Lots more Erik in this chapter. Thanks so much for your reviews, guys, it's very helpful to me to know how what I write is being received and understood. Every one makes my day!
Chapter 31 – The Prodigal
There was no time to think. Erik wrenched the Vicomte's arm up and heaved him backwards like a sandbag shield between himself and the gun. Freed from the force of his hand, the Vicomte's barely staunched wound spurted anew. He howled, mingled rage and pain, loud enough to drown out the roar of battle, and his blood leaked down onto Erik's trousers in a quick, sickeningly warm drip.
Madame Egrot's gun was aimed at them. The Vicomte's howl became a low moan, then stopped. Erik felt him begin to slip down and tightened his grip until his fingers were claws, until he was half-choking on the stink of the Vicomte's sweat and the coppery heat of his blood. The abyss of a remembered nightmare yawned open beneath him; it took all his strength not to fall.
Madame Egrot did not shoot.
Erik saw her look away from the gun that was now aimed at a fallen French officer, the steel barrel shuddering in her thin arms as though she had been struck with palsy. Perhaps she thought of her son in the army. At last, mercifully, the gun disappeared. The window was dark.
Erik let go the Vicomte's shoulder, and he tumbled down onto the dusty cobbles like a puppet and lay still.
Perhaps he was dead. Erik stared at his would-be corpse and a powerful sense of déjà vu swept over him, as though in a labyrinth he had come upon a path he recognised. He recalled how Christine had surged forward towards the lake only to stop, appalled, as the rope dropped from his hand onto the Vicomte's white neck. When she turned her eyes to him, her pupils had been black as death, and the monster Erik had seen reflected there was himself.
A volley of bullets whizzed through the front garden of Egrot's house before them, hitting the wooden door. The Bavarians were across the street.
This was madness, Erik thought, even as he gathered up the Vicomte's limp body onto his back like a heavy meat carcass, dislodging the gun he carried, even as he lurched, spurred by terror, towards that same door.
He had no idea what he was doing. Every part of his brain screamed at him to run, but he plunged doggedly onward. A bullet ripped through the shrubbery and sang past his cheek, so close that he thought it would slice clear through the bandage. For a wonder, the door was unlocked. Erik never knew how he managed to keep hold of the Vicomte's body while he negotiated the stairs to the porch, or how he succeeded in closing and bolting the door behind him.
He let his burden slide to the floor – and saw the reason for the unlocked door. Madame Egrot had descended the stairs, intending to come outside. She had been reaching for the door, but now she backed away and held up the gun across her chest with both bony hands, the way she might have raised a candlestick against a thief.
"Don't shoot." Erik did not have the breath to raise his voice.
Madame Egrot looked down from him to the body of the officer on the floor. Beneath the Vicomte's hip, the worn carpet was slowly turning red. Someone shouted outside; Erik saw her eyes flick to the door.
"I locked it," he answered her unspoken question. The bloodstain under the body continued to spread. "The Vi... This officer is wounded."
Madame Egrot made no move to help. Erik stared at her, feeling nauseous and dizzy in the sudden confines of the dark house.
"He's wounded!" he bellowed, surprising even himself.
She blanched and clutched the gun harder, as if that would save her. Erik moved towards her. He was no longer aware of anything except the spreading blood behind him, creeping up on him:
"He is bleeding to death! Do you understand me? He is going to die!"
"You swine," she spoke quickly, backing away from him, "you lying, cowardly – you... My husband is too ill to be moved and there're Germans at the door and you bring my son's own gun here... How dare you touch it! How dare you!"
"He is going to die. Get the maid. Now."
"Rachel is tending to my husband!"
"Then damn you, tend to this one yourself!" Leaping forward, Erik grabbed the gun from her and tossed it to the floor where it skidded against an armchair. Madame Egrot was hysterical; Erik snatched the shawl from her shoulders and thrust it into her clutching hands:
"There, now bind his wound!"
