This Thing of Darkness, page 19
Hugo clenched his free hand behind his back to stop himself trembling. There was something so unnerving about the transformation Evi was going through that he was beginning to doubt his own senses. “Bela Lugosi is dead; you are confused. I am in possession of my mental faculties.” He said this to reassure himself, only to lose his nerve again at the sight of Evi attempting to smile. He knew it was a trick of the poor light and the effect of the long white nightdress she was wearing that had been made for a rounder, fuller figure; he knew she was shivering only because of the effects of the drugs she was fighting off. Yet she looked so like a ghost, he wanted to reach out and touch the spectral vision simply to prove to himself that she had not crossed over from one world to the next.
“I did see him, Hugo,” she said. “You know I did.”
“You’re a journalist, Evi. Do you expect me to believe that you’ve never made up a story to suit yourself?”
The ghost stepped forward quickly and dealt him an unexpectedly powerful slap to the face. She was real after all; only a living woman would have responded like that. She was a woman with feelings to injure and a temper to rile and a body she could still use to hurt him. Hugo pressed his hand against his face and breathed a sigh of relief. “That was beneath you,” said Evi. “You know I’m not a liar. Maybe this is madness. Why should I pretend to have met Lugosi? Why should I imagine such a thing? I had never heard of him before Goldberg told me to write about him. I had no interest in his life whatsoever.”
Hugo put the paper down on the desk, letting it disappear among all the other stray white leaves. “All I know, Evi, is that you are claiming to have interviewed a. . . a dead man. Perhaps you could tell me what I am supposed to make of that?”
“I thought you could help me make sense of it,” said Evi. Hugo noticed a tear sliding down her cheek, but even that felt unnatural. She was weeping almost without noticing; there was no rage, no distress, just tears, slowly, one upon another, falling, sliding down her face, charting their own course. “I don’t feel real anymore, Hugo. I’m not real, or this is not real. I can’t decide.”
Hugo helped Evi into a chair. He thought she looked more normal sitting down, no longer hovering like a lost soul, and he imagined it might put her more at ease. “Evi, please don’t be afraid. I’m sure that this is nothing more than a serious case of shock. I should have done something about this sooner, but it would have been presumptuous to interfere. The years of isolation, the drink, the grief—and there has been so much grief, Evi. As you yourself said, there is only so much even a strong mind can be expected to bear. But there is nothing here that a good psychiatrist couldn’t help put right.” Evi was shaking her head wearily, but Hugo continued. Part of him suspected he would never get another chance to finish. “Evi, I don’t believe you’re mad. But watching you is like standing back and watching a friend burying himself deeper and deeper into a grave of his own making. You don’t have to live like this. Christy wouldn’t want it; he’d never forgive himself.”
Evi looked up with a start. “Christy? Since when did you call my husband by his nickname?”
Hugo fumbled for a response. “You know I met him. No one goes by formalities in a situation like that.”
“You’ve admitted you met him, but I know you’re not being truthful with me. He told me something to make me believe him.”
“Who did?”
“Lugosi.”
“Lugosi is dead!” shouted Hugo, and immediately regretted it; but uncharacteristically, Evi did not flinch at the sound of his raised voice. “Please, Evi, you must understand. Bela Lugosi is dead.”
“Yes,” answered Evi softly. “Bela Lugosi is dead.”
Hugo heaved a sigh of relief. “Good. I think we may be getting somewhere now.”
“I suspected he was dead when I spoke to him last.” She reached up and took Hugo’s hand, anticipating an interruption. “No, please. I know how it sounds. The more I think about it, the more insane it all feels, but I can’t think of any other way to explain things. I did meet him, Hugo, and since all the evidence makes it quite clear that he died before my last interview with him, then I met an imposter or I met a dead man. And I am thinking it must have been the latter.”
“Evi, please stop.”
