The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  It was a simplistic image, perhaps even a crude one, but all at once I felt Frank’s body twitch beneath me. I opened my eyes, and a second later Frank’s eyes opened too, and stared into mine.

  I saw no gratitude there, though, nor even confusion. What I saw was pain and regret and terrible knowledge. He said, ‘What have you done?’

  It wasn’t an accusatory question – his voice was dull and emotionless – but even so, I felt a need to justify myself. ‘I’ve brought you back, Frank,’ I said. ‘You were gone, but I brought you back. I’ve given you a second chance. Don’t be afraid.’

  I lifted the heart from his chest and put it in my pocket. There was no longer a wound underneath. After a moment Frank slowly raised a hand and put it on his chest where the heart had been. ‘Where have I gone?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re here, Frank,’ I said, and I gripped his shoulders as if to assure him he still had a physical presence. ‘You’re alive. You’re back with me.’

  He moved his head from side to side, a measured but emphatic denial. Though his face was expressionless a tear trickled from his eye and forged a route through the mud on his bony cheek.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing inside, Alex. The best part of me’s not there any more. There’s just darkness now.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ I said, though what I really meant was that I didn’t want to believe it. ‘You’re alive, Frank. You’re whole. You’ve just… had a bad experience, that’s all. But you’ll be okay.’

  Frank’s hand, the one resting on his chest, suddenly reached up and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I’m scared, Alex.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. I’m with you. We’ll be okay.’

  His eyes closed briefly, then opened again. Beneath the mud his flesh was so pale. ‘I was always scared, Alex. Shit-scared. I joked around, but underneath…’ He grimaced briefly. After a moment he said, ‘It was you what kept me going. You looked after me. You didn’t know you was, but you was. You were a mate to me. The best.’

  ‘I’m still a mate. We’ll always be mates.’

  ‘Yeah, we will,’ he said. ‘Always. But what you did… I know you did it for the best, but… maybe you shouldn’t have done it.’

  I felt as though he’d reached into my chest and squeezed. A sick, fearful shame swept over me. What had I done? How thoughtless and selfish had I been? What right had I to make Frank part of my story, to use him like this? But at the same time, had I had any choice in the matter? Hadn’t it been a fait accompli before I’d even been aware of Frank’s existence?

  ‘I’ll take us away from here,’ I said. ‘We’ll put all this fighting, all this death, behind us. I’ll take us somewhere peaceful.’

  ‘There ain’t nowhere,’ he muttered. ‘Not for me.’

  ‘There is,’ I said. ‘I promise there is.’

  I took the heart from my pocket again. Put my left arm around him and held him close, so close that the rims of our steel helmets clunked together. I squeezed the heart and wished us away from there. The noise of battle receded…

  The very air around us seemed to change, to settle; that’s how I knew we had moved. I felt a warm breeze slide over me, brush across my face. I would have opened my eyes then if I hadn’t felt the familiar bite of nausea in my belly, threatening to burst like a grenade and tear me apart. As the nanites rushed in to do their work, I instinctively curled up my body, locked down my senses.

  When the nausea began to ebb, and I eventually stirred and opened my eyes, I was surprised to find it was dark. I looked up into a night sky unsullied by smoke, devoid of light pollution, and saw an array of stars glittering like diamonds scattered across black velvet, the sight so dazzling it took my breath away.

  ‘It’s over, Frank,’ I whispered. ‘The War’s finally over. For both of us.’

  I was still hunched awkwardly over him, my left arm wrapped around his back, my hand clutching his left shoulder. His eyes were wide open and he too was gazing into the night sky.

  ‘How can it be?’ he murmured. His eyes shifted and he looked at me fearfully. ‘What are you, Alex? What you done to me?’

  ‘I’m your friend,’ I told him. ‘And I saved you. With this.’

  I showed him the heart. He looked at it, still with that fearful expression on his face, but he didn’t touch it.

  ‘What is it?’ he said. ‘That thing?’

