Black Swan Rising (34 page)

“Hi, I’m Robert Osborne and our movie tonight is”—the screen flickered for half a second and Robert Osborne’s broad, friendly face froze. His hooded eyes (
You can tell he’s spent his life in dark movie theaters,
Jay always said) seemed to darken—“our movie for tonight is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s
The Red Shoes
with the incomparable Moira Shearer as the doomed ballerina, Victoria Page, and the devastatingly charming Anton Walbrook as the diabolical impresario Boris Lermontov.”

I leaned closer to the set. Something was wrong with the sound quality. Robert Osborne’s words didn’t quite match the movements of his mouth. Or maybe I was just tired. I pulled
an old afghan throw over my knees and slid down in the couch, lulled by Robert Osborne’s mellifluous voice as he explained that the movie’s producers had wanted to create a manifesto for the power of art. He described with relish how the
diabolical
(he used the word several times) Lermontov drove Vicky Page to suicide.

Funny, I thought, Robert Osborne didn’t usually give out spoilers like that. But it was okay since I had seen the film before. I hadn’t remembered, though, how hallucinatory and vivid were the dream sequences in which Vicky Page reenacted the story of the girl who puts on a pair of red shoes crafted by a mysterious shoemaker and then dances herself to death. It was downright psychedelic . . . and Freudian. The face of the shoemaker became the face of her lover and then the face of Lermontov. I hadn’t noticed before how much Lermontov looked like John Dee . . . but of course I hadn’t met John Dee when I first saw the movie.

I could see how the movie must have affected Becky. In her own way, Becky was as driven to succeed as the ballerina Vicky Page. She even looked like Moira Shearer with her abundant red curls. And it suddenly struck me that the actor who played the composer who falls in love with Vicky looked a lot like Jay.

I must have fallen asleep for a bit because the next thing I knew I was sitting up, wineglass in hand, watching the penultimate scene in which Lermontov tells Vicky she must choose between the life of a great dancer and the mundane life of a housewife. I dimly remembered arguing with Becky about this scene when we first saw the film.

“Why does Vicky have to choose?” I’d asked.

“Because she does!” Becky had answered. “No one gets to have it both ways.”

Now I saw Lermontov’s—and Becky’s—point. Most of the great artists were no good at love—unless they had relationships with people who subjugated their own desires and goals to theirs. People who tried to lead ordinary lives—like Zach and Jay and me—failed in their art. In truth, we failed at everything. I’d been so busy running around trying to save the world that I’d ignored the signs that my best friend was in trouble. Now she was in the hospital along with my father. How many of the people I loved would have to suffer because of my carelessness? I really wasn’t any good at art
or
life, I thought as I watched Vicky Page run from the theater and throw herself in front of the Paris-bound train. I could see why she did it; it was just too hard to choose. At least now she could take off those red shoes and rest.

I picked up the remote to turn off the set, but Robert Osborne came back on. He was sitting in his red chair in front of a crackling fire with a glass of red wine in his hand.

“
The Red Shoes
was a failure when it was released in 1948,” he said. “Many moviegoers couldn’t stomach the film’s final message—that it’s better to die for art than to live for nothing. But we know what the right choice is, don’t we?” Robert Osborne smiled—even the woman in the portrait above the fireplace seemed to smile—and I nodded in agreement. I was sitting on the edge of the couch now, so close to the TV set that I could see the amber glint in Robert Osborne’s eyes. He was looking right at me, waiting for me to do the right thing. It
was
the right thing. After all, Robert Osborne knew
everything.
It occurred to me that Robert Osborne had been sent to me as a spirit guide. This was an unfamiliar, and vaguely uncomfortable, sensation, but totally compelling. I needed to follow Robert Osborne.

I got up and walked into the bathroom. The razor that Becky had used was still on the rim of the sink. As I picked it up, I met my eyes in the mirror. My pupils had swollen to cover all of my irises, making my eyes look black and empty, a cold emptiness that rose up inside me like water filling up a dark well. I would drown in that emptiness if I didn’t do something soon.

