The Eyes of the Dead

By

G.R. Yeates

Copyright (c) G.R. Yeates 2011

All Rights Reserved

Acknowledgements and Dedication

I would like to thank the following for their help, hard work and support provided during the evolution of this, my first novel.

Celeste Ramos Bjork-Larsen, for being a superb editor who didn’t mind being creeped out by my fuliginous imagination.

Ronnell D. Porter, for his fantastic cover artwork.

Ruth Latchford, Jez Joubinaux, Kris Dyer, Jason Brawn, Dolores Harrington, Mark & Tori Waddington for invaluable friendship, encouragement and booze.

I would like to dedicate this work to the memory of Claude Choules (1901-2011), the last combat veteran of the First World War.

Prologue

Private Wilson breathed in, choking as he did. He rolled over onto his back. Watery-brown muck ran from his mouth. He sat up and spat the rest of it out. Wiping the back of his hand across his lips, he looked around.

It stretched away from him in all directions.

A wasteland, gouged through with abandoned trenchworks. His uniform was soaked. The colour no longer discernible through its thick coating of filth. Icy bullets of rain fell, striking his face. Shivering, he clambered to his feet, sinking into the soft ground. He heaved his way through the mud. The going was slow.

He didn’t know where he was going.

He knew he had to keep moving.

As he slogged on, he felt his head aching. Then throbbing. Scalding force was gathering behind his eyes. Bringing tears. Sending lines of fire racing through his brain. He could feel movement inside his skull. The pain was a restless animal, scratching away the inside of its bone prison. Its furious cacophony clouding his mind, making his eyes water. The scratching was cutting deep too. It was working its way into the matter of his mind, re-opening scars. Wilson could feel the memories bleeding out.

With a cry, he fell to his knees, suddenly remembering everything.

Chapter One

Fuck Belgium, thought Private Wilson, spitting rainwater from his mouth.

What a fucking shithole.

Bent double like a beggar, wearily, he marched on, resting a hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. It was the only way to be sure of following a safe path. There were no roads or pathways here, just the endless trails of duckboards. Everything here was half-submerged in the mud. The duckboards squelched sickeningly underfoot.

In places, the trail was broken up by bombardments from the German guns. Wilson felt the wheezing softness of dead bodies giving way as he marched over them, making him feel ill.

Rain lashed down from the pitch black heavens. The only light was cast by flares bursting overhead, sending shadows scurrying over the wasteland. Wilson looked out across the flickering shades of the landscape before him. He saw soldiers stumbling along, heads bowed against the wet wind. Each man buried deep in his own bleak thoughts. Behind them was Ypres, or Wipers, as they called it. Before them rose the ridges which led to the village of Passchendaele.

Fancy names, thought Wilson, as a flare illuminated the crude ruins of his surroundings. Fancy names for a place that’s gone to hell.

The Germans occupied the high ground, the ridges of which curled around on both sides, looking down over the lowlands occupied by the soldiers of the Entente. Their Generals said the Ypres salient was a valuable point of penetration into the enemy lines. It must be held at all costs. To the soldiers, soaking and shivering in water-logged trenches, it was a death trap. Wilson watched the enemy’s flares going up all around them.

They were surrounded.

You weren’t even safe if you kept down low. A whizz-bang shell could get you. Poison gas could get you. Disease festering in the thousands upon thousands of corpses lying in the muck of no man’s land, that could get you as well. The Germans were safe and sound in pillboxes made from concrete and steel. Death was everywhere for the Entente soldiers below. As long as the bullets flew and the big guns rained down shells upon them, death was there. It was there when they slept, breeding freezing nightmares, which crawled up into their sweating brains. They felt it eating away at their nerves as they dug into the wet ground to make shelter. They heard it as a voice, as hollow as the holes they were making, telling each man that he was digging his own grave.

Chapter Two

Lieutenant Phillips crawled on his belly through the marshy ground towards the next shell hole in the line. His passage disturbed bones and rotten pieces of flesh from the ground. The smell of the dead lanced his nostrils. He held his breath. Christ, what a hellhole we’re fighting for, he thought, no-one’s going to want it once this is all over.

Thanks to the light cast by a flare, he could make out three moving shapes in the shell hole ahead. He could hear voices. One of them was high-pitched and ragged. It sounded like one of the young soldiers was losing his nerve. That was the last thing he needed.

These lads were to advance in the morning. Black Wood was to be taken and it was going to take bitter fighting to do it. There would be hundreds of bodies sinking into the slime by tomorrow evening. The men needed to keep their heads. At least for now. He found himself smirking at the black humour in the thought. One of the young soldiers getting windy was all it would take to set some of the others off.

Lieutenant Phillips slid down into the shell hole.

“What seems to be the trouble here, Sergeant?”

Sergeant Smith saluted the Lieutenant, rainwater dripping from his bristled face. He was a thick, sturdy man. Years of rough living had taken all the softness out of him. Only calluses were left.

“It’s young Brookes, sir. We can’t shut him up, keeps calling out for his bloody mum.”

As the shelling lulled, Phillips heard the plaintive mantra, “Oh, Mum! Oh, Mum! I don’t want to die! Oh, Mum!”

“I’ve given him a talking-to and a few slaps but nothing’s snapped him out of it.”

Phillips moved towards Brookes. He was a washed-out spectre huddling at the back of the shell hole. He was just a boy. Phillips could see that plainly. Another one who’d lied through his teeth to get up to the Front where the action was. Now here he was, tear-stained, soaked through, not living the proud romantic adventure he had expected. Phillips might have pitied him but his plaintive cries were putting this part of the line in danger. Depression and panic were always just below the surface out here. He’d seen it in the eyes of many men. He’d felt it himself.

Getting the horrors, that was what the lads called it.

The boy’s cries could also draw fire from the enemy. If the men around here were cut to pieces because of Brookes, the boy would be up on a charge, shot for cowardice, made an example of. All these thoughts spun through Phillips’ mind as he faced the snivelling child.

“I can’t stay here! Let me go home! I don’t want to die! Oh, Mum!”

Voices from the other shell holes carried over to them on the night wind.

“Get ‘im to shut his bleedin’ row up, will you?”

“Send the little sod home. We don’t need the likes of him out ‘ere.”

“Give him a fuckin’ clout so we can all have some peace and get some kip, eh?”

Phillips struck Brookes hard across the face.

The boy’s head lashed to one side from the force of the blow.

He overbalanced and fell.

“Look lad, we’ve got no place for cowards out here. Everyone is going over the top tomorrow, including you. If I find you have been had up for desertion or any other kind of charge then I will bloody well shoot you dead myself. Do you understand me, Private?”

Brookes blinked, one hand pressing against his cheek. He did not make a sound. Lieutenant Phillips looked down at him, not breaking eye contact with the fallen boy.

“Get up, wipe yourself down and stay quiet, you hear?”

“I think I can handle the boy now, sir,” said Sergeant Smith.

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Smith waited until the Lieutenant was gone and then he moved forward, putting a comforting arm around Brookes’ shoulder.

“Come on, boy. You bunk down with me tonight. We need to get some rest in before the morning.”

******

Brookes and Sergeant Smith huddled up together like lovers. The wet night air numbed them. Warmth was a sensation that was almost alien out here. A memory, no more.

“How long d’you think it will last, Sarge?”

“You mean the war, boy? It’ll last as long as it will. Until we’re all shot to pieces. The Generals haven’t done right by us yet and I don’t see how they will do anytime soon.”

Private Brookes was still new to the trenches and younger than he should be. They all knew the truth but kept quiet about it. There were plenty of other underage soldiers, on both sides.

I might be a holy terror with the lads, thought Smithy, but I respect any man or boy who wants to come out here and stick one on the Boche.

Besides, Brookes could not be spared. There was one job out here that fitted the underage Private so perfectly that it became his nickname.

The tag of Look-out Brookes was his before he’d been in the trenches for one week. His eyes always seemed to need something to keep them busy. Unexploded whizz-bang shells. Skulls and bones in the trench walls. Fat rats shuffling about in the dung of the toilet pits. A Jerry deserter here. A barbed wire entanglement there. That’s why the lad had joined up, Smithy guessed. He couldn’t stay at home and read about it in small print. He had to be there, seeing it all happen.

Those enquiring eyes of his could also be his downfall, though.

He remembered catching Brookes peering over the edge of the shell hole one morning. Watching the Jerry work parties collecting their dead from no man’s land. Rifle at the ready. Thinking he was one of the heroes in the newspapers.

One of the heroes who’s now six feet under, thought Smithy.

He grabbed Brookes, jerking him down, “You’ll get a bullet right through that curious eye of yours. We know the bastards are there and what they’re up to. Leave them be. You don’t need to be looking out for ‘em today.”

With that memory in mind, Smithy went to sleep.

Brookes shivered.

This wasn’t what he had expected the war would be like. It was so different from his favourite picture. He’d seen it years ago in a newspaper.

A black and white drawing of a boy trumpeter, galloping through bursting shells. A bandage on his head and a look of determination on his face, speckles of blood dotting the bandage. The stains were his badges of bravery. He had imagined the boy charging across the field of battle, all hope for victory resting on his young shoulders. Brookes had wanted to be that boy, proud herald of the final charge that would crush the murderous Hun, driving them back to their borders.

He knew now that wasn’t going to happen. He’d been lucky to survive this far, but he still wanted to do the right thing.

That was what Mr Kennington had always told him to do.

He twisted about in the sucking pit of the shell hole, dreaming.

He was back in the study, the afternoon light catching twinkling motes of dust as it fell through the gaps between the heavy curtains. It had been his father’s study. Mr Kennington was allowed to use it after he became the lodger. Mum hadn’t wanted to take one in but she’d needed the money, being a widow. She also needed the company of a man.

Young Brookes had been able to tell.

She never admitted it though.

Mr Kennington had made war seem so glorious to Brookes. It was a man’s life. Bringing civilisation to the outermost reaches of the world. Showing the people out there the right way to live. Mr Kennington had been a cavalryman in the Boer War. He was invalided home after taking a bullet in the chest. Brookes had marvelled at the white knuckled ridge of scar tissue. Running his fingertips across it, he imagined the nugget of metal, burrowing its way into Mr Kennington.

“You do the right thing with your life, young David. You never know when death’s going to come that bit too close to your heart.”

The big guns opened up again, throwing out splashes of white light, sending their murderous loads roaring across the heavens, jolting Brookes from his dream.

“You alright?”

Brookes nodded at the questioning silhouette.

It was Private Wilson.

“Yeah, fine.”

“Get some sleep, pal. We’ve got a lot of being shot at to do in the morning.”

******

Wilson couldn’t sleep. He rubbed at the bags under his eyes. Rain ran through his dark blonde hair. He was feeling the cold and the damp down to the bone. War was a shitty business, but there were worse things in life. Like the way civilians look at a soldier. They don’t understand what war means. They never could. War changes you. The man who goes home after the peace treaties are signed isn’t the same as the boy who left to fight years before.

That was why Wilson never went home. He could have gone home after the night of the fire. There would have been no questions asked. He didn’t remember what happened to him that night but he knew that it had been bad, really fucking bad.

…darkness then the bright fire…

…burning men falling…

…falling in flames…

He had been found after it was all over. His memories incinerated. Nothing of who he had been remaining, except for his name. He had no home that he could remember. Nothing then to return to. So he stayed. He would see the war through to the end, whatever that might be. Something brushed past his leg. He jumped and kicked out at it. There was a shrill squeak of pain. It was a rat.

“Awh, fuck!”

Wilson hated rats.

He kicked out again.

His boot struck a puddle of water.

The rat was gone.

Chapter Three

Dawn crept up from the horizon. A miserable shroud spreading over the battlefield. For now, the big guns were silent. They would start up again as soon as the signal to attack was made, hailing down a murderous curtain of metal rain for the infantry to advance behind.

Wilson yawned.

Smithy laughed at him.

It was not a happy sound.

Smithy, Wilson and Brookes were waiting, as always, resting against the soggy lip of the shell hole. Waiting for the signal to go over the top. Their packs were heavy on their backs. Aches and pains were wearing into their shoulders.

Their objective stood before them.

Black Wood.

The name was apt.

It was a desolate and unhappy place to look upon first thing in the morning. Or any time of day, come to that. Ancient, pagan and soulless. The trunks of the trees were shattered and dead. The undergrowth was a thick mess of torn roots and mouldering bodies. The latter growing ripe, falling apart in the sour wet earth. One brigade had already gone into the wood, the chatter of gunfire and cries of death carrying back to the men waiting in reserve. The first wave had been ordered to clear Black Wood. Those still in the trenches were to follow on. Consolidate the captured ground.

The plan had not worked out.

As usual, thought Wilson.

The Jerries were still in there, fighting tooth and nail for every inch of ruined ground.

“You ready to go Jerry-pickin’, Look-out?” Smithy asked.

“Can’t think of anything better to do on a morning like this, Sarge.”

His tone didn’t convince Smithy. He could see the rifle shaking in Brookes’s hands. Smithy decided to stick close by him. He didn’t like the idea of Brookes getting windy, running away, ending up with a bullet in the back. That would be a sure sign of cowardice, if the body was recovered. No, Smithy wasn’t going to let that be the end of this lad. He’d give him a hand if things got sticky.

“What about you, Wilson? Ready to go?”

Smithy knew Wilson’s story. Something had happened to the lad, so nasty that it had made him literally lose his mind. Everything, all of his memories gone, snuffed out.

Well, almost all of them.

Smithy had an idea that some had come back. He’d heard the sounds Wilson made when he did sleep. None of them were pretty. Some of the lads had taken to calling him Whiner Wilson. But not to the man’s face. Wilson had a peculiar air about him. Like he could turn vicious in a second. Like he was not just a soldier but something else. Something worse. But, as long as he kept it together whilst he was out in the field, he was fine by Smithy.

“Yes, Sarge. I’m ready t’go,” said Wilson.

Brookes wasn’t ready.

He didn’t want to go over the top. He wanted to take a bullet in the right place. That would be his ticket home. A Blighty wound, they called it. It wasn’t much to ask, was it? He was too young for this. Too young to be fighting and dying. He knew that now.

Now it was too late.

Something brushed his boot. Looking down, he saw a bloated rat. The rat shot up onto the lip of the shell hole. It regarded the boy with heartless eyes. Brookes clawed up a clod of mud and lobbed it at the rat. The missile missed. Brookes stared at the rat. It stared back at him. He jabbed his bayonet at it, hoping to frighten the filthy thing away. It scampered away a few feet.

It stopped.

It came back, still staring at him, enjoying his fear.

“You’ve made a friend there, Brookes,” said Wilson, without humour. “Maybe you can take him home to meet your mum when you get a Blighty, eh?”

The rat shot a glance at Wilson, making him flinch, before returning its eyes to Brookes.

Brookes threw another clod at it.

It didn’t even flinch as the second missile passed by.

Brookes raised the juddering barrel of his rifle towards the rodent.

Squinting down the sight, he took aim.

Smithy batted the rifle down, “You want to end up with Field Punishment One for wasting a bullet on a rat, Private?”

For a moment, there was silence.

“No, Sarge,” Brookes whispered.

“Leave that thing. When the shells start going over, it’ll be blown to kingdom come. It won’t be around to bother you anymore.”

“You saw it, Sarge. It was looking right at me. You know what they say about the rats, that they’re not scared of the dead. I’m not going to get a Blighty. Fuckin’ Christ, I’m going to die here, today, aren’t I?”

Smithy cuffed him on the chin, “That’s enough of that. You’re going over the top with me and Wilson this morning. You don’t think further ahead than that.”

Brookes made to say something more.

“Get back to your position!” Smithy barked.

“Yes, Sarge.”

Brookes braced himself alongside Wilson.

I’m going to die today, he thought, and for what?

Chapter Four

The wail of the officers’ whistles pierced the air.

Seconds later, the first whines of the creeping barrage could be heard.

The shells landed up ahead with a series of wet whumphs. The men squinted through the haze of dirt thrown into the air. In an uneven line, they clambered out of their craters and trenches. Bent over by the weight of their packs. Wincing at the din made by the falling shells. Half-walking, half-wading through the ruined earth. The going was good but they kept their eyes peeled all the same. Everyone watching for the tell-tale sign of movement that would betray Hun positions.

They made it all the way into Black Wood.

Their heads ached from the unending shriek, whine and bang of the barrage. Nothing else could be heard. Officers communicated with gestures of the hand and nods of the head. The claws of the wood closed around them as they moved further in. A few smiles crept across bedraggled faces. No-one dared speak it but the thought was already there, in their heads.

The Jerries had done a bunk.

But that could not be right.

No, they could not be that lucky.

Could cutting down the first wave of the attack have been cover for the enemy’s retreat?

The hearts of the infantry became lighter as they marched on through Black Wood.

Then, they came to the Menin Road.

It bisected Black Wood. It was a supply road. Horse-drawn limbers clattering up and down it, carrying commodities and foodstuffs to the Entente’s soldiers. The Germans knew the road’s importance. With their bird’s eye view, they were able to pound the length of the road with shells, day and night, trying to cut the life-giving artery for good. The shattered remains of limbers jutted up from the slurry of the road. Ugly wooden gravestones for the drivers and horses claimed by the swampy depths.

The soldiers would need to cross the road to complete their mission. They would be exposed when they did so. No-one wanted to take that first step out onto open ground. They might not be alive long enough to take a second one. The officers dithered. Fingering their revolvers, anxious to lead a heroic historic charge, none too keen to be blown to bits. The creeping barrage edged further and further in front of them. If they lost the cover of the barrage, they would be completely vulnerable.

Sergeant Smith took the first step forward.

More followed him, taking one careful step after another. Looking back and forth, back and forth. Easy victories were not common out here. None of them could believe they’d gotten this far as they ventured out onto the Menin Road.

The air behind them tore open.

Cascades of bullets ripped into the rear of the company. Dripping forms were rising up from amongst the trees. Screams of surprise drowned in lungs filling with blood.

Wilson felt Smithy’s meaty hand thump into his back, driving him face forward, “Get your arse down, Wilson, or you’ll never be able to sit down and shit again.”

Wilson looked up, watching his comrades fall this way and that, butchered by gunfire. Smithy whacked him on the backside with his rifle butt, “Come on. We’re going to get those Jerries. They’ve pulled a dirty trick on us and we’re going to pay them back.”

“Right behind you, sir. Let’s get the cunts,” Wilson said.

His face set, Wilson began to edge his way around until he was facing the woodland they had just traversed, where the rain of death was coming from. The attack had degenerated into a massacre in minutes.

Fucking hell, thought Wilson.

It was then that the German bombardment began.

******

Brookes was crawling along behind Smithy and Wilson. The ground erupting around him as the artillery shells of the enemy’s bombardment whistled down. He flung himself to one side as a shell slammed into the ground. The force of the explosion sent him sprawling. Raising his head, Brookes saw soldiers moving quickly amongst the broken trees. All covered in sloughing layers of mud. He didn’t know which side was which. Shrieks intertwined with the chatter of gunfire. Brookes hauled himself on through the shuddering sludge. Another shell wailed down, exploding with a dirty bang. Something tore in his left side. Fingering a warm wet patch with his hand, he cried out. Lightness came flooding into his skull, unwanted. He felt winded, then suffocated. He was being beaten up underwater. Sharp things were stabbing him in the heart. He wanted to roll over onto his back. Catch his breath. He couldn’t do it. The weight of his pack pinned him down. His thoughts were becoming scrambled with

…don’t want to take a bullet…

scalding white lines breaking

…don’t want no Blighty no more…

becoming fractured everything wrong.

He could feel his heart beating blood out through a big hole. He tried to paw some of his lost blood back in. He was rubbing handfuls of muck deep into the wound. It stung and then it burned. Hot and wet then terribly cold. The world buzzed with static, fraying at the edges.

…where is it?…

He had lost his rifle. They would kill him for losing his rifle. He could feel bits moving freely inside himself. Bones scraping. He tried to move. It hurt too much.

…a little piece of death, Mr Kennington, one of my very own…

“Get him! Take his arm!”

Grim, crusty faces loomed over him.

“I’ve lost my rifle.”

Brookes began to cry.

…don’t kill me oh please no…

Smithy and Wilson dragged the struggling Brookes along. The boy was soaked to the skin. Dark with mud. The patch on his left side was darker still, despite the field dressing.

“He’s not going to last, Sarge,” said Wilson.

Wilson wanted to leave Brookes behind. The boy was done for. The war had claimed him. Made him one more amongst the millions dead. Taking him with them would slow them down. Get them both killed. It made no sense to sacrifice three lives when only one was at an end. But he could see Smithy didn’t want to leave Brookes.

The old man was being sentimental, thought Wilson.

“We’ll get him back. We’ll have you fixed up, boy. Don’t you worry, you’re going to be alright.”

A chorus of screams split the air.

More gunfire made them quiet.

“Pick him up and let’s get moving.”

******

Brookes was moving along, rocking from side to side.

