As she sensed the story slipping out of her control, Bibi felt oppressed, claustrophobic. The architecture supported that reaction. The long cylindrical room and porthole windows suggested a vessel, a submarine, fog churning like a murky sea at the wedges of bronze-framed glass. Indeed, considering the grandness of this chamber and the megalomania expressed in its every detail, the vessel could only have been Jules Verne’s Nautilus, and Terezin a standin for Captain Nemo with a measure of Ahab.
He had said, If I kill her, I kill you.
The meaning of his words suddenly detonated, and Bibi stood shaken as if by a psychic concussion wave. He knew the true purpose of her quest: to save herself, to free herself of cancer by some as yet not fully understood interaction with Ashley Bell. But if he was only a character of her creation, devised for her narrative purposes, he couldn’t know anything about her other than what had happened in scenes that he shared with her. He could not know that to kill the child would be to kill her.
“The cancer’s eating your brain,” Terezin said. “Day by day, if not even hour by hour, your creative power as a writer will diminish, until soon you won’t be able to construct so much as a short-short story let alone a long quest. If I kill this girl, your exhausting journey to this moment will have been for nothing. You’ll have to start over—all new characters, all new incidents, cobble together another story to save yourself. And you don’t have time for that.”
Perhaps the cancer had already metastasized to the extent that her thinking was less clear than it had been. She knew what he said was half true, but she couldn’t reason her way to an understanding of the other half. Her confidence declined, and apprehension stole upon her.
In the chair, the beautiful child maintained the expression that she’d had in the photograph: a hard-won serenity, a mask to deny her captor the pleasure of seeing her true emotions.
“Tell me,” Terezin said, “in the swoon of writing, haven’t you at times created a character who seems as real to you as anyone in your daily life?”
“Of course. But you’re not one of them.”
“And have you ever been surprised when a character evolves such a degree of free will that he repeatedly does things that you don’t see coming, that you don’t plan, but that seem truly in character?”
“Every writer who trusts her intuition has that experience. It’s when you know a character is working, is true and right.”
Even a superior smirk could pass for an amused smile on his appealing face. “And has there ever been a time, during your writing, when you’ve had the uncanny feeling that one of your characters seems almost aware of your hand in his life, of being imagined and shaped, and he rebels, makes you struggle to keep him as you want him?”
“No,” she lied. “That doesn’t happen.”
“Fiction is a dangerous art, Bibi Blair, creating new worlds populated by people as real as you can make them. Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”
She tried again to remove him, this time by the expedient of an aneurysm. Then by imagining him dropping dead of a heart attack.
He regarded her with an infuriating expression of forbearance, a smile tart with pity. When enough time had passed to make it clear that he would not succumb to editing, he repeated his question. “Do you know how scientists explain the universe?”
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t explain it. Oh, after the Big Bang, they can explain why and how it expanded as it did. But as to where it came from—that defeats them. Some say it came from nothing. They concoct grotesque unprovable theories that purport to show not only that something can come from nothing but that it happens all the time. Happens without reason, is an effect without a cause.”
In the chair, Ashley Bell closed her eyes in resignation, as though she detected some clue in the cadences of his speech by which she knew he would soon arrive at a crescendo that he intended to emphasize by slitting her throat.
“Quite a few philosophers,” Terezin continued, “including some of the most respected and enduring, say the world was imagined into existence. The scientists who insist something can come from nothing will ridicule the philosophers. But at least imagination suggests a cause and a power behind it. Considering that I exist by virtue of the story you’ve been telling yourself, I come down on the side of the philosophers.”
“What’s your point?”