by Greg James
Tom felt his heart clutching warily.
There was a weight to this grey-edged darkness, a sense of the abysmal. The cell was narrow enough to be a coffin, one buried at frightening depths and degrees, the window with the wired glass, it might be the very last aperture out of which he would see. One day, night, afternoon, I will lie here, he thought, gooey with lingering amber rot, strung out on decay’s dismal opiates. One day, I will die here alone amidst these flaking angles with that window looking out upon a grey, dead horizon. His stomach was tight with unspoken screams, seeking to digest hopelessness, swallow whole the black stuff of despair. This was not how it was meant to be.
Stumbling sightless, flailing his arms, he ran smack into hard wall, its surface tiled over with a grubby crust of ripe rot and protein-rich death. Hand over groping hand, he followed it around, from corner to mulchy corner, disturbing the cockroach carcasses that were its plaster. They fell, forming a scabrous carpet of insect petals. Breathless yet breathing, he went scavenging through this banal filth for salvation.
The door, he was at the door. Oh, so good, the feeling of running fingers over its hard, depressed lines, fondling the whorls and cracks in its peeling, unpainted frame, probing for the handle, the lock, open, escape. The handle rattling, rolling in his hand, he could feel it turning against old springs, ancient fastenings, they yielded so far yet not enough. His fingers wept an oily sweat, slippery and clumsy, the lock was not just locked, it was broken on the inside. The door jumped about under the volley of blows he rained down on it.
Then, there was a sound, a voice, perhaps. A fellow soldier had come to let him out of here. Was he in here on a charge? Awaiting court martial? Where was Old Duty?
Hands of bone and meat were going to open this door, break him free from this small, suffocating world of wired glass and prison stone. The voice, close, was echoing slightly. Tom strained to make it out, he called out, he cried to it, then he stopped to listen.
His ear scraping on the rough door, he heard what was out there. It was no voice, no, no voice at all, no distinct words were being made, the sounds they receded, deforming, buckling, turning into twists. Still, he kept listening, not wanting to lose contact, not wanting to be left alone. The sounds came closer. A wheezing, a cough, a splutter, wet and dripping. What came to him next was a scent, a doughy odour making him gag a little. Then, the door was creaking under pressure, a weight. He heard splintering. It was pulling at the matter of the door, tearing at it, wanting to be in there, tearing at him. Then, it was pounding, pounding, pounding, rattling, rattling, rattling.
Tom ran from it. He cowered in a shit-stained corner. Better for there to be the silence that was there before the sounds, better for there to be only darkness and stillness and the quiet. He stayed where he was, retreated, defeated, in the corner by the window, well into the cell, away from the fetid, febrile stirrings of whatever persisted on the other side of the door. The cell was a place of horror but, at least, a horror that could be touched, perceived and understood. There was a locus here, a governing gravity, better to be safe in here than sorrier out there.
So he stayed, very still, barely breathing, just under the sill, beneath the window. Occasionally, he caught glimpses, saw the outside; how it moved, how it went by, burial waves washing over a seaming, sullen soil, churning turgid fogs and crawling mists, disturbing the ensilvered mire that was the Grey.
Tom grew skinnier, older, unpeeling. He harboured fears that he had always been there, in that cell, in that darkness, all of his life, that all else that came before and after had been a dream and a very bad one at that. There was no world out there, nothing but a few frail imaginings, ghosts in the Grey. He felt the cell, its darkness, gnawing away at him. He felt the bite of teeth that grind out darkness, stripping him of matter and of meaning. In the end, there would be only a few threads left, dangling in the black breeze; severed strings, some bloodied beads, his hanging bones. And the pounding, pounding, pounding, rattling, rattling, rattling.
It was the rattling that woke him and the pounding of the train in motion. The only other sound in the carriage was that of half a dozen men snoring. That rattling, there it was again. It was the window shaking in its frame, not from the wind but from violence. His heartbeat pumping at the back of his throat, Tom put a hand out to check if he was imagining this, if he was still in the last fuggy moment of a dream. He spread his fingers out and pressed his palm flat against the glass. His breathing steadied. The glass was still. It was okay.
