“I’ve always regarded myself as a woman with an ample vocabulary at her disposal. But now, my plummy lad, I find myself with a deficiency. I simply don’t have the words to express how utterly you’ve botched things.”
Yeah, that would be my phone, chirping venomously away in Margo’s voice. I hold it in front of my face, demonstratively banging the button to disconnect. Doesn’t do a damn thing, naturally. My imaginary Margo is one hell of a stubborn bitch.
“No wonder Gus has it in for you! Plenty of other Anguses have failed, but I doubt one has ever been as exhaustively inept as you. Why didn’t you kiss your her, I might ask? Because you were wearing the enemy’s pendant. Because you trusted Lore, even after you told yourself you hated her.”
“Okay,” I tell her. “I get it. Now why don’t you go choke on a cat?”
It takes two buses for me to slog my way back to the youth hostel. I’m wrecked, ready to crash in a cocoon of my own fury.
“So yeah,” the shaggy dude at the desk says. “We got a call about that credit card you’ve been using, and how it’s canceled because of some kind of fraud bullshit? So you can’t use it for tonight, and anyhow we’re not that into you staying here anymore?”
It would be a waste of my energy to hurt this guy, but I consider it anyway. But he’s nothing to me; he’s yawning emptiness bagged up in skin. Like, my fist might be swallowed by the void if I punched him.
“I just came to get my bag,” I tell him. “I’ve got somewhere else to stay.”
Because if Gus thinks I’m going to spend the rest of my rotten year shivering out on the street while he gloats, he doesn’t know me half as well as he thinks. A fat plastic Smurf bulges in my back pocket, and to hell with Carmen if she tries to stop me from slamming myself down on the mattress in my old room.
The way Geneva looked at me, the revolted chill that made the whole world shiver around me in her eyes—
Don’t think about that. Seriously, don’t.
I would have killed her, okay. Sure. That doesn’t change the fact that I loved her the whole time and I love her now. But she’ll never understand—
Shit, I’m tired. Too weary and heartsick to stifle the evil chatter in my head.
She wanted to kiss me. How could it be wrong for me to give her what she wanted?
“Do you feel lucky now, little pudding? Now that two sorcerers as passionate in their animus as Lore and Gus can agree on exactly one point, and that’s despising you? Everyone is against you now, absolutely everyone, so I’m hard pressed to imagine that you’ll be squeezing much fun out of the time you have left.”
I throw my phone in the gutter, grind the screen with my heel. It bursts with a satisfying pop, and I get a few beats of blissful silence. Then Margo’s voice leaps free of the broken shell and buzzes around my head like a wasp.
“Shut up, Margo. Why even bother? We both know you aren’t real. You’re just a noise Gus shoved into my head, a talking doll that jabbers when he pulls its string. He made you.”
“Oh, yes? And in what particular are you superior to me, I might ask? He made you as well.”
“You can say only the stuff he designed you to say. I can make my own choices.”
“Ooh, your vaunted agency. Lore told you that, didn’t she? Lore once again! I simply can’t think why she’d make such a point of your free will.”
We both know why. She wanted to encourage insurrection against her old enemy. And honestly, killing Gus would seem like a great idea at this point, if only I didn’t need him. If he dies, there will never be another one of me. Eliminating myself for all time isn’t my idea of a party, somehow.
“What about another girl? There must be others nearby who meet your specifications. Think outside the box, why don’t you?”
It’s the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard. I might be an abomination, but at least I’m loyal.
“I love Geneva,” I tell her. “I can’t love anyone else.”
I walk for hours, hounded by dream babble the whole way. It’s one in the morning by the time I reach the rusty green door in Carmen’s warehouse, and I’m so completely drained that for several moments I stand there with my head leaning on the wall and black spots crawling like roaches through my brain.
I find my mattress still in its place, and that’s all that really matters. I throw off my clothes, ignoring the journal as it thumps from my jeans pocket onto the floor. Turn out the light and hurl myself into bed face-first, sure that I’ll fall straight through and into endless strata of soft black sleep, down and down and down—
The space-print comforter leaps up around me like a slap. I nestle in, and the pillow is lumpy with wakefulness. When I roll over, the grubby sheet rustles like a thought teasing its way in and out of focus, almost becoming clear, almost explaining something incredibly important. A few minutes ago something chimed at the edge of my mind, but now I can’t remember what it was. If I’d only paid more attention, I’d know—
What?
What?
“Screw this noise,” I say out loud. “Bug me about whatever it is in the morning. Say around four p.m.? And bring me coffee in bed first.”
But my brain doesn’t take the hint. Keeps right on yammering like an obnoxious party in a next-door apartment. And I don’t even want to think about it, I’m actively trying not to, but the punishing ache knocks around my head anyway. Ugh, Gus blocked those memories with pain to keep me from thinking too hard, didn’t he?
It was something about Catherine, right? How she’s never dead enough. How she’s haunted Gus, how her death keeps screaming on and on and never falls silent.
Oh, for crissake, shut up! Shut up and let me sleep!
“Can’t stop picking all the raisins out of your own pudding, eh, dear boy? Worry away at your brains all you like. You won’t get anything for your efforts but sticky crumbs and a noggin full of sawblades.”
Margo again. Maybe I’m hard to kill, but couldn’t I use the pillow to suffocate myself into unconsciousness?
Margo would love that, wouldn’t she? She’s trying to discourage me from following this trail of thought. Snapping at me like Gus’s watchdog.
And then the fantasy Margo gives a little shriek. There’s a quick splatter of gagging noises, whines, squeaks—and the thing goes silent. It’s like somebody just throttled her—but wouldn’t that have to be somebody in my head, since presumably that’s where the old un-Margo was installed?
Whatever. It’s good to be able to think without all the distraction.
Catherine. He can’t have her, can’t touch her, but her death never leaves him. He put her scream away somewhere, but it’s still in his head. His hands will always be the hands that strangled her, like her murder is hiding curled up in his palms. That’s it: Catherine hides, she’s a lurking immanence, and she haunts both without and within—
I snap on the poodle lamp so hard it nearly crashes over and lunge for something. I’m not sure what I’m after until I flop back on the bed with my fat black journal clutched in my hand.
Yeah? Do I have terribly important thoughts to record, or something? Seriously, what’s the point? When I try to write in here I can’t make out a word of it, anyway. My handwriting races away from me into incomprehensible loops and squiggles. I stare and stare, but even I have no idea what the hell I’ve been scribbling down—
Oh. Shit!
I twang back the elastic strap and open it.
Turns out I can read the journal just fine now. If only Gus Farrow had not fled so precipitously on murdering me, or indeed if he had fled to any refuge but this one, I might have found peace. That’s how it starts, and then the line of ink catches my eyes and pulls them after it, and I can’t look away.
The next thing I realize: it was a big mistake not to take off the pendant before I started.