“Then if you ask me, it sounds like you have brought something tainted into the church. Have you not asked the boy what happened?”
“He has not spoken of the event. Indeed, he has barely spoken all the weeks he has been with me.”
“Well, when he does,” Sister Angelina said quickly, “he will reveal the truth. There are good samaritans yet in the world, many good things which still happen to people, many miracles. He was saved by good chance and the miracle of a passing stranger. Mark my words.” She touched his arm kindly, as she turned from the room. “You’ll see.”
“Yes,” Father Adansoni replied, looking to the window out of which Tacit was staring, “you are probably right. But from where the miracle first came, I do not know”, and he allowed his eyes to turn in the direction of Italy and a sky heavy with greying clouds.
THREE
23:37. MONDAY, 12 OCTOBER 1914.
THE FRONT LINE. ARRAS. FRANCE.
The British soldiers charged over the scarred and barren stretch of no man’s land, the whites of their eyes gleaming out of their filthy battered faces. They ran forward over the detritus of the month-old battlefield, curses on their breath, hearts in mouths, their rifles raised, the moonlit-gleam of bayonets at the ready, towards the silent trench ahead.
Whether day or night, no man’s land was a dreadful place to cross, the stench of rotting soldiers, churned amongst the earth and blasted trees, their bodies left to the torment of the elements and the hordes of rats and crows. But in the dark, the hateful blindness was almost overwhelming. Shadows swept and spun before one’s eyes, every rustle was the swish of an enemy’s trouser leg, every crack the setting of an enemy’s bolt. Every step closer towards the German line brought a growing sense of fear and trepidation, all waiting for the eruption of light from a German flare, the hard clack of the machine gun, the sharp bark of the rifle. But the closer they drew, and the longer not a single shot was heard, the more they realised that someone ahead of them had been busy with the enemy.
Sergeant Holmes set his pistol forward in one hand and raised his mace high in the other in readiness for what might greet him as the first to enter into the trench below. He peered over the lip of the parapet, and the mace slowly dropped to his side.
“What is it?” Henry hissed, stepping up. He looked down into the trench and lowered his own pistol. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, under his breath.
All along the front, a low rumble of surprise and revulsion from the approaching British soldiers gathered against the lip of the trench. Across every inch of the enemy trench, wherever one looked, the remnants of body parts and blood covered the ground, as if it had been used as an abattoir in hell.
Nothing could have survived that butchery. Nothing stirred. All that remained was a grisly carpet of blood, ruptured organs, torn uniforms and broken weapons, splintered bone and ripped skin, cruelly slashed and discarded like disposed filth from a butcher’s yard. Every now and then, amongst the muddied crimson waste, soldiers spotted a discernible body part, the top of a skull, a collection of fingers, the fleshy round of a thigh bone.
Soldiers turned and vomited back into the decay of no man’s land. They had seen shell strikes and their bloody aftermath, had witnessed first-hand the evisceration caused by the sniper’s bullet, the carnal gore of the bayonet’s twist. But this scene had a horror beyond anything they had witnessed before, a mass and brutal killing the entire length of the trench.
“Is there anybody left, do you think?” Holmes asked Henry, his dry mouth slackening, his wide eyes trying to comprehend what they were telling him.
“Can you hear anyone?” replied Henry brusquely, feeling a hardening in his stomach.
Holmes shook his head. “What you going to put in the unit diary, sir?”
“What we’ve seen,” the young Lieutenant said, turning away and covering his mouth. “A massacre.”
FOUR
1889. THE TATRA MOUNTAINS. POLAND.
It surprised the young boy to see how quickly the man died.
He’d only ever used his sharpened stick to stab at fish from the pool at the bottom of the valley. He’d always watched in wonder as skewered fish flapped and threw themselves about the river bank in their long drawn-out dances of death. They would always fight for survival with every drop of their might until their life finally bled out of them. But this man, this Slovak gypsy, who’d pulled a knife and had laughed wickedly, had gone down and hadn’t moved from the moment he’d been struck. The stick stood protruding upwards from deep inside the man’s right eye, a fine rivulet of blood oozing from the socket.
