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“Shoot it! Shoot!” Rob was yelling from beside him on the floor, flailing.
The man lay on a few feet away, groaning, curled in a ball, arms protecting his head.
Matty had been expecting a carnas or some other twisted creature, not a human. It foxed him momentarily. Then, “It’s a person!” he shouted back at Rob. “Grab him!”
They both piled forward onto the new arrival and there was a cartoonish mess of arms and legs and swearing which gradually slowed to three people in a heap panting heavily, which was a lot less traumatic than he had expected when they started.
One of them was being sick. It was the man who had come through the shimmer, who was at the bottom of the pile. Matty hastily rolled to one side, out of the way.
Their prisoner did nothing to escape but continued to retch.
Rob rolled aside and sat propped against the wood of the barn wall; head tilted back. He looked as if he might be sick too. Matty clambered to his feet and stood against the wall beside him with the Luger held loosely by his side, ready for any trouble.
He could still feel the thing pulling at his stomach, each time the man retched. It was horrible. As if something was pulsing to get out.
The man struggled to his hands and knees and continued to hack up nothing very much. As soon as he was able to speak, he ground out, “Cut it! Cut the line!”
Rob’s head jerked forward like a terrier catching the scent of a rat.
“What?” he said. “What did he say?”
“Cut the line?” Matty said.
“Cut the line!” the man repeated. “Cut it if you can, for God’s sake!” He was still on his hands and knees and Rob shuffled forward to kneel beside him, hand on his back.
“How do I cut it?” he asked. “Tell me and I’ll do it!”
“You have to use your kias.” He spun away from Rob, over on to his back, arm shielding his eyes. “God, it’s bright in here. Cut it with your kias. They didn’t tell me how. But do it. The Webber boy will die if you don’t.”
Rob blanched where he was sitting on his heels in the middle of the stable.
He looked at Matty and his eyes were dark holes of misery. “I can try a cut,” he said. “Perhaps that’ll work.”
He drew his pocket-knife. The book had said strike to exsanguinate, Matty thought. The implication was that a simple cut would not work. “Use your kias too,” he said, echoing the stranger. “Perhaps if you use kias too then it’ll work without full exsanguination.”
“They didn’t think it would,” the man said, unprompted and misinterpreting slightly. “The Ternants said if they cut it without him there, we’d both die. And if we don’t cut it, he’d die anyway. We need to be in the same place for it to have a chance of working, and it’s the only chance. You need to cut it. I don’t care if it kills me. I’m past caring.” He took his arm down from over his face and Matty saw he was familiar.
“Marchant?” he said. Arthur’s friend. A journalist. Bloody hell. That was a turn up for the books.
“Yes.” His voice was rough. He was still breathing heavily. “Hello, Webber.” He coughed. “I’m sorry about your brother. This is probably his fault, though.”
Matty stared at him.
“Do what you need to do to cut it,” Marchant said. “I’m ready. I’ve had enough. I’m ready. Please? I’m begging you.” He looked from Matty to Rob. “You’re Curland, aren’t you? I remember you from when I visited Arthur. Do it. Please. At least one of us should be free of it and I’m ready. Please.”
Rob looked at Matty again. Matty nodded, giving absolution. “Try it,” he said. He looked at Marchant, who had his arm back over his eyes. “He’s going to cut your palm, Marchant,” he said. “Hold still.”
Marchant nodded. Matty could see he was biting his lip in anticipation.
Rob took hold of the arm Marchant hadn’t thrown over his eyes and pressed it down to the packed earth of the barn, paused, turned the arm so the hand was palm up, and then put his knee on the forearm. Marchant winced. Rob fumbled his pocket-knife out of his pocket and eased the blade free.
“Steady now,” he said, as if he was gentling an animal.
“Just do it,” Marchant said.
Holding the arm steady with his knee and his left hand pressed down on the fingers, Rob took a breath in and shut his eyes. Matty assumed he was gathering his kias. A second later, he struck with the blade, quickly and decisively, slashing a great gash open across Marchant’s palm.
Marchant flinched but didn’t make a sound.
The stable was filled with nothing but the sound of men breathing as they both watched the blood pool on the floor under him. He still had his other arm flung over his eyes as he opened and shut his palm a few times.
