by Don Jacobson
There, over her brew and biscuit, the agent flipped deep into the paper to discover the personals. And there, halfway down the third column was information she had been told to expect.
Miss N: your Preacher awaits your arrival in the North. Stromness. Come & we will walk the cliffs above the Atlantic near Scapa overlooking Graemsay Island.
And today, as the sun crept from its early autumn zenith in the southerly skies, misty white with high clouds presaging dirty weather a day or two hence, Rose observed her target take his mail from beneath the galvanized lid. As he straightened, he scanned his surroundings; his watchful gaze holding for a moment at each possible bolt-hole. Only after his careful reconnoiter offered nothing out of the ordinary did he relax enough to consider the note he had pulled free.
However, during that careful survey, when his eyes paused at the bush underneath which she lay, Rose caught a clear view of his features; rough-hewn as if from the elemental stone that shaped the Scottish countryside. Yet, the planes of that visage held little meaning to her. However, to Eileen…
Fitzwilliam was stunned.
Here in his hand he held incontrovertible evidence—or so it seemed—of her survival. The note surely offered proofs: facts known only to two persons. What was missing from the note was any explanation of Eileen’s survival, of where she had been, of why she had dropped off the map with the last word being her capture nearly ten months before in southeastern France as she worked behind the collapsing German lines. At the time, though, he had been rather tied up coordinating between his French and Belgian networks during that rather inconvenient last spasm that had become popularly known as The Battle of the Bulge.
All he had known of her fate was what had been patched together much later by the research boffins at SOE and the Trust. Their tale was short on facts and detail and long on conjecture. While no corpse had ever been found, all agreed that a clear majority of the Gestapo’s victims would never receive a proper burial; instead being memorialized on faded citations in loved ones’ albums or on a local cenotaph honoring les morts de la deuxieme guerre mondiale raised on hundreds of places across the francophone world.
However, there had been some tantalizing whiffs of her fate. Treasure troves of documents had been discovered poorly hidden by the fleeing men in black leather overcoats. Other files had never been destroyed—the late war petrol was too diluted or the wood to wet to catch—on the pyre that was the last days of Hitler’s tyranny. Specialists had been set to combing through the debris of a Twelve-Year Reich.
In the end, all that had been confirmed was that his Rose had been handed off to an SS death squad in early January 1945. After that…well, the Gestapo had assumed that their more fanatical brethren would complete their task with their usual Himmlerian efficiency. These were secrets even the secret police did not care to learn. While the paucity of definitive dossier entries frustrated the minions toiling in the bowels of Curzon Street House, they ultimately accepted that the Geheime Staatspolezei was not mistaken. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Eileen Nearne was dead, one of over 100 million worldwide who were extinguished from 1939 to 1945.
Except that, either the deceased or someone who knew her as intimately as Fitzwilliam himself, had reached through that supposedly impenetrable veil.
And now a meeting was being sought.
Chapter III
The sun, far out on the curve of the world, turned the frosty mist rising above the ocean’s surface from its midday milk to a salmon hue. Fitzwilliam had pedaled south from Stromness to the heights overlooking the channel that marked the western approaches to the great naval basin in Scapa Flow. The fleet itself was quartered deep in the reaches behind the headland to the east and, thus, invisible to observers, either friendly or otherwise. That mattered little to Fitzwilliam.
He pulled his watch cap firmly down over his ears and shrugged deeper into his bridge coat. The late afternoon gusts cut deeply in this season, testing good Scottish woolens with a damp chill determined to worm its way in to Sassenach skin; to punish it for its presumption to hide beneath cloth woven in the Highlands.
Striking out as instructed on the trail which traversed the rise before switching back across the cliff, Richard made as if he was excited to arrive at this rendezvous; that his deeply ingrained prudence had fled in the face of his need to reconnect with her. He had no doubt that this interview, if one was to be undertaken, would be held on ground known to his interlocutor. Thusly, the Preacher had deemed it best to do that which he could to lower her guard.
Ever suspicious of all, even those professing the deepest friendship, Fitzwilliam gamboled along as if he had forgotten all he had absorbed in his career at the very point of Britain’s secret spear. His caution had allowed him to survive a 100,000 gold Reichsmark bounty for nearly four years.
If t’is truly Eileen I am to meet, she will have selected a space which has multiple ingress and egress points. Her tradecraft will be superior. She will be skittish, beyond wary. Her sensibilities will be heightened since she must have barely survived her trials at the hands of the SS. I will not even see her until she is upon me; and then only if she is supremely certain of her approach. Perhaps, though, I can even the playing field. This is, after all, my home pitch.
Marking carefully where the sun would be when it dropped down into the Atlantic, Fitzwilliam slowed his pace. His thoughts turned inward as he rolled a stop-motion film of this path. In a moment, he realized that there would be but one place and only one angle that would serve her if she were to surprise him—either for conversation or attack.
However, that space had one fatal flaw that Richard could turn to his advantage; all thanks to a drink-befuddled farmer who last September stumbled in the steeply angled meadow that bordered upon the slope leading to the lip!