The child crouched a little way away from the body, his fierce unblinking eyes on the corpse as if suspecting a trick. As if he expected the man to spring back to life and reach out at him, to choke the life out of him. The rat-faced man lay there, his back flat on the ground, his scowling, unmoving face turned upwards and to the side by the weight of the stick.
The boy could feel the blood beat in his ears. He was aware of the thumping in his chest and the ache in his clenched fist. His father had often told him of the Slovaks, bone-jawed and filthy, looting and stealing from the decent folk of the valleys and mountainsides of the southern Polish mountains, but he’d never seen one in the flesh. To him they’d been just stories, like those of ghosts and werewolves. Used by adults to keep him polite and quiet on a night. Now he felt guilt that he’d not believed his father, that he’d doubted monsters ever existed.
A strangled cry from away up the mountainside tore his eyes from the body. The cry came again from the ramshackle wooden house, teetering three hundred yards away on the rocky ridge above, this shriek even more desperate and shrill.
His mother.
An anger and a passion, the likes of which he’d never known in his twelve short years, coursed through him. He wrenched the stick from the man’s punctured eye and shot away up the mountainside, not even looking to see how he planted his shoes between the stones of the steep climb. His eyes remained fixed on the house and the wicked noises coming from within. There were men in the house. He could hear them now clearly – cruel laughter and shouts. He thought back to the dead gypsy at the river bank and imagined his house full of their type, pushing and taunting his mother, demanding food and money from her. There was only one aim in his mind. To act as his father would act, as any good shepherd would, to protect his own.
He leapt from the rocks of the river bank onto the dirt track, a short way from the front of the house. He landed and his left foot went from under him, skidding on the gravel. He went down, gashing his knee amongst the stones, skinning the knuckles of his hand holding the stick. The shutters of the house were closed against the morning sun but inside he could hear the angry growl of coarse voices and hard laughter, joined now and then by the pleading voice of his mother.
He whimpered and staggered to his feet; years of working atop the treacherous high ridge of the Tatras had taught him to ignore pain. He stumbled on towards the door, reaching out to the handle the very moment it was pulled open from inside. Instantly he knew it wasn’t his father framed in the doorway. The thin figure could only be one of them, his father always having to stoop his vast bulk beneath the lintel of the door. Without thinking, he closed his eyes and thrust his stick forwards with all the force he could summon from within. It snagged against something soft and then, moments later, continued its drive upwards, more slowly now, as if some force was pushing against the sharpened point. It reminded him of how he sometimes had to force his knife through chunks of mutton on his plate.
The stick slid five inches beyond the hang of the man’s shirt. He grunted and sank to his knees, his hands clutching weakly at the shaft. The handle of a knife glinted in his belt and instantly the child gathered it into his hand, leaping over the tumbling figure and through the open doorway.
A heavily bearded man stood to the right of him, the sneer on his hairy face foundering in surprise as the child leapt inside. Something lay curled in one co
rner of the room and he saw his mother, her clothing torn to shreds, on her hands and knees. A man, stripped beneath the waist, was forcing himself towards her.
At once his mother turned her head and cried out, pleading for the boy to be left alone. The hairy man spat something dark and reached forward to strike at him. Instinctively, the boy ducked and, finding himself between the man’s legs, drove the blade of the dagger upwards to the hilt with all his might. The man shrieked and staggered backwards against the wall, clutching at his butchered parts, blood pouring between his legs, out over the blade and his hands, on to the floor in a wild torrent.
