The Wraiths of War (9 page)

My breathing had slowed now, and my heart was beating less rapidly. In the near distance, jutting above the foreshortened horizon of No Man’s Land, I could see the sagging and splintered remains of a tree trunk sticking out of the churned mud like a vast taloned claw clutching at the air. I knew the trunk lay about a hundred yards in front of the German lines, because the lads manning the Howitzers and sixty-pounders often used it, among other landmarks, as a distance mark during bombardments. I knew too that Pyke had lobbed the heart in that general direction. And so, like a turtle, I began to crawl through the mud towards it.

I tried not to think about how exposed I was, how long it would take to crawl even these several hundred yards across No Man’s Land, and how unlikely were the chances of finding what I was looking for when I reached my destination. All I could do was cling to the hope that the heart and I were connected, that we had a mission to fulfil (whatever that might ultimately turn out to be) and that we were therefore
destined
to be together.

Woolly thinking, but it was all I had. All I could do was build a barrier in my mind to keep out the doubts and the uncertainties, and try to stay concentrated on the task in hand.

The mud was like glue, which made the sheer physical toil of crawling through it on my belly utterly exhausting. I tried to stay as quiet as I could, but sometimes I couldn’t prevent myself grunting with effort as I propelled myself forward using only my elbows and knees. Although my extremities were cold – my hands in particular were completely numb – I was pouring with sweat inside my uniform. I probably stank (I hadn’t changed my clothes since our last rest period away from the line almost a week ago), but the odour of sulphur and decay that hung over the battlefield – ‘the stink of Hell’, Frank called it – was far worse than any amount of BO generated by the unclean bodies of the living.

How badly I smelled, though, was the least of my concerns. What really worried me was the fact that if I wasn’t careful the sweat pouring from my body would eventually cool, even freeze, leaving me in real danger of dying from hypothermia. It was important, therefore, not to give in to exhaustion, but to keep moving. I tried to picture myself, having completed my mission and made it back unscathed, warming myself by the brazier, my freezing-cold, mud-plastered hands wrapped around a mug of army tea. I imagined myself sipping the tea, imagined it trickling down my throat, warming my insides. I knew it would taste disgusting, but that didn’t matter, because if I managed to make it back with the heart in my pocket, I also knew that the tea, foul though it was, would be the best I’d ever tasted.

The longer I crawled, the pain in my limbs and back steadily increasing, my skin continuing to ooze sweat, my breath becoming a series of ragged gasps, the more I felt my mind trying to break away, to drift. At one point I found myself wondering what Clover and Hope were doing now, whether they’d discovered I’d gone and how they’d reacted – and then I snapped to, like a sentry on duty trying desperately to stay awake during the graveyard shift, and I remembered that time didn’t work like that, that Clover and Hope didn’t exist in this world, in this time; that my life now, in 1915, wasn’t on some track that was running parallel to theirs in the future.

Time was an elusive beast, an ever-coiling snake, difficult to grasp and hold on to. And like a snake it had fangs that were full of poison, and the poison was loneliness. Or worse than loneliness, it was an all-encompassing desolation, one that forced you to realise we were all cast adrift on a vast, dark, endless sea, each of us friendless and forever lost and endlessly, endlessly…

It was the stench that snapped me out of the meaningless, sleepy ramble that my thoughts had become. My head jerked up as if someone had thrust a bottle of smelling salts under my nose. For a moment I couldn’t remember where I was. And then my eyes focused and I recoiled. On the ground in front of me, wrapped in muddy rags that must once have been part of a uniform (though whether it was one of ours or one of theirs was impossible to tell) was an entire but badly mangled leg.

It was bloated with green and purple-black rot, and the stench coming off it was unbelievable. Hideous too was the fact that the decaying foot was still encased in an army boot, the laces neatly tied.

I turned my head and vomited, hunching in my shoulders to avoid the spatter. Then I paddled frantically with my right elbow, trying to steer away from the sight and stench of the hideous obstacle in my path. I’d seen worse things, both in the trenches and earlier – I’d witnessed Hawkins, my butler and friend during my time in Victorian London, have his arm severed in front of me and die from the resulting blood loss, for example – but at that moment I was feeling at a particularly low ebb, my body and mind more vulnerable than usual. As soon as I was out of range of the leg, or at least of the worst of its smell, I paused to gather my strength, at which point a sudden wave of despair washed over me.

