The Echo Man

Chapter 72

The dead walk here. The dead and the insane and the forgotten. If you come with me, and hear what I hear, there is much more than the whistle of the wind.

There is the young man who came here in 1920. He had been wounded at St. Mihiel Salient. He bleeds from both wrists. 'I am going home,' he says to me. 'First to Pont-a-Mousson, then home.'

He never left.

There is the solicitor from Youngstown, Ohio. Twice he has tried to take his life. His neck is deeply scarred. He cannot speak above a whisper. His voice is a dry wind in the night desert.

There are the two sisters who tried to eat each other's flesh, found in the basement of their Olney row house, locked in an embrace, wrapped in barbed wire, blood dripping from their lips.

They gather around me, their voices lifted in a chorus of madness.

I walk with my lover.

I walk with the dead.