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“Just so.” She was oblivious to my irony. In fact, she appeared relieved. “I’m so pleased you and I are on the same page.”

I groaned. A page of what strange book? I wondered.

“Don’t worry,” she called. “I’ll get you where you need to go. Trust me, William.”

I felt a tiny chill play against my spine, for that was just what Vav had said. At that moment, I made a decision. Spurring my horse on, I leaned over toward her. So far as I could determine, playing by the rules, odd though they might be, had done me no good at all. All change! I grabbed her reins and drew her off the trodden path.

“What are you doing?” she said, alarmed.

“To the Manor, wherever that is,” I said. “Let the others handle the beast.”

“What others?” We were side by side now, our thighs touching. “William, we’re the only ones on this hunt.”

“So much the better,” I said. “No one will miss us when we don’t go on.”

“You don’t understand.”

I leaned in until I was close enough to smell her hair. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

She licked her lips. At the fall of night her eyes were like cabochon jewels. For an instant I found myself wondering idly, crazily, if she was as blind as Vav.

“We must run the beast to ground,” she said. “Otherwise, it will never let us get to the Manor House.”

“Why?”

“William—” There was something in her face now, some hint of a wound so fresh, so deep it was still bleeding. “Vav ignored the beast at her own peril. Look what happened to her. I won’t make the same mistake.”

She looked so vulnerable. I put my hand on the side of her neck. “What mistake?”

She was trembling a little. “The paintings and the beast are intertwined. You can’t see one without encountering the other. She thought she could take you directly to the paintings, that she could somehow circumvent the beast. But she was wrong.”

“You keep talking about a beast, but what exactly do you mean? To my knowledge there
are
no beasts in Leicestershire, or for that matter anywhere in England. Large predators are extinct here, as they are in most of Europe.”

Her eyes searched mine. “Vav didn’t explain?”

“If she had I wouldn’t be asking you, would I?” I said softly.

“It’s an exercise in futility. You won’t believe me, I promise you.”

I kissed her cheek. “You mean you won’t even give me the chance?”

This seemed to give her pause. I could sense that she was coming to a decision she would rather not make. “It’s best if we keep moving while we talk.”

I nodded and let go of her reins, following closely as she veered at an acute angle across the cool blue grassland into the inky shadows of the forest.

“The beast is a creature born of chaos,” she said at last. “It hardly thinks as you or I know it; you can’t reason with it or come to a compromise, but its reactions to stimuli are appallingly quick. It is pure evil.”

“It attacked Vav before I could even take a breath.”

“Poor Vav. She didn’t have a chance,” Gimel said in an odd tone of voice, as if she were speaking to herself. Then her gaze met mine across the short distance between us. “As I said, I won’t make the same mistake.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant, but all at once, inside the forest, everything changed. I don’t mean the oak trees, or the coolness of the evening, the rich earthy smells or the very strong sense of being in this place. I don’t quite know how to say this, but it was as if from the moment I had run out the back of Helicon I had been balancing on a taut wire. Now that wire had broken, and I was falling. Not literally, you understand. But figuratively I felt as if I were tailing from one reality—or rather my
perception
of reality—into another. A bubble had burst and I suddenly found myself beneath the skin of the universe. I was inside looking out at the surface—the bright, shiny, all-too-familiar shell—of every mundane thing we take for granted. Now everything looked different to me. And with that feeling came a ripple of recognition, like the déjà vu of a vivid dream, of the unfinished paintings I’d seen in Vav’s atelier. For just the briefest instant I glimpsed beneath their conventional Impressionist surface to what they were
about. It’s nothing to do with me
, Vav had said in speaking about the exhibition. I hadn’t understood her then. How could the exhibition
not
be about her? I had wondered in Paris. She was the artist. And yet now I was beginning to understand what she had meant. The paintings were what was important. Who had painted them was in a very real sense of no import.

“Wait!” I called out to Gimel. “Hold on a second!”

She whirled her horse around. “What is it?”

I was already dismounted. “There’s something about this place … something familiar.”

She jumped off her horse, and as it turned I saw attached to one side of the saddle an old-fashioned longbow—not one of those space-age-material composite bows hunters use nowadays—and a quiver of arrows. She came toward me with a pronounced limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. Then I saw that her left leg was narrower and smaller than her right, withered like a dried stalk of wheat.

“Perhaps you have been to this part of the Charnwood Forest before.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never been outside of London. But even if I had, that isn’t what I mean.” I was walking around the small glade. “What I’m feeling … It isn’t as simple as that.” She regarded me calmly, albeit with a certain degree of curiosity. “Do you think it’s possible to know a place—I mean know it inside and out—without ever having set foot in it?”

“If one looks at only the physical world, no, of course not.” She strode across the glade in her peculiar lopsided gait to stand in front of me. “But the universe is so much more than that, isn’t it?” In the tone of her voice I could sense that she was asking something else entirely.

Curious how these moments of transition came upon me. Once again, I found my consciousness cast back in time. The image of Donnatella, slightly drunk, stood before me. I had met her in Mexico, where she had come with her husband and sister for a vacation. While her unconscionable husband was romancing her sister, Donnatella and I sat in quiet, leafy Oaxacan squares and drank mescal. This had the effect of keeping the stifling heat at bay and also of arousing us to seizures of unbridled passion. Thinking now about those erotically charged moments in her hotel room or in mine I could for the first time see where it all went wrong. They were fierce, those sexual encounters, yes, but—and it hurts so much to admit this—they were also essentially joyless. It hurt because it showed me how little we really had, what small people we were together. It occurred to me that with Herman, Donnatella was a better person—and that hurt as well. To say all of this hit me with the impact of an express train was something of an understatement. Up until that moment I was absolutely certain we had loved one another, even after she and Herman ran off together. But now I knew better. Our love, like a billboard with a half-naked model, had been nothing more than wishful thinking. The sad truth is that Donnatella and I coupled for all the wrong reasons, and we married for them as well. Twelve hours after her divorce came through, wham, it was done: we were married. It was a seductive but poisonous start we made for ourselves, sitting sprawl-legged, drunk on mescal and each other, groping moist flesh beneath the plank table, under the somnolent, watchful gaze of the Mexican waiters. To this day I hear the soulful strum of a Mexican guitar and my eyes glaze over. But I suppose the truth is that all the while Donnatella was pleasuring me she was thinking of her husband and her sister, and of revenge.

No, we never loved one another. Our personal flame wasn’t even passion so much as rage—a rage at everything around us. And this rage—this demonic passion—made us safe. For a time. And then it vanished. You couldn’t even say our relationship was over, because it had never really begun. I curiously never stopped liking her. With Lily she was a saint, going to see her almost every week when I never would. She and I had the most god-awful fights about that. She’d often say it was a mortal sin, my ignoring my sister, and who knows, perhaps she was right. Then again, being Roman Catholic, Donnatella was consumed with all the conflicting quirks and superstitions that go along with the religion. I often wondered how she rationalized two divorces. Once, when I asked her, she told me with a curious kind of contempt that her uncle knew the Pope and had managed to secure for her some form of dispensation. To this day. I have no idea whether or not that was true. Anyway, I’m not sure it matters. She was certainly kinder to my sister than she was to her own sister, but how can I fault her for that? I can’t. I won’t. She’s a unique person and in the end I’m glad we met, even if I got to know her too well and too late. But when you come to the quick of it—when you strip away everything that doesn’t matter—she was never mine, and the deepest pain comes from the years of self-delusion that she once was.

The enormity of these revelations made me sick to my stomach. It was as if the world had turned to ash, as if memory like some terrible swift scythe had mown down a shining field of illusion.
My
illusion. Now all at once Donnatella, the languorous, leafy Mexican square, the sweaty furtive couplings, the plangent guitar music outside the cracked hotel window wavered and grew insubstantial like a djinn vanishing into his lamp.

I was back in the Charnwood Forest in the ethereal darkness of the glade. Gimel was still close beside me. I could smell her slightly spicy scent.

