Muse
Authors: Rebecca Lim
Dedication
To Barry and Judy Liu,
with thanks.
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
—
WILLIAM BLAKE (1794)
‘Mercy,’ I hear in the darkness behind my eyelids.
‘Where are you?’
It’s a young man’s voice, achingly familiar.
My eyes flash open, and I raise my left hand to the base of my throat. The fingers of that hand seem to burn with a customary fire, a faint tracery of pain that dissipates almost immediately. The palest, pearlescent glow comes off the surface of my skin.
It’s pitch dark in here, and I remember that I do that — glow — when there are no external sources of light around.
I take a long, trembling breath, expecting to feel a gunshot wound beneath my fingers, its edges ragged, bloody, fatal. But there’s no wound, and no blood.
I lie here whole, and unmarked, breathing easily. Not dying on the floor of a dingy café, blood filling my lungs, crowding my airways, cradled in the arms of a man called … Sulaiman?
I feel my brow furrow. Everything’s out of order; I can’t make things line up. Because when I remember Sulaiman’s stern face bent over mine, I see someone else there, inside him, inhabiting his body, lurking beneath his mortal skin. A shimmering being; one of the
elohim
: Gabriel.
And I am Lela Neill again, for one kaleidoscopic instant in which I feel the death rattle, the harsh susurration of her breathing. Feel myself mired in her body, which is cold and growing colder. Cold, too, the cracked linoleum upon which I lie.
Every sense is fading, the world turning to sepia before my eyes. Until there is a sensation, a sharp tug, as if some kind of cord has snapped, the bonds between myself and Lela’s body beginning to loosen. I feel myself become something like mist, like fog.
But it is illusory, this confused jumble of imagery and sensation, already memory. That jump-cut moment in which I seem to be two people at once, in two places at once. Because I’m not really there.
I can’t be. I know for a certainty, with a clarity that defies logic, that Lela is already dead.
And I give a single, piercing wail, my fingers flying up to my face in horror, the sound escaping before I can stop it. Its sonic aftershock seems to hover in this high-ceilinged room for an eternity. An elegy to the fallen girl.
I’m suddenly flooded with grief, with white heat, with a sensation like panic, and I fight my way out of the featherdown bedding I am inexplicably wrapped in, like a corpse in a winding sheet.
And though the blackness of the room should be impenetrable to my eyes, I see every chair, every ottoman, every vase, tasselled reading lamp, gilt-edged painting, porcelain ornament, every useless, luxurious appointment in this spacious chamber as if it is bright day and not night. Because I can see in the dark, like a cat.
No
, I correct myself automatically,
better than a cat
. No creature under heaven can see better in the dark than I can.
The air in here is cold, the kind of sharp cold that presages snowfall. There’s a window open somewhere.
I slide off the bed and make my way unerringly towards a set of deep curtain-covered windows,
touch the plush, heavily embroidered fabric with my fingertips. Shove the whole mass aside until I encounter the icy glass in a partially raised sash window. I study the view over the rooftops of the moonlit city below and see that it is no longer truly night, but the early, velvet morning. Every star in the sky seems etched upon the inky blackness.
There is a catch in my breathing as I study the floodlit church that dominates the view from my bedchamber. I feel the pupils of my eyes contract in shock.
I know this place.
Like a crazy confection, a riot of arches, pinnacles, fretted spires, flying buttresses, statuary and stained glass; like a waking dream, a conundrum, the church is both steadfast and airy, hundreds of feet deep, wide, tall. Monumental. It is the Duomo, one of the greatest cathedrals in the world.
And the realisation hits me a second later that I am in Milan, in Northern Italy.
Milan.
A city of infinite treasures. A city I once loved and wandered at will. Though when, and as whom, I do not know. Again, I feel a brief jolt of dislocation, as if I am caught between past and present, fully inhabiting neither.
Then the sensation leaves me, and I realise that it is two hours before matins, before dawn.
In front of the Duomo, dwarfed by it, is a gleaming Christmas tree at least one hundred feet tall.
Glorious Milan. In December.
Before I can process anything more, there’s a series of sharp taps upon the door.
