The Damned

by Tarn Richardson

  “What are you looking so pleased with yourself about?” demanded Mila playfully, stepping into the kitchen. He lunged forward and took hold of her in his arms, lifting her off the ground as if she were a child, enveloped in his vast strong arms.

  “What are you doing, you fool?” she laughed, giggling and batting at him with her hands.

  He kissed her behind the ear and shook her gently.

  “Careful!” she warned, eventually wriggling free of him and reaching for the safety of the kitchen side.

  “What is it?” asked Tacit, wrapping himself around her and kissing her neck again. “What’s wrong?”

  “Wrong?” she replied, turning in his grasp to face him and kissing him gently. “Nothing’s wrong, Poldek.” She put her hands to his face and kissed him again. “I’m pregnant.”

  NINETY ONE

  08:44. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 1914.

  FAMPOUX, NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  “Come on,” cried Sandrine, dragging Henry into a narrow side street, so ruined that they had to climb over piles of collapsed walls and roofs to get through it. “Let’s go!”

  “Where are we going?” asked Henry.

  “The tunnels.”

  They slithered and staggered over the mounds of broken masonry and stones, all the time listening for the approach of the Germans, for the whine of their shells, the sharp bark of their rifles. But they heard nothing, cocooned within the tumbled ruins through which Sandrine led them.

  She pushed him left into a short cul-de-sac and suddenly stopped, dropping to the floor of the road. “In here,” she called, lifting a stone to the side with ease. A dark square tunnel was revealed, leading downwards into the black, a ladder running down one wall. “Down here,” she said, pointing to the tunnel.

  “What’s down here?” Henry asked, ominously.

  Sandrine smiled and Henry longed to kiss her. “Escape,” she said. “These tunnels lead all the way to Arras.”

  Henry beamed. “Sandrine, I think I love you!” he announced.

  She blew a raspberry and tutted. “Only think?” she replied, hiding a smirk. “We will have to do something about that!” She swung her legs over the edge of the hole.

  “Do you have a lantern or a light? It looks awfully dark in there?”

  She gave her lover an odd look. “Henry, do you even need to ask? You know I think of everything! There’s a lantern at the bottom of the ladder.” She was soon swallowed up in the darkness below. Henry looked back one final time to the devastation of the village. Everywhere he looked he saw only signs of death and destruction. He looked back to the yawning hole. He knew it was time to leave.

  NINETY TWO

  08:42. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 1914.

  THE FRONT LINE. FAMPOUX, NR. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Forward they came, the massed ranks of the German forces, striding across the ravaged shell holes and undulations of No Man’s Land with caution and uncertainty as to what lay ahead. There had been jubilation within the German ranks at the news that they were to go forward into Fampoux, jubilation mixed with hysteria because of how the scouts had insisted that Fampoux had been deserted. Some said that it was a trap, others said there was a curse on the place, recounting how the Germans had been driven from the village less than a week ago. Expectancy was mixed with terror; fear became aggression.

  They attached bayonets and shouted their loyalty and allegiance to the Kaiser. They lined up in their trenches, mumbling final prayers and kissing rings and necklaces. There was not one who did not reflect upon – in those final few moments before the whistle was blown and they filed up the ladder and out into No Man’s Land – the catastrophic assault made the other night. Their Sergeants screamed for loyalty and belief in their commanding officers and told them to go forward and do their duty.

  Isabella staggered towards the hole in the trench into which Tacit had vanished. The pale rays of sunlight scorched across the landscape, reflecting on the wave of bayonets moving slowly closer towards the trench and Fampoux. She sank to her knees, her eyes welling with tears. She shuddered and roared a long and terrible cry of loss and pain, which scattered birds from the trees and rang about the land like a wail from beyond the grave.

  He was gone.

  Once night fell, she knew the wolves would tear out from the hole, the Germans would be torn and decimated: the British would steal forward and recapture the village; and the pitiless cycle of horror would begin again – capture, destruction, capture, destruction. An aimless, endless machine of death and devastation, all the soldiers and wolves small cogs in the great device. She knew she should leave, return to Arras, take a train to Rome and the Vatican, tell them the news, give her report on the assessment. Clear Tacit of all charges. Tell them he was the bravest and the most honourable man she’d ever met. But not yet. She owed Tacit a few more minutes of her time, reflecting on his grim resolve and their bond.

  She hung her head and clapped her face within her hands, sobbing uncontrollably with grief as the emotion engulfed her utterly. She wailed, wretched tears streaming down her face.

  She was crying so hard that she almost missed the crunch of earth from the trench. She lifted her head, blinking with pain, rubbing a sleeve across her nose, rubbing the tears from her eyes. She wept and looked again.

  It was him!

  She threw herself forward, sliding down the edge of the trench and diving into his vast frame, wrapping her arms around him.

  “You’re alive!” she moaned. “You’re alive,” hugging him tight to her body.

  Tacit stood stock still, his arms drawn out away from his body as if crucified on an invisible cross, the Sister weeping and tugging at him, her hands on his back, her head on his chest. Momentarily, something inside him softened and gave way, and he drew an arm forward and rested a comforting hand on the top of her back as she wept into him.

