The voice is her own, but from a different time. Jane lifts her head. A mirror sits on the far side of the banquet hall that was not there before, and in it is Jane. Jane, ringed in blood.
Jane knows this moment.
If Elodie does not appear, Jane does not open the crypt. The white expanse of paradoxical future will grow again, will become unbounded. The nothingness it hides within it, Augustine’s working and Elodie’s absence, will metastasize. What comes next Jane cannot know, because Jane only exists within a precarious sequence of events, a knot that she cannot untangle. If Elodie does not appear …
In the mirror, Jane focuses. She knows that her reflection is Elodie. Jane, dead, looks at the space before the mirror, and hopes. She hopes that this is where Elodie returns, that she conjured Elodie from nothingness, and that, perhaps, Elodie did as Jane did, working backward, filling in where she was needed.
But Elodie does not appear. It is Jane that feels a calling. A pulling.
She looks at Renton, twisted in upon himself, impossible flesh in an impossible space. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? she asks him.
He does not speak.
She wants to beg him for answers, but he offers none, and so she leaves him. She approaches the mirror. She sits.
She looks at herself.
Jane sags and sways with exhaustion and terror as she focuses. Jane remembers going through her precepts, limiting her knowledge. Did it matter? She still willed Elodie to appear, and Jane is not Elodie.
She searches herself. Is she changing? Will she now become Elodie? Is that how all this falls into place, becomes true, becomes what Jane knew?
Nothing shifts inside of her.
“Is Augustine alive?” Jane whispers to herself.
She fights to control her expression, but she knows she looks pained. She still holds Augustine in her arms.
“Were you with him, when he died?” Yes, a hundred times. He had known her, when he died. She does not like to think of it, or else she will be drawn to that moment, and not here at all.
“Is there something I can do, to fix this? To save him?”
No.
Jane looks at the plinth where the wrong Augustine works upon her. You will think there is, she almost says. You will believe you’ve saved him. But you have not.
And yet …
And yet, who is Jane to make that choice for her living self? This moment was what allowed Jane to continue on. To surmount the challenges before her, to feel as if she had atoned. She brought down the wall. She found Augustine.
That he is dead does not matter, because Jane is dead, too.
Finally, Jane nods.
“Can you tell me?” Jane nods again. “What? What must I do? What must I know to fix everything?”
There is no way to fix everything. There is only the way to this moment, now, but Jane is glad that she has it. She is glad that Elodie is gone; she is glad Elodie has not been here to suffer for so many years, to torment, to wait, to long for. She is glad ghosts are not real.
And that is when she realizes: she has always been Elodie.
No. Not always. She is the woman who married Augustine, who died upon the plinth, but she is not the first woman to do so. There was Elodie, and then Elodie died. Augustine ripped her from her time, fixed her at the moment of her death, at least in echo—but she has not existed since. It was not Elodie who came to Jane. Elodie is gone.
It has always been herself.
She has not been Elodie’s replacement. There was a mistake, a rupture, but it was long ago.
Ghosts are not real.
She needs only to write the words. Those four words change everything, and they are easy enough to spell out. They mean that Elodie is not Elodie. They mean that Abigail, with her rotted skull in her belly, did not suffer so. They mean that the Cunninghams have not died, and that the creatures wearing their faces have no power. They mean so much, and they free Jane, free her to triumph, to press onward, to reach this moment of understanding.
And if ghosts are not real, then Augustine is not a ghost. He is something else. Perhaps he is alive. She wants to know he is alive.
She takes up the journal. She writes the words. She sets the journal down, carefully, to mirror where it is in living Jane’s reflection. She watches herself grow calm, grow still, then pick up the journal. She watches herself read.
It is almost enough.
Jane leaves the mirror. Renton is gone. She stands among the statues ringing the operating table, and she looks at the redness of her blood, the orderly disorder of her viscera. It does not look as painful as it felt. It looks, in the candlelight, like ink in water. Like a painting. Like something delicate and rageful. It looks like she felt, all those days alone in Lindridge Hall. It looks like the forming of the chick within the egg.