The Language of the Dead (19 page)

Vera crossed her arms. She wanted to leave. She glanced up the hill and saw something that startled her. “Oh!”

“What is it?” Arthur stood.

She pointed up the hill. “It's him,” she said. “The boy.” Peter stood along the crest of a rise, watching them. His shoulder-length hair moved in the twilight breeze. Otherwise, he was still.

Arthur stood. “Go away—shoo!” he yelled at Peter, thrusting the back of his hand in Peter's direction. “You're not wanted here.”

Peter didn't move.

“I said to go away,” Arthur said angrily. “Go back to where you came from.”

“What's his name?” Vera asked.

“You don't want me to come up there,” Arthur said, glaring at Peter. He made a feint in Peter's direction; Peter flinched.

“What's his name?” Vera repeated.

Arthur whirled to face her. “What bloody difference does it make!”

“Don't yell at me,” Vera said angrily. “I'm not a child.” She looked past Arthur to where Peter had been standing. But Peter was gone. He
seemed to have left something where he stood—a piece of paper. Vera thought it might be a note. She began to walk up the hill, intending to fetch it.

“Where are you going?” Arthur asked. “I told you he's dangerous.”

She ignored him.

“Vera.” Arthur's voice suddenly had lost its heated edge and again taken on the vague character of pleading. “I'm sorry I yelled at you. His name is Peter.”

He followed her up the hill. By the time he reached her, she had picked up the paper that Peter had left. On it was a penciled sketch of a spider devouring a butterfly. The drawing possessed an amazing quality; Vera found it frightening and beautiful all at once.

“Does he draw these?” she asked Arthur.

“I'm sorry I yelled at you, but you don't understand how dangerous he is,” Arthur said. He tapped the picture. “Look at this. It's bloody bizarre. I told you, he's unpredictable.”

“We should go. I have to get up early for work tomorrow.” She began to walk down the hill with Peter's picture.

“But you're not going to take that bloody thing with you?”

“Yes.” She kept walking. The twilight was waning.

“But it's morbid,” Arthur said. He tried to hide any hint of anger or exasperation in his voice. But the loony boy seemed to have touched something within Vera and this made him jealous. He suddenly wondered if she'd paid
him
attention merely because she pitied him his lost arm.

He caught up with her and took her elbow. “You should leave that here,” he said. “Something like that is not fit for a girl like you to have.”

She moved her elbow free of his hand. “I'll decide that, Arthur.”

“Suit yourself, then,” he said, finding it harder to rein in his growing resentment at Vera's interest in Peter. “I can't stop you if you want that sort of bloody stuff.”

Vera didn't answer. She reached the path, crossed the bridge, and started down the trail, with Arthur at her heels. When they reached
her billet, Vera put herself between the door and Arthur. She tried to be pleasant. She smiled. She still feared Arthur's reaction to her rejection, but standing up to him on the hill had lessened that fear.

“Good night, Arthur,” she said firmly. “Thank you for the walk.”

“Can I come in?” Arthur asked.

“Not tonight. I'm very tired.”

“You're angry at me; angry because of what I said about the …” He caught himself, so as not to do any further damage. “… about Peter.”

“I'm sorry, but I don't like being yelled at, Arthur.” She paused, then added “All the same, I'm very tired.” She turned to open the door.

“Vera,” he said. She turned to face him and he moved to kiss her. He kissed her deeply, almost pinning her to the door. She allowed him to, but did not respond in kind. When he finished, he withdrew, his chest heaving slightly. “I've made a terrible mistake,” he said. “I've upset you.” He made a move to take her into his arm, but she fended him off with her forearm.

“Please, Arthur,” she said firmly. “We'll talk about it tomorrow.”

“But I've upset you,” he said desperately. “Tell me I haven't upset you.”

“You haven't upset me,” she lied. “I'm fine.”

She opened the door, stepped inside, closed the door and bolted it. She leaned against the door for a second clutching Peter's drawing, her heart pounding.

SOUTHAMPTON HARBOR LAY FAR BELOW, IN UTTER DARKNESS.

