Polystom (35 page)

‘It’s the lieutenant, sir.’

Stom made his way along the trench again. The men seemed to have formed a near-superstitious fear of going into the lieutenant’s dugout, but even from outside Stom could hear the whimpering of the injured man. What is it now?’ he called, stepping through the entrance.

Lieutenant Stetrus’s bashed face looked weirdly contorted, his one good eye bulging like a tongue in a cheek. He had pulled himself halfway into a sitting position in the bunk, and a doubled gasping sound was emerging from him, once from his mouth and once from the sagging hole in his throat. Stom faced him, caught his eye, followed its glance, and turned.

Beeswing was sitting, looking comfortable, in a chair behind the entrance.

Polystom didn’t call out, didn’t swear. The inside of his mouth felt like dried leather. He backed a step, and another. Then he stopped.

‘You see her too?’ he said, huskily, to the figure on the bed.

‘Oh, of course he does,’ said Beeswing. ‘Are you Polystom?’

‘I,’ said Stom. ‘I. I’ll sit down.’

The seat by the bed was pressing at the backs of his knees. He sank into it. Should he call in the men from outside? What good would that do? He could, he thought with a vivid, sudden flash of inspiration, he could take out his revolver and shoot her straight away. But almost as soon as the inspiration came on him it drained away again. Shoot a ghost? Ridiculous!

What had she said?
Are you Polystom?

‘Don’t you know me?’ he said.

Beeswing frowned. Wrinkles appeared on her clear brow like ripples in a pond.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I think so. We were married?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not clear. It’s vague. Like a baldly written outline, not like the real thing at all.’

‘This is extraordinary,’ Stom muttered.

‘Is it?’ said Beeswing, with a more characteristic insouciance.

‘Of course it is! You do know you’re dead, don’t you?’

‘Dead?’ she said. ‘You mean –
you
are. If by dead, you mean not real, not alive. Or maybe you’re right,’ she said, her gaze wandering along the walls, past the lieutenant’s half-unpacked boxes. ‘Maybe I’m the one that’s dead. It’s not very nice in here.’

‘No,’ conceded Polystom. The shock of her appearance was dissolving itself into a series of tremors running up and down his arms and legs.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, sharply.

‘I’m having,’ he said, as he unstoppered his bottle, ‘a drink. I need a drink. This is most disconcerting.’

‘If you were really married to me, once upon a time,’ said Beeswing languidly, ‘you might be pleased to see me again.’

‘To see the dead?’ he snapped, emboldened a little by the drink. ‘To see a ghost?’

‘Am I a ghost?’ said Beeswing, examining the back of her hand, as if the answer were written there. ‘How strange.’

‘You were always strange,’ he muttered. ‘Why are you bothering us now? What is it about this world, that the dead don’t stay where they should be, but come bothering the living? Is it the war? Did the big guns wake you?’

Beeswing was looking intently at him as he said all this. ‘I don’t understand any of that,’ she said. ‘Or very little. It’s clearly unpleasant for you to see a ghost.’

‘Of course!’

‘If that’s so, then it’s equally unpleasant for us to see you. Don’t you think it works both ways? Don’t you think you are as uncanny for us as we are for you?’

Polystom hadn’t considered it in that light before. He took another long swig from his bottle, scowling as it
burned its way down the back of his throat. Ghosts scared by the living, eh. People terrified by ghostly apparitions, ghosts scared by living apparitions. It went round his head. The alcohol made the heat worse, but it dampened the sense of stink in the oven-like dugout.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is something.’

‘Well,’ she echoed.

‘You came to see me before.’

‘Last night,’ she said. ‘It was tricky, then. It’s easier now. It’s a sort of knack, you know.’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘Haunting, a knack. If you say so.’ He laughed, briefly, abruptly.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘To be holding a conversation, like this, with my dead wife! I don’t know, it seemed funny somehow.’ Polystom swivelled in his chair, and looked at Stet. The lieutenant had calmed himself since his captain’s entrance, had lain down again, and was now breathing heavily but steadily.

‘Funny,’ said Beeswing, distantly.

There was a pause. Had they run out of things to say already?

‘So,’ said Stom, with slightly forced conversational effort. ‘What is it like being dead?’

‘Like being alive,’ said Beeswing, distractedly. ‘Only less so. We haven’t really got time to chat, you know.’

