The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  And yet he’d already found it. This had never happened to me before. I’d never been wrong. Or nearly wrong. For a second, panic gripped me so hard I nearly stopped breathing. I tried to calm myself. It was a simple slip, purely human to be wrong from time to time. But my powers had never failed me—not ever. And if they could be wrong this time, could they be wrong again? Had they been wrong before? How many times? What else had I seen that wasn’t true?

  If my powers could be wrong, then who was I?

  Someone bumped my shoulder, and a woman with a pram nearly nicked my shin. Raucous laughter came from a window somewhere. I took a breath, and then another.

  I wouldn’t think about it now; I had other things to worry about. It must have been a random mistake, wires crossed over what Paul Golding had been thinking about at the moment I touched him. It was just one of those things.

  In the meantime, Gloria’s killer was still free, and I needed help. I knew where to find it.

  I fished the address from my handbag and headed for the nearest stop to catch an omnibus.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  According to Paul Golding’s paper, James lived in Brixton. I boarded a bus going east, then got off and boarded another going north. I sat with my gloved hands folded in my lap, my eyes trained ahead as I tried to note everyone around me. What did George Sutter’s man look like? Was he the fiftyish gentleman trying to relight his dampened pipe? The man in the houndstooth jacket reading a copy of the Daily Mail? The stout man wiping his forehead with a handkerchief? Had I seen any of these men before? I didn’t remember.

  I entered my third bus and sat on the second deck, looking down at the streets below. What if it was a woman following me? I had no idea whether MI5 even employed women, other than as secretaries or typists. George Sutter knew who James was, and could presumably find his address, but the thought of being followed bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain. I remembered the hard-eyed, mustached man I’d seen at Ramona’s disastrous stage show. I’d assumed he was Ramona’s plant, but now I wondered.

  I circled for a while, until I was tired of buses and certain I hadn’t seen anyone twice, and then I went to Brixton. After disembarking, I turned up one street, then ducked through a likely alley and came out on another. I zigzagged the best I could, past washing lines and through tiny back lots with bedraggled kitchen gardens and bemused cats watching me from the damp tops of garden walls.

  I finally arrived at James’s street address. It was a three-story brick home that had long ago been turned into flats, like much of Brixton. The front stoop was sooty and the walk hadn’t been swept in ages, but a single pot of geraniums stood well tended by the door, vainly hoping for sunlight. I approached the door, raising my hand to knock, and the corner of my gaze caught something familiar. A houndstooth pattern. I turned to see a man in a familiar jacket cross the street a block away and turn a corner. He did not hurry, and he did not look at me.

  So much for losing my pursuer.

  A woman of at least eighty greeted my knock, her knobbed hands almost silvery pale in the cloudy light.

  “Third floor. The door is right off the landing,” she said when I asked for James. She eyed me swiftly up and down, but made no comment. I wondered how often girls came here asking for James Hawley.

  I climbed the windowless staircase—it smelled vaguely of gravy—and knocked on the door.

  The door swung open and James stared at me. He wore trousers and a white shirt open at the throat, his braces hanging loose. His hair was mussed, and when I dropped my gaze I couldn’t help but notice his feet were bare. My first thought was that I was happy to see him. My second thought, as I looked into his face, was that the feeling was not mutual.

  “Oh, good God,” he said.

  I swallowed. “I went to the New Society,” I managed. “They sent me here.”

  Wild surmise crossed his expression, and a flicker of panicked dread. “Paul sent you?” he said. “Paul sent you here?”

  “This is a bad time, isn’t it?” I babbled. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “Wait, wait.” I took a step back, but James reached out and grasped my elbow. His features looked harsh in the dim light. I wondered in horror whether there was a woman in the flat with him, a woman who had woken up with him. The thought stung, and I tugged on my arm, wanting to get away.

  We stood in silence for a moment, his hand on my elbow, I pulling back from his grip, ready to run. I could hear him breathing.

  “It’s all right,” he said at last. “Come in.”

  He pulled gently, and I followed the pull, my body slackening. I smelled shaving soap as I passed him in the doorway. I could not look in his eyes as I passed him.

  It was a sizable flat for the top floor of such a small house. Two mullioned windows looked over the back garden with its high wall and the houses behind, and the cloudy light they let in illuminated all corners of the room. It was a simple bachelor’s flat, unfurnished except for the barest of necessities, with a tiny kitchen in one corner and a doorway that led, presumably, to the bedroom. A desk sat before the windows, placed advantageously to catch the light, its surface covered thickly with books and papers. More books and papers stood in wobbling stacks around the foot of the desk, the papers sliding off one another and onto the floor, and against the wall stood three hefty cloth sacks with folded envelopes spilling from their tops.

  “Don’t say it,” James said to me as he disappeared through the door to the bedroom. “There’s a method to it, I swear. Just give me a moment and I’ll make you some tea.”

  “You don’t—,” I started, but he was already gone. I stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, smelling the strange, intimate scent of a man’s bachelor quarters—burnt coffee, dusty papers, laundry soap, male skin. A flush heated my cheeks. I pulled off my hat and my gloves, determined not to look at the doorway as he moved about in the next room.

