Revolving Door: Volume 2
Chapter 33: Phantasmagoria
Content warning (may contain spoilers)
This chapter contains depictions of physical assault.
It was the dawn of discovery, the sunset of silence. It was the gilded decade, the godless decade, the decade when the world began to feel small. It was the Year 1892, and that was the year I fell in love.
Across the sea, cities were swept by revolution while in London, streets brightened and steam cars plummeted from favour. For a century we had sung the praises of coal and boiler, watching as it had eagerly reshaped the world—but today, something new had risen to overshadow it: the sun.
It was upon our soil that we learned to conjure electricity from light, and saw, in a flash of clarity, the endless possibility within it. Once the metropolitan railway inaugurated its first solar train, the rest of the city was quick to follow. Suncatchers sprouted on every eave, till we saw more glass than chimneys, and councillors now blustered about the peril of too many windows, the birds they slew.
On a placid day in the middle of all this turbulence, I sat at my desk and wrote an essay, gazing out across the manor grounds at the catcher glittering atop our greenhouse. From my study, I had a full view of the green, brushed by summer and bursting into bloom. It was all of a Baroque construction, the yield of wealth older than the house—older than the road beside it.
Today, a rare sun lit the land in gold. Light fell through my window, scattered by leaves. As the birds burst into a bright refrain, I thought about Lucille.
*
Lucille had been no one to me till two weeks ago. Then at once, she was the young lady on the balcony at the Herberts’ evening function, waving a violet fan to set her pale curls aflutter. If she came from money, I would have known her by now—my father made sure to mingle me among families of our ilk.
So I could not fathom how she had landed in the company of these preening swans. But I met her eye, and she met mine, and we drifted together on the landing, illuminated like a tableau.
As we danced and talked and laughed, I felt a keen adoration—perhaps for the way she sang of her dreams, or the dance of chandelier crystals in her eyes—perhaps the way she had quipped, “Lucille Mercer, it has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”
In truth, it was none of those things, but the glamour of the change that was sweeping this smoky city, leaving its glitter everywhere. We, the youth of 1892, hung on the cusp of change. Daughters wrote where their mothers never had. Children could point at moths and speak to how their colours had changed, for they had a word for it: Evolution. And families had begun to shed the old manner of love, whittling away the vagaries of courtship till only the beating core was left. Our fathers and mothers had long dreamt of living by the whims of our hearts: we were the children of that dream.
Adoration was enough, in this world, to pledge our love. So I did, two meetings later.
*
As I thought upon Lucy and dallied on my homework, I heard a knock on my open door that could only be my mother. She was as she always had been, gliding in in blue paisley, her long hair knotted tightly on her head—the vintage style that was fading from favour.
“Felix, dearest,” her voice woke me from my pondering. “Your father arrives in London this evening—he shall wish to see you. Please come to the foyer at six on the clock.”
So that evening, in my summer best, I met her in the antechamber to await my father's car in the dusk. Mata was there, too—the kind, matronly maid preparing the polished tabletops with a feather-duster.
It would be my first time meeting my father in a month. We had all grown accustomed to the cycle of his visits, wondering at his adventures while we kept busy. But this was the first time we would receive him without my brother.
He had been informed already, of how Jasper had vanished to join some motley travelling crew, and he had doted upon me in letters, the only heir of this family left. He had spat poison at my brother's name, the boy I had grown up with. I was the good son, the one they were lucky to have.
Under the shadow of her lacy hat, I saw the crease in my mother's brow and, plain as sun through glass, the crumpling of the heart beneath. Theirs was a marriage forged in the furnace of the passing zeitgeist, and I knew how they loved each other. John Mercer was like an illusion—here for a blink, gone in the next.
“Are you excited to see Father?” I said.
“How could I not be?” she answered. “Every day I thank God to have been wed by a man like he. How I yearn for his smile! I see it in the glow of the paving stones every morn.” She waved her hand about—at the veined floors and the long mirrors mounted in ornate frames, their carvings telling tales of lands she would never see. They reflected the floor, and the floor reflected them, foggy in each other. “He gave us all of this, the roof over us, and the land that warms our soles! That is the utmost love one can show, and how lucky we are to receive it.”