…on a train chuffa-chuffa-chuffa-woo-woo…

He was on the train. Going out from Victoria. Away from the Gate of Goodbye. It was taking him towards the battlefields of Belgium. His mind was brimming with excitement, lost in a hot whirl of romances. He saw himself saving beautiful raven-haired French damsels from looming, oil-stained, steam-engine dragons. The monsters spat out rattling streams of bullets, not fire. All of the real dragons had been slain a long time ago by the knights of old. Everyone knew that. So, the fiendish Boche had built new ones to terrorise the world.

David Brookes was going to be the mightiest dragon-slayer of them all.

He stood his ground before the king of the dragons, the Kaiser. Wincing as its bullet-breath ricocheted off of his helmet. He charged at it, thrusting his bayonet deep into a chink in its neck-armour. The great beast let out a pained roar. Rearing back, it tore his rifle from his hands. There was a sound of iron splitting apart. The dragon Kaiser burst open, consumed in a furious ball of flame and gas. Brookes face fell. The damsels dissolved into vapour. Their faces sad and disappointed. The remaining dragons thundered towards him, spitting out steel hails of death. Their muddied mouths were leering, victorious.

Brookes trembled. His eyes went rolling in their sockets, showing the whites. Wilson and Smithy carried him on through the rattling-chattering nightmare of Black Wood.

Chapter Five

Shit and corruption, thought Wilson, we’re lost.

With Brookes cradled between them, they’d had to be careful going back through Black Wood. Rifles banged and cracked all around them. Shells whined overhead intermittently. They sheltered in water-logged craters. Some of which were occupied, but not by the living. The dim outlines of dead men could be seen, bobbing just below the surface of the fetid water they drowned in.

Wilson tried not to look at the bodies.

“What do we do, Sarge?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Now. What do we do about getting back. We can’t stay put. This place is a bloody death-trap. Jerries everywhere. We’re going slow and it’ll be getting dark soon.”

Wilson knew bringing Brookes with them would lead to this but he had kept his own counsel. He was a Private and Smithy was his Sergeant.

“You suggesting we leave Brookes here? Ditch him? You wouldn’t be thinking that?” Smithy’s voice was shaky, strained.

His eyes threatening Wilson.

Wilson paused, considering his next words.

He shook his head, “No, Sarge, but we need to do something. Look at him, he’s half-dead as it is. If we keep bunking down into these holes, he’s likely to catch something. Get an infection.”

Smithy cast a sideways glance at Wilson and then at Brookes. The wounded boy’s face was bleached of colour. His eyes were wide and wild in their sockets. Every time he came to, he croaked, “I got a Blighty, Smithy. I got a Blighty. I’m no coward. I lost my rifle but I’m no coward. It got me in the side, not the back, see. I’m going home. I’m going home with a real Blighty, a real one.”

It was going to take them an age to get him back, if they made it, and, by then, he could well be dead. They might be doing all of this for nothing.

Maybe Wilson was right.

He looked at Brookes again, thinking about what to do.

No, he couldn’t leave the boy behind. Even if he was dead by the time they got back. He would, at least, get a decent burial. He deserved that. If they left him, he would rot in the slime of the wood along with all the other poor bastards. Never to be found.

That was no way to end your days on this ball of clay, thought Smithy.

He got to his feet.

“Come on, Wilson. Let’s get him, and us, out of here. It’ll be dark soon.”

******

They crawled on. Their progress was painfully slow as they went inching towards the perimeter of Black Wood. Crouching then running and ducking down. Bullets came bang-cracking through the air every time they raised their heads. With every yard of ground they covered, they became wetter and weaker. In the pits of their stomachs, they felt a gnawing that was not hunger but fear.

Fear that they would not get out alive.

There it was, up ahead.

A flicker, light through the branches. Smithy and Wilson exchanged glances. The tangled fringe of the wood was waiting for them. Beyond it, open ground. But the distance to it was exposed. If they went for it, over that last patch of ground, they could well take bullets in the back. They would end up looking like cowards, fleeing from the battle. Brookes let out a wet, chuckling wheeze. His entire body convulsing violently in their arms.

Smithy nodded at Wilson.

They hitched Brookes’s arms over their shoulders and went for it, half-dragging, half-pulling him along, jolts of pain making him groan.

“That’s it, boy. As long as you’re moaning and groaning, you’re alive. You’re still with us.”

Their muscles ached. Their skulls rang from the endless gunfire. The ground sucked at their feet as they moved. Trees ripped at their bodies and faces. A crack of rifle fire sounded right behind them. Wilson’s heart skipped a beat.

He winced.

A twinge in his back.

Must be from humping this bloody pack and Brookes around all day, he thought.

Then, the world became faint, washed-out. He closed his eyes against a flush of pain. He opened them. He was okay. Black Wood was falling away behind them.

Its claws letting them go free.

Smithy and Wilson looked out over the battlefield. Dusk was settling over the salient. Shadows ran into one another, spreading, drowning the earth. Wilson dribbled the last trickles from his water bottle into Brookes’ slack mouth. The wounded boy’s jaw worked feebly, trying to catch the liquid. Most of it ran over his chin, down his chest. His breathing came in light whispers. They were still out in the field, nowhere near the support trenches. Brookes retched, spitting a stream of slimy blood.

“What’s that?” said Smithy, “Over there, Wilson! It’s one of the villages, I think.”

Wilson squinted. His eyes following the direction of Smithy’s jabbing finger. He was pointing to a cluster of unevenness. The edges of it were sharp and unfriendly. Unnatural against the fading light of the horizon.

“I think you’re right. Brookes might make it through the night if we can get him under some cover.”

Kneeling down by Brookes’s shivering form, Smithy slid an arm around the boy’s shoulders. He leaned in to whisper, “Come on, boy. You need to use all the strength God has left to you. Then we can get you under a roof for the night.”

Brookes’ eyes went wheeling before fixing on Smithy. The whites were the colour of spoiling eggs. The pupils dilating. Brookes nodded his head loosely. The world around him was loud and freezing cold. He wanted to leave it behind. Death was sliding bony fingers through his guts. He could taste phlegmy blood and salt in his throat. Brookes staggered to his feet. Flopping into the supporting embrace of his two comrades. Death might be with him every step but he could go a little further. One last step on your feet was better than lying down and dying.

They set off towards the shapes in the mist.

Chapter Six

Twilight came down as a depressing reverse of the day’s dawn. Light grey faded to dark grey and then to blackness. The shapes in the mist were the ruins of a church. It had no roof. The empty carcass was all that was left of it. Rubble was scattered everywhere. The walls were holed from countless bombardments. Looking up at it, Wilson frowned. He’d never seen or heard of it before.

Smithy kicked at a lump of fallen masonry.

“These walls won’t protect us any more than the trees in the wood,” Smithy said, “One good bang and this’ll all be down on top of us.”

“Yeah well, we can’t go any further tonight, Sarge. Brookes is knackered and so am I. We’ll have to doss down here and hope a stretcher party’ll find us.”

“Brookes won’t make it through the night, if we stay here. This place is too exposed,” there was that strain in Smithy’s voice again.

It set Wilson’s nerves on edge. Was the old man cracking up? About to get the horrors? That was the last thing they needed.

“Maybe he will die, maybe he won’t. There’s nothing you or I can do to change that now, is there? “

Smithy eyed Wilson, not wanting to believe him. The Private was right. They would have to stay here tonight. Breathing out hard, Smithy slumped down to the ground. Gravel and crumbling stone gave it some substance, stopping them from sinking down into the mire of no man’s land. Smithy looked over at Brookes. The boy looked dead already. Smithy could see him breathing though. His weak breaths were scarcely noticeable but they were there. You could easily tell the living from the dead, once you saw enough of the latter.

Wilson looked around their roofless shelter. He didn’t remember seeing it marked out when they were doing the dummy battles behind the lines at all. The officers had been very careful about the details, even using scale models, not wanting to leave anything out. Clumps of foliage were the trees. Lengths of wood were the trenches. Little stacks of brick were the buildings. Wilson remembered wondering if they all had toy train sets at home. Neatly laid out in the attics of their country mansions, with mocked-up villages, bridges and rivers.

This church had not been mentioned once. That bothered him. It nagged away at the back of his skull.

…scratching…

It was odd, considering how much of it was still standing. There were mills and villages out here that had been knocked flat. They were still marked out for the dummy battles. But not this place. Wilson shook his head. This was shelter. That was what was important. Brookes was dying. He was better off doing it here than being blown sky high as they struggled across no man’s land. Wilson stood up to stretch, aching lines of fire were racing through his shoulders and down through his back from all the walking and carrying done today.

A machine gun sang out.

Wilson threw himself down. Bullets rattled off stone. He rolled over, watching the light of a flare catch, briefly, on the crimson wings of an aeroplane swooping overhead.

Some bloody shelter, he thought.

The three lost soldiers shuddered as they huddled together for the night. Brookes tugged at his field dressing, pressing it tight against the wound in his side. A moment of unconsciousness swept through him. Smithy elected himself to be on night watch. Wilson didn’t argue. He settled down to sleep. He began to dream.

Fire everywhere.

Leaping through the air, weeping flaming droplets as it sprayed over men. There was nothing they could fight it with. Bullets and bayonets were no match for fire. No-one knew what to do. They were at the furthest tip of the salient.

This was Hooge Crater, a pit born of incessant mining, counter-mining, bombing and shelling. The trenches were lines of sandbags the men crouched behind, no more. The first waves of liquid fire swept through the sandbag barriers, setting men alight. They opened their mouths to scream. They ended up swallowing mouthfuls of boiling petrol that roasted their throats. Uniforms were burnt into flesh. Raw faces were raked with madly blistering fingers, tearing off chunks of cindery meat as they burned. Through the inferno came phantoms, bent forward from the weight of the sloshing black canisters on their backs, holding thick, gurgling hoses in their hands. One of them turned the glinting nozzle of its hose on Wilson. Wilson froze. He wanted to move, to run away. His limbs were unwilling. The nozzle was empty. Dead and empty.

Then, it burst into blinding life.

Wilson rolled over in his sleep, clenching his teeth, hissing through them.

It was gone midnight now.

Smithy could no longer ignore the aching in his bladder. Clouds covered the night sky, drowning the salient. The dull throbbing was hurting him too much. He didn’t fancy being caught with his trousers down by the Boche but he would have to risk it. Smithy staggered across to the far wall, fumbling with numb fingers. Wiping the bleariness from his face with one hand, he moved his feet apart. He didn’t fancy pissing on himself. The wall was a greyish blur in the solid darkness of the night. He reached out to it for support. The ground gave way underfoot. There was a crash of breaking stone. He jumped back, piss spraying onto his hands and puttees.

The Germans were a dab hand when it came to leaving nasty ‘presents’ for the unwary. He waited, freezing, not moving.

Nothing happened.

He squinted through the gloom at the hole that had opened up, right where he had been standing. Water trickled down into it. He could hear it dripping on stone, not far below. Smithy knelt down, clawing rubble away. He reached into the hole. He could feel a cool surface under his palm.

“Well now, will you look at this, eh?”

He cleared away the remainder of the rubble. His eyes adjusted. He could see low stone steps.

Smithy went down them.

The dark surrounded him. A thick dusty stew of buried blackness. The only sound down there was Smithy’s heart, beating a frantic tattoo inside his eardrums. Battered old stonework revealed itself. There was an opening visible in the far wall. A tunnel leading further in, perhaps. The air was musty and dry. It was quiet. No signs of life.

Smithy made his way back to the surface.

Stumbling back to his comrades, he shook Wilson awake.

“Wilson, I think I’ve found us some better shelter for the night.”

Wilson blinked at him, “You what, Sarge?”

“Some shelter. Underground.”

He led Wilson across to the hole in the ground. Smithy nodded towards it, “The old church crypt. We can kip down there until the morning.”

“What if someone’s down there? Jerries?”

“We’ll secure the position once we’re in. Brookes has a better chance if we can keep him in the dry than if he sleeps out here.”

Wilson didn’t voice more misgivings about the Sergeant’s idea. Smithy was on edge and he didn’t want to test his temper.

They collected Brookes and went down into the crypt.

“Give me your torch, Wilson.”

Wilson stripped off its waterproof sacking. He passed it to Smithy. Smithy turned it on. Pale light played over the walls and ceiling. The ceiling was low, stopping just above their heads. There was a dry mouldy odour in the air. A thick carpet of dust crunched under their boots. Torch light winked off of bone.

Wilson jumped back.

The grinning death’s head of a human skull was lying on the stone floor. He felt the empty eye sockets looking at him. The empty orifices studying him, looking into him, seeing what was buried there. Deep inside. Wilson looked away. Feeling queasy as something ugly went shifting about inside his head. His skin was creepy-crawling underneath his wet gear. There was something familiar about this place.

Wilson didn’t like it.

Not one bit.

Smithy took a step forward, casting the torch beam in an arc, passing it back and forth over the chamber. Hollows were cut into the walls all the way along. Each one filled with dried bones and brownish tatters of clothing. The beam alighted on the rough-edged hollow in the far wall. Smithy walked up to it and peered inside. He could make out walls leading away. It was a tunnel going deeper into the crypt. He would have to crouch when he went in. Not an ideal position to be in if there was anyone down there. I’ll have to risk it though, he decided. Death was the price a soldier paid for not securing a position.

“You stay here with Brookes. I’m going to go and see if we’ve got company down here.”

Wilson nodded his agreement. He didn’t fancy the twitchy Sergeant’s company right now.

Smithy headed off without another word.

Wilson watched the light from the torch bobbing away from him. It was soon swallowed up by the gloom of the tunnel. The only sound that came back to him was Smithy’s tuneless whistling.

Soon, that faded too.

Chapter Seven

The dusty ground scuffed loudly under Smithy’s feet. It was impressive, this place. So many bodies, all laid out in their own little holes. The bodies out in no man’s land would never get a burial as good as this. They were left where they fell to sink away, to be lost forever. He could see a faint light up ahead.

Oh well, so much for hoping.

No sound came from the light though. Maybe they were sleeping. That would make things much easier. They might have medical supplies, if he was lucky. Something to pep up young Brookes, long enough to get him back to the support trenches. Yes, that would be a stroke of luck. After a few minutes creeping along, he reached the light. It was a doorway carved into the left hand side of the tunnel. Smithy’s breath caught in his throat as he stepped towards it. He slowed his pace. Careful and quiet, he crept closer and closer. He swung into the doorway. His bayonet blade blinking bright, yellow lamp light reflecting off it.

Inside, a man was slumped over a table. He did not move at the sound of Smithy’s entrance. He was face down on the table, a tin plate covered in browning food beside him. The lamp casting the light hung from a wrought iron brace, set overhead in the ceiling. The chamber was a small cell and contained two dirty beds with straw mattresses, yellowed maps of the local area were hanging on the walls. Smithy recognised the dull grey of Jerry uniforms. There was one of their spiked helmets resting on the table too.

Smithy advanced on the prone man. No movement still. He noticed an empty bottle of wine beside the outstretched hand of the slumped figure.

Evil bugger’s blind drunk, he thought.

“Been toasting the Kaiser one too many times, eh?”

Smithy went up to the man. He took hold of a shoulder and pulled him upright. The head rocked back with a crackle of stiffened cartilage. He looked straight into a face with no eyes. White maggots were squirming in the rims of the empty sockets, disturbed by the sudden light cast upon them. Dried blood was crusted into the hollow of the corpse’s throat. The throat itself was torn open, little more than a ragged hole. The head lolled to one side as Smithy let it go. The tattered sallow remains of a tongue hung from the lipless mouth. He cupped a hand over his mouth, screwing his eyes up, he swallowed hard. Who or what the hell could’ve done such a thing to a man?

It was like nothing he had ever seen. No story about the Hun that he had heard. He could feel himself shaking violently. He backed away, thinking of running, running away very fast from the horror. The corpse was laughing at him. The light from the lamp overhead stretching and twisting the desiccated shadows of its face. Mocking the man who thought he could escape Death by hiding down here. Here was Death, before him. Death was not waiting for him above ground. It was here. This was its true home. Under the earth with the rats and the maggots.

Smithy caught his breath. No, that was all nonsense. The lateness of the hour was just stirring up his imagination. There was nothing to fear here. Everything was alright.

The flickering light glanced off something bright on the table. Smithy reached across and picked it up. It was a glossy sepia photograph. A little girl sitting on her mother’s knee. Both of them were smiling and calm. They were wearing very fancy dresses. Their hair was exquisitely curled. The kind of wife and daughter an officer would have, thought Smithy. Their unseeing eyes stared out from the photograph at a scene that they could never ever imagine. Smithy tucked the photograph into the front pocket of the dead man’s tunic, “There you go, mate, close by your heart where they should be. I’m not one to steal from the dead, even if you are a Jerry. I just hope they never find out you died here, like this.”

Despite himself, Smithy reached out and squeezed one of the emaciated hands. It did no good, he knew that, but it made him feel better. Smithy looked up at the glowing lamp.

“Now, who’s been keeping you alight then, eh?”

Something ancient rustled behind him and drew breath.

Chapter Eight

“He’s been gone too long. Go and look for him.”

Wilson looked up as Brookes spoke.

Well, spoke wasn’t the right word. It was more of a rasping, coming from lungs that were ready to give up. Brookes was forcing them to work, “Go and look for Smithy. I’m not going to last until dawn. I don’t want to die here but I don’t want you both dying too. You both tried to get me out alive. You did your best by me. Go find him,” Brookes was sweating as he talked. Wilson could see the shivers running through him, “I’ll be all right here. Leave me near the hole. I can shout up if any of our lot come past.”

“And what if it’s one of their lot?” Wilson asked.

“Then you won’t hear a thing, will you?”

Wilson averted his eyes from Brookes, running his tongue around the inside of his mouth, not knowing what to say.

Brave lad, he thought.

“Go on, Wilson. Find the Sarge. Go. It’s the right thing to do, that’s what’s important. I’m a goner. We both know that.”

Brookes gave Wilson a shove with his leg. Wilson got to his feet. Brookes was right in a way. The Sarge was not in good shape. Letting him wander off alone was just asking for trouble. The old man might have already lost his marbles for all he knew. He did not say this to Brookes though. The boy thought the world of the Sarge. All the same, Wilson didn’t relish the idea of going hunting for a madman in the dark. The tunnel yawned before him, a hungry mouth, waiting. He swallowed hard and walked in. He looked back over his shoulder at Brookes.

Was that a smile the boy was trying to force across his face?

It was too dark to be sure.

Brookes watched Wilson disappear. He felt light-headed as another coughing fit shook through him. A gush of blood ran out of his mouth, running down his tunic. The cold was everywhere. Spreading through him. He wanted to lift his hands so that he could rub them together. Blow on them. But his strength was gone. His muscles were heavy and useless. Was a little comfort before death too much to ask?

It was.

His tongue lay dead. A piece of raw meat buried in state, in the drying vault of his mouth. All the moisture was gone. Bitter blood coated his taste buds in an oily film. He shivered and shook. His teeth chattered. He shuddered and coughed. A hundred thousand winters were gathering in close, embracing him.

Brookes sighed once and let his eyes close.

******

“Christ, Wilson. You gave me the fright of my life. What’re you doin’ down here?”

Wilson had thumped straight into Smithy as he came around a corner. The old man bristled at the sight of him.

“I came to look for you, Sarge. Me and Brookes thought something’d happened to you.”

Smithy regarded him without saying a word. There was something wrong with the Sergeant’s eyes, “Yeah, I’ll bet. He’s in no fit state to speak. He told you to come down here after me, did he?”

“Yes, Sarge,” Wilson bristled himself at the accusation in Smithy’s tone.

“A likely story. You just ran off, didn’t you? What really happened? A shell explode outside and make you wet yourself?”

Wilson felt a sharp pain explode in his mid-section before he could answer. Smithy had smacked the butt of his rifle into Wilson’s stomach. Wilson crumpled to his knees. His eyes wide. Teeth grinding against the pain. Sergeant Smith stood over him. Blood was flushing the older man’s face. His teeth were set. His eyes were narrow, “You ran off and left him. You shit, Wilson! You coward! I’ll see you strapped to a gun carriage wheel for a month when we get back. We don’t need your sort out here. We need men with some fuckin’ backbone.”

The last word was punctuated by a kick to Wilson’s guts.

The Sarge had caught a full dose of the horrors.

Smithy hauled Wilson to his feet, “I want to see you get done, Wilson. I want everyone to see just what you are. A man who’d desert his own in the field. Brookes may’ve been scared but he’s a good lad. He’s got some guts in him. You’ve got nothing but fear in you. You’re a coward born and bred, if ever I saw one. I’m going to see you shot for it. Court-martialled, humiliated, shot! Now, move!” Smithy gave Wilson a punch in the spine. Wilson then felt the barrel of the Sergeant’s rifle digging in hard.

They started back towards the crypt’s entrance.

******

A beam of unclouded moonlight cut down into the crypt, colouring everything an icy blue. Smithy and Wilson stepped out from the tunnel. Brookes’ head was bowed in sleep. Smithy took cautious steps towards the slumped form, keeping his rifle aimed at Wilson. He shook Brookes gently by the shoulder, “Brookes. Wake up. Come on. Your Sarge’s back. I’m here for you.”

