“Yes or no?”
“I—yes. Yes.”Not him, Iven,Winter had said. But Winter was gone. “Anything,” Freddie added aloud, and even he could hear the desperate truth in his voice.
Without another word, Faland turned and crossed a muddy ditch, light on his feet. Freddie scrambled after him. They passed out of earshot of Brandhoek, found themselves in a gray field, swaddled in bitter mist. The world already seemed set at a remove, even the shellfire flattened to distant thunder. Freddie was so relieved he wept. He didn’t know where they were going, and he didn’t care. All his heart told him wasaway,and that was enough.
He would dream of that walk, after. Dream imaginary horrors: an orchard of dead men hanging like fruit, a river of silky black water. But memory told him only that he walked until the end of his faltering strength, that the world narrowed to nothing but the uneven sway of Faland’s stride ahead of him. That at last they stood together in front of a heavy door set into a timeworn wall.
That Faland pushed the door open and went inside.
Freddie hesitated. Raindrops pelted his face, but within lay aflickering darkness. He almost turned around. But his life was out in that rain, his losses, his ghosts. He crossed the threshold. The door swung shut.
“Welcome,” said Faland.
Freddie’s first impression was of a vast space, his second was of magnificence. Mellow gilt, soft firelight, marquetry and parquet, diapering and gilding, velvet and glass, almost painful in contrast with immediate memory. It could not be real. And yet Freddie couldfeelthe nap of the velvet on the wall, on a chair, when he ran his fingers across. The heat of the fire made his numb face tingle.
His third impression was of decay. The velvets frayed, the gilding peeled, tarnish showing through cracks in the glass. A faint dust, raised by Faland’s feet as he crossed the room.
Freddie followed him in a daze, registering dimly that the room had a startling number of doors. Faland laid his hand on one of them, but before it opened, Freddie caught sight of a mirror. He did not see his reflection in it. He saw Laura.
She was with Winter. They were sitting together at a table. They were well. Whole. God, even friends. They looked up at him, in unison. Laura and Winter, alive. His sister: quick, wry, competent. Winter, his face clean, his hair straw-colored. In the mirror Laura smiled at Freddie and said something to Winter, and he laughed.
Something inside him cracked, horribly, wide open. They wereright there.
Faland caught his wrist. Freddie realized that he’d been reaching toward the glass. “Not now,” said Faland. “Later, if you like.”
“What is it?”said Freddie.
“It depends on the person looking.”
“That’s impossible.”
“More so than anything else?” The tilt of Faland’s head seemed to encompass everything outside; the whole world gone mad.
To that Freddie had no answer. Perhaps he was dreaming. He hoped he never woke up.
· · ·
The bedroom at the top of the staircase was as grand as the foyer below, and as shabby. More velvet—on the heavy curtains, on the counterpane. Fine wood furniture, elaborately carved. But all of it chipped, splintered, faded.
Faland said, “Rest,” and left him in the doorway.
Freddie stopped thinking. He clawed off the rags of his uniform, found tepid water, a basin, scrubbed his skin raw, and then collapsed naked on the bed.
But he found himself too exhausted to sleep, ill at ease on a mattress, under sheets, in solitude, after so many nights sleeping rough with a dozen others, in barracks, in dugouts, in strange catch-as-catch-can billets. So instead of sleeping he thrashed and sweated and finally dozed, only to awaken in darkness, thinking he was back in the pillbox, thinking he was being smothered underground. Knowing he was all alone. Winter wasn’t breathing. Winter wasn’t there.
A sound, not far from a scream, nearly tore blood from his throat, and he folded in on himself, caught in an airless void. For a moment he yawed right on the edge of madness. He was already dead. Everything was broken, blackened by rain. He thought he saw a star through the fallen-in roof.
Then a light flared from the corridor, and his door flew open.
Freddie threw a hand over his eyes. Faland was in the doorway, a candle in his hand. The light showed an intact roof, a room of shabby magnificence.
“Hush,” Faland said. “Take the candle.”
Bed,he thought.Walls. Floor. Air.His feeling of choking eased. He tried to get up. But he couldn’t move.Shell-shock. Laura had patients who couldn’t move after they were shell-shocked.
Faland crossed the room, put the candle on the nightstand. His hair had dried from the rain, lightened to silver-gilt. Freddie found that his rigid limbs would heed him again. His chest was sheened with sweat. He must have made a racket in his sleep. He shivered at the draft from the door and drew the blankets up. “I—I’m sorry.”
With the candle on the nightstand, Faland’s face was in shadow.With a strange note in his voice, he said, “I woke in darkness once. I dream of it still. Now go back to sleep.”
