by Kathryn Hore
Beyond the tall doors lay the echoing corridors of the convalescent home. Mary wondered if she didn’t prefer the gnawing of the wind without to the sterile chill within. Upon enquiry, a nurse escorted them toward the day room.
‘He doesn’t talk much,’ she informed them. ‘We get a lot coming through like that. He sits and watches the trees, mostly. Please don’t talk about the war. It’s likely to upset him, or those around him.’
Mary looked pointedly down at Eric, who jammed his hands into his pockets.
Uncle James sat in a soft-cushioned wheelchair, a blanket over his knees, staring out the full-length windows at the swaying pine trees marking the boundary of the hospital property. Beyond them, the dark of tree and bush, wet earth and shadow.
Mary lowered herself onto the overstuffed couch beside her brother-in-law, motioning for Eric to sit, and to his credit he did so. She and William had raised him to listen to his elders and do as he was told. Maybe it was the unnatural quiet, the vacant looks, but his natural vivacity was somewhat subdued. Maybe the sight of his uncle in a wheelchair had made it all a little more real.
‘Hello James,’ Mary said, putting on her most genuine smile as she lifted the mourning veil from her face. ‘We’re so very pleased you’re home.’
James stared past her, his gloved hands clasped in his lap.
‘I see they gave you a medal,’ Mary continued, determined. ‘You must have been very brave.’
Mary felt a tug on her dress and turned to see Eric giving her his most darling frown. Just like that, she had broken the very rules she had set for him. Don’t talk about the war. But what else was there to talk about? And if not to talk about it, how would they ever overcome what had happened there?
‘James,’ she said, ‘your brother left a clause in his will that if he was to die and you were to survive him, that you are to inherit his stake in the printing business in Thames. There is...’ She swallowed hard, and pressed on. ‘I have made a room ready for you, so you will have a place to stay and a job when you’re ready to work.’
James stared into the trees, into the darkness. ‘Eric,’ he said at last, his voice harsh as barbed wire, ‘fetch me some water.’
Eric hurried away.
‘James?’ Mary urged him.
‘I watched William die, Mary.’
Mary blinked away a sharp sting. Don’t talk about the war. It may upset the soldiers. But what of the widows?
‘James, I—’
The veteran’s gloved hand snapped up and she fell silent. James may have gone away to war a volunteer, a bookish lad filled with stories and hope, but he had returned as someone else. Stronger? Perhaps. Or was he now nothing more than dragon’s teeth and shrapnel wrapped up in razor wire? ‘Now you want me to come home with you.’
She heard what he did not say; that a war widow’s pension was not money enough to raise a growing boy; that the years alone were more than she could face; that he remembered how he had once looked at her, when they were younger and his dashing older brother had been courting her, and how James with his awkward hands and shyness might never hope to dance with a young lady as fine as Mary; how in this world that the war had left behind, they must do the best they could with what broken pieces remained.
‘It was in his will,’ she repeated, wishing her veil might still conceal the flush in her cheeks. ‘But you needn’t feel obliged...’
James fixed her with a gaze which was all smoke and pain and the paling of dead flesh. One hand wrapped around the other as if to hide it, or to tear it off, if only he were able. ‘I saw things, Mary, things I wish I had never seen. I had to... make choices.’
He turned away as a glass clanked onto the tray table and Eric took up his place on the couch, hands folded in his lap.
James met the boy’s eyes, and nodded.
Drei (3)
The knife arcs up, and William screams.
The coated figure stands. James sees that its face is a bloody mess of exposed flesh and burnt skin, one eye leering sideways from a socket scoured of its eyelid. It lifts its prize — a single finger trailing a spool of blood — toward its mouth.
James jams the rifle against his shoulder and squeezes the trigger.
Black dust explodes from the ghast and it sways, but does not fall. It puts the bloody end of the finger into its mouth and sucks, as if inhaling on a fine cigar.