And I suppose that is why Jasper ran away, I thought, but did not say.
It was not long: John Mercer appeared as he always did, a vision of gleaming brass and clattering wheels. But this time, there was no fanfare of steam. He soared up the boulevard in a carriage pulled by light, adorned by leaves of glass and not a horse nor chimney in sight.
“I am home, my love!” he declared with a flourish that was heard before it was seen, the maids parting the doors to invite the pink sky inside. The golden man swept into the hall like a summer wind and scooped my mother into a kiss, and she tittered and swooned. Even as he strode out of the embrace and into the hall in search of supper, Catherine Mercer wandered after, wanting only to see the shadow of his back.
Among the cohort at my school, it took no mean feat to be well-regarded. With this illustrious brood, friendship always lived at close quarters with jealousy. But I excelled in what I could: I was a student of the arts, physics, astronomy and French, and enrolled in the choir. I toiled to be loved, for I feared nothing more than hatred. And I must have succeeded: if any rivalry brewed against me, I never heard of it.
I had discovered in childhood my sorcerous control over light, though it was not something I would make known to my classmates, God-fearing as they were. But it did not need to be made known: I chose to perform my conjurings when I could pass them off as real. Tricks of the light could fool my friends into believing they had seen preposterous things, and here and there I stole a glance at the teachers’ reports.
On one occasion, I did so on a grudge—a Robert Hanlon had spread a story about my sordid relations, so I ruined his experiments and sent him home with a failing grade in Physics.
But aside from Hanlon, I had all one could wish to have, for my father had made it so. He was a man of such vision his body could barely contain it, always chasing a certainty that he could improve any life by his deeds and financing. So my youth was a phantasmagoria of dreaming, wanting, and receiving, though I never quite fashioned my hopes to knife-point like he did.
*
Perhaps it was one of these things, or all of them, that began to change Lucy's affections. As the months flew on, I saw the first flecks of jealousy blooming through her adoration. She started to seek me at the school gate each afternoon to walk me home, unannounced and unyielding. The first time, I learned of it from my classmates, when they whispered about a woman at the foyer asking after me.
She was rosy with joy every time she met my eye, and eager and outspoken about her adoration. But once she showed her face at school, my classmates began calling her names I cannot repeat. As I listened to their crass utterances, I felt a kind of withering in me—a sorrow that had been there all my life.
“My love,” I finally said one evening, as we met for our promenade, “must you walk me home from school every day?”
Lucy was silent a minute while we passed wrought fences and summer trees. Then she said, “Why should I not? I love you too much to be parted from you for so long.”
“My friends are spreading rumours about you and I, and I find it…vexing.”
There was a flame in her bright blue eyes that I chose then not to heed. “Why should you be ashamed that they know of our union?”
I acceded, as I do, to Lucy's force—for it was what I loved in her, and I did love her, I was sure of it in my foolish young mind.
Supper was, like every supper, seasoned with a tale of my father’s escapades. Watched by the wall reliefs of angels in the banquet hall, he waxed lyrical about the Project he had returned for—this grand and wondrous new machine that would put all of France's efforts to shame.
He had whiled some weeks in Oxford with the President of the Travel Society, and written a grant to the bright minds who had convinced him that their machine would usher in the future. “A flying craft, L'Avion? Pah! If our head physicist is to be believed,” he declared over the roast, “then this marvellous contraption could transport the passenger thousands of miles in the time it would take to sign a letter! The Tunnel and Cage, they call it—it shall change transatlantic travel for good.”
“And will it be powered by the sun?” asked Mother.
“Of course! Sunlight, sunlight was always the answer. The engine that powers our world. We would accumulate its power in a stack, and then discharge it all at once. A suncatcher larger than the Big Ben, all glittering glass! It could repeat its feat ad infinitum. We are in talks with the County Council to begin constructing such a tower, the Society President and I—one grander than any you have ever seen. It is but a matter of time before our dream is realised. It must be done!”
As he spoke, my father's eyes lit up with madness. He was in love, and all of us knew it, though it was never said. My mother beamed and nodded, as she always had, dazzled and believing.
