Mysterium

Maybe dreaming was the only way to approach something so incomprehensible. Dex had coped better than most, because his own life had passed into the territory of dreams long ago. He had been sleepwalking since the fire took Abigail and David away from him. His life since then had been a kind of shadowy anticlimax in which even the events of the last few months had been hardly more than a recapitulation, his own bereavement somehow woven into the fabric of the larger world. He supposed Evelyn had sensed this about him, that even the tenderness that had passed between them—and it had been a real tenderness—was nevertheless eclipsed by something darker. He supposed that was why she had elected to stay in the boarding house with the Proctor Demarch. She had been afraid, of course, but not only afraid. She had known about Dex: what he had been, what he had lost.

He stood in the darkness under the lintel of the old apartment building and fumbled his wet key into the lock. He thought about Evelyn Woodward and what she had meant to him. For a time she had seemed to be a doorway back into a world from which he had been exiled—not a replacement for Abigail, but a way out of this blind canyon his life had become, into the highlands, the sun-washed places in which he had almost ceased to believe.

She hadn’t been equal to that aroused need, and who could be? It was better not to want such things. He had arrived at a sort of modus vivendi with his grief, and such deals were best not broken. You wore your grief, and if necessary you ate it and you drank it until it became your substance, until you looked in the mirror one day and there was nothing looking back but grief itself, a man made entirely of sorrow, but still standing, somehow still alive, surviving.

He left his wet clothes hanging over the curtain rod in the shower stall and went to bed,. craving these few hours of oblivion before another dawn.

∞

The knock at the door startled him awake.

The knock was peremptory and fierce, a Proctor’s knock. He woke blinking at daylight, his heart pounding hard.

He went directly to the door and opened it, apprehensive but not afraid; he was too tired of all this to be afraid.

The only light in the dim hallway was a patch of pale October morning through the east-facing window. Two junior Proctors, pink-cheeked youngsters only just beginning to master the routine arrogance of the professional religious policeman, looked at Dex and past him into the room. Then they moved to opposite sides of the door.

A woman stepped forward.

Bewildered, Dex could only stare.

She was wearing what he supposed his great-grandmother might have worn in her youth: a black, high-collared, long-sleeved, floor-length dress fixed with buttonhooks over the kind of corset that rendered the female figure as an S-shape, all bosom and buttocks. Definitely not a uniform; there was too much lace at the collar and cuffs. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept back to frame her face. She was about as tall as his collarbone.

She looked at Dex with a fierce determination. But she was blushing at the same time, maybe because he’d come to the door in nothing but briefs and a sleeveless T-shirt.

She said, “I’m sorry to disturb you … are you Mr. Dexter Graham?”

She spoke with that odd accent he had heard from some of the soldiers. The inflections were European, the vowel sounds almost Irish. She made “Dexter Graham” into something exotic, the name of a North Country highwayman in a Walter Scott epic.

He overcame his speechlessness and said, “Yes, I am.”

“My name is Linneth Stone. Lieutenant Demarch sent me to speak to you.” She paused. “I can wait, if you need to dress.” The blush deepened a little.

“Okay,” Dex said. “Thank you.” And went to look for his pants.

CHAPTER FOUR

Evelyn had been willing to stand in line for water like everyone else.

She had stood in line before. There were special deliveries to the house every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Proctors were generous with it, but she liked having her own ration. It permitted small luxuries: a private cup of coffee, when there was coffee; or tea; or just a quick extra wash on a hot day. The water line was a small nuisance and she didn’t begrudge the time she spent there.

Her new dress changed all that.

The dress was a wonderful gift, and she had accepted it in the spirit in which it was given, but not without reservations. It made the growing gulf between herself and the townspeople too obvious.