The Wraiths of War (16 page)

‘Oh God, Alex,’ she said, her shock wrong-footing her, causing her to half-stumble into the room. ‘What the fuck’s happened to you? Who’s done this?’

I couldn’t answer. Now that the floodgates had opened, there was no way they could be forced shut. The nanites inside me might have been able to repair me physically, but they were useless against naked emotions.

Raising a hand, I waved it feebly, as if to say:
give me a minute
. I couldn’t see her through my tears, but I heard her drop to her knees in front of me, felt her grab the hand I was waving and squeeze it hard.

‘You’re filthy,’ she said. ‘And you stink. And you’re covered in blood. Christ, what have they done to you?’ She paused, as if drawing breath. Then I sensed her going still, stiffening, and I knew that she was putting two and two together; that having regarded me properly for the first time, having perhaps registered what I was wearing, the penny was beginning to drop. She was silent for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, and when she next spoke her voice was different. Hurt. Accusatory.

‘You’ve been travelling, haven’t you? You used the heart without telling me?’

Try as I might to stop them, the tears were still gushing out of me. But now I was keeping my head down and my gaze averted not because of that – or not entirely anyway – but because I felt guilty, ashamed, of lying to her, letting her down. The note I’d written, now mud-smeared and partly crumpled, was on the floor by my left knee. I pushed it towards her, felt it slither beneath my fingertips as she snatched it up.

It’s amazing how the crackle of paper can convey tension and disapproval. As she read the note I made an attempt to pull myself together. I pushed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets, tried to contain my snivelling by alternately swallowing and taking deep breaths. Once I’d managed to force the floodgates shut again, I raised my head and looked at her blearily. I was embarrassed by my outburst, even though I knew it was nothing to be embarrassed about. I’d seen men break down in the trenches who’d been subjected to far less stress than I had in the past few hours.

‘The plan was that I wouldn’t be here when you read that,’ I said, my voice clogged. ‘That went a bit wrong, didn’t it?’

She sighed, looked at me. It was impossible to read her expression. In a softer voice than she’d used moments before, she asked, ‘How long have you been away?’

‘Eighteen months,’ I said.

She flinched as if someone had touched her neck with a cold hand.

‘Eighteen months! Are you serious?’

‘Afraid so.’

She reached out, and at first I thought she was going to slap me. But instead she touched my chest gently, as if checking whether my uniform was genuine.

‘You’ve been in the War? The trenches?’

I nodded.

Something flickered across her face. The threat of tears? But whatever it was, she brought it under control. Her voice, though, was husky.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I did tell you. In the note.’

This time it was anger that flashed in her eyes. ‘Don’t be smart, Alex. I deserve more than that.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be smart. It was just…’

‘Just what?’

I squirmed, struggling to express myself. ‘Well, I could hardly have taken you with me, could I? War is men’s work.’ I pulled a face to show I was joking. ‘At least, it was back then. And I just thought… if I went and did what I was supposed to do – what I
had
to do – then maybe I could be back before you knew I’d even gone.’ I nodded at the note she was still holding in her hand. ‘That was just meant to be insurance. In case anything went wrong.’

‘But what about the heart?’ she said. ‘What about the danger of that? Of using it? Last time you tried, it nearly killed you.’

I forced a smile. A weak attempt to make light of the situation. ‘It nearly killed me this time too. But it was something I had to go through. A gamble I had to take. To keep things on the right path.’ Stumblingly I told her what had happened – about my future self rescuing me, about the nanites in my system.

She reached out and touched my chest again. ‘And they’re inside you now? Those tiny robots?’

‘Yep. Like a swarm of microscopic doctors, ticking things off on their little charts.’

She shuddered. ‘Creepy.’

‘It’s just science, that’s all. Science that’s not available to us yet.’

‘It’s the origin story of a villain in a bloody superhero movie, is what it is. This is how it always starts. Some normal bloke tries some snazzy new scientific doo-dah on himself, which then goes wrong and turns him into a…’

‘Mutant?’ I suggested.

‘I was going to say “monster”.’

‘Oh, thanks. So that’s what you think I’ll become? A monster?’

She groaned and clapped her hands to her cheeks.

