Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Besides, Rose is allergic to cats.” She sighed and leaned down to kiss the filthy cat on the top of his ratty head, managing to convey the idea that Rose is also allergic to herself. Certainly the damnable woman acts as though she is, for she has given this girl up into my care as though she has been waiting for someone to come along and lay claim to her. I know how society views such a relationship, but she is hardly Lolita and I am not in the market for a prison sentence.

  But what if—just what if—you found the dearest friend of your life in the body of a twelve-year-old girl? Written out, it looks perverse, but it doesn’t feel so when she is sitting here discussing Plato or the Ulster Cycle with me, or making me laugh as I no longer thought it possible to laugh.

  When I queried the universe as to whether there was an invisible sign out there that had denoted me as a flophouse for the world’s strays, she asked me if I considered her such. She has not learned the art of coyness, therefore I knew it was an honest question and so I answered it in kind.

  “No, you are not a stray, Pamela. You are my friend.”

  “Thank you,” she said back to me, with the grave look that penetrates right through to my soul.

  What I did not add was that it is myself who is the stray, and that someday she will be old enough to know that. For now I am grateful for her ignorance.

  August____, 1962

  I have a manuscript due with my publishers in London at the end of this month. The last tome from the purple pen of the Professor, I hope.

  With this deadline hovering, I was in the back garden—such as it is—scribbling, cat upon my knee, when she came on me.

  “What are you writing?” she asked, plunking herself down in the canvas chair opposite, Louis abandoning me with yowling meows the minute he saw her.

  I started and flushed as guiltily as if she had come across me naked, doing something reprehensible to a sheep.

  “Oh, it’s that sort of thing,” she said, then raised a brow at me and smiled. For a single moment, it was as though the woman that she will one day be looked straight out her eyes at me and I was struck to the spot. I envy the man who will one day have her for his own. He is fortunate.

  “I have read Catullus, after all,” she said, and gave me a look that can only be described as bold. Sometimes I wonder if it is I who is not old enough for her.

  August____, 1962

  I can no longer reach Colleen. The nuns say she has asked to be left in silence for awhile. I do not know what to make of this. I only know it felt as though someone had stabbed me hard in the chest when the good sister said, ‘I regret to tell you, Mr. Kirkpatrick…’

  Yes, I regret too, dear Sister Anne. I regret so many things. I regret that I do not know how to pull my wife back from the wasteland into which she has wandered. A realm that she has traveled so far into that I fear I may never be able to retrieve her and bring her back into the warmth of what we knew for such a brief time. For I am no white knight, nor do I possess a steed that can carry me through the thicket of thorns and pain that separates us now.

  In fairytales, the princess always ends up with her prince, but this is not a fairytale and I cannot cross wastelands without water or forge pathways through fire. What the fairytales don’t always tell you is that in real life the prince sometimes has to let the princess go, even if she is taking his heart with her and he doesn’t expect ever to have it returned.

  What if all she needs is for me to let her go? Do I have the strength for that? For I truly believed, in that mute core where we all hold our most unshakeable beliefs, that we would love each other through this lifetime into old age and infirmity. And now—now I do not know what I believe anymore.

  August____, 1962

  There are ghosts in my head tonight, dreadful, rattling things with the wind singing laments through their bones. That poem by Sorley McLean is brought sharply to mind—

  Who is this, who is this in the night of the heart?

  It is the thing that is not reached,

  the ghost seen by the soul...

  That is so exact, the ghost seen by the soul—elusive, yet I am never able to rid myself of it. When the days are especially sharp and bright and the very air tastes like wine, I know I will soon see that ghost. I can hear the faint echo of its chains rattle most clearly when my mind is fire bright and I can write without sleep or sustenance for days.

  Tonight, however, is not a firelit one, and I can see the outlines of that ghost clearly, and how very dark and nasty is his shape, his visage that of hell itself. The shade of him is on the wall, flickering in my peripheral vision but not to be seen face on. He is too clever for that, this dark slitherer that infests my brain at will.

  Tomorrow morning I may well wake up in another world, another universe even. I will be able to see the old one from my vantage point, but I will not be able to touch it nor find my way back to it. For there are holes between this world and that, fractured panes of glass through which one can view events and people though the broken glass always distorts them, shapes all interactions oddly, changes the light and the sound so that voices come from a great distance yet are overly loud and grating—as though every word slaps my skin and flicks at my nerves. But there are no maps for this dark planet.

  Sometimes I really do believe the dead can walk. Because there are nights I’m certain I’m one of them.

  August____, 1962

  I have lost three days, just like that, as though the planet whirred round triple fast on its orbit and flung three days out into space. I might even think this had happened except that it appears the rest of the world did indeed experience those three days. I haven’t had a blackout like this since I was nineteen and it has shaken me to my roots. I don’t know where I went or what I did and can only hope that I holed up somewhere and did no damage to anyone or anything.