Brookes’s head rolled over to one side. His eyes were glazed, sightless white marbles. The wound in his throat opened up. It was a tattered, lipless mouth, blood running out from it in glistening rivulets.

Wilson’s breath snagged in his throat. The wall thumped into his back as he retreated straight into it. Smithy ran his fingers over Brookes’ face, pulling down the eyelids. He ran a cursory finger over the torn flaps of the neck wound. Brookes’ rifle was on the floor. Smithy could see the boy’s outstretched hand. He had been reaching for it when he died. Smithy bit his lip, his tear ducts prickling.

He turned his rifle on Wilson.

“You did this.”

Wilson blanched.

“You did this, you cowardly bastard. I should have known you would. I shouldn’t have left you alone with him. You done for him and then you were going to do for me too. That’s why you came after me, you cunt. Don’t you fuckin’ move, Wilson. I’m going to do to you what should’ve been done a long, long time ago.”

The rifle clicked as Smithy readied it. There was no time to run. Wilson closed his eyes. He waited for the bullet to strike home.

Nothing happened.

Wilson opened his eyes. Smithy was looking past Wilson. Something was behind him. He could feel the skin on the nape of his neck pebbling cold. The Private turned slowly around.

It was coming towards them.

Chapter Nine

Its eyes were pools of absolute obsidian. Black howling portals of hell. Black as an ocean under a moonless night sky. The eyes froze the two soldiers where they stood. The scrawny naked thing cocked its head on one side, looking at them. A curving smile sliced across its thin, scabrous face. It showed them teeth that were cracked with decay. Splinters and needles, dark yellow and deep brown. Its fingernails were long and torn, clicking like hollow beetle shells.

It stepped forwards.

Then it fell.

It fell apart.

Wilson could not believe what he was seeing. The figure hit the ground in pieces. Hairy moving pieces. Squirming, shrieking pieces. A milling, verminous mass that came surging towards the two soldiers.

The paralysing gaze was broken. They turned to run. The rats were already under their feet. Writhing forms clustering, tripping them. They kicked and stumbled their way towards the steps. Tiny bones crunched underfoot. The vermin shrieked in unholy chorus. Wilson scrambled up the steps of the crypt, ahead of Smithy. The moon bobbing in crazy eights above him. He lunged towards the opening.

A scream pierced the air. Hands grabbed onto Wilson’s legs. He was pulled back down the steps. Smithy had fallen. He was dragging Wilson down with him. The moon bobbed away. Abandoning him to the rats and the shadows. Wilson’s front teeth cracked down on stone. Breaking, then slicing into his bottom lip. He spat out pieces of bloodied enamel. Turning his head, he saw what was making Smithy scream.

“Brookes! You let me go! That’s an order!”

His torn throat flapping away, Brookes stared up at Wilson with glassy eyes. There was no life there. An emotionless grin cut its way across the dead boy’s face. Brookes had Smithy by the legs. The old man was thrashing about, tugging at Wilson, trying to use him as leverage to pull himself free.

Smithy’s voice broke, “Brookes, for pity’s sake, let me go.”

Rats swarmed over Brookes. Shredding his flesh as they passed. The corpse didn’t flinch. The timbre of Smithy’s screaming changed, rising high.

The rats had reached him.

Wilson’s eyes swelled as he realised the rats would soon be upon him too. His stomach began binding itself into strangling knots at the thought. Feeling Smithy’s fingers slackening, Wilson kicked himself free. Smithy pawed the air, grasping at Wilson, reaching out to him for help. Wilson shook him off. Smithy grasped again.

Wilson booted him in the face.

He drove one foot and then the other into Smithy’s face. Cartilage gave way under the assault. Smithy let out a thick nasal yell. His broken nostrils spitting out thick streams of blood. Wilson clambered backwards up the steps, away from his comrades.

One, dead.

The other, soon to be.

Wilson felt sick, watching Smithy flounder, drowning under the grim, ferocious tide. His uniform hanging in shreds, as was his skin, Wilson could barely tell one from the other. Twitching scabby forms, slick with gore, wriggled over Smithy, chewing on him. As Wilson watched, Smithy’s skin began undulating, rising and falling, bubbling.

There were rats under his skin.

Wilson gagged at the sight.

They were inside the Sergeant. Gnawing away his vitals. Smithy grasped one last time at the steps, trying to haul his violated body free. His eyes locked onto Wilson’s. Smithy opened his mouth to speak. He could not speak. There was a lump in his throat. Wilson could see it, protruding, moving. Smithy tensed his oesophagus, trying to clear the obstruction. It didn’t clear. The world spun in a hot, dizzy haze. Brilliant streaks of agony raced along the remnants of his nerves. Smithy felt hairs pricking his Adam’s apple. Bony daggers raking the back of his mouth. Tooth and claw cutting soft membrane open. Blood ran into Smithy’s mouth. Oblivion’s brackish waters swept through his brain. He felt his bowels emptying, sending rats squealing away from the sudden gush. He couldn’t stop his body convulsing. His mouth was filling with a mass of fetid skin and wiry hair.

His jaw cracked. Forced open. Splitting wide.

A black rat burst free from Smithy’s mouth, robed in a miasma of blood and matter. Smithy fell. His eyes rolled up, revealing the whites. His fingers clutched-unclutched. Then he was still.

The rat looked at Wilson. He recognised it. It was the rat from the shell hole. Big, black and unafraid. It made no move towards him. Neither did any of the other rats. They all perched on the corpses of Smithy and Brookes. Dozens of tiny glittering eyes illuminating the crypt, calmly watching the shivering Private.

They know me, thought Wilson.

Wilson clambered up, one unsteady foot after another; he started backing up the last few steps to the surface. He looked at the rats. They looked at him. None of them moved. He felt rubble grind under his heel. Another few steps. There was a squelch underfoot. One more step. He felt a light breeze. He was back on the surface.

Out of the crypt.

Wilson turned and ran. The wail of shells was, for the first time, greeted by him with a smile. He flung himself onto the ground. Breathing in a mouthful of muck. It tasted good. Rolling over onto his back, he spread his arms wide. Rain hammered down on him from the heavens above. It mingled with the tears pouring from his eyes. Wilson looked up at the skies, at the empty darkness there, the cold and ancient light of the stars. He laughed out loud.

It was an awful sound.

Chapter Ten

Dawn crept through the sky. Light spread, washing away shadows from the battered landscape. Wilson awoke with a cry. The rats had not come after him. He was alive. It was no comfort. His mind was pulsing with the livid images of the night.

Brookes and Smithy were dead.

Wilson got to his feet, swaying and staggering. Not knowing what to do next. The rats in the crypt. If he went back, they would get him, tear him apart. Wilson saw them, running over his body. Stinking shades peeling back his skin with long teeth. Plucking out his eyeballs. Lapping at the blood welling in wounds.

He didn’t want to go back there.

But he owed it to Brookes and to the Sarge. Smithy’s face flashed before his eyes. Broken and bloodied. That swollen rat forcing its way out of his mouth.

Wilson headed back towards the church.

Wilson could not find it.

He scanned the land around him, looking for the church’s jagged remains. It should’ve been there, standing in skeletal solitude against the morning sky. He had not run that far from the church, he was sure. There was no sign of the place. There were only shell craters here, old ones too. He peered over the edges of the holes, into the watery depths. Half-expecting to see Smithy and Brookes there, bobbing up to the surface, swollen with gas and water.

A volley of shells whined overhead. Wilson looked up. He watched the murderous blurs come arrowing down. He was too dumb from fatigue to move. The ground erupted. Wilson went flying, the wind knocked from his lungs. He landed in the crater with a wet wallop and a gasp. He lay there in the slurry, out of breath. After some minutes had passed, he was able to breathe. He slithered around, clawing at the sides of the crater, heaving himself to his feet. The water came up to his knees. Then, it crept up to his thighs.

Wilson’s stomach clenched.

He could feel the bottom of the crater softly collapsing under his feet, softly sucking him down. Crying out, he flung his hands out. Gouging his fingers deep into the muck, finding no purchase.

The water rose.

It was now chilling his armpits. Despite the constant crash and boom of shells, there was a sudden quiet settling over him. The boundaries of his world shrank in to the edges of the crater. He bobbed in the water, half-in half-out.

Wilson closed his eyes.

Praying for rescue.

None came.

******

Night fell, draining the last of the light away. Wilson waited. His legs were frozen logs beneath him. His teeth chattered and rattled, giving him a headache. Rain began to spatter the water of the crater.

Wilson fought the urge to cry out. Any sound in no man’s land at night could bring down a shell on your head. Then it would all be over.

Death by fire or water. What a choice to have to make. The water lapped up around his chin. Heavy rain drops hammered down, splashing his face and neck. He tipped his head back, gulping at the air. Water ran into his mouth. A murky curtain descended, obscuring everything momentarily.

He was blacking out.

He struggled. He fought. His mind screamed in protest. His body was giving up, surrendering to the grip no man’s land had upon it. Letting it claim him. Wilson watched the water’s surface shiver from the pounding of the rain. It was closing over him. Then, everything was drifting away, lost above him, as the sucking pit of the crater pulled him under.

Into the Grey.

******

It clouded Wilson’s senses. Clinging to him as he sank into it. Peering into it, trying to focus, did not work. There was nothing there but the Grey. He settled onto his feet. Wilson started walking through the all-pervading Grey. Clutching his arms to his sides. Hugging himself. Looking down, he could only see more of the shifting Grey beneath his feet. Wilson looking around at the limbo he was in. Gooseflesh crawled over him. He was being watched. He could see nothing but he could feel eyes watching him.

Wilson glanced over his shoulder.

They saw him.

Worse, he saw them.

His scream shook the swirling stuff of the strange space. Ripples swept out from him, giving his presence away, bringing them to him, parting the veil. He saw them moving, reaching out for him, scratching for him with those long, broken fingernails.

Chapter Eleven

Wilson jerked up from the bunk. He flopped forward, panting, gulping down air. He looked around. He clutched at his chest. Pain shot through it. His heart hurt. His head spun. Then, the pain eased, passing away. His throat hurt when he swallowed. He rubbed it ruefully. Passing a hand through his hair, Wilson huffed out a breath. It felt good to breathe again.

He remembered running, falling into a crater and then—

That was it, nothing more.

Looking around, he could see that he was in a dug out. The walls were shored up with lengths of fresh timber. The bunks all looked sturdy and new. I must be quite a way behind the lines, he thought. The trenches out on the perimeters of the Front were that in name only. Nothing but shell holes and ditches. This was very different to what he was used to. Wilson ran an appreciative hand over the solid wood of the bunk he was lying in, the rough brown blanket that covered him. A scattering of tiny colourless forms scuttled away as his fingers disturbed the surface of the fabric.

Lice.

Oh well, you can’t have everything.

A shadow passed over him.

“Awake at last, sunshine?”

Wilson blinked at the thick-set figure which had entered the dug-out.

“Smithy?”

The new arrival had a broad smile with four teeth missing. His nose was a large broken monument to fighting. The eyes were a clear sky-blue.

“I’m Hammer Cole, pleased t’meet you.”

The accent was tinged with a lilt of Scottish. The hand extended towards Wilson was thick and powerful.

“Private Wilson,” the words were spoken in a flat, functional tone. Something in the other man’s manner made him decide to keep his introduction formal.

Hammer shook Wilson’s hand with a single firm movement, “I see y’looking at my nose here. I do a bit of boxing when I’m on leave. Gets me a bit of extra pocket money. That’s how I got my name ‘round here. I’ve got myself a mean right hook, knocks men bandy,” he stroked his swollen nose as he spoke.

Wilson nodded.

“How’d I get here?”

“Y’don’t remember?”

Wilson shook his head.

“Found you in the communication trench, lying there like a dead man. Didn’t think y’were breathin’ too well so we brung you back here. You were making a horrible din whilst you were asleep. We all thought y’d gotten the horrors and that y’mind was gone f’good. Which outfit y’from?”

Wilson scratched away the lice nibbling at his neck.

“Westshire Rifles. D Company.”

“Where’re all your pals?”

“Back at Black Wood.”

“Black Wood? Christ Almighty, that’s miles away. Why, that’s nearer Passchendaele than Wipers. How the fuck did y’end up ‘round here?”

Wilson gnawed his lip and shrugged.

Silence was not the best answer to give when you looked to all the world like a deserter. It was the only answer he had though. He had no idea how he ended up here. He could not remember at all.

“Well, you can talk to the Captain about it. He asked me to come along and check on you. As you’re awake, you’d better come with me to see him.”

Wilson rolled out of the bunk and got to his feet.

Hammer didn’t like the newcomer. There was something about the man’s eyes. They were old and cracked. Not the way a young man’s eyes should be. Wilson was damaged goods. He could almost smell it on him. Whatever was wrong with the man, it was not shellshock. Something else had happened to him. Something worse than the war. That was what those strange eyes of his told Hammer Cole. He hoped the Captain would send Private Wilson on his way quick. His being there, in their trench, was bad news.

Wilson followed Hammer down the trench to the officer’s dugout. Losing your kit and your rifle was a punishable offence. He’d also been alone when they found him. He looked around at the men he passed on his way down the trench. None of them regarded him with a friendly eye. Picking his way over fire buckets, sandbags, navigating past scaling ladders, Wilson tried to keep low in the trench. He didn’t have a tin hat on.

A full-blown Morning Hate seemed to be on the go. He felt like it was directed right at him. He hunched down as shells screamed overhead, falling with dirty bangs behind the trench. Steadying himself, he saw Hammer thumbing at the entrance to the officer’s dugout.

“Here we are.”

A battered board proclaimed the captain’s name in angry red paint.

Captain M. Bone

Wilson entered the dugout.

******

A makeshift desk squatted in the centre. It was made from planks propped on top of empty ammunition boxes. A pristine field telephone rested on one corner of the table. A gleaming, well-polished gargoyle. Faded prints of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary hung from the uneven walls. At the back were two beds, one of which was occupied by a man with a bandaged brow. His eyelids flickered fitfully as he slept. The man at the desk was of medium build with auburn hair, parted in a diagonal fashion and slicked back. A bright red wart bulged out from his left cheek.

The sight of it made Wilson feel ill.

Captain Bone was supping from a steaming tin cup whilst reading The Times. He raised two pale ginger eyebrows. Looking up at the intrusion into his space.

“Captain Bone, Private Cole reporting with Private Wilson,” Cole saluted.

Bone folded his newspaper into a neat rectangle and snapped an unemotional smile in Wilson’s direction, “Ah, the unknown soldier. You may go, Cole. Thank you for bringing him to me. I’m afraid Forsythe still isn’t feeling up to much,” he gestured at the sleeping man.

Must be his bat-man, thought Wilson.

Cole left Wilson with the Captain.

Wilson felt very alone.

Bone eyed Wilson, his voice was quiet when he spoke. There was a drawling, earthy twang to it, “Where’s your outfit, Private? Why aren’t you with them?”

The lies were the easy part, “Lost ‘em, sir. I was in the attack on Black Wood. We were separated and I lost track of me mates. I took shelter in a shell hole and then headed back to the line, sir.”

Bone eyed him up and down, “I see. You ‘lost’ them. How do you lose your comrades, Wilson? Are they small change? Do they fall out of a hole in your pocket?”

“No, sir.”

“No, you’re right. They don’t,” Bone glowered at Wilson, keeping his voice even, he continued, “I think that you are not with them because you ‘lost’ them on purpose. You’re not the first. You won’t be the last. I can see it in your eyes. You ran away.”

The statement was spoken not as an accusation but rather as a simple fact. Bone had assessed Wilson, made his decision and passed sentence on him. It was part of his duty as an officer. Deserters had to be made an example of to the rest of the men.

“I didn’t run away, sir,” Wilson protested.

“You did,” Again, the Captain’s tone was quiet and matter-of-fact, almost disinterested, “Do you know how far Black Wood is from here?”

“No, sir.”

“It’s more than five miles from here. That distance could not be traversed by a tank in a day under these conditions, never mind by an ordinary man on foot. You deserted by the time of the attack, planning to use it as a cover story.”

I did the wrong thing but I tried to make up for it, thought Wilson, put it right. He couldn’t say that though. He couldn’t tell this man that his mates had been killed by some bloody monster from a church crypt that did not exist. He stood to attention and looked straight ahead, taking the Captain’s accusations on the chin.

“You’ll be taken down the line at twilight, Private Wilson. You will be taken for court-martial. You will be shot. Dismissed. Private Cole!”

Wilson felt his heart closing up as Hammer Cole led him back to the infantry dug out.

Bone returned to supping his tea and reading The Times. After a few minutes of reading and re-reading the same sentence, he flung it down onto his makeshift desk. His face was a mask of deep, unhappy lines. Sometimes, his duties infuriated him. Sending men from his own side to face the firing squad was a hateful obligation. The court martial was little more than a formality, something that had to be seen to be done. This war, it was utter lunacy, a mad nightmare. If the Germans didn’t kill their men then they did it themselves.

What was the point? Where was the bloody purpose to it all?

He nursed the ornate silver crucifix around his neck between finger and thumb. These days, it gave him no comfort. He looked at the image of Jesus Christ on his dug-out wall. Blank beneficence looked back out at him.

The Virgin Mary?

Her eyes were averted. No answers there. It was all so idiotic. Ask a hundred of the men up at the Frontline what they were fighting for, beyond ideals, beyond heroism or patriotism and the answer would be the same.

None of them knew, not really.

The whole situation was goddamn absurd and, try as he might, Bone could not see the hand of God anywhere in the design. He could see the hand of the Devil but not the Saviour. He could see a red right hand guiding the generals, speaking through the mouths of politicians, stroking their egos, laughing as they made the same mistakes over and over again. Feeding the slaughterhouse of the Western Front. The Prince of Lies was shaping this war into the blackest of comedies. Unequalled in human history.

A war to end all wars.

Bone smiled at the phrase.

There would be no end. Not to war. People liked killing people. That was the truth. Having someone to hate made life a damn sight easier to get through. There was purpose in hating someone. A sense of exorcism as all the unsightly parts of yourself were made the property of another. Without hatred and killing, mankind would have to face the truth about itself.

And truth was never a pretty thing, always unpopular.

That was why he left the States.

He did miss the Deep South. He missed its women, the sultry music of their voices. He missed the earthy attitude to life. He missed its curiously warm and honeyed aura, its homeliness but he did not miss the prejudice.

The race hate.

Near to his church, there had been a dead tree. It was called the Hanging Tree. One day, he awoke to find a Negro boy swinging from it. The mouth busy with flies. The body’s back was a network of ugly scars. A livid map carved out by patient torturers. It haunted him still. The Negro had been thirteen, maybe fourteen. Far too young for such a thing to happen. That is what he had thought then, before seeing the young boys in the trenches here.

Bone cut down the Negro boy, then the tree. It was an old gnarled thing that resisted his axe’s assaults with all its weathered might but, at twilight, it fell with an ashen crash.

Bone was ostracised for this act alone.

The cutting down of a dead tree meant more to the townsfolk than the lost life of the Negro boy. White children, well-schooled, sneered at him. Well-to-do women turned their backs on him. Their menfolk eyed him with a questioning fury. Bone was knocked back by the very people he was charged by God with saving. Man had been told to love thy neighbour and be kind.

Love and kindness were alien things there, Bone thought. I could teach these people nothing and they could not teach me to be like them.

It was not long before a decision was made. Bone stripped himself of his calling, with a hard and bitter heart. It was time to start over, somewhere else. Gathering his belongings and hopes together, he left America behind. With his savings, he made England his adopted home, hoping for sanctuary from hypocrisy.

Instead he found a jealous, selfish land, clinging bitterly to its dying empire. The rich were arrogant. The poor were dull-minded from oppression. The weather was miserable. And, as the war began, he found prejudice was there too. As deep-seated and repugnant as ever, hungry for blood.

As the hostilities gathered pace, he saw everything and everyone with a German name become the enemy. Leichner’s greasepaint was banned from theatres. Spa water was replaced by Buxton water. Germanic delicatessens flew Union Jacks and swore that their sauerkraut and liver-sausage were, in fact, English viands. Citizens changed their names to escape persecution, only for their aliases to be published in The Times. Even prostitutes of German descent adopted Belgian identities. Bone did the same. Before the war, his name was Merrick Bonewitz. He changed how he spoke too, working on his English.

It was all madness. Fearful tales of spies were told. Some were seen signalling out to sea. Others were caught being dropped in baskets onto the mainland by Zeppelins. The enemy was everywhere, according to rumour, if you listened to so-and-so.

Then came the riots.

Lives were ruined. Shops and homes were set alight. People died. The populace of England went from pettiness to murder in such a short space of time. He wondered if there were any hanging trees in England that would soon be used again. He felt raw inside from bearing witness to the horror that was Man. God was gone, humanity abandoned by its disgusted Creator. They were playthings of the Devil now, preferring his Lies to the Light. A world of meat puppets, eager to butcher one another.

Bone looked down at his ageing hands, useless. Here he was, a soldier and a Captain in his Majesty’s army, going through the motions. Sending men to their deaths over the top. Sending men to their deaths before the firing squad.

