"My Dear Devil"

November 16, 1914

My Dear Devil,

Am finding that, contrary to all current popular mythology, leave is not nearly as exciting when one has no one to see, and that no one wants to see you.

Arrived home in the middle of an infernal gale that made me question why I’d ever disparaged the heat of the lovely English summer sun. The only person awake was Mrs. Crockett, dear soul, and she proceeded to cry over me more than the Mater had in our twenty years of co-habitation. Since then, it’s been dull meetings. One after the other until my head aches. Have only been twice to the theater, and both times rather disappointed--everyone seems to be substituting furious merriment for actualy artistry these days.
Find myself unused to be alone now, despite being willing to sell my soul for a little peace during the whole endless weeks of drilling.

And what of you, Devil? I’ve no idea if this is indeed your address, but Allington said this was where you could be reached. How in the world did you end up that far north? Are you near Gibson Gardens? The Pater had some interests around there in former years. Have you seen polar bears? Does the postman even deliver to those parts anymore?

And A--? Not to pry, of course. Simply tell me when we are next sitting in a damp hole somewhere that she is…or isn't. And I shall be content.

Well, we’re off, so I’m told. Minnie Walker (the brunette, if you remember) has attached herself to my side this week to make sure this sentence of enforced gaiety is carried out to its fullest extent. How I wish they has warned us that the worst part of military training is in the leaving of it.
Until Friday, then, I suppose.
B.R.

The second document wasn’t a letter. It was a will.
It was standard for a solider to carry a will in his pay book, so that if his proverbial number came due, there would be some record of his last wishes. They were fairly informal and unwitnessed, more a precaution than a formal document. Later in the war, official forms with witnesses became a bit more common. Form B.243 allowed the benefactor to name one beneficiary--usually his mother, but occasionally it was a sibling or a wife. Form B.244, which was a rarety in my experience, was used when more than one beneficiary was listed. Most of the men who filled out these forms were too young to have many possessions or funds that required dispersal. The formal documents were left with the commanding officer so there was no risk of them being destroyed, but it wasn’t uncommon to find them jumbled up among the maze of paperwork that the war left behind.

There were myriad superstitions among soldiers, and some of the more gruesome came from the First World War. I’d read a few diaries and letters where men stated in no uncertain terms that those who carried their own wills were all but inviting a smiting from the Almighty. Others believed that to write one at all was requesting a bit too much attention from unfeeling fate, while a few others said that, just as you put your life in your comrades’ hands, it was symbolic to hand them your will, as well. While the policy may have let some men sleep better, it also meant that wills were frequently lost or mutilated and any worldly goods were simply forwarded to the next of kin, even if the particular signatory had designated otherwise. Thus, I wasn’t overly surprised to find that Barnaby Rutledge’s will was in L. Thomas’ collection. Perhaps he had believed in passing on his paperwork for safekeeping. It could very well have been a complete mix-up somewhere along the line, as well, so I decided not to worry about the presence of the will in the collection, at least until I’d read it. The signature on the form was similar to the one on the letter, but looked as if the writer had been running through a hurricane at the time of signing. The pen had punctured the paper twice in the signing, and the ink ran from a few places where the paper had been soaked through at some point in the past. It was dated October 1917. It specified that, in the event of the death of the below signed Barnaby Francis Rutledge left all his worldly goods, including items specified with his solicitor, to one Lieutenant L. Nathaniel Thomas. The money in his account and his books were left to one Alice Thomas (with a provision in case her name changed due to marriage), of Green Lanes, Haringey, London.

The Beginning, Again...

Nothing of any importance took place on Sunday. Mitch had two shows for which he had to usher, and I realized that, if I failed all my courses, it wouldn’t matter very much who Barnaby Rutledge and his mysterious female shadow might be, as I would be on the next plane to Boston. So I read about the role of women in the British Empire and took dutiful notes on whether woman had “agency” or a “voice” in the course of their current events or in the creation of their history. And by that evening, I’d given myself such a headache that the only thing I was fit for was bed.
The next morning, I was up early enough to not only make coffee, but to stop in to see Sergey. As soon as the bell over the door chimed my entry, he was poking his head around the side of a rack of bread and brandishing the stack of photocopies I’d given him the day earlier.
“My dear Kipling!” He smiled, but his eyes were worried. “I read, as you asked.”
I shivered. The weather was chill and the damp seemed to have found its way through my sweater and between my ribs. “And?”
“Not mad, my friend.”
He said it so grimly that I took a step closer, suddenly worried.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this…Rutledge,” he over-enunciated each syllable of the unfamiliar word. “He is not mad. I read your notes. On the side. Here.” He pointed to the list of oddities I’d scribbled. “And he is not mad. But you are right. This girl. It is the same girl. And she is very important. Very…” And his eyes suddenly fixed on the counter. His eyebrows drew together and he murmured something too low for me to hear.
“What is it?”
“Beatrice.” The words came out with an Italianate trill.
I felt my own eyebrows rising skywards before I realized what he was talking about.
“You mean—like Dante?”
“Indeed. The woman he wrote to. And wrote for, I suppose. If he writes her, she doesn’t die. Not completely. You understand?”
“I think so.” The shiver came back. “The only biographical information I could find—about his life, not his writing—was that he died alone. With no one.”
“He had her.” Sergey held up the paper. He had put brackets around one of the first descriptions of the woman from one of the stories.
“I guess so.” I took the papers and slid them in my bag.
A crisp paper bag was waiting for me on the counter when I looked back up.
“If you keep handing out free food,” I warned with a forced smile, before realizing I had no end to the threat. “It’s probably not the best business sense.”
“I will give you food until you stop looking so…tragic.”
That brought out a laugh. “I’m not tragic. Just…I don’t know. I hate the thought of him going nuts over a dead girl. It’s…it’s just awful.”

The elevators in the building where our seminar was being held were undergoing another round of closures, with signs bedecking the walls promising that they would be over shortly. I scanned the lobby in the hopes of seeing a workman, or even a few discarded tools, and saw nothing. I was about to resign myself to the ten-storey climb when the chime from the one working elevator sounded behind me. I turned toward the sound of the swushing doors and nearly collided with a blonde woman coming out.
“I’m so sorry!” I blurted before realizing quite what was happened.
“Oh honestly,” she hissed under her breath. Not loud enough to cause a scene, but certainly loud enough to let me know I’d just ruined her entire day.
I took a quick look at her. She was shorter than me. This didn’t surprise me, seeing as how most women (and a fair amount of men) were shorter than me. She was startling—and naturally blonde, with a tiny waist, ice blue eyes and treacherously high cheekbones.
“Are you alright?” I asked meekly, feeling like the most enormous, clumsy human being in the city.
“Quite,” she sniffed, then fixed me with a glacial smile and snapped away on her little kitten heels.
Thoroughly humiliated, I stepped through the doors of the elevator, only to be greeted by Damien and his growing smirk.
“Are you alright?” He managed without chuckling.
“Umm…yeah.” If my cheeks could have heated anymore, I think my face might have become radioactive. I turned around swiftly and faced the doors—which I realized too late were completely reflective—and sighed. “Yikes.”
Behind me, Damien kept grinning until the doors opened again.

