James Herbert - ‘48

But I couldn’t say all this to Muriel. No, instead I spun away from her and smashed the heel of my hand into the mirror over the washbasin, cracking the glass and fragmenting my image. I heard her give out a small scream and when I glared at her over my raised arm, my palm still pressed against the splintered glass, blood beginning to drip into the sink below it, she seemed about ready to run. I felt stupid, but I must have appeared insane.

I was ready to make some comment – it could’ve been an apology or a cuss – when Cagney started barking up a storm outside in the corridor. We heard shouting, more barking; something thumped against the bedroom door.

I moved fast, pushing Muriel aside and taking time to snatch the Colt from its holster inside my jacket. Then I was at the door, yanking it open. I stopped dead, gun hand extended.

Cagney was upset. He was damn-near rabid. Crouched low, snout wrinkled over yellow teeth, haunches quivering, the dog was getting ready to launch itself at something or someone standing beside the door I’d just thrown open.

‘It is wild.’ Shit – vild.

I took a step forward into the corridor so that I could see him. The German had his back pressed against the wall and there was real fear in those pallid eyes of his. Like mine, one of his arms was outstretched, at the end of it the muzzle of a small automatic. He was pointing it at Cagney.

My reaction was almost instinctive, the thought and the movement instantaneous: I smashed my own weapon down hard on Stern’s exposed wrist Spittle shot from the German’s open mouth with the shock and his gun clattered to the floor. He bent forward, clutching at his arm, and I brought my gun hand up again, catching him on the forehead so that he straightened and his head slammed against the wall behind. He slid to the floor and I went with him, grabbing the lapel of his jacket and jabbing the Colt’s muzzle into his scarred neck.

‘Please stop.’

His jaw must’ve been numbed, because the two words weren’t that coherent. I understood them though.

‘The animal…’ he managed to blurt. ‘It was…it was going to attack me…when I tried to enter your room.’ That’s what he tried to say, but it didn’t come out quite that well. I couldn’t have cared less anyway – I was ready to blow his brains out.

‘Hoke!’

Female’s voice, but I wasn’t taking enough notice to decide whose. It was time to settle the score with the German and I was just mad enough to do it right then and there. Blood oozing from my cut hand made the gun’s grip slippery, but still I pressed it into the flesh of his neck. A scream then and I glanced round to see Muriel standing in the doorway. It was Cissie who attacked me though.

Her knee connected with the side of my head, knocking me aside. Then her fingers tangled themselves in my hair and she pulled me backwards, so that I sprawled onto my back. She followed through by kneeling on my chest and grabbing at my gun hand, while Cagney leapt around us, yapping and too excited to figure out which one of us to attack. With a quick swipe of my other hand, I knocked Cissie away and raised my shoulders off the carpeted floor, the Colt finding its target once more.

‘Don’t shoot him!’

Now it was Muriel who was getting in the way. She positioned herself between me and the stunned German and screamed down at me.

‘Stop it, stop it now! We can’t go on killing one another, don’t you understand?’

To complete the picture, Albert Potter came lumbering along the corridor from his suite. For some reason he still had the warning rattle he’d used last night in his hand and for one bad moment I thought he was gonna blast our ears with it again. Instead he shouted: ‘What the bleedin ‘ell’s goin on? Can’t a fellah get a decent kip around ‘ere?’ Mercifully, he tucked the rattle back into one of the large pockets in his overalls.

Cissie, a leg still across my chest, finally got both hands around my wrist and pulled the gun away from its mark.

‘Please, Hoke, give it up,’ she pleaded and there was a sob at the end of her words.

I glanced at her, saw the tears beginning to roll, and I guess it was that that took the wind out of me. I was still full of rage, but some of its energy had left me. I let my head slump back onto the carpet, and as I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, I relaxed my grip on the gun, let my arm go limp. Still Cissie clung to my wrist, not trusting me.

‘Okay. I’m done,’ I assured her. ‘Just get him outta my sight for a while.’ They knew I meant Stern and not the dog who, now that the commotion was over, was trying to lick my face.

I heard someone helping the German to his feet, and then he was standing over me, looking down. There was no wariness in his eyes, no fear, only a simmering anger.

‘You are a fool,’ he hissed. ‘There was no need for this. I am not your enemy.’

I ignored him, then suddenly remembered the gun he’d been aiming at Cagney. I sat up, fast, Cissie’s grip instantly tightening on my wrist. With relief I saw that Potter had picked up the German’s weapon.

‘What’s this then?’ the warden mused, as if he’d never seen a gun before.

‘It’s a US military issue Colt 380,’ I informed him, and he nodded his head like he knew all along. ‘Don’t let Stern have it,’ I warned.

‘Do you really think I would shoot you?’ Stern sounded almost regretful. ‘After all that has happened…’ He waved his hands around as if indicating the world outside. ‘I found this weapon in my room and kept it for my own protection. I believe I was wise to do so. But do you honestly believe I have the desire to kill again? If you do, then you really are insane, Hoke. The Blood Death has made you so.’

With that he walked away from us, one hand held to his injured forehead. He disappeared inside his room and we heard the door close quietly behind him.

Supper that evening was a miserable affair. No one felt much like talking and Stern didn’t even join us. Let him sulk, I thought, it didn’t bother me none. Potter did his best to get things going by reminiscing, relating stories of the Blitz, some of them funny, some of them not so. He told us how one night when he was on his rounds, he’d found Ed Murrow, the famous American war correspondent, lying in the gutter outside the Savoy, not rolling drunk, as Potter had first assumed, but picking up the sounds of wailing sirens and enemy bombs hitting their targets with his microphone, these authentic noises of war to be broadcast across the Atlantic. He told us about the authorities’ grand idea of turning gas masks into Mickey Mouse faces so the kids wouldn’t be afraid to wear them; how once he’d chased a couple of looters through Covent Garden only to see them both blown to pieces before his eyes by a land mine, one of the looter’s legs landing on his shoulder as he’d stood there surprised; how on a cold, frosty dawn he’d come upon an elderly, white-haired lady sitting up in bed, totally bewildered as to why she was in the open, one floor up, two walls of her house completely demolished. He told us about the fireman he’d witnessed breaking down a warehouse door across the street, the poor man sucked inside by the firestorm when the door collapsed, to be burned to nothing, not even his bones left in the ashes; the warning whistle Potter always carried but which got stuck in his throat when a nearby explosion caused him to suck instead of blow, only a hefty blow on the back by a Heavy Rescue worker, who wondered why Potter was turning blue, saving his life when the whistle popped back into his mouth; the effigy of Adolf Hitler, wearing baggy grey bloomers, hanging by the neck from a crooked bus stop sign in Whitehall; the milk-cart horse painted with white stripes so that it wouldn’t get knocked down on dark winter mornings.