A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  It was dark in the boves, he told them. I’m glad to be home.

  There was a plate on the table. Reisden had in his pocket the last of the matches. Seven matches in a grubby cardboard box. He carefully piled six into a loose pyramid on the plate. Here is everything that keeps us apart, he said. And here’s what we’ll do with it. He lit the piled-up matches with the last; they flared up all at once. Look, here’s light, he said. With the ashes he marked her cheek and Toby’s.

  And in the euphoria after that, they simply talked. He didn’t re-member what they said, only the closeness, how beautiful she was. She talked about music, about Gilbert. She was sharing her loves, he thought. With her love. I am her love.

  “Reisden,” André said.

  For a moment he wondered what André was doing in the kitchen. He could still taste the tea— His throat felt sunburned. He groped for the idea he had had. He sat up and felt dizzy, disoriented in the absolute darkness. “My turn to watch. How long—?”

  Too long. He felt it by how thirsty he was. He smelled it in the breeze from the air shaft. It smelled warm; smelled like the sun over a field.

  “I don’t know, your watch has stopped. But I heard bells,” André said, “the bells from Sainte-Catherine. It’s nine o’clock. We ought to see light.”

  Reisden looked up, eyes wide, staring, trying to see a square of grey in the black. He could smell the hay. And with it, overpowering it, the damp stone chill of the boves.

  Reisden could see the top of this shaft as clearly as if he were standing in it. A cave with an opening facing westward toward the prevailing breeze. A natural ventilation shaft. Not used by shepherds, because there was no smell of sheep, no sheep-bones at the bottom of the pit.

  At the back of a cave.

  No light.

  I am my wife’s love, he thought. I am Toby’s father. I have to live.

  “Shout with me.” They shouted raucously. The boves swallowed up their voices. Someone standing at the top of the shaft, in the cave, would have heard them. “Lift me up.” He stood on André’s shoulders, balancing unsteadily in the air shaft. I burned the matches, he thought for a moment, panicked, then struck a match and held the candle-end above his head. He was looking up at a narrow, endless, slick vertical tunnel.

  No ladders. No ropes. A very small man, chimney-sweep-size, might theoretically have braced his shoulders and feet against the walls and inched his way up the shaft. Reisden was at least a foot too tall to do it.

  He tried. He almost wedged himself immovably. He half-fell back to the floor, scraped and battered. The candle went out. André re-lit it, using another match. Reisden sat on the floor catching his breath. Jules, awake now, stared at him. Reisden touched the prickly surface of the old pulley. It was rust-eaten so badly that he could break off the edge of the wheel as easily as dried sand.

  “No one will find us here.” They had two and a half candles and five matches. “We can’t waste the light. Let’s go.”

  They turned back, away from the fresh air that smelled like life and had only been a waste of time.

  ***

  They kept the candle alight, looking at the compass to guide them back. West, then southwest, then back through tunnels they had al-ready explored. They thought they saw their own footsteps on the damp floor, but the marks could have been shadows or stains in the chalk.

  Rocks littered the floor. This was new. They stumbled over them. It felt as though they had been doing this forever. Grope forward, stumble; find an opening, look at it, wonder if it was familiar. André sniffed at the openings, trying to smell ventilation again.

  “Do you recognize anything?” Reisden asked him.

  “No.”

  Jules, head down, staggered forward, leaning against the wall. The tunnels widened a bit, for a while, and Reisden could help him walk. Jules wasalmos t dead weight, gasping, breath rattling in his dry throat. He was too far gone to apologize for being a burden.

  When the tunnels narrowed again, Jules staggered on by himself but Reisden felt Jules’s phantom weight against his shoulder. It felt as though he were carrying Toby.

  The tunnels grew more tangled, more confusing, branches divid-ing away from them. A long, promising tunnel opened up into a cave, stretching away beyond the tiny candlelight. Fallen rock littered the floor. André took Jules; Reisden led them across, stumbling over rubble from the half-fallen ceiling, following the compass needle.

