He paused to look back. Here on Highgate Hill he could see down onto the burning capital of country and empire itself. Whole areas of the city blazed. It was as if he was looking down upon the face of an old friend that had erupted into fiery red sores. More bombs fell, ripping out the heart of offices and ancient houses. Anti-aircraft guns returned like for like, pouring out white-hot shells that ascended into the sky with a beauty that was as ethereal as it was deadly. And above the thud of bombs, so eerily deadened and softened by distance, he could make out the guttural drone of German Heinkel bombers as they passed overhead to deliver their lethal cargoes.
A line from a story he’d once read came to him: “There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.” Tonight those words were made real.
With a sigh he turned his back on the inferno and walked on. The time was just fifteen minutes to ten. A quarter of a mile to his right a bomb exploded in Highgate Cemetery, startling him into a crouch. Immediately his imagination flew to the site of the impact. How the hundred-kilogram ordnance would have penetrated the ground; male hardware entering female earth. How the steel shell would have shattered coffins, crunched through leathery skin and powdery bone. How the explosion would have torn a crater twenty feet across. How bones and rotten flesh would have come falling from the sky to be impaled on fence spikes. How arms and legs and heads would hang in the trees like the loathsome fruit of an orchard in hell.
“A night for resurrection,” he murmured to himself. “A night when we raise the dead.” His grim smile died immediately as the rising scream of another falling bomb slashed through the cold night air. The fear he felt wasn’t for himself. No. What if the bomb struck the house he was walking toward now? He’d come a long way to meet the man whose letter he now gripped in his hand. If that man were to die… such cruel irony… he’d never know the truth.
Fifty yards away the road surface twitched, then bulged, as if some subterranean creature had briefly raised its head to see what was happening outside. The man walked toward the still-steaming mound. By the light of a burning church down the road in Archway he glimpsed the shining carcass of a bomb. The detonator might have failed. Then again, perhaps it was set on a delayed fuse, and the device was merely biding its time before it blasted the nearby houses into atoms.
The time was now five minutes to ten. He could not permit anything to delay him further. He walked a little faster up the hill to a row of houses that overlooked Highgate Cemetery. Built on the whim of an architect with obvious Gothic tastes, the tops of the walls were castellated and a tower stood at one end of the row, as evocative as any that had imprisoned a fairy-tale princess. He hurried to the house that bore a brass figure eight on the door. So here it was: Number 8 Sabulum Reach.
My God, my heart’s beating hard. London’s being bombed into the ground, yet I’m more unnerved about knocking on this door.
He even paused as he raised his gloved hand, ready to knock. A liquid sensation flooded his stomach. His pulse rate quickened. And even now a voice in the back of his head told him: It’s not too late. You can walk away. You don’t have to meet him.
But he knew he hadn’t come so far to turn back now.
He rapped on the door, a firm rhythm that sent echoes announcing his arrival deep into the house. They seemed to recede into impossible distances, fading away beneath the foundations of the building.
Presently, the door opened. A white-haired man stood there with a tartan rug around his shoulders. In this light it resembled the cloak of some ancient wizard.
“Good evening…” But the sight of the old man robbed the next words from his lips. After all this time planning the visit, he wasn’t sure what to say next.
The old man seemed to understand. With a benign smile he said, “Good evening. Lieutenant Daelamare Smith, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
The old man continued, “It’s rather a filthy night out. I half expected you wouldn’t come.”
“No.” He almost shouted the response. “Nothing would have stopped me coming here tonight. Nothing.”
“Well then, lieutenant, please come indoors. Something warming would be timely for us both, I believe. Ah, we haven’t shaken hands…”
“Of course. Lieutenant Delamare Smith of the Monmouthshire Infantry Brigade.”
“A Monmouthshire man, hmm? Honoured to meet you, sir.” They shook hands. “And I, as you will have deduced, am Arthur Machen. Now, what is so important to have brought you all this way to see me?”
Smith closed his eyes before he passed across the threshold into Machen’s house. In the distance, and all around, he could hear the impacts of bombs, the crackling of ack-ack, the grumble of collapsing buildings and the soft roar of firestorms in their infancy. London was taking a true pounding tonight, that was for sure, but his senses seemed to echo memories of a different war.
True, he thought, it’s all true.
Drifting from the house before him was the pleasant warm tang of pipe smoke, but beneath it Smith could smell the rot of the trenches, corpses and muck and hopelessness mixing a rancid stew. He turned his face to the sky and rain pattered down onto his cheeks, but it could have been mud thrown up by the shelling, clouds of shrapnel and body parts pelting down like deathly snow. Water in his eyes… he hated that now. Back then, in the trenches, Hell had been water.
All true. I was there. There’s no other way to explain this.
He opened his eyes and met the gaze of the old man before him.
“I need you to tell me who I am.”
There were ten thousand dead Germans laid out before them. Gunshots still rang out, but the offensive had halted. What they heard now were the individual reports of German officers shooting their men as they turned tail and fled, and perhaps the occasional sound of a suicide. They screamed and shouted, these officers, urging the attack onward even though the slaughter was already over, accusing their own men of treachery and cowardice. Blinded by terror at what they had seen, it was their Lugers that gave final judgement.
“Thousands of them!” Bill said. “There’re thousands of them dead out there!”
Smith stood against the mud wall of the trench, rifle resting across the backs of two empty ammunition boxes. Its barrel was still hot. “Five thousand,” he said. “Maybe even ten.”
The nearest dead Hun lay only a stone’s throw from their forward trench — seemingly untouched, Smith noticed, as if he had simply lain down and gone to sleep — and stretching back from this corpse was a sea of grey, a frozen-ocean tableau where the highest waves were made of piled corpses, and the troughs were where old craters held the dead in their watery embrace. There was little movement: an eddy here and there where a limb twitched, a head raised, a hand clasped at the air for help. A strange silence lay over the whole shattered landscape. The German artillery was mute and even the rain had ceased.
Smith hauled himself up the side of the trench and stood at its lip, walking forward a few paces, stepping over a rotten body from a battle of weeks before. He could not tell whether it was British or German.
“Delamare, back here, you bloody fool!” Bill hissed.
Smith took no notice. He was looking at the sea of dead, aware suddenly of what he could not see. There was mud and water and the pale faces of the dead, hair adrift in puddles and limbs askew and lost rifles smoking their last… but there was no blood.