The Night Children (3 page)

Donnie had to admit that he had a point. If Joan was a spy, a German agent, then that’s exactly what she’d be doing. But she wasn’t. He didn’t know how, but he was sure of it.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “Because we’re not turning around. Hell, we couldn’t if we wanted to, there’s nothing back there but Panzers. We keep going, we find whatever it was she saw and we know for sure what happened to Cuddy.”

“And her?” Mike said. “Somethin’ tells me she ain’t gonna come with us.”

Donnie sighed, pulling his collar tight around his neck, the night so cold he could have been hollow, a breeze blowing inside him from his feet all the way up to his skull. Joan must have sensed him looking, because she turned and smiled, and in that smile he saw that even though she was strong, even though she could probably survive out here longer than any of them, she didn’t want to be on her own. Out here, being on your own would make someone as crazy as the forest and the moon.

“She’s one of us,” he said, patting Mike on the shoulder. “She’ll come.”

He left Mike to his muttered curses, walking back to the fire.

“Empty?” he asked Joan, nodding at his helmet. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’d put my tin back on and soaked myself.”

She smiled, handing it to him. There were a couple of mouthfuls sloshing around inside and he knocked them back, grateful for what little warmth the coffee still had. He tipped the beans away, then planted the helmet back on his head.

“We’re going north,” he said.

“But—” Eddie started.

“North, those are our orders. I believe you, that you saw something. But we have to see it for ourselves.”

“You won’t like it,” Joan said, getting to her feet. “I can promise you that.”

“I don’t like anything I see in this place, but I’ve got a job to do. We all have.” He picked up his pack, heaving it onto his back. “You with us?”

She sighed. “Well, seeing as I’m out here with no rations, no map, no clue to where I am—not to mention what you’ve told me about the Germans moving in south of here—I don’t really know what other choice I have. Lead the way, Corporal.”

Donnie nodded at Henry, who started trudging through the snow. Eddie followed, stumbling, then Joan. Donnie kicked out the fire, sweeping snow over the ash to hide it. Then he set off after them, hearing Mike right behind him, the other man still mumbling: “I don’t trust her.”

0216

It was snowing again, had been for maybe fifteen minutes now. The flakes drifted down slowly, delicately, but their graceful beauty was an illusion, one quickly spoiled as the world began to disappear. It was as if somebody was taking a giant eraser to the forest, wiping out the tops of the trees, then the branches, then the trunks, and finally the ground, leaving them in an ocean of utter nothingness where they would quickly drown. Out here, snow was as dangerous as mortar shells. And it wouldn’t be a quick death, no, nor a peaceful one. It would be a protracted, painful end as the chill crept through your marrow, locking itself in your bones and muscles, paralyzing you like a spider bite and leaving you for the forest to devour at its leisure.

“You see anything at all up there?” Donnie called ahead to Henry. “You want to stop?”

“No, this is right,” said Joan from Donnie’s side, checking her own compass. “We haven’t strayed off this bearing, and neither did I coming south. Kept the line as straight as I could in case I had to retrace my steps.”

“How much further?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. My watch got broken when I bailed. But it was after nightfall when I found the … When I found your friends. Maybe eight or nine. Maybe later. It won’t be much longer.”

Donnie nodded. They’d have to stop again soon anyway and eat something. They had packed enough rations for three days, but now they had an extra mouth to feed, and when the weather was like this even the egg disappeared fast. With any luck they’d find out what happened to Cuddy tonight; then they could worry about what came next. They couldn’t turn around and head back to an occupied camp, but there were Allied positions west of here that they could trek to in a day or two.

As impossible as it was, the snow had plunged the forest into even greater depths of silence. Donnie felt like he was underwater, kept swallowing to pop his ears the same way he did when he dived too deep in the quarry back home. Occasionally there was the whipcrack of a branch breaking under the weight of the fall, but other than that the crunch of their feet in the fresh drifts, and the chattering of their teeth, was the only sound.

“So,” he said, wanting to speak, to say anything to make the silence less deafening. “You got a fella back home?”

“Two,” Joan said, looking at him over her shoulder. Her skin was icy blue, her eyes the color of chestnuts.

“Two?”

“I have two fellas,” she said this with a clumsy American accent, “and a lady, too.”

