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From
BEWARE THE JADE CHRISTMAS
(761 Words)
Have you ever held
someone close and watched the light slowly, so slowly drain from their
eyes?
I lost count of those in my own time in the second war to end all wars.
As an O.S.S. agent, I knifed countless sentries, holding my hand over their mouths to keep their last sounds to themselves.
I can only imagine what someone whose mind
was not sociopathic would have felt. I
felt nothing, no thrill, no sadness.
Nothing.
Until Ingrid Durtz.
Against my direct orders, she came back for me that night.
It was clear suicide to do it. She did not care. Ingrid loved me though I could not love her in return.
Or I thought I couldn’t. A hell of a thing to discover I’d believed
incorrectly when it was too late.
I held her so tightly as she slowly bled out. The bullets whined past me, and I cared not a bit.
The
feathered wings of ice fluttered against the inside of my chest, and it
occurred to me that I might not fully understand what it meant to be
sociopathic.
That was the lesson of
the Great War: that none of us understood what we thought we did. The truth of us was an onion, and life had a
way of peeling layer after layer away while we wept.
The Christmas Eve that starts off this tale had been one of unceasing cold rain from sunrise
until the gradual brightening of the vague white light outside the Le Prete mansion indicated that the sun was nearing its zenith.
No White Christmases in New Orleans.
We were in the third month of Hitchcock’s filming, Murder by Moonlight, his eerie take on the Sultan Murders in the early days of the French Quarter.
Principal photography was nearing its end which was fortunate
since most of the crew were nearing the end of their endurance and sanity.
Of course, they had been at that point after the first day and night of the shoot.
The murders of several crew men that fateful night were still being investigated by the local police.
They would not solve them. Supernatural beings, even in New Orleans, could not be brought up on charges and tried in a court of law.
Hard to slap a pair of cuffs on creatures who
would tear out your throat in the attempt.
But those particular demons were three months gone.
I tried to forget the law of science that stated nature hated a vacuum and always sought to fill it. Could that apply to the supernatural?
I didn’t press
my luck and spent the nights in my room at the Ponchartrain Hotel.
The visiting spirit of my
dead lover, Ingrid Durtz, enjoyed the jazz played in the hotel’s club.
Yes, Ingrid, the woman I
discovered I could love only when she lay dying in my arms.
Science is a hollow know-it-all that proclaims surmises as
certainties.
The Gates to the Endless Gulfs had parted that harrowing night, allowing creatures of nightmare access to our plane.
A few human souls slipped in as well.
I could only surmise that Ingrid’s
soul somehow sensed I was close to dying again, and in she rushed … into a body
most like hers.
No one at Hotel Ponchartrain noticed.
Who looks for
ghosts in a jazz club? Especially when
they possess the body of a lovely police detective in a provocative emerald
dress?
What do you say to the woman who loved you when you were convinced you were incapable of love?
A woman who died saving you only to leave you with the numbing realization that you were capable of love after it was entirely too late?
What do you say to her when
you find her mind and soul housed in another’s body?
That first night after the Le Prete murders, we had a wide-ranging conversation;
we talked about love, fate, and everybody’s inability to truly leave the past behind.
It had been an ugly end to a woman beautiful both inside and out. I had gotten my head and heart handed to me.
And it was all said in a simple kiss that had my lungs feeling as if they were going to burst through my chest.
Even though I do not cry that was when the valves opened, all the used air expended into the atmosphere, and all the fresh poured in, filled with limitless new possibilities.
Perhaps Ingrid is right
when she says, ‘A kiss is a lovely trick
designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.’
(If the weather disasters will ever leave me alone, I will finish this!)
I hope you enjoyed this entry of mine after Covid-19, Hurricanes, and Winter Storms have battered me.
