The Darkest Hour

by Tony Schumacher

  “Who are you?” Rossett finally spoke, his voice soft now, panic gone and a cool calculation restored by the lamp.

  “George Chivers, and you are?” The old man stayed on the floor but proffered a hand to shake, which Rossett ignored.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Ah well, chum, that’s a long story.”

  “Tell it quickly,” Rossett replied, cutting off the old man, who smiled and shook his head.

  “In a ’urry, are you?”

  “Tell it quickly.”

  “It’s a misunderstandin’. Seems I’ve upset our mates upstairs and they think I’ve got something they need.”

  “Is that it?”

  “And I think they’re tryin’ to raise a bob or two, for the cause.”

  “What cause?”

  “To kick the bleedin’ Germans out of Blighty! Where’ve you been, sunshine?”

  Rossett stepped back from Chivers and looked around the room again. In the corner he saw a few small upturned wooden fruit-­packing boxes. He picked one up, placed it near to the door, and sat down, retaining control of the lamp by placing it at his feet.

  Chivers watched for a moment and then rummaged in his pockets under the sack, bringing out a small pouch of tobacco, with which he commenced to create a damp, twig-­sized cigarette. He stayed on the floor, propped on one elbow, finally looking up at Rossett as he licked the cigarette paper and rolled it between his fingers. The paper looked dirty and gray, same as the man who was holding it, but Rossett licked his lips at the thought of having a smoke. He nodded toward it and half managed a smile through his burgeoning hangover.

  “Any chance I can have a drag of that?” Rossett gestured toward the cigarette. Chivers clutched it to his chest and shook his head.

  “No bleedin’ way; get your own.” Chivers rolled the cigarette in between his fingers and then pulled a match out of the box that lay next to him. He lit the cigarette and savored it like fine wine, closing his eyes and holding on to the taste as long as he could. If it hadn’t been for the hacking cough that broke his concentration, Rossett doubted the old man would ever have breathed out again.

  Eventually, he surfaced, and the coughing, which sounded like wet mud being churned in his chest, subsided. Chivers glanced up from the floor with blinking eyes and offered the cigarette to Rossett by nodding and holding it up in his direction.

  “ ’Ere . . . ’ave it” was all he managed to say, his breath short as he tried to fight off the cough that lingered not far away.

  Rossett stood and took the cigarette. Close up, he realized just how ill the man looked. The gray skin wasn’t just the result of dirt. The man had the sort of coloring an undertaker would spend a week trying to get rid of. He smelled of damp and his hand shook slightly as he passed the cigarette to Rossett, who looked at the toothpick of tobacco, then took a drag.

  He offered the cigarette back to Chivers, who shook his head and slowly started to rise from his bed. Rossett returned to the orange box and watched as Chivers crossed the room to urinate into a tiny grille set into the floor in the far corner.

  The man was little more than a skeleton dressed in dirty rags. Rossett wondered if the same fate awaited him. Chivers picked up a metal mug that had been lying next to his bed and held it up.

  “Tea?”

  Rossett shook his head.

  “Can’t say I blames you.” Chivers looked down into the mug, then fished something out before taking a sip. “Been ’ere almost as long as I have.” The old man scratched himself with bony fingers. He looked at Rossett for a moment, then picked up another orange box and sat opposite him.

  “Seein’ as you woke me up, maybe you can tell me ’oo you are?”

  Rossett took another drag of the stale cigarette and for a moment thought about snuffing it out with his foot, then thought better and nipped off the burning end before slipping it into his pocket. He might need it later.

  “Maybe you should explain what you are doing here for a start?” Rossett replied, still looking for some explanation for his current situation.

  “I’m ’ere because them bastards won’t let me go!” Chivers laughed as he spoke, then started to cough again, hunching over and spilling his cold tea.

  Rossett waited for the coughing to subside and sat quietly watching the old man wipe his mouth with a rag that might once have been a scarf.

