by Mike Carey
And so on, and so forth.
Klaes answered as best he could, ate his pork and kept his counsel. Nothing that was said after that bore directly on the detachment’s presence here or the Prussian threat. And yet was not that very reticence odd in itself? A village of less than three hundred souls that had suddenly had a troop of soldiers the same size or greater move in next door might be expected to be very exercised about any number of practical matters relating to their feeding and watering, their entertainment and their general impact upon the local economy. The mayor and his wife had asked about none of these things, even though the mayor’s background in the dressing and vending of meat made it all but inevitable that mercantile considerations had come to his mind.
It was curious. Perhaps, as Colonel August seemed to think, it was suspicious.
And then, there was the girl. As he rode the three miles back to Pokoj, Klaes reviewed that portion of the conversation repeatedly in his mind, but was wholly unable to identify the word or phrase that had distressed Bosilka enough to make her cry. Something about the house, certainly. Perhaps the thought of having to serve there, with the soldiers quartered so close by. But she already had a position, and it was evident that the Weichoreks valued her. She was in no danger of having to sue to Colonel August for employment.
It seemed there was some secret here. Klaes was inclined, however, to believe that the secret related in some way to Bosilka herself. And if that were so, then its substance, if it were ever brought to light, would no doubt turn out to belong to the realm of confidences, promises, fancies and fallacies that made up young girls’ lives until they married.
He would say as much to the colonel, and advise him to take the matter no further. He wanted no more suppers with the Weichoreks.
6
Drozde lay on Molebacher’s pallet and stared into the dark. She couldn’t sleep, even though the bedding was softer than she’d lain on for months. She was still alone. After feeding August and the other officers, Molebacher had decided it was too late to make a general issue to the men, even though that was the tradition on the first night in a new billet, and had fobbed them off with travel rations of black bread and weeks-old sausage. But he had softened the blow by sending the orderlies out with three casks of the good beer. And naturally he then joined them to help drink it.
The rain had set in heavily shortly after dark, and no-one was in any hurry to return to their tents. They had commandeered one of the largest rooms towards the front of the house, with a solid floor and no obvious leaks, and dragged in benches for the sergeants; the rest of the men sat on the floor. Drozde could hear voices and laughter from there now, even a snatch of song. She was a little surprised at Molebacher: after the long march, the colonel might give the men some latitude, but they’d do well not to rely on it. The quartermaster was usually careful to keep on the right side of the officers. As if he had plucked the thought from her head, she heard Molebacher’s sharp voice, and the noise subsided.
It must have been near midnight when a general commotion in the corridors told her the enlisted men had been dispatched back to the camp. When the last of them had gone, she heard low voices in the passage outside her room, punctuated by Sergeant Strumpfel’s hoarse cough, and then the sound of another cask being trundled from the racks. Molebacher could don the persona of the convivial quartermaster like a second skin when it suited him, and whether disposed to carry on drinking for pleasure or indulging the other sergeants for reasons of his own, Drozde guessed that she wouldn’t see him again till morning. Relieved, she rolled over and closed her eyes.
She was woken by a pressure on the bedclothes at her side. She opened her eyes quickly and pulled herself up: Molebacher would expect her to be waiting for him after so many days apart, and when he was drunk was not a good time to thwart him. But it wasn’t Molebacher sitting on the bed. It was one of the ghosts.
She must have imagined the pressure. But this ghost was so distinct, so vividly present, it was easy to imagine that she had substance. Drozde had never seen a ghost of such solidity. She was young, maybe nine or ten years old by the look of her, and outlandishly dressed, as so many ghosts were. In fact the colours of her jacket and stockings – clashing pinks and reds – were so bright they hurt the eyes. Drozde wondered how she was seeing them when the room was so dark. But most astonishing was the child’s face. She was looking at Drozde with clear recognition – and with such unaffected joy that for an instant it caught at Drozde’s heart. She could make nothing of it. She stared at the little girl dumbly.