  The compass would work for them only as long as they had candles. The glass kept the compass-needle on its pin. Without light they could not use the compass unless they broke the glass. Break the glass and they would lose the needle.

  They had two candles and four matches.

  They reached a wall, a tunnel. They lit their next-to-last candle to look at the compass.

  “Southwest,” Reisden said.

  “No,” André said. “I think I know—I think I went here once. It’s that way.”

  “That’s north. We’ve been there.”

  André said nothing.

  Reisden slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Jules nearly fell over; André eased him down. Reisden held the candle to look at him. In the candlelight, Jules was pale, his eyes unfocused. André’s face moved into the candlelight, looking at Jules. André’s inaudibly moving lips were cracked and his eyes looked dry.

  Reisden blew out the candle. It would take one of their last four matches to light it again.

  He laid his crossed arms on his knees and his head on his arms and closed his eyes. It was not so dark with his eyes closed, but even then he could feel it, as black as if he were blind, black enough to dissolve in. He felt as if parts of his body were breaking off, floating.

  “Reisden.” André’s hoarse whisper echoed in the big space. “Light the candle.”

  “Not yet—”

  “Yes.”

  The match scraped and caught; three left. The inch of candle guttered. At their backs the wall reflected it yellow; in front of them was only utter blackness. André leaned toward Jules. Jules was trying to say something. He gave up and took out of his pocket the little notebook and pencil he had used to talk with. “No,” André said. Jules wrote something, fumbling, scrawling, then closed his eyes. André peered at the paper. Jules looked diminished, as if thirst were eating him from inside. The bit of candle on the floor sizzled windily and went out.

  Last candle, and three matches left.

  “He says to leave him,” André said in the darkness, “but I won’t.”

  Between them they tried to haul Jules to his feet. He was a sack of dirt, completely unconscious. They staggered a few steps with him, and then his weight brought them both to their knees. They laid Jules on the tunnel floor, in the dark.

  André’s breath rasped in the darkness. “You go. Take the candles. Bring help. But it’s that way. To the right.”

  “It’s the other way.”

  Neither said anything for a moment. “Omer Heurtemance,” André said. “Showed me the boves. When I was here in the summers. I never got lost.” He was silent for a long time.

  They were going to die here, in the dark, within sound of the bells of an Arras suburb. I want my family, Reisden thought. I don’t want to die in the dark.

  “Did I kill her?” André asked suddenly.

  “No,” he said. “We were watching you.”

  “The police were saying Jules did it,” André said hesitantly. “Or me. The two of us together.”

  “No.” But that’s exactly what the police would think.

  “Or the three of us,” André said, almost panicked. “Ruthie. They could blame Ruthie.”

  Or the four of us.

  “Sabine talked to me,” Reisden said. It hurt to talk, and he was so thirsty, he was fuzzy-minded. “Saturday night. Perdita asked me who cooked rabbit for Françoise Auclart. It was Sabine.” He paused to try to swallow. “She said ‘I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything that wouldn’t have happened anyway.’”

&nb
sp; “She was always talking about fate,” André said. “Telling my fortune. Dealing the cards. She said we were fated to be together. I wanted to love her.”

  Reisden nodded, too dry-mouthed to talk.

  For a moment, in the dark, André said nothing. “She was too much like the Necro. You’d think I’d like that. She poisoned me the night we were married. She said she didn’t. Then in Egypt she gave me a charm. I finished my play, then I ate it. It stung going down. I knew what it was. But it had— you understand, Reisden, a shape? It was like a story. It made sense. But it didn’t make me love her, I only got sick to my stomach, like being hungry, worse, so I ate some more, and then I threw up on my hands and there was blood. She looked at my face and said, ‘You won’t die!’”

  Reisden closed his eyes. You let yourself be poisoned, André?

  “I wanted to die. She was,” he dropped into Necrosar, “a little too crazy for me.”

  Trust André to make Necro of it even at the end.

