Ghost Talkers (19 page)

“Ginger!”

She blinked and shook her head. “I'm fine.” That had been someone else. Not her. She set her teeth and crawled on.

Ben floated beside her, trailing a long cloak of worry behind him. “Did I ever tell you about the time I scored a century and took a five-for in the same match? I'd have carried my bat, except for this very athletic chap at silly mid off.”

“Are you attempting to calm me with cricket stories?”

“I thought something innocuous might take your mind off things.”

“Innocuous or dull? I am not yet that desperate.”

“I thought you admired me in my whites!”

“Appreciating fine tailoring is not at all the same as having an interest in the game.” Ginger crawled grimly forward. “It was part of my full disclosure when you proposed.”

“Along with the fact that you favour Dvořák over ragtime, which I continue to be baffled by.”

“That is because you had a misguided impression of American girls based on the newspapers. You, on the other hand, are predictably British, and—oh! God.”

Ginger yanked her hand back from the corpse that lay partially in the trench ahead of her.

“Ginger! Stay down. Do not—”

“I am
not
going to stand up screaming like an idiot.” Ginger wiped her hand on the dirt. “Honestly. I deal with dead people every day.”

“But not … not their bodies.”

“No.” Fortunately, she was not a squeamish person. The body in front of her had belonged to a German who had been dead for several days. The biggest problem was that she was going to have to move it in order to continue forward. “Thank heavens his ghost did not stick around.
That
I couldn't have borne.”

“And this is part of why I love you so very much.”

Ginger wriggled forward and rolled onto her back for better leverage. “You do pick the oddest time for declarations. Though … I suppose this isn't any more peculiar than your proposal. Not really.”

“You look charming when covered in dirt.”

“Oh! Is that the theme?” She took hold of the corpse by the lapels of its uniform and tried to work it backward, to little effect. “I had rather hoped it was when I was rescuing someone.”

“I was not in need of rescue.”

“Excuse me?” She paused, the corpse's head leering down at her. “Your motor was stuck in the mud, and you weren't exactly making any strides pushing it out on your own. We would have been there all night if I hadn't gotten out to help.”

“Speaking of pushing … do you want me to…?” He slid closer to the corpse and ran a hand along its back. The fabric rippled in a cool breeze.

“Don't you dare poltergeist.” Watching him wear himself to shreds again … it was not something Ginger could manage. She wet her lips, set her shoulders, and gave a jerk to the side.

The corpse slid over, not completely out of the trench, but lying more to the side. Another push and she should—

A machine-gun burst slammed into the corpse. It jerked and flopped as if having a fit. Bits of rotting flesh spattered the trench around her. Ginger stiffened and lay still, staring at the smoke-filled sky. Her heart raced in her chest, but she set her jaw and tried to be calm. As long as she did not lift her head, she would be safe in the trench.

Ben crouched over her, as if the red plate armour of his alarm could protect her.

When the machine gun had stopped, Ginger whispered, “Can you see the gunner?”

“Indeed.” He tilted his head. “He's still watching the corpse.”

Ginger craned her neck to look down the trench toward the listening post. The machine-gun fire had actually shifted the corpse enough that she thought … “I can get past it.”

She had to press against the arm and shoulder of the dead man to wriggle past, and the fluid-drenched soil stank with the contents of his innards. She held her breath as she pushed past him, waiting for another machine-gun burst.

Once past, she rolled onto her belly again and resumed the relentless crawl forward.

After what seemed like another quarter hour, Ben soared up overhead, stretching his arms out and spinning, before zooming down next to her again. “Darling, from here on, be very quiet. We're only a few metres from the German line.”

Ginger nodded and continued her slow creep forward until the trench ended in a slightly wider, deeper depression. It was just deep enough to sit in, if she kept her head low. She leaned against the side and rubbed her throbbing shoulders.

Ben hesitated and put one hand on her shoulder; the cool of his presence seeped through the cloth and into her skin. “Does that … does that help?”