‘I don’t know. This is such a lot to take in. Twenty minutes ago you were FaceTiming Hope before popping upstairs for a lie-down while I ordered pizza. And now…’ She wafted a hand almost exasperatedly at me. ‘…all this. I mean… you really haven’t seen me for
eighteen months
?’

I shook my head. ‘And I can’t tell you how good it is.’

‘Not seeing me?’

My laughter sounded like a weary cough. ‘The opposite. It’s
so
good to see you. So good to be back here.’

‘And you’re done now, are you? You’re back for good?’

‘I wish I was.’

‘What do you mean?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t tell me you’re going back?’

‘I
have
to, Clover. I’ve got no choice. You know as well as I do what’ll happen if I don’t.’

She sighed. I could see she was struggling. Not to understand – she knew what was at stake – but simply to allow me to go through it without her help. By default we had become a team, but in this instance there was nothing she could do, no way she could watch my back.

Struggling to make it easier for her, I said, ‘Look, don’t worry. I’ve got the heart, remember. I can be there and back before you know it.’

‘If you survive.’

‘I will. I promise.’

She glared at me. ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I’m not a child. I know how this works.’

I held up my hands in apology – and was struck by the fact that ten minutes earlier, if I hadn’t got to the heart in time, I might have been doing the same thing under different circumstances.

Her expression softened. ‘You look done in.
Really
done in. You don’t have to go back straight away, do you?’

I hesitated. Weirdly I couldn’t help thinking that if I
didn’t
go back straight away I’d be cheating somehow. The other guys going through the War with me, sharing the hell of trench life, didn’t get any respite, so why should I? On the other hand, this was not my war. I was born in 1977, for fuck’s sake! I was a man out of time.

‘You look as though you need a good meal and a sleep,’ Clover said. ‘And you
definitely
need a bath. Much as I love you, Alex, you stink like road kill.’

‘It’s this coat. I had to nick it from a dead German to disguise myself. He wasn’t too fresh. In fact, he was oozing a bit.’

She bulged out her cheeks, as though trying to keep in a mouthful of puke. ‘That may be the grossest thing I’ve ever heard. That may even put me off my pizza.’

Pizza. I briefly closed my eyes and actually shivered with pleasure at the thought.

‘Well, it doesn’t put me off. I’ll have yours as well as mine if you don’t want it.’

She smiled a crooked smile. ‘I’ll run a bath for you. Do you want me to wash those clothes?’

‘Better not. It’d be weird if I arrived back in the trenches looking spotless.’ With an effort, my limbs so tired I could hardly manipulate them, I struggled out of the overcoat. ‘You can chuck this, though. Or preferably burn it. I won’t be needing it again.’

She pulled a face, picking the coat up by pinching the edge of its collar between her thumb and forefinger, holding it at arm’s length. She carried it across the room to the open door. At the threshold she paused.

‘Why
did
you come back? Why here and now, I mean? I can understand you needing a break, but if you didn’t want me to find out what you’d been up to, why didn’t you come back to a time when you knew the house would be empty?’ She nodded at the heart, which was still lying on the carpet a foot or so away from me. ‘I thought you had better control over that thing. I mean, I knew it made you ill, but in terms of where and when, I thought you just had to think of the date and place and there you’d be.’

‘Me too,’ I said, and rubbed a filthy hand over my filthy forehead. ‘But I was stressed and exhausted. Maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t even mean to have a break at all, to be honest. I meant to go back to the trenches. Maybe the heart… I dunno… picked up on my subconscious or something. Maybe it brought me where I needed to be rather than where I wanted to be.’

Still standing by the open door, Clover was peering at the heart, a frown on her face. ‘Is it okay, the heart? It looks… different somehow.’

‘Yes, it’s fine,’ I said automatically. But when I looked down at the heart, when I looked at it properly for the first time since I’d got here, I realised she was right: it
did
look different.

‘It’s just got mud on it,’ I said. ‘From my hands.’ Though even as I spoke the words I knew it was an attempt to convince myself rather than because I truly believed them. Then, when I picked up the heart and felt how light it was, my worst fears were confirmed: there
was
something wrong with it. Something seriously wrong.

Cupping the heart in my palm as if it were a sick hamster or an injured bird, I held it up to my face and examined it. As well as feeling light, as if all the life had been drained from it, it looked dull and misshapen, its fine detail scoured away, like the face of a stone gargoyle on the outside wall of a church that has been eroded by the elements.