  Reisden levered himself painfully up against the wall. He opened the matchbox. His fingers had gone half-numb from the cold, or from simple exhaustion. He took one match carefully out of the box and closed it before he held the match against the sandpaper on the box, ready to strike it. His hands were shaking and he held the match tight; it seemed too small to feel. We are all getting to the end of our strength, he thought, even as he struck the match again and again against the side of the box. It must be damp. It would light. It had to. He gave himself a minute.

  “I hope Krauss got away with the film,” André said.

  “André.”

  “It was good.”

  If I’d got her to confess all of whatever happened, Reisden thought, would she be alive? I would be. Fighting Cyron, fighting Pétiot: but the three of us wouldn’t be here dying. Toby wouldn’t have lost his father. That’s what’s going to happen. That’s what’s happening now.

  He tried to strike the match. It sparked and then broke in half. For a moment he saw red scratched against the blackness and then the dark slammed back in.

  He held the matchbox with the last two matches between his numb shaking hands. If I drop them, he thought--

  “Hamlet,” said André in the dark. “Are you all right?”

  “Feeling a bit crazy myself.”

  “Tell me,” André said. “I’ll be Dr. Jouvet. Dr. Katzmann. Dr. Wardrell. Why are you crazy? Why are you so normal, and frightened? Did you kill yourself because I put you in my play?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me a story,” André said.

  He had spent all summer knowing what he could say to André to make him feel less alone. He had envied André, going through the experience again, banishing it. No, no, he thought, not to André, I can’t say that to André of all people; but whatever he said, to whom, probably didn’t make much difference now.

  He put the matchbox in his pocket.

  “You asked me who Gilbert Knight is.” He heard his own voice surprisingly steady and sure. “My name was Richard Knight once, and when I was eight years old I shot my grandfather.”

  André said nothing for a moment, then, just as Reisden was going to try striking the match again: “What was it like?”

  “What was it like?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I really don’t know. I don’t remember.” He shouldn’t give an easy answer. “Something’s missing. I lie a lot. I’m not quite real. Someone who was there said, Don’t say anything, Richard. Never tell. He thought he was protecting me. I didn’t tell. Now I can’t.”

  “Do you want to?”

  No, he thought. “Do you know what murder’s like? Really? This is what I know. I have to be smarter than anyone else, André, and richer, because I have to outwit the world. Perdita asked me who cooked the rabbit that killed Françoise Auclart. I told her it wasn’t important. If I’d said you’re right, André’s right, she’s a murderess, let’s arrest her, I’d have been in a world of trouble with Cyron and we would have lost Pétiot’s contract.” He willed saliva into his dry mouth. “I didn’t know what to do when Sabine told me. I waited to think of something clever. Now she’s dead and so are we. I’m sorry, André.”

  He tried to light the match. It scratched a red glow-line across the matchbox and died. One left, he thought. “Give it to me,” André said. Reisden passed over the matchbox, groping to find André’s hand, and André struck the match. It flamed; he lit the last candle with the last match and held it by Jules’ face. Jules was breathing so shallowly that his breath barely stirred the candle flame. He handed it up to Reisden.

  “I’ll stay with Jules. Try to get us out.”

  They had not settled the question of which tunnel. Reisden made his way along the wall to its entrance and held the candle high. “No, north,” André said quickly. “Reisden—”

  “Do you know the way?” Reisden asked.

  “I think I know that tunnel.”

  He turned back and looked at André, at the two of them, Jules barely visible on the ground and André sitting beside him looking up into the candle flame like a sane child, for once in his life sure about something beyond the theatre, begging to be believed. You know the boves, he thought, you explored them for years. And still you’re staying, because Jules is your friend, but also because your father told you you can’t be a man unless you stay to the end of the deathbed. And I’m going because a murderer trusts only himself.

  “Do you really know the way?” Reisden said. “Then I’m staying with him. You’re going.” He held out the candle.

