Across the Spectrum (63 page)

“The last time I saw it was on her bedside table.”

“What time was that?” Aimee’s voice was sharp.

I thought about it. The glass turtle was there when Sashi
and I put Mavis to bed. I didn’t look at the table when I got her up for
dinner. I thought of the book and my cheeks grew hotter.

“Did you ask Sashi? She’s been in Mavis’s room.”

“She denies it,” Aimee snapped. “I want you to search the
rooms of the most mobile patients. Helen, or Judith. Do it discreetly.” She
stretched her arms across her desk, shoving papers. “You better hope you find
it.”

But I knew it wouldn’t be there. And I knew what Aimee’s
last words meant. Clouds rolled up outside and let down shaking sheets of rain.
Inside the home, inside me, a dark hole opened up. If the turtle didn’t show
up, I would be gone. Aimee was looking for a reason to fire me. And now she had
one.

I knew Sashi had taken it. I confronted her in the bathroom.
Her eyes grew wide as she stared up at me, and her fear fed me just as if I
were a wild animal and could eat her, tear out her tender insides and Mavis and
I could dine on them together.

“I know you took it. You want to see me get fired.”

Sashi leaned against the counter. She shook her head. “You
get away from me, you weirdo.”

But she would not admit to stealing it.

We searched the rooms but it didn’t turn up. Mavis’s
daughter came that evening and she eyed me stonily as she sat beside her
mother.

Aimee had already gone home when I put Mavis to bed. I
washed her and dressed her in a clean nightgown and daubed perfume behind her
ears. The bedside table was empty, and I sat in Mavis’s chair, ignoring Sashi
calling me to help her with Helen. The other books were still in the potted
plant. I pulled one out.

Mavis watched me from her bed, her eyes more wide than I had
ever seen them. Smiling, I smoothed her hair and opened the book. I found a
story about a black cat. The writing was strange, but I kept trying to
understand.

“Yet, mad I am not—and
very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow I die, and today I would unburthen my
soul.”

Mavis watched me a long time as I read. She did not squirm
or sigh. The man in the story did bad things to the cat and to his wife. When I
finished, Mavis was asleep with a smile on her face.

As I got up to go, I saw Helen in the doorway. Her glasses
reflected the bedside lamp like two shiny planets; her hair glowed like a cloud
in front of the moon. My breath stopped in my throat.

“There are more books like that, if you want. They can teach
you all kinds of ways people can die.” She had a strong voice. I knew she had
once been a teacher.

Standing up, I moved toward her, and she inched back,
staring up at me; I knew I could make the patients afraid of me. I didn’t want
to do that any more, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Is that how you
did it, Jackson—and Arlene? From books?” Arlene had died the same week as
Jackson. She’d had a heart attack in the laundry room. She was only 45.

Helen lifted her hand, waved it around. “You saw the bruises
on John. You know I didn’t tie him up. He didn’t get those bruises from trying
to get out of bed.”

Behind me I heard a muffled squeak from Mavis. Helen’s chin
stuck out sharply as she looked up at me. I saw a white hair glisten in the
lamplight. “You are lucky. We were planning to do you, but when you didn’t turn
in Mavis’s books, we decided you might be a friend.

“And that Sashi.” Helen lowered her voice. “She took money
from me. And Mavis’s turtle. She steals from your purse too. And you know Aimee
tells her to give extra sleeping pills to make them all quiet.”

∞

By the time I left that night I had everything ready. It
was easy to work in the med room; Sashi had gone home after pretending to help
me put the patients to bed. She always left early and when Sam the night nurse
came I told him how the patients were and what to expect. I thought Susie would
die tonight and I told Sam so. I thought Mavis would sleep through the night,
so he didn’t need to look in on her as often. I told him they had changed
Judith’s medicine.

I slept like a log that night. My back didn’t even hurt.

Aimee was meeting a new client when I came in the next
morning, so I had time before she fired me. Susie had died in the night and
they had taken her away. Mavis was sitting in her chair with her eyes closed
like always.

