Sleep, Pale Sister

I’d see her dead, first.

I arrived at Crook Street twenty minutes late with the throat of the storm fu

With Marta at my journey’s end Effie was hardly in my mind: tomorrow I would arrange for her to be taken to a good nursing-home at some distance from London where no-one would listen to her ravings-and if they did, my exemplary public life would surely exonerate me from all suspicion: she was, after all, only a woman, and an artist’s model at that. I might be pitied for the failure of my marriage, but I would not be blamed. Besides…she was ill. Maybe more ill than any of us thought. On a night like this I felt that almost anything might happen.

The door of Number 18 fa

Even Marta.

What bleak secrets did her perfect flesh conceal?

Wordless, I followed Fa

My own voice was brittle as icing: ‘Why do I have to go right up here? Why can’t we go into one of the parlours?’

Fa

‘Oh.’ My words were a tangle of wires in my mouth. ‘I…if she doesn’t mind, I’d rather not…isn’t it rather gloomy up here? And cold. It’s very cold in this part of the house. Maybe…’

‘The room is Marta’s choice,’ replied Fa

‘Oh.’ There was nothing more to say. I tried a jovial smile which felt more like a grimace. ‘I…I hadn’t quite understood. Certainly, if Marta…’

But Fa

Even her hands could not be that small. And the marks, sticky, blurred impressions, fresh against the white. Could they be…chocolate?

My self-control collapsed. I screamed and pushed against the door with all my strength. It did not open. There was no room in my mind for thought: an insane logic compelled me, a sudden conviction that after all these years, this was how God intended me to pay for what I had done to the whore’s child…to pay with Marta. The image was dreadfully plausible to my disordered brain: the whore’s child with her hand on the door, listening; entering to find Marta waiting for me. Leaving again, her revenge taken…and Marta still waiting with her dress pulled up over her face…

I screamed again and began to pound against the panels with my bruised fists. ‘Marta! Marta! M-m…’

Then the door opened into darkness. My momentum carried me into the room and crashed me against the far wall as the door swung shut behind me. For a moment the darkness was absolute and I continued to scream, certain now that the ghostchild was in the room with me, so cold, so white, and still wanting her story.

A light flared. For a moment I was blinded, then I saw her standing by the window, the lamp in her hand. My relief was so great that I almost passed out, great black blooms patterning my vision.

‘Marta.’ I tried to keep the relief from my voice. ‘I…I’m sorry. I’m…not quite myself today.’ I gri

‘As a matter of fact, Mr Chester, neither am I.’ Her smile was small and mischievous, her voice a whisper of hay and summer sky. ‘Perhaps we both need a drink.’

As she poured the drinks I watched her, feeling my heartbeat slow to almost normal, and before long I was able to look around.

The room was quite bare. A narrow bed with a white coverlet, a bedstand with a ewer and basin, a small table and a shabby armchair were all the furnishings there and, by the light of the single lamp, everything looked all the more bleak. There were no rugs on the bare boards, no pictures on the walls, no curtains. And today Marta herself was like her room, dressed in a plain white nightgown, barefoot, with her hair loose and partly shielding her face. For a moment I began to feel uneasy once more-the similarities to that other night were too strong-as if this, too, were another of her disguises designed to push me off-balance into permanent insanity. But when she put her arms around me she was warm and lightly scented with simple, childish fragrances: soap and lavender and something sweet like liquorice; she who had overwhelmed me with heady, exotic sensations was now the most elementary of juvenile seductresses, a shy, eager virgin of fourteen, delightfully untutored, painfully sincere.

And of course I knew that this, too, was one of her disguises: the essential Marta was as unknown to me now as it had ever been. But I gave myself up to the illusion of tenderness, and as we lay like children in each other’s arms she whispered a little story into my ear: the story of a man who falls in love with a dead woman’s portrait, who buys it and hides it in his attic for fear his wife might ask questions. Every day he visits the portrait, growing more and more melancholy, unable to give up the pleasure he feels gazing upon it. His wife begins to suspect and one day she follows him up into his secret place and watches him as he sits in front of the portrait. Seized with jealousy she waits until he has gone, then she takes a knife and goes up to the hated picture, meaning to slash it to pieces. But the picture is haunted by the soul of the dead woman and, as her rival comes at her with the knife, she leaps at her. There is a struggle, but the ghostwoman has the strength of desperation. The poor wife is driven shrieking out of her body into chaos and the ghostwoman, taking the other’s life for herself, calmly goes down the stairs to join her new lover.

I shivered as the story ended. ‘Do you believe in ghosts, Marta?’ I asked.

I felt her nod against my bare skin, and I thought she laughed softly. The laugh made me uneasy, and it was with a touch of anger that I replied: ‘There are no ghosts. People don’t come back to haunt the living. I don’t believe people go anywhere after they’re dead.’

‘Not even Heaven?’

‘Especially not Heaven.’

‘So…’ Her voice was teasing: ‘You’re not afraid of the dead?’