Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series Book 3) Read online

  I imagine him passing in his coach, that resplendent vehicle that cost such a fortune in its day, with its dinner service, its traveling library and plate chest, and its lounging sofa for the days after the nights of excess. I hear the jangle of harness, the snort of horses still warm from the stable, stamping their hooves in the pre-dawn light of Pisa.

  But here it is not possible to think of Byron without conjuring Shelley, pale, tired, worn from his ever-whirling household and all the people who wanted things from him. I see him walking along the shore, his mind on fire with all the words there would not be time to write down, all the feverish-winged thoughts that went out in the Gulf of Spezia forever. It was upon a shore not far from here that Shelley’s body was put to fire, though his heart, held in Byron’s grieving hands, would not, they say, take the flame. Perhaps Shelley was tired of burning, for he had been in the crucible all his life.

  Why are we haunted by all the things poets do not live long enough to say?

  May____, 1955

  We have found a place to stay for the next several weeks, a crumbling, decrepit casa with its feet in the sea. Behind us rise hills, rolling and heady with cypress and olive trees and the smell of ripe lemons wafting in through the windows—which is just as well as it helps to overpower the mildew.

  The house was owned by nobility until early this century but the war put an end to that. When I asked the old caretaker who rented it to us what happened to the family, he shrugged, one of those Italian shrugs that are more eloquent than thousands of words from a different race and said—‘They are all gone, disappeared after the war.’ This could mean any number of things—they were all killed, or they had to leave for their own safety, and for one reason or another never returned.

  Like all good casas worth their salt, it also comes, Giuseppe assures us, with its own ghost. He told us this as the night rolled in, blanketing the house like thick muffling velvet. He said it’s the ghost of a woman who lived here in the 16th century, who was imprisoned in the stone tower that looks out over the sea for the crime of not producing a male heir for her lord. She eventually died there, still imprisoned in the tower. It is said she roams the house in the night, looking for a doorway out but never finding it. Andrei looked suitably alarmed at this news, for he is used to Russian ghosts who tend to come back only for vengeful purposes. I am used to Irish ghosts however, who are an altogether milder species.

  My room looks out over the sea. I opened the tall windows and left them that way for the night, the shushing of the waves lulling me to sleep.

  May____, 1955

  We spent a sleepless night here, due to the peregrinations of the ghost—or so we thought at first. It occurs to me that an Irishman and a Russian ought not to share such old, decrepit lodgings. It seems inevitable we would summon a ghost eventually.

  I was fully asleep, having imbibed too much grappa during the evening, when the most unearthly moaning woke me up. I sat up in bed, rather startling the woman who had accompanied me home. It didn’t take her long to understand what had wakened me, and she set to jibbering in Italian in a manner not designed to pluck up a man’s courage.

  I left the bed swiftly, for the moaning continued, seeming to come from both the rafters and the window and then quite suddenly from the tree outside my window. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs and immediately regretted it—perhaps I was only having a grappa-induced hallucination. I felt it was time to put on some pants, as no man can meet a phantom with dignity when he’s naked as a new-minted babe.

  Pants on, I opened the door to my bedroom, feeling a bit like Shelley going off to face the terrifying apparitions that heralded his own death. Colliding with an angry Russian in the hall somewhat dampened this Romantic illusion. Andrei was, like myself, only half-clad, but ornamented with a signorina wrapped in a sheet. She too was letting loose a stream of Italian invective which I felt certain would either banish said ghost or bring it down upon our heads in fiery vengeance.

  A thing—a wafty, white sort of thing—was floating up in the tower near the cap in spiraling loops. In the gloom of the night, with the sea moaning and crashing in a lugubrious manner outside our walls, it looked utterly terrifying. There was no making head nor tail of it, for it was most oddly shaped and drifted in no comprehensible manner. Truly, it seemed that we were being paid a visit from the other side. As we stood there craning our necks, trying to rationalize it, the women very sensibly began praying loudly to Mary and went to retrieve their clothing, after which they made haste to leave our lodgings. I can’t say I blame them, for had I anywhere to run, I might well have done so. A ghost is hardly like a bug. You can’t merely eject it from your lodgings with a pat of its wings and a blessing to guide its path away from your door.

