The Last Thing I Stole

The Last Thing I Stole

The winter was cold and biting, Christ, colder than a swine’s smile, and I’m hunched so deep in this trench I might as well be buried already, pressed up against Davies’ corpse, bloody Davies, of all rotten luck, his face half gone and still managing to look deadly smug about it, the sod. He looked dead and horrid, but I can’t help but feel he’s mocking me. Davies always had a smug grin. Even when he stole smokes or bragged about kills he didn’t make, he wore a pleased bloody expression.

I can smell him even over the cordite, wet, his hair frozen stiff where the mud’s clumped it, twitching in the wind like it’s trying to crawl off his skull. I keep telling myself not to look, but my eyes keep dragging back, catching on the shine in his hand. A ring. His damn ring, the one he never shut up about, and before I know what I’m doing, my fingers are on it, slipping it off the swollen, cold, pale knuckle while shells crack overhead and someone’s screaming down the line.

“Sorry, mate,” I mutter, though I’m not, not even close, and the metal is cold as sin in my palm, burning its way straight through my gloves.

There was a time when corpses made my stomach knot, back when I still bothered pretending I had a line between living and dead. Now I just stare, waiting for something in me to react again, but nothing does. 

The ring fits too tight when I shove it onto my finger. The gold engraved band and the black squared gem bring memories to my mind, and for a stupid second I think of my father’s ring, the heavy thing he’d thump on the table whenever he was about to shout because mum had forgotten to do her chores again. I remember snatching it once, showing it off to the chaps at school. Everyone has thought me to be the finest lad in town since then. The beating father gave me after he found out was worth every second. 

Davies’ ring isn’t even close to being half as fine, but it sits in my finger just like father’s. My hands are shaking like a drunk’s, but I get a cigarette lit anyway, shielding the flame with the heel of my palm as the wind whistles over the trench lip. The first drag tastes like burnt paper, dry as gravel, and I breathe it deep, deeper, until it scrapes something raw in my chest. 

My eyes flicker over to his face. “Sod you, Davies,” I mutter through the smoke, tapping ash onto his ruined cheek. For a flicker, just a flicker, it almost feels as if his rolled back dead eyes are watching me do it. 

Funny thing is, I almost feel nothing, looking at him… or what’s left of him. It’s just this stupid sort of miracle that he ever managed to talk at all with that giant, slackening tongue lolling out. The big bloody hole punched though his cheek, the worms already threading through his hair, all of it such a crude irony, so much for bragging about how many holes he would pump in others, huh?

Nothing in me stirs, not pity, not fear, just this quiet, hollow calm, like he was doing what he should’ve been best at when alive: shutting up. There’s something almost endearing in the way his eye was stuck half open, staring up, past me, like he’s pretending to finally listen for once, the big mouth. Who was the damn fool now? He bragged enough for ten men, and look at him now! Silent as a stone while I nick his prize. Davies treated the ring like the most precious trinket he ever had.

 “But well, too bad for you, mate. You’re nothing but a bent, stinking corpse,” I say out loud, and the thought almost cracks a laugh out of me as I nudge his shoulder with the butt of my rifle, watching his head roll a little in the muck. 

Then Sergeant Mallory’s voice tears down, rough as gravel and twice as mad. “Boy! Get your useless arse over here before I drag you by the ear!”

And just like that, I’m up, boots sliding in the filth, cigarette still burning between my teeth as I trot after him, leaving Davies to his worms.

An hour later, or maybe two, hard to tell when the sky’s the same dead grey, I’m back on duckboards slick with mud and urine. Mallory is barking something about rations or rotations or who the flipping hell knows, his mouth moving faster than my head can keep up. The cold’s worse now, sharper, like the air’s been honed on a blade. My fingers keep twitching towards Davie’s ring, turning it, twisting it, like it’s some silly little machine I’m trying to figure out. The band warmed up to my skin, like it always belonged there better than it ever did on Davies. 

Some lad stumbles past, boots half lost in the mud, muttering about jam tins. Someone else is scraping frost off a Lewis gun, while another two help carry their wounded friend to the medics. The whole camp hums, alive with that low animal sound soldiers make when they’re trying not to think too hard.

I try not to think too hard either, but every time I blink I see Davies’ face again. Not the whole thing, just parts: the flap of cheek, the tongue, the whitened eyes. The worms. Christ, the worms. I can almost feel them wriggle behind my own eyelids, burrowed in. I tap the ring against my rifle stock, a metallic click, and tell myself it’s just nerves, just another day. I need to get a grip. But it doesn’t feel like nerves. It feels like someone’s breathing down the back of my neck, slow and damp.

Night in camp doesn’t feel like night. No matter what I do, I can’t bloody sleep, every time I shut my eyes I’m back in the trench with Davies’ slack jaw, so I’m sitting up, boots still on, knees drawn tight, picking at the lice seams in my shirt like they’re puzzles pieces I might solve if I scratch hard enough. My friend, Maclin, flops down beside me, stinking of rum ration and wet wool, his coat half-off his shoulders and his puttees unraveling like he’s molting. 

 He squints at my hand, at the way I’ve been turning the ring round and round, and lets out a low whistle. “No chance, mate. No bloody chance you actually nicked Davies’ ring!”

