Title: Entertaining Angels (part 2 of 3)
Author: Jordanna Morgan
It was rather ignominious, really.
What armies and assassins, vengeful supernatural beings and even the League of Darkness could not do, one lowly thief had accomplished on the streets of London: the demise of Phileas Fogg.
This was the thought that turned over in Phileas' mind, as he lay bleeding his life away in a cold dark alley. More than any other consideration, that humiliating concept roused his effort to move, to survive—but his wounds brought him down before he could stagger four steps toward the mouth of the alley. His attacker's knife must have found something vital, in its single lucky stroke.
Odds. That, eventually, was what it came down to, Phileas thought rather dreamily, staring up toward the one starlit patch of sky that was visible between the close-crowded roofs. The odds had overlooked him for much of his life. Odds that he would not return from a mission; odds that a Prussian bullet would not find the single spot on his person which was shielded by a small gold trinket.
No, the odds had never cared to give him his comeuppance for relentlessly courting them… but sooner or later, the house must always win.
He wouldn't have minded so terribly much, if not for the argument. Fate had caught him in a moment of embarrassing disregard for the precious value of those close to him. His last words with Rebecca had been spoken in anger—as had his last real conversation with Erasmus.
"Ye gods, Phil. You really have been hard at your cups tonight, haven't you?"
A unique sort of chill crept down Phileas' spine. The voice was distinct; he had not imagined it in any sense that he could comprehend, and his years of intimacy with alcohol had taught him a great deal about imagining things. Yet it was a voice which could not be.
Erasmus' voice.
The sliver of moonlight falling into the alley had brightened and widened as the moon rose higher in the sky. A dark shape detached itself from the shadows and stepped into that light, gingerly, as if appraising a very delicate situation. Said appraisal was summed up by a disapproving shake of the head.
Erasmus, just as Phileas had last seen him—only without the blood.
Phileas blinked several times and let out a slow breath. His head was throbbing more thunderously than any hangover he'd ever had; the brick-paved surface of the alley had gotten in more than one crack at him, during the fight with his attacker. That explained much, of course. A good solid concussion, perhaps even a fractured skull.
Now a pretty delusion to let him know how far gone he was.
"Come on, Phil. I know you can hear me." The figment of his fading mind that purported to be Erasmus leaned down, hands braced on his knees, peering at Phileas with a long-suffering expression. "You're only lucky some desperate character hasn't come along and robbed you."
A hiccuping sound that was suspiciously like a giggle somehow made its way out of Phileas. It hurt, but it couldn't be helped.
"Alright then, have it your own way." Erasmus reached out to put his hands under Phileas' arms, as if to lift him to his feet.
For an hallucination, this was proving to be a most vivid experience. Phileas could actually feel the firm pressure of Erasmus' hands taking hold of him; even a sharp pain as the wound in his side was jarred. He let out a soft grunt, and instinctively attempted to brush away the intrusive hand.
His uselessly clawing fingers found nothing solid to grasp.
At almost the same moment, the apparition started and drew back. Phileas heard Erasmus' sharp intake of breath; he saw, in the colorless moonlight, the black blood on his brother's hands.
Equally black memories suddenly threatened to swallow Phileas up. Erasmus—the blood…
His own blood, this time.
Then his persistent hallucination was kneeling beside him. Without ceremony his arm was pushed out of the way, and he felt his wound being explored by the hands which were not there. "What happened? Shot? Stabbed? Phileas!"
Even for a dying man, this was all really a bit too much. Phileas closed his eyes and turned his head away, trying to will his mind to abandon this illusion. To die with a clear mind was surely not too much to ask; to maintain enough dignity, at least, to be aware of reality, instead of delirious and conversing with imaginary phantoms.
"Answer me, Phil…"
For the first time, Phileas spoke directly to this apparition. The words somehow felt as murderous as a knife plunged into his brother's heart.
"You're dead, Erasmus."
Silence.
