The Damned

by Tarn Richardson

  It was a hard winter, the hardest Tacit had known since he’d settled at the farm. Deep snow and driving winds buried most of the fields and the north face of the farmhouse. They’d warned him at the market, the old hands who gently mocked the Priest who had turned his back on the fruits of God to worship the fruits of the land. But the ‘foolish’ Priest had not been lazy or unprepared. The house was well shuttered and warm, the stores well stocked and the fires roared beneath well swept chimneys.

  Nevertheless, Tacit couldn’t control the elements and word reached his ears that a tree had come down across a fence in the southern field and some livestock had escaped. Mila, heavily pregnant, had asked him not to go, but he knew he couldn’t leave the cattle to wander the night unhoused. Tacit, as well as anyone, knew what dangers lurked in the dark. It wasn’t far, just down to the bottom field. Three miles there and back. He assured her he wouldn’t be long, and he’d take the cart and a lantern, to speed his way.

  As ever, he stowed the shotgun under the rug in the back of the cart, just in case, and waved back to her as he took the reins. The Church hadn’t returned since that short visit two years ago, but his memory was long and he knew their memory would be longer.

  “Get back in the house!” he cried. “Keep our baby you’re growing, warm!”

  She laughed and blew him a kiss before shutting the door hard against the elements.

  He’d lost a bull and two cows in the blackness of the night and the storm, but the fence hadn’t taken long to fix. A good enough job with the tools and materials he had with him. Perhaps in the morning he’d set out and find the animals. For now, he’d take his cold whipped body home and warm it beside his love and the fire.

  It was the light on the hill which first caught his attention, a blaze on the horizon, ahead of him, in line with the path up which he was driving. It took just a moment for the cold horror to creep into his soul. The farm! The farm was on fire!

  He threw the horse forward into a gallop and roared up the hill towards the flames, weeping and crying out in anger and disbelief, as he leapt from the cart towards the raging building alight, staggering to a halt and dropping to his knees a few paces from the front porch when he saw her there. His hands tore at his face and hair, screaming against the wind in anguish and horror at the naked, bloodied figure prostrate on the stairs. They’d cut her from chest to pelvis, her entrails and unborn foetus spread about her in the blood stained snow, as if a specimen in some monstrous ritual.

  He lunged forward and bound the frozen remains of his unborn child and Mila into his arms, his head turned skyward, a roar screamed to the heavens above.

  NINETY FIVE

  16:12. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH. 1914, PARIS. FRANCE.

  Cardinal Poré turned the gilded handle of the door to his personal quarters in Paris and pushed it open. He hobbled inside and shut the door firmly behind him, dropping his hand to the key and turning it in the lock with a reassuring clack. Finally, he allowed his face to crack with the pain and discomfort he felt so cruelly in his leg, his head lolling back against the door, his mouth wide, eyes tight shut, swimming in the agony coming from his thigh.

  He pulled roughly at the buttons of his cassock and ripped the garment from his body, allowing it fall. The cool of the Parisian October air wrapped itself around the Cardinal’s thigh and unconsciously his hand dropped to his wound, snatching at the gash, as if in vain hope of being able to claw the bullet wound closed. The trauma to his leg, inflicted by Sister Isabella when she’d shot him with Tacit’s revolver, shrieked in anger and Poré moaned hopelessly and desperately in pain. He pictured the bullet, lodged deep within his leg, scraping hard against his thigh bone with every movement. It made Poré feel sick and hot. He gulped at the air in an attempt to calm himself and the pain. He had to be strong. He was too close now to fail.

  Cardinal Bishop Monteria had looked more grave than Poré had ever seen him when the younger Cardinal first hobbled in. Monteria recognised at once that Poré had been wounded, not believing the excuse the ailing Cardinal had given to Bishop Varsy that the autumn air had disagreed with his joints. He immediately suspected that Poré’s earlier promise to ‘take steps’ must have, as he feared it might do at the time, backfired. Those within his flock commented that they had never seen the usually cordial Cardinal Bishop look so private and subdued.

