“After what’s happened to me, I don’t want to travel yet. I want to stay and finish out the residency if possible.”
“Of course,” he said, obviously stunned. “Anything you need.”
“I saw something out in the woods. A temple. I know that sounds crazy, but I saw it, I swear. Why is there a temple out in the woods?”
The room fell uncomfortably silent.
“Oh, the folly,” said Dorian suddenly, and the atmospheric tension eased.
“Folly?” I asked. The term was familiar, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.
“Sure. You must have heard of follies before. The Conolly Folly, Needle’s Eye. They’re ornamental architectural elements added to grounds purely for fun. They were all the rage at one point. And in Ireland they’re strewn all over. Right, Finn?”
Finn looked startled but nodded. “Yeah. Famine follies, they’re called. They were built by the poor during the Great Famine because no one believed in handouts back then. So they paid the poor to build useless structures, miniature castles without proper interiors, towers in the middle of swamps, things like that.”
“That enormous thing out in the woods is a folly?”
Finn nodded, and I decided to drop it. There was no way I was getting the truth out of them anyway. I sat in silence for the rest of the evening, observing the others as they came up with various plans to try to find my assailant. It was odd, trying to track their thought processes. At first I’d been unsure whether Guillaume was somehow in league with them, but seeing the genuine disquiet in their eyes convinced me he was an outsider. However, it didn’t convince me that they were wholly unaware of his motive. They didn’t know him, but they didn’t seem especially surprised by the fact of him.
Plans to search the grounds were made, and Dorian pretended to call the police. I was under no delusion that this was the case (shocker—there was a problem with the phones), but it was a nice bit of theater. After a while, I told them I needed to rest, and the group disbanded.
That night I tried to sleep, but tossed and turned, uncomfortable in every position. Whatever the others might believe, I could barely sense the part of me that Isabelle occupied. I knew that I was her, but I didn’t feel like it. It was true that there was an unfamiliar strength lurking somewhere deep inside me, influencing me certainly, but it wasn’t as if I was suddenly a different person. It didn’t take away the sense of self that I knew. But was that going to change now? Sometime soon would I become a person I didn’t know, or would the process be barelyperceptible, Isabelle gradually eclipsing Robin until one day I would simply be gone?
As I lay there, tears swelling in my eyes, I felt a crushing grief for the life I’d never known, for the me that never was, and repeatedly, thoughts of Charles floated to the surface, bringing with them surges of emotion so strong, I could barely breathe. It was as if my heart was imprisoned in a belt of barbed wire and someone had just cinched it tighter. There I was again, standing in the snow, the anger and humiliation so cutting I’d needed to lash out. I’d pushed him. I remember that. Only none of that had ever happened. So why was the heartache so heavy I felt like it might smother me? I missed him terribly. I’d never stopped missing him. Only the world in which I was now missing him was a hell of a lot scarier.
Stifling a howl of frustration, I sat up and turned on the light. When I’d first moved into the cabana, I’d seen some booze somewhere in the kitchen—nothing that had seemed especially appetizing at the time, but right now anything would do. I began searching through cupboards until I found what I needed. Back behind the blender was a bottle of expensive-looking cognac. I wasn’t even sure what cognac was, but it would suffice.
It tasted like rotten peaches, and I suspected it had turned, but took another swig anyway. The alcohol slipped through my system, and my nerve endings began to light up. I was feeling something other than loss now, wasn’t I? Granted, it was a burning sensation, but at least it was different.
I took another swig, wincing at the flavor, and searched every crevice inside my soul for the memories I knew had to be there, but it was as if some kind of physical barrier was blocking anything from rising to the surface. Something, some path to memory, was blocked on purpose, wasn’t it? Whatever it wasthat lingered inaccessible inside of me, it must be so dark and deep, so sullied, that it was somehow safer not to remember it just yet.