“It’s not working,” he said. “I can still feel it.”
Matty could feel it too. The thing in his stomach was twisting and furling and turning. In fact, as he observed the sensation, he began to feel dizzy.
Marchant suddenly sat up and pushed Rob off him. “Get off me,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Rob fell back and Marchant knelt up, cradling his dripping hand against his chest. He looked at Matty.
“It’s not working. I can feel it still draining into me from you. You’ve gone green.” He pushed at Rob. “Get him sat, he’s going to faint.”
Matty did feel nauseated. He staggered as Rob guided him to sit on the floor and put his head between his knees.
“It’s not enough,” Marchant said. “You’re going to have to cut my throat.”
He said it quite matter-of-factly, as if he was suggesting they might all sit down and have a nice cup of tea after their hour of rolling around on the floor of the stable.
“What?”
Rob had his hand on Matty’s back and Matty felt him freeze.
“You heard me.” Marchant’s voice was steady. “You’re going to have to off me, old chap. I can’t see any other way to finish it. They didn’t seem to think there was any other way, either.”
He didn’t state who the mysterious they were.
Matty lifted his head with an effort and looked at him.
“Cutting the link itself is difficult and if you’re successful, there’s a strong possibility we both die. Or...if only one of us dies, or is killed, the link dies too, and the other man survives. Finish it, Curland!” Marchant’s voice was abrupt. “I’m sick of it. It’s been years. I don’t want it anymore and there’s been enough death. Finish it! Do it now!”
Rob looked at him. He looked back at Matty. Matty shook his head, unable to speak through both nausea and fear. He stood slowly from his position beside Matty and stepped over to where Marchant knelt.
“The book said exsanguinate,” he said.
“Cut my throat, then,” the other man replied matter-of-factly. “Do it, Curland, bloody do it!”
Rob moved around behind him and put a hand in his hair. Matty saw his fingers tighten slowly as he tilted Marchant’s head back and exposed his throat. The knife was still open in his other hand, blood already visible on the good steel blade.
He’d had the knife for years. Matty’s father had bought it for him when he turned fifteen, Matty remembered. Rob kept it sharp. He used it for everything from cutting twine to gutting rabbits.
He laid it across Marchant’s throat.
Marchant met Matty’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Webber. It wasn’t me who began it, but I should have made more effort to finish it years ago. I should have made the Ternants finish it. I was scared.”
He shut his eyes.
Gently, almost reverently, Rob drew the sharp blade of the knife across his neck under his ear. He and Marchant were both deathly silent.
The blood began to well against Marchant’s pale skin and spurt over Rob’s hand where it remained on his throat.
One of them let out a sigh.
Rob sank to his knees behind Marchant, letting the knife fall as he guided the man back across his lap. His face was blank.
Matty couldn’t move. He wanted to go over to them, but weakness kept him resting against the wall. He shut his eyes for a moment and when he opened them, Marchant’s head was thrown back and the blood was spurting freely. Rob must have cut his carotid. It was everywhere. They were both covered in it. Rob had slid his arm behind Marchant’s head and was holding his hands, where Marchant had them grasped loosely together on his chest.
They were watching each other. Marchant said something. Matty thought he said “It’s all right, old chap. It had to be done.”
He heard Rob say, “I thought I was done with killing.”
Marchant said, “Don’t think of it like that. Think of it as saving Webber.” And they both turned their heads and looked at him. Marchant looked peaceful. Rob looked tortured.
Matty couldn’t bear it.
“Stop!” he said. “Stop the bleeding!” He dragged himself across the floor into the lake of blood and shoved his hands into the middle of it all, over the place it was pumping out. He knew how to do this; he’d done it a few times in France. “I don’t bloody well want this, the pair of you! Stop it. Stop bleeding, you bastard!”
He looked up from where he was bent over Marchant, up to Rob. Rob’s eyes were still glazed. There was nobody home. Matty slapped him across his cheek with a blood-soaked hand.
“Snap out of it, Rob! Help me!”
Rob tugged at his ear, still not quite with it. Matty hit him again. There was blood all over his face now, as well as all over his chest and lap. “Rob! Help me! I need you to help me!”
