The Poison Artist Read online

  “God, yes. I want it.”

  “Then come inside,” she said. She took his arm again and led him the last few steps into her home.

  “There’s a little step at the threshold. But we’re almost there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stand here.”

  He stood, swaying in the darkness behind the blindfold.

  Behind him, the door closed and the locks turned. It was as cold in here as it had been outside, but the wind was gone. He heard her walk around him, deeper into the room. It must have been a big space. Her footfalls tracked thirty, forty feet away from him, but there were no barriers that separated them. No doors opening and closing, no partition walls to block the sound of her heels. She struck a match against the rough side of a box. A moment later he could smell the smoke. Otherwise, the room smelled of clean linens, and perfume. Cut flowers and polished wood. A clock was ticking from somewhere off to the left. A longcase clock, maybe. He could hear its pendulum swinging.

  “All right, Caleb,” she said. “Take off the blindfold. I want you to see me.”

  Nineteen

  THREE CANDLES LIT the space around her bed. Otherwise, there was no light. Windows ran down each side of the long room, but they had been boarded up from the inside. Roughly sawn, mismatched pieces of lumber were nailed in place across the casings. As for the candles, two were in thin glass globes that sat on a narrow table next to the bed. The third was inside an iron birdcage on a stand near the foot of the bed, and this candle was thick enough, and had burned long enough, that its flame flickered out of sight, setting the waxen cylinder aglow. It cast the shadows of the cage’s bars throughout the room. Into the exposed rafters and across the bed’s white duvet cover.

  Emmeline stood next to the caged candle, at the foot of the bed.

  She’d taken off her cloak, had draped it over the winding, wrought-iron vines of the bed frame. She stood with her arms crossed beneath her breasts and her head down, so that her dark hair partially hid her face.

  She looked up at him, used one hand to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.

  She wore a diaphanous black dress that was tied in place with a long length of crimson ribbon, like a ballerina’s pointe shoe. She leaned her head to the side and closed her eyes as she undid the bow on her right shoulder, slowly unwinding the ribbon from the bodice of the dress and from around her waist until it was free. She let the ribbon fall to the floor. Without it, the dress slipped down the length of her body, spreading into a silken pool at her feet like a shadow. She stepped out of it, toward him, her heels tapping lightly on the old wooden floor. Her corset was black, but was so thin and sheer that even by the uncertain candlelight he could see the white curve of her breasts, the dark circles of her areolae.

  “Caleb?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m cold.”

  For the second time this evening, he thought about dreams, about their subtly embedded signals, the unconsciously posted signs that labeled chimeras for what they were. As he walked to her, the signposts were everywhere. The candlelight was too dark. The air was so viscous, he had to swim through it to reach her. The floorboards expanded as he crossed them, the shadows hiding the true distance between them. Time was stopping. But this was no dream. He closed the gap—five feet, three feet. He reached the ambit of her arms, and then she was pulling him in, as if taking him from deep water. He swept his hands down the curve of her hips, tracing their shape, his thumbs slipping between her skin and her garter straps. As she kissed him, he found the front clips that released the tops of her stockings, and he let them both go at once. He lifted her, making a seat for her with his interlaced fingers. Her legs wrapped his waist, encircling him as he kissed the tops of her breasts. He carried her to the side of the bed and put her down.

  “When I picked you up, at the hospital, I said it was a game,” she said, between kisses. “I asked you if you wanted to play a game. Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was wrong of me to say that,” she said.

  He was standing at the side of the bed, her ankles crossed at the small of his back, locking him to her. Her right arm was hooked behind his neck and she was unbuttoning his shirt with her left hand. She spoke with her lips against his neck.

  “This isn’t a game, is it?” she said.

  “No. It’s not.”

  “I want you too much,” she whispered. “If I can’t afford to lose, it’s not a game.”

  “It’s not a game,” Caleb said. “I know that.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I already did. I’ll never hurt you.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  She pulled his shirt free from the waistband of his pants and then pushed it off his shoulders, running her hands down his arms until the shirt fell on the floor behind him. He grabbed the neck of his undershirt, pulled it over his head, and dropped it. Then she was pulling his belt back until it was free of the buckle’s chape, and she let go of his neck and used both hands to unbutton his pants.

  He ran his hands into her hair and looked up a moment, needing his bearings.

  Emmeline’s home was a huge loft space, a hundred feet long and half as wide, most of it lost in shadow. It was entirely open but for a carve-out in one corner, which may have been the kitchen, and a smaller alcove opposite, which might have been a bathroom. Most of the furniture was clustered in the area around the bed. There was a big cedar armoire and a pair of sea chests. An antique-looking table was encircled by high-backed chairs. A china cabinet backed with silvery, time-corroded mirrors. Other sheet-covered shapes evaporated in the shadows beyond the candlelight. Except for the bedspread, which was soft and new, there didn’t seem to be a single thing in the room that was less than two hundred years old.

