The Wraiths of War (15 page)

‘Put your cock away,’ I said.

‘My…?’

‘Your cock. Your knob. Your penis.’

He understood that all right. Without another word he did the necessary, then buttoned himself up.

‘Now I want you to take me to Kapitan Heidrich. He’s got something of mine and I want it back. But if you raise the alarm, I’ll kill you. You understand?’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘Good. Come on then.’ I grabbed the scruff of his collar.

‘Wait,’ he said.

Wait?
This was unexpected. I was thrown for a moment. Then my sense of self-preservation kicked back in. I was deep in enemy territory. I had to keep the upper hand here, had to keep my captive compliant, in fear for his life.

Still maintaining a tight grip on the back of the soldier’s collar, I yanked him backwards, then slammed him into the wall again. He gave a gasping cry of pain.

‘Fuck your “wait”,’ I said. ‘I’m in charge here. I give the orders. You understand?’

‘Yes.’ A breathless croak.

‘Good. Come on then.’

Leaving the lantern on the ground, I manhandled him towards the open back door and the darkness beyond.

I wondered why he’d asked me to wait. Perhaps because he wanted an assurance from me that after he had led me to Heidrich, I wouldn’t kill the both of them. So maybe, in order to
keep
him compliant, I ought to give him that assurance. Stepping into the sparse and functional kitchen, I said, ‘Stop.’

The soldier tensed, but complied. Leaning in close, I said, ‘Before we proceed, let me tell you how this is going to go. You’re going to take me to Kapitan Heidrich and I’m going to take back what’s mine. If you do as I say, no one will get hurt. When I have what I want I’ll tie you both up, and then I’ll leave, and you’ll never see me again. You understand?’

He gave two quick, jerking nods.

‘Not good enough. Say if you understand.’

‘Yes, yes, I understand.’

‘Good. So there’s no need to do anything stupid. You’re not going to try to be a hero, are you?’

‘No,’ he whispered.

‘Good lad. As long as we understand each other. Now take me to Heidrich. And remember – stay quiet.’

He led me through a door on the opposite side of the kitchen into a narrow corridor with rough stone walls and a stone-flagged floor. My hair and clothes wet from the rain outside, I tried not to shiver. Despite the warm glow of a candle, which was set into a recess in the wall halfway along the corridor, the interior of the house was like an ice-box. In fact, it was arguably colder in here than it had been in the yard.

At the end of the corridor, on the right, was another stout wooden door, from behind which came the sounds of men talking in German, interspersed with gouts of laughter. They sounded drunk, their speech – though I couldn’t understand what they were saying – sloppy and slurred, their laughter over-raucous. That was good. If they were drunk it meant their reflexes would be slow.

On the left, curving round and up, was a wooden staircase. It looked uneven, worn, roughly hewn. The handrail atop the twisted and haphazardly spaced support posts of the banister looked like it would give you splinters if you ran your palm across it.

‘He is up here,’ the young soldier whispered, indicating the staircase.

‘Up you go then.’

With my left hand still holding his collar and my right hand holding the gun which I was still pressing to his head, he preceded me up the stairs. Inevitably the steps creaked as we ascended, some so loudly that I clenched my teeth and glanced behind me, certain that the conversation below would dwindle and stop, that the door would suddenly fly open and half a dozen armed and drunken German officers would tumble into the corridor.

But nothing happened. Either the stone walls were thick enough to block the sounds of our ascent or the officers were too drunk or too blasé to investigate. Or maybe they just thought my captive had decided to hit the sack after taking his piss. Maybe they were even now joking about his lack of staying power.

Even so, I was glad when the stairs curved round far enough that we were out of sight of anyone who might emerge from the room below. Even happier when we reached the upper landing.

‘Where now?’ I asked, looking at the corridor ahead of us, at the four wooden doors – three on our right and one facing us at the end – which were so warped and irregularly-shaped that they looked as though they had been hacked to fit gaps in the bulging stone rather than being part of the farmhouse’s original design.

‘The second door,’ the soldier replied, pointing.

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Yes, that is Kapitan Heidrich’s room. I swear it.’

‘Open it.’

