The Monster's Wife(62)

“What?” She looked down, expecting to see that some moth had landed on her bodice for him to pin.

He reached out and pressed his hand over her heart. “Do you ever wonder how long it will keep working for?”

She stood still, letting him touch her. She wanted to move, but could not. “Yes.” Her voice sounded defeated.

“It must trouble you, the uncertainty... your heart, May vanishing, not knowing...”

She stared into his eyes, the silver of knife blades. Was he toying with her? He was so composed and impenetrable, it was impossible to tell.

“I’m sure you’ve searched, Oona, but have you asked the right questions? Who was the last person to see her, that you know of?”

She stared sideways at his smooth face that might have been handsome had the lines of thought not etched themselves into it. “I think it must be Old Cormick, the ferryman who lives in that shack by the sea.”

Victor’s hand dropped. He drew his chair back from the desk and sat down, as if drawn there by magic, as if he couldn’t stay away from his ghoulish work. “And did he tell you all you needed to know?”

She shrugged. “He’s always drunk and full of nonsense.”

Victor looked over his shoulder at her, his hands busy with a copper twist of wire that coiled between the hare’s neck and the lever-like knob on the flap. “Doesn’t it seem suspicious,” hands twisting, smoothing as he spoke, “that he had a stocking so conveniently tucked away to accuse me?”

The doe’s ears twitched and her paw grabbed the air. Oona stepped back, her heart knocking into her aching ribs. “She’s alive.” She didn’t know why she was surprised. It was the way of things here. Dead. Alive. Alive. Dead. It was just that she hadn’t seen something spring to life with its entrails hanging out before.

Victor flicked the lever on the rusted box and something left the air, like a song ending. The hare stopped moving. “She’s not, as it happens, but a touch more and she might cross back over the line.”

“The line to where?”

He smiled back at her, his hand hovering over the box. “The land of the living.”





54


The man slipped his arm through Eve’s and they began to walk. In the flickering dark, the objects in the room were ghostly versions of their daylight selves. He was talking to her about birds and the sky and things outside the room but she was hardly listening, thinking instead of the names of things – quill and manuscript, pliers and screws, the door, the keyhole, the key. She murmured the words under her breath.

“Eve – stop – you move… too fast.” He let go of her arm, pressing his hand to his ribs the way she had when he first made her walk.

“I am sorry.” She almost meant it, but all the time, her heart, her mind, were racing. She must move again.

“You are far stronger than an ordinary woman. You have the heart of a wolf. It will endure long past the time I’ve turned to dust.” He caught her wrist. “You’re…perfect…”

Her bandaged fingers moved to her face, rough threads of gauze tickling her cheeks and eyelids. “What do I look like?”

“Soon you may look in the glass and see for yourself.” He straightened and smiled his mysterious smile.

When the clock chimed midnight, he left her to bend to his work. She felt the creak of the door, the panting breaths of the key in the lock. She hated him then, for locking her in once more. She wanted to pound the door, to smash her fist through it and step straight onto the other side, to stride down the unknown hallway and be free.

But she could not picture either what lay beyond the room or what she would live on if she left it. Each day, he brought her soup and bread and beer to drink. He carried in peat and kept the fire burning. He unwrapped the pale tongues of her bindings and checked underneath to see that she was well. If she left, there would be nobody to do these things for her.

For a long time, she stared at red haloes of burning peat. The smoke curling up from it changed into the foam of a burn, the lick of a wave on the sea, the violet flowers of hill heather. There were other pictures, too: blurred faces and eyes intent with feeling, lips moving, although she couldn’t hear the words. She got up, paced the room. There were people out there who belonged to her. She didn’t know who they were or where they lived, but they might be looking for her at this very moment. She went from one table to the next, trailing her muffled hands over the contraption of wires and teeth.

On the table beside it was a dead mouse, soft muzzle slightly agape around the twin prongs of yellowed teeth. Its furry hide was split down the belly and pinned to the board beneath it. The tangled grey string inside it was hardening, although she couldn’t smell it, only the sour whisky stench of the liquid the man painted over it. Cradled in the basket of its ribs was a small pink pearl that he had said was the mouse’s heart.

She felt her chest ache and looked down to see her clumsy hand pressed to a painful place in the middle of her breastbone. It drummed her fingers, wild and fast, full of desire to love, to know. Her hand moved downwards like a thing with a will of its own, fumbling across the gleaming tools that surrounded the mouse. Pins. Clippers. A slender knife that slid easily between the layers of white gauze and pressed coolly into her skin.

Eve went to the door and knelt down before it as if she wanted to pray. She pushed the knife into the lock, jiggling it back and forth, listening for some tell-tale click within the door. She had some memory, blurred as a dream, of a girl’s hands doing just this, of a door opening onto the secrets of a hidden room. If only she’d looked more closely, remembered more clearly, then she would know the deft twist that would set her free. But her fingers were clumsy and the knife slipped about between layers of gauze and her sweat-greased skin.