Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [38]
“Can you do that?”
Alli shook her head.
Milla Tamirova sat in the chair, her hands lying along the arms. “Touch my hand, child. Just my hand.”
Alli hesitated.
“Please.”
Taking a deep breath, Alli placed her hand over Milla Tamirova’s. She began to have trouble breathing.
“I’m going to take my hand away,” the older woman said. “Do you understand?”
Alli, her eyes wide with terror, nodded.
Slowly and gently Milla Tamirova slid her hand out from under Alli’s. For a moment, Alli’s hand remained hovering above the gleaming wood and leather. Then, closing her eyes, shuddering with fear, she let her hand drop. With the touch of the cool wood came a terrifying vision of Morgan Herr’s repulsively handsome face, the evil words whispered in her ear.
“Open your eyes. Now look at me.” Milla Tamirova smiled. “It’s all right, yes? You’re here with me. Everything is fine, isn’t it?”
Alli barely found the strength to nod.
“Now—” Milla Tamirova rose. “Why don’t you sit where I was sitting?”
Alli felt her gorge rising, she was gripped by a kind of panic that throbbed behind her eyes, that threatened to take over her entire being.
“It’s important for you to sit in the chair.”
“I . . . I can’t.”
Milla Tamirova engaged Alli’s eyes. “As of this moment, you’re ruled by your fear. Unless you face it, unless you conquer it, you’ll live in fear the rest of your life.”
Alli felt paralyzed, completely powerless. It was as if she had once again been stripped of conscious volition.
“And then,” the older woman continued, “whoever did this to you, whoever abused you will have won.” She smiled. “We can’t have that, child, can we?”
“It’s too much,” Alli said, breathless. “I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” Milla Tamirova surveyed Alli’s pale, sweating face. “In here, you’re in full control. You’re the one who decides whether or not to sit in the chair.”
“I want to leave.”
Milla Tamirova lifted an arm. “Leave, then.” Her smile was rueful. “No one can make you do what you don’t want to do.” Alli was in the doorway when she added,“Without knowing it, you’ve made the memory sacred, you must understand that.”
Alli looked at her without seeing, her eyes watching something that had already happened, someone who was dead now. “The memory is profane.”
“And that is precisely where religion fails us.” Milla Tamirova’s hand seemed to caress the thick arm of the vile chair. “Memory cannot distinguish between the sacred and the profane, because it annihilates time. What was profane in the past memory makes sacred in the present.” The fingers—long, stark, bloodred at their ends—seemed, like memory itself, to have a life of their own. “This is the only possible explanation for why you hold on to your fear, why you cannot let it go.”
“Control,” Alli whispered. “That’s what I want.”
“It’s what we all want, child.” She paused for a moment, then walked toward Alli.
At that precise moment, as if they were two cars heading toward one another, Alli passed by her so closely she could smell Milla Tamirova’s pleasant, earthy scent.
Alli lowered herself into the chair, her arms placed where the older woman’s had been moments before. Her heart beat so hard it was almost painful, and she felt as if she were on fire, as if at any moment she would spontaneously combust. But gradually she became aware that what she felt was a seething energy that coincided or perhaps was the aftermath of the cresting of her terror. She felt the chair beneath her buttocks and thighs, her elbows and wrists. She looked at the restraints and they were just pieces of leather and metal, they weren’t talismans of voodoo or black magic that forced her back into that week of despair and fear. At least for the time being, that memory became manageable instead of overwhelming. Still, she couldn’t look at it for long without feeling blinded or perhaps plunged into a darkness beyond all comprehension.
She got up from the chair because