The Wraiths of War (2 page)

The thought made me feel queasy. I raised my hand again and stared at the back of it, as if half-believing I might actually see the nanites jumping under the surface of my skin like fleas.

‘So where are they?’

‘Everywhere,’ he said, as if enjoying my discomfort. His smile widened. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to them – or the idea of them, at any rate. And they do nothing but good. It’s all thanks to them you’re here talking to me.’

‘So what
do
they do exactly? Apart from bring you back from the dead?’

‘They repair you. Anything goes wrong with your body, they rush in and make it right again.’

‘Anything?’

‘Within reason. As long as your injuries aren’t
too
severe. I mean, you get your head lopped off or you get smashed to bits by a tube train, that’s your lot. But anything less drastic, they’ll keep your system ticking over and undertake instant repairs. They’re a preventative measure against cancer, heart attacks, strokes…’ He wagged his finger at me. ‘But that doesn’t mean you’re immortal. The nanites have their limits, plus they won’t last forever. Even they’re not immune to entropy.’

‘What about when I use the heart?’ I asked.

His smile reappeared. ‘That’s the beauty of it. You can use it more or less with impunity now. It will still make you feel ill, but the nanites will repair you, and quickly. This is the freedom I know you’ve been looking for. The magic formula. The big turning point.’ His smile became a grin. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

I stared at him in wonder. Yes, it did feel good. More than that, it felt wonderful. It opened up a whole new vista of possibilities.

‘So what do I do now?’

He grabbed my hand, and at first I thought he was going to squeeze it, or clasp it between both of his, but then I felt something hard and cold and weighty being pressed into my palm.

I knew what it was immediately. The obsidian heart. It moulded itself to the cup of my hand as though that was its natural resting place.

‘You go on,’ he said. ‘You pick up your journey where you left off, and you go on, and you get through it.’

He said nothing more, but I could see in his eyes just how tough this next stage of my life would be, and how it troubled him, and how he pitied me.

‘Is it going to be really bad?’ I asked.

His face seemed to sag, as though he’d been trying his best, but was no longer able to hold back the terrible weight of memory. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, and then finally he said, ‘If you’re careful, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get through it.’

There was a part of me that wished I
had
died. A part of me that wished I didn’t have to do this. But I had no choice. If I wanted to keep my life on track, if I wanted to prevent a catastrophe that would affect not just me personally, but those I loved, I had to travel back in time, almost two centuries, to 1914.

I had to meet and befriend a man called Frank Martin.

I had to fight alongside him in the trenches of the First World War.

I had to watch him die, and then I had to use the heart that I now clutched in my hand to bring him back to life.

‘Oi, you! Yes you, you little runt! How old are
you
then? Bloody Hun’ll have you for breakfast, son, and still have room for seconds.’

The voice was raucous, the tone ugly, and the laughter that followed it uglier still. I stepped to my right, peering ahead of me, up the length of the long queue of men stretching all the way down the street and around the corner from the recruiting station.

It was August 14th 1914, and Britain had been at war with Germany for just over a week. Despite the season it was cold and drizzly, the men who were waiting in line with me hunched against the blustery, side-swiping wind, caps or trilbies on their heads, fags hanging out of their mouths, hands jammed into their pockets. We looked like an audition queue for an Andy Capp movie. The thought made me smile, though if I’d voiced it I’d have been met with blank faces, as it’d be another forty-odd years before the character would make his debut in
The Daily Mirror
cartoon strip. During the week or so I’d spent in this time period, acclimatising to the unfamiliar surroundings, I had come to the conclusion that the early twentieth century was a time of bad suits and bad haircuts. Most of the clothes the men wore (mine included) were grey and baggy, the trousers sagging at knee and crotch, the waistbands high and so loose that if they hadn’t been held up by braces they’d have been puddling around our ankles. Beneath their shapeless, workaday jackets, a lot of the men wore home-knit jumpers over grubby white shirts, their Adam’s apples bobbing above tightly knotted ties.

