Page 2 of Iron Cross

After two weeks, the resentment in his eyes had waned as well.

“Maybe my recitation is insensitive, given the circumstances,” I admitted. If he weren’t my enemy, I would have apologized.

I used to watch him staring at the small glass opening to the outside world. It showed a bit of the ground, at the base of a rose bush that was now dormant, covered in snow. Those first few nights I had sat and watched him eat - he’d scarfed down the food fast, probably from fear we’d never feed him again. Then he slowed down, savoring his meals. Maybe it would be merciful to poison him now… but I wasn’t in the mood. I had made a vow that he would live until my wife was home. And I wasn’t a man who went back on his word.

“Byron’s prisoner could see a bird, and was comforted by its song.” He looked out the casement window, before turning his eyes back to me. “I have no such luxury. No birds, no swans, no water to glance at.”

I wondered if that small view into the outside world taunted him. Would it have been more merciful to close it off? Did he deserve mercy for his sins? Did I?

“I make do with the mouse that channeled its way into this rotten, haunted place.” He gestured roughly toward the squeaking rodent that was out of sight, but very much present. “Algernon’s poor company.”

“Algernon?”

“The mouse that comes and visits me from time to time.” Then with a glint of mirth, he smiled. “He doesn’t appreciate Italian poetry.”

Algernon and I were alike in that sense, I suppose. Italian poetry waxed far too melodramatic for my taste.

“My father died today.” I pulled a flask from my breast pocket, then put two glasses on the ground between us. I had not anticipated imbibing with my unwilling companion, but since hewasa captive audience…

I took one glass and drank. Morelli sipped the other.

“My condolences,” he said, the glass to his parched mouth. “... I think.”

He looked at me, assessing where to go next with this strange interaction. Him, a doomed man. Me, the monster that doomed him.

“How did it happen?” he asked, as he downed the rest of the glass, then put it back down. I refilled it.

“He fell down the stairs.” I took another shot, the Redbreast whiskey burning its way down my gullet.

Morelli’s bushy brows rose, his eyes still able to register shock, after the weeks of torment and isolation with nothing but me and the surgeon that bled him for my paint as company.

“That seems like an undignified end for the great Alastair Green.” Morelli took the refilled glass and drank it, before he started in on the chicken again.

He wasn’t wrong. It was anundignifiedend. I had just come up from my daily bleeding of Morelli, when I found them.

My stepmum, Aoibheann, with her ghastly red hair like a flame about her shoulders, her moon-pale face gazing down from the top of the stairs. Her green eyes were blank, and lips slightly parted in what looked like satisfaction. Like she had just taken her first breath in over a decade. Below, my father was sprawled, his neck twisted as a pool of blood blossomed around his head, his body limp and lifeless, strewn out like a rag doll.

Then that fucking melody again - the song she hummed to herself when no one was speaking to her.

Aoibheann wrapped her skeletal arms around her waist as she swayed on her feet, humming that haunting melody of hers. The sound of it flew around the house like a wicked spell, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had done something to him. She had made a deal with some devil and murdered her husband. She was Judas.

Aoibheann, at the top of the staircase, her hands over her mouth, as my father lay with his head splattered at the bottom of the steps. His soulless eyes looked at me with a blankness that filled me with… relief.

Morelli almost looked sad as he watched me replay the ghastly memory. That was surprising, since the two weren’t exactly friends, but mortal enemies.

The way he and I were mortal enemies.

But under the circumstances, maybe I could confide in him. It was Benjamin Franklin who once said, “Three could keep a secret if two of them were dead”. Morelli was almost dead, and I was dead inside. So maybe the last one standing would be the damn mouse, Algernon.

“His wife murdered him,” I said, whispering words that I knew to be true. “That witch cursed him.”

There was no other explanation for why a perfectly healthy man would break from such a simple stumble. He hadn’t so much as rolled an ankle in years, and now he took a tumble down the stairs? Preposterous.

The guard at the end of the hall said that she never touched him. So the possibility that she pushed him was out. That left only that damn black magic of hers, which carried on the melody she hummed to herself when she was in her strange trances. The melody that made our skin prickle - me, and my father’s old guards who had heard it in their nightmares.

“His wife… his wife… his wife…” The old Italian pondered a moment, tapping at his scraggly chin. “I could never say her name. One of those long lettered Irish things that don’t use the letters in it.”

“Aoibheann.”

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