Mrs. Farrow had meant to injure me; instead she won me the happiest year of my short life, a tender sanctuary in time. It was only two months before I was allowed to resume my studies with the Skelleys, but over a year before Gus returned to haunt me. Oh, he tried to corner me now and then, but I told him that I could not put my father’s employment at risk, and walked away, and thought that was the end of it. It was sad, of course, but our friendship was over, and there were reasons that might be for the best.
It was December 1855 when Gus put an end to that ending. Anna and my brothers were at school, and I was alone in the house with pale winter sunlight draped across my knees. I was engaged in a questionable effort to mend torn shirts and memorize irregular Greek verbs at the same time. Every didomi sent my stitches askew, and I was looking back on my work disgruntled—for I had no inclination to do it over—when something hissed behind me. A hectic glow licked up the wall where nothing but shadows should have been. The light was by the stove, as if a flame had escaped, and my first thought was that some carelessness of mine was about to burn down our house. I spun to look.
There was indeed an escaped flame balanced on the iron, but its shape was strange.
Another instant and I knew it for one of the fiery pollywogs that Darius had once sent to harass me. It balanced on its tail and grinned at me, and this time the face it bore was Darius’s own.
“If it isn’t the Object herself,” the thing mused in a thin and hissing echo of Darius’s voice. “The stars in his eyes, where elsewise the nights tend to be murky and damp. Don’t give yourself too much credit, eh? The fit is in the thrower, not in the floor he pummels with his fists.”
I stood, surprised at my own composure. “You know, your tricks aren’t nearly as impressive the second time. You aren’t welcome in this house, Darius.”
“Is that so? The friend of your friend is your enemy, little Catherine? Here I’ve come to give you a message from him, so you could at least invite me to sit down. Oh, the ache in these old knees!” By the leer on the blazing face, I knew this for a joke.
My hands settled on my hips. The words it’s all your fault spun like smoke behind my teeth—but what did I have to blame him for, exactly?
Instead I said, “I don’t believe you’re Gus’s friend either. But if you have a message, tell it.”
From the delighted way Darius’s mimic bobbed, it seemed that my hostility pleased him, if anything. Shadows like violet snakes pulsed on the walls.
“The Farrows are having a party tonight, and Gus doesn’t want you to miss it. He asked me to tell you how very important it is to him that you make an appearance. Round about ten, if you don’t mind.”
How absurd could Gus be? “Please remind him that I wasn’t invited.”
“Windows are for the looking-through, aren’t they? How tall and broad the Farrows like their windows, and how brightly lit they’ll be! Especially at about ten o’clock, as I mentioned.”
I started at this, as I was meant to. Icy suspicion sluiced through my mind—had Darius tempted Gus into some vicious retaliation against his parents?
“Gus wouldn’t hurt anyone,” I protested, but my voice was unsteady, and my chest felt hollow and resonant, humming with alarm. “No matter how you mislead him, he would never go so far wrong as that!”
A ghost must learn to savor the bitterness of such ironies, for bitterness is the only taste available. If death can become my life, can bitter not be my sweet?
“Come and see for yourself what he’ll do,” Darius suggested through the bent lips of his serpent. It shriveled and fell in a brushstroke of ash, and I was left staring.
Disturbing as I found this summons, there was no question I would heed it. A full moon reflected on fresh snow as I slipped along; the top of a barn rested on the treetops, a recumbent giant. Ten o’clock found me perched several feet up in a dogwood, peering out. The view my tree offered was less than ideal; I was rather far from the house, and at an angle which allowed me to watch only that end of the drawing room where the piano stood. I dared go no closer; light streaked across the shimmering ground. But as Darius had mentioned, the leaded windows soared up nearly to the high ceiling, and I could see flushed faces pitching on waves of laughter and the white trickle of pearls at Mrs. Farrow’s throat. So she was out of her bed at last; I was relieved to see it. Behind her stood the grandfather clock, seeping time so slowly that I wanted to shake it.
And I could see Gus, primly upright next to Margo on a small settee with his hands folded in his lap. It might have been only my imagination—I was too far away to see him in any detail—but I thought his smile had an unwholesome twist to it. Gus was waiting. For what?
Two minutes after ten, his mother laid her hand on his arm and spoke a few words to the company. I could see the false graciousness warping her face as her son bent to whisper in Margo’s ear. Did Margo blanch? I couldn’t be sure.
