The Descent (13 page)

As he took the cup from me, I couldn’t resist . . . I gazed deeply into his eyes as I leaned against him, and kissed him. For one moment, we were locked together and made one, and it was as though I could feel every emotion he was experiencing at that instant: surprise, elation, gratitude, longing, regret—so much regret—and happiness. I felt happiness, too, and it surged between us for one long minute, even after our mouths had parted. That kiss was all it took for me to know that I loved him, despite all that had happened between us, despite any doubts I might still have had. I loved him and there was nothing I could do to change that; I’d been stupid to try to deny it.

Adair felt it, too, in that kiss. He knew that something fundamental had changed between us and he hesitated, waiting for a sign from me. I could’ve stopped it right then, I think. I could’ve told Adair that I’d changed my mind and that would be that. We’d start to explore what could be between us—but it would be tainted from the very beginning. Adair had said as much himself: not knowing what happened to Jonathan would prey on my mind. Adair understood when I said nothing, did nothing, and without another word, he helped me lie back on the bed, and spread a blanket over me as though I was only about to take an afternoon nap.

I held on to the edge of the mattress to steady myself. “Something’s happening already,” I told him. “It feels like the bed is falling, as though the house is collapsing underneath me.” I tried to smile reassuringly as I spoke, but there are few feelings as frightening as suddenly losing all sense of balance.

“Will you be okay?” he asked, closing my hand tightly around the vial.

“I’m a little scared,” I admitted.

“I’ll be right here. I won’t leave your side. Don’t forget: the vial. Release it and I will bring you back in a heartbeat.” He ran a fingertip over my forehead, brushing a lock of hair aside in a tender moment of concern, my last image of him as I felt myself falling for real, halfway inside another world, with the world I knew galloping away from me. Adair disappeared from my view and I saw nothing but blackness, walls of blackness falling away from me. I held on to consciousness a moment longer, enough to realize that it didn’t feel like the transformation at all. There was no pain, only the feeling of being pulled along at an incredible speed through utter darkness—where was the light everyone talked about seeing as they were dying? And then, just as suddenly, there was nothing. No reassuring presence at my side, no vial in my hand, no lingering taste of vanilla on my lips. No blackness or the rush of wind on my face as I fell. Nothing at all.

NINE

W
hen I regained consciousness, I saw that I was in the fortress. I was surprised; I’d expected to be transported to another world, one that was familiar and biblical in nature, like that of Dante’s
Inferno
or Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. I don’t know why I’d made this assumption, though it seemed to prove that old saying that wayward souls will turn back to God on their deathbeds. Given my nightmares and the role that the fortress had played in them of late, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself there, and at least I was on the upper floor and hadn’t woken in the hated cellar.

As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t say that I “woke up,” as though I’d been asleep, but instead was suddenly aware of my surroundings, as often happens in dreams. Everything looked just as it had in Adair’s house. I was in a wide hall with a long
red runner under my feet, and the familiar wooden doors to the bedrooms faced me on either side. The same iron sconces hung on the wall, the same rough-hewn Italianate chairs sat at intervals the length of the corridor. It was so clearly Adair’s home that, for a minute, I wondered if the elixir hadn’t worked and I had only sleepwalked from my room. But when I looked at my surroundings more closely, I noticed that the hall ran longer than the ones in Adair’s house; as a matter of fact, this one seemed to telescope out like a fun house in both directions. If I took a step toward either end, it seemed to snake out farther still.

The hall was as quiet as a library. I walked up to one door and put my ear close, listening for sounds on the other side, before trying the handle. I strained, but I heard nothing. Had I any reason to choose this door over the one next to it or the one down the hall? I considered this predicament for a minute, but reasoned that I had been set down in the fortress at this precise spot for a reason, and that was to go into the room in front of me. I gripped the cold metal doorknob, gave it a turn, and stepped inside.

It was obvious that I’d stepped into another dimension. The room I entered wouldn’t have existed in Adair’s fortress. It seemed like the lobby of a grand hotel with groupings of chairs, rattan with pale green silk cushions, flanked by potted palms. The ceiling was high, the room itself very wide. Tall shuttered windows held back harsh white sunlight, throwing sliced shadows onto the floor. Huge ceiling fans circled overhead, pushing around hot, humid air. Streams of people walked by in all directions wearing clothing from an earlier era. The women wore dresses with long, full skirts and wide sleeves, and tall hats perched on elaborately done hair; the men
wore tight-waisted morning coats and long trousers, despite the heat. The crowd consisted mostly of Westerners, but there were a number of Arabs, too, in spotless white tunics as a kind of livery. It was a hotel, obviously one that catered to Western travelers, and by the looks of the people and the surroundings, not to mention the heat, it appeared to be somewhere in North Africa or the Levant. As I stumbled along, trying to make sense of the location, I realized that I recognized this place. I’d been here before.

As I walked slowly down the lobby, gaping at the hotel guests passing by, it started to make sense. This was the hotel in Fez where Jonathan had abandoned me nearly two hundred years ago. I felt a jolt of pain at the recollection, but I told myself that it was only the last, lingering traces of an old embarrassment and didn’t mean that I was still hurt by his cruelty. However, I couldn’t imagine what it meant that I’d been brought here to this time and place. That fateful day, the day I woke to find Jonathan had abandoned me, was not one I wanted to relive. I’d already felt the pain of that betrayal a thousand times. Perhaps that’s what happened in the underworld; perhaps I would be forced to relive all the worst moments of my life. The thought terrified me; I tried not to panic.
Hang on and let’s see what happens next,
I thought gamely to calm my nerves.

