CHAPTER 30:
I’ve watched and waited for your light
May 29, 1943: Leopoldville, Belgian Congo
Major David Leslie Cornwall walked the rows of the small hospital, housed in an old Belgian church built fifty years ago, during the last great wave of colonialism of the last century. It smelled of gangrene and vomit and some undeniable, underlying odor which was like antiseptic death, a smell which preceded the last frantic minutes of some improbable surgery that would kill despite all good intentions. He had traveled far to get here, not only in distance but in experience. Loaded down with writs, files, and maps, his journey was filled with teletype messages from London command at every stop: numbers of the dead, the wounded, and the missing in stark black and white, numbers which grew by the hour along with his own crushing guilt. If only they had found the location of the alien books in Australia. If only Barnsby had his vision sooner. How many men would never come home to England now because of his failure? How many more would die because of his damnable ineptitude?
Cornwall looked bad. Disheveled. His hair was combed straight back and thick with pomade, not styled in his usual manner. His uniform was clean and pressed, but was stained in the armpits and down the back with sweat. His face was blotchy and covered in bug bites. His demeanor was not much better.
Everything had been spinning out of control since his agents had missed intercepting the DELTA GREEN team in Australia. More bad news from Australia had arrived with the latest teletype. Two of his PISCES agents had come out of the desert at the beginning of the month with stories of some type of explosion. A search had been conducted by Menzies’ men, so far to no avail. No stones in the middle of the flatlands, no ruins, and no books. Someone or something had removed them before he could secure them, just after he discovered the connection between Peaslee, Jermyn and the stones. The PISCES men he’d sent to intercept the DELTA GREEN team were still missing, presumed dead. Was it the Americans? He didn’t know. Perhaps General Donovan was far more clever than he had believed.
Flanked by two British soldiers, Cornwall walked past the doctors and nurses without a second glance, purposefully marching up the aisle with an authoritarian stride. The two soldiers followed in near lock-step, their faces as blank as masks, toting rifles. Both were tan and jungle-thin, dressed in British khaki jungle fatigues.
The little Gurkha whom Cornwall had travelled so far to see was nothing more than a bundle of bones beneath a thin mosquito net and a pile of clean white sheets. Rai’s hands, misshapen and stump-like, were wrapped in thick bandages rich with what Cornwall believed at first to be blood, but which as he approached he realized was actually antiseptic treatment. The smell around him was fragrant with feces, alcohol, and the thick stench of morphine. The Nepalese man’s cheeks were sunken and his eyes were bruised pits, closed to the world. He looked tiny, like a smashed mockery of a child, like a cadaver pulled from the ground after months of cold rot. Like the major’s, his face was covered in bug bites and scabs. His breath came in deep pulses, lifting his ruined hands, resting atop his chest, slowly up and down. Unconscious pain crawled across his sleeping face with each breath. A morphine drip was installed nearby, allowing the soldier to sleep even with his destroyed limbs, despite whatever pain made it through the haze.
Somehow, in this state, the shattered man had stumbled from the most treacherous jungle on Earth after traveling through it for more than two weeks. He was discovered by a native work crew constructing a railroad spur through the jungle near Itoko, sprawled across the tracks like a corpse. A few of the men had even watched in silence as the little Nepalese man had stumbled from the bush and collapsed on the track, falling across it like it was a finish line in some insanely brutal race. None had ever seen a Gurkha before. Some believed he was Japanese, but cooler and more experienced heads prevailed.
“Wake up, Rai,” Cornwall hissed. He impatiently snapped his fingers in the air, a sharp sound. A white man in the bed next to Rai stared impertinently at the major, mumbling curses under his breath in Walloon. Doctors looked on, unsure what to do. Nurses pouted. A nun shook her head at the major and left the room. The soldiers stirred uncomfortably behind him.
Rai’s eyes lifted open slowly. His eyes were lucid, serene.
“Major,” he croaked.
Cornwall tried to smile. He knelt close to the netting. “Rai, the mission...what happened?” Cornwall wasn’t sweating just from the heat. The tension had him ready to bite his tongue off. If only Rai could tell him what he desperately needed to hear. The city in the Congo was their last chance to solve the mystery which had begun in Australia three years before with the mysterious books of Lawrence Hutchins. Perhaps the city in the jungle was an outpost like the one in Australia—perhaps it was another library. Perhaps there was still some chance to catch up. One last chance to know the future as fully as the past. The only other option was to cooperate with the Americans, something best left as a last resort. “Tell me what happened.”
“The American made it. He did it. He did it, and I...helped him. There was a light and a sound. An explosion,” Rai mumbled, his eyes closed, a thin smile on his lips.
“No!” Cornwall choked. His hands clenched in trembling fists. Before anyone could react the major had pulled away the mosquito netting and grabbed the injured man by the throat. He shook the rag-doll form twice in his muscular arms. The little Gurkha offered no resistance. His head shook wildly, spit flying from his numb mouth. A glass vial smashed on the ground as a doctor began to rush up the aisle to stop the major, discarding a tray full of medicines without a second thought. The man in the bed next to the major reached out to grab at him, but his sickly, thin hands fell away from the British man’s powerful frame.
