Tom McCarthy - C

“It’s a parachute,” he says to Gibbs. “We hit a parachute on the way down.”

His voice is strangely muffled: he can hear himself-but only silently, inside his head. Gibbs doesn’t seem to hear him either: he doesn’t answer-or if he does then his voice isn’t loud enough for Serge to pick it up. Serge turns round. Gibbs is dead: stuff from his chest is spattered about the cockpit. Serge unclips his own harness, levers himself from his seat and drops to the silk-coated ground. Pushing his hands against a roof and walls of silk, he makes his way along the soft, white tube towards the opening by the strings and, emerging through this, prods the man tied to them. He’s dead too, head split open from its impact against the earth. He must have jumped from the burning kite balloon, only for his parachute to be run into by their machine and carried along horizontally-or, rather, on a diagonal descent-dragging him with it.

Serge looks around him. The landscape is nondescript, brown and broken, like all the front’s terrain. Twenty or so yards away, a section of it jumps into the air as a shell lands on it. The explosion is silent: it’s as though he were watching one of Widsun’s films. Even the rushing air and the earth clods it brings smacking against his face carry no sound in their wake. He traps one of the clods against his skin, holds it out and inspects it. Viewed from this close, the earth takes on a similar resolution to the one it has in those photographs he shoots for Pietersen, pockmarked and lined with patterns. He lets it drop, from sympathy: it’s been churned up enough. Watching it fall past his groin, he realises he’s still got an erection. He looks about him, embarrassed, before remembering that there’s no one else around. He could be anywhere. The fact that they hit a German kite balloon’s occupant, or ex-occupant, on the way down suggests they were heading east, in which case… Should he torch the machine? As he wonders this, the pressure grows inside his ears-and with it comes, at last, a sound. It’s a quiet one, resonating at a low frequency and emerging from inside the parachute: an electric buzzing spilling out of the inflated pod. He heads back through its opening towards the broken wings and bent propeller blades that, like a set of irregular tent-poles, hold the structure up. The buzzing’s coming from the cockpit-from the back half of it, his half…

Pulling himself up again and peering in, he sees that it’s his spark set making it. The six-volt battery has fallen from its spot and half-smashed on the cabin’s floor; the wires issuing from it are sparking intermittently; and the unregulated flow of electricity into the tapper key is making the latter twitch, as though the current-and with it, the entire signalling regime-had been reversed and the set were now receiving rather than transmitting. Serge reaches past it for the medicine box, then realises that the two phials he picked up from the houseboat are still in his pocket. He takes one out, rolls back his sleeve and injects its contents into his forearm, then leans over Gibbs and grabs hold of his Verey gun.

“Silk pyjamas.”

Did he say that or just hear it in his muffled head? He looks at the buzzing radio set again. The sparks are spreading further down the wires now, spreading too across the cockpit’s floor, where engine oil is flickering alight. Serge drops the Verey gun, yanks what remains of the transmitter loose, lowers himself to the ground once more and walks slowly down the tube again, then past the dead parachutist and across the churned-up landscape. He turns back after a while and, cradling the spark set in his arms, watches the parachute and machine burning. The silk turns black, then orange, then falls away to reveal the wooden skeleton beneath it blackening as well. Small collapses and eruptions take place within the flames’ mass, but they make no noise: the only sound’s the low-resonating buzzing which, despite the spark set being both smashed and disconnected, is still echoing inside his head. He stares at the flames for what could be seconds, minutes or hours, then turns again and walks away.

After a while he finds himself strolling beneath mutilated willows at the edge of what must once have been a picturesque country pond. The water, frosted over in parts, has a rust-brown texture laced with silver threads of mercury. Pieces of shell-casing, ripped and jagged, protrude from its surface. At its sides yellow, erect reeds tremble and shudder. Serge can’t tell if it’s wind or buffeting from ordnance fall making them move. He can’t hear any rustling-but he does start hearing a high-pitched note, breaking through the buzzing in his head: it seems to come from somewhere else, somewhere exterior. Is it connected with the reeds, their oscillation? He can’t tell. The ground around the pond is coated with military refuse and metallic dust, as though fragments of the sky had flaked off and fallen to earth. Birds are moving among these: jackdaws, crows and ravens, picking through the pieces with gestures as mechanical and irregular as the broken parts themselves. Smoke drifts around their beaks. As Serge comes near they all take off and fly in a long, funerary procession towards nearby woodland, their shadows strafing the ground.

He follows them. What draws him towards the woods isn’t a reasoned need to find cover or hide, but rather the high-pitched note piercing his ears: it seems to carry from among the trees-to emanate from within their dense mass with a kind of intent, like an electric summons. The sound grows louder as he threads his way between the trunks, as though held in and concentrated by the canopies and branches, bounced back up by moss to linger at head height. Listening to it more carefully, he discovers that it’s actually composed of several notes and pitches, weaving into and out of one another like the strands of interference you get when you nudge through the dial. When he stands still and tunes his ear to them more finely, the notes amalgamate into two trunk-tones: the high-pitched one he first picked up and, nestling within its sonic shadow, a deeper one that has the pitch of trumpets. Together, the two tones form a melancholy wail, like the long-drawn-out scream of a fall that never hits the surface towards which it’s falling.

An animal darts past his feet and vanishes as soon as it appears. Was it a fox? A dog? It had something in its mouth. Serge, still cradling the broken spark set, presses on into the woods. More animals disperse as he comes near. They’re all holding things between their teeth, grey morsels laced with scarlet; even the black birds perching in the trees pinch titbits in the beaks down which they peer at him disdainfully. He’s come to a spot where all the trees are crippled: trunks riven, branches snapped, both scorched and covered in large patches of tar. Tar coats the ground in intermittent patches too, countering its winter hardness with soft, insulating accretions. The accretions grow more frequent as he treads towards a small clearing secreted among the trees: the tar-coat covers the floor of this almost completely. Men are sitting on the tar as though on a padded blanket, backs propped against the trees’ bases, packs and weapons at their feet. There must be ten or fifteen of them, wearing German uniforms. They’re all dead. They slump against the trunks like over-ripened fruit that’s lost its shape, begun to rot. Their faces all wear grimaces, as though frozen in a grotesque laughter bordering on the insane. Serge looks at their mouths: some of the jaws are dislocated and hang loose; two of them have been ripped open by shrapnel wounds extending from the chest, or neck, or cheek; one has been blown off entirely, leaving a hole through which broken shards of jawbone poke.

The sound’s loud here. The men’s deformed mouths seem to be either transmitting it or, if not, then at least shaping it, their twisted surfaces and turned-out membranes forming receptacles in which its frequencies and timbres are unravelled, recombined, then sent back out into the air both transformed and augmented, relayed onwards. Their eyes, despite being empty of perception or reaction, seem electrified, shot through with a current that, being too strong for them, has shattered them and left them with a burnt-out, hungry look. Their clothes have streaks of red on them. The tar’s black is streaked with red as well, just like the Albatros’s fuselage. It’s a bright red: a kind of scarlet, rippling across the tree trunks like an ensign fluttering in wind. It gives the tiny, overhung clearing a cosy glow that complements the sweet smell of tar and corruption lingering about its air. The sound vibrates about the air too, infusing the whole scene with what feels like a kind of heat: it seems as though, despite the cold, the earth were sweating, yielding up these phantoms, passing their bones and flesh on through its strata, up past layers of frosted mulch and tar, delivering them back to life, albeit in a dead form. They almost seem to move. One of them is moving: dragging himself upright against his tree trunk, then, placing one foot in front of the other, lurching forwards along a line that leads past Serge towards the clearing’s far side.