by Mark Morris
But nothing happened. Either the stone walls were thick enough to block the sounds of our ascent or the officers were too drunk or too blasé to investigate. Or maybe they just thought my captive had decided to hit the sack after taking his piss. Maybe they were even now joking about his lack of staying power.
Even so, I was glad when the stairs curved round far enough that we were out of sight of anyone who might emerge from the room below. Even happier when we reached the upper landing.
‘Where now?’ I asked, looking at the corridor ahead of us, at the four wooden doors – three on our right and one facing us at the end – which were so warped and irregularly-shaped that they looked as though they had been hacked to fit gaps in the bulging stone rather than being part of the farmhouse’s original design.
‘The second door,’ the soldier replied, pointing.
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Yes, that is Kapitan Heidrich’s room. I swear it.’
‘Open it.’
I tensed as the young soldier reached out and curled his hand around the doorknob. He had said that Heidrich was asleep, but what if he wasn’t? What if he was even now sitting up in bed, reaching for his gun, alerted by the sound of the opening door? Or worse, crouching in ambush, the heart in his hand, ready to unleash its power against me?
I had come to regard the heart as an ally. Up to now it had protected me. But would it continue to do so in the hands of someone else, or would it transfer its loyalty to its new owner? Even now I didn’t know.
The young soldier twisted the knob and pushed at the door. It was as badly fitting as it looked, scraping grittily across the floor as it opened.
I shoved the young soldier ahead of me, pretty much using him as a shield. The room was small and square, and at first his body blocked my view of the bed, which was against the wall on our left. When he jerked and cried out, my initial thought was that he’d been shot, even though I’d heard no sound. I half-expected him to fall, but instead he took a quick step backwards, which was so unexpected we almost clashed heads. Thinking he was making an attempt to overpower me, I lunged forward and, still gripping his collar, pushed my left hand downwards against the back of his neck with all my strength in an effort to force him to his knees. Unable to resist the pressure he stumbled and fell, and I staggered forward too, almost sprawling on top of him. I just about managed to regain my balance, and glanced up at the bed, to check what Heidrich was doing.
But Heidrich wasn’t doing anything.
Because Heidrich was dead.
He wasn’t just dead, though. He had been gutted. There was a candle flickering in one of the stone recesses in the wall, and it was illuminating a lot of red and a lot of wetness. Head back and arms out in a cruciform shape, the dead man had been killed with just two cuts. One had slashed so deeply and savagely across his throat that he had been virtually decapitated. The other had opened him up from his Adam’s apple to his pubis, releasing not only a hell of a lot of blood, which I realised now was running down the walls and dripping from the ceiling, but also a slippery snake’s nest of fat purple intestines. Heidrich, assuming this was him, was naked, and I could see his ribs sticking out through the rent in his chest. I could also see that nestled in the palm of his limp right hand was the obsidian heart.
The shock of finding Heidrich dead, of seeing the violence that had been done to him, and also of realising he was holding the heart, momentarily diverted my attention from the young German officer sprawled at my feet. Unbeknownst to me, my grip had slackened on his collar and my gun arm was now hanging limply by my side. Taking advantage of my lapse of concentration he suddenly rolled on to his back and kicked out, sweeping my legs from under me. I flew sideways as if hit by a car, sheer exhaustion making me feel as if I was light and hollow, my flesh thin as paper, my bones dry old sticks.
I hit the floor so hard my brain jarred in my skull, causing black pixels to swarm across my vision. My overwhelming thought was to keep hold of the gun, but I felt so weak, both physically and mentally, that the revolver flew from my numb fingers and went skidding and clattering across the bare wooden floor.
Fuck, I thought, still struggling to see, still struggling to get my body to do what I wanted it to, I’m dead.
I expected the young German to leap over my body, scoop up my gun and turn the tables on me, if not put a bullet in my brain. But instead he was out of the room in an instant, thumping along the corridor, clattering down the stairs.
In my dazed state I heard him yelling for help, his voice shrill, boyish. Although I was still dizzy, I knew I had no more than ten or fifteen seconds before the young German’s fellow officers, drunk though they were, would be pounding up the stairs and bursting into the room. Gritting my teeth, I pushed myself up onto all fours, and then I brought my knees up, planted my feet flat on the floor, and rose shakily but as swiftly as I could to a standing position, fingers gripping on to the cold rough wall for support.
The room dipped and swayed. It felt like the cabin of a ship in a terrible storm. I heard a roaring in my ears. The rain outside? The enraged men downstairs? My own blood rushing through my head? I forced myself to turn towards the bed, to focus on the black, blurred shape in the outstretched hands of the corpse. As I stumbled towards it, I heard feet pounding on the stairs.
I slipped in blood, went down on one knee, got up again. The heart was a black pulse, going in and out of focus. I reached out, grasped for it, but my hand swiped through empty air.
I heard a shout behind me, half-turned.
A man was in the doorway. Red complexion, moustache. Shock and outrage on his face. He had a pistol in his hand. He pointed it at me.
I turned away from him, took another step towards the heart, grasped for it again.
As I did, I heard a bang.
