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“The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now... is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time.”
— Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Philip has never known what to call it—this strange sixth sense he has—but it always starts as a fluttering beneath his ribcage that spreads slowly through his body like a stain across a tablecloth or a rug. When he was a boy, he thought of it as a curse, the burden he was forced to bear. When he got older, it manifested itself in visions—dreams, according to most. There was usually a beautiful woman, someone he inexplicably knew was his: a wife. Sometimes there was a castle that Philip also knew was his, or a dark, dank cave. Often, Philip dreamt of himself wandering the great stone halls—often he felt as if he was being pulled on the end of a string—toward what destination, he could not say.
Sometimes Philip even reached the room he was being pulled toward. Sometimes he was able to let himself in with the key he had found in his pocket.
Philip first sees her in one of his prophetic dreams. She is beautiful, of course, with long flaxen curls that glisten like sheaves of wheat. She has a finely formed figure and porcelain-white skin, like a doll, the kind his sister Marianne had kept—but was never allowed to play with—as a girl.
She looks like a doll too, with blue eyes shining like marbles, and her lips set in a curving pink cupid’s-bow.
“What is your name,” Philip asks her.
When the dream started, they were standing in the parlor of his grandmother’s house—but after he notes the quality of her blond hair, they are whisked to a field of wheat. His dreams—visions—are funny like that.
“Cecilia,” she says, extending a small pale hand to him.
“I am Philip,” he says, and clasps her hand tightly in his own.
“Come find me,” she says, twisting her hand in his grip until her fingers squeeze around his.
“What?” Philip tries to pull his hand away.
“I’m waiting for you, Philip,” she says, blue eyes boring into his with a startling intensity he hadn’t noticed before. Cecilia lets go of his hand and lets her arm fall to her side, steps away from him, sinking into the sheaves of wheat until she disappears completely.
Philip tells no one about his visions, at first. They are his curse to bear.
If he could only figure out why—Philip is far less concerned with the how than he is with the why. Why has he been chosen? Why does a blond girl, her long golden hair wrapped in blue ribbons, haunt his dreams?
Why does she ask him to come to her and yet vanish before he can follow?
When Philip turns twenty, he’s certain he’s found his answer.
His mother had put out an ad in the paper seeking a governess to help with Philip’s younger sister, Elizabeth, and a local girl had responded. Philip’s age, his mother had mentioned over breakfast, a simple peasant girl without any living relatives as far as she could tell.
When the girl arrives to interview with his mother, Philip is stunned to see that it’s the girl from his dreams.
Cecilia.
Philip makes himself scarce that first day, hiding in the dark, drafty wing of the manor while Mother interviews Cecilia for the vacant position.
She had told Philip to come find her, but she’s found him instead.
It feels fated, as if God Himself had reached down His Divine hand to move the two of them closer to one another.
“I’ve hired her on,” Mother informs him a few days after. “You mustn’t—”
“I know, Mother,” Philip says, with a roll of his eyes. “I mustn’t scare her off with my talk of spirits and prophetic dreams, and things that go bump in the night.”
His mother sighs. He’d scared off the previous girl, Martha, and the girl before that, Augusta, too.
Some day they’ll want to stay. It might even be Cecilia.
“I had a dream about you,” Philip says.
Cecilia watches him from the hearth, the iron poker clutched tightly in her hand. “My lord?” she queries, eyes flicking over to where Elizabeth plays with one of Marianne’s hand-me-down porcelain dolls.
Shadows flicker across Cecilia’s face, casting her in a ghoulish light. Her eyes are sunken pits, like a corpse’s, and her lips are pulled back from her teeth in a rictus grin.
“I dreamt about you before you even set foot inside this house,” Philip tells her, moving closer, creeping closer like a shadow over the stone.
“I—I’m certain I don’t understand,” Cecilia stammers, bringing the poker up in her shaking hand.
Philip reaches out and catches her hand in his, gently twisting her fingers away from the iron rod. It lands at their feet with a frightful clatter. “We are meant to be together,” he tells her, firmly. “I’ve seen that too. You shall be my wife.”
“Sir,” Cecilia insists, “my only concern is the well-being of your sister. Her upbringing, her—”
“We can be a family,” Philip says, moving in until Cecilia stumbles back into the little wooden end table beside the fireplace. A dish of decorative polished stones rattles like teeth in a coffee can. “You and I, lord and lady of the house. Think of it, Cecilia. We’ll be married immediately.”
Cecilia gropes behind her—searching for what? What does she intend to do? Philip is only telling her what he’s seen in his visions. He is only telling her what he’s seen of their shared future.
“Be my wife,” he says, gripping her by the wrist, squeezing his hand until he can feel the bones in her wrist crunch and grind together.
Cecilia tries to jerks her arm away. “No! I won’t. I won’t marry you.”
Philip sees their future—so bright as to be blinding—flutter away like a thin mist. Gone is his fantasy of a golden-headed fairytale princess with blue ribbons in her hair. In her place is this wretched woman, steeped in shadows, not fit to be a wife. Nor anything else.
He hears something snap and at first, he thinks he’s broken her wrist in his hand. But he soon realizes it’s just the wood in the fireplace, crackling and snapping in the hearth.
Philip stares at her, studies the curl of her hair for a moment and how the gleaming blond has dulled to smudged charcoal in the dimness of the library. In the dark, she looks like a different woman, not the girl he’d allowed himself to become enchanted with. An illusion, a bit of trickery, the oldest trick in the book.
Well, Philip thinks, as he tightens his grip on her wrist once more and pulls her toward the door, he won’t be tricked. Not by Cecilia, nor any other creature such as she.
“I’ve missed you, my dear.” Philip sets out the old, chipped china tea-service across black brocade and smooths the wrinkled fabric with an anxious hand. “It’s been so long.”
When he lifts his head, he meets his wife’s eyes. His first wife, Cecilia, stares back at him, her expression slack. Her wrinkled skin hangs from her skeletal frame in folds like silk.
“You look well,” Philip adds, as he lifts a teacup and extends it to her. Cecilia keeps her hands knotted in her lap. “Haven’t you got anything to say to me?”
Cecilia does not respond.
Philip flicks his eyes to the figure next to his wife, listing into her side like a sack of grain.
“Posture, Lizzie, posture! I won’t have you slouching in my presence,” Philip says to his sister, with an imperious air.
Elizabeth’s head lolls onto Cecilia’s shoulder as if to nod in agreement, then rolls right off, into her lap.
Philip sighs and leans over, tugging at the collar of Elizabeth’s pretty gingham pinafore.
“You look a fright,” he scolds, first to Elizabeth and then Cecilia. “Sophia’s coming to interview for the vacant position. I trust you two will be on your best behavior.”
Philip reaches out and takes Cecilia’s withered hand in his.
“I hope you do understand, I’m doing this for you,” he says. “For both of you.”
He glances about the empty room; briefly, Philip’s eyes land on his mother’s body where it sits, slumped against one of the walls. She’d be staring back at Philip with contempt, he thinks, if she’d still had eyes. But he had the last laugh, didn’t he?
Philip pulls his hand away from Cecilia’s clasping fingers.
“I’ll come for you very soon,” he promises his wife, and he leans in to press a kiss against her dry, brittle hair. “And I’ll bring you a friend too.”
With that, Philip gets up from the table and leaves his wife, sister, and mother to their devices.