Krak! Krakt! KRAKT!
He jerked his hand away from the pane.
In the light of the moon, he could see it. Claws howling down the glass, leaving skewed gouges as they went, damp ropes of grey dessication hanging from its body, fluttering and snapping in the wind. It was floating or so it seemed, able to ignore the kinetic force that should have torn it from the outside of the carriage and flung it far away into the dirt beside the tracks. A lactating orifice extruded from the mass of the creature and, puckering, it planted a smeared frogspawn kiss onto the glass.
Tom was sick, revolted.
“No!”
He punched at the window with his fist, hoping to knock the creature away.
“Keep it down, Potter. I’m trying to sleep!”
Lieutenant Bell was standing over him. Blinking, Tom looked to the window and saw nothing was there, never had been, no scratches, no smears.
“Sorry, sir.”
In the dark of the train carriage, he did not see the flies crawling about in the Lieutenant's oiled hair.
Chapter Nine
The passengers boarding the Night Bus sat in the empty seats behind and to the side of where Tom was. He could not see their faces but he could see outlines, faint smudges of earth trailing down their cheeks, marking their brows. Some sat with their hands in their laps and he could see black dirt caked under rotting splinters of fingernail. There was no comfort to be found in their dull, colourless eyes, nor in the eyeless visage of the Conductor, as it quietly paced up and down with that wicked needle jutting out from its breast, coming to each passenger in turn. Tom turned away as the hopeless scene of the Conductor at his work repeated and repeated, punching their tickets, making them scream. Scream as the men screamed on that night, when they left Cape Helles, when they pulled out from Gallipoli, and found Hell's Teeth awaiting.
*
Night descended, draining the heat from the land, leaving it cold and dead, and the soldiers of the Entente prepared to bid Cape Helles farewell. The last few men were scuttling across the strobing beach whilst, behind them, fuses were sizzling, running into caverns in the cliffs, each of which was stacked full of ammunition. There was no way the higher-ups were going to leave the Turks a parting gift. Sea winds were thundering in, making waves heave, buckle and crash against the shore, the incessant bellows of the enemy’s artillery barely audible through Nature’s own din.
The floating pier over which the men were to retreat was a ramshackle affair; a crude lash-together of steel tanks, steel drums and wooden barrels, rising and falling with the grey swell of the surf. The sodden rope creaked out moans of protest as the wind picked up. Tom brought up the rear of the company, battling on towards the motorized lighter idling in the water by the pier, they winced as the straps of their packs bit into their shoulders, dragging sore muscle over weary bone. The lighters would ferry them to waiting ships and from there they would head for home.
A steel drum sank, lurching back up as Tom trod on it. His dysentery-weakened stomach churned from the sensation. Screwing his eyes shut tight, he breathed in hard, concentrating, forcing his fatigued body to settle down, not to give up on him now.
Almost there, he thought, it’s nearly over with.
Men teemed about in the lighter, making as much room for one another as possible. It was going to be snug, an uncomfortable journey but worth it to know that Gallipoli and its long, slow slaughterhouse attrition of burrows and trenches was behind them. Tom heaved his pack int
o a pair of waiting, able hands. He reached out, steadying himself by taking hold of the side of the lighter, preparing to board, when from behind him came a man’s scream.
Someone had lost his footing and fell, dragged down by the weight of his pack, plunging in between a tanker and a barrel. The sea swallowed him up to his knees. Tom was there above him, free of his backpack and odds-and-ends, and he reached an arm down and under the fallen man’s shoulders.
“Come on, you bag of fucking bones. Get your arse back up here.”
The fallen man couldn’t hear his rescuer’s voice over the foul row made by the weather. Hooking a hand into his left armpit, bracing himself as best he could on the churning pier, Tom started to drag him up.
From the lighter, Lieutenant Bell watched them.
“We’ve got to go, sir,” said the Sergeant.
“No. I’m not leaving those men behind. We’ve lost enough already.”