  ‘It’s…’ I began, and then realised I didn’t know how to answer his question. Finally I said, ‘It can do amazing things, Frank. Things you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Things I wouldn’t want to believe,’ he muttered.

  I felt a flash of anger. ‘How can you say that? If it wasn’t for the heart you wouldn’t be alive now.’

  His gaze slid from the heart and locked on to mine again. ‘Is that what I am, Alex? Alive? ’Cause I don’t feel it. I feel cold.’

  ‘Course you’re alive,’ I snapped. ‘You’re just in shock, that’s all. Nice cup of tea, you’ll be right as rain.’

  He half-sat, taking note of his surroundings for the first time. He looked down and reached out, his hand hovering just above the ground. It was only then I realised we were no longer lying in mud, but on a soft, dry carpet of neatly trimmed grass.

  ‘Are we both dead, Alex?’ he asked. ‘Are we both in Heaven or Hell?’

  ‘We’re in neither,’ I said. ‘We’re safe.’

  ‘And the War’s over?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why do I still feel it?’ He touched his chest. ‘In here?’

  I knew he carried the War inside him. The horror of it, the darkness of it.

  ‘It’s just an echo,’ I said. ‘Don’t be scared of it. Soon you’ll be able to control it. You’ll learn to use it. For good.’

  He didn’t seem able to grasp that concept, or perhaps he was too distracted to take in what I was telling him. He was looking around again, clearly agitated.

  ‘Where are we, Alex? Where is everybody?’

  ‘Gone,’ I said. ‘Long gone.’

  ‘But we’ll get done. We’ll get done as deserters. Getting shot I can take, but not as a deserter. I don’t want my family to be ashamed of me.’

  ‘No one’ll be ashamed of you, Frank. The War’s long over.’ I paused. ‘We’ve come forward. In time, I mean. That little black heart of mine, it can do that. It can take you forwards and backwards through time.’

  I expected Frank to scoff, or at least give me a disbelieving look, but he didn’t. He just touched his chest again, where the bullet hole had been. ‘Regular box o’ tricks, ain’t it?’ Then he half-turned, pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  I looked in the direction he was indicating. The field we were sitting in rose behind us in soft, undulating waves, forming a gentle incline. Beyond the incline was the tip of a pale tower or obelisk, its edges limned in starlight.

  I rose to my feet. The nausea and the throbbing in my head had gone. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’

  I held out my hand and after a moment Frank took it. I pulled him to his feet and together we began to trudge up the gentle hill towards the white tower. Dressed in our mud and blood covered army uniforms, I hoped we wouldn’t meet anyone. If we did, not only would we give them a hell of a shock, but we’d have a lot of explaining to do. I guess we’d have to say we were part of a First World War re-enactment group or something, though what explanation we’d give for being there in the middle of the night I had no idea.

  Fortunately, though, we didn’t meet anyone. We reached the top of the incline and began to trudge down the other side. And now we could see the white tower for what it really was.

  Of course. It was a war memorial.

  The obelisk was maybe twelve metres high and around three metres wide on each side. We only realised we were approaching it from the rear when we saw that on the far side was a long pale path, which led off from the wide square of gravel into which the memorial had been set. The path meandered through a beautifully tended park that
I suppose, a century before, had been a churned-up battlefield strewn with mangled corpses. A trio of wide stone steps led up to the obelisk on each side. Dozens of wreaths had been laid at its base. In the moonlight they looked like dark wheels propped against the white stone.

  ‘Did we… fight here?’ Frank asked. There was a hushed kind of wonder in his voice.

  I glanced at him. He looked colourless and insubstantial. I had the odd feeling that if I reached out to touch him, I’d connect with nothing, and he’d smear out of existence, the illusion broken.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But it was a long time ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A hundred years, give or take.’

  He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘And the land’s been reborn.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good.’ He jerked an arm up, indicating the obelisk. ‘And that’s for us, is it? The men who fought here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we ain’t been forgotten?’

