by Greg James
The trench was dead.
*
Charley stumbled into the thickets surrounding the Aisne river, the branches overhead shook as fluttering shapes darted between them, shrieking and calling, frost fell on him, as did bony pieces of ice. All gone in minutes, his mates, chewed up and spat out by those horrible things and now they were after him. Those things, the singing, that moment he had, all of them, were part and parcel of the same thing.
Had the Jerries planned this? Summoned these horrible things from the grave?
He could hear them in the trees, moving like spiders and snakes, hissing, rustling and rattling. He couldn’t see them though. They were at one with the darkness and the fog of these winter nights, giving him nothing to aim at.
“Come on out.”
He wished his voice could have sounded more commanding, more threatening, less like a feeble plea.
“Out here where I can see you. Stop fuckin’ hidin', you cunts.”
Bracken crackled to his left.
With a wordless shout, Charley threw himself aside, out of the path of whatever was in there.
The dead man dove for him, for his bared throat, its teeth grinding and snapping, spraying him with spittle and flecks of meat. The blood and skin of his slaughtered mates. Charley grabbed the thing by its collar. They rolled over and over, crashing through the undergrowth, there was a roaring in Charley’s ears, growing in volume. Wet, foaming and furious. This close he could see through the translucent flesh of the thing, how there were plump white grubs and bulbous parasites crawling through its veins and arteries as blood flows through the living. Its eyes were glistening coals carved from the blackest ice, occasionally flickering white, catching the light of the moon as it glanced through the tumbling trees at their struggle, the uncaring, cataract-ridden eye of a long-dead god. The roaring was thunder now, an approaching storm, an oncoming surge of fury, chattering its teeth with the cold of drowning depths.
“You know what I heard?” Charley spat at the thing wearing a dead man’s skin.
It showed him teeth, hissing through brittle stumps and needles. Then, it seemed to understand. It had heard the rushing of the river, so close at hand. It paused for a second, a film flickering over its black eyes. They were on the brink of a collapsed river bank, a slithering trail of mud and debris awaited. Charley felt ribs give and snap as he took tight hold of the dead man.
“Cunts like you don't like running water much, do you?”
The dead man shrieked. Charley kicked at the earth, rolling with his momentum keeping a tight hold on the dead man. With a crash and a cry, they plunged into the arctic waters of the Aisne.
Faces, made pulpy and pregnant by extinction’s fermenting gases, floated on by. Fat fingers slithered over Charley as he sank into the deeper parts of the river. His foe’s leathery grip was gone, torn away by the churning rush and thunder. So cold down here, so deep, so dark and so cold. Then a light, pale as the bodies of the drowned appeared below him, seeming to draw him closer, drag him down. Charley kicked against it, thrashed his arms through the freezing water but it was to no avail. He sank and sank and the surface of the water and the world beyond were lost to him, as he fell into the weird white light.
He was in a cavern, an underground space, with high vaulted curves soaring overhead, worthy of a cathedral, making him feel small, so insignificant. Sopping wet, Charley got to his feet, wiping his eyes clear. He was standing on an uneven layer of water-polished stone, veined with nocturnal amethyst, undersea emerald and blood crimson. He followed the weaving path of the veins across the floor to where it became the slopes of walls, and then blended seamlessly into the misty heights of the echoing space he was in. The mist there was not Grey, it was pale and seemed to shimmer and shift; it was alive in some way as he watched it move away.
The cavern itself was not empty. There were men there, dozens of little groups huddling close around fires that cast the same limpid light as the weird glow that brought him here. Their uniforms were strange yet all of them sat together as comrades, intermingling, laughing, chatting, guffawing, swapping cigarettes, stealing nips of rum. A Roman soldier here. A Crimean veteran there, not Jimmy, sitting with a Boer farmer. Roundheads and Cavaliers. Confederates and Cossacks. Blinking the last drops of water from his eyes, Charley ran a hand through his hair. “Where in the bleedin’ hell am I?”
“You are underneath the world.”
