Unfinished Sympathy
Page 2
Only one song.
Haunted Town. Charlie Barnet and his Orchestra. Vocal by Lena Horne.
His finger poised over it. The phone screen slick with rain. It ignored his touch. He wiped the screen on his sleeve and pressed again.
The familiar, sad melody. A dancefloor. Holding Eleanor close. The scent of her. He could almost feel the whisper of her breath on his neck.
A digital bleep.
The song dimmed for an instant and rose again.
A grey field. Wild ponies staring.
He looked down at the phone in his hand. A text message. A number he didn’t recognize.
Have you seen the American Exorcism story? Reminds me of what you said. About the gods returning.
He turned his back on the rain, held the phone under his coat and texted back Who is this?
Sometimes it happened. He’d get a call or a text from a number and it would be someone who’d been one of his contacts for years. You would have to explain that you hadn’t deleted them, honest, it was just that the phone swallowed people’s details, at random. And always people he didn’t want to lose. People he didn’t care about stayed in there.
He’d considered throwing it away.
He might as well walk up to the cliffs by the lighthouse and throw it in the sea.
The phone bleeped again and he read:
It’s Rachel.
He pressed the green button to call her right away and the sound of a line ringing crackled and fizzed haltingly. The signal was dire.
She answered. “Hello, Mitch. Hope you’re enjoying your holiday.”
His socks were soggy. His boots had disappeared in mud.
Rachel’s sweet voice broken by a storm of static. “Exorcism... show... what you said... about the Gods... look it up.”
And silence. The line had dropped. He shook his phone.
The 4G symbol popped up with a single bar next to it. He keyed in a Google search and found some online gossip, sheltering under the raincoat, like Rachel had this afternoon.
A US late night TV exorcism show had been taken over by Native American ghosts. It had gone out live across the world.
Except they weren’t ghosts — they were gods.
Some said it was a hoax, badly scripted with cheap special effects and white actors covered in war paint. But others were adamant it was real. People had died in the studio before a Lakota girl on the production staff had chanted a spell that had sent those Gods back where they’d come from.
Mitch had always said the old Gods were returning, finding ways to encroach on the real world, and what were these powers that they possessed — Rachel, Mrs Hudson, Kath Bright, Pete Wethers and himself — to travel through time, to summon tornadoes, to feel the emotions of every living thing — but the powers of those Gods of old?
He wasn’t sure he believed it anymore.
The 4G signal disappeared.
The ponies shook their manes, flared their nostrils and cantered off down the field towards the lighthouse.
Mitch trudged back to the cottage.
— 4 —
HE WOKE TO RAIN CRACKLING on the window. Night. Perhaps midnight had gone and it was a new year. Voices from the kitchen. He thought someone was there for a moment, but no, he’d left the radio on all day. How could the old cottage withstand such a fierce storm? It shook the windows in waves and boomed on the roof with the incessant roar of a tsunami, a howling tempest, battering at every door and window; a vengeful ghost looking for a way in.
He stared at the ceiling and wondered what he was doing here. Perhaps he was having a holiday. Just that. Like normal people did. A wet, cold, rain-sodden holiday in Wales.
Another fierce wave lashed around the cottage with a spiteful howl.
He could slip away and die here and no one would know.
Hadn’t that also been the idea?
He opened his shirt and pulled out the silver Victorian locket. Eleanor and his younger self.
It had been so long that he couldn’t quite remember the sound of her voice. Even with the photograph, he was losing the sense of her face. It had merged into the faces of other girls — Rachel’s and Katherine’s most of all — and the sense of her was slipping from him, which was perhaps why he’d been unable to reach her for so long.
Eleanor was dead.
He’d watched her die.
But Eleanor was alive still in all the moments of the life she’d lived and Mitch could go to her in any of those moments, as long as he too was still alive.
Except he couldn’t.
Perhaps it was that he’d seen Eleanor die. He’d witnessed her last breath, wept over her, laid a posy of lilies on her grave. That seemed to stamp their love with a finality that couldn’t be surmounted. A closure so absolute that he couldn’t reopen it.
Why would you go back after that? It wasn’t natural. The symphony was finished, the orchestra had gone home, and he was alone in the auditorium calling out for an encore of the first movement.
On the fourth mention of the storm, he got up and tramped to the kitchen and really listened, recognizing this was something that might be real. A severe weather warning. A storm coming in that merited a name.
Storm Eleanor.
The hair on his neck danced and he shuddered. A freak coincidence, surely?
He listened, the sound of his heart thumping in his ears, and when they talked of something else he staggered out of the kitchen, up the hall, gasping for air.
The sickening memory of a man breaking time and causing a tornado to rip through Birmingham in two different decades. All over the lust for a girl. Pursuing her through a century, not caring for the trail of devastation behind him. This was what happened when you put your selfish need before Time, your wanton lust before history. You broke time and unleashed a tornado.
Was his love for Eleanor causing this storm that lashed at the cottage?
The roar of it out there, as if it were summoning the ocean to roll right over the land and obliterate it.
He snatched the locket from his neck and threw it in the open fire grate where it became buried in ash.
