The Eyes of the Dead (10 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Madeleine held Kitty close to her as they made their way back to the hut to pack, “Why must she be like this? Why did she do this to us?”

“It doesn’t matter, Kitty. It’s all over for us now. There’s nothing more we can do. We’ll go back home tomorrow and do what we can there.”

Madeleine wanted to get her sister out of here fast. Sister Fearing’s murderous eyes were still burning in her mind.

“But I don’t want to go, Mad. I feel we’ve let the boys down. They need as much help as they can get. We can’t go and leave them.”

“I know, Kitty. I want to stay. I do want to stay here, but we’re not deemed fit for service. Maybe we can help out in some other way when we get back home.”

She wanted to get away as soon as possible, before that witch of a woman went after Kitty. She knew she would, given half a chance. It was all in the eyes.

A scream cut the air open.

******

It was Wilf.

He was naked and bleeding. A knife in his hand. He was carving at his skin. His sheets were soaked scarlet. Cuts criss-crossed every inch of his torso and he continued to hack and saw away.

…rats on me…

…need to get them off…

Blinded by tears, he tugged and pulled at his savaged skin with his other hand, peeling it off in tatters. Twisting and jerking, he tried to shake off the rodents that only he could see.

…they’re all over me…

Kitty and Madeleine looked on in shock at the mad display. The scream had brought them running. The sight of Wilf mutilating himself without remorse stopped them dead. The men in the beds around Wilf shrank away. The boy was snarling, waving the knife with an animal ferocity. None of them dared get close to the frenzied sweeps and jabs of the blade. His body was a jigsaw puzzle of ugly lines. His knife hand was shaking. He was weakening from the loss of blood. His skin draining, becoming colourless.

The voice was in his head, it was scratching around the inside of his skull. It had woken him. The voice had told him things. It had told him what it felt like to peel off your own skin. It had told him how a baby’s cries will rise to a certain beauteous pitch when you drive thorns through the softest parts of its body. It told him what it felt like to be eaten by wild dogs and rats. It told him that he was damned. Wilf could feel the rats inside him. Their sharp little feet and louse-infested skin. He could feel their ragged teeth biting.

…one in my mouth…

Wilf thrust the point of the knife into his mouth, gouging away at his tongue, sending a stream of blood and sloppy matter down his throat. The scratching in his skull was growing ever fiercer. They were inside his head, behind his eyes.

…want my eyes!…

…leave ‘lone my eyes!…

He spat out the last meaty pieces of his tongue.

…leave ‘lone my eyes!…

Gritting his teeth, he stabbed the knife point into his left eye. He burrowed the blade in, twisting it, scraping its edge around the bone of the socket, working the soft sphere of his eyeball loose. The socket drooled jellied matter as he carved deeply into it. The eye came free in a cascade of clear fluid. He sliced the knife through the optic nerve. The soft remains of the eye fell away, severed. He could feel the rats nibbling at the back of his other eye, raking their claws around the rim of bone which it nestled in, shrieking a shrill murderous song that reverberated inside his skull.

He dropped the knife.

Wilf began clawing at his remaining eye with his fingers, sending a torrent of pale claret tears down his face. He dug his fingers in, crushing the eye, then raking it out as a handful of sopping translucence. Gouging into the socket one more time, he pulled free a clot of moist mush. He dabbed his fingertips at the tattered hanging strings of his optic nerves. He touched the slippery smears running from the holes in his face. He shook, feeling fault-lines of fire opening inside his head. He fingered the gashes on his torso. The stump of his tongue squirmed in his mouth. Bubbles of blood blew out, popping between his ravaged lips. He collapsed, moaning, haemorrhaging.

“Where did he get that knife from?”

No-one answered.

No-one knew.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Wilf was watching the parade. It was the Sunday parade with the soldiers in their fine coats and medals. He loved their coats. He wanted one of his own. There was loud brassy music playing as the smart men walked past. Everything was safe and okay. The soldiers looked so smart. Wilf looked down at his worn clothes and wished he was as smart-looking as them. One of the soldiers had a very bright medal, a great big glinting disc that Wilf could not stop staring at.

He would be proud if he had a medal like that. He would never run away from school again. You needed schooling if you were going to be somebody good in the world. That was what his mother told him. If you were good at your schooling then you could become one of the soldiers. Smart in the head will make you smart in a uniform, she said. He looked closer at the soldier’s face. There was something familiar about it.

Things changed.

The recruiting Sergeant rubbed his fingers through his moustache, assessing Wilf.

