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And over the wailing wind, the roaring fire, the chaos of uncreation as her flesh billows like black smoke off her bones, she manages nonetheless to hear what he says next:
“Then punish me,” he cries, and oh Stephen, Stephen, she tries to ask, what have you done, “not the world — not Christine.”
Which is when the man — or the god, possibly, although in that case he is a god of the older, elder sort, a being fixed above common human feeling and formed in some unfamiliar image; his skin is bright orange — looks down on them, narrows his fuller-white eyes in a mathematical calculation, and appears to reach a quite permanent decision, as such older and elder gods are known for.
“Fine,” he says. “If that’s your choice,” and he extends a hand, “then I can’t interfere.”
…
The cast-iron range in the house’s downstairs kitchen is something called a rotary stove, which features a crank-operated turntable and thus permits a cook — or a potions-brewer, unless only witches do that — to alternate the temperature in eight different saucepans at once, depending how they are pivoted above the stove’s firebox. Christine has lighted this stove using an old lucifer match she found in one of the cupboards and obtained the cream, eggs, sugar and vanilla by reaching her hand four times into a clay jar and asking politely for each item in succession, even if her first request for the sugar instead resulted in salt. She heats the cream to a fast simmer, whisks the eggs, vanilla and sugar into it, bakes it using a timer that screams at her in Ancient Greek when it goes off and sets her wobbly custard beside a jar of pickled sea cucumbers in the Undercroft’s refrigerator.
Several times her trailing red robes slip from a belt she tucks them into — they are meant to be worn by a taller person, by a man; the place called Kamar-Taj has not yet supplied her with anything better-fitted — and Christine must pause to adjust them.
While her custard cools she sits to read a book. It is one of those Choose Your Own Adventure installments from the eighties and the simple spell placed upon it leaves the chapters blank until Christine determines what she would like to happen next, within the volume’s limited imagination and general themes. The distant noise of Manhattan’s afternoon traffic honks from the street outside like a skein of geese.
The most peculiar thing about having been dead, and being alive again, is how little of it Christine can remember. She remembers the dying part, kind of, although the life that came and went in flashes before her eyes was more like a set of kaleidoscopic scraps than a coherent narrative:
She was six years old and walking down a dirt road that had been flooded by a springtime snowmelt river, studying the minnows who swam through the road’s deep wheel-ruts. She was eight years old and running through a meadow of purple blazing-star flowers to scare up a pie’s worth of blackbirds from the high summer grass. She was twelve and sitting beside her grandmother for the mass on Pentecost Sunday, watching candlelight flicker inside a red tabernacle lamp. She was sixteen and had just backed her pickup truck into the neighbor’s mailbox. She was on the graduation stage at NYU, reading the comics section of a newspaper in Central Park, kneeled behind a laboring woman in the ER and telling her now you go ahead and you scream, scream as loud as you want, your body hasn’t lied to you once yet. She was with her cousin folding a laundered bedsheet, the two of them walking towards one another so the sheet’s corners would align. She was with her grandfather out behind the old woodshed and examining each log’s heartwood rings, the transect of a century, before setting it down under the swing of his splitting-maul. She was with Stephen beneath the unblinking lights of an operating theater, Stephen trying to hit the notes of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Stephen tugging the curlicued silver ribbons off a slim black box containing a wristwatch, Stephen beside her in the car, except this part was where things got scrambled. He would start to say, ladies and gentleman, fellow doctors, no I’m just gonna wing it I’m gonna run up to the podium like a gameshow contestant only if you’re by my side maybe you make me happy why does this keep happening aren’t we allowed to be happy I only want you you’re the only thing that matters. She was six years old again and chasing after those coppery-colored minnows, carried to a wondrous new world by the river’s risen waters.
Christine, Christine, it’s me, Christine.
I brought you back. I saved you.
Which he has. Christine lays a hand over her heart every now and again to verify it.
The custard eventually firms. There are, logically, no butane kitchen torches in a house that has been inhabited by wizards for the last three hundred years, so Christine punches beneath various articles of furniture with a broom until a red lizard scrabbles out from behind the deflated sofa. It is a bit like catching an ornery rooster, snatching him by his legs and dangling him upside-down so the blood to his head will settle him, the main difference here being that the lizard is actually a teacup-sized dragon and a quick tickle of its belly makes it both squirm its stubby feet and expel flames over Christine’s custard. Within a half-minute the top has become caramelized into a passably competent crème brulée.
“You see, that wasn’t so bad.” She sets the dragon loose after giving it a bottle cap. It hoards them. “I’ll tell Wong he doesn’t have to set out those rat traps for you anymore.”
Wong has not offered to do this, but it would be within his character to threaten it. Their second impressions of one another have improved upon their first, not that this is saying much; Christine’s introduction to the man came when he left a room to start a kettle and returned five minutes later to discover a woman everyone understood had been dead for the past two years — two years on that very night — and a writhing, bellowing creature whose voice sounded vaguely like somebody he knew.
