The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  I had the feeling that something was beating insistently at a closed door in my brain, a thought or idea that I couldn’t quite grasp. I felt as though I was underwater, and the door was somewhere above me, and I was rising from the depths towards it. I could see the handle through the murk. I stretched out a hand in an attempt to grab it, stretched and stretched, straining every sinew. As if sensing my proximity the knocking grew louder, more persistent.

  …I woke up, or perhaps snapped from the fugue state I’d entered, to find that the knocking was real.

  I struggled up from my chair, automatically slipping the heart into my pocket. I took a staggering step towards the door that led into the hallway. But I was confused. I had the feeling I was going the wrong way, that for some reason the front door was no longer out there.

  Then I realised. The reason for my confusion was that the knocking wasn’t coming from the hallway. It was closer by. It was here in this room.

  It was behind me!

  I whirled round, expecting… well, I don’t know what I was expecting. Some ravening creature, its claws extended, its huge teeth clacking together? But there was nothing. Nothing but the windows behind me, concealed behind thick curtains. The knocking was coming from behind one of those. Immediately I was transported back to a snowy night over a hundred years earlier. Then my nocturnal visitor had been Lyn, or at least a vision of her that I’d come to think of as my spirit guide. Who or what would it be this time? Was I about to receive more guidance? Or could it be…

  ‘Clover?’

  Suddenly wide awake I crossed to the window in four strides and yanked back the curtain. I’d been so certain I’d see Clover out there, her hand perhaps raised in greeting, her lips compressed into an apologetic grimace, that when I didn’t I was completely thrown. For a split second I failed to recognise the slight, pale figure standing on the other side of the glass. I thought I was seeing a ghost. Then my mind clicked into gear, and I berated myself for my stupidity.

  It was Frank.

  Of course it was Frank.

  He was expressionless, but that wasn’t unusual. A thread of pale grey smoke was coiling up from the roll-up held loosely between the index finger and second finger of his right hand. I indicated he should come round to the front door and he gave me a thumbs-up. I pulled the curtain back into place and moved across the room, into the hallway.

  ‘I didn’t want to disturb the little ’un,’ said Frank when I opened the door.

  ‘How did you know where I was?’ I asked.

  ‘Saw the glow through the curtains, didn’t I?’

  ‘But how did you know I’d be awake?’ When his only answer was a shrug I said, ‘It’s getting on for 3 a.m.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said flatly. ‘Sorry, guv. Time don’t mean a lot to me these days. If I hadn’t seen a light I’d’ve waited ’til morning.’

  ‘So what you’ve got to tell me isn’t urgent?’ I said. ‘You’re not here because of Clover?’

  ‘No. I ain’t seen Clover since she popped round for Kate’s stuff the other day.’

  ‘How did she seem when she came round?’

  ‘Fine.’ He took a last drag on his roll-up, then flicked it into the darkness behind me. ‘Mind if I come in? I want to talk to you about something.’

  ‘Yes, course,’ I said, pulling the door wider. ‘Sorry.’

  He stepped in, clasping his hands and rubbing them together in an old-fashioned ‘right, let’s get down to it’ kind of way. I led him through to the parlour, where he barely gave the propped-up poster of The Great Barnaby a second look before standing in front of the fire, his back resting against the mantelpiece.

  ‘You’ll burn your arse if you’re not careful,’ I said.

  Morosely he replied, ‘Chance’d be a fine thing. Don’t feel it these days, do I? Neither hot nor cold. When I was perishing me knackers off in the trenches, I’d have said such a thing was a blessing. But it ain’t. I miss it, Alex. Even the things what used to make me miserable – the hunger, the cold, the fear that made you feel like you had a big black dog inside you, chewing on your guts.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Seeing my empty glass sitting on the hearth, I picked it up and, without thinking, offered him a drink.

  ‘Makes no odds to me,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t waste it if I were you.’

  I was already crossing the room to the table beside the sofa where I’d put the bottle of Southern Comfort. ‘You don’t mind if I have one?’

