Page 56 of Lucy Undying

I crept out of my bedroom, tucked a knife into my dressing gown, and stepped into the night. I was ready to look for my dog…but I was not alone. Standing in the darkness was a man, so still he seemed part of the rocks of Whitby. He stared, utterly fixed upon the bedroom window. The window behind which Mina was sleeping.

I froze. There was something wrong with him. The shadows hid his features, as though complicit in his disguise. My eyes told me he was an older gentleman, but my heart…

My heart knew it was false. Perhaps because I’ve spent so much time practicing expressions in the mirror so no one ever knows who I really am. Whatever the reason, I saw past what his face was telling me straight to what my heart was telling me:

He was not a man.

My first impulse was to hide. He hadn’t noticed me yet. He took a step toward the house, eyes burning red, fixed on the window. Only a little glass between him and Mina, and I—fool that I am!—had left the window cracked open.

I know men’s hunger. I have seen it in their faces my whole life, but the pure gnawing intensity of his expression made me cold all over.

As that cold washed over me, so, too, did calm. Because what did I care about a threat to myself? What hope did I have of future happiness? None. Without hope there is no fear, because there is nothing to lose. I only cared about Mina’s safety.

I walked up to him, my nightdress white like moonlight winking behind the clouds of my dressing gown. The dressing gown that was hiding a knife. “Come with me,” I said.

The ferocity in his face as he turned almost made me scream. But it shifted from pure predatory menace to the curiosity of the spider maintaining its web. He smiled, because he thought he had won, and I smiled, because he was going to follow me. And Mina would be safe.

I led him to the graveyard bench where so often I sat with Mina, looking out over this same view. But at night everything was shadow and mystery. The ruined abbey rose like the rotting ribs of some dread leviathan, the headstones around us flashes of pale, broken teeth. The wind dragged clouds across the moon, bathing us in sly, shuddering light.

I sat. It made me no more vulnerable than if I’d been standing. I longed to go and look down at the house in the hills beneath us, to gaze at where Mina was safe. But I needed this monster to stay focused on me.

“Why do you wander the night?” He leaned close. There was nothing lovely in his face, nothing heroic or handsome. Sharp lines and empty, burning pits for eyes. They expressed all the ravenous hunger his closed lips tried to hide. “Haven’t you enough love? I have heard men’s hearts race as they look on you.”

I smiled prettily at him, a smile so blank and perfect that men could project whatever they wanted onto it. My former art teacher. The annoying old man who used to hassle me on this very bench. Doctor Seward, Quincey Morris, even Arthur. I wasn’t a person to them, any more than I was a person to this monster.

“What love do I have?” I asked. “They look at me and want to possess me. They want to consume me. That’s not love, no matter what they tell themselves. Why are you pretending to be like them? Show me the truth.”

A low, urgent noise escaped him. He could barely hold himself in place here, something beneath his skin vibrating to be free. His animal moan of desire filled me with urgency to keep him here. Away from that window with the curtains drifting inward like fingers beckoning him toward Mina.

But his moan also filled me with a curiosity of my own. As the butterfly watches the spider approach, doesn’t it wonder what it will be like? How it will feel?

He resumed his form as the stately old gentleman. It’s such a flimsy disguise, I wondered how anyone ever believed it. Though most stately old gentlemen I know also hide fangs and claws. Perhaps that was the secret. People are used to looking away from what they’re too polite to notice. The same way we all looked away from that man abusing his dog. The same way everyone looked away from who my father was. From who my mother is.

“She is waiting for him,” he said. I felt another stab of cold dread. He was still thinking of Mina. I didn’t know how to make him stop. I’d never been able to stop thinking of her, either.

“Waiting for who?” I asked.

“For her Jonathan.” He smiled then, a smile as swift and brutal as an executioner’s blade. “He will never come for her.”

If he knew Jonathan, he knew exactly who Mina was. He had come here for her. It wasn’t chance that brought him to our window.

But I had always been more desirable than Mina, hadn’t I? She’d told me so enough times. “Perhaps that’s for the best.” I shrugged, letting my dressing gown slip off a shoulder, drawing his eyes there. “He could never have made her happy.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but it was so hard to pretend with him. I wondered if I needed to pretend. Perhaps it was best to be my own broken, strange self. Who was he going to tell? “I don’t know. I’m unhappy with my own fiancé, and I’m unhappy that Mina loves Jonathan, and so I search for signs that she’s unhappy, too. We use other people like mirrors, projecting our feelings onto them, looking for our reflections.”

He tilted his head. I don’t think his face is capable of actual expressions, merely mockery of human emotion. But he almost looked thoughtful. “I never see myself reflected.”

“Well, you’re not a person. You’re a monster.” I felt a thrill of triumph as at last he focused completely on me. I had him then. Either I would kill him, or, more likely, he would kill me. But after he killed me, there would be an uproar. He would be caught, Mina would be safe. I laughed again, because men hate to be laughed at, and he was pretending to be a man. “Oh, don’t be so surprised that I can tell. Of course you’ll never see your reflection. You don’t look at others and try to understand them, or try to understand yourself through them. You never could.”

One dark eyebrow lifted above his bottomless eyes. “You know me so well, then.”

I wished I did not. That I had searched his face and found nothing familiar. But maybe that was how I saw what he truly was. Because in him, I saw myself. “You are a gaping maw,” I said. “An endless, insatiable hunger. There’s not enough in this world to fill you, you can never have what you want, and yet you keep taking new forms, keep pretending, keep moving out of a desperate need to survive.”

I recognized the sound of desire he made, the one that repulsed me and filled me with shame, because it was the sound my own soul made every day. The sound of my whole self when I looked at Mina and wanted to consume her and knew I could not.

I reached up with my free hand and drew him close, holding him there. Holding him to me, away from Mina. I didn’t care if I couldn’t have her—I would never let him hurt her. My other hand clutched the handle of my knife. “Look in my eyes, and I think you will, at last, see yourself.”

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