Crisp and certain and loud, he told the thing: “Be. Noah.”
The room went silent.
It was 6:21.
A little less than six hundred miles down the ley line, a million tiny lights winked across the dark, cold ripples of the Charles River. The toothful November air found its way in the balcony door of Colin Greenmantle’s Back Bay town house. He had not left the door open, but it was open nonetheless. Just a crack.
In they crawled.
Colin Greenmantle himself was on the ground floor of the townhome, in the golden-brown, windowless room he had reserved for his collection. The cases themselves were beautiful, glass and iron, mesh and gold, suitably outlandish displays for suitably outlandish objects. The floor beneath the cases was made of oak reclaimed from an old farmhouse in Pennsylvania; the Greenmantles always preferred to possess things that used to be someone else’s. It was impossible to tell how large the room really was, because the only lights were the spotlights that illuminated each unusual artefact. The bulbs glowed through the blackness in each direction like ships in a night sea.
Greenmantle stood in front of an old mirror. The edge was all carved in acanthus leaves and swans feasting upon other swans, and a brass-rimmed clock was embedded in the topmost frame. The clock face read 6:21 P.M. Supposedly, the mirror itself beaded tears on viewers’ reflections if they’d had a recent death in the family. His reflection was dry-eyed, but he felt he looked pitiful, anyway. In one hand he held a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon whose label promised notes of cherry and graphite. In the other hand he held a pair of earrings he had obtained for his wife, Piper. He was wearing a beautifully cut jacket and a pair of boxers. He was not expecting company.
They came anyway, picking their way across the crown moulding of the second-floor library, crawling over each other’s bodies.
Greenmantle took a swig of the wine directly from the bottle – when he’d selected it from the kitchen, he had thought it would look more aesthetically pathetic and desperate than carrying a solitary glass, and it did. He wished there was someone here to see just how aesthetically pathetic and desperate he looked.
“Notes of black powder and abandonment,” he told his reflection. He took another swallow; this mouthful he choked on. A little too much black powder and abandonment at once.
His reflection went wide-eyed; his wife stood behind him, fingers wrapped around his throat. A few of her blond hairs strayed from her otherwise smooth hair, and the collection lights behind her burned these strands golden-white-fiery. Her eyes were black. One of her eyebrows was raised, but she looked otherwise unperplexed as her fingertips pressed into his skin. His neck purpled.
He blinked.
She wasn’t there.
She had never been there. She had left him behind. Well, in fairness, he had left her behind, but she’d started it. She was the one who had chosen to perpetuate a considerable amount of tactless violent crime in the wilds of Virginia, right when he had decided he was ready to take his toys and go.
“I’m alone,” Greenmantle told the mirror.
But he wasn’t. They buzzed down the stairs, alighting upon the tops of the picture frames, and ricocheted into the kitchen.
Greenmantle turned from the mirror to face his collection. A four-armed suit of armour, a taxidermy unicorn the size of a pygmy goat, a blade that continuously dripped blood on the floor of its glass case. It represented the finest of nearly two decades of collecting. Not really the finest, Greenmantle mused, merely the objects he thought most likely to capture Piper’s attention.
He thought he heard something in the hallway to the room. A humming. Or scratching. Not quite scratching – it was too light for that.
“After numerous personal betrayals, Colin Greenmantle had a nervous breakdown in his late thirties,” Greenmantle narrated, ignoring the sound, “leading many to believe he would fade into obscurity.”
He regarded the earrings in his hand. He had taken steps to acquire them over two years before, but it had taken this long for his suppliers to cut them from a woman’s head in Gambia. Rumour had it that the wearer could see through walls. Certain types of walls, anyway. Not brick. Not stone. But drywall. They could handle drywall. Greenmantle didn’t have pierced ears, so he hadn’t tried them. And with Piper pursuing a new life of crime, it seemed he might never find out.
“But the onlookers had underestimated Colin’s personal fortitude,” he said. “His ability to bounce back from emotional injury.”
He turned to the door just as the visitors exploded through it.
He blinked.
They did not disappear.
He blinked, and blinked again, and something was still coming in through the door, something that was neither his imagination nor a cursed mirror image. It took his mind a moment to process the sound and the sight to realize it was not a single visitor: It was many. They poured and tumbled and scrabbled over one another.
It was not until one broke free from the horde and flew at him erratically that he realized that it was insects. As the black wasp landed on his wrist, he told himself not to slap it. It stung him.
“Bitch!” he said, and swung the wine bottle at it.
Another wasp joined the first. Greenmantle shook his arm, dislodging it, but a third flew at him. A fourth, a fifth, a hallway-full of them. They were all over him. He was wearing a beautiful jacket, and boxers, and wasps.
The earrings fell to the floor as he spun. In the mirror, his reflection dripped tears and he saw not wasps, but Piper, her arms and smile wrapped around him.
“We’re through,” her mouth said.
The lights went out.