He said his goodnight, and I saw that my mother had gone to sleep already when my eyes followed him into the house. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My watch let me know it was after midnight and life on the farm starts early.
We never spoke of the wars we’d endured again, but I pulled myself together after that. I’d survived, and I’d done things I was not proud of, but I was alive and that meant I had to get on with living.
My grandfather died three years later. He died in his sleep, and I hope he died with a good dream playing in his mind, but I suspect I’ll never know for certain.
At his funeral, I saw many an old man from around Summitville. They’d been his friends in some cases, and in others they were just paying their regards to another fallen soldier, one who had survived the war like they had. I saw one young man, too. He was of average height and lean, with brown hair and brown eyes.
When the funeral line was arranged and all of the visitors were saying their condolences to us, the stranger looked at my mother and took her hands gently in his own. He spoke softly and solemnly and said to my mother, “Ben Finch was a fine man. He was a fine soldier. They don’t make them like him any more. He will be missed.”
When he came to me, he spoke just as softly and his hands held mine in a strong grip until I looked him in the eye. “Your grandfather was strong, Eddie. Make sure you honor that. Do wrong by his memory, and we will not be friends.” He smiled when he was done talking and I was the only one that saw it.
He had a smile that looked like it belonged on a killer. He only flashed that smile once after that, when I was looking at him, and either he winked at me, or the wind blew something in his eye.
That night I looked through the register of names from those who’d attended my grandfather’s funeral, prepared to send thank you notes. I noticed the name Jonathan Crowley, but he left no address.
For just a few seconds I wondered if maybe the man I’d seen smiling was the same man who’s smiled at my grandfather so long ago in a château in France. But that just wasn’t possible. He’d have been older, certainly; old and gray and frail.
But I thought about that smile, and I thought about that wink, and I remain uncertain. Like my grandfather, I think if I never meet that smiling man again, it’ll be too soon.
Changeling
A Joe Ledger Adventure
Jonathan Maberry
Author’s note: This story is set after the events in THE DRAGON FACTORY. You don’t have to have read that novel, but if you read this story first there are some spoilers.
-1-
The world keeps trying to kill me.
It’s taking some pretty serious shots and as the months and years pass, it hasn’t lost any of its enthusiasm. Or its deviousness.
I keep sucking air, though. Each time I somehow manage to pick myself up, and either slap off the dirt and stagger back to the fight, or someone medivacs me to an aid station or a trauma hospital and the doctors do their magic to ensure that I have another season to run.
You know that saying how a bone is stronger in the place where it broke? And the thing from Nietzsche everyone and his brother always quotes — about the things that don’t kill you making you stronger? A lot of that is true.
I’m stronger than I used to be. Less physically vulnerable. Not that I have super powers. Bullets don’t bounce off my skin the way they do with Superman, and I don’t have Iron Man’s armor. I don’t have spider sense or adamantium bones.
I’m stronger because each time I survive a fight, I learn from it. I become less trusting, less naïve.
Colder.
Harder.
It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot, and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.
This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.
That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.
And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you turn the dials on passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak — the prey — to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.
Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.
And yet…
And yet.
There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.
Loss.
Grief.
Call it what you want.
On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother in arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe — truly believe — that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.
You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun-smoke clears, and if you’re still alive, then you and the person you love will have a life together afterward. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.
But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on.
Damn.
That’s where the real monsters are made. When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.
Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realising your defeat.
Or…
Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.
Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.
That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.
But it is the monster that survives.
It’s the monster that can survive.
I loved twice in my life. Really loved.
The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.
Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.