To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  Yet after Abhaya had gone, Forrester felt her absence keenly.

  The truth was that his most recent contact with the Guest had shaken him. There had been occasions when he’d barely clung to his sense of self. If Abhaya hadn’t arrived when she had, might there have come a point when he was no longer able to find a way back, to remember what it was to be Lieutenant Rafael Forrester?

  Abhaya’s presence had allayed those fears. Odd how intuitively she understood when he discussed his communion with the Guest. Had their roles been reversed, he would have deemed the story so much bosh. She, however, hardly even seemed to regard his descriptions as strange. The way she spoke...

  Forrester froze, his every muscle locking rigid at once. For an instant, he imagined he might be suffering a heart attack, or be under the Guest’s influence, or struck down by some new torment Forbes had devised. But it was merely shock, the jolt of an epiphany vast in its implications, so clear now yet fantastical a moment before.

  Since he’d come to Sherston, he’d grown used to being singled out. Without at all realising, he’d let himself be swayed by Forbes’s assertions that he was special. Then, since his encounter with the Guest, his uniqueness had seemed unassailable, for who else had touched the creature’s mind as he had?

  Yet someone had. It was obvious, and he should have seen.

  The first time, when they’d met in the garden, he had rationalised her being there by assuming she was outside the range of whatever had occurred. The second time, when she’d brought him dinner while the rest of the household slept, he simply hadn’t put two and two together. All along he’d been too caught up with himself.

  Now he could see the unavoidable truth. Abhaya had not slept through the blackouts. She was immune, as he was. And he could conceive of just one explanation for that fact.

  His was not the only mind the Guest had reached out to.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “ W hy didn’t you tell me?”

  He had intended to be composed, to be rational, but in the night, amid muddled dreams in which he’d struggled to remember where he was, or even who he was, that resolution had dissolved.

  Now, as Forrester confronted Abhaya over his breakfast tray, he perceived dimly that this was as close as he’d come to resisting the Guest’s influence, and a portion of him remained sufficiently aware to be ashamed that it was her he was trying so intently to lose his temper with when he’d never succeeded with either Forbes or Campion.

  Abhaya put down the tray with a clatter. She still hadn’t spoken. In his half-fulfilled anger, Forrester felt sure that she must know what he was talking about, even if her expression admitted nothing. He reached past her to shut the door. Curiously, that action went some way to defusing his resentment, enough for him to drag down a deep breath, and enough that his voice was steady when he said, “You’ve been in contact, haven’t you? ”

  Abhaya only stood there. For a moment he was positive she’d deny it, but she didn’t.

  “With the Guest,” he continued, as though there might have been some ambiguity. “It’s contacted you. You weren’t affected by the blackouts. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Abhaya dropped her gaze then. She stared at the floor, and the side of her face that she turned to him was the one more bruised. Whether purposefully or not, she’d answered his question.

  “I wouldn’t have let on to Forbes,” Forrester said, more gently.

  “Not deliberately,” she conceded.

  “Not at all .”

  But he understood what she’d meant. If Forbes thought for one instant that Forrester was withholding something important, he wouldn’t hesitate to stoop to further torture. And he mightn’t need to go to such extremes. What might Forrester give away while he was in contact with the Guest, and would he even know? Now that he considered, he fervently wished he’d never uncovered Abhaya’s secret. All he’d done was place them both in jeopardy.

  Forrester sat heavily on the bed. “Damn it,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, Abhaya.”

  “I’m sorry too,” she said. “I didn’t mean to lie to you.”

  “How long has it been? How long since—“

  “From the day it came here. In my dreams, at first, like you.”

  “You were in my dream,” Forrester noted absently—and then, with abrupt horror, “you were in my dream.”

  She looked at him uncertainly.

  “The night I escaped, I dreamed I was in my old dugout. You were there, and you were trying to show me that the door was open, that there was a way out.”

