Smith sagged into the chair, deflated. He’d become a man of straw; nothing but a suit full of fibres. He had suddenly lost the strength to continue with his quest… his quest… his quest for what? Angels? To learn about what had happened to him one day in August more than two decades ago? More importantly, to invoke those angels again, save his country from an evil enemy that was reducing it to ruin. And now what? The only man who could help him refused. Maybe it was time to simply walk away into the night.
There was a long pause, the only sound the continued thump of falling bombs.
At last Machen spoke. His voice’s tone dropped into one that was as kind as it was mellifluous. “Lieutenant Smith. A while past you said you were going to ask me about a story I wrote a long time ago?”
“Yes.” Defeat held him down like a stone weight. “What of it?”
A slow, sad smile spread across Machen’s face. “Then why don’t you ask me about it now?”
Smith took a drink and nodded. “After all these years, I still don’t know what’s happening to me when I read it,” he said. “I grow cold, distanced, as if viewing myself from beyond my own body. My memory grows vague and much of what has happened between then and now vanishes, as if I’ve lived nothing. As if half of my life is empty. And at the same time I feel observed, as if someone a long way off is thinking of me, watching me, knowing my every move. It’s as though I am reading about myself, and in the story I know that’s the case. It’s not a story, not really: it’s a spell. A spell to invoke angels, Mr Machen, and you wrote it.”
“Ha!” Machen said, standing and spitting sparks from his pipe. “You admit at least that the story is mine! Well, there’s a good start, for sure. Many before now have denied me even that courtesy. The mad ones, mostly.”
“It worked, sir. It can work again!” Smith grabbed the arms of his chair when he felt the familiar tremors coming on, starting from his feet and vibrating up through his bones and flesh, as if he were feeling a slow-motion explosion through the ground. The whisky glass he had set on the chair’s arm shook and threatened to spill.
Machen watched him from beside the fireplace, calmly but not dispassionately. The old man’s eyes were filled with passion, and a knowledge that humbled Smith.
“You wrote ‘The Bowmen’, Mr Machen, and the bliss in which you spun those words made them into much more than the sum of their parts. That is what I believe, and have always believed since returning from the front and first reading it. Even now, you knew part of the story I was telling. You knew the numbers of German dead and-”
“Of course I did, because I wrote the story!”
“Yes! There! That’s it!”
“That isn’t it at all!” Machen said. He shook his head angrily and turned to the fire, seeming to find comfort in the cheery flames even as the light of a burning London flickered at the edges of the blackout curtains, fiery fingers seeking entrance. He mumbled something and shook his head again, relighting his pipe and puffing clouds of fragrant smoke into the room.
“What did you say?” Smith asked, nervous now. He had come here to talk to this man, not anger him.
“I thought that story had stopped haunting me years ago,” Machen said. He glanced back at Smith, and he had such a curious look in his eye-part fear, part fascination-that Smith’s heart skipped a beat. “Are you real?” the old writer asked.
“I am,” Smith said, unperturbed by the question. “Sometimes I wonder, but I know I am. I know what I did in the war, I know I’ve lived since then, and even though sometimes much of my life is a blank… of course I’m real. I’m as real as you.”
“As real as me,” Machen said. “Well, what more could I ask for?”
“The story,” Smith persisted. “ ‘The Bowmen’. Did you know what you were doing when you wrote it? Did you know what would happen?”
“That was an indifferent piece of work,” Machen said. “There was neither power in the words, nor ecstasy to the writing. It was a trifling tale, nothing more. Whatever you saw, Mr Smith, you have my leave to believe. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with the story I wrote all those years ago.”
“But-”
“When was the battle? When was the retreat, the slaughter of Mons? When was it you saw these Angels?”
“August, the hot August of 1914.”
“There. My story appeared on 29 September of that same year. Not before the event, sir. After! There are those who say I stole the tale in some manner, and although that is certainly not the case, if it pleases you to believe so then please do. If that will detract you from this lunacy, then please do.”
Another bomb fell outside, closer than any had fallen before, and the fire hissed in the grate as the heat-blast tried to suck it up and out of the chimney. Smith winced in his chair, but explosions held little fear for him. He could not see them. The blasts that tore his sleep to shreds were those he had seen, the ones full of mud and body parts, the explosions that lifted ten tons of mud and flung it down on top of a man, burying him alive, perhaps for ever. These detonations from outside were second-hand.
“You must have conceived of the tale before, though,” Smith persisted.
“No.”
“I know what I saw, Mr Machen-”
“No!”
“I know what I saw and I know what I read. And I know for sure that they were one and the same. I saw unearthly visions — angels, ghosts, apparitions, whatever — that we need to save us from destruction right now, and I read of them, and you wrote what I read.”
“Please just stop,” Machen said, looking suddenly tired, so old and tired.
“Whether they were Agincourt bowmen or true mercenaries from Heaven, you wrote those words. I really don’t see any way out of that.”
“Then you, sir, are a fool. Old soldier or not — and it shames me to say it — you are still a fool.”
“But-”
“Did you suffer from a blast-shock in the war? Were you shipped from the trenches on a stretcher, raving?”
“Well…” Smith thought back to that time at Mons, how silent the battlefield had become for a brief few minutes while he walked from corpse to corpse…
… Checking their pulses, suddenly certain that he would find them all alive. They were feigning, it was part of some diabolical Hun ploy, an hallucinogenic gas, and any minute now they would leap up and complete the slaughter that they had begun.
But no, they were all dead.
“Delamare!” The captain called from the trenches. “Get back here, you bloody fool! That’s not all of them, you know. There’ll be more on their way soon!”
“I think not,” Smith said to himself, looking down into the disbelieving eyes of a dead enemy soldier. He saw himself reflected there, and he realized that the two of them looked very similar. The dead man even had a shaving cut under his jaw, just as Smith had given himself only the day before. He reached up and scratched his own cut, pleased that it could bleed.
He walked further in, and it was like wading through frozen waves at the seaside. Grasping hands dropped back down as he brushed by, legs fell to the side, heads lolled on necks, and every one of them was dead. Smith turned one body over, lifted the arms on another, looking for the wounds that had killed them. Still, he could find none. His feet squelched in the mud that would be these men’s eternal resting place.
From his own trenches Smith could hear the amazed muttering of his comrades in arms. One of them was crying, a few were praying, and many more seemed to be talking to themselves, trying to find some sort of truth in whatever words they could utter. Miracle, he heard, and Angels, and Saved us, saved us…