A Whisper of Southern Lights (3 page)

THEY TOOK GABRIEL CLOSE
to a park at the northern perimeter of Singapore.

“Drop the rifle!” one of them shouted. “Drop the rifle, drop the rifle!”

Gabriel obeyed, and another soldier darted in and snatched it up.

“This way now!” the Japanese said. He was taller than the others, leaner, and there was a splash of blood on his cheek.

“Where are you taking me?” Gabriel asked.

“You’re a prisoner now.”

Good,
Gabriel thought.
One step closer.

“Your eye?”

Gabriel frowned, then felt the blood dribbling down his face. “An old wound,” he said.

The soldier stepped forward and came very close to Gabriel, staring at the patch. “Take it off, throw it here,” he said.

Gabriel sighed. He’d liked that lady in Verona. He took off the patch and lobbed it at the soldier, who caught it from the air and plunged it deep into his pocket. He looked up at Gabriel and paused, staring at his hollowed, scarred eye socket.

“Old wound?”

“Very.”

“Still bleeding.”

“It’s been upset.”

The soldier stared at Gabriel for a while, his expression perplexed. Then he nodded. “This way.”

The four of them moved off alongside the park. They were heading south, deeper into the city, and Gabriel hoped he had done the right thing. He could escape if he wanted to; he was sure of that. But he had no wish to add several bullet and bayonet wounds to his collection of scars.

As they passed the southern tip of the park, Gabriel saw a pile of bodies wearing British uniforms. There must have been at least thirty of them there, gathered around a destroyed machine-gun emplacement. They had obviously been executed—there were no weapons in sight, and some of them were wearing no boots or trousers.

The tall soldier glanced back at Gabriel, then forward again. “Don’t worry,” he said, obviously confident that his two companions could not understand what he was saying. “Not all Japanese will do that.”

“Whose blood is that on your cheek?”

“My own.”

As the hours went by, they gathered more prisoners, more guards, and moved farther south.

They arrived at Changi Prison. Gabriel entered with two dozen others, and he took a while to realise that the Japanese were leaving the POWs on their own. There were guards on the walls and no doubt more stationed outside, but within the main building itself, there were only the defeated.

There were thousands of men inside. There were no toilets that flushed, and the stink was horrendous. Many men still carried food, and they shared it as best they could. Gabriel was just one of many who seemed to be wandering the buildings, searching for their units or friends. Nobody stopped him, though his bloodied eye socket and gnarled face drew curious glances. Eventually, he fashioned a tie from his shirtsleeve, wrapping it around his head and covering the hollowed eye. He hoped that looking like a seasoned soldier would give him anonymity.

Every face he looked at could have been the man he sought. He had no way of finding out without asking, and asking would quickly draw attention. He did not want that.

Because Temple was close.

Even on his approach to the prison, Gabriel had felt fresh stabs of pain emanating from his old wounds. The hatred rose from deep within, familiar as his own heartbeat. But there was also caution and calm, born of his previous encounters with Temple. Neither of them had ever really won, but he knew one day, that would change. One day, he or Temple would be dead, and the world could be a very different place.

Hatred and calmness. Anger and caution. They were strange mixes, and confusing. But one thing Gabriel knew he could trust for sure was the feeling in his wounds.

He entered a small cell—designed for two people but holding eight—and slumped in a corner, shoulder-to-shoulder with a man with a burnt face. He closed his good eye and rested his head back against the wall. He had to think and plan. There was a man to find and a demon to fight once more.

He dreamed about the Italian garden. There were bullet holes in the building and the garden’s boundary wall, leaves and bark blasted from the tree, and the place spoke to him like no other. The dead fruits on the tree resembled his two dead children, and the tree itself was his wife, tall and willowy. In death, she stretched out her arms out to protect her offspring, twisting around them and holding them away from harm. But good intentions cannot divert fate, or a blade, or a bullet or bomb. The fruits were large, ripe and rotten, ruptured by shrapnel and open to the elements. A crow sat on one branch, its beak wet with rancid flesh, and it seemed to laugh at Gabriel as he looked for a stone to throw at it.

It’ll take more than a stone,
his wife’s voice said,
though the tree had not moved. It’ll take a change in things.

“I don’t know where I am,” Gabriel said. “Am I in Changi Jail or here? Am I alive, or dead?” There was no answer from the tree or the land. “I’ve never really known where I am,” he went on, sad silence the only reply.

And then leaves rustled against the breeze, grass swayed out of rhythm, grains of sand skittered uphill, and their combined whispers gave voice to something that had known about him forever. It was awe inspiring and terrifying, but more than anything, it gave Gabriel a brief, precious moment of peace.