“YOU BLOODY WOG! DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE! DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE BLOODY WELL DONE?” Cornwall shrieked. His eyes bulged and spit flew from his lips. He wanted to rend the little man to pieces, to rip him up as easily as he would tear up a pound note.
The two soldiers pulled the major off the little Gurkha with difficulty, struggling with their rifles slung over their shoulders. The three danced an uneasy, halting minuet with arms stiffly locked around one another, knocking over an end table and a chair. The morphine drip smashed on the ground in a huge puddle of glass and liquid. Finally, red-faced and wheezing, the major stopped struggling and the men released him. As the major composed himself he could hear hissing, shouts in French, and the little Gurkha laughing. A doctor stood behind the men, shouting at them in French.
“Oh shut up already, you bloody frogs,” Cornwall hissed.
Blood oozed from beneath Rai’s bandages in a sluggish stream, but the smile on his face was free from all pain. All the humor left the little man’s face as he looked through Cornwall sadly. Cornwall found his stare drawn into the black eyes of Rai. Perfect, clean circles of black.
“I know what I did, major,” Rai said quietly. “I know precisely what I did. Do you?”
CHAPTER 31:
The clock hands fall, and time comes to an end for me
July 29, 1943: Swanscombe, U.K.
The group was gathered near the Swanscombe Abbey, a frail structure which stuck out of the blunt green landscape like a finger pointing to heaven. It overlooked the grey sea, rich with gulls and the cool breeze blowing off occupied France, nothing more than a thin strip of tan on the horizon to the east. Across the channel Fortress Europe stood unchallenged, and would remain so for some time. For the time being, Fortress Europe sent tokens the abbey’s way every once in a while, a meal for the worms. Pilots, soldiers and naval men were laid to rest in view of the land they had died trying to set free.
The graveyard had been there for centuries, as had the abbey, each feeding the other in the loop of religious ritual. The group of people had gathered there to lay a memory to rest, another son who had perished in the war, First Lieutenant Thomas Arnold. Forever lost in the jungles of the Congo, forever on his last mission, gone to whatever fate time had dict
ated for him. A stone was set, a hole had been dug, an empty coffin prepared. A man would be commemorated. Most in the crowd hoped to push whatever feelings they had on the matter into that coffin, to ball them up and bury them. Few seemed capable of letting go. In their own ways, each one suffered.
General William Donovan stood by the graveside, a pug man in dress khakis, face still and calm, his cap at his side. His intensity seemed to push people away from him. He stood at the very lip of the grave, as if at any moment he would himself plunge into it. When the pastor began speaking Donovan started and stared at the man incredulously, as if the priest had disrupted some sacred moment with his speech.
Commander Martin Cook stood next to Donovan, looking earnestly at the pastor. He felt as if he were straining his face to project the illusion that there was something left in the pomp and circumstance to believe in. He desperately hoped his skepticism did not show.
Next to Cook stood Lieutenant Joseph Camp, still sunburned, still stick-thin and sickly, his barrel chest looking odd next to his rail-thin arms. His uniform was, however, pressed smooth and perfect for the first time in months. Camp’s eyes were clouded over in thought. He had not known the man whose memory they were honoring, and he was on his way back to Burma that same night after being debriefed for DELTA GREEN clearance at Joint Intelligence Command. Images repeated over and over in his mind, vague recollections of the incidents in Australia intermixed with the horrors of the report he had read the previous night. The word ‘Nulla’ played across his tongue silently several times during the service, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember just where he had heard the phrase before.
Major Michael Stillman stood like a statue next to Joe Camp. He wore Army dress like the rest, but it was obvious he had lost a lot of weight and had not worn his uniform for a long time. He looked like a boy playing dress-up in his father’s clothing. A jagged line of angry red stitches traced its way up the left side of his face like a fracture in a vase. His green eyes peered from uneven sockets with a stare that saw for miles. When the pastor stopped speaking, Stillman dropped a nickel photograph of himself and Arnold, sunburned and happy, two years younger, into the grave after the casket. He didn’t wait around afterwards and left without acknowledging anyone else in the crowd. No one turned to see him go.
Captain Mark Steuben stared straight ahead as if concentrating on some distant point, like he was willing himself away from the path to the grave which lay before him. Like Camp, he could not recall what exactly had occurred in Australia, but unlike Camp he didn’t care. Those nearest to him could smell the alcohol coming off him in waves like the summer heat.