The day did not improve. I found myself at odds over women and “agency” and history, not only with the rest of the class, but with my professor, who was apparently a new-age feminist with an axe to grind. I held my own, but by the time we left two hours later, I felt like I’d just gone twelve rounds with a steam shovel. When Damien had spoken, which wasn’t frequently, he usually came down on my side, which was a relief, but the rest of the time, he kept his eyes trained on me while I spoke, which only made me feel even more awkward.
He hung back to discuss an upcoming research paper with the professor, so I quickly slid through the doors to the stairs in order to avoid the rest of the class who was heading toward the single overworked elevator. I needed my desk, I needed some old diaries, and I needed to be left alone.
And, of course, there was a visiting researching who was making use of my desk when I arrived. He was short and thick, with round glasses and an Adam’s apple large enough to make him look like he was trying unsuccessfully to swallow a golf ball.
“Sorry, Kip,” Rich said quietly as I stared in dazed confusion at the person filling my seat. “I kept meaning to call, but the day just got away from me.”
“It’s ok,” I was physically unable to stay angry at Rich for long, so I merely hefted my bag again and snatched my teacup off the corner of the desk, startling the bespeckled squatter, who muttered a useless apology and went back to reading.
“The Room at the End of the Hall is open.” Rich offered. The room was usually used for meetings with Museum officials or members of the public donating major collections. Fitted out with a tea pot and a china set, it was where we went to impress people. I think it was technically referred to as a Conference Room, but The Room at the End of the Hall was its most common title. It was also the farthest from any office in the department, and seldom used during normal hours.
“Perfect,” I said, and Rich gave me a confused little smile when he realized I meant it. “Do you mind if I start the Thomas Collection today?”
“Still all tied up with Rutledge?”
“You could say that.”
Rich grinned and liberated the fat folder from the stack on his desk. “Have at it.”

I was settled in The Room at the End of the Hall with a mug of tea and took my first deep breath in what felt like hours. The room was equipped with a computer, and I pulled up a Word document in order to start making a list of the contents of the folder. There were a handful of letters in a feminine hand addressed to “Lt Nathaniel Thomas” in Egypt, then Salonika, and finally, one address to him in France. There was a clutch of letters from Rutledge. All written in a very small, neat hand. None were more than a page, front and back, but the writing was compact enough that they were sure to hold a good deal of information. I just had to hope that it was significant information. More often than I cared to admit, letters to and from soldiers tended to be filled with inside jokes, personal references and the most mundane of information about the war. Usually, it was about food, but just as frequently, it was about women.
Seeing his writing was oddly jarring. I’d been expecting a Poe-like hand, so tiny and scrabbled that every word was an effort to decipher; perhaps even a John Wilkes-Booth kind of grandiose scrawl that could cover an entire page in a handful of words. This, though…this was neat and precise and showed not only education, but patience. The return addresses were nearly all from somewhere near a front. If Barnaby Rutledge had taken the time to make his writing so neat and orderly in that kind of chaos, he certainly was not an emotional hysteric, as I had at first wondered. Nor was he a compulsive. The bridges between his letters were all level and rounded. Most of all, they were done quickly. He wasn’t laboring over each letter, they way Poe did, making the reader feel still and suffocated under the weight of the pen.
This writer, I realized, squinting again at the little letters, was perfectly, and utterly sane.

Diversions

The sun was shining when I woke up, which went a good way to lifting my spirits from their depths of the previous night, despite the fact that I was freezing cold and couldn’t feel my feet. Mitch had laid claim to the vast majority of the blankets over the course of the night, and looked thoroughly comfortable, borrowed so deep beneath them that the only thing that could be clearly seen was his hair, sticking out from the top of the blanket as if trying to make a bid for freedom.

Slowly, with devious caution, I slid my feet back under the blanket and beneath the hem of his shirt.

“Kipling Philby,” he muttered, jerking forward, “so help me, but if you ever touch me with those cold feet again, they won’t be able to find enough of you to identify your body.” He didn’t open his eyes at all, but I could see a grin fighting to make its presence known.

“Let’s go to Portobello Road Market.”

He pulled his arm to his face, and hazarded a one-eyed squint at the watch he had forgotten to remove last night.

“It’s…seven fucking thirty. What?”

“You. Me. Portobello Road.”

“Why?”

“Books.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Come on! I want to get there before the crazies descend.”

“Oh trust me,” he threw the blankets off his shoulders and finally turned over enough for me to see his face, creased and wrinkled with sofa-marks, “once you get there, there will be plenty enough crazy for everyone. Make me coffee. I’ll be back soon.”

When he clumped up the stairs a bit later, he was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt beneath an engulfing green cardigan that covered his hands completely. I froze in the act of handing him a mug of coffee and considered the elbow patches on the sleeves, which in themselves were large enough to cover most of his forearms.

“Umm…”

“It was my Uncle Samuel’s. One word and I swear…”

I giggled and set the coffee on the table. Mitch swooped down on it like an ungainly green buzzard.

“So last night’s little literary-fest wasn’t enough for you?” He took a hesitant sip and quickly pulled his head back, rubbing ruefully at his upper lip.

“Not a chance,” I replied, stirring in sugar meditatively. “I made this list last night of all the similarities in the stories and I think there’s more going on here than just shell-shock?”

“You mean the girl with the eyes?”

“You caught that, too?”

“How could you not?”

I made a non-verbal sound of agreement into my cup.

“I wonder if he really—“ Mitch’s comment was cut short by my mobile waking up and jittering spastically across the dining room table.

“Hello?” I said, catching it just before it crashed to the floor and flipping it open with my thumb.

“Kipling?” The voice was muffled by the several other shouts on its end of the line.

“Toni! How are you?” I kept my own voice cheerful while making a face of frustrated anguish for Mitch’s benefit.

Antonia and her husband, Eric, owned the house in which I was currently squatting. They were lovely people, but seemed to have a professional talent for calling at exactly the wrong time and proposing inopportune visits to collect their mail, let Eric make nice with his London-based colleagues, and generally make sure I hadn’t yet allowed the house to erupt into flames.

“Quite well, thank you. And you?”

“Oh, things here are fine.”

“Ah, good. Listen, Kipling,” I braced myself for the inevitable, “we’re in the car and I thought it would be nice to come down and check in on things. Would that be alright with you?”

“Of course,” I said, banging my head silently against the table, as Mitch smothered a chuckle in the expanse of his sweater.

“Hi Kipling!!” Came a fearsomely high screech, followed by a few grunts and a scratching noise. Then Toni’s patient reminder to her two kids in the backseat that they could be evacuated at any time to find their way home, should their continued presence prove too trying.

“Sorry about that, Kipling.”

“It’s ok. Tell Ned and Lily I can’t wait to see them, too.”