Christine carries her dessert dish upstairs. When she reaches the library’s door she stops to let an anticipatory shudder chase up her arms, but fear is silly as well as useless and so she stops being afraid. She has spent the last several weeks thinking about a picture book she read as a girl, a decade before she watched an animated movie with the same title and which took some creative liberties with its source story. They had removed her second-favorite part: and every night, after they dined together, the horrible and gentle Beast would ask her in his horrible, gentle voice, Beauty, will you be my wife?
She pushes the door open with a shoulder.
This house, Christine has been told, called the New York Sanctum Sanctorum, is a bit of a reprobate, mostly in that it does not abide by the usual laws of physical space. It has more rooms than should properly fit inside its architectural blueprint and far more than are listed on the city assessor’s property card for 177A Bleecker Street. Christine has asked about 177B Bleecker Street and Stephen has told her — she has gotten much better at understanding him — that the address previously belonged to a deli owner who sold out to them back in the sixties because his salamis kept growing green fur.
The Sanctum’s library, therefore, has been gradually changing, merging itself with some larger library of white limestone and towering shelves and at whose center grows a blossoming plum tree. Christine stands beside this tree while she peers off into the library’s different sections; she sees a crystal glimmer far back in the darkness and hears a heavy, dry slither.
“Stephen?”
Within that same darkness there is another noise, a gusty sound like a rolling banner, suggesting Stephen may have tucked his wings closer about himself to hide his face. Christine lifts an arm and clacks the two spoons she is holding.
“You can stop hiding now. Game’s over — olly-olly-oxen-free.” She glances towards another part of the library, where it still has the desk and fireplace of the former smaller room. “I’ve made you something. Come on out and try it.”
One of the chairs beside the fireplace is spuming itself away into a black sludge. Christine scowls at it, whereafter the chair resettles itself into solidity like a well-trained dog: an advantage, among several, to being the linchpin of a stabilized temporal paradox.
“That smells good.”
Her skin nearly leaps off in surprise. He has approached so silently that she has not heard even the click of his claws on the floor. All the sinuous tentacles on his back halt in their lazy, oscillating motions when Christine sees him — they apparently contain pigmented chromatophores, like an ordinary cephalopod’s, and can change color with his moods — and somehow, despite having at least ten luminous eyes in unlikely places, he wears a very recognizable look of awkward abashment.
She clutches the crème brulée dish to her chest. Her pulses are quick from the shock and instinctive aversion and something else, because Stephen has said many things to her before in that same deepened but similarly recognizable voice.
“— Stephen,” she says, “if you don’t quit doing that I’m just going to give you a bell.”
“Didn’t they used to make lepers carry those?”
The wings and flourishing horns make him appear enormous, but Christine has realized he is not much taller than he would be ordinarily, and whatever that concept of ordinariness means for him nowadays. From certain angles his golden eyes — the main pair — show irises of pale blue within them, and she suspects this detail contributes to her thready pulses too. When she first woke and saw him she thought she was in a nightmare, or else in hell; only later, in pieces, did she wonder why it had not struck her as odd that such a nightmare creature or a demon would be holding his left hand so tenderly under her head.
“I was thinking more like a cat’s bell,” she says. “You know, with a sparkly rhinestone collar.”
“And a tag that promises everyone I’m vaccinated for rabies?”
“Can mystic beings get rabies?”
“There was one that looked kind of like Bunnicula who probably can’t. I don’t think lagomorphs or rodents contract it — I won’t speak for everything else.”
“What, you didn’t let them introduce themselves before you ate them? That seems like bad table manners.”
“Admittedly, yes.”
He holds the snow-globe pocket dimension with those two stalemated opponents inside it — and, in accordance with a reciprocal elder-god logic, Stephen’s plea has been answered because a man powerful enough to break an absolute point in time would doubtless be useful later — before he puts it away behind his back with a magician’s sleight of hand. He is not a magician, though, or a wizard; he is a master of the mystic arts, a sorcerer, the Sorcerer Supreme, and while Christine suspects that certain factions within his crazy, creepy, Bob-Seger-song cult would prefer him dead, nobody has yet figured out how to kill him.
And when they do, Christine decides, despite knowing it is ignorant since she is only a storekeeper’s daughter from Iowa, they will have to go through me to get him.
He is a monster, they might say. He is deranged. He is dangerous.
But I know him, she will protest. Such protestations that have brought them safely thus far, at least.
I know him. I love him.
She sits with her legs crossed under the pink-blooming plum tree. Stephen sinks to his knees at the same time, leaving enough distance between them that no outgrowth or appendage of his body — the body he has fashioned for himself by a trial of ordeal to save her; he has always been a reckless overachiever — will hazard touching her. The embroidery on his robes is done in gold threads and deep imperial purples.
“So what’s this?” he asks.
“Nothing,” Christine says. “I just realized we never got to eat our crème brulée, did we?”
