From the Indie Side (27 page)

What should I tell her? An explosion had
drifted across time, damaged the wall, and knocked me on my ass?
And, by the way, the ghost of Charlie O’Shea came by just to cap it
all off?

“Settling,” I said, turning back to the
kitchen. Claire would leave soon. Then I would come back and study
it. Attempt to fathom its meaning.

“Settling? That’s not settling.”

She followed me.

“Houses don’t settle like that. It wasn’t
there yesterday. You can fit your fingers through that gap. It’s
dangerous. The house may be unstable.”

I’d made it to the stove—in good time, for
me. Normally, it took me twice the time to travel the distance. The
lack of normal was lessening the boundaries of age.

“I’m only worrying about coffee,” I said, as
I pulled the kettle from the stove and swung it toward the kitchen
sink. Before I’d completed the maneuver, Claire intercepted me.

“I’ll make that for you.” She pulled the
kettle from me and pushed it under the tap. “You just sit down, Mr.
Baker.”

 Usually I would have argued, if only to
see the way her lip quivered when I went too far. But today I
obeyed. The quicker I convinced her all was fine, the quicker she
would go.

But she didn’t go. She made two coffees and
put both on the table along with a plate of sugar cookies. She
pushed a steaming cup toward me, and instead of flitting off to the
recesses of the house to do her “straightening,” she plonked
herself down opposite me. Then she continued to talk, as if the
cracks were a conspiracy in which we had both collaborated.

“What will we do with you, Mr. Baker? I want
a doctor to check you. And we’ll need to get that wall and window
repaired—immediately.”

She sipped her coffee and continued. “In
fact, that window is dangerous. Promise me you won’t go near
it?”

She set down her cup, staring at it. Then she
stopped, as if suddenly remembering something, and looked up.

“Is that how you hurt yourself? Did you fall
against the window?”

I shrugged my shoulders, the only true answer
I had for her.

“No, you couldn’t have done that, could you?
Maybe the window, but not the wall… no.” Her lips pursed, and she
tutted and shook her head. “Maybe the local kids. Vandals? Do you
think, Mr. Baker? Did you see anything?”

Oh, I saw plenty. But I’m not telling
you.

She shook her head, picked up her coffee, and
stared at the yellowed melamine table between us. “Vandals. I bet
that’s it. Little so-and-sos.”

I stared at her and sighed loud enough to
catch her attention, hoping she’d interpret it as a sign of
exhaustion.
Please just go,
I willed.

She looked up from her headshaking, and her
face softened. Here was my chance.

“Can you help me back to the bedroom? I think
I need to rest.”

“You need a doctor,” she said, nodding her
head with each word.

“I need to rest,” I firmly repeated. “Really,
that’s all. I bumped my head. I don’t remember. It’s nothing.”

She took a deep breath and slowly expelled
it, as she tilted her head sideways and back.

“I don’t think I should—“

“Please. I’m just tired.”

She breathed another “tsk,” as if I were now
part of the vandal’s gang.

“Please,” I said, as an ache behind my eyes
began to build.

She chewed her bottom lip, staring at a point
behind me. Then her face relaxed. “Okay. But—one proviso. You call
me the instant you feel lightheaded, or if a bad headache comes on,
or you feel unbalanced. Anything not normal. All right?”

My head bobbed up and down.

She herded me into the bedroom, changed me
into my pajamas, and tucked my body in as if I were a weary
five-year-old returned from a big day out.

“I’ll make you something to eat and pop it in
the refrigerator. And I want you to eat all of it when you get up
again. Do you hear me?” She patted my hand.

Her tenacity would have impressed Mavis. She
would be my wife’s version of “a keeper.” I called her “a keeper”
too, but I was thinking more of animals in a zoo imprisoned until
the day they died. Yes, she was “a keeper,” Mavis.

And more.

But I wouldn’t know that until later.

An explosive rumble, followed by the sound of
cracking and splintering wood, jolted me awake. It was dark when my
eyes opened, my senses immediately alert.