Ned was ten years old and introduced me to his friends as his ‘rental sister’. Lily was twelve and a phenomenal artist and already far too cool for the likes of me. I am unashamed to admit that I bought my way into her good graces by letting her wear my mascara and eye shadow to the movies, to see a film that required a guardian for anyone under thirteen. Since then, I have not only been upgraded to “cool”, I even got invited to her birthday party in Kent in the spring.

The message was conveyed, to another round of squeals and thumps, before Toni came back.

“Right, well, we’re on the road now, so—perhaps an three quarters of an hour or so?”

Which meant about an hour and a half. I was never in what time zone Toni operated, but it must be really quite fun.

“Great,” I said, looking at Mitch. “Would you like me to have anything ready for you.” He nodded forcefully.

“Oh, you don’t have to! That would be lovely!” Ah, the fatal challenge of contradictions.

“Great,” I said again. “It’ll be a pleasure.”

We bantered for a bit, during which I watched the minute hand on the clock on the wall spin faster and faster. When Toni was done telling me about the trees they were passing and cows grazing on the field, I was down to one hour and ten minutes.

“You blinking liar,” Mitch said flatly when I finally closed the phone.

“What?”

“It’ll be a pleasure’. What, pray tell, are you going to whip up? A nice bowl of Frosties? Some apples and yogurt? Because I think that’s the extent of your pantry, Friend-O.”

“Shit.” He was right, of course. Flingpot has consumed the last of my groceries. I eyed the clock again and sighed.

“We’ll have to hit the Farmer’s Market,” I said, more to myself than to Mitch. “And I’m sure Sergey’s open by now. I’ll get some bread and something fattening and call it a day.”

“What is this ‘we’ all about?”

“Do you want to eat today?”

“Not if the little people are going to be here.” He grimaced. “I don’t do the little people.”

“Excellent,” I said, trying very hard not to laugh. “I’ll just tell them you’re my imaginary friend.”

“Works for me.”

And, thus liberated from a day of book-buying, Mitch stood, swung his arms until his sweater released his hands, and headed back home. Before descending the basement steps, he turned and nearly slammed my head with the door.

“Umm…oops. Anyway, bring those stories to Sergey. See what he says.”

“Good idea.” I said, stopping the mad whirlwind of cleaning and clearing.

“But take a shower first, ok?”

“Wherever would I be without you?” I replied dryly and ran upstairs to the bathroom.

Stoke Newington holds this tiny little farmer’s market every Saturday morning in the local school’s recess yard. It means that Church Street is nearly impassible by car until about 2pm, but there aren’t too many other places where you can see whole fish on ice next to a table of homemade gooseberry jam next to buckets of dirt-covered, moony mushrooms, next to the cupcake lady, who sells baby cupcakes for 75p, next to the enormous cheese wheel, next to the Cajun guy who sings while brewing coffee, who works beside the curmudgeonly Irish baker, who stands behind a table heaped with enough bread to make it hard to see his head over the crusty mountain.

Twenty minutes after Mitch’s departure, I was ducking through the gates of the William Patton school, politely taking a leaflet from a short women with enormous dreadlocks bundled on top of her head, admonishing me to abstain from buying produce from some foreign country that was doing something not-nice to some other foreign nation. I shoved the leaflet in my bag, where it met its friends from weeks past, and buzzed the circle of breads and veggies, deciding to skip on the aquatic life, since I had neither the time to cook it nor the inclination to kill us all with salmonella.

Once I had enough to make a passable vegetable and cheese dish, I zipped down toward the Green, sidestepping slower pedestrians and nearly colliding with a young blonde with a baby carriage as I rounded the corner.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, not stopping long enough to give the words any meaning.

Sergey was leaning against the door frame of the shop, absorbing the thinning sunlight, a dough-flecked copy of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in his hands. He looked up at the sound of my rustling bags, and a brilliant smile broke out across his face.

“My Kipling! I have missed you!”

An older man walking past on the opposite side of the street looked over warily—a true Londoner, I thought fleetingly. Frightened of any loud noises or real emotion.

“Hello Sergey,” I panted, setting my bags just inside the shop and shrugging off my sweater.

“How are you, my friend, how are you?”

“I’m ok—in a bit of a rush today,” I explained Toni and Erik’s unexpected incursion into my weekend.

“I see, I see.” He nodded, as if contemplating the fate of nations, rather than my culinary crisis. “You will need Blini. To wrap them. Yes. Definitely.”

“I am in your hands.” He chuckled and began wrapping a stack of whisper-thin pancakes in crackling brown paper.

“Have you brought me anything?” When he raised his eyebrow at me, I noticed it was coated with flour.

“Sort of,” I yanked the photocopies from my bag, where they had wrapped themselves adoringly around a zucchini. “It’s not a book, but a friend of mine gave this to me.” I put the papers on the counter and realized the list was still in the margin, devil horns and all. Sergey followed my eyes and scrutinized my artistic renderings.

“You have been giving this much thought, yes?”

I nodded. “I don’t know what to make of him yet. You let me know what you think, alright?”

“Absolutely.” He over-enunciated all the syllables with guttural relish. “I love a good mystery.”

I thanked him profusely and buzzed home. A quick check of my watch as I opened the door showed I had exactly twenty-five minutes left.

Mitch was sitting at my kitchen table, rubbing resin on his violin bow.

“If I help you cook, can I have some later?”

“Do you really need to ask?” I dumped the contents of the bags on the table as he snatched his bow out of the field of fire.

“I’ll chop. Turn the oven on.”

“You turn it on. I’m afraid of it.”

“He picked up an eggplant and eyed me warily.

“You what?”

“It growls at me!”

“It’s a convection oven! That’s the fan!”

“It wants to eat me.”

“Oh for mercy’s sake…” He crossed the kitchen in two steps and flicked a few switched and the oven roared to life

“Have I mentioned that I absolutely adore you?”

“Yup. Just now. I heard you.” He threw a dishrag at me that landed on my shoulder. “Wash your face. How did you get flour on you?”

We made it. Barely, but we made it. Just as I was taking the baked veggies and cheese out of the oven—which Mitch had turned off before scurrying off home—the door banged open and the hallway was filled with happy screeches.

“Children, children,” Erik was chiding. “Kipling is going to think that we have a rodent problem!”

“Kipling!” Ned launched himself at my hip nearly sent the pan flying.

“Hey, you!” I grinned. It was nice to be missed. “What’s up?”

“Mum said we could go to Victoria Park this afternoon—wanna come?”

“Definitely.”

Lily sauntered in and plopped down into a chair. “What smells good?”

“Veggies and cheese. And blinis to wrap them. Want some?”

“Oh my God, yes. I’m starving. I didn’t get any breakfast because Ned ate the last of the eggs this morning.”

“But if you were up earlier, you could have—“

“I was tired. I was sleeping in. That’s what you do on weekends. Not go on some big expedi—nice shoes, Kip.”

“Thanks.” I set plates before both of them. “Dig in.”