Mr. and Mrs. Alan Barnsby huddled together for comfort next to the pastor, as if it were freezing cold instead of a perfect summer day. Dressed in his usual black, Barnsby openly wept during most of the funeral and was finally led away by his young and pretty wife, who was several months pregnant. Donovan looked on the Brit with eyes as cold as flint and frowned as the couple walked away. Damned, double crossing—
At the foot of the grave stood Marjorie Arnold, Thomas Arnold’s mother, dabbing her eyes with a black, silk handkerchief and occasionally glancing up at the sky. She had traveled halfway around the world to bury an empty coffin at the behest of Billy Donovan, a last favor to a man to whom she had sacrificed her children. Now that she was here, she found it hard to even consider the fact that Tommy was really dead. She expected at some future date to somehow see Tommy and his younger brother Lucas again, as if they were away on a long errand and not dead in some pointless war. She looked old but not infirm. Her hair had faded to steel grey and her face was wrinkled, but something in her presence strengthened the rest of the mourners.
Overhead, drawing their attention away from the hole at their feet, a low, penetrating drone filled the air. In the perfect blue sky, tiny black planes crept forward across the vastness of heaven in V-shaped formations, heading implacably across the channel and into the heart of the Reich.
Marjorie tightened her black-gloved hand that of the little boy beside her and, sniffling, tried to smile. She looked down at the little miracle who had walked into her life less than three months before. She would never let him go off to war. She would never let him leave her. It was like a second chance. It was like a reprieve from God himself.
“Look Billy. Planes,” she said.
But the somber little boy, dressed all in black, continued to look at the hole. His black hair surrounded his pale, thin face like a frame. It was a face which was already showing the first signs of puberty, and his liquid eyes played across the surface of the casket. They fixed on the photograph of himself, in a different life, in a different body, and for a moment he felt a pang of sadness. Or perhaps madness?
No one should have to attend his own funeral, Thomas Arnold thought to himself, and he turned his young eyes to the sky.
EPILOGUE:
To Hinder a Gentleman from Hell, Part 2
December 25, 1961: Blackpool, U.K.
The clock hands fixed on midnight and the bell began to strike. From below him, through the floor, Lieutenant General David Leslie Cornwall could hear his family begin their revelry anew, shouting and laughing and singing as it officially became Christmas Day.
Cornwall’s mind was fixed in the past, on the strange books of Lawrence Hutchins that they had recovered so many years ago in Australia. The books which told the future. Thousands of facts had been gleaned from their strange, cellulose pages, facts about the future stretching into the unknown decades which still lay ahead of him. It was this most of all which nearly kept him from the task at hand—the want of seeing some of the miraculous things they predicted. But his sense of duty persisted. The facts were sporadic, random, and almost always general.
Almost.
One of the assortment of alien books contained the bland recollection of some dreary man who had served in the Ministry of Defense during the early 1960s. The cheerless functionary was questioned by some sort of interrogator who had more than a passing interest in the particulars about British intelligence personnel. In those strange metal pages the clerk recalled hearing some gossip, which commonly circulates around such bureaucracies, about the retired Lieutenant General Cornwall. Many believed he had died quietly in his family home on Christmas 1961, but almost all at the Ministry knew he had actually committed suicide and the incident had been covered up by the government.
For two decades there had raged a debate within the ranks of British intelligence as to whether these books Cornwall had put so much faith in, these books he had betrayed their wartime allies for, were worth anything at all. One of the arguments against the books’ validity, one that had been thrown in Cornwall’s face again and again, was Cornwall’s predicted suicide. “Do you really believe you would ever kill yourself?” he was asked, over and over again.
When he had first read those words, the notion of taking his own life had seemed almost nonsensical. Nevertheless, over and over again, other events in the books came to pass, reinforcing the certainty of his impending doom. At times Cornwall had tried to imagine why he might kill himself nearly two decades in the future. A painful and terminal illness seemed the most likely reason, but as the years counted down no organs failed, no tumors devoured his body, no ailment of the blood eclipsed his future.
It wasn’t until the last few years that he could feel the necessary emotions gathering, one by one, like volatile chemicals being mixed to form an explosive. They had been there, stirring, for some time. All of his control, after all, all of his power was nothing but an illusion.
As his escapes narrowed and his future darkened, he began to see that he had one last duty to perform.
If Cornwall’s betrayals were to have any value, then the promise of the library had to be more than some foolish pipe dream. The books, and all their prosaic talk of the future, would have to be true. Everything in them would have to be true. Otherwise, all of it would have been senseless, futile, hollow. Cornwall may have
failed to deliver the library, but he’d be damned in hell before he would allow his quest, his Holy Grail, to be nothing more than folly.
This moment had been preordained by the very power he had hoped to harness, but which he now knew he could never hope to understand. Cornwall knew he would never understand anything...
...anything except his last duty. He would protect the future by doing his part to make it the past.
Cornwall looked down the barrel of his Webley and tried desperately to see any future at all, but the black eye only looked back at him blankly.
Then, as the clock tolled twelve, just when he had given up hope, a light.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
First and foremost, I must tip my hat to the master, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, one more time, and the two marvelous tales of his I used as a basis to construct this novel, “Arthur Jermyn” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” Both tales haunted me as a teenager and continue to hold that certain fear of the unknowable today, in an age of million-dollar special effects and endless dull horror movies. Their detail and richness outshines anything I have seen, and they inspired me in different ways to answer some questions that they raised in me. If you have not read them prior to this novel, read them now.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 30