Lumière (The Illumination Paradox) (19 page)

“That’s not true and you know it.” I scowl.

Another scream rakes the ceiling, throwing both our chins up to see.

“Don’t lie to me, Urlick. Please tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing,” he snaps. “I assure you. There is no one else in this house but you and I and Iris—”

“And your father.”

A muscle twitches at the side of his cheek.

A noise from the hall has Urlick looking panicked, as another scream rolls up our spines.

“Iris!” I shout, suddenly remembering, cranking my head around and back. “Where is Iris? What’s happened to her?”

Urlick gasps. Looking as though he’s harboring a secret in his eyes.

“Where is she? I demand to see her
now!
IRIS!
” I spring from his arms and he reels me back, lifting my feet from the ground. I kick, trying to run, my heels meeting with his shins.
“IRIS!”
I scream. “Iris, where are you! Answer me!”

“Eyelet, please.” Urlick tightens his grip and I cough from the pressure. “Iris is in no danger, you have to believe me—”

“Then prove it!” I spin in his arms, trying to strip myself of his grip. “Produce her! Immediately!”

“IR-IIIIIS!”
Urlick shouts. “Iris, show yourself,
please!”

The bedroom door handle turns. The door creaks slowly open. Iris’s round moon face appears at the side of the jamb, her sad-dog eyes gawking in at me, her expression riddled with guilt.

“Iris?” I say, giving up the fight. “Iris? Are you’re okay?”

She says nothing, just tightens her grip on the jamb.

“You see, I told you”—Urlick’s breath is choppy—“Iris is perfectly fine.” He lowers my feet to the floorboards.

“Iris,” I gasp, my gaze shifting between the two of them. “Talk to me. Please, Iris. Tell me what’s going on!”

Her lips part as if to speak, but Urlick interrupts. “Go upstairs and fetch the
comfort
tea.” He flicks his chin toward the ceiling. “The medicinal one. From the room.”

Iris’s eyes grow big and desperate. Her grip tightens on the jamb.

“What room?” I wrench around, facing Urlick, then turn back to Iris. “What’s happening here? Iris, speak to me—”

“Right away Iris,
please!
”

“No!” I shake my head, thrashing up against him. “I’m fine. Honestly. I’ll go back to bed and won’t get up again, I promise. Please, just let go of me. Please, just let me go to bed.”

Another scream jags across the ceiling, sharp and ugly. My heart pulls to a stop. I stare hard into Urlick’s eyes. “Why are you doing this to me? Why won’t you tell me the truth?” My gaze pulls at Urlick. His jaw begins to drop.

“Iris,
please!”
He pulls his eyes away from me. “Go get the tea! NOW!”

Iris darts away, returning a moment later with a cup, steam rising like fingers from its rim.

“No.” I fight. “No, Urlick, please!” Forcing my head back into the crook of his arm, he parts my lips and thrusts the rim of the cup up against my teeth. “Drink this,” he says.

“No!” I sputter and squirm.

“You must!” His eyes are sharp and mean.

Another scream rises as he brings the cup back up to my lips. “Please, Eyelet,” he begs. “Just drink it. It won’t hurt you, I promise, I’d never hurt you…”

I look into his eyes, not knowing what to think. What’s happened to the Urlick I know? The one I spoke with last night at supper, the hurt little boy with the horrible birth story, the one who was kind enough to fix me a pie?

What’s happened to him? Where did he go? Why is he doing this to me?

He brings the cup to rest on my lips again, and I purse them tight. His eyes beg me to drop my resistance. “How much do you trust me?” he whispers, and I gasp.

“What did you just say?”

“I asked how much you trust me.”

As if I’ve just been pulled underwater, Urlick’s features begin to distort, his face interchanging sporadically with that of his father, then my father, then back to him again. The room starts to spin, becoming a whir of wobbly shadows. The light dims to a grey veil. I smell burning bread and all at once I realize it’s the silver, threading its way up inside my veins.

Not now. Oh,
please,
not now.

He mustn’t know. He mustn’t see this.

I close my eyes, trying hard to fight the feeling, but the silver’s toxic tentacles are far too powerful.

I can’t allow this to happen. I can’t fall into a full episode and writhe in his arms. I’ve got to find another way out.

Reaching out for the cup, I pull it to my lips, gulping down every last drop of its bitter contents. Then I push it away, planning to blame whatever happens next on the potion he’s just forced me to drink, not the silver.

T
wenty two

Urlick

I lower Eyelet to her bed, bringing her bedcovers up tight around her chin, and leave her room, weighed down by guilt as I stalk the hall toward my own.

I flop on my bed when I reach it, staring past my mobile of molecules at the ceiling, consumed with guilt. I reach out and spin the wheels of my origami hydrocycle model, knocking it from the shelf, and squint past my bat-winged chevron wallpaper at the portrait of Charles Darwin that hangs on the wall.

“I had no other choice, did I?” I whisper to him. “There was nothing else I could do. Perhaps Iris is right, I should have just told her. Perhaps Eyelet would have understood. Perhaps—
no
.” I run a hand through my hair.

“She can’t know. She must never know.”

I turn my head and stare out the window at the Vapours swelling high and fat over the ridge. It won’t be long now. They’ll come tumbling down and swallow us. And she’ll have nowhere else to go. If she were to find out now—before the Vapours set in—God knows what would happen to her. I can’t risk her knowing, for fear she bolts. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to that girl.

I swallow, forcing down the mix of feelings that have formed a wedge in my throat.

