Fullepub 
Chapter 39: Into This Wild Abyss
CHÂTEAU COUTHOVE AND PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
April 1918
The drive was empty, except for the queen’s car and the shadows of the orchard, cast long over the gravel. The crosses in the cemetery cut lines in the fading sky. The spring air felt cold on her face, and Laura was somehow not surprised to see a bloody figure among the shadows of the trees. It pointed, and Laura looked and saw movement; a brief anonymous flicker near the gate. She didn’t question anymore, or doubt or fear. She just ran toward it.
Faland was by the gate, and turning into the dusk, his hair the same color as cloudy sky. She was nearly upon him before she saw him, and then she seized him by his sleeve and spun him round.
To her surprise, he didn’t resist, but stood watching her with narrow interest. “I know perfectly what they were hoping for,” he said. “But I wasn’t sure you’d believe them.” He looked dissatisfied.
She set her jaw. “Where is my brother?”
“ ‘Great is the battle-god,’ ” quoted Faland. “ ‘Great, and his kingdom.’ Gone, of course.”
“You are a liar.” Laura kept expecting that Mary’s voice—someone’s voice—would call after her, inquiring, demanding. But the front door of Couthove didn’t open. The driver of the shining car didn’t turn his head.
“Perhaps I am,” said Faland. “But he is gone. All of him is mine now. Everything that matters. He gave it to me.” Faland spoke as though it was nothing to walk through the wreckage of the world, amused and curious and avid for the human soul.
She didn’t care. He was no more terrifying than Brandhoek, the bad nights and worse days. Her rational mind still protested, but she told it to be quiet. Her beloved was out there somewhere, in the abyss. And she was going after him.
“You’re wrong,” she whispered.
“Am I? Will you bet your life?” He fixed her with a narrow gaze.
“Yes.”
“He won’t go,” said Faland. “And you won’t be able to get back. Not where I’m taking you. Not this time.”
“Lead the way,” said Laura.
· · ·Laura would have said she knew the forbidden zone of the Ypres Salient. She knew its rest areas, its aerodromes, its crumbling towns, the lie of its roads, the color of its sky. Knew how men lived there, what they ate, how they joked. Knew how they died, and where they were buried.
But she never remembered that walk, could never recall the path they’d taken, although later she dreamed of seeing things that weren’t there: a river, a great, crumbling wall. She remembered that the hotel took her by surprise, that at first glimpse she thought it was a palace, standing ruined against a fiery evening sky. But it was just Faland’s hotel. He opened the door onto an empty foyer, silent and dark and smelling of dust. It made her think of Faland himself, the glitter of him, the air of years and slow decay. The room was as she’d last seen it: a ruin, dead and cold.
But Freddie was there.
He knelt, staring at nothing. A broken mirror hung over his head. “Freddie!” The cry scraped Laura’s throat. She lurched across the room, sank down beside him.
Her brother didn’t look up.
“Freddie, it’s Laura.”
He looked like a ghost himself. He didn’t even acknowledge her. “Freddie, what’s happened to you?”
She tried to take his hand. He removed it gently from her grasp.
“Freddie, for God’s sake—”
His brows drew together. He didn’t look at her. “Are you dead?”
“No, I’m not. I’m not, Freddie, I’m here. I came back to find you. Freddie, please.”
There was so little of her brother left in this hunched, gray man.
She turned on Faland.
“What have you done to him?” At Brandhoek, and after, during all those long days on the hospital train, on the hospital ship, despite the pain, she had not cried. But she was crying now.
Faland’s voice was almost gentle. “At least I know his name. I’m sure you’ve seen men worse, and at the hands of their fellow man.”
Laura was silent.
“Stay,” said Faland. “As my guests. You’ll be together. What’s the world got for you anyway?”
“Is that what you told him?”
Faland didn’t answer. He’d taken out his violin, his fingers restless on the neck of it as though he could pull music from her love and sorrow. Maybe there was no way to reach her brother. We have to get out, she thought. Out under the sky, into a world that sometimes made sense. “Freddie, we have to go.”
He was like a puppet when she pulled him to his feet.
Which door had they come through? There were too many. All alike. She dragged him to the nearest. Turned the handle.
It was unlocked. The door opened. She recoiled. Freddie cried out.
It wasn’t the way out. It wasn’t anything Laura understood at all.
· · ·The door opened, with a gust of frigid air, onto an iron-hard daylight, with bitter rain falling. Laura wavered; the ground had fallen away. She had to grip the doorframe to steady herself.
They were standing at the edge of a trench.