What was I doing? What could I possibly hope to achieve here? This was hopeless. Utterly hopeless.

Luckily the feeling lasted for no more than a few seconds. No sooner had I been gripped by it than I rallied, shrugging it off angrily.

No, I
wouldn’t
give in. I’d come too far to simply stop. If I was going to die here – whether that be my ultimate destiny, or whether I was simply unlucky enough to be in one of many alternate timelines that would simply peter out with my pointless and premature death – then I wouldn’t allow it to happen without first expending every last ounce of energy available to me. I would struggle and fight to the end. Either that, or be stopped by outside forces.

As if Fate were mocking me, the Germans chose that very moment to start firing.

I made myself as flat as possible, closing my eyes as my cheek smacked into the mud. At first I assumed the shots were nothing but routine – now and again in the dead of night, those on sentry duty, whether on our side or theirs, let off a volley just to prove they were doing their duty, and to let the enemy know they were still around and alert – but when bullets started splatting into the mud somewhere to my left, I realised I must have been spotted. Perilous though it was to move, I knew it was more perilous still to just lie there, because sooner or later I would be hit.

Trying to still the frantic terror of my thoughts, I lifted my head a fraction and looked around, searching for a place to hide or something I could use as cover. Perhaps ten yards ahead of me I spotted what looked like a shell crater – a black depression in the ground rimmed by a ridge of earth where the mud had been forced upwards by the impact. I waited for the initial burst of gunfire to subside, knowing there would be a slight pause between one volley and the next, and then, my ears throbbing, I scrambled up into a semi-crouch, ran forward and dived into the shell crater.

Although I didn’t have much choice, I was all too aware that throwing myself into an unknown hole in No Man’s Land was a move born of utter desperation. Full of future technology I might have been, but I knew if I landed on the jagged remains of a shell and slashed my belly open, then no amount of nanites could repair me. I knew too that if the hole was more than, say, six feet deep and full of thick, muddy water then the likelihood was I would be sucked under and drown.

Luckily, though, the hole turned out to be only four or five feet deep, added to which I had a soft landing. Not so luckily, the soft landing was a dead and rotting German soldier. How long he had been there I had no idea, but he stank to high Heaven and was crawling with maggots. He was lying on his back, his head – what was left of it – partially submerged in a pool of black water.

I landed across his midriff, part of which promptly broke with a gristly snap. Worse than that, though, was the feel of his flesh through his uniform. Decomposition had caused slippage, which meant that the violent pressure of my body resulted in the flesh, which had become soft like old bananas, sliding away from the bone beneath. In my revulsion, I unthinkingly put my left hand on his chest to lever myself up and away from him – whereupon his rib cage cracked like a lattice of dry sticks and my hand plunged into a cold, stinking pulp of rotting internal organs.

I clapped my free hand, which was caked in mud but not guts, over the bottom half of my face to stop myself from screaming. Not that it was likely the enemy would have heard me. Above my head, loud enough to make the bones of my skull ache, the Germans were still blazing away. Ordinarily I would have covered my ringing ears and kept my head down until it was over, but in the circumstances the gunfire seemed oddly divorced from me. Gagging, I withdrew my hand from the dead German’s innards with a slurping plop, then plunged it into the pool of muddy water between his booted feet.

The next few minutes were spent heaving and shuddering with reaction. I couldn’t tell whether the appalling stench that seemed to have wrapped itself around my head like a warm, damp towel, was coming from the dead German or my own hand. Certainly the thought of using that gut-smeared hand to eat, or even scratch myself, in the immediate future made me gag anew. As did the sight of the fat white maggots wriggling with frantic glee over the dead man’s body, some of which I had to brush off my own clothes, such was their eagerness to make friends.

