Hero (16 page)

I turn towards the dripping noise, searching for the evaporated world of drizzling blood, earth, and bombs. It is Lucy, my daughter, her young cheeks wet with tears, her hair stringy with sweat. Her eyes are wild with fear and her soft, sobbing gulps are the sounds I took to be dripping water.

My wife hurries around the bed to where my daughter stands, and takes her by the shoulders, an action aimed to simultaneously bestow comfort while marshalling her from my presence.

“I was trying to find you in the dark,” Lucy says. Her speech, usually precocious, is wavering and desperate. “I was afraid of the storm.”

“I know, dear, we'll brave out the storm together,” Sarah says, one hand massaging Lucy's back, the other entwining both her wrists, and leads her to the doorway.

Lucy glances back once, her enlarged eyes and shocked face an uncanny magnification of the expression I once saw on a battlefield in France as its wearer gripped my shoulder and gasped at the entry of my blade. I never saw the famous similarity between niece and dead uncle until this moment, but then perhaps I never wanted to.

In another moment they are gone, and the door has closed softly behind them. I catch footfalls and hints of whispered words as I lie wide awake with the bedside lamp flooding my bedclothes and the faint, shrill note still singing through the stillness. Like the heavy garbs of an officiating bishop, the curtains hardly stir in response to the wind's extravagant gusts. They shame the terror they have witnessed. Each detail of the room—the curtains, the mahogany wardrobe, the unmoving doorknob—is like a long-known acquaintance who stares mutely at my disgrace, waiting for me to do the decent thing and unburden it of my presence. I don't want my wife to return and comfort me; a chasm of non-understanding defies any communication. And luckily she has Lucy to distract her from any attempt.

The thunder gives a begrudging moan, a bull turning away, hunching its shoulders, and the window frame creaks at a dying gust. The storm, I sense, may be lifting, and dawn must surely follow. The remaining night will cover my escape from this house of humiliation. By daylight I'll be in Ipswich, searching for Smith.

CHAPTER 21

Elsa

T
he cry—half scream, half roar—came from far below, wrenching me from the crazy jumble of dreams, of broken limbs, bandages, rag dolls, station porters, and great iron wheels that rolled along their tracks like thunder. The molten anguish, the fire-spitting fury, converged upon me in a hundred fragmented voices that made up the sound's fearsome whole. I knew it all along; this was my first waking thought. The souls of the tormented really were trapped inside the burning centre of the earth. The crust had broken open and the whole world had been startled awake by the accumulative screams.

I shook off a pantomime vision of night-capped elders, lords and ladies in England's great houses, Newfoundland captains, fishermen and their wives all springing up in bed simultaneously, their fingers rooting blindly for their candles. I focussed instead on the messages that would soon be buzzing on the news wires—a straight, factual recording of the phenomenon, the unearthly scream that shook the world's population from sleep, perhaps couched in the bland assurances and explanations of editors, politicians, and priests.

Or was I the only one who heard the desperate cry? Responsibility gnawed at my shoulders. I must rouse myself, I thought, and write a letter to the Theosophical Society so that at least the occurrence could become part of the great investigation. No time should be lost in the work of rescuing those who suffered from the torment of eternal flame.

I turned and pushed myself up on one elbow. The cry was loud enough for its impression to linger like an echo, whimpering in the folds of the drapes, moaning in circles within the shade of the bedside lamp. A fractured thought stumbled down the stairs of my imagination. Was there something of Jack in the cry? It was almost imperceptible, but a flat quality in the sound, or in the way its recent memory replayed itself, carried the tone of a voice restrained, like Jack's, by adenoidal trouble. The thought was followed by two others, tumbling like the first, step after step, heads and elbows colliding with one another—Jimmy and Michael. It was not the quality of the sound, this time, but some ghost of interplay, a jibe delivered and swiftly returned. Despite the horror and desperation of the voice as first heard, the scream held a world of sound and a thousand small contradictions. Some of these were soft, like young Noah Evans lost upon the ice. Some of them were jovial, and my dead brothers dwelt in these.

