by Greg James
The paramedic had no face and wore a familiar bruised choker of lactating sores around its loose throat. In one stained hand, it brandished a hypodermic, the plastic shell of which was cracked and dirty-brown with old residue. The needle itself was broken and heavy with rust. A series of glutinous drips fell from it, running down to stain the faded green of the paramedic’s uniform. Looking past it, Tom could not see a driver at the wheel but he knew the paramedic’s companion was there and that he was a headless horror. He could not fight them, he was theirs, always had been, always would be.
The Conductor’s shoulders shook a little, with glee, mirth, maybe satisfaction.
Time to pay your fare, Tom-boy.
Tom’s face contorted into a grim, muscled mask as the infection-rich needle descended toward his chest. He hawked in his throat. He spat at the Conductor, a feeble gesture, one that changed nothing.
Still makes me feel better though, he thought, at least, I went down fighting.
The needle broke the skin and went sliding in, a gnawed thumb pushed poison deep into Tom's heart. Night came hurrying in from sight’s borders. Tom looked at the smattering of phlegm shining on the eyeless Conductor's face.
...wonder what happened to ‘em, I wonder.....his eyes...why're they gone...what did he see?
Then, darkness.
Chapter Twenty
The cracked beige bulb hung from a frayed flex in the ceiling, red and blue wires showing through split white plastic. The light cast was not good but it was enough to see by. Tom was in a small room without windows and with double doors. The walls were covered with sea-green tiles edged with mildewed mortar, a tray of blood-rusted surgical instruments rested to his left.
Is this it, he wondered, the end, where I have been coming to all this time?
The doors of the small room banged open, crashing against the walls and in strode a figure garbed in the washed-out green overalls of a surgeon. The white wrinkles of plastic gloves rucked over hands that were skinless glistening meat. It stopped at Tom’s side and leaned over him. Close, too close, not examining the old man, head tilting, craning from side to side, sniffing him?
as a predator does prey
Its eyes were gore tunnels, leading into the slick interior of a raw skull but he knew who it was standing over him. The Conductor was now the Surgeon.
“ ... Plaisirs d’amour ne dure qu’un jour ... ”
The words came out of the air and were gone as swiftly as they came, leaving tears in Tom's eyes. The Surgeon paused, tying a square face mask over a mouth it did not have. The material was pebble-dashed with cruel rusty spatters. The apron over the Surgeon's smock was streaked with crusts of pus and excretion. It picked up a scalpel, paused, cocking its head to one side, looking down at Tom. Though mouthless, on the cloth pocket of the face-mask, a bleeding smile was smearing its way across the underside of the porous material.
“ ... chagrins d’amour dure toute la vie ... ”
The words tore at his heart. Tom stared up into the light of the cracked, flickering bulb. He could hear its filaments fizzling. He stared into it until his pupils were little more than pinholes. It all hurt so much.
The Surgeon came at Tom, scalpel in hand. Tom flinched away. The surgeon placed the scalpel into the corner of Tom’s right eye, piercing the tear duct. Liquid flew into the air, speckling its gloved hands. Tom felt the blunt blade parting jelly and skin. Tears of blood ran from his eye as the surgeon worked. He could taste blood, feel it collecting at the back of his throat. He contemplated the scalpel, watching it chew through his veins so steadily in the Surgeon's grasp. Its blade, winking electric light into his macerated eye, there wasn’t much left to go now.
His work was almost done.
The door opened and Dilys walked in. Tom blinked his good eye, unbelieving, trying to move. She smiled down at him, streaked with soil, and her funeral dress scattering a pale rain of worms and lice to the ground. Her silver crucifix was hanging about her neck once more, plucked from where he cast it onto her coffin, and her bible was in her hands. He watched her raise it high, then bring it down hard on the back of the Surgeon's pulpy skull.