  Abhaya’s eyes widened. “I remember. ”

  “My God,” Forrester said. The magnitude of this fresh revelation was almost more than he could take in. “It really was you, then?”

  They sat in silence. After a while, Forrester’s appetite and the odour of cooked food began to overcome his agitation, and he got up to retrieve the breakfast tray. Yet he again found the meat to be beyond him, and even the scrambled egg proved an effort. He left half of it, along with the two sausages, guiltily envisaging what such a treat would mean to the men in the trenches.

  Nevertheless, he felt better for eating, at once more attuned to reality and more inclined to accept the incredible. However, accepting was one thing, explaining was quite another. All he could say definitely was that the answer lay with the Guest. It had touched his mind, it had touched Abhaya’s, and somehow that connection had brought the two of them together.

  “Did you contact me intentionally?” he asked, as soon as he’d put the breakfast tray aside.

  “I remember wanting to warn you that the door was open,” Abhaya said. “I think that in my dream I knew I could reach you, even if I forgot as soon as I woke.”

  That made sense. The dreams of the last few days were like shrapnel fragments in Forrester’s brain. He had the impression of important details lodged there, ones he still lacked the faculty to prise free.

  Out of nowhere, the germ of a possibility occurred to him. “Could we use this?”

  Abhaya regarded him questioningly.

  “That is, have we stumbled on a way we can confer without Forbes knowing?” Which reminded him, they mustn’t have Abhaya spending so much time in his room. “Look, you should go,” he continued, “before anyone grows suspicious. But let’s give the subject some thought, all right? This could be our first real advantage.”

  Campion came for Forrester soon after and led him down to the cellars. Forrester made a point of relying studiously on his stick. Better by far that Campion should underestimate the extent of his recovery.

  Forbes was waiting as he’d been on the preceding day, relaxed in his armchair, as if they were two old friends meeting to reminisce on their shared adventures. “Nurse Rao reports that you were feeling peaky after our endeavours,” he said. “Are you well enough to continue?”

  Forrester could easily have lied, but for how long could he feign sickness before Forbes brought the doctor in to check him over? No, his best advantage lay in having him believe that they were working toward common goals.

  “I’m better, thanks.” In a flash of inspiration, he added, “Yesterday was rather intense, though. Like I’d marched twenty miles in my mind. I think once a day may be the most I can manage.” Above all, Forbes mustn’t guess that he was contacting the Guest in his own time.

  Fortunately, Forbes’s voice was devoid of any mistrust as he said, “Nor would I expect more. We are experimenters in a previously unknown and unimagined field, and what’s inside that head of yours is our one tool. We must be extremely careful that we cause it no harm.”

  Forbes had his gramophone out again, his candles prepared and lit, his incense burning. Without any assistance, he was doing a fine job of convincing himself that Forrester and the Guest could not commune without his aid.

  “This time,” he said, “and assuming you’re really confident that you’re up to it, I’d like to try something more ambitious. We’re not going to get far if we can’t actively commu
nicate with the Guest, and that communication needs to be two-way. Currently I’d say our friend is doing most of the talking, yes? ”

  “Not talking,” Forrester corrected, “or anything like it. Sorry to keep hammering that point, only it’s vital you appreciate the difficulty. But yes, you’re right that our interaction has been one-sided. I’ve been pondering that too.”

  “Excellent!” Forbes crowed. “May I ask what conclusions you’ve come to?”

  “That I need to establish some basic, mutually comprehensible concepts, and that I can’t rely on language to do so.”

  “My thoughts precisely.” Forbes seemed immensely pleased. “So here are my suggestions. First, that you should have a few ideas clear in your mind: vivid memories, that sort of thing. And second, that you ought to be more forthright. I think you’re in awe of the Guest, frankly, and so long as that’s the case, it will keep on calling the shots. It’s only an animal, you know: no more special than a horse, no more sacred than a cow.”

