there was a kobold in the house, or so the girls of L’Odalisque claimed. A spiteful little sprite, it liked to play pranks on them—stealing trinkets, switching shoes, sullying their silks and ribbons with dust and dirt from the gardens. In close quarters in a house full of women, such things often went astray. A slit stay here, a slashed gown there, bits of tit for tat as they settled scores and slights with one another.
But these tricks were not the ordinary tallies of mundane retribution borne of a jilted lover, a disinterested client, an unpaid favor, the girls of L’Odalisque would protest. They were the cruel and capricious whims of an invisible spirit. No rhyme or reason but chance and discord, not mischief but malice. When Elif lost her mother’s pearl ring. When Aloysia’s perfume was switched for cat piss. When the miniature portrait of L’Odalisque’s late husband in her locket was defaced. The kobold seemed to know exactly where each person’s sore spots were and spared no one. Personal, pitiless, precise.
Maria and Caroline began carrying iron in their pockets. Edwina and Fadime made charms warding off the evil eye. L’Odalisque herself began lining the thresholds with salt, but no spell or superstition kept the sprite at bay.
It’s no use, Josef said in a distant, misty voice. The monster is in the mirror.
By now they were all used to the blond boy’s queer turns of phrase. He never quite seemed tethered to the present, seeming to trod on ether and air instead of earth and soil. Josef was neither innocent nor pure—he lived in a bawdy house, after all—yet there remained an aura of untouchability or distance to him that was both charismatic and off-putting. He was often seen wandering through the receiving rooms and reception halls of L’Odalisque’s at odd hours of the night, silent as a geist floating from chamber to chamber. The rare times he was heard to speak seemed like prophecy from on high, just as cryptic and just as obtuse as the words of an oracle.
Not a kobold, but a king. He rides ahead of the end. My end.
The girls shook their heads with affection and pity. Lost, they said. Laudanum-addled. And then, in lowered voices. Lacking.
Indeed as the days went on, Josef seemed less and less present. François watched with despair as time seemed to whittle his companion down to his essence, a being not meant for his world. The sunshine in Josef’s hair faded to the colorless gold of dusk or dawn, the blue in his summer-sky eyes dimming to a cloudy winter gray. He had grown tall and lanky with his height, his skin stretched pale over hollow bones. He was a wisp, a wight, a waif, and François wanted nothing more than to breathe life and love back into his beloved’s lungs.
Music was their only connection now, a tether growing thinner and more tenuous by the day. At first they would play suites by Vivaldi and concertos by Haydn, Mozart, and even the upstart Beethoven, much to the enjoyment of the patrons of the house.
I’m a fancy establishment now, L’Odalisque would say.
As long as you don’t raise the prices! the johns would reply.
But even in his playing Josef seemed to be drifting away. His notes were as exact and as clear as ever, but his soul was not in the moment or the melodies. His music was no less beautiful than it was before, only now it was less weighty, less . . . human. François closed his eyes, and turned his head away.
Late at night, the house could hear Josef play the melancholy airs and tunes of a childhood lost and left behind. The girls of L’Odalisque kept ungodly hours, but such was the nature of their trade. The spaces between transactions, the quiet between breaths, this was where Josef lived. He liked to stand before the mirrors in the girls’ quarters, watching the smoothness of his bowing arm, the movement of his fingers across the neck of his violin. Sometimes he wondered which was the reflection and which was the reality, for he felt as though he lived under glass, on the other side of emotion, the other side of home.
Until the glass disappeared.
Josef had not played Der Erlkönig since his last public performance, since the last time he had been seen in the world of Vienna above. He was frightened of the feelings the piece wrought in him—not just longing and homesickness, but rage, despair, frustration, futility, sorrow, grief, and hope. On the road with Master Antonius, he had played the bagatelle in secret, sharing the music with François like contraband. Then, Der Erlkönig had seemed both like shelter and an escape, the sensation of his sister’s arms enfolding him in a protective embrace.
But now it felt like a rebuke. Or perhaps a bruise. Having emotions at all felt tender, sore, and Josef was comfortably numb. He saw François’s sadness but did not share it. He was living under glass, and it was safe.
That night, he decided to open up old wounds.
As he was wont to do, he stood before the mirror and began to play. The instant his bow touched the strings, the world changed. The scent of pine and damp filled the room, the deep green of sleeping woods and earth. Shadows deepened the mirror-blue night with depth, and before him stood the tall, elegant stranger, also playing a violin.
Josef felt no fear or surprise, only a distant sense of recognition. He remembered this figure from his dreams, as familiar to him as an old friend. The stranger was cloaked and hooded, his face lost to darkness, but those long hands matched his bowing and fingering, phrase for phrase, the music matched in perfect unison.
And then, little by little, note by note, Josef felt the lightening of his spirit. A door had been opened, and for the first time in a long time, he was present. A faint, persistent drumming filled his ears. Hoofbeats? Or his heart?
The stranger stood in a room much like the one in which Josef was standing. He watched with fascination as the figure turned and explored the room, picking up a hairbrush here, a ribbon there. He pocketed a ring, a coin, a slipper. He unraveled a scarf, tied knots into corset strings, and hid a powder box on a shelf where no one could see. The stranger turned to Josef, and a slash of light illuminated the sharpened tips of a wolfish grin. He pressed his finger to his lips in a quiet gesture, and Josef found himself mirroring the movement. Up close, those long, elegant hands were twisted and odd, and Josef saw that there was an extra joint in each finger.
“Who are you?” he whispered to the stranger in his reflection.
The figure cocked his head. Blond curls peeked out from beneath the hood, a quizzical tilt of the chin. Josef nodded and the stranger’s grin widened. Slowly, deliberately, he raised those extra-jointed fingers to the edge of his hood and pushed it from his head.
It was his own face that stared back at him.
The kobold, the monster in the mirror, was him.
The thundering of Josef’s heart grew louder and louder, until it drowned out all sound and sense. He collapsed onto the floor, as shadows passed over the face of the moon, spectral riders on a spectral chase.
And outside, a woman with green eyes that glowed in the dark watched the clouds quake and quiver as they passed over the house of L’Odalisque, the small, satisfied smile of a hunter curling about her lips.