A wet crunch, a slump and collapse, and Tom could move his arms and legs again, his eye hurt, burning with lines of fire, but he could move, get to his feet and breathe. Dilys stood before him, cradling her bloodied bible, the smile on her face was a queer ripple, slowly weakening, stiffening and falling back into place as a firm line of rigor mortis. Despite the filth and the odour of ordure about her, and the dead glass look of her eyes, Tom found himself clasping her tightly to his breast, feeling her slither greasily through his arms as her strings were cut. He let her fall, and as she fell her lips parted and she spoke to him in a voice made soft and sloppy by years spent buried in the moist ground. “Love withers, hope dies, and redemption is but a pallid mask worn by that which remains.”
Then she lay down before him, a dreadful smile drawn across her lips, alien to the face of the woman he married and once loved. Tom fled once more, for the last time, teary-eyed, sobbing blood, pushing through the double doors, out into the wilderness, running, as ever, for his life – and so it all ended for Thomas Potter as it once began.
It came out of the black rain, and he heard the engine and then saw it in the moonlight, coming for him, ancient with rust, rattling and chuntering, its eyeless ferrymen at its beaten aft and battered helm.
... pokita-pokita-pokita ...
The one working headlight burst into life, as before, catching him forever in its glare, and he turned and he ran, endlessly fleeing from the beginning, from the end, from everything.
The Last Post
He tracked the dead man down a trench and saw that the black mud of the trench walls was studded with skulls, all of them without their jawbones, the mouthless dead staring emptily out, weeping sticky yellow tears. Through the man-made burrows he sloshed and squelched, always glimpsing but never quite seeing the retreating back of the man he knew to be dead.
The rain of Flanders battered down upon his brow, sometimes blinding him, always blurring his vision. Ducking underneath dripping boards, keeping low so as to not take a bullet in the head, he made his way through the steadily settling murk. Shrapnel Place and Howitzer Hill were a long way away now. This part of the trenchworks had been out of use for months; these were the early diggings, shallow pits with narrow, awkward channels connecting them, the ones the Germans tore apart with shells and grenades from the heights on the north side of the Aisne river. The only cover on the south side back then was the fog, greyly rolling off the broad thicket-framed mirror of the waters. That same fog was about him now, flooding into the pits and narrows of the abandoned diggings. Shapes and shadows bobbed, ducked and wove into and then out of view, some human, some not so.
He was not sure where the dead man was but he could not be far away.
Rounding the curves and bends with his breath tight in his throat, he wound his fingers tighter and tighter around his rifle. Bullets seemed to do little against these things. He’d seen a Vickers gun empty an entire belt of bullets into the dead men as they came marching, slow and steady, out of the Aisne’s fog. Grey-skinned, their uniforms dripping, the eyes of the dead were frosty scabs, crusts of pure frozen cold, seeming to glow with moonlight. He saw it in his mind’s eyes, the one that went for Reynolds, shrieking out of the mist, and the one shot that the Lieutenant took before it brought him down. The bullet from the revolver bursting the dead man's eye, shattering the rat-gnawed socket, scattering a sticky hail of soft blackness from inside the skull.
He could feel his own flesh creaking, going through a stiffening, a hardening, as the wet of encroaching winter sent a palpitation of deep cold pulsing through his limbs. He no longer breathed, he wheezed and sighed in thick bronchial tones, just like a dead man himself.
The fog cleared.
The dead man was before him, having come to a dead end, a mound of fallen earth was blocking its way. Its back was to him. His
finger stroked the rifle trigger, caressing the rain-slippery hoop of the trigger guard, wishing he could give it one in the back of the head.
The dead man’s colourless fingers were clawing at the pile of dirt blocking its way. Charley wiped water from his eyes. I need to stop that thing, he thought, I’ve got my bayonet, I can run it through with that.
They don't like it up 'em.
He smiled thinly at the phrase.
Still, he paused, some impulse stopping him.
Why wait?
The dead man swung around, pivoting on its heels with unearthly grace. The face was oozing and over-ripe, punished by rotting in the summer sun and then freezing over under the bitter winter. Teeth were extruding from death-soured gums. Broken and ratty, they ground together, making the diseased enamel squeak. The arms were outstretched, fingernails caked with blood and mud, scratching through the damp air. Those hollow eyes, burning so black, so very cold.
