The Green Man (25 page)

She looked out the window of the car at the empty lot where the house that neighbored the Linton house had stood. With it gone, she could see the canopy of trees in the ravine that ran behind it. She was convinced it was the same ravine, snaking its way through Caledon, edging ever closer to the Linton house through the years, until finally it threatened to draw it down.

Emily opened the car door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going in there.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Absolutely.” And she stepped out of the car.

“Then I’m coming with you.”

Emily leaned in through the window. “No, you’re not, young lady. You’re going to wait right here. This is something I have to do alone.”

Despite the damage, the house was as remote and forbidding as ever. The front door had been scarred by ax blows. The heavy brass knocker dangled by a screw. Yellow police tape had been strung across the doorway like a web. Emily gave the door a push, and it edged open. She stooped under the tape and stepped inside.

The hall walls were blackened from the blaze. The acrid smell of charred wood and damp cinders hung in
the air. But the floor seemed sound and the walls solid. She sensed no danger.

She stopped partway down the hall and pushed open the door on the left, into the large round room with the fireplace set against the far wall. The room was in ruins, the walls charred and broken, the lathing gaping through like bone. But she knew that, if she simply imagined hard enough, she could fill it in an instant with a makeshift stage, a group of excited children, the flickering glow of gas jets, and a magician with a deep melodious voice and eyes that burned into one’s very soul.

Many years ago, when Lawrence Linton had lived in the house, another fire had occurred in this very room. Isaac Steiner had unearthed the story while looking into the Linton family’s history. He had been by to visit them since the night of the accident and had shown them articles and photos from the newspapers of the time.

Apart from his work as an architect, Lawrence Linton had a fascination for the magical arts and took pride in being something of an amateur magician himself. Over time, he amassed a valuable collection of books on the subject.

He happened to meet a traveling magician who was passing through Caledon. In celebration of his niece’s twelfth birthday, Linton arranged for the magician to give a special show to a group of children at the Linton house on the night of August 8.

During the show, something went terribly wrong. One of the illusions called for a brazier of burning coals. Somehow, it was overturned, and some of the stage trappings caught fire. Within minutes, the fire was out of control. In the general panic that followed, one child was left behind.

Linton never forgave himself. After that night, he was a changed man, plagued with guilt for the part he believed he had played in the tragedy. As time went by, he grew increasingly reclusive. He developed a peculiar obsession, which he committed to the pages of his private journal. He became convinced that the magician was more than mortal, and that the fire had been no accident. He confided to the journal that during the height of the blaze, when he ran back into the house in an attempt to rescue the child, he had seen the magician standing in the midst of the flames unharmed. After the fire, no trace of him was found, apart from a charred jacket draped over what seemed to be the blackened remains of a large rosebush.

Much of the latter part of Linton’s journal was given over to his vain attempts to track down a traveling magician by name of Professor Mephisto. The name echoed eerily through the empty house now as Emily turned from the room and continued along the hall. She sensed that the magician was somehow still here, as present as the smell of smoke and cinders in the air.

She thought of O sitting in the car and of their conversation the night before. “If Lenora Linton died a year ago, who was it that called the shop, that showed us the collection, that was there with you on the night of the fire?”

“It was the magician. He is a master of illusion. He took that shape to serve his end.”

And everything they had seen in the house had been an elaborate illusion, an intricate web spun by the spider to ensnare the fly. He had come for her this time, and had it not been for O, he would have succeeded.

She felt a chill run through her. For a moment, the house seemed to flicker like a flame. It slept now, but she felt the life pulsing through it still and knew it could transform in an instant. Her every instinct told her to flee the place – now – but she forced her feet to keep moving along the hall.

She paused at the foot of the winding stair, where O had seen her collapse on the night of the fire. The carved dragon coiled atop the newel post slept beneath a shroud of soot, unharmed. She had the feeling that the whole house might have burned down and it would still have survived. Sifting through the charred refuse on the floor with the toe of her shoe, she searched for some evidence of the books she had been carrying down the stairs that night. Something to prove she was not simply mad, as most everyone seemed inclined to believe.

But any books that might have spilled to the foot of the stairs had been consumed by the fire. She stood looking into the shadows of the upper floor, knowing she had to go up there, but wishing she were anywhere else in the world but here. The stairs had been badly damaged in the blaze, but when she put her weight on the charred boards, they seemed sound. She kept close to the side and started up.

Though the fire had not reached the second floor, the pervasive smell of smoke and cinders hung in the air. She moved cautiously along the hall, edging open one door after another, apprehension knotting her stomach into a tight ball.

Each room presented the same sad face. Desolation – the floors thick with dust, the walls bare, a few abandoned sticks of furniture scattered about. Sad remnants of the lives once lived here. There were signs of intruders as well – a ragged mattress in the corner of a room, empty beer and wine bottles, graffiti scrawled on the walls. All of it irrefutable proof that the place had sat empty for some time.

It should perhaps have given her some comfort, but it didn’t. Instead, it gave her a dreadful sense of the creature’s power. That all the elaborate trappings she had seen had been spun from – what? Imagination, desire, dream?

She remembered the uncanny sense she had when she first saw the inside of the house – that everything was
just as she had imagined it would be. Somehow, it was the very strength of her own imagining that had helped bring the illusion to birth. And someone else would have conjured something else, after their own image.

It was desire that had brought her here, then as now. Then, it had been the desire to possess the impossible. Now, it was the desire to convince herself it was over, finished, done.

