Fullepub 
Chapter 36: Pandemonium
FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
March–April 1918
For the first time, Freddie woke in the hotel not with an absence, but with a new memory. Faint as cobweb, blurred, but there. He’d seen Laura. Alive. Limping. In the hotel. Reason told him he hadn’t seen her. It could have been some new trick of Faland’s, a mirror-image that his mind tried to insist had been real.
But the memory persisted. The things in Faland’s mirror faded the second you looked away. But this woman looked back at him from his own mind’s eye, as unforgettable as a wound: wet, scarred, furious, vital, threads of white in her tawny hair. He could not have imagined her. It was Laura.
He’d forgotten so much, changed so much. But he hadn’t forgotten her. Nearly every memory of his childhood contained his sister. Seeing her, he remembered that he was a person too, however shattered. He wasn’t a single agonizing note in Faland’s patient hands.
He didn’t know how much time had passed since he’d seen her. He’d long since stopped caring about day or night. But now he thought, How long has it been? Where is she now? With a ferocity that surprised even him, Freddie got up and went downstairs.
He was a few feet down the corridor when the first bars of music hit him. He cringed back at the sound. Faland was playing a piece he hadn’t heard before, and the sound of it was shocking. Jagged, glorious, insane.
Then the music stopped and began again, more tentatively, as though Faland, for the first time since Freddie had met him, was feeling his way through something unfamiliar.
Freddie followed the sound down the corridor, down the stairs, to the archway to the foyer.
Stopped.
The foyer was empty. The foyer was a ruin. It smelled of mold and mice, the furniture overturned, broken glass on the floor. And the worst part was, Freddie wondered for a moment what had happened. Because it was just like waking up, when your vague dreams dissolve in the cold light of morning. Of course the foyer was like this.
A scrape at the fiddle seized his attention, and he realized that Faland was sitting on the edge of an overturned ammunition crate, oblivious to the wreckage. He tried again to play the new music; briefly it soared, glorious and mad, and then fell apart. Faland was frowning.
He glanced up at Freddie, the same as he’d ever been, a little shabby in his checked suit, sardonic, the ghost of a terrible beauty still lurking somewhere in his face, beneath the cynicism and dissolution. He seemed almost more at home in the wreckage than he had in the intact hotel.
They eyed each other.
Faland seemed to study him and then he said, “Look at you, the toy soldier remembering he is a real boy.”
Freddie said the only thing that mattered. “I saw my sister.”
Faland began to play his violin again. An ordinary run of notes now, flavored mockingly with longing. “Did you?”
He had. He knew he had. The rush of emotion was too violent, too shimmering and fragile even to name. She’s alive. “Where is she now?”
A little curling smile. “Gone off into the bright world, mon brave. Do you think that shining girl wants to lurk in the shadows with you?”
It shouldn’t have hurt. Freddie told himself that it didn’t. “She was limping.”
Faland said nothing.
“She looked ill.”
Faland’s answer was in music, a melody like a caterwauling of childish plaints. Freddie gritted his teeth and said, “I’m going to go find her.”
“Indeed?” The music took on an exaggerated nobility. As though Faland was laying out all the leaves of Freddie’s soul, and finding them shallow and obvious. “Allow her to lament the remains of the man you were? Make her aid a deserter? Will you let her watch when they shoot you, or let them shoot her along with you, when she tries to help you?”
Freddie floundered. How could he risk— Fumblingly he said, “No—I can’t— She’s alive. I have to go to her. She—she won’t care what I did. I’ll go in secret, I won’t stay, I…”
The violin music shifted to a major key, bright with ferocious courage, and Faland said over the sound, “Do you think she’ll accept it? That amber-eyed girl? No, she’ll turn traitor for you, harbor you, a deserter, without a qualm, she’ll try everything she can to save you and when they arrest her for it, she won’t flinch for a moment. She’ll go to her death alongside you. Or am I mistaken?”
Freddie hated himself for shivering and falling silent.
Faland added, “If she won’t hesitate to risk her life, are you going to let her?”
Imagination failed him. He was so much less than he’d been.
“I didn’t think so,” said Faland.
Freddie bit his lip. “I have to know she’s all right at least.”
A faint gleam in Faland’s lighter eye and the tumble of half-mocking music went silent. “Well,” he said. “I could help you in that, perhaps.”