Hermann Seitz, the twenty-five-year-old pilot of Luftwaffe Heinkel HE-111 207, a medium-range bomber based in Cherbourg, knew from the readings on his instruments that he was over the harbor. But he had no clear idea of where his target lay. His quarry was the Supermarine factory, the place where the British made the fighter planes, the Spitfires, that had shot down so many of his comrades, men like him—men in slow-moving Heinkels who were supposed to be able to find a target in utter blackness, with nothing useful to guide them and without the fighter escort that might fend off the British in their Spitfires, give them a chance to at least drop their bombs in the right vicinity and still have half a prayer of returning to France, to live. At night, the Messerschmitts didn't even go aloft; fat Goering had said it was useless for the fighters to go along, given that no one
could see anything. That's why they had instruments. The best available, Goering said.
Ha!
Seitz would like to see that fat bastard find his fucking toes beneath his gut, much less the Spitfire factory in the dark from eighteen thousand feet!

On the journey across the Channel, the British had shot down three of the planes in his squadron—shot them into the sea. Now, they'd been flying through ack-ack for nearly five minutes. An eternity. That's the way it was every night. They were torn to bits and never succeeded in knocking out a damned thing. They'd tried to knock out the Blenheim bomber factory southeast of Winchester three times now and hadn't even come close. During those raids, he'd dropped his payloads regardless; he'd had no idea, really, where his bombs had fallen or whether they'd done any damage. He knew only that he must never return to Cherbourg without an empty bomb bay. Now Goering had set his sights on the Spitfire factory. And now they were over Southampton and, as usual, none of them knew where the hell they were.

Seitz felt something strike the Heinkel that made it shake and rock. They'd been hit. For an instant the plane began to heel to the south. He gripped the wheel and brought the plane under control, though he had to put all of his strength into the effort. Next to him, the navigator, Henning, yelled, “We've been fucking hit. Lucius is dead.” Lucius was the man—a boy, really—who manned the machine gun in the turret on the plane's roof.

Seitz looked at Henning.

“Time to go!” Seitz yelled, and Henning nodded. They were running now, fleeing, giving up on the Spitfire factory, though neither of them considered this wrong. After all, they were nothing but sitting ducks on a suicide mission. Seitz turned the plane to true north and began to climb, away from Southampton. As the plane rose steadily, relief filled Seitz. They were not mortally wounded. Not yet.

He turned east. To their right a plane exploded in midair, close enough that the shock waves engendered by its vaporization shook the Heinkel like a rabbit in a fox's mouth. “Holy Christ!” Henning yelled.

Despite the enveloping calamity, Seitz hoped that luck was with them. They sped east for little more than a minute; then he heeled the plane south, toward the Channel. Below them lay pasture and woodland and the occasional village.

They had just crossed the coast and were over the Solent when the Heinkel suddenly shook and rattled again, as if God had thrown down a handful of rocks upon it. Seitz looked at his port wing and saw that it was aflame.

Dear God,
he thought.

He must get away, be as fast as possible. Nothing must weigh him down. He remembered that he still was carrying his payload. Why hadn't he released it over Southampton? But too much had happened at once. Too goddamned much!

The bombardier sat just below and in front of him in the glass-and-steel cockpit. “Let them go,” Seitz shouted. They were back over the Channel now and the bombs began dropping into the sea.

The Heinkel shook violently and began to roll toward the east. The fire on the port wing continued to burn. Seitz said a Hail Mary. Then the plane nosed down suddenly and Seitz saw the black water rushing at him.

Emily Fordham pedaled along the darkened road toward Lipscombe. The night was clear and she could see well ahead. Behind her, to the southwest, the sky was lit from the fires that had begun to burn in Southampton harbor.

Her mother would be frantic by now; Emily would find her lying on the parlor floor, curled like a fetus from worry. But she was finished playing at her mother's sick game. The bloody woman could lie on the floor all night as far as she was concerned. In the past few days Emily had reached a kind of epiphany: she'd realized that her mother could not control her if she refused to allow it.

That day, she'd gone to Cloverton and met Charles in the little pub in the village near the airfield. Their meeting had been too brief.
Still, it had been better than having not seen Charles at all. She felt thankful to God that Charles had lived through the attack on the airfield. Now it was only a matter of him—of the three of them—getting through the rest of the war. She had exhibited what she considered to have been exceptional patience and bravery in recent days; she had waited by the checkpoint near the airfield well past dark before she'd gotten word from one of the ambulance drivers that Charles was unhurt—though as soon as she saw Charles at the pub she'd dissolved into tears. They'd spent a few minutes sitting on a bench outside the pub holding each other. Still, she had not told him about the baby. She could not forgive herself if he was killed because she'd distracted him by worries about their child.

As she maneuvered her bike around the big bend by the marsh, she saw a figure standing just off the road, about a hundred meters distant. The person appeared to be wearing a hat, though she could not, from that distance, tell whether the person was a man or a woman.

As she moved closer, the figure waved to her.