  I set down my hat and my gloves and wandered restlessly to the desk. I picked up the top letter from one of the mail sacks and slid it open.

  Dear Sirs.

  In response to your request in the Times of 24 July. I do apologize for the tardiness of this response as my wife sometimes does keep the newspapers in her sewing basket and neglects to give them to me in a timely manner. However I had an experience I do not often speak of.

  In the early part of 1916, that is 22 February to be exact, at five twenty in the morning I awoke for a reason I could not determine. At this time it was still dark. I descended the stairs and as I approached the kitchen door I saw the figure of my son, Alan. He stood next to the table where he’d always sat for supper before he left for war. It sounds strange but I do swear I saw him as clear as if he’d been in the brightest daylight, though the room was dark. He was in uniform, and he stood looking at me as if he could see me, though he did not speak.

  I called his name. I thought that by some wild chance he had come home on leave without telling us, but something about his appearance told me it was not so. When I spoke his name, he disappeared.

  I did not speak of this even to my wife, for she had been depressed in spirits since our son went to war and I did not wish to upset her. I thought I may have imagined Alan’s appearance, the thought of which distressed me not a little as I have always been a logical man. As it happened, we received a telegram three days later stating that my son, Alan, had been hit in the head with shrapnel and had died of wounds in a field hospital on the morning of 22 February.

  I do not claim to explain this. I do not speak of it to anyone. I do not know whether it was a communication from Alan or the product of my own distressed brain, and I do not ask that question. If you ask these questions, dear sirs, then you are braver than I, and as of this moment I pass this letter to you and from this day will think on this incident no more.

  Regards,

  Samuel W. Eustace

  “A deathbed
vision,” James said.

  I turned to find him standing at my shoulder. I inhaled in surprise; I hadn’t felt him approach.

  He’d combed his hair and put on his braces, but the top buttons of his white shirt were still undone. He looks rather stunning when he takes his jacket off, Gloria had said. She was right. He made the flat seem smaller. He put his hands in his pockets and nodded toward the letter. “A sighting of the dead at the moment of passing. They’re called deathbed visions. You’d be surprised how common they are.”

  “Paul Golding mentioned something about this,” I said. “Asking people to write letters.”

  “The Society put an ad in the Times,” James replied. “Paul has a vision of some kind of countrywide census of the supernatural, I think. My job is to sift through the responses and weed out the mad ones.”

  I looked at the bags of mail. “Are these all deathbed visions?”

  “No. People write us about all sorts of things—hauntings, boggarts, even garden pixies. But deathbed visions are especially numerous since the war.”

  “My God,” I said. There were hundreds of letters here, thousands. “This seems insurmountable.”

  “You should be used to it,” James said, taking the letter from my hand. “Bereaved parents, bereaved widows, fatherless children. England is full of them, it seems. An endless parade.”

  His voice was harsh, and he turned away from me. There was no sign this morning of the James who had confided in me the night before—or, for that matter, the James who had disintegrated my clothing with a single look in Trafalgar Square. This James was angry, exhausted, and I didn’t know why. It seemed he would ever be a cipher to me. Moody, like a tangle of thorns.

  “I’ve come at a bad time,” I said. “I should leave.”

  “It isn’t that.” James dropped the letter back onto the desk and paced away, moving like a cat. He did not glance at me again. “Paul shouldn’t have sent you here, to see this—to see how I live. I never have women here. You can see why.” He pulled a kettle from the cupboard and turned on the water in the tiny sink.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” I said.

  He made a noise that was not quite a laugh. “There’s plenty wrong with me, Ellie.”

  “Fine, then,” I said, suddenly angry. “There’s plenty wrong with me, too. There’s plenty wrong with everyone since the war ended. Everyone who’s still alive, that is.”

  He put the kettle on the stove, unlit, and paused, his back to me. He put his hands on the counter, his shoulders hunched, his head down, and there was a long moment of silence. When he spoke, his voice was calm again, but the pain in it had not abated. “Do you ever feel like you’re living someone else’s life?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” I answered, thinking of living in my mother’s house, wearing my mother’s dress.

  Still he did not move, did not turn. “Some days I wonder if I’m going to wake from a dream and find myself in the trenches again. If everything that has happened since the war has happened to a stranger, a man I don’t know.” He seemed to be forcing the words out, and I watched him, entranced. “The war,” he said slowly, “is my most vivid memory. Do you know that? More vivid than my childhood, more vivid than law school, more vivid than any woman. How is that fair? I tried to blot it out with drink for the first few years, until Paul found me, though it never worked. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw my men in those woods.” His knuckles went white on the edge of the counter, his arms flexed, his head bowed. Every line of his body spoke of pain.

  “Tell me,” I said softly.

  “I was an officer,” he said, though I thought perhaps he would have spoken even if I hadn’t asked. “I was in charge of those men. We were ordered to take the woods, to clear them out—it was tactical. So we advanced. But no one knew there was a machine gunner.” He lifted one hand and rubbed it over his face. “My men were mowed down. All of them. It took maybe ten seconds. I saw it happen, and I will never unsee it.”

  “Fenton,” I said.

