Now Comes the Mist

CHAPTER NINE

H ours later, I am still tossing in bed in a frenzy of embarrassment and frustration, unable to calm myself. When sleep finds me at last, I am suddenly standing in a grove of trees with no notion of how I got there until I see the mist swirling around my ankles, a garden of white marble statues, and moonlight glinting on a great glass-domed conservatory. I am dreaming again. My chest is tight, and my breath comes fast. I am furious and I cannot remember why.

“Lucy!” Arthur calls.

The revelation comes with both pain and relief. It is Arthur with whom I am enraged. I stay motionless beneath the trees, petulant even in my dreams.

“Lucy, come here,” he pleads. “I have something to say to you.”

He sounds so desperate that I reluctantly follow his voice to the conservatory. The mist is cold upon my feet as I wend my way through the headstones in the grass. A chill light illuminates the building, which is humid and warm and choked with a jungle of twisting plants. Gaping wide in the center of the stone floor is an open grave, next to which Arthur is waiting for me.

He looks remorsefully at me. “I’m sorry, Lucy. I’m sorry I didn’t drink the tea.”

A table stands in the corner. The steaming teapot releases coils of rich, fragrant jasmine.

“Will you forgive me?” Arthur holds out his hand. He looks like a lost little boy and his eyes are strange tonight, black and ringed with thick spider leg lashes. “Jump with me.”

I look into the open grave and see a great drawing room with a roaring fire, handsome furniture, and silk drapes at the windows, through which a light snow is falling. A dog dozes near the hearth, where another table is set for tea, though the pot smells only of bland chamomile. A servant enters the room. “All is ready, my lady,” she says, looking up out of the grave at me.

“Jump with me,” Arthur repeats. “I’ll take care of you.”

But I am suddenly, desperately afraid of falling. I look around in a panic, and once again I see between the neat paths of the conservatory that there is a hidden walkway covered with brambles. I try to pull away, preferring the thorns to the fall, but Arthur begins to cry. His sadness is unbearable, and so I let him tug me into the grave, expecting us to land before a warm and inviting hearth. But the drawing room is gone, and all that awaits us is a cold dirt floor.

I claw at the sides of the grave, terror-stricken. “I did not want this. I do not want to be here, not even with you. Let me out, Arthur!”

“Don’t go,” he pleads. “Stay with me.”

I am as frightened as I was angry earlier. Every clod of dirt I dislodge flies back into place as though I had never moved it. It is impossible to climb out of this grave. I will not see the brambles anymore , I think, grief tearing at my lungs. I will never drink Papa’s tea again.

“Stay with me,” Arthur says, and this time, it sounds more like a command.

A shadow falls over the grave. Through a curtain of mist emerges a powerful hand with a red gem shining upon the smallest finger. “I am here,” says a voice I know, a low baritone with shades of an accent I cannot place—French, perhaps, or German. Memories flood my mind: a broad frame, a face hidden by night, a kiss that promised me everything I have been denied. And a vow spoken on another evening, in another dream: I will find you again.

“It’s you,” I say with wonder. A familiar longing pierces my heart, like a hunger for that which I cannot name and have no words to describe. It has haunted me in every dream in which I wander through the mist, endlessly searching. I sense that this stranger’s long white hand holds all the answers. “Have you come for me?”

“Don’t go,” Arthur says at my elbow.

I turn and scream at what I see. Arthur is gone. In his place is something shaped like him but made entirely of writhing green vines as thick as my arm. They slither and twist and undulate like hellish snakes, each one pocked with gaping, seeping black holes full of tiny little teeth.

“Stay here,” the nightmarish mouths command me.

I seize the stranger’s hand, and in one powerful movement, he lifts me from the grave and away from the monster. And suddenly, we are no longer in the conservatory but a sprawling ballroom full of mist, dark but for the starlight filtering through the windows. Vases of dead roses surround us, and a waltz plays, hypnotic and seductive, though the room is empty.

The stranger takes me in his arms. Again, I detect no warmth or smell, only a feeling of dangerous, all-encompassing cold. “Dance with me, Lucy,” he murmurs, lips against my ear, and we waltz across the gleaming floor. I feel his hand on my waist and hear his breathing just above my head, yet when I look into the wall of mirrors behind us, I am dancing alone.

I gaze up at him, but his face is hidden in shadow. “You saved me.”

“You took my hand,” he replies.

“Where have you been?” I ask longingly. Time is often a twisted tangle in my dreams, but tonight I am certain that it has been months since our dreamed kiss in the statue garden, when I ran through the brambles to find him. I had forgotten until this very moment.

“I have been preoccupied,” he says, amused, spinning me around so that my back is pressed against his front. He wraps his arms around me, and his lips find my ear again, sending tingles of pleasure down my neck. “I will not refuse you anything. Not like them.”

I close my eyes and lean back, and I believe him. He would never recoil or turn me away as Jack has, as Quincey has. As Arthur has. Arthur, to whom I called with my heart in my hands. Arthur, whose rejection hurts me most of all.

“Lucy, look at me,” the man says.

I turn my head over my shoulder and his lips are there, his head tilted down to kiss me. Our mouths dance and his hands study the geography of my body, exploring curves and valleys, but too slowly for my taste. Greedily, I seize one of them and try to place it where I want it.

He removes it with a soft laugh. “Patience. Everything you want, I will give you in time.”

“When?” I plead.

He drops a cold kiss upon my neck. “Very soon. Wait for me.”

And then I wake up.

The man is gone, and my maid stands before me, her face drawn with worry in the light of the candle she holds. “At last!” she cries, relieved. “Miss Lucy, I have been trying to rouse you.”

“Harriet.” I blink the sleep from my eyes. We are in the ballroom of my mother’s house, but there are no dead roses, no hypnotic music from invisible violins. There is not even starlight, for the drapes are closed against the night. “How long have I been out of bed?”

“I don’t know, miss. I woke up an hour ago, came down for a cup of tea, and found you in here by yourself.” She shivers. “You were dancing all alone.”

“An hour? I was dancing all that time?” I ask, stunned.

“Perhaps longer. I saw that the door was open, and there you were in your nightdress, waltzing in the dark. I thought you were a ghost at first.” She gives an embarrassed laugh.

My mind feels scattered and fragmented. I clutch at the edges of the dream. There had been a man waltzing with me. Or at least, I believe we had been waltzing. My back had been pressed against him, and I had turned my head over my shoulder, and his lips …

“Miss Lucy?” Harriet asks, staring at me.

I press my hands to my hot cheeks. The dream had felt so real: the press of his mouth on mine, the feel of him behind me, his hands on my body. “Did you see anyone else here?”

Poor Harriet looks frightened now. “Of course not, miss. It’s the middle of the night.” She touches my elbow. “Please let me take you back to your room, or you’ll catch cold. At least you sleepwalked around the house tonight instead of out to that dreadful churchyard.”

Obediently, I follow her out of the room. Just before she shuts the door, I look back at the mirrors, almost expecting to see a shadowed figure gazing out at me. But the reflection is only that of my own small and slender form, draped in white and full of endless, futile yearning.