“In 1914 I was called up to serve this country in the Great War,” Powell said, facing away from her while they waited for the truck.

She rolled her eyes. “Did you wear one of those funny dish-shaped helmets?”

“Yes, I goddamned did,” he said, the back of his neck turning red. “I wore a Mark I two-pound helmet. And I wore khaki leggings to keep my feet dry but they never did. I don’t know what you’ve been taught that war was about, but for me it was about mud. Mud everywhere, and the Germans shelled the tar out of our mud, and we shelled theirs, and sometimes we took their mud away from them and sometimes we had to give it back. We dug down into the mud to try to get away from the explosions and then we crouched in our mud and waited to die. Every so often they told us to crawl over some barbed wire and shoot anything we saw. We did what we could to not think too much about it. There was always alcohol around, but cheap stuff, stuff people brewed in old coffee cans and it would make your stomach sour for days. Then there were women. This was France, after all, and France was supposed to be full of pretty girls. Too bad they’d all packed off for less muddy climes when the shooting started. One night my buddies and I borrowed a field car and just motored around for hours looking for anything female who might enjoy some uniformed attention. Just when we were ready to turn back a mate of mine from Vancouver shouted out for me to stop. I looked ahead through the windshield and there she was, standing by the road as if she was just waiting for us. Oh, she was beautiful. Long red hair and creamy skin and not a stitch of clothing on her.”

“That must have been a surprise,” Chey suggested.

“Oh, Heavens, yes. Especially back then. You won’t believe me but in those days we thought seeing a girl’s ankle was sexy. Still, this was wartime. People went crazy with the noise of the shells. This woman looked alright, she was just naked. We weren’t about to hold it against her.”

“So you were—how many of you were there?”

“Six of us, including myself,” Powell said.

“Six virginal teenagers looking for prostitutes and you saw a beautiful naked woman standing by the side of the road. I assume you pulled over.”

“Of course. I jumped out and ran up to her and took my cap off and asked her if she was alright and if she needed any assistance. She spoke English rather well, well enough to tell us a story we didn’t believe at the time. Something she’d obviously thought up on the spot. She said thieves had accosted her and taken her clothes. If we would give her a ride home she said she would reward us.”

Chey laughed. “Is this a horror story or a letter to Penthouse Forum?”

Powell stared at her with a lack of comprehension that made her realize he’d never heard of said magazine.

“Her name was Lucie and she was very pleased, she said, to meet such well-mannered gentlemen. I think some of us had wicked ideas before she said that but she shamed us into our best behavior. She climbed into the car beside me. I still remember the feel of her smooth, soft hip against my own. Her house, it turned out, was about ten kilometers away in the shelter of a deep river valley. It was a castle. Not a chateau, not a villa, but a real medieval castle. It stood in desperate need of repair and a German shell had knocked in one of its towers. Still, it was a castle—and our mysterious guest turned out to be the daughter of the Baron de Clichy-Sous-Vallee. The old man had gone off to fight as an officer in the Cavalry. He had died leading a charge into a hail of machine gun fire. The Baroness met us at the door in a dusty gown. She had brown hair and haunted eyes and she carried a golden candelabra with no candles in it. Like I said, we saw a lot of crazy people during the war. She looked maybe twenty or perhaps thirty years old and I thought she must be Lucie’s sister. She was not.

“Lucie threw on a gown from the last century. I mean the nineteenth century. We were lead inside into a banquet hall lined with tapestries. The roof was full of holes and rain had ruined most of the furniture but there was meat on the table, roast mutton of a kind we never got in the trenches. There was wine, too, of a kind that does not exist anymore. My mates and I drank our fill, and perhaps more.

“Lucie came and sat by me. She had taken a shine to me, who knows why. For whatever reason she whispered in my ear that she had something to show me. She had washed her white face and in her old-fashioned gown she looked like some ghost from a story. Even as I rose from the table, even as the boys whistled and cheered me on, I felt as if I were under some enchantment. Perhaps I was.”

Chey held her tongue.

“Lucie lead me through dark and dank hallways, our only light from a single candle she carried in her hand. I saw hot wax roll across her knuckles but she did not cry out and I wondered who this spirit could be. She lead me down a flight of stone stairs, into the cellars of the place, which were white with nitre and where the floor lay submerged under an centimeter of murky water. Her dress dragged through the muck but before I could say anything she hurried on, faster and faster, and it was all I could do to keep up. We passed racks of wine bottles, some burst with neglect. We passed piles of furniture stacked to the ceiling, pieces that would be priceless antiques today but these were left to rot. We came at last, at long last, to a narrow room that contained only a single enormous cage. It stood three meters high and twice as wide and the bars were made of solid silver. In the candlelight they glimmered like mirrors.

“‘The moon is rising,’ Lucie told me. I didn’t understand, of course. ‘Will you be my guest for the night? The accommodations are more comfortable than they appear.’ I stared at her, thinking she must be some kind of maniac. More than just crazy. I think you know what I saw.”

“She changed,” Chey nodded.

“She changed.”