First Interlude Gwen, Underfoot #2
Colin said, “Do you want to riddle with him, Arthur? I get the impression he’s fond of riddling contests.
Do you think you know any he hasn’t already heard in the last three thousand years?
” When Arthur didn’t reply, Colin went on: “This is how I parse it: we can make a desperate play to outfight him and wind up like Jayne Nighswander, or we can sacrifice a serial killer to him, a Ted Bundy type, and do a little good. Put another way, if we go to war against King Sorrow, we would essentially be risking our lives to protect a guy like Ted Bundy.” He glanced sidelong at Gwen, as if it had been her arguing instead of Arthur. “You have to decide
who’s worth more to the world, Gwen. Us, or some sick serial murderer somewhere.”
“But Colin,” Gwen said, “we’re serial murderers too.”
5.
It wasn’t her shift, but she went in to check on the old man. The evening nurse, Eddy, sat in a chair over by the windows,
under the only lit lamp, working at a book of word searches. Llewellyn slept with one gaunt hand curled on his chest and his
mouth open slightly, and, in his black satin pajamas with the red piping, projected something of a Dracula vibe. When he exhaled,
Gwen had the idea she could smell his insides dying . . . a ridiculous notion, and yet she was sure it was true. Eddy waved;
Gwen nodded and went back out.
She almost fell over Arthur. He was sitting on the staircase, his elbows on the top step, a glass of Colin’s good Scotch in one hand.
Gwen glanced down the hall and saw the door to the guest room open, the sheets rumpled up, and felt a nervous tickle in the pit of her stomach.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to take him by the hand, put a finger to her lips to shush him, and tow him down the hall to his bedroom.
The others were still downstairs and would guess what they were up to and have a good laugh at them when they reappeared, and she didn’t care.
But she did care about Jett and had to be at Tana’s in forty minutes, so instead of taking him by the hand and hauling him
to bed, she sat on the step next to him. He bumped his shoulder against hers and smiled.
“Hell of a Christmas present,” he said.
“Hell of a thing to come back to,” she agreed. “Right about now you probably wish you’d stayed.”
“No. I don’t wish I’d stayed. I wish I’d come back sooner. I almost did a couple times. I’d have these moments when I’d begin
doing the math . . . how long it takes to get from Oxford to London by train, how long it would take to get to Heathrow, how
long I’d be waiting for my flight. I’d get excited just thinking about it. I could imagine leaving all my stuff, not even
bothering to pack.”
“What about your classes?”
He shrugged. “What about them? I’d just go. I figured out I only needed twenty hours to get to Maine. I could have you in
bed within a day.”
She laughed at that, a loud, healthy shout of hilarity that echoed in the reception hall. Her face went hot.
“Pretty cocky,” she said. “How do you know I haven’t moved on? How do you know I haven’t been running a whole parade of men
in and out of my bed?”
“Have you?” he asked, earnestly. “Have you met someone?”
His eyes were bright in the dark and he took her hand in his. The funny tickling sensation of nervousness and longing was
in her chest now.
“No, Arthur,” was all she said. “Tell me one thing you love about Oxford.”
“The school hosted a literary gala for graduate students—champagne and fancy cheeses—and three different white kids asked
if I was the coat check boy. I loved that.”
“Oh, no, Arthur.”
“I try to remind myself it was much harder for my father when he attended Magdalen.”
“Is that why you wanted to go? Because he studied there?”
“I wanted to go because he should’ve taught there. He should’ve been made chair of medieval and Renaissance literature. He applied to teach. He applied three times.
He was told he lacked the qualifications. He spoke and read six languages. Maybe if he had learned seven, huh? The best he
could do was a job writing for The Guardian. They sent him to South Africa to cover apartheid, and he died there.”
“He was killed for writing about apartheid?” Gwen asked.
“I wish. That would be so cool. He had a few drinks with some friends, then fell running to catch a bus in the rain and hit
his head on the curb. He went back to his little apartment to sleep off his headache and died of an epidural hematoma instead.
He wasn’t killed by the apartheid state. Maybe you could say he was killed by Oxford. If they’d hired him, he’d be alive now.”
Arthur considered the sharp crease in his trousers. “Magdalen hired a Black woman recently. First-ever Black educator. Progress
comes for us all.”
She put her hand inside of his and they were quiet together on the stairs for a while.
“Did I see you peeking into my bedroom?” he asked her. “Were you thinking thoughts?”
She chortled and hid her face against his chest.