  Emmeline lightly raked her nails down his chest, trying to get his attention. He started to turn back to her, and then the clock he’d heard earlier began to chime. He spotted it on the far side of the room, behind the table. It was taller than he was, its French Comtoise–style case gorgeously curved like a cello’s body. Candlelight shone on its golden hands.

  Six o’clock.

  He turned back to Emmeline. She had unzipped his pants and was kissing a line downward from his chest. He put his hands on her shoulders and pressed her gently back onto the bedspread. Her hair painted a dark swath across its white surface. He unwound her legs from his waist, held both her ankles in one hand, and slipped the high-heeled shoes off her feet. She met his eyes and held them, and then she brought her ankle up and rested it on his left shoulder.

  She gave him a half-smile, with one corner of her mouth. She pointed at her stocking.

  He nodded and took hold of the top edge, rolling it upward from her thigh to her toes. The skin on her calf was soft and responded with goose bumps when he brushed his fingers along it. She shifted her legs so that he could roll the other stocking off.

  It came easily, silk gliding along her alabaster-smooth skin.

  “Hurry, Caleb,” she whispered. “It’s so cold.”

  “You want to get under the covers?”

  “Yes.”

  She slipped off the mattress so that she was standing on the floor. Without her heels on, the top of her head was just beneath his chin. She bent and slid off her panties and garter belt, then turned her back to Caleb.

  “Help me.”

  At first he didn’t understand, but then he saw.

  The back of her corset was held tightly together with a line of small hooks and eyelets. He unfastened them, wondering how she’d gotten them together to begin with. He dropped the corset into the pile of their clothes. She turned to him, naked now, her right hand cupping the full curve of her left breast, her left hand crossing her stomach and clutching her side as she shivered.

  “Quickly,” she said.

  She turned back the duvet, climbed beneath its down-padded bulk, and moved to the center of the bed. Caleb knelt and untied his shoes, then pulled them off as he stoo
d. He sat at the edge of the bed and slid out of his pants and socks in a single motion. Then he lifted the covers and rolled beneath them.

  They met in the middle of the bed, on their sides.

  Emmeline lifted herself to allow his arm to get under her, and then they were holding each other, no space at all between them. Her body trembled against his, whether from cold or desire, he couldn’t say.

  “Make me warm,” she said.

  She held on to him and rolled, to bring him on top of her. She didn’t need to guide him, didn’t need to tell him what to do or how to move. She lifted her knees and brought her hips up, and then all at once, as though he’d never been anywhere else, he was inside of her. The moment he entered, he realized—

  She wasn’t cold everywhere. Not at all.

  He thought of a fire—a fire inside a ring of stones, left untended through the night. At the coldest moment of dawn, its embers would still be there, buried under ashes. Waiting for the right stir. The right touch of breath and tinder to bring them alight. As he moved inside her, holding her close and working a counter-rhythm to the cadence of her hips, he focused on that: bringing the fire back. It was a slow and steady build, until her breasts and cheeks flushed pink with heat and even her feet against the backs of his knees were warm, and then, finally, she burst into flames beneath him.

  This wasn’t Spondulix, where she had to sing in a secret whisper.

  And there’d be no way to whisper this. Her fingers dug into his back, and she bit into his shoulder and cried out his name. His own release approached, became inevitable, and he tried to pull away. Tried to keep it from her. But she sensed it the moment it began to build in him, and she held him inside with her hands, with her wrapped legs.

  “Stay with me,” she gasped. “Stay in me. It’s all right to stay in me.”

  Beneath him, her hips bucked and then relaxed in time with him, and at the last, she melted into the soft down mattress. The duvet settled slowly around them, a cushion of warm air beneath it. He stayed with her until long after they were finished. What they had created, the heat between them, stayed too. When he finally moved off of her, he put one of the pillows against the iron headboard and rested his shoulders against it. She laid her head on his chest, and he put his lips into the dark halo of her hair.

  He looked across the room, past the birdcage and the ancient table, to the longcase clock on the far wall. He had to squint to read the time from here, and when he finally saw it, he sat up a little higher.

  It was a quarter after five. Which, of course, could not be.

  “What is it?” she murmured.

  “That clock. Does it run backwards?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was sleepy. “There are strange things. In here.”

  “Strange like the car. The Invicta.”

  “Like that. He collected things. Whatever he saw that was different, that he liked. The car, the clock . . . me.”

  He held her tightly, but lifted his head and looked around. The candle flames had grown taller as the wax melted around them. The circle of light stretched a little deeper into the space. He saw some of the shapes beneath the sheets and imagined what they might be. Wooden chests and suitcases, full-length mirrors on swiveling stands. He thought of something and the truth of it seemed very close. A dancing light, just out of reach.

  “He was a stage magician of some kind, wasn’t he?” Caleb said. “A performer.”

  “No,” Emmeline said. She stirred against his chest, moved her hands until she had a better grip on him. Then he felt all of her muscles relax. Her voice, when she spoke next, was perfectly calm. “But that’s almost it.”