Then Gus stood, obedient as dough. He seated himself on the piano bench, smoothed his coat. His movement landed like a raindrop in a puddle, driving the guests into a circle around him. I regretted that I was too far away to catch any sound but the wind. Gus’s playing was the loveliest, the most exalting music I had ever heard, and I’d missed hearing him.
His fingers landed on the keys. So lightly. Something in his posture spoke of malice, poised and delicate and sure of its imminent satisfaction. I could not hear his first notes, but they communicated to me nonetheless through the rapt stillness of the assembled guests. I knew at once that Gus had never played so well.
I thought a golden brushstroke followed his fingers like music made visible. How it shone!
The gold spread up from the keys, a smooth unscrolling, a lucid shimmer. Once it sheeted across the top of the piano it stroked up the wallpaper behind, cresting and curling. A moment’s bafflement, and I knew it was no poetic fancy I was seeing.
It was fire, but fire of a very unnatural aspect. It was too silky, too even, too billowing, draping like veils of light from the ceiling. And if the music was inaudible, that was not true of the screams.
Someone tried and failed to open the French doors, then lifted a chair and flung it through; glass sang, shrieks doubled in volume. And Gus sat quite untroubled at his piano, his fingers dancing with the flames.
Issuing them, in fact. I grasped that as another sweep of the chair cleared glassy fangs from the doorframe and people spilled out onto the adjacent patio and then over the stone balustrade, toppling and rolling in the snow. But they hardly looked like people, for every one of them was sheathed in liquid fire, a tight-fitting luminosity that followed them like a second skin no matter how they thrashed. If it hadn’t been for how they shoved one another to reach that shattered opening, how they clawed and convulsed, they might have been taken for angels. A young woman set off running through the night with hair like a comet and her dress become a bright ringing bell.
The whole drawing room, now, was a golden box, and Gus sat like the jewel it housed. His fingers pounded out some crescendo and his mouth bent in a smug and secret smile. I could hardly comprehend it—Gus was essentially good, I felt certain, and surely incapable of such viciousness. But the screams leapt higher, tearing at the night. Only the lash of his mother’s fire-coated pearls let me recognize her. She hit the balustrade and flopped over, landing on the ground with her legs comically akimbo.
A man more decent than the rest helped Margo through the broken panes, and I saw that she alone was free of fire. Her violet-gray dress appeared untouched, her silver hair unsinged; even her lace shawl remained a pristine moonlight gray.
The fire, I realized, made no sound at all. There was no crackle, no roar, only human cries and now the faint strains of Gus’s music. It did not touch any other part of the house, nor stretch and leap in the manner of an ordinary conflagration. Heat buffeted me, but its touch was somehow—thin?
Gus broke off, shaking with laughter. And all the flames vanished at once.
The well-dressed people tussling on the snowy lawn turned instantly from falling angels into so many stranded fish, the ladies’ legs kicking in disordered skirts, the men’s hats trampled, all of them with hair unraveled and faces smeared with desperate tears. There was an awkward interval before they were sufficiently calm to notice that their flesh was whole and unhurt, that not the faintest scorch besmirched their clothing. The drawing room as well stood luminous, serene, with cordial glasses still twinkling on its tables. The only signs of what had happened were the broken door, the diamantine scatter of broken glass.
Gus climbed out through the gap and sat on a stone bench, looking over his work with satisfaction. Then his gaze lifted, scanning the night, and I knew he was searching for me. I clung to my branch with both hands, perfectly still, and finally felt how blood drummed through my whole body, a captive thing begging for escape. I willed myself to be part of the darkness, an invisible wisp, a dropped seed whose blossoms ten thousand years hence would be formed of deepest shadow. I tried to shape myself out of absence, to be the cold space where a girl had once been.
A girl so dim, so frozen and so vacant could never be the intended audience for an exhibition like the one Gus had made. No one would bring her such fiery offerings, and no one would expect her to be awed by them.
I tried to negate myself, but I failed. The dogwood trembled with my dismay, and I was still myself, hands hot on cold bark, beads of muscle sliding in my clenched jaw, and eyes made of a darkness that was not empty at all.
Then fresh cries volleyed out. People were clustering around Gertrude Farrow, and I realized she alone hadn’t gotten up.
It wasn’t much of a fall, only perhaps six feet. But there had been a conjunction of unlucky angle and ill-placed stone.
A moment’s confusion, and Dr. Lewis boomed above the clamor, quite distinctly. “She’s broken her spine!”