Death, death and death again.

His every action seemed to end in death. What else was he to do? What was the voice of one man when so many were baying for blood?

He recalled an old Chinese proverb.

If you stand up then, like a nail, you will be knocked down.

Captain Bone sat staring, in the shade of his dugout, doing nothing.

******

Hammer Cole stood guard over Wilson throughout the afternoon, never faltering. If only he could get past Hammer and escape. But where was he going to escape to?

No point heading further behind the lines. The only other way was out into no man’s land. He looked up at Hammer Cole. He decided he would stay put. This was justice. I left Smithy to die. If only it could happen over again. Then he could make amends. No-one deserved to die like that, eaten by those rats. Wilson screwed his eyes shut, willing the memory away.

…pack up yer troubles in yer old kit bag…

He saw Smithy smiling at him. His broken jaw resting in a crooked grin.

…and smile, smile, smile…

The light of day ebbed away. Night spread its dingy presence over the trenches. Hammer slapped Wilson on the shoulder, “Better be going.”

Wilson looked Hammer Cole over, thinking about taking him on. Hammer was too big. Thick with muscles and scar tissue. He would knock Wilson’s block off in a second, easy. He’d do him some damage, no doubt about that, but Hammer would pound him into the ground for his trouble. Wilson made his way out of the dugout in silence. Raging inside against the fate that had befallen him. A moment of weakness had brought him to this. Hammer was close behind him with a bayoneted rifle in his meaty hands. Mud sprayed into their faces as a volley of shells chewed up the ground in front of the trench’s sandbag parapet.

“Ho, look at that. Jerry’s a bit off today. That lot of shells fell short,” Hammer said.

One of the sentries crouched down on the fire step, looking out through a rusted periscope apparatus. It gave him a good means of viewing no man’s land without the risk of taking a sniper bullet in the eye.

The colour ran out of the sentry’s face.

Warning whistle blasts sounded down the length of the trench. Sickly tendrils of vapour were pouring in, staining the air.

“Gas! Gas! Quick, lads!”

Chapter Twelve

The gas came crawling towards them. Hammer fumbled with clumsy hands at his gas mask, his breaths coming quickly as he freed it from its holder. He would be dead in seconds if he did not get it on.

Wilson could look after himself, the coward.

Wilson took his chance. He lashed out at Hammer’s kneecap, feeling it give as he drove his heel downwards. The big man yelled, dropping the mask, clamping his hands to his knee. Hammer roared with pain. He lunged at Wilson. The gas washed over him in a suffocating wave and the big man went down with a splash, gagging on the deadly fumes. Wilson snatched up the mask and wedged it over his head, pulling the strapping tight. He’d always been good at gas drill in training. The mask goggles misted over from his breathing, giving everything outside a washed-out quality. Wilson peered through his goggles at Hammer. Wilson gasped into the stale interior.

The veins in Hammer’s face were bulging, writhing as worms under the skin. The arteries on each side of his oak-thick neck were swelling, straining through the flesh. Skin began splitting open, creating a network of deep bleeding lines. Wilson saw the gas coiling around Hammer’s prone form, turning crimson, then ruddy, as it became suffused with his lifeblood. The body shuddered, convulsing as it was drained dry.

This stuff’s not Jerry gas, thought Wilson.

He turned and ran from its encroaching fingers.

******

Captain Bone heard the screams. The crimson gas followed. He fitted Forsythe with a gas mask before seeing to his own. He ventured out into the trench. One of the men, his face a maze of bloody lacerations walloped into him, knocking him back against the trench wall. The bleeding man fell to the ground. Phlegmy clots of gore trailing in sticky ribbons from his mouth. The man jerked a few times then was still. Bone blanched, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth.

“What in the hell-“

The poison gases used by the Germans were usually corrosives or irritants. They attacked the insides and the more sensitive extremities, the eyes, nose and mouth. This was something very different. He saw the blood-coloured haze settling over the trench. His men were falling, crumpling, collapsing. Every one of them, bleeding to death through their skins. Bone raised his own hands. Seeing speckles of blood dabbling them.

His eyes were wide behind his mask’s goggles. Bone felt a sensual elastic snap inside his brain. A strange smile spread across his lips as he realised what was happening here. He had not been wrong. All these years, he had been right. This part of the world was becoming an outpost of Hell, the tenth circle, Erebus.

This was the End.

The Last Day.

Atop the sides of the trench, he saw snaggled old trees reaching out of the earth, robed by the infernal atmosphere. Tangled in their coiling branches were soldiers. Every one of them crucified. Their heads hanging. Gruesome twists of thorn piercing their wrists and ankles. Skin dangling over bone in drying twists. Rats making nests in their hollow chests. Gnawing fingers. Biting off toes. Plucking at the fringes of ragged wounds. Making the half-dead scream, weep and beg. Yet, as the men screamed, they did so wearing the most wicked of sensual smiles.

Bone saw Him coming.

A dapper moustachioed gentleman in a black suit, top hat and tie. His skull-tipped cane squelching in the flesh of the fallen. His feet walking on the air, just off the ground. His shoes were a shining ebony, their tops covered with immaculate white spats. The elegant, scarlet fork of his tail flicking out between the tails of his suit jacket. He plucked at the curling tip of his goatie beard with finely manicured fingers, the fingernails of which were ebony too.

The Devil stopped before Bone.

His lacquered hair shone. He was smiling, flashing a pair of sharp vampiric incisors. Satan made a courteous and sweeping bow. Raising his bowed head a notch, Lucifer winked a wink that could snatch out a man’s soul. To Captain Bone, he extended a delicate, feminine hand. His voice was smooth, urbane and mercurial.

“Oh, Captain, sir, may I have this dance?”

Bone took the Devil by the hand.

******

Wilson dodged his way down the trench, weaving through the rolling banks of murderous gas. Shrieks echoed all around him. Bleeding hands snatched at him. Bodies fell, crumpling. Streaming rivers of blood ran from splitting skin. The bursts of the first flares of the evening shone through the gas, making it glow a ghoulish crimson. The world was on fire. Everyone was drowning in flame.

Like the night of the fire, all over again.

The past was after him. Bursting into crude life behind his eyes. The memories, hot and scalding.

…his face, what’s he doing to his…

…you want some, pal?…

…s’good this…

Wilson shouldered his way past dying men. A fine red film having settled over the goggles of his gas mask.

…coming from the hoses it was on fire…

He could feel it soaking into his uniform.

…the burning stuff…

This was the doing of that thing from the crypt. It had turned into rats and now it had turned into gas. Must be after me, thought Wilson. Not these poor bastards. Must’ve followed me here. He stopped. He removed the gas mask, threw it away. Turning around, he called out.

“Oi, you want me? Recognise me? You after me, you cunt? Well, come on then! Catch me, if you fuckin’ can!”

The tainted air grew dense, thickening. Wilson tore through it, running. At his heels was a wet whispering, it came flowing after him, over the many bloodless corpses.

Wilson dived into the communication trench. It was a branch of the diggings used by runners and signallers to report back to HQ. Stretcher bearers used it to ferry the wounded out to safety.

The gas wasn’t far behind him.

Leaving the slaughter behind, Wilson felt his own remembrances fading. He felt nauseous. He wanted to know what had happened to him but, at the same, he did not. He had a nasty feeling crawling around in his guts. There was something waiting for him in those memories, from the night of the fire. Something horrific he didn’t want to recall. He could see it. Under the surface of the sea of his thoughts. A charred black leviathan waiting to emerge.

A probing coil of gas slipped around his throat.

Wilson pitched himself forwards, falling away from it. He yelled. He stumbled. Flinging his arms out. He fell. He crashed through a tangle of waxy sheeting. He landed with a gruesome squelch. Untangling himself from the sheeting, he looked about and realised what he had tumbled into.

It was the toilet pit.

Excrement slopped around him as he moved. The walls of the pit were slick with shit. He couldn’t climb out. He breathed the rancid methane in tight little gasps.

Slow seconds passed by.

The gas overhead rolled away. Wilson waited. He heard a voice. A human shadow was cast over the pit.

“Hey, you down there!”

It was Captain Bone.

“Give me your hand.”

Wilson hesitated. Then he reached up a shit-stained hand. The older man grabbed on and hauled him up.

Bone smirked, “Private Wilson? So, Hammer didn’t make it out of the trench before the attack.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, what d’you think that was then, Wilson? A new kind of gas?”

“Yes, sir.”

Bone regarded him with a thin critical eye. He tugged his crucifix out, holding it between his fingers, before Wilson’s eyes, “Why do you think this scared it off then, hmmm? Saved me? A gas isn’t going to turn and run because of this now, is it?”

“I dunno, sir.”

“Wilson, what are you? An idiot? Have you never heard of vampires? Dracula? The undead? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Wilson’s brow furrowed.

Bone went on, “Then let me tell you about the Devil and his servants. Vampires are just one of the abominations he has visited on Mankind, Private. Vampires can turn into rats, wolves, bats and mist. The latter seems to be the form that this one has used on us today. Very clever, right? Having a form that we’d take to be a gas, deceiving us as to what is really going on.”

“Yes, sir. Very clever.”

“You don’t seem to have much to say about it, Wilson.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you listen to me. I have a lot to say. There’re unholy beasts on this earth, demons, and I just saw one of them at work with my own eyes. GHQ will never believe me though. We live in Godless times, Wilson. We’re here fighting Germany for a few miles of wretched land. We’ve turned it into Hell on earth and, in so doing, we have opened the way for creatures from the Nine Circles. From the heart of Hell, the Devil sends his agents to waylay us. Still, men remain blind to His deeds. We blame Man, but Man is only one vessel filled up by the Devil’s evil work. There are many others-“

There was a strange look to Bone as he continued his manic sermon. Wilson did not hear the rest of it. The look in the Captain’s eyes made Wilson queasy. He knew what this all meant. It had nothing to do with demons and devils. Captain Bone had the horrors.

He fixed his lost gaze on Wilson.

“-and why did it spare you, Wilson? Why do you still live, in place of my men? Did you make a pact with the Beast, with Satan himself, to save your life? Did you lead it here? Is that it? Offering up the blood of your own kind was the price you agreed to pay for your life?”

Bone drew out his revolver. His fingers were tight around the butt. A pulse was thrumming in the Captain’s temple. His eyes were hungry for murder. Wilson said nothing.

“You’re going to help me, Wilson. You are going to help me root out this horror and you are going to be my witness. If one man testifies to the existence of this beast, he’ll be locked up but two! They will have to take notice, right?”

Wilson doubted it. Bone was raving, trying to stitch the pieces of his broken mind back together with the logical threads of his military training. They would both be locked up in the madhouse. Still, he thought, better that than going the same way as the dead in the trench. Wilson nodded his agreement.

Bone smiled, “You will go first, Private. Take this.”

He handed his crucifix to Wilson.

“Like Moses, you will clear the way for me, through the red sea that lies ahead.”

Wilson held up the crucifix, feeling ridiculous. He brandished it. He took a step towards the bleeding gaseous wall. It did not flinch. It did not recoil. It continued to hang there. He took a step closer, gnawing on the insides of his mouth with his molars. This had better bloody work, he thought. He winced as Bone’s revolver nudged into his spine, urging him ahead. Wilson approached the heaving mass, holding out the crucifix. This was insane, walking straight into the stuff. It was playing a game with them, he was sure of it. Wilson’s steps became smaller the closer he got to the gas. He could feel fear pumping around his veins. Bone continued to jab the barrel of the revolver into his back, hard.

“Go on, Private, lead the way.”

Wilson blinked sweat out of his eyes and, drawing a deep breath from the fetid air, he thrust the crucifix forwards, plunging his arm into the gas. He tensed, preparing himself for a rush of needling pain.

The gas parted.

It opened up, moving away.

Wilson gasped and then let out a victorious cry, “Don’t want us? Can’t have us? What’re you scared of, eh?”

He jabbed the crucifix at the walls of gas on either side. It swam away, retreating in on itself, melting into the trench wall.

“Come on then. We’re right here. Come and get us.”

Bone came up behind him, “Get us to my dug-out, Wilson. We can telephone GHQ from there.”

Wilson’s jubilation died quickly. Bone still had him at gunpoint. He was still going to be court-martialed and shot. His death was merely being postponed. He heaved himself onward, further into the trench, watching the gas part. Making a tunnel for them to pass through, rolling back in bilious waves. They didn’t look down at the still forms of the dead as they passed them. Wilson’s mind was racing. He had to get out of here, otherwise he was a dead man too. There was no guarantee the phone line hadn’t been severed.

What then? Would Bone execute him, summarily?

The way the Captain was digging the revolver into his back, Wilson was sure he was eager to put it to use. The deadly gas had not left the trench either. It was still hanging over their heads, fronds of it wavering over the trenchworks. The branches of a forest on the borders of Hell. Wilson jabbed at them with the crucifix. Feeling a small burst of satisfaction inside as they dissolved.

There was a wet shuffling sound behind him. An inhuman ululation. Bone cried out.

The thump of a body falling to the ground.

Wilson turned, gaping at the scene that was unfolding before him. They were rising from where they had fallen, the dead men of the trench, pawing at the air. The ground sighed and murmured to itself as they clambered to their feet. Their flesh running like melting butter, reshaping into forms shambling, skinless and raw. Pus was leaking from the hanging folds of their faces. They were snatching and tearing at Bone. Their fingers were mummified, covered in coiled wrappings of cured human skin. They were kneeling over Bone, stabbing into him with their fingers, tearing at him with those quivering maws. The tableau was coloured macabre, the shades of an abattoir, cast over it by the rolling hood of gas hanging overhead.

Bone screamed, snapping Wilson back to reality. He could feel blood hammering in his ears. He had to save Bone. Rescuing a superior officer, it would go in his favour. Clenching the crucifix tight in his hand, he charged in. Striking out. The acrid stench of burning flesh stung his nostrils as the crucifix made contact with the fruit-soft substance of the creatures. They howled and gibbered. Viscous muck ran from the wounds he was making. Their ruined faces seemed to hang, slack with sadness, as Wilson attacked them. Blood-flecked secretions spattered Wilson’s face, stinging his eyes. He struck again and again with the crucifix. The creatures retreated.

Wilson reached out to the prone Captain.

“Come on, sir, we’re going to have to run for it.”

Bone’s revolver went off.

One bullet smacked into Wilson’s thigh. A second hit him in the shoulder, burying itself deep enough to scrape on bone. Wilson shouted, falling to the ground. The third bullet shot past his ear. Through the buzzing haze of pain, he heard Bone ranting, “A coward, Wilson. That’s what you are. A coward dies many deaths. A brave man dies but once. You will not cheat me of my death. You will not make me become as you are.”

Still, Wilson reached out a shaking hand to Bone. Bone was aiming the barrel of his revolver right between Wilson’s eyes.

“Don’t do this, sir.”

“Farewell, Private Wilson. Hell awaits.”

The gas reared up, rolling over Bone in a tidal wave. Its diaphanous folds embracing him. Wilson could hear the wet sound of the older man gurgling as the gas went gushing down his throat, eager to drink his insides dry. Bone’s body bucked violently, writhing from the violation.

Wilson saw no more.

The monstrous creatures were swarming around him. A mummified hand snatched at him. Wilson roared, batting it away. He had dropped the crucifix when he was shot. His fingers slippery with mud, blood and tainted fluid. He reached out for it. Clicking skeletal hands grabbed him, dragging him away from it, forcing him over onto his back. Wilson squirmed as they held him down. He felt the barrel of a revolver being pressed into the top of his head. He felt the cool metal hollow digging into the skin. He heard the percussion of it being cocked, a thunderclap, shaking him to the core.

“No! Please!”

He tried to bite his way free, gnawing at the fingers scrambling over his face. His teeth sank into the dried skin with ease but they did not seem to feel pain from his bites.

The hammer of the revolver cracked home.

…a coward dies many deaths, a brave man dies but once…

Wilson closed his eyes, hoping that he had been brave enough this time.

The bullet powered through skin and then the bone of Wilson’s skull. It went smashing into the brain beneath. Sending a gout of blood and colourless matter streaking back out of the entry wound. Wilson could smell his hair burning. The air above him was blurring into the colour of dawn. Wilson’s head was released. It flopped to one side. His eyes were still and glassy. His mouth fell open, slack. He could feel rats sniffing at the wound in his skull. He could feel them poking their noses inside. Tiny claws and teeth were scrabbling away at the edges of the wound, pulling away obstructing fragments of bone. Clearing the way. Making the hole bigger. Big enough. Scabby skin and sodden fur grazed against the rim of the opening. The rats burrowed their way deep inside. He could feel them, scratching and scratching. Through the shuffling legs of the nightmare crowd, Wilson saw the thing from the crypt, it was watching him.

Its eyes were glinting, it was smiling at him, amused.

Chapter Thirteen

A light!

It was over there, washed-out, a haziness, a steady white glow. He could see something at the heart of it, a stocky shape, standing, picking bits and pieces out of its beard, inspecting them, then discarding them.

“Smithy?”

It was Smithy. The haze made him seem out of focus. He was wearing ragged old clothes and had an unruly thick beard, but it was Smithy.

“Yes, it’s me, Wilson. What d’you want?”

“I dunno. Where are we? What is this place?”

“This is nowhere. Those rats had me, so here I am.”

Wilson avoided the spectre’s eyes.

“I’m sorry, Smithy.”

“Sorry? For what? You thought of yourself, Wilson. You kicked me in the face so you could get away. That’s what people do. We all think of ourselves first in the end, when it comes down to it, not others.”

“I should’ve helped you, Smithy.”

“You should’ve but you didn’t. There’re lots of things in your life you should’ve done, I’ll bet. You think about those things. You dream about them. You want to go back in time and put them ‘right’. But you can’t.”

Wilson looked into the eyes of the apparition. There was no hatred or malice there. They were just empty orbs.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Wilson. I ain’t here to judge you. I was no bleedin’ angel. I’m just here because you want to see me. The guilty part of you wants to say sorry. But you can’t say sorry to the dead, Wilson. You can’t hear much when you’re six feet under, know what I mean?”

“I will say this to you though, Wilson. You are halfway there. Do not go further than this. They know you’re here, talking to me.”

“Who are they? I thought there was just that thing from the crypt after me.”

“No, there’s more of ‘em. They don’t want you knowing that. They don’t want you knowing what’s happening to you.”

“Happening to me? Smithy, what the fuck are you talking about? Who are ‘they’!”

“Be careful, lad. The shadows are gathering.”

Smithy dimmed, a dying candle, flickering out.

Wilson opened his eyes.

It was night. Heavy raindrops were spattering his face. He was lying on a stretcher. The bearers were walking down a length of churned slurry, once a road. Wilson felt the lining of his stomach beginning to crawl. He looked over his shoulder into the tumbling rain behind.

Nothing but the light of falling flares could be seen.

Dying candles, flickering, slowly going out.

He fingered the top of his head. The skin there was undisturbed. He looked up at the bearer carrying the rear end of the stretcher. The man had his face bowed, he could not make it out in the dark. Wilson watched the rain course down the curve of his tin helmet, gathering into beads, dropping down onto his tunic. It was hypnotic. It took his mind off the crawling sensation in his guts. His shoulder and thigh pulsed with dull pain. Wilson couldn’t see beyond the edge of the road. The fall of the rain was too dense for that.

He wondered what was out there, watching them.

He’d heard the stories about the wild dogs. The lost pets of the local peasantry. Abandoned to eke out an existence in the squalor of no man’s land when the bombardments started in earnest, back in 1914. Some people were scared of the rats. Everyone was scared of the dogs. The dogs were bigger, more vicious. They could fell you more easily, chew damn great holes in you, bite your throat out in one go.

Something was there.

He shook his head, flicking fat drops of rain out of his eyes. The rain marked out a shape on the road behind them. It was hanging back, keeping pace, stalking them. The body was low and long. It wasn’t a man.

It was one of the dogs.

Wilson looked away. It was not a dog. His eyes were playing tricks on him. He was imagining things. That was all. Christ, he wished they were at the station already and that he was off this bloody stretcher and on his way. It would be dry and warm and well-lit in the train. No wild dogs in there.

What was he going to do?

Say something to the bearers?

No. they’d just think he was doolally from his wounds.

He looked again.

There it was, following. It hadn’t attacked them. Maybe it was okay. Maybe it wasn’t wild. Maybe it was just a normal stray. Hungry and hoping they would lead it to food. Wilson didn’t believe that for a second. He lay back on the stretcher and began to sing to take his mind off it.

“Pack up yer troubles in yer old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. Pack up yer troubles in yer old kit bag and smile boy, that’s the style.”

Spitting out the rain as it landed on his lips, he thought only about the next line that was coming, belting it out.

“What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile. So pack up yer troubles in yer old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Wilson watched the shape in the rain following them. It did not shrink back as he sang, nor did it move to attack. Whatever it was, it kept on coming. Dim points of lights broke through the gloom in front of them. Wilson felt his heart skip a beat. They were nearly there, at the station. He heard the chunter of a train pulling in. A whistle blew. A flare burst overhead, illuminating the face of the rear bearer.

It was Smithy.

