Ashley Bell: A Novel (59 page)

When she could find the strength to reach toward the nightstand lamp, she switched it on. The light was glorious. She wished morning would come to the window hours ahead of schedule. Just then, there could not be too much light. She leaned back against the pillows and the headboard. Blood trickled from one nostril, tears from both eyes. She thought she would throw up. She didn’t. She thought her heart would never stop sledgehammering, but it returned slowly to a more gentle beat. For a long time she sat in a kind of catatonia, not because she couldn’t move or speak, but because she didn’t want to move or speak, wondering—worrying about—what new thing might be called into the world by a thoughtless gesture or one wrong word.

In time she slept.

Morning came.

She woke. She showered. She ate breakfast.

She was quieter than usual, which her parents noted, but her mind was racing as always, bobbin and spindle and flyer working at high speed, spinning wooly thoughts into taut threads, into ideas and speculations. Before her sixth birthday, her life had changed dramatically, irrevocably, and there was nothing to be done other than to accept what she was now. And be cautious. Never again wish into the world something that was not natural to it. Stories were good. They made life better, happier. But stories should remain between the covers of a book.

Pax stood watching numbers roll up on the tape counter and the twin hubs turning as tape moved through the guide rollers. He didn’t listen as closely to the captain’s words as did Murphy and Nancy, for he’d heard them in the car with Pogo and would never forget them. As the magnetized strip of acetate spooled from reel to reel, paying out the past, he felt it pulling him toward the future. He wondered, with a reverent awe but also with some apprehension, what the years ahead with Bibi would be like, this remarkable woman, if she survived to share her life with him.

During Captain’s account, Room 456 seemed to emerge from the building in which it had been located, like a bubble from a bubble-blower’s loop, becoming a world unto itself, afloat, so that if one were to open the door, no hospital corridor would wait beyond, but instead an intolerable nothingness. His voice grew as mesmerizing as the drug that he’d put in young Bibi’s Coca-Cola. In spite of the outlandish nature of the story he told, none in his audience of four expressed disbelief, because they knew now of other instances when Bibi’s imagination had shaped her life for better (Jasper, who was renamed Olaf) or worse (the writing assignment for Dr. Solange St. Croix). At one point, Nancy needed a chair, and Murphy brought one bedside for her. Throughout, the girl lay apparently insensate to this world, living in a different one of her vivid imagining.

After recalling for Bibi the incident in her bedroom, which he had helped her to forget, the captain recounted how she had brought the creature out of the storybook again, this time in the kitchen of his apartment above the garage, to prove the truth of her claim. That experience had been terrifying for both of them, though less so for Bibi, because she had once vanquished the thing and knew that she had power over it.

Speaking now from the cassette recorder as from the grave, the captain said,
“Bibi, considering that you lived with that secret for eight months before you shared it with me, and considering that you were haunted by what had happened and were fearful of what you might unwittingly conjure up next, I still think the best solution was the memory trick. There are no coincidences. I came into your life with the knowledge necessary to heal you, protect you, and I believe that I was meant to do just that.”

Getting up from her chair, as if her father stood in the room to be confronted, Nancy said, “Drugs, hypnosis,
brainwashing
?” But then she seemed to resign herself to the situation as it was and sat once more, still weak-kneed, as the captain continued.

“You have such a powerful imagination, so colorful and detailed and…deep. In time I saw it was a gift. An extraordinary gift. I think you’re born to tell stories, Bibi. That’s a wonderful thing. I’ve read more truth in fiction than in nonfiction, partly because fiction can deal with the numinous, and nonfiction rarely does. The human heart and spirit. The unknown. The unknowable. Storytelling can heal broken hearts and damaged minds. As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul. I began to worry that, with the memory trick, I stole from you part of your precious gift, denied you the chance to control it and to become all that you might be. So I began collecting quotations from famous writers, their thoughts about the great value of imagination. A foolish exercise? God, I hope not. Over the years, as I’m sure you remember, we talked a lot about those quotations, and in my fumbling way, I tried to make sure that you would develop your gift, that the knowledge lost to you regarding the full extent of your talent, the knowledge burned away with the memory trick, would not prevent you from becoming all that you could be.”

“…in my fumbling way, I tried to make sure you would develop
your gift, that the knowledge lost to you regarding the full extent of your talent…would not prevent you from becoming all that you could be.”

Bibi had crawled out of the kneehole. She stood in the reception hall, a small figure in the vastness of white quartz, staring up at the circle of red stone and the two stylized lightning bolts centered in it.

Over the years, she had been troubled by a repetitive nightmare in which two robed and hooded figures, tall and shambling, deformed in limbs and spines, had carried a corpse wrapped in a shroud. Under a Cheshire moon, they brought the dead man through the brick-paved courtyard behind the bungalow, as she watched them from a window, terrified by their intent. They were, of course, returning Captain to the apartment above the garage, where he had died.

How strange the mind is,
she thought now.
How it shrouds from itself some of its darker capacities.

In the dream, one of the transporters of the dead became aware of her and turned its hooded head toward her bedroom window. Just then the night always brightened, and she could see the countenance of Death for a moment before he turned away. That glimpse frightened her to such an extent, she did not—could not, would not—carry the image with her when she woke. But now she remembered: Within the hood had been not a stripped-bare skull, not a rotting countenance acrawl with worms and beetles, but only her face, pale and set in a look of grim determination. Hooded Death hadn’t brought the captain home from the grave. Ten-year-old Bibi, his loving granddaughter—
she
wanted so badly to resurrect him. Dreaming, she’d intuited the formidable power of her imagination, of which she’d no recollection when awake, the knowledge having been burned away.

