by Nina Dreyer
She hadn’t noticed him yet.
John cracked the knuckles in his right hand.
Her eyes were closed in a pained frown, and she was whispering something, whimpering, clasping a deck of painted cards. John thought of that crumpled poster burning in the fireplace, flames licking the photograph of Marion on that stage, in front of a crowd of adoring Germans howling like Howitzers for blood. For his blood. His comrades’ blood. Corrigan’s blood. Moley’s. Harper’s. The blood and bones of his whole battalion. How confident she’d looked in that picture, arms raised, chin held high like a Greek goddess of vengeance. Golden oak leaves in her dark, tumbling hair. She didn’t look confident now. Crouching like that, like a frightened refugee in her meagre circle of light.
‘This was my mother’s old room, you know,’ John said, crossing the threshold.
Marion looked up, startled. The shawl slipped from her, a pool of embroidered silk at her knees.
John ground his teeth and tried to stop looking at her. His eyes felt dry and gritty, as if the wind had lashed dust and dirt in his face. ‘If you open that wardrobe door there, the one to the left, you can see a message she wrote there as a child. For posterity. Scratched deep with a pen knife.’
Marion rose very slowly and stepped back, wide eyes fixed on him, clutching the painted cards to her chest. He felt a snip of grim delight to see her like that. Faltering when she saw him.
‘She wrote that she hated her parents,’ he said, ‘and longed for their imminent demise. Exhilarating feeling, isn’t it? Longing for someone’s demise.’
Marion arched her shoulders, creeping backwards into the deep shadows.
John strode closer. On the carpet lay a single, vicious-looking hat pin with a pink coral bead on the end. He stepped on it, felt it cracking under his heel. Snatching a bottle of vermouth from the dressing table, he bit the cork out and spat it on the floor. He took a deep swig, glaring at her through the corner of his eye, sickly-sweet heat burning his throat.
Marion stood frozen, arms crossed tightly over her chest. Silent. Unreadable as always. Never a word breathed about her past. All the while mourning for her dead German husband. A German officer. A Freiherr. A nobleman. A black silhouette against a blazing arc of flamethrowers.
Marion followed him with her eyes, standing there in the faint candlelight, as rigid and thin and owl-eyed as martyr in a Byzantine icon.
All the frenzy, all the violent disturbances at their seances, it was all coming from her. Not him. Her. John ground his teeth and tried to swallow back the rising taste of rust at the back of his throat. Why hadn’t he realised? Why hadn’t he ever stopped to consider that talent like hers, death-skills like hers, they weren’t normal. Not healthy. Never came without a price. Oh, Sid had warned him. And Sid would be lurking in his room now, smirking with venomous satisfaction. Even bloody Charlie Kavanagh had known, had tried to warn him. No, Georgie had wailed, you’ll break his heart.
‘You lied to me.’ John flung the bottle aside, splintering it against a bedpost.
Marion started. The cards fell from her hands.
He stepped right up to her, close enough to see her chest rising and falling with each gasping breath, her pulse beating wildly in her neck, close enough to breathe she scent of her hair, violet and lavender, and beneath it, the scent of her. Her skin. That scent, it reminded him of kissing her that night, under cold moonlight, her lips soft and hot like brandy-stewed cherries. He stared at her pale neck and thought of the thrill of raising goosebumps down her naked chest with a just a trail of his fingertips. He dug his nails hard into the palm of his right fist.
She looked up, searching his face with darting eyes. ‘I never lied,’ she whispered.
A burst of red in the edge of his vision, hard and sharp and murderous. John grasped her throat and pushed her back, knocking over a delicate chair. The back of her head struck the wall with a thunk.
‘You’ve been lying to me all along,’ he shouted, his own voice harsh over the thin ringing in his ears.
She didn’t struggle. Maybe she was used to being hit. Maybe her German husband had hit her. Of course he had. Perhaps she hadn’t minded. She would have expected that. She’d have been in awe of him, impressed by his fucking uniform, spiked helmet and all.
‘I didn’t lie,’ she said, rasping for breath. Her eyelids were swollen from crying, pink and transparent like burns. ‘You never asked. You never asked me about my past.’
