To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  Maybe, though, Forrester himself could exert a degree of control. His role would be that of a guide, a liaison, for the Guest, and when the time came, he would set it free, regardless of what they demanded of him or of what they threatened him with.

  Only, they would know. They’d stop him. They’d find a way. Just as they’d found a way to hurt it, when to do so should have been impossible.

  The war twisted everything. He’d heard rumours that they were putting automobile engines into armoured shells; they made medical leaps back home purely so that they could patch young men up to be gouged apart anew. Anything that could be bent by war to meet its ends would be, inevitably. And any good he might hope to accomplish paled in comparison to the harm he could do in the long term. He had once imagined the Guest to be an Allied superweapon. In his hands, manipulated by his will, that was exactly what it might become.

  Yet ultimately, that wasn’t why Forrester had refused. The truth was what he’d told Forbes: the Guest was a living entity, one whose mind he’d been inimitably close to, and he despised the notion of it being used for such base purposes, or for any purpose at all. It was alone, frightened, in constant torment. It wanted nothing but to move among the stars again, to seek its lost kin who perhaps by now were lost forever.

  And that was what pained Forrester most. A nagging voice insisted, You care more for that one creature, a thing that isn’t human, than the thousands upon thousands of your countrymen out there in the trenches—young Tommies, dying in their droves. Was one life, no matter how unique or remarkable, worth more than the lives of millions? He knew what his instincts urged. But what was to say that his instincts didn’t make him a monster?

  In exasperation, Forrester returned to his regimen of the previous two days, stamping about his room in a sweeping oval. He lost track of time and even managed for brief spells to escape from beneath the suffocating burden of his conscience. He marched until his foot ached, until his leg ached, until his lungs ached, and he kept going, as if there were an end that he would reach if only he drove himself hard enough and for long enough.

  There came a knock at the door. Forrester jarred to a halt, his head whirling, as an hour’s dizziness caught up with him. He grasped the bedstead and hung on, his breathing violent. Who could it be? Not Campion. The sound had been a gentle rap and Campion would have hammered, if he’d bothered to knock at all. The nurse from before? But she’d already brought his lunch, and dinner was hours away. The one way out of his useless supposition was to invite whoever was outside in, yet his stomach was coiling into knots. In spite of the Guest’s power, he was afraid.

  The knock came again, gentle but insistent, and whether through some familiarity with the rhythm or by intuition, he knew who it was. “Come in, Abhaya,” he called.

  He heard the key, watched the door open. However, the corridor was in shadow, she had her head down, and at first all he could see was that the darkness didn’t seem to sit as it should on one half of her face. Then he understood. The whole right side was bruised, purple and almost black in places; that eye had sealed shut, leaving a thin rim of white between tumescent lids.

  “My God,” Forrester said, and then, “come in.”

  Abhaya stepped across the threshold, though reluctantly. Forrester thought for a moment that she was nervous of him, and realised straight away that, no, it wasn’t that. She was ashamed. Someone had done this to her and yet here she was, trying to hide the evidence.

  “Will you sit down?” Forrester asked, motioning to the bed since there was nowhere else. When she still hesitated, he added, “Please?”

  Maybe the note of pleading that had slipped into his tone was what broke through to her. She passed him and sat on the very edge of the bed, like a bird ready to take flight.

  “Who did this?” Forrester said. Keeping his voice steady was profoundly difficult.

  Abhaya didn’t look up. “He had three men take me out onto the moors. They had sealed orders. The orders told them they should beat me.” She hung her head. “They were given precise instructions as to how.”

  Forrester could picture the scene in his mind’s eye. He could visualise the moorland perfectly, having witnessed it only days before: the barrenness, the exhilarating openness, and then that stubborn tranquillity broken by an engine’s growl. They would not have been rowdy or abusive as he’d seen men be, the sorts that bragged about their drunken exploits in French brothels and the bruises they’d left, which seemed to delight them more than mere fornication ever could. No, these men would not have behaved like that. They’d have been stolid, methodical—for they had orders to follow.

  Fleetingly, Forrester came close to the rage he knew should be his reaction. It boiled near to the surface, so that he could feel its heat, and he was aggrieved when it subsided, leaving him as calm as ever.

  “Was one of the men Sergeant Campion?” he said.

  Abhaya nodded.

  He remembered Campion’s retort when Forrester had confronted him on the way to Forbes’s office: It’s not so impossible . No, with the correct manipulation, he could beat a defenceless woman quite easily. Yet he hadn’t seemed altogether proud of the deed. Perhaps even the redoubtable Sergeant Campion had his limits.

  Still, Campion had done what he’d done, and if he’d found the act distasteful, Forrester was sure he hadn’t complained. But he wasn’t the one who’d given the order. Forrester had known from the instant he saw Abhaya that the ultimate responsibility lay with Forbes. It was Forbes who’d contrived a means to punish her, one more machination to outwit the Guest’s influence. What kind of man was he, to devote his intelligence to such an objective? And Forrester determined that, whatever his doubts, he must never enable the use of the Guest’s power for any purpose that Forbes condoned. No matter what Forbes might say of peace and bloodless victory, he had a long streak of sadism, and Forrester suspected that impulse would always win out in the end.