Bell took one foot out of the rocking lighter, resting it on the makeshift pier. Cupping his hands to his mouth he called out to Tom. The Lieutenant’s words were snatched away by the volley of shells that came whistling down, a parting gift from the Turks.
They tore the pier apart, pulverising the lighter. A typhoon of butchered meat, burnt bones, metal and shredded wood went through the air. The world turned over, sky becoming water, water becoming sky, blue darkening to blood-red then to blackness, churning waves swallowing headless bodies and legless feet. Entrails bobbed on the surface for a moment before disappearing underneath, and heads, brainless, flooding with salt water, drowned as the deep sea dragged the dead down, making them her own. Stinging spray splashed into Tom’s eyes. Spluttering, he came round, soaked and at sea, slumped over two barrels lolloping on the waves.
“What happened?”
“We didn't die, for some reason,” Lieutenant Bell said.
They were both lying on what was left of the pier, cut loose by the shelling. It was now a ramshackle raft of barrels, drums and wood. Tom eased himself up into a sitting position as the raft sank and rose sharply, tensing, he waited for it to settle, to adjust to the shift in weight. A quarter moon was high in the night sky, illuminating the mist rolling over the broken mirror of the sea. Tom shuddered from the chill of the diaphanous vapours. His wet khakis were leaving his skin raw, and the running sores around his mouth stung. He scanned the horizon, hoping to glimpse land or sign of rescue. Neither came into view.
“You alright, Potter?”
“No, I’m not. We’re stranded. We don’t know where we are. Every other fucker’s dead.”
“We’ll hit land if we hold out, don’t worry.”
Tom heard the minute quaver in Bell’s voice, the officer’s brusque mask giving way.
The storm came out of nowhere.
Nature descending suddenly into a state of rabid frenzy, it struck the raft with a tidal wave, sinking it down, flooding the barrels and the lungs of the two soldiers. Black thunder rolled overhead, making the sky come down over them, so heavy and close the sea splintered into a fluid mosaic of breakers and foam. The screams of Tom and Bell were lost to the chaos. Grim, sparse lightning ripped through the sky. Soaked, blind, Tom held onto the plunging raft with fingers made numb. His body was rigid. He could feel bones pushing through flesh and skin, seeking escape. A cry from Bell reached his ears over the massive storm.
“Jesus Christ! It’s them!”
“What?” Tom croaked back.
“Look there! Hell’s Teeth!”
The legendary outcrop off of Cape Helles, buried beneath the waves when the sea was becalmed, became exposed whenever the weather brewed into a tempest. Through salt-caked eyelids, Tom watched the vicious black obelisks lunging out at them from the waves, calcified fangs salivating storm water.
They had all heard about them back in the trenches. Tom thought they were a story made up by the naval hands to frighten the land-bound soldiers; starve a man for weeks, feed him a little bug-ridden grub, and he’ll believe anything you say. There was no official record of the Teeth, dispatches never spoke of them, but here they were there. Demon-ugly twists, rotten spears of unreality chopping through mountainous tides, scattering the undercurrents, gutting the ocean, waiting for Tom and Bell, eager to skewer the drowning men.
Over the sound of the storm, Tom heard the silhouetted Teeth speak and groan. He tied ropes about his torso, hoping that binding himself to the body of the raft would give him some hope of coming back to the surface. Bell was busy doing the same, and he held out his hand to Tom. Tom took it, holding on tight. Their drenched raft was heaved up into the air, tossed high by the swell as the storm let out an ear-bleeding shriek.
And then the raft fell, shattering onto Hell’s Teeth.
Chapter Ten
Tom was sitting in the living room he had shared with Dilys for so many years, sucking the sugary butter from a toffee; savouring the sweet rush and how it washed away the bitter drowning taste of memory and black salt water. It was after dark and the lights were out – it saved on the bills. His pension wasn’t all that and Tom was buggered if he was letting someone put him in a home; he would leave this flat in a pine box, no other way, to leave it behind would be like losing Dilys a second time.
No, he wouldn’t do that to himself, not willingly.
He looked at the china dancers on the chipped mantelpiece, kicking their red-gold-green edged can-can dresses in the air. There was still so much of her here.