TEN
HOME IS WHERE…
The heart was in my hand. The bang was the sound of me hitting a hard floor as if I’d dropped from a height of maybe three or four feet. I was curled up in an almost foetal position, and my knees took the brunt of the impact. Spikes of pain shot up through both kneecaps and seemed to meet and shatter somewhere around my midriff.
Panting for breath, I curled around the pain, trying to contain it. At any moment I expected to be hauled upright, screamed at by a jostling crowd of drunken German officers.
If it wasn’t for the nanites in my body, constantly repairing me, I doubt I would have made it this far. But in spite of their ministrations, I was now completely spent. Plastered in mud, spattered with blood, my clothes reeking of death, I must have looked like one of the zombies that had attacked me in No Man’s Land. It was almost certainly thanks to the nanites that I hadn’t got dysentery like most of the other lads, but even so I knew I’d lost weight these past few weeks. I’m a naturally tall bloke, with a long, lean, slightly knobbly face, so whenever I shed a few pounds I end up looking not healthy but cadaverous.
I don’t know how long it took me to realise I’d shifted. When I’d grabbed the heart my instinctive desire had been to return to the trenches, but that wasn’t where I was now. As the throbbing pain ebbed – nanites again, doing their stuff – I realised my cheek was resting on some kind of rough material – a carpet! I pushed myself up on shaky arms, and immediately felt nauseous. I leaned over and tried to vomit, expelling only bile, which burned the back of my throat. My eyes watered, my stomach felt as if it was twisting in on itself, my muscles felt on the verge of going into cramp or worse… and then (Praise be to the nanites!) all these sensations smoothed out, and within thirty seconds had melted away.
The first thing I saw when my blurred vision came back into focus was the bed beside which I was kneeling. At the same time, mostly subconsciously, I realised it must be evening, because the room I was in was lit by electric light rather than daylight. As I tentatively sat up, rising above the level of the bed, my attention was grabbed by something which was sitting on the middle of the mostly red duvet. It was a sheet of wh
ite A4 paper.
My eyes widened. No! It couldn’t be! I reached out a filth-caked hand and grabbed the sheet, smearing it with mud. I held it in front of my face and peered at it, my mind racing so quickly that at first the words seemed to jitter and jump on the page. I blinked and concentrated harder and the words settled. I read:
Dear Clover
I’m really sorry, but I’ve had to go. I know you’ll think I’m stupid and reckless, but I don’t think I’ve got a choice…
My hand started to shake so much that I couldn’t read any more. But I didn’t have to. I knew what the rest of the note said. Because I’d written it myself, about eighteen months ago, just before using the heart to travel back to August 1914. And yet such were the convolutions of time travel that here the note was, as fresh as if I’d finished it only moments ago – which as far as this timeline was concerned I probably had. How long had it sat here undiscovered? How long had I missed myself by? Seconds? Minutes?
My own thoughts were so busy, so noisy, that I didn’t grasp someone was close by until I heard a floorboard creak outside the room. Frantically, still on my knees, I looked around for the heart, which I only now realised wasn’t in my hand. I wondered whether the heart and I had somehow become separated, or even whether it had moved on without me. Then I spotted it, on the floor a foot or so to my right. I groped for it – but too late.
After a perfunctory knock the door opened and Clover stepped into the room, her eyes screwed into a half-squint as if she was afraid of catching me naked or doing something embarrassing. As she entered she was saying, ‘Are you all right, Alex? Only I called up three times to let you know the pizza was here and you didn’t…’
Then she turned and saw me, and her voice abruptly cut off. The weight of her mouth dropping open seemed to yank her eyes wide. She stared at me in horror.
I stared back.
It was the first time I’d seen her for over a year and I was immediately overcome by a flood of emotions. Maybe if I hadn’t been in such a raw and traumatised state I would have been able to stay in control – who knows? Although Clover and I had become friends almost by default, having been brought together by a common enemy, I can only describe the love and affection I felt for her at that moment as both deep and familial. To my shame (I’m not generally given to blubbering like a goon) it was also powerful enough to break through my defences and make me crumble into tears.
‘Oh God, Alex,’ she said, her shock wrong-footing her, causing her to half-stumble into the room. ‘What the fuck’s happened to you? Who’s done this?’
I couldn’t answer. Now that the floodgates had opened, there was no way they could be forced shut. The nanites inside me might have been able to repair me physically, but they were useless against naked emotions.
Raising a hand, I waved it feebly, as if to say: give me a minute. I couldn’t see her through my tears, but I heard her drop to her knees in front of me, felt her grab the hand I was waving and squeeze it hard.
‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘And you stink. And you’re covered in blood. Christ, what have they done to you?’ She paused, as if drawing breath. Then I sensed her going still, stiffening, and I knew that she was putting two and two together; that having regarded me properly for the first time, having perhaps registered what I was wearing, the penny was beginning to drop. She was silent for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, and when she next spoke her voice was different. Hurt. Accusatory.
‘You’ve been travelling, haven’t you? You used the heart without telling me?’