For a moment, Phileas thought he was alone. For a moment as he opened his eyes, that thought filled him with an unspeakable horror.
Yet Erasmus was still there, gazing off into the middle distance. The expression on his face was one of surprise—and something more. Concern and puzzlement and… yes. Realization.
"I was falling," he said quietly—to all appearances unaware of the pain those three words aroused in Phileas' soul. "Falling for what seemed like an eternity… and then… I was here."
He raised his eyes, and once more, Phileas saw a young man's startled disillusionment harden into the steel of determination. Smiling grimly, Erasmus placed a hand over his.
The touch held the chill of an icy Prussian river.
"I am here," Erasmus said, in a firm, quiet voice. "And I intend to keep you alive."
For a moment, a profound silence filled the alley.
Then Phileas began to laugh.
It was choked and painful and it ended in a cough that gurgled most disturbingly in his left lung—but it was a laugh, nonetheless. The irony, the impossibility of the situation appealed to him. It was now Erasmus who proposed to hold on and not let go.
No. Not Erasmus. Not his brother's spirit… but a machination of his own mind.
"Phileas?"
Go away.
"If you're really here," Phileas rasped, "you might be so kind as to go and fetch a doctor." It seemed like a reasonable idea. At the very least, a pretext by which to drive off this illusion.
Erasmus started slightly. He looked up, toward the mouth of the alley, then down again at Phileas. His brow was creased by a frown of confusion; he shook his head. "I… can't."
"Ah." Phileas closed his eyes, a silent dismissal. "Let me tell you why that is, Erasmus. It's because you aren't really here at all… I'm only imagining you."
He could feel a frustrated tension in the silence which followed this blunt pronouncement.
"Believe that if you want," Erasmus grated at last. There were some scraping sounds as he moved—and Phileas suddenly felt himself hauled bodily up from the ground.
His eyes snapped open as pain flared in his side, but the movement was too swift to resist. It was over as quickly as it began, and he found his head and shoulders resting on the lap of Erasmus, who now sat with his back braced against one of the walls enclosing the alley. His right arm lay lightly across Phileas' body, clasping a hand over his side to staunch and shelter the wound there.
Somewhat absurdly, Phileas' first reaction was indignation. To be manhandled by a mirage was an entirely new level of indignity—yet the very fact of its unreality made it pointless to argue. Besides, hallucination or not, he felt somehow warmer and more comfortable there… in his brother's arms.
"I know my time is short," Erasmus whispered. "I can't leave you, but I will help you… if I can."
It was the tone of voice he had always used when he was utterly transfixed by an idea. Occasions such as, for example, the last day of his life, in the hunting shack… and on the cliff. And in spite of himself, Phileas found himself giving in to that once-familiar bullheadedness.
Closing his eyes, he grudgingly resigned himself to whatever illusions his mind might seek, to ease the shock of dying.
The ticking of the clock in the sitting-room seemed to be getting louder.
Well, perhaps it wasn't, but its relentless sound was beginning to grate on Jules' nerves. It resonated across the void left by the absence of a friend. Fogg had been gone for nearly two hours now, and his supper was left to grow cold, much to Passepartout's distress.
Yet it wasn't the noise of the clock that was distracting Jules from his writing. For the better part of the last hour, he had been sitting at the desk with his notebook open before him, but the pencil in his hand remained unmoving. The limitless possibilities of the blank page should have inspired him—but the longer he stared at it, the more its empty whiteness reflected a lonely expanse of mountain snow.
Phileas never has let go.
Perhaps that was the meaning of the dream, then. In the same sense that Fogg had not let go, he too had fallen—and to even deeper depths than his brother. Jules never had learned to understand those depths of blame and guilt; he saw only rare glimpses of them, for the substance of his past, if not the shadow of it, was something which Fogg held locked away deep within his heart. Yet in every moment that found him silent and still, it was all there behind his eyes, stealing a few shades of their light.
