Touch

by Merrie Haskell

"I'd like to go touch the corner of the building," she said to me, the cool spring breeze playing havoc in her bangs.

I nodded briefly, and she turned almost immediately, pirouetting like a dancer and rushing across the white limestone gravel towards the chateau.

I was well acquainted by now with her desire to touch things. At Notre Dame, she had moved from pillar to pillar, dragging her fingertips across the stonework. She had turned to me then, her face in shadow but her eyes gleaming from a stray sunbeam drifting down from on high. "Edwin, I know this place," she had told me. And truly it seemed so. In Paris, she navigated the twisty by-ways unerringly, taking us from sight to sight without consulting a map.

"Are you sure this is your first trip to Paris?" I'd asked skeptically when she found the most perfect café with the most perfect croissants and the most perfect hot chocolate, well out of the way of all the tourist paths.

She looked askance at me. "Edwin, how could I not be sure? What you mean is, did I lie to you."

"I'm not-"

She had raised a hand and shook her head. "No, that's exactly what you meant. Anyway, no, I've never been to Paris before. But it is strange… It makes me believe in past lives, almost."

And so it had gone, from Paris to Lyons, from Lyons to Nice, from Nice to Tours, and from Tours to here. She was an unerring guide through all the narrow and twisty streets; she knew the secret entrances to city walls and the back doors to ancient palaces. At first, I doubted, but now I certainly believed in-<i>something</i>. All along, of course, I teased her-gently, of course-and all along she pretended to hate it.

Which brought us here, to our bicycles and the long winding roads of chateaux country.

The night previous, we had sat in a restaurant for several hours, not by natural proclivity to linger over meals, but because French-waiter-time works that way. We had been enjoying a bottle of wine, and she had been running her thumbs over the smooth glass, again and again. I enjoyed watch her hands do this-strong, capable hands, cool and smooth and beautifully shaped.

"I did feel like I had been there before," she said. "Notre Dame-the darkness of it, and the heaviness and the lightness of the architecture, and those beams of light flinging themselves across the vaults…" She lapsed into silence for a moment, and then, "Everywhere we've been, seems a little familiar, but nothing so much as Paris. Until we got here… this countryside. It seems even more familiar. But it's annoying; every time I see something, I recognize it, but there's the strong feeling that I've <i>forgotten</i> something very, very important at the same time."

"Probably just that you're forgetting about work," I joked weakly.

She frowned at me. "No. It's more like anxiety. More like leaving the oven on, and knowing you're going to come back to find your house all burned down."

"You didn't leave the oven on, did you?" I asked quickly.

She scowled now. "Edwin, you can tease me all you want, but-"

"I'd better be able to tease you all I want, or I'm going to claim that you accepted marriage under false pretenses."

She relaxed and smiled at this, and drank some more wine.

And today, as we biked to this spired and turreted chateau, she had grown more and more excited. "Look at that cottage over there!" she caroled at me, pointing and waving. "There's a cave just in back of it!" And there, installed in the hillside, was a neat wooden door, just as she predicted. The people in this region turned caves into extra rooms for their houses-if they didn't live in the caves directly.

There was a thick blanket of forest that seemed to spring up around us we pedaled toward the chateau in question. The leaves lay thickly across one another, their growth so full that we could no longer see sunlight, and I was fairly amazed to think that it was not yet even full-on spring back home.

We burst back out into sunlight to see a sparklingly white chateau looming before us. We stopped, and I pulled out the guidebook. "Says here, the building is made of limestone, which just gets harder and whiter as it ages," I told her helpfully.

She hopped off her bike and leaned it against a tree.

Here we were.

"I'd like to go touch the corner of the building," she said, her eyes sparkling in the sunlight.

Touch. I just nodded, and turned my attention to the guidebook as she skipped towards the building.

When I joined her a few moments later, she was gazing at me with wonder. "I can't quite believe it," she murmured, turning her stare out towards the grounds, away from the gleaming pile of bricks that were so bright in the sunlight I almost couldn't stand to look at them.

"Shall we go inside?" I asked. "We're early; there don't seem to be any other tourists here yet."

She nodded.

We paid for our tickets, and each got a map and a little stub with a picture of the chateau on the back, and went inside.