His broken jaw hanging open. The head of the black rat poking out of his ruined mouth. The skin on his head was mottled and loose, coming away from the skull. Bulges rose and fell underneath the shredded cloth of his uniform as more rats foraged in his guts. The black rat hissed at Wilson. The obsidian gems of its eyes staring deep into his own.

Wilson looked to the head bearer.

Brookes turned his head and leered at Wilson. His torn throat flapping open. The dead boy grinned, gurgling, pointing to the battered sign hanging over the station entrance.

Wilson read the words on the sign.

Halfway There

Brookes and Smithy were laughing.

It was an awful sound.

Chapter Fourteen

Madeleine jerked up from her cot. Standing in the shelter of the shadows, they were always there, always with her. She could feel them but not see them, watching her. They did not speak. She was glad of that. She knew that it was not the done thing for the living to speak ill of the dead, but she did wonder if the dead spoke ill of the living. She talked to them every night. Telling them about her day, how Kitty was doing and what she had read in the newspapers about the war effort. She would ramble on in desperate whispers, hoping to placate the restless spirits. As each night passed into the early hours of morning, she would weep. She wrung her hands in penitence, begging them to go away, leave her in peace.

Mother, father and Uncle Albert.

Father and Uncle Albert died at The Somme.

Madeleine remembered receiving the letter. The official buff-coloured envelope with OHMS printed on it. They might be sick or wounded, she thought at the time, swaying on her feet, aware of little else but the feather-weight of the dour envelope in her hands. It was cool and smooth. She knew what it was going to say. She tore the envelope open. Snatching out the contents, casting the tattered envelope to one side, she read what was there. A standardised form headed by a short sequence of letters and numbers.

B.104-82B

She read a little more.

‘It is my painful duty to inform you….’

She bit her lip.

‘….sympathy of their Gracious Majesties…’

The tears were hurrying down her face as she read on.

‘….sincere regret of the Army Council…’

They were gone.

She felt pierced to the core. She sank down. Her knees giving away. Tears spilling down her cheeks. Her throat gagging on grief. The words became a spidery, indecipherable plague of letters. Something inside her gave way. She could not remember telling Mother and Kitty a thing. It was all a blur, a grey shapeless fog.

She could remember discovering Mother the next morning, hanging dead from the crossbeam, her feet made fat, and stained near-black, by livor mortis. Her lips bulging out as a white crust of bloodlessness. Those eyes, all of the capillaries broken open, making them into hellishly livid bubbles staring off into nothingness, out to nowhere.

Madeleine remembered the words of their housekeeper, Miss Hearn, as they stood on the platform at Victoria station. The train hissing, impatient.

“You be careful, my dears. This war will ruin your hands. Just make sure it does not ruin your hearts n’all. You’ve had a devil of a time, losin’ your folks and your uncle. Mind you don’t let things get on top of you. There’s no worse judge of us and what we do than ourselves, you mark my words.”

Madeleine looked down at her hands and smirked at the memory of the old woman’s remark. Miss Hearn had not been wrong. Her hands were not as they had once been. Scrubbing, cleaning, brushing, fetching and carrying had made sure of that. She picked at the remains of blisters, wondering how Miss Hearn was. Communications between the continent and England were haphazard. She hoped to see the village of Sevengraves again, someday. She imagined arriving there, with the sun out. Everything bright and beautiful. The cottage door opening. Miss Hearn being there, waving them both inside with a flutter of her veined hand. The table laid. A feast of roast pork, vegetables and potatoes. All ready for them to tuck into.

Madeleine was disturbed from her dreamy reflections by one of the orderlies walking in. It was Dawson.

“Time for your round, Sister. You asked me to come and get you.”

He was a balding man with a limp face. Bands of wrinkles traced their way over his mottled skin. His hands seemed bigger than they should be. His frame was a wiry one and he slouched as if the weight of his large hands bore him down to the ground.

His eye caught hers.

Madeleine averted her eyes from his gaze and swung her legs off the bed, slipping her feet into her shoes. She began fastening them, “Thank you for letting me know, Dawson. Please don’t call me Sister on the ward though. I’m a VAD. You know how Sister Fearing is if we’re referred to otherwise.”

“‘Course. Sorry ‘bout that, Sister.”

Madeleine smiled at him and stepped outside, brushing against Dawson as she did.

There was a loud crash from the direction of the nearest ward hut.

******

Wilf was a pock-marked youth from the east end of London. He’d been nothing but trouble since being sent back from the Front. The crash of metal had come from a trolley. It now lay overturned on the floor of the hut. An orderly was standing there. Hands bunched into fists. Ready to teach Wilf a lesson he would never forget as Madeleine entered the hut.

Kitty was sitting on the bed with Wilf.

Kitty was the one who always seemed to be able to talk sense into the rowdier ones. Madeleine knew why. Kitty was the prettiest girl in the hospital. She’d blossomed since leaving England. Her figure curving into a shapely hour-glass. She had the sweetest elfish smile too. It brought out her dimples, working a subtle magic on the boys. It wasn’t just her looks though that made her so popular. She was always calm and approachable. Madeleine was prone to being snappy after too little sleep, but not Kitty. She was always on her best behaviour. Kitty looked up. She saw Madeleine approaching, said a few more words to Wilf, then went over to her sister.

“What upset him this time, Kitty?”

“He’s going back to the Front tomorrow. Dr Meredith wouldn’t give him a Blighty ticket. It’s my fault, Mad.”

“Don’t be silly, how?”

“You know how some of the boys believe I have the Blighty Touch?”

Madeleine nodded.

She knew Kitty put in a few kind words for the poorliest patients, in the hope they would be sent home. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. The patients didn’t take much notice of the latter cases though. As far as they were concerned, Kitty had the Blighty Touch. She could get them sent home. That was that.

Kitty went on, “Wilf believed it. I was giving him his supper last night and he reached out. He touched my cloak and smiled up at me. He said, “I’m going home now, aren’t I, Sister?” He thought just touching me would do the trick. When they gave him the news today, that he was being sent back to the Front, he couldn’t believe it. He started shouting and swearing and then he attacked Trevor,” she gestured at the orderly who was busy righting the trolley. “He hates me, Mad. He thinks that I told them to send him back,” her voice broke as she finished speaking.

Mad looked over at the youth. His eyes were accusing. He’d pinned all his hopes on Kitty putting in a word for him. He’d been let down. Mad was sure he’d been let down many times before. It showed in the way anger was carving his face into a hard, unforgiving scowl.

“What do you think will happen to him, Mad?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be fine, Kitty.”

Mad hated the aftertaste the lie left in her mouth. She couldn’t tell Kitty the truth. Wilf would go back to the Front and he would die. To be invalided back from the Front once was lucky. To be invalided back twice would take nothing short of a miracle.

Madeleine slipped a comforting arm around her sister’s shoulders and walked her away. Kitty still had such a hard time absorbing the brutal realities of war. She remembered the first time Kitty had seen a serious injury.

They were both helping Sister Fearing clean up one of the new arrivals. The flesh of his backside had been shredded by barbed wire on the first day of the Big Push at the Somme. Sister Fearing peeled back the last of his uniform. They saw the wound where his buttocks should have been. A suppurating mash of flesh, faeces and pus-flecked gore. Kitty fled from the sight. Madeleine found her on her knees, being sick behind the hut. Her face colourless. Her body trembling.

She was trembling again now, as Madeleine led her away.

******

The carriage of the train was packed. Everyone and everything was crammed in, all too close together. Every inch of space, not occupied by a wounded man, was piled up with comforts and medical stores. Boxes rattled and chinked. Crates shunted this way and that. Sisters swayed their way along the hot airless carriages.

Wilson was awoken by the rocking motion of the train. He blinked dumbly in the faint amber light cast by the hurricane lamps. His wounds were stiff and sore under their dressings. He moaned. The fuzz of sleep drifting away from his memory. He remembered being somewhere. Wet ground, cold, and grey skies. The cries of black birds, scraps of dirty cloth, their dead, dark eyes. The taste of water and blood in his mouth.

He didn’t know how he had ended up on this train.

He had to find out.

A nurse was tottering her way along the carriage. He thrust out an arm to bar her way. She recoiled at his sudden movement, “Please, Sister. Do you know who dropped me off at the station?”

She looked at him. Her eyes were pitted burrows of sleeplessness. “I’m sure it was some of your pals who brought you along, making sure you got out of that hellhole safe and sound.”

She patted him on the arm, smiling a tired smile.

Wilson chewed his lip, “So, you don’t know?”

“I’m sorry, no. We picked up a lot of men at the last stop. Most of you were laid out, ready to go, on the platform. There was no-one waiting with you.”

“Thank you, Sister.”

She went on her way.

Wilson slumped back onto his bunk. The wood felt harsh against his back despite the blanket. He listened to the rap of the nurse’s shoes moving away from him. Then he remembered. His two dead mates, Smithy and Brookes, bearing him along to the station.

But they were dead.

He fingered his wounds through their bindings.

…Wilson…

Craning his neck, he looked up and down the carriage. The nurse was nowhere to be seen. No-one had said a thing.

…Wilson…

The voice was inside his head. Its broken-fingernail sound scratching away at his ear drums.

…did you forget me, Wilson?…

Oh Christ, thought Wilson, I’ve got the horrors.

…it’s me, Wilson. Look-out Brookes. The rats, they ate me up. Do you know what that feels like? They’re going to hurt you, Wilson, unless you keep on feeding them. The rats’ll make you scream, beg them to stop, if you don’t feed them. They’ll keep at you until you feed them more people. You fed them Smithy and me, now you need to feed them some more. Otherwise, they’ll come for you. They’re always hungry, Wilson, always hungry…

Wilson screwed up his eyes, grinding his teeth.

“Fuck off,” he muttered.

The scratching voice rose to a shriek inside his skull.

…Feed the rats, Wilson, feed them well. Else, they feed on you!…

Wilson screamed.

The nurse came hurtling down to his bunk. Pinning him down. She tried to calm him. Wilson was deaf to her words. There was just the terrible scratching sound in his head now. All he could hear was a rabid feral rhythm tearing away at his brain. It wasn’t the sound of broken fingernails. It was worse than that. It was the sound of rats’ claws, hundreds of them, thousands, millions, more!

They were inside his head.

Chapter Fifteen

Base Hospital Twenty-Six was close to the coast. Everyone cursed the stinging sea winds that came in, but the pure bite of salt in the air was something many of them had not known since leaving England. After months of breathing in nothing but the smell of dead men, dead horses, dead everything, it was a scent that came straight from Heaven. The sun was burning low in the sky. Waning from brilliant yellow to a dusky orchard orange. Shadows lengthened across the camp. The air rang with the plaintive notes of The Last Post.

Every base hospital had a cemetery.

Madeleine and Kitty stopped by the twilit cemetery to watch the funeral ceremony taking place. The rest of their ward round had been uneventful. Apart from Wilf, the boys were pleased to see them. They changed dressings on wounds and blushed a little at the soldiers’ bawdier jokes and sing-songs. Their round done, they decided to take a walk in the fresh air. There wasn’t another rush of wounded due until the next day. The best should be made of the few quiet hours they had.

It was an officer’s funeral that was taking place.

Madeleine and Kitty had seen many of them. The coffin was wheeled into the cemetery on a hand-bier, draped in the Union Jack. The coffin was then carried down to the graveside where the chaplain would read a short service before the coffin was lowered into the grave as ‘The Last Post’ sounded.

To the side of the grave were two women. One was old, frail and grey. The other, a young, thin redhead. Their heads were bowed. They seemed to be alien to the formality of the ceremony. This was a terrible, unique moment in their lives. The eyes of the priest and the pall-bearers were glassy from overexposure to wartime horrors, whereas for the women, this was their first experience of it. They held hands as they cast handfuls of dirt onto the descending coffin. The sound of their weeping was carried inland by the sea breeze.

Madeleine and Kitty moved on past the cemetery, to the sand dunes at the perimeter of the hospital. They stood together as the sun went down. The wind raced along, making little eddies of yellow-white sand dance at their feet. Over the crest of the dunes, the land swept away towards the sea.

There was The Bull Ring.

The training camp for new arrivals and convalescents. During the day, you could see the troops down there being marched around, drilled into shape by NCOs. The bellows of brutal encouragement carrying to the hospital on the wind, making some of the patients twitch. The Bull Ring was quiet now though, as evening drew in. The Machine Gun School was quiet too. The war was stopping, just for a moment, to allow dusk to settle everywhere, in peace. Madeleine and Kitty said nothing. Lost in their own thoughts, they stood, looking off into the distance. Behind them, a bugle sounded in a harsh, strident tone. They both knew what it meant.

The convoy of wounded had arrived early.

The men staggered along the camouflaged duckboard paths and into the base hospital. Unwashed, bearded and dirty, their puttees and tunics clinging to them. Stretcher-bearers wheezed as they bore their human loads to waiting beds. Many of the men should have been on stretchers. It was rare for there to be enough for everyone. Some of the walking wounded rested a hand on the shoulder of the soldier in front of them. Going into the trenches, they did this to make sure they stayed on the duckboard paths. Going out of the trenches, they did this because they had been made blind. Tears of dirty blood wept from the browned dressings that were mercifully covering the gaping holes where their eyes had once been.

The convoy looked like tramps, come to beg succour from the unrelenting pain the world had relentlessly rained down on them. Lamps illuminated their path as they entered the camp. Nurses and orderlies came forward, leading them away to their allocated wards. Duckboards quivered under hurrying feet. Dirty uniforms were taken away to be destroyed. The seriously wounded were taken to waiting surgeons. Those who could be were ferried to the bathhouse hut to be cleaned up. Moans, groans and barked instructions rose in chorus across the camp.

It was going to be a busy night.

******

Dr Meredith hissed through his teeth as he cut away the material from Wilson’s shoulder and thigh. Kneeling to examine the bulbous discoloured tissue, he tapped it with his finger. The wounds rang hollow.

“Oh dear, gas gangrene. Poor fellow.”

He looked up at Madeleine.

“I can remove the bullets but he will need these wounds irrigated with Eusol every three hours, Miss Goldsworth. I want you to keep an eye on him and to administer the treatment, under the supervision of Sister Fearing.”

“Yes, Dr Meredith.”

He peeled the eyelids back and peered into the orbs beneath.

“We can then but pray he comes through.”

Wilson opened his eyes. He got to his feet, his head was pounding. He was in the church crypt. Where were Brookes and Smithy? They were hurt. He knew they were hurt. Where were they? Why couldn’t he remember?

He needed to find them.

Save his mates.

It was all a jumble in his head, trying to think made his brain hurt. Maybe that thing had got them. It could still be down here, waiting to tear out his throat. Shivering, Wilson began to walk down the tunnel.

Kitty pushed the plunger down.

The end of the syringe fed into a length of tubing that disappeared into the pus-flecked wound in Wilson’s shoulder. Inside the tubing was the Eusol solution. It was a mixture of hydrochloric acid and boiled water. She had seen it save several men but it was a long, painful treatment. The wound needed to be re-dressed and irrigated every three hours. Wilson’s eyelids quivered. Shuddering breaths skipping through him as the icy solution was pushed through the infected tissue.

This was his third day in the base hospital.

The tunnel began to slope downwards. Wilson stopped and turned about. He wanted to get up and out of here not go further down into the crypt. Running a hand along the rough-hewn wall, he groped and shuffled along. Going back the way he had come. There was no sound to be heard, except his faltering footsteps. The wall disappeared from under his hand. Stifling a cry, he flapped his palm through the air, trying to find the wall again. His groping fingertips brushed against it. He breathed out heavily and began to follow the wall along once more. It was sloping down this way too. How could that be?

What was that?

He could hear something. He stopped.

Another set of footsteps stopped too.

Kitty wiped the grains of sleep from her eyes. Stifling a yawn, she pressed a new dressing to Wilson’s thigh. The wound there was still bulging but it was not as severe as it had been. Treated with the Eusol, it was gradually contracting. She fastened the mackintosh material covering the dressing into place. She felt a shiver shake through the dazed man. He had not spoken a bit of sense since arriving, just a babyish babble of nonsense.

This was his fifth day in the base hospital.

Wilson stopped and listened. There was nothing he could hear except his own breathing and the quickness of his heartbeat. Wilson let out another heavy breath and wiped at his face. He started walking again.

He stopped.

It was definitely someone else’s footsteps that he could hear. He turned around to face the way he had come. There was something there. A dim light.

Coming towards him.

Sister Fearing’s handling of the Eusol tubing made Kitty flinch. The Sister was always like this with the nervous men. Did something about them offend her sensibilities? Would she rather they died? She pushed the syringe into the end of the tubing and pumped the cool solution into the soldier’s shoulder wound with a hard thrust of her thumb. There was a flinty light in Sister Fearing’s eyes as she did this. It made Kitty wonder if the Sister hoped the stuff would make his heart fail.

Wilson winced as his heart skipped a beat. The light was coming his way, a pinpoint of dirty amber.

“Hallo! Over here! I’m over here!”

The light kept on coming but there was no response to his cry.

“Sprecken zee doight-chuh? Are you English?”

Nothing was said. The light kept on coming.

“Oi, can you hear me? Where’re you from? What company?”

Maybe it was that devil-eyed thing again.

Out on the hunt. Out to kill.

Kitty peeled the last Eusol dressing off of Wilson. This time she applied standard dressings to his shoulder and thigh, doing so made her smile. He had made it. He was better. Another one of their boys was safe.

Wilson slid his bayonet into his hand, just in case. He could hear the steps of the light-bearer now. They were uneven, Wilson wondered if the man was drunk. He wouldn’t be surprised. Better to die drunk in this hellhole than not. The light blossomed one last brilliant time. Wilson blinked and saw the bearer clearly as he came towards him.

Smithy came lurching out of the tunnel. A flickering oil lamp swinging from a chain around his neck. Grim clouds went billowing across his features as the lamp jerked about. His shredded face wept tears of rheumy blood as he reached out for Wilson. The Sergeant’s hands were skeletal, meat hanging from them as fleshy streamers. The mouth worked feverishly, gagging on the black rat nestling within.

“I been ate up, Wilson, all of me. I’ve been all ate up. My eyes are gone, see? You left me to him and he ate my eyes out. Give me yours.”

Smithy came at him, reaching for him, shrieking out of the dark.

“Give me your eyes, boy!”

Dead fingers plunged into Wilson’s face.

Chapter Sixteen

The men in the tent were quiet as Kitty entered. It was the ward for those suffering from shellshock. No-one was allowed to call it that, orders from the top, Mad had told her. The men’s medical tags all read the same.

‘Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous’

Everyone was told to refer to them as the nervous patients.

Sister Fearing had asked her to come here and help with a difficult dressing. The unknown soldier was here too, recuperating from his wounds. The gas gangrene had finally cleared up after a week of irrigating the wounds with Eusol. He was lucky to be alive. The Ypres casualty clearing stations were always flooded with wounded. Many died from infection out there in the field before they were sent down the line. The unknown soldier was in the bed nearest to the tent’s entrance. She walked past him, favouring him with a glance.

Wilson rushed upwards. His lungs bursting. He clawed his way up through the dismal layers of oblivion, gasping for breath. He surfaced. The chill of passing dreams ran through him, dissipating the memory of the nightmare. Resting his head on his knees, he breathed in and then out, hard. He felt feminine hands take hold of his shoulders, easing him back into the pillow. He looked up and saw her. A beautiful young woman in the washed-out white of a nurse’s uniform.

Wilson snatched at her hand. “Where am I?”

“General Hospital Twenty-Six.”

He looked at her, eyes wide, as if he didn’t believe she was real. He gripped her hand, squeezing it tight, too tight, expecting her to melt away at his touch.

“This isn’t a dream. You’re real.”

She nodded.

“Thank Christ. Oh, thank Christ. I’ve had enough of not knowing what’s real and what’s not.”

A shaky breath escaped him as he slumped back onto the bed. He swallowed the salty sea air washing in through the tent flaps. His nerves settled a little. Yes, this was real. You could not dream air as good as that.

“How long have I been here?”

“You’ve been off the train for quite a while. You’ve been with us just over a week. Do you remember your name? Do you know who you are? You didn’t have your tags on you.”

“Me? I….I’m-“

He stopped speaking and looked dead ahead.

His brow knitted. He scratched at it.

“I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember?”

“It could be shock. I’m sure it will come back to you. By the way, please call me Miss Goldsworth. The Sister gets very cross if volunteers, such as myself, are called Sister.”

He looked up, managing a weak smile. “Okay, Sister.”

She smiled back at him. “Now, how are you feeling otherwise?”

“Rough. I didn’t sleep too well. I think I had nightmares.”

“You poor thing.” She pressed a palm to his brow. No fever or temperature. Her soft touch soothed his skin, strengthening his smile.

“I’ll be alright. A bit of rest is what I need. I’ll be right as rain.”

He smiled up at her, hoping to convince her he would be okay. His eyes were a strange shade of grey. There was so much unhappiness in them. They reminded Kitty of a sad and lonely day when she was a child. She’d been looking out of the window into the garden. The rain had been falling so hard. She remembered the words that came into her mind back then. Nothing but the rain shall fall.