You have to let go…
Jules jerked upright in his chair, like a marionette whose strings had been pulled taut. A sudden sense of urgency was vibrating in his nerves. He turned to look over his shoulder at Rebecca, but she was sitting on the sofa with a book in her hands, oblivious to his sudden movement. He knew, as well, that her mood was still… precarious. Perhaps only more so since he had related his dream—no doubt stirring memories which must have been painful for her.
Swallowing hard, he rose and stepped away from the desk. "Rebecca… I think we should go look for Phileas."
Two blue eyes raised themselves from the retreat of the printed word, to fasten upon his with a look of mild—and mildly reproving—incredulity. "What on earth for, Jules? He's just had a fuss and gone out drinking or playing cards. You know he does it all the time."
"I know, but…" How could he explain a feeling of un-rightness? Jules shook his head, and tried to win with mere persistence what he had no logical reason to request. "I just feel like something might be wrong. I'd feel better if he were here."
The book snapped shut. Rebecca set it aside with a dubious expression and leaned forward, folding her arms over her knees. "Jules, you've been ill, and you shouldn't be running around London in the night air. Besides, Phileas could be in any of a hundred places—half of which do not even permit women within their doors." Her voice dropped indignantly upon this conclusion.
Passepartout, who had been standing by and fussing with the tea-service, chose that moment to come to Jules' defense.
"Miss Rebecca, I am thinking Mister Jules is right. Is the Eve of All Souls. Many scary things walking the earth on this night." The valet solemnly crossed himself, eyes turned heavenward. "The dead spirits, they come back, to haunt the living."
"Poppycock." Rebecca pronounced the annoyingly English word with a tone of finality.
Two unwavering French gazes meted out a silent reply.
With a long-suffering sigh, Rebecca suddenly rose from the sofa. "Oh, all right! We'll go out and look for Phileas—and he can very well hope that I am not the one who finds him first. 'Dead spirits', indeed… Come along, Jules, you had better dress warmly."
She did not remember Lazarus, then. Jules wondered if Fogg had ever really bothered to tell her.
However, that was a story for a more peaceful Eve of All Souls, when ghostly tales could be told amongst friends round the fireside. There was an idea in that; Passepartout would relish the opportunity to share his grandmother's superstitious yarns, and Rebecca might be amused by them when she was in a better mood. Fogg, of course, would sit lurking behind his newspaper and scoff at such things—but that was only to be expected.
His heart torn between hope and dread, Jules followed Rebecca and Passepartout from the room.
"Phileas, stay awake. Stay with me."
The voice distracted Phileas from the contemplation of a most enticing darkness. His head hurt, and he was bloody uncomfortable, and who was talking to him and why couldn't he just sleep?
Then he remembered.
Stabbed somewhere round about the spleen, or the left lung perhaps, and robbed. Bleeding to death in an alley. A worthless way to die, even by his own ambivalent valuation of his life.
And a cracked head conjuring the delusion of his dead brother to keep him company.
With great reluctance Phileas opened his eyes to find Erasmus still holding him, peering down anxiously into his face. The worry that was reflected there eased just a little at the sight of his annoyed grimace. "Ah, good. Come on, Phil… don't leave me now."
Something about those words affected Phileas profoundly.
He had not left—had not let go—when Erasmus had asked him, begged him to. Now Erasmus asked him to stay, and he could not refuse his brother again. Even if this wasn't real, he could know that he had done his best to humor this shadow of Erasmus; the thought would count, at least to him. Letting out a ragged breath, he silently collected himself. His strength. His will to survive.
Erasmus apparently noted the effort, because he smiled gently, if perhaps a bit sadly. "That's better. You must talk to me, and keep alert."
"I don't feel like talking," Phileas retorted querulously. His voice was low and rough; his throat ached, and he was thirsty, although the pain in his side seemed to have diminished. "You talk. If you really are Erasmus… you ought to be able to tell me something about the glories of the Pearly Gates. —Or are you better acquainted with a different sphere?"
