Chapter Two - 7

VI. 1916, The Trenches, The French-German Front

 

7

 

I woke up in my room. It was an unpleasant awakening. My whole body was drenched in sweat. I had an acute headache, and the room was pitch black. The ticking of the clock on the side table had a rattling edge to it. Maybe the clock was broken. I sat up. I always fall asleep praying that the whole world will have changed by the time I wake up, but it never does. I've had plenty of unpleasant awakenings. I'll probably have nothing but unpleasant awakenings until the war is over. But there is one other possibility. That's if I die. If I die, I'll wake up in an era without war.

I downed the glass of water next to the clock in a single gulp. There is no era without war. So the question is, where will I be reborn?

Marie was asleep next to me in the bed. She lay on her back. I stroked her chestnut hair. It was like delicate spun glass, so soft it looked like it would break at the slightest touch. Marie seemed to have noticed me, and she woke up, muttering something.

“...Oh. You're awake, Raine.”

“You're the one who just woke up, Marie.”

That made her giggle.

“You were sleeping like the dead. I thought you really had died.”

“Nope. Still alive.”

“Yeah. Still alive.”

Last night, I buried the dagger that had been stored in the attic. It had the number III on it. I buried it as deep as I possibly could and hardened the soil over it so it could never return. Maybe we'd get lucky and an exploding mortar would destroy it. I had considered shooting or exploding the dagger myself, but there were penalties for wasting ammo and since I wasn't an artilleryman I couldn't just go out and grab a bomb. So I had no choice but to bury it. Maybe someone will dig it up soon. It's inevitable that the dagger will return eventually. But we needed to be freed from the dagger, if only temporarily.

“You were so agitated last night.”

“I was the same as usual.”

“You had a bad dream.”

“...They were all headless,” I said, looking down. “And their bodies disappeared. That wasn't a dream. That really happened. When I looked in from inside the trench, there were four corpses in the bunker. But when I went up topside and looked down, they were gone. When I went back, they were still gone. It all happened in just a few minutes.”

“Didn't someone just take them away?”

“Not possible. No one passed the bunker. Moving four corpses is at least an eight man job. There's no way anyone would just miss eight people carrying bodies. No, even if they somehow pulled it off with just four, there's no way they wouldn't have been seen.”

“Why were the heads missing?”

“I don't know. I figured they were probably just blown off by a shell.”

I remembered the battlefield and felt sick. I was up to my waist in stagnant water, shivering with cold and clutching a gun. I jumped over a corpse to try and make another corpse. The awful memories were dyed with murderous cruelty, and they tormented me every time I recalled them.

“Let's not talk about corpses,” said Marie, leaning closer. “You always look like you're in pain.”

“I see.” I laughed. “How is everyone on the first floor? Were they toasting to the end of the world as usual?”

“Yes, but the number of people at the party decreases every day. I wonder if by the end that pastor will be all alone. He'll have to preach to the houseplants.”

“He's a respectable man. By the way, what time is it?”

“It's 2:00 at night.”

 “Jean isn't here.” I looked at the bed next to me, which was empty. “I wonder if he's still downstairs.”

“Jean is dead.”

“Dead?”

“You collapsed from your fever and missed it all. Jean was killed by a stray bullet from a machine gun. I don't know if it was the enemy or friendly fire. Either way, he isn't here anymore.”

“...He said he wanted to be reborn as a Mediterranean diva. I wonder if he got his wish.”

“He did. I'm sure of it.”

“Then let's go give that diva a bouquet of flowers.”

“Yes, and some to Hale as well. He carried you back on his shoulders. If it hadn't been for him, you would have been buried with all the other bodies.”

“He saved me again. That's the second time, now.”

“You're not going to die.”

I nodded. We silently held each others' hand. Marie's hand was small and cold. Her hand was always cold when I took it in the middle of the night.

 “Marie, I can't really remember who I was before, where I lived, what I've done anymore. But I haven't forgotten anything important. The incident that happened at Lapis Lazuli Castle, the fact that I was Raine, and the fact that you were Marie. But I'm not sure if I've really been reborn, if I'm alive in 1916.”

“This isn't like you. Whatever happened to the snob I usually have to deal with? We've been reborn and we're here. That much is certain. Because I love you. I don't fall in love easily. Or would you rather I went off and fell for someone else?”

“I don't know.”

“If I ever lose my memories of being reincarnated and fall in love with someone else, will you come take me away?”

“I'm sure you wouldn't want me to.”

“What if in my next life I come back as a squirrel?”

“You won't become a squirrel. We only ever become humans.”

“Why is that?”

“I guess it's the work of the dagger.”

“Who made those daggers in the first place?”

“Wasn't it Geoffroy?”

“No, it wasn't.”

“It's like those daggers have always existed since the beginning of time.”

“'In the beginning, God created the world. Then there were the daggers.'” Marie laughed, amused at herself. “No wonder we can't destroy them easily. We can't just destroy the world.”

“I don't know about that. We need to, somehow.”