  “It must be nerves,” Varsy had said, but Poré knew it was his injury, and the manner by which it had been received, which so concerned the architect of the Mass.

  “Don’t worry,” hissed Poré through his pain, when the pair had a moment of quiet together. “Tacit’s in Arras. He knows nothing of Paris, of our plan.”

  That seemed to calm Monteria and he brightened as the final rehearsal ran its course.

  In the safety of his apartment, Poré hobbled to the chair in front of his desk and lowered himself gingerly onto it, trying to straighten his leg with a cry. He forced his hand hard into the bullet hole, a pathetic attempt to stem the blood which had begun to stream from the wound after hours on his feet. He shook his head and wiped his sweating forehead with his unbloodied hand. Just one more night. Just one more night, he thought to himself. Just one more night and his work would be done. It would all be over then.

  The sallow looking Cardinal looked about himself for something to help stem the blood trickling down his thigh and onto the chair on which he sat. His eyes fell on the sleeve of his shirt and moments later he was tearing strips from it, inserting a ball of wadding into the crimson hole. It made him howl and he collapsed into unconsciousness from his labours.

  He came to, he knew not how long later, to the sound of a knock at the door. Thank Heavens I locked it, he thought to himself, as he clawed his way back to consciousness.

  “Cardinal Poré?” came a voice the Cardinal recognised as Father Gugan’s outside his door.

  “Yes? Who is it?” Poré replied, more alarmed than he wished to sound.

  “It is Father Gugan. I just wanted to check you were alright, Cardinal Poré?” he asked, into the frame of the door. “You looked and seemed a little out of sorts at the Mass rehearsal. A little white, if I may say so. I just wished to make sure you were okay?”

  “Yes, yes, I am fine, Father Gugan,” Poré replied, looking down at his shattered leg and blood-soaked wrapping bound loosely around the wound.

  “I do hope you’re not ailing with something, Cardinal?”

  “No. No, I am just a little tired from my travels, that is all. I will rest tonight and am I sure I will be fine in the morning.”

  “Very good, Cardinal Poré. Is there anything I can bring you, Cardinal?”

  “No, I am fine thank you, Father Gugan. Please be at rest.”

  Poré waited until he heard no more footsteps outside his door. He wept and bit hard into his fist, shoved tight into his mouth to mask his cries. Slowly, with all the energy and nerve he could muster, he levered himself up out of his chair and hobbled like a broken thing to the cupboard. He inserted a key, which he had gathered from the desk, and unlocked the door of the tall dark wooden cupboard. He could no longer resist looking at it, to check it was still there. He had to look on the foul thing inside one more time before he retired to his bed, the source of his agony, his turmoil.

  It hung alone on the inside rail, limp and grey, stinking, tufted with dirt and dried black blood where it had been roughly hacked from Frederick Prideux. There was a vulgar smell of rot about the pelt, an animalistic musk which seemed to seep through and outside the wooden cupboard which housed it. It looked vile, more belonging in the window of a demonic curiosity shop or a coven’s lair of sorcery. Its very essence seemed to emanate a dark power.

  Poré stared at it, like a King surveying a great and terrible weapon, locked in a deep chamber beneath his castle walls, with which he would destroy his foes. Tomorrow everything would be completed. After tomorrow nothing would ever be the same again.

  NINETY SIX

  16:56. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 1914.
ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Tacit and Isabella stumbled from the Cathedral’s residences in the hope of finding some swift method of transport. They were greeted with a rare prize, a taxi, a Renault Freres motor car, stood empty in the square, rattling and cranking on its robust frame and hard wheels, engine still hot from its previous journey. Amiens was the closest city to Arras with a station on a direct line to the capital. Speed was not of the essence, it was a necessity.

  “Amiens,” called Isabella, climbing under the canopy and into the back of the vehicle.

  “Amiens?!” the driver called, sounding relieved. “Just came from there. Will be a pleasure to get back there too,” he added, indicating the screams and the thundering of shells encroaching on the city’s outlying lands.

