Blake smiled, accepting the offering.“I won’t say no to that.”
“You, too,” Celeste said, leaning back to crowd a donut into Marin’s hands.For a moment they ate in silence, the cinnamon-sugar crumble coating the donut dissolving into Blake’s mouth.
“So that was a bust,” Celeste said, breaking the tentative quiet.
“Not entirely,” Blake shook his head.“We’ve got confirmation that the conditions are real.”
“Yeah, that’s only if he wasn’t lying about what was in that journal.”Celeste snorted.“That guy was fully insane.”
“Well,” Marin said quietly.He shuffled in place, pulling something out of his pocket.“It’s a good thing I swiped it then.”
There was an extended pause in the car.
“Holy shit?!”Celeste shouted, reaching into the back seat and grabbing the booklet.“Marin, you—goddamn,I didn’t know you had it in you!”
Blake was stunned into silence.Marin had certainly been impish in the past—prone to pranks, of course—but he’d never considered him capable of petty theft.There was still quite a bit that Blake needed to learn about him.Still, he gaped at the merman in disbelief.
“I’m not completely innocent,” Marin said with a furtive smile, flipping open the book.“We can take pictures of the pages and put it back in his mailbox on the way out of town.”
“Hey, an ‘accident’ is an ‘accident’, right?”Celeste snorted, easing the diary out of Marin’s hands.They unclasped the belt, flipping to the first page.“Oh sweet, looks like he left his translations in here!”
They extracted their phone from their coat pocket, beginning to snap pictures of the laminated translations stored between the pages.They finished much faster than Blake had anticipated, and after twenty minutes they were back in front of Paul’s gates.Blake offered to be the one to place the diary in the mailbox, pressing down on the nearby call button despite his heart thudding into his throat.
“Hey, you’ve reached Paul,” a neutral voice crackled out of the aging speaker.“I’m not home right now, so you can leave a message.”
“Hey Paul, it’s Blake.From earlier.Uh.We were in a hurry so we managed to accidentally take the diary.It’s in the mailbox.Sorry about that.”
Still, there was no answer, and Blake returned to the car, only to find that Celeste and Marin were switching their seats, with Celeste settling down in the back and Marin in the passenger seat.
“Can you drive?”Celeste asked, their eyes glued to the screen of their phone.“I wanted to read some of this to you.”
“Sure,” Blake agreed, climbing back in and adjusting the seat to his height.As he headed back towards the freeway, Celeste began to narrate:
“June 17, 1803
After consulting with Louisa and Anaïs, I have an amendment to make to my previous hypothesis of two requirements required for the—it says‘pugmalion’instead of ‘pygmalion’ here, which I think is closer to the Greek pronunciation—for the pugmalion to remain living.There seems to be a third requirement hitherto unknown to myself.
“The case of Louisa and Anaïs: Louisa returned Anaïs to the banks of the Seine where she accidentally fell and struck her head.Additionally, Anaïs communicated to Louisa that her last desire was to eat the famous baba au rhum from La Maison Stohrer, which she enjoyed with Louisa on her third day after being reawakened.It has been approximately four years since Anaïs was reawakened, and she and Louisa still tend to their lavender farm in the Alpes-de-Haute Province.Louisa treats her gently and graciously; I have never before seen a woman so reverent of a dear friend.Overall, Louisa has an upstanding moral character and a selflessness I have never hitherto seen.
“The case of Beatriz and Duarte: On the second day after reawakening her fiancé, Beatriz returned Duarte to the square where he was beheaded.On the fourth day, Duarte was able to recall that his final wish before his execution was to see the sunset on Amoreira Beach, where Beatriz took him that night.However, upon reaching the mark of ninety-six hours, Duarte reverted back into the form of a stone duende.Although Beatriz seems to have been afflicted with the torment and madness typical of those who have failed to keep their pugmalion alive, various accounts from fellow aristocrats purported her to be a vile, haughty, and ingenuous woman with a propensity for defaming her cohorts.Additionally, she famously engaged in adultery against Duarte during their engagement some fifty years prior.
“Perhaps this third requirement concerns the moral character of the person who had awakened the pugmalion, or their treatment of that person?As I do not yet have any way to gauge or specify these requirements, I will hold off reawakening my Fluirina properly.”
“That’s great news, then!”Marin cheered, reaching across the center console to touch Blake’s knee.“It sounds like you have to be a pretty awful person to fail the third requirement.”
“It… really seems that way,” Blake agreed, hesitant to flatter his own character.
“Blake, Paul is an asshole,” Celeste interjected.“Even if his wife’s last wish was impossible to fulfill, he would have failed her anyway.His daughter fucking died and all he can think about is his wife and getting her back after she chose to end her life.And then he ended up getting his ass haunted.Shows him for denying her agency.”
“But those examples mentioned in the diary were both accidental deaths.We still don’t know how it would affect the requirements if Marin’s death was…” Blake bit his tongue, unwilling to finish the sentence.His eyes flicked to Marin and then back to Celeste.The implication was more than clear.The car was silent.
We don’t knowif Marin’s death was a suicide.
25
There were several factors in Laurel Aberley’s second death that set her apart from the examples in Eric Brilhart’s diary: the fact that her dying wish was impossible to grant and that she had committed suicide.
“I…” Marin spoke up, his voice small.“I don’t remember much about my previous life, or evenhowI died, but can tell you for certain: I didn’t kill myself.”