“You’ve been delirious since you got here. You were quite mad with pain. We didn’t think you’d come back to us with a clear head. You need to rest as much as you can. I’ll be round again later to check on you.”

“Thank you, Miss Goldsworth. I need your help in here, please,” Sister Fearing’s strident command rang out.

It came from inside the screens erected around the neighbouring bed, breaking the spell of the soldier’s sad eyes. Wilson watched her move onto the next bed and disappear behind the set of screens. Lying back in the bed, he patted the fresh dressings on his shoulder and thigh. They were stiff and hurt when he touched them. He’d been told that infected wounds hurt the worst of all. This pain was real pain though. The good kind of pain. Simple and straightforward. It didn’t come with muggy horrors piggy-backing on it. He closed his eyes to rest, enjoying the soothing sightlessness.

…the nozzle ignited…

…spraying hot death into his face…

He opened his eyes and lay there, unmoving.

Some wounds were not healing.

******

Kitty felt the gaze of the man on her as she walked away from him. Sister Fearing was waiting for her. The older woman’s hands clasped together as if in prayer. She was a skeletal woman with mousey hair secured in a tight bun under her nurse’s bonnet. Her face was peculiar. The skin around her lips was tight and lined, as if she were sucking her face in through her mouth.

“How’s the new arrival, Miss Goldsworth?”

“He’s fine, Sister. Just needs some rest, I think. His nerves seem to have settled too.”

“You can never be too sure of that, Miss Goldsworth. We had a boy in here a few months before you came, seemed to be on the mend. You wouldn’t have thought him different from any of the other Tommies. He had fits. They came on sudden. They stayed longer and longer each time.”

“What happened to him, Sister?”

“Died, his heart gave out.”

Kitty shivered, directing her attention back to the task in hand. Sister Fearing always talked of such morbid things. Mad said that she was just trying to scare her. A bitter old woman picking on a pretty young girl. Kitty dismissed the thoughts from her mind. The boy in bed needed tending to. That was the most important thing, here and now.

Sister Fearing eased back the blankets to reveal the ‘difficult’ wound that needed to be re-dressed. There was a hole where the young man’s genitals should have been. It was packed with pieces of soiled gauze, lodged within the mass of dressing was the length of tubing he used to relieve himself.

“I need you to keep him calm, Miss Goldsworth. You have a way with the men. Try to stop him moving about too much whilst I deal with this.”

The boy was blank-faced, staring into space. His skin was washed-out. His lower lip seemed to tremble at a constant rate. Sister Fearing eased out a piece of soiled gauze. He came to life, squirming. Kitty placed a gentle hand onto his arm, easing him back down to the mattress.

He looked into her eyes.

“We’re going to make you better,” she smiled at him, “Please lie back and let the Sister finish cleaning you up. Your wound will get infected otherwise and you won’t get better.”

Kitty laid him back and placed a square of cloth across his face, to preserve the little dignity he had left as Sister Fearing removed the gauze pieces from the wound. The boy’s tears soaked into the cloth. Sister Fearing cleaned the wound with a series of rough strokes. Being gentle on such a sensitive part of the body was difficult, but not impossible. Sister Fearing did not even try to be gentle. She saw no point in making concessions to the feelings of the wounded. Especially if they were going to act up when she was trying to help them. They were soldiers and should have enough grit in their bellies to stand a sore spot or two.

Kitty handed Sister Fearing the fresh gauze padding she needed for re-dressing the patient’s wound. A new length of tubing was fed into the hole. Then the pieces of gauze padding were packed in around it. The boy hissed between his teeth as it was all pushed into place. Kitty removed the cloth from his face. His eyes were open, blank and glassy once more.

Seeing but not seeing.

Kitty wanted to say something to him, comfort him in some way but she knew what Sister Fearing would say. She kept quiet, sorting all the used dressings onto a tray. As they walked out, the older woman cocked her head to Kitty. “He’s not going to be much use as a man is he, eh? What girl would want that? Bet he wishes the Hun had finished him off properly.”

Kitty heard low sobs coming from behind the screens.

******

“How’s the unknown soldier?”

Kitty and Madeleine were busy folding the newly-washed linen in the back of the main ward hut. The men were quiet. The afternoon was a clear one. The good weather had brought with it a soothing quality that prevailed over the hospital, for the time being. They both had a round to do with Sister Fearing and Dr Meredith in the evening. Until then, they had the menial chores to keep them busy.

“So, how is he? Your new favourite?”

“Mad! That’s unkind. I don’t have any favourites.”

“You do now. You asked to do the Eusol injections. You were by his bedside, even when his dressings were not being changed. You like him.”

“So what if I do? Nothing is going to come of it. You know perfectly well what the rules of conduct are for us here. If we start to become familiar with one of the boys, they will send us straight back to England.”

Madeleine smiled at the vexed expression on her sister’s face. Kitty was a good girl. She wouldn’t dare break the precious rules of conduct that Sister Fearing drummed into their heads on arrival. She had taken a shine to the unknown soldier though, Madeleine could see that. It was unfair. Her sister’s first blossoming of tenderness for a man occurring in this filthy theatre of war. Nothing could come of it, Kitty was right. If something did, they would be found out. Kitty would be humiliated by her dismissal back to England.

Madeleine smiled a comforting smile at her, as they continued with their task, thinking of how things would change between her and Kitty now that men were becoming more a part of her sister’s world. Practically joined at the hip, those two, mother had said. That was all going to change. There would be confidences, secrets and things left unsaid. There would be tears, worries and feelings of inadequacy that could not be shared. I’m going to lose her after all, thought Madeleine.

A weary silence settled between the two sisters.

Chapter Seventeen

Wilson was staring at the ceiling, his eyes tracing out imagined patterns. He could hear a sound. He kept on staring upwards, ignoring it. It was a scratching. He gnawed his lips, still ignoring it. He rolled over in his bed. Looking at the walls as they shivered from the wind outside.

Was it the wind making that sound?

Yes, it had to be the wind.

A shape went squirming and writhing over the material of the tent. A rat, hunched and black. He shuddered. Had they followed him here from the crypt?

He imagined them. Keeping pace with the train, racing along on their scabby legs. The black rat leading them on.

Scritch-scritch-scratch-scratch

He kicked off the sheets.

No, no rats under there. His skin was itching. Itching. Scritching. Scratching. More shapes were swarming over the tent canopy, blocking out the light. Wilson cowered in his bed, hugging the bed sheets to his shaking torso. He could hear them. He could see them. They were everywhere.

They were inside the tent.

He saw wicked eyes glinting. They were all around him. A living carpet covering the other beds, the walls and the ceiling. A bloodthirsty mass of bubonic skin, ragged claws, broken teeth and hungry empty eyes. They’d overrun the hospital. Killed everyone. Biting out the throats of sleeping men and women. Peeling back their skins. Squirming about in the soft moist offal of internal organs, making the corpses twitch and dance about, as they were gutted by the ravenous vermin.

Scritch-scratch

Scritch-scratch

It leapt up onto the bed. It was the rat from the crater, the fearless vermin king. Wilson could feel its weight. His tongue was still, frozen, unable to call for help. His eyes fixed on the shifting, living mound before him. He wanted to close his hands around its throat. Strangle the beast. Stamp on its brethren until they were nothing but fur, blood and bones.

His arms remained at his side.

He could feel the rat squatting there, on his belly. He could hear its tail lashing back and forth. Its stomach was gurgling. It was hungry.

…feed the rats, Wilson…

…else, they feed on you…

******

Kitty closed her eyes to sleep but she could not sleep. The hut was empty and still. There was nothing to be afraid of. Why then, did she feel something was gathering there. Kitty opened her eyes.

The interior of the hut was as black as pitch.

She closed them and then opened them again. There was no discernible difference. There was just the same shapeless blackness flooding her vision. Nothing was becoming clear, her eyes were not adjusting to the dimness, picking out familiar shapes. The bed was all that she was aware of and that was because she was lying on it. She couldn’t make out Mad’s bed, which was only a few feet away from hers.

Had her sight, that most precious sense, been taken away from her?

Shadows were moving around the bed in a whispering sea, daring her to get up, tempting her, with their oppressive closeness, to get up and light the lamp. She did not move. She knew what would happen. Once she let her feet touch the space where the ground had been, the shadows would have her. They ruled the emptiness below.

She would go sinking down into it. Drown in a midnight sea of suppurating gloom. She felt a momentary pulse of panic rush through her. She resisted it. Biting her lip, she bundled it up into a tight ball and drove it down into the pit of her stomach, keeping it there by sheer force of will.

I will be strong, she thought.

Silence filled the hut.

She knew that was wrong.

This was a military hospital camp. She should be able to hear something. She strained her ears. There was a hissing. The same sound you hear when a radio is between stations. The static of dead air. Dead space, she thought, that’s exactly what I am hearing. All the boys who have died, she thought, this is what they hear before they go.

There was a rustling near to her bed.

She could smell dried animal droppings and soured meat. The back of her throat became embittered as she inhaled the nauseating odours. There is something here, she thought, something old and dead. It hates me. I am young and alive, its antithesis. Feeling a shiver of gooseflesh rippling over her skin, she wondered what it was going to do to her. She could feel it coming in close, close enough to brush on her skin. She could feel the air stirring, parting around a spidery deadness.

There was a small thin sound. A scratching on her bed sheets. She drew her feet away from it, curling them underneath her. She did not scream. She had to be strong. She was getting too old to behave like a child when bad things happened. A presence pressed in on her, whispering in her ears, smelling of graveworms. Murmuring promises that she prayed would not be kept.

A face appeared, leaning towards her. It was very close. She could hear the unsteady rattle of its breathing. The face was somehow familiar. Familiar yet deformed by a smile of mouldering, splintered teeth. It hung there, silent and bodiless, a frail ephemeral mask. If she reached out, to peel away the skin of it and then the bleeding ruin beneath, she would be left with a sculpture of leering, chambered bone. Then, this would be no more - dust and ashes, and inside she would see nothing left but emptiness, that which lurks behind the veil of existence. That which waits, so patient, so quiet, ancient, awful and forbidden. The dark stuff running through all things as a black river. From it came a groan, a shuddering of atonal throat chords.

Then, it was gone.

Kitty breathed in clean air and relaxed back into sleep’s quiet caress. She would remember her visitor as a bad dream.

This alone and nothing more.

******

Sister Fearing twisted and turned in her sleep. The dream was upon her again, the same one that had been tormenting her ever since her boy’s death. Through imagined streets she ran, sobbing, in her nightgown, rain lashing down from a storm-stricken heaven. Behind her, he was coming, stalking her, unseen. A grim reaper in the rain. His ponderous footfalls sloshing through the floodwaters that ran over the cobbled streets. Lightning illuminating his fleshless head. His tin hat was studded with bullet holes. He held out a rusted bayonet before him. It had been bent and twisted out of shape by the elements. It was still good enough to do the job.

He marched on after his fleeing mother.

Margaret Fearing ran, her legs pounding in a furious rhythm. She was racing to the church. It stood on the crest of the hill, separate from the town, rising out of the heart of the graveyard. Its spire jabbing into the swollen belly of the night sky, a taunting gothic finger, beckoning her on. She had nowhere else to go. She scrambled her way up the hill, through the overflowing gutters of the streets. Falling, banging her hands and knees, getting back up, lurching onwards. Her skin was numb, drenched rubber. The church tilted, listing this way and that, as she made her ascent. Must be the rain, she thought, getting in my eyes. The tread of her pursuer could still be heard above the storm.

Sister Fearing spurred herself on.

Through the graveyard of crumbling headstones, she squelched. Stubbing her toes on chunks of stone, she stumbled up to the church door. Half-falling, she pounded her fists upon it, crying out for help, for sanctuary. She glanced over her shoulder. He was at the graveyard gate, kicking it open with a rusty shriek. Raindrops glistening on his yellow-brown visage. Skeletal fingers wrapped in dried skin were curled tight around his bayonet. A flickering flash of lightning made him appear to be smiling. His knees were buckling, unsteady, being only of bone, but he righted himself.

His eyeless gaze ever-fixed upon her.

He would never stop. He would always be coming for her.

Sister Fearing let out a caterwaul of despair. The heavy doors of the church opened with a crash. Sister Fearing ran inside, slamming them closed. She pressed her weight against the doors, waiting for the insistent pounding to begin. She braced herself on the flagstone floor. No pounding came. She moved away from the doors. They did not shake. They did not tremble, nor open.

All was still.

The silence in the church was sudden and suffocating after the roaring of the tempest outside. She crossed herself with dutiful, earnest strokes. She made her way further in. Candelabras lit the low curving gothic vaults of the interior with a comforting womb-light. The only sound came from the echoes of Sister Fearing’s wet feet slapping on the stone floor. She made her way through the varnished network of pews.

She was drawn to the confessional box. She sat down inside it. The cushioned alcove was warm and dry. Shivering and damp, she crossed herself once more.

There was someone on the other side.

Through the ornate grille, Sister Fearing could see a silhouette. Its head was bowed in respectful patience. She leaned towards the grille, clearing her throat.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

She watched the dim outline of the priest’s hunched, hooded head. He spoke in the calm, honeyed tones of Father Lawrence. Her childhood priest. The kind-hearted Italian man who baptised and confirmed her, “And what do you have to confess, my child?”

She opened her mouth to speak.

There was silence.

Maggie could not speak. She tried to. Nothing came out. Not a whisper, nor a mutter. There was just the sound of water dripping from her sodden nightclothes. Father Lawrence sighed his impatience. She tried to shout, to scream the words out. She had so much to say. She had to tell him everything. About Nathaniel, about her son’s death.

Still, nothing came out.

“Nothing?” the priest asked in a terse voice.

She banged her palms against the alcove wall. Frustration coursing through her.

Tears came.

“You have nothing to say for yourself?”

Sister Fearing heard laughter echoing from the form of the priest. There was a soft squelching. Then, a harsh scraping. The rusted bayonet blade stabbed through the confessional grille.

Plunging into her face.

Sister Fearing awoke.

Her scream, this time, was very loud and very real.

******

Wilson was wandering through a realm of fire. He could make out nothing and nobody. Flames danced and screamed. Laughing at him, pointing with charred fingers. A body came lunging out from the fire at him. Uttering a guttering scream. Flames ran over it in hungry tongues. Wilson jumped away, letting the corpse fall to the ground. The body hissed as it went out in the damp earth. Incinerated. Dead. Something heavy fell onto Wilson’s shoulder, scaly with blackened skin. It was a rat, gnawing on a strip of burnt flesh. Its beady eyes looked at Wilson.

…want to try some?…

…try some, s’good…

…first cooked meat in months…

He awoke with a yell.

Wilson looked up from his pillow into a tired, white face framed by ebony hair, which was pinned tight under a white cap. The face was similar to the other nurse but it wasn’t as young and there were no dimples.

“Good morning. How are you feeling? Kitty, Miss Goldsworth, asked me to check on you for her. She’s helping Sister Fearing in another ward.”

He stared at her blankly.

“Miss Goldsworth? She’s my sister. My real sister, I mean.”

He nodded.

“So, how are you feeli-“

“Rats.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Rats. Are there any rats in the hospital?”

Madeleine suppressed a shudder. She hated rats. Ever since she had come across one in the kitchen of the family home, she’d been terrified of them. She had been nine at the time. It had been late at night. She remembered the old grandfather clock in the sitting room chiming two in the morning as she tip-toed through to the hallway. In the hallway was the stair to the kitchen. The servants were all in their beds and she should have been as well. She knew she would be scolded if she was caught sneaking around the house in the middle of the night. Down in the kitchen, she clumsily navigated her way to the pantry. Her bare feet padding noiselessly on the stone floor. Opening the door, she saw a furry shape whip around to face her from inside. For a second, she thought it was their cat, Badger. Winston, the butler, had shut him in there before, by accident.

She reached out to pet her cat.

Tiny prickles sank deep into her fingers. She screamed, pulling her hand away. The rat shrieked, bolting from the pantry, skittering across the kitchen floor, back into the dingy places from whence it came. There was a thumping and shouting from upstairs as the household was stirred into life by her cries. She was found by Nanny, curled up on the floor, crying, nursing her wounded hand.

Looking down at the pale-faced soldier, she shook her head, “I’m quite sure there are no rats in the hospital.”

He did not seem to hear her, “I think they followed me here, from the trenches.”

“Followed you here? Why would they follow you here?”

“Because of him. He’s them and they’re him. Same thing. One and the other.”

He was talking rubbish, the same as the other nervous patients.

“I’m not lying, you know.”

“I’m sure you’re not but they are not here now. Why don’t you just lie back and relax?”

“But I see them.”

Madeleine shuddered as she saw the conviction in his grey eyes. Her voice became forceful. “Lie down please. There are no rats in the hospital. You had a dream. That’s all.”

Wilson chewed at his lip as she raised her voice at him.

“Yes, Sister,” he murmured.

He lay back down on the bed as she went about her chores.

Mad’s hands were trembling as she did her round of the nervous ward. The unknown soldier had unsettled her with his ranting about rats. It was a coincidence, she told herself, that’s all. There was no connection between what he had said and the dream she had last night. None at all. She had awoken that morning in a sweat. Fragments of the dream still there, floating on the surface. Flotsam and jetsam left behind by a sinking ship lost to the sea’s depths. She remembered the landscape of her dream. The grey wasteland she had become familiar with ever since the deaths of her parents. But, this time, there was something different about it. It was no longer desolate. It was teeming with life. Squealing, hairy, scabrous life. Madeleine finished tidying up the tent, making sure that she steered well clear of Wilson.

******

The rats came again that night, destroying all hopes of pleasant dreams. Their grotesque king squatted on Wilson’s chest, piercing him with its eyes. He could feel its empty belly rumbling through the bedsheets. Unable to move or scream, he listened as it told him what he was going to do. He would do as he was told.

Or, he would dream again about the night of the fire.

Chapter Eighteen

The scream startled Kitty. She was on night duty in the nervous ward. Wilson shrieked again, louder this time. He banged his head against his fists as the fit sent him thrashing around the bed. He curled in on himself with the bed sheets bundled up around him. He shook so much that the bed shuddered under him. His eyes rolled in their sockets. They darted this way and that. The muscles in his face twisted. A tidal wave of pure nightmare swept through him. His hands curled into claws, tearing at his hair, raking across his skull. The scratching was deafening. Even in sleep there was no escaping it.

Gnawing her lip, Kitty stepped towards him, hovering her hands over his shaking shoulders, unsure whether to touch him or not.

“It’s alright. Nothing will hurt you here.” She wasn’t convinced by her own words as she spoke them.

An eye opened and locked onto her. She took hold of one of his hands squeezing it, gently. She felt like she was making contact with someone but only just, peering through a grey haze, across a black abyss.

“It was my fault. I couldn’t do it. He had hold of my legs. I could’ve pulled him up. Pulled him away from those fucking things but I couldn’t do it. He didn’t have to die.” Wilson rocked backwards and forwards. “I couldn’t do it and now I’ve brought them fucking things back here with me. I can hear ‘em in my head!”

Kitty sat with him, listening.

“I’m sorry,” he said to thin air, “I’m sorry for what I did, so sorry. It hurts and it won’t stop hurtin’. It won’t go away and I don’t know who I am.”

Kitty wished Mad was here, she was much better with this sort of thing. She could not leave him though. His eyes were earnest, desperate for her attention and understanding. No-one else’s. Who knew what would happen if she did not give it to him?

“I keep hearing them making noises, you see, the rats, they’re always scratching away. Can you hear that, Sister? The scratching? Is it just me?”

Kitty placed a tentative hand on his shoulder. “I think you should try and sleep. They’re just dreams and they can’t hurt you. We all hear or see things when we’re very tired. I’m sure if you sleep a little more, these ‘rats’ will go away and leave you alone.”

Wilson placed his hand over hers.

“I hope so.”

He didn’t take hold of her hand. He just rested his own on top of it.

“You’re so soft,” he said, smiling at her.

They sat together for a few minutes. Kitty felt she’d pulled him part of the way out from the grisly place he had been sliding into.

“Can you remember your name yet?”

“No.”

“It’ll come to you, I’m sure. Maybe that’s what the rats are. You trying to remember who you are. Trying to scratch out the truth.”

“Maybe. Thank you, Sister. I’ll try to sleep.”

He removed his hand from hers and lay down.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said.

Moving back to the table in the middle of the tent, Kitty didn’t see Sister Fearing standing outside, watching. She’d seen them touching each other. The older woman pursed her bitter lips together and slipped away.

******

Madeleine and Dawson stood inside the hut, looking at each other. He fidgeted, hardly able to believe his luck, being propositioned by a good-looking girl. Dawson had a dull ageing wife and children back home. Sex was a distant memory for him. Something that happened years ago. He had expected it to remain so. His wife never need know about this. It would be a secret to keep him warm at night when he was back there, next to her, a wheezing edifice of indifference.

