“No,” Lillyfield said, solemnly. “We’ve had a couple of vacancies since . . . yesterday morning’s push.”
So they would be moving into dead men’s quarters, Wells thought. But then, what weren’t dead men’s quarters on the Front? There wasn’t an inch of soil that hadn’t been drenched in blood.
“Well, I’ll leave you two to it,” Lillyfield said. “I’ve got some work to do yet.”
Wells could see a glass slide, with a smudge of something dark in its center, under the microscope.
“Dinner’s at seven, right, Norridge?”
“Or whenever the soufflé rises,” the corporal replied.
Wells and Stubb pulled the curtain all the way back on the alcove, revealing two hard pallets wedged sideways into the dirt wall, with a single flat pillow and a striped wool blanket on each.
“Your choice,” Stubb said, his voice suddenly so strained it was almost gone.
“As you’re more agile, I’ll take the lower.”
Stubb grunted, and slung his own pack off his back and onto the upper bunk, before hoisting himself up, too.
Wells opened his suitcase, took out the few necessary items he would need that night—his toothbrush, the sleeping cap that Rebecca had made fun of, a fresh pair of woolen socks (his feet always got cold)—and then closed it again and pushed it under the bunk.
Though the table was covered with maps, official army bulletins, and the distinctive green envelopes used for letters home, Lillyfield had cleared a space beside the lantern for his makeshift laboratory. A tray of slides and several chemical vials were arrayed around the microscope, the sight of which took Wells, who had made quite a study of biology and chemistry, back to his school days at the Normal School of Science, to which he’d been admitted, in view of his family’s poverty, on scholarship.
“What’s your profession?” Wells asked. “Are you a doctor?”
“Associate professor of natural history,” Lillyfield said, jotting down a note with one hand while adjusting the lens with the other. “Take a look at this tick.” He leaned back on the hind legs of the spindly chair, so that Wells could observe.
What he saw was enough to put him off anything Norridge might rustle up from the galley. A tick—the fattest he’d ever seen—was split open, its eight legs splayed wide, its beak-like mouth gaping open.
“I swear,” Lillyfield said, “the war has given nature license to create newer and bigger forms of arachnid life and, as you’ve no doubt seen on your way to our little haven, vermin galore. They positively thrive on human catastrophe.”
It was just the sort of idea that Wells might have employed in one of his earlier science fiction novels, and Lillyfield must have thought so, too.
“It reminds me of your Food of the Gods, where the chickens grew as big as a house. I remember reading that book when I was a lad and should have been swotting for my finals at Harrow instead.”
Wells removed his eye from the microscope and took a good look at the captain. Under the gaunt and grimy skin, the uncombed hair and wire spectacles, he could see that he was indeed no more than twenty-eight or nine—a lad still, in his book.
But one who was in charge of the lives of countless other lads, some as young as nineteen, the requisite age to serve at the Front—and many more, even younger, who had lied about their age to enlist. The recruiters, Wells was aware, were known to turn a willfully blind eye to the deception.
When dinner was served—atop a makeshift table fashioned from old ration crates—Wells found himself pleasantly surprised by the fare. Given the conditions under which the corporal-cum-chef labored, in a veritable cave, over a sputtering gas flame perilously close to ammunitions boxes, beneath a strange agglomeration of tins perched on rickety shelves, it was a miracle he could produce anything edible at all. Mopping up some of the hot Irish stew with a hunk from a crisp baguette, Wells asked if he’d been a cook in civilian life.
“Fish and chips shop. Best in Newcastle.” His shaved head still gleamed with sweat from the galley. “My mum always said I could make a dead cat taste savory.”
“Is that what’s in this?” Lillyfield joshed.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell ye no lies.”
Stubb, Wells noted, chewed his food carefully and long, and swallowed with difficulty, following each bite with a slug of cold water from the earthenware jar. He said nothing, as what voice he could still muster had probably been used up for the day. Wells wondered if he ever used it to complain, but judging from his stoic demeanor, guessed not.