She sank to her knees. Erik thought she had fainted, but she half-crawled towards the body and pressed the bulk of the shawl against the Vicomte's wounded hip. Twisting the rest of the fabric, she wound it over his thigh and pulled the knot tight. Then she rocked back on her heels and clenched her hands to her mouth, as if to stop herself from crying.
Erik stared at the result. The shawl made a crooked bandage that was already turning red, but not as fast as he had anticipated. Perhaps that meant the Vicomte would live. Or perhaps he was already near death, and there was no more blood to lose.
"There are bandages and lint in the kitchen," Madame Egrot said quietly, without turning around. "You can take him to the cellar. Then you can go away."
Erik hesitated. "Your husband will live."
"My husband..." Madame Egrot stood up with difficulty, her hands pulling at her unkempt hair. She looked haggard and old. "He trusted you. After you disappeared last time, he said, Andersson must have been a soldier in Algiers or Mexico, they can be strange afterwards. It isn't true, is it."
"He will live," Erik repeated.
"You liar! You leave my husband for dead but you carry this boy through the bullets – why? Why him!"
Something metal banged against the closed door, making the hinges groan. "You should hide in the cellar," Erik said forcefully, even as Madame Egrot picked up her gun again.
"What is he to you?" She motioned at the body of the Vicomte. He was as waxen as a corpse, and his wound was no longer bleeding.
"We fought together," Erik heard himself say. It was almost true.
A bullet smashed an upstairs window, sending a shower of glass down outside the door.
"The cellar, Madame Egrot. Unless you mean to die here."
"Pauline!" Erik heard Egrot's voice from upstairs. "Pauline! Are you down there? Are you hurt?"
Madame Egrot hefted her gun and rushed back up the stairs. Erik heard her calling up to Egrot that she was all right, that she was on her way.
He was left alone with his folly. There were Bavarians just outside, the rattle of German orders and German guns was now near-constant. If they caught sight of the idiot woman shooting upstairs, they would storm the house. He could still make it out alive, perhaps, via the back door into the garden.
He glanced down at the Vicomte's slack face. With revulsion, he picked up the heavy body, balancing as best he could, and wended his way through the living-room into the kitchen. The trapdoor was open. The cellar below was a black grave; the damp musty smell hit Erik's face like a fist. Gritting his teeth and cursing, he struggled down the ladder, then pulled the Vicomte down after him, trying his best not to jar the wound. He carried him through the hidden niche.
In the second cellar, the Vicomte opened his eyes.
Erik barely kept from dropping the body. The Vicomte did not scream or speak a word, even as Erik lowered him to the earthen floor and stepped back. What faint light trickled in through the opened trapdoor above the outer cellar was presumably insufficient for the Vicomte's eyes, and for a while he stared blindly in a sort of stupid shock.
"I'm dead."
"Not yet," Erik said. He saw how his voice struck the other man's face with horror.
"Phantom!"
"Vicomte."
"Where am I? Why are.. Ohhh," he made a low sound so full of pain that Erik had to step back. He wanted nothing more than to turn and run. He forced himself to search for the lamp Egrot kept hidden here somewhere under a bench.
"My leg," the Vicomte groaned. "What have you done?.."
"If I were you, I'd conserve my energies, monsieur. Your last heroic effort nearly cost you your life."
"What have you done to me? I can't see!" His face contorted in a grimace of pain. Panic crept into his voice.
"That is because you are in a cellar, my dear Vicomte. A dark, damp cellar beneath the ground." Erik's searching hand finally closed on the lamp. He laughed without humour. "Welcome to my world."
The Vicomte did not reply, and Erik turned to see that he was weeping, fighting agony.
"There is a lamp here," Erik said grudgingly. "But I must to go back up to get matches."
"I have... matches... My pocket."
Erik watched him trying to reach for the pocket of his army jacket. It was pathetic. He left him to his efforts, and went back up to the kitchen to get matches and the bandages Madame Egrot had mentioned, along with scissors, a pitcher of water and a bowl. If the Vicomte was determined to survive, he supposed he should at least be given a chance to wash out that wound before it festered.
To Erik's surprise, the lamp had been lit by the time he returned. The Vicomte was slumped next to the bench, breathing shallowly. There was a dark smear on the floor where he had dragged his leg.
"Bandages," Erik said tersely. It annoyed him that the Vicomte just nodded silently over his injury instead of babbling and weeping and fainting again. He tossed the bandages down on the bench near the lamp.
The Vicomte managed to cut away the fabric of his trouser leg around the wound, then dampened Madame Egrot's shawl and removed it. Even at the sight of the bloodied hole in his thigh, he only cursed and hissed in pain. Evidently he was determined not to lose consciousness again. Erik watched his clumsy efforts for a while, before exasperation made him pour the water into the bowl himself and pass it to the Vicomte.
In tense silence, the Vicomte washed the wound. Erik listened for the sound of fighting outside, but all was quiet. If the Bavarians had started to storm the house, he could not hear it.
"She didn't shoot you," he heard the Vicomte say. He glanced down, but the sight of the bloodied bandages did not agree with his gut; he sought something else to draw his attention. The lamp sent bizarre shapes leaping across the opposite wall.
"That ... woman," the Vicomte persisted. One would think he kept himself talking to pretend he was not in pain.
"Yes. You made an excellent shield, Vicomte. Fortunately for you, Madame Egrot chose not to shoot an officer."
The Vicomte appeared to ignore this. Erik risked a glance down; the fool was reaching for the bandage.
"I suggest you pack that first. With the lint. Yes, that."
Erik looked away again as the Vicomte struggled with lint and bandages. For some reason he was reminded of Vincent Fiaux, the young engineer, leaving the office after he was conscripted, walking with a jaunty bounce in his step and his hands thrust into his pockets.
"It comes as something of a surprise to find you in the army, Vicomte. I had thought that pretty masquerade costume was a show."
"And I had thought your mask and hair real," the Vicomte countered. "It seems both of us were mistaken – Erik."
Erik could not help it; he felt the shock of his own name being wielded by this boy, this former enemy, and he knew that the Vicomte had looked up in that moment deliberately, to see the sharp fear in his face.
"So Christine was right. You have a man's name after all. Have you also a man's honour, then?"
Erik could barely think for the blood rushing to his head. Christine had spoken to her fiancé about him? She had told him his name?
"Why did you save me?"
"You are lying," Erik cut him off. "Christine told you nothing."
"She had not meant to tell me," the Vicomte admitted. He hacked with the scissors at the end of the bandage and held his palm flat to his hip, as though to draw the pain away. His trembling body was soaked in perspiration, and for a moment Erik felt almost sorry for him. He looked close to collapse.
"Why did you save me?" Erik saw the question was real; it burned in the Vicomte's feverish eyes. Perhaps it was all that kept him awake. "I don't know why you're here, but... You could have ... left me to die."
Erik rose. "If the Bavarians come, I advise you to scream very loudly. I just might hear."
"Where are you going? Phantom!"
Ignoring him, Erik left the cellar and climbed back out into the kitchen. He considered closing the trapdoor, then felt a flush of anger at the thought. It was beneath him. The Vicomte may think he did not have a man's honour, but he would not leave him to die in the darkness.
He took the stairs two at a time, and was in the attic before he could determine what exactly he was intending to do there. It was full daylight now, and sunlight streamed into the room through the little window, revealing clouds of dust and gunpowder. The sounds of battle were no longer coming from directly below, but carried from either end of the street.
Egrot was lying on a straw mattress on the floor near the window, with a bandage around his head. His wife was beside him; her gun left forgotten near the window. The maid was nowhere in sight.
"Andersson..." Egrot called, spotting him when he emerged from the stairs into the daylight. "Pauline told me you had returned."
Erik elected not to hear the implied invitation to explain himself.
"She also said that – you brought back a former army mate?"
One look at Madame Egrot was sufficient to assure Erik that unlike her husband, she did not believe a word of it. She knew he was no soldier. Her mouth was tight with anger.
"I left him downstairs in your new cellar, Egrot. Where you had best join him."
Egrot studied him for a while from beneath his bandage. How odd, Erik thought, that he should cause another man to wear a mask like his own. There was a disquieting wrongness about it, about the sight of Egrot lying prone with his head bandaged and the split skin that must be hidden underneath. Fresh from confronting the Vicomte's wound, Erik did not wish to think about yet more blood.
He had never come back to see what it looked like, before. There had always been somebody else to clean things up. He did not like this at all.
"Well, don't just stand there," Egrot said genially, yet with no more genuine friendliness in his voice than he would have afforded a casual acquaintance. "It is good that you returned; my wife can use the help."
Erik nodded, accepting the truce. He went to the window. Despite the daylight, the smoke hanging over the town made it difficult to see much further than the Place d'Eglise. What he could see of the square was overrun with the tiny shapes of Bavarians.
"How far have they got?" Egrot asked from his mattress.
"At least as far as the square." Then, driven by what he could only think of as compassion, he turned to Madame Egrot:
"Help me carry him downstairs, madame."
"Do not take me for a log!" Egrot exploded. "There will be no talk of carrying me anywhere. Take that gun, Andersson, or prop me up and let me at them!"
"There is nobody down there," Erik began, but just then a dozen Marines gave the lie to his words. They ran out onto the street, rifles at the ready. One stumbled over a corpse; there were other bodies strewn across the cobbles where the Vicomte had fallen earlier. Almost immediately, one of the Marines fell. More shots echoed, and Erik realised a new wave of Bavarians was rolling this way. Unlike the Marines, they looked neither dusty nor exhausted; their helmets gleamed in the light. These had to be reinforcements.
"You load it like this." Madame Egrot had come up silently behind him and now stood holding up her own gun and a new cartridge.
Erik watched her demonstrate this. He knew Egrot was watching too, and that this was certain to convince him that no former soldier such as he supposed Erik to be would have needed this instruction. Perhaps that was why Madame Egrot did it. Yet Erik thanked her with deliberate politeness. Let them think what they would. He had not needed to come back. He could have been approaching Belgium and safety by now.
He loaded, and took aim.
The first two shots went wide, and the third succeeded only in alerting the first of the ranked Bavarians to the location of his gun. The next one, however, hit one of their officers in the neck, cutting short an order.
Madame Egrot made a small sound of triumph. Erik thought he had dropped the gun, but he hadn't; he was reloading even as he thought he should go away now, that he did not need to be here. The stricken officer was gurgling in the street below. Erik did not look. He reloaded and fired. Another went down.
It was so simple. The gun was old and inaccurate but he could compensate; it took only a few shots to work out that he had to aim slightly to the left of his target, and he quickly learned to brace his shoulder for the rebound shock. It was ridiculously easy to squeeze the trigger and fell the explosion rip through the steel and launch lead through the air, through flesh. It was all so much easier than the rope, so much faster and cleaner and he didn't have to look...
But he looked anyway. He watched the men go down, a spectator outside his own body counting the uniforms on the corpses filling the street. Egrot was saying something behind him, but he could not hear him for the cracking of gunpowder. A Bavarian screamed and a shot ricocheted off the windowframe, shooting splinters past Erik's face. More kept coming, scattering through the street, getting closer. Erik fired.
He did not want to stop. He felt he was standing at the top of a great tower, with all the mobs of the world below him, and from here he could keep them all back. Some tried to fire into the attic, but it meant they had to squint into the bright white sky to aim, and Erik had the advantage of height. He picked them off. It was easy.