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“No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”
“Yes, yes! Please, madam, this way!”
The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.
Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.
And there the strange man lay, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.
My God, she thought, he’s dead!
Out loud she said, “I’ll call if I need you.”
The maître d’ went away.
Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet …
But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.
“Listen very carefully. Yes?”
For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat.
She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—”
The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken.
“I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of people!”
His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart. She said:
“The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”
Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.
“Yessss … sss.”
Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:
“You are from some Middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people listen? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but …”
Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.
The ghastly passenger withered.
“How do … you …” he whispered, “… know … thisss?”
“I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”
“Saw?” the pale man exhaled.
“In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of rain and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me col
d. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper … was much … like you.”
Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:
“And who … and what… am I?”