  “There must be a reason why they put you down here.”

  Chivers smiled, showing teeth that were almost as moss covered as the walls, and slowly shook his head.

  “ ’Ow do I know you ain’t one of ’em come to ask me questions?”

  “Because I’m banged up here with you?”

  “Bah! They’ve tried this before, stuck a young lad in with me one night tryin’ to get me to talk. I told ’im to piss off, same as I’ll tell you. Piss off.”

  Chivers stood up from the crate and turned away, as if he had somewhere to go and was ending a business meeting. Rossett watched him stand and then cross the room to lean against the wall where he had urinated earlier. After a moment, the old man coughed and spat a solid chunk of phlegm into the grate with startling precision before turning to face Rossett again. His cheeks looked hollow in the shadows and his eyes like potholes to hell.

  “You can piss off, all you Churchill-­loving monarchists. Nobody’s going to win this war ’cept us. And I ain’t ’elping a bunch of cowards ’iding in Canada while good communists battle ’alfway across Europe to save Britain. Government in exile? Don’t make me bleedin’ larf. Government in fucking ’iding, that’s what they are . . . cowards, the lot of ’em.”

  Chivers spat again.

  Rossett shook his head and regretted putting out the cigarette.

  “I’m glad you got that off your chest,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees and easing the strain of sitting on the box.

  “It ’ad to be said,” Chivers replied.

  “I was talking about the phlegm.”

  Chivers stared at him across the room for a moment before starting to laugh and crossing back to his box. He sat down before the coughing started again, milder this time, but still loud enough to startle a donkey.

  Rossett looked at the broken old man and felt another shiver of his potential fate.

  The two men sat for a while, with just the mysterious drip drip drip to break the silence until Rossett stood and prowled the room again. He stopped over the grid in the floor and leaned low to look into it. It was about nine inches wide and smelled foul, a makeshift toilet that wouldn’t flush. He considered lifting the cast-­iron grate but decided against it; he wouldn’t fit through it, and even if he could have, he doubted that he would want to.

  “They give me a bucket of water most days to wash in and then pour down it. I don’t know ’ow it’ll cope with two of us. It’ll be fair foul, I’d imagine.”

  Rossett turned to look at Chivers from the grate.

  “When do they bring the water?”

  “How the bleedin’ ’ell should I know? They just do. Door opens, I get me tea, some grub, and the bucket. Sometimes I get some baccy and a drop of oil for the lamp, other times, like I said, when it’s very cold they put in a stove to dry meself and get some warmth in me bones.”

  Rossett looked at the door, willing it to open. He decided that would be his best chance of escape. The room’s only weakness would be the humans who came in.

  As if reading his mind, Chivers smiled and said, “They make me stand in the corner before that all ’appens. They bang on the door and shout for me to get there. I reckons they can see me, ’cos if I don’t move they don’t come in. They just leave me for a while, and it’s a long time made longer when you ain’t got some grub and water, so I do as I’m told. Even when they come in, they ’ave guns, so don’t you be thinkin’ ’bout jumping anyone, else you’ll get me kil
led.”

  Rossett crossed back to his box and sat down again, glad to be away from the smell of the grid, even if it was only to experience the smell of Chivers.

  He stared at the old man and said, “Why haven’t they just killed you? What’s the point of going to all this trouble?”

  The old man smiled again and pointed a finger at Rossett before cackling, “As if you didn’t know. I’m not daft, you know?”

  Rossett shook his head and leaned back on his box, allowing his back to rest against the damp wall and closing his eyes for a moment.

  “Humor me. Tell me, why haven’t they . . . we . . . killed you?”

  Chivers shook his head and smiled again.

  “I’ll tell you what you already know, just for conversation like. You lot won’t kill me ’cos I knows where the guns are.” The old man sat back proudly, crossed his arms, and tapped his left foot, enjoying the conversation, as if he were in a pub bantering with his old friends.

