It is early evening still, with the long night ahead of him, the last he must spend in the City-between-the-Bridges. His words of farewell to Cardell still sear his tongue. A scratch at his door; he opens for Hedvig.
“I saw your note on the corner. What do you want?”
He returns to the pile of papers he has sorted to pack in his trunk, but not quickly enough to prevent her ever-watchful gaze from seeking out the gold chain that now decorates his waistcoat. He lifts the watch from his pocket and holds it out to her.
“Jean Michael had it, this whole time. He must have got it from the pawnshop last winter, just after Cecil’s death. God only knows what it must have cost him. Every penny of his wages, and more besides, for months on end. For him, Cecil’s memory was worth the hunger it cost.”
The tireless brass pulse of the watch counts out each moment. Hedvig studies it for a long time, as if to assure herself that every last detail concurs with her memory.
“Do you want it? Take it. You have more right to it than I do.”
He unhooks the chain from his buttonhole, places the watch on the table, and resumes his packing, all of his possessions strewn in disarray across the bed, ready to be swept into the trunk. A comb that lacks some teeth; some bread, and a bottle of well water for the road; travel documents at the ready. The stack of papers Cecil left behind in his room in the Meadowland. The leather pouch of tiny tools required for clock repairs. He feels Hedvig’s eyes burn into his back. He only manages to pretend being busy for a few minutes before he gives up and sits down in front of her with sunken shoulders, his hands in his lap. He lowers his chin before the worry in her face.
“So you are leaving us. Why this sudden change of heart, Emil? What has happened?”
The mere memory is enough to make his lungs pump with rapid and shallow breaths.
“I thought I saw him, Hedvig, this morning. Cecil came to me in the street, in the middle of the day. As real as you are now. The apparitions are coming. My disease has grown too strong. I must go home. I should never have come.”
“Back to your old quarters, then. For what? To wait out your life? Will you start drinking again?”
“Better that than this. Your doctors in the Oxenstierna madhouse had no cures. No medicine would work. They took my clothes away, and put me in a dark chamber with a hatch in the ceiling through which a bucket of ice water would come pouring when I least expected it, so as to shock my body back to health. After a while I realized they were only keeping me as a curiosity. A line of students came for daily visits to stare at me through a hole in the door. Escape was my only chance to keep what little sanity still remained, and once I was out, only the drinking helped. Maybe it will help again. The price may be high, but the illness is worse. I never want to see Cecil in the street again. He said terrible things. All of them true.”
In his rage at his lack of self-control, he blinks a tear down his cheek. She allows him to calm down before she answers. It takes a while, but finally his thin shoulders stop shaking and his breaths slow down.
“You shouldn’t mistake the vision conjured by your ailment for our brother.”
“Whatever I saw was made up of memories, what else? If Cecil had been there and alive, he would have said the same thing, word for word.”
Hedvig shakes her head.
“No. You’re being unfair, or else bitterness has clouded your memories.”
“Prove it.”
“Your escape from the tomb of the living, Emil, how did it happen?”
“I stole a key.”
“From whom? And how?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Did it simply appear in your cell one evening, just as the lights were being doused for the night? And were the corridors empty as if by coincidence, all the way out to the square, unlit by either moonlight or lanterns?”
“What are you trying to say, Hedvig?”
“Perhaps you had help, little brother, from someone who knew that a helping hand would be swept aside if you only knew to whom it belonged.”
Emil feels the blood rush to his temples and drum an increasingly rapid rhythm in his forehead.
“Cecil? Are you saying that Cecil helped me escape? But how? Where would he have found the money to buy my liberty?”
He goes to the bed and pulls out the brown-paper parcel of his brother’s documents, leafing quickly through them until he finds what he is looking for, then follows the text with his finger until he finds the date that coincides all too well to leave any room for doubt. For a moment, his sight darkens.
“I saw the receipt before, but not the date. He pawned his watch twice. The first time was to pay my way out of the madhouse.”
“When I found you, you were in a terrible state, Emil. You were no longer among us, saw things beyond our sight, spoke only to phantoms. Perhaps the treatment would have alleviated your suffering if you had but stayed long enough for it to take effect. Cecil chose another way, but I don’t doubt that his reasons were the same as mine. To him, you may still have a debt to pay.”
Emil puts the receipt back where he found it and covers his face with his hands.
“Too late now.”
He feels her hand on his shoulder, cool in its comfort.
“Is it?”
She leaves him alone in a silence broken only by the anxious ticking of the watch.