The Curfew Circle

by Nina Dreyer

  ‘See that you don’t,’ said John.

  The lieutenant shrank back a little. ‘It may not be my place, but I want to speak my piece. The men are unsettled by him. By him coming here. It’s rumoured that he keeps occultists, that he dabbles in infernalism, and that unnatural things occur in his rooms…’

  John looked on patiently while Rothman continued speaking. He lit a cigarette and exhaled, savouring the scratch of tobacco at the back of his throat and gazing up at the dark-glazed portraits on the walls.

  The lieutenant finally stopped talking.

  Brock stared at the man in disbelief, then split his face into a throaty laugh. ‘Well, John! What do you say to that!’

  John smiled crookedly. ‘Dabbling? I don’t dabble, sir.’

  ‘Quite right sir, quite right.’ Brock laughed again, then turned in his chair and pointed at the lieutenant. ‘Now you, clear off. I’ll look past this indiscretion of yours this one time, on account of your service to your country, but if I hear your tongue wagging about this, so help me…’

  Hold your tongue, thought John, or the colonel will slice it out and eat it for supper, with parsley and gravy and a crisp napkin tucked under his fat chin. The lieutenant left, and the red door slid shut behind him.

  ‘Quite the fearsome fellow you are, then.’

  John shrugged. ‘Something of a folk devil, it seems.’

  ‘Are they really saying things like that?’ Brock bit down on his pipe and looked at John. For a moment, John thought he saw concern in the older man’s eyes. Probably just a trick of the light.

  ‘They don’t say it to my face.’

  ‘Wretched business, I say,’ Brock snorted and shook his head, ‘bloody wretched, talking behind the back of a fellow like that.’

  ‘Returning to the topic of my proposal,’ said John. ‘A demonstration can be arranged, at your liking.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘Anywhere, really. Your residence.’

  Brock furrowed his brow. ‘My wife sleeps there, you know, some of my men have their offices there. I can’t say I want you to raise the dead there.’

  Raise the dead, thought John. Such a lurid an expression, so full of blood and blind terror. He imagined Brock cowering like a frightened caveman by a little fire in the vast cavernous darkness, whimpering for fear of the encroaching presences. ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Uncalled for.’ Brock tugged at his stiff collar. ‘I don’t want my wife or my staff needlessly unsettled, that’s all. This demonstration of yours, this business of yours… my staff and my wife, they’re damn skittish people. What if they start imagining themselves to be persecuted by tormented souls?’

  John rose, sauntered to the window and peered into the sleet-streaked night. Down below, in the courtyard, a sentry stomped his boots and breathed into his hands for warmth.

  ‘There is no pain on the other side,’ John said quietly. ‘It’s sublime, like a still sea of pale silver under a haze of dawn light. There may be a momentary… discomfort. But nobody is in pain on the other side. People who blather on about ghosts and horrors, they’re only superstitious. Ignorant. It’s not real, Brock.’

  Brock looked at him for a long moment, his pipe still unlit in his hand. ‘Well, that’s alright then,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s have your demonstration, and we’ll see what can be done. But do not, and I mean do not breathe a word about this to anyone, especially anyone in G Division.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Now, mind you,’ Brock pointed the pipe at John, ‘I won’t take just any old mumbo-jumbo. Give me something solid, something real. Something I can use to bash these miscreants over the head with.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said John, ‘I’ll show you what we can do.’

  Marion knelt on her floor in the bleary dawn light, sleeves rolled up, scrubbing her floor boards with Mrs. Skeehan’s bristle brush. Besides her stood a battered metal bucket and a box of lye soap. She had not bothered to explain to the landlady why she needed to take these from her kitchen, and Mrs. Skeehan hadn’t asked. In fact, she hadn’t looked Marion in the eye since the night before, nor had she called for anyone to come repair the front door. She just sat in her kitchen with her rosary, looking bleakly at the grey light from the small window.

  Marion dipped the brush in the reddening water and scrubbed again in short, hard bursts. The stain had seeped into the floorboards and blackened them with the young man’s blood.

  She leaned back on her heels and dropped the brush in the bucket.