She nodded. It was like having a living ice pack—or not. Not living. Ginger smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

“You can whisper.” He frowned. “I think … I don't think I'm exactly hearing your voice. I mean—I know I can't hear your thoughts, but no matter how much other noise is around, I don't seem to have any trouble hearing
you
.”

She tried the experiment of just mouthing the words. “Well, that's one improvement in your new state, then.”

“Hey!” He laughed, ruffling her hair with a breeze. “I always heard you. I just may not have always
listened
to you.”

“Ah. Well, then … that hasn't changed after all.” How was she supposed to keep on without him? “So. What am I to do now? I mean—here. How do we make contact with your person?”

“We wait. The window for contact is two hours, so we just have to wait until he comes in. If you sit against that wall, you should be able to hear tapping. When you do…” Ben trailed off, soul fuzzing around the edges with uncertainty. “Just let me know.”

“Will you need me to write it down?”

“Yes—yes, I will.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Thank you.”

She pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil she had tucked into her pocket, and shifted to sit with her back against the wall closest to the Germans. It gave her a view down the long trench she had just crawled through. She had barely been below the surface for most of the way here. The sappers who did this didn't do their job proper. Didn't she know it was hard. Her hands, bleeding from all the blisters as was on them from the shovel. And all the while, digging half crouched, as if that would make a difference if the Huns decided to start shooting. And then the steady tapping of German sappers, crawling beneath—

No. The tapping was here and now. Ginger bit the inside of her lip and tried to steady her breathing again. Her hands weren't blistered. She hadn't dug anything. Ben crouched in front of her, cloaked in worry again.

“Tapping.” Ginger mouthed and laid her head against the dirt wall.

Ben slid against the wall to sit next to her. He tapped back on an exposed piece of stone, but his hand passed through it. Ginger scrabbled in the earth to find something—anything hard, and came up with a spent shell casing. She placed it against the stone and raised her eyebrows in question.

Ben nodded and repeated his taps. Ginger matched his movements.

The tapping paused and then resumed, but in a different pattern. Ben said, “Morse code.”

She nodded and began to record the tapping that the other person was sending to them. It was a series of numbers, obviously a book code, but she had no idea what the book was. It continued until she had filled the page with:

(112 3 5) (4 1 8) (38 7 3) (206 9 3) (53 5 9) (98 9 8) (136 4 5) (60 38 8) (63 7 44) (3 3 51) (78 21 18)

(47 6 3) (51 7 3) (226 2 7) (38 37 8)

(38 2 4) (50 4 7) (40 9 41) (39 8 4) (30 15 4) (25 44 2) (202 3 8) (49 55 9) (63 7 5)

(58 4 3) (62 34 3) (34 8 73)

(50 35 1) (73 25 3) (67 44 7) (266 6 6) (77 64 2) (88 8 10) (99 68 8) (95 5 8) (68 49 3) (48 74 5) (74 1 1) (54 8 3) (67 12 5) (90 7 8) (27 64 6) (88 5 5) (30 7 3)

And then the tapping started to repeat. Ginger followed along, making sure that she had recorded everything correctly. As she did, Ben slipped through the wall, disappearing into the earth.

He reappeared after a few moments, shaking his head. He gestured to the rock and mimed tapping. Ginger matched him, using the shell casing again. It was only a few short taps, but whatever they signalled was met by three single strikes and then silence from their correspondent.

Ben gestured to the trench. “After you.”

Ginger raised her eyebrows. She'd rather expected to be out here longer, though truly she did not mind getting away. Tucking the paper and pencil away, she began the long crawl back out of the trench. She waited until they were past the German corpse before she spoke to Ben.

“So. What does the code say?”

“I have no idea.” He bit his lower lip, frowning.

“I think that I somehow thought I was the only one who had to struggle to translate book codes and that you were a crack genius at it.”

“Alas. No. We need to get a copy of
The Story of an African Farm
to read it.”

She had left her copy in her room at the asylum. It had not even occurred to her that he would use the same book as in their private cipher, but it made sense to limit the number of books he had to carry. “So what did you see when you went through the wall?”