There was a soldier, younger than he was, rising to his feet from the nearest group of fire-huddlers. He was slim, blonde and verging on adolescence, so it seemed. His eyes were bright blue and his pale skin had a waxy cast to it. The voice was grim and heavily Teutonic but his youth softened the hard edges of the words he spoke.
Rubbing and clapping his hands, he turned to Charley. “Welcome Charley. I am Johann. We have a place for you here.”
He gestured to an empty ammo box resting by the fire.
“I’m fine, thanks. Where am I? I was in the Aisne, thought I was drowning. Going under for good and all.”
“No, Charley. This place, we call it the Last Post.”
“Oh aye? Why’m I here? Is it something to do with those things?”
“Yes, those things, as you call them, the Vetala.”
“You what?”
“Not You-What, Vetala. They are not quite spirits, not quite dreams. They are where all our nightmares have come from.”
“Right, clear as mud, mate.”
“There are holes in the world, Charley, forgotten places, buried long ago, and sometimes something crawls out of these holes. Tonight, the Vetala crawled out and you fell down another one of those holes into this place.”
“Right, I see. Actually, no, I don’t.”
“You don’t need to. All that matters is you are here with us. Now, let us sing. It is Christmas, after all.”
The men around him nodded and grunted their assent. Those that stood, Charley could see, had the same waxy pallor as Johann.
“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.”
The German passed him a strip of roasted rare meat as the song went on.
“Alles schlaft; einsam wacht.”
Charley took a juicy bite, enjoying the feel of the grain parting as his teeth cut through it.
“Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.”
Then he spat, spraying the mouthful onto the opalescent stones underfoot, bitter and rancid pieces spattering his putties.
“Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar.”
Little things were writhing out from within the meat, pulpy, pale worms and flukes.
“Schlaf in himml-”
The song died out.
“What was that shit you gave me, Johann? It had dead things in it. Christ!”
Charley roughly wiped his tongue on the back of his hand. He could still taste the grittiness on his teeth. Johann’s face was unmoved but his eyes roamed about, like one of those laughing sailors Charley had seen in glass boxes at the seaside.
Like a thing that was not alive.
When Johann spoke, it was not with the voice of a German boy but with another, toneless and flat. “Tears, blood and fears will fall upon the earth and the earth will answer with unburied horror. This is the century of sorrow, Charley, its birthplace, its beginning, we are the first fallen and this is our last post before we pass over into the gravelands. If you had eaten the meat, you would have joined us, Charley. It is sad for you that you must live again.”
“You mean I’m dead here?”
Johann’s eyes blinked and his voice reassumed its former register. “Of course, I know you are not terribly bright, Charley, but I thought you would have realised this. Remember the words of your Bard; in that sleep of death what dreams may come.”
“Why are you telling me this shit? I don’t get it. Why am I here? I don’t understand!”
The face of the dead soldier was suddenly sanguine, his eyes so very sad. “Because I have to tell someone, Charley.”
Johann laid a hand on Charl
ey’s shoulder. He could feel no warmth from it through his dripping uniform, it was as cold as clay.
“Auf wiedersehen, my friend,” said the German, who had died well before his time.
Then there was the bugle, calling out, the cavern resonating as a colossal skull, the stalactites weeping as the men all got to their feet, stumping out the fires and moving, slump-shouldered, away from Charley. There were holes in the cavern, black burrows that the dead bowed to pass through into the embrace of whatever waited on the other side.
Johann was the last to go through.
“I don’t want to go, Charley, I miss home, I miss mother, I don’t want to.” His voice was small and plaintive in the cavern depths.
Then, there was a terrific trembling and the darkness nestling in the burrow stirred, gathering, and opened to reveal what was waiting behind the veil of extinction. Charley heard the bones there; grinding, ever-grinding. Johann cried out, for it had teeth as well, such terrible teeth, and it knew how to use them.