He puts his clawed hands on his thighs. “I told you, I think we could’ve done better than crème brulée.”
“Yeah, okay, grandstander. I get it. You’re the kind of guy who asks somebody to dinner at Eleven Madison Park on a first date.”
“While you’re the kind of woman who tells him ‘Mm, you know what, I’ve got a book club meeting on Friday.’” It would be bizarre to hear any impression of herself at all coming from that body, in that voice, let alone one that is such a well-pitched mimicry of her inflections and mannerisms. “‘Why don’t we have breakfast on Saturday morning instead?’”
“And it was just as good, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Stephen says, with a cavernous sound that is almost a laugh, “but I don’t think the food had a lot to do with it.”
“My point exactly.” She plays the two spoons again. “Crème brulée was what you bribed me with and that’s what I wanted, so here we are.”
“How’d you caramelize it?”
“I caught that dragon who lives down in the Undercroft.”
“Smaug the Tiny and Terrible?”
“Is that his real name? I’ve been calling him Elliott this whole time.”
“I guess you can call him whatever you want. He’s not going to answer you.”
“Well.” She looks at the dish; I know him, I love him. “I’ve never made this before, even without the dragon part. I can’t promise how good it’ll actually taste, but —”
She holds out the spoons.
“— do you want to share?”
Stephen pauses. His supernal golden gaze with the blue behind it moves from her face to the bare skin of her outstretched arm — something inside her uncurls at this look, like a fern frond — before he presents her with his gray, outsized hands, in which the spoon Christine is offering to him would resemble the piece from a child’s tea set. Every time he has been required to touch her thus far it has been as gentle and implicit as a leaf floating on water.
“I’ll just make a mess. I don’t want to add anything to the bad table manners record.” There is also something affectingly familiar about the way his face crinkles around his mouth and eyes when he smiles. “But you should try it and tell me how it tastes.”
She watches him.
He looks so lonely, he looks so far away, and it is a thought Christine has had many times before about Stephen Vincent Strange. There is an old original wound within his soul, somewhere, running deeper than the ones most people carry, although she figures everybody carries the same sort of wounds in common; it is hidden in a place he has never really let her see, or reach, and the punishment Stephen has accepted for his arrogance as well as in ransom for the world and her life is that now, as a monster who can be neither looked upon nor reached towards, he will never be able to. Christine has only ever been shown one photograph of him with his sister, where the two of them are seated at a kitchen table as they construct a sandwich-paper kite shaped like a blue butterfly. The photograph is dated from April, 1995, meaning that in three months’ time Donna Strange will misjudge her dive into a public swimming pool in Creston, Platte County, Nebraska, and drown. She will be a week shy of her eleventh birthday.
You don’t have to stay here, Stephen has told Christine. We’ll figure something out. We’ll find a place for you. Everybody else who knows and loves you should learn the truth.
I’m sorry.
But here is the most important detail: the Watcher whom Stephen calls Uatu is fair, pragmatic, a studious observer and keeper of accounts, but he is not a god, nor does he hold any knowledge either inherent or incarnate of what it is like to be a human, and so Christine may yet be capable of surprising him. Her favorite part from that old picture book, after all, was how the woman called Beauty could not simply turn the story one page ahead the way Christine could, as a reader, to see the handsome prince or the final ending, but she nevertheless laid her ear against the great, gentle heart of her Beast and said my love, oh my love, please don’t die, live and be my husband just as I will be your wife, because from this moment I give you my hand and I will be none but yours.
It was a lot of drama, certainly. Christine had reread that book until its binding fell apart and paid the library a repair fee using money she saved up from recycling aluminum cans at the grocery store.
She takes her spoon to smack it down on the delicate shell of the crème brulée. It crackles into candied pieces, so she can sweep out a decadent mouthful, and she offers it to Stephen.
“Here, then,” she says. “Come closer.”
Stephen hesitates, but he obeys, and does it with a kind of polite dignity, a fold of his big sheltering wings in the same way he would fix his coattails before approaching a speaker’s lectern or sitting down at a piano. He bends his head towards her; she puts her spoon into his opened mouth, the metal clacking over his sharp teeth, and draws it, carefully, out again, between his lips, with that slight proffering lift at the end to be sure he gets the full taste of it. The muscles move in his throat.
“How’s that?“ she asks.
Stephen’s face has not been altered quite enough that Christine cannot interpret the look on it. The long dark spikes at his back have previously impressed her as belonging to a sea urchin, or possibly a porcupine, but they lie down a little smoother now in something like an easing comfort and maybe they are nearer in nature to the spines on a hedgehog. She has dealt with weirder things.
“Very nice,” Stephen says. “Thank you.”
She smiles.
Just in case he does not get her point, though — which he may not; she will court her way towards it — Christine sweeps a second lavish bite from the crème brulée, on the same spoon, then with a trill of bridal-chamber daring in her heart she puts it into her own mouth.
…