Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Stand to attention soldier!” A came voice from behind Harry.
Harry did not respond; he dare not move.
“Are you ignoring me?” the officer asked commandingly.
Harry did not respond. But instead of grabbing him by the shoulder and physically turning him around, the phantom walked out over the water, and stood in front of Harry's fixed gaze.
Harry considered turning away, but he did not want to give the entity the satisfaction of knowing that he had modified Harry's will in any way whatsoever.
“If it wants to stand there, then let it,” Harry thought.
The officer reviewed Harry, looking him up and down. Harry held his gaze straight through the image of the officer before him. The transparency of the officer's body contributed to the building sense of unreality.
“The thousand yard stare,” the officer started, “I've seen it before, from stronger men than you.”
The officer pulled himself up straight so that his chest puffed out, and his spine was erect.
“But I've also seen it on lesser men.”
The backhanded compliment took Harry by surprise, and he permitted his vision to focus for a moment.
He was face to face with a soldier he knew in the war, looking just as he did the day the enemy grenade took him.
Harry had been fond of the officer, and had even modeled his work ethic after his example.
One day they were doing routine sweeps through the city, and a child had come up to Harry, claiming to be hurt.
The child was bleeding from a knife wound on his left arm, and Harry had knelt down to pull out his med kit, and apply a quick bandage.
The other soldiers in the platoon scoffed, and some even told him to back off, because kids like that, or attractive women were often used as a means of distracting soldiers.
The officer standing before him was the very same person who had given Harry the warning that day.
Harry figured that if a soldier couldn't take care of a wounded innocent, then he didn't much care to be a soldier anyway; and to hell with his commanding officer if he thought otherwise.
In the middle of the bandaging a grenade had been thrown in the center of the group. It was a fragmentation grenade, with a short fuse. There was no time to scoop it away, and there was no time to run.
A bright explosion went off in front of Harry's face, and the next thing he knew the sounds of screams melded into a torturous song, followed by the mournful wails and curses of the people from the neighborhood.
Harry was covered in blood. Most of it the blood of others.
Those soldiers closest to the explosion were least recognizable.
The boy in front of him, the one who had initially served as the decoy for the soldiers, had taken the brunt of the grenade, and had effectively served as a human shield.
The child died in Harry's arms, coughing blood onto his desert camo uniform.
“You're not real.” Harry told the specter of the officer standing before him on the lake. “My mind is making you up, like it has every night since your decisions lead to the slaughter of our entire platoon.”
“Maybe so,” the specter replied, but I could kill you like I killed your friends. If I were really nothing more than an illusion, then I imagine you could simply dismiss me, and I would cease to persist.”
The image of the officer wavered slightly, but it was only the reflection of the water beneath it, and the officer's eyes met Harry's without deviation.
“If you'd like to meditate on the concept of reality further, it may behoove you to consider how those dreams that you claim are also unreal have very real effects on your existence,” continued the officer.
Harry did not have anything to say in response to this claim, though he knew it to be the truth.
“I know enough about you and your situation to know that you couldn't have saved me,” the officer continued, “and that your only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time, yet doing the right thing.”
“You don't know me!” Harry shouted at the phantom on the water, “You aren't the officer you appear to be, you aren't Al's sister, or any of the other ghosts you have impersonated.”
“You're going to want to keep that anger under control son,” began the officer.
“Or what?” Harry asked, “Or you'll murder me like you did everyone else? See if I give a shit, I'm not going to be bullied about by you, or anyone else for that matter.”
The soldier paused for a moment, and the static began to form at the edges of his figure.
It seemed as though the image might disappear, but then the image came back into focus as though it had decided to remain a while longer than usual.
Its face shifted and became something shapeless. The image began shifting between the shapeless thing and the officer and though the voice continued to speak in the dialect of the officer, the sound quality failed, and it seemed as though the voice were being put through a filter and run over by a train.
“Your superiors are planning on sending a lot more here to me,” the thing said, “and I expect they will be much more satisfying than you.
Stay out of my way, and I won't bother you any further.
For a moment, Harry couldn't believe what he was hearing. It seemed as though the entity was admitting that there was a sense of satisfaction from its sadistic behavior.
Harry stared hard at the phantom and continued to lock eyes with it, even as its form appeared to destabilize, and fade out before him.
“It won't be paradise,” the image spoke in its distorted tone, “but at least you'll have three squares and a roof.”
A few seconds after the last sentence was spoken, the soldier finally dissipated, leaving nothing but static, and an ethereal afterimage in its place
He couldn't believe it. There had been so much turmoil and angst about the impending judgment to be delivered. Each victim leaving psychological scars on the prisoners that remained; and here was Harry, the last prisoner of this twisted, failed experiment, if not sane, then surely alive.
He had once felt peaceful in this place, and now that he was alone, without any sense of a threat, he wondered if that same sense of peace would return.