Just as they were enjoying the tinned apricots Norridge had rustled up for dessert, an unwelcome guest appeared in the doorway. Or so, at least, Wells would have thought.
An albino rat, with a missing tail and bent whiskers, sitting up on his hind legs like a dog.
“Alphonse,” the captain said, “you’re late,” before tossing him a leftover crust of bread. The rat lunged for it.
“I do wish you wouldn’t encourage this,” Norridge said. “He burrowed through a whole box of oatmeal the other day.”
“Alphonse is our mascot,” Lillyfield explained.
“Your mascot,” Norridge grumbled.
“He’s survived two direct hits, and an unfortunate incident when the enemy actually managed to penetrate the front line. He brings good luck.”
“He brings disease,” Norridge said, gathering up the empty plates. “And one of these days when you’re not around, I’m going to settle his hash.”
Wells watched in astonishment as the rat finished his supper, licking his twisted whiskers, and scooted back under the door.
“Shall we join him,” Lillyfield suggested, “for a postprandial stroll?”
Outside, it was a moonlit night, and both he and Wells took pipes from their pockets and lit up. The captain walked up and down several of the interconnecting trenches, bucking up the soldiers. Wells got the impression that Lillyfield was a popular officer among the men. And when they came to a breach in the parapet, the captain stood on a firing step and put his eye to a periscope raised just an inch or two above the uppermost sandbag. After swiveling the scope this way and that, he offered it to Wells.
“No man’s land by moonlight. A dispiriting sight if ever there was one . . . especially after an unsuccessful push.”
Wells tamped out his pipe, took his place on the step, and after a moment or two, got his focus. It wasn’t easy to see much—just a couple hundred yards of scarred and uneven terrain, punctuated by leaning posts and shell holes and tangles of barbed wire. In more than one spot, he discerned what, to his dismay, could only be the bodies of dead English infantrymen draped over the wire like dirty laundry hanging on a line. Others were thrown all over the ground, willy-nilly.
“You can’t retrieve the bodies?” Wells said, still taking in the awful scene.
“Not unless Jerry wants to call a truce to do the same for theirs.”
Wells knew that even if he tried to conjure this bleak landscape for the readers back home, the War Office would never let it go through. Like the letters in the green field envelopes, it would be read first by a censor and then either redacted, or destroyed. He was here to create moral uplift and patriotic spirit, not a blunt account of the horrors of war.
But just before he relinquished his hold on the periscope, something caught his eye. Something moving.
“My God,” he said, “I think one of ours is alive out there.”
“What do you see?”
“It’s hard to say. It’s all black. Creeping on the ground.”
“Coming our way?”
Wells watched. “No. It’s not.” It barely looked human at all. It slithered among the fallen bodies like a crocodile. For a moment, its head rose, as if sniffing the air, then went down again, squirming in the muck and mire.
“Here, let me see,” the captain said, brushing Wells aside.
Wells stood to one side, a shiver descending his spine. He’d been sent to the Front in search of angels, an
d instead found this—whatever it was.
“Bloody hell,” Lillyfield muttered, then moved to the closest soldier, huddling in a funk hole, and demanded his rifle. Positioning himself on the firing step, he took careful aim, then shot.
There was a muffled cry.
The bolt sprang back, and Lillyfield shot again.
“But what if it’s one of ours?” Wells remonstrated.
“Might have been . . . once,” the captain replied, firing off another round. “Now it’s just another bloody damn ghoul.”
Ghoul?
Lillyfield put the rifle down, and quickly peered through the periscope again. “Can’t tell if I got the bastard or not.”
Wells waited.
“But at least it’s not moving anymore. Could just be lying low.”
“What was it you called him again?”
“It’s not a ‘him.’ It’s an ‘it.’ Better off dead than a disgrace.” Wells was suddenly reminded of the strange warning from the orderly on the transport ship.
