by Charley Swire
The war came for my brother the way it came for all men: a manila envelope that flopped through his letterbox and landed on the doormat.
It was a warm autumn. We lay suffocating in his hot-boxed living room. Sweat rolled down my back and pooled in the dimples at the bottom of my spine. The topography of my body puzzle pieced itself against the springs and stuffing of the sofa.
The sound of the letter flap cut through the fog of tar and nicotine. The envelope hit the mat with a heavy, wet sound, as though someone had packed it full of ground beef. There was no meat in there, just a single sheet of card. It was cream with a black border and for a moment I mistook it for an invitation, which I suppose it was. It said his name, a serial number, and a date two weeks in the future. At the bottom was a red stamp from His Majesty’s War Office, the ink still wet. It smudged as I brushed my thumb against it.
The war office had been closed in 1964, and the draft had been abolished the year before that. Repeating these facts aloud did little to change the circumstances at hand.
“Are we at war?” he asked, as though somehow I might know something he didn’t.
We went to the war office the next day. The bus was crematorium-hot, a casket crawling forward with certainty. My brother wore one of dad’s old suits. The shoulder seams of the blazer fell midway to his elbow and his white shirt billowed outwards no matter how tightly it was tucked. Even as he drowned in the fabric, I could tell it fit him better than a tailored uniform ever would. That morning, I had hangman knotted his tie and neither of us cried.
The war office sat on a corner 1020 feet down from The Cenotaph and 570 feet from Great Scotland Yard. In all the photos we had seen of it, the brickwork seemed white but up close they were a dull grey, like bones after burning. Each wall was lined with dozens of windows. Trying to see through them was like looking through someone else’s pupil. A unicorn and a lion both carved from dusty marble rested atop the door, crownlike.
“Do we go in?” I asked.
“Can’t just stand here forever,” He replied, though he made no attempt to move.
I took his rough hand, noticing the ashy tributaries that ran towards his fingers and stepped over the threshold with him.
The floor was black marble and every impact of rubber sole against it reverberated around the room, as if crying out ‘dead man walking’. The colour the lightbulbs gave off was reddish; for a moment it was like walking into a darkroom. The only person there was a woman at the far end.
The two of us strode the length of the hall, towards the faceless bureaucrat who was waiting behind an oak desk. Her back was ramrod straight as she pressed the keys of her typewriter. We stood in front of her for so long that I noticed that she had no eyelashes before she eventually looked up. The corners of her mouth were unnaturally turned upwards as though she had been caught by a fishing line, her lips trembled slightly. Her eyes were wide with pinprick pupils barely visible, drowned in piercing blue.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, her voice close to human.
“No,” my brother replied, “But we need to talk to someone. There’s been a mistake.”
The woman stared at us, frozen, like a broken animatronic. Seconds ticked by as we watched the circuitry of muscle under her face twitch.
“Up the stairs on your right. He will see you.” She replied and then returned to typing. My brother rushed past and began his climb of the stairs; I stayed for a moment to watch her work. It was strange, the letters her fingers touched did not seem to match up with what was on the page. From what I could tell, she was pressing the same six keys in a repeating pattern, but on the page was a vaguely familiar nursery rhyme.
Bye, baby bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
Gone to get a rabbit skin,
To wrap the baby bunting in.
My brother called me from the top of the stairs, and I raced up after him. The marble had given way to carpet which squelched underfoot, producing a mildewy smell.
“Do you know what you’re going to say?” I asked.
“I’m just going to explain that there has been a mistake. That’s all I can say.”
He paused and I stopped with him. I didn’t need to remember what it was like being boys together. The fear that hid behind his eyes and leaked from the trembling corner of his mouth allowed me to see the child he had been. Time crept forward as though it were moving through thick mud whilst we stood stuck in a moment that rendered us both speechless.
We continued to the door without another word, both wanting to reach out to the other for comfort but knowing there was none to be found there. The wood grain of the deep purple door shone like an oil spill. Our reflections funhouse-mirrored themselves in the gold door handle, mocking us. The metal was cool to the touch and turned easily when tried.
The pig wanders into the slaughterhouse and asks to be spared.
The man, the ‘He’ that would see us, had his eyes closed. He sat behind a mahogany desk on the far side of the room. There was no sign of movement, no twitch of his eyebrow, no tremble of his lip. The skin stretched over his skull was papery and every angle and protrusion of his bones was brought into sharp relief. Various medals sat above his right breast; they were silver but sometimes when the light caught them I could see the tarnish beginning to crawl over their faces. His hands lay palm down on the desk before him; under each of his nails was a thick packed layer of mud, as though he had dug himself out of the grave.