  You couldn’t be more wrong , Forrester thought. Compared with the Guest, he found it hard to view himself as anything other than the lowliest of primates. Yet all he said was, “You’re right, of course.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Forbes replied. “You and I may differ in our opinions of what our—by which I mean, mankind’s—relationship with the Guest should be, and that’s a problem we’ll have to return to one of these days, I’m afraid. But in the meantime, I don’t see why our goals can’t align. I know you’re every bit as fascinated by that creature down there as I am. Can we agree that it would be a dreadful shame to miss this opportunity to discover all we can about our visitor?”

  “That’s reasonable,” Forrester allowed.

  “Good. Ready to make a start, then? Why don’t you get a memory set in your mind; something fresh, something you can visualise. But let’s steer off the war, our Guest has been exposed to enough of that already.”

  Forrester nodded and closed his eyes. Forbes didn’t understand what he was asking. Remembering any event from before the war was so vexing, as though the years of conflict were a painting in lurid oils smeared over the delicate watercolour of his youth. Anyway, there had been few happy memories, even in those final months of peacetime. His friendship with Fairweather had come closest, and that had concluded in such a very ugly fashion.

  Then, as that disturbance had begun to settle, he’d received the news of his mother’s death. He had been aware for weeks that the end was near, but had hardly dared to visit, humiliated by what she must think after the Fairweather business. When he returned on the eve of the funeral, he saw the blame in his father’s eyes: At the last , that bitter gaze said, it was you that killed her .

  But Forrester had known that wasn’t true. His mother hadn’t died of shame. She’d died from her husband’s cruelty, and over the course of years. In that moment, he had needed all of his strength of will not to strike his father.

  The next day—with war, unknown to them, less than a month away—there came the funeral itself. Two years later and still Forrester could picture every detail of the scene. Even in death, and for all the mortician’s efforts, he’d felt that his mother did not look peaceful. It had wounded his heart to think that, if what the priest said was right and she’d gone to a better place, she had carried the burdens of her earthly existence there with her.

  In his reminiscence, Forrester watched as they lowered his mother’s coffin into the ground, not willing to avert his eyes lest he inadvertently meet his father’s glare. The next day, he would tell the man what he truly thought, would blame him as he himself had been blamed. But Forrester didn’t know that then and could not have imagined it. His father terrified him more than ever. He was reduced to looking on as the coffin’s lacquered flank dipped beneath the crumbling black earth, bearing his mother’s remains toward oblivion.

  And Forrester was not the only one observing.

  Without realising, he’d done exactly as Forbes had instructed. For an instant, despite the Guest’s influence, Forrester felt the purest panic, a sense of intrusion profound enough to all but paralyze him. He fought past it. Not for Forbes; none of this was for Forbes. He made himself allow this violation because he wanted the Guest to see. It must know that he was capable of deliberation and emotion, just as it was, and for that purpose this remembrance would serve as well as any.

  His mind hadn’t roved here by accident. Few occasions had done more to define him. The following days would contain his one legitimate argument with his father, the saying of words that could not be unspoken, and soon after, Forrester’s seeking a commission in the new-born war. Within a month, the entirety of his former life would have unravelled, and the man—really, the boy—that he’d been that day would be all but erased.

  If the Guest was ever to understand him, this was a good place to start. Yet its presence was so disturbing, an infringement of privacy he couldn’t have conceived of a week before. He could feel its questioning, its bewilderment, and had to strive not to be infected by them, to see his own recollections as alien and strange.

  He’d have gritted his teeth if he could have quite recalled where his body was. But there was only memory and the Guest, the two now inextricably entwined.

  The next time, later that afternoon, was easier .

  Forrester was glad to be away from Forbes and his distractions. Even had he not despised the man so, his music and his incense and his pretence of comprehending things he was wholly ignorant of had grown wearisome. In two days, Forrester had learned more about the Guest than Forbes ever would or could, and his awareness was expanding virtually by the hour. Forbes wanted desperately to be in control, but he was excluded, and he would be forever unless the Guest should choose otherwise.