The fear, dormant for several minutes, leapt up again in Stom’s chest. ‘What do you mean?’

‘How frightened you look!’

‘I don’t want to die,’ he said. ‘I think I should ask you to go and leave me in peace.’

‘Your uncle,’ said Beeswing’s ghost. ‘I think that’s who he is. He wants to see you, to speak with you. Come along!’

‘My uncle?’ But that made sense too, to Polystom’s slightly drink-furred brain. In the kingdom of the dead there would be promiscuous social interchange. In the kingdom of the dead corpse would tangle with corpse,
ghost swap ectoplasmic wisp with ghost. Alive his uncle had never liked Beeswing, Polystom knew. But maybe everything changed after death.

‘Oh,’ she said, exhaling a sudden disappointment. ‘Oh no. Another time.’

‘What?’ asked Stom. ‘Am I saved? Have you decided not to drag me down into the lands of death today?’

‘Silly!’ she said. ‘It’s not that. Only I can hear the rain starting again. And I can hear the guns firing, which means you’re under attack outside. No, my one-time husband,’ she said, suddenly on her feet, somehow instantly by his side, bending over him so that her hair flopped down and brushed near his face with ticklish intensity. ‘No I’ve not come to drag you down to death. That’s not the arena in which your uncle wants to meet with you. In fact,’ she added, whispering now, her lips touching the lobes of his ear, tinglingly, ‘if you die in this attack then it won’t be
possible
to set up the meeting. Bye bye.’

‘Sir! Sir!’

Shouts from outside the dugout.

Stom was alone, save only for the ruined body of Lieutenant Stet, who seemed now to be asleep.

Stom rushed through the door, and out into flashing silver strings of rain. Almost at once, like thunder and lightning, he heard the detonation of the shelling. His men, all eight of them, were leaning over the east side of the trench, their guns sounding and sounding. Stom, rushing, tried to stop, but the gooey, slippery new mud at the bottom of the trench wrongfooted him and he slipped down. Falling down.

‘What about the west flank?’ he bellowed, getting to his feet.

One of his men peeled away and slammed himself against the west side of the trench. ‘Nothing down there, sir! They’re massing in the east,’ he said, tearing himself away,
mud smeared down his front, and dashing against the east side again. ‘Coming up!’

Stom took up position on the east, leaned as far over the trench as he could, and fired his pistol again and again. He fired, wildly, into the blurring of the rain, aiming at shadows and nothing, until all the bullets in his slot were discharged. His finger kept beckoning at the trigger, even though the mechanism could only cluck emptily like a hen.

A rank of figures swarmed up through the rain. They were going to reach the trench easily. The shots of his eight men were hardly dropping any of them. In an ecstasy of panic, Stom threw his pistol from him, dropped to the trench floor, searching for a rifle from one of the rotten corpses. drowning in the puddles there. He couldn’t find anything.

‘Men!’ he bellowed, standing up. ‘Sergeant! Up the west side, and to the gun. Now! Now!’

He scattered down the trench, slipping and kicking in the water, the rain tapping hard into his face. He was up the stairs and on top of the west side of the ridge before he realised that nobody was following him. Maybe they hadn’t heard his orders. ‘Hey,’ he bellowed at the backs of the men, now a little below him. ‘Hey!’ Trying to make his voice carry over the clatter of the rainstorm. ‘This way! Sergeant! Sergeant!’ What was the man’s name? ‘We’re retreating up the ridge, a tactical retreat.’

The enemy swept up the far side. He could see several of them taking aim at him – exposed, above the level of the trench. One went onto a knee to steady his rifle. Another simply hoisted the weapon to his shoulder and fired. A bullet whistled past him. Another hit the mud at his feet.

Polystom had just been talking to his dead wife.

Everything was pressing upon him, terrifying, overwhelming.

I can hear the rain starting again
, Beeswing had said. He had felt her lips, her dead lips, against the skin of his ear.

He turned, ducked, and ran as fast as he could towards the wreck of the gun, expecting at every step to feel the kick of a bullet in his back. The agony of that.

At the blackened metal of the gun, he swung himself about, taking cover. He could see the little sparky flames from his troop’s rifles, and just about make out the mass of enemy soldiers, individual bodies collapsing, others pressing on. But it was all misty, a kinematic image not properly focused.

His breath was dense, loud in his ears.

