Chapter 2: Bernie at the Scarpe

When the sun had slipped beneath the ocean and the police more-or-less declared martial law on Abraboca Beach, I sat with Lawson at the bar, drowning the memories with liquor and talk. Mostly liquor.

    “But the body…Christ, John, they say it was cooked. Like a steak or somethin’.”

     “Try a log.” I took a swig of rum. The liquid shot down my throat like a bullet of fire and exploded in my stomach. “It... she was black and burnt and almost gone. Horrible. That wasn’t the worst part, though.” The screams were the worst part, Amy weeping into my shirt was the worst part, the hollow void in my heart where pain should have been was the worst part. “The worst part was the smell. Like onions mixed with skunk and sickness, mate.”

     “God,” Lawson swore. He took a sip for himself. “Darcy looked like a ghost when you brought her back. Hardly said a word.”

     We sat there in silence for what felt like forever. Not like we had to say anything; every mouth in the bar was having the same conversation, like a dozen radios tuned to the same station in a slightly different language. The Burnt Girl of Abraboca would be on the cover of every newspaper from here to California by this time tomorrow.

     Don’t think about that, John. Think about Bernie Lutz. Beads of sweat dripped down my brow and onto the wooden table. Those dead eyes, that blackened skin, that slack-jawed look of terror frozen forever and ever and ever "

      “They’re never gonna find him,” I blurted out. Maybe it was the alcohol talking. Maybe it was me. Maybe they were the same thing at that point. “They’ll turn the whole country upside down and scrape out the crust underneath, but they’ll never, ever find him.”

     “Find who?”

     “You know who.” The rum was making me brave. “That sick, dirty -”

     “Oh, him, you mean. You seem pretty sure of that, mate.” Lawson had started lifting British vernacular from me. “Bollocks” was his favorite so far, much to his wife’s dismay. “Were you a detective back in England? Or a cop? Probably not. Can’t make a good living as a cop, can you? I’ve seen your house. Let me guess. You were a -”

     “Soldier,” I said. Okay, that was definitely the rum talking. “I soldiered for a living.”

    “Never heard it put that way, but okay. Good to meet you, Soldier John. Marry my cousin-in-law so I can get drunk and call it family bonding. Make Christmas fun again, am I right?”

     “They’ll never check the neck.”

     “Beg your pardon?”

    “The neck.” I stood up on wobbly legs, kicking the chair back as I went. “It’s all about the neck. I’ll show you. My apartment. Neck, neck, neck. They’ll never…”

      “I think you might be a little bit drunk, mate.”

   “Stop stealing our words. And help me back to my flat. Apartment. Place of, I dunno, residing. We can drink more. And I have pictures. The girl. Naomi. It’s all about the neck, don’t you see that?”

     “Can we please talk about something else? Anything else? Christ, John. I’ll talk about my feelings or my sex life. Anything but child murder and neck wounds, I just -”

     “Neck,” I blurted out stupidly, pointing towards the door. More than a few eyes had drawn my way. At this rate, I would be Suspect Number One by this time tomorrow. But I didn’t care. Bernie Lutz had invaded my mind and refused to vacate the premises. “Now. We go.”

     It was the charge of the drunk and drunker brigade. Lawson propped me up against his wiry frame and helped me back to my apartment. I immediately collapsed on the sofa, but insisted that Lawson remain.

     My apartment was a mess of unpacked boxes and awkwardly tilted furniture, which wasn’t helped at all by my clear adherence to the ancient bachelor philosophy that every table is also a trashcan in disguise. Lawson had to unpack four different boxes before he had the leather-bound scrapbook in his hand. I was virtually sober by then, having nursed myself back to relative health with a loaf of bread and enough water to send my bladder into a state of riot.

     Flipping through the book while Lawson helped himself to my scotch, I could feel my heart thumping in protest. Bernie Lutz is dead, I remember thinking. And the girl they call Naomi Fisher is even deader. They are gone and nothing can bring him back. Let it go, Swansea. Let the past burn. Everything seems to be burning these days.

  Bernie Lutz was near the back, sandwiched between a photograph of me at graduation and three tickets to a London opera house. In the photo, he was still a boy, glancing off to the distance with a twinkle in his eye and a smile full of awkward, crooked teeth. His face was practically a baby’s, but it couldn’t have been two or three years before the war. If memory served, Bernie had carried that face full of baby fat with him to the grave.

