About this story
Reuel Briggs has been haunted by a stranger's face on the wet Cambridge streets, and finds it again on the Fisk singers' stage as Dianthe Lusk takes her solo — moments before an electric lamp bursts and Dianthe insists an unseen voice calls her childhood name, one no one in the company should know. The troupe entrains that same night, and before dawn the train wrecks outside Boston. Called to the wreck, Reuel works over a body a colleague has already pronounced dead, until Dianthe opens her eyes.
How it opens
Rain darkened your Cambridge room where medical books outnumbered meals you could afford.
Aubrey LivingstonReuel, even Erebus kept a lamp for visitors less wet than I am.
Your wealthy classmate entered without knocking because friendship had once paid tuition.
Aubrey LivingstonYou are staring through me as if diagnosis has found a ghost.
I saw someone outside who vanished before the streetcar crossed her shadow.
Choose
I will come if curiosity may purchase the cheapest seat.
A concert will not repair sleep or the examination waiting tomorrow.