  I woke up two nights ago in a mist-chill field with no idea of how I came to be there, nor what field it was or even if I’d managed to stay on the Island. I set out walking in an easterly direction for I could hear the sea faint on the night air and knew if I could make my way there, I could navigate back to this shambling salt tossed cottage and lock myself in until I could turn the world back from its upside-down orientation.

  I have that dreadful arid feeling in my head, as though my mind and memory are nothing more than sand blown about by any chance ill wind. I write here in the vain (I fear) hope that something will swim up out of the pitch dark of my subconscious and shine a small light on what took place these last days. Even in my bipolar state, I know this sort of incident is not normal—as much as anyone can apply the term ‘normal’ to a mental illness.

  Apparently I have been cared for during this episode. Once I was lucid enough to realize how much time had passed, I stumbled out to the stable to check on Pelargonium, worried that he was half-starved and dehydrated with neglect. But there was fresh hay in his stall, unsullied water in the trough and a look of smug contentment on his face that said he’d had adequate exercise. It’s as though a fairy has stolen in and out and arranged things so that my disappearance would leave no trace upon either myself or my surroundings. There is fresh milk in the fridge, tea (loose—so I know the Irish preference is understood) and the place has been dusted and aired. The sheets are fresh and there is a vase stuffed willy-nilly with the wild roses that fill the roadsides here.

  It is, of course, Pamela who has been, done, and cared. Sometimes she seems a child and others, like now, she is far older in soul than anyone else I’ve ever met. I tried to thank her, to ask her what had happened, what she’d witnessed but she only looked at me long and soberly, and said, “It’s alright, Jamie. We don’t need to talk about it.”

  And that, it seems, is to be the last word, for she refuses to speak to me on the subject. Which begs the question of what the hell I may have done or said to her during that time. I shudde
r to think, because I have no memory and feel like I am only now inhabiting my body once again. I try to judge by the way she holds herself and the look in her eyes—normally so telling—but currently she is a closed book where I am concerned.

  August____, 1962

  My oceaniade refuses to leave me to the mercies of myself and has been here each night since I came up out of the abyss. I suspect somehow, in some way, she is responsible for my reappearance in the land of the living.

  That first evening after I returned to myself, she sat propped in the ancient chair at the end of my bed, a worn copy of Seneca’s ‘Letters From a Stoic’ spread open on her knees. I told her she needed to get herself home before dark, to which she replied, ‘I’ve brought my things, and am staying the night.’ To which I replied, ‘No, you are not.’ She merely looked at me with those terribly candid eyes and said, ‘I hardly think you’re ready to be alone. You might wake up in a field again. Besides, I’ve told Rose I’m staying at Katy Lipton’s house so going home now would only get me into a heap of trouble.”

  “And what if Rose finds out?” I asked.

  “She won’t,’ she said. “She never checks anything.” As this is only too true, I had no following argument. I hardly knew how to broach the subject of how inappropriate it was for a girl of her age to be staying with a man of mine. I knew such arguments would hold no sway with her. But as usual, she read my mind and laid it out for me in black and white.

  “I can tell by the crease in your forehead that you’re worried about what people will think and say, but as you live at the end of nowhere here, I hardly think we need to worry about it.”

  She manages to silence me in this way at least three times a day. I imagine it’s good for my character but it does get a tad annoying to be anticipated in this manner.

  So she stayed, safely tucked up in the other room, yet with a good view of the door, should I try to make a night flit again. Oddly, I was comforted by her presence and slept as I have not in many months.

  And so it is with words and the fresh heart of a young girl that I am drawn forth through each circle of hell, until I find myself standing once again on terra firma and recognizing the face that looks at me with those green eyes as pure and beneficent as spring after a bitter winter. A child has been my salvation and my rock, and suddenly I am afraid to be without her.

  She closed the journal there and laid it down on the desk in front of her. Outside the afternoon light had faded into a chill spring evening and a wind had come up, causing the rose canes to scratch against the study windows as though seeking entrance. Her tea break was long over and she had been caught up in reading Jamie’s thoughts for the better part of an hour.

  The journal made clear something she had always suspected—that there were things he did not remember—had not even been aware of when they happened. He didn’t know the reason she would not leave him for that first week after his collapse was because she was terrified that he would kill himself, either accidentally or with full intent. He could never have known, of course, the things he had shouted during the worst of it. Nor the way his eyes had burned hollow with a pain that was so tangible it became an entity unto itself, a third being there in the room with them.

  Even now the remembrance of it made her stomach cramp.

  During the very worst of it, she had barred the door and slept curled on the mat in front of it like a dog guarding its master from the wolves that howled incessantly outside. Only the wolves were within, and there was no earthly guard against that. And then there had been that night when he had lain there with those lightless eyes wide open, yet she knew he was not present—as though the bright spirit that lived within was submerged in a primeval swamp from which it could not surface. That night, she had crawled into the bed with him and held his hands in her own. And she had offered up as sacrifice every bit of beauty her young life had known, every song, every story, every ripple of light on water—all of it was said and sung, words to build a webbed bridge by which he might safely cross the chasm of the night.