And then Rob was back. “Shitfire,” he said. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m bloody sure, Rob! I’m not going to let you have this on your conscience. Now help me stop the bleeding!”
Marchant was pretty out of it, not gone completely, but certainly away with the fairies. Matty tugged him off Rob’s lap completely, pulled his own jacket off and wadded it up, cotton-lining out. He pressed it against the cut.
“Go and get the doctor,” he said to Rob. “It’s going to need to be stitched. And his hand.”
Rob stared at him for a moment. “Rob! God! Go!” Matty shouted and then the other man shot to his feet and was moving. Matty shouted after him “Get her to bring a transfusion kit if she has one!” Marchant was going into shock.
Matty was suddenly feeling more alive than he had for months. He knew he was Type O blood; he’d been stuck full of needles on behalf of the wounded of his platoon several times at the Front. He could spare some blood for Marchant if Marchant needed it. Marchant had been prepared to give his life to save Matty’s. He pressed harder on the bundled-up jacket.
* * * *
IT WAS THE LONGEST hour of his life before Rob came back with the doctor. Matty had managed to stop the bleeding, but he didn’t know if it was soon enough.
Dr Marks was about the same age as Rob, sensible and kept up with the latest medical papers. She was also wearing knickerbockers, which made Matty look twice.
“What?” she said, irritably, as she knelt beside him in the pool of blood without a flinch. “I was about to go for a bicycle ride. Lucky for your young friend here I hadn’t left and that I had the car outside. Here. Let me see.” She pushed his hands out of the way. “Well, you’ve stopped it, which is something. But whether he’s lost too much...” She trailed off, thinking. “I’ve brought a transfusion kit...my brother sent me one last year, most interesting...”
As her voice ran out, Matty said, “I’m Type O. I can donate if you can set it up. I’ve done it before.”
She was obviously thinking furiously.
“I haven’t,” she said, finally. “I’ve only seen photographs. But I suppose we’ll manage.” She looked up at Rob. “The kit, Curland?” she said.
“Here, Ma’am,” he said, stepping forward. He had been hovering in the doorway as if he was afraid to come in, and he returned there once he’d handed off the wooden box.
She didn’t spare him another glance, turning back to Matty. “Roll your sleeve up, then,” she said. “It’s probably going to hurt. It’s a bloody big needle.”
“I’ll do me, you do him,” Matty said, gesturing at Marchant, and she nodded.
He pushed his own sleeve up above his elbow and tied the strap off round his bicep, while the doctor pushed Marchant’s sodden sleeve back to reveal his forearm. She muttered to herself under her breath as she did so.
“Right then,” she said, once his arm was exposed. “No point putting the line into him before the blood’s out of you.”
Matty winced as she said the word line and saw Rob do the same out of the corner of his eye. “Is he still breathing?” he asked, as she began to pat his inner elbow to raise the veins.
“Don’t want to waste your blood on him if he’s not?” she asked, acerbically. “Yes, he’s still breathing. Heartbeat’s faint, though. Are you ready?”
She stuck him with the needle before he could say yes.
The familiar dropping dizziness as the blood drained out of him into the glass vessel was like an old friend. He’d never minded doing it, it was an easy way to help people. A little blood went a long way, both inside and outside the body.
“I should be lying down,” he said, vaguely.
“Be my guest.” She gestured to the blood-soaked earth of the stable floor.
He coughed in surprise as she neatly pressed down on his vein and slid out the needle. He’d forgotten she had a dark sense of humour.
She bent his hand back up toward his shoulder. “Here. Keep pressure on that.” She turned toward Rob.
“Curland! I need you to hold this!” She busied herself putting the top on the glass flask and attaching the tubing. “You’re going to turn it upside down so I can get the air out, I’m going to insert the needle, attach the tubing, and then you’re going to hold it up for me.”
Rob was motionless in the doorway.
“Come on, man. Hurry up! Unless you want him to die?”
Rob shook himself at that and stepped forward. “I don’t want him to die,” he said, almost to himself.
“Well then. Let’s get a chivvy on!”
