The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits

Author:Heidi Julavits [Julavits, Heidi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychological, Horror, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307947598
Google: rIcEbwc6NH4C
Amazon: B005WBEEDG
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2012-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Two days after I’d unwrapped the rump roast, I skipped lunch and visited, for the first time since I’d discovered Helena’s ring, the baths.

I was alone, everyone else at lunch.

I chose the hottest bath—more of a swimming pool—and eased myself in one step at a time, the water to my shins, now my hips, now my shoulders. I floated on my back. I noticed for the first time that the skylight overhead was nearly identical to the skylight at the Regnor—same beveled corners, same twining snake-or-ivy.

It gave me an exercise idea that I felt, after my petrification success, skilled enough to attempt.

I centered myself beneath the skylight and tried to imagine myself back to the Regnor, a place I’d once been, a place where there’d be a fossilized placeholder for me to slip inside. This was the easiest form of regression because it allowed you to travel along the familiar byways of memory and required you to be no more foreign a person than a past version of yourself. However, risks were involved. We initiates were advised against using our own lives too frequently as practice fodder; revisiting one’s memories could result, over time, in a form of self-erasure.

I gave it a try.

A busier skylight blotted out the Goergen’s plainer one—it was like watching a text written in invisible ink exposed to heat, the hidden letters burning to the foreground. I saw a giant clock, the hour frozen at 2:29 p.m., the second hand poised, spear-like, over the belly of the six. I stared at that second hand. I tried to activate the space, break through the static barrier that froze this moment in time.

No success.

I imagined myself diving into water, but this felt wrong. Water could too easily, and without yielding apparent wreckage, accommodate a foreign object. Once, as Madame Ackermann lay on her futon couch, snoozing through another failed regression, she’d started crying in her sleep.

This is my only legacy, she’d whimpered. I make scars in time.

So I envisioned the barrier as layers of transparent muscle, fat, skin. (I’d been born by cesarean section, my umbilical cord wrapped three times around my neck.) I dove headfirst into the barrier. It stretched, it resisted. I dove a second time and the barrier tore. I heard amplified sounds: the electric buzz of the clock, the crick of a heater vent.

I opened my eyes. This lobby was not the lobby of the Regnor. There was an elevator, but a smaller one. A wall was covered with mirrored tiles that gridded the lobby’s reflection into cocktail-napkin-sized squares of visual information. People in winter coats spoke French.

The elevator disgorged a trio of women, one of whom was crying.

I searched for someone I recognized and found one person. I knew her from somewhere—as Borka might say, she was a big déjà vu for me. I could see her in the gridded reflection, but when I turned, I could not locate her in the lobby. She existed only in the mirror.

I was comically slow to realize that this girl, she was me.

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