“When I went to check his pulse and he knocked me down, it made me think that he wasn’t attacking me because he was afraid I was going to hurt him. He was afraid that I wouldn’t find a pulse.”
Hugo turned his back and stood facing the wall. It was easier not to have to look at her. “Please, please stop. Listen to what you are saying.”
“Think about it, Hugo. Even the strength of the man doesn’t make any sense. How could a frail old man supposedly at death’s door possibly hit me hard enough to knock me down? The force was terrible. He didn’t just knock me off my feet, he threw me across the room. No man of that age could do that.”
Hugo turned round suddenly, a thought coming to him like an answer to prayer. “Evi, you have said that he always made you sit in darkness. That’s correct, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was an imposter. Perhaps it was always an imposter. He made it impossible for you to get a completely clear view of his face. You’d never met Lugosi before your editor gave you this job, had you?”
“No.”
“And one of the first things you told me when we met was that you were not interested in movies. You had never even heard of the man, let alone watched any of his pictures. You had no idea what he even looked like.”
“That’s true.”
“What if this were some sort of elaborate hoax? Someone impersonating the man, perhaps trying to cause you a professional embarrassment? It might even have been some kind of practical joke that got a little out of hand.”
It was Evi’s turn to look incredulous. “But why on earth would anyone do that? All that time and effort to impersonate a film star no one cares about anymore? What would anyone have to gain by making me falsely believe I was conducting an interview with Lugosi?”
“It’s plausible.”
“Not at all. The only person who knew about the assignment to begin with was Goldberg. He’s an insufferable little man, but he had nothing to gain by sending me on some wild goose chase and employing a man to pretend to be the subject of my feature articles. He is a busy man. If he wanted to destroy me, he had only to send me packing.”
Hugo pressed his knuckles into the wall. There had to be a rational explanation. There had to be a rational explanation which did not involve him having to admit that he had fallen in love with a crazed woman who entertained dark fantasies about interviewing the Undead. “Maybe sending you packing was not enough. Maybe there was some reason he had to destroy your reputation, discredit you in the eyes of the public. Were you involved in some private investigation, perhaps? Think about it. Were you working on a story that was in any way dangerous or controversial?”
Evi shook her head sadly. “I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s no good. I have not produced any work of any significance on anyone for a very long time. I live hand to mouth, writing whatever nonsense I’m commanded to put on paper. I’m not considered a serious reporter anymore. If Goldberg wanted to discredit me, he had only to expose my drink problem. He knew about it well enough; he taunted me about it all the time.”
Evi stood up and moved over to where Hugo was standing. He noticed that she was a little unsteady on her feet, which was hardly surprising, but it appalled him to think of how poisoned her body must be if the sedation had such little effect on her. “Hugo, there’s something else you should know. He also talked about you. He said I would doubt my sanity afterwards because none of it would make sense, but he said he could prove everything to me, he could make me believe his story that he was destroyed by the Darkness he had served. He said things about my husband he could not possibly have known.”
“Evi, it’s very easy to suggest things to a person in certain situations.”
“Bela said my husband was killed in battle.”
Relief again. The cold relief of flawed evidence in an invisible trial. “He was a prisoner. Of course he didn’t die in battle.”
“I said as much, but he said that battles are fought all over the place, including in camps, and that Christy had been a warrior for the Truth. He said Christy died a terrible, glorious death because he would not submit to the Darkness. He said he knew how my husband died because they were fighting on opposite sides of an invisible war.”
Hugo could sense her staring at him and turned to leave the room, but she took hold of his arm with surprising force, stopping him in his tracks. “A terrible and glorious death because he would not submit to the Darkness. Hugo, please tell me what that means!”