It felt as though he had been noticed.

Gabriel awoke to find someone staring at him. Temple! He sat up, cringing against the pain of his empty eye, and the man reached out to touch his face.

“Take it easy,” he said. “Here. A drink.”

Gabriel closed his eye. Temple could be anyone, but he was not this man. There was too much kindness here for even the demon to impersonate.

“Thank you.” He took the proffered bottle and drank deep. The water tasted foul but very good.

“You were with the 18th?”

Gabriel frowned, confused for a moment as the remnants of his dream and the real world collided. Then he felt the itch of his unfamiliar uniform. “No,” he said. “My uniform was ruined; I had to borrow these.” He drank some more.
This is important,
he thought.
I could use this man’s help, but he has to believe me.
If I make him suspicious
. . .

“You’re wounded.” The man was looking at Gabriel’s face, and in the poor light, his eyes were wide. He seemed to have already sensed that there was something not quite right.

“The eye is an old one,” Gabriel said. “The others . . . scars from past battles.”

“Which ones?”

“I was in France with the BEF. Hopped on a destroyer at Dunkirk and it was sunk half a mile out.”

The man nodded, still eyeing Gabriel’s face.

Gabriel had to take control of the conversation. “Surely you don’t think I’m one of them?”

The man grinned. “Well, you don’t look like a Jap.”

“Bastards.”

“Aye, you’re right there. They killed my mate in front of me. He’d taken shrapnel in the leg and couldn’t walk, so . . .” The man’s stare moved over Gabriel’s shoulder and far away.

“So, what now?” Gabriel asked.

“I guess we stay here.”

“I wonder for how long.” Both fell silent because neither knew the answer. Others in the cell were chatting quietly, though no one took control to address everyone. Gabriel wondered whether they all knew each other. He’d seen hundreds of prisoners being marched to the jail and thousands more inside, and the chance of finding one man in such a place seemed impossible.

He leaned forward and put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and then he injected the weight of all his years into his voice. “I’m looking for someone,” he said. “It’s important.”

“You sound so tired,” the man said. “But so alive.”

“I am tired. I’ve been out here a long time.”

Perhaps then this man sensed the importance of what Gabriel sought. Because he leaned in closer, staring at Gabriel’s missing eye, and lowered his voice so that it was barely louder than a sigh.

“What’s his name?”

“Jack Sykes.”

The man shook his head, confused. “But I don’t know him.”

“I know he’s here somewhere. But there’s someone else looking . . . a man of many faces. I have to find Sykes first. It’s important.”

“Important,” the man said. “Of course it is. Who are you?”

“My name is Gabriel.”

“Like the angel.”

“Nothing like the angel.”

The man nodded, sat back on his haunches and closed his eyes. For a second, Gabriel thought he had drifted into sleep, removing himself from the sudden strangeness of this conversation and into a protective cocoon of sleep. But then his eyes snapped open again, and he smiled. “Perhaps I can find him for you.”

“I’d be grateful for your help.”

“Henry.” The man held out his hand.

“Henry. Thank you.” Gabriel shook his hand and smiled.

Henry stood and walked to the cell door. Outside, there were men lying in corridors, spilling out of other rooms, sleeping beneath broken cisterns; a sea of defeated humanity that exuded hunger and pain in unbearable waves. He stepped into the throng. From his stance, Gabriel knew that Henry was glad of something to distance him from the cloudy future.

How cloudy is my future?
he thought.
I have brave young Henry seeking the man I came here to find, but if Temple finds and kills him first, I’m back where I began. And he’ll kill Henry, too. Another death seeded in my selfish quest.

Gabriel wiped another bloody tear from his cheek and waited for things to change.

A DAY AFTER ARRIVING
at the jail, they sent us out to cremate bodies.

Singapore was full of them. A thousand dead, maybe tens of thousands, and the Japanese wanted someone else to clean up the mess they had made. So, they chose us, of course. The prisoners, the defeated and dishonoured. They gave us matches and paper and told us to break up furniture and fences, pile bodies and burn the evidence of slaughter.

We worked in small groups watched over by a few guards, and though they seemed more laid-back than during the battle, the Japanese were still very much on the alert. One young lad from our group—can’t have been more than eighteen—returned to the jail one night with a pocketful of dates. The guards searched us all on the way in, and when they found the smuggled food, they beat him and tied him to a tree outside the jail, leaving him there all night. We took him down the next day and carried him with us, supporting him all day, afraid that if he fell, the guards would finish him with a bayonet.

I tried not to catch their eyes, because I couldn’t hide my hatred.