I do not turn away from the window. Instead, I shake my long, unbound hair over my face, dig the toes of my narrow feet into the soft, plush pile of the carpet and pull the cuffs of my long sleeves over my hands. So that no part of my skin is visible from behind. It’s become almost a reflex these days. Hiding this little light of mine.
The door opens behind me, before I can find my voice.
‘Irina?’ someone says blearily into the darkness. ‘I heard you cry out — you scared me to death! Are you all right?’
Through the curtain of my long hair, I quickly scan the figure silhouetted in the doorway before returning my gaze to the city framed in the window.
A short, slender young woman — in her late twenties? — with jaw-length straight hair cut in a sleek bob stands there. The light behind her casts her
face into shadow. I have no idea who she is. But she has a cut-glass accent, of a kind I’ve heard before.
English
, supplies my inner voice dryly.
She’s English.
How do I even …
know
that?
‘What’s the matter with you?’ the girl mutters. ‘Cat got your tongue? Hard to believe.’
She snaps on a lamp by the door. The sudden flare of light makes the pupils of my borrowed eyes contract into pinpoints, but I adjust to the change in illumination instantaneously, without flinching.
The light of the lamp has extinguished the strange glow of my skin. I turn to face the stranger warily, uncurling my fingers from inside my sleeves, senses on high alert.
Who is she? What does she want from me?
The day can’t come soon enough when I’ll never again have to grope forward through the fog of a stranger’s life, trying desperately not to give myself away.
The girl shakes her head in exasperation and tightens the belt of her patterned, blush-coloured kimono before heading purposefully across the room towards me. She stops a short distance away, looking me up and down critically.
‘You don’t need a PA, Irina, you need a nanny!
You’ve got
eight
hours of fittings ahead of you today, and that’s just for starters. Hours of keeping perfectly still and taking direction, and we know those aren’t your best skills. Now let’s get you back to bed, okay? It’s called “beauty sleep” for good reason, and even people like
you
need it.’
The girl has unusual eyes, one brown, one blue, and a cute pixie face, strong dark brows, a precision-cut slanting fringe — sleek silent-movie-star hair. But she’s not, strictly speaking, beautiful. Not like … ‘me’.
I’m arrested by the reflection of the long, lean, exotic creature I see in the oval, gilt-framed mirror across the room. Touch the fingers of one hand to my face just to be certain that the young woman I’m looking at is me. Irina.
Us
.
Irina’s unusually tall — a fraction over six foot, without shoes — with pale, clear, downy skin, large, wide-set, dark, feline eyes and fine features, almost elfin ears. A wide, mobile mouth, a small, heart-shaped face and thick, poker-straight hair the colour of burnt caramel that falls almost to the waist, worn with a blunt-cut fringe that slices straight across her forehead above wickedly arched brows.
Irina’s clad in a fine, ivory-coloured cashmere sweater and bespoke matching trousers, very narrow,
like cigarette pants, edged in pale blue ribbon. The most elegant sleepwear I’ve ever seen. Her build is lean and sinuous, narrow through the hips and shoulders, a swan’s neck, collarbones very prominent above the V-neck of the sweater. In the mirror, Irina’s knees appear wider than the midpoint of each thigh, and it’s no trick of the light.
I’m inhabiting a beautiful stick insect. A freak of nature.
Irina’s young. Younger than the stranger with the critical eyes.
But what’s more startling than all this is the reflection
within
the reflection. There’s another person framed in the mirror, even more preternaturally tall than the first. A ghost girl outlined in stardust, in moonlight. Who looks maybe sixteen on the outside, but seldom ever feels that way. With brown eyes, alabaster skin, a long, straight nose in an oval face framed by shoulder-length brown hair, each strand straight, even and perfectly the same. No will-o’-the-wisp like the other one, but broad-limbed, strong-looking. Stern-faced.
The second self, my true self.
The stranger laughs without amusement. ‘Admiring yourself again?’
It’s clear from her tone that she doesn’t see
me
— just the human shell I’m inhabiting today. The girl I’ve soul-jacked.
‘I suppose you can’t help it,’ she mutters, ‘with a face and body like yours.’
I
think Irina looks like a doll-faced alien with spidery limbs, but there’s a sullen envy in the other girl’s words. She should sooner envy Frankenstein’s monster. For, despite her surface gloss, that’s what Irina is today — a composite being, cobbled together from remnants.
