Latimer
The first-person narrator of the novel is writing his last testament in the final hours as “the time of my end approaches.” The reader learns that he was always rather frail and sickly as a child, but in the process of recovering from severe illness at the end of his teenage years he is shocked (to the point of fainting) to discover he suddenly possesses a “superadded consciousness” which allows him to see future events exactly as they will play out.
Alfred
Alfred is Latimer’s older brother. Latimer’s introduction to his newly acquired power of clairvoyance is a vision of being introduced to Alfred’s fiancé. Minutes later, what Latimer saw in his mind plays before his eyes exactly as he saw it. What Latimer does not see coming, however, is the day that Alfred mounts a horse in the normal way, but dismounts in a fatally abnormal fashion.
Bertha
The fiancé squared. That is an apt description because Bertha is twice a fiancé within the same family. Initially, of course, she is betrothed to Alfred. When Alfred makes that ill-fated decision to ride a horse, however, circumstances change significantly. Latimer moves from being a stalker-type whose attention she finds flattering to his brother’s replacement. And soon afterward Latimer becomes what Alfred never managed: Bertha’s husband. A husband who one day far into the future will be told by his bitter, alienated, estranged, malevolent wife that the world would be much improved if he were to actively remove himself from. And so the marriage of Bertha and Latimer becomes for Latimer nothing more than a long, long wait for that day seen in his vision all those years ago to finally arrive.
Mrs. Archer
Latimer makes it known that his ability to see future events is by no means limited to those he explicitly describes. The ones to which he allows the reader to bear witness are primarily only those of extraordinary significance. Oddly, the new maid that Bertha hires—Mrs. Archer—seems strangely immune to his supernatural powers of clairvoyance. He is forced to make assumptions about future events in her life which may affected using the mundane powers of intuition and observation.
Charles Meunier
Meunier is a childhood friend of Latimer; seemingly his only real friend. Many years later, long after Latimer’s marriage has turned sour and even after his suspicions that Mrs. Archer and Bertha are joined together in some kind of conspiracy against him have been dislodged by the eruption of a fracture in their relationship, Meunier shows up on Latimer’s doorstep at the most opportune of time. Despite the estrangement between the formerly inseparable mistress of the house and her maid, Bertha has proven to be quite the attentive nursemaid to the increasingly ill Mrs. Archer. Despite this attention, however, she is near-death as Dr. Charles Meunier shows up. Meunier has a request to make of his old friend concerning his dying maid: that he be allowed to conduct a blood transfusion between himself and her corpse immediately upon her expiration. Latimer agrees, Mrs. Archer dies and Meunier’s fresh, warm, thriving blood flows freely into the dead body.
