Fortress of Ephemera: A Gothic Thriller (26 page)

Yours Faithfully,

Dr. Horace Dunn

Forensic Alienist

Bellevue Hospital

New York, New York

March 19
^th
, 1920

Bellevue Hospital Grounds

“Hurrah for Ringling Brothers! And Barnum and Bailey too!”
For I can see through a window that, with another of the circus's charity performances underway in the main auditorium, the back lawn is virtually barren of patients.

The taciturn white coat escorting me opens the locked door that I use as a shortcut and leaves me to go outside, where other white coats await to supervise me. The weather is clement, at least for late winter, and the sun graces the lawn and the East River beyond. Shrinking islands of snow dot the grass and the walkways.

A few consumptives are wrapped in blankets on chaise lounges and taking air. I select an open seat as far from them as possible, lay back, and close my eyes.

“Trenowyth!” I soon hear. The voice I recognize before locating its owner. It's Rico Grimaldi, an alien from Italy, a paranoid. He stands beneath the covered veranda, where the chessboards congregate, gesturing for me to come over to him. “Fancy game of chess, please?”

“You'd only accuse me of cheating,” I call. “When I inevitably thump you.”

“You
do
cheat,” he says.

An idiot with echolalia wanders by Grimaldi, vocalizing nonstop. A stolen stethoscope dangles at his chest.

“Play him,” I say to Grimaldi. “He'll defeat you too, but won't mind being called names afterwards.” I turn away, collapse against the back rest again.

“Please, Trenowyth!” I ignore him, and he soon realizes it. “Cheater! Big cheater!”

Three figures approach from a meandering walkway in front of me. One of them I recognize as Doctor Dunn and another as my primary psychiatrist, Doctor Cuthbertson. The small figure between them is a woman, not an inmate, because she wears civilian attire, the loose garb of the
flapper,
as the newspapers say. Her hair is short and bobbed and flaming red, the same exact shade, in fact, as my departed wife's hair had been. There is a familiar sway to her gait. I think I know her too, but can't quite place her.

Or can I?

My body rises from the chaise lounge of its own accord. She grows more familiar to me by the step—the eyes, the lips, that nose, the cheeks—until I believe what I am seeing no more.

“Hello, Miles,” she says, still approaching, and I know the voice too. Intimately.

My eyes see through a curtain of water by now, and her image blurs as she halts before me. I rub the tears away—desperately—with a wipe of my sleeve, so that I may gawk anew. It is unmistakable. It is my dead love, and no other, who stands before me, inexplicably alive again.

“Annabel!”

THE END

Also by Eric Christopherson:

CRACK-UP: A Psychological Thriller (4.5 stars, 47 reviews at Amazon US)

THE PROPHET MOTIVE: A Cult Thriller (4.2 stars, 62 reviews at Amazon US)

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