Page 31 of Now Comes the Mist

A dozen questions form behind my lips. I want to ask who he is, where he comes from, why he is here, and whether we have met before. But try as I might, I cannot—nor can I look at him. It is as though my words and actions are barred by some invisible gate. I clear my throat to ask another question, which comes out easily. “And is it beautiful, your earliest glimpse?”

“Yes, it is beautiful,” he says with a smile in his voice.

I have known much admiration in my nineteen years. I have received gifts and flowers, love letters and compliments, and three proposals of marriage. But from this man I still have not properly seen, the praise somehow means more than any silly flirtation. I am flooded by the knowledge that everything up to this point in my life has been meaningless. I have been waiting for this exact moment in time.

I have been waiting for him.

He runs his thumb over my cheek, and I close my eyes at his cool, soothing touch. The questions I long to ask fade like shadows. I am content not to know anything but what he chooses to tell me. “I come here every day,” I say. “The cliffs bring me a peace I cannot find elsewhere. I sit on this bench and look out to sea, and it seems I am suspended between two worlds. The waking and the dreaming. The living and …”

The dreamy sunlight of his focus sharpens into a blinding ray of heat. “And?”

“And the dead.”

He is surprised, I think, and the notion that I can astonish him with anything I say is heady and overpowering. I am oddly proud that I can affect this man.

“I often imagine what it would be like to slip over that fence,” I say, my voice rising and falling with the music of a reverie. It is so easy to share my deepest self with him, as inevitable as rain pouring from the sky. “I picture climbing to the other side, my shoes sliding on the crumbling earth, and then nothing but air beneath me as I plummet toward the sea.”

He smooths my hair behind my shoulder, as gentle as my own mother. “And what if you fall toward the rocks instead?” he asks as calmly as though we are conversing about the weather.

“Then I would accept that fate, too.”

“Are you that tired of life that you would so readily embrace death?”

“It calls to me, though I have many people for whom I wish to stay. My mother … Mina, my dearest friend … and Arthur.”

The man’s attention is now so sharp I can almost feel its razor edge brushing against my throat. He places his large, cold hand on top of both of mine, resting in my lap, and I turn my palms upward to meet his. “Arthur is someone who loves you?”

“He has given me his heart and he will give me his name.”

“But your heart? Where is that?”

“My heart is like the sea,” I say sadly as the man’s fingers close softly around my own. “It is deep and dark and belongs to no man, however many try to tame it.”

“I disagree,” he says in a quiet voice. “You are not the sea, but a sailor. A wanderer like me. You want to steer a ship to foreign lands, tread ground you have never walked, encounter wonders you have never seen.” His thumb traces the lines of my palm as though he knows them by heart. “You want to taste all of life, but you are shackled here. And you’re wrong, you know.”

I am shaking as I listen, moved almost to tears. “Wrong about what?”

“About my not seeing your chains. I see them, Lucy.” He runs his thumb down the inside of my wrist, so tenderly that my sorrow overflows. Tears scald my cheeks and splash onto our joined fingers. He lifts my wet hand but does not kiss it as I expect him to. Instead, he presses my tears against his own eyes, as though he would willingly take my pain and make it his own, to spare me. “I know why you are drawn to the places of the dead, to graveyards such as this one. There is freedom here. No one to watch or listen or try to change us into something we are not.”

I choke back a sob. This man sees me. Heseesme as no one in my life ever has or ever will. “Tell me this is not just a dream. Tell me I will not wake up and be so alone again.”

“You will wake up,” he says kindly. “But I promise you, Lucy: you will never be alone again. Not now that I have found you, here in a place only we two know. Suspended between the waking and the dreaming.”

“Between the living and the dead,” I whisper, and like an incantation, the words lift the dreamy, hypnotic stupor from me. I feel it all come back: the ability to ask any question I wish, to move my body as I like, and to look where I want to look. I sense that this return of my free will is a gift he has bestowed upon me and that I have proven myself to him in some way. And I am able, at last, to turn and see him for the first time.

The man beside me has the appearance of stone, as though every angle has been cut into unforgiving rock, hewn by no human hand but by the passing of years and the relentless wearing down by wind and water. He is like the cliffs, and it is every bit as tempting to imagine myself plunging against him to my doom. His skin is as white as the flower still clutched in my hand, contrasting with wavy dark hair slightly curling at his temples and neck. He has thick eyebrows over a long straight nose and a thin, pale-lipped mouth.

But it is his eyes that arrest me. If a painter could capture the ocean in a single gaze, it would be this one. I look into the deep blue-green of his eyes, and I can remember every summer I have spent on these cliffs, my lonely heart aching for the horizon. It is the color of solitude, of empty longing, of the pain of having to hide everything I am and everything I need. It is breathtaking, unsettling, like staring into a mirror and seeing my true self reflected for the first time. His eyes would be frightening, I think, if their expression was not so soft. I find that I am struggling for breath as I look at him. I seem to have forgotten how to take in air, an action I have done since the very first moment I came into this world.

“I have been waiting for you,” I hear myself say as tears continue to spill down my face.

“And I have come,” he says.

I am trembling as though I sit in the depths of winter, and I know it is from hunger and relief, from joy and sorrow all at once and not from being cold. But still, the man removes his jacket, which is of a beautiful dark wool too heavy for the weather, his movements slow and deliberate as though he does not wish to startle me. He wraps me within its folds and meets my eyes with that fathomless ocean gaze, a question on his starklyhandsome, fine-boned features. Something in my face must answer it, for he gently lifts me—jacket and all—until I am in his lap, sitting sideways, and he hugs me tight to him. We do not speak for a long time, and I wonder with every beat of my yearning heart how he knew that I needed to be held like this: with infinite tenderness and no hesitation, no expectation of anything in return but for me to accept his care.

Not even Arthur would dare give me this intimacy outside of marriage, and to find it from an almost perfect stranger is dizzying, shocking, gratifying.

My face is pressed to the man’s white linen shirt, which exposes a strong throat corded with veins. “Who are you?” I whisper in the shelter of his arms. “How did you find me?”

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