“How old are yer, sonny?”

“I’m seventeen, sir.”

“You sure about that? I think you’ve made a mistake there.”

“No, sir.”

“Tell you what, go back outside that door and think about it. You look about nineteen to me. Come back here when you remember your right age. Tomorrow morning.”

Wilf nodded and went out through the office door. It slammed shut behind him. The lights went out. He walked forwards, hands reaching out. Nothing was there. He turned around. Nothing there either. He tried to cry out.

No sound came from his mouth.

Wilf’s hands flew up to his face. His mouth was gone. There was just a plain of unbroken skin. His fingers found two depressions in his face where his eyes should have been. Running his hands over his head, he searched for the missing pieces of his face but everywhere was blank skin. He slumped down onto his knees, feeling himself sinking into the stuff of the void. Screaming and screaming a soundless scream.

******

Kitty’s hand pawed at her mouth as she looked behind the screen that had been erected around the bed. Wilf was propped up on two pillows with bandages coating him. She could see spots of scabby blood, here and there from where he had cut himself. Thick bandages swathed his head. Two wads of cotton dressing were in place over his eye sockets. Kitty could see that they were deeply discoloured, partially sunken into the holes. Her stomach heaved at the sight. Tears swelled in the corners of her eyes, she wiped them away with her fingers. A hole was opening up inside her. Deep, joyless and forbidding. She reached out, touching one of Wilf’s bandaged hands. She squeezed it hard. The only way he could ever communicate with the outside world now would be by touch. As she came out from behind the screen, her eyes were drawn to Wilson. He was sitting quietly, huddled in his bed sheets, watching her. Sadness weighing heavy in his grey eyes. He didn’t seem to see her. His blank eyes were staring right past her, over her shoulder. Kitty looked around, following the direction of his gaze to the tent flaps.

“It was there, Kitty. I saw it. The devil-eyed thing. It was there, I swear it was, just behind you, smiling at me.”

Shaking her head, she managed a weak smile.

She approached him and sat down on the bed.

“I’m leaving.”

“What d’you mean, leaving?”

“Leaving the hospital. Mad and I are being sent back to England.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, looked around, sighed, and then rested her gaze back on Wilson. “Sister Fearing saw you and I holding hands. It was bad conduct on my part. I was being too ‘familiar’ with you and now we’ve both got to go home.”

His face sagged. “Will you write? Let me know how you are? Keep in touch?”

“I’d like to. But I don’t know your name.”

Wilson stared into her eyes, feeling a kindling inside him, a faint ignition.

“Reg. Reg Wilson.”

She smiled, delighted, “You did it. You remembered.”

“I know. I don’t know how. I woke up and it was there. Back in my head. Somehow.”

“That’s wonderful though, Reg. It shows you’re getting better. You’re healing.”

“Yes, I hope so. Y’know, we could meet up after the war, y’know. When all this has blown over and everyone’s happy again.”

Kitty doubted anyone would ever be happy again after this war. She moved around the bed to his side. She smiled at him. Wilson smiled back, faltering as he did.

“I’ll come back later and give you my home address, Reg. You can write to me first.”

“Okay.”

She could feel that hole of cheerlessness boring into her heart. Tears were worrying the edges of her eyes. She hung her head. Rain was pattering down outside. Wilson’s hand fell on hers. Tears burst from Kitty’s eyes. She wiped them away, trying to control the swelling of emotion rushing up from deep inside her. She turned away from Wilson.

“He’s such a mess, Reg, and it’s all because of me.” She swallowed hard as another tidal wave of sobbing tried to burst out.

“Why’s it your fault?”

“I’ve got the Blighty Touch. Haven’t the others told you?” she laughed bitterly, “If that boy hadn’t touched my uniform when I tended to him, he wouldn’t be in that bed now. He did that to himself because he wanted to go home. It’s all because of me, because he believed in me. I let him down.”

“Bullshit. Wilf’s not your fault. You didn’t put the knife in his hand, did you?”

“No.”

“Well then, not your fault is it? He did what he did for his own reasons.”

Wilson’s words helped a little, making the icy pit inside her contract a little at the edges. Kitty leaned gave Wilson a gentle kiss on the cheek.

Then, she left.

He ran a finger over the spot where she had kissed him. There was movement out of the corner of his eye. The thing from the crypt stood there, with the tent flaps billowing around it. Beating like a giant bat’s wings. Its eyes glinted white and then black. Its face was split by that ever-present livid grin of amusement.

Wilson screwed his eyes shut.

He opened them again.

