All Those Vanished Engines (6 page)

But why would he have given her his golden bracelet, engraved with his own name?

She no longer wore even the tattered ruins of her Mardi Gras dress, but instead a shirt and trousers over her bandages. Someone had changed her clothes while she was asleep, a thought which filled her with woozy embarrassment. Was it possible she had been drugged as well?

This entire struggle between her cousin and her grandmother (as she persisted in thinking of them), or else between the UDC and the Yankee soldiers, had been over the possession of her body—the physical object—and no other part of her. Who was she? Where was she going? No one had bothered to explain any of this. And much of what she'd always thought about herself was obviously untrue.

Screeching and scraping, the train inched round a corner and then gathered speed. She lay in the middle of a sumptuous compartment, with leather banquettes and velvet curtains tied with braided gold festoons. Now they had left behind the lanterns on the tracks outside, and the train plunged into darkness. But then an electric lamp snapped on, an illuminated bulb behind an ornate shield, revealing the stranger seated in an armchair. She had a syringe in her hand, and she was staring at the needle. Then she put it back into its case, which she laid aside, onto the surface of a table that was bolted to the floor. An empty wineglass trembled there. She smiled.

“You're awake.”

Paulina turned her head. At first she lay with her cheek on the cold enamel, and then she raised herself on one elbow, wincing as she did so.

“You cut yourself up there pretty good. I guess I should have opened that window, not just smashed it. I guess I ruined my own plan.”

Paulina was seized with a suspicion that these people who had rescued her didn't necessarily wish her well. She found this thought particularly disconcerting as she looked at the stranger's face, identical to her own, the narrow nose and lips, the freckle-dusted skin, the yellow hair around her shoulders, the high forehead and wide, heavy brows.

“We've been going all night. Just stopped there to take on water. It must be dawn in the big world.”

“What's your name?”

“Elizabeth. ‘Lizzie,' they call me.”

Paulina considered this. Was it possible that she could use
The Bracelet,
a story she had invented in her diary to pass the time, to predict the future? A fantasy version of 1967, decorated with a few details from 1864, was it possible it held some sort of clue?

No. Doubtless not. Doubtless the girl's name was a coincidence, or else a meaningless tremor in some submerged portion of her mind. “Don't worry,” Lizzie said. “I was the one who stripped you down. It turns out I didn't have to bother, but I'll confess I was curious. It's like your own fingers.”

“Who are you?”

She got to her feet, stood with her hands on her hips in the swaying car. Her clothes were like the ones Paulina wore: denim trousers, and a coarse, workingman's shirt. “More like the same thing. A glass vat, a little cut of skin. Fed me through a tube, so far as I know.”

Wasn't that just what Matthew had described on Christmas Hill among the snow-covered stones? “Why?” she said.

Lizzie took a step toward her. To brace herself in the swaying train, she grabbed hold of the steel rods above Paulina's head and leaned down over her. When she opened her mouth, her breath smelled like marijuana and red wine. Her teeth were stained with it. “When your mother gave you up, she grew me in a vat to keep her company, like a doll.”

Paulina wondered where her doll was now, the fat-bellied, gutta-percha-headed figurine that had disappeared from her room. Was it here too? “A little cut of your skin,” Lizzie continued. “Maybe she couldn't predict how much better the copy is than the original. But it's no surprise to me. Can you see why I didn't care if you hurt yourself? Stupid me. It ruined my great idea.”

“But … you saved my life.”

Lizzie smiled. “Colonel's orders. I'm a good girl. Do what I'm told.”

Paulina turned her head away. Tucked into pillows of the armchair where the stranger had been sitting, partially wrapped in the torn Mardi Gras dress, lay the diary with the marbleized cover, which contained the first few interrupted pages of
The Bracelet.

It did not contain, or at least not yet, this extension of it:

As if without thinking, Lizzie pulled a signal gun from the inside pocket of her down coat. She clasped it in both hands above her head and fired without aiming into the sky. Because the alien craft was of a new design (a long rubberized compartment filled with hydrogen gas, rather than a sphere of heated air), it was vulnerable to fire.

