Chapter 6
CHAPTER
Michael
MY FLAT ALWAYS smelled of coal and tea.
I’d long ago gotten used to it. No choice but to.
The scent clung to everything, curtains, the bread tin, the pages of whatever book I’d left open on the table.
I liked to keep the room tidy. Out of habit. Not really out of comfort. I liked knowing where everything was. It helped me feel steady, grounded. I also didn’t own much, which was just fine with me. That made it all the easier to leave it all behind.
A narrow cot tucked against the wall. A small table with more books, all of them borrowed. The only bit of decoration in the entire place was a horseshoe hung above the door. Thanks to Wendy.
Though, tonight the whole place smelled off.
Putrid. Like something had crawled behind the walls and died there.
I rushed over to the windows and threw them all open. Cold October air rushing in, along with city noises from below.
The clatter of tram wheels. Boots marching home, or maybe some away from home.
Someone below shouting “Good night!” Perhaps after a few too many pints.
Then, farther off in the distance, a man scream-shouted-slurred the words to “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.
” I wonder how many he’d had to numb it all.
I fell into the wingback chair by the window and looked down at my hands. Blue ink stained my fingertips.
The words from the contract burned behind my eyes: Enlistment. Service. Purpose.
The gas lamp outside sputtered once and died, shooting shadows across the room.
I shut the windows and eased back into the chair, closing my eyes, drawing a long breath.
I’d go see Wendy and John tomorrow. Of course I would. I was leaving soon. I know we didn’t speak much, but still, I loved them, and goodbyes were owed.
A drip echoed from the kitchen sink, slow, metallic, steady. A lone man’s lullaby.
Soon enough I’d be somewhere that never slept, where the noises never ceased, where quiet was a luxury, maybe a lie.
What else was there to do? Enlistment. Service. Purpose.
Something sharp creaked in the corner. I opened my eyes. Listened.
“That’s strange.”
The only thing that sat in that part of the room was an old toy chest. It was the only thing I brought here from my childhood home. I set it in that corner the day I moved in and never touched it again.
I felt stupid some days having it there, but I reasoned, Wendy had her journal. I had this.
Sometimes remembering the past isn’t about being stuck in it. Sometimes remembering the past is a reminder of what happened, what was learned, and how we can continue forward.
From the chair, I could see it clearly, the brass hinge catching the lamplight, and the lid … open just a crack.
“That’s … very strange.” I straightened up in my chair.
And now, the smell of the room shifted. Of wind carrying hints of river water.
“No,” I whispered to myself, but it was already too late.
My mind was there, and I could hear John. Sharp. Frantic. “Toss those things in the fire, Wendy! Burn them!”
“No! I can’t!”
“We can’t take anything back—”
And then the memory sharpened: Wendy, on her knees. Roger, on the ground, legs splayed out in front of him. His back against a tree trunk, eyes closed.
Nearby, Peter …
“Wendy,” John pressed, voice breaking. “We have to go.”
She was sobbing. Her arms around the neck of a dying boy. Her face buried in his jacket. His long dark hair resting on her shoulders.
Her fingers clutched her journal one hand, and in the other she held a pocket watch, glinting in the sun.
My face was covered in tears. My hands and feet caked in dirt. From running. From falling.
“John …” I whimpered. “I want to go home.”
John looked at me. My big brother. Eyes so sure. “We’re going to get you home. All of us.”
Something stirred. Shifted. The ping of something metal dropping onto a wooden floor.
I sat up, pulse leaping. I looked around the dark room. It was so small I could see every inch in moments, and there was nothing out of its place.
My eyes moved back to the chest … and my breath snagged.
The lid had been pushed fully open.
Before I could step forward and look inside, my eyes shifted downward, where I spotted the impossible.
Tin soldiers.
Not scattered. Not toppled from age or gravity. Neatly arranged in perfect formation.
Each soldier’s shadow leaned inward, their dark silhouettes converging on the same point.
The lamplight glinted off of their bayonets. Their helmets tipped forward in a posture that wasn’t accidental. They were at the ready.
A low hum prickled up my arms.
A grown man shouldn’t be unnerved by toy soldiers. But I was.
My hand trembled as I reached for the nearest figure. Its chipped head gleamed back at me, its eyes worn away a long time ago.
I’d forgotten how light they were. How sharp their bayonets.
“How …”
Something rumbled beneath my feet, beneath the floorboards. As if someone were running upright on the ceiling below.
The platoon quivered.
One soldier shifted to his side with a tiny scrape of its boot against the floorboard.
I stared, noting their position. And then it all clicked into place.
They weren’t guarding anything.
Every face. Every rifle. All of them, they were turned directly toward me.
“Bloody hell …”
They weren’t arranged in a position of protection. They were lined up as if they’d just set sights on their enemy. Me.
“Michael …”
The voice was a spear dug straight through my ribs.
I spun around. There was nothing there. My chair. The window.
“Michael, you left me.”
“I refuse to believe in you anymore,” I said. “I’ve grown up.” I took a step back.
The floor gave an uncertain creak beneath my heel.
I dragged my hands over my face. I’m tired, I reasoned. It’s nerves. I leave in days. Off to another country, it might as well be another world.
The lamplight shuddered, sending a shock of shadows across the walls. I monitored them, one by one, moving like no shadows should. They swirled against the surface of things like a drop of ink dropped into a glass of water.
