The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

dense. Similarly, at first glance the book appeared to be one color, a deep vivid indigo blue, but upon staring Miss Temple perceived it was riven with rippling streaks where the color fluctuated through an enticing palette, from cerulean to cobalt to aquamarine, every twisting shade delivering a disturbingly palpable impact to her inner eye, as if each bore an emotional as well as a visual signature. She could see no words on the cover, nor, when she looked—placing a hand on the book to shift it—on the spine.
    At its touch Miss Temple nearly swooned. If the blue card had exerted a seductive enticement upon a person, the book provoked a maelstrom of raw sensation set to swallow her whole. Miss Temple yanked her hand free with a gasp.
    She looked to the open door—beyond it the other women were silent. She really ought to return to them—she ought to
leave
—for they would no doubt enter the room after her any second, and on their heels must soon be the Comte or the Contessa. She dug her hand under the damask shawl, so to touch the book with impunity, and prepared to wrap it up and take it with her—for surely here was a prize to amaze the Doctor and Chang. Miss Temple looked down and bit her lip. If she opened the book without touching the glass…surely that would protect her…surely then she should have even more understanding to share with the others. With another glance behind her—had Miss Vandaariff fallen into a faint?—she carefully lifted up the cover.
    The pages—for she could see down through them, each thin layer overlapping the next with its unique formless pattern of swirling blues—seemed as delicate as wasp wings—square wasp wings the size of a dish plate—and were strangely hinged into the spine so that she could indeed turn them like a normal book. She could not tell at once, but there seemed to be hundreds of pages, all of them imbued, like the cover, with a pulsing blue glow that cast the whole of the room in an unnatural spectral light. She was frightened to turn the page for fear of snapping the glass (just as she was frightened to stare at it too closely), but when she gathered her nerves to do so she found the glass was actually quite strong—it felt more like the thick pane of a window than the paper-thin sheet it was. Miss Temple turned one brilliant page and then another. She stared into the book, blinked, and then squeezed her eyes—could the formless swirls be
moving
? The worry in her head had transformed into a heaviness, an urge toward sleep, or if not sleep outright a relaxation of intention and control. She blinked again. She should close the book at once and leave. The room had become so hot. A drop of sweat fell from her forehead onto the glass, the surface clouding darkly where it landed, then swirling, the dark blot expanding across the page. Miss Temple gazed into it with sudden dread—an indigo knot opening like an orchid or blood blossoming from a wound…it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, though she was filled with fear at what would happen when the dark unfurling had covered the entirety of the page. But then it was done, the last bit of shimmering blue blotted out and she could no longer see through to the lower pages…only into the depths of the indigo stain. Miss Temple heard a gasping sound—dimly aware that it came from her own mouth—and was swallowed.

    The images writhed around her mind and then with a rush passed through it, the singular point, both terrifying and delicious, being that
she
did not seem to be present at all, for just as with Mrs. Marchmoor and the card, her awareness was subsumed within the immediacies of whichever sensation had entrapped her. It felt to Miss Temple that she had plunged into the experience of several lifetimes piled up in delirious succession, so wholly persuasive and in such number that they threatened the very idea of Celeste Temple as any stable entity…she was at a masked ball in Venice drinking spiced wine in winter, the smell of the canal water and the dank stone and the hot tallow candles, the hands groping her from behind in the dark and her own delighted poise while she somehow maintained a conversation with the masked churchman in front of her, as if nothing untoward was happening…creeping slowly through a narrow brick passage, lined with tiny alcoves, holding a shuttered lantern, counting the alcoves to either side and then at the seventh on her right stepping to the far