“What were you just thinking?” she asked. “I could feel your tension.”

“I was recalling my life,” I said truthfully. “And, sadly, it occurred to me that it hasn’t been what I’d thought it was.”

“What is?” Her eyes were shining in the dark. “Whatever we can immediately know must be of poor value, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know you.” I gripped her more tightly. “Not at all.”

“Am I precious, then?” Her eyes danced as she smiled wickedly at me. “Is that your meaning?”

A cool stillness seemed to banish the rest of the world to a dim and hazy daguerreotype. Did the breeze cease to stir the oak leaves; did the birds cease their evening songs, the insects their nocturnal Morse code? It seemed that way to me. In Mexico, Donnatella had once told me that when she was with me nothing else was real. “Existence, it is the tip of the flame,” she had said in the endearing way she had of reparsing the English language in her own image. “When I am in your arms I am in the flame, can you understand this?”

With Gimel I felt I was inside the flame, as if all existence resided in the minuscule space between us. But, in the end, the outside world intruded like a clammy and inauspicious wind. In the instant that my memories had overtaken me I had missed something, perhaps something crucial.

I was at once filled with apprehension. The smile had frozen on her face. I could see the skin on her arms had broken out into goose bumps.

“What’s happened?” I said.

Then I heard it, too. Something quite large was making its way through the forest. As we stood without moving a muscle, straining to interpret the sound, I could tell it was heading directly for us.

“It’s the beast,” she whispered. “It’s found us.”

“We’d better get back on our horses,” I said.

“Do you think that’s wise?” She put a hand on my mount’s bridle. “Now that we’re here do you still believe the best choice is to run?”

“What else is there to do?” I said. “Will your arrows stop it?”

“I have no idea.”

“That uncertainty doesn’t make for good odds.”

“What have odds to do with it?” All at once she seemed saddened. “Do you think Vav considered the odds when she took you down the Parisian alley?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Then you’re right,” she said, abruptly letting go of the bridle. She sounded as if at any moment she would break into tears. “We’d better try to flee before it’s too late.”

But it was already too late. As I put one boot into the stirrup, the underbrush parted and a dark and ungainly shape rushed us from the shadows. The black mare reared up, snorting, her nostrils flared, and Gimel nocked an arrow to her bowstring. She drew back the string and let fly. Maybe it was a trick of the last of the evening’s cobalt light, but the arrow seemed to disappear an instant before it would have pierced the beast’s chest. With a soft cry, she hurled herself directly into the beast’s path.

. “No!” I shouted as the thing swung an enormous paw at her. It was immensely powerful. Even from that distance I could hear her neck crack. She was lifted off her feet by the terrific force of the blow, spun around so that I saw all the light had gone out of her eyes. She fell to the forest floor, her head at an unnatural angle.

My stomach turned over and I tried to get to her. But I also felt compelled to get a better look at this beast than I had at the gargoyle. And yet I could only take it in with brief, furtive flicks of my eyes. It had the same hideous face I’d glimpsed out of the corner of my eye in the Parisian alley, but this time its body was definitely more animal than human. Just as it had before, it hesitated, but this time I thought I heard something, a far-off crack as if a rifle shot. Wasting no time, I gathered Gimel to me and dragged her into the mass of oaks. I picked her up amid the dense tangle of underbrush; she was as light as an infant. It was as if there was no substance to her, as if all that she had been had vanished the moment the beast had broken her neck.

Still I could not bear to let her go. She had sacrificed herself, throwing herself between me and the beast. But there was no time to lose. Behind me, the beast was crashing through the forest toward me. I turned and ran, stumbling over villages of roots and vines, colonies of pale toadstools. Once, I went down on my knees, but I never let go of Gimel. I could not imagine leaving her there for the beast to find and perhaps maul over. That would have been an inhuman act.

I have already said that her body was quite light, nevertheless it was an impediment amid the forest’s tenacious undergrowth. As a consequence, I was rapidly losing ground to the beast, whose hellacious panting was like the roar of an immense vehicle about to run me down.