  So Forbes had devised a way to chastise Abhaya for her part in Forrester’s elopement, which he would easily have uncovered. But it was worse even than that. “Forbes had them hurt you to show me what happens when I try to escape,” he said.

  Abhaya nodded once more. Of course she would have reached the same conclusion.

  A question occurred to him. “You know something about Forbes, don’t you?”

  “I know plenty of things about him,” Abhaya said. “He’s my husband.”

  It was the last answer Forrester would have predicted. Having nothing sensible to say and feeling he must respond somehow, Forrester stammered, “Your ... your husband?”

  In frustration, he paced the length of the room and back again, as though the exertion might jog his thoughts free. Forbes, the man who’d had him tortured, who had ordered Abhaya beaten—her husband! And that was why she’d been selected to take care of him.

  “Are you really a nurse?” he asked.

  Abhaya shook her head, dark hair slipping in wisps around her features. “They gave me a little training. How to change a bandage. What to look for.”

  “But Forbes chose you because you could keep an eye on me and report back.”

  “He chose me because he trusted me,” Abhaya said. “There aren’t many people he trusts.”

  And he was afraid I’d talk , Forrester recognised, that I’d talk about his Guest. They couldn’t have thrown just any nurse in here with him. They would have supposed he was shell shocked, delirious, and yet still word might have got out.

  Belatedly, it dawned on him what Abhaya had done. She had defied her own husband to help him. The debt of gratitude he’d owed her now seemed increased beyond his ability to repay. Forrester felt a wave of pity. All this time he’d considered himself a prisoner without appreciating what that truly meant. At worst, there had only ever been a locked door between him and freedom.

  Suddenly the multitude of questions he’d had were unimportant. They had all been in some way about him, and he’d ceased to find that topic as interesting as he
did Abhaya. “Would you tell me how you met?” he said.

  “He was the major of a nearby garrison,” she replied, with less hesitation than he’d expected. “I’d seen him often, though we’d scarcely spoken. Then one day he asked my father, who was the town magistrate, for my hand in marriage, offering a substantial dowry. I think my father would have agreed in any case. He hoped the match would bring him esteem.”

  “But Forbes returned to England?”

  “He fell from a horse and injured his hip. They said he’d never be fully better and that he couldn’t serve any longer. If he wasn’t a kind man when we married, he wasn’t cruel either, but that ... changed him. His father and grandfather had been soldiers. It was the only thing he’d ever wished to do. He tried to be a doctor, as he’d once been in the army, but his temper...” Abhaya sighed softly, patterns of old memories fleeing across her blemished face. “Then an old friend came to him about a job. Something completely different. They knew he spoke good Hindi, as well as French and German.”

  “They wanted him to be a spy,” Forrester said.

  Abhaya frowned, as though she hadn’t thought of Forbes’s role that way. “They wanted him to hunt for spies. They knew a war was coming. Gustav used to talk of it even before anyone else did.”

  Forrester needed a moment to register who she’d meant. He had almost come to fancy that Forbes was all the name the man had. So, his Christian name was Gustav. A British spy with a Germanic forename, no wonder he had so much to prove. Yet that same quality would have made him an invaluable resource to this MI5 he’d spoken of. For all his loathing, Forrester was intrigued, but it would have been wrong to press Abhaya further. He could see how the effort of speaking pained her.

  Nonetheless, there was more that he needed to know. She was here, after all, for a reason. And that was perhaps the most important question, the one he ought to have begun with. Forbes had sent her to show off his handiwork, and as a threat of what could so easily be done to Forrester himself. However, he sensed there was more to it than that. “Forbes told you to come here, didn’t he? Did he say why?”

  “He told me what he wants you to do,” Abhaya said. “And that I should convince you.”

  “You know what’s been happening, then? About that creature they keep chained up, buried under this place? The thing he calls his Guest? ”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it.”

  Yet she spoke the words as one would talk of an experience dreamed. She seemed curiously reconciled to the Guest’s existence, rather than awed as he was or disturbed as the soldiers had been. Forrester had little concept of India beyond what was common knowledge, but he wondered if her culture might offer more capacity for accepting the miraculous and the bizarre.

  “I know he wants you to learn to control it,” Abhaya continued. “As if it were a horse to pull a cart. He wants you to use it, so that he can use both it and you: make you go where he likes and do what he believes should be done. And he wants me to convince you, to beg you so that I won’t be hurt anymore. But I won’t .”

  This last she said with such vehemence that Forrester almost took a step back. He caught her eyes inadvertently, and in their black depths was a rage he never could have imagined there. Then the Guest’s influence reasserted itself, or else her own willpower did, and there was nothing in them at all. She must have grown skilled at hiding her emotions.

  “If you intend to do as he says, I won’t help you,” Abhaya finished, more calmly.

  “I should hope not,” Forrester said. “His proposal is horrifying. Oh, not on the surface, I suppose, but if one predicts where it would lead, what it would mean...”

  “I’ve seen what your people did to my country. Your politicians would enslave the whole world if they could.”

