The Curfew Circle

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The Curfew Circle Page 33

by Nina Dreyer


  The few lamps on the corridor walls had been lit, slanting a yellowish glow over the old brown wallpaper. His face hurt. He brushed the deep gash on his cheek with his fingertips and shook himself. Why would Marion say such a thing to him? Why would she curse him like that?

  He winced at the thought of that ashtray smashing into his face with such force. With a trembling hand, he pulled out a cigarette from his chest pocket and lit it. His trench lighter. A Lucifer, they’d called them. He’d kept his for luck. And a few nights ago, he’d taken it out of the drawer again. The words of that absurd song rang in his ears. Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile, while you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag, smile boys, that’s the style…

  He looked down at his hand. Please God, no. Not the shaking again. He must stop shaking.

  He paused, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. On a low side table stood a set of photographs in glittering crystal frames. John exhaled smoke and bent down to look at them, his reflection faint in the old glass.

  One showed him and Corrigan in their new uniforms, arm in arm under late summer oaks. Another of him and Corrigan on their horses in the courtyard at Beggar’s Bush barracks, Corrigan sitting straight in the saddle, chest thrust out, smiling, and John with his officer’s cap askew, grinning at the photographer. They looked so young. John stroked the glittering frame. He remembered the bright summer morning when they rode out at the head of C Squadron, him and Corrigan riding side by side down along the Liffey quays. A girl on a bicycle had cheered them and waved her blue hat over her head. Church bells had rung out. Blinding sunlight had flooded the faces of the clapping onlookers and sparkled on the lazy-flowing Liffey. Women had thrown carnations onto the cobblestone streets, to be crushed under their horses’ hooves, and in the distance, up by the docks, a brass band had played.

  John held the photograph up to the light. Dublin had looked so fine in that long, hot summer. Flower stalls and fluttering flags and women in white muslin gowns. Before the rebels had caused the town to be shelled and burned. Before anyone had spat at him in the street. He put the photograph back, his throat tightening as he noticed he’d smeared blood on it.

  ‘Is that you, John?’ Sid’s voice rang out from a half-open door. ‘You will get yourself in here this instant!’

  John ground his teeth and followed Sid’s voice into the small library. Sid’s favourite room for sitting in during the late afternoons, sipping brandy and blowing pipe smoke over reports from his land agents and letters from the Salon. John remembered coming in here as a child, hovering in the door to plead for fishing rods or cricket baits, or a puppy from Sean McKee’s new litter of border collies up at Ruane’s Hill, and Sid grumbling at him, not unkindly, get out of here, you little blighter, and let a man get a decent day’s work done.

  He glanced around. This room was as familiar to him as an old recurring dream, although everything, the old oak wainscoting, the thick blue rugs, the groaning floor boards, now seemed smaller than he had recalled them. Home. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Nothing ever did change around here, in these grey hills, this dim old house.

  Sid sat behind his old desk, his thick, wrinkled hands lit by the underwater glow of a small green desk lamp. By his side, birch logs snapped and crackled in the fireplace. A limp blanket was draped around his sagging shoulders.

  John wiped blood from his chin with his sleeve and glowered at the old man. ‘Why have you put those photos there in the hallway? Not good enough for any of your parlours? Not fine enough? Just good enough for some dusty corridor, is that it?’

  ‘Don’t you dare start with that nonsense again,’ Sid wheezed, ‘you’re not in some filthy trench now playing soldier, don’t be acting the maggot in this house, come over here right now…’ His voice droned on and on.

  John felt his pulse thickening with slow-burning anger. His last image of Corrigan flickered through his mind. He shook himself. Stay in the present.

  Corrigan hanging on a coil of barbed wire, fingers curled and stiff, legs splayed behind him in the frost-glinting mud. His head gone. He’d hung there for three days and four nights before they could retrieve his corpse, rats creeping over him under the flare and blast of artillery. And for those four nights, under icy moonlight, John had thought he could hear Corrigan calling for him. He shook himself again, trying to shove the memory back down.

  Stay in the present.

  He breathed the smell of smoke and brandy, and strained to listen to the wind blustering in the chimney, the hail clattering the windows. The willows and oaks out back would be stripped bare by morning.