I needed to distract myself, so, opening the drawer beside my bed, I retrieved the divination cards. They had been bothering me. I understood how to use the widows’ keys (if not why exactly), but I wasn’t sure what the cards had to do with anything. I shuffled through them, trying to understand what they were. Similar to the tarot, except they lacked a major arcana, they were composed of five suits: angels, demons, peasants, flora, and beasts. As I sipped the probably poison cognac, I sorted the cards, organizing them into suits.
“Oh…” I whispered, suddenly seeing.
Jumping up, I pulled the coffee table away from the couch and pushed the armchair back to make room on the floor. I got down on my hands and knees. Shaking with excitement, methodically, I placed each card as if assembling an enormous jigsaw puzzle. Now I understood. When arranged in ascending order, each suit revealed a narrative. My heart racing, I began to see that if I arranged the cards correctly, they told one huge, overarching story.
It began with a series of images showing ordinary peasants living typical agrarian lives. That was followed by cards that showed black rain falling and plants growing. The next set showed smokelike demons rising up from the soil and the villagers dying off in horrific ways. Next came the monsters—hideous beasts, subterranean nightmares, and a malevolent horned god. The end of the series showed angels coming forth to rescue the survivors and helping them to flee across the sea to a new, safe land. And finally—and here it was hard to tell—the last two cards seemed to indicate a peasant planting a yellow flower inthe soil of the new earth, and finally, the return of the monsters. It was some sort of a cycle.
Stepping back, I looked over the entire sequence, and suddenly I saw. My mind flashed to Pliny the Elder, to what he’d written about the black rains: how in antiquity, they’d brought forth the silphium, that panacea that I now knew grew plentifully here at Hildegard. I looked at the bloodshed depicted in the cards, at the images of people being torn limb from limb, at the burning skies, the fallow fields, and I had a depth of knowledge so strong I knew it could only have come from Isabelle. These cards, whatever they were, they weren’t just used for divination or carnival fortune-telling.
This wasn’t a game of any kind.
This was a warning.
4.2SECRET SIGNS: THE HIDDEN REALITIES OF EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE
The truth needs the trick, the fact the fantasy. It is almost as if the left brain will not let the right brain speak (which it can’t anyway, since language is generally a left-brain function), so the right brain turns to image and story to say what it has to say (without saying it).
—JEFFREYJ.KRIPAL,PHD
The next day I found myself thinking about my bluebird. That longing had been with me since the start, emerging in dreams and lingering just outside of view. In my dreams, Charles had told me I needed to find my bluebird, so it couldn’t be him, but it was related to him somehow; I could feel it.
I wasn’t ready to see the others just yet, and I was supposed to be looking for Charles, so I decided to do just that. Now that I knew he was here, I needed to reconsider all those times I’d had a sense that someone was watching me, in case it might have been Charles. I dressed and set out through the crispness of the early-morning fog for a walk out into the woods. The woods—always the woods, as if there was something specific out therethat I sought. And perhaps there was. It was possible that there were dangers in the woods, but at this point, ignorance seemed to pose the biggest threat to me. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I did deviate from the set paths, and soon I found myself on an unmarked trail.
The morning was pretty glorious in a brisk, misty way, and for a short while I was able to lose myself in the meditative rhythm of my stride. If pressed, I wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact moment when I realized something was walking beside me, just on the other side of the trees. Instead, it was more a growing awareness of a feeling that I wasn’t alone. I was walking along a woodsy path that cut through a grove of cedars, and I could hear it: footfalls, crunching of leaves, the stray snap of a twig. I stopped, and the movement stopped in tandem. When I started up again, it started up as well, and when I picked up speed, so did the mysterious presence.
I had the distinct feeling that someone or something was pacing alongside me in the woods, perhaps trying to keep me from stumbling onto something I wasn’t supposed to see. Of course its intentions could be worse, much worse. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to find out what that worst-case scenario might entail. Turning, I started back the way I’d come, and the movement shifted with me. My breath was shaking and raspy now, and a swelling terror in my belly was making itself known. I needed to get the hell out of there, and fast.