I touched it with my fingertip, and realised it was brittle and flaky, shreds of it coming away and leaving a residue on my skin. I felt a spasm of alarm, which manifested as a stab of actual pain somewhere between my breastbone and my belly.

‘It’s sick,’ I said, as if the heart
were
a pet. ‘There’s something wrong with it.’

‘It looks old,’ Clover said. ‘Ancient, in fact.’

Her words transported me back to my time in Victorian London, to a night just after the Christmas of 1895 when Hawkins and I had been lured to a riverside dock called Blyth’s Wharf in Limehouse. The Dark Man and his cronies had been waiting for us there, and in his possession that night the Dark Man had had a heart which looked, if anything, even more ravaged than the one I held now.

Could it be possible…?
My mind raced as I thought again of the dead rising from the mud of No Man’s Land; of Heidrich’s savagely mutilated body; of the way the heart had been nestled snugly – and conveniently – in his outstretched hand.

‘It was him,’ I breathed.

‘Who?’ When I didn’t immediately answer, Clover’s voice hardened. ‘Alex, who do you mean? What are you talking about?’

I looked up at her, my mind still whirling. ‘The Dark Man. He was there. He must have been. He knew what would happen, so he took advantage of the situation. He stole my heart and left his old one in its place. That’s why it didn’t take me where I wanted to go. Because it’s… malfunctioning. It’s clapped out. Unreliable.’

‘But the Dark Man’s dead,’ said Clover, and then she checked herself. ‘Hang on. I get it. Time travel, yeah? The Dark Man you mean is an earlier version, before he died.’ She checked herself again, rolled her eyes. In a goofy voice she said, ‘Duh. Obviously.’

‘Shit,’ I muttered, looking at the brittle, gnarled lump of stone in my hand and trying to work through the implications. ‘Shit, fuck and bollocks.’

‘Sounds like a pretty accurate summing up of the situation,’ she said, though her expression told me she was thinking hard too.

Sure enough, a few seconds later she said, ‘We saw the Dark Man die in Victorian London, yeah? He was so fucked-up that the power of the heart – your heart, I mean – was too much for him and it killed him.’

‘So?’

‘So,’ she said, ‘judging by
that
heart,’ (she nodded at the one in my hand) ‘which is old, but I’m guessing not as old as the one the Dark Man showed you back in 1895, the Dark Man who took your heart and left you
that
one must be pretty old too – but he must be young enough to be able to handle the power, or at least he thinks he is. I guess it depends on whether he knows what happened to the older version of himself or not.’

I scowled. ‘None of this is helping. Whether he knows or not, the fact is, he’s got my…
Ferrari
of a heart, whereas I’ve been left with his old, clapped-out Hillman Imp.’

A wave of despair washed through me, and seemed to take with it what little energy I had left. I slumped forward until my forehead was resting on the carpet.

‘So how the fuck am I going to find him and get my own heart back now?’ I said.

I had no idea what to do next.

So for the next few days I did nothing.

Well, no, that’s not strictly true. I spent a lot of time shut away with the heart, trying to ‘commune’ with it as I’d done on several occasions before. This involved holding the heart in my hand and staring at it until my perception changed and I slipped into a meditative, almost trance-like state, whereupon the heart would seem to blur, to shimmer, to both shift out of phase and become intrinsically linked to my mind.

Although I’d had visions before, I didn’t know – particularly on this occasion – how much of what I’d seen had been conjured from my own subconscious and how much had been a consequence of the heart gifting me the ability to view the world through
its
eyes. I
do
know that whereas before I’d let my mind roam free, had let it go wherever the heart, or my own subconscious, had wanted to take me, this time I was more tentative. Because of the state of this particular heart, I didn’t know how reliable it was, or how dangerous. I didn’t want to risk using it to travel, not yet anyway, because who knew what might happen or where I might end up? If it had brought me here when I had intended to go back to the trenches, who was to say that next time it wouldn’t simply return me to my starting point – the farmhouse in the German camp, where I’d have to face down a horde of drunken German soldiers who thought I’d murdered one of their comrades? Or maybe it would plunge me into the midst of the Dark Man and his cohorts? Or what if it simply shattered through overuse and I shattered along with it, my pieces scattered through time?