Decorum | ONC 2023 Shortlister

Chapter Seven

It had never been a question in Abigail's mind that, following her conversation with Arthur, she would immediately wind her way up the stairs to the third floor library. Whether it would be empty this early in the morning or occupied by the ghost-like figure of Victor Blackwell, she didn't know, but there was something strangely comforting about the book-ridden room with its burgundy carpets and spattering of furniture. Somehow it was a safe haven in this otherwise empty manor, a dark womb filled with words and decaying roses. It felt to Abigail as though it was the only room that at once reflected and gave refuge from the oppressive air that hung about Blackwell Manor.

The earthen smell of roses hung delicately about the doorless entrance to the library, and when Abigail entered through it, she found Victor already seated at his table, his book about that woman and her lover in Italy.

He looked up upon her approach, and then, returning to his book, said, "I saw Arthur's car in front of the house."

For some reason, even at this early hour, Abigail had expected him to be here, sitting at his table, or perhaps even in the chaise lounge, book in hand. What she hadn't expected, however, was the immediacy with which he addressed her. Often their encounters were long, drawn out affairs, with several hours of silence elapsing between them before Victor uttered a word to her.

"You're awake rather early." Abigail said. Watching him from the corner of her eye, she wandered to her section of the bookshelf and pulled the three field guides from the tightly stuffed rows of books. When she had turned around again, she found Victor watching her, and he continued to do so until she had joined him at the table and opened one of her guides. This seemed to pacify Victor, and he joined her in looking down at his respective book.

"I couldn't sleep." He said, and then, without pause he asked, "Did you speak to him?"

"Who? Arthur?" Abigail flipped idly through the book of plants, pausing when she came across images of lily pads and waterweeds.

"Yes."

"Yes." She replied.

The aquatic plants stared back at her, flat, colorful renditions of the actual plants themselves. Abigail tried to picture them in the water, but here, in the glossy pages of the field guide, it almost appeared as if the lily pads weren't actually floating, but were instead plastic statues, some sort of educational replica that might be found in a school or science museum. They weren't made of the soft grey greens that she had so vividly pictured earlier in the morning.

"What did he say?" Victor asked.

Now he was watching her from over the top of his book, a previously undemonstrated sense of anticipation filling the air about him. Abigail flipped the page to reveal curly pondweed and Nymphoides cordata— little floating hearts, trying to determine what she ought to say and how much of it. On account of her and Victor's limited, and almost exclusively shallow, conversations, she had very little sense of what topics might send her companion off into another spiral of paranoia and delusion. The two had only spoken of Arthur once before, and Abigail had never attempted to broach the subject of immediate family with him.

So she stared for a moment at the pondweed and floating hearts and the smaller pictures of bladderwort, trying to picture them swaying within a soft, invisible current. At length, she raised her eyes from the images to meet Victor's gaze. He hung by the thread of her silence, waiting anxiously for any information she might depart on him. It was the first time that she had seen him keen on speaking to anyone, and perhaps this is what made him appear so much more alive to her in this moment. Here, with his book propped between his hands and his eyes inquisitively searching hers, Abigail thought she could see the man that he might have been before. In fact, if it weren't for the sunkenness of his features and the dark shadows that hung beneath his eyes, she might have struggled to see the version of Victor Blackwell that she had first met upon her arrival.