  “You’re alive, you’re alive,” she kept whispering over and over until her voice finally shrank to silence.

  Tacit loosened his grip on the Sister and pulled her a little away from him, wincing as the adrenaline ebbed out of him and the pain from his wounds returned.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked, seeing the tattered remains of his coat hanging from his side. “You are!” she exclaimed with horror, looking closer and seeing his clothes sodden with his blood, chainmail hanging in blasted, matted rags.

  “It is nothing,” Tacit hissed back.

  “But your side!” Isabella fussed.

  Tacit took her hands and drew them from their inquisitive search of his bloodied flesh. “There’s something back in Arras,” he said urgently, holding her fast at arm’s length in front of him.

  “What?” muttered Isabella, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

  “I’m not sure. Within the lair, a wolf, perhaps he was their leader, he was certainly the last one alive before I was finished, he said something about ‘you and your kind turning’.”

  “Turning?”

  “We need to go back and see the Cardinal.”

  “Cardinal?”

  “Poré. What about the Prideux woman? Did you find her?”

  Isabella turned her eyes from Tacit’s face. Her faced flushed with shame but then, almost at once, a resolve grew within her. “Yes, I found her.” She looked hard into Tacit’s eyes. “But I let her go,” she said, staring into Tacit’s impassive face. “I let her live.”

  Their eyes bored into each other. Isabella shuddered, imagining all the hateful things Tacit was summoning within his vocabulary to castigate her for this act of foolish kindness. But he wasn’t thinking anything of the sort. He was recalling the face of his mother in the contours of Isabella’s and his life when she was alive.

  “Then our only move is to Arras,” he growled, as if coming out of a dream.

  “If we want to catch Poré we should hurry,” suggested Isabella. “He’ll be leaving for the Mass for Peace shortly.” And then Isabella stopped. “Peace,” she muttered to herself, recollecting Sandrine’
s words.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing,” said the Sister, shaking her head.

  Tacit found a steep pathway out of the trench and scrambled his way up it, proffering his hand to Isabella once he was out. His grip was like a vice around her wrist.

  They half ran, half walked along the top of the trench and up the sunken road beside the retaken village.

  “The Germans will find nothing left,” Isabella mused, looking over her shoulder towards where the Germans were scrambling across No Man’s Land. “Nothing except shadows of the past.”

  PART SIX

  * * *

  “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.”

  Exodus, 31, Verse 3

  NINETY THREE

  13:02. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  The newly elected, and rapidly promoted, Father of the Cathedral of Arras, Father Xabier couldn’t have been more unfriendly if he had tried. He scowled when Isabella asked where Poré was to be found.

  “He’s not at his residence,” Tacit added, unconsciously thumping a fist into a palm.

  “He won’t be.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because he’s gone,” the Father replied briskly, striding across the ambulatory in a manner which showed his impatience and irritation.

  The ambulatory, where it had first begun.

  He was young and squat and well fed, Father Xabier. He had a complexion which suggested he preferred the outdoors to the cool confines of Cathedral interiors. He’d been brought in from the Basque region of France, where war was only rumour. Tacit secretly gave him six months before he reckoned the Father would apply for a secondment to a position more suited to his preference for the outdoors and warmer climes.

  “All the other Fathers have gone off to war,” he revealed. “More fool them.” He said it with a scowl and an unconscious smoothing of his short, greasy hair. “So, for now, Arras has got me, whether the congregation like it or not. And, at the moment, I am late, my sermon is barely written, the books have yet to be set out and the new chorister is yet to learn his parts after the last one quit.”

  Isabella cast a fierce glare at the Inquisitor at this particular piece of news.

  “Where’s he gone?” asked Isabella. “Poré?”

  “Paris. Left yesterday. Abruptly, by his personal carriage. For the Mass for Peace.” At this moment, the guns along the front started up their distant rumble and the ground began to shake, such was the massed barrage’s combined devastation. “Mass for Peace,” grumbled Father Xabier doubtfully, in reply to the rumble, ambling over to the pulpit and thrusting down his sermon notes. “Mass for Peace indeed. If the power of prayer hasn’t worked already, then I have no reason to believe that a Mass for Peace will work now. It would require something extraordinary to happen in order for the warring nations to sit up and take note, to listen to our combined Catholic voices.” He waved his hands as he spoke, conducting an invisible orchestra. “And more to the point, act in all our combined interests. In other words, not act solely for the Catholic Church, but for every religion, every person in the world to bring everyone together and act as one single combined force for good. And that, frankly, is a step too far, as far as I am concerned, seeing as we don’t even talk to half of them and they certainly don’t talk to us. It’ll take a miracle. And, if I am honest, the miracle that I currently need is for someone to ensure that this Cathedral is ready for its own Mass in just twenty minutes.”

  He stopped and looked up, aware that the visitors had fallen silent during his rant. It was then that the Father found that he was alone.

  The Cardinal’s door to his private quarters broke with a single kick of Tacit’s boot, the wood splintering around the lock and sending it tumbling noisily across the wood panelled floor.