And thus the day progressed. We ate, then Erik and Toni went over the house, ostensibly to retrieve various books and scarves and sneakers, but I was fairly sure they were looking for scorch marks, or Satanic ritualistic markings carved into the railings, or drunken Hobos napping in the bathtub. As ever, I passed inspection, and we spent a fairly pleasant afternoon in Victoria Park, marred only slightly by a dog who tried to remove Ned’s shoe while we were sitting under a tree, eliciting a storm of hysteria and by a butterfly that landed on Toni’s bag, which necessitated a detailed, half-hour lecture on lepidoptery. That and the consistent requests for tag and hide and seek and catch the grasshopper that I couldn’t, in good conscience, refuse. Seeing as how I was the cool one, and all.

I spent the time sitting in the shade of a chestnut tree and wondering about Barnaby Rutledge and watching people stroll or jog or amble past, examining each face for a pair of eyes that could be as arresting as the ones he’d described.

They took off again about five, and as soon as they were out of sight, I flopped on the couch, savoring the return of silence. Silence that was broken about three minutes later when there was a resounding bang on the floor beneath my feet and the cellar door opened to the sound of a violin, faintly playing the Hallelujah Chorus.

“I completely agree,” I smiled. “There’s plenty in the fridge. Go nuts.”

I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of cutlery on porcelain and the patient beeping of the microwave. Then there was the smell of melting cheese and the weight of another body on the couch beside me. I opened one eye and watched Mitch digging into his enormous plate with relish.

“You know,” he said between mouthfuls, “I was thinking.”

“Really? Well done.”

“Hush, you.” He put a folded-up blini in the hand that was lying in my lap and I found the energy to bring it to my mouth. “Anyway,” swallowed and sat back, “you know that Lost Angel story you brought home last week?”

“Yeah?”

“What was she listening for?”

“What?” I sat forward, something in my brain clicking very loudly into place.

“There was a line that—“

“I know, I know, wait a second.” I knelt down and started rummaging under the couch, where I’d thrown everything that would fit during my morning cleaning fit. The copies of the Rutledge manuscript were jammed under an unidentified show, but I managed to get it out relatively undamaged.

“Here…” I flipped the pages until I came to the line, “De-dah, de-dah, circles of the damned, words held no power over her, de-dah de-dah, umm….right. ‘The song had been made in the secret darkness of the night, and carried in it the spice of spring rain and the lonely chill of autumn winds. It was a song to hold her and keep her as no words ever could, as he would never be able to himself. And so he cast his spell in song, trapping her soul in his melody’…and then… she goes around the ward and, let’s see….’in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity ‘”.

“Yikes. Right.” Mitch mumbled and swallowed. “And how about the mountain man?”

“I gave the copies to Sergey, but…”

I looked up to see Mitch nodding, a very serious expression on his face.

“It’s the same song, isn’t it?”

He nodded even more emphatically. “It’s got to be. I mean, it’s the same girl, isn’t it?”

“You think so, too?”

“Well,” he slid his empty plate to the side and started plucking fitfully at the strings on his violin, “if it’s not the same girl in each story, each girl in each story has to be based on one girl. Does that make sense?”

“Totally.” My mind was firing like an engine, racing ahead of this one clue to make a thousand more connections. But without more evidence, without any more stories, it was just consuming itself.

“I wonder who she was,” Mitch asked his violin. It gave a little chirp in response.

I stared at the photocopy in my lap, at the little note in Rutledge’s quick, sharp hand, and remembered.

“Whoever she was, he never found her.” Mitch’s hands stopped moving, but he didn’t look up. “The biography in Damien’s copies,” my voice sounded oddly far away, “said he died without family.” Died? I thought nervously.

“Alone.” Mitch whispered.

It was one of those words that didn’t need any answer.

In Which I Get Suspicions.....

I finished reading and dropped the photocopy to my lap. Mitch was asleep, sprawling out over most of the couch, his head lolling awkwardly over the arm. It looked totally and absolutely normal. I desperately wanted to wake him up and make him tell me it was ok. To tell me this guy had died at least sixty years ago and there was no rational reason for me to be as freaked out as I currently was.

I didn’t know what it was about his writing, but something about each of these stories was setting off a who cacophony of alarm bells, both the professional ones and otherwise. From a professional standpoint, having spent years reading historical documents, there was something about Rutledge’s writing that made me incredibly uncomfortable. And it wasn’t just that he sounded like someone who was nuttier than a peanut butter factory.

I had spent a few months working on a collection of spy correspondence in college. They were letters written by an American diplomat who got stuck on the wrong side of the continent at the outbreak of the war. He was granted permission to receive letters from his “Maiden Sister in Dorchester”, over whom he had full responsibility following their parent's death. No matter that she was in her mid-thirties and apparently nearly six feet tall and built like a water tank. Not only that, it turned out later that the sister was an old acquaintance of Howard Burnham, an American who spied for France during the war. It did appear that there was some kind of code, or linguistic understanding between the siblings before the diplomat’s departure, since there was never any cipher discovered, either in the collection of their correspondence, or in that of Burnham that any of us could find. It took about two years, but we finally figured out (or thought we figured out) that it wasn’t so much what they were saying, but the order in which they were saying things, and the way in which they said it. Each letter had passed the censors in Vienna because, as far as they were concerned, the sister was merely writing about her cat chasing moths and her love of opera and the apple pastries she had baked that afternoon—simple stories of a crazy-old-cat-lady, cooped up in her house and knitting herself into obscurity.

It was the cat stories that gave it away, actually. We noticed—no, I noticed, damn it—that the cat was an Abyssinian. When I realized that Burnham had been sent on an expedition to Algeria, which was a French colony that had become a bit too friendly with the Germans, things started to fall into place. Especially when the poor cat was "pushed from the window by the moths, taking all its friends with it, and we were lucky to get him back in one piece". Burnham's team was captured in Germany and alone was able to return to France. It was all quite cleverly done, and no one suspected a thing for nearly eighty years. Truth be told, I've still no concrete proof that I didn't make the whole thing up, but it paid the bills for a bit and I got my name in the paper.

Anyway, the point of it all that is that these stories were setting off the same alarm-bells that the story about the cat had when I was working on the diplomat’s letters. There was an emphasis on certain images or themes that seemed far too obvious. Because the rest of the writing was so lyrical, these bits stuck out like someone singing the wrong notes in the Hallelujah Chorus. And thinking about these little dissonances was keeping me from sleeping with the lights on for a month after reading Rutledge’s ravings.

I reached for a pencil on the coffee table and pulled the pages back up against my thigh. Using the side of the pencil that still had lead exposed and grimacing at the teeth marks that dotted the metal band around the eraser, I wrote, as neatly as possible under the circumstances, a heading in the margin:

“Many Deaths + Down/Mountain + Angel”

Drawing a line, I began a shorthand list of the similarities that recalled themselves to me.