He could not bring himself to look at her. “Evi, I owe you an apology,” he said flatly, but he could not risk any emotion taking hold of him or he knew he would break down, and he would never forgive himself for such weakness. He continued, in the same flat, rapid tone, “I owe you many apologies. I should have known you were too intelligent to be taken in; it was only a matter of time before you realised that I had known your husband. But I think you know now that I witnessed his death. He didn’t want you to know. He didn’t want you to know how he died. I made a promise, and I didn’t want to break it. It felt like the greatest dishonour to break an oath made to a dying man. But I don’t believe he ever intended this. He never imagined what it would do to you to be left in the dark.”
“He told you to keep the truth from me?”
Hugo forced himself to look down at Evi’s reproachful face. “Please, Evi, he was trying to protect you. You. . . you have no idea how terrible it was.”
“Terrible and glorious?”
The case was hopeless; Hugo could feel himself drowning. It was as though he had been sheltering from a cataclysmic storm, only for a tidal wave to smash against the windows of his shelter, shattering the glass to smithereens and sending him spiralling under freezing water. He staggered back against the wall, too overcome to speak, praying she would take the hint and leave him alone. “Please. . .”
“Is that how it happened, Hugo? Was Bela Lugosi right? You don’t have to answer; I know he’s right, about the murder anyway. I dream about it. I wake up screaming in the night.”
Hugo felt himself sweating. He remembered the sensation well, the sweat brought on by unadulterated terror, not the heat, though he had struggled with the heat of the Korean summer far more than the deadly chill of the winter—and those winters had been so savage, when they had been forced to march for days in their shirtsleeves and bare feet, their winter coats and boots having been confiscated.
There had been agony and death whatever the season, men dropping and dying, shivering with hypothermia, their feet frostbitten and gangrenous. In the summer, with the blistering sun bearing down on them and the murderous thirst, he had been forced to watch men ravaged by disease, tormented by maggots and blowflies that infested their untreated wounds as though the men were already corpses to be eaten by parasites. Hugo would always remember the summer as the harshest season, with the stench of death everywhere, but perhaps that was only because the one death from which he could never recover had happened on a summer’s day. The worst of deaths. A terrible, glorious death. Hugo always wondered whether Christy would have been in a less volatile temper if the cold had been leaching the life out of him rather than the sun burning his flesh. Hugo had never been at his best in the heat either.
“I hardly know what to say to you, Evi,” said Hugo, but his throat was taut with stress. “I have no idea whom you have been speaking to; I can’t make sense of any of this now. Perhaps we are both mad, I don’t know, but your Angel of Death was right, whoever he was.” He let himself sink to the floor. It was all wrong, but he doubted Evi cared if he sat on the floor. “Christy was murdered, and I saw it. He was killed in front of my eyes, and I could do nothing to stop it.”
Evi stared at him, more out of curiosity than reproach. “And you didn’t tell me? You know I’ve been tormented all this time wondering what happened to him, and you had the answer all along?”
Hugo looked up at the ceiling, focusing his eyes on the long crack that splintered its way in a diagonal jumble from one corner to the next. If he looked hard enough at something inconsequential, he would not see Christy lying dead in the dust, riddled with puncture wounds. He did not have to hear his own voice screaming at his friend, in the last fraught moments before the guards turned on him: For God’s sake, do what they want! Do what they want, you stubborn Irish bastard!
“Hugo, did they shoot him?” Evi did not belong where Hugo was; the sound of a female voice startled him. “Was he shot? I’ve often thought that must have been how it happened. I’ve dreamed he was full of holes. That was why I thought Lugosi must be telling the truth. If he was shot, it might be martyrdom; it was a terrible death.”
“He wasn’t shot, Evi,” Hugo managed to answer, but he still could not look at her. “It might have been easier if he had been.” That had come out all wrong. Hugo summoned up every scrap of courage he still possessed and looked steadily at Evi. “Would it be enough for me to tell you that he went to his death without fear, his dignity intact, his head held high? And that he died surrounded by men who would happily have died defending him if we had had the chance? Is that enough?”