* * * *
THE TROUBLE WITH DR Marks, her patients sometimes said, was that once you invited her in, it was almost impossible to get rid of her. She had an extremely strong interest in the wellbeing of people who had asked for her help and she didn’t simply let her cases drop willy-nilly once she’d become involved in them.
This proved to be true in all instances.
“Let’s get him up to the house then, chaps,” she said, as she tied off the sutures she’d used to close the neat, deep, three-inch gash Rob had sliced into the side of Marchand’s neck.
Neither of them responded.
Rob was in the doorway to where he had retreated as soon as she’d taken the bottle of blood back from him and Matty had continued kneeling beside her and Marchant on the floor, trying and mostly failing to be of assistance. He felt light-headed but the previously incapacitating nausea and pain in his stomach had disappeared.
“Chaps?” She stood, brushing perfunctorily at her knickerbockers. It didn’t do much good. All four of them were soaked in Marchant’s blood.
“Will he live?” Rob’s voice was soft and empty, and she eyed him gravely.
“Probably. If he didn’t lose too much, if the transfusion doesn’t go wrong and didn’t get contaminated somehow, and if no-one tries to cut his throat again.”
She paused and into the speaking silence again commanded severely, “Now. Gentlemen. Shall we get him up to the house?”
Matty went and fetched one of the blankets from the abandoned men’s sleeping quarters over the barn. They were folded up neatly in the oak chest in the corner where his mother had arranged it and when he drew out the one on top, it smelled faintly of cedar and lavender, scattered in there against the moths.
He shook it out and brought it down the worn wooden stairs and they doubled it over and rolled Marchant on to it as gently as they could. It wasn’t anything either of them lacked experience in.
Then, as the doctor gathered up her precious transfusion kit, they took two corners each and carefully carried him through the rain and up to the house.
“Put him on the table a minute,” Dr Marks said, brushing water from her hair as they entered the kitchen. I want to check and see if he has any other wounds.”
Rob seemed more himself now he’d had something to do other than stand and stare, and he handed her a towel for her hair. “He doesn’t,” he said before filling the kettle and putting it on and then turning back to the sink to scrub his hands clean with the carbolic. “Only his hand. As you can see.”
“I’ll be the judge of that, shall I?” She moved him gently to the side and took up position beside him. “Me being the actual doctor in the room and all that. Pass the soap, please. And if you could put my transfusion kit in to soak, I’d be very grateful.”
Rob handed her the soap mutely and Matty suddenly decided he needed to get off his feet. He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down heavily. She looked at him sharply. “All right?” she asked.
“Bit dizzy,” he said. “But yes, I think so.”
“You need some tea. Curland here can make some while I check over the patient. What’s his name again?”
“Marchant. Peter Marchant. He was a friend of Arthur’s.”
She sniffed. “Was he now. Well. Let’s get his clothes off him, I need to see if he’s bleeding anywhere else.”
“He’s not!” Rob’s raised voice echoed all around the kitchen as he slammed the brown pottery teapot down on the wooden draining board.
They both stopped still and stared at him. He was holding the handle of the teapot in his hand. It was detached from the pot.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am.” He breathed in through his nose, obviously trying to regain precarious control. Matty wanted to go to him but he could tell from the way Rob was holding himself that he’d be pushed away. “He’s not bleeding anywhere else. He wasn’t— I... It was me.” He swallowed. “I cut him.”
She stared at him.
“I beg your pardon?”
He stared at her and then glanced frantically at Matty, over to Marchant, and then back at her. “I...it was me.”
“No. I attacked him first,” came an almost inaudible slurred voice from the head of the table. “I attacked him, and he defended himself.” Marchant stirred weakly and Dr Marks whipped around and stepped up to him.
“Try not to move around too much,” she said, briskly. “I don’t want you to start bleeding again.” She conjured a pair of scissors from somewhere and began to cut off his shirt. “Stay still. I need to examine you and these clothes need burning.”
Marchant made a weak sort of noise and did as he was asked. Or he might have passed out again. He hadn’t opened his eyes at all.
