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And it was true.
As Emily Sloane came into the soft light, there was the faintest motion, the tiniest twitch of her eyes under the lids, as the imperceptible beat of the candle flames beckoned silence and leaned shadows.
I fanned the air.
I chimed the bell.
At this, Emily Sloane’s body itself—wafted. Like a weightless kite, borne in an unseen wind, she shifted as if her flesh had melted away.
The bell rang again, and the smoke of the incense made her nostrils quiver.
Constance backed away into shadows.
Emily Sloane’s head turned into the light.
“Ohmigod,” I whispered.
It’s her, I thought.
The blind woman who had come into the Brown Derby and left with the Beast on that night, it seemed a thousand nights ago.
And she was not blind.
Only catatonic.
But no ordinary catatonic.
Out of the grave and across the room in the smell and the smoke of incense and the sounding of the bell.
Emily Sloane.
Emily sat for ten minutes saying nothing. We counted our heartbeats. We watched the flames burn down the candles as the incense smoke sifted off.
And then at last the beautiful moment when her head tilted and her eyes dilated.
She must have sat another ten minutes, drinking in things remembered from long before the collision that had left her wrecked along the California coast.
I saw her mouth stir as her tongue moved behind her lips.
She wrote things on the inside of her eyelids, then gave them translation:
“No one …” she murmured, “under … stands …”
And then …
“No one … ever did.”
Silence.
“He was …” she said at last, and stopped.
The incense smoked. The bell gave a small sound.
“. . . the … studio … he ?
? loved …”
I bit the back of my hand, waiting.
