The Thing That Followed Me Home

The infrared equipment will not be at the house until Thursday, and a person can only sit in a beautiful cold mansion deciding nothing happened for so many days before she needs a sandwich she did not have to charge to a recluse, so on Wednesday I drive into the nearest town that has a chemist and a supermarket and a pub, and I let myself be ordinary for an afternoon.

It is the right instinct and it nearly gets me killed.

I buy a cheese-and-pickle sandwich and a coffee in a paper cup and I sit on a bench in the small grey square and I phone my sister back, finally, because I have been not-phoning her for four days and the guilt has reached the size where avoiding it costs more than facing it.

"You're alive," Bea says, which is how she says hello when she is hurt. "I was about to report you missing. Where even are you?"

"Working. A residency. Some collector out past nowhere wants the cleaning done on site." I do not tell her about the candles, or the missing mirrors, or the man who said I smell of every colour at once, because Bea is the original and I am the copy and there are some things you do not hand to the original, some things you keep, in the patch of yourself nobody else gets to retouch. "It's a good commission. Conservative. Right up my street."

"Of course it is," Bea says, and there it is, the small freight on of course, the implication that a conservative cleaning is exactly the size of thing I am for, and she does not even mean it cruelly, that is the worst of it, she means it the way you state a known fact, the way you say water is wet. I make a noise that could be agreement. I eat my sandwich. I tell her I love her, because I do, ruinously, the way you love the person who was always going to be more than you, and I hang up and I sit in the grey light feeling exactly as forgettable as I have trained myself to feel, which is, I will understand later, the precise emotional state in which a person is easiest to take.

I notice him in the supermarket, which is the wrong place to notice anyone, all that flat killing light, the very light Casa Vasco refuses, and at first I think only that he is too well dressed for a Wednesday and too still in the way that has started to mean something to me. He is by the wine, young, beautiful in a glossy, finished, retouched way, the way the panel's widow was finished, a face smoothed by a later hand. He looks at me over the bottles, and he smiles, and his smile is the kind of overpaint I have learned to read in three days: there is something underneath it that the smile was laid down to cover.

I pay for my sandwich and my chemist things and I do not look at the wine again and I get into my car in the multi-storey, and that is where he is waiting, because of course he did not need to follow me through the supermarket, he has been ahead of me the whole time, the way the cold gets into a room before you do.

"You smell wrong," he says, conversationally, leaning on the next car as if we are colleagues at a conference. "Did you know that? The whole shop. I came in for the ordinary thing, the bored thing, a girl by the wine, and then there was you, all the way across the building, and you smell" he tips his head, and the smile drops off his face entirely, like a varnish gone all at once to nothing, and what is under it is not a face I have words for, "you smell like the thing we lost. Every one of us. You smell like morning."

I have my keys between my fingers. I took a class once. I have the ordinary mortal arsenal of a woman who has walked to a lot of cars in the dark, and it is, I understand in a cold rush as he comes off the other car without seeming to cross the distance between, exactly as useful as a cotton swab against a house fire.

He has me against my own door with a hand at my jaw, tilting my head, baring my throat the way you bare a canvas to the light, and he is breathing me in with his eyes half-closed and a look of unbearable greed and grief mixed, the desert face, the same face Sabre made and could not stop himself making, except that this one has stopped governing, this one has no governor at all.

"I shouldn't," he murmurs, to himself, the way I hummed to myself, both of us singing the songs we did not choose. "There's something on you. Old. Wrong. Like a name written under your skin in a hand I almost recognise, and every one of us is going to want to read it, and the ones who can read it will want you dead for what it says." His mouth at my throat now, cold, the cold of the house, the cold of stone. "But a sip first. After a hundred years of student-grade. One sip of the real thing before they argue over the rest of you. Who could "

I do the only thing my hands know. I do not scream, because deciding nothing is happening is a reflex older than fear in me, and instead, absurdly, idiotically, what comes up out of the grain under my overpaint, what I say into the cold and the dark with a stranger's teeth a breath from my pulse, is three notes down and one back up, in a language I never learned: dormi.

He flinches.

It is the smallest thing. It is nothing. A whole one second in which his grip loosens by a hair because some part of him, some made and bloodbound part, heard a thing it has not heard in longer than it has been a monster and could not, for that one second, do the simple thing it came to do.

One second is enough, because Sabre is already there.

I do not see him arrive. There is the cold stranger and his teeth and the falling tune, and then there is a sound like a struck bell and a smear of dark across my vision, and the weight is gone off me and I am sliding down my own car door to sit on the filthy concrete, and across the multi-storey, against a pillar, Sabre has the young beautiful retouched thing by the throat, off his feet, held there one-handed and without strain, the way I hold a swab.

He is not governed now. This is what I will not be able to un-know, after, this is the thing that ends the part of my life where I get to decide nothing happened. The careful man, the man who drove the fast car at a crawl, who stopped himself at every threshold, who took the mirrors off his own walls rather than be shown one more time the thing he is, is gone, and what is in his place is the thing the mirrors would have shown, and it is beautiful and it is wrong and it is moving in ways a body does not move, fast and certain and old, so old, and when it speaks its voice is still his, still that low tired velvet, which is the worst thing of all.

"She is not yours," Sabre says to the creature in his hand, almost gently, almost the way he said charge everything to me, "and she is not mine, whatever your nose told you, and that is precisely the trouble, because it means she is no one's, and a thing that is no one's is a thing every one of us will come for. You have simply come first. And now I am going to have to remember how to do this, which I had so hoped to be spared."

"I had hoped," Sabre goes on, in that same dreadful conversational velvet, "to have a few more years of peace. A century, perhaps two. I had very nearly persuaded myself to go under and not come up again. And then she walked into my library smelling of every morning I have not had, and now here you are with your mouth at her throat, reminding me exactly what I am and exactly what I will do about it, when I have spent so long, so very long, being too tired to do anything at all."

The young one makes a sound. Sabre's hand does something I do not watch. The sound stops.

And then he turns, still holding the not-moving weight, and looks down at me where I am sitting on the concrete with my keys still uselessly threaded through my fingers and a stranger's cold fading off my throat, and his face is already trying to put itself back, already reaching for the governor, for the courtesy, for the smile that is laid over the thousand years, and not finding them, not yet, so that for one moment I see him with nothing painted over it at all.

"Lio," he says, wrecked, and it is the first time my name has sounded like that in anyone's mouth, like something precious and already half-lost. "I am so sorry. I had hoped to have longer before you had to see "

"What you are," I finish, because someone has to, because my voice is steadier than it has any right to be and the steadiness is the last lie I will get to tell myself, the last nothing-is-happening, and it is already failing, it is already gone. "Before I had to see what you are."

He looks at me across the dark and the dead weight in his hand and the small cooling proof that the world is not the shape I have spent twenty-seven years agreeing it was, and he does not deny it.

"Yes," says the thousand-year-old man. "That."