The child seemed to be waiting for her to speak. After a moment’s silence she laughed, as if they were playing a game, and laid her small hand over Drozde’s own. The slight warmth of it hit Drozde like a thunderbolt.
‘Hello, Drozde!’ the little girl said. ‘What shall we do now?’
7
Drozde was no stranger to ghosts. She’d lived with them since before she was even old enough to know what they were. Once she did, it was far too late for her to fear them. She associated them with many things, some of them melancholy and some merely curious, but none terrible.
And they caused no confusion, because for the most part they were easy to tell from the living. They were paler, the colours of their bodies and their garments washed out to a near-uniform grey. In fact, so many of the details that would have identified them as human were missing, and so seldom did they move or speak, that it was easier for the young Drozde to see them as features of the landscape – outcrops of mist or cloud in the same way that mountains displayed outcrops of rock or bushes in summer outcrops of leaves and branches.
When they did speak, the sounds most often failed to come together into words. Or else they did, but the words made no sense or merely repeated themselves. In the kitchen of her parents’ house in Trej there had been a ghost that looked something like a woman. It was silent mostly, but two or three times in a month would say in a low voice, ‘Let it sit by the door a while, it won’t harm.’ The words were always accompanied by the same gesture, a hoisting of the shoulders and a ducking of the head as though she was trying to hide her face. But she had no face to hide, only a stipple of near-translucent grey like the film of ice on a water barrel on a winter morning.
Once, when she had maybe ten years on her back, Drozde had made the mistake of asking her parents about the dead who stood or sat with them wherever they went. She was even reckless enough to speculate on their possible identities. Since they rarely strayed far from a single spot, perhaps they were the ghosts of people who’d died in those self-same places and now were doomed to spend eternity there, like markers for their own graves.
Her father had beaten her for being fanciful, and her mother all over again for her lack of respect for the dead. The dead looked on, never asking for respect or acknowledging it. Drozde learned her lesson, and though it was probably not the one her parents wanted to impart it was nonetheless of great value. She learned to keep her own counsel.
Since then she had had many lovers and more than a few friends, but she had never indicated to any of them that her sight went beyond theirs. Perhaps it didn’t. For all she knew, there might be many like her. It might even be the rule, rather than the exception, to see dead and living alike. It didn’t matter. She had taken the habit of silence, and it agreed with her. She needed no reassurance that her situation was common. She suspected that everyone’s experience, in the end, was unique. That each lived alone in the world of their own flesh, their own thoughts, looking out from time to time through their eyes but never stepping across the threshold.
But this strange dead child did frighten her. She was anomalous in too many ways. Her expression was lively, her voice vivid and inflected. The colours of her clothes were brighter than Drozde had seen on most living people, not at all like the bleached uniformity of the dead. And she had used Drozde’s name, although Drozde was certain they’d never met before.
The first question that came to her lips was both b
anal and unanswerable. ‘Who are you?’ There was no point in expecting a ghost to answer that. Who were you? would be more to the point, and even then most could not say – could not turn air into sound, memories into words, the past into the now. They were trapped in their death like flies in spilled beer.
She tried again. ‘How do you know me?’
The girl laughed delightedly, as though Drozde was playing a clever trick on her. Placing her hands over her eyes, she first covered them and then exposed them again – the game which all mothers play with their children before the children can even talk, usually accompanied by the cry: Peepo!
‘I’m serious,’ Drozde said sternly. ‘How do you know me?’
‘You’re my friend,’ the girl said. Her joyous enthusiasm waned just a little, a note of doubt creeping into her voice as she added, ‘You’re my Drozde.’
‘I’m my own Drozde, not yours. Where have we met before?’
The girl looked around her, very expressively, and pointed. ‘Here.’
‘I’ve never been here before,’ Drozde said. ‘You’re mistaking me for someone else.’