His eyes didn’t open when we walked in. They didn’t open when we sat down in the two chairs in front of him. They didn’t open even when my brother cleared his throat. On the desk in front of him was a name plate, the metal fighting off the same incoming tarnish as the medals. It identified the man as ‘Field Marshal Douglas Haig’.
“Field Marshal Haig sir?” I asked, my voice far steadier than I felt.
His eyes snapped open, and he acted as though there had been no gap in his awareness.
“On your feet both of you.” he snapped; his voice seemed as though it belonged to a much younger man. The two of us rushed to stand up; my brother knocked his chair to the ground in his desperation to rise. “I am your commanding officer. Is this how you show respect?”
“No sir,” my brother replied, “I can only apologise for myself and my brother’s behaviour.”
Field Marshal Haig appraised us with a practised eye, like an antiquities dealer. “Brothers you say? Heh I suppose I can see the similarity. Now what is your name, boy?”
“Ben, sir,” my brother said. It scared me to see him fight the urge to raise his hand to his head and salute.
“And you?”
“Christopher.” I don’t know why I lied; Christopher was not my name; it never had been. Even now I cannot understand why I chose that name, but I have lived with it ever since.
For several moments more he stared at us, and I realised he wasn’t looking at us like an antiques dealer, after all. He was looking at us like a scrapper assessing a broken-down car, evaluating which pieces were worth his while and which should find their way back to the dump.
“Sit.” We did. “So, gentlemen, what is it I can help you with?”
“Well, you see sir, there has been a mistake.” My brother was careful with his words, weighing them each in his mouth “I was sent a draft card yesterday morning.”
No one spoke for thirty seconds. I know, I counted.
“Can I see it?” Haig asked, a slight tremble in his voice as he did so.
My brother began digging through his bag before producing the card. The Field Marshall extended his skeletal fingers with the same desperation that a man in the desert reaches for water. As he gazed at the paper, the expression that painted his face could not be mistaken for anything short of ecstasy. The old man faded away and instead we were left staring into the face of the youth Haig had once been.
“But there isn’t a war.” I had wanted this to come out as a statement of fact, something concrete to oppose the insanity that seemed to have settled over the world. Instead, it came out high pitched and trembling.
“Says who?” My stomach dropped through the floor and buried itself somewhere in the building’s foundation.
“But there’s been nothing on the news.” My eyes began to sting.
“My dear boy, listen to yourself. When has the news ever been honest about the world? This country has seen more off-the-record military operations than you’ve had hot dinners.”
“I don’t want to go.” My brother said, equal parts defiant and afraid.
The Field Marshal’s face greyed, the lines in his cheeks deepened and the humanity in his eyes vanished. “Strangely enough young man, that is not up to you. War has broken out on the continent, and it is your duty as a citizen of this nation to serve her when she calls upon you. In two weeks, you will be ready to ship out or you will learn how this country views cowards. Now, get out of my sight.”
My brother got up and started walking towards the door. The closer he got to the exit, the more certain I became of what I had to do, I only prayed that he would forgive me.
“How do I go with him?” I asked, and there was silence. The sound of footsteps stopped, and I watched as Haig knit his mouth into something that was clearly his attempt at a smile.
“So, you wish to enlist?” He asked, allowing me for a moment to glimpse the devil behind his eyes.
“Would that allow me to ship out with him?” To gamble with a monkey’s paw is an exercise in destruction, but I could see no other way. My brother had called off his retreat and planted himself next to me.
“Christopher, please don’t do this.” He didn’t call me Christopher, but I don’t remember my old name. I ignored him.
The Field Marshal had produced a contract, some of the dirt from under his nails marred the alabaster paper. A golden fountain pen with a leaking red nib appeared in my hand.
“Sign here and I will personally ensure it that you will remain by his side.” Haig’s teeth had begun to rot in his mouth, decay spreading across his smile the way fire decimates a field.
I leant forward and forfeited my life on a dotted line. The air in the room was heavy now, each breath like attempting to suck pitch through a straw. The reality of what I had done settled in my stomach the way sediment settles in an oyster, small and maddening. The contract was gone as soon as my pen left the page and the smug satisfaction on Haig’s face sent bile crawling up my throat.
“Two boys going off to war. Your mother will be so proud.”
Charley Swire is a London based writer whose prose attempts to explore the intersections between horror and autofiction. The majority of their work focuses on the uncanny and revels in the discomfort of the unfamiliar.
This piece was selected as a winner of our ‘Lies’ writing competition, and will be published in diceroll magazine issue II.
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