A Whisper of Southern Lights

by Tim Lebbon

  He was a few steps away when he started to open his outstretched hand.

  A shot took him in the shoulder and he grunted, going to one knee in the disturbed soil. Another shot, then another, and I realised that the three Japanese guards must have seen his face.

  He was struck in the chest and stomach, the arm and ear, and another impact drove him down onto his side.

  I stood and backed away, never taking my eyes from this man and his open hand. There was something there, shimmering in the blazing sun. I could not quite make it out. But I feared it.

  The guards were closing in on him now, shooting again as he rolled onto his back and reached for a cloud. A bullet smashed his hand aside in a mist of blood, and I turned and ran. My mates were already a hundred yards along the street, ducking behind a wrecked truck to dodge the bullets and perhaps also the sight of that strange man being shot to pieces.

  He knows me, I thought. He knows my name, and maybe if he’d had another second, he’d have shown me . . . “What scares you, Sykes?” he had asked. Perhaps he knew.

  Something whistled past my ear and I heard the shot, then the shouts and the sound of boots hitting dirt as the guards chased us. I stopped in the middle of the street with my arms held high, cringing, expecting a bullet or bayonet between my shoulder blades at any second. But the guards only gathered us together and hustled us away, heading back to Changi. They were quieter than usual, less cruel, and I took advantage of the leisurely pace to gather my thoughts.

  None of the other men talked to me. They had heard him calling my name.

  We were searched as thoroughly as ever upon our return to Changi, and then let inside under our own steam. I parted from the others and made my way into the main building, climbing staircases that were now home to dozens of men, finding my cell, grabbing my meager belongings and leaving. I had to find somewhere else to sleep. I craved the company of strangers.

  More than anything, I needed to think about what had happened.

  “Sykes,” a voice said.

  I gasped and spun around on the landing. There were men all around me, sitting in hallways, leaning against doors, talking and smoking and sleeping. I tried to see where the voice had come from. I dreaded seeing that shifting face again.

  He was shot, I thought. A dozen times or more . . . he was dead.

  “Sykes, here.” A man stepped from the shadows of a doorway and motioned me toward him.

  “You stay away from me,” I said. I backed away, keeping my voice low. “Just stay away.”

  “Sykes, someone needs to see you.” He was following me, a short, thin man with a wound to the side of his neck. “He’s been looking for you, says it’s something important. His name’s Gabriel, like the angel.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I heard from a lad I know that you ran into a bit of trouble on your work party today. Japs shot someone who attacked you and your sergeant major.”

  “And how many names do you have?”

  The man frowned and shook his head. “My name’s Henry.”

  I saw nothing in his face or eyes to reveal a lie. My heart thudded in my chest, and my vision throbbed with each heartbeat. I was badly scared. I’d seen something that I could not even begin to explain, and there was a hot patch on the back of my neck, as if someone was staring at me.

  “What does this Gabriel want?”

  Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think he’s been looking for a while. He’s old.”

  “How old?”

  Henry shrugged, frowning again. “I dunno. There’s just something about him.”

  “His face changes,” I said. I had to get away. I had to run, flee . . . but I was a prisoner there. A rat in a trap waiting to be killed.

  “No,” Henry said. “But I’m sure he wishes it could. Follow me if you like. He said it was important. Don’t know how or why, but I believe him.” Henry turned and walked away along the landing.

  I followed. I should have gone in the opposite direction, exploring the depths of the prison until I found somewhere dark to hide. But I was suddenly tired and depressed, driven down by everything I had seen, scared at whatever was to come. Some said the Japanese were going to leave us here to rot, while others heard rumours of work parties being sent up-country to work on roads and railways. The future felt bleak.

  We moved through the prison, and the stink and sounds of that place could have been lifted straight from Hell.

  Seven

  AND THERE HE WAS.

  Gabriel knew that the man who walked through the door behind Henry was Jack Sykes. He had never seen him, had no hint from the voice of the land of what he looked like, but he knew that he had his man.