Madeleine knew this was not the proper thing to do but she had to do it. There were rules of conduct about fraternisation between staff and Sister Fearing observed them to the letter. If she broke them, then she could take Kitty away from here, back to their safe little cottage. Her reason for doing this was sound. She was able to excuse herself morally, just. Throughout the day, more of the rat-infested dream had come back to her. Thinking of it now sent chills through her. The rats spread out before her, covering the deadlands. A verminous sea of thousands, she was looking down on them from an outcrop of rock. She could feel its rough, gritty surface biting into the bottoms of her bare feet. Across from her was another outcrop of rock, it rose up out of the squealing ocean below. A wolf stood upon it. An ugly, powerful specimen with patchy fur and many scars criss-crossing its skin. Its claws appeared to be carved from jet and its eyes were lit from within by a luminous arctic glow. Its muzzle seemed to be shaping itself into a cadaverous sneer. It was pawing at a pale, cloth-swaddled form. Madeleine saw who it was.

Kitty!

She opened her mouth to scream a warning. No sound came out. The wolf made a grizzly chuckling sound in its throat. It leaned over the prostrate Kitty. Its jaws slung wide, drooling ichor. It closed its maw around her sister’s throat. It tore the flesh there wide open. A red rain fell. There was a terrific flash and boom of flame.

Then, nothing more.

Except for that dead, uncomfortable feeling. A foreboding, growing stronger, leading her to Dawson. Someone must have seen them both coming here, to her hut. She had not had time to check. Madeleine was relying on human nature and its habit of prying, unasked for, into other people’s business. Word would get to Sister Fearing. Then she could get her sister away from here. She returned her thoughts to the matter in hand.

Madeleine looked Dawson over. He was older than her, losing his hair. His skin was beginning to sag with the years. They embraced each other. Their lips met. Their tongues ran over each other in a passionate snake dance. She felt Dawson’s old fingers fiddling with the fastenings of her uniform. She was very close to him and was reminded that he was not a handsome man. Age had accentuated his physical ugliness. His skin felt strange and loose as it brushed against her. She felt her underwear loosening, falling away. She slipped off her shoes. Dawson laid her down on the bunk.

She raised her knees, opening herself to him. He eased his fingers inside the soft delicate parting between her legs. The roughness of his skin tickled her. Moist muscles squeezed tight around his fingers. He circled his fingers inside her, exciting the nerves, making her wet. He withdrew his fingers and wiped them on his trousers.

With a rustling of fabric, he unfastened his trousers and climbed onto the bunk. He mounted her with no ceremony. His cock was not big but it felt good inside her as it swelled up to a rigid hardness. She could feel a tingling, a light-headedness, edging in on the fringes of her senses, a soundless buzzing. She felt his cock stroking the nubbin of her clitoris, teasing it until it was a hard tender bud. The tingling became a tension, then a weakness, spreading outwards from where he was inside her. It rushed up towards her head and down towards her toes. Dawson was settling into a steady, insistent rhythm.

Madeleine felt herself becoming tighter around him, her muscles pulling at him, holding him there as that wonderful tension continued to build and build. The boundaries of her world were contracting, encircling them, joining them. Nothing else existed. She was caught in the moment. She was running too fast. She was rushing up to the surface from the bottom of the sea. There was a pushing outwards, a rushing inwards. A singularity burning down to nothing. A small cry, a sudden bright hot bursting.

Madeleine came, hard.

Dawson stroked her face and kissed her cheek. Gentle and thankful, he helped her to re-dress.

She hoped she had done the right thing.

******

Kitty sipped at a mug of tepid beige liquid. You could not have called it tea. She looked first at Wilson then around the tent at the other shellshocked men. Some were sleeping fitfully, others just lying there, staring off into space.

Wounded in heart and soul.

That was how Sister Fearing described them.

They all had purplish bags under their eyes from night upon night of restless horror-ridden sleep. So much silent torture was confined to this tent. It seemed to taint the air. Kitty wondered if that was why this hut always seemed dingier inside than the rest, even in the day time.

She realised how little she knew about the war. Shrapnel wounds were horrible things but bearable for the soldiers, and the civilians back home. These men with their fits, their panicked cries and unstill bodies were not bearable. They would not be feted or praised for their deeds. People would turn away from them in fear. They would cross the street to avoid them. They would hide them away. Families would try to forget them. Wives and sweet-hearts would take new beaus. Pretending the boyfriend or husband who lost his mind never existed, writing them out of history.

These men had squatted in water-logged holes, their stomachs growling, listening to dying comrades screaming out their last breath. Shells had rained down in a continual hellish chorus, but they wouldn’t be called heroes for surviving it all. There would no fine words for them because they would be forgotten, as simple as that.

Kitty did not sleep. Instead she kept looking at the men, turning over one single thought in her mind.

I will remember.

Chapter Nineteen

Wilson was walking through the hospital camp in the dead of night. He didn’t remember getting up, nor leaving the tent. His skin was creeping. His nerves were aching. The only sound was the snap-snap of tent flaps in the midnight wind. Wilson walked out onto the main duckboard path that ran through the centre of the camp. Wilson caught glimpses of hanging mottled limbs, gaunt faces, white as nitre. He turned to see, to look at them closely but they melted away, the stuff of dreams. He could feel them. They were here. The creatures that killed Captain Bone. Lurking out of sight, in the shelter of the shadows. They were all around him. In the spaces between one heartbeat and the next. Their skins asquirm with maggoty fears, worming with neuroses. He swallowed hard, shaking his head in denial. What were they?

What was the word Captain Bone had used for them?

He couldn’t remember.

From somewhere in the distance, came a feral howl.

Blinking in the half-light, Wilson sat up, awake and looked around. A low guzzling snore came from the bed to his right. Shadows moved in front of his eyes, resolving into the shape of his neighbour’s bed. Blinking, he squinted at it. The shape was wrong. The contours of the body in the bed were out of place, dislocated. Wilson peeled back his bed sheets and wobbled onto his feet. He slid across to the misshapen form. Reaching out, he eased back the linen, feeling it resisting as he did so.

He saw what was concealed by the sheets.

Blood ran out in thick trickles from a ragged, congealing wound in the man’s throat. Gore soaked his chest, pooling under his head, matting his hair to the pillow. The mouth hung open. The eyes stared blind.

The face of the dead man was Brookes.

Rats were foraging in the torn torso’s mess, nibbling on the rotten meat. There was movement under the bed. A face peered out, a devil’s eye winked at Wilson. A heavy crust of drying blood caking its lips, making the mouth grotesque and demonic. A crumbling hell-portal.

It was smiling at him, amused.

Kitty stroked a hand across Wilson’s face. The muscles were moving in violent dances under his skin. His eyelids shuddering and then rolling. The nightmares were ripping through him. She rubbed his hand, making a silent prayer for them to leave him in peace.

Wilson’s eyelids fluttered open.

He looked up at Kitty. Her lips were crusted with flakes of blood. Her eyes glazed over with a film of sticky wet cataracts. She sucked her lips into her mouth. She began chewing at them, frenziedly, shearing them off. Her hand clamped tight around his wrist. He tried to pull away, his heart jumping up into his throat. Through her gnawed lips, he saw broken rat’s teeth jutting out from rancid discoloured gums. Phlegm was dripping onto his face as the teeth spread out into a bloodied grin. Her nose twitched, verminous. The monstrous mouth opened, breathing out a stench born from uncountable open graves.

Wilson lunged.

His hands fastening around the monster’s sinewy throat. He dug his thumbs in under the bobbing Adam’s apple. Shaking it back and forth, choking the life from the horror. A thin cracking sound escaped its constricted throat. Wilson let go. It flopped onto the bed, rolling over. Kitty’s extinct eyes looked into his. A necklace of black and blue bruises blossoming around her neck. Scarlet blood came, soaking through the chest of her uniform, quickly darkening it. He reached out to her. His fingers running over the rainbow of abuse he had made.

Wilson tore her throat out.

Chapter Twenty

Madeleine looked up as her sister entered their hut. “Are you okay, Kitty?”

“I think so, Mad, just tired. It’s so terrible. I just sat there all night. There is nothing I can do for those boys. I can help dress the wounds on their body but not the wounds in their minds. You can’t even see where those wounds are. You don’t know where to start. You don’t know if someone is getting better or worse. You can only hope, and even then, it just seems to go on and on. It makes me feel so empty inside, so helpless,” she sighed, pulling off her cap and running a hand through her hair. Madeleine got to her feet, went over and embraced her sister. They hugged each other hard.

Sister Fearing entered the hut.

The two sisters parted instantly.

“Young ladies, would you come with me, please?”

******

Somewhere in the camp, a scrap of stygian gloom detached itself from the shelter of the shadows. Staying low, it made its way between the huts and tents. The dull orange glimmer of a lit lamp came from within one of them. There was the rustling of the occupant disrobing. The sound of hair being brushed could be heard and then, a woman’s voice cursing.

“Damned greybacks. Bastard lice get everywhere.”

The scrap of midnight flowed around to the tent’s entrance.

“Hello. Is someone there?”

It did not speak.

“Hey, you shouldn’t be here. Look at the state of you. You need seeing to in one of the other tents.”

It entered the tent.

“Good lord.”

There was a crackle and a crunch of breaking glass.

There were no screams.

The light was snuffed out.

******

Wilson awoke. He pinched himself. The small pain jolting his brain. He was awake this time. He breathed a sigh of relief. His sheets were a mess. He tugged them into shape and made himself ready for real sleep. Something wet squelched between Wilson’s toes. He pulled back the bedsheets.

His feet were caked in mud.

******

Sister Fearing rested her knuckles on her office desk. She gave the impression that she was readying herself for a fight. Her baleful expression reinforced that idea as she spoke to the two sisters before her.

“Miss Katherine Goldsworth, you have some explaining to do.”

Madeleine looked up in surprise. Kitty was the one in trouble? That couldn’t be right. She was always good. Madeleine had been the one carrying on with an orderly. That’s what she had thought this summons would be about. What could Kitty possibly have done to excite Sister Fearing’s wrath?

Sister Fearing glared at the two VADs before her. She hated them. Training to be a nurse was hard work and she had put in that hard work. During the back-breaking first two years on the wards she had been paid nothing. She hadn’t had it easy. Long hours of study followed by long hours of duty followed on by more long hours of study and duty. An endless daily grind these rich strumpets knew nothing about. They were treated by the patients as if they were royalty, never mind qualified nurses. They were not either of these things in Sister Fearing’s eyes. They had no right to be addressed as nurse or Sister. They had not earned that right. Especially the little one she had seen holding hands with a patient earlier tonight.

Sister Fearing felt like she had been struck across the face as she watched the scene unfold between Kitty Goldsworth and the soldier in the nervous ward. Such a blatant display of affection between staff members and patients was unacceptable. The younger Miss Goldsworth did not know how to behave. Sister Fearing was going to tear a strip off her and her molly-coddling sister for it. Her anger simmered hot and bright. She felt her heart clenching, relishing the infernal feeling.

“I would remind you both that there are rules of correct conduct and behaviour between patients and staff members. Disobeying any of these rules will lead to your being sent home. Neither of you is indispensable. There are hundreds of volunteers in England waiting to take your place. Do you understand what I am saying?”

Madeleine eyed Sister Fearing as the woman made her self-important little speech. That was all it was. A speech to remind them that she had risen to her position through hard work and that they had not worked half as much as she had. This gave her the right to be their superior here, even if she was not so in social standing. There was also an undercurrent that had nothing to do with hard work or class privilege.

It was plain and simple jealousy.

Madeleine noticed for the first time that there was no wedding band on the white-knuckled hand of the Sister. No-one loved her. It could not be said outright but those were the pair of all-too-apparent ingredients that made Sister Fearing what she was. A lack of love and a lot of jealousy. A septic cocktail lacing the wound where her heart should be. She fed and cared for that wound the way a mother does a child, by punishing those around her for the bitterness she chose to bear.

“You, Katherine Goldsworth, have broken the rules of conduct. You will both be put on the next train and taken back to England in the morning. May God have mercy on your sinful souls and one day show you the righteous path before your wandering feet.”

“Me? But I have done nothing wrong.”

Kitty was not happy with Sister Fearing. The attitude of this older woman was horrible. She treated the men as if they were carcasses on a butcher’s slab. They’d gone through all that pain and the thanks they got was this sour-faced scarecrow of a witch ill-treating them.

“I saw you. I saw you carousing and holding hands with one of the patients.”

“I did not carouse with anyone. I held his hand because he was feeling lonely and unloved. He needed to feel better about himself. Haven’t you ever needed that, Sister? Some affection?”

Kitty had innocently put her finger right on the emotional wound at the heart of Sister Fearing. The puckers of Sister Fearing’s face deepened into ridges, drawing themselves together, knitting into lines, ferocious cracks and crags emerged. She came forward, her skin darkening with spots of blood. Her thin hand raised to lash out, fingers all stiff, then it faltered, wavered, collapsing in on itself, defeated.

Sister Fearing’s eyes were becoming wet.

“Get out! You…both of you, get out!”

Madeleine drew Kitty away from the Sister and out of the hut. She saw the hard glint in the old woman’s glazed eyes as they left. She saw what was going through the Sister’s mind. The wolf of her dream flashed before her eyes. She felt her heart tighten and she urged Kitty on, towards their hut. Her plan had not worked.

They had to leave tonight.

******

Sister Fearing shook. She sat down at her desk, cradling her head in her hands. She began to cry. Thick, choking sobs burst out from her. Her body shook with wave after wave of weeping. The tears subsided after a time.

A living piece of the night passed by her tent.

It made Sister Fearing sleep.

The moon was hollowed out, a broken shell crescent casting a paltry light. The graveyard was no longer a graveyard when night fell upon it. It was a maw of splintered gravestone teeth. Shadows seemed quick to gather here. A lonesome soul stood by her son’s resting place, her head bowed.

Nathaniel Fearing

1897-1915

Gone but not Forgotten

With our Father, who art in Heaven

She’d watched him grow up to become reserved, educated, full of scientific rubbish, rejecting the rough and ready pursuits that were normal for a boy his age, instead becoming an effete thinker. He asked too many questions. He stopped attending church. He said that he did not believe in God. That there was no logical reason for His existence.

Logic, she thought, what an ugly word to come from the mouth of an unwise child.

Her son’s blasphemy shamed her as she sat in church alone. The other women were hand-in-hand with their sons whilst hers did not even deign to respect the Sabbath. Her relationship with Nathaniel grew into one of disrespectful silence. Bad feeling blossomed into a twisting tangle of tendrils that wound its way around their souls. Binding tighter and tighter each day. Feeding and watering the growths there with self-righteousness. Letting rage become hatred, allowing it to strangle their hearts. He thought her stupid. She thought him insolent. Other mothers wept and wailed as their young boys left home to fight in the war. Margaret Fearing did not. He signed up and off he went, without so much as a word to her. She had none for him either.

She did not care.

Nathaniel was invalided home, sick from gas gangrene. That early in the war, there had been no curative measures available for the bacillus that caused it. She sat at his hospital bedside, watching her son breathe his last. The defiance was gone from him. His eyes, red and sore from weeping. His body shivering, exhausted, as the bacillus did its degenerative work, eating him alive. She remembered that last look he gave her. She had held his hand, feeling him slip away as his grip went light and loose. When he looked gone, she allowed herself a little smile.

A little triumph.

His eyes opened, just for a moment.

…he saw me smile…

Then he died.

Guilt for what she had wished upon him, what he suffered lingered, torturing her, driving her to try and save other young men. But, each one she saw, had Nathaniel’s face and she was repelled. Still wounded by her son’s treatment of her, unable to forgive him, unable to let her unhappiness go.

The frosty sickle of the moon hung over the scene. A funereal fog shrouding it. A few maggots squirmed out of the ground. Margaret Fearing didn’t see the white squirming shapes at her feet. She was trying to speak. To get the words out that she’d never been able to say to him. Her words were silent, unheard. The ground beneath her feet shuddered. The earth there was breathing in and out. One hazy moment flowed into another before she realised something was moving, crawling up her leg. Margaret shrieked as she looked down and saw the small quivering forms surging around her. She looked up at the moon.

She screamed at it.

She tried to pull herself free from the parasitic mass. But, below the knees, there was little more than bone left. Unable to support her weight or co-ordinate, her legs buckled and she fell to the ground. Bucking, gagging on her own vomit and blood, she cried and slapped at the cemetery ground in desperation. She tore up fistfuls of grass, desperate to pull herself away from what was flooding out of the ground. She could feel the vicious invertebrates making their way up her. Burrowing into her. Her body shook violently, going into spasm. Dried tears mingled with snot and phlegm on Margaret’s face. Her cries were degenerate gurgles. The maggots ate their way through her soft insides, hollowing her out. Satiated clots of the parasites came spilling from her lips, ears and nostrils. Shaking, she began crawling, pulling herself over to her son’s grave. The earth had split wide open. The lid of the coffin was in pieces. There was not much left of Nathaniel Fearing but a sticky skeleton and the fraying tatters of internal organs. Segmented nuggets of puce matter clothed every inch of him. His eyes opened. His blue-brown irises, they were completely untouched by decay.

They were weeping for her.

In the waking world, a thin rancid flux of black-headed grubs and dead spiders ran out over Margaret Fearing’s lips and onto her pillow, soaking in, turning the linen to yellow and brown. For a moment, she gagged, choking on the vile syrup. Then, she was still, dead and gone. The shape in the shadows knelt down over her, to feed.

Chapter Twenty-One

Madeleine held Kitty close to her as they made their way back to the hut to pack, “Why must she be like this? Why did she do this to us?”

“It doesn’t matter, Kitty. It’s all over for us now. There’s nothing more we can do. We’ll go back home tomorrow and do what we can there.”

Madeleine wanted to get her sister out of here fast. Sister Fearing’s murderous eyes were still burning in her mind.

“But I don’t want to go, Mad. I feel we’ve let the boys down. They need as much help as they can get. We can’t go and leave them.”

“I know, Kitty. I want to stay. I do want to stay here, but we’re not deemed fit for service. Maybe we can help out in some other way when we get back home.”

She wanted to get away as soon as possible, before that witch of a woman went after Kitty. She knew she would, given half a chance. It was all in the eyes.

A scream cut the air open.

******

It was Wilf.

He was naked and bleeding. A knife in his hand. He was carving at his skin. His sheets were soaked scarlet. Cuts criss-crossed every inch of his torso and he continued to hack and saw away.

…rats on me…

…need to get them off…

Blinded by tears, he tugged and pulled at his savaged skin with his other hand, peeling it off in tatters. Twisting and jerking, he tried to shake off the rodents that only he could see.

…they’re all over me…

Kitty and Madeleine looked on in shock at the mad display. The scream had brought them running. The sight of Wilf mutilating himself without remorse stopped them dead. The men in the beds around Wilf shrank away. The boy was snarling, waving the knife with an animal ferocity. None of them dared get close to the frenzied sweeps and jabs of the blade. His body was a jigsaw puzzle of ugly lines. His knife hand was shaking. He was weakening from the loss of blood. His skin draining, becoming colourless.

The voice was in his head, it was scratching around the inside of his skull. It had woken him. The voice had told him things. It had told him what it felt like to peel off your own skin. It had told him how a baby’s cries will rise to a certain beauteous pitch when you drive thorns through the softest parts of its body. It told him what it felt like to be eaten by wild dogs and rats. It told him that he was damned. Wilf could feel the rats inside him. Their sharp little feet and louse-infested skin. He could feel their ragged teeth biting.

…one in my mouth…

Wilf thrust the point of the knife into his mouth, gouging away at his tongue, sending a stream of blood and sloppy matter down his throat. The scratching in his skull was growing ever fiercer. They were inside his head, behind his eyes.

…want my eyes!…

…leave ‘lone my eyes!…

He spat out the last meaty pieces of his tongue.

…leave ‘lone my eyes!…

Gritting his teeth, he stabbed the knife point into his left eye. He burrowed the blade in, twisting it, scraping its edge around the bone of the socket, working the soft sphere of his eyeball loose. The socket drooled jellied matter as he carved deeply into it. The eye came free in a cascade of clear fluid. He sliced the knife through the optic nerve. The soft remains of the eye fell away, severed. He could feel the rats nibbling at the back of his other eye, raking their claws around the rim of bone which it nestled in, shrieking a shrill murderous song that reverberated inside his skull.

He dropped the knife.

Wilf began clawing at his remaining eye with his fingers, sending a torrent of pale claret tears down his face. He dug his fingers in, crushing the eye, then raking it out as a handful of sopping translucence. Gouging into the socket one more time, he pulled free a clot of moist mush. He dabbed his fingertips at the tattered hanging strings of his optic nerves. He touched the slippery smears running from the holes in his face. He shook, feeling fault-lines of fire opening inside his head. He fingered the gashes on his torso. The stump of his tongue squirmed in his mouth. Bubbles of blood blew out, popping between his ravaged lips. He collapsed, moaning, haemorrhaging.

“Where did he get that knife from?”

No-one answered.

No-one knew.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Wilf was watching the parade. It was the Sunday parade with the soldiers in their fine coats and medals. He loved their coats. He wanted one of his own. There was loud brassy music playing as the smart men walked past. Everything was safe and okay. The soldiers looked so smart. Wilf looked down at his worn clothes and wished he was as smart-looking as them. One of the soldiers had a very bright medal, a great big glinting disc that Wilf could not stop staring at.