Evi moved closer to Hugo, brushing tears away from her face as though they were an embarrassment. At least she was aware that she was weeping, which felt a little like a return to sentience. “Would you have died for him, Hugo?”
Hugo took a risk and drew Evi into his arms, as much to hide the shame the question provoked as to comfort her. He felt the weight of her head resting against his chest and let his hand press lightly against her hair, as though he were sheltering her from a downpour of rain. “I would have gone anywhere with him, Evi,” he said quietly. “If they hadn’t dragged me away, I would never have left his side.”
“Bela said Christy died as a witness to the Truth. Did he?”
Hugo felt the blood draining from his face. He heard himself shouting at Christy, pleading with him to do as he was told, to give in, to betray everything he believed. . . “Yes, he did. I’m afraid I didn’t understand what he was doing at the time; all I could think of was that I couldn’t let him die. I wanted him to do whatever was necessary to stay alive.”
Evi disengaged herself from Hugo and looked up at him with the steely determination he remembered from their first meeting. “I want you to tell me precisely what happened. Neither Christy nor you had any right to keep the truth from me; neither of you had any business deciding what I was capable of bearing.”
“Evi, please. You don’t have to know the details,” said Hugo. “He did die a terrible death, and yes, he was killed because of his beliefs, so some might say it was also glorious. That’s all you need to know.”
Evi gave Hugo a shove, causing him to hit the wall with an ignominious thud. “I have not come this far to be fobbed off by you!” she raged. “He was my husband! Bad enough that he died far away from me, but to be deceived and kept in the dark?”
“He didn’t want you to know!”
“As you yourself admit,” Evi continued relentlessly, “Christy could never have known how much it would destroy me not to know. You are released from your promise.”
“It’s not as easy as that,” Hugo protested. “I can’t speak of it. I’ve never been able to talk about Korea; the words just won’t come out of my mouth!”
“Don’t be such a bloody coward,” snapped Evi. “We’ve both been to hell and back. Are you honestly telling me you can’t look me in the eye and tell me what happened?”
Hugo felt his temper flare; the anger was misdirected, and he knew it was, but he could not help himself. “Would you like to look me in the eye and describe your worst memory to me? Come on, now; it’s not that hard. Describe to me the moment you found out your family had perished in the Coventry blitz; describe to me the first time you saw a dead body. Don’t be a coward; tell me in lurid detail about the first time someone hurt you. Don’t spare yourself; tell me how it felt to be helpless, humiliated, crying with pain. You’re not going to tell me you can’t bear it, are you?”
Evi turned her back on him; she was furious now, but it was infinitely easier that way. Anger was a cheap anaesthesia for two broken lives that had come crashing together, connected by horrors, both real and imagined. “I think you have made your point. But you have no business demanding to know the details of my worst memories. My husband’s murder is my business.”
“I can’t! Don’t you understand? I just can’t!”
Evi’s temper cooled a moment before Hugo’s did. “Could you write it down, then? You could sit at my desk and write an account of what happened. Sometimes it’s easier to put things on paper.”
Hugo shook his head. “I’ve tried before. I shall sit before a blank sheet of paper all day.”
But she was walking over to her desk as though she had not registered his concerns. Evi had the brutal efficiency of a chaotically untidy woman with a good memory, and she rapidly picked up handfuls of paper, clearing a decent-sized space across the front of the desk. “I stopped believing that every problem has a solution a very long time ago,” she said, opening a drawer and sticking her fingers into the far corner. Evi retrieved a small brass key which she inserted into the lock of a cupboard Hugo had barely noticed, though he could not help registering that it took her three or four attempts to get the key into the lock before opening it. He moved close enough to look inside, only to see a sight to gladden the heart of any archivist.
“Good heavens, where did you get that?” he asked, staring at the perfectly preserved Dictaphone sitting in neglected splendour at his feet. “Dictaphone” did not do the machine justice; it was practically an antique, the type that still used wax cylinders. “It looks like something out of—”