  ‘’Course not. You go ahead. You enjoy it for the both of us.’

  I poured myself a drink and carried it back to the fireplace. Plonking myself in the armchair, I gestured at the other chair facing me across the hearth. ‘Sit down, Frank. Just move that picture out of the way. I’m sick of looking at it, to be honest.’

  Frank glanced at the chair, but shook his head. ‘I’ll stand, if that’s all right with you.’

  ‘That sounds ominous. What’s on your mind?’

  Frank was silent for a moment. I got the impression he was uncomfortable, though nothing showed on his face. Eventually he said, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for what you did for me, Alex. Because I am. You gave me the best thing that anyone can give anyone. You gave me my life back.’

  ‘I’m guessing there’s a “but” coming,’ I said.

  His expression didn’t change, but all at once I was overcome by a sense of deep melancholy. It was as if the emotion was pulsing off him in waves.

  ‘The thing is… there’s nothing for me here. And when I say “nothing”, I mean, literally, nothing. I can’t feel, Alex, that’s the thing. I know what I should be feeling, and I know what’s right and wrong, but although I’m moving about, and thinking, and talking, I’m just going through the motions, doing what I think I should be doing. But inside here’ – he clenched a fist and gently thumped his chest – ‘I feel dead. There’s no love, no hate, no happiness, no sadness. Or maybe there’s an… idea of sadness. But it’s not really sadness, it’s… emptiness. I’m empty, Alex.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I’m not explaining this very well. I’ve never been that good with words.’

  ‘You’re explaining it perfectly,’ I said. ‘And I’m sorry, Frank, I really am. I thought by bringing you back, I’d be restoring your life, making you just like you were before. Maybe even better.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know you did what you did for the right reasons. And like I say, I ain’t blaming you. You did what any real mate would’ve done in the circumstances.’

  ‘So what do you want me to do now?’ I asked. ‘How can I put it right? Do you want me to take you back to your family? Because I could do that. I could fix it so that I took you back at the end of the War, so that you didn’t have to fight again. I could—’

  ‘No!’ he said, cutting in. He’d raised a hand, but now he lowered it. ‘No,’ he repeated softly. ‘I don’t want that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I want…’ His eyes flickered from mine. He stared into the depths of the room behind me, as if seeing something that I couldn’t. He was silent for ten, fifteen seconds. It seemed like an eternity. At last he said, ‘I want peace. That’s all. Just peace. I want to move on – if there’s anything to move on to.’

  I’d been expecting this, but I felt a tightness in my throat all the same, felt as if his sadness was infecting me, breaking down my defences, building up with a fever-like heat in my sinuses and behind my eyes.

  ‘What are you asking me to do?’ I said, forcing out the words.

  ‘I thought… maybe that heart of yours could help. I mean, it brought me here… so maybe it can send me back.’

  My throat was so clogged I couldn’t speak. I swallowed, trying to clear the obstruction. When it didn’t work I took a sip of Southern Comfort, wincing as it burned. I tried again, and in a hoarse voice I managed to say, ‘You want me to reverse what I did? You’re asking me to…’ But I couldn’t finish.

  ‘Kill me?’ Frank s
aid. He shrugged, as if it was of no consequence. ‘I don’t really feel alive any more, so I don’t think that’s what you’d be doing.’

  I swallowed more Southern Comfort – took such a big gulp, in fact, that my eyes watered. It did the trick, though. It unblocked my throat.

  ‘I can’t do it, Frank,’ I said. ‘You can’t ask me to do it. I want to help you, but you’re my friend. You can’t ask me to…’

  ‘Just give me the heart, Alex,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Just give me the heart and I’ll do it myself.’

  My instinct was to refuse. But if I did what would I be doing except condemning him to a living hell? Because he was right. There was nothing for him here. Nothing except me, and what could I offer him, aside from my occasional company? Refusing him access to the heart – which I wasn’t even certain would do his bidding – would be nothing but a selfish act, even a cowardly one. And what would Frank do if I did refuse him? Try to top himself another way? But what if he couldn’t? What if, whatever he tried, the heart kept him alive? The possible consequences of that were too horrific to contemplate.