  The stain would never come out. It would remain there forever. Another blood splatter left behind by the English, another life crushed under the ceaseless stomp of their boots, another life carelessly tossed aside like a chewed bone stump.

  Wiping her eyes on her sleeve, Marion went to her dressing table and fumbled in a drawer until she found her jewellery box. From it, took from it a small golden medallion, beaten and worn. She curled her fingers around it, feeling the rough texture of the medallion’s edges dig into the palm of her hand. She gazed at it. In the centre, a symbol was carefully carved. Marion smiled sadly and ran a chilled fingertip over it. It was an ancient symbol, obscure now to many, but beloved for its comfort and strength to those who knew and understood. A symbol of order and luck, of the power behind the sun.

  She pressed the medallion to her cold lips. ‘Erich,’ she whispered, ‘I’m trying to be strong. To do right, now.’ She remembered the night when he had given her this medallion, slipping its cold chain around her bared neck under the silver glow of the harvest moon of 1914. You must be strong now, he’d said with that commanding expression on his lean face that forbade any tears, you have no other choice now but to be strong. You will not fail me. She didn’t truly deserve to wear this medallion anymore. Not after what she’d done to him. ‘I’ll be strong now,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll see, Erich. I’ll do the right thing, this time.’

  She knelt by the young man’s bloodstain. She’d wait here. For however long it took. She’d wait and feel for the disturbance in the air that always preceded the return of a shredded soul. She closed her eyes and listened. The dead young man’s shade might come back. And she’d be there to help him.

  Hours passed uncounted.

  Dusk settled over Dublin, and the colours bled from her walls, from her bedspread, from her green dress laid over a chair in the far corner.

  She went to take bread and water from the kitchen. Almost as a penance. Bread and water. She wrapped herself in a threadbare blanket and sat, staring, listening, feeling for the young man’s return. She watched the shadows deepen in the corners of her room and heard the noise of traffic underneath her window subside.

  In the still hour after midnight, she lit candles in a circle and watched the flames flicker in the cold draft.

  In the still hour before dawn, she began to feel unutterably lonely, and not a little foolish. Why would that young man return here when he could return to his home, to his own room, to his mother’s bedside? People did that sometimes, in the first days after a sudden death. They stood screaming by their mothers’ bedsides, screaming soundlessly to be seen and heard again. Marion had seen it happen, and it broke her heart. She closed her eyes.

  In the late afternoon, Marion felt a sudden rush of delirious fear. Here she sat, like a rabbit in a trap. The memory rushed through her mind of gun metal cold against her cheek. Gunmen waiting in shadows, waiting to return, very much alive, with revolvers in their hands. Liam’s face in a hard snarl, we will come back for you if you whisper a single word of this. Even in your dreams. We’ll know.

  By nightfall, she felt nothing at all. The hunger had died down, and she hugged herself limply as the hours ticked away unheeded. All but one of her candles had now burned down entirely. The last flame glowed dimly.

  A creak sounded on the stairs. Footsteps, hesitant.

  Marion stared unseeing at the stain on the floor. It had dried now, to the colour of old rust.

  A tap
ping on the door. Marion turned her head slowly.

  The door swung open. John emerged. For a moment, Marion thought she might be dreaming him, conjuring him from some blur of exhaustion and fear and hunger and hope.

  ‘I didn’t see you at the Salon,’ he began, then stopped talking. He stood for a moment, one hand on the door frame, blinking at her. ‘Marion? Are you ill? What on earth are you doing?’ He entered, ducking his head in the door, and saw the blood. ‘What the…’

  ‘I have to wait here,’ said Marion. Her tongue felt thick, her jaws hard and clenched from the cold.

  John turned to look at the bloodstain, his face unreadable. ‘Come on,’ he said gently. ‘You’re coming with me now.’ He pulled her up by the elbows, shook off his black coat and wrapped it around her. It felt heavy and warm from his skin.

  ‘No, I have to stay here and wait,’ said Marion. She felt dizzy, standing up too suddenly.

  John did not reply. Instead, he guided her to the door, his hand firmly on her arm. She looked down. He stepped over the bloodstain, as if it was just a wine spill left over from a party of one.