Try as I might to stop them, the tears were still gushing out of me. But now I was keeping my head down and my gaze averted not because of that – or not entirely anyway – but because I felt guilty, ashamed, of lying to her, letting her down. The note I’d written, now mud-smeared and partly crumpled, was on the floor by my left knee. I pushed it towards her, felt it slither beneath my fingertips as she snatched it up.
It’s amazing how the crackle of paper can convey tension and disapproval. As she read the note I made an attempt to pull myself together. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, tried to contain my snivelling by alternately swallowing and taking deep breaths. Once I’d managed to force the floodgates shut again, I raised my head and looked at her blearily. I was embarrassed by my outburst, even though I knew it was nothing to be embarrassed about. I’d seen men break down in the trenches who’d been subjected to far less stress than I had in the past few hours.
‘The plan was that I wouldn’t be here when you read that,’ I said, my voice clogged. ‘That went a bit wrong, didn’t it?’
She sighed, looked at me. It was impossible to read her expression. In a softer voice than she’d used moments before, she asked, ‘How long have you been away?’
‘Eighteen months,’ I said.
She flinched as if someone had touched her neck with a cold hand.
‘Eighteen months! Are you serious?’
‘Afraid so.’
She reached out, and at first I thought she was going to slap me. But instead she touched my chest gently, as if checking whether my uniform was genuine.
‘You’ve been in the War? The trenches?’
I nodded.
Something flickered across her face. The threat of tears? But whatever it was, she brought it under control. Her voice, though, was husky.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did tell you. In the note.’
This time it was anger that flashed in her eyes. ‘Don’t be smart, Alex. I deserve more than that.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be smart. It was just…’
‘Just what?’
I squirmed, struggling to express myself. ‘Well, I could hardly have taken you with me, could I? War is men’s work.’ I pulled a face to show I was joking. ‘At least, it was back then. And I just thought… if I went and did what I was supposed to do – what I had to do – then maybe I could be back before you knew I’d even gone.’ I nodded at the note she was still holding in her hand. ‘That was just meant to be insurance. In case anything went wrong.’
‘But what about the heart?’ she said. ‘What about the danger of that? Of using it? Last time you tried, it nearly killed you.’
I forced a smile. A weak attempt to make light of the situation. ‘It nearly killed me this time too. But it was something I had to go through. A gamble I had to take. To keep things on the right path.’ Stumblingly I told her what had happened – about my future self rescuing me, about the nanites in my system.
She reached out and touched my chest again. ‘And they’re inside you now? Those tiny robots?’
‘Yep. Like a swarm of microscopic doctors, ticking things off on their little charts.’
She shuddered. ‘Creepy.’
‘It’s just science, that’s all. Science that’s not available to us yet.’
‘It’s the origin story of a villain in a bloody superhero movie, is what it is. This is how it always starts. Some normal bloke tries some snazzy new scientific doo-dah on himself, which then goes wrong and turns him into a…’
‘Mutant?’ I suggested.
‘I was going to say “monster”.’
‘Oh, thanks. So that’s what you think I’ll become? A monster?’
She groaned and clapped her hands to her cheeks.
‘I don’t know. This is such a lot to take in. Twenty minutes ago you were FaceTiming Hope before popping upstairs for a lie-down while I ordered pizza. And now…’ She wafted a hand almost exasperatedly at me. ‘…all this. I mean… you really haven’t seen me for eighteen months?’
I shook my head. ‘And I can’t tell you how good it is.’
‘Not seeing me?’
My laughter sounded like a weary cough. ‘The opposite. It’s so good to see you. So good to be back here.’
‘And you’re done now, are you? You’re back for good?’
‘I wish I was.’
‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’
t tell me you’re going back?’
‘I have to, Clover. I’ve got no choice. You know as well as I do what’ll happen if I don’t.’
She sighed. I could see she was struggling. Not to understand – she knew what was at stake – but simply to allow me to go through it without her help. By default we had become a team, but in this instance there was nothing she could do, no way she could watch my back.
Struggling to make it easier for her, I said, ‘Look, don’t worry. I’ve got the heart, remember. I can be there and back before you know it.’
‘If you survive.’
‘I will. I promise.’
She glared at me. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I’m not a child. I know how this works.’
I held up my hands in apology – and was struck by the fact that ten minutes earlier, if I hadn’t got to the heart in time, I might have been doing the same thing under different circumstances.
Her expression softened. ‘You look done in. Really done in. You don’t have to go back straight away, do you?’
I hesitated. Weirdly I couldn’t help thinking that if I didn’t go back straight away I’d be cheating somehow. The other guys going through the War with me, sharing the hell of trench life, didn’t get any respite, so why should I? On the other hand, this was not my war. I was born in 1977, for fuck’s sake! I was a man out of time.
‘You look as though you need a good meal and a sleep,’ Clover said. ‘And you definitely need a bath. Much as I love you, Alex, you stink like road kill.’
‘It’s this coat. I had to nick it from a dead German to disguise myself. He wasn’t too fresh. In fact, he was oozing a bit.’
She bulged out her cheeks, as though trying to keep in a mouthful of puke. ‘That may be the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. That may even put me off my pizza.’
