Exsanguination and Other Love Stories

X. Enter the Witch

At the same time, I felt the floor begin to shake beneath my feet. This was particularly noticeable around the pedestals, of all things, which seemed to be shaking even more than the floor. Peculiar, because they had looked so much as if they were made of solid marble...

Mr. Blue was barking into his wrist piece with robotic fury and gesticulating with all his might: but nothing was happening. A little blue glowing inchworm turned circle after circle on the view screen.

"Maybe it's an earthquake," I said. "Is this building quake-proof?"

And I shuddered to think what things might be like upstairs now, with the glass ceilings.

Mr. Blue wasn't listening to me anymore, though, and I was just fine with that. I did my best to distance myself from the four walls of the room. I couldn't see any cracks in the thick glass yet, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. Inside the aquarium, the waters continued to churn and rage scarlet. If I squinted I could almost make out flickers of forms in there – faces. I shuddered and averted my eyes. The sight of their gaping eyes and open mouths made my stomach turn. I could have sworn they were the faces of women, and the more I looked the sharper and more definite their features grew.

I ran for Anystysya's guitar, and pulled it off the pedestal. It didn't have much heft to it, but if it had been enough to do her in, I figured it might be able to fend off Mr. Blue for a bit.

But even as I yanked the instrument out of the stand, the platform it was standing on split in two and burst outwards. I was sent flying, fingers clamped around the glittery handle, and landed in a clamor of discordant strings several feet away.

Standing at the edge of a very large hole in the floor, the two halves of the pedestal split and flung to the sides like paper (and indeed, they were not marble, but some sort of pasteboard with marble lined on top) was a dripping black figure, unfamiliar in form and feature: the stink made me reel and gag.

Mr. Blue looked up from his uncooperative wrist piece in disbelief.

"Who are you?" he demanded, of the stooping stranger.

The stranger's rounded, bug-eyed face cracked open in a broad, yellow-toothed smile. He was an old man, and his cheeks were wrinkled like an old apple and reddened under the filth. There was a confidence in his eyes despite his bedraggled condition which was quite baffling. They were bright, keen, and utterly focused on Mr. Blue.

"Is that all you have to say to me, after all this time?" he asked, and he laughed.

And I stared, because I wasn't hearing an old man's voice coming out of that old man's frame. I heard a woman's voice – an old high-pitched woman's voice, without the comforting rasp of old age or the richness – but old nonetheless, old and polished and silencing. It was more frightening than Mr. Blue's expressionless ranting. It was more frightening than Florian's smile and his overwhelming charm. It was the sort of sound that says, yes, you've lost before you've even begun: because I've been here longer than you can even imagine, my pretty, and I have no soft spot for youth or cleverness: and no pity, either.

I heard all this, but Mr. Blue must have heard only the whine of an unfamiliar stranger, and he stepped forward with his face quite terrifyingly set, razor in hand.

"Don't – " I cried out, and I wasn't sure whether I was crying out for the sake of the stranger or for the sake of Mr. Blue. Even as I stepped forward, though, there was another great blur of motion, something black and batlike and equally reeking sprung out of the hole in the floor and made for me.

"Don't move, Bill," said Florian in my ear, a scarce two seconds later.

With superhuman competence, he had seized both my arms and was now holding me fixed against his chest. He had not, however, gone so far as to pry the guitar from my hand. I suppose it must have seemed to him a good thing to let me hold something at the moment, like one would leave a pacifier in the hands of a fretful child.

"Taken up an instrument since you left me?" he asked, his blue eyes bright with amusement – but at the same time, staring up at his besmirched and lovely face in shock, I felt a keen sense he was trying to lighten the mood on purpose. "Are those – bloodstains on your guitar? Grim. "

"Let go!" I cried at him, struggling fruitlessly to free myself so I could see what was happening now with Mr. Blue and the stranger. Florian had me facing away from all the action. "What have you done?"

"I brought help," Florian said brightly. "Blue may own the building, but he doesn't own the sewers, and he doesn't own the space in between Cordelia's waters, either. She sponsored the tank construction, clever old thing."

Witch waters! sang out a voice in my head.

"Witch waters..." I mumbled half-mindedly.

"Are you all right, Bill?"

"You're lying to me," I said, with sudden acute awareness. "You know more than you're saying." And I pounded on the back of his thoroughly ruined trench coat with my fist and tried to swat him with the guitar with the other. "Let me go! You stink!"

"I'm sure I do," Florian said. "But trust me, you don't really need to know the truth. You just need me to sweep in and save the day. We all have all our roles, Bill. Play yours nicely – continue to make a show of being feisty, by all means, but for heaven's sake don't actually try and get involved. Look at what happened to all the others. Let us take care of things."

"Us!" I exclaimed. "Who is your friend?"

"I'll be happy to introduce her to you as soon as she's finished dealing with your friend."

"This must all be a very bad dream." I said, staring over his shoulder at the nearest aquarium wall. "It must be. Water can't turn red like that. What's happening? Why are there faces in the water?"

Florian grinned. "But the question is – are you a heroine dreaming you are Sabilla Vane, or Sabilla Vane dreaming you are a hero - faces? What faces?"

And he pushed me back by the shoulders and looked very intently into my eyes.

"But can't you see them?" I asked, quite bewildered. "Girl's faces. And women. There's – Neve.... And..."

I fell silent.

"Bill?" Florian frowned deeply, glancing back in a blur and then back at me. "There's nothing there. Are you sure you didn't hit your head when we came up? I heard you fall... "

I shut my eyes, and tuned his nattering out, and I thought, harder than I'd thought ever before in my life, for a few short seconds which felt like an eternity. This was because at that moment I was thinking for my life: and not the clever kind of thinking at all, but the kind of thought that words just crowd out and confuse, particularly other people's words, and sometimes even one's own more than anything.

It's hard to explain for that reason alone, but that was when I knew that everything in that room must all be a dream, or something very like one. And that was also when I knew I had all the power that I wanted to have, if I only wanted to have it. This is something she used to tell me, late at night – the last face I'd seen in the water- when she would come home late from work and sit with me in our small living room, where I was pretending to sleep, long after Dad had gone back upstairs to bed. That when the dreams got bad enough – you only had to remember – if things can bend so badly one way, they can bend back for you, too, if you can only remember to push.

My mother may not have been a witch, but she was wiser in her own way than many of them.

"Let me go," I said hoarsely to Florian. My own voice seemed like it was coming from a very long ways away. I felt a bit as if I were going to faint for a moment, but fought it down. I dropped the guitar: it would do me no good from here on out. I shoved again at Florian. "Let me go."

And this time when I spoke, the voice inside spoke with me.