  John closed the door behind her and led her down the groaning old staircase. The front door still hadn’t been fixed. The splintered hinges groaned in the wind.

  At the foot of the stairs, Mrs. Skeehan emerged. ‘What’s this,’ she barked, her face like a low-hanging thundercloud, ‘no men after six o’clock.’ She knotted her raw hands into her apron and stared Marion up and down. ‘No men after six, you know that, that’s the rule, I don’t care how things are done wherever you’re from, here-’

  John brushed past her, tore open the splintered front door and then turned to her. ‘You let your tenants sit and starve, madam,’ he said to Mrs. Skeehan, ‘you should have sent for a doctor. This is shameful.’

  Mrs. Skeehan glowered at his expensive suit and retreated into the kitchen.

  Weak sheets of rain drizzled down the bare stone walls and grey cobblestones. John didn’t bother to shut the front door behind him. Marion felt like she might keel over, leaning on John’s arm. By the curb, a hackney coach stood waiting. The driver nodded at John, spat some tobacco and tightened his grip on the reins. Marion let John herd her into the coach. He clicked the door shut as the coach jolted into motion.

  ‘I think you should find a new place to live,’ he said slowly.

  Marion sank into his coat and slumped against the window, gazing out at the rain-sodden cyclists and the slogging rows of dreary-faced businessmen with their damp hats. She had rarely felt so drained in her life. ‘I have to come back here before the curfew hour,’ she slurred, ‘I’m waiting for someone.’

  Chapter Eight

  John lit a cigarette and checked his watch. Twenty to nine. He got up and began pacing the floor. He’d been waiting in the Salon library for over an hour. Why was this taking so long? A doctor never took this long unless there was something seriously wrong. He rubbed his eyes and felt a sinking dread as he recalled Marion crouching there on the floor of that dismal room, half-dead from exhaustion, staring at a large bloodstain surrounded by a circle of candles. Memories of that screeching Parisian trance medium flickered through his mind. He chewed his lip. No. None of that. Marion was going to be fine. Everything was going to be just fine. No use worrying. Any moment now, the doctor would come in and tell him that everything was fine. Surely.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed at his own blurry reflection in the rain-streaked window pane. The servants hadn’t closed the shutters and drawn the curtains, because John usually liked to sit here, looking out into the emptying streets. Rain dappled the glass. It was the window from which Margaret Devlin had flung herself forty years earlier. It didn’t even face the main road. He wouldn’t have chosen that one as his final exit. She would have departed this world and left her earthly remains next to the bins. What sort of death was that?

  The door opened, and Dr. Grey emerged, clutching his medical bag and sweating slightly.

  John spun around. ‘Yes? Well?’

  Grey had been attending to the mediums for almost fifteen years. He was a meek, sniffling sort of man, but his discretion was unassailable. ‘Um, yes, Mr. Kilcoyne,’ he said, pushing up his round glasses, ‘there is nothing physically wrong with her, that is, in the corporeal sense, in the sense of her bodily well-being…’

  ‘Good. So she’s fine?’

  ‘Well,’ Grey looked down at his feet, then up at the ceiling. ‘Is she a, uh, relation of yours in any sense, Mr Kilcoyne? Perhaps a, how shall one put it, a romantic interest of yours?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ John crossed his arms.

  ‘Well, um, some gentlemen take great umbrage at news like this…’

  ‘Just tell me what’s going on,’ snapped John.

  ‘She seems to labour under some malady of the spirit, that is to say, some delusion oppresses her.’

  ‘Delusion.’ John felt the back of his neck prickle.

  ‘Well, yes. She seems to have suffered a very severe shock, Mr. Kilcoyne.’ The doctor blinked his moist little eyes at him, almost reproachfully. ‘She’s not imbued with very strong and stable mental faculties, you see. I sincerely hope you haven’t been submitting her to frights and horrors and, um, and such?’

  John pondered this for a moment. ‘There was a substantial amount of blood on the floor in her room when I found her. Was that her blood?’

