His face I could not, at this distance, render. I tried. The writer’s reflex. The hunting for the word. The face did not give itself.
He did not look at me.
He covered the next fifty feet without looking at me, and then the next, and I felt the not-looking as a discipline he was performing on my behalf. He was not ignoring me. He was, in some old courteous way, declining to take me in on the wrong terms. He was saving me for the looking. He waswaiting—I felt this with the part of myself that wrote sentences in the dark—to be close enough that the looking could be done properly.
He passed the creatures.
He did not slow. He did not turn his head. He lifted his right hand—gloved, a thin black glove, the leather so fine that the seams along the knuckles were almost invisible—and as he passed the held leaping body of the youngest, he made a single soft sound.
It was not a word.
It was a note. The sort of note a wet finger makes on the rim of a wine glass. A clean held tone. The tone had, at the very edge ofit, the suggestion of a name. The name was not in any language I had ever read, and I had read a great many languages, in fragments, in the course of nine years of writing other women’s books. The name was a name spoken underwater. The name went past me at the speed of his stride.
The note carried.
The creatures flickered.
They did it the way a candle flickers in a draft—a small unhappy guttering, a thinning of the body of the flame, a moment in which the flame is still there and is also already on its way out. The leaping smallest, suspended six feet off the silver with its tongue uncoiled,thinned. I could see, as it thinned, the cinder of the held sky through the place its shoulder had been. The other five thinned with it. They went translucent for a long courteous half-second and then they were gone, and the silver where they had stood was bare, and the silver under the place the youngest had been hanging was bare too, and the long wet dark line its tongue had been dragging across the air came down onto the floor and hung there a moment, dark on the silver, and then thinned, and then was gone.
The held silence resumed its breath.
The cinder above me—which had been frozen mid-shift, the lavender stopped on its way to bronze—let go of itself. The colors finished. The bronze arrived. The plain went on with the small slow pulse it had been doing under my feet before I had been able to feel it pulsing.
He turned to me.
He did it slowly. He looked.
I knew the look from the inside out. The look was not desire, although it had desire in it. It was not appraisal, although it had appraisal in it. It was the look of having found, after a long quiet patience, the thing one had been searching for. It was a look thatknew, exactly, where the load of the sentence was sitting. It was a look that knew which word was carrying it.
His eyes were the color of mirrors.
Not metaphorically. Pure mercury. Polished. I saw, in them, my own face looking back at me looking at him, and I saw my own face — the one I had not been able to look at over a basin in a hotel ladies’ room without shame, the one I had slid past in the dark glass of McNally Jackson on Prince Street —clearly. Bare. Hair down. Hazel. Tired. Wanting. He held my gaze, and he did not let me look away, and he did not, in the holding, make me feel held against my will. He made me feel held. The way a sentence holds a word at its load-bearing point. The way a hand holds the shape of a thing it has been waiting to hold.
“Rachel,” he said, in a voice that was pure desire. “I have been expecting you.”
“Where am I?”
“Sweetheart,” he said, softly. “You’re in hell.”
Hell?
I felt it then.
It came at the inside of my left wrist first.
A thread of cold. Not unpleasant. The cold of clean water on a hot wrist after a long walk. It traced, in a thin line, the small soft hollow where the radial artery came up under the skin, and then, a fraction of an inch above the heel of my palm, it went still. It became, as I watched, opalescent. The color of the inside of an oyster shell. The color of the shimmer along the line of his cheekbone. It held there, in a small bracelet of itself, and then — without anyone having decided to draw them—sigils began to sketch themselves along it.
They were not in any language I had ever read.
The sigils sketched themselves slowly. They drew themselves in the order a hand draws a thing it has drawn many times before and is, now, drawing for somebody specific.
My jaw unclenched.
That was the part I felt last. It was the part that had been clenched the longest. There was a small permanent ridge of scar tissue on the inside of my left cheek where I had bitten the same molar for a decade, and the molar let go of the cheek now, and the masseter on the left side of my face, which had been a small private tight knot of itself since I was nineteen, eased.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re just yourself,” he replied. He held out a hand to me. “Take it.”