T’was one of those rare fall days when the prevailing gusts blew off-shore rather than on. When old MacGregor tangled his brogans and ended up face down in the browned sward, his freshly-charged pipe, knocked from between the few teeth he had left in his ancient head, set ablaze the golden dry fodder waiting to be cut and baled. With the easterlies raging, the entire hillside had been turned to ash in moments.
Then t’was easy work for the winter’s melt and the spring rains to loosen the denuded soil on this least-loved of silage patches. The pebbly glacial leavings now covering the eroded brae were as stable as a child’s bag of aggies, always shifting in a perpetual motion determined to fly across the trail and down to the Cambrian scree piled on the shore. Any person seeking to plant a foot on this surface, loosely bound with the thinnest of clayey mud, would end up tumbling out-of-control.
Rose huddled above a boulder fall just past where the track dropped off the heath and began to make its tenuous way across the cliff face above the rumbling combers crashing ten stories below. The brisk breeze had numbed her frail frame, unpadded with no spare fat after months of short-to-no rations. Her acuity, so deeply focused upon the trail above, slipped from time-to-time as the elements battered her.
This was one of those fleeting instants when Eileen became aware that the threat of the Swabian’s torture had receded. The opening of some of the manacles chaining her away allowed echoes of Rose’s plan to slam against Eileen’s emerging awareness. The dimensions of the coming betrayal both enraged and frightened the sliver that flew to pierce the zona pellucida of Eileen’s dungeon; although here t’was the reverse of the norm with her vital germ seeking to fertilize that which lay without in the broadness of her corporeal brain rather than within the miniscule singularity[x]. Miss Nearne’s alpha-self struggled to be released from her prison, to begin the integration with the beta-alter controlling all else.
But, the dominant Rose used the power of her consciousness to tamp down those elements of her other self seeping through.
Yet, Rose was noticeably weakened both by Eileen’s attempted escape as well as the harsh weather dangerously lo
wering her core temperature. She was forced to ignite the last few matches in her psychic pack. This led her to commit a strategic error even as she achieved a tactical victory. Thinking that she had put the genie back in the figurative bottle, her monitoring mind, never as strong as when it had been whole, did not complete its patrol of the guard posts erected around Eileen. She neglected to isolate Eileen from the optic processing center of their joint brain.
Recalling the Swabian’s plan, Eileen reached out and held her metaphysical fingers above those marvelous trunk lines, her own optic nerves.
The sun dipped its lower limb into the grey vastness stretching westward. The orange rays bounced off the ocean’s surface to paint Rose’s boulder hideout, gilding lichen-smirched granite.
Then she heard the unmistakable skritch of gravel beneath leather sole.
Rose pulled every ounce of power away from her internal guardians, responding to the conditioning beaten into her over months beneath that forested hillside in South Germany; to focus on her tasks over the next few minutes. The relaxing of the internal vigilance permitted Eileen to slip ethereal fingers into two optic nerves sparkling with impulses that had reduced the outside world to code, much as an old-time London hackney driver would grasp the ribbons leading to his knackered gelding, her consciousness floating above those remarkable conduits. Ever so slowly, Eileen allowed the wisps that were sight to her sentience to wash across finger tips and pads which could never be hardened by callouses. Those pulsations sped along from orb to organ uninterrupted by her eavesdropping
…to be translated and grokked without any hesitation by Rose.[xi]
…and the entire universe blasted Eileen’s flickering consciousness as she, small spark that she was, faced a firehose of data.
The glorious brilliance almost blew her back into her gaol, nearly casting her into roiling energies; condemning her to be incinerated on the sun god’s altar like an errant dust mote.
Yet, in that same instant, a calming force placed its palm over her hands, wrapping them in bands of rainbows that coruscated across spectrums visible and invisible. The colors cooled, moderated, and throttled back the awesome majesty of the three-dimensional real world as apprehended through Eileen’s own, although now stolen by her other, sky-blue, near purple eyes.
With that, Eileen could now see that which Rose did, if smudged and slightly distorted; as if she was not facing the visions directly to allow them to play over her in their fullness, but rather as a detached observer; off to one side. The projection ran like a film in the background, along the curved wall of her imagination, periodically skipping and jumping as if the strip slipped a sprocket hole from time-to-time.
In the foreground of this mind’s eye imagery, though, came another; an entity at once familiar while also being utterly foreign. This essence was she who had held her up when, as a small child, Eileen wept as the long winter’s night enveloped her Glaswegian rowhouse. The comfort afforded the little one who huddled beneath her quilts was the same as the succor celebrated by a worn soul finding a crystalline spring bubbling from beneath a date palm in the Empty Quarter. And now she had returned.
>soft now, gentleness calms the light
What is? Who are?
Eileen had so little strength, separated from the well-springs of her mental and physical power, that she could offer only fragmentary queries and replies: gasps, really, as if she had been forcing air across vocal cords rather than launching thoughts from those cobbled together circuits that allowed her the chance to be a fly on the proverbial wall.