The first floor started with a kind of gallery of all the family portraits, the folk who had owned the chateau throughout the ages. I was half-concerned that my wife was going to start walking down among the portraits and pointing-"Oh there's great-uncle Frederick!" but she did no such thing, and she was quiet throughout.

At the other end of the gallery, a flight of stairs led upward, and our maps told us that this was the way to go. A landing at the top of the stairs held a marble-topped table, which in turn held a giant cut-glass urn, filled with flowers. Roses, to be precise, as bright as new blood.

I had turned away from the roses toward the drawing rooms that were the first exhibits on this floor, when I heard a gasp of pain from behind me. My wife was standing there, facing the urn of roses, with her fingers in her mouth, sucking on them.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Thorns," she mumbled briefly around her fingers.

"The roses had thorns," I repeated, like an idiot. Then, patiently, as though <i>she</i> were the idiot, "Honey, why did you touch the roses?"

"I wanted to see if they were real." She turned around and pushed past me.

I opened my mouth to say something mocking, but before the sound came, she said brightly, "As it turns out, they were!"

But that was the last cheerful thing she said. The chateau seemed to depress her. We wandered from room to room, reading small placards and studying our maps, and she did not speak at all, a characteristic sign that she was sad about something.

I wondered if I had been teasing her too much. I took her hand as we went into a child's nursery on the third floor.

"Honey, what's wrong?"

She looked at me. "I feel like this whole castle is asleep."

I looked around, wondering what could give her this idea. The furnishings were all quite Victorian and heavy, not the lush, airy elegance of the <i>r&eacute;gime</i> of the Sun King, under whose rule this chateau had been built. It made a paradox of decoration against architecture. I could see her point.

"Perhaps it's because there are no tourists here," I suggested. "Or perhaps it's the Victorian furniture."

She shook her head doubtfully. "Maybe."

I squeezed her hand, and took out my map, and found the notation. "The nursery," I began reading to her. "The bed on the left accommodated a night nursery-maid. The day nanny had her own room off to the right (closed for remodeling until June of next year)…"

By the time I had read the entire blurb out loud, I became aware of the fact that my wife was no longer standing in the room. She might have jaunted off to find a restroom, I supposed, but it seemed unlikely. The only hint I had that something else might be in the works was a slight breeze, where before there had been none.

Just beyond the night nursery-maid's bed, there was a crack in the wallpaper, and the breeze was blowing from there. I jumped the velvet rope that was supposed to keep the curious from fondling the lace bed linens, and slid my hand into the crack in the wallpaper. The crack was, in fact, a door.

I pulled it open to reveal a spiral staircase. Dust lay deep on the stairs, and a set of neat little footprints led upward. I followed them.

At the top of the stair was a round room, a tower room; it had once been glassed in, I supposed, but the glass had broken and fallen out long ago. Shafts of light rained down from the high windows, illuminating the scene vividly. Leaves lay in a thick carpet on the floor, and pigeons roosted in the rafters. A couch, covered in tattered graying cloth sat opposite a large spinning wheel, with a long, wicked, pointy spindle. In contrast to the rest of the room, the spinning wheel was polished and clean, gleaming soft, dark wood in the sunlight.

My wife was standing next to this spinning wheel, running her fingers over the curves of it. I stood transfixed as she ran her fingers over the curve of the wheel, turning it slightly, and then around and around, up the spindle towards the tip. I tried to cry out, to warn her, suddenly filled with an ancient and nameless dread. Her fingers reached the wicked point, and rested there for a moment.

Blood welled up as the spindle pierced her fingertip. My wife's eyes met my own.

"I just wanted to touch it," she said hopelessly. Her eyes rolled back, and she swooned onto the torn brocade of the couch with boneless grace.

"No-! No, no, no," I gasped, attempting to rush towards her. My foot was caught, and I went sprawling. I caught myself on my hands, and tried to stand up, but something held me down. Sharp pains darted through me at my wrists and ankles, and then at waist and neck, and when I looked over, I saw that there were tangled briars growing all over me.

I fought against the briars, but as I struggled, the vines grew ever stronger and more attached, digging into my flesh with determination.

The thorns are drinking my blood, I thought dazedly, before roses grew and bloomed over my eyes.

The sleep touched us both.