Lillyfield returned the rifle to the soldier, with the admonition, “Mum’s the word.” The soldier, his face caked with mud, nodded. Turning to Wells, the captain said, “Shame you had to witness that.”
Witness what, exactly? Wells wondered.
“But what would you say to a spot of cognac?” the captain said, brushing the grime from his hands. “It’s going to be a big day tomorrow.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jane drove the car even more cautiously than ever, making sure not to arouse any attention from anyone who might see it going by—though at this time of night, on a country road, there was little chance of anyone being about—and avoiding any pothole or rut that might give a jolt to Kurt, lying flat and under a blanket in the back seat. Although they could barely make themselves understood—her German was only a few words, his English was the same—he seemed to trust her. She had helped him down from the attic and into the back seat of the car, and apart from a searching glance, he had not pressed for more of an explanation, or expressed any reluctance. She suspected that he knew where he was going.
Dr. Gruber’s house was on the edge of the town, and his surgery was accessible by a side door, under a porte cochere. He had left the gate light on, as he had promised, and when she pulled in, the door was already waiting open. He came out immediately, and after a quick look about, opened the rear door of the car and helped Jane to get the hobbling Kurt inside. It was only when she closed the door after them that Jane noticed something curious: the brass plaque on his door that used to say, “Dr. Rudolf Gruber, General Physician,” had been replaced by a shinier new one, which read, “Dr. Richard Grover, General Physician.” She didn’t have to wonder why, but she did wonder when it had happened.
“In here,” the doctor said, leading the way to his office, though Jane had been there enough times before, usually dragging one of her boys who had fallen off a swing or collided with a badminton racket. The front room was the consulting parlor, with its desk and bookcases filled with worn-out medical texts; she noticed two conspicuous blank spaces on the wall, before recalling that his medical degrees had once hung there. One, she recalled now, had been from a university in Munich. More evidence gone. The back room was where he performed his examinations and procedures.
The operating table was ready, and Jane steadied Kurt as he eased his way up onto it. He’d had a full bath earlier in the day, and his ruined uniform had been traded for some old clothes of H. G.’s. He looked no different than half the boys she would see on the rugby field in town. Time and time again, she had to remind herself of who he really was, and castigate herself for what she was doing. There could be—there would be—consequences to pay, but there was simply something about the situation that aroused her indignation. The war was an insane and costly blunder, committed by foolish and shortsighted old men, on both sides of the Channel, who were prepared to sacrifice thousands—hundreds of thousands—of young lives to achieve some obscure geopolitical gain that even they could barely explain. And now, she had a chance, however tiny in the great scheme of things, to defy them, to say, No, I won’t participate, I won’t do what’s considered right and proper, because it isn’t right and proper. I won’t be a cog in the immense and destructive war machine. I won’t.
“Jane, may I ask you to go in the kitchen, and bring back the pot of hot water warming on top of the stove? I’m afraid you will have to serve as my assistant tonight.”
“Of course,” she said, knowing full well that she would be called upon to act as nurse. Normally, the doctor’s wife filled that role, but she was conveniently out of town that night, visiting her sister in Berwick Hill. That at least was a stroke of luck, as the operating room would have been unavailable if she’d been about. Mrs. Gruber—Grover—was not only the head of the town war bond drive, but also the head of the local watch committee.
By the time Jane had brought the water back, Dr. Grover, in a clean white smock now, had had Kurt remove his shirt and trousers, and was explaining what he was about to do. Sitting up, in just his underwear, Kurt worriedly asked a question or two, and the doctor reassured him, even placing a hand on his painfully thin shoulder, before laying him flat on the table. As the anesthesia was being prepared, Kurt turned toward Jane, and said several things that she had to struggle to comprehend.
Dr. Grover translated. “He says, he hopes that if you have a son in the war, that he finds someone like you in his own country.”
If only he knew, she thought, that she had a husband, not a son, on the front line at that very moment.