>the fullness of being
>that which/who would be one with you always
>all that was pushed off to side in the moment of horror
>the oneness once was, soon to be whole again
When?
>moments away
>to act soon you must
How?
>smallest is in your power, nothing more
But, t’will count?
>all eyes/colors gone before will powers lend
The backdrop rippled as she drifted off. Now, rather than being forced to consider events as through a glass darkly, Eileen waded into the center of that stream of reality. All the while, she, like Rose, remained focused on the path leading up toward/down from the autumnal white afternoon sky.
There was a subtle difference not felt before her communion with the Guide. Eileen now also knew the added surge of energy as other life forces slid up beside her, resting their limbs on hers, channeling support from unseen planes. They put their shoulders to the wheel and added their eldritch capabilities, however minute, to hers. None bore names, but their identities were not obscure.
Some felt to Eileen as her grandmother had when she had bundled Leenie onto her lap, to watch as her grand-bairn’s stubby fingers traced the patterns of her apron. Others were new to her, but clearly from places in the cosmos reserved for those akin to Eileen. All came not in sound, but rather in color…and across the visible spectrum…from silver as to be nearly white through a blue that tended toward grey all the way to the richest chocolate brown, edging nearly to black. All were for her. All were clearly feminine, with one exception. That life force swirled in a steel grey that flashed and flickered as if responding to extreme pressure.
Beyond the color, a message undulated through a floral tinged scent that washed over and through Eileen. Rosa floribundae tinctured sound and light with smell.
>child/daughter/niece, little we can offer. the veils of time are thickly folded. the skeins upon which we are permitted liberty to move are but gossamer. take that which we give and add it to your meager hoard. use wisely and you will save him.
The male presence called out, sight/sound dopplering in and out as the Universe pulsed.
>little one…unknown child of my sister’s children’s children’s children[xii]…use what we direct to adjust perspectives. even a butterfly sneeze when multiplied in its billions will tilt the world on its axis.[xiii]
In the middle distance, a man’s leg swung into view.
Chapter IV
Fitzwilliam narrowed his eyes but did not break his rolling gait lest he alert Rose. This place would have been where he would have prepared his own ambush if he had been so inclined. Here, in the thirty-odd feet after the path had cut through a small rise to then swing around a large piece of Norway, a most noticeable glacial detritus poking up from the brackish heath, rested all elements necessary to provide ideal conditions for an assassination rather than a conversation. Thus, the final piece in his understanding of her urgency to speak with him slid into place.
She has no interest in exploring my thoughts on the status of rationing, to be sure. T’is to be wet work.[xiv] If I recall correctly, Rose found a hatpin to serve up a near bloodless murder.
The Preacher never broke stride, knowing that if he gave the slightest whiff of awareness, his quarry—yes, the hunted now is seeking to be the hunter—would vanish, only to try again in a time-and-place of her, not his, choosing.
Her moment had arrived. The compulsion which had driven her to this spot in the Orkneys was nearly irresistible; drowning out every scruple that had informed the duality of Eileen/Rose.
Frostily so, with a coldness only found in the deepest of Swabian winters, Rose catalogued her next few moments. The needle slid between the third and fourth fingers of her right hand, its ebony head firmly seated against the palm inside of her clenched fist. She gathered her legs beneath her, lean shanks steeled into rigidity preparing to launch her from behind the lichen-covered outcrop.
One quick stroke from the steel thorn into the softness beneath his ear was all that was needed.
Then a noiseless tumble into the combers foaming below would erase both the evidence of the attack and the evilness of the Fitzwilliam clan. Justice would be served.
However, there was another needle awaiting.
Fitzwilliam had nearly finished his descent and was passing in front of the boulder. Hi
s only hope was a degree of distraction that would somehow alter the sureness of the assault.
This reminds me of those early training bouts at the Nursery when our instructors would pop out of darkened hallways or from beneath stairs to deliver rabbit punches to our kidneys. T’was their subtle way of reminding us that their ruthlessly efficient fists could just as easily be a Fairbairn-Sykes stiletto.
Careful now…make it seem natural, an accidental misstep, soon corrected.
He made to slip on the cobble, his suddenly scuffing feet kicking up a small swirl of dust which churned in the on-shore gale.
Eileen registered the momentary variation as the cloud eddied past Rose’s aerie.
Fitzwilliam whistled between his teeth trying to sound like a man who had been suddenly dragged back to awareness, realizing that he had best pay attention to where he placed his feet.
Rose accepted the ruse as the long-legged game neither ceased his transit nor offered any indication that he apprehended danger. Her idée fixé now became her weakness where before it had been her strength. She did not realize that, while she still held the upper hand over the man on the trail, her back door was left unguarded. The air, once so crystalline, was now smudgy, less sharp—not much, perhaps no more than five percent—not enough to deter Rose, driven as she was, but more than sufficient for Eileen’s purposes, strengthened by the guides surrounding her.
The figure which was at once so familiar and likewise strange to Rose passed into sight slightly below her position. His undefended back was fully exposed to her, and she soundlessly rose to all fours before lifting her right arm into a rigid kill position.