He turned again, ducked forward, and hurried out of cover, running northward along the hogsback ridge.

He struggled through the mud for more than an hour, as the noise of battle retreated behind him, until he collapsed panting into a puddle-bottomed shellhole. The rain had ceased, and up in the sky snaggle-edged clouds broke and reformed against a deep mauve background. For a long time Polystom simply sat in the hole, until his breathing was under control. He thought about what he had done. For several minutes he peered over the edge of the crater, the direction from which he had come. He could just make out the asterisk of the ruined cannon, on the horizon, but he could see nothing more, and no sound carried. Were they still fighting? Maybe they were all dead. All his men, dead. He slid back to the bottom of the crater, his feet splashing into the warm brown water. Would they come back now, as ghosts, like Beeswing, like Cleonicles? Beeswing had said
your uncle wants to see you, to speak with you
. The more he thought about it, the more his breathing hurried. He turned and turned, half expecting to see the ghosts of his dead men rearing up from the mud to accuse him. You abandoned us. You deserted us.

The sun appeared from behind a cloud, and sunlight was everywhere, turning the puddle into glowing copper.

Polystom slitted his eyes against the glare. Somebody was in the crater with him, indistinct in the wash of light. And, with a shudder, the sunlight drained to grey as another cloud passed before the sun.

There were three of them. Beeswing and two others. Polystom did not recognise the others.

‘You startle me,’ he said, scrabbling halfway up the crater wall. ‘You frighten me.’ His heart was beating palpably in
his chest. He reached for his pistol before he remembered he had already discarded it.

‘Husband,’ said Beeswing. ‘Husband.’ It wasn’t clear whether she was addressing him, or explaining his relationship to the other dead people present. Polystom looked more closely at them. One was a tall, black-haired man, thin save for a balloon-shaped pot belly. Were all the imperfections of flesh carried into the afterlife? The other was a short woman of indeterminate age, with the curiously glazed polished skin of the dead. ‘You’re all three of you dead,’ Polystom said to them. ‘You all are.’

‘We’re all dead,’ agreed Beeswing, as if placating a child.

The two figures, one on each side, said nothing.

‘What is it you want with me?’

‘Personally,’ said Beeswing, who – somehow – had zipped through the air in an instant and was now sitting in the mud at his side. ‘Personally I don’t want anything from you.’ Polystom noticed that the mud was marking the pale grey of her trousers, blotching onto the hem of her grey shift. Did the dead go about dressed? Did they have to wash their clothes?

‘You need to go further north,’ Beeswing was saying.

‘North?’

‘To the mountain. Not all the way, necessarily, I don’t know. It
really
isn’t clear.’ She seemed momentarily cross, but the emotion faded as soon as it appeared.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your uncle. He can’t make it out here to meet you.’

‘I need to go further north to meet my uncle?’

‘Yes yes yes,’ hurriedly, impatiently.

‘Why?’

‘Ask him,’ she said, dreamy now. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Those two,’ said Polystom, indicating the two. ‘Who are they?’

‘Nobody you know,’ said Beeswing, standing between them again. ‘Nobody you
knew
, I should say – although, as I
mentioned before, from our perspective it is
you
who are not real, you know.’

‘It’s creepy,’ said Polystom. ‘Dead people appearing all over the place.’

‘Oh, we’re all around you,’ Beeswing replied. Her voice was smaller now, reducing, as if she were retreating from him, although simultaneously she was standing clearly in front of him, and in fact seemed to be growing, swelling. ‘All the time, all around you. You take us for granted. Like the air,’ she added, putting her head back to stare at the grey sky, ‘like the air, that only sometimes condenses itself into clouds, but which is generally perfectly invisible, and which is purer and purer the further away you go, until it is almost invisible, with only the slightest,’ (very faint, as if she were an enormous distance away, and yet she was still right there), ‘purple in the immensity.’

‘Death has changed you, Beeswing,’ Polystom said. ‘You were never like this when you were alive.’ But he was alone in the crater. With a sense of anticlimax, the air shivered into swathes and swathes of warm drizzle.

Polystom trudged further northward, berating himself as he went for doing so. Following a ghost’s instructions, deserting his post, all his men dead, this was nothing less than madness. The drizzle came and went, interspersed with occasional periods of bright sunshine that made his uniform smoke moistly, clouds steaming off him like pollen. Then the sun would hide again, and the rain would start drifting down again.