Ypres, September 1921
HARRY WHITTLES A PENCIL TO A POINT AND GOES TO RETRIEVE THE sketchbook from his bunk. He treads carefully on the stairs. It is dark in the dugout and his fingertips stretch to find the walls. He curses as he kicks at a fallen-over stool, kicks it into Alfred McCabe’s suspended shins.
He staggers back. Hanging from the beam, his belt about his throat, Alfred McCabe creaks. His tongue protrudes horribly. There is a crust of blood in his beard. His eyes bulge, but there is no brightness of life behind them. Only the red ribbon, wound through McCabe’s dead fingers, stirs. A silver-plated Saint Christopher spins.
Harry vomits. McCabe is their old contemptible, their regular, their warhorse; he is all swagger and soldiering lingo, is all talk of Boers and cavalry and Mafeking medals on his chest. It doesn’t seem right that McCabe should be dead. Harry straightens and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Now they are all as good as dead. “Old soldiers never die,” he whispers. “Young ones wish they would.”
The electric bulb dips and buzzes and suddenly Harry sees that McCabe’s face is not his, but his brother’s. Francis Blythe, wrongly and rightly, is hanging dead in a dugout south of Cambrai. Harry stares. He gulps for breath, his chest shudders, blood bangs in his ears, but his brain and his eyes cannot align. Gravity jolts. He is transfixed by the face of his four-months-maybe-dead brother. He scans the dugout. All is as it was: he touches the ironclad walls, the wooden props, the pressed-earth floor, the mirror and the pinups and posted poems, and McCabe’s boots, suspended still six inches off the earth. He hears water drip and smells damp clay and tastes blood where he has bitten his lip.
He takes a step closer, his legs unsteady. Francis’s lips are cracked and all the color has gone out of them. But his lips are parted, as if he does yet have something to say. Harry doesn’t want to hear what his brother’s dead mouth might have to say. He doesn’t want to look at his dead face up close like this, but fear fixes him to the spot. Francis’s hair sticks to his forehead in damp curls. Dirt accentuates the contours of his cheeks. Fatigue hollows his eyes. But then Francis’s eyes flash open, pupils dilated. His wide, dark-lashed, blue eyes address Harry’s own.
HARRY SCREAMS. TERROR tears out of him and then there is the shock of black silence. The black is the dilation of a pupil just an inch from his own. When he gasps, his breath mists the mirror. His eyes refocus and the mirror is breaking. He watches the fissures spread. It is a sigh and then a crackle and only the shattering rush of noise right then at the end. His own reflected face falls in fragments.
“Harry!” It is her voice through the paper wall. “Harry, what’s happening?”
He slides down to the floor and sits among the splinters. There is glass everywhere now. The half-lit lines of the room are alien for a second. He puts his head between his knees and tries to remember how to breathe. He hears her door open and close and then she is banging at his. He watches the handle turning. She keeps banging. He reels back, re-tracks.
“Harry! Please let me in.”
He cuts his hand on the glass as he stands. There is blood on his shirt and now hand-printed on the door. Edie looks pale under the electric light. There are other voices and faces in the corridor. She pushes him back into the room and shuts the door behind them.
“Harry, what’s happened?”
She holds his hands between hers and steers him toward the washbasin. Harry watches as she pours from the jug. His blood swirls pink in the white basin. The water is cold. His hands are trembling. He can hear Edie breathing.
“Harry?”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She takes his hands from the water and dries them on a towel. She turns his hands over, runs her fingertips over them, and pulls a piece of glass from his palm. Her fingers tremble, he sees, and she gasps at the same moment that he does, as if that sharp flinch of pain is her own. There is a smear of red on the shard of glass. He recalls her, earlier that day, holding a piece of blue glass up to the light, the quivering triangle of blue light on her throat.
“You’re shivering. Talk to me,” she says.
“I broke the mirror.”
“But why?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
He thinks about Francis’s face in the mirror of the ransacked house, their eyes meeting in the mirror and then the trinkets and violets raining down on his head. The memory makes him want to put his hands over his head. “Don’t look like that,” he hears Francis’s voice again. “It’s for Edie.”
“I had a dream,” Harry says. “A nightmare. I must have sleepwalked.”
“Have you cut your feet?” She pulls her shawl around her shoulders. It is embroidered with Indian flowers, he sees. The fringe of the shawl brushes softly against his hand. Harry imagines that he can smell the musky silk roses.
“I don’t think so.”
He sits on the edge of the bed while she washes his feet. His eyes keep closing. He’s not sure that he isn’t still asleep. She sweeps the glass shards together and folds them into a newspaper. His hand aches where she pulled the glass from it. Her hands lift up his feet and pull over the sheets. She puts a finger to her lips and then there is nothing but the black.
“It will be all right,” says Edie’s voice.
He shuts his eyes and briefly believes her.