Eventually I managed to calm myself, to stop the shakes that kept wanting to ripple through my body. At around the same time the gunfire from the German trenches, which had already become intermittent, stopped altogether. I knew that if Frank and I had been on sentry duty, and we’d looked out over No Man’s Land and spotted movement, we’d have blazed away too. I also knew that if, after several minutes, we’d seen no further signs of movement, we’d have assumed that either we’d been mistaken, that the enemy had been hit or that they’d retreated back to where they’d come from. We’d then have been vigilant for a while, our senses heightened. But at last the draining conditions, our jittery tiredness and the sheer constant boredom of waiting for something to happen would have taken their toll, and we’d have sunk back into our usual state of edgy torpor, secure in the knowledge that no human being could cross that blasted heath between us and them without being spotted.

Despite my anxiety about the onset of hypothermia, not to mention my instinctive desire to put distance between me and my gruesome companion, I forced myself to sit tight for a while. I wondered, with all the racket from the German guns, whether my absence had been discovered back in the home trench, and what Frank would say to cover me if it had.

But that was something to worry about later. If I found the heart I might even be able to use it to backtrack an hour or two, to return to my post only ten minutes or so after setting out on my mission. I could tell Frank I’d changed my mind – or better still, that he’d changed it for me, had made me realise that what I intended to do was hopeless and stupid. Of course, I’d have to keep the heart hidden from then on, but with Pyke no longer around to cause trouble, that shouldn’t be a problem.

After what felt like half an hour or so, the cold really started to bite, to embed itself into my bones and guts. I began to shiver, and then to shudder, and no amount of willpower could stop it from getting worse. Even more alarming, my mind started to drift again; I felt sleep stealing over me in ever-increasing waves. The fourth time I snapped awake, I thought I’d lost the ability to move. For a moment my mind battled between caring and not caring – there was a big part of me that just wanted to give up, to let it all go. If it hadn’t been for Kate, for my overriding desire to find her, to see this through, to make everything all right again, I might have given in to that temptation.

Instead I forced myself to move, groaning and wincing as I rose from the huddled sitting position into which I’d sunk. My feet were wet and frozen. My uniform clung to me like cold cardboard. With a grimace I flicked another maggot off my sleeve. Looking down at the dead German, his ravaged face half-turned away from me, his teeth clenched in a ghastly grin through shrivelled lips, I could just about make out that over his uniform he was wearing what appeared to be an officer’s overcoat made of some thick woolly material. Fingers trembling from the cold, I extracted my box of army-issue matches from my breast pocket and struck one. I half-expected it to be too damp to light, but it flared into life immediately. I glanced up at the lip of the shell hole, hoping that the bloom of flame couldn’t be seen over the top. If it could, it would be only a matter of seconds before the Germans started blazing away again.

When all remained silent, I extended my arm, the flame shaking as its glow spilled over the dead soldier, illuminating some of the grislier details of his condition. I tried not to look too closely at the hideous cavity in his chest, at his twisted limbs and caved-in head, at the black patches of slimy rot on his uniform. Instead I focused on his coat, which was open and spread out in the mud beneath him like a cape, and tried to think only of how much warmer I would be with it wrapped around me. Yes, it had been lying in muddy water, and would therefore be wet and filthy, and yes, its dead owner had been decomposing into it for God knew how long, which meant that the stench would be unspeakable, but if I wanted to avoid freezing to death I’d have to get over my revulsion. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

I shook out my match and tossed it aside. With one foot planted either side of the man’s sprawled legs, I shuffled forward, moving slowly to prevent myself slipping over in the mud and landing on top of his maggot-riddled corpse for a second time. As I moved up past his knees, and then his thighs, the stench of rotting flesh intensified, rising so thickly to envelop me that I couldn’t help but imagine it as green, sinuous vapour coiling serpent-like around my body. I gagged, but managed to prevent myself from vomiting again.

Once my feet were either side of his hips, I steeled myself, then bent forward. I kept my breathing shallow, blocking off my nose and taking in small sips of air through my mouth. Even that, though, was bad enough. To me the air tasted sour, almost brackish, like polluted water. Although it was dark, I could still see the basic shape of the German beneath me, the white wriggling commas that were maggots, the greyish flesh of his dead face and hands.