“Fire” I wrote, and underlined the “fire somewhere in France”, the “Wicked Man” who was born in the fire, and the Coward who was “left behind with the fire”. Flipping to the back of the story, I drew a big arrow to Barnaby Rutledge’s death in the flame. The arrow wrinkled the paper and when I tried to make it more emphatic, it looked like it had grown hair instead from all the errant lines around it. The Lost Angel had been looking for her love who had been “lost in the fire”. The piano player had looked at his love, I remembered, “and he wished that he had died in the cold or in the flames or in the filth”…

Next on the list, I added “Eyes”. Not just any eyes, I realized. There was someone—or, more to the point, a specific person’s eyes. That Angel in the hospital and the woman in the nightclub…were they the same person? They had both been listening for to a song, and the only feature that Rutledge had felt the need to mention on both of them was…their eyes. And in this one, there was “the salvation that can live in a pair of human eyes”. Not just any eyes, I was willing to bet.

Looking at the word “salvation” gave me a thought, and I added “damnation” to my list. The letters from the Angel’s missing soldier-love talked about those who walked the “circle of the damned”, and the same line was nearly repeated in this story, as well. And there was the continued reference to the ‘Fallen Angel’. I wrote “Lucifer?” beside “damnation”. Then, because I was getting slightly creeped out, I gave the word horns and made an attempt at a forked tail, which much more closely resembled an artistic rendition of a squashed fly. The piano-player—he was in hell by the story’s end, wasn’t he?

Below my mangled devil-word-doodle, I added “salvation—no”. Because each character could see the thing that could save them—usually music of some kind, it would seem, or eyes. Or the release of death. And none of them were able to do more than glimpse it, making the hell in which they existed even crueler.

I frowned at the list and tapped the nibbled pencil against my chin. There was another aspect to Mr. Rutledge’s writing that was bothering me as much as the stories themselves. They made sense. They weren’t stream of consciousness and they weren’t hallucinations or dreams or maniac rantings. They were sane and they were well-written. Barnaby Rutledge wasn’t writing to cure himself of shell-shock; I’d bet the vast majority of my paltry pay check on it. He was writing with a much more definite purpose. I just hadn’t—yet—figured out what it was.

And seeing as how all the libraries in the vicinity would be closed for another six to seven hours, it didn’t seem like I was going to be making much progress in that direction anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that Mitch had rolled over, pinning my legs beneath him.

I thought about kicking my way free and heading to bed. Then I thought about the darkness at the top of the stairs, and the way the wind sometimes made the walls creak like someone was walking along the landing, and decided that I had a very over-active imagination.

“Mitch,” I whispered sternly, “move. Mitch—move! Mitch,” I thunked his arm with the side of my foot, “move.” He made a high, sighing sound and rolled back, liberating my feet, and curled up his legs, leaving me a bit more than a cushion of couch.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and tugged some of the blanket back from his clenched hands. I scooted my perpetually cold feet between his legs and against the couch, hoping his body heat would keep them warm, and tucked my head against the arm of the couch. I shut my eyes and listened to his breathing for a long time before I finally fell asleep, too weary by then to dream about angels or fires or madmen at all.

The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge: Prologue

The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge

(as transcribed by Mitchell Berenson)

Prologue:

Three men sat huddled before a fire somewhere in France. One was a coward, who was too afraid to live, one was a man who was far too wicked to die, and one man was Barnaby Rutledge.

The Coward had spent the day with a French battalion, organizing the handover of a local trench and thus had nothing to speak about but the smell of burnt sausages and the salacious reading material matted to the walls of the trench and smeared with too-many filthy thumbprints. Every time a shell ruptured the sky, he ducked his head and tried to hide the tremors in his hands and his mouth. But it wasn’t this that made him a Coward. But if I were to tell you all my secrets, there would be no way to keep you near me.

The Wicked Man was, like the fallen angel himself, born in fire and had heard the music of angels, and now inhabited the circles of the damned. There were very few who knew anything of this man’s story, and it was Barnaby Rutledge alone who knew it all. All men will try and gain immortality by telling their story, and there are none so insistent as those into whose eyes Death had stared. Their voices filled the night, lonely souls, seeking the comfort of ghosts. But for these two, it was different. For Barnaby Rutledge had already lived too many lives for one man, and it was in his power alone to save the Angel from the fires into which he was born to perish.

The Coward slept eventually, his naturally dull mind further tamed by the liberal application of French whiskey. He was far too well-bred to snore, but, like all men who had seen war, his sleep was broken by frantic words that even the wind had learned to ignore. And as he slept, the blessed unconsciousness that is the only haven, the Fallen Angel watched the flames, and spoke to Barnaby Rutledge. He explained to him about the songs that the winter whispers in the fall of the snow and showed him the path that is trod by dreams and the limping lope of nightmares, and of the salvation that can live in a pair of human eyes. He told him the truth. For Barnaby Rutledge was to die that night, once again.

Once again and once again.

It happened at dawn, as somehow all deaths must. Barnaby Rutledge and his wicked companion had risen, and were walking through the mud and the stench that was a mockery of farmer’s fields and children’s gardens. The Coward had been left behind in the fire and neither man remaining could even remember his name. They were lost and they were cold and neither had slept in nearly three days. And still, their battalion was no where in site. The earth was filled with men and with parts of men and yet, for all the faces they saw and all the faces they tried not to see, the men for whom they searched remained utterly elusive.

How many do you think there are, whispered Barnaby Rutledge to The Wicked One.

As many as there are grains of sand on the shore, and all of them worth no more than that combined. Came the hushed reply from a dry and rasping throat.

But Barnaby Rutledge knew this could not be. For Barnaby Rutledge could see the men behind the mud and the fear and the blood and the mask of stupid indifference that a life in the earth casts on each face. And it was because Barnaby Rutledge saw a man, or the helmet of one, at least, pass along the top of a nearby ridge that he climbed to the top and peered over. And then the sky was lit with a fire brighter than the dawn; a fire known far too well to the wicked man. Whether the fire came from the sky like an arm of the vengeful sun or from the ground where the demons dwelled who had once been men, no one had time to tell. For before the eye could see the spark or the ear hear the scream of triumph, Barnaby Rutledge was consumed by the fire. And Barnaby Rutledge died, once again.

It was not a sensation he feared, for Death had grown fond of Barnaby Rutledge. There was, indeed, a sort of relief in knowing that the worst that humankind could conceive was not merely tolerable. It was a blessing. For there were so many ways to die in the cloying mud of France. The fire sang and shrieked with joy when it burned, and the sound of its song drowned out the voice of the men. Its heat warmed him in places he didn’t know existed. It made him feel as if he had a soul.

And so Barnaby Rutledge closed his eyes and thought of how his next death should be and from where the fire would next descend. And he studied the eyes of the wicked man below him. He could have saved him, he thought, as the flames traced the blue of his eyes. The Wicked Man watched the fire with guilty envy. And he watched Death take Barnaby Rutledge and lead him away from the trenches and the things that lived in them. And in Death, he saw a familiar face; one that he had known from his first days, but a face that had never looked at him with anything but contempt. And he wondered why it was that he was never permitted to follow. And when the last chorus of the flames had floated away, the wicked man looked at the earth that now held the best of a good man, and he spit and he walked away, alone.

