Free Echo House by Ward Just Page B

find that it had. A fly was struggling in the threads, and he removed it with a fingernail and watched it dart away. He lay down at once, but sleep did not come. He lay in the nervous interval between the quiet and the frantic, heavy with desire that he knew could not be satisfied. He swallowed the last of the Cognac and put the glass aside, wishing that he had another, because he was on the spike of the present moment, the future unknowable and the past out of reach. As the French say, he was
coincé,
cornered, in that small room high above the valley. Moonlight fell through the open window, the air redolent of the vineyards. He was wide awake with his eyes closed, wrapped in a cocoon of his own making. As he often did during those years in France, he sought to penetrate his eyelids to discover the world beyond the nervous interval. He counted the countries he had lived in or visited, working backward from the most recent. There were twenty-six altogether, and soon he found himself on his long honeymoon voyage to India, Ceylon, Burma, and Siam.
    In India they had had letters of introduction. They were invited to visit the archives of the museum at Calcutta. The curator showed them statuary and temple rubbings, many of them pornographic. When Sylvia laughed loudly, the curator was offended; then he too began to smile. The naïveté of Americans amused him. They stayed at the museum all morning, then walked back to the hotel in the furnace of midday, Sylvia still convulsed. Axel thought she was behaving like a schoolgirl. She admitted later that she had been caught unawares, off guard, and asked him if he had ever seen such things before. Of course, he said. The British Museum, the Dahlem, even the Corcoran in Washington. Why didn't you tell me? she demanded. This became a great issue with her. You're so secretive, she said. You never tell me anything. I know nothing of your thoughts. She worried the matter all the way to Siam.
    In that way the early morning advanced at its usual pace; and in due course Sylvia left and Nadège arrived, and still he could not see beyond the next tick of the clock. He thought that when sadness closed its fist around your heart, it would never relax until it had squeezed you dry.

    They departed at dawn, driving into a gorgeous sunrise. There was no one about in the château or in the village. They went out the way they came in, but in no time were lost, driving along a country road no wider than the Jeep. After an hour Fred stopped and Axel climbed on the hood with field glasses to search for a landmark, anything that would point the way to a town. In the saddle of the next low valley was a church spire and a few crabbed buildings. A thin ribbon of smoke rose from one of the chimneys. Many birds were gathered round and about. Even at a mile or more away Axel could see them perched on the steeple and swarming nearby, tiny as insects. With the glasses he saw that the stained glass windows of the church were intact and the steeple unmarked. Townspeople were seated in the little graveyard beside the church. Fred put the car in gear and proceeded carefully. They had no idea what they would find or if they would be welcome.
    The cries of the birds grew shrill as they approached, but there was no other sound, because this was a city of the dead. The people in the graveyard had been shot and left to die where they fell. The parish priest was impaled on a bayonet and abandoned on the church porch. There were other dead in the streets and on the front steps of houses and littered like garbage at the base of the World War One monument. Huge blackbirds had collected on the tables in front of the café, walking over the bodies of the dead. More people lay across chairs and under the tables, some shot and others hacked to death. There were women and children, some infants, and men young and old. A dog prowled among the corpses, and as the Americans watched, he too collapsed and died. There was no