  This left Andrei and me looking at one another in blank dismay, neither of us being versed in the finer points of how to exorcise a ghost. Admittedly, a damp, crumbling casa by the sea in Pisa does not lend itself to a feeling of jolly calm. In fact, I was beginning to feel rather like a vapor-given character in a Gothic novel when the ghost—how to say this delicately—emitted a rather worldly substance that landed squarely on my shoulder. That, I am assured by our housekeeper Gina, is a sign of great fortune. We shall see.

  Our phantom was an owl that had somehow not only managed to fly in through the gaps in the tower, but arrived with a pair of commodious ladies’ underwear attached to its head. The resulting confusion had understandably upset it, hence the mournful moaning.

  How to get it down became the issue. And get it down we must for it was bumping about up there like a demented ghoul intent on dashing its brains out.

  Before I really thought about it, I started to climb the sides of the tower. It was an exhilarating climb, though in retrospect, suicidal. I could feel the stones crumble in places as my feet left their purchase. I felt as though I had quicksilver along all my limbs and that I merely flowed along the wall as if I were as much part of it as the stone and lichen, wind and rain.

  I managed to shove the shutters open so that the owl could fly out. Feeling the air, it did, though not before flapping furiously around my head for what seemed a very long time. Just as the owl gained its freedom, letting out a screech into the night that would have chilled a Viking to his core, I felt the stone under my hand give. There wasn’t time for thought, only blindly flailing and hoping for some solidity in a suddenly precarious universe.

  It is difficult to give truth to this scene, so ridiculous was it. For there I was, hanging from a chandelier that was clearly about to tear itself out of its crumbling moorings and take me with it straight to the pits of hell—or at the very least, to the cold stone floor of the casa.

  Andrei, seized with inspiration, grabbed the sheets from his bed and returned, frantically knotting them. I was still hanging on despite the chandelier groaning in a manner that indicated it was about done with my nonsense. He knotted the end with what seemed to me sadistic thoroughness and tossed it to me. I had a moment of free fall as the chandelier gave way and crashed to the floor below. I caught the knot of the sheet and fell like a stone. The sheet snapped tight. Andrei had the other end braced over the balustrade, the tendons in his neck and arms standing out like an anatomical drawing. I shimmied up the sheet with adrenaline booming through every cell, crawled over the shaky stone of the balustrade and collapsed at Andrei’s feet. I started to laugh, for the sheer ludicrousness of the situation and for the immense relief of being alive.

  Andrei looked down the haughty length of his exceptionally aristocratic nose and said, “You are fucking mad, Yasha. Oh and by the way, you are welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I said, suitably chastened as the adrenaline ebbed and the various contusions and cuts began to assert themselves.

  Then being a good Russian, he poured us each a shot of vodka from the store he carries everywhere with him. We drank it back, said goodnight with what dignit
y remained to each of us, which is to say, none, and departed to our respective beds.

  June____, 1955

  We visited the ancient Bay of Baiae today, taking a boat over its drowned columns and cracked mosaics, the heaved blind arches thick with swaying mosses and the pearled remnants of ancient marbled cisterns. Here is the home of Poseidon, here where Caligula built his bridge of boats, giving lie to Thrasyllus’ prediction that he had no more chance of becoming Emperor than riding a horse across the Gulf of Baiae. Rome suffered famine for Caligula’s conceits, and here many drowned in the rose thick water as boats overturned after nights where wine spilled upon lip and over gem-studded prow with a profligacy only the most crazed of emperors could have summoned forth, even from a land as fertile as this one. It was here that Hadrian died, wasted away and bleeding from nose and mouth. Here that Caesar and Nero summered. Here that Cleopatra studied while waiting for her lover to return… but it was not Caesar that came to her, only the ghost of his violent death.