I longed to comprehend every word and excruciating detail of my father’s pursuits. While my mother attended to his whim for the rest of his stay, I whiled hours away in his library, toiling through a tower of books on space tunnelling. I lost myself in their pages, reliving a century of science, till I knew where the frontiers lay.
I could not claim to understand all of it, but it seemed my father’s project sought to achieve what had long been thought beyond the reach of mankind—a machine that demanded the horsepower of ten thousand steam cars, discharged in seconds. With the work of the sun and an immense series of electrical accumulators, such volumes of power could be amassed and fired at once. Mere seconds of blinding electricity, weeks of sunlight burning in a blink, and one would soar to the ends of the earth.
Three mornings we breakfasted together. Three evenings I spent in the company of those books. As the third night fell upon the library, I heard the wheels of the sun car churn gravel outside—and so my father was to leave again, this time for America—but he had left behind a curiosity that would thread itself through my days.
As the world changed, so did our hearts. With uncertainty came fear, and with fear came vigilance. It did not take long for Lucille's passions to tip in favour of that bottomless terror, as the withering days of Autumn fluttered by. I clearly perceived for the first time how she had changed when she handed me a locket of her hair.
She had watched me two days before, staring in wonder at the dancer busking on the market square. Red-haired and sharp-eyed, perhaps my eyes had rested on that woman’s too long, though she had clearly been of an age beyond either of us.
“Do you take me for a fool?” Lucy had cried that evening. “I saw you staring, I saw you!”
So today she brought a golden chain, one to keep me. We walked together upon the manor grounds hand in hand, I with her locket on my neck.
Something about it sat strange, burning my skin. It was dawning on me that I knew not where we stood. What was infidelity? If our partnership had been made so cursorily—no word exchanged between our parents, no estate to lend it heft—then did it take something equally cursory to defile it?
But she had me under her thumb, and how I would bend to remain hers.
We wandered up the boulevard, my hand in her talon grip, my rabbit heart thumping. She wanted anchorage, some true solid ground to affix our souls to. Perhaps I should have, too. And only houses and oaths could be so sturdy, though the world had agreed to leave such promises behind.
The next time my father returned to London, it was to inaugurate the sun tower. This was the project he had dreamt up last Summer with Sarah Hughes, the very President of the Travel Society, which had furnished its connections to seeing it through. For months I had watched it grow over the rooftops, like a strange flower reflecting sunlight onto the streets of Hampstead.
“A glorious day, a glorious day for John,” my mother sighed as we boarded the chauffeur’s car. “He really did it. He said he would, and he did.”
We detoured to Bromley for Lucille, for I had thought this a good occasion to share with her. When we found her, she was gorgeous as a dream, silky golden tresses flowing in loose waves even as she frowned at the itinerary of the day. Together we milled among the crowd, awaiting the grand opening of my father's crowning achievement as it loomed over us all in its paradise hues.
Beneath its penumbra, John Mercer declared its opening with a flourishing wave on the rostrum. He shook hands vigorously with Sarah, who was as radiant as the tower, dressed in gold silk with her dark hair cut in a modern bob.
Lucy frowned. “Why are we here?”
“To witness a happy day,” I answered, waving a hand at my old man.
“He looks like you, but stouter. How come I am only seeing him now?” Her voice drowned his out.
“He's a terribly busy man,” I replied.
“Well, I would much rather be alone with you. We should have stolen the chance, your mother and father would not be home to see us—”
I felt pressure against my shoulder as Lucille began to lean towards me, lips puckered for a kiss. But it was when her hand crept down my leg that I became aware of too many things at once: of the eyes of my mother, and of strangers besides, and the creeping shame that I had nursed all my life.
I jolted away in a panic. She cried my name, but I could not look. I sprang from my seat, dashed through the crowd, and disappeared into thin air. That is what I appeared to do, to all who were watching. Lucille could not find me, and when she screamed my name, the president of the society fell silent.
I fled down the streets of Hampstead, wandering by the houses and inns and shops till my heart had ceased to race. Only then did the guilt show rear up, clawing through me like a dragon from its egg.