The boy looked back at the man behind his mother. He’d now pushed himself away from her and had turned, his yellow-white thighs flecked with froth and blood, a monstrous looking member bobbing evilly between his legs. It confused and repulsed the child, how it wavered and hung like a weapon tilted towards him. The man shouted something in a language the boy didn’t understand and charged, kicking out with a mud-caked foot. The child was too quick for him and had turned and reached the far wall cupboard by the time the Slovak had regained his balance. As the boy passed the body curled in the corner, he recognised it instantly as his father, his face submerged in a pool of his own blood, wickedly slain with a knife in the back. A weight of grief and sickness crashed into him, almost dragging the child onto the floor.
The man shouted again. The boy tore open the cupboard drawing the revolver he knew his father always kept. The man’s eyes flashed and he ran forward, his tone more urgent, his hands raised.
The revolver blew itself out of child’s hands in the same instant that the man’s head blew backwards, sending him tumbling to the floor, the wooden floorboards showered in a vanilla and crimson spray of flesh and bone.
Finally silence flooded into the house and enveloped the room, the only sound now being the ringing of the boy’s ears from the gun. He wondered if he’d been deafened, until he heard his own voice call out.
“Mama!” he cried, racing to his mother, throwing himself into her side with a wide embrace.
He thought it strange how she didn’t wrap her arms around him, at least until he drenched his hands on the deep gash in her neck.
He never saw them arrive. He never heard their footsteps on the front porch of the house, their horrified cries when they first laid their eyes on the carnage in the room, capped their hands to their mouths in an attempt to hide their revulsion and mask the stench from the bodies. Trapped on the faint edge of unconsciousness between hunger and grief, the first time the boy was aware of the Fathers was when one of them knelt forward and gathered him from the half-naked woman, believing the child to be a victim amongst the dead.
They’d come to the valley as missionaries, to spread the word and message of their Catholic faith, to shepherd the desolate and the unguided towards the light. They’d never expected to find such horror as this.
The boy remembered how the Father had muttered about miracles the instant that he’d stirred and had his cheek cupped by the Father’s hand.
“What is your name, my child?” the Father asked, his eyes full of concern and sorrow.
“Tacit,” said the boy to the Priest, feeling very small under the heavy eyebrows of the missionary. He sniffed and brushed the hair weakly from his dead mother’s face. “Poldek Tacit.”
FIVE
23:37. MONDAY, 12 OCTOBER 1914. ARRAS. FRANCE.
Father Andreas always found pleasure from extinguishing the candles at the end of evening mass. Like the drawing of a veil across a stage at the end of an evening’s performance, the snuffing out of each flame with the small metal cup gave one the chance to reflect on the day’s achievements, whilst drawing one day to a close and heralding in the promise of another.
But not tonight.
Tonight there was no peace to be found for the Father in this slow and measured act. The deliberate smothering of each flickering flame brought no respite to his own flickering thoughts. How could the snuffing out of candlelight in any way halt this raging torment within the mind of a man who had, in one single act, snuffed out his worthiness to his faith?
For seven weeks Father Andreas had tended his flock at St. Vaast’s Cathedral of Arras, an ambitious post for one so young. He remembered, as if it was yesterday, when he was first approached to take up the role. He wasn’t sure if it was his impetuous enthusiasm Cardinal Poré had recognised, or his seemingly endless commitment to doing good which had secured him the post, but at twenty-four he was the youngest Father ever to be awarded the position at the Cathedral.
Almost immediately, he became a figurehead amongst the local population of Arras, adored by the existing, and ever-swelling, congregations. He was young, handsome, brave, devout, possessing a natural way with people, words and deeds. The older members of the congregation loved his godliness and his piety. “A local saint achieving his rightful place,” they would say, being born, as he was, in the city. The younger attendees at the church were inspired by his style and ardour. People joked that the Cathedral would need to be rebuilt to house the new influx of worshippers coming to witness and find sanctuary there thanks to this wondrous new appointment within the Catholic Church.