  “Church spends a fortune on quality locks and buys the cheapest wooden doors,” muttered Tacit, thrusting the doors wide.

  “What are we looking for?” Isabella asked, stepping over the splinters into his study and peering around the small tome-lined room. Every available inch of wall, every surface appeared covered. The early afternoon Arras sun smudged the spines of books with its thin light.

  “I don’t know,” Tacit replied, working his way along a shelf of books, tugging tomes from their place, letting some fall straight to the floor, whilst with others taking more time to peer through their pages before throwing them to the ornate carpet beneath his booted feet.

  Across Pore’s desk were personal letters and oddments, letters from his congregation asking for assistance or prayers during the difficulties of war. All were innocuous, nothing which suggested anything untoward. Isabella shrieked in frustration and shook her hair into her face.

  “Maybe it’s nothing after all,” she suggested, holding two handfuls of paper up. “Maybe this is just a dead end. Maybe the wolf was playing with you, a final parting gift, a trick to plant suspicion? A red herring?”

  “No,” Tacit replied, gruffly. “There’s something. The wolf said it, like a taunt, like I knew those personally who were turning. We’ve gone full circle. The only place left now is with Poré. He must know something, something that can help.”

  “What on earth do you think you are doing?” called an officious voice suddenly from the shattered open door to Poré’s apartment. “If you don’t leave at once, then I will call the Sodalitium Pianum!”

  “If you don’t leave at once,” Tacit roared in reply, “I’ll break your nose!”

  The Priest, dark haired with greying flecks, cassock bound, blanched and shook his head in disdain. He turned on his heel and marched away, his shoes clipping on the polished marble.

  “Hey, hold yourself!” the Inquisitor called, thundering after the man and dragging him back to the busted doorway. “Where does Cardinal Poré keep his correspondence?!” he demanded to know, shaking him.

  “If you think I am going to tell a common stranger like you, you, you, whoever you are, you have another think coming!”

  But the Inquisitor and Sister traced where his eyes fell onto a wooden box in the corner of the room, hidden beneath piles of books and lengths of cloth.

  “Thanks!” growled Tacit, connecting his ham-like fist with the bridge of the Priest’s nose. He went down with a cry, a dead weight, flat out unconscious, his nose split, blood pouring from his nostrils.

  “You’re an excellent negotiator, Tacit,” Isabella mocked, as the Inquisitor heaved the partially hidden box from the shelf and manhandled it onto the table. She tried the catch.

  Locked.

  “We need a key,” said Isabella, looking around the walls, searching across the mantlepiece. She heard Tacit mumble something and the next thing she heard was the cracking of wood, as he inserted his fingernails into the space between the lid and the main body of the box and wrenched it open, shattering the lock and its casement. A number of papers shone like white gold inside.

  “And an excellent lock picker, too,” she added, pulling the first few papers from the top of the pile. Tacit did the same, his eyes flittering across the pages. With each valueless sheet, disdainfully he let it drop to the floor or the desk. A sudden intake of breath from the Sister drew him away from his studies.

  “Oh my God,” said Isabella, her hand to her mouth, “I think it’s Poré!”

  Tacit stole forward, his face grim, and snatched the paper from her fingers.

  “It can’t be!” hissed Tacit, his eyes keen on the paper. “Poré was attacked by the wolf!”

  It was a letter, written on an old vellum parchment in a wild and chaotic scrawl, the words almost impossible to decipher, such was their savage and desperate style. The letters and words all ran into each other, as if the writer was possessed or incoherent with madness. But there could be no question that it was undoubtedly a letter written for and to Cardinal Poré. Within it, the sender had assured the Cardinal of his ultimate gi
ft, his very own wolf pelt, in exchange for the task to be done, ‘… to accomplish our differing but combined ends.’ ‘An eye for an eye,’ the letter read in a bold and menacing font. ‘A tooth for a tooth,’ it finished.

  It was signed ‘Frederick Prideux’.

  “Prideux,” muttered Tacit.

  “Sandrine Prideux’s father?” Isabella stuttered. “What do you think he means when he writes, ‘to accomplish our differing but combined ends’?”

  Tacit shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’ve been so blind.” He turned on the Sister. “We should never have believed Poré when he said he was attacked! Stupid! Stupid!” he cried, casting the box of papers from the table with a crash, letters and documents tumbling out and over the floor. “Took his word for it. Took the word of a liar as gospel. So stupid.” He slammed a palm hard into his forehead, the sound like the crack of a circus master’s whip.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Now? We catch a train. To Paris.”

  “I just don’t believe it. Poré, he attacked the Fathers?” Isabella stuttered, sitting back on the desk and shaking her head incredulously. “He used the pelt! He attacked me! But why? What’s to be gained by killing the Fathers?”

  “And why is he attending the Mass for Peace with it in his possession?”

  Isabella rose her hand to her mouth and appeared to sob. “I can’t believe it. Everything you thought was sacred, everything you believed in and then suddenly, it’s gone.”

  Tacit put his heavy eyes onto her. “Finally,” he growled darkly, “you’re beginning to understand.”

  NINETY FOUR

  1910. NAPLES. ITALY.