“Missing something,” Reggie repeated, his voice quiet and strange. Charlie watched Reggie’s hand creep across his chest to rest against the dip of the ribs where his heart was.
“My grandfather called it Hollow Chest,” Charlie continued.
“Hollow Chest,” Reggie said, his voice rolling each syllable around like a pebble. “Yes. Yes, that sounds right.”
“Then you know about . . .” Charlie’s tongue was thick and dry as clay in his mouth, a swollen, lifeless thing, the wrong shape for its task. He couldn’t think of a way to be clever, he was too tired and desperate, and so he decided to take a chance. He lowered his voice to a whisper and said, “You know about the war wolves?”
Reggie flinched as if Charlie had hit him, curling around the hand braced against his chest as if cradling a wound from further harm.
“I’ve been seeing them,” Charlie went on. “I talked to one, and—”
Reggie jerked and looked up. Charlie could not begin to read his expression. He had gone very pale, his skin almost the same color as the bedsheets. He smiled, but it wasn’t a happy sort of smile. It looked like he was in pain. He began to rub at his arm.
“Well, I can’t say as I was expecting that. Do you know what I’ve got, Charlie? Why I’m in here?”
Charlie shook his head. He knew that sometimes things went wrong with people that you couldn’t see on the outside, but the man looked quite healthy, for all that he was wan and beginning to break out in a sweat.
“Battle fatigue, they call it. It means my body’s fine, but my head’s a mess. They don’t know what to do with people like me, so they keep us here and have fine people like the esteemed Nurse Aggie look after us.”
“What do you mean, your head’s a mess?”
“I forget where I am, sometimes. I’ll wake up, think I’m still out in a foxhole somewhere. Some days I stay in bed all day and some days I stay under my bed all day, although less of that of late. I get mixed up about what’s real and made up sometimes, what actually happened and what didn’t.” At that, his eyes went a bit unfocused, and his fingertips ghosted over that spot on his ribs again. “But I know the wolves were real. I’d heard someone else talking about them, but didn’t start seeing them myself until just before I came home. Even then, I didn’t think they were really there, until the night . . .”
Reggie trailed off, staring very intently at nothing Charlie could see. Charlie swallowed. He didn’t have to wait long for Reggie to continue. “We’d just finished a push into German territory. We’d lost a lot of men, I was lucky to be alive. That’s what everyone told me, anyway. I didn’t feel lucky. It felt like I was being punished, staying alive when everyone else . . . They came in the night, that first day after the offensive started. There were two of them. One of them held me down—the weight of it on my chest, I thought it would crush me. The sound it made, when they took it . . . The medic couldn’t find anything wrong with me the next day. But . . . I knew it was gone.”
“Your . . . your heart?”
Reggie nodded grimly. He jerked his head to a stethoscope that was hanging from a corner of the metal bed frame.
Uncertain, Charlie picked it up.
“Listen,” Reggie said, tapping at his chest with one hand.
Charlie gulped down a thick knot that had tied itself up in his throat, and fit the stethoscope to his ears. He had vague memories of when Mum had been certain he had pneumonia, but the doctor had listened to his chest and assured her it was only a bad cold. Flicking his eyes around to make sure Aggie wasn’t on her way back, he pressed the flat part of the stethoscope to Reggie’s chest the way that doctor had.
Nothing.
“You see? They ate it whole.”
“Don’t the doctors notice?”
“They hear what they expect to hear, just like all of us. I’m breathing, I’m speaking, I’m eating, so I must be alive, so I must have a heartbeat, so they believe that they hear one. It’s an impressive exercise in hope, really.” He was quiet for a moment. “Or self-delusion, I suppose.”
“Do you know—” Charlie had to untangle the knot in his throat again. “Dishonor, the wolf I met, it said that if I could find where the war wolves meet here in London, that I could talk to them, maybe get my brother’s heart back.”
At this, Reggie coughed, but said nothing. When he didn’t speak, Charlie asked, “Do you know how to find them?”