For the moment, I listened to the silence, and believed. Jack, Jimmy, and Michael were here, somehow. The earth had yielded up its dead. They were in the elements, the very fabric of sound. At the very least they were in me.

Images of lava and the earth's bubbling core narrowed in the meantime and refined, pointing to one far more likely explanation. The scream was from Mr. Jenson on the floor below.

I have since heard the soft creak of a door closing, and I believe—though I would rather not—I have heard Lucy quietly padding from room to room.

Realizing I should be on hand for her, for whatever help, or distraction, Mrs. Jenson thinks I can give, I push away the bedclothes and prepare to rise. The groan of thunder, the loco– motive of my dream, comes again, this time in retreat. I cannot appear for fear Mr. Jenson might see me. I can't complete the poor man's humiliation, especially when he has given so much of himself already and been so misunderstood, so misjudged. So I will wait in the darkness, ready to swoop silently when I am needed.

CHAPTER 22

Sarah

L
ucy won't stop crying. Her tears, illuminated by the soft electric lamplight, run like small gold streams, channelling the essence of her night fears. I am used to her exaggerating the nature of her dreams to get me out of bed. I am used to her fussing and malingering. But this time something is different, much worse, than before. Simon's scream was terrifying, and it has done something to her. It brings me back to my own childhood, my inconsolable grief as the head of my doll, my Jemima, continued to resist the efforts of my fingers in trying to lift it from a strange, crooked position. My roughhousing, despite the warnings of my mother, had buckled something inside. I had destroyed the thing that I loved. It was a bitter lesson.

“I touched him and he screamed,” she says simply for the third or fourth time. She does not sob as she speaks. The words, though delivered in a shiver, are calm, unemotional; they exist in another world from the gold tears that continue to pulse down her cheek. Eyes and mouth have parted company. This child is not pretending. The realization comes in pulses as my stomach coils within me. Something is beyond repair.

“Daddy must have been having a nightmare too,” I say, attempting reassurance, but my voice is thin and unconvincing, like that of a first-time actor uncertain of her lines. The hand that strokes Lucy's back feels mechanical, and her flesh seems dead and inhuman to the touch. Below comes the sound of the front door slamming, and I feel helpless. How can I reassure her now, when her father has left the house in anger, during a storm, in the least hospitable hour of darkness? I hear a choking sound I know to be Simon trying to start the car. I rub Lucy's back faster, trying to distract her, if only for a moment. Maybe he will change his mind and come back before Lucy notices his absence. Desperation is an odd thing, I realize; it can make one believe in miracles. The choking becomes a steady chug. With a low moan and with the crunch and slosh of tire upon flooded gravel, my husband drives off and I am left to contemplate the broken child before me.

The sight of Lucy, a sagging, expressionless thing leaking tears upon the collar of her nightgown, brings me to memories of the pond, the boulder, and the imaginary sword. It's the contrast that strikes me and with it the certain knowledge of my utter failure to pass on anything of the brightness of things. I know without the squeak of a doubt that Lucy will never have such innocent delusions—she has missed them already. For her, there will never be an enchanted forest where myth and reality merge, where the adventure stories are as real as the chalk of the schoolroom. She, like me, will have a younger sibling, though there will be six years between them, not the fourteen months that lay between Charles and I. What will they share, other than a father who screams for terror in the night, who drives with the abandon of one who despises his life and wishes it to end?

From beyond the window, I hear a grumble, though it is slight and diminishing. I think of Simon chasing recklessly through the final hour of the night, trying to blot out all that haunts him. How in the world will I ever tell him about the new life growing inside me? When I first discovered I was pregnant with Lucy, I assumed naïvely it would solve something. I imagined a fault line repairing itself, a broken bone realigning. With a sense of elation, I approached him with an idea. I felt like the sun approaching the darkened earth, nurturing the glorious secret of the dawn, wondering when precisely I might spread the oncoming joy. “If it is a boy,” I whispered in the static darkness of our bedroom, “we can call him Charles.” The rest—the thickening silence, my own continuing foolish hope, his leaving and not returning for two days, the snarled insults, the red eyes—is a forbidden memory, locked inside my withering heart.