  “Fortune favours the brave, Tacit,” the Sister chirped from the back, as the Inquisitor stepped on the footplate and into the front seat of the car, the vehicle buckling under his weight.

  “And I favour a passenger a little more on the smaller size, begging your pardon, Father,” mumbled the driver, cranking his gears and inching the vehicle forward.

  “How long to Amiens?” asked Tacit, leaning forward in his compact seat to relieve the pressure on his wounds.

  “An hour,” replied the driver of the car. “But with you on board, more likely two,” he grumbled, looking over at his vast size and shaking his head. “My springs,” he mumbled to himself. “My poor springs.”

  Isabella leant forward to the ear of the driver. “Do you know when the last train to Paris is tonight?”

  “From Amiens? Six o’clock.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Nearly five,” replied the driver, checking his wrist watch

  “We’re not going to make it,” Tacit grunted, clenching his fists into balls.

  “Can this car not go any quicker?” she asked.

  “Yes. You can lose your oversized passenger and you can get out and push.” He pushed his foot firmer down on the accelerator pedal and the tone of the engine yelled a little higher.

  “Keep your foot there, driver,” Tacit advised, feeling in his pockets for something to sooth his aching body. “If your car goes up in smoke, the Church will buy you a new one.”

  “If the car goes up in smoke and me with it, at least I’m in good company,” the driver added, with a shrug. “Don’t forget to give me my last rites, Sister.”

  “Why the Sister?” asked Tacit, uncorking the bottle and preparing to take a sip. “Why not me?”

  “Because if the engine goes, we’re both sitting on top of it.”

  Tacit drank long from the bottle. It was nearly half empty by the time he took it from his lips. He shut his eyes and felt the whistle of the wind on his face, felt the surge of alcohol fire his body and prickle within his mind. He raised the bottle to his lips and then paused, turning and proffering it to the Sister.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she replied, snatching it from him and setting the lip of the bottle to her mouth. She drank deeply. She grimaced and set the bottle in her lap, staring out at the other traffic on the road, some going out of Arras, most going into the ravaged city; lorries laden with men, soldiers marching weary beneath packs, long lines of horses, panic-stricken civilians, a vortex of humanity, running, walking, riding, but all caught up and confused in the machinations of the war. Some lucky ones, like Tacit and Isabella, had found escape courtesy of other motor cars. They drove slowly through crowds, hooting their way through the slow moving throng of exhausted people, until they were out into the open lands of Picardian France and could take the metalled roads at a pace.

  Isabella raised the bottle to her lips again and drank, toasting the city farewell.

  As the driver turned the car at the front of the station, Tacit and Isabella were already leaping from it, long before it had shuddered to a halt. “If there’s a train leaving for Paris at six o’clock …” cried Tacit, charging behind Isabella sprinting ahead of him.

  “That gives us three minutes to board it!” Isabella called back, checking the clock tower in the square at front of the station. “What platform?”

  Tacit grunted back.

  “I said, what platform?”

  “Who do you think I am?” he growled in reply, “a station hand?”

  They raced over the forecourt and into the brisk cool shadows of the station entrance hall, skidding to a halt before the black departures board.

  “Paris … Paris … Paris …” Isabella called to herself, scouring the lists as quickly as her eyes and brain could work. She cursed her stupidity at sharing Tacit’s bottle. “Paris!” she exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “Platform thirteen!” They both looked to the clock tower.

  “Gonna be close!” Tacit warned, as they thundered down the station towards the platform at the far end of the building.

  “Typical!” roared the Inquisitor, weaving in and out of the meandering crowd. “It’s always the platform at the far end of the station when you’re in a rush!”

  There was a goods train standing at platform two, steam pouring from every facet of its vast black engine. The air about it and the platform hung heavy with the caustic bite of coal fire and oil, the engine’s sooty belch engulfing the assembled throng; nervous soldiers, cheering and singing civilians, flustered station hands hurrying this way and that with baggage carts creaking under luggage.