  Forrester was confident that it wouldn’t. With the knowledge that it had also sought contact with Abhaya had come some inkling of why he might have been picked. The answer lay in accepting what the two of them had in common. He and Abhaya had both been outsiders separated irreparably from those around them. Forrester could concede now that he had never regarded himself as one of the men, that even among the junior officers he’d rarely felt other than alone. Such seclusion must have been foremost in his thoughts in the moment that the Guest—forsaken, cut off, and in pain—had reached out. In that instant, his consciousness had simply been the least foreign.

  Abhaya, though—surely in those terms she had far more to offer than Forrester did. Her isolation had been so much more complete than his, a construction of race, culture, language, marriage to a man she didn’t love and couldn’t respect, and then, as if all that weren’t enough, being brought to this place in the middle of nowhere and obliged to playact an even more estranged existence. It was little surprise the Guest had been drawn to her.

  Forrester wondered sometimes why it hadn’t relinquished him altogether in her favour. Maybe eventually it would. But in the meantime, the Guest was an apt pupil. It wanted to learn, almost as zealously as it wanted to share—for that was what had happened when he’d entered its presence in the cave, of course, and perhaps why its perception had bled into his dreams. It was so used to experiencing, and to doing so in concert with other, sympathetic minds. Isolation was driving it insane, and Abhaya and he were its sole conduits out of the world of obscurity it was imprisoned in.

  The weight of its expectation was nearly irresistible. More and more, Forrester needed all of his willpower to control what he shared and what he held back. Yet the Guest was cautious not to hurt him. Though it was like an eager child in many ways, it evinced no childish cruelty. It acknowledged his pain and discomfort, even when it found them unintelligible. This process, this communalising of experience, was as natural to it as breathing was to him. Still, if the Guest could not explain why he occasionally recoiled, it recognised to retreat then, enough for him to gather his thoughts and say with certainty which were not his own.

  By the time Abhaya came with his dinner, Forrester was close to
exhaustion, with a mental weariness so great as to affect him physically, leaving his muscles taut and aching. Nonetheless, his fatigue was easy to push aside. There was much that he badly wanted to convey to her.

  This time, she’d brought him a dish made exclusively of vegetables, which she’d prepared herself. The food was more spiced than he was used to, the flavours rich and unusual. However, he was so hungry that he wolfed the meal down without any real contemplation, and subsequently decided that he’d enjoyed it.

  Dinner done, he hurriedly recounted the day’s events and the progress he’d made. Abhaya nodded along as he spoke, and he soon realised that her reaction wasn’t mere polite attention but familiarity.

  “I’m forgetting,” he broke off. “Most of this you already know.”

  “No,” Abhaya said meditatively, “it’s been different for me. More...” She gave up with a shake of her head. “I can’t say it in your language,” she admitted, with obvious frustration.

  Forrester had found her grasp of English to be impeccable. Whatever concept she was trying to express must be tricky indeed. “Tell me, and perhaps I’ll come up with the word you’re after.”

  Abhaya hesitated, visibly composing her response. “I’ve described how our encounters started in dreams, as they did for you,” she said. “But soon I began to feel as though they must mean something more. I saw the Guest often. I began to talk to it. I hadn’t prayed since we left India, but this was like praying—as praying had been when I was a little girl, when I’d thought the gods were nearby and listening.

  “Except that the Guest was always there. Soon I was forgetting, talking to it when I was awake. I liked not being alone. I didn’t believe in my childhood gods anymore, so I thought I might be going mad. If I was, it didn’t concern me. It even seemed better that way. Only when Gustav showed me what they’d captured and were keeping in the darkness did everything make sense. But by then I was so used to imagining the Guest as my friend, my companion, that I could barely see it for what it actually was.”