  Temple will be on his trail, he thought. But he blinked, and listened to his own pain, and the demon was not close.

  “Are you him?” Sykes asked. He was standing in the doorway, tensed and ready to run. Henry had already sat down against a wall, and the others from the cell had gone to search for food.

  “No,” Gabriel said. “You’ve seen him?”

  Sykes nodded, and Gabriel knew that he was telling the truth.

  “You saw him and lived.” He could not keep the amazement from his voice.

  “The Japs shot him to pieces,” Sykes said. “He’s dead.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Not dead,” he said. “Probably crawled off somewhere to recover. Did he show you his hand?”

  “He meant to. He had something there, but . . . Who is he?”

  “His name is Temple. He’s also the Twin, a thing of many faces. And you know something about him that I need.”

  Sykes walked fully into the cell and squatted by the door. He grimaced as his knees popped. He wiped sweat from his face and rested his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know anything about him,” he said. “Only that he’s wrong.”

  “You do know something. You have to. Something that gives him reason to seek you out and kill you.”

  “He wants to kill me?”

  “Yes. He’s an assassin.”

  “Who would want to assassinate me?”

  “Only Temple. It’s a private affair this time.”

  Sykes rested his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  “A story,” Gabriel said. “A myth. Something you heard but didn’t believe, a phrase you could not understand. Somewhere in the jungle, perhaps? Think. It could be the demon’s downfall.”

  “Demon?” Sykes’s eyes snapped open.

  Gabriel took in a deep breath, and his missing eye pained him. He sighed. “Yes, I used that word,” he said.

  “Demon.” Sykes closed his eyes again. “A demon, trying to kill me. You hear that, Henry?”

  “I hear,” Henry said.

  Gabriel stood and went to Sykes, kneeling beside him and wanting to hold him tight. “Do you believe in demons?” he asked.

  Sykes opened his eyes and stared at Gabriel’s empty eye socket. His face was expressionless. “You’re bleeding,” he said after a while, and he pushed himself to his feet.

  Gabriel stood and dabbed at his eye. “Jack Sykes, what do you know?”

  “I had a friend,” Sykes said. “He was killed on the mainland. He raved. He said he saw something in the jungle, a man with a snake in his eye. And he knew things that he wrote down and buried with a dead man.”

  Snake in his eye! Gabriel gasped, and the pain of his wounds made itself known. Snake in his eye! That man, that preacher, that monster in the woods on the day my family were slaughtered. He groaned and leaned against a wall, watching blood drip from his ruined eye as though he were seeing violence from long ago.

  “What’s wrong?” Sykes asked.

  “He’s nearer!” Gabriel reached for Sykes, grasping his shirt and pulling him close so that their noses were almost touching. “We have to find that grave,” he said. “Your friend may have seen or heard something that could help me.”

  “Help you with what?”

  Gabriel tried to blink
away the pain, but it would not go. He took in a deep, replenishing breath, but all movement hurt. “Help me die in peace.”

  He nodded his thanks to Henry, dragged Sykes from the cell and tried to decide which way to go.

  Eight

  WE LEFT CHANGI JAIL. We had only been there for a few days, and the layout of the place was still a mystery to me. But even though Gabriel said he had been there no longer than me, he seemed to know his way around, familiar with where doorways and passages and staircases would be. He led us deep, and in the depths of the jail we found places where men had gone to die. They lay along corridors, in subterranean rooms and on stairs, drinking feebly, moaning, many of them already dead. I could smell their wounds and taste the hopelessness of a hundred last breaths. Some of them seemed to recognise that we had escape on our minds, because they raised themselves up on bony elbows and smiled us on.

  Most of them were wounded, but some were diseased. I’d seen it before in the jungle, but here, there were no medicines and no one to help, so the sick resigned themselves to their fate.

  “How can the officers just leave these men down here?” I asked.