And he was out, wrenching the front door open and falling outside to scream at the sky.
“I’m sorry! I won’t go back to you!”
But the wind snatched his words from his mouth and he fell choking in the mud, rain lashing on him, the force of the gale dragging him across the gravel path.
He crawled back to the open door, a shipwrecked, stumbling soul, till he fell back into the house and slammed the door shut on the sea monster out there that raged against him.
Lying panting on the cool tiles of the hall, he knew he’d angered the gods and prayed they would leave him alone.
HE WOKE TO MUSIC. A deep sense of longing that ached in his throat. I am yours, all yours, please be mine and I will dedicate my life to you. A woman’s face through clouds. Radiant. A look that kissed. Exquisite yearning.
The locket was in his hand.
He must have woken in the night and crawled to the fire grate.
Ash on his fingers.
He was lying in the lounge.
A beautiful woman turning to him on a grey boulevard, smiling from under a picture hat.
Marry me, my love, my life.
The locket in his hand was closed.
The woman’s face was not Eleanor’s.
She turned to him and smiled from under a picture hat and black veil.
Beckoning him.
Come to me. I am waiting. Come to me through oceans of time.
Violins rising and swelling in threnody.
There was music.
He pushed himself up from the cold rug.
The radio in the kitchen was playing Mahler.
He stumbled to his feet, pain throbbing through his limbs, and fell.
The radio was playing bloody Mahler.
He crawled across the lounge carpet.
Had to stop it before it dragged him to the wrong time.
&
nbsp; He crawled up the hall, cold tiles on his hands, trying to hold the locket in his fist. The music rising as he got closer, pulling him in.
The adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. Gustav Mahler’s marriage proposal to Alma. It could pull him to Vienna in 1888, or Kennedy’s funeral in 1963, or a cinema showing Death in Venice in 1976.
As he crawled closer to the kitchen, the swell of desire took him and made the cold floor a sea. He was adrift.
He opened the locket. Concentrate on Eleanor.
Go to her, not to this.
His last thought was that he should have run out of the door, to escape the music, waited till the radio station had returned to inane talk about the weather, instead of crawling towards the whirlpool.
It sucked him in, and with a gasp, he was consumed.
— 5 —
A SPOT OF COLDNESS on the back of his head. Was it blood? Had he smashed his skull as he fainted?
The music had stopped. Just a percussive rattling from afar, echoing. Horses hooves. A carriage.
He lifted his head, dizzy.
This was not home. This was not the cottage in Wales. Steep walls of red brick towering above him. Cobbled ground. Snow. He squinted up and down. An alley. He was lying in a dim alley, grey sky above. Cold. So cold.
Horses hooves and the clatter of carriage wheels echoing.
Where the hell was he?
A scream.
He sprang to his feet, his boots scraping on the cobbles. Scooped up his hat.
She screamed again. A woman. A guttural bark, like a fox caught in a trap.
He stumbled towards the sound, turning into another narrow alley, a huge crevasse between tenements.
Half way down, a man in a black fedora and overcoat, or cape, and a woman in a long Edwardian dress to her ankles, broad black hat and veil. They were dancing. Pressed close together, his one arm around her, the other hand holding hers above her head. Some strange type of waltz. They swayed in a clumsy circle as she writhed in the man’s grip.
“Hilf!” she cried.
Not a dance. A wave of anxiety came off them, swept down the alley and punched Mitch in the face. He swayed with the aftershock.
Raw, naked fear. A woman’s fear.
“Hey!” he yelled, and was running before he knew what he was running towards or what he might do once he got there.
The man saw him coming, wrenched his arm free of the woman, and shoved her to the floor. And there it was, a brief flash of what this had been about — a wad of paper in the man’s hand — she had been trying to wrestle it from him.
The man scooted up the alley, heading for the white strip of street at the end. A carriage flashed by. And he was gone.
Gone. All gone.
Mitch ran to the woman, kneeling quickly, offering his hand. She looked up from under the broad black brim of her hat, her eyes on his.
Oh.
Luminous beauty hit him like a bullet in the heart. It was her: the face that had called to him.
A beautiful woman turning to him on a grey boulevard, smiling from under a picture hat. Come to me. I am waiting. Come to me through oceans of time.
This woman had called him. When he’d wanted to find Eleanor, this woman had called him instead.
“Thank you,” she said, stifling a sob that caught in her throat. “Thank you for your help.”
Gone. All gone. What am I to do now?
Something brittle in the phrasing. German, perhaps? Hungarian? A smile formed in her eyes. Such beauty.
“You!”
They both turned. A man too big for his seaweed-check suit, fists like ham hocks, neck bulging out of his collar, eyes of malevolent green. He whipped a billy club from his pocket and pointed at Mitch. It was a billy club that longed to see blood before it saw his pocket again.
The man marched forward, boots crumping on snow.
Mitch pulled the lady to her feet and edged her away, to make for the street. She shrugged him off and stepped towards the thug.
“Stop this!” she cried. “He has helped me.”
The bruiser didn’t hear, brushed the lady aside, protective, the billy club still pointed at Mitch.