As I watched her, half my mind was fixed on the stranger, swaying in the Yankee train as it hurried down into the dark. But with the other half I watched the flare ascending from the wide muzzle of the gun. It made a gentle, quiet, vaporous arc. I saw activity on the gondola, the long rope ladder hanging down, and then the aircraft made an abrupt, zigzag motion as it tried to rise. Intercepting it lazily, the flare burst high on the flank of the torpedo-like balloon, and for a moment I could see the cage of metal struts, a tracery of green, electric fire.

Oh, I thought, oh God. How could you fight against these creatures? Was she trying to get us killed? In my mind, half-seen, half-heard, the clone leaned down over Paulina's head, showing her stained teeth. “God knows what the empress wants to do with me now she's got you back. Me or the other dolls she's growing. My great idea was to inject you while you slept, drop you from the car, take your place.”

She nodded toward the syringe-case on the table. “That was my plan. But I can't, because the colonel would know. He could tell—he'd know. Damn it, he'd know. He saw the bandages.”

She smiled a defeated smile. “Those cuts kept you alive. You can thank that broken glass, not me.”

3. T
HE
S
ECOND
H
INGE

You'd have to brush your teeth, Paulina thought. And wash—you smell like smoke. And change the way you speak. It's not so easy to become someone else, with someone else's memories. What did the stranger know about the house on Marshall Street?

She closed her eyes and turned away from Lizzie's smiling face, her wine-soaked breath. Eyes closed, Paulina pictured the little scene she'd created in her mind, the exploding fire, and the two girls running away through the snow, out of the firelight and the questing lantern. Matthew stayed where he was in the little dell on Christmas Hill—why didn't he move? Why didn't he try to save himself?

His eyes, also, were closed, the lids pressed together. He wore the wire-framed National Health spectacles that he had gotten when his father was at Cambridge in 1962. They'd called him “four-eyes,” and tied him to a fence. He had light curls and darkish skin. In the future, the boys still wore their hair long, she was glad to see.

A tear ran sideways down her cheek and dripped onto the white enamel. She imagined the “clones” erupting from their vats, their faces blank. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Bethy—holding hands like paper dolls they formed a line, the last one reaching toward her with a stubby, unformed finger. As if in response to this fantasy, she heard the scream of the air brake, and the car shuddered and convulsed. She couldn't tell whether the Martians had released some kind of shell or bomb, or else whether the flare from the signal gun had managed to ignite the hydrogen in the balloon. She felt the concussion, and a rattling, metallic hail in the branches of the trees. The car swerved, then slowed along the straightaway, shuddering as if it might break apart. Paulina held on to the sides of the bed, and Lizzie fell back against the window, grasping the curtain to stay upright. The wineglass tumbled from the little table, rolled along the floor.

Beside those at either end of the car, opposing doors led from the middle of the compartment, down to the tracks on either side. As the train squealed to a stop, Lizzie staggered backward to the left-hand steps and unlocked the door. She turned back to emit some kind of barking command, lost in the steam whistle. Then she was gone.

Paulina tumbled to her feet. Just like her namesake, running away into the snowy woods to escape the men from Mars, she didn't ask herself where she was going. Legs aching, she hurried backward through the stalled train, through a series of identical, empty compartments, each with its massy curtains and leather seats along the sides, framing the long Oriental carpet, a line of red medallions.

Each with its hospital bed set into brackets on the floor—she turned her face away. Fourth in the sequence was the library car, and at the end of it, hunched over the fried egg on his supper tray, lit from overhead as if in a circle of gold, sat Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA, in a gray dress uniform only a little worse for wear, and decorated at the breast with the Cross of Southern Honor, which in calmer times he had received from the anointing hands of the Virginia UDC, for his heroism during the siege. He drained what looked like whiskey from his square-bottomed tumbler, blotted his lips with a white handkerchief, and stood up from the side table. His boots shone, his gloves were in his belt. “Is she awake?” he asked—he didn't recognize her yet, maybe because she was wearing Lizzie's clothes, she thought. His fine brows knotted with worry and surprise, a momentary tremor of expression. Then his face was smooth again. “Ah,” he said, and smiled.