James can only watch as William gasps, twitches, and grows pale. A white vapour rises from his skin as his back arches, though whether in agony or rapture James cannot be sure. The white mist swirls toward the ghast, who continues to inhale, even as another shell explodes nearby, raining them with wet, hot debris.
William lies still. As the smoke clears, the monster is walking toward James, unhurried, unperturbed. Its face is no longer blasted but whole, yet somehow even more horrific for what James has just seen. The bloody knife hangs loose in its grasp as it approaches. James fumbles with his ruined hand to cock the rifle, but he is too slow.
Vier (4)
Mary fumbled for words which did not verge on desperation. Thankfully, James found them for her.
‘He looks like his father, when we were lads.’
An age ago. Another world. Different men.
‘That’s what your mother always said.’
‘Boy needs a man around.’
Somehow, it sounded no less desperate for having come from him, rather than her. Mary looked up with renewed hope. In his eyes, however, was not the warm paternal glow she craved. It was something she recognised all too well, something windblasted, wounded, and riddled with fear.
‘We’d be so pleased,’ Mary said, trying to sound cheerful and unafraid, choosing not to see the hollow, ravenous light in his eyes, or how James looked at Eric like a hunter sizing up his prey. She reminded herself of where he had been, what he had seen, what that must do to a man’s heart. He wasn’t William; William was never coming back. She and Eric needed James, no matter how broken, how bitter. Perhaps in time, she could make him well again, and he could learn to be as good a father as William had been. They may yet be able to salvage a future out of the ruins left behind by the war. There was enough ruin in this world that surely a woman ought not to be begrudged for trying to find a sliver of sunlight when the clouds broke, if only for a short time.
‘I must heal,’ James said finally, looking away.
‘Of course,’ Mary said, ‘and your legs—’
‘My legs are fine,’ he snapped, causing Mary to flinch. ‘I can walk. These doctors coddle me. I have other wounds which must be tended.’ Slowly, deliberately, he eased the glove back from his left hand. It was loose, as if a size too big. Beneath it was a bandage seeping yellow and red, where two fingers should’ve been.
Mary tried not to gag as Eric sat forward, his face alight. The waft of charred flesh overwhelmed the antiseptic swill of the hospital, carrying hints of mud, cordite, decay and, oddly, snow.
‘We will change the dressing twice a day until it is healed. I trained as a nurse, remember.’
James replaced the glove, a smile twitching his lips as he studied Eric’s rapt expression. ‘It may heal in time,’ James said, ‘or it may not. We will see.’
Fünf (5)
James bunches his shoulder to thrust, ready to ram his bayonet through the approaching thing. He can barely grasp the rifle, his arm in agony, but desperation drives him on. It is one thing to fall in a hail of machine gun fire, but this is something else altogether. With a cry, he lunges, but the monster knocks him aside. For a moment, they grapple, among the dirt and the dead. James, his left hand a bloody mess, is outmatched, and the thing pins him down. He’s on his knees in the mud, bent double, his wounded hand wrenched behind his back in a blossom of fresh agony. He hears steel slice through flesh, bone, and the distant sound of his own screams.
Tossed aside, he lies in the mud, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest, and listens to the squelch of boots. He weeps, a boy who wanted only to sit in a quie
t patch of sunshine reading books, and waits to die. He has been waiting for this since the day he volunteered, but has only now come to realise its sheer, brutal inevitability. Through the haze of his tears, he sees a sticky thread of spooling blood, lacing patterns on the creature’s mud-caked boots, drawing his eyes up to meet the monster’s as it lifts James’ finger to its lips.
‘Shh,’ it whispers, and laughs.
Sechs (6)
Wind groaned mournfully through the pines as Mary, James and Eric made their way along the lane to where the Ford was parked. An orderly carried James’ duffle, the muzzle of a rifle protruding from it. He loaded it onto the car’s rear platform while Mary helped James into the car.
As they drove, Eric finally had a chance to ask some of his most burning questions. James stared past the rain, and offered answers of one or two words, if any. Mary chose not to tell the boy to desist. The sooner they started down the road to casting out James’ ghosts, the better.