John swallowed dryly. He could feel her pulse beating wildly under his grip.
It was true.
He never had asked.
He hadn’t wanted to know. A blank canvas just for him, that’s what he’d wanted. Just a refugee, barefoot, with no past. Shutting his eyes tightly, he tried not to imagine her in bed with that German, breathing rum fumes all over her skin and knotting her hair in his meaty fist, and her lovingly wrapping her legs around his bare waist… he tightened his grasp on her throat. His face felt too hot. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, over the thin whine.
‘Is that what you were doing that night when I found you in a pool of blood in your old rooms in Crow Street,’ he growled, ‘is it? Dreaming of the rise of your dead Hun armies?’
She tried to shake her head.
‘All this rage coming through at our seances,’ he said, ‘you’ve been blaming me all along, but it’s not me. It’s you. It’s coming from you. You’re not a medium, you’re an occultist, a necromancer, and what the fuck is this talk about a new German dawn, what does that even bloody mean, Marion?’
He could feel her trying to swallow under his grip.
‘I had no choice,’ she rasped, ‘I was born into it. It’s a closed world. I was steeped in it, drowning in it…’
John recoiled. He’d heard about those circles. No, not circles. Cults. Snippets of rumours he’d heard before the war came back to him now. Strange rumours of writhing rituals by bonfire in ancient Teutonic ruins. Eerie rumours of mandrakes and runes. Not psychical research, not mediumship. Old-fashioned occultism. Wild, raving nightmares of blood and soil and race and destiny rising from the deepest, darkest heart of Germany and Austria like an electrical storm. And she’d been born into that. Bred for it. Bred to serve that gathering nightmare.
‘No choice,’ he tightened his grip on her throat, ‘no choice but to go on stage and bark and howl for slaughter and revenge?’
‘Listen to me,’ she gasped, ‘listen to me. The war made a terrible person of me. It turned me inside out, blind and numb from grief and hunger. I wanted revenge. I went insane for it. It was all I had to cling to. Anger. Revenge. They killed my husband, my friends, they starved us with naval blockades…’
John flinched. ‘They? They? I was in that army, Marion.’ He leaned over her close enough to whisper in her ear, ‘which means you’re the enemy.’
She went completely limp then, stunned, and just stared at his neck, eyes blank.
That look in her face. A fevered chill prickled down his back, a feeling like he was splintering. He’d seen that look before. In the faces of the condemned men at the courts martial. In the cold cells before dawn. He shook himself. Stay in the present.
‘I don’t want revenge any longer, John. I want it all to stop now. We all suffered the same,’ she whispered. ‘What was it all for? Nothing. Meaningless.’
‘It was not meaningless,’ he shouted, shoving her back until he could hear her hair grips grinding against the wallpaper, ‘my friends did not fucking die for nothing, do you understand that? My men did not lay down their lives for nothing, they laid down their lives to save civilisation from your bloody barbarous Kaiser!’
Looking him straight in the eye, she closed her fingers over his hand and squeezed. As if she wanted him to actually strangle her.
‘You have to stop now,’ she rasped, ‘or you will end up like me. I did a terrible thing, John. On that stage.’ Her hand fell to her side. ‘I abused my husband’s death. And I abused the deaths of so many others, on that st
age. I clawed them back from the outer darkness and fed on their rage. It made me feel better. Then it made me feel sick, sick and cold and dirty.’
John stared at her in stunned disbelief, as if he’d stepped on a live wire.
‘I ran away,’ she whispered. ‘When I finally saw what I’d done, I ran away. I had nothing. I had to build myself, from the bottom up. To create a mind of my own, a heart of my own. And I thought I had done that. When I came here. When I met Eilis. When I met you.’ She closed her eyes tightly, and tears spilled over, trickling down her cheek and staining his fingers.
Her face was reddening under his grasp, almost like how she’d blushed at him that night, blushed and smiled and glanced sideways at him as they’d walked through the Salon, arm in arm, on the night of the ceremony so many weeks ago. Almost like the way she’d blushed and smiled at him over the flickering haze of candlelight in Eilis’ dining room that night.
John let go of her throat, feeling a mournful urge to wrap his arm around her and shush her and feel her cheek resting against his chest.