The girl smiled a tentative smile. ‘I don’t think I’d ever mistake you for anyone else,’ she said. ‘If I heard your voice from the bottom of a well in a deep, dark wood in the middle of a storm, I’d know it was you because I love you so much. And you love me too, best of anybody. Better than Anton, even. You know you do.’
‘Who is Anton?’
The girl looked long and hard at Drozde.
‘Oh,’ she said at last, with a tinge of what sounded like hurt or bitterness. ‘All right. I’m not supposed to say that to you. I’m going to get into trouble now. But really, I don’t know who it’s meant to be a secret from, when nobody else can even see us!’
‘No,’ Drozde agreed guardedly. ‘I don’t know either.’ She had never met a mad ghost before, or thought it possible there could be one. She got up out of the bed, wrapping the blanket around her. The proximity of the dead girl was unnerving her, as was this impossible conversation. The ghosts she’d seen in the past had no use for words, but clearly the spirits of Pokoj were different.
‘I think you should go now,’ she said. ‘It must be almost morning. Ghosts don’t walk in the daylight.’
The dead girl rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, we do,’ she said. ‘Don’t be silly. We walk whenever we want to. It’s just that people can’t always see us in daylight. And you said daylight might be bad for us because the light wears us thin like old sheets. But then you said no, it was only that we’re like whispers in a room and the sun is like a big shouty voice that drowns us out. But it doesn’t stop us being there; it only stops other people seeing us and us seeing each other. It doesn’t hurt or anything.’
She smiled brightly, as if she was a little pleased with herself to have delivered this long speech so faultlessly. Drozde felt cold stone against her shoulders and buttocks. She’d drawn away from the child without realising it, until she was backed against the wall of the small room.
‘Anyway,’ the girl said into the strained silence, ‘it’s not going to be morning for ages yet. Can we go for a walk?’
‘A walk?’ Drozde echoed.
‘Yes. It will be nice. We can watch Amelie come.’
Drozde hesitated. The house seemed very forbidding in the dark, and the chill air on her skin did nothing to make the prospect of a midnight stroll more inviting. But there was a perversity in her nature that made her advance towards what frightened her, and there was no denying that this precocious child with her senseless assertions frightened her badly. She felt there was something here that she needed to understand, and she wouldn’t achieve that understanding by hiding from it.
So she rose and dressed – which just meant slipping her smock and shirt back on and lacing up her boots. She hadn’t taken off her stockings or her shift. ‘Show me, then,’ she said, and the girl clapped her hands in delight. She led the way, her movements as natural as those of a living girl. Most ghosts drifted like flotsam, but this one moved purposefully and her feet seemed to touch the flagstoned floor at each step rather than stepping through it or hovering above it.
The candles had all guttered in the kitchen, but the fire had been built up well and was still filling the room with a faint red glow. Molebacher and some of the other sergeants had drawn chairs up to the fire and drunk until they passed out. Drozde could see their outlines against the firelight and hear the rumble of their snores as she threaded her way through the room, still following the dead girl and avoiding by unexamined instinct the other ghost she’d seen earlier on the kitchen floor.
Once they left the kitchen behind them the great house was almost entirely silent. The officers and their wives were meant to be sleeping here, Drozde knew, but she saw no sign of them. It would be difficult for her if she did, for if one of them heard her and awoke then she could make no ready explanation for her presence.
She had the moonlight as a lantern, there being no curtains on any of the high windows. And the little girl was her guide, showing her stairways and passages that took her deeper into the house, away from encounters and explanations. This aroused mixed emotions in Drozde. She had no desire to be where the house’s living occupants could see her. On the other hand, to trust herself to the dead ones seemed just then a questionable strategy. The girl was amiable enough, and certainly not threatening in the least. She had called Drozde by her given name, and asserted the warmest of feelings for her. But how could those feelings be genuine when the two of them had never met until this moment? In spite of herself, Drozde felt uneasy, and the feeling heightened when they reached a servants’ staircase that was narrow and lightless, panelled in on both sides.
