Abigail Sheaffer

Mademoiselle X

 

 

March 1880

Paris, France

 

She comes into his quarters in an afternoon gown of draping ebony duchesse—a lace veil affixed over her violet eyes. Her skin is wane, her wrists thin and trembling. Her right-hand clasps onto the polished brass of a walking stick. She cannot be more than 20 years old. She is tall—all skin and bones. Her willowy height hides what light filters in through the room. She is elegant but strange.

 

Beside her, her sister stands.

 

“Forgive me, Monsieur Cotard,” the sister says, “but I have a most unusual case for you to discern. You see…my sister…” at this, she shifts her weight uncomfortably and brings a gloved hand to her sister’s shoulder, “…my sister believes she is already dead.”

 

He looks up from his ledger, nonplussed (what a lovely, strange girl! What ugly, unbearable thoughts!)

 

“Dead?” he responds, his voice a hoarse whisper.

 

“Oui, Monsieur.”

 

The young woman draped in black seems to smile, but her eyes remain glassy, lifeless pools. A chill seizes his spine.

 

*

 

The first crocus peels through the stalwart soil. In the parks near his office, the first horse chestnuts are budding on the trees. The sky moving out of winter’s rotation becomes a warm coneflower blue.

 

She sits in his office, eerily still and quiet. Occasionally, she moves her eyes to glance at the notes on his ledger. She is a breathing corpse.

 

“When did you happen upon this belief?” he asks her, studying her hollowed out cheekbones.

 

“This belief?” the words tumble out of her mouth in a husky sizzle. She laughs cruelly. Pursing her dry, cracked lips she returns his gaze. His bowels cower in panic.

 

“It is no belief, Monsieur Cotard. Perhaps you should adjust your reality.”

 

The ticking of the clock unnerves him as the afternoon sunlight dims into evening. He requests his maid bring a port or whisky, some bread and cheese (surely this should rouse her from her stupor). The maid (also unnerved) briskly moves out of the room and toward the kitchen.

 

The room seems to cave in and suffocate them. The gas lit walls seem to permeate rotten soil and carrion.

 

She turns to him.

 

“Just give in,” she murmurs.

 

“Give in to what?” he asks (his brow sweating).

 

“La morte.”

 

The walls seem to moan with a million thunderous screams. Fingers seem to scratch through the brocade wallpaper.

 

Then—at once—the maid returns with a tray of food and wine.

 

(The port looks like freshly drawn blood, and the brie seems rotten with maggots)

 

Not so, not so!

 

He looks again…

 

*

 

April 1880

Deauville, France

 

He believed, somehow, that by taking her to the coast she would immediately snap back into reality. He was under the assumption that perhaps the cry of the seagulls and the sonorous lapping of the tide would awaken her from her bizarre stupor.

 

But it was the voyage to the shore that confounded the situation. Indeed, by the time they reached Deauville, the world around them seemed to descend into the smoldering blur of unreality. The sky—once a bright and warm cerulean—seemed to become a dull chartreuse. The shore, a once extraordinarily rich sapphire, became murky and gray.

 

The hotel where they stayed seemed drained of guests. A harsh gale wind billowed through the region, making the windows quake. They checked into their room.

 

Again, her willowy frame seems to blacken out what little sunlight remains. She is thinner than before but she does not tremble.

 

“The Delirium of Negation,” she hums, referring to his study of her. Her hair hangs limply from her head as she reaches down to touch his ledger. She looks up at him, her lips curled into a serpentine smile. She laughs—short, staccato laughs that ripple up from her throat—she closes her eyes whose bulbs seem to be swallowed from beneath her protruding forehead. His heart throttles in his chest and plummets down to his bowels. His thighs quiver and his heart is frigid with terror.

 

But when she stops laughing, and when she opens her eyes, he is moved by the iridescent sadness.

 

To be alone with Lady Death.

 

*

 

“Can’t you tell,” she murmurs, bringing her withered hands to her eyes. Her stark black hair splays across the silk pillowcase (the room breathes heavily upon them).

 

“Tell what?” he asks, but his voice seems to not be his own.

 

“We’ll all be dead soon… all of us… the trees will be dead, the fields will wither, and the oceans will dry.”

 

She lowers her hands from her eyes and looks at him.

 

He is startled, but not for the reasons before. It seems—as though for the first time—there is a glimmer of (life) hope? Passion? In her violet eyes.

 

He surprises himself and leans in to give her a gentle kiss.

 

“Your lips are cold,” he says.

 

“Then warm them up,” she answers.

 

Outside, the gale wind whoops and rattles the windows. The fires on the beach that the fisherman lit dance across the dry landscape.

 

She brings an icy hand to his beard and is shocked by the static electricity, by the strange warmth that elucidates itself between them.

 

*

 

But in the morning (after the beach fire), she was stubborn and rigid. The delusion had locked itself into her and her self-inflicted famine was determined to swallow her. What light he had seen in her eyes, what beauty he had briefly glimpsed, was snuffed out.

 

He had no choice but to put her in a sanitarium and watch with reluctance while she gave herself up to the delusion. He could not watch as starvation took hold, as she surrendered to it.

 

He could not follow her.

 

*

 

March 1881

London, England

 

He looks up from the podium to the sea of people and notes silently in his head the death of all his anxieties. The folie á deux which disintegrated as quickly as it had taken root between them.

 

At times though, he would glimpse the world as he’d believed it to be. It would drain of color becoming a smudged sepia landscape. All people would cease to exist around him. In his mind he would see her, willowy and strange. The oddity of her warm, gentle kisses would thunder through him.

 

Mademoiselle X…o, sweet lady death…

 

 

 

Abigail Sheaffer is the editor-in-chief of Chicago Literati and a teacher of “Mastering the Macabre” at The Republic of Letters in Geneva, Illinois. Her fiction has been published in Danse Macabre, Luna Luna, Bluestockings, Literary Orphans, and many more publications.