  Though she had been only inches from him, she knew he did not see her, did not recognize her presence, for certainly he never would have allowed the proximity had he been even vaguely aware. So it was she was able to wipe his face with cool cloths and smooth the golden hair out of his eyes. To this day she could feel the fear of that night, how it had wrapped them both as in a thick and cloying shroud—he lost to his own demons, swarming up endlessly from the abyss—and she in terror for him. It had been that night she had told him, because he could not hear nor protest, that she loved him. The words had seemed natural, despite the fact that she had never uttered them to anyone outside of her father in all her life.

  Because she was neither a child nor yet a woman, she gave him her heart in a way that a child could not have, and a woman would have had the wisdom not to. Only he did not know and she did not have the words to tell him of the gift he had been given.

  Through him, in those three days, she glimpsed the edge of the abyss and found herself so afraid that she was physically ill with it. That the human mind could turn on its owner in this fashion, rabid as a hellhound, she had not known. That a mind could subject someone to such torment, could seize and grasp and bind to the point of madness, was not knowledge most would encounter in a lifetime. To witness it firsthand bound her to this man as little else could have done. It did not occur to her to call for help, to find someone in the medical profession to come with needles and pills, because she knew Jamie would not want it, that somehow the abyss was as necessary as it was dreaded.

  So it was that they crossed it together, Jamie in its depths and she walking the tightrope above, never losing sight of him, and dragging him inexorably to that far shore where sanity, arid and overly bright, awaited him. She suspected he would not thank her for it, but she would do it nonetheless, for there was nothing in her young life that had taught her that there might be choice in such a time.

  In any event, he was too sick when he regained consciousness to either thank or castigate her. The sickness he could deal with himself, dragging himself back to the bed, hair translucent with perspiration, eyes dark but no longer hollow. He was too weak to order her away from him, and for that she was grateful.

  She lived a strange life that next week, slipping in and out of the cottage that she shared with Rose, pretending to go to sleep in her own bed, only to slip into the moonlit shadows and onto the long sandy road to that other cottage after dark, for she would not leave Jamie for more than a few hours at a time. Rose, thankfully, fell into an alcoholic stupor early in the evening and as long as Pamela made a show of going off to bed, barefoot and clad in her nightgown, she never checked further.

  Jamie, without much choice in the matter, left the door unlatched for her. Stripped down to his essentials both mentally and emotionally, he gave no time to remonstrating with her, for he sensed, she thought, how little good it would do him.

  The nights were the most difficult for him. That was clear. As though the darkness itself came and sat upon his shoulders, a great and weighty bird of prey, waiting to clutch and claw at his brain. And so from dusk to dawn she read to him, curled in the tatty chair that she had pulled to the foot of his bed. She read the books from which he had read to her and many others besides, songs both of innocence and experience, books of dry wit, and books of fulsome beauty. She read poems from other ages more golden than this one, but just as fraught with all the foibles of man and womankind.

  In this manner, over the course of that week, she put her hand in his and drew him step by step away from the lip of the abyss. And so it was that a friendship whose bonds had been forged in the darkest of hours was woven into an unbreakable pattern.

  Part Five

  Back in the USSR

  Russia – March-August 1973

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  March 1973

  The Frozen Forest


  His Lordship James Stuart Kirkpatrick was about as far from the glamorous world of high finance and corporate piracy as one could get and still be on the same planet within which he had once moved.

  He was, to put it succinctly, at the arse end of the world, in a prison camp where he was being held against his will for sins he wasn’t aware of committing. This was where he had awakened after the furious scuffle and world-eclipsing blow to the head. He had not seen Andrei since that morning. He had no idea if he was alive or dead, injured or himself imprisoned.

  The Soviet euphemism for this state was Repressed in the Second Category. Repressed in the First Category meant you were no longer breathing. He wondered what they would call his first week of incarceration, when they had not allowed him to sleep, questioned him under bright lights all night and then left him to sit on a stool during the day, kicking him if his eyes closed. He was given a minimum of water and an occasional heel of bread to eat—just enough, he supposed to keep him from fainting. Torture was hampered, after all, by an unconscious victim.

  He was all too well aware how much worse it might have been. He had heard tales of the tortures the secret police were capable of dishing out. They had tried a few on him, from soft-voiced persuasion of the ‘if you just tell us what we want to know, we’ll feed you, you can rest and then you can go home’, to screaming in his ears at the top of their voices about making his death long and painful, using the sudden reversals of tone to unbalance him. But they hadn’t gone further and, beyond the bruises and cuts he had sustained, they hadn’t used pain as a means to pry a confession from him. He knew how it might have been, and felt fortunate not to have had that sort of wreckage inflicted upon him—removal of fingernails, immersion in acid, strait-jacketing and something called ‘bridling’ where they put a rough length of toweling in a man’s mouth, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his ankles so that he was arched in agony for days, often until his spine snapped. These were only things he knew about, for there was no limit, apparently, to the lengths a well-fed, rested man could go to in the name of getting information out of another.