It was almost dark when they arrived at the small cottage behind the press shop, the old pines along the hill groaning in the wind. Eric dutifully carried Uncle James’ bag to the back room while Mary stoked the fire, filled the kettle, and dished plates of stew that she had put in the oven to cook before they had left that morning. She found James at the front step, wind gusting past him, gazing across the Hauraki Plains as curtains of rain stalked the horizon.
‘Come sit by the fire,’ she said, easing him inside and settling him on William’s armchair near the potbelly. While she busied herself with the gas lamps, James’ eyes drifted restlessly, settling on nothing.
Eric set the table, and so the evening progressed in an awkward parody of normality.
‘Old Mister Lux has been helping run the shop since you left,’ Mary told him, after Eric had gone to bed and she sat on a stool, unwinding the soiled bandages from James’ hand. ‘He’s happy to show you the ropes, but he’ll be just as happy to go back into retirement. He did it as a favour, keeping the place going these past couple of years.’ The bandage peeled away, revealing a raw mass of flesh still red and black in places, oozing thin blood and pale yellow fluids. Why was it taking so long to heal?
James stared into the stove’s emberous slivers. He had moved the chair — William’s chair — ever so slightly, so it no longer faced into the room, but toward the fire. ‘What do we print?’
Mary blinked. It was a strange, hollow question. James had lived all his life in this town, including the years that William had run the printing press. He knew what the press printed. ‘What our customers want. Advertising, brochures and posters and the like, mainly.’
‘No newspapers.’
Mary dropped the bandages into a bowl of water, the stain spreading. ‘William’s gazette—’
‘No news stories, nothing political. And I don’t want any newspapers delivered here.’
A chill fluttered in her stomach. ‘James, the world goes on. The war is still—’
He slammed his good fist into the armchair. ‘If not for the newspapers and the government and their lies, we never would’ve gone, Mary. William would still be here, and I wouldn’t be living on your charity.’
In the stillness that followed, the only sounds were Eric’s quiet cries from the next room. Mary set her bowl down and left James and his open wounds to the comfort of the flames.
Sieben (7)
The creature kneels in the mud before James tilts his chin with one cadaverous hand, so he must meet its eyes. In its other hand, it holds James’ finger, congealing blood hanging like a tail from a sliver of bone. James looks into the creature’s face, which is long, thin, too elfin to be human, its eyes pale and ancient as glacier ice. It is grinning.
‘Meine’, it says, and touches the dismembered digit to its thin, dry lips. It inhales sharply, and James shudders as burning cold drives into his chest. He gasps, a piece of himself freezing, breaking, severing away. His strength fades as his terror grows, and hot tears spill down his cheeks. Finally, something warm in this place which has been nothing but cold and rain and mud and snow for so very long. William is dead. There’s no one to see him cry. No one to see his shame.
But he won’t die like this, sucked dry by this spawn of dark German forests and the darker legends that grow there, a creature of twisted black boles and windshriek river canyons and nightmare. His good hand snakes inside the creature’s coat, and he snatches one of its bone-handled daggers. The thing recoils in surprise, as James plunges the knife into his own chest.
Acht (8)
Mary found Eric in the printing press, huddled over the assembly board in the ruddy glow of a single gas lamp. The machines sat silent around them.
‘What are you writing?’
He looked up at her, his face drawn, older than it should have been. Tired. She glanced at the inverted letters he was so painstakingly setting on the plate, but they made no sense to her. His fingers and face were smudged with black ink, like William’s had always been at the end of the day.
‘Stories,’ he said, looking away, embarrassed. ‘Just silly stuff.’
‘It’s late. Uncle James wants to talk to you, about school.’
Eric drew back. ‘He’s not my dad.’
‘We’re not having this discussion again. Your uncle wants you to tell him about these stories, the ones you give out at school.’
‘I don’t give them away; I sell them, a penny each.’
‘Let’s talk inside. You’re not in trouble, darling. Uncle James just has a few questions. He just wants to talk.’