I looked down and saw that my left hand was holding the razor blade over my right wrist.
Funny,
I thought, as I dragged the blade tentatively across my skin,
I’m right-handed.
A faint crimson line opened up in my skin.
Letting out the dark
. I could hear the surge of my blood, hammering against my skin as if eager to get out. But the sound came from the bathtub. It was the shower curtain rings rattling against the rod. Jay had said something about the shower curtain . . . the sound of the curtain moving in the breeze had woken him up . . . only the window wasn’t open now. I had closed it when I first came into the bathroom this morning. I stared at the curtain, the hand that held the razor blade arrested above my wrist, puzzled. Later I would wonder why it was this discrepancy that got to me—not the appearance of a bottle of wine called Lost Time or the new décor on the TCM set or the oddity of Robert Osborne suggesting suicide—but a shower curtain moving in a windless room. I’m still not sure why, but something in its
wrongness
penetrated the black fog that had swamped my brain.

I put the razor blade down on the edge of the sink, stepped over to the tub, and looked down. There, sprawled on the bottom of the tub was a perfect miniature version of Vicky Page in the last scene of
The Red Shoes
—from wild red hair to tattered, stained tutu and red shoes. I bent down to look closer
and recognized Lol. She lay limply on the bottom of the porcelain tub, one tiny hand jerking the edge of the shower curtain. When she saw me she opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Then she let go of the shower curtain and pointed at her feet.

What I had thought were red shoes were actually Lol’s bare feet stained red with blood.

The smaller fey can’t stand the touch of iron.
I recalled what Oberon had said in the park when he scattered the remains of the sylphs. And blood was full of iron.

I quickly scooped her up and carried her to the sink. I rinsed her feet in cold water, then filled the sink with water so she could soak her feet in it. While she sat on the edge of the sink, I found a Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet and put it on over my scratched wrist. When I looked back down into the basin, I saw images forming in the water, just as I had in the park with Melusine. So she
had
left me with one skill, only instead of seeing the present, I saw the past in the water: Lol finding Becky in the bathroom and trying to stanch the blood, but when the blood had got on her feet, she had fallen in the tub. She’d rattled the shower curtain to alert Jay.

“Thank you,” I said. “You saved Becky—and me.” She squawked and splashed water in my face. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Lol folded her arms over her chest and huffed. Then she flexed her wings and flew into the living room and hovered above the TV set. The image of Robert Osborne was still frozen on the screen, only it wasn’t Robert Osborne. It was John Dee.

“He tried to make Becky kill herself and then he did the same thing to me.”

Lol fluttered in the air and pointed at something on the screen.

“Yes,” I said. “I see. It’s John Dee’s lair. The paintings and the rugs are the same as the ones I saw in the cavern under the river. I’ll tell Oberon—damn!” I looked at the time on the cable box. It was 1:33. I had less than half an hour to make it down to City Hall. “I have to go meet the fire elemental,” I told Lol, and then, remembering that she was a fire fey, added, “Do you want to come with me?”

Lol’s tawny skin turned powder white. She shook her head, for once rendered mute. She had dive-bombed a vampire and risked the contagion of poisonous blood. I wondered what could possibly scare her so badly.

Riding the subway to City Hall, I couldn’t quite shake the dirty feel of Dee’s presence in my brain. If the shadowmen’s breaking into my home felt like a violation, this felt like mind rape. The worst part was wondering if he was still inside me, subtly influencing my thoughts in ways I couldn’t imagine. When I looked at my fellow passengers on the subway, I sensed fatigue and despair, but was I projecting my own bad mood on them? Were the murky auras I saw hallucinations? Were the voices I’d heard since my flight with Ariel my own demons speaking to me? Was I imagining everything?

Perhaps you’re simply losing your mind,
a voice that sounded somewhere between John Dee’s and Robert Osborne’s said inside my head. I’d taken each spectacular manifestation I’d experienced as proof that what was happening was real, but what if it was all a hallucination? How could I possibly know?