"I won't dignify that with a reply." Beneath him Erasmus shifted his position slightly, as though he had sat still for too long and was feeling a cramp, and on some level it amused Phileas that an hallucination—or indeed a ghost—should be subject to such physical discomfort. "I don't remember."
"I don't suppose you've seen Father, then." Phileas closed his eyes. "No, of course not… You could never have gone where he must be."
The silence in reply stretched just a bit too far, and he looked up to search Erasmus' eyes. He found deep sorrow there—and for all he refused to believe that this was truly his brother, he suddenly regretted that he should have caused that pain.
"Then Father is dead," Erasmus said softly. "I thought, somehow, but… Tell me, Phil, what happened to him."
"His heart failed. Some time after…" Phileas couldn't say the words. In a very deep place within his own heart, he was sure the horror which took place on that Prussian mountain had killed Sir Boniface Fogg, as surely as it had killed his younger son.
That… and his elder son's bitter rejection of him, in the aftermath.
Erasmus was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke at last, his words astounded Phileas.
"Then… it was me that killed him."
"No!" Phileas managed a slight shake of his head. "Absolutely not. It was you who made him truly live. God knows Father never thought I was worth living for… or dying for."
Phileas was the elder, the heir apparent. From the day of his birth, Sir Boniface Fogg had intended to make his son worthy of that duty and privilege—worthy to succeed him as head of the British Secret Service. His means of assuring that had been hard, sometimes even cruel… and ultimately, a failure. Even Phileas' own mother had watched what he became at the hands of his father, seen the shadows that lingered in his soul, and regretted it; and, thank God, had not permitted the same to befall Erasmus.
Yet Erasmus had accepted willingly the duty which Phileas resented, and for that, their father loved him. As for Phileas, he was a lost cause, a fatally flawed experiment.
He closed his eyes, remembering the hand of his brother as it slipped from his, and later the hand of their grieving father extended to him at Erasmus' memorial service—a hand which he had refused to take. It was the harsh and calculating hand which had sought to shape his life to Sir Boniface's own grim purposes; the silently searching, pleading hand which, not an hour later, he had pushed away from him forever.
"No, Ras. It was me… I killed him, too."
A slight start passed through Erasmus. "What?"
"You don't know what really happened on that mountain. The truth came too late." Phileas drew a breath, deep and painful, and felt it tremble with the force of emotions aroused. "Father knew there were questions about the integrity of that double agent we were sent to meet. He knew… and he sent us anyway."
Silence, for a long moment. Erasmus leaned back slightly, his posture stiffening, in a manner very typical of a Fogg who was confronting an unpleasant fact.
"Ah," he said at last. Phileas had perfected every nuance of that eloquent monosyllable, but Erasmus had always possessed a command of its expressive range, as well.
"Well, the truth is… I would have done the same," he concluded, after a long, contemplative moment.
Struck speechless, an expression of shock was Phileas' only response.
"Oh, come on, Phil. The information that double agent claimed to have could have broken the security of Prussia's entire intelligence network—and doubts or not, he'd steered us right in the past. You more than anyone ought to recognize a good gamble when you see it."
"Father gambled with the lives of his own sons," Phileas ground out. "Pawns on a chessboard, Ras… he didn't care."
"No. Phil, listen to me. I know he was harder on you than on me; I know you and Mother protected me. But I know things you don't, as well. I remember once when we were young, after you'd been punished—no doubt for something I had done. I saw Father standing outside the door of your room, listening to you cry… almost in tears himself. I know he didn't take any pleasure in being harsh with us." Erasmus paused. "I think he knew the kind of life he lived could put us in danger, and he wanted to make us strong enough to protect ourselves—because he loved us. He loved us both."
It was an interesting theory, and Phileas wished he could believe it. If he could have felt that his father had loved him, perhaps he could have resented less what his father had made him become: something he feared no one could love.
