“Well, if you don’t know,” said the voice, “then it’s because she hasn’t told you everything. It’s because she hasn’t been as honest with you as I’m being right now.”

Christ, thought Bernard. Christ, Christ Hugging his shoulders more tightly, arms crossed like a corpse. He didn’t know how to answer this, even within himself. He had always thought that it didn’t matter, that he never minded. That he even enjoyed the unspoken knowledge, the tacit understanding between himself and Harper. He had been raised by a sturdy innkeeping family up in the lakes. Educated at a boarding school outside London. But Harper’s visits to him had been frequent even in his childhood. Her conversations with him had always been intimate and pointed. She had explained her mission to him so thoroughly, so steadily, with such maternal assurance, that he had understood, from the earliest age, that it was his mission too, by birth, by right. Was it dishonesty for her not to speak aloud the fact he already knew?

“I can’t breathe!” he screamed. His hands flew up, scrabbled at the rough slab. The flesh at his fingers tore and the blood ran down over them. Then his hands fell back again. He lay there, crying. “I can’t breathe.”

“When I first found her,” the voice went on, unmoved. Cool, smoky. “When I first found her, she was in ruins. Her mother gone, her father in prison. Her own life a round of the worst kind of self-abuse: your life, believe me, is a poor imitation. It was she who attached herself to me, Bernard, not the other way around.”

“I know that,” Bernard said, under his breath so it wouldn’t be heard.

“Good,” said the voice. “I’m glad she told you that, at least. Because the rest was the same. If I degraded her, if I hurt her, it was because she wanted me to. Begged me to. Crawled to me on her knees, Bernard, and demanded it. On her knees, Bernard.”

Bernard felt he was going to be sick again, sick unto death this time. He felt he was going to vomit up everything inside him, blood and guts, the very tinkerbell-flicker of life itself. The smell and the worsening air had all been displaced by the miasma of that voice. It seeped into his skin, cool and vital and refreshing. His own weird passion met it, and he felt sick and poisoned unto death.