“When are you back from your mother’s?” she asked.
He rested his chin on the top of her head.
“Not nearly soon enough,” he said. “When do you leave for Tana’s?”
“Too soon,” she said.
“Story of our lives,” he told her.
6.
They all remembered bringing King Sorrow into the world differently.
Colin and Arthur believed there had been a helmet filled with water, and they had passed it around and around, looking into it for some hint of dragons.
But Gwen never saw a helmet. She remembered a cracked hand mirror with a mother-of-pearl handle and a Y-shaped fissure in the glass, so reflections appeared as a triptych.
It had belonged to Maria Romanov before her murder.
Colin said her executioner had told her to calm herself, to brush her hair, everything would be fine, and so she was staring into it when he raised the gun to shoot her in the back of the head.
It was just a story, no one could prove it, but Gwen could see that Colin relished the idea.
He said they could use it as a scrying mirror and Van said, “If I had your face, I’d cry every time I looked in a mirror too,” and Colin smiled indulgently and said he was talking about catoptromancy and Van said, “I don’t want to do nothin’ that’s going to trigger catalepsy, I already have trouble staying awake in my goddamn classes. ”
“Catoptromancy is the art of using a reflective surface as a window to see into other worlds. I figure the hand mirror of
a murdered Russian princess will do,” Colin said as he offered the mirror to Arthur, handle first.
They had passed the mirror and called for the King. Gwen promised him snacks. Allie pretended she was working the desk in
an airport. “Paging King Sorrow. Your American Airlines flight to Podomaquassy, Maine, and other points on Earth is fully
boarded, please get your scaly ass in your seat.”
“Come on in,” Arthur said. “The door is open.”
The door to the hall flew open behind them, as if flung wide by a sudden gust. Air blew papers across the desk at the far
end of the room, ruffled the pages of an open book. Before anyone could react, the door slammed itself shut. Donna screamed
and yanked her hands off the table.
“Fuck this!”
“Come on in,” Colin said. “We’re waiting.”
The door opened again and slammed so hard it knocked some of the framed shadow boxes on the wall askew, the boxes that contained Llewellyn’s collection of dead, glittering, brooch-like butterflies.
A hundred corpses, precisely impaled by Llewellyn Wren’s silver pins, lovingly embalmed with Llewellyn Wren’s poisons.
7.
“None of these poisons will kill the virus,” Llewellyn told her, “but if we give them time, Gwen, they might kill me. It’s a race to see what I die of first: my infections or my medicine.”
They were in the dark of his bedroom and she was passing him the paper cups with his pills in them, one at a time.
The shades were drawn against the last of the daylight. Llewellyn couldn’t bear the sunshine any longer. His eyes had gone
the color of filthy dishwater from a cytomegalovirus, eyelids red and inflamed. His face was a death mask; his nose had a
great wine-stain sarcoma on the end of it, ruining what had been a genial, affectionate face.
She handed him another paper thimble of tablets. “Keep swallowing.”
“That’s what the boys said to me, my first Friday night belowdecks on a destroyer,” Llewellyn said. “God, that was a good
time. There was a lot of excellent fagging about in the North Atlantic in those days.” He swallowed three more pills and grimaced.
“Tasty. I think I said something about the war the other night. Was I rambling, Gwen?”
Gwen noted, with interest, his almost sly undertone.
“Which war?”
“Well, precisely,” he sighed. “I did have a hand in quite a few of them . . . including the one upon us now. I wrote a psychological
profile on Saddam. Terrifically uninteresting fellow. Generic gangster mentality. Thinks there’s nothing classier than shitting
on a gold toilet.”
Gwen spooned up some porridge. She fed him with care, using the spoon to catch anything that didn’t make his lips and nudging it back in.
“Thank you, my love,” he said. “But I did talk to you, didn’t I? About one of my wars? What did I say?”
“Just a bunch of malarkey,” Gwen said. “You talked about important men you wanted to screw, important men who wanted to screw
you. Who knew you had such a torrid imagination, you filthy old fairy. Ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’m an innocent and
untutored girl of the Christian faith. I feel despoiled every time I walk out of here.”
“Nothing about Vietnam?” he asked her. “Nothing about my instruction manual or my research in Saigon?”
Something in his tone unsettled her—his slow, probing curiosity.
“No,” she said.
He sighed again. She fed him another spoonful.
“You are right,” he said, suddenly. “It is all malarkey. You mustn’t believe anything I say when I am not myself, my dearest. It may sound real but be sure of it: it