  I could see, if I half-closed my eyes, the scented women and men, the warriors on furlough, the philosophers and hedonists all come to this aqueous garden that Seneca called a ‘harbor of vice’. How different they were and yet how much the same, drinking deep of the sun’s nectar, seeking pleasure, wanting love, planning battles and dreaming new philosophies amongst the terraced gardens. How many affairs were begun and ended amid the summer’s pleasures? How many hearts were broken briefly or, perhaps, permanently?

  June____, 1955

  Andrei and I have gathered round us a social group of mathematicians, poets and philosophers, students and vagabonds who are resting here before continuing the journey onward after the call of the Siren East. The evenings are pleasant, spent with the local wine and grappa, and the food that Gina makes for us. The weather has been perfect, as though we exist in some idyll in a story rather than a climate that can be brutally hot in summer. And if the days are perfect, the nights are beyond sublime, the stars so thick and heavy that they bring to mind Joyce’s words about the ‘heaven-tree of stars hung with night-blue fruit.’ And, of course, there are the Italian women. Andrei seems to be trying to sample as many of the locals as possible before the summer is over. I prefer to linger over the meal and find its secret delights. There is a beautiful divorcée living in the hills above us here who intrigues with smoky silence and a fierce hunger of infinite variety that leaves me hollow-eyed and making my way home in the pre-dawn silence with only the thick cypress and lemon and olive groves for my companions. John lectured me roundly on gluttony, debauchery, and the regrets that are their constant companions before I left Oxford for the summer. I know he referred not to food but to women and I have tried to keep his advice in mind, because I do not like to take a woman to my bed without feeling, even if it is only fondness and desire.

  I wonder though, if it is ever possible to leave a woman’s bed feeling entirely whole, not as if something, however small and unidentifiable, is missing. If such a place exists, I have yet to find it.

  There is nothing missing, however, in all the talk and speculation that gathers itself around our table each night. We have a small gnome of a man who comes once or twice a week, named Pietro, who is an amateur local astronomer and has shown me the heavens in a way I have never seen them before. He has a dreamer’s soul, and therefore we speak the language of one like spirit to another. Often we can stretch out on the grass behind the casa and stare at the heavens for hours altogether and never need to say more than a sentence here or there.

  July____, 1955

  I noticed that terrible brilliance at the edges of my vision today. At first, I thought it was merely aftershocks from the sun on the sea, or rather I hoped it was. I do not want to have one of my episodes here. I do not want to have them anywhere, for that matter, but somehow I know this will, should it arrive, be a bad one. I dare not run, for it runs with me, fleet and dark, taking off the chains that bind it even now. Like Shelley, I would find a wild wood and stretch my frame in the gloomiest of shades to try to quench the unceasing fire that gnaws at me like a beast with an insatiable appetite.

  But I cannot find the wood. The pit looms and I will fall.

  July____, 1955

  It is never easy to describe time spent with the Crooked Man, not even to myself. I shudder to bring such thoughts into focus, as I only want to travel away from those times, as far and as fast as I can. It is like being in and out of focus in your own emotions, your surroundings—in short, reality—whatever constitutes that fragile state. Sometimes it is like a broken mirror afterward. You can only summon the most distorted of images and make out fragments of a picture you don’t particularly want to see. This time, I carried something clear out with me, as though I held something precious and knew it, so took care to protect it through whatever dark and filthy landscape must be crossed to get to the other side.

  It was a woman. It sounds mad now but I could swear I felt someone take my hand and pull me toward a sanctuary where the noise stopped and the whisperings of the Crooked Man were silenced. A place where it was cool and I could just rest. I don’t know if I saw her face, felt her skin or… what? I didn’t carry the memory of those things out with me, but I feel the trace of her along myself, as though she wrote directly upon my soul. But I don’t know the words that were carved thereon.

