Watchers of Time - Charles Todd [178]
Rutledge was still scouring the faces illuminated by the flames. A policeman was trained to observe, to remember the shape of a nose, the width of a mouth, the way the eyes were set and the height of the forehead.
He couldn’t have been wrong, there had to be someone who bore a faint resemblance to the man he’d seen. Something had triggered that memory, something had reached somewhere deep in his past and dredged it up.
But there were only strangers here, appearing and disappearing in the smoke like wraiths, none of them familiar, all of them solidly alive, villagers with every right to be here enjoying the night.
In God’s name, it had surely been a ghost . . .
He knew about ghosts—
People were milling around him now, slapping each other on the back, celebrating, calling out to friends, pressing him toward the fire, into the heart of the crowd. Mind-numbing to a man who was claustrophobic. Someone who knew Elizabeth came past and thrust a glass of long-hoarded champagne into their hands, shouting something Rutledge couldn’t decipher in the din. He drank the champagne quickly, to steady himself. What was happening to him? Why had a perfectly normal evening gone so badly wrong?
Hamish said, “It’s November—”
As if that explained everything.
And in a terrible way it did. Last November Rutledge had been in the trenches of France, he and his men abandoned by hope, and bitter, too tired to relish the successes of the Americans or to believe the whispers of a peace.
The doctors had warned him there would be flashbacks, that he would from time to time find himself reliving what was best forgotten. “Sometimes as vividly as life,” Dr. Fleming had cautioned him. “And far from unnatural.”
Easy for Fleming to say, sitting in his sparsely furnished surgery surrounded by stacks of folders of the living dead, the men who had come home shattered in body or spirit.
Locked in by the crowd, his body confined on all sides by people oblivious to his sense of suffocation as the claustrophobia gripped him, wanting to break through them to space and air, fighting to draw a full breath, Rutledge struggled with panic. Even Elizabeth, chatting with a neighbor, was pressing against him, her body warm with excitement and the heat of the fire.
The nightmare surrounded him, unending, like torment meted out carefully to make the pain last. He felt like the Guy, helpless and a spectacle.
And then the Guy was consumed, the flames began to die back, and the euphoria of the evening seemed to wane as well. Women began to collect reluctant children, and men with rakes and brooms went to brush some of the ashes back towards the center. Voices could actually be heard over the din and the crowd started to move in different directions, freeing him at last.
Elizabeth, her face pink from laughter, looked up at him and said gratefully, “Thank you for coming, Ian! I couldn’t have faced it on my own. Although it’s time I learned, isn’t it?” She was holding his arm again, her fingers like individual bands of steel gripping him.
And then as swiftly as he had seemed to suffocate, his mind cleared and he was himself again. He put his hand over hers and managed a smile.
As she moved away to speak to someone else, Rutledge scanned the far side of the smoking remains of the fire for a last time, but the face was not there. The man was not there.
Surely he never had been—
Elizabeth said, turning to look behind her, “Did you see someone you know? Do you want to try to catch him up?”
“No—!” Rutledge answered abruptly, and then added at Hamish’s prompting, “I—a trick of the light, that’s all. I was wrong.”
It was surely something about the night that had disturbed him, and the noise and the acrid smell of the fireworks lingering in the smoky air. There was no one there—
“He canna’ be,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “He’s dead. Like me!”
Dead. Like me!
Rutledge hesitated, on the point of asking