I got off at Park Place. As I was leaving the subway station, I passed several mosaic eyes embedded in the walls. I’d seen them before, but today I glanced at them nervously, as if they
were following my progress. I couldn’t quite shake that feeling of being watched as I walked east on Park Place. Even seeing Oberon waiting for me—in a beige sweatshirt and baseball cap—at the security checkpoint on Broadway did nothing to reassure me of my sanity. He could simply be part of the whole elaborate hallucination. I greeted him politely, though, just in case.

“I’m sorry about your friend Becky,” he said. “I knew Dee might try to get to you through one of your loved ones, but I thought it would be your father, whom I’m watching much of the time at the hospital, or Jay, whom I told Lol to watch.”

“Becky would have died if not for Lol.” I told him how I’d found Lol in the bathtub with her feet soaked in blood. I didn’t tell him, though, about my own close call with the razor blade; my long sleeves covered the Band-Aid. I saw him studying me closely so I quickly went on to give a full report of everything that had happened yesterday with Melusine. A shadow of pain crossed his face when I told him about Melusine melting into the rock, and he had no idea what could be done to bring her back from her current state inside the bottle. The only question he asked me was about John Dee’s lair.

“Were there any windows?”

“Windows? Why would there be windows? We were under the East River.”

Oberon shook his head. “That was a projection of his real location into a space where he could lure you and Melusine and then flush you out into the river. He knew the salt water would destroy Melusine.”

“If you knew all that, why didn’t you stop her?” I asked, my voice rising with anger now. A group of women—also wearing
beige sweatshirts and caps—glanced in our direction as they walked through the metal detectors, but no one paid much attention to us.

Oberon only laughed at my outrage. “Stop an elemental? I’d as soon try to stop the tides of the ocean or the earth from turning. Melusine knew what she was doing. If there was anything useful you learned from that glimpse you had of Dee’s lair, she’d want you to use it. If there were windows you might have seen something from them that indicated where he really was.”

I shook my head. “The walls were covered with paintings,” I said. “If there were any windows, they were covered.”

“Did you notice what the walls were made of?”

“Some kind of gold paneling. It was a complete waste of time—and a waste of Melusine.”

Oberon tilted his head and regarded me through his slanty green eyes. “I doubt that. Something will come to you. But for now, we have something else to do.” He handed me a sweatshirt and baseball cap. “Here, put these on.”

I noticed now that both the sweatshirt and the cap bore the logo of the Queens Public Libraries. “Are these our cover?”

“I don’t need cover,” he replied, “but I thought it would be nice to show our support. A lot of the fey work in the public libraries—or use their resources. It would be terrible to see them closed.”

We told the guard that we were joining the protest on the steps and passed through a metal detector into the courtyard. I hadn’t been at City Hall since a third-grade trip and had forgotten what a pretty building it was. The limestone façade glowed in the midafternoon light. But as we approached the building, I looked up and saw that though the statue of Justice on top of the clock tower still gleamed, the sky was darkening
to the east. The statue on top of the Municipal Building to the east was already obscured by fog.

As we walked past the protesters on the stairs—carrying banners that read
SLOW ECONOMY = BUSY LIBRARIES AND DON’T LET LIBRARIES GO DARK
—Oberon started chanting, “Save our libraries! Save our libraries.” The rest of the protesters took up the chant immediately, but we kept going, through the arched doorway, past the bronze statue of George Washington and the marble rotunda, but then instead of taking the sweeping, cantilevered stairway up, Oberon led me to a service elevator that went down to a subbasement. The elevator door opened up onto a dimly lit hallway. We turned right and walked down to the end of the corridor, where there was a door with a frosted-glass window stenciled with gold letters that read
THE OFFICE OF THE EXCHEQUER OF THE ASSESSOR
. A small wooden sign, hanging from a hook above the window, read
ONE AT A TIME PLEASE
, and another wooden sign held up by an elaborate cast-iron stand read
LINE FORMS HERE
. A dozen or so people stood waiting in an orderly line, each one clutching a yellowish sheet of paper in his or her hands. Oberon went to the head of the line and reached for the doorknob.