Memory and Dream

more human.

“I’m missing something here,” he told her. “How did you know that it wasn’t me who came to fetch the painting? And if you didn’t give it to my double, then how did Rushkin get it?”

But Rushkin hadn’t acquired it, had he? His gateway painting still had to be in Barb’s closet, or else he wouldn’t be here. Yet he’d seen the painting in Rushkin’s hands.

Barb smiled. “First, although the guy looked like you, that’s where the resemblance ended.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

“Have you ever known identical twins?” Barb asked.

John shook his head.

“I grew up with a set of them. They might look identical, but once you get to know them, you can always tell them apart. Not from a distance, maybe, but up close and talking? You can’t not know which is which.”

“If you say so,” John said, doubtfully.

“I do.”

Barb regarded him with mock severity until John said, “Okay. I believe you. But Bitterweed and I—”

“Is that his name? Bitterweed?”

John nodded.

“I guess he thought the play on your own surname was clever.”

“Maybe he didn’t get a choice in the matter,” John said, feeling a little odd. As soon as he spoke the words he realized that he carried a certain amount of sympathy for his double. What must it feel like when your only reason for existence was to refute another’s?

“Anyway,” Barb went on. “You and I—we’ve known each other for a long time now. The man who came here with your face wasn’t you. And if he had been you, well he didn’t deserve to get what he’d come looking for. He’d have to lose that arrogance before I’d even give him the time of day.”

“But the painting ... ?”

Barb shook her head as if to say, Don’t you know me better by now?

“I’ve been expecting something like this for years,” she said. “Once I realized it was all true—the gateways and the otherworld and all—and once I realized how important your painting was to your existence, I knew something like this would come up at some point. If not from Rushkin, then from some other enemy.”

“You think I have so many enemies?”

“Since Rushkin can bring you folks across, I figure you’d have as many as he painted.”

“I suppose you’re right. But even if you knew Bitterweed wasn’t me, it still doesn’t explain how I ended up here.”

“That’s simple,” Barb told him. “I did another one. I duplicated the painting Isabelle used to bring you across, and then on top of it I made a copy of mine so that the two were exactly the same.”

“So I’ve got yet another doppelganger running about?” John asked, not at all pleased with the idea.

Bitterweed was bad enough. Though since it had been Barb bringing this other double across, he could at least be assured that it wouldn’t hold the same spiteful intentions toward him that Bitterweed did.

Barb shook her head again. “No, I thought about it before I started the new painting. With a bit of experimentation I discovered that it’s possible to make a gateway painting in which the gate will only open a bit— no wider than a crack. Enough to let the taste of your otherworld through, but not so much so that someone else can make the passage between our worlds.”

“So what Rushkin believed to be me ...”

“Was only an echo of you,” Barb finished. “Or rather, a taste of the otherworld, but nothing more.”

John looked at her with open admiration. He thought of what must have happened back at the tenement where he’d left Rushkin and Isabelle. Rushkin would have cut the canvas and consumed the spirit released. He’d now be thinking that John was dead. He wouldn’t have fed well on what little sustenance he’d obtained from the painting, but he wouldn’t doubt that it was John’s essence he’d swallowed.

“You saved my life,” he said.

Barb flushed and looked away. “Indirectly, perhaps.”

John didn’t push it. Like Isabelle, Barb was often far too modest for her own good. He sometimes wondered how either of them got any work done since the very act of putting pigment to ground required a healthy measure of self-confidence that neither seemed to be able to muster with the same level of intensity outside the compass of their art.

Beside him, Barb took another swallow of her tea, then set the mug down on the floor. She leaned back against the arm of the chesterfield so that she was facing him, knees drawn up to her chest, chin propped up on her forearms.

“So I take it Rushkin’s back,” she said.

John nodded. “In the flesh.”

“I was hoping he’d finally died.”

Allow me immunity to whatever protects makers from attack by those of us brought across from the before, John thought, and he would be.

“So long as he can feed on us,” John said, “he’ll live forever.”

Barb sighed. John could see the muscles of her hands contract with tension and knew she was remembering her own time spent under his tutelage. “So what’s the old bastard up to this time?” she asked.

As John explained, Barb’s tension intensified—this time in empathy to what Isabelle was going through. Just as he was getting to the moment when Rushkin had appeared in the doorway of the makeshift studio, he suddenly sat up straight, story forgotten. Through his connection with Isabelle, he felt the decision she’d come to. In his mind’s eye he could see the utility blade in her hand as it rose up to her throat.

“No!” he cried as the razor edge sliced into her skin, his voice ringing sharply in the confines of the studio.

Barb jolted as though struck. She leaned forward and gripped his arm. “John! What’s the matter?”

John’s lower jaw worked, but he couldn’t get a sound out. The enormity of what he felt left him helpless and numb. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he fell limply against the back of the chesterfield.

“John!” Barb cried again.

He finally managed to focus on her for one long moment, but before he could speak, he was taken away, drawn out of her grip with a rush of displaced air that eddied across her face, blowing her hair around her brow and temples.

Barb’s hand fell limply to her thigh. Her gaze was pulled to the door of her closet, which still stood ajar. His painting was still in there, that much she knew. But if John had been taken away ..

She rose to her feet and darted across the room, suddenly afraid that for all her precautions, someone had snuck in and stolen the painting while they sat on the chesterfield talking. At the doorway of the closet, she hit the light switch, flooding the interior with a bright fluorescent glare. A few quick steps inside and she was flipping through the paintings. John’s gateway wasn’t hard to find. She picked it up and brought it back out into the warmer light of her studio, where she studied it carefully. There was no doubt in her mind that this was The Spirit Is Strong, painted over with her own deliberately crude brushstrokes to disguise it.

John had explained it all to her, how those brought across from the before could always instantaneously return to their source paintings. But that was it. The ability went no further than that one-way journey.

Holding the painting, she stared at the empty chesterfield, a deep chill settling in her chest. So what had just happened was impossible. Except John was gone. She held his source painting in her hands, but she was still alone in the studio.

“Oh, John,” she said softly, unable to keep the tremor from her voice. “What have they done to you now?”

XII

It wasn’t going to be hard at all, Isabelle realized as she put her decision into action. It felt so true, so

... inevitable. Was this how it had felt for Kathy?

Everything decelerated into slow motion. Alan’s movement seemed like a series of quick sketches from a life-drawing class. He took forever, plunging toward her through air gone suddenly thick and syrupy, a look of desperation and horror etched on his face. They both knew he’d be too late. By the time he reached her, knocking