It was only half an hour later, when the shudders had deserted me, that I slunk back to the square. By then, the function was over and the crowds were scattering into conversation. And my Lucille awaited me under a banner, glowering like a storm cloud.
She took me to a small green on Southend Road, wordless until we stood face to face in the shadow of a tree. Then she slapped me.
“How could you?” she growled. She pulled her hand back, and I could not so much as recoil as she slapped me again. “How dare you treat me as dirt?”
“I'm sorry, Lucy, I was afraid of to be seen—”
“Why? Why should you be ashamed of your soon-betrothed?”
I could not find the words to answer, for now it became achingly plain, plain as the stinging of my cheek, that we were two pieces irreconcilably misaligned.
“Are we soon to be betrothed? I did not think we were quite that close.”
She pummelled me on the same cheek. Sparks flew. I tasted blood, and I knew it had left a mark. Wailing like a hound, she cried, “Then what are we?”
It drizzled as I called a cab home, for the family chauffeur had long left by the time I had gathered myself. Before I stepped through the door, I saw myself in a window, the bruise stark and blotchy. Before I entered, I lifted my hands and conjured, out of light, a covering for the wound.
Even without seeing the injury, my mother fussed over me like a hen who had lost a chick. “Felix, dearest, wherever have you been?” she sang like a lady from a nursery rhyme. “I feared you had gone the same way as Jasper…your father is dining with the Society tonight.”
I wore my mask to supper. Without Father, Mother was reticent and paltry in her offerings of conversation. She spoke of her most recent project: a novel, like any number of other novels she had begun and never finished, a tale of a rugged young street urchin. She barely acknowledged Mata when the maid came to take our dishes; I had never heard her speak the woman's name.
We conversed over dessert cakes, Mother and I, of the odd world we lived in, of the lobbyists seeking to bring coal back into vogue. Then she retired, leaving a perfect silence in her wake.
I sat with the quietude and stared at my empty plate for several minutes, until Mata wandered over again.
“I take it for you?” she said, timidly. I offered her my empty crockery.
“Mata,” I murmured then. “Do you have a family?”
She paused and blinked, seemingly startled, as she always was. Perhaps I was a fool for thinking every person had a story I wanted to know. “Yes, I have a son. Five years old. He talks a lot, like you.”
I chuckled at that, but as I met her mournful eye, the sorrow I'd come to know well roared in me again. “Thank you.”
She nodded mutely, and with a gentle smile, took my plate to the scullery with her.
I followed my mother’s lead and returned to my bedroom early for the night.
Lying on the silks, I tossed and turned like a stormy sea, the ache of my cheek igniting in perfect clarity the vision of Lucille’s rage—creasing her brow, moving her hand.
I burned with fear, for though I was infatuated, I saw that our joy had grown thorns. If I told her we were to part ways, she could not take well to it, but if I remained her partner, I could only see our misery compounding. And to marry—that was an idea that I could not stomach, though I could not say why.
So spun my thoughts, round and round, like a dog chasing its tail, until the lamps went out and the sliver under my door went dark.
Then, I finally crawled from my bed and opened my door. In the dark, I wandered down the hall. It was the forbidden part of the night, the one I had never been allowed to see as a child, on pain of punishment.
Everything was strange and blue in that light: the ornate drawers and vases, the antique masks on the walls, rendered ghost-like by the moon. I passed the dining hall, the empty chairs a spectral invitation. I halted at the top of the stairs.
I was not alone. In the stairwell, I heard voices whispering in the antechamber below. Heart booming, yet morbidly curious, I crept down the stairs, the carpet deadening my footsteps.
At the third lowest step, I glimpsed the silhouette of someone in the far corner, outlined against a window faintly reflected off a mirror. I sharpened the light to clarity in my eye, and saw a haircut I knew. But I did not fully understand, till I heard the voice.
“...but it is the forbidden fruit that tastes sweetest, no?” Sarah Hughes.
My father’s voice answered in a gravelly tone—his was the silhouette I saw next, tall and stocky and grasping the woman by the waist. They leaned together, and then they began to kiss.
I choked back a cry, ready to turn and fly. But instead I watched, breath shortening, as they leapt out of the kiss and turned to me.
