Are You Haunted (part twenty)

Are You Haunted

(part twenty)

But his old friends would call him a liar, if he told them he had left believing the work would save them all. In expiation, Rohdl could say only that the lie had been told to him.

How could it make a difference?

He had never been close to as many as twenty or thirty people. The question could never be one of valuing a life against another life. That very excuse, that distinction…

That, if the desert project failed, if physics failed to end the war, chemistry might. Vast incendiary destruction could be caused chemically. Wednesday’s, Thursday’s, Friday’s, Saturday’s piles of corpses might be erased from the calendar…and this would be advantageous, having only Sunday’s, Monday’s, and Tuesday’s.

A corner streetlamp made of the fog a slow moving picture…

Rohdl did not value his own life. He waited, these days, only to be shown what was expected of him.

And as he watched, Beauty crossed the river. She emerged whiter than the yellow glow of the lamp or the churning mist. Her pallor was of ice-bound death, and for Rohdl, her eyes did not shift. She might have borne him some compassion. He was small and dark and had always been terribly isolated. But in her last hours, Beauty had known this loneliness too.

And though her chill withered and dispelled the halo of fog that surrounded her, the others who followed, the ribs, the skull with its single eye, the arms with their curled, clutching fingers, burned with a green, scintillating fire.

He heard the poem, the monk of München’s plague poem…though in English.

They have gone before,

Who falter on this narrow span,

Made treacherous by blood and tears.

Unreconciled in wordless horror,

Their ranks unceasing none return;

But fall into the tomb and claw at air,

With an endless echo of despair.

A sensation shocked Powell awake, gripped the back of his head and drilled inside, a pulse indistinguishable from noised. His heart raced. He rolled to his knees and staggered up, dragging the blanket around his ankles, eyes adjusting.

Uneasy about the window, not wanting Guy with another broken thing to hold against him, he had made his dream end. He had forced himself awake. But outside the dream went on, the valley lying levelled…Summers had said it…by whiteness. By fog.

He wouldn’t have imagined closing the window.

20

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part twenty-one)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)