It took him just that long to tell the difference. He knew who she was. He'd known her her whole life. Paulina examined, around the circumference of his plate, a circle of four linked sausages, the last one smudged with yolk. For a moment she was reminded of Elly's niello bracelet.

She gripped one of the overhead oak rails while she considered what her cousin's part had been in this, why he had risked his life to deliver her to his old enemies, whose dark banners he had faced at the Crater, and on a dozen other hard campaigns. Now they were deep in Yankee territory. Why was he dressed like this?

Between the two doors that led down to the tracks, she paused. “Why are you dressed like that?” he asked. “Did Lizzie dress you up like that?”

He placed his napkin on the tray. “I was coming to see you now,” he said. “I do not want you to exert yourself. You have lost some blood.”

“I am fine,” she said. “Really.”

He held out his hands. “Oh, my little lump-cat. You were always such a stubborn one.”

His eyes, as always when he looked at her, were kind. “You catch me at my last meal. Is there something I can provide for you? This must come as a great shock.”

Beyond him, in the cushions where he had been sitting, she could see the gutta-percha doll. It had been damaged, one of the seams ripped out, some of the stuffing spread over the leather seat.

Someone must have brought it from her bedroom. Someone must have brought it, and her diary too. Almost she felt like running to him, to grasp hold of his hands, as she had when she was young. Instead she glanced down the steps to the right and to the left.

“You must ask yourself what you are doing here, where we are going,” said the colonel after a pause. “It is very simple. I am taking you to see your mother. She will be waiting for us at the next station in twenty minutes' time. That is … I am not sure why we have stopped. I was just going to…”

He trailed off. The tumbler fit into a raised corner of the tray, which in turn fit into a raised corner of the table. They slid together like a child's game. “Why?” she said.

“Child, they were going to kill you. Because the Yankees broke the terms.”

That wasn't what she meant. How could he betray his country, the Commonwealth of Virginia? How could he dishonor his uniform, and once dishonored, why would he still choose to wear it? That was the puzzle, and she could not solve it by giving in to her emotions. Perhaps her grandmother was right about one thing at least, that he was crazy or unstable. In fact, the more she stared at him, the more nervous he seemed, his complexion pasty under the flickering electric lights, his eyes darting from side to side—was he afraid she might bolt down the side steps? Where would she go? There was nothing but darkness outside the windows, and Paulina had assumed they were still in the railway tunnel—no, that wasn't it. What had he said, that her mother was waiting for them at the station?

Perhaps as she'd slept the train had debouched into the dark fields of the Yankee empire. As if liberated by that possibility, she pressed her imagination outward through the opaque double-paned windows, framed with velvet curtains and gilt ropes like a series of miniature proscenia. Soon the stagehands would hoist the artificial sun into the vault, and the dim red light would chase across the woodlands and the hills, and press against the stone walls and pale, clapboard façades. Men in black clothes would spur their black horses. Women in black veils would scuttle through the streets. Or else it would be still dark when they reached the station, and she would step out onto the platform under the dripping kerosene lanterns high up on their poles, a forest of discolored light, and under those flickering trees the Yankee empress waited with her court, surrounded by her silent army of black dogs. Her gray hair would be arranged in a towering headdress, but she would be a stranger. What had her cousin meant, “You catch me at my last meal?”

“Whatever happens,” he said now, “I would like you to know how much my visits to Mrs. McKenney have meant to me all these years, when the world seemed dark to me, the comfort I found in you when you were just a child. You would wait by the window to see me turning in the gate, and you would raise your little arms so I could pick you up. That meant so much to me in difficult times. Even now I wonder if we could all meet together sometime, in this life or the next, at the table in the Marshall Street house.”