For the first time in centuries the sun, bloodied by its setting and hazed by a storm of dust, burst into the abyss. The rats ran shrieking, a whirlwind of bats exploded, the four men screamed unashamedly and tried to crawl into one another's arms as boulders fell around them like hailstones, only to bounce and fall again. The Colossus hurled aside the rubbish to trigger an avalanche that went unnoticed by all but those in the valley below.
Cyril had expected a roar of Miltonic magnitude to accompany the thing's efforts, but the sound it made, though loud enough for Satan, was less evil than eerie: the sighs and groans of a multitudinous choir in the reverberant loft of its throat.
When the dust had settled and the boulders come to rest, when the men had sheepishly disengaged their tangled limbs and stilled their chattering teeth, they found themselves standing in the shadow of a foot whose arch seemed high and wide as the great door of Westminster Abbey. Far, far above them, the face of the Colossus was turned toward the crimson ball of the sun with a look of resignation and distaste.
“
The men were wondering if you mightn't christen it,” Cyril told Father Nathaire when he joined them on the hill at twilight.
“Christen it?” He seemed scandalized. “One does not baptize the dead."
“Like a ship, look you,” Jenkins said. “With a bottle of champagne, Padre. Where's the harm in that?"
The priest surveyed it, requiring him to lean back so far that he stumbled and might have fallen if Cyril hadn't taken his arm. With exasperating literal-mindedness, he said, “It is not a ship."
“They want to name it after me, Padre,” Thomas boasted, and Jenkins dealt him a surreptitious kick. Cyril ignored this. He knew very well why the men called it “Big John Thomas.” He had overheard Powell suggesting that it would play hell with the victory parade down the Champs Elysee if the Colossus were suddenly inflamed by the wanton display of its only suitable mate (aside from a lady called Jane Ellis, of Rhondda), the Arc de Triomphe.
“In exceptional circumstances, however,” the priest said, “those who are about to die may be received into the bosom of the Church."
Just then the sky blackened and the earliest stars blinked out. The shape of the monster changed like a black cloud; it took Cyril a moment to grasp that it was lowering itself to one knee. He assumed the priest's offer had been directed at the giant. Was it signaling acceptance? No: its intent became obvious as it laid its hand, palm upward, on the ground near them.
“For England and St. George!” Cyril meant to shout, but the words stuck in his throat as he bounded into the palm and urged the men onward with a wave of his pistol. Slowly, laboriously, retching and grimacing, they followed.
The priest raised his hand as if to bless them at last, but Cyril was struck by the odd fancy that this was a gesture of command. The Colossus rose at that very moment, like a child with a handful of toy soldiers. He peered over the edge to see Father Nathaire vanish into the shadow of the foot, although it seemed in the uncertain light that he vanished like a burrowing worm into the foot itself.
Cyril gave no orders, but the Colossus turned its face to the northeast and strode forward with a steadily-increasing velocity that soon grew alarming to the men perched on its shoulder. Its feet pounded the earth like a great hollow drum as it devoured leagues of field and forest. The splintering crashes that rose from the darkness were trees underfoot, Cyril told himself, though sometimes a chorus of thin cries suggested that they were trampling buildings. A bridge collapsed beneath them. Water boiling to its waist, the Colossus pressed on without missing a step.
Terror gave way to exhilaration. It was impossible to share his impressions with the others in the blasting wind of their passage, but he believed he heard the men laughing; and sometimes it seemed that other voices joined in the laughter. Their speed increased even more when, beyond the horizon, Cyril saw what he would once have called heat-lightning. That phrase belonged to a scarcely remembered world of fireflies in the green gloom of summer evenings, when such tinpot charades as thunder and lightning had seemed awesome.
He heard even louder thuds than those of the mighty feet.
Brigadier Sir Rolf Hunt-Barker, Bart., seemed not fully appreciative of the wonder that Cyril had brought him, due to his apparent state of elevated confusion. But the lieutenant was unwilling to fault the mental condition of a superior officer who had been deprived the fealty of twenty-two thousand men before lunchtime that day, all of them marching with full field packs and in measured cadence up to the muzzles of the German guns, or as close to them as their individual fortunes had permitted.
It would be impossible to maintain secrecy for long. The Colossus had arrived before dawn, and that afternoon a Fokker eindecker had determinedly buzzed the rear area where it lay under camouflage tarpaulins. Sir Rolf decreed that it should attack the enemy trenches shortly after nightfall. He rejected Cyril's pleas that its way be paved with an artillery barrage.
“Surprise the sods, that's half the battle,” the brigadier said. “One track minds, that's the Huns’ weakness. Ever listen to their bloody awful Wagner, on and on and on for eight hours at a stretch without one tune you can whistle? Throw a surprise at Fritz and he's like a schoolgirl with a thumb on her button, he lapses into coma and lets you have your way. ‘This vass not in the battle-plan, Herr General.’ Haw! Beer and music, that's all they're good for, and they can keep their music. We'll beat their swords into ploughshares for them, and we'll do it with their thick skulls. Surprise!"