Yet was it ever really over? Three times in her life, the dark had come to her – in adolescence, in middle age, and now in old age. And each time, the collision with it had sent her careening off in a different direction. It had wounded her, yes, but at the same time it had deepened her resolve to survive, to create. Without it, she was convinced she would never have written a word. She would be someone else, living some other life. Would she be happy? Perhaps. But she would not be herself. She would not be Emily.

And now it would be up to another to watch and wait for the show’s return.

She moved along the hall as if in a dream. At the foot of the stairs leading to the turret room, she stopped. Outdoors, it was midday, but here the shadows hung as if it were their home. She had pursued the nightmare through the house. There was no choice now but to follow it up these narrow stairs.

She went up slowly, pausing an eternity on each step. At last she stood in the dark at the top of the stairs. She put her ear to the door and listened, then turned the handle and stepped into the room.

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Perhaps, in some secret part of her, she’d harbored the hope that the treasure she’d come so close to possessing would still be here, sublimely spared. What she found instead was the broken shell of a room. Several of the windows had been shattered. Broken glass splintered underfoot as she edged cautiously across the floor.

Pigeons had gained entrance through the broken windows and built their nests on the empty shelves. The floor beneath was spattered with droppings. Some of the nests were empty, but others still held birds. Agitated at the entrance of an intruder, they fluttered their wings and paced nervously up and down the shelves, eyeing her with their sideways gaze. With a loud beating of wings, several took flight and made their escape through the broken windows.

So these were the shelves where she had pored over the priceless volumes from the Linton collection. And this fireplace, choked with rubbish and dead leaves, was where she had dozed and dreamt in front of the fire.

She knew that if she curled up on the cold floor in front of it now and fell asleep, she would waken to the crackle
of flames and the creak of Miss Linton’s footsteps on the stairs. And the books would grace the shelves again and be spread in all their glory across the table. She was not mad. She had
not
simply imagined it. It
had
been here.

She took her bag from under her arm, opened it, and took out the book. It was an old, crudely produced, little book in paper wraps – the book she had slipped unknowingly into her bag that night. As she held it in her hand now, the room rippled for a second, like a painted scene. She sensed something moving just the other side of it. She could feel the stir of magic in the air, like the seductive scent of perfume.

Things hovered on the verge of visibility – all the former trappings of the room, the house, and its ghostly inhabitant. She could hear her name being called, the sound of footsteps in the shadows of the empty house as it slowly woke around her.

The book had turned brittle since it first found its way into her purse. In the beginning, she’d been tempted to slip it into a protective cover and place it among her collection. But each night it was in her possession, he had come to her in her dreams. She knew she must end it.

“Here,” she said to the empty room, to the pigeons pacing the shelves, to the shattered windows and the cold, leaf-choked fireplace. “I’m done with it. I want none of it. It’s yours. Do you hear me?”

And she tore the brittle pages into small pieces and let them flutter to the floor, where they shriveled, shrank, and crumbled into dust.

She heard footsteps coming slowly, steadily up the stairs. The door edged open – and O peeked her head around it. When she saw Emily standing dead still in the midst of the ruined room, she let out a shriek.

“Oh my God, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” she said, throwing her hand up to her chest.

“And you me,” said Emily.

“I’ve been calling and calling. You were gone so long, I got worried.” She looked around the room, glancing nervously up at the pigeons, at the shattered windows and the glass-strewn floor. “Maybe we should go now,” she said.

“Yes,” said Emily. “We should go.”

She took one last look around the room, then turned and followed O down the stairs.

T
he trouble with poets was that most of them happened to be crazy. Either they started out that way or they wound up that way in the end. It was what you might call an occupational hazard.

There were plenty of poets milling around the Green Man at that moment. Leonard Wellman had contacted several people from Emily’s past to let them know about this special meeting of the Tuesdays at the Green Man. It was something of an anniversary, and he had an important announcement to make.

Emily was holding court in the back room, the object of attention of all who entered. Friends and fellow poets she hadn’t seen in years had come. Gigi had kindly donated cookies for the occasion. O set them out on a tray, with a note reading
Compliments of Gigi’s Patisserie
and a pile of Gigi’s funky pink business cards alongside.

As O bustled around, setting up extra chairs and starting a second pot of coffee, her eyes kept drifting to the door. Despite the large turnout, there was no trace of
the one person she really hoped would come. In honor of the occasion, she had agreed to read a couple of her poems, and she desperately wanted Rimbaud to be there to hear them.

Who knew where poems came from? In the end, they were a gift. All you could do was accept it with gratitude and carry it into the light as best you could. She was glad for what she’d been given and hoped she’d be given more. If nothing else, this incredible summer had taught her one thing – she was happiest at those times when words stirred inside her.

The Green Man was a place where extraordinary things happened. Not the least of those things had been meeting the mysterious stranger who had come into her life here. As she fingered the little amulet around her neck, she remembered what Isaac Steiner had said: it was a charm worn to ward off evil by invoking the names of guardian spirits.

In a way, that was what Rimbaud had been – her guardian spirit, watching over her in the night, catching her when she fell, rescuing her from danger. Well, she needed watching over now. So where was he?

Her eyes went to the door again. Night was falling, and the shop had begun to fill with shadows. She glanced over at Emily, who gave her a little nod to let her know they were ready to begin. That was her cue to go and lock
the door. As she passed the poetry section, she imagined Rimbaud standing there, as she had seen him standing many times before. But he wasn’t there, nor was he at the door. She looked up and down the empty street, then closed the door and hung the
PLEASE KNOCK FOR POETRY READING
sign in the window.

She settled herself on a chair inside the entrance to the reading room, where she could keep an eye open for latecomers. Emily rang the little brass bell to call the meeting to order, then rose from her seat and went to the front to address the gathering.