Chapter 18: Far, Far From Home - The Night Market

PART III

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The fields smelled of fire and milkweed. Bomb craters had turned the French farmland into gouged, weeping wounds, the soil blackened and slick with oil and rain. Laik crouched low beside a broken wall of limestone and lichen, boots sunk in the mud. They’d moved through the night, across twisted hedgerows and grainfields gone to ruin, pressed in tight formation under a sky that threatened to unleash another downpour.

Six of them, left from twelve, all bone-tired and underfed. Just lads from Cardiff and Aberystwyth and Merthyr, stitched together with sandbags, rifles and half-spoken prayers. Gareth had been the youngest of the lot, and it showed. Barely needing to shave, always pushing his helmet back with a nervous flick of his thumb as though it never quite sat right, every attempt to hold a conversation ended with him shaking with nerves. He’d carried a photograph in his breast pocket — two sisters on a pebble beach — and had shown it round often enough that everyone could picture their squinting smiles from memory. One, he promised, he would marry when he returned. The young man shadowed Laik at every opportunity, even making a point of comparing him to his eldest brother back in Cardiff. After that, he seemed to settle whenever he found his place at Laik’s side, as though the company steadied whatever in him the war had knocked loose. Laik hadn’t encouraged this behaviour, but neither had the heart to discourage it. As long as the boy kept pace and kept quiet when it mattered, there was no problem.

A week earlier they’d been part of a larger push, pressing back the German forces as they bled toward the Seine. But something had gone wrong with the orders, or the map, or both. And now they were too deep, too far east, flanked by ruined villages and farm roads with no names. Far, far from home.

They’d taken shelter in a bombed-out cowshed, its thatched roof sporting a hole so big it was as if God himself had driven a fist through it. The bodies of three French civilians had been moved to the side of the barn – or what was left of them. A mother, a father, a boy. They had not been shot. Laik tried not to look at the necks. Even for the Germans, it was cruel. Gareth had muttered something about it being a quick end at least, but nobody believed it. Not really.

The loft provided a decent vantage point over the nearby fields. Hours began to stretch. Laik and the others took turns in providing lookout upstairs while the sergeant made his plans and the sun began to bathe the sky in citrus. When it was Laik’s turn for rest, he had barely closed his eyes when the shouting started. German voices, sharp and rushed from outside. Then a crack – Gareth was the first on the ground, clutching his side with his mouth open like a scream had been ripped out of it. Laik had tried to drag him back when the sarge ordered they return fire. Bullets tore through the air, bright as lightning, loud as judgement.

It wasn’t a firefight. It was a slaughter. In under a minute, three more went down. Wood cracked and burst around them. Then silence, save for the sizzle of blood in the hay and the sound of someone wetly choking.

Laik didn’t remember the bullet that hit him. Just the heat in his gut and the sky tipping sideways. He saw stars, but they weren’t above. They were stitched into the earth. A glitter of shell casings and ration tins. His body crumpled against the beam of the ruined loft, half covered in rubble, propping him up. Breathing was hard. He didn’t call for help. There wasn’t anyone left to hear him. Instead, he let his mind retreat to the green fields of the farm in Wales. Home. The faces of his family. And the last, desperate wish to be with them once more.

He waited for the calls from the Germans to grow closer, but they didn’t come.

He waited for the patrol to finish the job, but it never happened.

He waited for death to finally claim him, and it would do so in time. But not in the fashion that he hoped.

The light bled out of the foreign sky. Moonlight cut across the floorboards in sharp lines. Shadows spilled across the walls like ink, and with them came the quiet.

And then – movement.

Laik opened one eye. Something was crunching in the straw below. Low to the ground. Steady. Methodical.

His first thought was a wild dog, but the shape was all wrong. It didn’t growl. And its eyes weren’t right. They shone with a dull, unnatural sheen – not yellow, not green, something stranger. Something hungry. It was dragging something out of sight: the sergeant.

No breath. No voice. Just that slow, wet rip.

Laik tried to lift his head, and the shape stopped. One eye blinked up at him from the dark. It didn’t flee.

He lay very still, too afraid to move, and watched as the shadow crept from one body to the next. It wanted more. There was more, more of them in the loft. Fresh meat.

It carefully made its way up the ladder.

Laik could barely see straight, the cold having long crept into his muscles.

Now in the loft, it stalked low over the dusty floorboards, staying in the black. When it came to Gareth’s corpse, something shifted in the way it moved – a twitch, like it had caught a scent. Laik could hear it then. Breathing. Soft. Human.

And then the eyes turned on him.

It didn’t pounce. It came slowly, and with intent.

Laik’s limbs failed to obey as he tried to move, his fingers clenched slate and stone, casting one forward to try and spook it, but the effort was pathetic. The creature stalked closer, no bigger than a man, but its shadow twisted long. He saw fingers, or maybe claws. The torn folds of something like wings? Maybe a cloak? A coat? The silhouette never settled.

It knelt over him.

The mouth that opened was too wide. Moonlight caressed too sharp teeth.

Laik lacked the strength to move, the will to resist.

He didn’t feel pain. Not at first. Just pressure on his neck, ice water forcing itself through his veins. Then heat. Rising up his spine, into his jaw, writhing behind his eyes. Struggle was beyond him. His body locked. His chest burned.

