by Nina Dreyer
‘There you are,’ Brock said, biting down on his pipe so hard that his moustache bristled, ‘come over here at once. There. Sit there.’ He stabbed a finger at a chair.
Marion glanced over her shoulder.
By the door stood the Tan, his rifle held across his chest. Bayonet fixed. She stared at it. It had been Erich’s worst fear. He’d written that to her once. One single admission of fear. The jab of the bayonet sinking into your gut, the turn of the blade, the sucking crunch…
‘I said sit down.’ Brock unbuttoned his holster, pulled out his revolver and slammed it down on the table. ‘You there,’ he turned and pointed at the Tan, ‘go and guard the back entrance by the kitchens.’
The Tan left.
Marion inched closer and sat down on the edge of the chair, hands knotted under the table.
‘Perhaps you only understand commands in German, eh,’ said Brock, ‘or do you understand this?’ He lifted his revolver, weighing it in his hand.
A side door creaked.
John emerged from the deep shadows, turning his black lighter over and over in his fingers. Marion’s heart caught in her throat. His collar was crumpled, like he’d been in a fight.
‘Come, come, John, you’ll want to hear this.’ Brock rubbed his hands together like a man about to sit down at a banquet.
John neared the table.
‘John,’ said Marion, half-rising out of her chair, ‘what is this? What are we doing here?’
He glanced at her, but his gaze slid off her again and he rubbed his temple with a knuckle. The green glass lamp cast a sickly glow over his face. He was grinding his teeth.
‘Now, excellent news from brigade HQ,’ said Brock, brandishing a crumpled telegram. ‘Great raid in Dublin, seven Sinn Fein rebels shot, no survivors.’ He smiled expectantly at John.
Marion lifted a hand to her throat. She thought of the pale man with the bitten-down fingernails. She thought of Fr. McSorley, cowering in his shadow. She thought of the young man bleeding to death on her floor, his waxen hand cold in her grasp. She thought of Eilis, gunned down in her parlour, her precious heart’s blood smeared under soldiers’ boots. ‘How do you know they were all guilty,’ she croaked.
‘Of course they were all bloody well guilty, otherwise our men wouldn’t have shot them.’ Brock tugged at his collar and turned to John again. ‘Now-’
‘And did they die in their sleep?’ John lit a cigarette with a crackle of his black lighter.
‘What the hell does that matter? All that matters is that they’ve been exterminated.’
‘It matters a great deal.’ John’s eyes looked glassy. ‘Dying in your sleep is too easy. Nobody who chooses to style himself a soldier should have the luxury of dying in bed.’
Marion shivered and looked down at the red-patterned carpet. Dying in your sleep could be worse. Dreams would bleed into death, and you might think you were trapped in a dream for years. When really you were dead. She’d seen that happen.
‘Well,’ said Brock, ‘as to that, a couple of my men bought it. Early this morning. Bastards must have gotten their addresses somehow. They were quartered in rooms around Shelbourne Road, you know. The rebels burst in on them and shot them dead, right there in their pyjamas. One of them was my own courier, actually.’ Brock snorted philosophically. ‘Rum business. But it was only a courier, and we’re winning this war, I tell you that right now.’
Marion narrowed her eyes at Brock. There he stood, boots planted wide apart, chest bristling with medals. Used to ordering gas attacks. He’d been angered by the death of Rothman, but only like a man angered by the loss of a prize greyhound. Used to wasting hundreds of lives, thousands. To him, this was nothing but a lost dog race, a slip-up in a cricket match.
Brock clapped his hands together. ‘They gave their lives for their country, like good, solid patriots. And as for patriotic feeling,’ he said, ‘I’ve had a word or two with your esteemed uncle, John, and it seems you’ve been cradling a snake at your chest. Oh, this little madam has been keeping secrets from-’
‘I want her here,’ said John.
‘And a husband in the Hun army, who got blown to bits at Passchendaele, I believe you fought there yourself, John, eh? What do you say to that?’
‘Stop talking.’ John pressed a hand to his mouth and lifted his leaden gaze to the ceiling.
