Free Human for a Day (9781101552391) by Jennifer (EDT) Martin Harry (EDT); Brozek Greenberg Page B

old and caked with clay, the heat and then the cold of it as it had filled with blood, but through it all, the hard unmoving armor of it as stone. He held on to that one image as his own as the voices carried on, unrelenting as they dredged up the past and layered it on the present.
    â€œ I found some metal. ”
    â€œ A weapon? ”
    Jamming, shattering, flung away, tossed aside, or held as tightly as a talisman.
    â€œ No, it ’ s too fine, more like wire. Yes, see here ’ s a roll of it around what was probably a wooden spool. ”
    Crawling in the darkness and the mud, a line of wire unraveling behind him in the darkness.
    â€œ Wait. There ’ s something here tucked up beside the ribs, something leather. A small book, I think, or a piece of it, anyway. ”
    â€œ A journal? ”
    â€œ Could be. ”
    â€œ Can you open it? Can you make anything out? Words or a name? ”
    â€œ I think so. Shine your torch here. ”
    â€œ Careful now, careful. ”
    The rush of memories froze in place as he waited for words he’d hadn’t known he’d ever hear or ever thought he’d need to.
    â€œ Private William Falkner. ”
    A boy in face and form, and a man in duty, lost, and honored to be carved in stone by the ones he’d left behind. Found.
    He opened his eyes.
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    A white-dressed cemetery filled his vision: a jumble of old gravestones and iron markers radiating out to lines of stark, grey trees. He heard birds and far away a single church bell tolling morning. As the dawn sun warmed his face, he stepped off the monument that had been his sentry box and heard the crack of hard-packed snow break beneath his boots. The wind whispered past his face and, as he turned, he saw a single candle flame beckon in the distance.
    He followed it.
    The gravestones became older, darker, covered in moss and worn smooth by years of rain and snow. At the far end of the cemetery, the land sloped steeply down into a line of trees and he stared at them for a long time, feeling them stare back. They and their kin had been fed by the dead for so long that it was impossible to tell where trees left off and the dead began. But he could see the candle flame flickering behind them. He took a single step forward and suddenly the memories he had carried for so long rushed over him: the screaming of the shells, the stiffness of his uniform, the fear, the falling and the darkness. Behind him, the monument called out to him, offering the serenity of silence and the strength of stone, but the candle flame still beckoned and he stood frozen, unable to go forward and unable to go back.
    Far away he felt himself lifted as the voices that had begun his transformation spoke again.
    â€œ Be careful with his bones. They ’ re fragile. ”
    â€œ I wonder if he has any relatives still living who might remember him. ”
    â€œ I doubt it, after all this time. But there might be family somewhere and a grave. People do that sometimes, you know. Just place a marker with a name on it to have a place to go. ”
    He glanced about the rows of gravestones. Many of them had fallen into disrepair as the people who’d once tended them had died in turn. The soldiers who lay beneath them had long since passed beyond the trees.
    All save one.
    He moved towards it, then crouching down, he stripped the moss away and read the words aloud.
    â€œPrivate Arthur Townsend.”
    His own voice startled him for a moment; then he shook himself and bent to study the grave itself, seeing it as only he could see it. The soldier who slumbered in this place held on to memories so dear that he would not be moved no matter how beseechingly the candle beckoned. And stretching out into the distance, past the monument, he saw a line of equal strength that bound the living to the dead through memories too precious and too painful to be forgotten.
    But as he watched, it wavered and he knew it would not bind them long.