eddying vortex that took her past the amplification of all her senses to a place where there were no sights or smells or sounds. To a place where there was only silence. And darkness.
And then nothing.
Isabelle awoke lying on her back in a grove of birch trees on the north part of the island. A wide open field edged the grove, spreading away from the trees until it went tumbling down into the lake in a series of ragged cliffs. From where she lay Isabelle could hear the sound of the lake as its waves lapped against the rocky shoreline. The sunlight burned her eyes and there was an incredibly foul taste in her mouth. She rolled over onto her stomach and felt it do a couple of slow, queasy turns before it settled down again. There was a distinctive odor in the air, but it took her a few moments to realize what it was: the charred smell of an old campfire.
Recognition of the smell ignited her memory process and it all came back to her, the whole awful train of events that had begun with her chasing Rushkin’s numena around the side of the building to finding out that she’d inadvertently ingested god knew how much acid.
She sat up very slowly and looked down at herself. Her hands and clothes were smudged with soot as though someone had taken a stick of charcoal and scribbled with it all over her body. She had no idea how it had gotten there. She could remember nothing from after she’d taken Kathy’s old advice and stopped fighting the drugs. When she let the acid take her away, her ensuing unconsciousness had swallowed all subsequent recollection.
Although not exactly, she realized as she thought a little harder. At some point she’d slipped from the oblivion of the drugs she’d ingested into a dreaming sleep. Her dreams had been horrible. The farmhouse had burned down, taking with it all her paintings. And then the numena had begun to die—frail burning bodies dropping in the farmyard, their ghastly remains lit by the roaring inferno that the farmhouse had become. She remembered taking them in her arms, trying to ease the pain of their dying, her cheeks streaked with tears, her heart breaking. She’d been unaware of the people around her, but then most of them had been stoned as well and paying little attention to either her or the dying numena, everyone so far gone that the farmhouse was long past saving before anyone could think to fight the fire ....
A deep coldness entered Isabelle and everything went still inside her. She looked at her hands again.
If that had been a dream, then why were her hands and clothes all black?
Slowly she made her way from the birch grove and looked south. On the far side of the island she could see a thin tendril of smoke rising up above the canopy of the forest. The coldness penetrated her, settling deep in her chest so that she felt her heart and lungs were encrusted with frost. She floundered in the general direction of the farmhouse, not wanting to go, but unable to stop herself from moving toward it. When she reached the meadow where the Maypole stood, she took a moment to rest. The beribboned pole looked so forlorn. There was no breeze and its streamers hung limply along its length.
Maypole.
For May Day.
Mayday. SOS.
She remembered Rushkin and his numena finding her behind the barn. Remembered Rushkin demanding she give him her own numena paintings. Remembered him pressing the box of matches into her hand.
She shook her head. No. She couldn’t have done it. Even messed up on drugs, there was no way she could have done it.
She stumbled on, away from the Maypole, along the familiar forest path that wound through the trees and up to the hill where the farmhouse stood. Her progress was slow and halting, but eventually she emerged from the cover of the trees. She stood there in that borderland between the wild wood and the cultivated gardens that surrounded the farmyard and stared bleakly at the ruins of her home. The fieldstone chimney of the farmhouse, its stones blackened with soot, was all that remained. Everything else had been reduced to charred timbers and ashes. The smell of smoke was cloyingly thick here.
Numbly, she looked around the farmyard, but there was no sign of the dead numena. There were only her friends, standing about looking as shaken as she herself felt. A red-haired figure detached herself from one group of muted on-lookers and hurried up to her.
“Oh, ma
“I ... I didn’t do it,” Isabelle said.
“Do what?” Kathy asked.
Isabelle pointed a trembling hand toward the ruins of the farmhouse. “He tried to make me, but I swear I didn’t do it.”
“Who tried to make you?”
“Rushkin.”
“Did he spike the punch?” Kathy asked.
Isabelle nodded.
“I’ll kill that bastard,” Kathy said. “I swear I will.”
All Isabelle could do was stare at the smoldering ruins of her home. The farmhouse had always been there, so far as she was concerned. It had stood there before she was born and she’d always assumed it would still be there, long after she herself was dead. It seemed inconceivable that it was gone. The farmhouse and her paintings.
“The ... the numena paintings,” she asked, gaze locked on the charred timbers that lay in front of her.
Had that been one of the rafters? Had that been the carved wood of the mantelpiece? “Did anyone save the paintings?”
Kathy hesitated for a moment, then said, “Everybody was too screwed up to think straight. And only you and I knew about the numena. By the time I got back to the farmhouse, it was too late to get up to the attic.”
“So they’re all gone,” Isabelle said. “He got them all.” She turned an anguished face to Kathy. “He got John,” she said.
Kathy held her more tightly.
“Was ... was I here?” Isabelle asked. “When it was burning?”
“I don’t know,” Kathy told her. “It was craziness. Everybody was stoned and ...” She shrugged helplessly. “I looked for you,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. But I didn’t see you last night—not when the farmhouse was ... burning.”
Isabelle turned to regard the charred remains of the farmhouse once more. Her hands were closed into fists at her side, fingernails making half-moon indentations in her palms.
Think, she told herself. For once just think, don’t hide the memory away.
She forced herself to remember but all that came was old truths that she’d hidden away, from herself perhaps more than from the world: John hadn’t walked out on her, she’d sent him away. She hadn’t been mugged by street punks, Rushkin had beaten her. Tangled up in those two major truths was the real story behind a hundred and one of the other lies she’d told herself over the years, told herself so convincingly that she actually believed them. But of last night she could remember only one thing: Rushkin pressing the matches into her hand.
Could anyone have that much control over another person? Could they make them do something so evil?
She looked down at the soot that was ground into her palms and fingers, then pressed her face against Kathy’s shoulder. The coldness that had entered her earlier was a part other now, burrowed deep inside her, and she knew she would never be free of it again.
It was a week after the fire before Isabelle felt strong enough to confront Rushkin. She went to his studio with Kathy, but of course he denied any involvement whatsoever, denied even being in the area that night. He claimed to have been in New York at the time and even had the airline boarding passes and hotel receipts to prove
