The Fog of War

by A. L. Lester

  Lucy was fun to have around, and Sylvia was incredibly happy she’d decided to stay. The lingering doubts stirred up by the things she’d learned from Arthur Webber had settled down to a dull background worry that Sylvia could ignore if she tried hard enough. She’d settle for halfway to happy and leave the rest of her niggles buried deep.

  She left the big coupe parked around the back of the house—she’d put it away later—and went to change into her cycling clothes. A bit of a whizz around the cold country lanes on her bicycle would blow the cobwebs away and she’d feel she’d earned her afternoon of novel-reading in front of the fire.

  As she wheeled her bicycle around the side of the house and prepared to mount, a man appeared at the end of the lane, running.

  Odd.

  He was clearly tired…she could see he was panting hard, even from a distance. As he got closer, she could see it was Robert Curland, one of the farm workers from Webber’s Farm. What was happening now? He was obviously in distress as he stopped beside her, putting a hand out to the fence to steady himself.

  “Curland!” she said, propping the bicycle against the fence beside him and taking his elbow in concern, “Whatever’s the matter?”

  “Dr Marks!” he panted. “I need you to come…come at once! And bring a transfusion kit! There’s been an accident! A terrible accident!” He bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath.

  Her training kicked in and she looked him over with a calmly assessing eye. He was covered in blood.

  “I’ll get my things,” she said, quickly, already moving toward the front door and the surgery. “You can fill me in on the way. Start the car and get in.”

  She grabbed her bag and the wooden box housing the new transfusion kit she’d got hold of out of interest, and never yet used. She’d read about it and seen it done once…but she’d never done it herself. Needs must though, if whoever needed help had lost that much blood. She was Type O herself and could donate if they needed it. She stifled a shudder…she hated being stuck with needles…as she flung it all in the back of the Austin, turned the nose down the lane, and put her foot down.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  Curland gave her a garbled account of a friend of Arthur Webber’s with an acute injury at the farm…a cut throat…which seemed unlikely…but Curland was soaked with blood that clearly wasn’t his own, so, perhaps? He directed her round the back of the house to the barn and tumbled out of the car and through the open double doors without waiting for her. She grabbed her bag and the wooden box housing the transfusion kit out of the rear seat and ran after him.

  The younger Webber brother, Matthew, was crouched in the bull-stall at the far end of the building, putting pressure on the throat of an unconscious man on the floor. There was a lot of blood. He still managed to shoot a judgemental look at her knickerbockers, which immediately put her back up.

  “What?” she said, irritably, putting the things down at the doorway out of the way as she knelt beside him in the pool of blood. She tried not to flinch at the warm, sticky sensation as it soaked through the tweed to her skin. “I was about to go for a bicycle ride. Lucky for your young friend here I hadn’t left and I had the car outside. Here. Let me see.” She pushed his hands out of the way. “Well, you’ve stopped it, which is something. But whether he’s lost too much…” She trailed off, thinking. “I’ve brought a transfusion kit…I got hold of one at the hospital last year, most interesting…”

  As her voice ran out, Webber said, “I’m Type O. I can donate if you can set it up. I’ve done it before.”

  She thought furiously.

  “I haven’t,” she said, finally. “I’ve only seen it done once, and photographs. But I suppose we’ll manage.” She looked up at Curland. “The kit, Curland?” she said.

  “Here, Ma’am,” he said, stepping forward. He had been hovering in the doorway as if he were afraid to come in, and he returned there once he’d handed off the wooden box.

  She didn’t spare him another glance, turning back to Webber. “Roll your sleeve up, then,” she said. “It’s probably going to hurt. It’s a bloody big needle.”

  “I’ll do me, you roll his up,” Webber said, gesturing at the man, and she nodded.

  She left him to it and turned her attention to pushing the patient’s sodden sleeve back to reveal his forearm. There’s a lot of blood here. Might be too late. Then she pulled herself together and said, “Right then. No point putting the line into him before the blood’s out of you,” as she turned back to where Webber was still kneeling beside her.

  “Is he still breathing?” Webber asked, as she began to pat his inner elbow to raise the veins.

  “Don’t want to waste your blood on him if he’s not?” she asked, acerbically. “Yes, he’s still breathing. Heartbeat’s faint, though. Are you ready?”

  She stuck him with the needle before he could say yes. No point giving patients time to think about things if you could avoid it.

  “I should be lying down,” he said, vaguely.

  “Be my guest.” She gestured to the blood-soaked earth of the stable floor. She waited for the flask to fill and then withdrew the needle, bent his hand back up toward his shoulder, and said, “Here. Keep pressure on that,” as she turned toward Curland.

  “Curland! I need you to hold this!” She busied herself putting the top on the glass flask of blood and attaching the rubber tube. “You’re going to turn it upside down to get the air out, I’m going to insert the needle, attach the tubing to it, and then you’re going to hold it up for me whilst I sew him up.”

  Curland was motionless in the doorway.

  “Come on, man. Hurry up! Unless you want him to die?”

  Curland shook himself out of whatever funk he’d slipped into at that and stepped forward. “I don’t want him to die,” he said, quietly.