Protection.
He was her bodyguard. He thought Mitch was the attacker. Fury crackled off him.
Chivalry was all very well but not worth the price of a cracked skull. She was safe now. He needed to be gone.
Mitch turned and ran, his footsteps echoing off the tall tenement walls. That narrow strip of daylight ahead, where her real attacker had run.
He plunged for daylight, the snorting breath of the bruiser behind him, and out onto the street. He dodged right and ran through startled pedestrians, men and women in Edwardian dress.
He’d gone far back. Why this time? And where the hell was this?
Carriages flitting by. A wide boulevard. Snow piled in the gutters.
If he ran a few streets away he could lose him. Lose him and think his way back home, or back to Eleanor. He had saved the woman, whoever she was.
The boulevard opened out to a crossroads and he skirted it, casting a quick glance back over his shoulder.
The bruiser was twenty yards in his wake, and slowing.
Round this corner and he might shake him off with ease.
He dodged right again, intending to barrel into the street and take the nearest side street.
But there was a ship.
He stopped dead, falling back.
An ocean liner sailing up the street, towering over him. He caught his breath and fell, and knew where he was.
There was no building quite like it. It stood like a mighty wall that could topple in a strong wind, defying gravity. The prow of an ocean liner, splitting 5th Avenue and Broadway.
The Flatiron.
He wondered how the hell he’d come to New York a hundred years ago, before the prow of the ship turned everything dark and his little boat sank into the ocean.
— 6 —
HE WOKE TO THE STINGING crack of a slap.
“Wake up, Boy Jones, or I’ll slap the whiskers off of your face, so I will.”
Another slap burned the other cheek, and Mitch thrashed against his assailant. A fist holding his collar tight. A ruddy face breathing a waft of cabbage water.
He tried to kick away. The man held him fast, a knee across his legs on a velvet sofa.
Woozy, he retched. The bodyguard jerked back. Coughing and spluttering, memory swam back to him.
The woman being attacked. This man, her bodyguard, suspecting Mitch. The Flatiron building towering over him like the Titanic.
He was in New York, a hundred years ago.
And about to be beaten up, perhaps thrown in jail. He was in deep and needed to get home.
The bodyguard yanked him up by the collar so he was sitting upright on the sofa and shoved him back.
“If you get up, I swear to God I’ll brain you so hard you’ll have my footprint in your face for the rest of your days.”
A strong hint of Irish.
Think of home, think of home, home, home. Get back there. Disappear right in front of his stupid eyes. Let him live with that little bit of magic for the rest of his life.
He thought of his Birmingham flat, and the antiques shop in Moseley he’d sold, and the cottage in Wales, and Eleanor... Eleanor when? Back to 1941 in Fishguard? Somewhere in London after the war? That was the safest.
The options swam before his eyes, too many to catch one. He slumped back, dizzy.
“Wake up, or I’ll—”
“Enough!”
Another voice.
Mitch, hand raised, blinked at the figure standing in the doorway across the room. A man in a Carolina blue suit. Short and wiry, he wore the suit with panache — a buttoned waistcoat from which hung a watch chain. A black silk bow tie flopped over his pristine, white collar. His face, craggy but warm, peering through rimless spectacles, his receding hair swept back on his skull.
Mitch stared and his mouth fell open.
“Mahler,” he said.
There was a flicker of surprise in the composer’s face, his mouth tightened. An instant of vanity at being recognized and then something else — fear, that this man knew him.
Fear for his wife.
Mitch knew the woman in the alley: in old photographs on the back of those same vinyl album covers. Alma Mahler, the famous wife of the great composer. The Viennese beauty who had inspired his greatest symphonies. The love at the heart of his masterpieces. The Bride of the Wind. Her face had called to him across time, pulled him in, lured him with her siren call, when he had wanted to reach Eleanor.
Another sharp flash of pain across his cheek.
“Gilhooly! Enough, I say.”
The bodyguard stepped back, rolling his shoulders, skulking like a scolded Rottweiler, still poised to rip Mitch’s throat out. He reached for something on a round walnut side table and Mitch clutched his heart. His wallet.
“There’s nothing here that identifies him, Mister Mahler, sir. Some strange money. British. Nothing I’ve seen before. Various colours. Probably counterfeit.”
Mahler strode towards Gilhooly but did not seem interested in the money. His keen eyes held Mitch’s gaze for a moment, as if weighing his soul.
“He also dropped this,” said Gilhooly, holding up a square of card, a flyer of some kind.
Mitch saw plain type but couldn’t read it.
“I found it in the alley right next to Mrs Mahler, sir. I know this place, and what’s more, there’s a name scribbled on it. His accomplice, I’ve no doubt.”
Mahler’s gaze flashed to something over Mitch’s shoulder and all three men looked to the little girl standing in a door on the opposite side of the room.
She wore a white smock, her russet hair pinned high on her head and tumbling in waves around her shoulders. Deep brown eyes.
A woman rushed to her from the adjoining room. A flash of olive skin and jet black hair. Scrawny. Her bony fingers pulled the little girl away and closed the door.