Baltimore,: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire - Couverture rigide

Mignola, Mike; Golden, Christopher

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0553804715 ISBN 13 : 9780553804713

Editeur : Spectra, 2007

Synopsis

Baltimore,: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire

- Used Book in Good Condition

A propos du livre

Extrait

PRELUDE:

REQUIEM
“There were once five and twenty tin soldiers,
all brothers, for they were the offspring
of the same old tin spoon.”

–The Steadfast Tin Soldier
by Hans Christian Andersen
On a cold autumn night, under a black sky leached of starlight and absent the moon, Captain Henry Baltimore clutches his rifle and stares across the dark abyss of the battlefield, and knows in his heart that these are the torture fields of Hell, and damnation awaits mere steps ahead.

On one knee he pauses, listening, but the only sound comes from the chill autumn wind that carries with it the stink of death and decay. Baltimore gestures to the men picking their way through the darkness behind him, then moves in a crouch toward a small rise that could be a mound of war-torn earth...or a hill of corpses.

He falls to one knee behind the mound, which is indeed an innocent pile of dirt, excavated in the process of digging a trench. But Baltimore feels no relief at the discovery, save that the small mound provides better cover than corpses would have. Bullets pass through putrefying flesh far easier than through hard earth.

In the thick of the night, only a madman would attempt to cross the ravaged No Man’s Land that separates his battalion from the Hessians. The blasted tundra is furrowed with dank, muddy trenches and strewn with the bodies of the dead. Bales of barbed wire are stretched in winding serpents across the field.

Yet madmen they are. The battalion commander has determined that someone must traverse that damned earth in the dark and bring the fight to the enemy. Desperation demands it. Without some twist of fate–brought by gods or men–the dawn will find them in circumstances most dire.

The mission has gone to Captain Baltimore.

He has led his platoon away from the safety of the battalion camp, out of the forest that now seems so far behind them, and fifty yards into No Man's Land. Ahead lies at least four times that distance before they will reach any
decent cover. The Hessians are camped in thick woods on the other side of the battlefield.

Baltimore knows that he stands at the very edge of the world. How else to explain the dread that slithers in the hollow of his chest and wraps itself around his soul? He must be on the threshold of Hell, for he can conceive of no patch of ground that could be farther from home and family and comfort. Yet this is the nature of war. To become a soldier, to spill blood and evict human souls in the name of faith or country, means traveling so far from home that home becomes as distant and cherished a memory as innocence.

He yearns for them both, even as he realizes at last–only now, only here–that they are lost to him forever.

As a boy he had kept to his room on rainy days and played with his tin soldiers, had cast them as enemies and caused them to kill one another on the battlefield of his blanket. But tin soldiers do not bleed. They go back in the box and live to fight another day.

Soldiers of flesh and blood also end up in a box, but theirs is of heavy pine. Baltimore has seen far too many soldiers bleed, and go into that wooden box in pieces. Dread flows in his veins now, making it difficult for him to move. Death waits for him on that ravaged ground and he has no wish to meet it. His bones ache with a chill that is more from terror and sadness than the November air, and he can scarcely breathe.

He raises a hand and signals his men, first to the left and then to the right. In two lines they hurry forward, flanking his position on both sides. Their motion is barely a whisper to disturb the darkness, yet to him they seem far too loud. As they come nearer he can hear the soft tread of boots upon hard earth and the chest-deep grunts of grim men tired of killing.

They take shape in the darkness, figures topped with the flat plate helmets of the allied forces, carrying rifles at the ready. Nearest him is Sergeant Tomlin, whose rifle lies cradled in his arms like a newborn.

The night sky is hung low with billowing clouds. Only the barest hint of light filters through from the heavens. Tomlin’s eyes glint in the dark, and now that he is close, Baltimore sees the urgency in the man’s features. His skin prickles with fear, and his chest aches with the pounding of his heart. Baltimore has never been a coward. Yet now he hesitates, in the worst place imaginable for such a pause.

With no other choice, he nods, raises his hand, and signals again.

Ebon shapes move out across the field. Baltimore and Sergeant Tomlin split up, go around the earthen mound, and even at that distance the sergeant exists as little more than a dark patch of moving shadow. Baltimore clutches his rifle so tightly that the grip pains him. His legs move seemingly of their own accord, carrying him across the torn-up earth. He nearly stumbles over a dead soldier, his body burnt so badly that it is impossible to tell whether he had been friend or foe. The dead man’s face has run like melted wax.

"My God," he whispers to the night.

Tomlin scurries left to meet up with his detachment and Baltimore tears himself away from the gaze of the dead man to join up with the detachment on the right. Soft grunts and the shush of canvas and cotton uniforms can be heard up the line where Tomlin’s group convenes, but the night has swallowed them.

In a crouch, Baltimore steals along the ruined ground, his men falling in around him. He lifts a hand, glances around for Norwich, the corporal with the wire-cutters, and finds the man right beside him, the twin handles of the tool jutting from his pack.