Laura stood still, disbelieving. Beside her, Freddie made a small sound, of fear or sudden comprehension. It was cold, and the rain was falling just behind that ordinary wooden door. There was the sound of guns, the smell of wet wool, and excrement, and corpses. Men waded along the trench, not glancing up, mud to their waists, holding rifles over their heads. One leaned in to the other and said, grinning, “They’ll have to bring in the navy soon, to bring us up. Too wet for the infantry…” just as a section of a trench gave way, and a body, half-rotted, slumped out of the revetments…
Freddie made a low, agonized sound.
Laura slammed the door. Freddie backed up. Horror was trying to break through the blankness in his eyes. “No,” he said. “No, I’d forgotten.”
Faland was watching them.
She pulled herself together, caught Freddie’s unresisting hand, tugged. “We just have to get out. We’ll try another door. Just one more, Freddie.”
But the next opened into a hospital, and now it was Laura’s turn to freeze rigid in the doorway. For they’d bundled a dead man up into a sheet, with orderlies preparing to lift him, and a sister lurched forward, calling, “No, wait, be careful—”
But they’d lifted him too quick, and his broken body simply—slid apart…
“Laura,” Freddie said then. “I can’t.” It wasn’t dramatic. It was just a statement of fact. The door was still open. The memory-hospital was sharply real, down to the smell. She slammed the door shut. Freddie was shivering as if he was sick.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No,” said Freddie.
Her heart crumbled. They’d have to try the doors to get out. Door after door. What more lay behind them? Could she ask him to face it? Did she have a right to decide for him at all? “Then—do you want to stay here?”
“I don’t want anything,” he whispered. “I’m not—I’m not anything. You don’t want me.”
She caught his face between her hands. “Never say that. Never. You’re everything I have.”
For long moments, he was silent. She thought he wouldn’t answer. Then his ragged-nailed fingertip came up and blotted her wet face. “Laura?”
“I’m here,” she whispered.
“I’m—I’m not the same. You don’t love me. The Freddie you loved—he died.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’m a traitor,” he whispered. “I remember that. I—I did a terrible thing. I killed—” His voice stuttered. “I ran. I’m not brave.”
“You don’t have to be. Not for me.”
The blankness was trying to slide across his features again. But then he clenched his jaw. He said, “I don’t want—” He stopped. “I don’t know if we can leave.”
“We can. I know we can.”
He looked so frail. “I’ll try.”
He was shaking so hard it vibrated up her arm when she took his hand. They tried another door. And another.
None of them led out. They led back through his mind. Through fear, boredom, envy, anger. Waste, disillusionment, cold nights and dark days. Laura didn’t know she was crying until she tasted the salt. A man’s head blown from his shoulders, but his body still running. A shell that had fallen on an observation post, and Freddie given a sandbag and a shovel, to retrieve the bodies.
She began to hesitate before the hammer-blows of each door, but her brother’s blank face had slowly taken on an insane determination. Now he pushed ahead of her, opening door after door, as though looking for something. As though there were some truth about himself, something he needed, contained in one of those monstrous minutes.
A single glance back showed Faland on his feet, watching.
Then Freddie opened another door, and didn’t go on to the next. He stood there rigid. Laura, at his shoulder, saw Freddie, in memory, tumble into a shell hole, followed by a big man whose sandy hair was plastered flat with rain. Then another man, in a soaked Canadian uniform, fell into them, screaming. She saw the screaming man strike at the man with sandy hair—Winter, Laura thought. Freddie and Winter. Saw the Canadian stretch to his full height, bayonet raised. But Freddie was there, dropping his shoulder, tackling the man, sending them both flying into foul water. They writhed a moment, one uppermost, then the other, until Freddie got his feet under him.
Held the other man down until he stopped moving.
In the hotel, in the doorway, Freddie stood still. “I killed him.” His voice was perfectly flat. “I wanted you to see it. He was one of ours and I killed him.”
She didn’t touch him. She thought he’d flinch away. “You didn’t mean to.”
“Oh, I did,” said Freddie. They were still looking through the doorway, where, in memory, Freddie was crawling up the ice-slick slope of the shell hole. Winter caught him around the shoulders before he could fall, and put a canteen to his lips. They were staring at each other. As though each contained the other’s entire world.
Laura bit blood from her lip. Thought—and for the first time, really regretted—Winter’s going to die. He’d had a bout of madness—or patriotism—and tried to kill a general. He was going to be interrogated and executed.