The dead man, drooling bloodied spittle, came on, aching to kill him, to suck his blood, make him scream and die and then rise and walk again, as one with the dead.
The dead man opened its foul mouth and screamed.
*
“It’s not fuckin’ good enough, mate, not at all.”
The four soldiers huddled around the brazier as rain sluiced down from heavens they could not see. The shadows bred shadows here, in this pitch black night. Everything was coated with a slick layer of winter frost. The pathetic thing was they were all holding their hands out to the brazier even though it was long dead. An hour ago, maybe two, it had gone out but here they all were trying to absorb some last vestige of heat from the sodden kindling.
“What d’you mean, Bennett?” asked Charley. He’d been mates with Bennett for years before they joined up. Pals from the workhouse they were, used to things being shitty but not as shitty as this.
“Look at this, what we’ve got, this is shit. Some fuckin’ Christmas.” Bennett kicked the brazier viciously.
“You were expecting this to be a picnic, were you, eh?” Jimmy said, catching the brazier before it splashed down into the trench, further evidence, if needed, that it was stone cold.
“Fuck’s sake, no, I wasn’t expecting a fuckin’ picnic but something would be nice, y’know. A bit of cake, some decent rum, just to make this place a bit less shit than it is.”
“You’re dreamin’,” said Jimmy. “They don’t give us a fuck about us. We’re here to feed the guns, the same as sheep to the slaughterhouse, we’re herded over the top when they blow the whistle and they watch us die and say to the papers back home that they’re tryin' their best and that we're doin' the right thing and that we died brave, bold and hearty.”
“Quiet down, you men.” The voice came out of the shadows and brought them all to slovenly attention.
Lieutenant Reynolds was from an old family, his voice and bearing were defined by their distance from Oxford, like he was not wholly tuned into this world, the crude reality around him. But, despite his penchant for being trim and smart, they could all see the lines etching into his skin, the darkness wearing hollows under his eyes, only a few short months it had taken but they were months spent in hell.
The word had been that they would send the Boche packing by Christmas. Well, here was Christmas and here they all were shivering in holes in the ground whilst the Germans nestled in their dug-outs on the heights over the far side of the Aisne river.
“I have some good news for you.” said Reynolds.
“War over yet, sir?” Bennett grumbled.
“Don’t be smart, Private. No, the Hun is tenacious as ever but I have been informed that there will be an extra supply of rations laid on for all of you as a gesture of goodwill from GHQ. None of us expected to be out here this long but we have to make the best of it.”
“Extra rations, great,” said Jimmy. “How about some blankets, sir? It’s bloody perishing doin' sentry duty in this cold.”
“Again, don’t be smart, Private. If you had a blanket around your shoulders and a Hun soldier came at you, you would first become entangled and second become a dead man.”
“At least the dead don’t freeze their bollocks off,” muttered Bennett.
“Okay, that will do. I know it’s tough out here men, but, like I said, we have to make the best of it. We can’t let down those we are fighting for.”
“What, the bloody government? Like they give two shits,” said Bennett.
“No, Private, I mean your families, your loved ones. If we let the Hun through, who will protect them? Now, back to your posts, it’s going to be a long night.”
"Aye, Christmas fuckin' Eve," Bennett muttered.
Reynolds turned about and retreated back down the trench, into the shadows, into the darkness.
“I’ll bet he’s got a fuckin’ blanket,” said Charley.
“Quiet down, lad. He’ll hear you and give you Field Punishment One,” said Jimmy. “I remember fucks like him from the Crimea. Can’t think outside their own heads half the fuckin' time and their heads are stuffed up their hairless arses with all sorts of noble, glorious cavalry crap that doesn’t mean shit to those of us in the frontline getting shot to bits. First, you become entangled. Second, you become a dead man. Pompous cunt. Who’s got that rum? Cheers Bennett. Ah, that’s better, hits the spot, warms the cockles nicely.”