The more time went by, the worse the job became. Each day in the baking heat, the bodies smelled more, and by the end of the first week, the stench of the city was dreadful. Most of the bodies had been cleared from the streets by then, and we started going into bombed houses and destroyed vehicles. Many of the corpses were already torn up by their violent deaths, worked at by dogs, picked at by birds and beetles and rats.

Each time I added another body part to a funeral pyre, I whispered a few words to God.

And all the time I kept a lookout for that strange man, the one who’d changed before my eyes from a tall Brit into a shorter, stockier Japanese. I tried to convince myself many times that I had not really seen that. Perhaps the heat had got to me, or the pressures of the past few weeks had driven me close to delusion. But it was not the memory of his change that convinced me of what I had seen; it was the memory of my fellow prisoners’ reactions.

That, and Sergeant Major Snelling’s suggestion that this man had been looking for me.

I had no idea who or what he was, or why he would want me. Perhaps I should have died back in the jungle, and he was the angel of death come to claim my soul.

The food in Changi ran out and we started subsisting on scavenged rice and water. Vitamin deficiency kicked in quickly, and many men developed rice balls—raw, seeping flesh around the scrotum and inner thighs—and happy feet, which weren’t happy at all. Somehow, I escaped both afflictions. When most of the bodies had been cleared, the Japs set us to work shifting rubble, pushing aside destroyed vehicles and bringing Singapore’s ruined transport network back to some sort of order.

We were working in the courtyard of an expensive manor, burning several bodies and trying to fill a bomb crater, when I saw that man again.

He marched into the garden, claiming possession of the place with his arrogance. “Jack Sykes!” he shouted. He wore the uniform and the face of a Japanese, but his voice bore no real accent. He could have been anyone. “Jack Sykes!”

I glanced around at my mates. None of them looked at me, because they saw the threat in this man’s stance. And maybe they sensed something of his wrongness as well.

Sergeant Major Snelling stood a few paces to my left. “Easy, Jack,” he whispered.

The three Japanese guards who accompanied us seemed unsettled and jumpy. They did not know this man. One of them said something, and the man shouted him down. The guard bowed his head and stepped back, rifle still held across his chest.

“Jack Sykes!” the man shouted again. “Message from home!”

Home! He could not mean that. It was a lie, a lure.

“Easy, Jack,” Sergeant Major Snelling whispered again, and the man heard him speak.

“You! To me, now.” He was speaking less and less like a Japanese man speaking English.

Something happened to his eyes. I couldn’t tell what, but they seemed to shift somehow, as though the sun had moved several hours across the sky in one blink. A ripple of uncertainty passed through the other prisoners, and even the three guards seemed more nervous than before.

This is power,
I thought. The man had more power than simple rank could imply.

Snelling walked forward without pause. “There’s no Jack Sykes here,” he said.

“Come to me and we’ll see about that,” the man said. “What’s your name?”

“Sergeant Major Snelling.”

“Snelling. Sounds like an insect. Do insects scare you, Snelling?”

“No.”

“Then what does?”

Snelling did not answer. It was such a strange question, yet so loaded.

“We’ll see,” the man said. He beckoned Snelling forward, snapping a few orders over his shoulder at the three guards.

“This way.” He turned his back on Snelling and walked into the shattered back door of the manor. Snelling followed.

Easy, Jack,
he had said. How could I be easy now?

The guards urged us back to work, stealing frequent glances at the manor. We started piling loose soil and rubble into the crater, but without any real effort. All of us—prisoners and guards alike—were waiting to see what happened next.

There was a scream. I’d heard many screams during my war: pleas to God, to life, to Mother, to end pain. But none like this. This was the cry of a man who had seen the end and knew that there was worse to follow. It was an outpouring of every bad thing, and a second after it ended, Snelling ran from the manor.

He was not the man he had been when he went inside. Then he had been proud and defiant; now he was broken. He’d pissed himself, and there were scratches down both cheeks where he had gouged his own skin. He darted across the garden, knocking a fellow POW aside, changing direction, breath hitching in his throat as he tried to scream again. He barrelled into one of the guards, sending him backward into the crater we had been sent there to fill, and the impact changed his direction yet again.

He was running directly toward me when the other two guards shot him.

Sergeant Major Snelling fell a dozen steps away, twitching in the dirt as blood pooled beneath him. The expression on his face had not changed. There was no agony, nor fear of impending death; it was still a mask of terror.

I dashed to his side and held his head, but he was already dead.

The fallen guard crawled from the half-filled crater and snatched up his rifle. He was jabbering at the other two, but all three of them fell silent when the strange man emerged from the manor.