“But if we do that, then we won't be able to see each other again. You know, sometimes I think 'maybe this isn't so bad'. All we have to do is endure a bit of pain occasionally, and we can live forever, and be together forever. Or do you not want to spend eternity with me?”

“I get bored easily. I can't imagine eternity.”

“I can. Eternity is just one point. Staying at a single point is what we call eternity. We perceive time by jumping from point to point. But eternity is a single, lonely point, connected to nothing. There's no flow. Everything is still, everything is unchanging.”

“In that case, even if we could go to a world of eternity, we'd just become lifeless dolls. We wouldn't talk, we wouldn't breath, we wouldn't touch each other. It would be boring.”

“No, it would be wonderful. We'd be together forever.”

“How is that any different from death?”

“The differences don't matter. Not for lovers.”

“Only if they can be together. If you were trapped in eternity alone, that would be unbearable.”

“If you were alone, you could wait.”

“And you'd just keep waiting forever? Is that not so bad?”

Marie laughed under her breath.

“There's a story. When a soul is born, it splits in two, and the two halves are born into the world as two people, one male, one female. They were originally one soul, so they spend their whole lives looking for each other. Maybe they pass each other in a cafe. Maybe they become lovers. Maybe they die without ever reuniting.”

Marie put her face on my chest.

“Maybe we were like that.”

“I don't know.”

“You're so mean.”

Marie smiled.

“I saw a German soldier,” I said.

“Did he have a gun?”

“Yes. He had a Mauser. No matter how you look at it, he was a German infantryman. But he wasn't just a German soldier. He was someone of great significance to us.”

“Who was he?”

“Someone like us. Someone who is constantly reborn.”

“But, that means... That's impossible...”

“I'm certain.”

“I wonder what they want.”

Marie sat up, her face grim.

“I don't know. But there's something I'm curious about. It's the headless corpse I saw in the trench.”

“Are you talking about corpses again?”

“Yes, but this is a bit different from before. Right before my eyes, an enemy soldier suddenly turned into a headless corpse. Without question, he was alive right up until the moment I saw him. But when he emerged from around the bend, his head was missing. He had turned into a corpse. Not only that, but an allied soldier, Christophe, also suddenly turned into a headless corpse.”

“Did they just suddenly lose their heads?”

“Yes. I've been thinking about the mystery of the headless bodies for a while now. But maybe this isn't all that difficult to solve. Whether it was the German soldier or Christophe, they just had their heads blown off by a grenade. They probably had powerful explosives shoved in their mouths. The French army has developed a type of terrible bomb that uses flechettes, and the German army has a grenade that looks like a hammer called a Stielhandgranate. Someone snuck up behind them and put grenades in their mouths. They were both killed by the same person.”

“But... if a bomb explodes, it makes a huge noise, right? Wouldn't you have heard it?”

“We probably did. But the sound of artillery explosions were echoing all around us. The massive explosions of the shells drowned out the sound of a grenade. Perhaps the culprit deliberately timed their grenades to match the falling shells. Looking back, a shell did go off quite close by immediately before the German soldier died. Jean, who witnessed Christophe's death, also mentioned shells.”

“Even if someone snuck up on them and put a bomb in their mouths, wouldn't they just spit it out?”

“They probably held it in until just before the explosion. For example, I've heard that the Stielhandgranate explodes about four seconds after a cord inside the handle is pulled. The murderer moved in time with the sound of the shells, pulled the cord, then ran away at the last possible moment to avoid being caught in the blast.”

“Could they really have escaped that quickly?”

“There was only one place they could escape to: the feet of the people they'd just killed. The trench was flooded. The culprit dove into the water under their feet to avoid being directly exposed to the shrapnel from the explosions. Both Jean and I were at the scenes of blasts. The reason we didn't see him was because he was in the water. He must have swam away through the muddy water.”

“If their heads were blown up, there would have been marks left everywhere. It would have been a bloody mess.”

“Yeah. Most of the pieces of meat probably sank into the water. But if we examine the walls of the trench, we might find some traces.”

“That's disgusting,” Marie said with a slight shiver. “So, what's the truth behind the cases of headlessness?”

“Christophe's murder was a dry run, a practice session for the culprit to figure out things like the timing of the explosion and their escape method. The murder of the German soldier, on the other hand, was done simply because the killer needed a corpse. A corpse to replace their own. He blew off the head with a bomb to disguise the victim's identity. He swapped I.D. tags and notebooks with the corpse. He plans to make the army believe that he's dead because his things were found on an otherwise unidentifiable corpse. It's a better option than being hunted down by his own countrymen as a deserter.”

“That doesn't make sense. The murderer went out of their way to show you their headless corpse. There was no need to go to the trouble of making the headless corpse in front of you, and there were plenty of other ways to escape the army.”

“Indeed. You could say he was targeting us. If he wasn't intending to threaten me, he could have just blown the head off of a corpse lying on the ground. But whatever his method, it's a fact that he's escaped the army. He's free now. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“He's going to kill us.”

The man in the German uniform who had appeared before me was Geoffroy.

Another man who continued to be reborn.

 

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