Chapter Four #2
“Not really, no.” Tone matter-of-fact. “We had no frame of reference back then, you see, for what we were facing. We saw the bodies, German infantry, looked like a whole detachment had been ambushed. And while we were staring at them, the Huldu did for us, too. Corporal Timmons was the first. From the sound, I thought he’d been bitten by a viper.
That was the arrow, of course. Made a hissing through the air.
Timmons cried out, fell. Nobody knew what to make of it; we’d no experience to put it against. Timmons crawling toward us, screaming, we didn’t spot the shaft at first. And then, when we did, I couldn’t work it out.
Looked like a swagger stick, caught up somehow in his battle dress.
And by then, two more men were down. Someone—I think my sergeant—yelled Archers! It made no sense.”
He gave Duncan the small, awkward smile again.
“We started firing into the trees. Blind barrage, completely hopeless. Someone tried to pull the arrow out of Timmons. He was still screaming, you see. And then so was the poor sod who’d tried to help him.
Private Lamb—young lad, quite possibly underage when he volunteered.
There were a lot like that. Anyway, he grabbed the arrow shaft and pulled.
His hand came away ripped up and bloody, as if he’d hauled on a strand of barbed wire. ”
Duncan nodded. “Fresh elf-shot will do that, aye.”
“We fired another barrage, very ragged this time. Timmons died, or at least he stopped making any noise. Lamb collapsed, weeping over his hand. More hissing; we saw the arrows coming this time, they seemed to glint in the air. More screams, more men down, I’m sure you can imagine.
And yes, Mr. Silver, maybe I did see something then, in those moments.
Some…wisp of something, between the trees, there and gone.
Gray figures, like ghosts, or just—smoke.
” Hardy shrugged. “And then, suddenly, it was just the sergeant and myself shooting. Man was bawling at me: We need to fall back, sir, we must fall back. He was right, of course.”
“That he was.”
“We got Lamb up between us, dragged him away. Got out of the woods and back to post. By then, of course, they’d started finding dead Germans all over the place, with the arrow wounds on them. Not many shafts, though.”
“No. They’ll melt fully into the wound if you give them the chance.” Duncan watched Hardy’s face. “That’s not the end of this story, though, is it.”
“Not quite, no.”
“I assume Lamb died?”
Hardy met his gaze, almost unwillingly, and Duncan saw a shard of old anger in his eyes that made him like the Guardsman just a fraction more.
“He didn’t just die.” Voice tightening like a tourniquet.
“That boy…suffered. He was running a fever, almost from the moment we got him back to the command post. Never seen anything like it. It seemed to burn the flesh from him. You could almost see it happening. In and out of delirium, screaming nightmares. They moved him out to a field hospital the following day. And he died there, two days later, I’m told. ”
Duncan heard the way Hardy’s voice trailed off. “But?”
“But I already knew.”
“Knew he was going to die?”
Hardy set down his teacup, got up, and went to stand at the window, hands crossed behind his back and gripped together. He stared down into the street. His voice, when it came, was still tight with the anger he’d buried that day.
“You ask me, Mr. Silver—did I see what killed my men? And, truthfully, I did not. But the night we escaped, I found I couldn’t sleep, and so I went back to check on Lamb.
He’d stopped screaming you see, and I wondered…
Well, you know what I wondered. They had him in a dugout down the line—alone, because of the screams, you see.
It must have been about two in the morning when he stopped.
Clear night, good moon. I walked down the line, and when I was about twenty yards away, someone pushed back the flap on the dugout and came out. ”
He jarred to a halt. Took a breath and started again.
“No. That’s not accurate. Some thing came out of that dugout, Mr. Silver.
It looked like…” Turning to face Duncan now, hands open in front of him, like a potter trying to mold something in clay from his memories.
“I don’t know what it looked like. A gargoyle, perhaps?
A figment from an Arthur Machen tale? It was pale, like something sculpted from marble.
It seemed…hunched? Crouched. It stood like nothing human, despite its form.
There was something around it that smudged my vision, like a heat haze, or fog, or—” He shook his head.
“It stopped me dead in my tracks. It froze me, despite all the training I have ever had. And while I stood there, locked in place, it turned and looked at me.”
Hardy drew a deep breath, came back to his chair, and sat down.
“I will never forget those eyes so long as I live,” he said. “The emptiness in them.”
Duncan said nothing. Hardy summoned his tight smile once more.
“And then, of course, it was gone. Up and over the lip of the trench, scuttling, faster than my eyes could track it. I swear it bared its teeth at me before it fled—like some predator, warning other animals away from its prey. And I knew, in that moment, there was nothing we would be able to do for Lamb.”
He crossed one leg over the other, brushed at something invisible he seemed to see on the fabric of his trousers.
“There is, as I’m sure you’re aware, a fashionable theory that the war is what brought about this…
change we are living through. That the millions who died, the horrors they endured, the—how do the Theosophicals put it—the psychic scream all that combined suffering unleashed, that this somehow tore a hole in the fabric of our universe and let the Huldu in.
“But I know that to be a lie.”
Duncan wasn’t going to argue. There were a dozen different theories for why the Forests had returned and the Huldu with them. None of it made much sense. As far as he could see, none of it mattered that much either.
“It’s a lie, Mr. Silver, because I know that in August 1914 in the retreat after Mons, only weeks into the conflict, they were already here among us.”
Some response seemed to be required. Duncan shifted in his seat.
“Perhaps they could sense what was coming,” he offered. “I’m told by people who know that it takes very little blood in the water to attract sharks. They come in anticipation of a feast, apparently, even if it hasn’t yet begun.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“I don’t need to believe anything, Colonel. I deal with the Huldu as and when I find them. I have tools that work, some insight into their behavior, an appreciation of the risks.” Duncan shrugged. “It’s enough to get by.”