  ‘… you even listening to me? What’s wrong with you,’ Sid said, ‘standing there shaking like a loon! Blathering about bloody photographs? Are you drunk?’

  John staggered into the small circle of light from Sid’s desk lamp.

  Sid paled. ‘What in the name of all that is holy happened to your face?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’ John frowned at the pain, hard as a kick to the face.

  ‘You think I’m old and deaf, just some mumbling old fart who can’t hear what’s going on around me,’ Sid raised his voice, ‘but I’m telling you now, this business with prisoners in my cellars, this business with your wild seances, you think I can’t sense the darkness creeping in on us all, you think-’

  ‘There is no darkness.’ John licked his teeth, tasting blood. He looked down. His hand was still shaking. He flung his cigarette into the fireplace.

  ‘Oh, it’s all fine, is it,’ Sid barked, ‘it’s not enough for you that poor Brigid Doran died of fright in my own Salon-’

  ‘She did not die of fright,’ John said, gritting his teeth, ‘she died of a heart attack. She was old, Sid.’ He thought briefly about old Brigid, flouncing around the Salon parlours with her strange feathery hats, forever mumbling about the Lusitania. He was sorry she’d died alone. ‘If that was all you wanted to say to me, then goodnight.’

  ‘Oh, my boy, my fine boy, I’m just getting started’ Sid leaned back, patting his belly like a contented alley cat. ‘I’ve tried to warn you, so I have, but you won’t be warned, will you? Ah no. You’ll make your own mistakes, bull-headed as you are. But now the time’s come to talk about that Hun slattern of yours.’

  John turned to leave. ‘This again. Blow it out your arse, I’m sick of it, Sid.’ He wanted a shot of whiskey and a shot of morphine. He wanted silence.

  ‘You will stay, and you will listen to me for once in your life,’ Sid raised his voice to a wheezy bellow and heaved himself up from his creaking old chair, leaning heavily on his desk. For a moment, glaring like that, he looked like his old self. ‘You can start with that, right there.’ He slapped a crumpled sheet of paper on the desk.

  John frowned at it. A poster. Like you’d see on a billboard for plays. Creased, folded too many times, fraying at the edges.

  A faded photograph of Marion.

  Marion on a stage, arms outstretched under sharp lights, dressed in a gown like a torn battle flag. Golden oak leaves entwined in her dark hair. By her feet lay a dead German soldier with matted blood in his golden hair. And in his back, a knife was plunged deep. All lovingly coloured by hand.

  ‘There you have it,’ Sid bellowed, ‘I told you I’d get in touch with my contacts on the Continent, and I’ve found all there is to find about that little…’

  John stared at the poster heading with a creeping cold crawling down the back of his neck.

  Deutschland wird wieder stiegen.

  John’s throat closed. Germany will rise again.

  He blinked, swallowed hard, shook his head.

  Marion von Reimsbach spricht mit den Stimmen unserer gefallenen Krieger.

  He stared at it. …speaks with the voices of our fallen warriors.

  ‘That’s not her,’ said John, turning his face away. ‘That’s not her. That’s not her name. It’s not her.’ He thought about her voice, so soft and deep, but bristling with the hard iron spikes of tha
t accent. That accent, which reminded him of voices faintly carried from the other side of No Man’s Land, hushed under gas-hazy moonlight.

  ‘It is her,’ Sid bellowed, ‘she-’

  John glanced at the poster again. Printed at Marion’s right hand, the word Rache!

  Revenge.

  ‘I told you,’ Sid shouted, ‘she’s not just some medium, she’s a fucking occultist, John, a German occultist from one of those grotesque Hun cults, and if that there isn’t enough for you, then you can bloody well read this!’ He flung a letter at John.

  John picked it up. Foreign post stamps covered the front, all black eagles and oak leaves.

  He felt a sinking dread in his chest.

  An ugly hand-writing, hard-angled, Gothic and stiff, and the letter-writer had pressed his pen too hard on the paper. The letterhead was adorned with strange symbols, hard-etched lines like runes, and in the middle, a strange squarish symbol, like a cross hooked anti-clockwise, or a wheel with broken spokes. John felt a sickening lurch in his gut. He’d seen that strange symbol before. On that medallion Marion wore. He’d seen at it, hanging there on a metal chain against the naked skin between her breasts. He reached for a bottle on the desk and drank as he read, drops of whiskey trickling down his bared throat.

