Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [31]
Angelos patted his arm. “You did the best thing for everyone, sir. Even, it may well be, for me. After all, I was never much of a medical student, and I have always wanted to travel. And there will certainly always be company”—he chuckled suddenly—“and voices may be answered, spoken to as well as heard. Imagine . . . imagine, if I should actually strike up a conversation with the sorrowing heart of the world.” He touched Mr. Emanetoglu’s arm a second time. “Perhaps that is what I’m supposed to do, old man. Who knows?”
Behind them, Hodja Abbas paced back and forth in what had been Angelos’s rooms, talking to himself—as it seemed—in ponderous, rolling Turkish. Hodja Cenghiz followed him, step by step, writing down the words he recited on the strips of gilded paper they had brought with them from Haringey. Folding the strips according to a precise pattern, he then inserted them into various cracks in the floor and in the molding. Mr. Emanetoglu, watching, thought, Nothing exists for us Turks unless it is written down. Even our magic has to be in writing. He turned to say this over his shoulder, but Angelos had already left.
The night was cold and still when Angelos finally came back, well after the hodjas and Mr. Emanetoglu were gone, and Scheuch, Vordran and Griffith long abed. The only voice he heard was the one he knew, the one that continued and continued: wordlessly, incomprehensibly, pounding itself through his skull like a blazing nail. He stood and listened for a long while, before he finally said aloud, “We will be friends, you and I. There’s plenty of time for us to understand one another.” He went to bed then, and slept, if not well and deeply, at least without dreams.
Oddly, it was Griffith who was the most help in packing his belongings the next day. Scheuch, being as burly as a navvy, carried most of his bags and boxes to the hired wagon waiting in the street; but Griffith actually quarreled with him for the privilege. He appeared on the edge of telling Angelos the full story behind his failure to return to Oxford after the war, but they were interrupted by Vordran’s farewell, which was awkwardly emotional and vaguely accusatory at the same time. Angelos never did learn the truth of Griffith’s Balliol days, but he rather suspected that there had been a monkey involved.
Scheuch never said goodbye. He simply shook hands with Angelos, handed him the original envelope Angelos had given Mr. Emanetoglu the day before—it contained the same cheque, as well, and a short message from the Turk—growled, “I believe you know where I live,” and walked away. Angelos got up beside the driver, said to someone the driver could not see, “If you don’t care for the new digs, we won’t be there long,” and the cart rumbled away out of Russell Square.
None of his former housemates ever saw Angelos again. Mr. Emanetoglu’s brother Ismail quickly found a tenant to replace him, and he jogged along as well with the others as Angelos ever had. Scheuch eventually married and went to work in a Bristol branch of his London bank, while Vordran was eventually and unwillingly pensioned off from the Bishopsgate law firm where he was never a clerk. Griffith moved back to Oxford, went mad so genteelly that no one recognized it for quite some while, and ended his days in Bensham, as Angelos had feared for himself. Russell Square no longer played host to constant shadowy voices seeping down Geraldine Row—most especially not that one which had set children and their cowering parents running futilely indoors with their hands over their ears. There were, over time, legends of similar occurrences in Bayswater, Clerkenwell and Holborn; but each of those faded with the passing months and years of the new century, as happened even with that awful business up in Durham, so there you are.
Afterword to “Music, When Soft Voices Die”
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