It had grown dark in Central Park.
Sanguineus crossed a bridge where a lamppost began to show a faint halo in the fog that crept up from the stream.
He had his gloved hands in the pockets of his black frock coat. His boots made muffled taps on the grey bricks and his breath was a wraith that caressed his face coldly.
Somewhere nearby an owl hooted. A mockingbird answered in a dozen different avian languages. He saw and heard everything around him, because he had no particular subject in mind. He was between assignments. If there was anything like a pressing matter that concerned him, it was where to have dinner.
"I knew..." said a familiar female voice.
There was no one else on the trail. He slowed gradually to a stop and looked around at the maples that were just beginning to lose their fall leaves. In the lamplight and the masking fog the fall colors appeared as pale silver and deepest black. Nothing moved within the gulfs of shadow between the dark droplet glitter of the tree trunks.
"You know..." said the voice.
It tantalized him not just because it was unexpected and spectral, but because it recalled to mind a woman he had known intimately, and who was now dead.
"I know nothing," Sanguineus said, more to himself than to the disembodied voice.
He stood waiting for what might come of his comment. If this was a real voice and not an audible memory haunting him, it would answer him. But he was hungry. He had walked miles through the park. He was tired and a little sleepy. And just as he was about to continue down the trail the voice spoke again.
"We know..."
He hesitated, debating with himself. Were his assignments taking a toll on his sanity? He had been cautioned by Red Rum's in-house therapist that fear and stress were sums, not transitory conditions that, once overcome, were gone forever. To the contrary, they left a part of their weight in his consciousness and in the machinery of his body.
"Good night," he said to the voice that was no more real than the ghosts of his exhales in the chilly air.
He started down the trail. But his stride was slower, and shorter, than before. Something was pulling him back. He felt a strange unaccountable dismay.
He was trained to solve mysteries and to find the hidden. It was his nature to discover causes and analyze their effects. He stopped and turned around.
The voice said, "I knew... YOU knew..."
He scoured this voice that hung in his mind. The timbre, the quality of its brief articulation... He saw in his mind an image of the woman, that particular woman, who had been murdered by a man that he himself later killed in an act of revenge.
He did not believe there were earthbound spirits of the dead. But he had never formulated a philosophy of what he did and didn't believe. He had yet to analyze himself, to find himself. He had taken himself at face value, taken his agnosticism for granted.
He stood, hands in coat pockets, black sockcap beading in the fog, and listened for what he could not believe was her.
"We knew... We can know more now," it said.
He smiled in reaction to the thought that a girl was playing a trick on him, a girl from the office, one of the secretaries who had a crush on him, perhaps an obsession, who had followed him earlier that afternoon and was now hiding amidst the maples, wanting him, but afraid of him.
This thought did not explain the precise familiarity of the voice, the voice of THAT woman, the one who haunted him more than any other he had known and lost.
"Come out," he said, calmly, "and let me see you."
A long pause.
"You already do," said the voice. "You haven't forgotten."
The trace of despair, of regret, struck him surprisingly hard. For that moment he had no doubts.
But another interval of silence made a skeptic of him, a silence marred only by the night birds. And even they were speaking in hushed tones now, and from farther away.
"I'm tired of your game," he said. "I'm leaving. You have a good evening."
He turned, again hesitating. He heard the snap of twigs and the soft crunch of long dead leaves.
"Look then," the voice said. "If you can't believe what you hear, will you believe what you see?"
It was HER voice. It could not be anyone else's. His mind froze in the uprush of emotion, neither fear nor joy; rather a puzzling appreciation for the freaks of fate that skewered any idea that life was a dull straight line of pure logic. No, life itself was a form of insanity.
He looked over his shoulder.
A female figure in a hooded cape of some dark color approached with flat-heeled shoes that made real sounds on the gravel path. He saw the clouds of steam billowing from a nose and mouth he could not distinctly see.
"Stop," he said. "I'll come to you. Stay where you are."
She had her arms at her sides, her mittened hands in plain sight. Still the frozen breath hid her face.
"Come then," she said. "I'm afraid of everything now, except you. I know too much now. Too much."
Sanguineus walked toward her, watching her hands. "Too much of what?"
A long sigh sent a cloud halfway to him. "I thought you would ask who I am."
"I know who you are," he said, slowing his steps. "But I don't know how or why you're here."
"It's simple," she said, and just the trace of a laugh hung freezing in her exhale. "I was never dead."
"Tanya," he said and stood within arm's reach of her.
With the mention of her name he could see her face, her eyes, her open mouth, through her breath that mixed with the fog.
"Yes... Sanguineus."
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