by Mae Ronan
The Veil:
Dark Stories from
the Other Side
By Mae Ronan
Table of Contents:
I. The Ghost of David Carton
II. Nights in Finland
III. Me & Sam
IV. I’ll Fly Away
V. Liberty Hospital
VI. Mikey
VII. The Hopeless Case of Toby Markus
NOTE: The time in which each story is set is written in parentheses below the title.
The Ghost of David Carton
(2004)
I.
Already the sun was lowering itself in the Western sky. Half of its flaming orange orb had hidden away behind the tree-covered mountains, while the remainder lay jutting up above them, seemingly winking at all who looked upon it, like a naughty little child who would not dream of putting itself to bed without a fuss. As it sank farther and farther out of sight, the bluish sky above it began to darken, though still it was streaked with ample remnants of fiery red. Its brother to the East was a charcoal grey, with very small wisps of light cloud passing ever and anon across its face.
In less than half an hour, the whole mess of it would be black. Pitch black – for it was the night of a new moon, and there was to be a cloud cover which would not admit the silver light of a few silly stars.
Pitch black. It should be much better then, all in all, thought David. This canvas of bright, variegated light, to be true, merely provoked him. It was only in darkness that his perpetual discomfort began to ease. The others could not see him, then, nearly so well; and his own black heart felt more at home amidst the shadows.
He was strapped to one of six seats in the rear of an Army helicopter. The pilot was a fellow well known to him, an old man named Wilks. He was a retired veteran, who had taken again to flying choppers since his wife died ten years earlier. His eyes were periwinkle blue, and crinkled when he smiled.
David’s was a special-operations unit, which dealt mainly in the recovery of stolen arms. He had returned hardly more than two months before from a year-long tour in Iraq, where he was second-in-command of an elite squadron of explosives experts. Innumerable were the boxes of volatile machinery which he had carried out of the dark, fetid dens of terrorists. (He had burn scars enough, and half of a missing ring finger to prove it. With the finger went the wedding band; and not long after went the marriage, too.)
But he and McNally – well, they had been tops. There was just no eluding them; and there wasn’t an Iraqi insurgent who didn’t know it. Yet it was at the end of a sweltering August that McNally hefted the unmarked package which would be his last. He tumbled like a battering ram through the first floor of the house, with David at his heels. They flew together down a flight of narrow, half-rotted steps, and found themselves face-to-face with a small band of bearded fellows, who did not appear at all pleased to see them. David went to the right; McNally to the left. It was always their game plan.
The rest of the squad was upstairs, awaiting the signal. As he plowed into the first of the human obstacles which stood between him and the gold, David snatched up his radio, and hollered for the cavalry. They came barrelling down the staircase like elephants in a stampede. The weight of them sent Proctor through the third step. Williams paused on his way, fished Proctor out of the hole, and then pulled him back into the flood.
David was some sixty yards away, engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a particularly feisty insurgent, when McNally took up the first of the cases into his hands. He was the one always granted this especial honour. He was the most powerful of them all, and yet somehow also the swiftest; so it was his own mission to capture as many as possible of the packages in question, and deliver them to the soldier who had won the lucky lot of waiting in the street.
This day was a day like any other. David and the others were locked in battle with the basement beards; and McNally went for the boxes. They were stacked like a pyramid, David remembered; each row with one less box than the row which had preceded it, all the way to the top, where just a single box sat waiting, some six feet off the floor – looking for all the world like Khufu at Giza.
McNally grabbed it; and the world exploded. All commotion in the basement ceased. Everyone halted in their movements, and turned on their heels. Soldier and insurgent alike gazed silently into the charred, smoking corner. Each of them was covered with bits of McNally.
David was sent home in September. He lay for three weeks on the tattered sofa, staring blankly at the television screen. Those voices which lived behind it were the only ones that existed. Mary had left him. The children had vanished.
Even the dog was gone.
On the first day of October, he reported to Fort Bragg. They all wondered what brought him there; he told them he couldn’t stand it anymore. Send him anywhere, he begged. Send him to the darkest corner of the earth. Even to be dead was better than this.
He remained at Bragg for nearly a month, training for an operation which was planned to begin in November. In the heart of the jungle. Which jungle? he wondered. Oh, never mind – honestly he didn’t care. He would walk somewhere beneath a scorching sun, between the snake-pits and the monkey-trees. He had been there before. Why not go back again? Perhaps, after all, the jungle had missed him. Even if it wasn’t much – still it was more than Mary did.
He sat now in the helicopter, looking through the little scratched window at the greenness which stretched out far below. Green, green, green, everywhere he looked. But it was better than brown.
In the front of the chopper, beside the pilot, sat the team leader. His name was St. John – and it fit him not at all. He was a murderous fellow, with an evil eye, and a finger which lay nervously on a trigger. Never did he need much excuse to pull it. His short hair was grizzled; his lips were thin and white. They could not have been more perfect, really, for the dry curses which poured constantly from his mouth. He looked on his men like vermin, like eighteen-year-old privates with piss-stained boxers. Yet he had a wife, a very beautiful wife.
