Stain

In 1945, I am sure that I killed many men. I did not murder a man, however, until one night in a ransacked house in Hamburg. The rifle in my hand was slick with sweat, and I wondered desperately how, despite it, I could still feel so afraid. My polished medals were heavy, and I realised then that I did not deserve one of them. I had no more ammunition, so my next shot would be my last.

In the corner, just then, came a noise. I whipped round, my face wild with fright, and was met, not by an enemy combatant, but a cowering young German boy of no more than fourteen. A civilian. I am a sharp man. I recognised those facts in an instant. And yet, a moment later, I had fired my last shot. Days later, crippled and insensible and awash with the stench of my own fetid waste, I was rescued. My comrades dragged me out along the harsh, hot ground, scattering in our wake the flickering embers of our victory (for, despite our subsequent aggrandisements, we were many of us thoughtless, brutish men).

Against the triumphant inferno raging across the sky I remember the house. The bombed-out husk that had been my prison stood, monolithic, like a great black gash on the world. It seemed to swallow me up, for in my delirium all I could see was a hideous black void, within which a piercing pair of lifeless eyes haunted me.

The following year I had traded the European theatre for England. It was decided that I was to recover in Lymstock, a desiccated market town stuck awkwardly among a maze of hills. The estate of Little Furze was quickly leased to me, and I began my misbegotten new life as a country gentleman. The subsequent months were a hell. I could not be alone, wandering the labyrinthine manor, nor, I found, could I suffer the gossiping wretches of the town, who to me were represented by a hundred pairs of watchful eyes, who saw me, I was convinced, for exactly what I was. Dr. Griffith’s visits were, therefore, something of a reprieve. He was not an especially smart man, but he brought news from London, along with, I soon discovered, whatever new medical device had caught his eye that week. ‘What do you see?’ he said one afternoon, his hands holding a white piece of paper covered in a stainlike mess of black ink (a Rorschach test, I believe he called it).

I saw a face, bloodied and disfigured by the fatal crack of a rifle. ‘A butterfly. I see a pretty butterfly.’ Griffith seemed contented.

He made to leave soon after, and I watched from the window as the doctor ambled down the road. He turned his head to face me just then, and, even from a hundred yards away, I could see plainly that the faraway look on his face was gone, replaced by one of disquieting shrewdness and perception. In that moment I hated Dr. Griffith, but more than anything I was afraid of him.

Thereafter I flew into a rage, and ripped from the walls every portrait in the house, till I was tormented no longer by the reproachful stares of men whom I did not know yet who would surely have despised me. Having staged my pathetic tantrum, I lay awake in impotent silence, a ghastly phantom hiding in the shadows of another man’s home.

The next day, I began writing the letters.

I wrote the first with no intention that anyone but myself should see it. It accused Mrs. Briggs, the stout woman who worked in the chemist’s and who had been curt with me the previous day, of infidelity. My next described Mr. Chapman, the schoolmaster, as a serial predator. Soon, writing them became something of a compulsion, and I composed as many as six in a single morning, which led, inevitably, to disseminating them about town.

I took a morbid satisfaction, I think, in imposing in Lymstock the kind of fear and suspicion with which I had lived my every day in that place. I, of course, was at that time free from suspicion; after all, one of the very first letters that ‘the poison pen writer’ ever wrote had been addressed to me and dutifully handed to the local police, whose oafish bafflement gave me no small degree of pleasure. ‘You murderer,’ it had begun. ‘You cowardly murderer.’

I see the yawning blackness again now, just as I had done on Dr. Griffith’s paper, and in the shadowy corridors of Little Furze, and, long before either, in the ash-choked streets of Hamburg. I see it in the stark, poisonous ink of my letters, and I am not afraid.

by Martin Mullaney.