“You don’t have to find them. They’re always there. They’ve always been there. Most people just don’t know how to see them.”
Charlie felt cold and hot at the same time, imagining Dishonor lurking in the shadow of every memory. That dog, the one outside his window, the one he saw again at the train station, slithering between all those soldiers and their fresh, battered hearts . . .
Charlie’s own heart sank, heavy as a stone.
“But the rats came first,” Reggie said finally. “If I was trying to find the wolves again—which I wouldn’t, because I may be addled but I’m not mad—I would try to find the rats first.”
“Rats?” Charlie was not particularly afraid of rats, but neither did he have a particular fondness for them. He had learned in history class that they had helped spread the Black Death, and ever since, they had possessed a certain sinister air for him.
Reggie nodded. “They came first, I remember. I could see their eyes in the shadows. Their feet made these little pattering noises on the ground beneath our cots, in the shadows of the foxholes we dug. They were there after the wolves, too. I could feel their tails sliding over me, looking for leftovers. . . .”
Charlie shuddered, but made himself form the words. “When they . . . when they took your heart . . .” He found did not know how to end the question, or else he just couldn’t bear to.
“It wasn’t . . . it wasn’t what you might think.” Reggie seemed almost outside himself, as if he were listening to someone very far away. “I was thinking about my father, actually, my mother and sisters, when the wolves appeared, I thought that I might . . . I thought . . .” Reggie’s voice trailed off, his eyes unfocused.
“Your family?” Charlie prompted him, as gently as he dared.
Reggie started, looking surprised to find Charlie still there. “It’s good. Good they haven’t seen me like this.”
“They haven’t come to see you?” Charlie asked. “Ever?”
Reggie became terribly interested in smoothing the dust jacket of his book. “They don’t, er, know I’m here, exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“I didn’t . . . tell them. When I came home.”
Charlie felt panicked by this, though he couldn’t say exactly why. “Do they know you’re alive?”
“Yes! Yes. I’m almost—yes, of course they know. Or, they know I’m not dead. I suspect they believe I’m still in France.”
“Why would you ever do that? How could you not tell them you’d come back?” Charlie immediately felt ashamed, prying into someone’s private life like he had any business to, but he also remembered those horrible days when Theo’s letters had stopped. How after that every letter from anyone else in the post could have been the one that told him and Mum and Grandpa Fitz that Theodore Merriweather was never coming home.
“They wouldn’t want me. Not like this. I’d be, I’d be . . . an embarrassment to them, a burden. They’re better off this way, and so am I.”
Mellie’s voice echoed in Charlie’s ears. That’s not living, is it? Spend so much time without your heart, you become cut off from everyone. Being so alone.
“I don’t think it’s true, that they’re better off. If you really were my brother, I would want you to come home. I wouldn’t mind if you went under the bed sometimes.” But another voice, different to Mellie’s and infinitely nastier, whispered that Charlie seemed to mind the things Theo had been doing, an awful lot.
That’s different, he thought, pushing the voice aside, but a squirmy little seed of uncertainty was starting to spread
roots in his stomach.
Reggie was rubbing at the skin of his arm again, so hard Charlie was certain he would have bruises. “I can’t stop you from doing this,” he said at last. “And I can’t tell you what to do. But, Charlie, I want you to listen to me. The wolves are dangerous. I know you know that, but please remember it. I can’t imagine anyone—recovering . . .” Reggie trailed off again, the same as he had when he’d mentioned his family, but he wasn’t silent for long. “I don’t know, maybe it’s possible. But whatever this . . . Dishonor told you, the wolves won’t play fair. They don’t have to. You must think very carefully about why they would let you try to get your brother’s heart back. They want something from you, as much as you want something from them, or they wouldn’t bother. Be careful, Charlie—”
“How are we doing in here, lads?”
They jumped as Aggie strode back into the room, her heels clicking against the floor. She took in the sight of them, both pale and bit shaky.
“Oh, fine, fine,” Charlie said reflexively, even as he knew she wouldn’t believe it.