Charley peered out into the gloom of no man’s land, crooked tangles of wire rustled and whistled in the night wind, some of them decorated with the sagging remains of men he knew.
What a Christmas this was going to be.
“Ding dong merrily on bloody high.”
*
It was late into the night when he heard it, stirring him from slumber. With a grumph, Charley shuffled back to attention.
Dozing off on duty, fuck, could get done and be shot for that.
Hard to believe he had dozed off though, considering how miserable, cold and wet they all were.
“Jimmy, you hear that, mate?” Charley yawned, scraping clots of sleep from his eyes.
“Yeah, it’s-”
“The Boche, mate. They’re bloody singing,” shouted Bennett, jumping up, throwing himself belly first over the trench parapet.
“Get down, you idiot!” Jimmy dragged him back down, tipping him into a puddle with a splosh, breaking the thin layer of ice that had settled across it.
It was true, they could all hear it, a distant operatic drone drifting out over no man’s land.
“What’re they singing, Jimmy? C’mon, you speak a bit o’ Hun,” Bennett asked as he got back to his feet.
“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Hirten erst kundgemaaacht.....”
“It’s not easy to make out, not with my ears as they are, but I think it’s Silent Night.”
“Durch der Engel Halleluja, Tönt es laut von fern und naaah.....”
“Yeah, he’s right, y’know. Listen, to the sound, not the words. Silent bloody Night, bloody beautiful it is.” whispered Charley.
“Christ, der Retter ist daaa! Christ, der Retter ist daaa.....”
Looking out over the desolation that lay between them, Charley saw not the bodies and the rusting rustles of wire this time, he saw moonlight and stars, points of limpid light shimmering in the frost and water of no man’s land, skewed strangely by the twisted nature of dead and ruined things. It did not make it beautiful, not by any means, it made it into something else, something he could not put into words. There were no words, not even in the singing, neither were the voices human, neither were there voices. The sound was singular, a dismal moaning, woven through with sharp piercing notes, cut and strident, broken echoes. Silence with voices.
It was a moment of stillness, between one breath and another, where the superficial parted and what lay beneath was sundered enough to reveal all, bleakly and brightly they shone, stark, the bare bones of reality. The narrow gnawing structures that work as teeth against the rot and decay of all things, endlessly grinding, rarely ever seen, barely ever heard
. Charley heard and he saw through the open wound left by war, guided by the solemn song of the trenches, for one lonely moment. Then it was gone, completely over, and the singing of Stille Nacht was there once more.
“It’s coming closer too, ‘ere, look over there,” said Bennett, tugging urgently at his shoulder. “See?”
There were ghosts walking abroad and the singing was coming from them.
“It’s Fritz! They’re out of their trenches. They’re in no man’s land.”
“Bloody lunatics. They’ll get their heads shot off. Stupid cunts must be sloshed,” said Jimmy.
“I dunno, they’re not staggering about much. Hoi, Jerry!”
The shapes kept on coming. There was a strange light about them, cast from festive lanterns of some kind that they held in their hands?
A peace offering?
Gifts for a Christmas truce?
Charley and the others didn’t know what to make of it; they relaxed, holding their rifles loosely, unready. The mist then cleared away, withdrawing as if inhaled into the monstrous black lung of the night. The shapes were human figures but they were not the Germans.
“Getcha guns, lads!”
Reynolds was on the lip of the trench, beating his swagger stick against his thigh, his service revolver glinting in his gloved hand as he took aim at one of the figures. Trigger squeezed tight, bullet flew out, shattering a lifeless eye. With a howl born of withered vocal cords and worn-out muscle, the half-blinded figure lashed out at Reynolds. A glittering spray, and the Lieutenant fell, vomiting his lifeblood.
“Watch your backs!”
They came out of the fog, the Grey, born from it in some way, slashing, slicing, attacking and mauling. Faces went white as the life was taken from them, eyes wept tears of salt, water and blood. Fingers clutched tight, snatching fistfuls of mud. Legs kicked and thrashed. A cry, a guttering choke and all was still.