  A split second before handing the heart over to him, it struck me that this might be a trick. What if this wasn’t really Frank? What if it was the shape-shifter? But I couldn’t spend my life being suspicious of everyone. Although it terrified me to think of it, the shape-shifter could come in the night and replace Kate. Or it could imitate Clover again. Or Lyn. Or even a future version of me. I could become seriously paranoid if I started to think of all the ways the Dark Man might try to outwit me. All I could hope was that he was just as constrained by the ‘laws’ of time as I was.

  I hesitated for maybe a second, then held out the heart and allowed Frank to take it from me. As soon as his fingers touched it, it reacted, myriad threads of darkness rising from its surface and not only writhing around his body but attaching themselves to it. The threads seemed to fuse seamlessly with his dark suit, as though they and the suit were made of the same substance.

  As the threads crept upwards and outwards, twining themselves around Frank’s body, he calmly opened his mouth. At first I thought it was to allow the darkness access to his body, but then I saw more threads of darkness, identical to those rising from the heart, curling from between his lips, just as they had when I’d first encountered him at Benny’s house. The threads reminded me of black eels emerging from the parted lips of an underwater corpse. Once released from within him, they moved with purpose, slithering in all directions – downwards across his chin and throat, sideways across his cheeks, up across his face. Quickly they obscured his features – his nose, his eyes – and then continued to rise vertically across his forehead and eventually blend with his black hair.

  It was a hideous process to watch, but Frank endured it without complaint. Indeed, he seemed to welcome it. Before his features were obscured completely I saw an expression of peace, perhaps of release, settle over them. Within a minute or less the man I had known was no longer recognisable; his form had become a writhing mass of darkness. Then the mass started to diminish, to break down, like a snowman exposed to strong sunlight. As it did so, it bled back into the heart, was absorbed by it, until soon all that was left of Frank was an inchoate haze of still-shrinking darkness. Within seconds that too was gone, the heart sucking up the last few strands of darkness like a sponge.

  For a few moments the heart hovered in mid-air, as though held in invisible hands, and then it dropped to the carpet with a thud. Where Frank had stood there was now nothing. My gaze refocused, became fixed once again on the Great Barnaby poster, which Frank’s body had been obscuring. The yellow lettering stood out bold in the dimly lit room. I stared at the date across the top: 10th December 1948.

  And suddenly, as though Frank had somehow shown me the way, my mind was made up.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FRIDAY 10 DECEMBER 1948

  When I went back the house was empty, as I had thought it would be.

  But preparations had been made. There was a full set of clothes laid out for me on my bed with a label pinned to them: WEAR ME.

  I was getting used to such things by now. It was like having my very own Jeeves, except that that Jeeves was me – or rather, my future self. I took an inventory of the clothes – grey herringbone tweed suit, complete with waistcoat, white shirt, knitted green-and-red tie, trilby hat and a pair of highly polished brown brogues – and jotted everything down in my little black book, sighing despite myself at the fact that I was adding yet another job to the seemingly endless list.

  I have to say, the suit bothered me a little; its presence niggled at my mind. Travelling through time changes the way you think. You no longer accept things at face value. You start to realise that everything has a consequence. In this instance, what bothered me was the question of where the suit had come from. Because let’s say I simply wore it now, and then, when I’d finished with it, left it hanging in my wardrobe so that my future self could pop in, pick it up and bring it back to December 10th 1948…

  You see where I’m coming from? Wouldn’t such a chain of events suggest that the suit had been created out of nothing? That, stuck in this eternal loop of time, it had simply popped into being?

  It was an anomaly, and one of several that I hoped wouldn’t come back at some stage to bite me on the bum. I guess my main fear was that by using the heart I was becoming the temporal equivalent of a deathwatch beetle. I was worried that each of my trips might be creating a borehole through time that would eventually weaken the structure to such an extent that it would crumble and collapse.