The creature fed, slow at first, then more urgently, bony fingers kneading into the flesh beneath his uniform in the process. Laik felt himself fading, blood leaving him by the heartbeat. His vision doubled. The stars danced again, but now they were inside him. Fireflies in his skull.

The man-shape above him froze, jerking its attention at something behind it, within or beyond the barn. Perhaps it was simply called by an instinct beyond his understanding. Fingers ran down Laik’s face. In comfort? Apology, maybe? But he was weak. So weak.

And then it was gone. Just gone.

He lay there shaking, taking in the moving shadows as the moonlight passed through the hole in the roof. He felt the wet from his neck sodden the collar, dampen his chest. Time passed, and the inevitable refused to transpire. The longer the moonlight shone, the stranger the space became. Something was wrong with the dark. It bent around him. It whispered. He could hear sounds of movement, the presence of life, like the peculiar sensation of being watched from here, there, everywhere. None of the sounds were his. Every corpse had gone quiet. But he could hear them still. Feel them still.

Struggling eyelids flickered. The moonlight traced the outline of Gareth before him. The movement in Laik’s hands didn’t feel like his. They were weak, an instinct, the push of desperation which had abandoned him before. He slumped sideways onto the barn roof with a hollow thud, still looking.

The hand extended slowly once more. Followed by the arm. Nails bit into the board edges to drag himself forward to his companion. His jacket rasped against the coarse grain as he moved closer. And closer. And closer. Until finally . . .

Burning.

The sudden sensation of Laik feeling his hand had been thrust into coals summoned him from dreaming. With a paranoid yelp, he shifted from being spread out to rip his hand back in shock, brandishing it with the other. It had blistered, with open sores hissing steam. He had seen burns like this in the unit, but there was no fire present as the cause. No boiling water to have it make sense.

Only sunlight.

The midday sun had leaked into the barn, shifting over the boards much like the moon did before it. Its harshness contrasted against the pitch-heavy shadows that the barn sheltered. But the things that it did reveal made Laik’s stomach violently lurch, and horror fill his throat.

Spread out on the floorboards was Gareth. Torn green uniform soaked, gore and parts carelessly splashed. Gareth, thankfully, looked at peace, despite being in pieces.

Laik blubbered, fighting the shaking that was now dominating his body. He crept across the dry parts of the boards on all fours and reached a hand out into the streak of light to take hold of the dog tag, so that Gareth’s death could be properly recorded. Like all of theirs could.

The burning began anew. Laik snatched his hand away, wincing at the new onslaught of pain, but this quickly shifted into confusion. Testing, he reached out once more, finding that as soon as his fingertips were illuminated, his skin flushed red and scorched.

It didn’t make sense.

But then, nothing did anymore.

Not the dark, congealed trail of blood that weaved across the floorboards toward him like a serpent.

Not the weight clinging to his jacket, a tacky, rust-dark stain that soaked from collar to cuff.

And not the cold crust of dried blood flaking from his mouth, brittle along his stubble like peeling skin.

Laik stared, breath frozen. His fingers trembled as they lifted to his lips, frantically trying to scrub away the evidence of what he’d done.

He wandered when the sun had surrendered its place in the sky. Slept when its dangers were evident by its presence. All he knew was to keep moving.

The woods didn’t want him. The road barely acknowledged him. By the time Laik stumbled into the village, the soles of his boots had split. His soiled jacket had been scrubbed to prevent any difficult conversations, especially ones with himself, but evidence remained; a dull stain. A bullet hole. The houses here had seen conflict, shutters fastened like the town had blinked shut. Bullet holes cracked the facades, and debris collected by the roadside. Rubble and daffodils clung to the stone walls. Dull oil lamps did their best to provide light. Headstones standing sentry around a small church had performed their duty well, some having fallen in the face of gunfire.

Cicadas serenaded him as he took the path to the church and stepped inside.

There was no one waiting. No priest at the pulpit. The absence of salvation. Just the silence, and the cracked stained-glass saints spilling ribbons of rainbow light across the nave. Candles shivered as he passed.

Laik slumped in the central pew and breathed. The scent of wax and dry wood settled into his lungs, replacing the stench of wet leaves and soil.

He whispered an apology he didn’t know how to shape. To God. To the boys. To himself. All the while his clenched hands refused to stop shaking.

The door creaked behind him. The candles danced again. Footsteps, now. Laik didn’t know who or what to expect. He was mid-fifties. Collared. Calm. He paused at the end of the pew, taking in the state of the young man hunched there like an abandoned dog.

The priest recognised the uniform immediately and attentively asked what brought him here. He asked, with fragments of English, if he needed prayer or confession.

Laik shook his head. Said, in broken French, that nothing could help him now, but he could do something for others. He placed a collection of dog tags, including his own, into the priest’s open hand and asked him to get them to where they needed to be.

He slept at dawn in the church’s back room, curled beneath a donated coat and an onslaught of nightmares.

The hunger remained.

It stayed with him. In his gums, in his throat, deep in the pit of his gut. The bread the priest gave him tasted like dust. The water made him gag. The blessings brought no comfort. Laik wasn’t just waiting out the daylight. He knew he was waiting for something to arrive. Was it forgiveness? A miracle? To be smited?

None of these came.

He slipped out without a goodbye the following evening. As the roads and the towns became filled with occupying troops, their presence ignored and patrols avoided, Laik realised that the war was over for him.

But the battle for his soul had only just begun.