The men of Great Britain had greeted the declaration of war with a kind of gung-ho euphoria that was terrifying to behold. From my viewpoint their naivety seemed child-like, no doubt based on the fact that, in this day and age, information about the harsh realities of war was very much at a premium. There was no Internet, no TV, very few movies. There weren’t even many photographs – not ones that were publicly available at any rate – and the newspapers I’d eagerly sought out were composed of little more than dry facts, densely and tediously presented.

People didn’t seem to read books all that much either – not the general workforce, at any rate. The penny serials, or penny dreadfuls, which recounted lurid tales of pirates and highwaymen, had been popular during Victoria’s reign, and were
still
popular, but even the works of, say, Charles Dickens were priced beyond the pockets of most working people. And though contemporary writers like James Joyce, Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster were becoming more well known, books still tended on the whole to be heavy, daunting things, used by the rich to line the shelves of their libraries and read only by scholars and academics.

Basically, what I’m saying is that the male population of Britain had no fucking clue what they were letting themselves in for. It was horrible looking at the men queueing with me, many of whom were barely old enough to shave, and knowing that many –
most
– of them would be heading off to war and never coming back. No doubt they thought of war as a playground game, as a fun and exciting adventure. From the snippets of chatter I picked up, it was clear that the majority of them expected to send Jerry packing without too much trouble, and return home to a hero’s welcome in time for Christmas, grinning and bedecked with medals.

From my modern perspective there was surprisingly little cynicism in these overheard conversations, surprisingly little doubt, and surprisingly little criticism – in fact, none whatsoever – of the powers-that-be. It seemed no matter what your status in life – whether you be king or politician, a member of the privileged classes or a humble working man – the general consensus was that you were all in this together, fighting side by side for freedom and justice, secure in the knowledge that evil would be conquered and good would prevail.

All of which made the belittling comments of the man ahead of me in the queue, and the sneery laughter that followed, strange to hear. It was a bum note in the general atmosphere of camaraderie. As I looked up the length of the queue I heard, but didn’t see, someone (presumably the ‘runt’) respond to the bullish man’s insult. The tone the ‘runt’ used was defiant, but his actual words were obscured by the bluster of the wind and by the fact that he was standing with his back to me, presumably facing his aggressor.

Whatever he said must have been cutting, though, because the laughter that followed
his
retort was a startled, even admiring, whoop of mirth. The tail end of the laughter was superseded by an animal-like snarl and the bullish man’s voice again, angry with humiliation: ‘Why, you little shit! I’ll give you a hiding you’ll never forget!’

As the queue ahead of me, about halfway between where I was standing and the door of the recruiting station, bulged and rippled, I was already moving, because suddenly I
knew
that this was it. I’d arrived in this time period wondering how I’d meet Frank, realising I had no idea which recruitment office to go to, and on which day, and at what time.

Then I’d realised it didn’t matter. Frank had told me it would happen, which meant that therefore it would. It was a
fait accompli –
or maybe even a
Fate accompli
. All I had to do was act on what little information I had, and destiny would do the rest.

Thinking back to my conversation with Frank on the tube after he’d rescued me from the trap that Benny Magee had led me into in Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow, I recalled him telling me he’d been born in Lewisham and that he’d been training to be a draughtsman when war had broken out. I’d therefore headed to the Lewisham recruiting office, rather than the one closest to my house in Kensington, in the hope our paths would cross. Frank had also told me, during that same tube conversation, that he’d died (or
would
die) at Ypres in 1917 at the age of twenty. As 1917 was still three years away, that meant Frank would currently be seventeen. So like a lot of the men eager to head off to war he’d be little more than a kid. Younger even than my eldest daughter, Candice.

As I hurried towards what seemed to be a scuffle in the queue ahead, the knot of men surrounding it swelled even further, then broke apart. A few of them staggered back as two bodies hurtled sideways on to the pavement. One was a tall, burly guy in his twenties with red hair jutting from beneath the brim of a grey cap, and a complexion like lumpy, freckled cheese. The other, flailing and scrapping like a cornered cat, was Frank Martin. The burly man had him round the throat and had lifted him clean off the ground.