Aggie’s warm, firm hand was on his back. “I think we should let your brother get some rest now, Charlie.”
“Do you know what the oldest medicine in the entire world is?” Aggie asked. She kept her warm hand on the middle of Charlie’s back, pushing him around various corners and down various halls until they arrived at a long, narrow room filled with long, narrow benches around long, narrow tables covered in clumps of white-and-gray-and-lipsticked nurses chattering away or hunched over bowls of soup or asleep on their folded arms.
“No?”
“A hot cup of tea, and that’s the truth. They teach us that in school. Ask anyone if you don’t believe me.” Aggie steered him towards an unoccupied bit of bench. “You wait right there and I’ll prove it.”
Charlie’s feet could only just reach the ground when he sat on the bench, and it made him feel even smaller than he already did. He wanted to fold up his arms and go to sleep, wake up to discover he was still in his own bed and had never had this unbelievably stupid idea. Maybe if he slept long enough, he would wake up to find out the whole war had been a terrible dream, that Theo had never left, they were all still whole.
Aggie plunked a chipped white mug down in front of him, sloshing a bit of tea onto the tablecloth. The mug was so big Charlie could barely fit both hands around it as he dragged it to his lips. Hot steam curled up against his face in an almost Biscuits-ish sort of way, which made him feel a bit warmer.
“Were you a nurse during the war, too?” Charlie asked after he’d slurped down a fortifying amount of his tea. He wasn’t sure how old Aggie was, if she was old enough to have been a nurse long. Mum didn’t wear makeup except for special occasions, and Aggie’s made her look like a poster of a lady, not quite real.
“Oh, yeah. I worked on a hospital train before I was a ward sister here. A year I was on that bloody thing, right out of training.”
“Hospital train?”
“It’s a train that the army turned into a sort of moving hospital to get soldiers from the field hospital to the big hospitals. Let me tell you, the only thing worse than a soldier whinging about how he’s been shot is a soldier whinging about how he’s got motion sickness. Get their feet off the ground and they all turn into little old ladies.”
“Was it scary?”
Aggie waved one hand, as if shooing the suggestion away. “No, I was so busy I didn’t have time to be scared of anything. There’s no cure for scary like a job that needs doing, I’ll tell you that for free.”
Charlie took another sip of tea. “Have you ever heard of Hollow Chest?”
“Hollow what?” Aggie cocked her head at him, a bit like one of Mellie’s pigeons.
“Hollow Chest. My granddad was talking about it. He said he knew some people who got it during the Great War.”
“What, like asthma?”
“I don’t think that was it.”
“Well, it’s not anything I ever heard of during training, but these military types should come with a translator with all the gibberish they talk. Do you know what the Australian soldiers call a rifle?” Charlie shook his head. “A bang stick.” Aggie rolled her eyes so hard Charlie was a bit worried she might strain them. “Not the most creative lads God ever saw fit to give life, the Aussies. Now, let’s have a chat about why you’re in a hospital in your jim-jams and snow boots in the dead of night, hmm?”
Charlie tried to inhale a mouthful of tea. “Uhm.”
“Yes?”
“I was just . . . I’m trying to help my brother.”
“Your brother’s fine, love. Or he will be fine, at any rate. He’s alive and he’s recovering. He’s got the very best looking after him, and he’s got a pretty all right brother keeping an eye on him, if you ask me.”
Charlie didn’t feel like a pretty all right brother just now. “But . . . he hasn’t been the same since he got back.”
“And he might not ever be the same, Charlie, but that’s growing up. Are you the same as you were this time last year?”
“I dunno,” Charlie said into his tea.
“I very much doubt you are. I know I’m not the same as I was when I first stepped onto that train. My pop used to tell me all the time that he and my mum had to take time every year to get to know the person they’d married, because every year we change a bit. The trick to marriage, he told me, was if you could both learn to love the new person, not just the person you remember.”
“But I’m not married to my brother.”
