And wasn’t that the damnable part? Freddie couldn’t look away.
· · ·
He didn’t know how much time passed after that. The world moved more and more to dream logic. He didn’t know if hours had gone by, or days. Freddie said, “You promised. I don’t have much time,” and knew it to be true. He didn’t know if it was his mind failing or his body, but after he told Faland his first memory of Winter, he lived in a wrung-out daze. He was fairly certain he’d be mad or dead now, if he’d not seen Laura. He told the memory over andover in his mind: how she’d looked, the tone of her voice. And he hung on. “I have to see her,” he said. “You promised I’d see her.”
Then, between one hour and the next, Faland came to him where he lay asleep, and shook him awake.
Freddie looked up, and briefly thought he saw the roof fallen in over his head, a single star shining, and with the dim light behind him, Faland a specter of avarice and despair. Freddie would have called him inhuman once, except now he knew better. Whatever Faland was, it wasn’t inhuman. Inhuman was out there on the Ridge.
“Come with me,” said Faland, and put out a hand.
Freddie took it just as Faland glanced up at the star himself. Shook his head a little, and when he turned away, carrying his violin, Freddie followed. It was night, and the air smelled of spring. Freddie felt the weakness of his limbs, the dimming of his eyes. Wept a little, as he walked.
They halted in a cemetery outside a crumbling old château. “Where are we?” Freddie whispered. He was so tired.
“Watch,” said Faland, and he turned his head, so that Freddie was fixed with the darkness of his left eye. “And do not say a word.” The moonlight eased some of the lines in Faland’s face; the grandeur of him was ascendant, his face alive with what might have been curiosity. And there Faland set bow to string.
For the first time, Freddie realized that Faland in his hotel had been merely amusing himself, trying this melody and that, a musician at play. On Christmas, true, he’d filled the air with anger, perhaps disturbed the nights of his hearers. But he’d been humoring Freddie, giving him a taste, nothing more. He hadn’t meant it.
Perhaps he rarely meant it. But he did now, for Faland stood there and played pure terror into the night.
Freddie listened with a fist over his mouth. It wasn’t music. It was the fear of a man in a frontline trench, jumping at every noise, it was the fear of a man in a hospital when supple-winged Death visits the bed beside him. It was terrible and primal and it washis,the road to Ypres, with the falling shells and the bodies and the ghost, and Freddie wanted to scream for Faland to stop. Too much of it and horrorwas all Freddie would remember; he’d be nothing more than a memory of crawling dread.Laura,he thought.Laura.
Soldiers stripped the war of emotions as best they could. They’d go mad if they did not. But Faland was relentless; he poured long-denied fear into the night until men shouted in terror from behind the château’s dark windows.
In the midst of the clamor, Faland stood still as the eye of a hurricane, sketching Freddie in sound, until Freddie had utterly forgotten anything besides being afraid. Until he was on his knees but didn’t know it, his arms wrapped round his head.
Finally the violin dropped to Faland’s side, but the music didn’t die away. It seemed to Freddie that the essence of it had been taken up by the sounds in the château: screams, orders, moving lights. He raised his head; he was covered in cold sweat, snatching desperately at memory-fragments, anything to anchor him through the fear. There was nothing. He felt like he was drowning in mud. Somewhere behind his eyes, the dead man smiled at him. Faland just stood poised, waiting. His eyes were on the window.
A light hurried in, and in it, Freddie saw Laura. She was herself, straight-shouldered, neat in her uniform, authority in the lines of her body. She was all right.Laura,he thought.Laura, I’m frightened.She turned toward the window; he saw her face clear in the lights within. His breathing started to settle. A patient was standing in his pajamas, facing the window. More lights had come into the ward. His sister spoke to the standing patient, then caught him when he fell. A doctor came, helped her ease the patient back into bed.
Again Laura glanced toward the window.
Instinctively Freddie shrank into the shadows but he was so caught up in the sight of her—now she was bending over a patient, a tall dark-haired doctor beside her—that he failed to notice the woman who slipped out the château’s front door until she was halfway across the drive, her steps tentative in the dewy grass. Faland stirred, and Freddie turned and recognized the woman. From the hotel. With the golden hair.
Her face changed when she saw Faland. She crossed the spacebetween them, slowly, and stood still, facing him, colorless in the moonlight. The music still seemed to echo, in the dying clamor of the château.
The woman said, “I’ve been talking to the men. They say such things about you. Are they true?”
“What do they say?”
The woman was silent.
Faland smiled. “Perhaps they are true, then.”
“I won’t do it,” the woman whispered. “You know I won’t. It doesn’t matter what I saw.” She was so beautiful. Freddie wanted to say something, but his throat was locked tight. She had not once looked away from Faland.
Faland’s voice was softer than Freddie had ever heard it. “And yet you came outside.”
She said nothing, but in her face was a strange and terrible desire that made Freddie’s flesh creep. Faland was watching her as though in fascination. Then she shook her head, whispered, “No—no—I don’t even know how I would do it.”
Faland said, “Oh, I think you know exactly how.”
The woman stood still, her lips parted. Then she wrenched herself round and ran back the way she’d come.
Faland turned away, whistling. “Well, that’s done.”
“Leave her alone,” said Freddie. “That’s my sister’s friend. Leave her alone.”