When I walked in, still wearing my coat, Sashi glanced at me
and then away, saying nothing, as if she knew what was going to happen. I got
down the tea like I always did and laid out the mugs and boiled the water, made
the tea and added the sugar, spooned out the blueberries that I had put in the
fridge the night before, deep black like the night sky, with sprinkles of sugar
like melting snow.

Aimee came for her tea after the new client left and fired
me, there in the kitchen in front of Sashi. They all stood eating blueberries
and looking at everything but me. Sighing, I turned away and walked into the
day room and sat next to Mavis.

“I want you to leave now,” Aimee said. She stood quivering
in the doorway.

I took the book out of my purse and laid it in Mavis’s lap.
“I am visiting Mavis. I am no longer an employee. I am a visitor, and I am
visiting Mavis.”

Aimee inhaled sharply. “I thought all the books were gone. I
told you no more books in this house. Books are bad. Books give people ideas.
The old folks don’t need to be reading books that will only depress them.” She
snatched the book and stomped into the kitchen in her high-heeled boots, her
hair flying out from the bands and pins and things she had stuck in it.

I sat for a half-hour beside Mavis and we watched a funny TV
show about old women living together. Mavis looked at me, placed her hand on my
arm and it shocked me. She opened her mouth and said something, and I leaned
over and listened and hot waves of anxiety went through me and my heart thundered,
each beat a heavy pulse of excitement.

She spoke, only for me to hear, her voice rasping and
half-hoarse, and it was the line from the book I had read.

I wondered astonished how she knew. The only thing different
was what had been damaged, stolen, from me and from her.

I closed my eyes. It was Merricat with the cat ears and the
black hair, on the front of the book. She said to her sister, after the
neighbors attacked them and burned down their house,

“One of our mother’s
Dresden figurines is broken, I thought, and I said aloud to Constance, ‘I am
going to put death in all their food and watch them die’.”

I held Mavis’s hand and we watched TV as Sashi and Aimee
clutched their stomachs and ran to the bathroom and retched and fell to their
knees. Helen, Judith, Mavis and I laughed at the old women on the TV show.

“Books are good,” I said to Helen, who looked at me through
her thick glasses. “They give people ideas.”

“Betrayal” grows out of my early love of the King Arthur
legends, expanding on the often-shadowy character of Nimue, and answering
questions about the end of the Arthurian story arc. I loved creating Nimue’s
voice, that of an adolescent girl who is just beginning to understand the scope
of her powers—both magical and mundane.

∞ ∞ ∞

You think I’m evil, don’t you?

I’ve heard the tales you tell, the angry stories that you
whisper in the night. You say I am a temptress, a vixen, a slattern who used my
body to seduce a man and steal his richest secrets. You know me as the woman
who betrayed my uncle, who enticed him to his death in a tree or a crystal cave
or an invisible force field, all so I could have his magic.

My uncle was Merlin. I am Nimue.

∞

The mist swirled over the Lake, obscuring the sacred
island, and I stared hard at the orb of fire that kissed my palm.

“That’s right,” Uncle Merlin crooned. “You’ve got it there.
Now, very gently, raise your thoughts. Raise your powers up, and over the
water. Good. . . Good. . . Let the fire grow. Let it float higher. . . Higher.
. .”

A fish jumped from the lake, and I bit back a shriek of
surprise. The fire plunged into the water, sinking beneath the dark surface
like a stone.

“Earth and Fire!” I exclaimed.

“Now, now, I’ll not listen to you swear.”

“Why not? You swear whenever you want.”

“I am a wizard of the sixteenth order, a Druid and a priest
besides. When I swear, I know the forces I’m calling on.”

“And I don’t?” I was whining. It seemed so unfair.

“Nimue, you are twelve years old. When you have lived as
long as I, then you may decide how you will swear. Until then, you’ll listen to
your elders.”

I scowled, but I knew better than to argue any more. He
waited in silence until I managed: “Yes, Uncle.” He wasn’t even really my
uncle; he and Mother were not blood relations. But all the Ladies of the Lake
claimed him as their own.

“Very well, then.” He reached for the small boat’s oars and
began to stroke us in toward shore. His face was handsome in the dying light;
he had not bothered to add grey to his hair that morning. There were no ordinary
folk around to care.

“You seem well today, Uncle.”