He would find Barnaby Rutledge again, one day, he knew. And he would whisper to him of the song of rain on a windowpane, or the hushed frenzies of dried autumn leaves. And he would watch him die. Once again.

Once again and once again.

Excerpts...

Days passed, as days have an irritating habit of doing, and before I wasproperly prepared, Thursday arrived once again. I took an extra twenty minutes to settle my hair and poked myself in the eye twice trying to even out my eye shadow, telling myself all the while that I was not trying to impress anyone. At all. I’m a terrible liar.

But Damien never showed up to class. No one had heard from him, so we muddled through a discussion on the importance of uniforms in building identity among national armies, and no one gave me a second look, except for when Sam and I got in a spat over the merits of wool uniforms for infantrymen in the First World War. As we were rising to leave, Professor Bryson made an announcement that next week our meeting would take place in the conference room down the hall, as a new staff member would be moving in and he didn’t want “this group to be disturbing…disturbed. You know. “ And with a wave of an arm encased in some deeply disturbing mauve paisley fabric, we were dismissed.

I spent the rest of the day at work, slogging through a photocopy request that had come through from a patron that no one else wanted to tackle. Which was understandable, considering the fact that it took me the rest of the day to get even halfway through with the order, and in the end I had to call maintenance to bring up more toner so I could finish the rest on Friday. As with all manner of technology, as soon as the machine learned that I was in need of its services, it collapsed in a steaming heap of plastic and inkblots, and it took the vast majority of my day to convince it to act like a man and get the copies in the post.

The thick autumn sunlight outside was warm and I decided a bit of a walk would do me good, so I alighted the bus at Angel and ducked into the Tinderbox in order to fortify myself for the journey. I was standing in line behind a tall, heavyset man and his German Shepherd when a low voice behind me murmured, right in my ear, “And here I was, just looking for a friendly face.”

Being me means being very jumpy in crowds, and thus reacting very badly to chance meetings. Having had no sense that there was anyone at all behind me to begin with, I spun around, far more startled than any normal person would ever be, and found myself staring into a pair of familiar blue-gray eyes.

“Ned! I…oh. Hi. How…uh…hi.”

“Did I startle you? I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean...”

“No, no!” I tried again, wishing there was a way to discreetly kick myself. “I just…” I waved a hand and tried to look vaguely coordinated. And failed. “Didn’t expect to see you…here, I mean. Just surprised.”

“I’ll have to sneak up on you more often then.” He winked, his smile stretching as my face grew hot. He really was quite easy on the eyes, especially with that smile. Which made the whole situation ten times worse. It was difficult enough to talk with someone who was so socially at ease without becoming tongue-tied with jealousy. Being distracted by those eyes and that secret little smile was not in any way what the situation required.

“Spectacular,” I replied dryly.

“Can I help you?” The man behind the counter tapped his finger testily against the metal pitcher in his hand, making the milk thermometer clunk loudly in response.

“Large skinny latte,” I replied automatically.

“Make it two,” Damien interjected, and the man nodded briskly and set about steaming and brewing.

“So where were you yesterday?” I turned back, trying to slow my heartbeat, which was pounding in my ears so loudly that I could hardly hear his first few words.

“Uh…right.” He ducked his head. “I completely lost track of time and by the time I realized where I should be,” he shrugged and his eyes crinkled into a smile, “I figured showing up would just make things worse.”

“I see,” I replied, not entirely convinced.

He took an infinitesimal step closer.

“Miss me?”

My mouth opened, but before anything asinine could fall out, the man behind the counter set two cardboard cups before us. Damien paid for both and handed one to me. “The least I can do after stalking you.” He winked again and I followed him back onto the street, hoping the breeze would dampen the heat in my cheeks.

“Well, I can’t say it was the most stimulating class I’ve ever attended, so don’t feel bad,” I prevaricated. “I could get you my notes, if you think you’d like them.”

“Might not be a bad idea,” he said distantly, watching a few commuters hustle past the wall against which he had propped himself. When he turned back to me, his eyes stopped at the bag on my shoulder and his eyebrows lifted slowly.

I had visions of bird stains, of gaping holes; hell, at the rate this exchange was going, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn I was spontaneously combusting. With mounting trepidation, I looked to my left and saw my museum ID swinging from the strap of my bag.

“Sorry…didn’t mean to stare. I just had no idea you worked there.”

“No worries.”

“Sounds perfect for you.”

“Not far from it, at any rate,” I smiled.

“What do you do?”

“I catalogue new First World War acquisitions—letters, diaries, that kind of stuff.”

“Jesus, seriously, that sounds perfect.” He sipped his coffee and watched my smile intently. “Oh! Speaking of which,” he rolled his own bag from his shoulder to the ground and knelt beside it, ruffling through several bunches of loose paper before extracting a small pile of photocopied sheets stapled together. “I copied those stories I was telling you about. If—you’d still like to read them.”

For an instant, he looked unsure of himself; but I put out my hand and took the stack. His hand was cool and dry when it brushed my own.

The top of the page was headed with Early 20^th Century Fiction: An Anthology. The shadows on the photocopies suggested they were made from a hardcover book, and the traceries of cracks and folds made me fairly sure the book had not been a new one.

“There’s only two of them, but it’s a start.” I was saying, as I flipped through the pages. “I’d love to find some more—it would make the rest of the paper so much better.”

I started to tell him about my find at the museum, about the other Barnaby Rutledge stories I’d found, about the letters that might contain more information or further leads. Then, with a stab of guilt, I bit my lip. I had already started thinking of Rutledge as mine, and the idea of sharing him so soon was not one I was willing to tolerate.

“I’ll keep my eyes out for something,” I said instead.

“I’ve tried before,” he zipped his bag and settled it across his shoulder once again. “It’s like he just…I don’t know. Disappeared, or something.”

“How bizarre.”

“I know. Sometimes, I wonder—“

A cell phone began chirping urgently. With practiced ease, Damien shifted his cup to his other hand and extracted a phone from his pocket. It was sleek and chrome and looks incredibly efficient.

“Damn. I need to run,” he said, staring at the blinking screen. “But you’ll have to let me know what you think of those.” He nodded towards the stories and a lock of hair tumbled into his eyes. He shook it away and his eyes locked on mine. “Sometime next week, alright?”

I nodded, and felt heat tingle through my hand as I held my own cup tighter and tighter.

“Excellent.” He smiled that charmingly bemused smile at me. “I’ll try to be a better stalker and not scare you to death next time, ok?”

I laughed. “Fair enough.”

He jogged across the street and headed into the network of streets by St. Michael’s Church, while I sagged into the wall and grinned like an idiot.

That night, after Mitch got home and showered away the stale smoke and fug of other people’s colognes, we made Flingpot for dinner in his house. Flingpot, you see, involves collecting all the potentially perishable things in the refrigerator and flinging them in a pot. That night, our Flingpot consisted of basmati rice, red peppers, mushrooms, broccoli and cloves, and was remarkably edible. Especially considering the other combinations of Flingpot we’d tried in the past…

While cleaned up, I filled Mitch in on my run-in with Damien and the new Barnaby Rutledge stories he’d provided.

