Hello, Angus, my abhorred one, my baleful companion. I see you’ve arrived on a certain riverbank, beside a certain watermill; I see you’ve met old friends there. My face has risen clearly inside your mind: no mere flash, but an undeniable person. To you that face must seem novel, an epiphany, even if it carries a disagreeable stink of déjà vu.
But you don’t yet understand that I have never left you. Not for one moment of all your myriad lives. While you ate, vomited, wandered, murdered, I was there, unnoticed but intimate, my watchful death infusing your every wretched rebirth.
You will understand soon enough.
I could not eliminate my consciousness completely, though I assure you I tried. My first swoon had been deeper, and it had excluded reality far more effectively. Perhaps in my decades of vigilance I had lost the knack.
No; the best I could manage was a sort of twilight fog, and the abnegation of all responsibility and all will of my own. I still felt the regular torture of Asterion’s umbrastring, for example, though I tried to sink away from it into my own shadows. When Gus went to reclaim the final beamer child from Margo I sagged limp and indifferent above him, mesmerized by my own flicker, and did not watch the agony on her face. My scream went on, of course, but it was now as insensate, as uncaring, as the shriek of tearing metal. Did Margo suffer? Well, she was hardly alone in that respect.
And when Gus crafted the first adult beamer—a youth of nineteen, as he had been when he murdered me—and endowed it with a real, substantial body made of Flynn’s reassembled cells, I saw it stand and run fingers through its hair. I saw it dimly, as when dream and reality mingle and every image is indeterminate, uncertain in its provenance, a figment of the threshold. Why, I even seemed to see momentarily through its eyes, to feel that silky hair parting around its fingers, to sway with its uncertain balance! How odd that was, but not odd enough to muster my awareness. And then I rolled over, figuratively speaking, and went back to sleep, or tried. Also figuratively speaking.
I was oblivious enough that I can only report much of what occurred next by inference. I imagine, for example, that Asterion grew increasingly sullen when he and Gus met to drain me, but I did not actually observe his shifting moods. I imagine Sky came, wheedling for a chance to maul me. Margo, too—she must have waited for the next iteration of her child-Angus, at first with casual bitterness, since Gus had brought her the creatures as reliably as clockwork. She must have grown puzzled when enough of Nautilus’s hazy time had passed, wondering what was taking so long—for I imagine, as well, that Gus did not favor her with an explanation or even a visit. She must at last have come to him, and learned that her loneliness was henceforth absolute. At least I assume so, for I did not rouse myself to hear her howling.
“Catherine,” Gus said imperiously. “Catherine! Will you please have the bare courtesy to look at me when I address you?”
The words licked at my careful unawareness. But since I am reporting them, you can gather that I could not blot them out as utterly as I wished. I did not gratify him with a look, at least; by this time I had the trick of quite literally directing my gaze inward. In that endless blinking, phosphor pale, soot dark, I rolled like a bottle on the sea.
“This is important,” Gus announced. “Pay close attention! There is one more task I must complete before this young Angus is ready to go out into the world and stake his claim there. I’ve already imprinted him with the feeling of you, the scent of your mind, and with the inexorable desire to seek it out. Wherever he is, he’ll track down the girl whose character most nearly matches yours. The only question is, will that girl redeem you? Will she repair your mistakes that damned us both?”
I am dead, I told the black and white waves of my inmost self. The dead owe nothing to the living.
“You might think you no longer have any choice in the matter. That it is too late for you to undo the past, to love me as you were always meant to do. On the contrary! You have a choice through her, whoever she is. Do you see, Catherine? Do you see my mercy? I’m giving you another chance, even after everything you’ve done to hurt me!”
Gus was pacing; I did not look, but I felt the rhythm of his footsteps jarring through me.
“Oh, Catherine,” he said after a lull, and his voice was so soft that I nearly slipped away again. “When you spurned me, it was like a rent in the fabric of the world. All that should have been right turned wrong, ruined. All this time, and still I cannot understand how you could do such a thing. All this time and it still makes me weep. Will you not look? See, see the tears coursing down my face!”
I would not, as it happened. But for all my assumed obliviousness the maudlin seep of his voice felt like some foul liquid wicking through my clothes.