My bedroom door flies back, crashing into the wall, knocking Darwin dangerously off kilter.

A steaming Iris stands in the doorframe, her arms tightly crossed over her chest. Her lips as well as her brows are pursed. I’m in trouble.

She storms across the floor and hands me a note. “Do you really think that was necessary?” I read.

“Oh, I don’t know.” I sit up. “Don’t you?”

The line of her lips grows even more severe. Her hands thrust hard to her hips.

“Okay, so perhaps that was a little harsh. But what was I supposed to do?”

Iris snatches away the paper, scrawls something else, and stuffs it back in my face.

“Anything but that,” I read. “Really!” I spring from the bed. “All right, go ahead, enlighten me! How would you have kept her from knowing the secret?”

Iris’s gaze drops to the floor.

“Yeah, exactly.” I tug at the points of my waistcoat and smooth back my hair. “What do you think is going to happen if she ever finds out? Hmmm…” I jut my face toward Iris’s. “The gig would be up then, wouldn’t it?”

Iris refuses to look at me. She purses her lips even tighter.

“You know we can’t let her wander around in this place un-chaperoned.” I turn and pace. “You know what that could lead to.”

Iris glances at me through seething, squinty eyes.

“Don’t you look at me like that! You know she can’t know—”

“Why not?” She scribbles, forcing the note again on me.

“Why not?” I toss it back. “Do you really think we can trust her?”

Iris scratches another sentence down and flings the paper back. “You expected
her
to
trust
you!”

“Admirable point,” I say, leaning back on my heels. The floorboards squeak beneath them. “But it’s one thing for me to ask it of her, quite another for me to believe I could accept hers in return. Why, the girl’s little more than a gypsy!”

Iris narrows her eyes. She turns on her heel and charges across the room, heading for the door. “You’re a fool,” she mouths on her way past me, balling up the paper and throwing it in the trash.

“Perhaps,” I say. “But I’m a fool with his secrets intact!”

She storms out into the hallway and slams the door, not once but three times in a row—then again, four more times even quicker than before. Iris’s code for “You. Are. So.
Im-pos-si-ble!”

“Me?” I shout after her. “You should make your own acquaintance some time!”

“Pfft!” I hear her huff from the hall. She takes to the stairs, stomping her way up the treads to her apartment, slamming the door of her bedroom as well.

I fall back on the bed, listening to her shoes clomp about the room overhead. Perhaps Iris is right. Perhaps I could have trusted Eyelet. Perhaps she would have understood. My eyes drift again to the window. Or perhaps she’d just think me a madman.

A gust of wind slaps the glass, drawing my attention to the wave of Vapours building momentum on the horizon. I jump from the bed, checking the Vapour barometer mounted just outside my window. Its needle fluctuates between forty-seven and forty-eight parts per million. We’ve got about twenty-four hours—maybe more, maybe less.

I stare at the needle. We’ll need supplies. Plenty of them. What, with an extra mouth to feed and an extra pair of lungs to keep breathing? I don’t dare risk not having enough oxygen on hand. You never know what’s going to happen when the Vapours set in.

I look up again at the dark clouds brewing atop the ridge.

I hate the thought of leaving her here, unattended. But if I don’t go now, I go never.

T
wenty th
ree

Eyelet

I sit up and check my face in the looking glass. I’ve no thrash marks on my cheeks. No dried drool to chisel from the corners of my mouth. I don’t look drained or weathered, my skin isn’t sallow, and I’ve no dark circles under my eyes as I normally do after I wake from a grand mal episode. Which I was sure I was slipping into last night. It’s as though I sank swiftly into the depths of a major seizure only to somehow be pulled from it, escaping the brunt of its storm.

But how? It’s not possible. Once an episode begins, it can’t be reversed. That’s never happened before. Unless…

My eyes land on the empty cup resting atop my dressing table.

The
tea.

Of course.

I wash, dress, pull my hair up into a twist, secure it with combs, and race down the stairs. Exposed or not, I’ve questions that need answering. Starting with what was in that tea.

“I demand to know what happened last night.” I fill the entranceway, letting him know I mean business, a barbed tongue my weapon.

“Good morning to you, too.” Urlick sips his tea, staring at me through the steam.

“I know there’s something going on in this house, and I intend to find out what it is.” I circle him like a panther.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

He flips open a copy of
The New Age
.

I disarm him of it. “Let’s start with the noises I heard last night, shall we?”

“Noises? What noises?” He exaggerates the word like he pours his tea: high, then low, then high again. “I heard no noises.” He throws a glance at Iris across the room. “Did you?”

Iris beats the batter relentlessly.

“Perhaps it was just a figment of your imagination,” he returns to me. “You know, new room, strange place—”

“It was no figment, and you know it.” I pinch up close. “Neither were the feet I saw scurrying up the chimney.”

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a boat in bad weather.

“Stymied you now, haven’t I?”

“You’re sure you’ve not become afflicted?” he says, reaching out and laying a hand to my forehead as if I were sick.

I bat it away. “Don’t play games with me!”

“I don’t believe it’s
me
playing the games.” He reaches for the paper. I snatch it away.

“Oh really? Perhaps then you’d like to explain to me what was in the tea you forced me to drink last evening!”

“What tea?”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to try to deny it!”

Iris breaks an egg too sharply over the edge of her bowl.

“You were never drugged.” He peers at me through snowy white flustered lashes. His hands clasp and unclasp the chair back.

“What do you call it then? Oh, that’s right, you called it
comfort
tea, didn’t you?
Medicinal
, you claimed, as you forced it down my throat—”