  ‘No, Frank. You’ll – we’ll – never be forgotten.’

  This time he was silent for so long that I almost asked him if he was all right. I was about to when he said, ‘Can we have a look?’

  ‘Course we can.’

  We descended the incline towards the memorial, a couple of ghosts haunting the battlefield where thousands had died. The neat, gravelled square from the centre of which the obelisk reared, like a vast finger pointing at the sky, was bordered on all sides except the front by a black wrought iron fence, which was shin-high and comprised of a series of equidistant spikes linked by cross bars. We stepped over the fence and approached the memorial from the back, our feet crunching on gravel. When we got up close we saw that words had been carved into the stone on all four of the obelisk’s sides. There was an elaborately bordered inscription on the front, in French, and lists of names – hundreds, probably thousands – occupying the other three sides. I wandered around to the left of the obelisk, and angled myself until the moonlight fell just so on the carved letters. Squinting a bit, I made out the heading at the top: CEUX QUI SONT TOMBÉS.

  ‘Those who are…’ I murmured, puzzling over the last word. Then it struck me. ‘Fallen! Those who are fallen. Those who fell.’

  It was a list of the dead.

  I scanned it quickly, realising that this side of the obelisk was a record of all those whose surnames fell within the first half of the alphabet – A to M. This meant that my surname, Locke, and Frank’s, Martin, should be towards the bottom of the fifth and final column.

  But they weren’t. I looked twice. The second time I even stepped right up to the obelisk and ran my finger over the letters carved into the stone.

  We weren’t there. Which meant that as far as history was concerned, it was as if we had never been there. I didn’t particularly care for myself, because although I’d fought in the War, it had never really been my conflict. I’d known the outcome before going in; I’d been nothing but a temporal aberration, a man out of time.

  But Frank… that was different. He’d been part of the generation of boys and men who had not only endured Hell but had made the ultimate sacrifice for his country in the pursuit of justice and liberty. It was Frank, and men like him, who deserved to be remembered. How could I tell him that he hadn’t been?

  I glanced at him. He was standing a few metres from me, peering up at the back of the obelisk, his lips moving slightly.

  ‘Alex, what does dis-per-us mean?’ he asked, saying the word slowly and pronouncing it with a hard ‘s’ at the end.

  I walked over to join him, tilting my head up to see what he was looking at.

  ‘Disparus,’ I said in the best French accent I could muster. ‘It means… the lost, I think. No… the missing.’

  He stepped forward, ascended the stone steps and jabbed at the obelisk with a long white finger. ‘That’s us then, is it? We ain’t dead, we’re just missing?’

  I stepped up beside him. And there we were. There were our names on the list carved into the back of the obelisk. Alexander Locke. Frank Martin. It was a weird sensation, knowing that this memorial had been erected before I was born, and yet my part in a war that I’d learned about in history lessons at school had been immortalised on this stone monument in this Belgian field.

  I ran my fingers over my own name, thinking that no matter how commonplace time travel might eventually become for me, I would surely never get used to moments like this; moments in which the rug was suddenly whipped from under me and I was struck with a sense of… I guess the word was ‘wonder’. Maybe ‘awe’.

  ‘The missing,’ Frank said again. He nodded. ‘That’s just right, that is. That’s how I feel. In here.’ He pointed at his own chest.

  ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ His words brought me back down to earth. ‘I was only doing… what I thought was right.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know you were.’ He looked up at the obelisk once more, then he sighed and turned away.

  ‘Can we go now, Alex?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to be here any more.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE GREAT BARNABY

  A few weeks later I brought Kate home.

  I say a few weeks, but that’s only an estimation of how long it seemed in my terms. Because the fact is, between resurrecting Frank and seeing my little girl again, I did a hell of a lot of jumping about.

  The jumping about constituted what I guess you could call housekeeping. Little – and sometimes not so little – jobs that needed doing in order to keep the machine oiled and running smoothly. With the War over, I was naturally desperate to see Kate again, desperate to bring her back to London and try to re-establish something like a normal life. But before I could do that I felt as though I ought to put certain things in place, simply because they were piling up and I didn’t want my precious time with my daughter compromised by the knowledge that I had an accumulation of prior commitments hanging over me.