“Can you?”
“Yes.” He was looking straight at Freddie now, and the dusty silence in all the ruin was far worse than the background of violin music.
“What do you want?” Freddie whispered. He thought he knew the answer.
But Faland surprised him. He did not ask about the pillbox. “Tell me a story that frightens you.”
“Why?”
“You are full of questions for a man solely concerned with the fate of his beloved sister.”
Freddie still hesitated. “And if I tell you…”
“Then you will see her, and not endanger her life. I swear it.”
Freddie said, “But you know what frightens me. I’ve told you—” He didn’t remember what he’d told Faland.
Faland began tuning his fiddle, as though in anticipation. “Not that. Tell me why you scream at night.”
“No,” Freddie whispered. The memories that woke him screaming all involved Winter. He wasn’t ready to—
Faland said, “Leave her to her fate, then, what do I care?” He drew his bow lightly across the strings, made a moue of dissatisfaction at the sound, tuned the violin again.
He couldn’t go to Laura. That much was clear. The brother she’d loved had died in the pillbox. But if he could do even this small thing, from afar, to ensure her welfare, then it was cheap at the price of any memory. And again, he felt himself yield. “Your word?”
“Yes.”
Freddie was silent, then. What frightened him? Memories were growing harder for him to dredge up, and when they came they were fainter, like ink too much handled. And Faland wanted to hear about one of the days that had no words, that should stay in his mind, always unvoiced. He thought of the night he believed Laura had died, opened his mouth with the road to Brandhoek already glittering foully behind his eyes. But he was suddenly afraid that the memory of grief was part of the edifice that fixed his love for her in his mind. Could he not rid himself of sorrow without losing the rest?
Faland waited.
What, then? Was he afraid of the hotel? No. He was afraid of how much he never wanted to leave the hotel.
Without consciously deciding, he found himself speaking of the walk from the shell hole to Ypres. It all came back to him: the noise, the smell, Winter’s hands holding him back from the water, holding his soul together. His courage, leavening the horror, the only reason Freddie had come out alive, and sane. He retched on the words, and didn’t know whether it was from the memory or his sorrow at losing it. Already the color of Winter’s eyes seemed less immutable in his mind. But he told it.
This time Faland listened with his lips a little parted. As though he could drink up Freddie’s whole life, swallow it for nourishment.
At the end, Freddie was weeping, and Faland let out a long, delighted sigh.
Freddie said nothing. He looked up and the hotel was beautiful, warm and gilded, although shabbier than ever and the broken glass was still on the floor. Reality was a crumbling thing, a rotten tree.
“Is this place a ruin?” he whispered.
Faland reached out and tucked a strand of Freddie’s hair behind his ear. Freddie hadn’t noticed how long it had grown. Caressingly, he said, “Not to you, little soldier. Not as long as you’re with me.”
The fire was so warm. Faland’s fingers were tangled in his hair. “I saw a ruin,” he insisted.
Faland said, “Don’t look at it. Look at me instead.”
And wasn’t that the damnable part? Freddie couldn’t look away.
· · ·He didn’t know how much time passed after that. The world moved more and more to dream logic. He didn’t know if hours had gone by, or days. Freddie said, “You promised. I don’t have much time,” and knew it to be true. He didn’t know if it was his mind failing or his body, but after he told Faland his first memory of Winter, he lived in a wrung-out daze. He was fairly certain he’d be mad or dead now, if he’d not seen Laura. He told the memory over and over in his mind: how she’d looked, the tone of her voice. And he hung on. “I have to see her,” he said. “You promised I’d see her.”
Then, between one hour and the next, Faland came to him where he lay asleep, and shook him awake.
Freddie looked up, and briefly thought he saw the roof fallen in over his head, a single star shining, and with the dim light behind him, Faland a specter of avarice and despair. Freddie would have called him inhuman once, except now he knew better. Whatever Faland was, it wasn’t inhuman. Inhuman was out there on the Ridge.
“Come with me,” said Faland, and put out a hand.
Freddie took it just as Faland glanced up at the star himself. Shook his head a little, and when he turned away, carrying his violin, Freddie followed. It was night, and the air smelled of spring. Freddie felt the weakness of his limbs, the dimming of his eyes. Wept a little, as he walked.
