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 From a professional standpoint, having spent years reading historical documents, there was something about Rutledge’s writing that made me incredibly uncomfortable.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.