“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.