The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

by Stuart Turton

Yet instead of being angry, he pities me. That’s the worst part. Anger’s solid; it has weight. You can beat your fists against it. Pity’s a fog to become lost within.

“Well, to be frank, I like your pensiveness, Doctor. You strike me as a man who’d much rather be somewhere else, a feeling I can wholeheartedly sympathize with.”

“What does a child who has everything want?” More, just like everybody else.

“Don’t worry about the light,” says the darkness. “It will little profit you.”

I suddenly have the sense of taking part in a play in which everybody knows their lines but me.

“If freeing me is within your power, why not just do it, damn you!” I say. “Why play these games?” “Because eternity is dull,” he says. “Or maybe because playing is the important part. I’ll leave you to speculate.

“But every time I’ve tried to change today’s events, I’ve ended up becoming the architect of whatever misery I was trying to prevent.

If this is a trap, what kind of prey is worthy of it?

I threw the first stone. I can’t complain if a boulder comes back at me.”

Nothing like a mask to reveal somebody’s true nature.

my rage can’t make sense of anything but itself.

“Your frustration is understandable, but what use is rearranging the furniture if you burn the house down doing it?”

Despite my best efforts, everything’s happening exactly as I remember it.

Our eyes meet, mine doubtful and his appealing. I can’t help but submit.

“I promise,” I say, adding another lie to the pile.

I search for some encouraging platitude, but her doubts have crawled under my skin, and they’re beginning to itch.

His hatred is viscous; it has texture. I could wring it out of the air and bottle it.

It’s like I’ve been asked to dig a hole with a shovel made of sparrows.

Time passes; I can’t say how much. It isn’t that sort of time.

Lit by the flames, it’s clear the years have taken more from him than they’ve given. Uncertainty is a crack through the center of him, undermining any suggestion of solidity or strength. This man’s been broken in two and put back together crooked, and if I had to guess, I’d say there was a child-shaped hole right in the middle.

Up close, he looks like something recently dug up.

Thick bushes have sprung up between us, forcing us to carry on our conversation blind, like two lovers in a maze.

“A good man,” he scoffs. “Avoiding unpleasant acts doesn’t make a man good.

Memories are stirring slowly and so far away that I feel like a man reaching across a river to trap a butterfly between his fingers.

And that’s when reason washes its hands of me.

If this isn’t hell, the devil is surely taking notes.

I thought coming here would bring some clarity, but whatever the lake remembers, it has little interest in sharing.

I study her face for a lie, but I might as well be turning a microscope on a patch of fog.

I’m no longer a man, I’m a chorus.

He wears his sadness like a secondhand suit.

His cheeks are flushed, his green eyes glazed. They’re filled with such a sweet, sincere sorrow that I almost believe him.

Anger gave me courage, but it’s also made a fool of me.

If this is hell, then it’s one of our making.”

Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.

I’m too tired to look around. I’m melted candle wax, formless and spent, waiting for somebody to scrape me off the floor. All I want to do is sleep, to close my eyes and free myself of all thought,

Birds are singing, three rabbits hopping around the cottage’s small garden, their fur made rust-colored by the sunlight. If I’d known paradise was on the far side of a sunrise, I’d never have wasted a single night on sleep.

Knowledge was never my problem. Ignorance is the condition I struggle with.”

After the sun’s early foray, it’s abandoned us to the gloom, the sky a muddle of grays. I search the flower beds for splashes of red, hints of purple, pink, or white. I search for the brighter world behind this one, imagining Blackheath alight, wearing a crown of flames and a cape of fire. I see the gray sky burning, black ash falling like snow. I imagine the world remade, if only for an instant.

So many memories and secrets, so many burdens. Every life has such weight. I don’t know how anybody carries even one.

I’ve been drinking solidly for an hour, trying to wash away the shame of what’s coming, and though I’m drunk, I’m not nearly drunk enough.

Gold beds other men’s wives, cheats at dice, and generally carries on as though the sky is going to fall any minute, but he wouldn’t crush a wasp that stung him.

If I wasn’t so afraid, I’d smile at the irony.

I shiver, horrified at the margins between life and death.

She seems surprised, as though death arrived with flowers in its hand.

Our entire future’s written in the creases around her eyes; that pale face is a crystal ball with only horrors in the fog.

It must have taken a great deal of determination, and I admire that, but nothing is so unbecoming as a lack of pride.”

If she’s afraid, she’s keeping it in a pocket somewhere I can’t see.

“That’s the beauty of corrupt men, you can always rely on them to be corrupt.”

Her love is rabid, pulsing and rotten, but it’s sincere. Somehow that only makes her more monstrous.

At best the memories will cripple you. At worst…” He lets that hang.