  He looked around the room again, seeing things he hadn’t noticed on the first sweep. There was a dusty stuffed eagle perched on top of the armoire, its beak open and its tongue curled up as if caught in the midst of a scream. Cut-glass prisms and gold amulets hung on fine chains from the stems of the wineglasses in the china cabinet. A crystal cake stand on a side table close to the doorway held a single dried rose and a deck of cards.

  “A hypnotist,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “And you were his assistant,” he whispered. “When you got old enough, he made you into his helper. At the shows.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Did you see us?”

  “No. I’ve never been to anything like that.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t know how he knew. Guessing this history was almost like remembering it. Maybe it was hidden in the place—a magic trick forgotten at the bottom of a sea chest. There’d been other clues. The way Emmeline walked and held herself. Out of place and out of time. Or the fact that she could stop his heart with a word, with a turn of her dark eyes.

  “Do you remember anything, from before him?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “Think what he did.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. It was too easy to imagine the things he’d done to her, the things he’d made her do. Caleb was starting to fill in the blank spaces, to sketch in what happened beyond the circle of Emmeline’s reach while she was alone for days, limited to the length of her chain.

  He was a collector. So he’d need to hunt.

  He lifted her chin with his fingers and kissed her, and they held each other under the covers, the warmth between them unabated. She put her head on his chest again and he looked to his left, seeing another thing he’d missed in his rush to get into the bed with her. On the nightstand, behind the glass candle globes, there was a picture in a simple wooden frame. A charcoal sketch, one of the five he’d made in a fever before the fireplace in his living room. He looked at that, at the way her hand brushed along his as she taught him how to pour water into absinthe. He looked at the loveliness of her face in the soft darkness of House of Shields and remembered how it had been, meeting her.

  He ran his fingers through her hair, then down the length of her back under the covers. She stretched out against him.

  “Were you looking for me, that night, at House of Shields?”

  But she didn’t answer.

  When the rhythm of her breath on his chest stayed warm and constant, when the long hand on the clock unwound another five minutes in its journey back through time, he realized she was asleep. He sank with her into the pillows, let her carry him to wherever she was.

  He wasn’t sure which of them woke first, or what woke them. He didn’t know how it had started this time, this second time. But she was on top of him, and the covers had fallen to her hips, and the two smaller candles on the nightstand had gone out recently enough that their dying smoke was still in the air. The candle inside the birdcage was still guttering and flickering, casting barred shadows, and Emmeline rode him slowly, the tip of her finger between his teeth.

  She knew where they were going, knew the way well, and she brought him there gently. Leading him and resting, and leading again, so that when they arrived, they arrived together. Then they were holding each other again, cupped together on their sides, her breast filling his hand as he held himself against her back.

  “Sleep, Caleb,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  But the weight of sleep was too much. He couldn’t answer her. So he just held her, and the second time, he was the one who carried her through the night’s door.

  It was her absence from the bed that woke him. The space she’d occupied was still warm, but she wasn’t in it. He felt out to each edge of the mattress and found only emptiness. He sat up in the darkness and let the cover fall into his lap. The last candle had gone out. He looked at his watch; it was five in the morning.

  Christmas morning.

  On the far side of the room, he heard a match strike. He turned and saw Emmeline’s nude profile, the flame cupped behind her hand. She knelt and lit a candle, then another. She shook out the match and took the candles in their glass holders, turning to him.

  “You’re awake.”

  “And now I’m worr
ied,” he said.

  “About?”

  “That it’s time to go.”

  “But then, tomorrow, it’ll be time to come back. If you want to.”

  “I do.”

  She placed the candles on the table and then walked to the armoire. She was lovely to watch, lit from behind by the two small flames as she stood in front of the open shadow of the armoire. She leaned up on her tiptoes and reached inside, then stepped back holding a long, fur-trimmed coat. She put it on, nothing beneath it.

  “It’ll still be dark when I get back,” she said. “So this is all I need. You should get dressed, though.”

  He nodded and swung his legs out from the warmth of the covers, then knelt by the bed and gathered his clothes.

  “You have a bathroom?”

  She pointed to the small alcove at the end of the room.

  “Down there. There’s running water, but it’s cold.”

  “Okay.”

  He started toward the bathroom, but she caught up to him. She was holding one of the candles.

  “You’ll need this.”

  “Thanks.”

  She hadn’t been exaggerating about the water. What came out of the tap was like liquid ice. He filled the sink basin with it and used a washcloth to bathe himself while shifting from foot to foot, trying to keep warm. The candle threw a wavering circle of light on the stone countertop, illuminating a scatter of Emmeline’s things. He saw a bone-handled brush and a makeup compact with mother-of-pearl inlays on its lid.

  At the back of the counter, there was a shelf of glassware. He saw a glass retort with its bulbous base and downward-angled condensing neck, the kind of thing an alchemist or a perfumer might use over a low flame to distill something to its essence. Next to it were crystal perfume vials filled with golden liquid.

  He set down the washcloth and picked up one of the vials.

  It was heavy and cold in his hand. He withdrew its elongated stopper and raised the opening to his nose.

  It wasn’t perfume.

  Twenty