For all his doubts, Captain had been right to use the memory trick. In spite of the hideous experience with the gingerbread man, she would not have been able to resist the compulsion to bring the captain back. In fact, she understood now that in the weeks following his death, while visiting his apartment, she had unwittingly brought him out of the grave more than once, in the condition of an animated corpse, had brought him back and sent him away without any conscious awareness of what she was doing. The footsteps in other rooms. The wet blood dripping off his bedroom doorknob. The ominous presence in the apartment attic, which stepped out of shadow into light. Those had been brief, half-realized resurrections. Had she been aware that she could effect his return with her imagination, she would have brought him back in full, and the horror of what she’d done would have destroyed her.

When the golden retriever, Olaf, had died six years after her grandfather’s passing, the memory trick must have begun to fail. Captain had been wrong to believe that traumatic experiences were burned away forever. They were instead flushed into a deep memory hole, there to fester until some stressful circumstance drew them toward the surface. Bibi had wanted to witness the dog’s cremation, to be sure that he had been reduced to ashes, and she had not kept a twist of his fur, as she had kept the lock of hair and scrap of scalp from the captain’s body. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she had been afraid that she would bring him back, imagine him with her again. Inevitably, he would have been a strange and menacing version of the dog she had loved. In spite of Olaf being only an urn full of ashes, she had yearned for reanimation. After spending three days locked in her room alone, struggling against the reckless love that would have led to resurrection, she had in desperation used the memory trick once more.

As Pax switched off the recorder and picked it up from the bed, Bibi opened her eyes.

He breathed her name, but she did not look directly at him.

Her gaze traveled right to left, left to right, alighting on no one, taking in everyone and everything—or nothing. She closed her eyes and remained unresponsive.

When Bibi turned from the red circle and the black bolts of lightning, the immense white reception hall and another white room had for a moment been integrated. Ten feet away stood a hospital bed, an array of associated monitors, an IV drip. Nancy, Murphy, Pogo, and beautiful Paxton were gathered around the bed, their attention focused on the patient, who was Bibi herself.

She understood at once what this vision meant, that it was not in fact a vision in the paranormal sense, that it was the truth of her condition, a revelation made by herself to herself, inspired by the captain speaking from beyond the grave. She was not surprised that she existed in two worlds simultaneously, and in two conditions. In the deepest recesses of mind and heart, she had known all along, but she had required this second narrative in order to rescue herself in the first. She had needed to break the hold of the memory trick, discover again the extraordinary power of her imagination, and use it to restore herself to health.

The one medicine that had always relieved her pain and healed her sorrow had been stories, reading them and writing them. She knew no other effective therapy.

The hospital vignette faded into the other world, other life.

A fleeting image rose in memory: herself at six, with Captain in the bungalow kitchen, holding an index card in steel tongs, the white cardstock suddenly on fire, a butterfly of flame flexing its wings, butterflies bright and beautiful in the captain’s eyes….

If the past could ever truly be past, she had at last put it behind her. The future was now where all threats lay, and she had no option but to meet them in the world where she was lying in a hospital room, watched and monitored, as well as in this world of her own making.

As she had recognized earlier in the night, when she’d yearned for Pax to find her, she was not dreaming. The shapen world of her extraordinary imagination was as solid as the quartz under her feet, as real as the hot pain that coruscated through the turnings of her damaged ear and throbbed in her bruised face.

This place lay between Heaven and Earth, and where she would wind up at the conclusion of her quest could not be imagined. It had to be achieved.

In spite of all her power, here in a world of her creation, she was not immortal any more than in the first world. She was not a god, merely a gifted imaginer. A shot to the head would put an end to her and all that she had imagined. If she died here, she died also in the world where she’d been born. And she was not confident about her chances.

From her shoulder holster, she drew the pistol. Considered it for a moment. Then put it down on the black-granite reception desk.

One enemy remained. In this world as in the one where she had been born, the ultimate enemy couldn’t be dispatched with violence.

In the wall behind the desk, three doors were paneled with the same white quartz that surrounded them. She chose the middle of the three, which stood under the red-and-black symbol of totalitarian power. Beyond the door lay a hallway that she followed to an elevator alcove. When she pressed the call button, one of six sets of doors slid open, and she boarded that car. According to the car-station panel, there were four aboveground floors and a basement. The 4 lit without her touch, the doors slid shut, and she was whisked upward.

In this world of her invention, she had imagined other people with power, and none more than he into whose lair she now ventured. She thought of Kelsey Faulkner, the silversmith and father of this man, half his face handsome, the other half ruined. She thought of Kelsey’s wife, Beth, mother of the man now awaiting her, raped by her own son, stabbed twenty-three times, acid poured on her face. He took their money, unspecified items of value, and set out upon a new life, that teenage boy obsessed with Hitler and the occult.

In the end, after Bibi had endured four Taserings, once she had understood that she possessed the power, Chubb Coy had been easily edited away, his role truncated to five appearances. But he had been a minor character and rather poorly imagined, with no past other than a reference to having been a police detective. By contrast, Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Birkenau Terezin, had a vivid and twisted past, a violent pathology that made him memorable. Besides, since this had begun, all the others who obstructed her were either members of Terezin’s cult or in some way allied with him, which made him the spider at the center of the web, the primary antagonist. She could not edit him from existence without collapsing this entire imagined world. Only the most formulaic authors always knew when they began a story what the fate of their lead would be. When writing organically, allowing characters their free will, the author could be surprised by who died and who lived in the final act.