The girl standing there giving me the evil eye isn’t to know that the cycle that blights my existence has begun again: I’ve woken inside a new ‘host’ and am expected to rely on my wits, to hit the ground running, even though my entire world, my entire frame of reference, has shifted overnight. Though I call myself Mercy, I still don’t know what my real name is. And I’m invisible to the world entire. Undetectable to any, save my own kind.
My own kind.
I feel Irina’s brow furrow as I recall Gabriel disguised within the mortal, Sulaiman. The way I’m disguised now.
Eight of my own kind did this to me.
Unexpectedly, I’m assailed by monstrous images —
— of a steep, distant mountainside, a deadly crater upon one lonely slope, the soil scorched for leagues around, every tree, plant, animal and rock in the vicinity reduced to ashes, utterly destroyed.
— of a series of chambers, deep beneath the streets of an old city, piled high with the bones of the human dead. In the midst of this hellish domain — eight men. Each one unnaturally tall, preternaturally beautiful, youthful, ageless. Each one a being of pure fire, casting no shadow. They are gathered around a marble dais upon which something lies — blackened, twisted, burnt beyond recognition, barely alive.
What my inner eye sees there, upon that lonely tomb, brings another ringing scream to my lips.
The English girl covers her ears in pain, shrinking from me as if my cry has sharp edges to it, as if it’s a noise loud enough to wake an entire sleeping city.
‘Christ, Irina,’ she gasps when the sound finally dies away. ‘No need to scream the walls down! Everyone knows you can’t pass a mirror without looking at yourself. It was meant to be a joke, okay?’
My left hand is flaring in agony, and I jam it beneath my elbow, against my right side, so the girl will not see it glow with a pale, white fire.
That burnt and blasted thing I saw? It was
me
.
I’d gone to that place of nightmare to die. Years ago. Centuries. I’d woken, instead, to find my fate in the hands of that righteous cabal: the Eight.
And I’ve been under their absolute dominion ever since.
Let me name them for you, for their identities are no longer a mystery to me. I saw them in my mind’s eye, as Lela lay dying in Gabriel’s arms.
Picture them, standing there, judgment in their eyes, every one. Each as beautiful as the next, but all so different. In form, in temperament, in abilities.
Gabriel, the herald of mysteries. Flame-haired, emerald-eyed. The self-same Gabriel who disguised himself, centuries later, as the mortal, Sulaiman, in order to watch over me.
Uriel: in face, in form, identical to me — the real me — save that he was created male. Which is a mystery in itself, one I have no answer for.
Fearsome Michael, the leader of them all, his flashing eyes as dark as his curling, black hair.
Selaphiel, sandy-haired and serious, absent, courteous, gentle, his quiet blue eyes fixed on things unseen.
Jegudiel with the waving, golden hair and dark, steely gaze, whose weapon of choice is a triple-thonged whip.
Silver-eyed, auburn-haired Jeremiel, who possesses a voice like exaltation.
Dark-eyed, dark-haired Barachiel, whose province is lightning, and whose emblem is a white rose.
And to close the circle of all those who passed sentence on me?
Raphael, the healer. Sable-eyed, dark-haired and olive-skinned. Whose mouth was made for laughter and compassion. The ‘architect’, so Gabriel had said, of my misery. The one whose plan it was, all those years ago, to hide me inside an unbroken succession of human lives. We’d been friends once. We might have been more, given time.
But Luc had changed all that.
I back towards an elegant armchair and perch unsteadily upon one arm as the memory of him takes me over.
Luc. My golden beloved.
My day star
, I called him, because he outshone all the stars, even the sun.
Luc — the one I have longed for. Whom I can never have, whom I can never find, because the Eight have pursued a policy, over these interminable centuries, of
keeping us apart. I don’t pretend to understand their reasons, because my memory has fault lines to it that have never healed, and may never heal.
Luc
loved
me, more than life itself. This much I know.
And, despite what I have become, he loves me still. He tells me so in my sleep, in my dreams — the only way we can ever be together these days. And Luc warns me, again and again, that the Eight wish me harm, that they cannot be trusted, that I must run from them. Keep running, and never stop.
But the Eight insist upon keeping me from Luc for my own good, the good of all things.