  “Yes, some of them would. A few.” Thinking about it, he felt obliged to add, “Enough.”

  “I won’t help you work for my husband,” she said once more.

  “No. ”

  “But I’d help you resist him, if that was what you wanted.”

  “It is.” Forrester realised he hadn’t even paused to consider. There was no other conceivable answer.

  He sat on the bed then, at the far end from her—he was worn out with standing—and they talked in hushed tones. They planned. And, for the short term anyway, their resolutions were simple and straightforward, a scheme Forbes and his spymasters might have approved of under different circumstances.

  When they’d reached what seemed a temporary conclusion, Abhaya said, “I should go. Before he becomes suspicious.”

  “You should,” Forrester concurred. That was the crucial point, that Forbes have no idea what they were up to.

  She went without a goodbye. But as she closed the door, she did smile at him, ever so slightly, as much as swollen muscles would allow. It was a conspiratorial smile, he felt, one that said, I’m glad we’re no longer alone .

  After Abhaya left, Forrester sat a while, reflecting. It had been easy to be certain in her presence, easy to accept how he had to resist Forbes with her bruise-blackened face in front of him. In her absence, the prospect was more intimidating. He was not, by nature, dishonest, and if nothing else, the coming days would require a great deal of dishonesty. There was plenty he’d have to learn, not all of it savoury.

  Yet, whether by purpose or accident, he’d explored every other course he could think of, and they had led him here.

  He’d tried compliance. But now he knew the full extent of Forbes’s goals, the schemes of the men he represented, and he could not possibly go along with them.

  He’d tried argument, tried reason. He saw now, if he hadn’t already, that no argument he made would affect Forbes’s opinions one iota. No amount of reason would ever change his mind .

  He’d tried escape. It hadn’t worked, and he would not get another chance. In any case, he appreciated now what he’d be fleeing from and what he’d leave behind. If he was gone, there would be no one to protect the Guest. They’d find an alternative means to coerce it, or at least they would endeavour to, and perhaps in the process they’d harm it further, even kill it.

  He’d tried surrender—to Forbes, to despair, to physical infirmity—and had proved unable. Maybe the Guest had lent him some unconscious strength without his knowing, or maybe he had always been stronger than he’d acknowledged. Looking back, he had often submitted to the will of other men, a pattern set by his relationship with his father and recurring through the years. He had capitulated even when, as with the war, he had been led down paths he found unconscionable.

  In that, he and Abhaya had something in common.

  Only one option remained, and it was she who had shown him the way. If he’d observed properly, truly watched her and understood, he’d have seen much sooner.

  He would do what was asked of him. He would nod and smile, if needed. He would play the good soldier. But from here on, he would fight Forbes with every nerve of his body.

  Chapter Eighteen

  T he next few days were the strangest of Forrester’s life.

  They began, however, normally enough, on the day after his conversation with Abhaya, with yet another summons from Forbes. Campion came for him as before, and said, “Come on, the major would like to see you.”

  His manner was unusually subdued. Thus Forrester was all the more surprised when, halfway down the stairs, Campion indicated his walking stick and commented, without apparent irony, “You’re doing well with that.”

  It was true. Forrester had spent the remainder of yesterday practising, first pacing with the stick and then turning to other exercises, strengthening muscles grown slack with forced inactivity. He was using the stick almost as an able-bodied man might, rather than relying on it as he had a mere two days ago.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  He was still bracing for some cruel gibe, but none came. Again, the sergeant seemed consumed by his own thoughts.

 
; That left Forrester to ponder their route. They weren’t going to Forbes’s office, that much was clear. They had already reached the ground floor, and for a moment he surmised that they were headed to the common room. He had a flash of Major Morgan, flushed and jovial, greeting him with deafening intensity. Yet when they passed, the doors were open and the room was empty, even its temporary furnishings vanished, as though Morgan and the other patients had never been.

  In the entrance hall, Campion ignored the broad stone staircase and the columned portico of the front entrance in favour of a nondescript door tucked in a corner. There were steep steps beyond, and for the first time Forrester struggled with his stick. Then they were in the cellars, the region he had inadvertently explored during the initial blackout, what felt like a lifetime ago. This section was unfamiliar, and Forrester trailed on after Campion, absorbing as much as he could in case the knowledge should be useful later.

  They came eventually to another low door, which Campion opened. Within, bottles and a few small barrels were stacked in racks upon three walls. Though the room was not large, a space had been cleared at its centre. There, bizarrely, two armchairs had been set across from each other, beside a squat coffee table, as if someone had begun a half-hearted attempt to convert the subterranean chamber into a drawing room.

  In the farther armchair, Forbes sat, sipping from a crystal glass. “Hello, Lieutenant Forrester,” he said. “Will you join me in a snifter of port?”

  Forbes seemed ebullient. Forrester wondered if he mightn’t already have indulged in a snifter too many. “It’s a little early for me,” he replied.

  “Oh come! I insist.” Forbes pressed a glass into his hand. “For medical purposes.”

  Since it was evident what was expected of him, Forrester took the seat opposite and sipped.