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Her hair grew back slowly, inch by inch beginning to cover over the scarred surface of her skull. Vanessa let none of the servants touch it, not even once it was long enough to brush at the tops of her shoulders. Alone in her quiet bedroom, not looking at the spot on the floor where her mother had died, she rubbed oils into it, willing the dark strands to become strong and shining again.
Look in the mirror, Vanessa. Let me see you.
“Can’t you see well enough without that?” she said aloud to the empty room, “Your power, I thought, was infinite, dark one.”
A rumble in her lungs which could have been a laugh. Seeing through spirit has its disadvantages. Let me borrow your eyes.
It felt good to be desired; it felt good to have something she could give or withhold. Slowly, half teasing, she lifted the dust-cloth from the mirror on her vanity; she had not wanted, of late, to look at herself, not when the last image this mirror had shown was the same one of her convulsing body which had occasioned her mother’s collapse. But now: there she was, her hair framing her face again almost as it had once been. Vanessa met her own gaze steadily; if she looked deep enough into her own eyes, perhaps she could see him there behind them.
“Do you like what you see?” she whispered, no more than a soft exhale of breath.
You know well that I do. Her arm lifted without her willing it, the back of her hand against her cheekbone and then trailing back down again, still-soft fingertips against the side of her face, her chapped lips, and then down down down, against the veins in the throat and the curve of her breast and the sensitive skin above her hips, soft as a snake rustling against dead leaves. This she knew, had known for so long, the slick, sickening slither of him, coiling and uncoiling within her ligaments, making her own body foreign to herself. Between the clean pressed, lace-edged sheets of her childhood bed, her-his fingers grasping between her legs, moving with a surety she could not herself have had.
She wanted it now, and she didn’t. “Let me finish brushing my hair,” she said.
She picked up the hairbrush; silver-backed, soft-bristled; known, familiar. At the pressure of it against her hair, though - a flash, quick as lightning; unpracticed hands doing this, tugging at the tangles, gentler than she was, moving at once with patience and urgency. Warm hands. The last time anyone had done this for her, the last time anyone ever would; the smell of carbolic acid and stale cabbage and her own unwashed body; she knew, she knew, she remembered -
Nothing. Vanessa remembered nothing of the white room.
The dark one was not so accommodating as that of her divided attention. There he was again, pulling at her. You have an enemy, Vanessa.
She laughed, keeping the strokes of her hairbrush as steady as she could. “Other than you, beloved? Or is it our dear Almighty himself to whom you refer? Our relationship may have become rather fraught of late, but I would hardly call him my enemy, even if he does disapprove of your presence in my mind.”
I have never been your enemy; you know what I want for you. I have been your oldest friend. Am I not here, when all others have deserted you?
Vanessa put down her hairbrush and closed the eyes which were also his, denying him the image of her face. Father of lies and yet he spoke true, in his fashion. Even the doctors with their drills could not take him away from her.
“You’ll give me whatever I want,” it was half question and half demand; she heard her echoes of a child’s petulance in her voice, “as long as I serve you.”
Yes, my beloved; all your desires, bright and shining, all these will I give to you. But you must deny our enemy, when he comes to you. You must not let him have you; not an ounce of flesh, not a drop of blood, not whatever petty thing he asks.
“Tell me of this enemy. What danger does he carry?”
Nothing of which you’d like to think. Rot and decay and the corruption of that smooth white body which houses the soul I want so much; he would pierce, he would crack, he would dirty what I leave pure. He would make you his whore.
Legs flung open on the bed, welcoming the ghostly vision of Sir Malcolm’s body into her own; was a whore not what Lucifer had made her? But no, that was not so; he would not have her give up her body to any earthly thing, would have her need nothing but his touch of the spirit, would gratify all her basest desires without ever entering into the physical realm to do so. The nun and the witch were not so different, perhaps; each could find fulfillment alone, in a closed room.
There: the door slammed shut, key turned in the lock and the walls were white and the floor was white and the ceiling was white, and no one came in or out, no one entered or left and she was alone and she remembered -
Nothing. Vanessa remembered nothing.
“Give me Mina back,” she said, suddenly, listening to the timbre of her own voice, “make her love me again. You say you’ll give me whatever I desire; give me that, then.”
Easily done. Look, see what I do for you.
An image fluttered in the mirror, in the edges of Vanessa’s sight; golden hair. Vanessa turned, and there she was, legs curled underneath her on Vanessa’s bed. Her cream and honey Mina, with only a loose wrap over her corset and petticoats. Her hand outstretched, “My dear Vanessa, how I’ve missed you.”
Vanessa almost went then, almost took the hand and kissed the petal-soft lips and fucked Mina as she had always wanted to. But she thought of a servant coming in to bring her tea and seeing Vanessa crouched down upon the bed, lapping at an imagined woman’s sex. What humiliation it was, to be an hysteric; what indignity. She wished to be done with it; she could never be done with it.