“Felix?” said John flatly.
And then Sarah gasped, and stumbled backward, away from him, and flew to the door, disappearing like a moth into the night.
We stood for an endless minute, staring across the room at each other.
I had long adored my father, in the same way one does a hero—following his exploits, his daring, and his folly, wanting his victory through it all.
I had hoped to grow into him—to be his equal in all things. Where he had bought trade bonds, I had asked him to spare me the funds to do the same. Where he had begun travelling for work, I too had sought to travel, although never as far afield as he did.
Some of that adoration held me captive now, even as it splintered around me.
John Mercer strode steadily across the hall. In the dark, his blond hair glistened. I recoiled, but now he was close enough that I could smell the wine. He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Felix. My only son. You must say nothing of this.”
I saw, now, that in this secret, I towered over him.
“It would ruin the Project and the Society,” he went on. “It would ruin all that we have built. It would ruin me. And it would ruin you, too.”
“This isn't fair to Mother.”
He clenched a fist, and I remembered the sting of hands on my face all too well. “What she doesn't know cannot hurt her.”
I clenched my jaw and trembled as I thought upon it all—his name, his house, his reputation, and Mother. I had seen the trouble on her face at dinner, and some part of her must have known. But if she ever found out, I knew she would stay—here, in this house without compare.
I knew, for I would have done the same.
“Then I shan't speak,” I answered, “but only to save Mother the sorrow.”
“Good boy,” he answered, and I felt my heart war with itself. “You were raised well. Don't let your curiosity spoil it.”
That, I recall, was the first night in my life that I did not sleep a minute. I lay and stared out my window and its gilded frames, at the light gleaming off my dresser and felt, all at once, that it was all thinner than paper.
In the next room, my mother dozed soundly. I heard no whispering when my father shuffled up the hallway and opened their door.
The next day, I called upon Lucille in the midst of a gentle drizzle. It was a modest townhouse, her father's—two stories, grey rain-weathered shingles, crammed between two similar ones. Out of the rain, under the eaves of the doorway, I stood and waited.
The door clicked open. From within emerged Lucy, like a butterfly from silk, in a light lace gown—beautiful and alone. She met my eye with a face of terrified joy.
“My love,” she said.
“Lucy,” I replied. She must have seen the leaden weight in my eyes, for her face grew cold.
“Why are you here?”
I swallowed. We looked each other in the eye: the dying bird, the tattered husk. “I have loved you dearly, Lucy, but this cannot sustain. I am no longer willing. We must part ways.”
It took her a minute of silence, and then three minutes of screaming, weeping and clawing at her skin, to finally speak again.
“I knew—I knew you never meant to stay! I saw it in your eyes that you longed to be elsewhere, that you would rather be rid of me! But I cannot call you evil for it. You are like all men. They will all leave, they will, if they are not bound!”
And though I knew I had no cause to rue my choice, to think her accusation any more than heartbroken raving, I heard her words with full clarity today.
Of course she had always suspected me. Of course she’d had to cling. I could have been my father.
But now, I took a step backward, and she did not pursue, like I had thought she would. We weren't promised to each other, and so there was no thread that ran between us, and she simply let me go—back into the summer morning, into the summer rain.
To let out hearts decide the trajectories of our lives—that is dangerous, and wondrous, and foolish. But this was the dawn of discovery, the sunset of silence, and I seem to have a penchant for it—this sentimentality, this love for poetry.
So when the Tunnel Machine, the lovechild of my father and the President of the Travel Society, was opened for its inaugural passenger, I was the one who bought the ticket. They were all there—my father, my mother, the president, when their mysterious correspondent stepped up to the podium and beamed, like a magician before his act.
The public attendees all thought it a trick of my father's—to demonstrate his confidence in this invention by offering his son as its first subject. He could not so much as frown as they led me inside that tank of metal. Somehow, he knew, and I knew too, that I was about to be torn away from him, just like my brother had been.
*
It only took ten seconds, as they had said it would. It is the strangest thing, being torn from the fabric of the universe. I heard all the sounds from beyond the chamber vanish from knowing, and all at once, I began to miss him—the great man, the terrible man, the man who had given me all I had.