    “This,” I said, tapping my finger against the photograph. Lawson craned in for a look. “Bernie Augustus Lutz. Born in Wales. Moved to London in 1910 and joined the RFC in 1913. Never made it back.”

      “Back from what?”

     “When Lutz " when Bernie, I mean…when he died, I was there. I watched it happen. I watched him…burn. I watched it…”

     “You’re not making any sense, Swansea. Maybe you should lie down, just to be "”

     “I’m fine, Leonard.” I tapped on the photograph again, as if prodding him could annoy Lutz back to the land of the living. “This, though, this is not fine.”

     “You’re not making any sense,” he said again, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe go bed, and when you’ve sobered up, we can talk about beach corpses and dead comrades all you want. How’s that sound?”

     “No,” I said stubbornly. If I sobered up, my courage might fly away. Best let it out while the moment was hot. For Bernie’s sake, at least. I poured a glass of scotch for myself and one for Lawson. “Sit down, Leonard. It’s story time.”

     We were three years deep in the war, I told him. As we headed into the final push, it was becoming obvious that the RFC had seen better days. Our numbers dropped like flies and the crown insisted on building us back up like haystacks. The new blood was brittle, untested, some of them without so much as their first zit let alone their first kill. And God, they had to pile it up, didn’t they? Trenchard took the same approach to the aircraft as he did to the men that piloted them; I swear to God, some of the new planes had staples holding the wings on. Add it all these things up and you get the obvious outcome: dead pilots piled up on top of other dead pilots.

     But April was the worst.

    We were stationed in Arras right along the Scarpe River. All my life I’d dreamed of French girls, and here I was on a goddamn river with nothing but c***s and beards as far as the eye could see. There were twelve of us in my squadron, Bernard Lutz included. He was one of the green boys, one of the kids recruited off the back streets of London with promises of war and glory and, oh, did we mention you get to fly a plane? Every time I looked at him, all I saw was a sack of skin just waiting to burn, a pile of bones just waiting to be shattered, a scrawny mum waiting to weep for her baby. Most of the greenies last a day or two, maybe even a week if they were clever enough.

     Bernie Lutz was clever enough. I hated him for it, if you want the truth. He was young and stupid and I hated that crooked grin of his. Like he was some bony boy playing at war between the shops with sticks for swords and fingers for guns. Yet there he was: alive and undamaged. Even through the horrors of that terrible April in France, Bernie Lutz somehow managed to maintain a state of “not dead.” The Luftstreitkräfte were b******s, the lot of them, and for every German we sent to hell he dragged four along with him. But for some reason, Trenchard insisted that the Royal Flying Corps keep on pushing and God insisted that Bernie Lutz keep on living.

     I don’t remember much of that April, least of all the fighting. I remember the stars over France. I remember empty spaces where friends used to be. I remember Lutz’s boyish grin. I remember very, very little.

     But I remember the last night in April. We’d waded through a sea of unmarked graves and burning metal and skies screaming with fire and rain, and here we were: alive, despite the crown’s best intentions. For the first time since the Austrian prince felt his blood go cold, I allowed myself to close my eyes and think of home, of that strange and tangled place called After. That feeling died with Bernie.

     I was dreaming of England when my bladder woke me. You could fault the French for their courage, but never for their beer. Half-mad, I stumbled out of my sheets, past the makeshift bunks and through the flap of the tent into the dark, starless night. I was still half-asleep and swaying in the dim shadow of the tent with my bladder ready to retch when the screaming started. You wouldn’t be blamed for mistaking it for a wolf - it was an animal, all right, but one of Darwin’s, not God’s.

     “Oh, not you, too,” said Lawson, shaking his head. He crossed his arms, staring me down like he’d caught me with my hand in a cookie jar. “Don’t tell me you believe that crackpot evolution s**t. If one more scholar-boy in a tweed jacket and bowtie flexes his smile at me and starts going on about how we all used to be monkeys, my head will -”

     “It was a joke, Leonard,” I said.

     “It wasn’t very funny.”

     I shrugged. “Black humor?”

     “Well, do you?”

     “Do I what?”

    “Believe in God, Mister Swansea. Do you believe in the God who died for you or the half-mad scientist who only bled ink?”

     “Can I still marry your cousin if I side with the madman?” I laughed a bitter laugh. “My fool’s dream of gods and their heavens died along the banks of the Scarpe.”