  Gabriel only shrugged. He spoke little, and I’d come to learn that all of what he said had to do with his quest for the being called Temple.

  We went lower, and in a corridor ankle-deep in oily water we found several doors leading into boiler and plant rooms. Two rooms were black with coal dust but now completely empty of coal. Another two rooms contained giant, dead machinery. Water leaked from cracked pipes and dripped from the machines. I found it an eerie, disturbing place.

  “We’ll go this way,” Gabriel said. He pointed to a room at the end of the corridor that had barely been formed out of the rocky ground. There was an open doorway set in the concrete wall, but beyond, when it was illuminated by a heavy lantern Gabriel found in the plant room, I saw only bare rock. It was an unfinished room, entry to a ghost wing of the prison that had never been built.

  “So, we dig through rock,” I said. “A tunnel. Genius.” I’d expected much more from this man. I’d been waiting for him to lead us to a hidden doorway to the outside. A route back to Britain, perhaps, bypassing all that painful, cruel distance in between.

  “A ready-made tunnel,” he said. “Look.” He shone the lantern to the left, and the light slid from the curve of a manmade form.

  I went closer to inspect it and found the large, wide head of a pipe curved up from the ground. “Drain?” I asked.

  Gabriel nodded. “Our way out. Now let’s break it open.”

  “What sort of drain?” He did not answer, and as we went to work with rusty tools I began to wonder just what we would discover upon breaking the pipe.

  Days earlier, when we had first arrived, there had been running water. Pipes hammered with fluctuating pressure, toilets flushed, we drank and washed. But soon after, the water supply failed. Toilets rapidly became unusable, and men found other places to defecate.

  The drain was tall enough to walk in, and knee-deep in shit.

  I fell back when the shell of the pipe broke, forced away by the stink that gushed from the rupture. Gabriel glanced at me and hit the drain again, shattering a large portion of it with one careful blow. He leaned and shone the lantern both ways.

  I heard things running, splashing and squealing in there. I gagged, calmed myself, then retched a thin, painful fluid. There was little food for me to bring up, and my puke was a sickly green.

  “We have no choice,” Gabriel said.

  “I do. I’m not crawling through that only to be—”

  He shone the lantern at the ceiling so that it illuminated both of our faces equally, then came closer and stood before me. “We have no choice,” he said again. He carried no gun or knife, but I heard the threat in his voice.

  “So is this kidnapping now?” I asked.

  “Rescue.”

  “Even if I don’t want to be rescued?”

  “You want to stay? Do you? You know what they’re like. You know what’s going to happen to most of those men up there; they’ll be used as slave labour up-country, then executed when they become unfit.”

  “That’s just a rumour.”

  “It’s a fact. The Japanese have no respect for surrender.”

  “So if I do decide to stay . . .”

  Gabriel leaned in closer, and I could smell something on his breath that I did not like: age. He was an old, old man, even though he appeared only a few years older than me.

  “You can’t stay,” he said. “We have to find the grave your friend dug and read the note he left. It’s important.”

  “For you.”

  “Perhaps not only for me. I don’t know. I’m still no closer to understanding.”

  I approached the fractured drain, trying to breathe lightly. But nothing could hide that stink.

  “How long is this?” I asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “But you knew it was here?”

  “I surmised.”

  I nodded. “You go first.”

  The stuff in the drain had a crust across the top of it. I hoped it would hold our weight, but it crumpled and cracked and our feet went through, and that disgusting mess came up to just above my knees, warm and vile, and there were things running across the hardened surface, rats and beetles and fat spiders whose weight could be easily supported. I caught only brief glimpses of them as Gabriel swung the lantern by his side, and I puked again at the smells that rose around us. There was no air movement at all down there, nothing to purge my lungs, and every minute I grew more amazed that I was still alive. We moved on, crunching and slopping, and the mess seemed to be getting deeper the farther away from the prison we went.

  “Will he follow?” I asked.