One by one they reach the barbed wire–a tangled, coiled mess as tall as a man. Baltimore drops to one knee. With a gesture, he signals to Corporal Norwich. The man hands his rifle to the private beside him and slides the wire-cutters from his pack. Swiftly, and as silently as possible, Norwich sets to work on the barbed wire. Farther up the line, Tomlin’s detachment will be doing the same.

Baltimore stands and peers at the wall of darkness on the far side of the battlefield. The trees nearest the open ground are stripes of shadow against the deeper black of the forest.

Norwich has progressed halfway through the six-foot mesh of barbed wire. Where he’s already cut, the wire has pulled back like the flesh around a wound.

The corporal snips a wire that whips back and lashes his cheek, tearing flesh. Norwich groans loudly, drops the wire-cutters, and claps a hand to his cheek, but he does not shout or curse. Baltimore races toward the break in the barbed wire. He signals to the private holding Norwich’s rifle and together the two men drag Norwich out of the breach by his legs.

The corporal’s eyes are wide with pain and a seething, oddly directionless anger. Blood paints black streaks on his cheek and jaw, seeping out from the hand he presses to his wound.

Baltimore gives Norwich a nod of approval for the effort he’s made to keep quiet. Then he gestures to the private who helped him pull Norwich out of the wire, a silent command for him to pick up the cutters and continue the job. The private hesitates a moment, as though hoping the order had been directed at some other soldier. Then, reluctantly, he crawls into the barbed wire and picks up the cutters.

A shadowy figure of grays and blacks moves nearer, emerging from the clutch of waiting soldiers. He doffs his flat plate helmet and Baltimore sees it is the medic, Stockton. The man reaches into a pouch strapped over his shoulder and pulls out a small kit. Quickly, as the skinny private snips wireafter wire, opening a path through the barbed coils, Stockton cleans Norwich’s wound and smears a coagulant paste over it. There is nothing more to be done. The placement of the gash makes a bandage troublesome in the field.

Stockton takes one last look at the wound but in the dark it is impossible to discern any real detail. The medic gives Captain Baltimore a thumbs up and moves in a crouch to join the other soldiers awaiting the order to move out. A black silhouette in Mercury’s helmet hands him his rifle.

The skinny private emerges from the wire, moving low. He’s finished the job Norwich had begun. They have a path now.

Grimacing, Norwich stands and takes the cutters back, slipping them into his pack. He and the private turn an expectant look upon their captain. Baltimore nods, and signals them forward. Private Macintosh takes point. Baltimore could not have mistaken the silhouette of that giant brute for any other. The captain falls in with his men, fifth in line as they step quickly through the gap in the tangle of barbed wire.

Once they are through, they spread out, making a line along the inside of the wire. Baltimore surveys the pitted and scarred field of battle ahead. The wind kicks up. He shivers as the chill cuts through his uniform, slicing to the bone.

Less than ten feet ahead lies a trench that gapes like a wound slashed in the world. The blackness in that pit makes the night seem bright in comparison. To his left, Tomlin’s detachment will have made it through by now and spread out so that the platoon is all together. They will be awaiting his order, as if there is any other possible choice but forward–down into the trench and up the other side.

Baltimore raises his hand to signal the advance.

In quick succession, three soft pops puncture the night, followed by a strange whistling that ends when a trio of flares explode into brightness above the battlefield, casting the entirety of the scene in a garish white light, such that every corpse and trench and divot in the earth stands out in perfect detail.

The platoon is strung along the line of earth between barbed wire and trench, completely exposed.

Dread and fear turn to rigid ice in his veins and Baltimore freezes, legs locked in place like one of his cherished tin soldiers, feet welded to its base. He has failed his country, and the men who follow him. His gaze follows the flares as they rise to the peak of their arcs and seem to hang for a moment like angels on high.

Ten or twenty feet to the right, one of his men curses. The voice sounds as though it comes from a thousand miles away. They might as well have been separated by such distances–all of them–for in the moment when death comes, each man is alone.

Awash in white light, Baltimore looks down even as the trench comes alive with movement. The Hessians who have lain in wait rise, rifle and machine gun barrels swinging up to take aim.
A tin soldier cannot move.

He stands at the ready, rifle in hand, but it will take the hand of the child to move him into action against his enemy. The battlefield is a heavy blanket striped two shades of blue, wrinkled and ridged with hills up which the platoon of tin soldiers must be made to charge.

The war hesitates. It breathes with a light spring breeze flitting through the room.

The boy has gone for now. Allies and enemies are frozen on the brink. The great force that moves them all has abandoned them in the midst of this scene and terror grips the tin soldier. Paralyzed, he can only wait for the battle to start again. Once the boy returns, his fate will be decided. Perhaps he will survive, perhaps not, but it is the unknown that gnaws at him.