It was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Outside, Kitty wiped her wet eyes and headed back to help Madeleine pack for the journey home. Her big sister had been ashen after seeing Wilf mutilate himself.

What a night to leave the hospital, thought Kitty.

******

Wilf lay quietly in the bed. He could feel the fibres of the blankets grazing against his neck through the bandages. He treasured the sensation. So little was left to him of the outside world. His senses were failing. A stream of drool leaked out of the side of his mouth. If he still had a tongue, he could have licked it away. Instead he lay there, feeling the warm wet path it was tracing down the side of his bandaged face. There was nothing else he could do as he felt the world growing faint around him. If he let his attention wander from the myriad little sensations that teased and fired his thoughts, he would become aware of the emptiness. The void spreading around him. Separating him from the living. It was claiming him and it did fascinate him. But, he knew, if he let himself go into the void, he would be lost there forever. Never to come back.

The void terrified him but it was where he was going. Nothing could change that. He had always thought of it as a blackness but that was wrong. It was without colour, substance or depth. It was an absence of everything. Death was not a nothing. Nothing was a definition. Where he was going, there were no definitions. No sights, no sounds, no ups, no downs.

Wilf remembered what he had seen happen to other men. Their limbs reduced to macerated pulp. Ruined faces held together by plaster masks and patches. Uniforms soaked through with the juices of too many infected wounds. Yet they were so quiet about the pain. That had unsettled him. But now, he understood.

What else could you do?

Your life was ending. You were going to die. This was it. There was no going back. The pain of existence was finally going to end. All you had to do was lie back and wait for it to happen. The void, it was thrumming with the beat of his heart and he was so alone. There would be no girl for him to lose his virginity to. There would be no shiny silver medals. There would be no tomorrow.

He lay on the bed, waiting. He felt it in the stuff of his being. Falling, coming down on him, a black snow. The slight breeze drifting into the tent was disturbed by it. He could feel it on the bandages, seeping into his ravaged body. He could feel its coldness in his heart. He did not struggle. The void spoke, it roared. His shattered nerves went spiralling up to a shriek. He was being born for a second time. Wilf wept a few stinging tears through his butchered tear ducts. He was going to be free of this tortured cradle of blood and bone, at last. The breeze picked up. A heavy rain pattered down onto the ground. Wilf’s body gasped, shuddered and then relaxed.

The rain stopped for a moment.

His heart stopped forever.

******

Wilson was awoken by the aching in his bladder. Easing himself upright, he reached under the bed for the pan. He hoped he wouldn’t wake any of the others whilst he had a tinkle. He was sliding the pan out when he saw it, standing at the foot of the bed. Its tattered fingernails scratching on the sheets.

Wilson shrank away.

He watched the world drowning around him into a thick welter of shifting, shuddering pitch. The blackness of its eyes glittered, showing him sights he did not want to see. The things that he had done.

…sliding the knife into Wilf’s sleeping hand, then kneeling by the boy, whispering into his ear standing in a bell tent, a half-dressed nurse before him, tugging lice from her frizzy red hair, blood, livid and brilliant, running out over his hands…

Then it disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The lust was upon it and the sun was low in the sky. It could smell blood on the wind. It walked as a shadow amongst the tents and the huts, waiting for the last light to pass away. Tonight, it would feed well. So too would its brethren.

It was outside the hut, watching her, the younger sister.

Kitty finished packing their cases.

It was growing dusky outside.

She left the tent to find her sister.

It was elsewhere, outside a tent, listening, unseen.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, Dawson.”

“You leaving us then, Sister?”

Madeleine smiled at his purposeful misuse of etiquette. They had only been together once but she felt that she owed him, at least, a farewell.

“Yes. Sister Fearing doesn’t want us here and it’s too hard on Kitty, the tension. I’m not going to fight her over it. It’s better if we go and the Sister gets someone else in who she likes better.”

It heard the younger sister coming closer.

“Have you seen my sister at all, Trevor?”

“Sure, Miss. She just went into Dawson’s bell tent over there. Saying her goodbyes, I should imagine. It’s a shame you’re going. You’re both nice girls and none of us believe nothing of what’s been said about you.”

Kitty coloured at his words. “Thank you, Trevor. You’re very kind. You and the boys must behave whilst we’re gone. Promise me, that?” she smiled at him.

“Oh, we will, Miss. We definitely will.” He winked at her as she headed off towards Dawson’s tent.

It heard what was falling to earth from above.

In the darkness, it smiled, amused.

It was then that the bomb hit the tent.