The Cypress House Read Free Page A

and as the sun broke through the mist he'd done a fine
job of convincing himself that this was nothing but the most horrifying of
hallucinations.
        It
was midafternoon and the Marines were readying another assault, seeking to push
deeper into the Wood, when he turned to two of the men he'd known best over
there, known best and liked best, good boys who fought hard, and saw that their
eyes were gone. The flesh remained on their faces but their eyes were gone, the
sockets filled with gray smoke that leaked out and formed wreaths around their
heads.
        Both
of them were dead within the hour.
        For
the rest of the war it was like that — bones showing in the night battles,
smoke-filled eye sockets smiling at him during the daylight. That promise of
death was all he ever got. Never did a ghost linger with him after the last
breath rattled out of tortured lungs, never did a phantom version of one of
those lost men return in the night to offer him some sense of the reason behind
it all. No voices whispered to him in the dark, no invisible hand guided him in
battle or menaced him in sleep.
        He
spoke of it only once, knew immediately from the looks exchanged around him
that if he kept telling the tale he'd soon be hospital-bound with all the other
poor shell-shocked bastards who gibbered on about things far from the grasp of
reality. Arlen kept his mouth shut and kept seeing the same terrible sights.
        As
the war went on, he discovered some of them could be saved. They would perish
if left to fight alone, but if he could keep them down and out of the fire
line, sometimes they made it through. Not often enough, though. Not nearly
often enough. And there were so, so many of them.
        After
the armistice the premonitions ceased, and for a time Arlen thought it was
done. Then he'd walked into an Army hospital back in the States to visit a
buddy and had seen smoke-eyes everywhere he looked, stumbled back out of the
place without ever finding his friend. He'd gone to the first speakeasy he
could find and tipped whiskey glasses back until his own vision was too clouded
and blurred to see smoke even if someone lit a match right in front of his
face.
        He'd
worked in a railyard for a time, had seen a man with bone hands and a gleaming
skull face laughing over a joke just minutes before the chains on a log car
snapped and he was crushed beneath one of the timbers. The last time Arlen
ventured back into West Virginia — it wasn't a place of warm memories and
welcoming embraces — he'd gone hunting with a friend from the war who'd turned
into a bitter drunk with a stump where his left hand belonged. One-handed or
not he'd wanted to go hunting, and Arlen had agreed, then saw the smoke
swirling in the man's eye sockets about thirty seconds before he stepped into a
snarl of loose brush and a rattlesnake struck him in the calf, just below the
knee. Arlen had shot the snake, whose thick coiled body would've gone every bit
of five feet stretched out full, and cut the wound to bleed the venom, but
still the smoke wouldn't leave those eyes, grew thicker and darker as Arlen
dragged his old friend back to town, and he was dead by noon the next day.
        So
there were incidents, but in this warless world they were far less common, and
he worked hard at burying the memories just the same as they'd buried the men
who created them. Drinking helped. Even through Prohibition, Arlen always found
a way to keep his flask filled.
        Like
many of the men back from the war, he'd wandered in the years that followed,
taking work when and where he could, unable or unwilling to settle. When the
Bonus Marchers had moved on Washington, demanding wages for veterans, only to
be driven away with tear gas, he'd watched the papers idly, expecting nothing.
But after Roosevelt allowed that some veterans might join his Civilian
Conservation Corps, out to save the nation one tree at a time, Arlen had some
interest. Dollars