His ambition could sometimes overwhelm him, not his personal aspiration, for he was meek and humble before his faith, but his ambition for his Church and its capacity for correcting the wrongs of its past and solving the problems of today. That ambition never left him, like a voice forever taunting in his ear, and it was the very thing that led him to make choices that he knew ran counter to the will of the Church.
Momentarily distracted from his thoughts, Father Andreas became aware of the silence in the Cathedral. He stood and listened, turning his head slowly from side to side to check that he had not simply been struck deaf. Out there, in the east, at the front where the German, French and British forces had fought each other into the earth, there was, for the first time in weeks, a silence almost too beautiful to bear. The guns had stopped. It was usually at night that they were at their most terrible, pummelling the darkness and those beneath their trajectories with their dreadful payloads. Arras had been already been cruelly pounded, an inexorable killing within the city and its people, which had seen hundreds killed, many more injured. It was not unknown for Father Andreas to blow dust from the holy passages of the Cathedral bible as he celebrated Mass. Homes had been set on fire or had been blasted to rubble and shabby silhouettes of their former selves. Many residents had forsaken the city, abandoned their homes and moved west to wherever they could find some liberation from the churning machinations of war.
Father Andreas closed his eyes for a moment, bathing in the moment of stillness. Then he knew he had to press on.
With the left hand of the ambulatory now cast into darkness, he crossed to the opposite side and raised the conical lid of the snuffer to the sixteen candles on the right, their flames dancing gently in the still cool of the Cathedral air, oozing white wax onto their dais. A trail of smoke snaked lazily from the first extinguished candle, up into the rafters of the building. Andreas looked to watch it rise. The ceiling of the Cathedral of St. Vaast never failed to inspire him. His head spun as he craned his neck to see, the blood pooling in the base of his skull from the crick in his neck. He wavered a little gingerly on his feet and closed his eyes, enjoying the lightheadedness that his stance gave him, a feeling almost like a wave of righteousness washing over him from the Lord above.
“I trust I have not failed you too greatly, Lord?” he murmured quietly to himself, as if in prayer, as if in reflection. “I mean only to do right.”
He lowered his head and felt his senses settle themselves squarely back onto his two feet, his mind clearing. “Thank you, oh Lord, for the gifts you have given,” he added, almost as a liturgy.
He opened his eyes and looked at the candles, now raising the lid to extinguish them quickly. It was time to return the whole of the Cathedral to blackness, to permit it rest for the night, to let Father Andreas
himself rest. For he was gravely tired.
Was it guilt that made him feel that way? Was it the dishonesty he felt so keenly, knowing he had failed himself in everything he had ever been taught to do? He’d tried to tell the Cardinal, to reveal his doubts and his concerns as to what he had done, the part he had played in the plan. But as he’d stood before him, fighting back at the grief which was trying to consume him, the words had failed him. How could he speak so openly of his blasphemy to one who had showed him such faith and belief?
Each candle died with a hiss, as he flattened the lid into the wax. Sometimes he liked to choke the life out of the candle by holding the lid a fraction above it, watching the flame slowly splutter and die, as it was starved of oxygen. But not tonight. Their slow, tormented dying reminded him too much of how his own soul felt. Tonight Father Andreas thrust the lid down and snuffed the flames out firmly into the wax, wicks and all.
Suddenly, those candles still alight flickered in unison. He felt the draft from an open door. Andreas turned and peered through the gloom of the Cathedral. The side door to the Cathedral’s transept stood ajar, wide enough for a figure to have slipped through, narrow enough for the wind to have blown it open. Father Andreas strained his eyes to try and spot a figure standing near the doorway, someone stepping up the aisle towards him, perhaps someone returning to the Cathedral having left something behind at Mass?
He called out, quietly. “Hello?”
He lowered the snuffer and peered hard through the gloom. A peculiar sense of fear gripped him. His voice sounded small as it left his throat, but it echoed around and up into the vaulted ceiling of the Cathedral, as if God himself was taking the timid voice and empowering it with his grace.
The Darkest Hand Trilogy Box Set Page 2