     “You can marry my sister-in-law all you like. If anything, it’ll stop her constant whining about bridesmaid duty. And is that what you think of me? A fool? A fool with dreams of forgiveness and kindness and meaning? More heaven for me, I say. Twenty bucks says I get in and you don’t.”

      “Do you want me to finish the story or not?”

     “Only if it ends with a wedding,” he said. “I apologize. I have an angel whispering in ear sometimes. Makes me say righteous stuff.”

     And I a devil screaming in mine, making me spill my soul.

    I found Bernie at the edge of the Scarpe, twisting and writhing on the ground like a man gone mad and half-hidden in a large tangle of weeds. Some animal was upon him, hunched over his throat with teeth glistening in the moonlight. Bernie screamed and screamed and screamed some more and by the time I was close enough to make out what was happening, the screaming stopped abruptly and only a soft weeping remained. Bernie’s pale white hand clutched at the grass, shivering.

     The creature stopped, and tilted its head towards me. No, my brain said, no that’s not an animal. That’s a man gone mad. He grinned at me, baring shark-like teeth that glistened with blood. His (No, its! It can’t be a man! No man could do that, no man has teeth like that, no man-) very flesh was pulsing, not from the dim light of the moon, but from within. Faint red veins cackled with sunlight as he breathed. (No, as he chewed. He’s chewing on Bernie. Even now I can hear the slurp of flesh and the crunch of bone.) His eyes were white as snow and just as dead as they glared at me, mocking me.

     It dipped its head back into Bernie. It went for the neck, and Bernie gave up one last cry as the teeth sunk into his flesh. The coward who had the gall to call himself a soldier just stood there, eyes wide and heart screaming as he watched Bernie’s skin crackle, watched the flames creep across his flesh, watched the blaze turn him black. The creature stood over him, grinning at me above the flames even as he slipped down into the Scarpe and let the darkness swallow him.

     Months later, as I stood in the dingy flat at the edge of London, I bowed my head and said sorry so many times the word lost all its meaning. Mrs. Lutz had gotten the letter by then, so my visit was just another stone on her back. I told her how it happened, how the bullet had hit him in the back of the head, how he never even felt a thing, how we lost his body to the river. That last part was true, at least. In the end, all I’d wanted was a picture; any old picture would do, I told her. And now I keep him in my album, tucked beneath a mountain of papers and old books in the closest thing Bernie would ever have to a burial.

     “You’re not a fool,” I told Leonard Lawson, who was fool enough to name me a friend. “But there is no heaven.” The drink had slurred my words, but I still meant every one. “Only a cold, endless oblivion waiting to swallow us all. The universe is mad and impossible and it doesn’t care whether we live or die or breathe or choke or wake or sleep. It doesn’t care because it can’t. It’s nothing, Lawson. Just a big, black sea of nothing with a score of silence to sing us to sleep.”

     For a while we sat in silence marked only by the ticking of the dusty old grandfather clock in the corner. I ran a hand through my tangle of hair, trying to push Bernie Lutz away, trying to push away the screams, trying not to see the flesh burn and the terrible shark-toothed grin.

     “‘A big, black sea of nothing with a score of silence to sing us to sleep.’ So it’s a book of poetry you’re writing.” Lawson snorted. “I’ve always wondered why you wore that stupid fedora.”

       “You don’t believe me, do you?”

     “Of course I do.” He nudged me. “A man as drunk as you couldn’t lie with a gun to his head. I’ve hear stories, too, Swansea. The world is dark and mad and full of secrets. I won’t turn you into the authorities, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

     I wasn’t, but after my show at the tavern, there was no doubt in my mind that a few wary eyes were turning their attention to the strange, reclusive foreigner who’d shown up not two weeks before a dead body washed up on the beach. Welcome to Abraboca, John Swansea.

     “You want to know the truth of it, Lawson?” I said after another silence. For a moment, I was sure that he had fallen asleep, but a drunken grunt and a slight nod of the head told me that he hadn’t. “I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in heaven. I don’t believe in angels or Christs or streets of gold or rivers of eternal life. I don’t believe in any of that.” I blinked, and for a moment I saw Bernie Lutz’s bright blue eyes turning to ash. “But you know what? After that night in France, there’s nothing in the world you can do to convince me there’s no such thing as the Devil.”