The brigadier wanted the Colossus to carry a howitzer, but the difficulty of converting a field-piece to a side-arm, to say nothing of training the irregular conscript to use it, soon became obvious. In the end a Lewis gun was strapped to its shoulder, which Cyril could man while traveling behind like a Red Indian's papoose. Five knapsacks of grenades would ride on the monster's back beside him, to be distributed at his discretion.
The only other equipment Sir Rolf allowed, indeed insisted upon, was a pair of Union Jacks draped fore and aft on the giant's loins for modesty and “to make sure Fritz knows who's stamping his kraut-crammed jowls into the mud."
The French, who might have been said to own the Colossus, were too late in advancing their vehement objections to this.
Cyril thought that Sir Rolf had relented and he was getting some artillery support, however minimal, when he heard the distinctive crump! of a mortar behind him. Then the star-shell burst overhead. Within minutes it was joined by a leisurely descent of parachute flares like Pentecostal tongues in the enormous night. The brigadier had wanted Fritz to see what was coming for him, and he did, but instead of lapsing into coma he woke in a chaos of whistles, sirens and bugles and opened up with a dozen machine-guns and a thousand rifles.
“Mind you don't muck up our wire,” the brigadier had said, but in the stark light of wafting flares Cyril saw that the Colossus dragged hundreds of yards of it from his ankles, along with its attendant stakes and entangled soldiery: as if a plucky detachment of today's dead had joined the medieval corpses to march against the arch-foe of Western Civilization. This image was spoiled when he noted that the march was more like a madhouse quadrille, a flopping, rolling and continual shedding of loose parts and individuals, along with a sporadic recruitment of bloated things that the draglines wrenched out of the mud.
“I gave as good as I got,” Cyril said aloud as he composed a letter to Penelope to keep his mind at one remove from his descent into Hell, but that was untrue. He could give only a sputtering cackle of small-calibre bullets while getting the massed firepower of an army that had long been pining for one big target. The giant thrummed and creaked like a ship battered by wind and wave. A rain of bone fragments rattled on Cyril's helmet as the vast ear above him was whittled away.
A whole German division saw his pathetic gun as the likeliest aiming-point on the monster. He released the grips and slid below the shoulder, where he found himself pressed against a woman: as dead as anything could be, but wr
ithing in a mockery of passion as part of the muscles that swung the ponderous arms in time to the stride of the Colossus. He wrenched his mind from thoughts that made him unworthy of Penelope and surveyed the mud behind him, where he noticed for the first time that his chaps were cheering him on.
The foe brought larger weapons into play. The Teutonic delight in skipping shells off the ground and counting on air-borne concussion to do all the damage seemed less efficient than would have been direct aim at the solar plexus. Their method had little effect on the inexorable legs and feet. But as each scorching wind roared against its chest from exploding shells, Cyril grew more aware of a stench of roasting carrion. As the heat was transferred through the shoulders, the bodies around him began noticeably to soften, to weep and bleed unspeakable fluids.
“Turn back!” he screamed, not thinking what this would mean to his own position vis-à-vis the enemy, but only of the knights and scholars and lovers and laborers of his dream, who were being punched to pieces by the steel chisel-point of a universal fusillade. “They're killing you!” In sardonic response, the mouth of a nearby corpse flapped suddenly open as its liquefaction quickened.
Unwilling to cringe at the rear any longer, he heaved himself back to the shoulder, his boots now sinking like one climbing a muddy slope. He seized the gun and opened fire on the Hun trenches, shaking the weapon and screaming as if to lend the piffling spray of lead the force of his outrage. The gun jammed. He tore open the nearest sack of grenades. Before he could grasp one he found himself tumbling helplessly through a world of white light.
For a short while, he sensed the presence of countless companions.
“
Bloody fucking hell,” said Private Thomas, who witnessed the direct hit to the chest of the Colossus from the questionable safety of a firing-step. He had wagered heavily that Little Hansel would win the war single-handed, and he saw the sudden blossoming of the monster into a cloud of tumbling bodies and wafting flags as a symbol of three months’ pay strewn to the winds.
“It was a lucky shot,” Powell said with false sympathy. “Our Colossus should have taken a round from Big Bertha in the belly without so much as rescheduling his bowel movements."
“Shut your bloody holes and look sharp for the attack!” Jenkins shouted.
“Our attack, he probably means,” Thomas groaned, and he was dead right.
No part of the Colossus remained intact, no giant leg or foot to prove that it had walked the waterish waste, only corpses. Rain fell all that night, mingled with occasional showers of high-explosive shells and sleet-storms of machine-gun fire. The dead rose from their graves to be rearranged and reburied. The landscape was smudged out and redrawn again, the soup of mud and men and steel replenished and stirred yet again, until no one could have said with any certainty which were the new corpses and which the old.
About the Author
Brian McNaughton was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and attended Harvard. He worked for ten years as a reporter for the Newark Evening News and has since held all sorts of other jobs while publishing some 200 stories in a variety of magazines and books. He recently ended a ten-year stint as night manager at a decrepit seaside hotel, where he once had the honor of helping his hero, Warren Zevon, break into a stubborn soda machine. The Throne of Bones won the World Fantasy and the International Horror Guild awards in 1998 for best collection.
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Even More Nasty Stories Page 19