“I’m going out,” she told her demon lover.
-
The crowded streets of London; voices and smells and movement. She could do what she liked, if there was anything she liked to do; there was no one who marked her comings and goings now, no one who waited for her, no one who anticipated her presence or absence. She was free, and she was unmoored.
She took a cab to the British Museum. It stood there, sure and certain as it had been when she was a girl, the rows of pale columns unwavering. The scholars and visitors passed in and out, not even glancing at her; nothing marked her as different from their number, with her hair bound up under her hat so no one could see how short it was, and her thin, starved frame concealed within layers of satin and wool. No one knew who she was, where she had been, what she had done. She went inside.
Vanessa smiled at the bright colors of the ceiling, illuminated by the luminous brightness of the electric lights; her heels clicked against the marble. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard a voice echo in the high space of the entry hall.
“Vanessa.”
She turned, frozen midway in her ascent. Below, at the landing at the foot of the stairs, a man stood, framed by the fluting columns. Trim, mustachioed, with dark hair and round ears. A nice-looking sort of man, she would think.
She had never seen him before in her life.
“Pardon me?”
“Vanessa,” he said again, “I have been looking for you. I did not mean for it to take so long -”
“Who are you?” her voice was crisp, and a woman above her on the stairs briefly gave her a sharp glance.
The man smiled. “You know who I am.”
The leathery whisper of bat’s wings. Hands; teeth; her upturned eyes resting on padded walls. Vanessa remembered, and then, like a finger tracing along the polished wood of a table and then suddenly coming to its edge, memory plunged into abyss.
“I do not know you.”
He took a step upwards, towards her. “Let me accompany you.”
“If you please.”
The man reached her stair and held out an arm, with all ease and familiarity. Who was he - some guest at a party held by the Murrays? An eligible man to whom she had been introduced at the opera? A business associate of her solicitor father? A memory lost to the trepanning drill, surely. She took his arm. “Forgive my rudeness, sir. I have been unwell, and my mind is not so clear as I would have it.”
“I know,” the man said, “he has been concealing you from me, and concealing your mind from itself. They named my brother fittingly, did they not, when they called him the father of lies?”
They were already walking up the stairs together, Vanessa’s gloved hand holding up her skirts, and then her mind was all a rush of wind. “Who are you,” she said again, the pitch of her voice ascending upwards towards the elegant ceiling, “who are you, who are you, who are you,”
He turned her to face him, hand on her shoulder. “Look at me, Vanessa. You know me; you remember; look.”
She didn’t want to. “I can’t be talking to hallucinations in public anymore; they’ll cart me right back off to the clinic and I don’t have anything more to lose, my hair has barely grown back and if they put any more holes in my head then my brain will leak right back out of it like a sieve. Stop this; stop this.”
“Is anyone staring, Vanessa? Did they stare when you took my arm as you so rightfully should? I am no hallucination, my dear bride.”
He was right; others glanced her way as they might at anyone having a private conversation in a public place, but they were not the stares at a madwoman to which she had become more accustomed. But she could not think; something within her pulled back like a finger from candle-flame.
“You were there?” she asked, feeling suddenly vulnerable, her voice faint, “you were there in the white room?”
“I was there with you,” he said, “as I was there with you three hundred years ago; eight hundred; two thousand. As I will always be with you, always find you.”
“How is it that others can see you?” Her voice sounded like a child’s to her own ears.
The man smiled. “Because I am the flesh, as he is the spirit. And I can give you what he never can, be with you as he never shall.”
This was the enemy Lucifer warned her against, then, the one who would defile her as even the devil dared not. What did he want from her; what would he take? Her blood, she thought, with sudden clarity; drop after drop after drop of it, and all of the body which held it. She turned aside and began again ascending the stairs. “I am here to visit the museum.”
“Vanessa. You cannot ignore me.”
“I can certainly try.” Words from an unfamiliar language, bubbling up in her throat; she did not know how to speak them again, but someone would; they were somewhere. If this man was real, then so might they be too. She could seek out what she needed, whether in tomes of occult learning or the parlors of spiritualists. If any of this had existence outside the boundaries of her own mind, if any of this could be touched and heard and smelled and tasted, then so too might there exist others who knew how to fight it.
“I can give her to you.”
Vanessa stopped.
“That thing you asked, which my brother falsely promised. Her in the flesh, and in the blood. I can take her and transfigure her until she is revolted by you no more, until she is as far from marriage and childrearing as you could ever dream. And then I can offer her back up to you. All you have to do is follow.”
Vanessa laughed, shortly, and turned away again. “You lie as much as your brother.”
“Now that is untrue, beloved. You will see.”
She was not listening, or trying not to listen; she moved forward on her way to see the Egyptian collection, ignoring the living, breathing man who stood upon the steps as though he had no more substance than an hallucination. The abyss yawned again; the door to the white room slammed shut. She would not remember him, when next they met.