‘He never just wants to talk. He wants to make me feel small and worthless and horrible. That’s all he ever does. He’s a nasty man, and I don’t like him.’
Mary flinched. Such vehemence, from one so young. Such brutal honesty. But even if Eric was right, she needed James, and her son needed to respect him. In time, that respect would be reciprocated, she was certain. But for now, Eric was the boy, and James was the man. ‘You will do as you’re told and come inside now.’ She pointed to the door, where the last rays of evening light painted the timber frame in shades of fire and blood.
Eric stomped away from the small corner table which held the manual press, an anachronism enshrined. The small hand-driven press had been the start of William’s business, embodying his youthful fascination and passion for print, which had evolved into a career and a livelihood. How terribly she missed his enthusiasm, his determination. He had always wanted to capture the world in black and white, with his weekly gazette featuring stories of success and celebration and local interest. Had he survived, how would he see this world now? In black and white? Or in shades of grey and red?
As Mary reached up to extinguish the gaslight, her eyes caught a single word on the offset plate mounted on the table. While she lacked William’s knack of reading letters backwards, the single word isolated from the blocks of text above and below it, emphasised by italicised letters and quotation marks on either side, was almost impossible not to read. The single word, for all that it was foreign and stood out on the page devoid of context, sent a shiver through her, for reasons she could not express:
‘Meine.’
Neun (9)
‘Nein!’
The ghast lunges, its skin dry like old paper as it grips James’ hand, hot with his pumping blood. James’ severed finger falls forgotten into the mud as man and monster wrestle for the knife, for the right to claim the soldier’s dying moments. James clutches the handle tight, determined to die by his own hand before the ghast can suck him dry. But it tears his fingers loose, and wrenches the blade free.
Still, his blood pulses down his muddy fatigues in an ever-weakening stream. James grimaces, savouring victory.
The ghast leans forward, a wicked gleam in its eyes like sun lancing off alpine peaks, and pushes its fingers inside his chest wound.
‘Meine,’ it says, through brittle teeth and bleeding gums. ‘Du bist meine.’
Zehn (10)
‘Where did you he
ar these stories?’ James asked, waving one of the hand-pressed penny-dreadful sheets.
Eric shrugged. ‘I make them up. They’re just stories.’
James gave him a hard look. Mary wondered at his intent, but he remained so remote that she couldn’t guess.
‘You just think of them,’ James said, his voice flat. ‘These stories of ghosts and war and violence. From your eleven-year-old brain.’
Eric nodded.
James slapped the paper with his crippled hand. ‘These stories don’t even make sense. They’re little more than... scraps of dreams. Why would anyone pay to read them?’
Eric shrugged, sinking further into himself. ‘I guess they like them, Uncle. People like stories, stuff that isn’t real. Stories where bad stuff happens, but it’s not happening to them.’
Mary frowned. This was not what she had expected of the conversation. So what of Eric’s inspiration? What about his suffering schoolwork, and the hollow, haunted look in his eyes?
‘Are you sure, Eric? For there is nothing entertaining about war, or death. Or is it that you have dreams? Bad dreams?’
Mary sat frozen as Eric turned his gaze to his uncle, and in the gaslight she saw moisture glistening in his eyes. She put a hand on his shoulder, but he recoiled from her touch.
‘And what of this Elffingern you wrote of? Did you dream him, too?’
Eric paled, and nodded. When he spoke, his voice was a cracked whisper. ‘Every night, uncle.’
Elf (11)
James gasps, his eyes flaring open, and the breath in his lungs burns cold as winter. Ice runs through his veins and the world is rimed in frost, and mist, the grey dirt of the trenches and the long pallid puddles all stripped of colour. But all he can see is the face before him, a leering mask of withered flesh peeling back from tooth and bone. The coat and helmet and knives are gone, leaving the creature almost naked in this colourless otherworld blanketed in the drifts of a Bavarian December. The ghast is clothed in string upon string of bones, short and thin — finger bones, all strung together with white knotted sinew.