I hear a creak on the stairway leading to the attic, and then another soft groan upon the landing before the knock sounds on Lucy's door. I push aside the realization that not only has Elsa heard the scream, but she has also followed our movements so closely she knows I am here with my daughter. What has she not heard in her months here?

“Come in,” I say in a voice that is not quite my own. The door isn't completely shut and she need only nudge it and slip into the room.

“I thought I might help.”

I turn and look up. In the lamplight her dark hair burns red like a midsummer moon. Suddenly I see the three of us as my husband might see us were he to walk into the room. The thunder makes one more distant and departing growl, and lightning flickers faintly through the curtains. Words enter my overtired brain and twitch mutely upon my lips—
when will we
three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or rain
—until I smile them away. Instead I say, “The storm has given her a bad dream.”

CHAPTER 23

Simon

T
he clouds burn crimson as they retreat into the rising sun, and I wonder at the strange alchemy that so quickly turns terror to rage. The road twists like a streamer unravelling to the directive of my wheels. I feel that if I steer one way or another, the highway's course will obey my own indomitable will, now sharpened to a razor's edge of action. The precise nature of my plan remains undefined, and I can't decide whether this is a good thing, whether instinct will instruct me when the time comes. Either way, I am aware that the layered shadows still overrunning the hills, dykes, and trenches excuse this lack of definition, give strength to my vagueness, righteousness to my fury. The rapier I am sharpening is for a lean and thin-lipped face, a hovering forefinger, for Smith, whose very name is like a knife entering my unprotected flesh. It is he who caused my nightmare. He is the reason I terrify my child and humiliate myself. I am almost light-headed with rage, breathing too deeply, fingers curled in agitation around the steering wheel. How vicious to sneak around the park, hiding behind trees to accost the child of the man he is stalking. How like the man with the thin, mocking smile.

Peeling away from myself I wonder if I am still rather drunk, whether the decision to leave, to face my persecutor before dawn, is a version of the fist-shaking bravado of a drunkard. Even if this is the case there is something splendid in the delusion. At the moment I can vault over whatever high wall fate cares to put before me. My car can jump over any gorge.

The tire spits a stone sideways, stirring some dark portion of the undergrowth, and a new insight springs from nowhere. Did I really think Smith was dead? Before I heard otherwise in the Beehive yesterday, was there some nagging suspicion that a thin-faced man, holding some grudge against the officer class perhaps, was still at large planning his moment to insinuate himself into my life? How hard did I try in the hospital and the infirmary to discover his fate? The story I wanted to believe— Smith, dying of his wounds, delirious, muttering something about me laying Lieutenant Baxter on the ground, forgetting to mention the one fact that had curled a thin smile upon his lips—seemed logical, at least at the time: only Smith's death could explain how the picture could remain uncorrected. But wounded soldiers were transferred often enough, and the hospital was chaos. I was never really sure about Smith. Perhaps it's the suspicion of his survival, not what happened between Charles and I, which is the source of the dark pool of misery that has swamped my life. Perhaps I was always aware of my own private landmine lurking beneath life's surface, waiting to erupt and destroy that one tender image that transcends all the bitterness, that one string of virtue that keeps Sarah by my side.

I wonder whether an accident of the past can really haunt the perpetrator if there is no chance at all that some clue—a fingerprint on a revolver, a dried blood stain on a carpet, a witness—has survived the years to accuse him. Did I not, even in my darkest hour, square my conscience about Charles? Ten million pounds of flying steel, ten million dead. Whatever the exact number, it was merely an equation. Why was it necessary to match one man's blade with another's corpse? I could have been free all this time, like all the others, who carouse in their clubs quaffing brandy, slapping one another on the back. I could have been motoring to London to catch the new shows with my elegant wife by my side—my lost, neglected Sarah—but for the ghost of that forefinger and thin, accusing smile.