  The tiny weight felt heavy in his hand. The flame bobbed at the end of an inch of wax. “Take it. Careful. If you’re wrong I’ll haunt you.”

  For a dizzying moment he was giving the candle to mad Necrosar. The dark, the dark, you’re afraid of the dark.... “Take it," Reisden said. “Don’t waste the light.”

  André took it and turned away, shading the candle with his hand, and the hungry dark swooped in. “Wait,” said Reisden. He ripped the stock off his shirt; he turned out his pockets. His handkerchief; Sabine’s cards, which for a moment he didn’t remember her giving him. Jules’ notebook, which he took from Jules’ lax hand. “They’ll burn. They’ll give you light.”

  “Keep something—”

  “No.”

  The light moved away across the cave. It was a glow, then a spark; then gone. Reisden closed his eyes and laid his head on his arm, his arm across his knees, trying to keep warm, listening to Jules’ breathing in the dark. “Jules?” Jules did not reply; and after a while he could no longer hear Jules’ breathing, and then not even his own. His face was cold and numb, his hands were numb, he could not feel his eyelids or know whether his eyes were open or shut, or whether he had hands or arms or legs, except by the pressure of the dark against them. The darkness pressed in on him, with the weight of thousands of pounds of earth above him. He had been buried alive. He remembered every Necro horror André had ever conjured out of the dark, and wished he hadn’t, but remembering them was a trick to keep the worst of the dark away. And he ran out of them and there was nothing left but the dark, eating him down to the skeleton.

  After an indefinite time, out of the darkness, something touched him. A cane, the thick metal end of a heavy lead-weighted cane in an enormous hand. Poking into the back of a too-small dark closet where a child was hiding, jabbing, trying to make the child run like a scared animal. Richard? An old man’s voice, harsh, demanding. Richard, come out, or it will be the worse for you.

  William.

  He saw what happened next. Not with the same feelings he had had then, as if he could know that. He saw William poking his cane into the closet under the stairs, and Richard finally being driven out, backed up, into the front room. He saw William cleaning his guns, looking up with his mad grey eyes toward his grandson, and the child, only a little less mad, seeing the little pistol, knowing what would happen to him because he knew what he would do.

  It wasn’t happening to Reisden—A
lexander von Reisden had a quarter-century’s practice at not being Richard Knight—but it was happening and he was there and he knew what he felt now. And he knew what to do, because for five years he had been Reisden of Jouvet. “Richard,” he said, “you don’t belong here now. Make yourself safe. Go.” He saw the child turn and look at him, surprised. How much, how very much, he looked like Toby. He smiled. And then Richard—faded; he was simply not there.

  I am making a play, Reisden thought, like André. I must tell Katzmann this is how one can bear remembering.

  You can have me, he told William. Stay with me if you want. Haunt me; I murdered you. You have a right to me. But you don’t beat children around me. I don’t let you.

  William stood, shaking his lead-weighted cane; but he couldn’t lift it, he couldn’t raise his arm, and after a moment Reisden saw why; his arms were tied. Behind him, shadowy, stood André’s slant-eyed angels.

  I will have you, Sir! William cried out all the same. You will obey, Sir! You will do my will!

  Reisden watched him, not taking his eyes off him. William was frightening. What am I doing, he thought, letting Richard go, letting William in my life?

  Darling, said Dotty, is he a case?

  He turned and looked at her in surprise. What are you doing here, darling? She was dressed in the pastel silk and ropes of pearl that she had worn to face Gehazy.

  You know I always come when you need me, she said, making a face.

  I wonder what makes this man tick, said Leo, coming up beside her, examining William. I wonder what he means by what he does.

  He wanted to see Perdita and Toby; those were the ghosts he wanted to spend this last time with. But Gilbert came next. Gilbert and Elphinstone. I promised you, Gilbert said. If you needed me I would come. They sat for a while, Elphinstone’s head leaning against Reisden’s knee. William, tied to the bedpost, shouted at them. They talked about him as if he were not there.