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He sat, as he did each evening, staring at the woman in the photograph on the wall. She stared back at him, seeming to blink in the dancing firelight, her eyes reanimated with each flicker of the flames. A trick of the light, and of a mournful heart.&nbsp; It was solace of sorts, though, to watch her like this - to allow the mind to wander, to entertain fancy upon fancy - before the light faded and her features became indistinguishable once again, the space between them darkened by the soft whispering of the dying hearth. “Not long now, mein Freund.” A cold hand draped across his shoulder, pulling him from his wistfulness with a shiver. “You will soon see your Liebchen again.”He wanted to turn and face his companion, but the mask restricted his movement, and the effort of hauling himself out of the chair would have left him gasping, even with the oxygen being pumped into his lungs. The other man seemed to understand, and moved round to the adjacent armchair, settling into it with a sigh. Francis met his gaze and nodded slowly, then returned his gaze to her image upon the wall. He lifted the mask from his face for a moment. “I’m ready, old boy. I reckon we all are.” “She will sense it,” the other man agreed. “If your bond is as strong as you say, she will know that the time is near.” He too turned to look at the frame. She was not so different from his own sweetheart, especially in the half-light. “Rest now, Kumpel. It is late.” Francis looked deep into the glowing embers. He had had his fill of sleep. Each night, the same dream. The same echoing knell of fateful sin. Even when he closed his eyes, he could see it - the wet ground, glistening in the twilight; the splintered building littered with contorted bodies, draped like marionettes over crates and mounds of earth; and between it all, the wide eyes, burning, begging. The empty hands reaching out towards him. And the snap of the rifle in his hands. It had wrenched him from his sleep each night since. Shell-shock, they called it back then. Psychological distress. Night terrors. Not uncommon at all, old boy, they’d say. Stands to reason. Yet the anguish had not been confined to his dreams.&nbsp; He had thought he had gone mad, of course. Even before, he had been a God-fearing man. But his faith had not prepared him for the realisation that afterlife was not confined to the heavens.&nbsp; Bastian was his name. An officer of the German army, wounded, and being nursed back to health by his doting wife and daughter. Helpless against the sweeping tide of Allied shellfire and gas, and the troops that followed on foot, razing the town to the ground. It had been Francis, through the misty panes of the gasmask, who had found him, pinned by the rubble, choking on his blistered tongue, eyes milky-white and unseeing, arms stretching desperately out towards his enemies. And it had been Francis who, without hesitation, had fired the bullet into Bastian’s heart. It was this final act that had tied the two men together irrevocably. Bastian became his tormentor, for he had been vengeful, at first. Fury incarnate, yet without flesh. Filling each of Francis’ waking moments with shrieked curses and driving him away from all he held dear. But, over time, Bastian’s rage had subsided. He became withdrawn, lost without the wife and daughter who had been swallowed by the rubble. He would even disappear from time to time, wandering aimlessly across this unfamiliar land. But that was long ago. Some decades later, he returned to Francis, seemingly at peace with the understanding that their fates were intertwined. In all the years since, Bastian had not left his side. Sitting in the bedside chair as he slept; taking the empty place at the table; standing astride him as he rode the train, the fellow passengers oblivious to the spirit in their midst, passing through his form with nought but blissful ignorance and a shiver down their spines.&nbsp; So it had been. Moreso now, in these twilight years, since Francis’ own wife had passed, he regarded Bastian as a companion, a friend. It was Bastian who raised his spirits, even through the illness that was eating away at him inside his chest. He was tired now, so tired. The breaths he could manage were shallow, rasping. Bastian’s head abruptly turned towards him, the cloudy eyes regarding him with keen anticipation. Francis understood; he pulled the mask from his face and the room began to darken, as if the hearth was draining it of its colour. Bastian was standing now, before him, hand outstretched. Yet he could not raise his own.&nbsp; With barely a whimper, he breathed his last. . . . . . The room was different. Almost imperceptibly so. The embers still smouldered in the hearth, but the smell of the woodsmoke had faded, somehow, even without the mask upon his face. With a start, Francis realised that His heart swelled as he saw them - saw the chains of Bastian’s torment melt away in the tight embrace of his family. Sixty long years they had waited to hold one another once again. Bastian looked back at him, his wounds restored, forever now the gallant young officer that had stood before him all of those years ago. Francis smiled, feeling the guilt that had polluted his living moments beginning to dissipate in the ethereal air.&nbsp; Bastian whispered something in his wife’s ear and she looked over to Francis, nodding. He cupped his daughters’ faces in his palms, and they pulled at his tunic as he moved back to where the old man stood.“I… I do not know what to say, old boy,” Francis said quietly. He glanced over at Bastian’s shoulder. “Only that I hope nothing will ever come between you again.”Bastian smiled and bowed his head. “Nothing shall, mein Freund. I will make certain of it.” And with that he wrapped his arms around Francis in a tight embrace, tight enough that it would have squeezed the air from his lungs. Francis could do nought but return it, and they stood there together for a few moments, their final seconds of closeness after those long decades in which they were helplessly bound together. As they parted, and Bastian stepped back, Francis was suddenly aware of another presence. Behind where Bastian’s family waited, a familiar face looked anxiously on. “Annie!” he shouted. Joy and relief flooded his being.Bastian saw her too. “Didn’t I tell you?” he grinned. “Your Liebchen is here. She has come to see.”The strangeness of his words was lost on Francis, whose attention was solely on his wife. “Annie!” he repeated earnestly. “I’m coming, my love!” But he could not seem to move toward her. His legs moved, but each step forward simply left him rooted to the spot. “Bastian?” he looked to him earnestly. He held out his hands. “Help me, my friend. I cannot move.”“So it would seem,” Bastian replied quietly. He stepped in front of Francis so they were now face-to-face. “Once upon a time, mein Freund, it was I who held out my hands to you. It was I who needed your help.”Those milky-white eyes were now icy blue, cold and razor-sharp. Francis gasped. “But… but Bastian, y-you told me you understood.” The blue eyes were unblinking. “Had I known then… For goodness sake, man, we’ve lived a lifetime together!”“You have lived, Francis,” Bastian snarled. “I have festered. I have languished and decayed, wasting away these years by your side, instead of with my family!” He shook his head vigorously. “Nein, old friend. You withheld your mercy. Now I shall do the same.” Bastian stepped back, watching Francis frantically try to move. “It is no good, Kumpel. You cannot cross over. You are thethered to this realm.”“No!” Francis cried. “I must come with you! Annie, she is waiting for me!” He looked over Bastian’s shoulder where Annie still stood. Tears rolled down her pale face.Bastian shook his head. “She knows that what I say is true. This is the price of your sin, old friend.” He raised his hands - those empty, pleading hands - in farewell. “May you one day find peace.” With that, Francis felt himself thrust backwards, back into darkness. He blinked, and found that he was back in the cold, dark living room of his home. He gasped as he saw that his lifeless body still lay in the armchair, the oxygen mask hanging uselessly across his chest. “No,” he gasped again. “No!” He stumbled to the photograph on the wall, to those eyes that blinked in the dancing firelight. They stared back at him, unmoving. He wrenched it from the fixture and threw it into the hearth, throwing his head back in a bloodcurdling scream.&nbsp; “Annie!”

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The Wages of Sin

David_Mann

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The Wages of Sin

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David Mann

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