Garnet Firefly (Ch38)

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If I could bend time, I would undo my worst sins and become as a child again: innocent. The power of a dark sorceress who bestows the gift of redemption in the form of erasure. I’d snap the hands from a clock and turn it into a phantom whose time had no definition in the material world.

Up until that day in March of 1918, Theda Evora would have only taken back one moment in her life: the moment when she walked into a coffee house on the outskirts of Philadelphia and saw Maxim. In her broken-clock fantasy, one she imagined many times, she makes an about-face and walks away from the stifling heat and chatter and brewed Turkish coffee instead of proceeding forward into the dark smile of a man who would turn murderer in less than three years.

She did not realize that she was walking into the second such time in her life.

Cyril put one shoulder against the dilapidated barn’s double door and with a hrrumph! shoved, but the doors separated only for a second revealing a vertical line of ochre light that snapped shut in a waterfall of splinters.

“There’s something on the other side locking it,” Theda said.

“Stand back,” Cyril raised one leg and brought the heel down hard where the two doors met and they shattered apart.

A chemical odor rushed out and Theda closed her eyes against the sting, the pungent odor plugging her sinuses. She turned her head and gasped the pure, snow-filled air. For a sick moment, she thought a poisonous gas cannister had been deployed but then she recognized the scent. Gasoline.

“Mother!” Violet rushed past her stopped short with a strangled scream.

Standing in the middle of the barn were Margaret and Harold Evora. Harold stood slightly in front of his wife with both hands held up.

Twenty feet away from them was Dr. Harris, dressed in a drenched army overcoat that hung damply on his slight frame, dripping at his bare feet. His thin hair stretched fine over his bald head and his face was a mask of painful rage. The friendly doctor that Theda had seen in the Infirmary was replaced by this shaking creature. Theda remembered his false entry in the Infirmary ledger after the arrival of Van Horn, taken in unconscious and almost frozen to death, and the truth of what Conlin and Jackson had been trying to tell her finally settled in the pit of her stomach. It’s him. He is Thrax.

Harris was aiming a long-nosed Colt at the center of Harold’s chest.

Margaret Evora, hands up slightly, shot her mother’s eyes at her daughters silently communicating stay there! Harold and Dr. Harris were locked in an unblinking gaze.

At Dr. Harris’s feet were three oil lamps that cast three rings sickly yellow light. Behind him, carelessly tossed onto their sides were two large gasoline cans. The barn was empty but for the damp and moldy hay that had rotted to the point of disintegration, but now, that hay was freshly wet. Circling the dust around the perimeter of the vast room was a splashy trail that ended at one of the gas cans that where a drip of amber fluid hung in suspension from the side-turned spout.

Oh, God, no. The barn was a dormant torch, just waiting for the first spark.

“Stay where you are!” Harris called, eyes not moving from the Evoras, the gun shaking. “Stay right there,” he said around huffing, sobbing breaths.

“Girls, don’t come any closer. Please,” Harold Evora said in the voice he reserved for panicked patients. Her mother continued to watch them stone-faced, but a jerk of her chin toward Violet told Theda what to do. Your sister. Theda gently pulled Violet to her side then stepped in front of her.

“Don’t you let them leave, Harold,” Harris shook his head in a palsy-like frenzy. “They need to know.”

Violet squeezed her shoulders. “Theda…” she whispered. Cyril moved protectively next to them.

“Jonathan,” Harold said reasonably. “I know you’re frightened. But please. Just listen. I can help you.” He stepped forward. “You don’t have to go through this yourself. I understand. You think I don’t, but I do.”

“You despicable liar,” Harris spat. “You think because your little girls are here that you’re going to lie your way out? You think one of your thugs can protect you?” He jerked the gun toward Cyril.

“You still don’t fully understand, do you, Jonathan,” Harold said sadly. “He’s here to kill you.”

Cyril startled. “Doc, what’re you talking about?”

“You never stop, do you?” Harris pulled his other hand from the pocket of the overcoat. It was bright red, as if dipped on scalding hot water.

“Jonathan, you trusted the wrong people. Did you think they were going to let you live after this gets out? You thought they’d let you go home to Omaha and putter around the garden and teach your classes and play the good country doctor in peace? As of today, you’re a criminal. You’re a murderer.”

Harris laughed.

“You were deceived,” Harold went on. “You believed they were on your side, and they were. But only temporarily. Only until you did what they wanted you to do. And you never once stopped to realize that you were as expendable as those boys you ripped from Leavenworth.”

“Everything that you did,” Harris’s face paled and his finger tried for the hammer but slipped twice, but the third time it caught. He cocked the hammer, the sound reverberating in Theda’s heart. “God, if only the world knew who you really are, they’d put you in front of the firing squad.”

“Jonathan, I’m afraid you’re mixed up. But it’s understandable. The mind breaks when confronted by the hideousness of this life. This world.” He stepped forward and Theda knew what he was doing. It was the way he handled sick children who were afraid. “So much secrecy. But I discovered. Smelling rats isn’t very hard when you’re surrounded by them. I understood what they brought me in for shortly after I arrived. But I fought it. Something you didn’t do. You accepted that assignment with the obedience of a whipped dog.”

“You’ll burn in hell, Harold. For your lies. For your work.” He leveled the gun.

“Cyril’s not here to shoot you, Jonathan, but he’ll kill you all the same. He’s the carrier.”

Harris faltered. “That’s impossible. The carrier is already gone.”