“Hmm,” Mitch tapped a spoon against the inside of the metal sink, clearly delighted by the hollow clunking sound it produced. “I’d keep an eye on him, Kip.” He grinned wickedly. “He’s clearly got his on you.”

I threw a sponge at him.

“We’re changing the subject.”

Mitch rolled his eyes and flicked an errant soap smudge from his sweater.

“Very well,” he sighed dramatically. “What about the Rutledge bloke’s stories?”

“No idea. Haven’t looked at them as yet.”

“Good. I’m too tired to watch a film. You can read to me.”

So we tramped across to my house, which had more furniture, and Mitch sprawled out on the divan, his bright eyes fixed on the photocopies in my hands.

“Go on then. What’s it say?”

“Well, the introductory stuff says that Rutledge was in the First World War…apparently saw action at Ypres in 1915, the Dardanelles, the Somme….Jesus, back to Ypres in 1917—how the hell did he manage all that? –And was taken prisoner in the winter of 1917-8. Treated for shell-shock—little surprise there—and began writing in order to “expunge the memories of the horrors from his mind.” Apparently, he suffered severe insomnia and most of his descriptions of the people in the hospitals were taken from real life, observed at night while they slept.”

“How awful,” Mitch breathed.

“I know. Let’s see… released from Queens Square National Hospital in 1926 and published continually until his death in 1941. No mention of any private life, though…hmm… Listen to this: ”His departure from our workaday world is a tragedy among tragedies. Alone, without family and with only the specters of his past for company, Mr. Rutledge’s works are terrifying, entrancing reminders of the darkness that is possessed in every human soul. His writing probes the secrets in all our hearts and sings a siren’s song of madness that every heart can, in some way, understand.”

“Well, if that wasn’t histrionic, I don’t know what is.”

I grinned distractedly. “Agreed. But did you hear that? ‘His departure from the world.’ Not ‘his death’.”

“Just a quaint little euphemism, isn’t it?”

“Is it? That Wikipedia entry said he might have faked his death.”

“Do you listen to yourself sometimes? A Wikipedia article?”

“I know, I know. But it is interesting.”

“No, I suppose you’re right. It is odd. And he had a family somewhere, too.”

“Good point.”

“So what stories are there?”

There were two. One was entitled “Down from the Mountain”, and was a retelling of a sorts of Rip Van Winkle. In this version, a soldier is released from a POW camp in Germany and finds himself in an utterly changed, utterly alien world: “Women walked about dressed as men and men sat is metal chairs with vacant eyes and useless limbs.” The man finds work at a restaurant where he plays the piano while the strange, unknowable people eat: “They consumed their food, they talked and they lived with a strange, frenzied haste, as if they knew everything before them could be obliterated. Life had to be lived at a pace that kept time with the scream of bombs and the march of boots. And in his corner, The Man tapped at his keys and marked their time for them, all the while wondering if the horrors he had escaped were not quite as frightening as the world into which he had been freed.”

In the end, The Man sees a woman he had loved from before the war. He tried to play a song for her that will make her remember him:

And whatever was left of his stained soul called out to whatever was left in her that could still be called human. And as he played, he heard the wind sigh in trees that had been burned to ashes years before, and the laughter of children long since dead, and felt the heat of the sun on skin, which, for an instant was smooth and young and nearly beautiful. And she turned her head and looked at him and he wished that he had died in the cold or in the flames or in the filth. For there was nothing in her eyes but vacant fear. The soul he had known was gone and she was one of Them.”

“My Lord,” Mitch huffed as he rolled over, his long fingers brushing at the fringe of the blanket over the back of the divan. “He can make anything sound like a nightmare, can’t he.”

I nodded, thinking of the Lost Angel from the last story and the song she had heard in the shadows of the ward. There was a odd feeling of continuation in the two stories that made my skin tingle.

“I mean,” Mitch propped himself up and pointed to the page. “How do you think like that? Are you born that…dark? That fucked up? Or…”

What had that other story said? That the fiancé was “lost in the great fire of 1917”. Not killed. Taken prisoner.

“Or did he become like this?” He looked up at me, the echo of my question on his face.

The other story had mentioned her eyes, too. Vacant eyes. And this woman was silent, too.

“Read the next one.” He said, rolling over onto his back once again and folding his arms around him. “Not like I can be any more disturbed, right?”

My mother would have called them “Famous last words”.

The italic introduction noted that the second story was taken from Rutledge’s 1940 book, The Many Deaths of Barnaby Rutledge. “Perhaps the most well-known of Rutledge’s works,” the introduction explained, “it has never been determined how much of the stories in this collection were taken from the author’s experience and how much was a product of imagination or hearsay. What is certainly true is that, of all of Rutledge’s stories, these are the most realistic and, perhaps, the most simplistic. In the following, Rutledge seeks not to trap the reader in a nightmare, but to lay before them the truth, which, under his pen, is equally as chilling and labyrinthine.”

The except was only five pages long…

"The Lost Angel"

As the day remained sunny and not entirely unsummery, I got off the 76 around Southgate Road and began the walk back home. I was eager to read the Rutledge manuscript, but if my inner six-year-old would sit still a lot longer if I tired her out a bit first. Like a true New Englander, I could feel rain in the wind, which would mean confinement to a fug-filled bus full of damp and grumpy Londoners, so I decided to enjoy the open air as long as possible.

My cell phone began buzzing in my backpack, rattling against my keys and causing a racket loud enough to make a passing jogger turn and regard me warily as I swung the bag over my shoulder and fumbled to extract the phone.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“Nearly home. You?”

“Just finishing up here.”

“Where is here?”

“Covent Garden.” The blare of a truck horn bellowed down the line and I heard Mitch’s muttered curse before he continued. “Some American family gave me fifteen pounds!”

I giggled. “Someone didn’t read the exchange rate properly, me thinks.”

“I’m not complaining, but I don’t want to be around when they figure it out for themselves. Anyway, you want burritos for dinner?’

“Have I mentioned to you lately that I think you are wonderful?”

I could hear him snicker. “Not in the past few hours, ungrateful thing that you are.”

“How about I let you pick the movie, then?”

Neither of our families had seen it as worthwhile to pay for a TV license in a house in which they were no longer residing, and the two of us decided we’d be damned—or starving—if we forked over it. So we watched one hell of a lot of movies. And ate a great many burritos from this new place in Islington that had given out free food the day it opened and got us both hooked. In the seven or eight weeks we’d been—co-habitating, I guess is the best word—Mitch and I had watched nearly a hundred movies and I’m sure the mail-rental company was kicking themselves that we were getting charged a flat monthly rate to rob them blind.

“Whatever came in today is fine. Chicken for you?”

“Yuppers. No beans, extra cheese.”

“Sounds good. I’ll probably be back by seven—ok?”

“Perfect.”

“I think I’m about to be hit by a bus.”

And he hung up.