Flickering light lit the slit below my
bedroom door. For a moment, I thought Claire was playing games with
the light switches.

Now I faced a familiar choice. Go watch the
spectacle, which always seemed to shorten it—some kind of strange
reward for my attendance—or stay here and wait. They would
eventually go; they always did. Except for last night, the anomaly.
That made this a different choice, one that was uncertain and
somehow—

A flash again.

The vibrations of this explosion I felt
through the bedclothes. My hand shook as much from the tremors as
from my shock. Normally I could control my emotions. It had taken
decades of familiarity with fear, but eventually we’d become
bedfellows in life. But tonight my heart leapt like a trapped
animal.

Then I heard the voice.

At first I thought it was just another new
part of it, just like the grenade and Charlie O’Shea and his silent
mouthing. But after another tremor and another flash from beneath
the door, it came again. The muffled words were indiscernible and
muted, but the terror in them resonated loud and clear.

My neatly folded dressing gown lay at the
foot of the bed, courtesy of Claire. The chaos I heard propelled me
to my feet; I threw the gown on more quickly than my eighty-eight
years usually allowed. The only thing slowing me down was the
complexity of forcing arthritic fingers to knot the sash while
panicked. Intermittent flashes, like rapid fireworks, continued
outside the door as my hands slipped and contorted around the
material.

Was I mistaken, or were the explosions
growing louder?

Finally I’d tied the damn knot and gathered
my faculties, and I was in the hall. From here, I had a straight
view to the living room and the cracked window. The cracks now
reflected a fiery light playing through from the front yard.

And there was Claire at the window, staring
out, a silhouette against the illuminations, an intruder in the
drama.

“Claire?”

She swung about, her eyes saucers in her pale
face, her hand cupped to her mouth. When she saw me, her hand
dropped, and she cried out, “What is it? What’s happening?”

She saw it.

But how? These were
my
nightmares.
They belonged to my past. They couldn’t be here for her to see.
What would that make them?

I used everything in my trick bag to stay
calm and steady, my heart beating like that of a startled animal.
Reds, yellows, and brilliant whites burst in from outside, dappling
the darkened walls like grains of brilliant sand thrown against
them.

“You see it?”

Claire nodded, and then seeing me move toward
her, she swung back to face the window, where the filament cracks
had multiplied, urged on by the proximity of this night’s
explosions.

When I moved beside her, she didn’t turn to
me, but continued to stare out, bewildered, hypnotized. She
stuttered barely recognizable words, “I… I s-s-see some…
What’s—?”

A loud bang sounded, followed by a crack. It
came from a tree near the perimeter of my property. Then a boom,
and a second later the hissing of sand and dirt spraying against
the window.

Claire screamed and took a step back, one
shaking hand pressed against her mouth. The reflection of my
creased, strained face looked back at me from the glass. How could
she and I both view a scene that didn’t exist?

Mist surged and swirled in a sweeping wave of
gray. Through the smoke, red-gold flares shot upward, only to fade
in moments, then fall back to earth fifty feet away, exploding on
impact. Glowing remnants lit the ground like scattered embers,
except these were not of warmth but of destruction, of killing.

Shrill, sharp gunshots echoed in the street,
until the whir of a machine gun spilling its rounds drowned out the
lesser sound.

My hand found its way to the glass again, as
if touching it might cause the mirage to disappear. At first touch,
as if my fingers were electrified, the glass shattered with an
ear-splitting crack. Glistening shards and splinters exploded into
the air, raining down on Claire and me. Cold air and smoke rushed
in, laden with the smell of gunpowder and the wretched stench of
death.

Instantly our arms flew up in an attempt to
deflect the glass. I caught sight of my hands and saw blood seeping
out through cuts in the creases. But I felt nothing.

The destruction of the window must be another
part of the illusion. Damn, it was so vivid, I could taste the
air.

My instinct was to move away from the window,
but I was drawn to the vision outside of it. The wind had kicked
up, clearing patches in the smoke, just as it had back in ’44.