David did not understand. He was not entirely sure that he wished to go on living in a world where such things took place. The bloody pictures, locked forever in his mind, he could stand. The missing finger he could tolerate. The utter darkness, hopelessness and mootness of the world – all this he could bear. What he could not endure was the existence of a Mrs St. John, a very lovely and supportive Mrs St. John, who cooked very tasty food with all her women friends, every family picnic at Bragg. He could not endure this Mrs St. John, being just as perfect as she was, when he did not even have his unpleasant Mrs Carton.
He did not understand. He was not ignorant; he was not crass. He was not fat. He dressed himself neatly, and parted his hair evenly. When he was home or at base, he shaved his face carefully each morning. He dabbed on cologne, only Mary’s favourite kind; and he even rubbed a little lotion on his chin, so that when he kissed Mary, the skin would not be so rough. She used to like to kiss him.
He wondered if he should not simply unstrap himself now, and leap screaming from the helicopter. Surely it would be very soothing, for a minute or two; and then he should never be obliged to endure a single thing more.
He shook these thoughts from his head, and looked absently to the left, as Ericsohn tapped him on the shoulder.
“What?”
The fellow looked full into David’s face. It seemed he was trembling.
“Oh, now, Jimmie,” David whispered, thumping the corporal reassuringly on the back. “It won’t be so bad. Two weeks on the ground; we find the boys; and zip-zam, we’re back on the chopper again.”
He looked carefully into the young man’s pale face, an
d frowned. His flaxen hair was sticking up in sweaty spikes all over his head, many times as he had run his shaking hands through it.
“You’d best knock off with all that, Jimmie,” David advised gravely. “The other boys won’t let you live it down.”
“It’s just – I’ve never been this far from base before,” Ericsohn murmured. “What if we’re eaten by cannibals? Or tigers?”
David couldn’t help it; he laughed aloud. A few of the others looked to him questioningly, but he graced them only with a blank and indifferent gaze.
“Well, Jimmie,” he said, “it seems to me you’re looking at it the wrong way. What if we aren’t eaten by cannibals – and we live another fifty years? That’s the scary thing, Jimmie, if you ask me.”
Ericsohn looked at him as if he were crazy; and then turned abruptly away from him, presumably to seek a more positive sort of solace from Boothe.
As you may already have gathered, it was no ordinary weapons extraction, this one. David and his team were sent into the heart of Africa, to search for a band of troopers (engaged in classified activities) who were missing in action (last location unknown). Wilks would drop them at the coordinates of their last supposed check-in, and they would have an interval of fourteen days to engage in full-force reconnaissance. There were enemies nearby, that much was certain; though quite naturally no one had thought fit to explain their identity, or level of dangerousness, to the ones who should be forced to encounter them.
David slumped down in his seat, and glared for a moment at St. John. He studied the great white scar that lanced across the side of his head, between the buzzed patches of grey hair. Whence that scar had come, the man had never told; but always he treated it with a solemn sort of reverence, and expected all others to do the same. David began to ponder all the disreputable ways in which the thing might have come to pass. So ludicrous were some of these ideas (yet somehow so sensible, too), that he fell again into a fit of laughter. His comrades looked at him, strapped to his little seat by the window, chuckling nonsensically. It seemed they were all beginning to think that his safety harness ought to be swapped for a straitjacket.
He was not sure that he wholly disagreed.
Directly across from him, little Ricardo sat, looking silently and sullenly out of his own window. Neither of David’s quiet outbursts caused him to turn his head. He was a man always with little to say; and certainly nothing that he ever did have to say, had anything at all to do with the disparagement of his fellow man. He thought his own seemingly deep thoughts, and left all of that other business to his teammates.
Beside Ricardo was Williams – Joe Williams, the same Williams who was previously mentioned to have saved one Philip Proctor from having his head squashed in by a combat boot. He was the only one of the group whom David had worked with before. He sat quietly in his seat, his hard bulk sticking into the sides of his companions on either hand, his eyes fixed on the black metal floor. The second time David laughed, he raised those eyes, and stared him crossly into silence. It seemed David reminded him of Iraq, and of what things had happened there – and he loved him not at all for it.
Beside Williams was Morelli. He was a hot-headed sort of fellow, both quick to laugh and quick to shout. His glossy black hair was shoulder-length, and pulled constantly into a ponytail at the back of his head. It was a source of never-ending derision, that ponytail – but still he refused to cut it. He was born in a pizza shop in Brooklyn, where his father and grandfather before him had sported the proud ponytail, while shoving rounds of dough in and out of a brick oven.
Across from Morelli was Boothe. He was a compact, clean-looking sort of man, with ivory skin and perfectly-shaped white crescents for fingernails. He talked nearly as much as Morelli, but was nowhere near so stupid. Rather, he liked to ramble on about all of the books he had read, and all of the pieces of music which he had learned to perform on his baby grand in Virginia – hoping with every new conversation that someone would have something in common with him. Never was he very successful, though, on that score.