“I am well aware of that, thank you. What I mean is that just because someone changes doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means you love them for who they are, not who you want them to be. And I always listen to my pop because he’s very clever—almost as clever as me.” Aggie winked at him, nudging an elbow into his ribs again. Then she looked up and the grin promptly fell off her face.
“Oh, bother, Matron’s coming.”
The intimidating lady from his first visit, the one who Father Mac had said was in charge, came striding into the room, her black clothes flapping with the force of her walk, this time with a strange, ornate hat adorning her head. She looked a bit like an industrious cannonball, flying through the room with great purpose.
But it wasn’t her stride Charlie was looking at. Nor, apparently, was Aggie. They were both looking at her hat. Or what appeared to be a hat.
“Oh no,” they whispered in perfect unison.
Pudge sat atop Matron’s head like a smaller Matron, plump and majestic. Matron did not seem to be aware of this fact. Pudge, in turn, did not seem to be aware that Biscuits was creeping along behind Matron, her eyes bright with bad intentions.
Charlie made a frantic shooing gesture under the table at his cat, but she either couldn’t see or didn’t care, so focused was she on the hunt. A strange thing was happening to the other people in the room. They were all going silent and very pale, making little grabbing motions with their hands that they kept choking off as Matron turned the glaring beacon of her bright, dark eyes on them. Charlie slid down low in his seat.
“What on earth has gotten into you lot?” she asked in a clipped, booming voice that matched the rest of her, big and imperious. “You all look on the verge of swooning like maiden aunts at a poetry recitation. Come, come!” She clapped her hands and everyone in the room winced. Matron’s look of suspicion deepened. Charlie slid lower and lower into the bench until he was completely under the table.
“What is wrong with you milksops? Wilting like daisies, all of you! Speak!”
She swung around to glare at them all in equal ration, and Pudge spread his wings briefly to keep his balance. There was a collective intake of breath as he almost tipped over Matron’s head and onto the floor, but he only ruffled up his feathers and settled back down again. Charlie began army-crawling on his belly down the length of the table, sneaking past legs and feet to where he could just make out Biscuits’s tail, twitching, twitching, twitching.
“Matron!” Aggie’s voice rang out, and Charlie glanced back down the length of the table to where her feet (surprisingly large and in un-sensible shoes with little straps across the ankles) had sprung upright as she stood. Behind Matron’s back, another nurse was trying to work out how to grab Pudge without alerting Matron to his presence. So far, this seemed to involve a lot of being too scared to move aside from waving her hands around a bit in the air.
“Yes, Miss Carlisle? Do you have some insight into what has transformed you and your compatriots into a pack of fluttering moths?”
“Yes! I—that is to say—do you ever think about Antarctica, ma’am?”
“Do I ever think about Antarctica? Is that what you just asked me, Miss Carlisle?”
Charlie slunk out from underneath the table, his pajamas making barely a sound against the tile floor. He could see all of Biscuits now, her eyes huge as dinner plates, glued to Pudge.
“Yes, I just—I think sometimes we all just think about Antarctica and how very sad and lonely it must be there, what with all the snow, and we all, well, we all just feel a bit down. Don’t we?” There was a hasty chorus of affirmative murmurings.
“So you mean to tell me that the entirety of my staff has been overcome by a sudden bout of melancholia about the lonely state of the Antarctic Circle? Miss Carlisle?”
Biscuits bunched her legs up underneath her. Charlie got up onto his hands and knees. There was a moment of total silence.
Pudge cooed. Biscuits leaped. So did Charlie. At which point the room promptly exploded. Charlie’s fingers missed Biscuits by an inch, and she landed, claws outstretched, on Matron’s head. Matron made a sound like a wounded bear, which startled Pudge into launching himself into the air, but because of his bad wing, all he really managed to do was fall with unprecedented flair while smacking Matron in the face repeatedly. Charlie managed to get hold of Biscuits’s tail and yanked as hard as he could. But he underestimated his strength in his panic and sent Biscuits flying up into the air like a large, furry grenade.
Hollow Chest Page 13