The bedroom window is open a crack, letting that spring air swirl and eddy into the room. Sunlight marks out an elongated rectangle upon the floor, cut through with a quartet of windowpane crosses. The laughter of children carries in on the breeze. The boy is outside, playing with others, when on that blue-striped blanket, the fate of two tin armies hangs frozen in the balance.

If the boy would only come in, if Henry would play with them and bring his laughter into the room, the tin soldier knows that all would be well. With the boy in the room there is warmth and happiness. There is safety. But in this petrified moment, anything can happen.

Anything at all.

The tin soldier cannot move.

A new sound enters the room. Harsh, chuffing laughter. This is no childhood merriment. It comes not from the green spring day outside the window, but from a shelf high on the wall. From within a wooden box, whose sides are painted and etched with grinning jester faces. A crank handle juts from one side of the box, unmoving.

But inside the box, something stirs.

The goblin Jack shifts inside his wooden box and there comes a thump thump thump of its wooden head striking the walls. A tinkle of jangling, happy music blats three notes, but the crank does not move. The laughter comes again–a harsh, barking staccato, and the soldier knows there is something to fear more than losing his life, more than losing the war...
The gunfire punctures the air–a harsh, barking staccato. The platoon are black silhouettes cut out of a brilliant white background. The angel flares float languidly downward, drifting on the autumn breeze. They begin to flicker almost in rhythm with the machine gun fire, turning the slaughter of Baltimore’s men into a gruesome zoetrope–a Grand Guignol of shadows and light.

Cries of pain and death rise all around him. Baltimore turns to the left and sees Sergeant Tomlin and another man stagger backward in a marionette dance of bullets and flesh. They are driven into the barbed wire and thrash there, tearing their flesh with each new motion. Bleeding. Dying.

To the right, the skinny private stands straight as though at attention, the top of his skull missing and a hole where his nose should be. An entry wound. Already dead, he still clutches his rifle and marches three steps forwardbefore tumbling down into the trench with the Hessians who have murdered him.

The tin soldier cannot move.

Baltimore does not realize he has been shot until he feels hot blood sliding down his thigh and his left leg gives out. He does not even raise his rifle as he stumbles, attempting to hold himself up. The gun remains clutched in his hands, a useless bit of metal.

A fresh barrage of gunfire comes from the trench. And as he spins, falling, he sees the faces of the Hessian soldiers, dark with dirt for camouflage, loading their rifles and feeding ammunition into their heavy machine guns. As the flares begin to die, he sees the men of his platoon moving toward him, Stockton and the giant Macintosh forming around their captain. They return fire, but the ten rounds in the magazines of their rifles will not be enough.

Baltimore falls.
The tin soldier cannot see, but he can still hear the rasping, insinuating laughter of the thing in the carved box, the hideous Jack. The sound is like some terrible machine, a devil’s factory. He knows that up on its shelf, in the box, the Jack stirs still, amused and waiting for its chance to emerge.

What it will do then, the tin soldier does not know. But he dreads the moment he will hear the bright, jarring calliope of its handle being cranked, for then he will know the Jack is about to be freed.

For now, the laughter is horrid enough.

And then it ceases.

Time passes, though the soldier knows not how long. He feels the cold, unyielding press of his comrades all around him, tin arms and legs beneath him and pressing down from above.

They are back in their box, of course. The boy has gathered them up and packed them away until the mood strikes him for another war. To the boy, it is so simple, so innocent.

It is a comfort, being back in the box. Stifling, yes, for he is contorted in there, on his back with his legs jutting upward and all of those other tin me...

Revue de presse

“Final word: Mignola's stark black-and-white illustrations are an excellent complement to Golden's words in that rarest of supernatural novels: an original vampire tale.”—Rocky Mountain News

"Baltimore is an old time rootin' tootin' sense of wonder story dragged through a modern blender, then slow baked in hell. I loved it. It was velvet bullet—speedy and rich in sensation. Go boys, go."—Joe R. Lansdale

“With Baltimore, Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden lay siege to the reader's imagination with a grim battalion of gothic images and a thunderous barrage of narrative artillery. This is not a novel: it's a war machine. Surrender immediately.”—Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shapped Box

"I have admired Mike Mignola both as an artist and as a tremendous story teller pretty much since his career began. In this collaboration with Christopher Golden, it’s fair to say he surpasses himself. He and Golden have produced a witty classic of supernatural fiction.”—Michael Moorcock, bestselling author of The Elric Saga

“Co-authors Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden brilliantly cross the evocative dread of early supernatural writers Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce with the inventive, in-your-face horror of contemporary counterparts Stephen King and Bentley Little.”–Omaha World Herald

“A haunting allegory on the nature of war.... Stark monochromatic illustrations from Mignola enhance this dramatic tale of war and fear.”—Publishers Weekly

“Outstanding.... Mike Mignola's outstanding black-and-white illustrations turn the book into a beautiful object and add to its overall storybook quality. He and Golden have outdone themselves with Baltimore, a gorgeous, haunting tale that may well become a classic.”—Fangoria

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Spectra
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0553804715
• ISBN 13: 9780553804713
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 304