  “Well then. Let’s get a chivvy on!”

  It didn’t take long to put a neat line of stitches across his throat. It was an exceptionally clean cut. The blood was still flowing steadily down the rubber tube into his arm as she tied off the sutures she’d used to close the single, deep, three-inch gash.

  “Let’s get him up to the house then, chaps,” she said, after another few moments, taking out the needle in his arm when the flask of blood was completely empty.

  Neither of them responded.

  Curland was still in the doorway, where he had retreated as soon as she’d taken the bottle of blood back from him and Webber had continued kneeling beside her and the patient on the floor, trying and mostly failing to be of assistance.

  “Chaps?” She stood, brushing perfunctorily at her knickerbockers. It didn’t do much good. She was going to have to burn them. Experience told her there was no getting bloodstains this serious out.

  “Will he live?” Curland’s voice was soft and empty, and she eyed him gravely.

  “Probably. If he didn’t lose too much, if the transfusion doesn’t go wrong and didn’t get contaminated somehow, and if no-one tries to cut his throat again.”

  She paused and into the speaking silence again commanded severely, “Now. Gentlemen. Shall we get him up to the house?”

  * * * *

  Webber dug out an old blanket from somewhere in the hayloft and they used it as a makeshift stretcher to shift him out of the barn and across the yard.

  “Put him on the table a minute,” Sylvia said as they entered the kitchen. “I want to check and see if he has any other wounds.”

  Curland seemed a bit less stupefied now he had something to do other than stand and stare. “He doesn’t,” he said before filling the kettle, putting it on, and then turning back to the sink to scrub his hands clean with the carbolic. “Only his hand. As you can see.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that, shall I?” Sylvia moved him gently to the side and took up position beside him. “Me being the actual doctor in the room and all that. Pass the soap, please. And if you could put my transfusion kit to soak, I’d be grateful.”


  Curland handed her the soap mutely and Webber suddenly pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down heavily. Sylvia looked at him sharply. “All right?” she asked.

  “Bit dizzy,” he said. “But yes, I think so.”

  “Blood loss. You need some tea. Curland here can make some while I check over the patient. What’s his name again?”

  “Marchant. Peter Marchant. He was a friend of Arthur’s.”

  She sniffed. “Was he now. Well. Let’s get his clothes off him, I need to see if he’s bleeding anywhere else.”

  “He’s not!” Curland’s raised voice echoed all around the kitchen as he slammed the brown pottery teapot down on the wooden draining board.

  They both stopped still and stared at him. He was holding the handle of the teapot in his hand. It was detached from the pot.

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am.” He breathed in through his nose, obviously trying to regain precarious control. “He’s not bleeding anywhere else. He wasn’t—I…it was me.” She could see him swallow. “I cut him.”

  Sylvia stared at him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He stared at her and then glanced frantically at Webber, over to the patient, and then back at her. “I…it was me.”

  “No. I attacked him first,” came an almost inaudible slurred voice from the head of the table. “I attacked him, and he defended himself.” The patient stirred weakly, and Sylvia whipped around and stepped up to him.

  “Try not to move around too much,” she said, briskly. “I don’t want you to start bleeding again.” She took a pair of scissors from her bag and began to cut off his shirt. “Stay still. I need to examine you and these clothes need burning.”

  He made a weak sort of noise and did as he was asked. Or he might have passed out again. He hadn’t opened his eyes at all. That wasn’t good.

  “We will talk about this,” Sylvia said, pinning Curland with gimlet eyes. “But first, I need to stitch this gash on his hand—” she glared at the offending appendage as if she held it personally responsible for its injury, “—and then we need to get this man into a proper bed and we all need to wash.”

  Chapter 15

  With the patient passed out upstairs after a perfunctory sponge down that Webber helped her with, they settled down around the table in the kitchen.

  “Now,” said Sylvia in the quiet, firm voice she used with children when she did their inoculations, “will one of you please tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Dr Marks…” Webber began.

  “Sylvia, please. And you are Matthew. And you are Robert. Yes?” She gathered up both their gazes. “Start at the beginning. Not today. Start with what was wrong with your brother, please, Matthew.”

  Webber swallowed and stared at her.

  “What?” he said.

  At the same time as Curland said, “You said it was cancer, probably, when you signed the death certificate. Liver cancer.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I? And it might have been. But I don’t think it was, was it?”

  She glared from one to the other of them as if they were recalcitrant VADs, bandaging the wrong patient.

  Webber broke first. “Not as such, no. We don’t think so.”

  There was a long pause.

  Sylvia coughed and put her cup down in its blue willow-pattern saucer. It was now or never. “Was it magic, Matthew?”

  Curland choked on his tea.

  By the time Webber had finished thumping him on the back and mopping up the spilt liquid and refilling everyone’s cups, they had both settled down a bit.

  “Was it magic?” Sylvia repeated.

  “I don’t think they like you to call it that,” Curland said, in his soft country voice. “As I understand it.”

  She gave him an assessing look. “No, I don’t suppose they do,” she said, eventually. “I don’t know much about it, really. But I do know that. I saw Arthur doing something, back in the summer. Making lights.”

  She paused.

