Rob stormed out of the office slamming furiously the door behind him. He hurtled down the stairs of the old building in a hurry, miraculously avoiding falling off, and threw himself into the effervescence of London's east end. The clamouring of his superior still rung in his ears, but the noises of the modern life muffled them gradually.
It was one of those days…
The night was spreading its black coat while the autumn rain poured down heavily, reflecting the lights of the city onto the wet asphalt like a coloured lake.
Rob dived into the maze of dark, narrow streets, winding through the tide of grey umbrellas. He walked at a brisk pace, passing the headlights of backed-up cars, obscure little shops and fast foods of strong frying smell flashing around him. Raindrops slapped his face and soaked his shirt - he had left his coat on the back of his chair at the office and had no desire to go back for it.
What a shitty day ! His rotten mood definitively needed the emotional comfort of some strong alcohol.
Suddenly appearing in front of him out of nowhere, a little man stopped his wild race. He vigorously waved an umbrella under his nose which Rob took with a sigh of relief in exchange for a few pounds from his pockets. It was a shabby little grey umbrella like all the others, that would nonetheless do up to the subway entrance. Cold and soaked to the skin, he took shelter under the thin fabric and quickened his pace, his head down, eyes fixating the glistening sidewalk.
Scarcely had he resume his path when it was interrupted again, his shoulder stroked violently something. Or someone. Stunned by the force of the collision, he turned around to apologize for his own negligence, and realized he had knocked a man lost in a desperate trance. Immobile, he was petrified like a pillar of salt, while the crowd swarmed around him, indifferent to his stupor.
Taken aback, Rob stopped a moment to make sure the man was okay, watching out for a reaction from him.
The scene that unfolded felt like something out of a science fiction movie. His dark silhouette, melting into the black night, stood motionless, as if life had been drained out of him, oblivious to everything but his own thoughts.
Rain mixed with tears was streaming down his chiselled face, his eyes obscured by wet locks of jet hair falling over his forehead. There was an air of gloom about him that send shivers down Rob's spine. He looked like a man who had been to hell and back.
Transfixed by the apparition, Rob took a step towards him and felt dizzy, seeing the stranger gave him an odd feeling, like he was looking at a prisoner of another time and space.
He moved closer, and the world around him blurred, turning into a silent stream of ghostly silhouettes. The entire city vibrated in slow motion. Rob had the peculiar sensation of his body being swept away like the leaves at his feet, defying gravity, as the air thickened at their approach and wrapped them in a cottony fog.
Certainly, his eyes had to play tricks on him, for it seems that cars had scattered, their curves having all of a sudden the sophistication of antique automobiles. Here and there, shadows emerged from the dark mist, ladies in old fashioned gown holding hands with men looking very dapper in suits and hats. Flashes so unclear that Rob could only blame his imaginative mind and his lack of sleep, impressions so sudden that the sensation of it disappeared the moment he felt it, leaving him breathless and stunned. Oh God.. Is it still the side effects of that bloody acid I took back in 98?!
Cautiously - perhaps for fear for breaking the glass bubble of his daydream into a thousand pieces - he held out a hand to touch the man's shoulder, and when he finally laid his fingers on his long black coat, the man with ebony hair slowly raised his head and sunk a deep grey gaze into his eyes.
As though awaking from a paralysing nightmare, his figure set in motion. He sniffled and carried his drenched sleeve to his eyes to dry his tears - it made little sense.
"I'm sorry, did I hurt you?" asked Rob softly, a worried tone seeping into his words.
"No", replied the man in a hoarse voice after a long silence. He swept an haggard glace around him and muttered:
"I don't understand what I'm doing here.. I must have fell asleep in the yard…"
Rob's chest tightened as his sentence broke off. The man looked like a lost boy trapped in an environment that did not belong to him.
He didn't know why, but he felt tender concern for this mysterious soul, feeling deep in him the need to reassure him. With the tenderness one could have toward a wounded creature, he took him gently by the shoulder and sheltered his frame under the grey umbrella. Side by side, they headed for a coffee at a safe place Rob knew well, where they could dry off and warm up, and where the enigmatic stranger could reveal his secrets.
When this strange Mr Barrow – or Thomas, he gave away after some reluctance- showed his face under the raw light of the café, Rob was seized with astonishment. For a moment, he felt like he was looking at his own reflection, their features echoing each other in a scary mirror effect.
Maybe he had just found his doppelganger. Didn't some legend say that every human had his own double, somewhere in the universe?
Je est un autre. Rimbaud mad idiom had never been more real, more lucid. Inside, Rob wondered if he did not projected in him his own fantasized self. There was a venenous charm about this melancholic figure that he was clearly devoid of.
It seemed they were carved from the same marble, but of different dispositions.
While Rob generous, mischievous face radiated a warm and nonchalant appearance, Thomas, his opposite, seemed to hide a dark and heavy heart behind an icy face and an impeccable appearance.
The most unsettling was that the more Rob examined him, the more he gave him the impression of a man from elsewhere, escaped from another time, since his clothes had the finesse and style of a bygone era and his expressions were at times charmingly passé.
Coffee was followed by wine, melting masks and restrain, loosening up the conversation in its toxic spell. Sipping nervously his beverage, Rob was shifting from impatience on his chair, rambling about his day as if he had known the man in front of him forever, although deep down, longing to ask him the question that burned his tongue.
His drink empty, words flew away like birds from a cage.