‘And her performances always sold out,’ Brock raised his voice, ‘always concluded with a brisk chorus of Hun anthems, oh yes, very rousing indeed, very inspiring, very spiritual!’
Marion plucked at her shirt front, her whole body prickling with a clammy chill. She tried to push it back down, the echo of the deep undertow of hunger, the amputees, the starving, the insane, decorated veterans and fevered boys, all staring up at her on the stage, and the hot lights burning her face, the smell of wet saw dust and sweating bodies, the crash of applause, the thumping of heavy boots and the clinking of beer steins, and the roar, roar, roar at the chorus. And dead Erich, a black knot of pain and terror, pulled from the deep grip of death to feed the roar… She pressed a cold hand to her eyes.
‘War does strange things to everyone,’ she heard John say. Marion slowly lowered her hand and glanced at him, searching his face for a glimmer of kindness.
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the papers on the table.
‘Oh, times were hard for the little lady,’ Brock sneered, ‘so she did it for mercenary reasons, what a relief, I suppose it rather beats prostitution-’
‘I said stop talking,’ John shouted, flinging his cigarette into the cold fireplace, ‘I want her here, we can’t do this without her!’ He snatched a deep breath. ‘Now. Bring in the prisoner.’
Brock pursed his lips. Then he marched to the door, barking a command.
Marion scrambled to her feet. ‘Prisoner? John, what the hell are you doing…’
He turned his back and gazed at his own reflection in the dark window, cut by distant winter stars over the black hills.
The door burst open.
Marion spun around.
Brock came striding in, dragging a man by the scruff of the neck, a young man, hand-cuffed, trailing the smell of blood and earthen basement air. He gaped at the room in disbelief, shivering, reeling, eyes darting to the revolver on the table. ‘What in the hell are you playing at,’ he shouted, ‘are you having some kind of a laugh?’ Brock twisted his arm, and the man grimaced.
Brock dragged him to the edge of the table and forced him to his knees.
Marion gulped back a gasp and stared at the man, at his broken nose, his thin, weather-beaten face, his carefully-mended shirt, his straw-coloured curls plastered to his sweaty forehead.
Recognition struck her, sucking all breath from her chest.
Sean McKee. From the photograph.
Sean and John, same name. The two of them leaning in the heather with wind in their hair and seven dead rabbits at their feet.
John lowered his head, staring at Sean with a hard, dark brilliance in his eyes.
Sean’s face contorted. ‘Johnnie? Johnnie Kilcoyne? What in the-’
Brock smacked the back of his head, hard. Sean shook himself and drew a shaking breath. ‘Why are you doing this to me now, Johnnie? We were mates when we were wee lads, we went into the hills, we…’
‘And now you use your father’s farm as an arms dump. Planning to murder me. Planning to murder us all. You’re a traitor,’ John said, his voice low and menacing.
Marion’s heart was thumping in her chest. ‘John, let him go home, he’s just a farmer, let-’
‘Shut your mouth, woman,’ Brock growled.
‘You’re the fucking traitor,’ Sean shouted, ‘you’re after letting the bloody Tans stay here, they’re killing us, they burned my cousin’s farm to the ground, they dishonoured his wife, she’s ruined now, you fucking sleveen, you-’
Brock punched him in the back of the head. Sean slumped forward, sniffling blood.
John pulled Sean’s head back
with a fistful of hair and gagged him with a strip of linen. Sean was choking, coughing blood.
John pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, tapping the black lighter on the edge of the table and gazing steadily at Marion. ‘We begin,’ he said.
‘I am not taking any part in this. I am not,’ she shouted, smacking the table with an open hand, ‘this is madness, this is a desecration of the seance circle-’
John leaned over her. She could feel his breath on her ear. ‘You will. All your dark training leads to this.’
Her heart jolted in panic as she felt Brock tightening the black blindfold over her eyes, and she scratched and struggled to push away his fingers as he knotted it, ripping locks of her hair into the knot.
Darkness.