‘I thought I could atone. I wanted to help the murdered,’ she whispered. ‘But we’re not helping. You’re not trying to help anymore, you’re trying to punish and harm.’
John shook his head, grinding his teeth, turning his side to her. The little candle had almost burned down, sluggish wax pooling on the white lace on the bed stand.
‘Listen to me.’ Marion curled her cold little fingers around his wrist. ‘The IRA know what we’ve done. They say we are spies. They’ve marked us both for death.’
John stiffened. The thought of those animals laying a single finger on Marion, speaking a single word to her, even as much as looking at her…
‘You have to stop now, John,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘You are abusing the dead. It is a sin. You have to stop now, or you will be hurt. Grievously.’
John rubbed his eyes. His face ached. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
Marion curled her fingers into his shirt collar. ‘Listen to me. There is a man behind you,’ she whispered, her eyes darkening, ‘a man in a blue coat, with his face shot off, I can smell the smoke, the blood on the cobblestones, the blood in the gutter, you shot him, and behind him, there are so many others, so many from-’
John pressed his hand over her mouth, a deep chill slicing through his chest. ‘No,’ he said, ‘shut up.’
She tugged his hand from her mouth. ‘You are hurting, my love,’ she whispered, ‘hurt by the loss of your comrades. But you must forget them now. They are not at rest. And your sins at the seance table is distorting the darkness, drawing them closer-’
‘Shut your mouth,’ John rasped, ‘stop it…’
‘I’ve seen them,’ she whispered, her eyes like bleeding ink, ‘I’ve seen a man drowned in a gas mask. I’ve seen the headless man hanging on the barbed wire. He doesn’t remember his name,’ her voice deepened and turned to grating rust, ‘but his name was Cor… Corrig…’
John clasped his hand over her mouth, hard. He felt his arms and legs grow numb, tingling, and all his blood rushing to his gut. ‘Shut… shut up.’ He gulped back a wave of prickling, rising bile.
Marion shoved his hand away. ‘They are waiting for you,’ she whispered in a voice like iron nails on bone, ‘they are attracted to your anger, your blood lust, like moths to a flame.’ She stepped closer and grazed his slashed cheek with her fingertips. ‘We all have something that needs forgiving, my love. I know what you did in the war, too. I know about the corpses at the pole. They are angry with you, John. They are waiting for you. They can smell your sins in the darkness. Like sharks tasting blood. They are circling closer.’
John stopped breathing. Marion’s words struck him like a horsewhip across the face. He dropped his hand to his side. He felt heavy, heavier than lead, and he backed away, shaking his head. Marion stood with hands clasped, neck bruised, silently watching him with her dark eyes, and he staggered from the room, bumping his bruised shoulder against the door frame and stumbling into the dark corridor.
John staggered down the corridors, trailing curses, flexing his fist and snarling at every fleeting shadow. His face felt prickly hot. Marion’s words burned him like smouldering cigarettes jabbed into his eyes. I know what you did in the war.
She’d despise him now.
Shaking himself, John swept a hand over his face. Red finger marks on her pale throat. His finger marks. He’d harmed her. The ringing in his ears rose to a shrill, sawing whine, like a violin string just about to snap.
He reached out and smacked a plaster bust from a sideboard, shattering it on the floor. Might have been the King. He trampled over the fragments and kept walking, the dark corridor tilting around him.
From the basement came the stomp of boots. Sharp laughter. Brock’s voice booming over muffled screams.
A slant of light fell over the dusty carpets from an half-open door. ‘John?’ Sid’s voice. ‘Is that you, John? Come in here!’
John shoved the door open with the tip of his boot.
‘What is going on down there,’ Sid shouted, ‘have you all gone mad!’
John ignored him and stumbled straight for the drinks cabinet, knocking over half-empty bottles as he rummaged, finally pulling out a bottle of whiskey. He knocked his head back and drank until his eyes stung.
‘What is wrong with you,’ he heard Sid wheeze, ‘have you turned into a complete madman!’
John turned to glare at Sid. He sat under an old bay window, propped up like a broken doll in a velvet chair. A mosaic glass lamp illuminated his face in dapples of light the colour of old bruises.