Show us a bit of leg, girls.
Their faces turned towards Tom, smiling painted pink smiles. He’d dropped one of them years back, the arm had broken off and he’d never gotten round to mending it. She was still smiling though, the one-armed dancer. Some things that are broken don’t need to be fixed.
Dilys had bought the sheet music sleeves framed on the walls too, picking them out because they were her favourite songs, under glass, and they were ageing well.
Unlike me, thought Tom.
Tom’s mind was roaming back into the past. Back to old hurts, obsessing over them, he could feel himself tugging at the scar tissue of the wounds, probing and picking at scabs with dirty fingernails. Tom tried to stop himself from doing it, to leave the past be.
It never worked though.
He remembered how the sun was scalding. Their uniforms, what was left of them, became part of them, roasting into their skin. Tom squinted up at the sun, colours exploding across his retina. He looked away from the searing orb, his stained eyes throbbing, and looked over to Bell. The Lieutenant was lying amidst his life-saving tangle of ropes; half-dead, running on empty, staring into space, seeing and not seeing. They had survived Hell’s Teeth, somehow. God alone knew how. Now, they were adrift, lost, out of sight of land, burning under the sun.
Keep him talking, Tom thought, keep him going or he’s dead. I can barely keep myself going, keep my eyes open, stay awake. There’s a point where the heat makes you want to give up, quit, lie there and just let it cook your guts until they boil and burst inside you, drift in and out of consciousness until there’s nothing left but a skeleton with burnt bacon for skin.
“Fuckin' what’re we going to do now, Tom-boy, eh?” croaked Bell.
He hadn’t expected this, none of them had.
The posters back home had made the war look like the most exciting thing you’d ever do in your life, a great tale to pass on to the grandkids, an adventure, a romp, a merry old go, not Hell on Earth, not at all.
He was so far from the sweeter things back then, drifting on the burning wet glass of the sea, so weak and without strength. Tom dreamed about being with a woman, not out here; the scent of her sweat, the taste of her fingers, lips, nipples and toes, the erotic pain of the bites she left to blossom into bruises on a shoulder. His stomach was pitted and shrunken, his mouth tasted coppery and sour, his skin was sore from dehydration. These foul realities did not allow the sweet dreams to last for long.
I could die out here, he’d thought.
What a thing, eh? What
a way to go.
The raft, if you could call it that, was sinking bit by bit, and still they clung to it. Two rats unable to abandon their ship. Bell banged his forehead on the steel drum he was holding onto, splitting the skin apart, making it bleed. He wiped a dirty hand across his brow, licking the flakes of blood from his fingers, knowing it would do him no good.
“What fucking hope is there for us, soldier, eh?”
Tom looked at him, grinning but it was not a happy expression. There was something crazed and mental in the shape of Bell's dried-out face.
“Tom? Tom-boy, you still in there?” he asked, squinting.
“Still here,” Tom rasped, “Still where I don't want to be, just like I was back home in London, just like back on the farm, now I'm here with you, never where I want to be, doing what I want to do.”
Bell wasn't listening, nor talking, just chattering, too far gone. “Hang in there, mate. For me. Hang in there, please. Hanging there. Hanging. There. Hanging there, hanging there where no-one was before, except for her. Except. For. Her.”
Will I be next, Tom wondered, will I lose my marbles out here too?
Later, Tom was in a doze, half-dreaming about how he’d eat nothing but chocolate until his teeth fell out if he survived this, that was the solemn promise he made to himself in place of a prayer. He felt a weight on his head.
“Tom-boy, don’ move. You’ve a gull on your head. Careful now, think you can snag it?”
“No worries,” Tom croaked under his breath.
Keeping his head and shoulders still as he could, he lifted up his right hand, fluttering feathers brushed on sunburnt skin. He flexed his hand, loosening the sick-sore bones, and he snapped his fingers shut around its neck. The gull flapped, struggled, twisted and beat at his head with its feet and wings. Tom snapped his left hand up and squeezed tight around the bird’s throat. He wrung the life out from it.
It made a horrible meal.