“Indeed. Enough to do rather better than just getting by, if my sources are to be believed.”
Duncan felt his hackles rise. “Sources?”
“Oh, we canvassed extensively among the woodsman community and other associated…practitioners. You have quite the reputation, it seems.”
“Well, it isn’t a difficult community to excel in.”
“No?”
“No. What you said earlier—smoke and mirrors and cheap conjuring. And a lot of charlatans out there making money from desperate people. Men who wouldn’t know how to bring a lost child out of the Forest if the Huldu served it up on a silver platter with a bow on top. It isn’t hard to do better than that.”
“I suppose not. Though your success rate is quite remarkable, apparently. Uncanny, even.”
“Look—”
“Mr. Silver, tell me something.” A new urgency rising in the other man’s voice.
“What if there were a way not to retrieve these children, painstakingly, one by one, from the Forest, but to put a stop to their abduction altogether? Once and for all, forever. What if I could offer you the chance not to get by fighting these creatures, but to drive them out entirely?”
“You believe that’s possible?”
“Certain people do.” Hardy snapped to his feet again—something in the memories he’d shared had clearly agitated him out of his ex-Guardsman sangfroid.
He went to his desk, began lifting and moving papers, shuffling them together.
“We have a number of top men working on the situation in Cambridge and in London. Level heads, not the usual Blavatsky hysteria brigade. We are mapping the Forest, trying to understand it. We are excavating the European myth base, sorting the fanciful from the potentially useful. In time, we hope to evolve weapons and tactics far beyond the crude tricks with iron we rely on now.”
He finished his paperwork, held up a loose sheaf of typed foolscap sheets.
“For now, I would need you in London.”
Duncan blinked.
“Come again?”
“London.” Hardy brought the sheaf of papers over to him.
“We’d really need you to get the train down this week.
I’ve had your contract backdated to the beginning of the month; it’ll come with a small advance to cover any relocation costs you might incur.
And of course, for now, we’ll arrange your accommodation.
It is a matter of some urgency, you see. ”
“You’re offering me…a job?”
“Did I not make that clear to your secretary yesterday?”
“Not entirely. I assumed that this was the work I usually do. That somebody was lost in the Forest.”
“What’s lost in the Forest currently is our future as a nation and an empire, Mr. Silver. We’re hiring you to get it back. For the duration. It’s all here.” He dropped the papers on the table in front of Duncan. “I think you’ll find the starting terms agreeable.”
Duncan glanced through the documentation. Agreeable was right—twenty-five fucking shillings a day! He’d finished the war a major and had been on a lot less. Paid tickets to London, accommodation covered, work he could likely do standing on his head…
For a moment, the soft comfort of it all beckoned—like the too-good-to-be-true promise of a four-day rest order, dropped on you while you were still in the fire trench—some fuck-up with scheduling back at HQ, you wouldn’t even have to do your close reserve stint first. All the way back, lads, all the way back right now.
Warm baths, decent cooked food, a bed with sheets on it, maybe even so far back from the front line you wouldn’t hear it anymore.
All there, just waiting for you. Grab your kit and scramble.
Your daughter is in the Forest.
Irene Rush and her pleading eyes.
He set the paperwork carefully down on the table again.
“Very generous. But I’m afraid this week isn’t going to be convenient.”
Hardy did the thing with his eyebrow again. “I…beg your pardon?”
“I’m currently under contract. It’ll take me a few days to clear, maybe longer. So there’s no way I can be in London this week.”
“You’re…turning down this appointment?”
“No. But I’m going to have to revisit it when I have discharged my existing obligations.” In the general ache and blur of his hangover, his words seemed to be coming out of someone else’s—some other profligate idiot’s—mouth. “I’m sure that’s something you’ll be able to understand.”
“And your obligation to your country?” A snap in Hardy’s voice now, the peeling of the officer veneer off harsher layers beneath. “Where does that weigh in your considerations?”
Duncan heard the screams at Messines again, the howl and crash-boom of the sky torn open. The busy natter of the machine guns to each other, the pleading of men caught up on the wire.
He got unhurriedly to his feet.
“I answered my country’s call to arms nine years ago, Colonel.
And I saw my country spend men’s lives like toilet paper to wipe the arses of leaders and generals too fucking stupid or lazy to understand that the world they lived in had changed.
This time around, my country will have to wait its turn. ”
Hardy went white. “How dare you!”
It got very quiet in the sun-soaked room.
They faced each other at not much more than touching distance.
Hardy’s pale combat face, his right fist balled at his side.
Drift of dust motes in the angled rays of light.
Steam from the tea in the china cups. Duncan waited, faint smile floating to his lips, dreaming all the damage he might do.
The moment passed.
“You really think, Mr. Silver,” Hardy, biting the words off, “that you’re the only man who suffered, that had to live through those four years of hell?”
“No. But I sometimes think I was one of the few paying attention along the way.”
A thin sneer. “What are you, then? Some of kind of Communist?”
“Well, they make some interesting arguments, don’t they. But no, I’m not any kind of Communist. What I am is a man of my word. If that’s unacceptable to you, or to His Majesty’s government, then perhaps we’re wasting each other’s time.”
“His Majesty’s Gov—” Hardy visibly held down his temper. “There is a large difference, Mr. Silver, between affairs of state, and the tribulations of cooks and seamstresses and C3 bookkeepers who should have kept better watch over their children in the first place.”
“Not to me there isn’t,” Duncan said evenly. “Thanks for the tea, though. I’ll see myself out.”