  ‘Esteemed Sir: most gratified we are to hear of your discovery of the lady in question. This woman, Marion von Reimsbach, née Hahn, has abandoned her Volk and her nation in a time of most urgent and mortal need. We have trained this woman since her infancy in the ancient and most holy occult arts. She was bred for this very purpose.’

  John choked on his whiskey and frowned at the words in disbelief.

  ‘She performs for us the vital work of summoning our fallen heroes of the battlefield, so that the psychic power of their blood-sacrifice for the Fatherland may be harnessed for the rise and rebirth of our glorious nation now as we are on the cusp of a new dawn of Ario-German supremacy. Her husband, Erich Freiherr von Reimsbach, gave his life for his Fatherland on the battlefield, but she speaks still in his voice across the divide of death, and heralds the rising dawn of the Aryan world order, the light of which shall burn away all falsehood and subdue all lesser nations. The German army, betrayed and stabbed in the back but undefeated, will rise again. You, Sir, as a noble and pure-blooded member of the ancient Hiberno-Celtic race, in your present struggles against the British empire and its cowardly, mongrelised armies, will understand our grief at Marion von Reimsbach’s abandonment of her patriotic duty to her race. We will appreciate to have her please returned to us with all haste. Congenially yours,

  Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels,

  Ordo Novi Templii,

  Vienna, Austria.’

  John let the letter fall to the floor. He took a step back, then another. His chest was hollowing out. Sid was shouting something, pounding the desk with both meaty hands. John grasped the poster and crumpled it onto a hard ball in his unbroken fist and flung it at the fireplace, his eyes blurring as he watched the flames lick the photograph of Marion’s face, her white, outstretched arms dissolving into whirling ashes.

  He turned and staggered from the room, Sid bellowing after him, his voice hoarse and thin, ‘… black spider, she wants to drive us all mad, John, she’ll be trying to drive you to kill yourself next!’

  In her room, Marion sat hunched in front of a single flickering candle. She stared at the flame until her eyes stung, drinking in the weak light, trying to suppress the stench of flesh and rust in the back of her mouth.

  She clasped Eilis’ cards in her cold hands, admiring the gleam of gold and vermilion and indigo, and a burning heat tightened behind her eyes. She’d snatched them from the wreckage of Eilis’ parlour amid snarling strangers, and she’d brought them here, like a talisman.

  She wanted to reach an arm into the darkness, hand open in invitation, to search with the tips of her fingers for the hem of dead Eilis’ gown. To feel Eilis’ presence again, to breathe the scent of her hair, night-blooming flowers, heliotrope and jasmine, it would feel like the warmth of a torch in a deep, dark tunnel.

  ‘I miss you, Eilis,’ she whispered, pressing the cards to her cheek. ‘But you mustn’t come here. You must stay away from me, from this place.’

  A little golden-brown moth flittered towards the candlelight. Marion wondered how it still survived. She reached a fingertip gently towards it, but stiffened, hand paused mid-air.

  Mr. Sidney’s muffled voice rose behind closed doors, angry, loud. I know what you are. I know what you did in the war. He’d be telling John all about her, all about her past. He’d said he would. And John would never look at her again. He’d fling her onto the rubbish heap like a rotting chicken carcass and walk away.

  Marion cowered at the memory of the seance table rattling as if from distant artillery fire, the sharp flash of the ashtray flung at John, a gash of screaming red across his cheek and mouth, blood dripping onto the Ouija board. The shades of war closing in, howling of despair and agony and revenge.

  Revenge, revenge. She’d howled that word herself, over and over until her throat was raw, in front of hungry crowds, her arms flung wide under burning stage lights. How she’d longed for revenge, then.

  And in the wings of that stage, deep in the shadows, she’d glimpsed her old mentor, Herr von Liebenfels, nodding at her with a look of luminous spit-pride in his eyes.

  The candle fluttered in a cold draft, flickering long shadows over the velvet bed hangings.