  “What guns?”

  “You know what guns. You know what guns I mean all right.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Our guns, the communist guns and explosives. You want me to tell you? Well, you can piss off, ’cos I ain’t going to.” Chivers tapped his hands on his knees as if he were playing imaginary drums, then fished in his pockets again for his tobacco, chuckling to himself while shaking his head.

  Rossett watched the old man and briefly wondered if Chivers had been on his own for too long and had gone mad. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “I thought you said I was the resistance?”

  Chivers opened the pouch and placed the cigarette makings carefully on his lap before looking back up at Rossett and speaking slowly, as if explaining to a child.

  “You are . . . but we are the proper resistance, we’re the communists. We are the ones fightin’. You lot are the bleedin’ government-­in-­’iding lot, and you want our guns because you lot are runnin’ out of ’em. Bleedin’ Yanks turned their backs on you now Roosevelt is dead. Churchill has run out of chums, ’asn’t ’e? The fat bastard.”

  “So you’ve got the guns?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got the bleedin’ guns. Comrades in Russia are making them and risking their lives getting them ’ere for us even though they need them for their own struggle back east.”

  “And you know where they are hidden?”

  Chivers looked up from rolling his cigarette and winked a watery eye at Rossett, who, in turn, found himself half smiling back, bemused to find himself taking a liking to the old man.

  “Too right, sunshine, I got ’em ’idden after we got ’em off the ship. Nobody knows where they are ’cept me, and if you think I’m tellin’ you where they’re at, you can piss right off, ’cos knowin’ where those guns are is keepin’ me alive.”

  Chivers gave Rossett a toothy smile and folded his arms triumphantly. Rossett shook his head and looked back toward the door. He’d had a long day, eventful to say the least. What had started out as a routine roundup had turned into one disaster after another, and he suddenly felt tired beyond belief.

  He looked at the boards and sacks that made up Chivers’s bed and decided he needed to sleep. Chivers, as if reading his mind, unfolded his arms and moved toward the bed defensively.

  “You ain’t ’avin’ my bed.” He quickly sat down on the boards, like a child protecting his favorite toy.

  “I don’t want it.”

  Rossett stood and checked the orange boxes. They were wide enough to sleep on if he laid them end to end. They wouldn’t be comfortable, but they would be drier than the hard floor, and with fewer fleas than Chivers’s dirty sacks.

  He laid them out, watched by Chivers, who was now lying down. After a moment or two, Rossett finally lay down and pulled his coat around his chest, exhaustion caving in his head like the heaviest of hammers.

  “Why are you stuck down ’ere?” Chivers said across the room and through the gloom.

  “I made a mistake.”

  “What kind of mistake? It must’ve been a bad one to get you stuck in ’ere.”

  “It was the worst mistake a man could make.”

  “Go on?”

  “I started thinking again.”

  Chapter 25

  ROSSETT HADN’T HEARD a key in the door or the sliding of a lock. The first he knew of anything was when the boot hit hard into his left temple. Reflexes had done most of the work for him, and he’d half turned his head and rolled off the boxes onto the damp floor. He was almost at a crouch when someone else slammed something into his kidneys from behind, and the best he could manage in reply was a halfhearted shrug before the pain shorted out his brain and he fell to the floor completely.

  Whoever was attacking him was carrying battery-­powered torches, and they seemed to flick around him like spotlights as the kicks rained down. He covered his head as best he could and tried to turn this way and that in an attempt to put his own legs between him and the hobnailed boots that seemed to be coming from all directions.

  The weird thing, he thought, was the silence. Whoever was upon him hadn’t spoken a word, and neither had he. This was a disciplined attack.

  After what seemed an age, but was probably only a minute, the attack stopped. Rossett lay still on the floor, covering his head, carrying out a mental audit of his body.

  He was sore, but no major damage seemed to have been done. Either his attackers were amateurs or they were experts who hadn’t wanted him incapacitated.