The doctor wiped an antiseptic swab across Kurt’s arm, then filled two syringes from an upright metal table at his elbow. Holding the first one up to the light, he said to Jane, “Morphine, 1.6 milligrams.” That was no surprise, though the second—“scopolamine,” he said—was. “It’s a drying agent,” he said. “Dries up the saliva and ensures better breathing.”
Next he lifted a wire frame mask, its shape reminiscent of a fencing mask, and fitted two slips of gauze into its lower portion. “I will want you to hold this gently but firmly to his face,” he said, and Jane complied. Kurt’s eyes, which until now had been filled with nothing but anxiety, were already showing the effects of the injections. His expression was dreamy, and when the doctor administered several drops of ether to the gauze and instructed him to count from one to ten, he had gotten no further than eight before his eyes closed and his chin fell to his chest.
“I want you to continue to monitor his respiration,” Grover said, “and tell me if anything seems to change—especially if the anesthesia is wearing off. If that happens, douse the gauze with just one or two—no more—drops of the ether.”
Then he turned to the left ankle, propped up on a wooden block covered with a white cloth; it was purple and blue, and bent at an unnatural angle, and to Jane’s horror, she saw Dr. Grover remove from a lower shelf of the metal table a small hammer and a vise the size of a heavy bookend. He placed its sides against the lower shin and carefully assessed the situation, looking it over from every vantage point, the way one might a valuable old vase. After squeezing the limb at several points, he went to work with a scalpel and the hammer, breaking and resetting the bone.
Jane had to avert her eyes, though the sounds were unavoidable. Although Kurt twitched once or twice, he betrayed no sign of becoming conscious. She kept her eyes riveted to his face, even as her thoughts wandered to a time when her son Gip had fractured an arm, and then to the night she had discovered Kurt in the barn, and from there, as they so often did, to H. G. Where was he right now? Was he in danger?
Curiously, and not happily, the next intruder in her thoughts was that girl who had come to the rectory, the young writer, who was so clearly infatuated with her husband. Lord knows there had been enough others before her, and over time Jane had learned not to dwell upon them. Like omnibuses, they came and went. His so-called passades. But to Jane they were never quite so benign. Oh, she always pretended to be a goo
d sport about them, but this last one, this Rebecca West, troubled her. Apart from her beauty, there was real substance to this girl. She might prove to be someone capable of captivating H. G. in ways that the others had not.
Perhaps it was because she was caught up in these thoughts, and overly weary from the night before (she had not been able to sleep, not with the German boy in the attic), that Dr. Grover was alerted to the threat before she was.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“What?” But now she did, the sound of tires crunching on the gravel of the front driveway.
Then, voices, a woman’s—“Thanks again for waiting for my train”—followed by a man’s—“Say hello to the doc for me.”
“My God,” Grover muttered, “my wife’s come home!”
“I wonder whose car that is around the side,” Maude said. “Hope there was no emergency.”
“Need any help with that bag?”
“No, I’m fine. Good night, Mr. Slattery.”
“Good night.”
Jane glanced at the boy’s ankle, straightened now and stitched, but not yet in a cast or splint. She could hear the front door of the house opening. Keys being dropped on a center hall table.
“I’m home, dear.”
The doctor hurried to bind the site of the surgery. “I can make the cast tomorrow, at your house.”
The door to the front parlor of his office opened, and the voice called out his name—the new one. “Richard?”
By the time Mrs. Grover peeked into the examining room, all she could have seen was her husband finishing up a surgery, with, of all people, Jane acting as his assistant.
“Mrs. Wells?” she said in astonishment.
“Maude,” he said, “I didn’t expect you until Sunday.”
“My sister caught cold, and I didn’t want to wait around to catch it.”
“We have a bit of an emergency on our hands,” he explained. “Can you give us a few minutes?”
“Can I help?” After all, her tone implied, she was his usual nurse.
“No, we’re almost done.”
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 9