They halted in a cemetery outside a crumbling old château. “Where are we?” Freddie whispered. He was so tired.
“Watch,” said Faland, and he turned his head, so that Freddie was fixed with the darkness of his left eye. “And do not say a word.” The moonlight eased some of the lines in Faland’s face; the grandeur of him was ascendant, his face alive with what might have been curiosity. And there Faland set bow to string.
For the first time, Freddie realized that Faland in his hotel had been merely amusing himself, trying this melody and that, a musician at play. On Christmas, true, he’d filled the air with anger, perhaps disturbed the nights of his hearers. But he’d been humoring Freddie, giving him a taste, nothing more. He hadn’t meant it.
Perhaps he rarely meant it. But he did now, for Faland stood there and played pure terror into the night.
Freddie listened with a fist over his mouth. It wasn’t music. It was the fear of a man in a frontline trench, jumping at every noise, it was the fear of a man in a hospital when supple-winged Death visits the bed beside him. It was terrible and primal and it was his, the road to Ypres, with the falling shells and the bodies and the ghost, and Freddie wanted to scream for Faland to stop. Too much of it and horror was all Freddie would remember; he’d be nothing more than a memory of crawling dread. Laura, he thought. Laura.
Soldiers stripped the war of emotions as best they could. They’d go mad if they did not. But Faland was relentless; he poured long-denied fear into the night until men shouted in terror from behind the château’s dark windows.
In the midst of the clamor, Faland stood still as the eye of a hurricane, sketching Freddie in sound, until Freddie had utterly forgotten anything besides being afraid. Until he was on his knees but didn’t know it, his arms wrapped round his head.
Finally the violin dropped to Faland’s side, but the music didn’t die away. It seemed to Freddie that the essence of it had been taken up by the sounds in the château: screams, orders, moving lights. He raised his head; he was covered in cold sweat, snatching desperately at memory-fragments, anything to anchor him through the fear. There was nothing. He felt like he was drowning in mud. Somewhere behind his eyes, the dead man smiled at him. Faland just stood poised, waiting. His eyes were on the window.
A light hurried in, and in it, Freddie saw Laura. She was herself, straight-shouldered, neat in her uniform, authority in the lines of her body. She was all right. Laura, he thought. Laura, I’m frightened. She turned toward the window; he saw her face clear in the lights within. His breathing started to settle. A patient was standing in his pajamas, facing the window. More lights had come into the ward. His sister spoke to the standing patient, then caught him when he fell. A doctor came, helped her ease the patient back into bed.
Again Laura glanced toward the window.
Instinctively Freddie shrank into the shadows but he was so caught up in the sight of her—now she was bending over a patient, a tall dark-haired doctor beside her—that he failed to notice the woman who slipped out the château’s front door until she was halfway across the drive, her steps tentative in the dewy grass. Faland stirred, and Freddie turned and recognized the woman. From the hotel. With the golden hair.
Her face changed when she saw Faland. She crossed the space between them, slowly, and stood still, facing him, colorless in the moonlight. The music still seemed to echo, in the dying clamor of the château.
The woman said, “I’ve been talking to the men. They say such things about you. Are they true?”
“What do they say?”
The woman was silent.
Faland smiled. “Perhaps they are true, then.”
“I won’t do it,” the woman whispered. “You know I won’t. It doesn’t matter what I saw.” She was so beautiful. Freddie wanted to say something, but his throat was locked tight. She had not once looked away from Faland.
Faland’s voice was softer than Freddie had ever heard it. “And yet you came outside.”
She said nothing, but in her face was a strange and terrible desire that made Freddie’s flesh creep. Faland was watching her as though in fascination. Then she shook her head, whispered, “No—no—I don’t even know how I would do it.”
Faland said, “Oh, I think you know exactly how.”
The woman stood still, her lips parted. Then she wrenched herself round and ran back the way she’d come.
Faland turned away, whistling. “Well, that’s done.”
“Leave her alone,” said Freddie. “That’s my sister’s friend. Leave her alone.”
“Did I ask her to go out wandering at night, arguing with bad men? Leave me to my pleasures, Iven, the world’s so dour now.”
“What does she want?”
Faland said, “What does anyone want? Her heart’s desire. Enough. I’m going. Come back with me or go to blazes, boy, which is it?”