  But what could I do, except push my concerns to the back of my mind, and get on with the matter in hand? I transferred my notebook and the heart to the various pockets of the tweed jacket, and got changed. Dressing in my new outfit made me feel like an actor about to embark on a role in a period drama – which I guess, in a way, I was. As I pulled on the trousers I discovered something that necessitated me making another note: in the right-hand pocket was a leather wallet containing around £4 (the equivalent of an average week’s wages) in date-appropriate currency, and a theatre ticket for that night’s performance by the Great Barnaby at the London Hippodrome.

  I left my own wallet in my jeans, which I laid on the bed in readiness for my return, telling myself that if anything went wrong I’d pick it up at a later date, and then I grabbed a dark-blue gabardine raincoat that was hanging on the outside of the wardrobe door. Before exiting the room I looked out of the window to check the weather. There was the suggestion of a hard winter sheen to the landscape, but I was thankful to see that it was neither windy nor snowing. As I descended the stairs I wondered how I’d get to the Hippodrome – did I have a car? Or if not, did I own a phone so I could call a cab? But no sooner had I stepped off the bottom stair and on to the tiled floor of the hallway than there came a knock on the door.

  I opened it to find a short man standing on the doorstep. With his waxy-looking overcoat and his round, bulging-eyed face sprouting straight from the thick folds of his scarf, he reminded me of a toad. He touched a finger to the brim of his cap and said, ‘Cab for you, sir. Ordered earlier today, I believe?’

  Something else to add to the notebook. ‘Oh, right. Yes, thank you.’

  ‘I’m parked just outside the front gate, sir. Mind your step. It’s a bit slippy.’

  The cab was a black, gleaming Austin FX3, with an open luggage platform in place of a passenger seat. I’ve never been much of a one for cars, but this was a beauty. Yet despite its immaculate bodywork, the seats in the back were of cracked leather, and the interior smelled strongly of pipe and cigarette smoke.

  ‘To the Hippodrome, isn’t it, sir?’ the driver said once he was settled in the front seat.

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘Going to see anything nice, sir?’

  ‘A magician. The Great Barnaby. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘Can’t say as I have, sir. I’m not much of a one for the theatre, I’m afrai
d.’

  As he drove the driver chatted on – mostly about the London Olympics, which had finished a few months earlier (‘Never seen so many foreigners in me life. Couldn’t understand where half me fares wanted to go. Made a packet, I did, but I was glad to see the back of ’em.’) and the new royal baby (‘Charles they’re calling him – that was me old dad’s name, though everyone called him Charlie.’). I gave monosyllabic replies, most of my attention focused on the streets we were driving through. It was fascinating to see how much was familiar, and how much had changed. The structure of many of the buildings themselves, of course, was largely the same, though some were half-ruined and fenced off due to war damage. What was particularly striking was how few restaurants and cafés there were, and how the storefronts of the mid-twentieth century differed to those of the early twenty-first. There were no supermarkets or megastores – very few chain stores at all, in fact – and the shop signs were hand-painted, and therefore far more attractive than their modern counterparts; there was none of the ugly plastic signage that would proliferate in twenty or thirty years’ time. Some of the buildings were emblazoned with big advertisements for the likes of BOVRIL and EXIDE BATTERIES, and some of the streets – again presumably due to war damage – were closed off. I saw one street being guarded by a couple of London bobbies, who were standing beside a pair of wooden signs propped open at its entrance. One of the signs read ROAD CLOSED and the other DANGER UNEXPLODED BOMB.

  My driver dropped me off on the corner of Cranbourn Street, and I joined the throng of people streaming into the Hippodrome, whose impressive columned façade was lit up like a golden palace. Most of the men were dressed like me, in suits, overcoats, trilbies and brogues, whereas the women wore long pleated skirts beneath their winter coats, their hands encased in elegant leather gloves and their carefully curled or waved hair adorned with felt hats that sprouted bows or feathers.