He was flexing his fist, as though he had just held something hot. He was smiling. And he looked directly at me.

“Jack Sykes,” he said.

Never in my life had I felt so singled out. Across that ruined landscape, over the back of a dead man, his eyes found and held me like a pin holds a butterfly. I was fixed to the ground, unable to move as he started walking toward me. I sensed other men falling back from me, unwilling to interfere in something that was so obviously not their business.

And was this my business? I could not know. The man would not look away long enough for me to think.

As he walked, he changed. The skin of his face flickered and flowed, as though seen suddenly behind a heat haze. His legs seemed to lengthen and his chest grew broader. He was halfway to me, and now he was a tall blond man, the wrong shape and size for the Japanese army clothes stretched across his body.

“What scares you, Sykes?” he asked, holding out his hand as he skirted the edge of the bomb crater.

What scares me? How could he know?
I stepped back but tripped over Snelling’s outstretched arm. I went down on my rump, staring at this man, this thing, flesh still flowing across his face as he became one man after another, and I knew none of them.

He was a few steps away when he started to open his outstretched hand.

A shot took him in the shoulder and he grunted, going to one knee in the disturbed soil. Another shot, then another, and I realised that the three Japanese guards must have seen his face.

He was struck in the chest and stomach, the arm and ear, and another impact drove him down onto his side.

I stood and backed away, never taking my eyes from this man and his open hand. There was something there, shimmering in the blazing sun. I could not quite make it out. But I feared it.

The guards were closing in on him now, shooting again as he rolled onto his back and reached for a cloud. A bullet smashed his hand aside in a mist of blood, and I turned and ran. My mates were already a hundred yards along the street, ducking behind a wrecked truck to dodge the bullets and perhaps also the sight of that strange man being shot to pieces.

He knows me,
I thought.
He knows my name, and maybe if he’d had another second, he’d have shown me . . .
“What scares you, Sykes?” he had asked. Perhaps he knew.

Something whistled past my ear and I heard the shot, then the shouts and the sound of boots hitting dirt as the guards chased us. I stopped in the middle of the street with my arms held high, cringing, expecting a bullet or bayonet between my shoulder blades at any second. But the guards only gathered us together and hustled us away, heading back to Changi. They were quieter than usual, less cruel, and I took advantage of the leisurely pace to gather my thoughts.

None of the other men talked to me. They had heard him calling my name.

We were searched as thoroughly as ever upon our return to Changi, and then let inside under our own steam. I parted from the others and made my way into the main building, climbing staircases that were now home to dozens of men, finding my cell, grabbing my meager belongings and leaving. I had to find somewhere else to sleep. I craved the company of strangers.

More than anything, I needed to think about what had happened.

“Sykes,” a voice said.

I gasped and spun around on the landing. There were men all around me, sitting in hallways, leaning against doors, talking and smoking and sleeping. I tried to see where the voice had come from. I dreaded seeing that shifting face again.

He was shot, I thought. A dozen times or more . . . he was dead.

“Sykes, here.” A man stepped from the shadows of a doorway and motioned me toward him.

“You stay away from me,” I said. I backed away, keeping my voice low. “Just stay away.”

“Sykes, someone needs to see you.” He was following me, a short, thin man with a wound to the side of his neck. “He’s been looking for you, says it’s something important. His name’s Gabriel, like the angel.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I heard from a lad I know that you ran into a bit of trouble on your work party today. Japs shot someone who attacked you and your sergeant major.”

“And how many names do you have?”

The man frowned and shook his head. “My name’s Henry.”

I saw nothing in his face or eyes to reveal a lie. My heart thudded in my chest, and my vision throbbed with each heartbeat. I was badly scared. I’d seen something that I could not even begin to explain, and there was a hot patch on the back of my neck, as if someone was staring at me.

“What does this Gabriel want?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t know. But I think he’s been looking for a while. He’s old.”

“How old?”

Henry shrugged, frowning again. “I dunno. There’s just something about him.”

“His face changes,” I said. I had to get away. I had to run, flee . . . but I was a prisoner there. A rat in a trap waiting to be killed.

“No,” Henry said. “But I’m sure he wishes it could. Follow me if you like. He said it was important. Don’t know how or why, but I believe him.” Henry turned and walked away along the landing.

I followed. I should have gone in the opposite direction, exploring the depths of the prison until I found somewhere dark to hide. But I was suddenly tired and depressed, driven down by everything I had seen, scared at whatever was to come. Some said the Japanese were going to leave us here to rot, while others heard rumours of work parties being sent up-country to work on roads and railways. The future felt bleak.

We moved through the prison, and the stink and sounds of that place could have been lifted straight from Hell.