She stayed silent. Freddie was staring into the dark. But he wasn’t looking at Winter. His eyes were on the body, floating facedown in the shell hole. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to it. “It should have been me, not you. I’m sorry.” Freddie reached out and slowly closed the door. He looked old. But the blankness did not come back into his face. “I needed to remember that.” His voice was a croak. “And there’s something else I have to remember.”
“What?”
“I’ll know when I see it.”
· · ·Laura did not know how many doors later, but finally one of them opened onto nothing. Onto darkness like the beginning of the world. And in the darkness, she heard snatches of voices. “—Sunlight in the pines. Blackberries—”
“—the sea. I love the sea.”
A verse of a poem. Voices that mingled in the emptiness. She realized that she was crying again.
Freddie whispered, “I remember now. It was so dark.”
“And Winter was there,” said Laura.
“Yes,” said Freddie. “He was there.” He turned. And it was her brother’s hazel eyes looking into hers. Exhausted, sad, with horror lurking in the back of them. But he was there. “I’ll go where you want, Laura,” he said. “As long as you can. But I’m still a traitor. I’m still a coward and a murderer.”
Laura held his hand and said nothing.
Faland was watching them. Had been that whole time. “Really?” he said. “I open the secrets of my hotel to you and this is how you answer? Go back out there and live with it?” He was stalking across the room. Freddie and Laura both stood very still. “But didn’t you scream for your mother to run, that night in my hotel, Laura? I heard you. You want to remember this for the rest of your life?” His hand was on the knob of another door. He flung it open.
· · ·It was their parents’ bedroom, in Halifax, full of broken glass. Their mother in the middle of it, lying in her own blood. The room was filling with smoke, sparks falling outside. Their mother was trying to cry, but her tear ducts were gone.
Freddie went perfectly still.
And Laura darted forward, into the memory, and knelt beside her. All she could think was that she finally had a second chance. Back in the heart of her own nightmares, she could do it over again. And again. And again, until she got it right. Until she saved her mother.
But someone was pulling her away. She didn’t want to go. But the arms held her, and she found herself sobbing against her brother’s chest. His arms were tight around her. They were together in the memory, in the burnt living room in Veith Street.
“When?” he whispered, into her hair.
Her voice was almost unrecognizable. “In December. Mother and Father are dead. The house is gone. Everything’s gone.”
Freddie was silent. They held each other, shivering. How do you go on from the end of everything? She didn’t have an answer, and neither did he. They were frozen by it, at a standstill. In the doubt-filled darkness, Faland’s voice came and wrapped around them again. “You don’t have to go on. You don’t have to remember.”
He was right, Laura thought. He’d pour them wine, if they asked. He’d play his fiddle. They wouldn’t need anything else. She could see the truth of that in her brother’s haunted eyes. They could both just stop. A look of triumph came into Faland’s face.
But then Freddie said, “I couldn’t leave, for myself,” his voice thin as a thread. “But Laura can’t stay here. Laura—she has to help people. Do you hear me, Laura? I won’t let you stay here.”
Freddie’s words made Laura think of Jones. Jones who did still believe in the future. Perhaps there was something beyond all this, something she couldn’t see.
“I won’t leave without you,” she said.
“I don’t know how to get out,” Freddie whispered. “I don’t even know how to try.”
Stop trying doors,Laura thought. The doors weren’t the way out. Faland was. She felt in her pocket. She had matches, from lighting the Bunsen burner in the sterilization room. She glanced up. Crossed the room. Faland was leaning on a table, watching her carefully. She struck a match and held it poised. “Let us out,” said Laura, “or I’ll set the place on fire.”
He looked unimpressed.
The match was pitiful; it was burning her fingers. Laura stepped closer to him. Closer still. He looked impatient. Then she threw the match. It arced, and his eyes followed it.
As they did, she lunged forward and snatched his violin, raised it, poised to smash. “Now,” she said.
He went very still.
“You can’t escape,” he said. “Even if I let you out. There is nowhere for you to escape to. Don’t you understand? What future can you expect, out there? In the wreck of the world? Haven’t you even seen all the ways you are ruined?”
She didn’t answer. She was afraid to; she might find herself agreeing. Instead she clutched the violin by the neck and started to whip it down.
“Stop!” he snapped.
She waited.
“You think this is a victory? It will only end in ashes.”
Laura said nothing. Finally, unwillingly, his head turned. She followed his gaze, and where there had been only wall, she saw another door.
“With my malediction,” said Faland. It was almost gentle.
“I am not afraid of you,” said Laura. She took her brother’s hand and walked outside.