“Damn you,” said Freddie. “What about my sister?”
“You saw her, she’s perfectly well,” said Faland.
He didn’t move. “You lied. You came for that woman. You didn’t come to show me Laura at all.”
“Laura was ill,” said Faland, with precision. “Influenza, and pneumonia. She survived, evidently. She is now working in that—” He pointed at the chateâu. “A private field hospital. Happy as a rabbit in clover. Anything else you want to know?”
“How did you know all that?”
“I am an inveterate gossip,” said Faland.
“Leave my sister alone.”
Faland snorted. “If she leaves me alone; she’s the righteous, meddling kind, you know.”
Freddie strained his dimming faculties. “And that woman? What do you want with her?”
With exaggerated patience, Faland said, “I think your question should be what do I want with you?”
“I know what you want with me,” said Freddie.
They shared a long look. It is not far from love, Freddie thought somewhere in the embers of a mind that had been a poet’s. The tie of hunter and prey. “I want to see Laura again.”
“I said you’d see her, and you did. You could have gone in.”
He couldn’t have. Faland, that bastard, knew it.
Faland said, “Stay or go, Iven?”
He was already walking away, over the dewy spring grass, whistling a little to himself, as though trying out a melody. Without a word, head bent, Freddie followed.
· · ·More time passed. No one came to the hotel anymore, as though Faland had suddenly got tired of playing at hospitality. Freddie drifted through corridors that he did not always recognize; lived in a world that was nine parts dream. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten. But still he clung to the scraps of himself. Laura was out there. She’d survived, she’d come back. He didn’t have the strength to go to her. But he couldn’t bear to leave her either. Not when she hadn’t left him. Perhaps he’d see her again, he thought vaguely. Even from afar. So he wavered, a stranger to himself. Hour after hour.
Faland spent every moment on a piece he could not seem to master, love and madness twined in a nauseating swirl. Freddie kept telling over memories that felt like they’d happened to someone else, trying to reweave the fabric of his soul as quick as Faland tore it apart. And at the end of each day’s story, when Freddie was slumped, crying, feeling like he’d clawed pieces off himself with his fingernails, he’d ask, “How is she?”
“The same,” Faland would say.
And finally Faland answered instead, “She’s left the hospital. Your sister.”
“Why?” said Freddie. But he knew why. Deep in the remains of his soul, he knew, whatever his mind tried to tell him. His heart beat faster—was it in fear or delight? She’s looking for me.
Don’t find me, Laura. I don’t want you to find me.He hated himself for being glad that she was looking.
“Do you wish to see her?” said Faland.
He tried to fight his way through lethargy, like clawing away cobweb. Why would Faland ask? “Yes.”
Faland touched Freddie’s face with a wounding gentleness. “All right,” he said. “I shall take you to her. But first I want you to tell me what you see, all those times you’ve fled from nothing, when you look behind you in my hotel.”
He saw the shell hole, the soldier’s face as he drowned. Winter. The shell hole was one of his hoarded memories of Winter. Of course Faland wanted that.
“I—” He couldn’t say no anymore. He wanted to see Laura. Perhaps the sight of her would tell him what to do, how to live, or when he could die. Perhaps he’d grown too tired at last to carry the weight of himself. “Listen, then,” he said.
Faland smiled at him, with heartbreaking gentleness.
Freddie told him about taking refuge in the shell hole, the night they escaped the pillbox. About the drowned man, and how Winter had looked Freddie in the face, after he killed him. What color were Winter’s eyes? They’d been dark, hadn’t they? No.
“Come with me,” said Faland afterward. He was glowing, as though Freddie’s love and terror were things he could hold, wear, possess. “I know where she is.”
“Where?” said Freddie. He was slow as a tired child.
“Poperinghe,” said Faland.
They walked, and sometime later—he’d no idea how long—Freddie saw the lights of Pop all around him, wavering as though underwater. Perhaps, months ago, when he’d first come to the hotel, he’d have been afraid. Afraid that the sheer, pulsing life of Poperinghe, its edge-of-death giddiness, would draw him back into the world’s bloody maw. But now he wasn’t. He was too far gone to be afraid. His tie to the world was thin as a silk thread.
Poperinghe was full of men, loud as a holiday, and Freddie watched them with distant eyes. “Where’s Laura?”
