the Residence. And the stars, sharp as pins and claws, brighter than eyes. No moon. Leocadia could not remember seeing the moon for a long while. Had it gone away from her?
She went down the lawn, the grass crisp on her bare feet, going by the birdbath with the dregs of tea. The summerhouse was ghostly, the hothouse like a fiend, its vampire vine and smashed edges.
Across the grasses the ancient blocks were white now, as if after all a moon shone on them, or within. Yet the windows had stayed blind.
The fence was difficult – perhaps she had chosen a more awkward spot. It tore her robe.
Through the high grass, pleased, like a lion in the park. She got onto the paving and moved toward the alley she had taken last, and so reached the square with the stone block, and the girl phantom in the window.
Nothing now. Nevertheless, she located the particular pane, marked it out. Then she went up the steps, still warm from the summer day, and she thrust at the door.
Which opened.
Leocadia stole into the deserted halls of old madness.
She could see very clearly, a sort of night sight.
She could make out long passages, and rooms that led off them, and stairs ascending.
She did not mean to lose her way.
She chose a left-hand stair and moved up it. These steps were not warm at all. No, they were cold as marble. She shivered. And then she gazed upward.
High over the stair, high on the wall, a mark. A tide mark. Fluid had risen, and stood, and then drawn away. The wave. The wave that drowned. It had been here.
At the stairhead, she turned aside. She was going toward the place where, from the outside, she had seen the girl.
How cold, the building. How silent and – stopped. Like a clock that had used up all its time.
Everything was the same. Passages and doors opening into rooms. Bare, polished as bones.
And here was the one, the room that she had looked into from below.
Leocadia crossed the shining floor.
At the window, no one. And yet, the windowpane – She went near and examined it.
Upon the casement, like the play of winter frost, were two fine and narrow shapes, the prints of two hands. Formed in ice. A little moisture trickled from them, but only a very little.
If I’m dreaming, I can wake up now.
But she could not.
The cries and screams had faded. There were only the handprints and the print of high tide on the walls, and the freezing stillness out of time.
She left the room quickly. She ran toward the stair and rushed down it. Fear had almost caught her up. Below too she ran, for the doorway, and dashed through it and down the steps.
Too cold.
Up the alley Leocadia flew. It was as if the madhouse might collapse on her, masonry unsafe –
She grazed her feet on the paving, and among the long grasses she fell once but jumped up and ran on.
As she managed the fence, she felt her heart beating pitilessly.
The gravel hurt. It was hot now, after the coldness. She entered the Residence and found the elevator, and it went up with her, up and up, and it took too long, but here was the corridor, so modern and pristine, without the marks of tides. She came to her room, and the door gave without fuss. She closed herself in. She stumbled to her bed, and as she lay down on it, she woke up.
Her eyes opened. She was stretched out full-length. She had been dreaming, then. But she was so cold, so chilled.
She pushed herself off the bed, and stepped over her night robe, which was lying on the floor, with a tear in it. Her feet were sore, yet numb. She got to the door and tried it – fast shut. She had never been out.
Leocadia went into the alcove with the refrigerator. Shivering with cold, she wanted a drink, the revitalizing vodka.
She opened the refrigerator. A gust of delicious warmth poured out on her.
She saw the ice packed in, but like feathers from some glorious bed. She touched it. It was soothing, smooth, like the stone hot-water bottles that had come back into fashion. It gave off heat.
She took out and poured the vodka. Cold, as it was meant to be.
She stood by the refrigerator for warmth. It was wonderful, like a summer meadow.
She turned, to warm her back in its depths, and saw across the room a great shadow. Over two meters in height, like a black column with an aproned core of whiteness. Its elongate and fearful head was moving. Horizontal, elliptical. Daggered.
The glass dropped from Leocadia’s hand, and as it broke, she touched the light switch beside the alcove.
The lights roared on. She could not see. And then she did, and the room was empty. The night was warm and the refrigerator cold. Her feet were not sore.
But across the floor, she could still see it, the tear in her night robe the fence had made.