“I’m not afraid.”
He didn’t dignify that with a response. He’d seen her staring inhorror at nothing. Laura set her jaw. Madness stalked the Western Front, but she would not, could never, succumb. She was the steady one when others lost their heads. She must concentrate on what she’d come for: to learn what had become of Freddie. “I can’t stay. I have things to do.”
“Do you?”
Did she? Why was she in Flanders, really? To torment herself with the—
Across the room, Pim screamed. She was staring into the mirror over the bar, her expression reflected in the glass raw with equal parts hunger and horror. Laura didn’t think even a great obscenity would put that look on her face. “Pim—”
Faland had turned as well, almost impatiently, but then his shoulders stiffened. Laura could see in profile his lips pursed in a soundless whistle. But there was nothing to see but a woman, her golden hair coming down, looking into a mirror. “What does she see?” demanded Laura, already making her stumbling way across the room.
He didn’t answer; she didn’t know if he followed. Mary didn’t stir, her head still pillowed on her folded arms. The mirror itself glimmered, black with tarnish in spots, spider-webbed with cracks in one corner. Laura squinted into the depths but could see nothing that would have prompted Pim to—
A face, reflected in the mirror, swam into focus as she walked closer. It wasn’t hers.
Then she thought her heart would stop, because it was Freddie.
Freddie with eyes hollow and blank. Freddie with white threaded through the russet of his hair. Freddie with his expression strangely dim, puzzled. A reflection that wavered, as though her brother were caught in the tarnished glass.
She knew it was just a figment. Some sort of hypnotic suggestion. Faland hadsaidshe’d see her heart’s desire, and he’d meant it literally. It was his voice working on her brain, along with the dimness, and the wine, and her fever. Sheknew.And still she turned to look behind her. No power on earth could have kept her from looking.
And of course he wasn’t there. Just a sea of men, drowsy, with—
No. There. For an instant she could have sworn she saw russet hair, straight shoulders, haunted eyes. His name came tearing from her throat. “Freddie!”
But he was already gone, vanished between tables, between men, between shadows. He’d never been there at all.
She tried to follow anyway. Came up instantly against people dazed and stupid with wine, came up against her own drunkenness and doubt, her cramping leg. Found herself pushing like a woman in a nightmare, not even sure what she was looking for. There were so many doors. The room was ringed with doors. Which door? Take the right door, she thought confusedly, and she’d find herself in a different world, she’d find herself back in Halifax, before the end of everything. She clawed her way out of the sodden crowd.
Fetched up against a person who caught her by the shoulders. “Gently, Mademoiselle,” said Faland. “You are hallucinating, feverish, you are not yourself.”
“My brother— I saw my brother.”
He didn’t let go. “That damned mirror. I’m sorry I said anything about it. You are very ill, you know.”
She pulled away, fighting for her balance. “No, I saw him. In the room. Not just in the mirror.I saw him.”
His face expressed nothing but puzzled concern. “Could your brother be here tonight? By coincidence? Forgive me, but why would you have to chase him? He’d come to you, surely.”
Of course he’d come to her. If he could. He wasn’t there. He was dead, and there was no such thing as ghosts. “No,” she whispered. The fight went out of her. “He couldn’t be here tonight.”
Faland’s face softened. “Then I am so sorry, Mademoiselle.” He offered her an arm. “I shall take you back to your companions. You should sleep. You should stay. You are in no condition to endanger—”
Endanger? His words reminded her of Pim, and she looked up. Pim was still standing in front of the tarnished mirror, utterly still,an expression of horrified longing on her face. “What’s wrong with my friend? What did she see?”
Faland’s green eye glittered with firelight, but the dark eye had no reflection. “It is often illuminating, to see your heart’s desire. But it is not always pleasant. You might have just discovered that yourself. Come, I will take you to her.”
HELLFIRE CORNER, YPRES, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
November 1917
Light crept reluctantly back intothe world, and with the light came a shrouding fog that left the landscape as formless as it had been by night. Winter and Freddie and their rescued soldier stumbled westward through a gray void. Slick duckboards alternated with mud that tried to claw off their boots and the road had long since been registered by German artillery. A shell came down ahead of them. They heard it fall, heard the screams where it landed, but saw nothing but fog and one another. It hardly seemed real.
The Tommy was even filthier than they and possibly more off his head. He was whispering, half to himself, “Where are we going? Is it quiet, where we’re going?”
“Keep walking,” said Winter.
Freddie didn’t speak. It was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. He didn’t dare look behind him. He kept hearing footsteps in the mist. His reasoning mind pointed out that no one was following them. No one couldseethem. They could hardly see each other in the fog. And when he looked back, there was nothing. But part of him whispered anyway, that the dead man followed.That the dead man would never let him go.