Through the hollows in the curling
gray-white, I saw them. Poor wretched souls they were. Bodies
toppled upon bodies in piles of anonymous death. Men dropped so
rapidly that they still clutched their guns, eyes blank, staring at
comrades who battled forward only to be cut down themselves a few
feet farther on. The sand ran red with their life, terrible crimson
rivers straight from hell.

And as the mist retreated, I saw their eyes.
Eyes I’d never before seen in the visions. Open eyes, hundreds of
them, all turned toward me. Unseeing, unmoving—but knowing. So
knowing.

A low
phht
zinged past my face, close
enough that I felt the air move and the heat of it.
Phht
—another.
Phht
—and another. I ducked down below
the windowsill. Claire quickly moved beside me. I wanted to turn to
her and explain.
Whatever it
was that she saw, it was not what she thought. It couldn’t
be.

Yet the room glowed with the color of
exploding armaments, the smell so strong I was beginning to
gag.

I knew I should move, do something. Get
Claire out of there. But I was frozen, afraid, and weak, just as I
had been seventy years before. And just as I had done at eighteen,
so I did at eighty-eight: I lay there, and I prayed for it to
end.

The memory of that morning was so vivid that
I could still taste the salt of the sand in my mouth and feel the
grit between my teeth. I lay on Omaha Beach, on June 6, 1944. I’d
made it under the machine gun bunkers.

By then, five hundred men had already died so
that some of us—the lucky few—could make it there to the overhang
of the salt cliffs. In its shadow, we would be safe. When enough of
us were there, we would climb up and over and overrun the gunners.
More would die, but it was our best chance.

So I waited as instructed, gathering my
breath in short, hurried gulps, not daring to look back down the
beach toward the sea. I didn’t want to the see those left behind.
Hearing them was bad enough.

I’d been there ten minutes when I saw, under
the shadows of the cliffs, a man moving sideways toward me,
crawling on his arms and knees. For one terrifying moment, I
thought it was a Jerry bastard.

I struggled frantically with my gun, trying
to heave it around and level it up before me, ready to fire. My
hands shook so much that if it
had
been the enemy, I would
have been dead.

Turned out it was our reedy platoon sergeant,
Bill Black—an ex-jockey we called Blackey.

He took one look at me and whispered through
gritted teeth, “Calm down, Baker.”

“How?” would have been my answer if I could
have spoken, but my teeth were chattering too much. My body was
rigid; the only part of me moving was my shaking hands, and I had
no control over that. We’d fallen into hell, or more accurately,
been offloaded into hell. And no amount of training could prepare a
fresh-faced eighteen-year-old for this.

But I tried to follow Blackey’s orders, tried
to still my hands, my jaw. Reaching for a chain around my neck, I
pulled at the Saint Christopher’s medal my mother had given me the
day we shipped out.

Then I took five deep breaths.

Between the second and the third, I felt my
heart slow a little.

Somehow, by the fifth, I’d brought my panic
under some kind of control.

Blackey saw it in my face—that I’d come
back from the edge. And I’ve often wondered: if I’d succumbed to my
hysteria… if he hadn’t picked me… if he had moved on to some other
hapless soul… how would my life have turned out?

But I did calm down, and when he saw that I
was quiet, he began to speak in a clear, frighteningly calm voice,
his gaze never leaving my face. His dark brown eyes bored into me
as each word left his mouth and sank into my brain.

“That’s right… Breathe, son. Okay? Good. Now
listen, Baker. I need you to do something. It’s very important. Do
you understand?”

My head nodded automatically. He was my
superior; even if I didn’t agree, I would do whatever he commanded.
They’d trained us well, and explained in detail what would happen
if we disobeyed or abandoned our post in combat.

“Right. Now stay with me, Baker. For some
reason, we can’t get through on the radios to the landing
vessels.”

He paused, letting that sink in, though I
couldn’t understand why he was telling me. I wasn’t a radio
operator, so I couldn’t help him with that. I was still trying to
comprehend why he was talking to me, thinking maybe he’d mistaken
me for someone else. In fact, I was about to set him straight when
he continued.