  Marion dug her fingers into the musty carpet and swallowed back the memory of that foul taste still festering in her throat. Herr von Liebenfel’s special preparation. Black rum laced with cough syrup and cocaine. He’d made her swallow a whole mug of it before every stage performance, stroking her hair with his leathery fingers and breathing in her ear, you are nothing without your Volk, and you are nothing without your husband, you exist only to serve our undefeated fallen, to give voice to Erich.

  But in death, Erich had not wanted a voice. He had let the last fragments of his memory and identity sink into the deepest recesses of the outer darkness, down deep below all thought and feeling, to rest in perfect, unbroken oblivion.

  But Marion had clawed into the outer darkness, deeper than she ever had before, and she’d dragged him back to her, clawing her nails into him and tearing him back to his pain, his terror, his desolation, and she’d forced his dead voice out in a roar through her throat to feed the baying crowd, to feed herself.

  And the howls of the crowd had risen to a fever-pitch of murder-chants ringing in the stench of stale beer and sweat and tobacco grease, the floor had shaken with the thump of boots on planks and wet sawdust, those who stabbed our battalions in the back must drown, drown, drown in their own blood, Germany, undefeated, will rise again.

  And after such a performance, the audience had flocked to plead for membership of Herr von Liebenfel’s occult society, and his Hagenkreuz medallions had sold like warm cakes.

  Marion lowered her head and dug her fingernails into the back of her hand.

  The venom was still in her blood.

  She’d spent her years inhaling hatred for the English and exhaling hatred for the English, but they’d died the same terrible deaths as the Germans, the Austrians, the Italians, the French, the Senegalese, the Indians, the Americans, the Australians, all of them. They’d all suffered the same. It was all meaningless, a blazing madness that gorged on itself until the whole Continent was nothing but a blasted wasteland stretching under bleak skies.

  Marion slumped down, leaning one hand on the carpet and pressing the cards to her chest with the other. Tears stung her eyes. John could have been among the fallen, at the Somme, or at Passchendaele, with Erich. He could so easily have been among those gaping, shrieking war dead creeping closer in the outer darkness with their blasted fingers clawing for the living light. And before she’d met him, she’d have rejoiced, she’d have laughed, she’d have cackled with acid glee to hear of another enemy dead.

  Sniffling,
she thought of that night not so long ago when she’d lain on snowy sheets warm from John’s skin. She’d felt a sweet delirium in those stolen nights with him. And from that sweet delirium, a lunacy had bloomed in her mind, and she’d imagined herself saving John, freeing him back into the light. Saving him from his gunmen enemies, saving him from the pale man, saving him from his past. Her, walking hand in hand with John down sun-dappled, peaceful boulevards. Her, lying in his arms under a dawn-glimmering window with the sound of blackbirds singing in gardens.

  Her, of all people.

  She was a dried husk with nothing but soot for a soul.

  A sudden impulse rose in her. To find a razor, a pair of scissors, or her long, sharp hat-pin, the one with the coral rose at the tip. She could cut her own wrists, her chest, her thighs. She could slice herself anywhere, over and over. Nobody would ever want to see her naked skin again. Nobody would ever know. She’d huddle in on herself like a snail in a gutter with her scratches and her shame.

  ‘Eilis,’ she whispered into the light of the candle, ‘I don’t know what to do. You’d be sure. You were always so sure. I used to be so sure, too. Of everything.’

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve, and at that moment, a single card fell from her hand. She glanced down at it, breath held.

  VI. The Lovers.

  She picked it up and held it to the flickering flame. Dried mud from a soldier’s boot covered it. She wiped it gently with the edge of her silken shawl.

  The card showed a man and a woman, naked, straining to reach for each other. Behind the woman, a tree encircled by a snake. Behind the man, a tree engulfed in flames. Above them, a great angel with outstretched hands, his crimson wings spanning a frozen sky.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  John halted in the door of his mother’s room, turning his black lighter over in his shaking fingers. Marion sat huddled by the night table, wrapped in a black shawl embroidered with poppies and white carnations. A single candle fluttered in her breath, the small circle of light illuminating the red wallpaper and threadbare bed hangings.

 

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