Thanks, Mitch.

I pushed open the door to the house and gathered up the mail that had accumulated on the floor, adding it to the trash bag hanging behind the kitchen door, tossing the next delivery of DVDs on the living room coffee table, and put the kettle on for tea. Ten minutes later saw me in my ratty black sweatpants and an enormous t-shirt I had inherited at some point in my wanderings, curled up on the sofa beside a large mug of tea and tucking into the photocopies of what looked to be Barnaby Rutledge’s last manuscript.

I should have known I was in for something strange as soon I read the author’s note on the second page:

Author’s Note:

These stories, like so many of the others, are all true, for there is no story written that is not in some way the confession of a truth. The face of the confessor is unimportant, for in revealing his tale, he ceases to become unique and instead joins the procession of human smoke that rises from the ashes of history and disappears without trace. It is only I, who am watching you now, as ever, who remains.

BR.

“Holy hell,” I muttered, laying the sheet face down on the coffee table before looking down at the one beneath it.

Dedication:

For the one who has never left me.

I pulled the blanket on the back of the couch over my legs and shimmied down beneath it, as if hiding.

The stories were all set in a ward in a national hospital somewhere in London. A nurse on the night watch was walking from bed to bed and checking on the men who slept—or didn’t—on each. As she looked at them, another story began, whether of their childhood, their wartime experience, or whatever specific memory defined them and defined the cause of their madness.

They were beautifully well-written, with long, elegant sentences that made you feel like there was someone, tall and thin and wasted, who was curled up beside you and whispering in your ear. And because it was so graceful, it was all the more frightening. The beauty of it transfixed you, and by the time you realized what this crazed man had done to his characters—or what they had done to him, since it seemed that it was their combined madness that had sent him to this imaginary hall lunacy—it was too late to look away. Despite the residual heat of the day, I was curled up under the blanket and the fringes of it were dusting my face by the time I was a third of the way through the stories.

The one that stuck with me the most was the one in the middle, a kind of intermission in this insane literary circus. It was the story of the nurse herself, who looked in at each of the men in the ward. Rutledge described her as “too tall for delicacy and eyes just a little too wide-set and wide for beauty, with a tide of dark hair curling behind her ears and small, childlike hands. Standing in the doorway, a man might be fooled into believing her an angel of mercy in that hall of tormented spirits. But one look at those eyes showed that she was nothing more than a ghost herself, a soul, like all the others, frozen in another time and forced forever to hide in the darkness of memory.”

The other stories told of violence, of angry death or shouted curses that had chased these men into this ward. The Nurse’s story (we never learn her name. She is only referred to as “The Nurse”, or “The Lost Angel”, which is also the title of the story) was different. She had grown up nearly mute, speaking only when there was no other way of communicating, and no one was nearby to speak for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid or unable to speak, it was that “words held no power over her”, which seemed utterly contradictory to me. That a woman created with words could refuse the power of them made her somehow disturbing, and yet, infinitely more real than the other characters. It was as if she had managed to break free of the author’s control and was wandering around the book of her own free will. Anyway, she was loved by a man (who also had no name) who had written her a tune on the piano, since she refused to hear any spoken declaration of his feelings for her. They had been engaged when the war broke out, and had both enlisted, he as a Captain and she as a nurse. He was lost in “the great fire of 1917”, which I could only assume was 3rd Ypres, more commonly known as the Battle of Passchendale.

The man who loved her had written her several letters from the battle, telling her of the horrors of the trenches and of the lunatic beauty of shells exploding at night and the “exquisite horror of treading the circles of the damned”. In truth, he sounded like the maddest of them all. When she had opened the letter, she had begun to hear his song playing on the air, and assumed him to be dead. When no telegram arrived, and no news of his injury or capture was forthcoming, she had burned the letter. The music had sounded from the flames. Now, wherever she went, “she was followed by the cadence of a melody she knew better than her own soul”. The reason she was in the ward, peering in at all these men, was in the hopes of finding her fiancé among them. But there was no recognition in any of the dull eyes before her. She never spoke—indeed, it was assumed by most of the men that she was unable to speak.

“But what use were words,” Rutledge asked at the end of the story, “crude, useless words that could speak only of mud and of death and of pain, when in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity?”

It was melodramatic, yes, and perhaps a little more dated than the others because of the nature of its subject matter, but I was shivering when I had finished reading it. The room seemed filled with ghosts and with ghostly music and try as I might, I couldn’t help but hear the footsteps of that silent, haunted nurse, forever treading the halls, searching for something she would never…

“Do you want to eat in here or in the kitchen?”

I let out a yelp and tumbled off the couch.

“What the—are you alright?”

“When the hell did you come in?”

“Like, five minutes ago—didn’t you hear me say “Hi Kip, I have dinner?”

The smell of spiced chicken and peppers began to waft across the room and I sat up, disentangling myself from the blanket and blinking at Mitch.

“No, actually. Jesus, you scared me.”

“Sorry. What are you reading, then?”

I held up the book and gave him a brief explanation of the stories while we carried plates and glasses into the living room. I tucked Mr. Rutledge back into his folder, slid him back into my bag, and settled back down on the couch with Mitch’s laptop on the coffee table between us.

“My, my. Sounds like a charming subject matter. So—what’s come in, then?” He asked, tucking into his burrito with gusto.

“Umm…” I giggled. “My Fair Lady and The Green Mile. What the hell?”

“Mmm…My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn’s better looking than Tom Hanks.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat, chewing and singing along at intervals, and I expressed the wish that all lower-middle class workers in England really did burst into song at every opportunity. The group dances would make economic history much more interesting. Mitch snorted and turned up the volume to drown out my ruminations.

Do you know the scene where Higgins brings Eliza to the races and she goes on and on about how her aunt died of influenza—“fairly blue with it, she was”? If you do, take a look at the way Freddie looks at her while she’s giving that little speech. That, I realized belatedly, was the same way Ned had been looking at me while I was rambling on earlier that afternoon. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it, even as I felt a furious blush rising to my cheeks.

“So tell me,” Mitch said, as the ‘intermission’ played, “how did you manage to find this mad Mr. Rutledge?”

“I met a guy in one of my classes who is working on his as part of his dissertation. He said he’d loan me some, but we had this at the museum and I figured I’d—“

“Wait, wait, wait. You ‘met a guy’?” I thought Mitch’s eyebrows were going to raise themselves right off his forehead. “As in ‘met a guy’?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean!” He poked one absurdly strong finger into my arm.

“Ow, you maniac! No—I mean…well, we did go out for coffee.”

“Alright, do you want me to alert the media, or just your mother?”

I swatted at him. “It’s nothing! Just—“ and he burst out laughing.

“Whatever you say, Miss Philby.” The ‘intermission’ scene faded and Rex Harrison began stalking across the screen once more.

“Funny,” Mitch mumbled through the last few bites of burrito. “I would have assumed poetry or something to get a nice girl to notice you, not a bunch of awful madmen in a war hospital.” He sniggered. “This bloke must have you down to a tee.”