I tell him to bugger off, whisper it sharply, but he’s grinning now, elbow jabbing me like we’re back in society in some schoolyard instead of a sandbag coffin. 

 “You’re dead,” he says, cheerfully. “Properly dead. Davies said he’d haunt whoever dared touch it. Swore on his Ma. You’re done for, pal.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I mutter, rolling my eyes. The utter buffoon. “ Haunt me? He couldn’t even run a mile without coughing his lungs up. The scamp could barely shoot straight.”

Maclin just laughs, low and mean, pulling his blanket over himself like a shroud. “You wait,” he says, voice teasing. “You’ll see him tonight. Corpses don’t just forget.”

 I try to laugh back, but the outside rustles in a wind that isn’t there, and for a sick second I swear I hear a wet breath behind me. Slow. Dragging. Like someone with half a cheek trying to whisper my name as guts spill from his head.

Days blur, mud to smoke to marching orders, and then suddenly we’re at that small town miles away from camp again, crammed into a pub thick with spilled ale. Maclin shoves a drink into my hands. Someone else shoves me into the back corridor where the lamps burn low and everything smells of perfume. There was a cute broad there. The girl has her coat half-off before I can muster one thought, tugging me down by the collar, lips hot and messy against mine, her nails dragging my neck as if she’s desperately trying to clam her way inside my body. I press her up against the wall, rough brick scrapping my knuckles and the ring. For a moment, the world shrunk to breath, warmth, her whispering something I don’t even bother to understand over the blood pounding all over my body. 

The corridor’s narrow as a coffin lid, lamps stuttering overhead, shadows pooling behind the crates staked at the far end. 

Then I turn my head, just a flicker, just a stupid instinct to check behind me, and there he is.
    
Davies. 

Standing at the far end of the lane, half rotten cheek sagging, tongue dark and swollen, it almost looked like a cigar, eyes wide and waiting like he’s been there the whole damn time. The lamplight gutters across the hole in his face and the worms gleam pale as candle-wax.

I freeze. The girl makes a soft impatient sound, a click of the tongue, annoyed, and it snaps me like a whip. I blink, and he’s gone. The corridor’s empty. Just shadows and pee steam rising off the cobbles.

My hands twitch the ring. It’s over now. Just your head.

But it doesn’t end there. Christ, it doesn’t stop. It never stops.

That night I see him again, standing by me like he’s waiting for me to wake up and take payback for nicking his ring. Then on the line, he’s there too, in the corner of my eye as I fire across no-man’s-land, his ruined face hovering behind a German’s helmet as the man drops. I see him in the medical tent, behind the blinking eyes of some pale boy clutching his own stomach. I see him when the lads try kicking the football. They shout across the dirt, their voices warping through the cold, and for a second the world wavers, like heat off a stove except it’s cold. Maclin waves me to come over as he kicks Davie’s stupid face to my feet. I see him in the tin of beef, in the sheen of grease on the surface, his empty eyes staring back up at me like he’s sunk inside the meat. 

 It’s the ring.

 It has to be the damn ring. 

 It’s been getting warmer on my finger, warmer than it should be. Like it’s breathing with me. Like it’s breathing for him.

It’s night again, or something like it. I can’t sleep. I-...Haven’t slept proper in days, the ring burning a hot circle into my hand, branding me. Christ, it’s branding my skin. I can’t take it off. Maclin’s snoring somewhere behind the sandbags, men muttering in their dreams, rats doing their night parades. I can’t take it off. 

I sit up. My heart’s punches hitting my ribcage like a wild mandrill trying to break its way out. Pum. Pum. Pum.

He’s there. Davies. The stupid scamp, lifting his hand, eyes beckoning for the ring.

My jaw locks.  Imgonnakillhimimgonnakillhimsonofabitch. 

I swing my bare feet onto the freezing planks below me.

Davies drifts back a step. Not walking. Just…sliding.

I move before thinking. Boots on duckboards, boots on mud, slipping past the sentry who is asleep against his post. The world narrows to Davies’ shape drifting ahead, just out of reach, like he's walking on air. Cold bites through my coat. The mud sucks at my ankles. 

The air tastes wrong. Thick. Sweetly sour. Like the breath I’ve been hearing for nights.

“Davies!” I call out, whisper-shout, voice cracking. “Take it, then! Come bloody take it!” 

He turns his head, that awful angle, like the bones have softened, and I swear he smiles, with an awful knowing curl of his lip over what’s left of his teeth.

The ring throbs, hotter, hotter, like it’s tightening on my finger.

I tear at it. It sticks. Skin pulls. It comes free. 

A flare bursts somewhere to the right. White. Sudden. Blinding. For a second he’s whole again, for a second he looks almost warm. 

Then the shots, hot, then cold, then nothing at all.

Sound fractures in the air, the world, my skull. Davies blurs, then snaps out of sight as the mud leaps up to meet me. 

I hit the ground sideways. It’s strangely soft. Like sinking into a pillow. 

The ring slips from my hand. I hear it land but can’t see where. 

Davies kneels beside me and his face is whole again, no worms, no ruin, just the smug scamp I hated, looking at me like he knew all along this was how it’d end. 

“Should’ve left it,” he says, or thinks, or maybe it’s me, or the mud, or God.

The world goes dark in pieces, like someone is blowing out candles one by one. Dark falls into pieces, like soot settling, and the world folds shut.