Stephen Jones: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

“Please just stop,” Machen said, looking suddenly tired, so old and tired.

“Whether they were Agincourt bowmen or true mercenaries from Heaven, you wrote those words. I really don’t see any way out of that.”

“Then you, sir, are a fool. Old soldier or not — and it shames me to say it — you are still a fool.”

“But-”

“Did you suffer from a blast-shock in the war? Were you shipped from the trenches on a stretcher, raving?”

“Well…” Smith thought back to that time at Mons, how silent the battlefield had become for a brief few minutes while he walked from corpse to corpse…

… Checking their pulses, suddenly certain that he would find them all alive. They were feigning, it was part of some diabolical Hun ploy, an hallucinogenic gas, and any minute now they would leap up and complete the slaughter that they had begun.

But no, they were all dead.

“Delamare!” The captain called from the trenches. “Get back here, you bloody fool! That’s not all of them, you know. There’ll be more on their way soon!”

“I think not,” Smith said to himself, looking down into the disbelieving eyes of a dead enemy soldier. He saw himself reflected there, and he realized that the two of them looked very similar. The dead man even had a shaving cut under his jaw, just as Smith had given himself only the day before. He reached up and scratched his own cut, pleased that it could bleed.

He walked further in, and it was like wading through frozen waves at the seaside. Grasping hands dropped back down as he brushed by, legs fell to the side, heads lolled on necks, and every one of them was dead. Smith turned one body over, lifted the arms on another, looking for the wounds that had killed them. Still, he could find none. His feet squelched in the mud that would be these men’s eternal resting place.

From his own trenches Smith could hear the amazed muttering of his comrades in arms. One of them was crying, a few were praying, and many more seemed to be talking to themselves, trying to find some sort of truth in whatever words they could utter. Miracle, he heard, and Angels, and Saved us, saved us…

Out here he needed to find truth, a revelation that would prove him sane, and yet there was only more madness in the faces of these dead Huns.

And then he heard a sound. It was something he recognized and knew that he could not escape. However far he ran, however fast, he could just as easily have been running into its path. What set the sound of this shell aside was that it was on its own, cutting a single whistling line through the August sky, fired in anger, haste or sad defiance.

He turned and looked back at the trenches, and the only man he saw was Bill. Everyone else had ducked down to find whatever cover they could.

Their stares met, and Smith knew: My time is now.

The shell landed and exploded twenty feet to his left. He was aware of the eruption, the slap of the shock wave as it tore his skin and flipped him sideways onto the ground, the heat singeing his hair and setting his clothes smouldering. And then from above came a flock of shadows blotting out the sun: the dead enemy raining down in broken pieces to bury him.

The noise was nightmarish. The sounds of a house dying around him, wood splitting and plaster powdering, floors ruptured, water hosing across the walls as plumbing was ripped to shreds by the force of the explosion.

Smith found himself on the floor. Whisky had spilled from his tumbled glass and now he wished he had drunk some more, ineffectual though it had seemed. In his memories a cold hand slapped his face, as the rest of its dead owner showered down upon him.

Here, and now, he heard a shout from the old writer as a ball of flame and smoke rushed in through the shattered window, setting the curtains instantly ablaze and dripping fire across the carpet.

“Smith!” Machen shouted.

Smith tried to lift himself up, but something held him down. Another explosion rocked the floor beneath his body, and he heard a house grumbling its last as it collapsed further along the street.

The first explosion seemed to be continuing. Its initial blast had shattered beams and walls, and now the house was slowly crumbling in on itself with a terrible clamour, the noise just as loud and shocking as the initial blast. Smith was buried, as he had been buried before, but this time he was conscious. He looked up and saw stars, winking in and out of existence as if time itself had increased to an incredible speed… or perhaps they were angels, come to take him… and then he realized that he was watching tiny explosions high in the air, anti-aircraft fire seeking out dark shapes caught in converging searchlights.

“Smith!” Machen shouted again, and a shadow blotted out the violent light. A hand closed around Smith’s wrist, Machen grunted and cursed as he heaved, and seconds later the two men were sprawled in the road outside the house, witnessing its final collapse.

As if the destruction of this house had been the culmination of their aims, the German bombers drifted away for the night. The sudden reduction in noise was shocking — there were still explosions, fires roaring in the distance and setting the horizon aflame, shouting, the sounds of fire tenders racing through the streets — but the bombing had stopped, and to Smith it felt like morning. Another night of nightmare ended.

“Are you hurt?” Machen asked. “Are you all right?” Smith ran his hand over his body, feeling for broken bones but finding only old wounds. There was the knot in his hip where a dead German’s head had landed with such force that it had smashed the bone. Scar tissue across his neck from shrapnel wounds. And other places, traumas he could not touch because they were inside him, scorched on his mind.

“I think so,” Smith said, his answer ambiguous even to himself. Was he all right? Had he ever been all right?

Machen was looking around at the wreck of the house, shaking his head. “My friend will be upset,” he said. “I was merely lodging here. Pity — lovely house. Charming fireplace, and a wine cellar I shall mourn for the rest of my days.”

Smith stood on shaking legs, still searching for new injuries. It appeared that he had escaped relatively unharmed. He would have called it a miracle, had he not already been witness to one.

“You seem unconcerned at our near miss,” he said.

Machen looked at him and smiled. Somehow he had rescued his pipe, and now he put it to his mouth and puffed until fresh smoke began to issue forth. “I am an old man now. If the Lord chooses my time, then he does. Though I must admit, the thought that maybe this was my time was still worrying.”

“So now do you see why we need their help?”

“Oh, your angels.”

“Yes!”

Machen puffed at his pipe, frowning. He seemed to be deep in thought, and Smith sensed that now was not the time to interrupt. Finally, the old man spoke.

“I admit that you have me intrigued,” he said, “but for reasons all my own. There is certainly further investigation we can carry out into your claims. This is a matter I have long wished to put behind me — it makes me sick to the core, to tell the truth — but your insistence is pressing.” He regarded Smith with a look that only the aged can really muster. “You seem a polite young man, although perhaps not possessing all your senses. You appear certain of what you saw. And for that, I believe that you believe it is the truth.”

“I don’t believe, I know!”

“Truth and certainty are not good bedfellows, Lieutenant Smith. Come! We have somewhere to go!”