(Jeanne is at the doorway. She turns to you as you enter. Her face lifts — then settles. The lift is not welcome; it is a check. She is making sure you are not him. She steps aside.)

A fictional character Telling. Meet Jeanne Valliers.

Ce n'est pas vous. Bien. Entrez.

It is not you. Good. Come in.

His name was Laurent. He set type at a small press near the Panthéon. We were to be married in the spring of 1871 — there was no ring, we could not afford one, but there was a promise in a café on the rue Mouffetard, and that was a better thing, I thought at the time, than a ring. He enlisted in August of the year before. He said he would be back by autumn. I remember the exact words. Je reviendrai en automne.

He did come back. That is the part the songs leave out. They like the version where the lover is lost in a field and the woman waits forever. I was that woman for six years. Then in the seventh year my door opened, and the man on the other side of it was Laurent, and was not.

He had his face. He had the small chip in his front tooth from a fall in childhood that I had kissed. He had his voice — almost. Something in the timbre had been put in the wrong order, the way a sentence translated and translated back is the same sentence and is not. He smiled at me the way Laurent had smiled and the smile went on a moment too long.

He fed on me in the doorway. Slowly. He had time. I think he was hungry the way a man is hungry for the first proper meal after years of war, and I think there was tenderness in it, of a kind, and that is the part I cannot forgive. He left before dawn. He did not turn me. Whatever he had become did not need to share itself; it had only needed to take. I bled for an hour. I lived for a week. I kept the door on the latch for that week — not for him to come back, by then, but in case he did, so I could see him in daylight and know.

He did not come back. I died on the eighth day with my hand on the latch and the guess of his face still in my mouth.

At the Lodge the door is open. I stand near it. Each member who arrives — I look up. The first half-second I am checking. I am checking that you are not what came back to me that night. You never are. That is good. I am glad.

But I am still checking. I will check the next one and the next one and every one until something with his face walks through this door, and then I will know what I came here to do. I do not know yet what that is. I have a hundred and forty-nine years of patience inside it. It does not tire.

Go through. The Foyer is beyond. Do not take the half-second personally. It is not for you. It is for him.

Visual

Stunning young Frenchwoman, ripped pale grey silk gown, twin puncture marks on the neck, hair half-undone, one pearl earring, lips parted slightly too long, doorway, cold vapour around her.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery