Disclaimer: Seriously, if they were mine, wouldn't I be getting paid for this?
I Keep Straining My Ears to Hear a Sound
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Unlike the rest of them, he never told the story. Of course, that's what it was to them. A story. Something to entertain their children and grandchildren around campfires or on stormy nights, except that by the time the operation could be talked about the children were too old, and later the grandchildren were too worldly, to be interested in such a simple story.
Unless there never were any children and grandchildren.
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It was a routine night. The Colonel - afraid his men would grow complacent - always tried to tell them it wasn't, that none of them were, but it was. How many bridges had they blown up? Fifty? A hundred? A million? Newkirk had once tried to keep count but had lost interest when the Colonel refused to offer a three day pass as a prize for whatever milestone the Englishman had chosen.
So it was routine. Well, except for him being there, he supposed. There instead of the radio room that was beginning to feel like a dungeon. Routine except for the force of the blast blowing him off his feet, causing him to strike his head against a tree.
But maybe that night wasn't important at all. Maybe it had nothing to do with the voice.
.
He can't remember how many days later it was when he heard it. But then, that was life in a prison camp for you. Days, weeks, months - they all blurred together after a while. Blow up that, save this, get this information, that weapon plan...it was endless. Or maybe it was because they were always forced to live in the moment, concentrate on this second. The past didn't exist and the future was a fantasy; life was always right now. One never-ending, constantly repeating, forever urgent yet almost always boring moment.
Perhaps it was just him. Perhaps Carter with his boundless enthusiasm, or Lebeau with his creative outlet in cooking, didn't feel it.
Then again, it could be because he was usually alone, haunting the tunnels while the others were outside, focused and engaged on whatever latest mission had come down from London.
How long had he been down here?
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The tune was in his head long before he ever 'heard' it. It wasn't a song he knew, the singer asking if they'd 'given up and all gone home to bed', and yet it seemed somehow familiar.
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It continued the next night and it was a song about tunnels.
About being trapped.
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He searched the tunnels the first time it penetrated his consciousness that actually hear singing. Not all of them; he didn't want to be too far away from the radio while the guys were out. When he found no one though, it didn't bother him. Likely it was just another prisoner, he thought, down in the tunnels for some chore or other, unknown to him his voice rebounding off the walls as he sung to pass the time.
It was only later that night, tucked into his bunk with the team home and safe, that he realized the voice had been a woman's.
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The guys didn't let him forget it when he got lost in the tunnels a couple of weeks later. He didn't know how it had happened, how it could have possibly have happened, but he hadn't recognized the layout - a layout he normally knew like the back of his hand - and the tunnels had seemed... wrong. Cold and empty. Silent.
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A flash of movement out of the corner of his eye...the curve of a woman's back. He raced to his feet and after her, but lost her before he'd gone three steps.
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"I keep straining my ears to hear a sound,
Maybe someone is digging underground,
Or have they given up and all gone home to bed,
Thinking those who once existed must be dead?"*
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"A woman, Kinch? Are you sure?" the Colonel asked.
"No, sir. That's... that's why I don't want to tell the guys. I think I might be hearing things."
Colonel Hogan looked at him for a long moment. "Do you think maybe you should see a doctor? Maybe that hit on the head last month caused some damage to your eardrum."
Kinch understood what the Colonel didn't say.
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After several days, the Colonel let Kinch back down in the tunnels again to relieve Baker. It wasn't that the Colonel didn't trust Baker, but Kinch was his second-in-command and needed to be seen as reliable. The guys were out on yet another mission - rescuing an underground agent this time - and so Kinch was back on the radio. Back on the radio with nothing to actually do.
"This way," the woman said, as she lead a group of shadows past him.
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They only saw each other once. She was alone when he followed her that time, alone and singing the same song as at ease as if she'd been one of his sisters walking down a corridor in his own house. Her golden brown hair was cut short, in a style unfamiliar to him, and she wore a matching leaf green skirt and jacket that looked almost like a uniform. When she turned and caught him looking, her mouth agape, Kinch could see that her features were pleasant rather than pretty and that she had a nameplate over her left breast. But what really caught his breath was a radio - his radio - built into a glass display case behind her.
"Which of us is the ghost?" he asked her before he knew what he was doing.
He didn't think she'd get over her shock in time to answer, but she did. "Neither," she mouthed, and then frowned, as if puzzled by her own answer.
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He'd always thought of ghosts as visitors from the past. So what did that mean? These tunnels had never existed before being dug out by them. How could she have ever been in them then?
The answer was, of course, that she hadn't.
For a long time, his mind wouldn't let him take in the truth.
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Let's assume you were going to die.
How would you know it hasn't happened already?
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It was a question that his mind cried every night:
How long have I been down here?
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* "New York Mining Disaster 1941" by Barry and Robin Gibb.
Well, so there you go - I thought I'd get back to my spooky roots. I can't tell how well this worked out because I literally wrote it just now, but if you're wondering about the style, it's because I've been reading a lot of long stories told in chapter drabbles format lately.
About the song lyrics, I usually don't include things like that, especially in the SSWW contest where we have to meet a minimum word count, so I'll just say that this story does in fact scrape by the 1000 word mark when you take away the lyrics and this note. I didn't want anyone to think I was cheating.