Old Ghosts

Chapter 3

They'd left him in the cold. He remembered this – the dingy walls of the darkened room, the creak of the chains holding his arms above his head. Most of all, he remembered the smell. Men had died here. Men had burned. Zola's lab. The War, back when HYDRA had grown unchecked, back when his unit had been prisoners of the Red Skull. He remembered this. Because it was the first time he'd accepted that there was no hope.

But the memory was wrong. It belonged to someone else. The arms that stretched above him, suspending him from the ceiling, should have been whole. But instead his left arm glinted in the dim, whirring as it strained uselessly against his chains. His hair hung limp against his face as he stared down at his chest, saw the scars of more years than that soldier ever should have known. This wasn't a memory. It was a dream.

A door opened at the far end of the room, throwing a long shaft of light across him. He squinted into it, expecting Zola, expecting more tests. But the figure cast a long, sinuous shadow, the walls ringing with the sharp click of high heels. The woman stalked toward him on swaying steps, her features taking shape in the darkness, her face framed by a shadowy halo of black curls. He wet his lips, trying to find a name for her.

Because he knew her, had seen her in the swirling, screaming blur of faces that waited whenever he closed his eyes. Another ghost come to show him what he'd done. Another ghost that he had made.

Pursing her lips, she brushed his hair back from his face and tucked it behind his ear, studying him with wide brown eyes. There was nothing tender in them, nothing angry. Only cold.

She dragged a painted nail down his chest, his flesh prickling beneath her touch. Help me, he wanted to say. But he had trained for this, trained to resist, to give them nothing no matter what tortures they devised. He'd held out once, hadn't he? But that had been another time, another man. This was something worse.

The woman leaned close, walking her fingers up his chest. When she reached his throat, her hand clamped down, her whisper cold against his ear. "Bogota, 1979."

Light burst behind his eyes, her grip tightening, choking the life from him. Bound as he was, he couldn't fight her, even if he'd wanted to. Because he remembered now, remembered her, the way her face had purpled, the way her neck had snapped so easily beneath his hands. He had killed her and she was repaying him in kind.

As the darkness took him, he willed himself to feel this, to know what he had done. He bucked against the chains, his body fighting feebly for air. His head was pounding, his muscles rigid, but still the ghost only watched, her gaze cool and impassive, her eyes filling his vision as the world went black.

And then she was gone. He had died and she had left him hanging in his chains, alone again in the darkness. Across the room, the door opened again, another shadow stretching toward him. He knew now what he was facing. It was only a dream, but for decades the nightmare had been real. The nightmare had been him. It didn't help to know that he was dreaming. Because here, the ghosts could touch him. Here, they were the same.

He wouldn't fight them, wouldn't let them see him break. Because he deserved this, deserved it all.

"Oran, 1957," said the old man who came next, pressing a finger to his forehead. It drove deep between his eyes, parting flesh and bone, opening his skull exactly where his bullet had opened the old man's. Blood rushed down, blinding him as the darkness came again.

"Budapest, 1949," said the stern-faced man who opened his throat. "Gaza, 2008," said a man in a dark suit as he drove two fingers between his ribs, following the path of the knife that had killed him. Always the pain, always the darkness. And then the creak of the door, the light blinding him as the scene started over again.