Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [132]
So then why was the third dream so damnably insistent? Not a physical hidden room, not the general opening up of my past—what? What was it I hadn't yet explored, what did I still shy away from confronting?
(Their deaths) my mind whispered to me, but before the phrase was complete I was already on my feet and moving to the kettle, reaching for the tin of coffee, wondering even if Flo had left one of her cigarettes downstairs because although I didn't normally smoke I found myself craving one, the nicotine and the calming ritual of lighting and puffing.
While the coffee was brewing I went to my bedroom and put on some warmer clothes, then took a cup outside where I could sit on the terrace and watch the stars fade, but as soon as I had sat on the low stone wall and drawn my feet up the whisper came again.
(Their deaths.)
I jumped down from the wall, took a swallow of the scalding brew, and set the cup down again, where it clattered so badly it nearly leapt from its saucer. The air of the terrace was suddenly cold, and I hugged my coat around me and walked to the end of the stones and back again, pausing again to take another drink from the cup that persisted in shaking between my hands. I paced to the end of the terrace and back again until I began to feel like some lion in its cage, then abandoned the coffee and the terrace and set out blindly across the wet grass.
(They died) and Yes, damn it, they died, and the immediate cause of their deaths was my irritable adolescent self tormenting my brother and forcing my father to take his eyes off the road. Only he shouldn't have done so, because he was an experienced driver and almost never did that, he'd driven across the country and never got into trouble, not once, and it was a terrible road but he knew it was a terrible road and he was well used to it.
But other people who knew the road went off it as well, as evidenced by the thin insurance man clambering around on the rocks in precisely that spot.
Odd, I thought idly, to happen across the investigation of a motor accident when it was a motor accident that had brought me to that place. And then I heard the voice begin to speak in my ear again and I made a violent turn to shake it off, dimly aware that the ground beneath my feet was sloping down.
(They—)
All right—Yes, they died! Mother, Father, Levi, they all died, but then again people did, all the time. Dr Ginzberg had died, and Mah and Micah, all the time people died. Although actually, no, come to think of it, it wasn't all the time, it was all at the same time that they'd died.
An odd coincidence, I conceded; and with that word, I was suddenly aware that I was beginning to have a bad feeling about this.
My feet were at the edge of the dock, and I stepped onto the worn boards, listening to the stretch and creak of the wood giving under my weight. At the end, I sat down with my boots dangling off the end. The water was still and watchful beneath the marginally lighter sky.
Three dreams. One to drag me by the scruff of my neck up to the events of April 1906, when books flew, objects smashed, the sky burned. The second to bring me face-to-face with an ambivalent figure who had come into the tent in the days following the fire: a man with no features, who simultaneously terrified and reassured me, come looking for my father. And a third to repeat, over and over, the message that I needed only to open the door to find the hidden rooms, that I knew they were there, and had only to stretch out my hand for the latch.
And yes, they died, my family, servants, friend. But my family died eight years after the city burned and half a day's journey south of the place where the faceless man had come into the tent. They died in a snatched moment of leisure before the end of an era, days before my father would go into uniform and my mother would travel east. It might well have been our very last time on that road.
More irony than coincidence, that one.
I shivered in the cold; the air was so still, the lake seemed to be