At seventeen Frank was even weedier than the version of him I’d known in my own time. His thin, slightly ferrety face was bright red through lack of air, and his dark hair was drooping over his forehead in oily strands.

To give him credit, though, he was making a good job of fighting his corner. The red-haired man was twice as broad as Frank and a good eight to ten inches taller, but Frank was lashing out at him as he hung in the air, landing punches wherever he could – which, to be honest, were mostly ineffectual thumps on his assailant’s tree-trunk arms and bulging shoulders.

Almost casually the red-haired man drew back his free arm, as if to let loose an arrow from a bow, and curled his meaty fingers into a fist. From my perspective the fist looked about the size of Frank’s head, and the arm about to propel it forward looked as if it would give the fist more than enough momentum to knock Frank’s block clean off his shoulders.

By now I was running fast enough for the wind to catch hold of the brim of my hat and whip it from my head.

‘Oi, Ginger!’ I yelled. ‘Try picking on someone your own size!’

Fist poised, the red-haired man was caught momentarily off-guard. He half-turned so suddenly that he stumbled, inadvertently both loosening his grip on Frank’s throat and drawing him closer.

I’ll say this for Frank – he had bloody good reflexes. Making the most of his opportunity, he kicked out at his assailant, his foot making a solid
thock
as it connected with the ginger man’s shinbone.

His attacker’s face contorted and he let loose a girlish howl of pain. His grip on Frank’s throat slackened further, allowing Frank to wriggle free. Instead of making a break for it, though, Frank drew back his arm, jumped up and socked the ginger man in the eye. The man’s head snapped back and his cap fell to the pavement. I was still running at him full-pelt, and before he could recover I thrust out both hands and shoved him as hard as I could.

The bloke was as compact as an ox, and if he hadn’t already been tottering I might have done no more than jar my arms. But because he was off-balance over he went, a look of dumb incomprehension on his face, his arms windmilling behind him. He landed on his arse with a coccyx-crunching thump that made me wince. Sitting there, legs and arms akimbo, he resembled an over-sized baby. When I glanced at Frank, he looked at me and grinned. His face was flushed, his tie was askew and one side of his collar was sticking up in the air like a crumpled white bat’s wing, but he looked utterly gleeful. I’d never seen him grin like that before, and it was an expression both joyous and heart-rendingly painful to see.

We were only able to enjoy the moment for a couple of seconds, though. As stunned as Ginger had been by the way the tables had been turned on him, he recovered quickly. With a roar he scrambled to his feet.

‘You fucking sods! I’ll have the fucking both of yer! Yer dead men!’ he bellowed.

As he lumbered towards us, I tensed, poised between fight and flight. Although I was as tall as Ginger, he was a lot heftier than me, and despite coming from a rough neighbourhood and having the kind of face that sometimes made people uneasy (apparently my default expression, as I’d been variously told in the past, was moody and intense) I wasn’t much of a scrapper.

I glanced at Frank again to gauge his intentions, wondering whether he was of a mind that we should join forces and put this bully down for good. Before it became a decision we’d be forced into making, though, fate intervened, in the form of several other blokes in the queue who started to pipe up on our behalf.

First to speak was a squat, dark-bearded, balding man with a Scottish accent. ‘Ach, they beat ye fair and square, man. I’d accept that if I were ye.’

There were grunts of assent, nods of agreement. Like a cornered animal, Ginger rounded on the dark-bearded man and snarled, ‘I’ll lay you out too, Scotty, if you don’t shut yer trap.’

Now another man jumped in, rangy like me, but pugnacious-looking. In an accent that was pure East End, he said, ‘You have a go at him, mate, and you’ll have to have a go at me too. Like the rest o’ these gents, I’m here today to stand up to a pack of bullies across the sea. But before I give the Hun what for, I’d just as happily stand up to bullies on me own soil.’

The roars of assent were louder this time. Some of the men stepped forward, fists raised defiantly in Ginger’s direction.