  “I thought he was quite mad of course, to start with. I’m so sorry to say, Matthew. I didn’t believe him until I saw for myself. And some of the things he told me…Quite unbelievable.” She swallowed. “I had no choice but to believe what he said once I’d seen some of it for myself.”

  “Marchant’s been somewhere else,” Curland said, after a small pause. “We think. We think he was joined to first Arthur and then Matty with some sort of connection that was draining the life out of both of them. I did a…spell, I suppose you’d call it…earlier today to try to free Matty from it. And whatever I did…Marchant turned up in the stable at the end of the thread of magic I pulled on.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “The book…one of the books…Arthur left a lot of books…had some spells in it.” He paused again. “They probably don’t like you to call them spells, either.”

  He gave a small, twisted, unamused smile.

  “We found a spell in the book about cutting a connection.”

  “Here, I’ll get it…” Webber jumped to his feet and disappeared, coming back a moment later with an old green leather-bound thing. He sat down again and leafed through it. “It’s here…look. I wrote a translation out as well.” He pushed the open book across the table to her.

  It was astonishingly old. The edges of the pages were quite badly foxed. It was handwritten. She put her thumb in to mark the page he’d wanted her to look at and leafed a few pages back and forth. Someone’s notebook. Or a few people’s. The writing was different. And the languages. The page he’d opened it to was Latin. There was French…old German. Some sort of East Asian language. All sorts of things.

  The men sat in silence and watched her as she turned back to the page marked with her thumb. Latin. With a translation on a loose leaf beside it.

  Gather your power

  See your target as a fish on a line

  Pull sharply

  Like a fish on a line you may have to fight it

  Play out the line as with a fish in the river

  Power splashing like sunlit water

  Until held steady,

  You can grasp your target with your hands

  And strike to exsanguinate.

  She looked up sharply at Curland.

  “So, he turned up at the end of this line you pulled at and you cut his throat, yes?”

  Curland flinched and Webber made a noise of denial.

  “What then? What did I walk in on?” she asked them.

  “We thought it would be a creature. There are creatures…monsters if you like,” Webber said. “We’ve seen them…seen shadows and silhouettes of them. When we first realised what was happening…when we first found out about it all. They’re terrible things. They make these dreadful howling noises.

  “But it wasn’t one of them?” Sylvia frowned down at the book.

  “No. It t’were Marchant.” Curland’s voice was still quiet.

  “And he came through when we were expecting some sort of monster; and he asked me to do it. He said it was the only way and that Matty would die otherwise. He begged me, Sylvia.” He came to a stop. “And so I did it. Because otherwise…Matty…” His voice trailed off.

  Ah, that was how it was, was it? She’d wondered.

  “And did it work?” she asked Webber. “Was it enough? Or are you still connected to him?”

  Webber was silent for a moment, thinking. “I can’t tell,” he said. “I don’t feel any different.”

  Curland squinted at him. “It’s gone,” he said, finally. “I think it’s gone.

  “You can sense it, just like that?” Silvia asked him. “You’re one of them, properly?”

  Curland pulled at his ear uncomfortably. “No. No, I’m not. Do I look like one of them?” he said, irritably. “I tried a few things in the books, that’s all, and some of them worked.”

  “What do you mean, do you look like one of them?” she asked. There had been something else they hadn’t been telling her, she knew.

&nbs
p; “Erm…” Curland was still not quite exhausted enough to stop prevaricating, apparently.

  Webber said, quite calmly, “There’s a whole other world beyond the shimmer thing that the not-magicians draw power from. There are people who are tall and slim and who carry swords and use magic like you or I use a knife and fork. No, I don’t know anything more than that. Yes, I think that’s where Marchant was. Yes, let’s ask him when he wakes up.”

  He took a breath.

  Sylvia stared at him, open-mouthed.

  He looked back at her, clearly realising that wasn’t what she’d meant. “What did you mean?” he asked cautiously before she could gather herself. “Is Rob one of them?”

  “I only meant…can he do it? That’s all.” Sylvia’s voice sounded unsure to her own ears. “Like Arthur could.”

  There was another silence.

  “I’m not a fool, Robert Curland,” she said, “despite being in skirts. I knew there was something odd about what was wrong with him when he wouldn’t let me examine him. He wasn’t like the old country boys, who don’t like a woman seeing their naked chest outside the bedroom.”

  Curland blushed and Webber snorted painfully through his nose despite his exhausted misery.

  “Annie Beelock asked me to come out and see him one Saturday morning when I saw her in the Post Office. She said he was lethargic, not eating, and she was worried about him. She couldn’t persuade him to come down to the surgery, so I called in as I was passing by on my way home.” She proffered the teapot at Webber and he shook his head as she refilled her own cup. “I could see him through the sitting room window.” She put the teapot down with a decisive little thump. “He was waving his arms around and there was a cloud of light in the room with him.”

  There was a potent silence.

  “What did you do?” Curland asked, eventually.

  “I watched for a while, obviously. What would you have done?” It was a rhetorical question. “And then when he seemed to have finished whatever he was doing and the light had gone away, I knocked on the door and asked him to tell me what he was up to.”