Dreaming Of The Bones

After a long moment she began to climb the stairs slowly, her calves and thighs aching with the burden of each step. When she reached the first floor, she held on to the wall like an unsteady drunk as she made her way to the bathroom.

Shivering, shallow-breathed, she closed and locked the door. The motions required a deliberate concentration; her hands still felt oddly disconnected from her body. The bath taps next; she adjusted the temperature with the same care. Tepid—she’d read somewhere that the water should be tepid—and salts, yes, of course, she added the bath salts, now the water would be warm and saline, satin as blood.

Satisfied, she stood, and the deep blue silk of the dressing gown puddled at her feet. She stepped in and sank into the water, Aphrodite returning from whence she came, razor in hand.

*   *   *

Victoria McClellan lifted her hands from the keyboard, took a breath, and shook herself What in hell had just happened to her? She was a biographer, for Christ’s sake, not a novelist, and she’d never experienced anything like this, certainly never written anything like this. She had felt the water slide against her skin, had known the seductive terror of the razor.

She shivered. It was all absolute rubbish, of course. The whole passage would have to go. It was full of supposition, conjecture, and the loss of objectivity that was fatal to a good biography. Swiftly, she blocked the text, then hesitated with her finger poised over the delete key. And yet… maybe the more rational light of morning would reveal something salvageable. Rubbing her stinging eyes, she tried to focus on the clock above her desk. Almost midnight. The central heating in her drafty Cambridgeshire cottage had shut off almost an hour ago and she suddenly realized she was achingly cold. She flexed her stiff fingers and looked about her, seeking reassurance in familiarity.

The small room overflowed with the flotsam of Lydia Brooke’s life, and Vic, tidy by nature, sometimes felt powerless before the onslaught of paper—letters, journals, photographs, manuscript pages, and her own index cards—all of which defied organization. But biography was an unavoidably messy job, and Brooke had seemed a biographer’s dream, tailor-made to advance Vic’s position in the English Faculty. A poet whose brilliance was surpassed only by the havoc of a personal life strewn with difficult relationships and frequent suicide attempts, Brooke survived the late-sixties episode in the bath for more than twenty years. Then, having completed her finest work, she died quietly from an overdose of heart medication.

The fact that Brooke had died just five years before allowed Vic access to Lydia’s friends and colleagues as well as her papers. And while Vic had expected to be fascinated, she hadn’t been prepared for Lydia to come alive. She’d seen Lydia’s house—left to Morgan Ashby, the former husband, who’d leased it to a university don with two small children. Littered with Legos and hobbyhorses, it had seemed to Vic to retain some indefinable imprint of Lydia’s personality—yet even that odd phenomenon provided no explanation for what had begun to seem perilously close to possession.

Lydia Lovelace Brooke Ashby… Vic repeated the names in her mind, then added her own with an ironic smile. Victoria Potts Kincaid McClellan. Not as lyrical as Lydia’s, but if you left off the Potts it had a bit of elegance. She hadn’t thought much about her own divorce in the past few years—but perhaps her recent marital difficulties had caused her to identify so strongly with Lydia’s pain. Recent marital difficulties, bloody hell, she thought with a sudden flash of anger. Couldn’t she be honest even with herself? She’d been left, abandoned, just as Lydia had been left by Morgan Ashby, but at least Lydia had known where Morgan was—and Lydia hadn’t a child to consider, she added as she heard the creak of Kit’s bedroom door.