  James shook his head. “There was nothing special about Fenton, not before that day. He was just one of my men. He was the only one besides me who made it alive past the tree line, that’s all. We didn’t make it far into the woods before we fell. I was only shot behind the knee, while the rest of them were dead in the grass. Except Fenton, who died on the ground next to me. He’d been ripped open, nearly split in half. It was a miracle that he ran as far as he did.”

  And then the German had come for his souvenir. I was chilled, shocked—but not as chilled and shocked as I should have been. Part of me had seen it, smelled it. Part of me had lain on the ground, listening to the screaming. I knew.

  James straightened, ran a hand through his hair. Finally he turned and looked at me, his features etched in the cloudy light from the window. “When Paul found me, I realized, what did it matter? All the drink in the world couldn’t make the war go away. Why not face it head-on, then? Talk to the grieving, the mad, the deluded. Why not look for the answers to life and death? It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I threw myself into it. I exposed the liars, the ones who prey on the families of the men who were butchered just like my men were. It was satisfying, a little like I was avenging my men in the only way I knew.”

  “And then Gloria came along,” I said.

  James shook his head. “No. Gloria’s power was amazing, it’s true, but finding her was a little like an astronomer claiming to discover the North Star. It was incredibly obvious to me, as experienced as I was, that I was dealing with the real thing, almost from the first moment. The one who bothered me—the one who still bothers me—is you.”

  “We’ve been over this, James.”

  He pushed away from the counter and came toward me. “It wasn’t just that I was fooled, that there was a true medium under my nose and I didn’t see it. It was that it had to be you.” He came close and brushed his fingertips over my cheek, his gaze taking me in. I held my breath. “I knew perfectly well that you were awake that night, you know, when I put you to bed on the sofa. I knew it all along.” When I sighed, he smiled. “I’ve told you, you’re a terrible liar.”

  You’ll never find a man to take you unless you lie to him—do you know that? said Gloria’s voice in my head. “I was drunk,” I told James, “and rather pathetic. I wanted you to like me.”

  “It always bothered me, what happened,” he said softly. “I told you that. But I tried not to think about it. And then Gloria died, and there you were in Trafalgar Square, and I was reminded . . .” His fingers traveled to my hair, touched the blond ends where they curled over my ear. “I spotted you right away. I told you it was a lucky guess that I found you at Ramona’s, but I lied. I followed you. I didn’t even know why, not really—it was just instinct. I knew that whatever was going to happen, I only had to wait. And then you had that vision.” He looked into my eyes and his gaze cleared. He was so close I could feel his breath on my cheek, see the warm shadows in the hollow of his throat. I could smell his familiar shaving soap. “What did you come here for, Ellie?” he asked me.

  Words tumbled through my disordered mind, but I couldn’t speak them. I could only look at him for a long moment. He was right—I was a terrible liar, and all the longing I felt must have shown in my face. I curled my fingers over his wrist, pressed my fingers into the warm pad at the base of his thumb.

  “I want to meet the Dubbses,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows a little and waited, not moving away.

  I took a step back, though reluctantly. “I want to interview them,” I said, my voice admirably calm, I thought. “And I want to see where they had the séance. Where Gloria died.”

  James dropped his hand, his wrist leaving my grip, but the gesture was leisurely. “It’s an interesting idea.”

  “They’ve been strangely quiet, don’t you think?” I said. “There’s barely a line
about them in the papers. You’d think a reporter would have gotten to them by now, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  “Then you should probably talk to Scotland Yard.”

  “George Sutter says you already did.”

  James shrugged. He sat on the edge of the radiator next to the window and began to pull on his shoes and socks. “They interviewed me yesterday afternoon,” he admitted. He seemed to be recovering from his dark mood, training his thoughts back to the case. “An inspector called Merriken. He didn’t think much of either me or my profession, and he didn’t bother being polite about it. Not that it mattered to me.” He looked up at me. “There’s nothing to tell, Ellie.”

  “If you were the Dubbses,” I said to him, “who would you be more likely to talk to? The police, or the New Society, who can help you contact your dead son?”

  He pushed himself off the radiator and thought it over. “Fine. I’ll see what I can dig up, and we’ll bypass the Yard for now. And what are you going to do?”

  I thought about the coded schedule I’d found in Gloria’s flask bag, and I sighed. “There’s nothing else for it,” I said. “I’ll have to talk to Davies again.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When I heard a dog barking, I opened my eyes. It took a frantic moment of disorientation before I remembered where I was.

  I was home in St. John’s Wood. I’d called on Davies after leaving James, but she hadn’t been home at her flat. I’d waited for nearly half an hour, beset by a strangely frantic feeling—if Davies ever had social engagements, I was unaware of them—but she hadn’t returned. By then I had a roaring headache that made the darkened streets seem as bright as the Sahara and nearly made the world buckle before my eyes. I had gone home, the sound of the tube enormous in my head, and sent my daily woman away. If I was being followed by the man in the houndstooth jacket, I was in too much pain to notice. I’d made a cup of tea and sat in a chair in the sitting room, as shaky as an old woman, absorbing the silence like a sponge. The clock ticked on the mantel, sullen rain spattered the window, and I drifted off.