I tensed as the young soldier reached out and curled his hand around the doorknob. He had said that Heidrich was asleep, but what if he wasn’t? What if he was even now sitting up in bed, reaching for his gun, alerted by the sound of the opening door? Or worse, crouching in ambush, the heart in his hand, ready to unleash its power against me?

I had come to regard the heart as an ally. Up to now it had protected me. But would it continue to do so in the hands of someone else, or would it transfer its loyalty to its new owner? Even now I didn’t know.

The young soldier twisted the knob and pushed at the door. It was as badly fitting as it looked, scraping grittily across the floor as it opened.

I shoved the young soldier ahead of me, pretty much using him as a shield. The room was small and square, and at first his body blocked my view of the bed, which was against the wall on our left. When he jerked and cried out, my initial thought was that he’d been shot, even though I’d heard no sound. I half-expected him to fall, but instead he took a quick step backwards, which was so unexpected we almost clashed heads. Thinking he was making an attempt to overpower me, I lunged forward and, still gripping his collar, pushed my left hand downwards against the back of his neck with all my strength in an effort to force him to his knees. Unable to resist the pressure he stumbled and fell, and I staggered forward too, almost sprawling on top of him. I just about managed to regain my balance, and glanced up at the bed, to check what Heidrich was doing.

But Heidrich wasn’t doing anything.

Because Heidrich was dead.

He wasn’t
just
dead, though. He had been gutted. There was a candle flickering in one of the stone recesses in the wall, and it was illuminating a lot of red and a lot of wetness. Head back and arms out in a cruciform shape, the dead man had been killed with just two cuts. One had slashed so deeply and savagely across his throat that he had been virtually decapitated. The other had opened him up from his Adam’s apple to his pubis, releasing not only a hell of a lot of blood, which I realised now was running down the walls and dripping from the ceiling, but also a slippery snake’s nest of fat purple intestines. Heidrich, assuming this was him, was naked, and I could see his ribs sticking out through the rent in his chest. I could also see that nestled in the palm of his limp right hand was the obsidian heart.

The shock of finding Heidrich dead, of seeing the violence that had been done to him, and also of realising he was holding the heart, momentarily diverted my attention from the young German officer sprawled at my feet. Unbeknownst to me, my grip had slackened on his collar and my gun arm was now hanging limply by my side. Taking advantage of my lapse of concentration he suddenly rolled on to his back and kicked out, sweeping my legs from under me. I flew sideways as if hit by a car, sheer exhaustion making me feel as if I was light and hollow, my flesh thin as paper, my bones dry old sticks.

I hit the floor so hard my brain jarred in my skull, causing black pixels to swarm across my vision. My overwhelming thought was to keep hold of the gun, but I felt so weak, both physically and mentally, that the revolver flew from my numb fingers and went skidding and clattering across the bare wooden floor.

Fuck
, I thought, still struggling to see, still struggling to get my body to do what I wanted it to,
I’m dead
.

I expected the young German to leap over my body, scoop up my gun and turn the tables on me, if not put a bullet in my brain. But instead he was out of the room in an instant, thumping along the corridor, clattering down the stairs.

In my dazed state I heard him yelling for help, his voice shrill, boyish. Although I was still dizzy, I knew I had no more than ten or fifteen seconds before the young German’s fellow officers, drunk though they were, would be pounding up the stairs and bursting into the room. Gritting my teeth, I pushed myself up onto all fours, and then I brought my knees up, planted my feet flat on the floor, and rose shakily but as swiftly as I could to a standing position, fingers gripping on to the cold rough wall for support.

The room dipped and swayed. It felt like the cabin of a ship in a terrible storm. I heard a roaring in my ears. The rain outside? The enraged men downstairs? My own blood rushing through my head? I forced myself to turn towards the bed, to focus on the black, blurred shape in the outstretched hands of the corpse. As I stumbled towards it, I heard feet pounding on the stairs.

I slipped in blood, went down on one knee, got up again. The heart was a black pulse, going in and out of focus. I reached out, grasped for it, but my hand swiped through empty air.

I heard a shout behind me, half-turned.

A man was in the doorway. Red complexion, moustache. Shock and outrage on his face. He had a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at me.