“We will talk about this,” she said, pinning Rob with gimlet eyes. “But first, I need to stitch this gash on his hand,” she glared at the offending appendage as if she held it personally responsible for its injury, “and then we need to get this man into a proper bed and we all need to wash.”
* * * *
WITH MARCHANT PASSED out upstairs after a perfunctory sponge down that Matty and Dr Marks performed between them, and a similar perfunctory wash undertaken by everyone else, each of them without assistance, they settled down around the table in the kitchen. Matty rubbed at the blood that had smudged on to it from Marchant in a desultory fashion with a wet cloth and was slightly surprised to find it left no traces. He’d half expected it to be a permanent stain.
He felt better with a clean table, clean clothes, clean hands and face, and a cup of sweet tea inside him. Luckily his mother had had more than one teapot.
Rob still wasn’t right. He was back with them, but his silence was tense and stiff, not his usual comfortable confidence.
“Now,” said Dr Marks, in the quiet, firm voice she used with children when she did their inoculations, “will one of you please tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Dr Marks...” Matty didn’t know where to start and she interrupted, anyway.
“Sylvia, please. And you are Matthew. And you are Robert. Yes?” She gathered up both their gazes. “Start at the beginning. Not today. Start with what was wrong with your brother, please, Matthew.”
Matty swallowed and stared at her.
“What?” he said.
At the same time as Rob said, “You said it was cancer, probably. Liver cancer.”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I? And it might have been. But I don’t think it was, was it?”
She looked from one of them to the other with her head tilted to one side, like a particularly insightful bird. A goose, probably. Or a buzzard. Something that was on the attack, anyway.
Matty broke first. “Not as such, no. We don’t think so.”
There was a long pause.
She coughed, delicately, and put her cup down in its blue willow-pattern saucer. Matty had got the good china out for her. “Was it magic, Matthew?”
Rob choked on his tea.
By the time Matty had finished thumping him on the back and mopping up the spilt liquid and re-filling everyone’s cups, they had both settled a bit.
“Was it magic?” she repeated.
“I don’t think they like you to call it that,” Rob said, quietly. “As I understand it.”
She gave him an assessing look. “No, I don’t suppose they do,” she said, eventually. “I don’t know much about it, really. But I do know that. Tell me.”
By the time they had given her an outline, they were on their third pot of tea and she had been up to check on the sleeping Marchant twice. It was getting on for tea-time and the evening was drawing in. The injured man didn’t have a temperature and seemed to be sleeping peacefully.
“And did this cut the line?” she asked Matty, finally. “Was it enough? Or are you still connected to him?”
Matty stopped and thought. He hadn’t checked since that dreadful moment in the stable as he’d watched Rob get ready to slice Marchant’s willing throat.
Rob looked at him from squinted eyes. “It’s gone,” he said, finally. “I think it’s gone.”
“You can sense it?” Dr Marks...Silvia...asked. “You’re one of them?”
She didn’t sound entirely friendly.
Rob pulled at his ear uncomfortably. “No. No, I’m not. Do I look like one of them?” he said, irritably. “I tried a few things in the books, that’s all, and some of them worked.”
“What do you mean, do you look like one of them?” she asked. She was exceedingly sharp. They’d skirted round the bit about Lin of the Frem and the gate between the worlds, concentrating on the line linking Matty, and presumably Arthur before him, to Marchant and how their efforts to cut it had caused Marchant to appear out of thin air.
“Erm...” Rob was all out of hedging ability.
Matty said, quite calmly, “There’s a whole other world beyond the shimmer thing that the not-magicians draw power from and there are people who are tall and slim and who carry swords and use magic like you or I use a knife and fork. No, I don’t know anything more than that. Yes, I think that’s where Marchant was. Yes, let’s ask him when he wakes up.”
He took a breath. She didn’t appear to have anything to say, which was a bloody first.
“What did you mean?” he asked, before she could get going again. “Is Rob one of them?”
“I only meant...can he do it? That’s all.” She sounded unsure, which was the first time in all the years he’d known her that he’d heard her sound less than a hundred percent certain about anything, ever. “Like Arthur could.”
There was another silence.
Clearly, they had all been hoarding information.
Rob cleared his throat. “Like Arthur could?” he repeated.