‘I won’t be able to see in there,’ she pointed out.
The little girl frowned. ‘I think there may be candles,’ she said. ‘There were candles once. There. In a big bucket.’ She pointed to the wall at the foot of the stairs. There was no bucket to be seen. ‘Well, take my hand,’ she suggested instead. ‘Just until we get to the top. There are windows in the gallery, so you’ll be able to see up there.’
‘Take your hand?’ Drozde repeated. ‘How is that going to work?’
‘It’s easy. We did this, remember? You taught me.’ The girl reached out, and the tips of her fingers brushed Drozde’s bare forearm. There was a definite sensation, as of a faint breath very close against her skin.
Tentatively, she reached out, palm open. The girl put her small hand inside Drozde’s, and Drozde closed her fingers slowly. It was like holding on to a sigh.
They went up the stairs in this manner. The ghost’s touch was palpable, but not of very much use. Still, the direction was straight up. Drozde used her free hand to feel her way.
At the top of the stairs there was, as the girl had promised, a gallery or walk. There were windows all along one side looking down into a well of shadow that must be a courtyard, and on the other wall hung great numbers of paintings. They seemed all to be landscapes, or at least those that were touched by the moonlight were so. All were in much the same style, too, with hills and cypress trees and the occasional waterfall, as though someone had painted them all at once, with one brush and one pot, in the same way as you’d daub a wall with roughcast to keep out the damp.
The little girl clearly liked them, though, and walked down the gallery counting off each in turn. ‘Saw that one,’ she muttered, more to herself than to Drozde. ‘And that one. And that one. Not that one.’
‘Saw them?’ Drozde enquired. ‘What do you mean?’
The girl turned to face her again, all seriousness. ‘In the collection. When I came here. I like to remember that time. Do you want to see Amelie? See her come, I mean? Tonight is when she comes.’
‘I think I’d like to know who you are.’
‘Yes.’ The girl nodded. ‘I know it’s important to remember, Drozde. Every night and every day. And I do. Honestly. But can I not tell it tonight? I don’t think it’s my turn, and A
rinak keeps count. You know she does. And so does Mr Gelbfisc.’
Every word this strange creature spoke seemed only to add to Drozde’s feeling of disorientation. ‘I have no idea who those people are,’ she said, ‘or what it is you’re talking about. Just tell me who you are. Where you come from. Did you live here in Pokoj before the family moved away?’
There was an awkward silence. The girl seemed as false-footed by these questions as Drozde was by her bizarre soliloquies. ‘Come and see Amelie,’ she said at last, stepping around the impasse.
She beckoned to Drozde and ran ahead down the length of the gallery. At its further end, under a shuttered window, there were several stacks of pictures and picture frames of various sizes, which had been leaned against the wall there at some time in the past and forgotten.
‘There,’ the girl said, pointing down.
Drozde knelt and leaned in close to peer into the narrow recesses behind the frames. In one of them something moved. She started back in surprise, but a mewling cry from the interior darkness told her what it was that was in front of her. In the gloom she could barely see it at all. She undid the shutters on the window and threw them back, letting the moonlight in.
It was a full moon, huge and perfect. The little girl seemed pleased to see it. She looked from its face to Drozde’s, smiling broadly as though the moon was a joke that they shared. She pantomimed reaching up and taking it down out of the sky, then tucking it into the pocket of her skirt. ‘You won’t miss it,’ she said. ‘It was never yours in the first place.’
Drozde was mystified all over again. ‘What?’
The girl raised her eyebrows and repeated the words, her face full of exhortation like a teacher asking a child to recite. When that didn’t work, she coaxed: ‘What Mr Stupendo said. When he did his trick.’
Unable to sound the depths of this nonsense, Drozde decided that the simplest course was to ignore it. She squatted down to look at the cat, since that was what the girl had brought her here for.