“I feel well. Soon, it won’t be enough just to color my
hair. Even this beard will give me away, stop being such a ragged mess. I’m not
certain what I’ll do when I grow that young.”

“Why don’t you just tell King Arthur?”

“Ah, little Nimue. You don’t know anything about men, do
you?” He smiled as he pulled the oars, and I stuck out my tongue defiantly.
“Trust me, little one. My power over Arthur and his knights is based on my grey
beard and my wrinkles.”

“But they should recognize you for who you are, for your
true power, however old you appear!”

“They expect wisdom to come from age.” He rowed some more.
“Besides, is it such a lie? I
am
old, even if I don’t look it, even if I
grow younger every day.”

I leaned forward to play with his straggling beard and
teased: “Tell me again how you came into the world, Uncle Merlin.”

“I, Nimue? I was born of lightning, in the middle of a
rainstorm, fire that sizzled through the air and cleft a stone.” Fire and
Water, Air and Earth, all four elements. Every time I asked my uncle about his
birth, his story changed, but he always kept the essentials the same—all four
elements had combined to give him life.

The boat ground against our landing on the island. All this
talk of age made me uneasy. I could not imagine a world without Uncle Merlin, a
world without my teacher on the lake. The Ladies whispered that he had but two
score years left before he died. Forty years to retreat through adolescence, to
infancy, and then to the unknown.

“Little Nimue. You mustn’t fear the future.” He reached out
a hand to cup my chin, and his fingers were warm against my lake-chilled flesh.

My belly flopped beneath my heart, like the fish that had
interrupted my lesson. “I’m not afraid.” I glared at him defiantly.

“Good girl.” He smiled. “Now, tie up the boat. I’m going up
to your mother’s cottage. These old bones still get chilled on the lake.”

“Old bones!” I snorted, imitating my mother, but I took the
rope from him.

After the boat was secured, I meandered up the hill, taking
a side trip to the chicken coop to gather the day’s eggs. Mother had made it
clear that I could not shirk my duties, even if I was training with the great
magician Merlin.

The eggs were still warm from the hens’ protective bodies
when I nudged my way into Mother’s cottage. She and Uncle Merlin were seated at
the hearth. As usual, they were in the middle of a heated debate.

“I tell you, old woman, you can’t chain her to this
cottage!”

“Chain her? Merlin, she’s my
child.
I won’t let you
carry her off into the world of men.”

“It’s not the world of men, Ysobel. It’s the world of magic.
I want her to learn my magic.”

“It’s not right, Merlin.”

“Why not? You’d let me take her if she were a boy.”

“Any of us Ladies would let you take our
boys
. That’s
the point, you old fool. We are the
Ladies
of the Lake. Our sons can go
on whatever quests they choose. Our daughters stay here. They learn from us.
Become one with us.”

Uncle Merlin knelt beside her, and his body was still old
enough that the movement was awkward. “I’m begging you, Ysobel. Let me work
with Nimue. You know that she is the strongest among you. Let me teach her all
my knowledge now. Before it is too late.”

Mother stared at him for a long minute, and a crystal tear
crept into her eye. “Merlin, I love her. She’s my only child.”

“I’ll never ask another thing of you, Ysobel. I wouldn’t ask
this if it weren’t important.”

Mother settled a long-fingered hand against his cheek, along
the line where his beard met his flesh. “Very well, then. Take her. But I beg
you, be careful.”

He caught her hand and kissed her palm. Even across the
room, I could see her fingers curl in, like the petals of some rare flower
stroked beneath the full moon.

“Take me where?” I crossed the room and settled the eggs in
a basket on the scrubbed table.

“You’re going with your Uncle Merlin,” Mother replied, and
her voice was matter-of-fact.

“And if I want to stay here?” My natural rebellion sprang
up, even as I imagined the adventures the old man would show me.

“You’ll learn to live with disappointment.” Mother rose from
her chair, shaking out her skirts as if they were dusty. “Now, reach down those
dried mushrooms, and let’s prepare supper.” There was no brooking her tone. I
glanced at Uncle Merlin for reassurance, but he was staring deep into the fire,
his hands clenched into fists on the arms of his chair.