“Yes. I’m not a fool, Robert Curland, despite being in skirts. I knew there was something odd about what was wrong with him when he wouldn’t let me examine him. He wasn’t like the old country boys, who don’t like a woman seeing their naked chest outside the bedroom.”
Rob blushed and Matty snorted painfully through his nose despite his exhausted misery.
“Annie Beelock asked me to come out and see him one Saturday morning when I saw her in the post office. She said he was lethargic, not eating, and she was worried about him. She couldn’t persuade him to come down to the surgery, so I called in as I was passing by on my way home.” She proffered the teapot at Matty and he shook his head as she refilled her own cup. “I could see him through the sitting room window.” She put the teapot down with a decisive little thump. “He was waving his arms around and there was a cloud of light in the room with him.”
There was a potent silence.
“What did you do?” Rob asked, eventually, when it seemed as if she had run out of words.
“I watched for a while, obviously. What would you have done?” It was a rhetorical question. “And then when he seemed to have finished whatever he was doing and the light had gone away, I knocked on the door and asked him to tell me what he was up to.”
There was another pause. She was an astonishing woman.
“And what did he say?” It was Matty’s turn to prompt her.
“He said he’d found a book of instructions about how to make things happen with an invisible power, it absolutely wasn’t magic, how I dare I call it that, and that he was going to create a weapon to end the war and bring the boys home.”
A heavy silence fell over all three of them.
“That’s what he told me he was doing, too,” said Marchant, in an exhausted whisper, from the doorway.
They all leapt out of their collective skins.
He was leaning against the door jamb and the trip down the stairs had clearly been unwise. He was a pale greenish colour and looked done in.
“Sit!” barked the doctor. “Idiot!” Her bedside manner was dreadful.
She jumped to her feet along with Matty and they guided him down into the carver chair with arms at the head of the table. He folded down bonelessly, breathing quick and shallow and shut his eyes, resting his head on the tall ladder-back. The movement exposed the dressing Sylvia had put on his neck and Matty caught Rob staring at it, almost transfixed.
“Pour him some tea, would you Rob?” Matty asked, hoping to distract him. “I expect he could do with a drink.”
“He shouldn’t even be out of bed,” Sylvia said.
“I could hear you talking,” Marchant rasped. “I wanted to tell my part of it.”
“Drink your tea.” Rob’s voice was quiet as he put the mug down on the table in front of him.
“Thank you.” He looked up at Rob. “I’m sorry, Curland. I shouldn’t have asked it of you.”
Rob turned away and busied himself filling the kettle, stoking up the range and finding more milk.
“It’s all right,” he said finally, soft country voice that of the real Rob again. “I know what it’s like. That just wanting it all to be over. I was stuck under a collapsed building for hours once, waiting for it to fall. It would have almost been a relief if it had.” He ran a hand through his already-disordered hair as he turned back to them. “And it was enough, as it turns out. Unless you can still feel it?”
Marchant’s eyes were shut again, and he took a little while to answer. “No,” he said. “I think it’s gone. Whatever we did, between us, it’s gone. Arthur began it years ago and it looks like we’ve finished it today.”
His part of the story didn’t take all that long to tell, but it wasn’t comfortable listening. Matty had always looked up to Arthur. This didn’t sound like the Arthur he knew.
“He really wasn’t well, toward the end, before you came home,” Sylvia told him. “In his mind, I mean, as well as physically. He certainly thought he was going to make a weapon so terrible it would end the war. Annie was truly worried about him the day she asked me to come out here.”
“His letters to me got more and more rambling,” Marchant added. “I’m not sure they’d have made sense even before the censor got to them.” He drank some of his tea. “Is the war over?” he asked, cautiously. “I don’t even know what date it is.”
“It’s two days before Christmas, 1919,” Matty told him. “And you should probably go back to bed. If you feel half as bad as you look, you’re dead on your feet.” He stood up. “Plus, none of us had any lunch and it’s nearly tea-time. I am going to have some bread and cheese and fruit cake. You may all have some too if you would like some, but even if you don’t, I’m still going to.” He moved decisively toward the larder.
He didn’t want to hear any more about Arthur going mad this evening. He’d had enough for one day.