‘You told her what I did in the war,’ said John, wiping his bruised lips with the back of his hand. ‘You fucking went and told her.’
‘What? What are you on about, I didn’t tell-’
‘I’ve got nothing more to say to you,’ John said, ‘sitting there like some moth-eaten old Machiavelli.’ Pain from his broken arm screamed through him like a rusty saw. The morphine was wearing off. His arms ached, his bloodied cheek ached, his mind ached as if splinters from that ashtray had stuck inside his skull.
‘Don’t you take that tone with me in my own damned house!’ Sid knocked the balding arm rest of his chair with a limp fist. ‘Do you think I’ve not got ears to hear anymore? I’m not talking about your dirty little Hun mistress, I’m talking about the prisoners in my basement! Don’t play thick with me,’ he stabbed the air with a blunt finger, ‘I can hear them, screaming below stairs, being subjected to Lord knows what! Those are local lads, those are workers on my estate, I know their families, known them for generations! This is still a country run by laws, His Majesty’s Government does not condone torture, a man has a right to stand trial!’
John chuckled bitterly. ‘Oh, does he indeed, Sid?’ Images of the court martial flickered in his mind. Polished linoleum floors. Bored staff officers flicking briefly through the charge sheets. The metallic tick of the wall clock. Prisoners standing rigid, unblinking. The whole thing over and done with at the flutter of a colonel’s hand and the clunk of a red rubber stamp.
Sid thumped the arm rest again. ‘I will not have you murdering and abusing people under this roof, do you hear me!’
‘So the men can use this house for a base, store and clean their weapons and ammunition here, bring their prisoners here, but that’s it. Do you know what this reminds me of?’ John lit a cigarette, inhaling sharply. ‘A whore with exceptions. It’s all go, but ah no, not that sir, not that.’
Sid turned deathly pale. ‘You will hold you filthy tongue.’
‘Or what, Sid? What’ll you do, eh?’ John stalked closer. ‘Give me a damn good thrashing with that stick of yours? You think that can hurt me now?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve turned into,’ Sid pulled himself up a little, digging his yellowed nails into the arm rests. ‘You’ve lost your moral compass-’
‘Oh, I thought you’d be pleased,’ John shouted, ‘you’re the one w
ho broke my so-called moral compass for me.’
Sid drew back. ‘The war did that, my boy, the war did that. Come here,’ he reached out a fleshy hand, ‘come over here now, lad. Sit you down. We’ll sit and have a brandy now, and not talk anymore of this.’
‘Blow it out your arse.’ John took a hard drag on his cigarette and tried to stop his hand from shaking. ‘The war turned me into a soldier. Not a murderer. You did that.’ His eye twitched once, then again.
‘You should be grateful to me…’
‘Grateful?’ All warmth drained from John’s face. He lowered his hand slowly from his eyes. ‘Have you got,’ he gasped hoarsely, ‘have you got any idea what you did? Do you?’
‘We’ll not talk of it anymore. It’s no use rubbing salt in the… in the wounds.’ Sid wouldn’t look him in the eye.
‘This,’ John shouted, thumping his own bruised chest, ‘is your fault, you turned me into a slaughterer, you should have never fucking meddled, what right did you have, sitting here in the safety of your fucking easy chair!’
‘You should never have gone to that war,’ Sid bellowed, ‘you wasted your life! I wanted you to train as a lawyer, a stockbroker, to take over my estates, but you went and squandered your life on that stupid bloody adventure, playing at soldiers, thinking you’d come home in glory, well look at you now!’
‘I would have come home in glory,’ John roared, lashing out his arm, ‘if you hadn’t had me transferred, do you know what they called us? Do you? The fucking butcher unit!’
Sid raised his hands to his chest, wheezing heavily. ‘Now, now, I only did what I could for you, to save you… there’s no shame in a man using his hard-earned connections, John, and it was only a transfer, I only got your transferred, and you would have died at the front if I’d not…’
John stared at the old man as he kept speaking. He watched Sid’s mouth move, watched his face contort, the skin stretching and sagging as if lifted up and down by fishhooks on the inside of the face. Sid was jabbering, snatching his breath, stumbling over his words.