Emily paced around the desk that stood in the center of the room. Round and round she went, as was her habit when the words would not come. Over time, her pacing had worn the rug around the desk almost bare. Some magic in the moonlight brought the pattern in the Persian carpet to life, so that as she passed through the band of light, she seemed to tread on a lush bed of luminous flowers and winding vines.
A swing-light with a dim bulb shone down on the typewriter that stood on the desk. Each time the circuit of the desk brought her back before the typewriter, she paused to glance at the sheet of paper it held, hoping to shake loose the next word … the next phrase … the next line in the poem that refused to be finished.
When words came, she sat down and added them to the rest, then began to pace again. Now and then she veered off course and stood by the window, staring into the night. Apart from the occasional car that whispered by, the street slept. There was something peaceful about the city at night, something calming in standing here surveying her estate.
She turned from the window and began her circuit of the room again. She let her mind prowl, pretending not to pay much attention to it. Her thoughts crept like a cat through the shadows, ready to pounce when the words showed themselves. The better part of writing was waiting.
As she paced, Emily recited the opening lines of the poem aloud:
“The long dead come back
Dressed in rags of dream.
Eyes sealed in sleep
Open wide again.
Years slide away like stones
Rolled back from mouths of tombs.
The dead stride blinking
Into blaze of noon.”
As she rounded the desk, her eye fell on the corner of the envelope she had tucked under the typewriter. It was a letter from her brother Charles. She and Charles had kept up a correspondence that went back to when she had left home in her late teens and he was barely more than a boy. She had kept it all.
Over time, there had come a change in their relationship. Once, she had been the one offering comfort, especially during the dark months after his wife, Anne, had died, when Ophelia was not yet two. And then as he struggled to raise the child on his own, while establishing himself at the university.
But now, he was the one giving her advice. What had happened? Time had happened. And then there was the heart attack – just a minor one, the doctors assured her, but more than enough to send a shiver of mortality through her. Suddenly she was no longer invulnerable. Suddenly her mind was full of memories of her father, who had died of a similar attack while still a young man.
And now Charles was off to Italy for the summer to complete his study of Ezra Pound, and Ophelia was coming to stay with her. Emily suspected Charles had an ulterior motive for sending the girl to her. She suspected he was worried about his older sister and was seeing to it she had someone around to watch over her.
He had included a snapshot in his letter, a recent picture of Ophelia. She picked up the photo and studied it again. The girl, no longer a child, was a radiant young woman who stared boldly back at her. Her fair hair was short, her head cocked slightly to one side. Definitely an Endicott. She reminded Emily of how she herself had looked at that age – about the time when it had all begun.
And now it was poised to begin again. The thought filled her with dread. With the dread came the now-familiar tightening in her chest, the sudden knifepoint of pain, the feeling that she was unable to breathe.
She made her way over to the cot in the corner of the room and lay down. Fear washed over her in chill waves. She had been a strong woman once, but she was as weak as a kitten now. She closed her eyes. Just a few minutes rest and she would be fine. The lines of the poem spun round in her head:
The long dead come back
Dressed in rags of dream.
Eyes sealed in sleep
Open wide again.…
Sleep stole over her like a shadow. With it came the dream – the one that visited her almost nightly now. The dream of the magic show.