  Gabriel turned around, and I noticed the blood dripping from his eye, the pain etched into every scar and wound on his face. “He already is.”

  In the end, we came to a large domed junction, a collection point that drained into a larger tunnel that led to the river. It was too deep to walk. We had to swim.

  Nine

  FOR THE LAST HOUR, Gabriel had been struggling against the pain. Temple must be so close for it to be this bad, but however hard he listened, he could hear no signs of pursuit. Perhaps the Twin was above ground, following the route of their escape across the prison yard and surrounding area. If so, they would exit the sewer into a storm of violence. And Gabriel felt in no shape for a fight.

  At least the stink might distract Temple for a precious few seconds.

  After an age, he sensed the first gleam of natural light from ahead. He told Sykes to stop, and saw a definite sheen of silvery light across the fetid water surface. He even sensed a whiff of fresh air below the stench, and he turned to Sykes. The soldier already knew, and he smiled through a mask of muck.

  “Almost out,” Gabriel said.

  “And the demon?”

  “Close. We’ll wait at the end of the pipe for a while. Then I’ll go out, see what’s around, and we decide our next step from there.”

  “I don’t understand what this is all about,” Sykes said. The look of bewilderment in his eyes spoke volumes.

  “We can talk more,” Gabriel said. “Away from Singapore, back in the jungles, there’ll be time.”

  Sykes nodded, but he did not seem comforted. He had already been through those jungles, and they had been bad for him. Gabriel could empathise. He had lived through many bad times, and the sense of dread Sykes must be feeling was as familiar as breathing.

  They came close to the end of the pipe and revelled in the fresher air wafting in from outside. Gabriel motioned to Sykes to keep still and waded on alone. Each movement stirred up a stink. Things bumped against his legs, and some of them swam away. He tried not to think about the infections he and Sykes might be picking up. Almost there, he thought.

  The sun was dipping toward the horizon, setting the warm air alight. Gabriel squatted at the end of the pipe for a while, breathing in the fresher
air and enjoying the sensation as it moved against his sweaty skin. Where is he? he thought. The familiar pains and aches were still there, though they seemed to have lessened again. Perhaps at some point during their nightmare escape, Temple had crossed their path on the ground above. So close.

  Gabriel searched the marshy area around the pipe’s outflow for signs of movement. A few birds waded here and there, and things slipped into and out of the water, skins slick and camouflaged with effluent. He stood slowly, held onto the rough upper curve of the pipe and looked back toward Changi Jail. The prison wall, tall and blank, caught some of the setting sun. There were a couple of shapes walking the wall—probably Japanese guards—but they would never see him from that distance. Ahead of him, across the boggy ground, a few trees marked the place where he and Sykes should head. From there, more hiding and slinking until they bypassed Changi Village and made it to the water. Steal a boat, make their way to the mainland, then travel back up through Malaya to the site of Jack Sykes’s friend’s rough grave.

  And all the time, Temple would be searching for them. And as usual, he had death on his mind.

  Gabriel took one more look around, then ducked back inside to fetch Sykes.

  Seconds after starting across open ground, they heard voices.

  “Stop!” Gabriel whispered. He sank to his knees, and Sykes followed suit.

  The voices came from ahead of them, before the trees at the edge of the bog, their owners probably hidden away by a clump of bushes. They were Japanese.

  “Slowly, back.”

  “To the drain?”

  “For now.”

  As they started moving back, a Japanese soldier stood a dozen steps ahead of them, slung his rifle over his shoulder and walked along a low ridge of rock. He was muttering to himself, laughing, sniggering and then muttering again. Telling himself a joke, Gabriel thought. I hope it’s funny enough to keep him occupied until—

  The soldier paused and raised his head. He looked directly at Gabriel, and for a few seconds, his expression did not change. Whether it was surprise, shock or the joke still clearing itself from his senses, Gabriel had time to reach into his sock and pull out the throwing knife he had acquired during his first day in Changi.