Jane, fading fast toward oblivion, hears him speak to her from upstairs in the hall. His voice is distant. It is close. He is reaching for her. She cannot see him. She watches everything.
She flees, unwilling to see Augustine alone, afraid, because of her.
The maze of the crypt folds around her. She steps past frozen statues, peers at their faces, and tries not to hear Augustine behind her.
He collapses without a sound and curls up, weak and drawn. She does not face him, but still sees his hunger, fierce and gnawing, tangled in his abdomen and pulsing with bright fury in the lines of the world. He has tried to work magic. Tried to feed himself with wishing, tried to conjure water, conjure warmth. He cannot do it, because he does not know the ritual forms, and the forms control him, though they are man-made, and magic, Jane knows, is not.
He is weak, and Jane is, too. She holds him in her arms, and he curls into her, whispering her name. She strokes his hair. She cradles him as he shivers, but she is not alive; she can provide no warmth, no help.
He dies.
He dies afraid. His body grows cold. He did not last long at all. She smells the smoke of blood-soaked sheets burning in the library fireplace.
So soon.
She never had a chance of saving him. He was dead as soon as Jane conjured the stone door, desperate to save her earlier self, heedless of the consequences. Just now? A lifetime ago? She looks at the body in her arms. And yet he comes to her, in the study. She feels him move inside her. His hands are deep within her body. His lips are hot against her cheek. But no; it is not him.
She looks at this form that is shaped from him, shares the lines of him. In some places, like his hands, his face, there is intricate, exacting detail, fine-sketched shapes against a chalkboard. But in his chest, his legs, there are gaps. Great, gaping holes where magic cannot describe him, because Jane does not know him well enough.
She stares. She frowns. She touches the chest of the Augustine who operates on her, and the chest of Augustine, nervous on their wedding night, and feels both, warm and solid beneath her fingertips. And yet they are not the same.
What is her surgeon? What is it that has killed her at her demand? Is he free to leave, or will he, too, evaporate with the dawn?
She does not want him to. She wants him to be real. She wants to have had some chance at success.
Augustine dies. Augustine lives.
Both are true, here in death. She wishes that could be true elsewhere. But in life, time is linear. One thing happens, and then the other. There is no changing that.
And then there is Renton.
He exists two feet off the ground, his limbs knotted back on themselves the way his bowel had twisted and killed him. He stinks of filth, the scent pungent and real in a way the burning sheets are not. His head is bent back, tucked beneath one arm, and he looks at her calmly.
He is not a statue. There is no blankness clinging to him, or the white expanse of Jane’s paradox, or shame, or anything she has come to associate with the wreckage of Augustine’s working.
Jane frowns.
I KNOW YOU. Her voice is not speech, not sound, but it ripples through the extended, compressed space around them, the space that is and is not Lindridge Hall. They are deep inside unhewn earth. They are inside a brilliantly lit ritual space. They are nowhere at all.
GHOSTS ARE NOT REAL, she says.
He does not disappear, despite her logic. No, he replies. THEY ARE NOT.
WHAT ARE YOU?
AN ECHO. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MY MAGIC AND AUGUSTINE’S AND YOURS, I AM TRAPPED.
IS IT BAD, TO BE TRAPPED?
NOT WHEN GIVEN FORM.
She takes him at his word. What else is there?
MY MAGIC? she asks.
IT MAKES ME REAL.
AND THE REST?
MY MAGIC MADE ME OTHER THAN HUMAN. AUGUSTINE’S MAGIC DREW THE MEMORY OF ME TO THIS HOUSE, BETWEEN YOUR GUILT AND HIS. AND YOUR MAGIC MADE ME MORE THAN HUNGRY, MORE THAN ENDLESS.
YOU MEAN YOU ARE NOT LIKE THE STATUES?
He nods. It is unsettling.
She considers him. Her magic made him real. She looks at Augustine, half sketched, half real.
Renton sees where she is looking. He shrugs. That is worse than unsettling. WE ARE MORE OR LESS THE SAME. YOU ARE VERY GOOD AT KNOWING THINGS TO BE AS THEY ARE. I WAS NOT AS GOOD. I KNEW WRONG THINGS.
AND THIS IS NOT WRONG? she asks, and they gaze together at Augustine cutting out the mass from her belly. It has hair. It has teeth. It has one green eye.
That is worst of all.
IT IS INTENTIONAL, Renton replies.
Jane frowns and thinks to ask a question, but is interrupted. （Interrupted. Interrupted how? There is time now, imposed upon no time at all, and Jane’s confusion grows.）
“Elodie, come!”