“Perhaps you are too jaded now to care,” Gus groused. “Your substitute will be fresh, with a fresh heart. It falls to her to undo the past and heal the damaged world. A solemn responsibility, and a great one.” He paused again. “I’ve made something. Something very precious, very beautiful. Here it is; another moment, and I will install it in young Angus. Will you not look?”
Quite against my will, my drowsing awareness tipped toward the object in Gus’s upraised hand. My gaze tumbled out of its flashing fog. Just for an instant I saw it: a delicate, shell-pink thing some two inches long, frilled and involute and gelatinous. It put me in mind of the medusas Gus and I had gazed on so very long ago in the colored plates of his father’s book.
I hastened to roll my gaze back into my own interior. All I wanted was to fall under my own spell, to see and hear nothing and to care even less.
But I had seen it. The impression of that pink object came with me, something like a sunspot emblazoned on your retinae after you close your eyes. Its image stuck fast, a ghost within a ghost.
It is in me still.
“It’s a kiss,” Gus explained.
The dead owe nothing to the living. That is the sole, the only prerogative of death: to owe nothing, feel nothing. No matter the atrocities visited on the living, they are not my concern.
Of course, most of the dead cannot care. I understand that now, though at the time I refused the knowledge even as it lingered inside me. I expect many other dead would envy me this: that I still can. Love, outrage, fury: to feel such things is an immense privilege, and yet I cast them away like garbage.
Since no one but you, my tragic and terrible reader, will ever see these pages, there is no point in begging for forgiveness. Yours is no use to me.
“I’ve invested a very great deal in this kiss, both labor and talens. I needed to make it worthy of you, you see. Worthy of your memory, and the memory of that single kiss we shared. I flatter myself that I’ve succeeded.”
He waited in vain for my approval.
“It’s magic, of course. When the Angus locates your approximation, your spiritual daughter if you will, he will woo her. Then kiss her. He will bestow this kiss. It’s the only one he has.”
I tried to kill him. I failed. What else remains?
“All she has to do, then, is to love him! Love him truly, mind. Love him with the same deep and ardent and consuming love I felt for you, every day of your life. And beyond. If she does, the peace of her love will save us both.”
And if she does not?
I did not want to ask that question. I tried to erase the words even as I thought them. In any case, I knew the answer.
“If she loves him—something so simple, so natural, so necessary!—if she loves him, all will be well. I’ll never make another beamer again, then. You see, Catherine? I am not a monster. I only seek to heal the past. To stanch the wound you made, repair your harms! If she loves him, the kiss will know it. It’s only in the event that the girl fails—well. It’s a curse as well as a kiss, if it has to be. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
If she doesn’t love him, the kiss will kill her.
I provided that answer despite my best efforts at ignorance.
And she won’t. If she is indeed anything like me, loving you and your creations will be no part of her. This is nothing but wanton destruction. A display meant to prove that there’s nothing you can’t waste, not even human lives.
“You are a part of me,” Gus explained. “You can’t reject me, any more than my right leg can cast off the rest of my body. If magic can’t fix such a profound mistake, then—then magic is just as stupid as you always said it was, that’s all, and I’ve given my life for nothing. I won’t stand for it.”
Gus crouched. And once again the impulse to see, to know, to feel—to live, if I may be so bold—got the better of me. I looked in time to see Gus pressing the rippled pink object against the lips of what appeared to be a sleeping youth. This early beamer still looked roughly like Gus, blond and sharp-featured, but much more handsome and at least three inches taller.
The kiss disappeared, insinuating itself under the skin.
And I, oh! I flung myself away from the sight, plunged into the deepest oblivion that would have me. Here it was at last, the moment of crisis I had dreaded so long. Gus was ready to murder those girls who would not submit in my stead. The weapon he’d labored so long to perfect, a weapon in a boy’s shape, was now fit for deployment. And rather than exerting myself to stop him, I lolled in my internal lightshow like a fine lady who stays in bed and claims to be indisposed.
Viola, forgive me. Justine, forgive me. Pearl, Judith, Megan, Reiko, Crystal, Eleanor, Lucy, Claire, Breanna, Miracle, Sasha, Jeanette, Lorca, others whose names I cannot now recall: forgive me. Or don’t.
I pretended I owed nothing to the living. So now that you are also dead, you certainly owe nothing to me.