In answer Faland bowed his head and set his bow to his strings, and loosed music like a flight of arrows into the night.
This time it wasn’t fear that Faland conjured. It was rage, close kin to madness, unleavened by understanding, or sorrow. The hot rage of a soldier on a trench raid, the poisonous anger of men in the back area told they must polish their buttons between spells in the line. The rage that had drowned a man in a shell hole in No Man’s Land, under Freddie’s unflinching hand.
It was the worst thing he’d ever heard. It conjured it all, true as life: The sounds the soldier had made as he died, the color of his face, the smell of the rain, and Freddie’s entire existence shrank to that one moment, to that one wretched self—murderer. That was all he was. All he would be, forever and ever, amen. There was nothing else. He was screaming. But no one heard. The entire town was screaming.
Because they’d heard his anger—and answered it. The same violence lay at the heart of every man there, and Faland drew it forth like a conjuror. Between one note and the next, music morphed into the sound of riot: screams and running feet, shouts, and wild laughter. Glass broke, wood smashed, and the streets were packed, everyone mourning, rowdy, drunk. Freddie was screaming with the rest. They might walk and laugh and fight like men, but they were all screaming underneath. Faland knew. Of course Faland knew. Faland might be oblivion with hands and a face and a quicksilver tongue, but he knew them all. He’d been a soldier too.
The crowd swung dizzyingly past. He thought he saw Faland standing face-to-face with the golden-haired woman. Her eyes were as wild as his. His lips moved. “Shall I show you?” he said. They disappeared in the turmoil.
He didn’t follow. The tumult was all around him, the tumult was him. He was going to drown in it. Laura wasn’t here. Please let her not be here. Let it all be over.
But before he could move, he froze. He’d seen a ghost in the crowd.
A ghost he knew.
Not Laura this time, but Hans Winter, a point of stillness in all the wild movement. Their eyes locked. The left sleeve of Winter’s jacket was empty. Freddie realized Winter was fighting to get to him. Realized that he was doing the same, shoving forward. Winter hadn’t gone. He hadn’t forgotten. His eyes weren’t dark. They were a shattering blue.
They would despise you,Faland had said. Laura and Winter. But there was no scorn on Winter’s face. They pushed toward each other, and Freddie felt his mind slowly clear, felt reason briefly return. For a second, he was himself, and he thought, I am needed. Why should I give my soul to that dilettante musician?
Now Freddie heard running footsteps. A voice shouted, “Halt!”
There was fear in Winter’s eyes. Of course Winter would be a fugitive. How else could he be here? Their hands were almost touching when a pistol cracked from an unknown source, the crowd heaved, and Winter jerked back, his hand coming to press against his side.
Freddie saw the stain blooming.
Blue, desperate eyes stared into his.
“Hold on, Iven.” And then Winter ran again, stumbling, and vanished in the crowd.
· · ·Freddie went straight to Faland, although it took far too long to find him, darting in a panic from lights to darkness, his head swimming with the sound of the gunshot, the look on Winter’s face. Freddie found Faland sitting in a café, of all places. He had a glass of something and an expression of heavy-lidded contentment. To Freddie he said, “You seem to have had a pleasant evening.” A gleam of knowing malice there. “See anyone you know?”
“Winter’s alive,” said Freddie, panting.
Faland lifted both brows, sipped his drink, made a face. It occurred to Freddie to wonder how much Faland knew, how much he’d planned, but he shook the thought away. It didn’t matter.
“He’s wounded—shot—they’re looking for him. I have to help him.”
“Do you?”
Bitter admission. “I can’t, alone.” He couldn’t do anything alone. He could hardly exist.
Faland rolled his glass between his fingers. “And what will you give me, if I help you?”
All the air seemed to leave his body. “You know,” said Freddie. “There is only one thing you want from me. And—and you planned this. To get it from me.”
“Well? Did I get it?”
“Yes. Damn you, yes. Anything.”
Faland got to his feet. His eye sparked. “Very well. We’ll take a leaf out of your book, Iven, and take your poor hunted friend to your sister. A fair price, would you say?”
Freddie was silent.
Faland fixed him with a faintly smiling gaze. “And afterward, Wilfred, you will tell me at last about the darkness, and how you came to love that man.”
