Helen clutched her necklace, willing him not to see her.
As if in response he looked over to where she was. But all that happened is the air seemed to suddenly go out of him, like a popped balloon. He sagged, a ventriloquist’s dummy gone slack, limp in every joint.
“Millicent,” he said, softly, brokenly. “This is all my fault.…”
He reached down and gently unclasped the rubber funnel. Helen saw Millicent’s face then, blue-white as if all the air had gone out of her. The funnel and black rubber tube fell to the ground, one in a sea of tubes. Her eye traced the tubes back to their cages, where the funnels hung on the outside of the iron bars. With dawning horror she realized what the oval mountings actually were. She looked around—yes. There was one without the funnel.
Rows and rows and rows of them, that’s what Jane had said, looking at you with their black blank eyes.
It was a woman’s face. The original face of someone who was now startlingly beautiful, like all of them.
Calendula Smith.
The masks were placeholders for where the women were to go. This was his machine, this is why it had a hundred tubes leading to a hundred cages. It will all work when we have more power.
What will work?
With great effort Helen tore her gaze away from that oval mask, that caricatured skin, as ugly as the current Calendula was beautiful. She remembered Jane telling her how the rows and rows of masks looked when they still hung in Mr. Rochart’s house, their skin sagging and wrinkled from drying on the wall.
Helen’s eyes were tight as she watched Grimsby delicately close the eyelids of his wife. She did not know what to do. Did he care? Was this an accident? What was he?
He sank to his knees and buried his head in the long trail of dress that hung over the side of the bed like a torn banner, fraying in the wind.
Helen stood up, her eyes stinging, and pushed herself away from the window.
She pushed herself through the numb cold and black night, back through the shadows toward the dwarvven underground. There near the bookstore she stood out of sight, and waited for the next black car to drive down the block. They were circling. They knew where the dwarvven were. She did not know what they were waiting for, but she knew if she went down to the underground, she would be found with them.
She went.
She went through the bookstore and down the stairs. She had seen Millicent go and so she went through the underground tunnels to the dance to find Rook. She did not fully think through why being miserable and lost meant she wanted to find Rook, she just went and stood in that gay mad atmosphere of dwarvven who were going to damn well enjoy the dance of the last night on earth and she saw Rook dancing.
He was dancing with a girl and Helen’s heart thudded to her knees.
He was dancing with a girl, slim and lovely and so petite that Helen felt like a big oaf, even though she and Rook were of a height, and she was slim herself.
She was there and he was dancing with another and that was the way it was going to be forever and ever, all because Helen had once told herself that the true things inside didn’t matter, and that you could tell your heart what to do and it would obey.
She knew how wildly wrong she had been and she was stuck.
The music pressed in on her as they danced, laughing. Helen turned to a dwarvven man next to her and said things, all manner of things, let them tumble out of her mouth, and she had no idea what any of them were a second after she said them, because her heart was breaking. She was witty, she was bright, she was a whirl of apple green ruffled voile. She made the man laugh, head thrown wildly back, and another dwarvven man brought her a bathtub gin, and Helen made him laugh, too. She let this one lead her into the dance, and she whirled around and around with the skills she had from a lifetime of tenpence dances, dances with Alistair, dances from every moment of her existence. The city could burst into blue flames and still Helen could dance.
The dance ended and Helen drew back, waving her gin glass as an excuse. “It’s not empty,” the man said, and she tossed it back and laughed, and escaped. She did not know what she had said or saw; all she knew was the skirts whisking around her, triumphant laughter belling the air as Rook danced with somebody else.
She bumped into a gentleman—said something delightfully saucy, who knew what? Admiring eyes followed her. She tried to lean into their approval, but she had been doing that for half her life and tonight it was flat and hollow. Millicent was gone and Rook was gone and when would Helen be gone? Not soon enough. It was all noise, so much noise that she could no longer hear any particular words, so much sight that she let it blur in a wash of color across her path.
The next man she bumped into did not move.
She tilted her head to let her mouth chatter wildly and found herself looking into bright hazel eyes, a face that she had surely pieced together herself out of the chaos of color and spectacle around her.
“Dance with me,” Rook said.
“I am getting gin,” Helen said, because in the merry-go-round around her ears it was the one thing she could make sense of. The words were crisp and staccato. The clever chatter left her, and all that was there was something like truth, which was that she definitely wanted a gin.
He took the glass from her hand, dropped it into the bemused hand of a fat dwarvven man standing by the wall. Next her hand, fingers lacing through hers, and Rook drew her in. Their eyes met, level, equal. He was light and lithe and deft in the dance. A touch here, there, and they were moving in time together around the floor, his fingers subtly guiding, hers subtly suggesting.
The detachment was leaving her now. She was suddenly very there, very present in his arms, very there for his uncharacteristic silence. He looked at her thoughtfully, and Helen looked back as if she had nothing to hide, because she could no longer think how to hide it.
“Funny us meeting like this,” she said. It was meant to be a joke, and yet it slipped out without breath, and he let it hang there too many seconds to still sound like a joke.
Music, the sort that lifted you around and around, violins and piano, a heartbeat rhythm pounding faster, stair-stepping higher. A familiar refrain worked into the melody, repeating itself, and her fingers beat it out upon his shoulder as it came round again.
It did not matter how many dancers were in the room, they were alone as the melody went round and round, climbing to a finish that was heartbreaking in the way it triumphed and broke apart, fading away like dying applause, everything wonderful has just happened and now it is over, over, over.
Her heart pounded the echo of the finished music, racing without a song to follow.
“Helen,” he said, and took her hand tightly, so very tightly. Everything was a blur of color around her. She only saw him, and beyond him, like an afterimage, a mirage, a girl in a white dress with a grass green sash.
“Helen,” he said, again, seeking for more words, but she knew the future of all the words he would say.
“Don’t,” she said, and she freed her hand from his grasp. She pressed one finger, two to his lips.
Rook caught her hand before she could pull away, slip away like the tale of the girl who has to flee the dance at midnight, leaving behind one fey-blue shoe. “Isn’t there something I can do,” he said in a low voice. “I must be able to … to free you.”
“No one can help me,” she said. She tugged against his grip. “I must go.”
“But.”
“No,” she said, and turned on him. “You must never speak this. Not even think it to yourself. That is how you can help me.”