  I knew her. She was as real as this paper beneath my hand, as real as the broken colonnade that runs down to the sea. But she was more than these things. I knew her in a way that seemed to have little to do with time. She was my ‘soul without my soul’, as Shelley once put it. But even Shelley, with his passions and loves, did not truly believe in the ‘Epipsychidion’—mourning the loss of this ideal. For poets know better than others that such things do not happen in this realm. But oh, how we all long for it. Whether we can express it in words or not, still we yearn.

  She lay down beside me and took my hand in hers. A strange peace descended over me at her touch and I could feel her weight on the mattress, smell her scent, fresh and somehow soft. She touched her hand to my face and told me to sleep. And I did.

  I awoke and, of course, she was not there. She had only been a fevered dream, a beautiful dream that seemed more real than the waking world, but a dream nonetheless. I felt a terrible loss, as though I had lived a life with her in some other time, some other place, but now we could only meet in dreams, in that fragmented landscape of my brain and heart at its lowest and darkest.

  Tonight I sat by the window in my room, the scent of the sea strong, and found lines of Rilke running through my head.

  You who never arrived

  In my arms, Beloved…

  I don’t know her. She never existed and yet tonight I feel the cut of loss as deeply as if someone had torn my heart out.

  “I miss you.” I said it low, looking toward the sea, but I said it to her—she who never arrived.

  July____, 1955

  Andrei has been stalking around in an icy silence for two days, since I managed to get up out of my bed and rejoin the world. I finally confronted him today and asked him what the hell was wrong with him.

  He flashed me one of his haughtiest looks and said, “If you’re planning to commit suicide, I’d rather you didn’t do it on my watch.”

  I refrained from pointing out that this was somewhat rich, considering his tricks on the Eiffel Tower.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, though my heart was thumping in my chest. I have no memory of the last few days other than the dream of the woman.

  He gave me one of his iciest looks, the one that makes you feel like an undesirable bug caught in someone’s soup. Then his expression changed.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “Remember what?” I asked, fear making me peevish with him.

  “Yasha, you were walking into the sea when I found you. If I hadn’t wa
kened in the night, you would have drowned. You don’t remember, do you?”

  I shook my head, feeling sick. I have done some very stupid things during previous episodes, but not to this extent, not something that might actually have killed me, and without even a vague memory of it.

  “I was yelling at you as I ran down the shore. You never even turned your head. You seemed completely unaware that I was there, as though you were in another place altogether, even after I grabbed you and dragged you out. I shook you hard, I was so angry, and you just looked at me like you weren’t sure who I was or why I was shaking you.”

  There is no way to tell him the vision I was caught up in, how I did not even feel the waves wrapping round me, ready to pull me in and down, that I was on another far plane where the Crooked Man rules and it is always night. There are no words to explain and so I did not. Andrei seemed to sense this for though he is normally given to large and very verbal fits on anything that upsets him, he merely shrugged and said, ‘Yasha, you are well now. That is all that matters. Eat, for the love of God, before you disappear.’

  One cannot explain a journey with the Crooked Man to one who does not travel those ways. It is to touch the drought, to know such aridity of soul that one thinks one will never know water again, either spiritually or mentally.

  July____, 1955

  A letter from my father arrived today. It was, as usual, filled with paternal admonitions to come home for at least part of the summer. Guilt had begun to dribble in at my toes the minute I took it from our postman. I even contemplated putting it aside and not reading it. But filial guilt did its work and I read it.

  I just want this summer free of the yoke that comes with being a Kirkpatrick. I just want to be me for a few months. How weak that sentence sounds yet it sums up all that I feel, what I want right now. I see my life stretching out before me. I know my duty, and for now I want to run in the opposite direction, for I know my feet will take me back to what I must do eventually.