Charley awoke with a gasp, raggedly breathing. Not dead, he thought, not dead underwater, I didn’t drown. His body was shaking and shivering, soaked through, next to no feeling crept along his limbs as he heaved his aching body up and onto his feet. Numb as ice, he swayed and studied his surroundings, not sure where the undercurrents had pitched him up.
Trees, but not the same as the trees along the banks of the Aisne. These trees were withered and dead, their bark blackened and flaky like roasted meat, showing paler and darker matter beneath. The branches were all shattered and torn, broken fingers reaching out to nothing.
“Dream, that’s all that shit was, a dream, a nightmare, need to get back to the trench, that’s what I need to do. Shit, where am I?”
A black night in a black wood, he thought, better start trudging. No sense in waiting about for someone to find me. I’m probably miles away from the trench.
Charley took slow steps into the wood, hoping for some salvation tonight after everything that had happened.
“It’s Christmas Eve for chrissakes,” he wheezed out to no-one.
The tree branches rattled, old bones in the breeze. Charley plucked crud from his ears. He could have sworn he had heard something, someone, laughing.
A light, yellow, dancing as a will-o’-the-wisp, disappearing behind trees, leading him on, deeper into the black wood. His skull was aching from his near-drowning, he was sure that was the reason for the pain webbing his brain. It was nothing else, he wasn’t drawing close to something. Something he should not be close to. He stopped, stomping some warmth into the numb lumps of his feet, then went on again, following his lingering yellow guide.
He came to a farmhouse, seemingly empty in a clearing at the centre of the wood. It was that light in one of the windows, dimly visible by reflection in the others, that drew him to its door, made him raise his stiffened fingers and knock hard on the splintering, unvarnished wood. The door was unfastened, it swung inwards with barely a sound. Inside was the feeble warmth of the lamplight, Charley went in, shutting the door, shutting out the cold. His breath was snatched away at what he saw before him, where he now was.
He was home.
Mum, Dad, Dolly and Bert, they were all there in the lamplight. At the dinner table as they always were for Christmas. Mum was a plump pudding of a woman next to the craggy moustachioed stone of Dad. Dolly was like her a name, pretty and sweet-looking like a porcelain doll, and Bert was the spit of Charley but for his raggedy shock of ginger hair. All sitting there, all smiling widely, so wide.
“Gotcha fav’rit in, son. Eel pie and mash for Chris’mas dinner.”
Mum’s voice.
“Si'down son, you must be knackered after that dunkin' in that there river.”
How did Dad know about that?
“We missed you, Charley. We missed you. It’s good to see you home.”
Dolly and Bert sounded plaintive, so far away.
Charley saw what was wrong, their voices, their bodies, the scene before him. The voices were not coming from their mouths, they were echoing ghosts proceeding and retreating into and out from the empty spaces around them.
Their lips were still, the eyes were also still, staring dead ahead.
Dead.
Puppets with their strings cut. Dolls with empty heads. Mum, Dad, Dolly and Bert; their throats were tangled messes, torn musculature, skin and dangling arteries. These were the holes from which those voices came.
Charley remembered Johann’s words.
“There are holes in the world, and sometimes something crawls out of these holes.”
The eyes were open and the pupils dilated until all colour was obliterated from the irises. His mum once told him how eyes were the mirrors of the soul. Well, her eyes were nothing but black holes now, portals into some unimaginable hell. The knowledge conjured by those last moments before death when one sees everything and everyone stripped away to nothing, bare as bones, knowing that we are but echoes, chattering away to ourselves, convinced we are seen, certain we are heard, yet so deaf and so blind to what we are and what is there.
Charley went to the dead and gently drew down the lids of their eyes, wishing he could do something about their mouths too, but the muscles in their faces went hard long ago. He bowed his head, muttered a silent prayer and crossed himself like mum taught him to. Charley then slumped down to the floor, his eyes wet and shining.
Outside, he heard a sound, the crunching of boot soles breaking through muddy permafrost. He clumped over to the window.
And there they were.
The shot rang out and that was it, done.