And it was in that moment I realized: We may try to forget our monsters, but they won’t forget us.
“We killed you.”
Laughter erupted in the room followed by a boy’s scream.
“I remember,” I told myself. Again and again.
Wendy bursting through the trees. Breath ragged. Roger right behind her. John and I waiting for them on the forest path, where it forked. One way toward the treehouse, and the other … home.
Peter was there waiting. Eyes furious that we had discovered the way back home.
“We have to go.” Wendy stepped forward, and that’s when Peter snatched her wrist and pulled her close.
My sister screamed. Crows cawed and Peter laughed.
I cried, “Wendy! Leave her alone!”
John knelt and looked me in the eyes. “If I tell you to run along, you do. You go, quickly. I’ll bring Wendy. We’ll be right behind you.”
I stood in my flat now, frozen, half man, half child, but fully a ghost.
We were not the only thing to emerge from Kensington Gardens that day.
There were bodies. Some John’s size. Others mine. All desiccated and darkened by the sun.
A balloon vendor heard us crying, and it was he who called for the constables. The Darling children were found.
Now I see, we never really did kill that story. It’d just been sleeping this entire time.
A toy soldier tipped sideways. Then another. A slow cascade. As if some unseen child’s hand was knocking them down one by one.
Toy rifles and bayonets skittered across the floor. Helmets rolled in uneven arcs. One soldier snapped straight clean across the middle when he hit the floor. Severed at the waist.
Fear pinned me upright.
“Still playing soldier, Michael?”
I swallowed hard, throat dry. Unsure what to do. Where to go. Every corner of the room felt alive.
Just as the toy soldiers had done. Just as boys on the battlefield would soon do beside me.
I feared not only the wrong command but making the wrong decision.
“Who’s there?” I managed.
A child’s giggle responded.
Beneath my boots, the floorboards began to hum again with that vibration, of someone running. Pacing. Moving.
Then the floorboards began to move and lift as if hands below were pushing them up. Hard.
Wooden boards bowed upward. Loud splintering cracks filled the room. I took a step back away from the path of wood bulging.
A tremor crawled up my calves, and I could move no farther or look away.
And then, slowly, a thin gray finger slid through a break. Wrongly thin.
Its nail split straight down the center, exposing white slivers of bone like ivory needles.
Another board cracked, sharper. And then a whole section of floor splintered open.
From that black pit below I heard a small child snickering.
A small hand appeared, blue, twisted, the skin puckered with red and yellow sores, cut open in places that had never healed.
A child’s hand. It waved toward me.
I could not move. I could not close my eyes.
The hand continued to move, splitting and breaking floorboards wide until it reached me, and hooked one finger into the bottom of my trouser leg, tugging once, soft as breath.
“Don’t leave us again, Michael. Come with us.”
The voice seeped up through the boards, soggy, soaked, echoing with years.
My stomach dropped into ice water. I begged my eyelids to shut, but they would not.
Another crack, faster now. The floor giving way in a jagged line.
Within that gap, an eye appeared. Small, gray-white and set deep in a child’s face that should not have been able to move.
The face rose slowly through the gap, pale, swollen, blue-white cheeks dusted with dirt. I remembered him.
A dozen years ago.
A boy. About my age at the time. Nibs. Nodding in the direction of the swampy lagoon. All of us had gathered there for a game.
Peter had dared Nibs to swim across it.
“I can do that!” Nibs blurted, eagerly.
“You sure?” Peter teased. “There’re crocodiles in there.” And the way Peter said it, so excitedly, felt wrong.
Nibs jumped in the water, the sun shining on his golden hair.
Small arms paddling, and it took no time. Seconds maybe before they all gathered.
Massive, scaly beasts. Their bodies slick and green. Mouths snapped open. White bone. Dark throats. Green dark water churning.
Nibs didn’t even have time to scream.
A soft sound escaped me, a gasp and a sob.
Fingers clawed at the inside of my skull searching for an explanation, for sense, exhaustion, war, the fog.
The telephone rang. The sound of brass bells screaming for attention.
I stared at the candlestick telephone for a moment. Something so normal in this madness. When I looked back to the floor the toy soldiers, the dead little boy, the torn-up floorboards, it was all gone.
I stumbled over to the phone. Lifted the receiver and then I heard her.
“Michael?”
Her voice sounded so faint. So distant. A dream I was trying to remember.
“Wendy?”
Static.
“I had a bad dream.”
Static.
My mouth tasted of copper, as if I’d bitten down on my own fear.
“Me too,” I managed.
The line hissed, cracked once, and went dead.
I stood there, holding the phone in my hand, listening.
Outside, a tram clattered. An automobile honked. And I overheard the bright laughter of young women.
I looked toward the chest. The lid was down.
From here, it didn’t seem special at all.
Just a battered old toy chest with a few worn toy soldiers inside.
Objects a man clung onto to remember that at one time he was a child and at one time his life was full of imagination and splendor, and not the weighted worry of stepping onto a battlefield.
I set the receiver down and returned to my chair. My hands shook. My feet shook.
Tomorrow, I wouldn’t just call.
I’d go. To my sister. To Wendy.
I’d tell her all I’d seen, and let her know that I remembered.