"What the hell happened to you?" he spat out, then added, a bit playful : " Oh I'm sure it must be some love story gone awfully wrong!"
Thomas stiffened.
He ran a hand through his thick hair and slicked it back with a sullen expression ; invisible strings lifting subtly the corner of his mouth in an irritated, bitter smile, the chiaroscuro lighting digging his cheekbones in a dramatic effect. At that very moment, as shaped by the brush of a renaissance painter or the pen of a novelist, his face seemed eerie, somehow possessed by a malicious force.
"Do you have a cigarette? I would kill for one".
Thomas dry tone cut out with a knife the thick tension palpable in the air. It almost made Rob fear for his life. He shook his head no, for all he wished he did, just to please the man and lighten his mood, he did not smoke.
A few moments later, Thomas broke the stretches of uncomfortable silence that had settled between them.
"I was dismissed from the place I was working at, without a reference."
"I'm sorry" replied Rob, in a slight affected smile, suddenly embarrassed by his own curiosity. "What was your job?"
Thomas relaxed a bit.
"I am… or rather I was in the service of a big house in the Yorkshire. But without a reference, I will certainly be able to pursue a great and fascinating career in collecting refuse."
Rob chuckled softly and tried to ease his discomfort:
"I'm working with a fancy hotel company at the moment, I can check with the director to find you some work. It probably won't be anything special, a job as a valet or as a groom maybe." With a sneer, he continued, his eyes brightening up: "Unless you were fired for butchering some patronizing rich boss of yours and made dinner with the rest of his body…Hannibal style."
His hint at humour fell flat. Thomas remained impassive, only his hands, strumming on the wood table, betrayed his embarrassment.
"Nothing that sinister", Thomas said in a low voice.
His face darkened, and Rob regretted bringing up the subject. Thomas opened his mouth as if about to speak, but retained his words for a moment.
After some time, he bared his soul, as if he could no longer remain silent.
"I made an inappropriate gesture to an employee". He looked up at Rob, who was listening in an attitude of attention : "I was deceived by my own illusions. I am foolish and impulsive. Someone made me believe my attraction to the person I was infatuated with was mutual. I fell into the trap." Gauging Rob's lack of reaction, he hesitated: " I…I kissed this man…who threatened to call the police. I got fired."
Rob widened his eyes, perplexed.
"The police?! I knew Yorkshire was removed from civilization but I didn't know they had practices from the Dark Ages! You can't fire people for this!"
Thomas did not seem to react to the bewilderment that his confession had engendered.
"No, you send them to prison." He corrected in a monotonous and disembodied tone. Rob couldn't believe his ears. Had this guy spent the last century under a rock?!
"But I regret nothing." Thomas came alive again. "If this is the price I have to pay for daring to have feelings, so… be it." The words came out solemnly, like a vow.
Confusing as his tale was for a 21th century exchange, he spoke with such a deep conviction that Rob couldn't help but being moved by his brief speech, at once fatuous and brave. And yet, fearing Thomas was having some kind of joke on
him, he decided to cut the conversation short.
"Look, I suggest we meet here tomorrow, same time."
Thomas put a leather-gloved hand on that of Rob and thanked him warmly. Touched by the display of affection but refusing to give in to the sentimentality, Rob removed his hand from his clutch and asked :
"Do you have a picture of you I can send to the general manager of the hotel? Thomas nodded and pulled out from his wallet an old yellowed and spotted photograph.
"I am sorry", he said a little chagrined. "It was in a better state last time I saw it, it must have been wet by the rain. It dates back to a long time ago, when I was a footman. Before the Great war. You can see me posing in livery in front of the mansion."
Rob took hold of the picture. Thomas face was shaded off but he could still distinguish its outlines. He was so elegant, standing before the lens of the camera, a destabilizing air of arrogance and pride printed over his face.
It was not the distraught character he had found in the London's streets. Was it really the same man?
The building behind him was magnificent. A castle from a fairy tale.
Before the Great War…repeated Rob, as if he had just grasped the sense of the words. Something dreadful hit him – a revelation.
His natural pale complexion turned livid. Fright captured him as though he had seen a ghost. He stammered :
" I… I should go… They are waiting for me at home.." He leaped up, apologized, took his bag, slid the photograph inside and threw over his shoulder an inaudible "See you tomorrow".
A slight wave of the hand and he was gone, swallowed into the darkness of the city.
The wind was whistling, cold and clammy. It penetrated his mind, tiring him away from the uncanny meeting to bring him back to reality, his everyday life, the path he made every day for years, the same that made this evening so surreal. He ran as if chased by supernatural forces, trying to get away from the feeling that he had met his own self from an anterior life.
He wanted to escape the disturbing picture Thomas reflected back to him _ his fears and all he had always refused to be.
The erratic pounding of his heels echoing the rhythm of his heartbeats, it was the sound of his clockwork life ticking toward the shattered reality of chaos, toward the familiar yet alien face that haunted his mind.
And thus, he rushed into the gaping maw of glowy the subway entrance, eager to find a compose life whose sense he had just lost, guilt already overpowering him for having abandoned the man. Deep down, he knew he would come back tomorrow. He was too captivated not to, too jolted to get way from this.
A little further up the street, still seated at the café, Thomas fell asleep on his chair, his thoughts turned toward the person he had met and whom he would never see again ; he would wake up later, in his narrow bed at Downton Abbey, to face his demons, pack his suitcase and take the road of a new life.
Though he failed curiously to grasp that his step toward an unknown destiny had already been taken.