You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,73
I presume, to live where it all went down.
I don’t know where Mother went after she moved, but I reckon that you do. If she is still alive she must be well over ninety and tucked away in some home, I guess. Somewhere close to Olivia and maybe even you.
“It is not important,” Pepper-Man says when I bring it up, “you will always have me.” And he is right about that, and wrong too.
* * *
“Maybe I didn’t go to the clinic,” I say, when I fall into one of my retrospective moods. “Maybe I only made that up. Maybe Dr. Martin helped me make that up…”
“Why do you think of that? Why is it significant?” Pepper-Man asks.
“It is significant to them: to Mother, to Mara, and to Ferdinand too, who died…”
“Nothing is significant to the dead. They are gone.”
“You are not.”
“I am not like most dead.”
He will take my weary old feet in his hands then. His fingers are gnarled again, from age, not from sap. He massages the pads of my toes, the hard skin on my heels. He has changed some since Father died, become softer and kinder, gentler with me. Less of a faerie and more of a man, vulnerable and brittle with age. “What is done is done,” he says, “and it can never be undone.”
If the night is fair and I’m up for it, we take a stroll around the garden, pondering what was and what will be. Pepper-Man picks plums and apples from the branches and offers them to me; jewels of fall, sweet and taut with juice.
“What will happen later?” I ask, as we walk below the canopy of gnarled branches and glossy leaves, the rich taste of apples in my mouth. His hand is on my back, steadying my steps.
“You are growing weary now?”
“I am.”
“I will take you to the mound, then.”
“And…?”
“You go inside.” He pauses and turns toward me, catches a wisp of my white hair between his fingers, rubs it as if to feel the texture, how it has withered since my youth.
“And then I don’t come out again?” The sky above bleeds a twilight violet.
“No, not for a while. And when you do, you will be different.”
“Will I be like you then, taking life from the living?”
“What is life, Cassandra, really? Would you say I do not live?” He lifts the coil of hair to his lips and kisses it.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, you will be like me.”
“I will feed off a horse, then.” I imagine the wind through my hair as I race across a meadow.
“Your face would be horribly long. If you still care about such things, after.”
“A cat, then.” I imagine lustrous fur and whiskers.
“A cat would suit you fine.”
“Will you still be with me?”
Pepper-Man’s gaze meets mine. His face is still smooth but ashen and worn; paler somehow, skin paper thin. His hair is dry and steely gray. “We can both feed from cats, together.”
He might not have loved me at first, when he entered my world when I was a child, but he does now, I’ll tell you that. It was nothing he expected, I’ll tell you that too. I was simply a meal at first, a strawberry tart to chew on—but the heart, even a dead one, doesn’t ask before it swells. He needs me, yes, but he loves me too.
Loves me even more than I do.
“I have known you for so long.” I reach up and let my fingers trail the outline of his face. “It’s like you are a part of me, of every breath I take.”
“Two peas in a pod,” he answers and laces his fingers with mine. “I will always be with you, every step of the way, until your last breath is gone, and beyond.”
XXXI
And now you have reached the end of me. The end of this body of words.
Janus, I bet you’re groaning deeply, as you rise from the chair and stretch your stiff limbs. Penelope, you’re just sighing, and let the last pages flutter to the floor. Nothing for you to do now, is there, but lock up the house and drive away, arrive at the solicitor’s early tomorrow morning, fresh and ready after a good night’s sleep, and there you will say the magic word: THORN, and the manila envelope is opened and the treasure is yours. Yes. All of it. You are my heirs, as I have no one else. You are my heirs—isn’t that strange?
“But where is she?” Penelope may be