A Whisper of Southern Lights Read Online Free PDF Page B

words to God.
    And all the time I kept a lookout for that strange man, the one who’d changed before my eyes from a tall Brit into a shorter, stockier Japanese. I tried to convince myself many times that I had not really seen that. Perhaps the heat had got to me, or the pressures of the past few weeks had driven me close to delusion. But it was not the memory of his change that convinced me of what I had seen; it was the memory of my fellow prisoners’ reactions.
    That, and Sergeant Major Snelling’s suggestion that this man had been looking for me.
    I had no idea who or what he was, or why he would want me. Perhaps I should have died back in the jungle, and he was the angel of death come to claim my soul.
    The food in Changi ran out and we started subsisting on scavenged rice and water. Vitamin deficiency kicked in quickly, and many men developed rice balls—raw, seeping flesh around the scrotum and inner thighs—and happy feet, which weren’t happy at all. Somehow, I escaped both afflictions. When most of the bodies had been cleared, the Japs set us to work shifting rubble, pushing aside destroyed vehicles and bringing Singapore’s ruined transport network back to some sort of order.
    We were working in the courtyard of an expensive manor, burning several bodies and trying to fill a bomb crater, when I saw that man again.

    He marched into the garden, claiming possession of the place with his arrogance. “Jack Sykes!” he shouted. He wore the uniform and the face of a Japanese, but his voice bore no real accent. He could have been anyone. “Jack Sykes!”
    I glanced around at my mates. None of them looked at me, because they saw the threat in this man’s stance. And maybe they sensed something of his wrongness as well.
    Sergeant Major Snelling stood a few paces to my left. “Easy, Jack,” he whispered.
    The three Japanese guards who accompanied us seemed unsettled and jumpy. They did not know this man. One of them said something, and the man shouted him down. The guard bowed his head and stepped back, rifle still held across his chest.
    “Jack Sykes!” the man shouted again. “Message from home!”
    Home! He could not mean that. It was a lie, a lure.
    “Easy, Jack,” Sergeant Major Snelling whispered again, and the man heard him speak.
    “You! To me, now.” He was speaking less and less like a Japanese man speaking English.
    Something happened to his eyes. I couldn’t tell what, but they seemed to shift somehow, as though the sun had moved several hours across the sky in one blink. A ripple of uncertainty passed through the other prisoners, and even the three guards seemed more nervous than before.
    This is power,
I thought. The man had more power than simple rank could imply.
    Snelling walked forward without pause. “There’s no Jack Sykes here,” he said.
    “Come to me and we’ll see about that,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
    “Sergeant Major Snelling.”
    “Snelling. Sounds like an insect. Do insects scare you, Snelling?”
    “No.”
    “Then what does?”
    Snelling did not answer. It was such a strange question, yet so loaded.
    “We’ll see,” the man said. He beckoned Snelling forward, snapping a few orders over his shoulder at the three guards.
    “This way.” He turned his back on Snelling and walked into the shattered back door of the manor. Snelling followed.
    Easy, Jack,
he had said. How could I be easy now?
    The guards urged us back to work, stealing frequent glances at the manor. We started piling loose soil and rubble into the crater, but without any real effort. All of us—prisoners and guards alike—were waiting to see what happened next.
    There was a scream. I’d heard many screams during my war: pleas to God, to life, to Mother, to end pain. But none like this. This was the cry of a man who had seen the end and knew that there was worse to follow. It was an outpouring of every bad thing, and a second after it ended, Snelling ran from the manor.
    He was not the