‘No,’ Marion cried, kicking back with her heels in the thick carpet, ‘I will not-’
Click. Marion stiffened. The cold muzzle of a gun pressed into her bared neck. Brock’s cologne, his smell of pork fat and pipe smoke. ‘Move an inch,’ he said, ‘and I’ll shoot you. Disobey, and I will shoot you.’
Marion gulped for breath, her heart pounding in her throat. She laid her shaking hands flat on the table, over crackling papers and photographs. They were like chess players now, she thought. John and her. Like in that old folk tale where the knight challenges Death himself to a game of chess for his life.
She would have to play.
She would have to win.
But she would not be playing for her own life now.
Breathing deeply, she rolled her eyes back and let herself sink into the outer darkness, past bursts of swirling colour, past garbled sound, further down, down past thought and word and form and memory.
The darkness closed over her, a fathomless, endless night, and the room became a small, distant pinprick of light in a black chasm.
She fumbled in the dark and clasped Sean’s arm, feeling the tendons of his wrist tighten under his worn shirt sleeve.
For a moment, there was nothing but his fear and anger. Thoughts of rifles and fires.
‘This man is innocent.’ Dreams of blood in the heather, of bone splinters in roadside ditches. ‘He is innocent.’ She tensed her jaw. Lying at a seance invited bad luck. Very bad luck.
‘… lie, she’s lying…’ Brock’s voice came as a warped wail.
She slid deeper into the darkness, pressing her thumb into the man’s wrist, and she felt slivers of his longing for his home. Grey hills rose in her mind’s eye, pines fading in mists towards a low, warm sky. She reached into the darkness, beckoning. If anyone loves this man, she said in her mind’s voice, come to him now, protect him, surround him.
‘… bloody ambush! Make her find out!’ Brock’s voice could barely reach her.
In her mind’s eye, Marion saw a figure glide closer, blurred amid gorse and heather, pale eyes and a white pipe, dreams of waving fields of rye, of old songs by hearth light. ‘Your father is here for you,’ she whispered to Sean, ‘to protect you.’ Sean started and tried to wrest his arm free from her grasp.
‘… is she doing, she’s not supposed to soothe the bastard…’ Brock’s voice bellowed somewhere on the surface far above. Marion closed her eyes more tightly and dug her fingers firmly into Sean’s wrist. Shield him, protect him, guard him, surround him. His pulse hammered wildly under her grasp.
John’s voice came to her, distant, distorted. ‘…no different from our seance at the prison. This man is going to be executed anyway… die now, and when he does, you will catch his spirit force the truth from him… keep your eyes closed…’
With a jolt of icy panic, Marion scrambled over the table, clawing to drag Sean closer, to pull him to her, to cover him with her arms.
She felt Brock’s thick hand rip her back, and she struggled to keep her grasp on Sean’s trembling arms.
‘Keep your eyes closed, Marion,’ she heard John call, ‘do not touch your blindfold.’
A clink of metal, a short, scraping sound.
She could hear her own screams distantly, as if deep under a heaving ocean.
Click.
An explosion thundered through her, deafening, sharp, metallic. The image of the hills shattered around her, and Sean came to her in a red burst of spine-splintering pain, his torn shade struggling half-in and half-out of his dead body, no outline and no form, no will and no memory, nothing but a convulsion of sickness and terror. Marion flung out her hands to him in the darkness, but his shade burned her, and his dead voice roared, a primal call, raw with horror and hatred and torment.
‘Murderers,’ Marion screamed, her own voice dim and distant, ‘murderers!’ She felt someone’s hand on her arm, John’s or Brock’s, but she shoved them away and raised her shaking left arm, hand curled in a tight fist, forefinger and little finger extended stiffly in the ancient gesture of summoning.
‘… the hell is she doing!’
Deeper down, deeper into the darkness she went, deeper than ever before, and in her mind’s voice, she roared her darkest incantations, chanted the most forbidden invocations to the dead, recited them like black crystals on a string of curses. She called to all the shredded and torn, the angry, the lost, the raging dead of the battlefields and the execution chambers, the back alleys and the basements.
