The Death of Jane Lawrence(113)

He is not a statue. There is no blankness clinging to him, or the white expanse of Jane’s paradox, or shame, or anything she has come to associate with the wreckage of Augustine’s working.

Jane frowns.

I KNOW YOU. Her voice is not speech, not sound, but it ripples through the extended, compressed space around them, the space that is and is not Lindridge Hall. They are deep inside unhewn earth. They are inside a brilliantly lit ritual space. They are nowhere at all.

GHOSTS ARE NOT REAL, she says.

He does not disappear, despite her logic. No, he replies. THEY ARE NOT.

WHAT ARE YOU?

AN ECHO. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MY MAGIC AND AUGUSTINE’S AND YOURS, I AM TRAPPED.

IS IT BAD, TO BE TRAPPED?

NOT WHEN GIVEN FORM.

She takes him at his word. What else is there?

MY MAGIC? she asks.

IT MAKES ME REAL.

AND THE REST?

MY MAGIC MADE ME OTHER THAN HUMAN. AUGUSTINE’S MAGIC DREW THE MEMORY OF ME TO THIS HOUSE, BETWEEN YOUR GUILT AND HIS. AND YOUR MAGIC MADE ME MORE THAN HUNGRY, MORE THAN ENDLESS.

YOU MEAN YOU ARE NOT LIKE THE STATUES?

He nods. It is unsettling.

She considers him. Her magic made him real. She looks at Augustine, half sketched, half real.

Renton sees where she is looking. He shrugs. That is worse than unsettling. WE ARE MORE OR LESS THE SAME. YOU ARE VERY GOOD AT KNOWING THINGS TO BE AS THEY ARE. I WAS NOT AS GOOD. I KNEW WRONG THINGS.

AND THIS IS NOT WRONG? she asks, and they gaze together at Augustine cutting out the mass from her belly. It has hair. It has teeth. It has one green eye.

That is worst of all.

IT IS INTENTIONAL, Renton replies.

Jane frowns and thinks to ask a question, but is interrupted. (Interrupted. Interrupted how? There is time now, imposed upon no time at all, and Jane’s confusion grows.)

“Elodie, come!”

The voice is her own, but from a different time. Jane lifts her head. A mirror sits on the far side of the banquet hall that was not there before, and in it is Jane. Jane, ringed in blood.

Jane knows this moment.

If Elodie does not appear, Jane does not open the crypt. The white expanse of paradoxical future will grow again, will become unbounded. The nothingness it hides within it, Augustine’s working and Elodie’s absence, will metastasize. What comes next Jane cannot know, because Jane only exists within a precarious sequence of events, a knot that she cannot untangle. If Elodie does not appear …

In the mirror, Jane focuses. She knows that her reflection is Elodie. Jane, dead, looks at the space before the mirror, and hopes. She hopes that this is where Elodie returns, that she conjured Elodie from nothingness, and that, perhaps, Elodie did as Jane did, working backward, filling in where she was needed.

But Elodie does not appear. It is Jane that feels a calling. A pulling.

She looks at Renton, twisted in upon himself, impossible flesh in an impossible space. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? she asks him.

He does not speak.

She wants to beg him for answers, but he offers none, and so she leaves him. She approaches the mirror. She sits.

She looks at herself.

Jane sags and sways with exhaustion and terror as she focuses. Jane remembers going through her precepts, limiting her knowledge. Did it matter? She still willed Elodie to appear, and Jane is not Elodie.

She searches herself. Is she changing? Will she now become Elodie? Is that how all this falls into place, becomes true, becomes what Jane knew?

Nothing shifts inside of her.

“Is Augustine alive?” Jane whispers to herself.

She fights to control her expression, but she knows she looks pained. She still holds Augustine in her arms.

“Were you with him, when he died?” Yes, a hundred times. He had known her, when he died. She does not like to think of it, or else she will be drawn to that moment, and not here at all.

“Is there something I can do, to fix this? To save him?”

No.

Jane looks at the plinth where the wrong Augustine works upon her. You will think there is, she almost says. You will believe you’ve saved him. But you have not.

And yet …

And yet, who is Jane to make that choice for her living self? This moment was what allowed Jane to continue on. To surmount the challenges before her, to feel as if she had atoned. She brought down the wall. She found Augustine.

That he is dead does not matter, because Jane is dead, too.

Finally, Jane nods.

“Can you tell me?” Jane nods again. “What? What must I do? What must I know to fix everything?”

There is no way to fix everything. There is only the way to this moment, now, but Jane is glad that she has it. She is glad that Elodie is gone; she is glad Elodie has not been here to suffer for so many years, to torment, to wait, to long for. She is glad ghosts are not real.

And that is when she realizes: she has always been Elodie.

No. Not always. She is the woman who married Augustine, who died upon the plinth, but she is not the first woman to do so. There was Elodie, and then Elodie died. Augustine ripped her from her time, fixed her at the moment of her death, at least in echo—but she has not existed since. It was not Elodie who came to Jane. Elodie is gone.

It has always been herself.

She has not been Elodie’s replacement. There was a mistake, a rupture, but it was long ago.

Ghosts are not real.

She needs only to write the words. Those four words change everything, and they are easy enough to spell out. They mean that Elodie is not Elodie. They mean that Abigail, with her rotted skull in her belly, did not suffer so. They mean that the Cunninghams have not died, and that the creatures wearing their faces have no power. They mean so much, and they free Jane, free her to triumph, to press onward, to reach this moment of understanding.