Between Boothe and David, as you know, was the pasty, perspiring Ericsohn. A cowardly corporal, sent to Africa for having no other place to go, he was stuck as a mismatched tail onto the hind end of Team Echo, only because there was not a single man more who was not already assigned to a squad. He was the least trained, and the least qualified soldier in the chopper; and his violent shivers were evidence enough that he was aware of it. When he turned to Boothe for comfort, he was met only with a proffered discussion on either the morality or immorality of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He turned from Boothe, as he had turned from David, and sat staring straight ahead of him, looking quite as if he were going to cry.
At last, Wilks called out from his forward seat, and informed them that he was beginning the descent. “Down we go, boyos,” he said merrily, as his snow-white hair blew about in the wind from the blades. “Hold on to your hats.”
“We’re going to die,” whispered Ericsohn, as the helicopter started on its downward creep. “We’re all going to die – I just know it.”
“Oh, shut up – would you, Ericsohn?” Williams snapped, as he lifted his eyes once again from that thing, that incredibly and momentously interesting thing upon the floor, which he had been watching all evening.
“I can’t help it, Joe,” Ericsohn whined. “I’m scared.”
“Good God, man!” exclaimed Morelli. “Do you even have a dick under those cargo pants? But wait – you must! You just pissed yourself.”
Ericsohn looked down in surprise, and saw indeed that a dark stain was spreading slowly from the fly of his brown trousers. He looked up sheepishly at Morelli; but the latter only screeched with laughter. All the others began to groan, as the chopper filled steadily with the vinegarish odour of urine. David frowned deeply, when something wet touched his thigh.
“What in the hell is that smell?” barked St. John.
“Ericsohn’s lily just sprung a leak, sir,” Morelli answered cheerfully.
“Damn it, Ericsohn! Remind me to slap you when we land.”
“Yes, sir,” Ericsohn replied feebly.
Down, down they went. Night had fallen some time ago, and the world was shrouded with black; therefore the ground crept up very suddenly on the chopper, and David started slightly as its feet touched earth.
“Here we are, boyos!” said Wilks. “A safe journey to ye, I wish with all my heart. I’ll be here to fetch ye two weeks hence.” He turned to St. John, and said, “Goodbye, Luke.”
St. John jumped out of the passenger door, and came round to supervise his men, as they began to debark. He pointed with a thick, hairy finger at the packs tied down to the floor between the rows of seats, and ordered that they be tossed out on the double.
“And devil fetch you,” he shouted, “don’t forget any of them! Miss any one of those packs, maggots, and we’ll be dead, quicker than you can say ‘Jack Robinson’!”
“Jack Robinson,” Morelli echoed moodily, as he began to sweat with the heaviness of the supplies.
Soon all the packs, and all the soldiers, were on the ground. Wilks gave a last wave, and smiled so his eyes crinkled. David was the only one who looked up from his work, in time to yell “Goodbye, Tom!”
He stood watching as the helicopter proceeded on its path out of sight. Even after the lights had gone, he stared up at the blank, cloudy sky, thinking of Tom and his crinkling blue eyes.
After a little Williams elbowed him. “Get to it, Carton!” he whispered. “St. John will have your ass.”
David nodded, and moved nearer to the mound of packs. The men were standing round it, and dividing it as evenly as they could manage amongst themselves. Soon they were laden down considerably, and looked mournfully after St. John, who was trooping already off into the muggy night.
“What a hellhole,” Morelli said, as he swatted at yet another mosquito. “Jesus – what do I have, sugar in my veins? These fucking things!”
“No, Morelli,” an
swered Boothe dryly. “You’re just a dirty Italian.”
“Why, you little son of a –”
“What’s going on back there?” cried St. John.
“Nothing, sir,” six voices answered in unison.
“There damn well better not be.”
II.
Four hours later, they arrived at their predetermined camp. It was a little clearing in the midst of a thick grove of towering trees, surrounded on all sides with thick logs. Williams and Ricardo set about starting a fire, while Boothe went through the packs, looking for food. St. John wandered round for a moment, looking in all directions into the impenetrable darkness; till finally he called David, Morelli and Ericsohn after him.
“Get your guns,” he said softly.
“What’s going on, Captain?” Morelli asked.
“Nothing is going on, Angelo,” St. John rejoined. “Would you rather secure the perimeter, or wake up in the middle of the night with a spear in your back?”
Ericsohn’s mouth dropped open immediately; and his eyes were wide as saucers. He sidled over to Boothe, and began whispering fervently to him. It was obvious he wanted to switch places. But Boothe shook his head resolutely.
“Oh – please? Please, Browning?”
Browning Boothe shook his head once more.
“What are you doing there, Ericsohn?” St. John asked.
“N-nothing, sir.”
“Are you trying to shirk your duty, soldier?”
“N-no, sir!”
“Then fall in! And so help me – if you piss your pants again, I’ll feed you to a goddamned wolf.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
The four men took up their guns, and filed out of the clearing. St. John led them twice, very slowly, round the outside; and upon determining that the surrounding forest was secure, he marched them back to the fire.