  First and foremost, I needed to get Frank settled. And by settled, I mean I needed to stay with him while he acclimatised to his new… condition. Moreover, I needed to brief him. I needed to tell him where he had to be, and when. And what he had to do.

  Compliant as he was, I found it tough. Tough because he trusted me and relied on me, and because in the twenty-first century he was a fish out of water, which meant I was responsible for him. And tough, to be perfectly honest, because I didn’t truly know what he was, what I’d ‘created’, and so I was uncertain both how to handle him and how to feel about him.

  Was he alive or dead? If the former, then why did he carry the darkness of war inside him, seemingly in place of a soul? And how was he able to access that darkness and use it like… well, like some kind of twisted super power?

  More fundamentally, how come he never needed to sleep? I know he wanted to, but he found it impossible. Sometimes he’d lie on his back with his eyes closed and his hands by his sides, looking for all the world like a laid-out corpse, and he’d rest – that’s what he called it anyway.

  ‘Does your mind drift when you rest?’ I asked him once. ‘Do you feel drowsy?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t feel nothing. I lie there and think about things – my family and the War and my old life – but I don’t feel tired. Just like I don’t feel hot or cold. Or hungry or thirsty.’

  ‘But you eat,’ I said. ‘If I make you food, you eat it. And if we go to the pub, you drink. In fact, two nights ago we went to the pub because you wanted to. You said you could murder a pint.’

  ‘Habit,’ he said. ‘It’s all habit. If I have a pie and a pint I can feel normal. I can’t taste it and it don’t affect me – I could drink thirty pints and it wouldn’t affect me – but at least by saying and doing normal things I can pretend I’m normal.’ His voice dropped. ‘But I’m not, am I? I don’t know what I am, but I’m not normal.’

  Did he bleed? Did he shit? Did his heart pump and his blood rush through his veins? We never got into that. I suppose I was part
ly in denial. I didn’t want to think I’d done the wrong thing, a selfish thing, by bringing him back.

  But I also didn’t want to upset him by highlighting the differences between us. I’m sure he was aware of how he functioned, of his physical limitations and capabilities, but because he never brought the subject up, I didn’t either. It helped to maintain that precious illusion of normality.

  Another thing that helped was giving him a home, or at least a base, somewhere he could call his own. I could have booked him into a hotel, but I thought that would make him uncomfortable, so instead I installed him in my old flat, the one that the Wolves of London had trashed (unless, as I said before, I’d done it myself, perhaps as a warning not to go back there and become a sitting duck, and I simply wasn’t aware of it yet).

  Anyway, we cleaned the place up as best we could, and there we stayed while I filled Frank in on his role. Giving him a ‘role’ in the first place felt somewhat mercenary on my part, but that didn’t get away from the fact that it was also something I needed to do in order to maintain the timeline as I knew it.

  I didn’t get heavy or lay a guilt trip on him. I didn’t want to make him feel he owed me. On the other hand, I didn’t want to make him feel resentful towards me either. So after wondering for a while how to approach it, I simply decided to tell him the whole story from the beginning, to give him all the facts.

  Even now I’m not sure how he took it. He didn’t give much away. He seemed to accept what I told him without question, in the same way he’d have accepted whatever orders a commanding officer might have given him during the War.

  No, that’s not strictly true, because during the War he’d at least had more verve about him. Before dying he’d been what is known in old-fashioned terms as a ‘chirpy chap’, one who was able to maintain his pluck and humour whatever the circumstances. But since coming back there’d been something missing. He’d lost his spirit, his essence, his joie de vivre. That wasn’t to say he didn’t occasionally smile, or make a joke, or show emotion, or talk with a certain amount of animation. He wasn’t a robot. He wasn’t a zombie, for God’s sake!