The two German soldiers trod carefully into the farmhouse, eyes flicking back and forth, one brandishing a crude crucifix of branches bound together with withering garlic root. There was no sign of life. One approached Charley and rolled him over with a brute shove.
“Guter schuss, Johann.”
The German who had fired the shot drove his rifle’s bayonet hard through Charley’s heart. He was slim, blonde and only just verging on adolescence. His eyes were bright blue and his pale skin had a waxy caste to it. His Teutonic voice softened by the tones of youth.
"It is sad for you that you must live again.”
He knelt, hawked and spat in the face of the dying man.
“Merry Christmas, Charley-boy.”
The End of War
The day was hot, a bright one, when the earth in Belgium began to crack and crumble. Flanders fields were no longer pits of misery, drowning men in water and mud – those days of hell were long gone and the last of the veterans had passed on.
No-one remembered what had happened here.
The Great War, the War to end All Wars, was history.
The field where the earth began to part and sink in on itself was tilled and furrowed, a farmer's land. Occasionally, the farmer's plough would raise fine white bones, the odd rusted trinket and spent shells. Such was the legacy of a conflict that sent millions into the meat-grinder of the Western Front and then left them to rot. A few crows were picking here and there in the soil but, when the ground began to crumble through, they shrieked and took to the air, beating their black wings ferociously, as a form became clear – heaving itself out of the clinging loam.
It struggled, crawling awkwardly, hands clutching hard at the soil until it was out of the shallow pit. Shaking, it hacked, spat and coughed until its mouth was clear of suffocating dirt. It looked up into the clear summer sky where the sun burned. The last thing it could remember was grey skies, black birds and pain. Tears ran freely from long-buried eyes that had not wept in years. It reached its hands up as if to grasp hold of the sun, the sky, to tear them both down, embrace them as one might old, old friends.
Private Reginald Wilson let out a howl, the sound ripping cleanly from his throat, for it was a cry of joy.
He walked, he did not know how far, or for how long, across the fields of Flanders. The light stung his eyes but the hurt of it was a good feeling. He welcom
ed the aches and cramps that made their way through his limbs, unused to this strain. He could see that the war was over. How long had it been since the great mire below the heights of Passchendaele dried out?
There was no way of telling, as he had not met a soul as he walked and walked, passing from soft fields onto firmer ground. He paused on the track-marked path to turn and turn, to take in the open swathes of land, no longer torn and bloodied. Abundance was here - life and growth had come to pass after so much death and destruction, and Black Wood was no more. There was no sign of its benighted, lifeless trees.
"I never thought I'd see it."
The words were quiet and rough coming from his unwatered throat. The heat of the sun was starting to wear on him through the heavy cloth of his uniform. He wiped the sweat from his brow and, as he did, he looked down at his hands. So pale, so white and washed free of life, with fingernails that were little more than scrags of yellow and brown chitin. Shivering, he raised his hands to his mouth, opened his lips and felt his teeth, fearing what he would find nestling in the meat of his gums. He sighed aloud; his teeth were not the splinters he thought that they would be. Looking down at his dirty hands again, he wondered how long he had been under the earth. He also wondered why he had awoken and arisen. What was the purpose behind it, the reason?
Why would he be allowed to walk free?
Walking on down the path cut through the fields, Wilson saw a figure on the horizon, small and dark, growing taller, coming closer. He went still, holding his breath tight in his chest, not sure what to expect, wondering what would be thought of him. He was filthy, waxen, clothed for hardship and war on a bright summer's day. He stayed where he was until the figure resolved out of sun-cast silhouette.
She was pushing a bicycle with a split tyre, though he had never seen one that shone with such colours of the rainbow. She was lean and young, not quite into her twenties. She had a fuzz of ginger hair and heavy freckles blending into the light sunburn on her bare shoulders. She was squinting or smiling at him – he was not sure because of the sunglasses she wore – he had only ever seen them worn by the rich. Her legs were as bare as her shoulders, her shorts were khaki and her toes twitched in the sandals on her feet. Wilson realised he was staring and began to stutter; speaking was hard when he was so dry.