I turned away from him, took another step towards the heart, grasped for it again.

As I did, I heard a bang.

The heart was in my hand. The bang was the sound of me hitting a hard floor as if I’d dropped from a height of maybe three or four feet. I was curled up in an almost foetal position, and my knees took the brunt of the impact. Spikes of pain shot up through both kneecaps and seemed to meet and shatter somewhere around my midriff.

Panting for breath, I curled around the pain, trying to contain it. At any moment I expected to be hauled upright, screamed at by a jostling crowd of drunken German officers.

If it wasn’t for the nanites in my body, constantly repairing me, I doubt I would have made it this far. But in spite of their ministrations, I was now completely spent. Plastered in mud, spattered with blood, my clothes reeking of death, I must have looked like one of the zombies that had attacked me in No Man’s Land. It was almost certainly thanks to the nanites that I hadn’t got dysentery like most of the other lads, but even so I knew I’d lost weight these past few weeks. I’m a naturally tall bloke, with a long, lean, slightly knobbly face, so whenever I shed a few pounds I end up looking not healthy but cadaverous.

I don’t know how long it took me to realise I’d shifted. When I’d grabbed the heart my instinctive desire had been to return to the trenches, but that wasn’t where I was now. As the throbbing pain ebbed – nanites again, doing their stuff – I realised my cheek was resting on some kind of rough material – a carpet! I pushed myself up on shaky arms, and immediately felt nauseous. I leaned over and tried to vomit, expelling only bile, which burned the back of my throat. My eyes watered, my stomach felt as if it was twisting in on itself, my muscles felt on the verge of going into cramp or worse… and then (Praise be to the nanites!) all these sensations smoothed out, and within thirty seconds had melted away.

The first thing I saw when my blurred vision came back into focus was the bed beside which I was kneeling. At the same time, mostly subconsciously, I realised it must be evening, because the room I was in was lit by electric light rather than daylight. As I tentatively sat up, rising above the level of the bed, my attention was grabbed by something which was sitting on the middle of the mostly red duvet. It was a sheet of white A4 paper.

My eyes widened.
No! It couldn’t be!
I reached out a filth-caked hand and grabbed the sheet, smearing it with mud. I held it in front of my face and peered at it, my mind racing so quickly that at first the words seemed to jitter and jump on the page. I blinked and concentrated harder and the words settled. I read:

Dear Clover

I’m really sorry, but I’ve had to go. I know you’ll think I’m stupid and reckless, but I don’t think I’ve got a choice…

My hand started to shake so much that I couldn’t read any more. But I didn’t have to. I knew what the rest of the note said. Because I’d written it myself, about eighteen months ago, just before using the heart to travel back to August 1914. And yet such were the convolutions of time travel that here the note was, as fresh as if I’d finished it only moments ago – which as far as this timeline was concerned I probably had. How long had it sat here undiscovered? How long had I missed myself by? Seconds? Minutes?

My own thoughts were so busy, so
noisy
, that I didn’t grasp someone was close by until I heard a floorboard creak outside the room. Frantically, still on my knees, I looked around for the heart, which I only now realised wasn’t in my hand. I wondered whether the heart and I had somehow become separated, or even whether it had moved on without me. Then I spotted it, on the floor a foot or so to my right. I groped for it – but too late.

After a perfunctory knock the door opened and Clover stepped into the room, her eyes screwed into a half-squint as if she was afraid of catching me naked or doing something embarrassing. As she entered she was saying, ‘Are you all right, Alex? Only I called up three times to let you know the pizza was here and you didn’t…’

Then she turned and saw me, and her voice abruptly cut off. The weight of her mouth dropping open seemed to yank her eyes wide. She stared at me in horror.

I stared back.

It was the first time I’d seen her for over a year and I was immediately overcome by a flood of emotions. Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a raw and traumatised state I would have been able to stay in control – who knows? Although Clover and I had become friends almost by default, having been brought together by a common enemy, I can only describe the love and affection I felt for her at that moment as both deep and familial. To my shame (I’m not generally given to blubbering like a goon) it was also powerful enough to break through my defences and make me crumble into tears.