As I walked through the lobby, I realized that the people all around me couldn’t see me. They couldn’t hear me or feel my presence, either. I was like a ghost to them, here to observe them, not vice versa. But why I’d been sent to this place at this particular moment in time, I couldn’t guess.

I was about to turn around and look for a way out when my
gaze fell on a man in a tall, fan-backed rattan chair. I knew this man. He wore an impeccably tailored suit of light wool, a swallow-tailed morning jacket in a dove gray, with a pale-pink-and-gray foulard silk cravat wound high around his throat. His blond curly hair was tamed with pomade, and a charcoal top hat sat jauntily atop his head. His gloved hands rested on the silver handle of a fine gentleman’s walking stick, and he looked at me over the rim of a pair of dark spectacles, with an amused look on his face.

“I was wondering when you were going to turn up, Lanny. I’ve been waiting for you for a whole five minutes. You’re late.” It was my old friend Savva.

I took the chair opposite him, as I’d done in an earlier life when he found me in this same lobby and brought me back from the brink of despair after Jonathan had left me. That was the first time I’d met him, and it was this meeting that made me realize there were more of Adair’s companions walking the earth than I’d hitherto guessed. After our initial meeting, Savva and I traveled together for a number of years, through northern Africa and along the Silk Road for the most part, trying to avoid detection and eke out a living. It had been a precarious existence, mainly because neither of us had any useful skills beyond being decorative and charming. I was only a woman, a fact that counted for little in those days, and Savva was a wildly unreliable drunkard, opium fiend, and homosexual. We were, in short, a suspect pair as far as society was concerned but not a threat to anyone. As long as no one took special notice of us, we managed to skate by.

The man who sat in the chair in front of me was nothing like Savva as I’d last seen him four years ago, ravaged by heavy drug use and alcoholism. By then, it was clear that what had been thought of as his nature—indolent, capricious, and naughty, by nineteenth-century standards—was actually a serious personality disorder, bipolar or some other manifestation, which he’d tried to endure through the increasingly heavy use of drugs. The man in the chair opposite me was the Savva of old, charming, devilish, and sweetly beautiful. He was like a boy bent on playful anarchy, who—with a mischievous glint in his eye—beckons you to join him.

“I thought I’d never see you again!” Savva exclaimed, at the same time I said, “What are you doing here?” and we both laughed.

“Are you dead?” Savva asked delicately.

“No, I’m not. Are you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

Savva nodded. “Yes, for . . . well, a short while. One loses track of time here, one day bleeding into the next, if there are actually ‘days’ at all.” He pulled a gold watch from a vest pocket and waved it nonchalantly on the end of its little chain. “Completely useless here. It reads the same all the time, regardless of whether it’s light or dark. Doesn’t matter if I look at it all day. Useless.”

“If you’re dead, then it must’ve been . . .” I’d been putting the pieces together and broke off, unable to finish the sentence.

“It was Adair, yes. He found me and released me,” Savva said calmly. “He told me that
you’d
sent him. Now, don’t look so shocked; I know you meant it as a kindness. It was a very
enlightening
encounter and I will tell you all about it, but not right now.
I would much rather hear your news. How in the world did you come to be here if you haven’t died? Wait—don’t answer that yet. I want to show you something first. Come with me. We’re going for a
stroll
.”

Miraculously, when we stepped through a door, all of Fez unfurled before us, Fez of 1830, better than my memory could ever capture. The city was exactly as it had been, as though it had never evolved, as though it had been someone’s intent to capture it this way for eternity so it could be bookmarked and called up instantly, perhaps for a purpose very much like this—and I wondered if all of history was indexed like this, and for what reason.

We took to the thoroughfare in front of the hotel. Carriages clattered by, carrying Western tourists out to see the sights of the day, but Moroccans comprised most of the traffic, traveling by foot or the occasional donkey-drawn cart. There was dust everywhere, a fine white powder raised by traffic, floating at knee height in perpetual clouds. Savva hooked my arm under his and we started along the street, the merciless Moroccan sun beating down on our heads. As we walked, Savva shot his walking stick out smartly, the polished wood glinting in the sunlight.

“How can this be? How could we be back nearly two centuries in time?” I asked, gesturing to the scene around us. “It’s not possible. It can’t be Morocco. We must be in heaven or hell. Which is it, Savva?”

He gave me a thoughtful frown. “Why, I’ve always assumed I was in heaven, for how could hell possibly be like this?”

“And have you been here the entire time you’ve been, um, deceased?”

“In Morocco? Goodness, no.” He chuckled drily. “If I had
to spend the hereafter in just one place, I would hardly pick that dreary hotel. No, I suspect I was brought here because of
you
, to see you.”

“Is that how it works? Are you summoned to a particular time or spot every time someone once close to you dies?”

The brilliant sun glinted off Savva’s dark spectacles as he shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s the case. When Adair killed me, I first arrived at a lovely mansion, one of those white palatial affairs, set on a huge green lawn with a hedgerow maze and clouds of sheep grazing off in the distance. I thought I’d been brought to the English countryside, that heaven was an English country manor—one teeming with gorgeous men. The best part was that they were all gay—or if they were straight they found me
irresistible,
because all I had to do was smile at them and we’d be off shagging in one of the upstairs bedrooms.” He smiled glassy-eyed at the memory of those early happy days after death.