Donnie tried to whistle, but the cold turned it into a sigh.

“I didn’t take you for that kind of girl.”

“I’m not,” she said, laughing. “I’m engaged, to a dope named William. We’ve got two kids already, George and Grace.”

“Seriously?” Donnie said. “You don’t look old enough.”

“Thank you. I’m probably older than you think. George is six, I had him when I was twenty-one, before the war. Grace is four, from back when I’d never have dreamed of being up in a Spitfire.”

“Got a picture?”

Joan bent down and reached into her boot. She pulled out a transparent envelope which contained a letter and a photograph. He recognized the letter. They all had one tucked away in a pocket; I’m sorry I didn’t make it home, please don’t forget me, I love you. She handed him the photo. It had obviously been taken in a studio: a tall, bony man wearing glasses and a goofy grin; a kid on each knee, the little girl clutching a doll and looking out of the shot, her face blurred as though she’d turned just as the picture had been taken, the boy fair-haired and holding a toy plane above his head. Joan was there, too, standing behind the others in a dress uniform as if she were a canvas backdrop, rounder in the face, her cheeks flushed, her hair up, and a smile that could have lit the scene without a single photographer’s flash.

Beautiful, Donnie nearly said, settling for, “You miss them?”

“Of course,” Joan said, tucking the picture back in the envelope and sliding it inside her boot. “More than anything. Well, the little ones anyway. William, he’s … he’s what we call a wet blanket. But he’s good, and he’s safe, and he loves me. He works for the government, nothing important, just number crunching in Whitehall.”

“Wet blanket, eh? Why you with him?”

Joan shrugged, obviously embarrassed.

“He’s my parachute. When I come back, when I come home after a mission, he makes sure I land safely.” She looked as if she wanted to say more, but didn’t. “What about you?”

“A gal? No.” He shook his head and thought of Betty, Betty his neighbor, his best friend, Sweet Betty Marmalade who got married a year ago to a milkman called Joe. “No, I kind of missed the boat on that one. We maybe had—”

“Pssst.”

Donnie turned, saw Mike a dozen yards behind them half lost in the falling snow. He was holding up his hand. Donnie stopped, making the same signal to Henry and Eddie up front.

“Trouble?” said Joan.

“I hope not,” he replied, scampering over his own footprints until he reached Mike. The other man was staring the way they had just come, the snow a curtain of gauze which smudged everything into nothing. Donnie stared into the forest, turned to bone by the idiot moon, and the forest seemed to stare back.

“What is it, Mike?” he asked. Mike didn’t reply, he didn’t blink. Donnie’s flesh squirmed, and he swore he could feel somebody’s eyes crawling over him. He squinted into the haze, nothing there aside from the sentient trees thinking their old, slow thoughts.

Mike turned to him, and there was fear there in the darkness of his eyes and the way his jaw clenched. Donnie didn’t like it. Mike was a sonofabitch, but he was a brave sonofabitch, no doubt about it. He was too stupid to be anything other than brave.

“What is it?” Donnie repeated.

“Can’t you see it?” he whispered, flecks of spit in the corners of his mouth.

“See what?” Donnie said, shaking his head. “Mike, there’s nothing there, just trees.”

“Between the trees,” he replied, his words little more than breath. “Don’t you see them?”

Donnie looked into the snow. He looked between the trees, where the flakes fell and danced in tight spirals. He looked and did not blink, looked at those shifting loops of white against white which seemed for an instant to form shapes there—not quite solid, not quite not, like figures waiting just under the skin of the world—then split apart to be nothing more than snow again. He looked, and he saw, and felt the forest peel away a piece of his sanity as a trophy.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing Mike’s sleeve and dragging him away. “There’s nothing there. Nothing real.”

Mike resisted for a moment, then turned and followed, still not blinking.

“Nothing real,” Donnie insisted.

But something was definitely watching. Something with a smile on its face.

0253

“We’re close.”

They were the first words that anyone had spoken for over half an hour, and the forest gobbled them up so quickly that Donnie had to ask Joan to repeat them.

“This is it, I’m sure of it,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Just over there.”

Henry had stopped at a shallow gully, and when Donnie caught up he saw that the water below—what little of it wasn’t hidden by the fall—had frozen. On the other side was a bank that rose to a tight-knit line of short, fat pines.