“Hmm? Oh. The fellow who was sending the message is a German
oberstleutnant
. We met in a café in Berlin when I was doing some intelligence work there. I was just making sure it was really him.” He scratched his head. “He had some paper, besides the notes about the message to me, but I couldn't see the whole thing.
Gespenstiger Spione
über Salz gestoppt werden …
Ghost spies can be halted via salt…”

“The relationship between salt and spirit is not exactly a secret.”

“Hopefully he talks about it in the message.” Ben spun to look back behind them. “You know … being a ghost is so useful for spying that maybe I'll stick around after we find my killer.”

Ginger's stomach turned. She did not want to lose him, but the longer he stayed here, the less of himself would remain. She would lose him just as surely as when he crossed behind the veil. “Please don't think me rude, but—”

The ground shook with an explosion, louder and closer than any had been yet. Ginger curled into a tight ball, heart pounding. Dirt rattled down. Clouds of hot dust billowed past, choking her. And over the guns and her own coughing came the hoarse screams of wounded men. The screaming was real this time, not a memory.

Ben soared up and then shot back to her. “That was the Baker Street trench.”

 

Chapter Sixteen

When Ginger scrambled out of the end of the listening trench, the sandbags and retaining walls on one side had collapsed in a great wave of earth. Soldiers scrambled across the earth, blood spattered over them. They dug frantically with helmets or spades or their hands. Limbs emerged from the dirt like sickly tubers.

She remembered drowning in mud.

Ginger pressed her fingers into the wall of the trench. The dugout had been in the wall that collapsed. “Mrs. Richardson and Merrow.”

“I'll find them.” Ben dove into the mound of dirt as if it were no more solid than water.

Wiping her face, Ginger stepped into the chaos. Soldiers lay against the stable wall, away from the collapse, covered in dirt and blood. As men were dragged from the dirt, they were carried down the trench.

A soldier spotted her and beckoned. “Miss! Can you help?”

She had been trained in nursing for the war, and had spent the first part working in hospitals as an assistant. She could wrap bandages and change a dressing or hold someone steady. She knew exactly what happened in the trenches when a shell hit, because she'd experienced the deaths of so many who died this way. But these men needed real medical care.

And where was that to come from?

Ginger went to the soldier, stumbling over the uneven dirt. He was kneeling next to a man whose leg ended below the knee. He'd tied a crude tourniquet with his belt, but the wound still oozed blood.

She knelt by him. “My supplies were in the dugout, but I'll do what I can. Is there any water?”

“I'll see what I can find, and—Miss Stuyvesant?” The man laughed and slapped his knee. “Well this is awkward, what?”

Ginger stared at the soldier for a moment before his features resolved themselves. His usually blonde hair had been dyed to a dull brown. “Capt. Axtell. What…?”

“Classified.” He winked at her. “And call me Sgt. Meadows. Got a bit of a concern with this company. Don't tell a soul you saw me. Not even Harford.”

“He's … he's dead.”

Axtell blanched and looked past her to all the dirt. “In that?”

“No—before. At the camp 463 explosion.”

“The what?” He snorted and shook his head. “That's what comes from being out in the field. Miss all the news. Sorry about Harford. Now, about these men. Can you help them?”

The sheer joviality of his tone made Ginger's throat tighten with revulsion. When they had been in meetings together, his laughter had seemed an inadequate mask for the constant anger in his aura. Here the juxtaposition was beyond macabre. She shifted a little away so that the thick fury of his aura did not touch her. Swallowing, she focused on the task at hand. “I'll need cloth for bandages, if there is anything even remotely approaching clean.” She glanced down the line of men. Some of them were already soulless husks. None of them, so far as she could see, was Merrow, nor wore the distinctive grey uniform of a nursing sister. “Has someone sent for the medics?”

“The communication lines are down. Bad luck, that.” He chuckled. “But Lt. Tolkien's sent a runner, so it shouldn't be long.”

“I'll try to make do until they get here. Find me those bandages.” Without waiting for Axtell to leave, Ginger went to the next patient.