  Grey shook his head. ‘As I said, her malady is purely of the mind. It was only after coaxing her for an age with my promise of confidentiality that she finally spoke at all. She said she can’t tell me anything at all, and she labours under the impression that the uh,’ he glanced around the empty room and lowered his voice, ‘that the gunmen, as she said, will come to get her. To shoot her, one imagines, although who knows, when a female imagination is disturbed… Oh,’ he dabbed his forehead, ‘she expressly asked me not to tell you that, but you see, ladies are not good judges of what should and should not be imparted to their menfolk, they get embarrassed, you see, they wish to withhold certain things which a more rational mind can easily see should be-’

  ‘Gunmen. She told you that. Gunmen.’

  ‘Yes, you see,’ began Grey, warming to his subject, ‘when a female of unsound mind suffers a very severe shock, then her feminine imagination, you see, which is far more prone to feverish outbursts, can produce delusions to explain the recent trauma, so that is to say, she then begins to fantasise about being pursued by men, who purportedly wish to-’

  ‘Yes, thanks for that.’ John sighed inwardly. ‘So you’re telling me that she hasn’t been physically harmed, that it definitely was not her blood, but that she’s had some sort of shock?’

  ‘Oh yes, almost certainly. You know,’ Grey rubbed his hands, ‘it’s a fascinating medical topic. There’s a woman in Wicklow Street, a good, respectable sort of woman, and well, she was after witnessing a shooting near her home, you know, when that district inspector was shot, and now she believes she is being pursued by none other than Michael Collins himself, who is supposedly overcome by, um, unhealthy longing for her.’

  ‘Are you being quite serious?’

  ‘Oh yes. In fact, I’m presenting a paper about the phenomenon in just a few weeks. To the Royal College of Surgeons. It would be extremely helpful to me, Mr. Kilcoyne, if you’d allow me to return and interview this young lady again? For my research?’ He blinked hopefully at John.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ said John, in his most level voice. Grey deflated a little. ‘But tell me this, Grey, what’s the cure for this supposed mental ailment of hers?’

  ‘Um,’ began Grey, as if the thought hadn’t previously occurred to him, ‘it’s hard to say…’

  ‘What do you mean, hard?’ John raised his voice. ‘You’re the bloody doctor here, so fix her! I want her to be well again, to be happy and well, now.’

  ‘Well, I suppose a regime of rest, bland food, cold baths,’ said Grey doubtfully.
‘You know, we could send for an alienist. My colleague up at Richmond District Lunatic Asylum in Grangegorman, Dr. Meagher, he’s really a most renowned specialist in maladies of the female mind, I’d be most pleased to sit in on any interview he might conduct?’

  ‘No.’ John clenched his teeth. ‘No alienists. You know how they regard our profession, he’d have her committed before the week was out, and I don’t have time for nonsense like that.’ The thought of Marion stripped to an asylum bed made his gut freeze.

  ‘Oh,’ Grey shrunk a little, ‘well, no, I suppose…’

  John took a banknote from his chest pocket and pressed it into Grey’s outstretched hand. ‘I’ll send for you again if her condition worsens.’

  ‘Yes, yes, please do.’ Grey put on his hat and went to the door.

  John looked at him for a moment. ‘And Grey?’

  ‘Mmmm?’ Grey turned in the doorway.

  ‘Just to be clear. We are ruling out entirely the possibility that some of these murder gang characters actually are out to get her?’

  ‘With all due respect,’ Grey chortled, ‘the notion is perfectly ridiculous. Only a female imagination could have conjured that. Sure what on earth would they want to be persecuting some little woman for? Don’t they have the might of the British Army to be worrying about?’ He shook his head, chuckling, as he left.

  John took a deep breath and went into the next room.

  It was a cluttered little parlour, nestled towards the back of the house. The window had long since been boarded up to avoid spectators, hungry for scandal and thrill, peering in from a window in the opposite house. It was covered now with heavy, wine-red drapes.

  On a sofa by the fireplace sat Marion.

  John smarted at the sight of her.

  She was still wrapped in his overcoat, clutched around her tightly. Underneath it, the same shirt she’d been wearing when last he’d seen her in Eilis’ stifling dining room. Threadbare white silk. Blood splatters now stained the stiff white lace at her throat.