  He guessed they were experts who didn’t want to have to carry him to the interrogation he knew was coming next.

  Rossett was an old hand at this sort of thing; he knew the drill. He didn’t lift up his head. He could hear the deep breathing of his attackers, and he imagined them standing above him waiting for him to look up so they could start again.

  He wasn’t that stupid. He could wait.

  Unfortunately, Chivers couldn’t.

  “Cowards! Three onto one fella!” Chivers shouted from his bed. Rossett inwardly sighed as the kicks started again, this time with less fury, but the pain was greater as they hit home on flesh that was starting to bruise from the first assault.

  Rossett tried to stay focused, to find a pattern in the kicks to enable him to twist into them, but there wasn’t one. Each man was waiting his turn to land the perfect blow. Rossett was tiring and his back screamed in pain as he rolled around like an upside-­down tortoise. Finally, he broke the silence of the attack by shouting out, more in frustration than anger.

  It surprised him that his shouting halted the attack, and he wished he’d done it earlier.

  The cell fell silent again. A second passed until he heard more footsteps entering. He raised an elbow to allow himself to peek an eye out of his protective cocoon of wrapped arms and saw a pair of polished shoes next to the heavy docker’s boots in the doorway.

  Whoever was in charge had arrived. Rossett tried to look out into the hallway beyond the feet. He’d been hooded when they brought him in, and he needed to get an idea of what lay beyond if he was going to find a way out.

  He didn’t get long to carry out his survey. Somebody emptied a bucket of freezing water over his head, so cold it caused him to gasp and arch his body backward. Immediately, the kicking started again, this time for only a few seconds, before he was dragged to his feet, still gasping from the dowsing and the beating.

  Someone pulled back his arms and Rossett shook his head trying to clear the water from his vision. He expected a punch in the face or stomach, but it didn’t come. Whoever was holding him from behind had him pinned well, so that his arms couldn’t move an inch.

  He hung his head and tried to suck in some air. His body ached, but he didn’t think any ribs were broken. He felt his left eye swelling after the initial kick, but even that was superficial. He didn’t think he was bleeding; the only wetness was the ice-­cold w
ater that was running down his back.

  The torches shone into his face, and Rossett knew what they were doing, disorienting him. He’d been through this before, years ago, in another place, worse than this. He knew what came next, interrogation, and he was ready. He hoped they would take him out of the cell to do it. He guessed they would. It would be part of the game, keep him guessing. He knew the rules: he’d played this game many times before, on both teams.

  A face appeared in front of him, close up, with foul breath.

  “Time to ’ave a little chat, chum.” The face broke into a smile and then a laugh.

  Rossett head-­butted it, feeling teeth bite into his forehead. Suddenly the room exploded into action again, and in a moment he was on the floor once more, kicks and, this time, punches slamming home. He heard Chivers shouting for them to stop just before he passed out, a sense of cold satisfaction passing through his brain. He’d lost the fight but won round one; they’d lost discipline and he had outwitted them.

  Chapter 26

  HE CAME TO as they dragged the hood off his head, which lolled, too heavy for his neck, off to the side. He struggled to focus as the two men who’d carried him in left the room and slammed the door shut behind them. After a moment, clarity returned and he realized he was sitting on a metal chair, in a room lit by a solitary electric bulb that hung from the ceiling. He noticed that the bulb wasn’t heavy enough for the thick cable it was attached to and that it sat at a slight angle, defying gravity.

  He shook his head, then regretted the action as the room swam and his forehead ached.

  The chair he was sitting on was in the middle of the room, and he could feel handcuffs pinning his wrists behind his back. He didn’t try to stand up, guessing that his hands were threaded through the chair frame. He looked at the door, this one just a domestic wooden one. Across the room there was a boarded-­up window. At least, this time he was certain he was above ground. No point putting a window in to look at a sewer.