And they answered. They answered her call.
This time, she did not fight them. She reached for them. Help me now, she whispered, and she felt the outer darkness coagulate around her, she felt them sliding closer, she felt the current of their presence crackling up her spine and singing her scalp like a current of a hundred thousand volts of electricity and she ground her teeth and reached for them.
Come to me, she spoke wordlessly into the fathomless darkness tinged with the dead man’s newly-burnt offering, I give you my arms and my mind. See this man. See him now.
She lashed out her cold, stiff right hand and clawed over the table, felt the rough seams on the dead man’s shoulder, splayed her fingers and searched, until her fingers curled around Brock’s meaty wrist like an iron vice.
‘… hell are you doing, woman!’ Brock’s voice was distant, as if coming to her through damp clay. She tightened her grip and rolled her eyes further back into the darkness. See him. See his hand, which commanded you into death, which destroyed whole battalions, see how he survived when you died, see his hand, which ordered your execution, see his tongue, which commanded your death in a gutter, see the loathing in his mind and awaken it, force it, break it open and let the poison infect his soul.
She felt the dead rise through her bones and her throat, their minds shattered by gunshot, their necks broken and twisted, their mouths packed with wet clay, their hands spreading through her in lashes of rusting barbed wire coils. The hunger, the hatred, surged through her like a blistering toxin, and she tightened her grip on Brock’s arm and tensed her body so hard she felt her teeth would splinter.
Kill, she commanded, kill.
She tore the blindfold from her face just in time to see Brock, his face a stiff grimace, his mouth open in a wheezing sob, raise his revolver and point it with a trembling hand to his own temple.
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
Another explosion ripped her eardrums, and a red arc of blood burst through the air. Brock slumped forwards, his face landing on the table and then slowly sliding off. A stench of burnt flesh and hot metal sifted through the shadows.
Marion lifted her gaze to John, seeing him faintly through the veil of darkness, his face shock-white, his eyes blind, as if he’d been burnt by staring into the sun. She saw the smoking gun in his trembling hand.
She heaved herself up fully, pressing her hands on the table into pools of warm blood, ‘I warned you,’ she growled.
John staggered back.
Marion strode towards him, gas and blood and mud thick in her throat, dark power crackling down her arms to her fingertips, the legions of the dead in her wake.
John pushed himself back against the wall and raised his revolver, a
iming it at her face.
Moonlight gleamed in the muzzle.
She held his gaze and curled her fingers around it, feeling her skin burn against the scorching barrel. Slowly she forced the revolver aside and stepped closer, close enough the breathe she scent of his skin, close enough to see his pulse thumping in his throat, to see the single bead of sweat glinting over his ear. He was baring his teeth in a soundless scream.
‘I warned you,’ she roared. She gripped his face, leaning further back into the darkness, and ground her teeth, straining as she’d never strained, feeling every muscle in her body harden, and she pulled at the dead with her mind, pulled them closer, opening her throat and her mind in invitation. Come into his mind, she commanded in the storm of darkness, come through me and come into his mind and break him apart, show him what he has done, show him the truth.
She felt him struggling, but she held him in an iron-vice grip, feeling the rage burning through her and into him, the terror, the grief, she felt their dead fingers clawing out through her throat, through her hands and into him, and she screamed through clenched teeth. Dead faces hurled through her, shredded limbs, white rags pinned to bleeding chests, hands rising from bloodied gutters, hands rising from grey mud to curl their fingers into his mind.
She could hear John’s screams, but only faintly.
They were drowned out by another sound.
A roar swelled in Marion’s chest, like gushing blood in the inner ear, searing and burning, and the sound of distant boots thumping distant floors, of clinking beer steins and a growling, barking, rousing chorus, howled out in beat with the old drum beats, the chorus of rising again, of burning away the betrayal and the defeat, and she felt again the blistering heat of the stage lights on her forehead, and the raw chorus burned her throat, and our glorious dead who gave their lives for the Fatherland marched on ahead, and she heard herself laughing, distantly, hysterically, far away and long ago, but no, no, no…