Instead…
"He blamed me, Ras," Phileas whispered, his voice becoming rough. "When I came home, without you… he dared to blame me, when I—"
"Shh." Erasmus laid his left hand on the side of Phileas' head, stroking his hair, almost the way a mother would comfort a child. "That just sounds like Father being Father—always in need of someone to shout at. Anyway, I'm sorry I wasn't there to take what I deserved of it. Seems you took the blame for my stupidity yet again."
Phileas rigidly blinked away the tears he felt gathering in his eyes. "I'm the elder. Looking after you was my responsibility."
"Do I detect a note of wounded pride in your voice?" Erasmus grinned down at him. "Yes, Phil, you were the responsible one. You were the careful one, at least when it came to me, and you did your best to shelter me. I find, however… that sometimes one only wins by letting go."
On those solemn words his eyes met Phileas', filled with a directness and meaning that forced the elder Fogg to look away, lest he lose his composure.
"I didn't want you to be like me," Phileas murmured.
"And you were just like Father." Erasmus grinned at Phileas' ungrateful glare. "I was once fool enough to take your concern as jealousy, you know. I thought you were always trying to come between Father and I—protecting me whether I wanted it or not, and all of that. It's only now I realize… I was the one who came between you and him. God, even after… when you needed each other most."
"Ah, but you between us was the only tie that Father and I ever had." Phileas smiled ruefully. "Warring over the fate of your eternal soul was the one thing we had in common."
His brother chuckled softly. "In that case, I'm afraid Father won my soul. And yours into the bargain, I suppose."
"No. Not mine… Not all of it." Phileas closed his eyes briefly. "I quit the Service, after."
Erasmus gave a start as though he had been pinched.
"Does that really surprise you?" Phileas felt a stirring of grim amusement that was not unwelcome.
"Knowing now what happened between you and Father… no, I suppose it shouldn't." Erasmus carefully shifted the weight of Phileas' upper body across his lap. "It's only that, finding you here like this… well, I rather assumed some foreign assassin had happened along. But if no one is out to kill you just now, then precisely how did you get into this fix?"
"Oh, I can assure you, I am still wanted dead in any number of countries. Rebecca has seen to that." Not quite comfortable with the way Erasmus had settled him, Phileas moved slightly, grimacing at the renewed pain. "In point of fact, a common thief caught me by surprise. A grand and noble ending for a Fogg, don't you think?"
His brother ignored the bitter sarcasm; he always had. "It's no ending if I can help it."
"Do you know… the wretch even got your locket. Or what was left of it."
A faint smile flitted over Erasmus' lips. "You mean to say you've actually kept it with you?"
"After a fashion. I had the gold made into a bracelet. It's not funny," Phileas grumbled, as Erasmus let out a snort of surprise and amusement. "It was a gift from your heart, meant to win Rebecca's… and it caught a bullet meant for mine. I suppose I thought there was something binding in that. I wanted to keep it near me. I should have given it to her, but—"
"I'm glad you didn't." Erasmus shook his head at Phileas' puzzled frown. "You were right, Phil. Rebecca was not a prize for me to win, and I would've lost her esteem if I'd treated her as such. I was only a friend—and I'd be very grateful if you let it stay that way. Don't let her search the past for evidence of things better left unsaid; don't tell her how I felt. Please."
Phileas winced. "I don't believe I'll be telling Rebecca anything anymore, Ras."
"Here, none of that now." Erasmus shook Phileas' shoulder very gently, in mild admonishment. "You're going to live, because I'm trusting you in my place to take care of our sweet… innocent… little lamb of a cousin." He grinned. "Or do you think you might not be quite up to the task?"
A crooked smile was Phileas' skeptical response. "I do believe you're asking a miracle."
"A miracle," Erasmus repeated thoughtfully. He lowered his eyes, and a gentle smile crossed his face. "Yes, Phil… I think a miracle would do very nicely."