WHEN DEATH BEARS GIFTS

 

Major Richard Blaine is in the midst of trying to persuade 19 battle-hardened veterans 

to come with him on a lone craft to fight 9 Nazi E-Boats when his Dark Passenger urges him to snap his fingers.

WHEN DEATH BEARS GIFTS

“Beware of shadows bearing gifts.” 

- Steven Erikson

 Life is not unlike one of those hellishly deep gold mines in India. Hardships dull your senses, your instincts. 

In weariness, you go through the motions thinking one day will be just like the last.

Then, one day the  winch jams. The scaffolding buckles. The air conditioning collapses.

You glance up to see by your headlamp the canary keeled over in its cage. You reach into a cranny for your gas mask to find a deadly asp instead. You yank on your rope only to find it is frayed. 

It is too late.

Life has played its last practical joke on you.

Like it just had on me.

As I snapped my fingers, I asked Sentient, ‘Why didn’t you snap for me?’

‘Perhaps I wanted to give you the illusion of control? Perhaps when I utilize your body, your face becomes too remote to be persuasive? Perhaps I am motivated by reasons you will never understand?

‘In other words, when you want to me to know something, you will tell me.’

‘Perhaps.’

A rumbling beneath my boots cut short my retort. A flash of a nightmarish mottled face both Other and human filled my mind’s eye. Then, it was gone, but the shivers remained.

‘What was that?’ I asked in a panic.

‘A memory of a fiasco in Sicily I buried in your mind. Obviously, not deep enough. Hybla still greatly hates you, for she mourns her children.’

Great. Laska, now this Hybla.

That was two enemies who hated me for things Sentient did in my body … without leaving me any memory of having done them. How many more did I have?

Pvt. “Chuck” Dickens, a man who would never use one word when he could cram in a dozen, was suddenly made succinct by fear. “Damn! Sicily again.”

Other cries whose owners I couldn’t place:

“Earthquake!”

“Not again!”

“England doesn’t have earthquakes!”

“We’re being bombed!”

“The Nazi’s have found us!”

Sgt. Savalas snapped, “Spartans! At-ten-tion!”

Amazingly, that worked for them … and for me. I was myself again. I drew in a deep breath.

“This is not Sicily, Gentlemen. We are not being bombed. The Luftwaffe is a shadow of its former self.”

“Kit” Carson yelped, “Then, what is it?”

“You are within a living, thinking building.”

I was met with a chorus of “What’s?”

“The ‘Still. Small Voice’ crafted these barracks for you. She is trying to give you, gentlemen, a fighting chance tonight. She hates Hitler crowing that the 3^rd Reich is the future of the world. So, she has decided to give the Nazi’s a taste of the world’s future.”

“She?” frowned Pvt. Eric Evans. “God’s a Woman?”

Alfred Kent, Eric’s smart-mouth crony snorted, “You better hope not, old sod. You know your luck with the bro ….”

Lt. Stein snapped, “Language!”

Pvt. “Pete” Floyd, our morose pianist, grumbled, “Why is the Major so hung up on cussing?”

Sgt. Savalas said, “You don’t ask why, private. You just do.”

I paused before I spoke, for the right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

“The power of word has always been greater than the power of sense. The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity. We are the Spartan 300, and our word will mean something, for we will speak fitly or not at all.”

All further words died on dry tongues as an opening in the floor slid soundlessly open between me and the rest of the Spartans. Plumes of icy vapor breathed from it as if giving birth to dry ice.

Sentient murmured sadly in my mind,

‘The Time is out of joint. O, curséd spite, that ever I was born to set it right.’

Four glistening ivory pedestals rose slowly, majestically, ominously from the smoking aperture.

Death had brought gifts.