Dr. Evora smiled and shook his head sadly. “They switched at the end. More secrets. The gentlemen in the below floor were asymptomatic. He’s right there,” he nodded toward Cyril. “You have a chance at reversing the destructive course you charted when you answered Whittaker’s call. I’m giving you a chance at redemption that even the good Lord Himself can’t give you. Kill him.”

Cyril’s face turned a deep red and his lips pulled tight over the bad teeth in a bitter snarl. He grabbed Theda under the arm and yanked her toward him, but Violet held on strong to her shoulders. Cyril whipped around and swiftly kicked Theda in the ankle.

She yelped and collapsed to the ground, Violet sinking with her, the pain in upper arm that Cyril was pinching mercilessly competing with the exploding pain in her ankle bones. She tried to wiggle free and almost succeeded, but he shifted his grip and dug his fingers into her muscle.

“Let her go!” Violet yelled and landed a decent blow, more accidentally than due to good aim, on his wrist and he released Theda’s arm. She sat hard on the barn floor and wrapped both hands around her ankle.

“Goddamn you all!” Cyril yelled.

Like an animated marionette, Harris’s torso jerked sideways and in one move pulled the trigger.

The blast shook the old barn causing a second explosion of black-winged and forked-tail barn swallows. Cyril stumbled, hands covering the hole in his chest. Shot right through the tattoo. Her empty stomach turned to acid. He fell backward, body wracked by spasms as his wet shoes dragged twin lines in the dusty floor. A moment later he lay still.

Violet screamed and muffled the sound with her hands. Margaret ran to her daughters. “Can you stand?” she asked Theda, kneeling next to her.

“I don’t know,” Theda rasped. She tried to place her foot flat to the floor, but the pain was too sharp. Chipped bone. The combat boots spared her from a break.

“Mother,” Violet started but Margaret hushed her by laying her hand gently on Violet’s back. Then she turned to Theda.

“Someone is hiding in the hay. By the back door,” she said quietly.

Theda slowly turned her head and saw a white face peeking out from the shadows.

It was Van Horn.

Margaret Evora brough both hands in front of her and pulled off her ring, the only ring besides her plain gold wedding band, that she wore constantly. She grabbed Theda’s hand and slipped the ring on her right middle finger.

It was her firefly ring with the cabochon garnet center.

Margaret never took it off. When the girls were little, they would beg to try the ring on, but Margaret always refused. It’s a special ring, one that I wear always. When you are older, you may have a special ring as well, and then you’ll understand.

Confused, Theda raised her face to her mother’s, and she recognized what she had known but had never articulated, even to herself, even during the times of recent turbulence. We are the same.

“No matter what happens, you’ll find me here,” Margaret said and stood. “Dr. Harris,” she called. “My daughters are going to leave this building. Then my husband and I are going to follow. Now.” She walked to Harold.

“Now what, Harold?” Harris said as if Margaret hadn’t spoken, but his voice had lost its prior hysteria and was as deflated as an old merchant who had a day of lost sales. A casual observer might have heard defeat in that tone, but only someone who had experienced willful death understood it. The memory of the white-haired man offering himself to the armed men in the middle of the Army City street passed through Theda’s thoughts.

Harris’s arm fell and the gun slipped from his fingers and he knelt, as if preparing to take the host in church.

Theda struggled to stand.

Harris grabbed the wire handle of the nearest lantern and flung it at the wall.

The flames burst upward in the same splashy pattern as the ground, and the fiery hunger consumed the barn in a rapid circle. Violet ran toward Margaret. Out of the shadows the pale face of Van Horn peeled himself away from the fire.

Harris took the next lantern and set it in front of himself. He lifted the glass and passed his wet sleeve through the small flame. Dr. Jonathan Harris became a kneeling torch that fell forward in shaking pyre.

Harold ran toward her. He knelt and picked her up under her arms. “Stand!”

“Mother!” Theda screamed. A wall of flames separated her from Margaret and Violet.

“There’s no time! Now!” Harold shouted and hauled her to her feet. He pulled her through the door.

They stumbled through the snow and away from the barn that was now engulfed and in the late afternoon hours it held a strange beauty. Theda stopped, struggling with her father and tried to pull him toward the barn, but he dragged her onward.

“They got out the back! I pushed them toward the back door!” Harold held her under the arm in the same bruised place that Cyril had. “We must go! This flu can still be stopped but you must come with me now!”

Theda’s ankle screamed and her thoughts became the jumbled wreck of someone both in pain and stunned. Had someone been tracking them, they would see her injury by the step-and-drag of her tracks. Focus. Focus. They got out the back. “Where are we going?” she said.

“There,” Harold pointed. A small structure rose in the middle of the miles of empty field. As they got closer, it took the shape of a regular backyard shed that held innocent tools such as rakes and shovels. What a funny place to place a shed!

She felt that same feeling of pulling, of strong confusion, that she had experienced in Cyril’s car. Pain. Pain and shock.

“We’re almost there,” Harold huffed, and then he said in his lyrical voice:

“When do I ask white Age he saith not so:

“My head hangs weighted with snow.”

“I’ve never heard that verse,” she said, her voice a million miles away, stumbling and holding onto his shoulder.

“You would not have heard of it. It’s Wilfred Owen.”

“Owen?”

“Yes, my dear. He is one of the most celebrated poets of World War One.”

Theda took two more stumbling steps. She stopped and stared into her father’s eyes.

He lightly kicked her hurt ankle and she went down into the snow.