Page 4 of Feast of Sparks (Thornchapel 2)
The police officer across the table from me gives me a sympathetic smile.
“Almost finished,” she says kindly. “Just a few more things and then I’ll be off to take Mr. Martinez’s report.”
I nod, glance out the library windows at the gross day outside. All my life I’ve romanticized English rain; this past month, I’ve been downright rhapsodizing about the stark, sublime beauty of winter—but right now I hate all of it. I hate the cold and the wet and the brown, I’m sick of the insidious damp and the fucking mud. I want color and light and asphalt baked so hot it makes the air shimmer. I want the sounds of children screeching as they jump through sprinklers and parties blaring music into the night—I want life, full and summery, so thick and lush that it makes every moment a whispering joy.
Convivificat.
God, what a lie. Nothing will stir or quicken ever again.
As if able to sense my unhappiness, Sir James Frazer stands up from where he was sitting only a few feet away and walks over to me, nosing at my elbow until I drop a hand to pet him. He tries to lick the hand that’s petting him, but is baffled by all the bandages there, and so he gives up and curls protectively around my feet, letting out a doggy huff as he does. When the officer chased everyone away earlier, I expected Sir James to follow Auden outside, but the sweet hound refused to leave the library, instead staying next to me for the entire uncomfortable hour.
An uncomfortable hour that, thankfully, is nearly over.
Writing on a pad of paper, the officer asks me for my father’s contact information, which I give, and then finally she asks if I know why my mother would’ve come here to Thornchapel the year she went missing.
The year she died.
“I think . . . I mean, I know she was involved with the owner of this house at that time,” I answer, trying to be as blunt and informational as possible.
“Romantically?” the officer asks tactfully.
“Sexually,” I correct. Both Ralph and my mother are dead, it’s not like it’s going to hurt their feelings.
Oh God, my mother is dead, she’s really dead . . .
“That’s very interesting,” she says, and I wonder what interesting is cop-speak for. Then again, what does it matter? She wasn’t the one who had to learn that her parents were polyamorous kinksters who were involved with the parents of the same people that she has been getting kinky with. She didn’t have to learn that her mother was descended from the Kernstow family, and therefore the object of Ralph Guest’s obsession, and that it also made her the object of Ralph Guest’s obsession.
To the officer, this is just another day on the job. Human remains that happen to be in an unusual place.
For me, it’s the end of the world.
After thanking me and promising a detective would be in touch, the officer leaves to find St. Sebastian, and I sit in the library alone with the sound of rain, my cold tea, and the sleeping dog at my feet. I manage a text to my father with the neatest summary of the events I can imagine and tell him I’ll call tomorrow. The idea of calling tonight and talking it through all over again sounds worse than torture.
I just want to be alone, not only with the bones of my mother’s body, but also with the bones of every hope and dream about her I ever had.
“Come on, Poe,” a soft voice says near my ear. I look up to see Rebecca standing above me. The tea is gone and there’s a scatter of limp, used bandages on the table that I must have peeled off in my reverie.
“Are they all gone?” I ask in a whisper. “Are they . . . done?”
“St. Sebastian is still with them, but the rest are done for now.”
Just last night, Rebecca guided Delphine and me as we fucked for the first time. She watched as Auden kissed my virgin’s blood from my cunt, and then crawled back up to kiss my mouth. She watched as Saint joined us, as the three of us shared what felt like the inevitable. Rituals and fire and happiness. The consecration of the May Queen, becoming a bride by thorns. All just last night, and now . . .
I blink up at her.
“Have you cried since you saw her?” Rebecca asks, her eyes soft and her voice gentle, even though her words are not. Her words mean business; her words don’t shy away from the truth. None of us doubt that the bones buried behind the altar are my mother’s, and while the officer interviewing me told me there would be a confirmation process involving Mom’s teeth, I don’t need their endorsement to see the truth.
Now all that’s left is to face it.
I rub at my bleary but dry eyes. “No. I haven’t cried.”
“I thought so,” she says. “Come on.”
“Come on where?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer and I stand up anyway. Rebecca isn’t to be resisted , and I’m in no state to resist anyone right now. I’m too tired, too shocked, too sad. I feel like a ghost as we walk out of the library, like my feet don’t even touch the floor, like I’ll pass through any wall I come to. How can I still have a body when my mother is nothing but bones?
“How did you feel this morning?” Rebecca asks, almost conversationally, as we climb up not the west stairs, but the south stairs, the ones that lead to the nearly renovated wing. “Before, I mean.”
This morning.