  The doors of the train wagons were open. From them had leapt reservists, still dressed in their civilian clothes, waving and laughing, smacking each other on the back and ambling out from the platform in the direction all the other newly arrived men appeared to be heading. The atmosphere had been charged and urgent. Long after they had gone, and with them their songs and the laughter and the spirit of belief, lines of silent bleeding men were carried or assisted onto the train in their place.

  By the time Tacit and Isabella jumped over the closing barrier and heaved themselves up the black pigiron steps into the train, it had changed from being a transport of hope and proud defiance to being a train carrying the decimated reality of those dreams. The vast black train cranked and heaved itself forward, and slowly, like a beast battling against chains, it slipped from the station and into the closing light of early evening.

  They found a compartment to themselves. Much of the train consisted of wagons into which the injured had been laid. Few healthy soldiers or officers who could sit in compartments were going west.

  “How long to Paris?” growled Tacit, dropping cautiously into the seat.

  “Four hours,” replied Isabella. “Back still paining you?” she asked, watching him wince as he sat.

  “Some.” He felt deep in the left hand side of his coat and then in the right.

  “You want me to look?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied, sitting back and uncorking the new bottle he had retrieved from somewhere in the folds of his long jacket.

  Isabella shook her head but she was smiling. “How many of those do you have in there?”

  “Usually enough,” he replied, as he glugged three times and wiped his mouth, exhaling gratefully. “But never enough when you really need them.” He offered the bottle but Isaballa shook her still spinning head.

  The train trundled west through the creeping darkness with an extraordinary lack of urgency.

  “You’ve not brought your case,” noted Isabella.

  Tacit shook his head and closed his eyes, the bottle gripped firmly in his crotch. He teased the folds of his jacket apart to reveal the silver revolver strapped to his thigh. “It’s all I need now,” he replied, blowing with exhaustion and relief silently out through his lips.

  “Are you going to kill him? Poré, I mean?”

  “Depends,” replied Tacit, his eyes closed.

  “On what?”

  “If he tries to kill me. And …” He ran a hand across his head, placing his capello on the seat next to him.

  “And?” Isabella asked, but the silence told her she’d never know the answer. “Well,�
� she said, sitting back. “It’s been an interesting few days, Tacit.” She reflected on events as her reflection stared back at her from the train window.

  But the Inquisitor was already fast asleep.

  NINETY SEVEN

  13:34. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16TH, 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.

  Sandrine climbed the final few rungs and pulled herself clear, setting down the lantern and killing the flame within it. She reached down and held out her hand to Henry, coming up out of the darkness after her.

  “I do hope you didn’t look up?” she said, sniggering like a love struck teenager.

  “Perish the thought,” replied Henry, adopting a look of mock surprise at the accusation. He laughed and then caught the rumble of the latest artillery barrage upon the city. “So they’re at it again,” he mused sadly, as Sandrine knelt and pushed the cover back over the hole to conceal it.

  “It won’t be for long, Henry, trust me.”

  She took his hand and stepped quickly away.

  “I do like your optimism, my darling, but I fail to share in it. It seems to me that everything has, well, stalled. I can’t see us ever getting over it, or out of France.”

  She stopped and drew him into her arms, kissing him briefly but passionately.

  “But for you, Henry Frost, it is over. These clothes,” she said, tugging at his shirt, “say good bye to them, for after today, you will not wear a uniform again.” She took the diary from under his arm. “What are you going to do with this?”

  Henry looked at it and pursed his lips.

  “I don’t know. I should probably have left it behind, like everything else but I felt, well, I just thought I owed it to them, to Sergeant Holmes and Dawson and, well, all the men, that they shouldn’t be forgotten.”

  “We will post it,” Sandrine announced, nodding with satisfaction at her suggestion. “We will post it, in the morning, and then you will be free of it.”

  Henry smiled and drew her to him, showering kisses on her mouth and her cheeks.