“You sure?” Donnie asked, unclipping his holster and trying to pull out his pistol. His fingers were too numb, and he went for his Garand instead, swiveling the rifle into position.

“Looks pretty quiet,” said Henry. “No tracks.”

The snow had stopped a while back, although the trees continued to shed a mist of flakes. Nobody had been this way for at least thirty minutes, unless they’d thought to brush over their footprints as they went.

“I remember I came through those bushes so fast I didn’t see the ditch,” Joan said. “Nearly broke my neck.”

“What were you running from?” asked Eddie, his face mouse-like in its apprehension. Joan looked at him.

“I told you. Something bad.”

For a while, nobody moved; they just stared at the bank opposite and felt the silence drip from it in great, invisible chunks.

“It won’t do any good to go over there,” Joan said.

“This is crazy,” said Mike, pushing between them, rifle in his hands. “She’s a broad. You coming or not?”

He scrambled down the side of the gully, and managed to keep his feet as he stepped gingerly over the ice and up the other side. Donnie didn’t look at Joan again. He was frightened that if he did, if he met her eyes, he’d somehow see what she had seen and he wouldn’t be able to find the strength to carry on. He waited for Henry to move, for Eddie to slide down on his backside; then he half jumped and half fell onto the frozen river. Mike was waiting for him, hand extended, and Donnie let the man haul him up. When he turned, Joan was still standing there, a ghost against the glowing night, the snow on her helmet and silk parachute shawl making her look almost transparent, fading fast. Maybe we are specters, Donnie thought. Maybe we died back there, somewhere, and this is where we spend eternity.

“Joan,” he called, if only an attempt to keep her here, to stop her from dissolving into the night. “Come on. We’re safer together.”

She shook her head, but made her way across the stream anyway.

“A hundred feet, maybe,” she said as he carefully pulled her almost weightless frame up the bank. “Can’t be any more than that.”

Mike took the lead this time, walking too fast as if to prove that there was nothing to fear. But Donnie remembered his face, his grinding jaw—something between the trees—and knew that they were all feeling that same tug of panic in their guts. He jogged a little to catch up with him, rifle ready.

“Keep your eyes open, Private,” he said. “Could be anything up here. And spread out, all of you, five-meter intervals.”

The men fanned to either side of him, treading carefully, hunched over their rifles. There was nothing different about this stretch of forest—the same trees, the same snow, the same moon—and yet the pressure in Donnie’s ears was even greater, almost painful, like being back inside the transport plane as it took off from England heading into Fortress Europe. His pulse sounded as if something were furiously grinding its teeth inside him.

“Sir,” said Henry, nudging his Garand forward. “Over there.”

He saw them. Shapes between the trees. Only these weren’t phantoms of snow and wind. He lifted his rifle, peering down the sight as he took step after stumbling step.

“That’s Cuddy,” said Eddie. “Oh Christ, it’s him.”

And it was. Sergeant Bill Cudden stood there on the edge of a small clearing, motionless. There was something wrong with his face, and it took Donnie a moment to understand what.

It wasn’t attached to anything.

It had been cut loose, and hung like a flag from the top of a wooden man. Moonlight shone through the eyes and mouth, nestled like a halo in his hair, giving him the appearance of a saint. His body was a collection of sticks and branches, standing maybe eight or nine feet tall, a rifle for one leg. A coat had been draped over his shoulders, twigs poking from the bloodied cuffs and the pockets stuffed with straw. Donnie stared at him, at this human doll, and felt something break loose in the engine of his mind.

“No,” somebody sobbed. “It isn’t … It can’t be.”

Donnie staggered forward, his rifle hanging by his side, forgotten. Cuddy hadn’t suffered his fate alone. Two more men had been propped around the circumference of the clearing, each just as tall, each facing inward as if attending a bizarre midnight rendezvous of quiet giants. They, too, were puppets of flesh and wood, their faces leather masks worn by crude, knotted mannequins. One—it was Albert Connaught, Donnie thought—held his helmet against his chest with twig fingers, like a pious man entering a church. The other, unrecognizable, had a deer’s skull for a torso, the antlers pushing up the arms of his jacket as if he had frozen midway through a lumbering dance. His legs were saplings thrust through the eye sockets of his improvised chest.