He would be proud if he had a medal like that. He would never run away from school again. You needed schooling if you were going to be somebody good in the world. That was what his mother told him. If you were good at your schooling then you could become one of the soldiers. Smart in the head will make you smart in a uniform, she said. He looked closer at the soldier’s face. There was something familiar about it.

Things changed.

The recruiting Sergeant rubbed his fingers through his moustache, assessing Wilf.

“How old are yer, sonny?”

“I’m seventeen, sir.”

“You sure about that? I think you’ve made a mistake there.”

“No, sir.”

“Tell you what, go back outside that door and think about it. You look about nineteen to me. Come back here when you remember your right age. Tomorrow morning.”

Wilf nodded and went out through the office door. It slammed shut behind him. The lights went out. He walked forwards, hands reaching out. Nothing was there. He turned around. Nothing there either. He tried to cry out.

No sound came from his mouth.

Wilf’s hands flew up to his face. His mouth was gone. There was just a plain of unbroken skin. His fingers found two depressions in his face where his eyes should have been. Running his hands over his head, he searched for the missing pieces of his face but everywhere was blank skin. He slumped down onto his knees, feeling himself sinking into the stuff of the void. Screaming and screaming a soundless scream.

******

Kitty’s hand pawed at her mouth as she looked behind the screen that had been erected around the bed. Wilf was propped up on two pillows with bandages coating him. She could see spots of scabby blood, here and there from where he had cut himself. Thick bandages swathed his head. Two wads of cotton dressing were in place over his eye sockets. Kitty could see that they were deeply discoloured, partially sunken into the holes. Her stomach heaved at the sight. Tears swelled in the corners of her eyes, she wiped them away with her fingers. A hole was opening up inside her. Deep, joyless and forbidding. She reached out, touching one of Wilf’s bandaged hands. She squeezed it hard. The only way he could ever communicate with the outside world now would be by touch. As she came out from behind the screen, her eyes were drawn to Wilson. He was sitting quietly, huddled in his bed sheets, watching her. Sadness weighing heavy in his grey eyes. He didn’t seem to see her. His blank eyes were staring right past her, over her shoulder. Kitty looked around, following the direction of his gaze to the tent flaps.

“It was there, Kitty. I saw it. The devil-eyed thing. It was there, I swear it was, just behind you, smiling at me.”

Shaking her head, she managed a weak smile.

She approached him and sat down on the bed.

“I’m leaving.”

“What d’you mean, leaving?”

“Leaving the hospital. Mad and I are being sent back to England.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, looked around, sighed, and then rested her gaze back on Wilson. “Sister Fearing saw you and I holding hands. It was bad conduct on my part. I was being too ‘familiar’ with you and now we’ve both got to go home.”

His face sagged. “Will you write? Let me know how you are? Keep in touch?”

“I’d like to. But I don’t know your name.”

Wilson stared into her eyes, feeling a kindling inside him, a faint ignition.

“Reg. Reg Wilson.”

She smiled, delighted, “You did it. You remembered.”

“I know. I don’t know how. I woke up and it was there. Back in my head. Somehow.”

“That’s wonderful though, Reg. It shows you’re getting better. You’re healing.”

“Yes, I hope so. Y’know, we could meet up after the war, y’know. When all this has blown over and everyone’s happy again.”

Kitty doubted anyone would ever be happy again after this war. She moved around the bed to his side. She smiled at him. Wilson smiled back, faltering as he did.

“I’ll come back later and give you my home address, Reg. You can write to me first.”

“Okay.”

She could feel that hole of cheerlessness boring into her heart. Tears were worrying the edges of her eyes. She hung her head. Rain was pattering down outside. Wilson’s hand fell on hers. Tears burst from Kitty’s eyes. She wiped them away, trying to control the swelling of emotion rushing up from deep inside her. She turned away from Wilson.

“He’s such a mess, Reg, and it’s all because of me.” She swallowed hard as another tidal wave of sobbing tried to burst out.

“Why’s it your fault?”

“I’ve got the Blighty Touch. Haven’t the others told you?” she laughed bitterly, “If that boy hadn’t touched my uniform when I tended to him, he wouldn’t be in that bed now. He did that to himself because he wanted to go home. It’s all because of me, because he believed in me. I let him down.”

“Bullshit. Wilf’s not your fault. You didn’t put the knife in his hand, did you?”

“No.”

“Well then, not your fault is it? He did what he did for his own reasons.”

Wilson’s words helped a little, making the icy pit inside her contract a little at the edges. Kitty leaned gave Wilson a gentle kiss on the cheek.

Then, she left.

He ran a finger over the spot where she had kissed him. There was movement out of the corner of his eye. The thing from the crypt stood there, with the tent flaps billowing around it. Beating like a giant bat’s wings. Its eyes glinted white and then black. Its face was split by that ever-present livid grin of amusement.

Wilson screwed his eyes shut.

He opened them again.

It was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Outside, Kitty wiped her wet eyes and headed back to help Madeleine pack for the journey home. Her big sister had been ashen after seeing Wilf mutilate himself.

What a night to leave the hospital, thought Kitty.

******

Wilf lay quietly in the bed. He could feel the fibres of the blankets grazing against his neck through the bandages. He treasured the sensation. So little was left to him of the outside world. His senses were failing. A stream of drool leaked out of the side of his mouth. If he still had a tongue, he could have licked it away. Instead he lay there, feeling the warm wet path it was tracing down the side of his bandaged face. There was nothing else he could do as he felt the world growing faint around him. If he let his attention wander from the myriad little sensations that teased and fired his thoughts, he would become aware of the emptiness. The void spreading around him. Separating him from the living. It was claiming him and it did fascinate him. But, he knew, if he let himself go into the void, he would be lost there forever. Never to come back.

The void terrified him but it was where he was going. Nothing could change that. He had always thought of it as a blackness but that was wrong. It was without colour, substance or depth. It was an absence of everything. Death was not a nothing. Nothing was a definition. Where he was going, there were no definitions. No sights, no sounds, no ups, no downs.

Wilf remembered what he had seen happen to other men. Their limbs reduced to macerated pulp. Ruined faces held together by plaster masks and patches. Uniforms soaked through with the juices of too many infected wounds. Yet they were so quiet about the pain. That had unsettled him. But now, he understood.

What else could you do?

Your life was ending. You were going to die. This was it. There was no going back. The pain of existence was finally going to end. All you had to do was lie back and wait for it to happen. The void, it was thrumming with the beat of his heart and he was so alone. There would be no girl for him to lose his virginity to. There would be no shiny silver medals. There would be no tomorrow.

He lay on the bed, waiting. He felt it in the stuff of his being. Falling, coming down on him, a black snow. The slight breeze drifting into the tent was disturbed by it. He could feel it on the bandages, seeping into his ravaged body. He could feel its coldness in his heart. He did not struggle. The void spoke, it roared. His shattered nerves went spiralling up to a shriek. He was being born for a second time. Wilf wept a few stinging tears through his butchered tear ducts. He was going to be free of this tortured cradle of blood and bone, at last. The breeze picked up. A heavy rain pattered down onto the ground. Wilf’s body gasped, shuddered and then relaxed.

The rain stopped for a moment.

His heart stopped forever.

******

Wilson was awoken by the aching in his bladder. Easing himself upright, he reached under the bed for the pan. He hoped he wouldn’t wake any of the others whilst he had a tinkle. He was sliding the pan out when he saw it, standing at the foot of the bed. Its tattered fingernails scratching on the sheets.

Wilson shrank away.

He watched the world drowning around him into a thick welter of shifting, shuddering pitch. The blackness of its eyes glittered, showing him sights he did not want to see. The things that he had done.

…sliding the knife into Wilf’s sleeping hand, then kneeling by the boy, whispering into his ear standing in a bell tent, a half-dressed nurse before him, tugging lice from her frizzy red hair, blood, livid and brilliant, running out over his hands…

Then it disappeared.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The lust was upon it and the sun was low in the sky. It could smell blood on the wind. It walked as a shadow amongst the tents and the huts, waiting for the last light to pass away. Tonight, it would feed well. So too would its brethren.

It was outside the hut, watching her, the younger sister.

Kitty finished packing their cases.

It was growing dusky outside.

She left the tent to find her sister.

It was elsewhere, outside a tent, listening, unseen.

“I’ve come to say goodbye, Dawson.”

“You leaving us then, Sister?”

Madeleine smiled at his purposeful misuse of etiquette. They had only been together once but she felt that she owed him, at least, a farewell.

“Yes. Sister Fearing doesn’t want us here and it’s too hard on Kitty, the tension. I’m not going to fight her over it. It’s better if we go and the Sister gets someone else in who she likes better.”

It heard the younger sister coming closer.

“Have you seen my sister at all, Trevor?”

“Sure, Miss. She just went into Dawson’s bell tent over there. Saying her goodbyes, I should imagine. It’s a shame you’re going. You’re both nice girls and none of us believe nothing of what’s been said about you.”

Kitty coloured at his words. “Thank you, Trevor. You’re very kind. You and the boys must behave whilst we’re gone. Promise me, that?” she smiled at him.

“Oh, we will, Miss. We definitely will.” He winked at her as she headed off towards Dawson’s tent.

It heard what was falling to earth from above.

In the darkness, it smiled, amused.

It was then that the bomb hit the tent.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The air screamed as the fire-bomb struck and burst open. Twisted shrapnel went scything through the air. Flames roared out, scorching the surrounding tents and huts. Golden tongues licked up into the night sky. The thunder of the blaze drowned out the screams of those who were still alive within it. They thrashed about as if they were lost at sea, drowning in burning waves that were roasting them to a crisp.

Kitty’s eyes were transfixed by the sudden eruption. She ran towards it. Waves of heat soon beating her back. She felt her eyes watering from the hot dirt swirling through the air. She watched the fire raging away.

“Madeleine!”

******

Bleary-eyed, Wilson shuffled outside. Wondering what was going on, watching unsteady silhouettes run this way and that. Unsure what to do, his mind still tired and foggy, he walked out into the jostling pandemonium. He saw Kitty. She was too close to the fire. He heard her scream a name. Her sister was in there. Trapped in there. Like the men on the night of the fire. Burning to death.

He ran at Kitty.

“Get fuckin’ down!”

He knocked her flat with his weight. A whistling sound was coming from all around. There was a shriek and a bang. It split the air, multiplying. It was everywhere, a chorus of banshee shrieks and thunderous roars. Huts dissolved into matchwood. Tents ignited, disintegrating. Howls came from inside. Kitty saw flapping shapes come hurtling out, dragging their burning bedding behind them. The pathways of the hospital were a chaos of activity as men and women rallied to fight the fire, stop it from spreading. Patients who could stand but not walk, rocked back and forth on their crutches, watching the brilliant aurora before them.

Hypnotised by Madeleine’s untimely funeral pyre.

Staying here, watching it burn will only get us killed, thought Wilson. The bombers could come back and this place is lit up like Christmas, thanks to the blaze. Keeping your head down is the only way you’re going to survive this shitty business, Smithy had once told him.

I need to get her out of here, Wilson thought.

Wilson was dragging Kitty to her feet, talking to her. She listened to him, wanting a distraction from the morbid spectators.

“-thing you can do. She’s gone, your sister. That fire is going to act like a bloody beacon to the Jerries. They can bomb the shit out of this place now. They can see us from the air, plain as day. We need to get out of here.”

Kitty heard the words tumbling out of his mouth. She wasn’t taking them in. Her world had just blown up in her face. Mad was smart, strong and sensible. Mad had known what to do when mother and father died, when their uncle died.

Kitty didn’t know what to do.

There was a shape in the fire, moving. Something was still alive in there. It lurched onto its feet, stumbling forward. The fire parting before it, rolling away in fluidic waves. The air was rich with the smell of burnt pork, boiling glue and old fat. A patient screamed and ran, dropping his fire bucket, as he saw it stepping out from the inferno, sizzling, hissing. Flakes of flesh clung to raw muscles that pulsed with each step it took. Scalded, blistered, it strode through the devastation, a lipless grin slicing across its face. Wilson saw it and yet didn’t see it. He was back in the night of the fire, at Hooge Crater, two years ago.

…turning burning howling…

…guttering human candles…

…falling away melting…

…sizzling fleshy sloughs…

As the burning figure strode on, it hunched and buckled, rolling and twisting in on itself. Wiry shoots sprouting from its body, engulfing its charred flesh in thick fur. Its face stretching, cracking, forming a lupine snout. The bones of the body splitting apart, then flowing together once more, making strange new formations. Powerful jaws snapped at the air, a predatory growl came from deep in its throat. A strong tail lashed the air. The wolf jerked its head back, pointing its muzzle at the sky.

A wintry lonesome howl echoed through the camp.

The howl of the wolf brought Wilson out of his reverie.

It made him shudder to the core. He grabbed Kitty and led her away from the inferno, holding her hand in a way he had not done before. It was a firm and confident grip, not slack and nervous. Kitty was shaking as she ran along beside him. He didn’t know where he was heading for, just away. Away from the fire. Away from the memories. Away from that evil thing, hidden for so long in his dreams, now roaming abroad, seeking him.

He was talking as he led the way. A barrage of nonsense, hoping to distract her from grief, “Christ, I remember when I was still fresh meat. The other guys went out to this whorehouse one night. When they came back, they pinned me down on the bed and rubbed their fingers all over my face. Talk about fish fingers,” he laughed at the memory.

It was then that he felt Kitty tear away from him, running off into the night, crying.

Nice one, Reg, he thought.

******

Her insides were bursting. She needed to get away from all these people, all this talking, all this noise. She wanted to run down to the sea. She wanted to fling herself into the water, tear off the wretched uniform she was wearing and be baptised anew, cleansed.

…garbed as angels of death are we…

That’s what Mad had said. It had been a joke but it was true. For every life saved, a dozen more died. All the filthy things she’d seen men dying from clung to the uniform she was wearing, infecting it, soiling her.

It was a taint.

The touch of death.

The Blighty Touch.

Screaming, she threw herself forward. She landed with a squelch on something soft. Kitty reached out a tentative hand, probing a mushy surface. Her fingers pierced it and it parted. The shitty smell of death gushed up into her face. Opening her eyes, Kitty saw the sickly flesh of a dead man, bleached and porcine from decay. His eyeballs were colourless nuggets of gristle. She scrambled away from the horror. Her hand sunk into the ruptured belly of another corpse. The clouds parted for a second, letting a momentary shaft of moonlight spill down. The dead were everywhere, all around, bodies and corpses littering the swampy land as far as the eye could see. Millions crushed together, somehow all brought here to be interred in this abysmal place by the war. And, hanging over them all, she saw an oozing chitinous bulk, a leviathan, dragging the sea of the dead with teeming fungal members, long, lithe and thin, gluttonously drawing hefty doses of blood and decaying substance into itself. Millions of motes polluted the air, exuding from oscillating cystic pouches where the crusty meat of the thing was naked and exposed. Tumour-hued bulbs seemed to have burst forth from the charnel folds of its under-flesh. These enseamed moons gave off a sickening fuliginous light that found Kitty. Burning, hot and cold, into her eyes. She heard the ancient goliath let out a cosmogonic groan.

She screamed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Wilson found Kitty kneeling. Her eyes streaming, hard bullets of crystal that were threading their way down over her dimpled cheeks. Her body was shaking. Her breathing was rapid and halting. She was staring at the dead. Her eyes flitting from one corpse to another.

She was getting the horrors.

He could see it, rising up in her, undoing her reason. Wilson bit his lip, knelt down and pulled her to him. Kitty wrapped her arms tight around his torso. They embraced with a fierceness that was strange for two people who barely knew one another. They parted with a sharp exhalation. Kitty wiped her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have run away from you. You were only trying to help me. Do what was best.”

Wilson let out a dry bark of laughter. “Are you kidding? I didn’t know what I was doing. I’ve no idea how to make someone feel better.”

“You’ve been in the trenches though. You’ve seen the killing. You know what happens. You know what to do.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. Out there, you expect your number to be up at some point. You know there’s a bullet with your name on it. This is different, this is a hospital. People are supposed to get better here, not fucking die,” he said, looking around at the mangled bodies, which had been blown out of their graves by the German bombs.

One of them moved. A chill ran through him. He squeezed Kitty’s hand. She smiled back at him through her tears.

“I thought I could get away. I thought I could just run down to the sea and keep on going. Close my eyes and just run forever. But you can’t outrun these things, can you? They catch up to you in the end.”

Wilson nodded, not speaking, his eyes were on the corpses. He could see more of them beginning to twitch. He hoped it was his eyes playing tricks, insanity, anything other than reality. The clouds were over the moon. Rain began to patter down. They both got to their feet, wiping muck from their clothes.

Kitty dabbed at her eyes. “Crying doesn’t solve anything, does it? I should stop.”

“Rubbish. Crying solves plenty. It makes you feel better, gets it all out of your system. There’d be no point in us being able to cry otherwise, would there?”

“No, I guess not. You talk too much sense, Reg.”

They smiled at one another.

Wilson looked up at the rain falling from the sky. He stumbled, feeling a tremor run through the ground, damp earth shifting under his feet. Kitty cried out and grabbed onto him for support. Wilson felt his heart clenching. The ground was moving, as if it were a vast lung, inhaling and exhaling in long breaths. The corpses were stirring, jerking in awkward spasms. Dead heads rolling back and forth on loose necks. One of them bucked, arching its back. There was a soft, wet tearing sound. Its thorax ripped open. A great shape bulged out. Obscene, invertebrate, pushing up through the clinging ropes of internal organs. Writhing free, its segmented hide decorated with a livid flaking crust of acne. It flopped onto the ground, floundering, its rear end was still embedded in the dead body. It nuzzled the ground with its bulbous blind head. Murmuring like a drowning man, it began to heave itself towards Kitty and Wilson, dragging the corpse along behind. They could see other corpses splitting open. Giving birth to more. The worms squirmed towards them. The rain battered down, harder and harder. Kitty felt tears on her face. The worms were surrounding them.

There was no way out.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The wolf watched the scene unfold from the cover of night. The worms had Wilson and Kitty surrounded. It cocked its head back, baying a single icy note of command. One of the worms reared up, lunging forward. Its stump of a head thumping into Wilson. Winding him. Knocking him down. He grappled with it. His fingers digging into the slick matter of the creature’s hide. It squirmed up onto him, pinning him.

“Run, Kitty. They’re after me. They’ll leave you alone if you go now. Get back to the hospital.”

The weight of the worm was on his rib cage, he could feel the thin bones screaming with the strain they were bearing. Begging to collapse, to give in and break. Each breath hurt. In his mind, he saw the edges of the bones brushing against the outer layers of his lungs. Tears stung his eyes as he heaved at the worm, trying to force it off. His teeth ground against each other. His shoulders shook. He could feel the worm matching his struggles, pressing down harder, harder. He could not breathe.

Then, it was gone. Cooling rain pebbled his face. The suffocating monstrosity evaporated, leaving nothing but a tracery of bitter mist. Wilson blinked, swallowing deep lungfuls of air. He felt sensation returning to him. He got to his feet. Kitty was there. Her left hand was shaking, bunched into a delicate fist.

The worms were all gone.

The corpses from the cemetery were still all around them but they were intact, still, with no sign of violation. As they had been. The dead were dead.

“What happened?”

“I hit it. I punched it on the nose. It, they all, just went away. Weren’t they real?”

Wilson rubbed his aching shoulders with his fingers, touched his chest. The aches and pains from that thing crushing him were very real. He reached out for Kitty’s hand and jerked his head towards the hospital. They were no safer out here than in there. Whatever was stalking him, it had forms other than the wolf and the thing from the crypt. Wherever he went, it would be waiting for him, somehow, in some blighted shape.

“Come on, let’s go.”

The pair turned and began to walk back through the torn earth. The dying light of the fire in the hospital was just ahead. It was almost a welcome sight. Kitty caught Wilson’s eye. Her irises were as black as the night around them. He blinked. Her eyes were normal again. Her brow furrowed as she saw him looking at her. Wilson looked away. Up ahead, there were screams.

“Oh no, they’re in the camp.”

“Who’re they?”

Wilson didn’t answer.

He set off at a run, pulling Kitty after him.

The wolf’s eyes glinted, amused. It watched them run. It turned and broke into a loping stride, cantering along, building up speed. It could smell their blood, hear it roaring through their veins. Rain stung its eyes. It was burning with hunger. A hunger that never left it. It could quiet the hunger but it could never silence it altogether. The hunger was too much a part of it. The hunger wanted the girl. Licking its long teeth, the wolf raced after her. Lifting its nostrils high, it inspected her scent.

Tasting her from a distance.

******

They heard the swift breathing of the wolf before they knew they were being pursued. It was coming, running in a rhythm sympathetic to the beat of the rain. Wilson looked over his shoulder and saw it, in all its nightmarish glory. As dirty and dire as the rats from the crypts. Eyes carved of ebony flint. Its skin scaled over with scars that came from centuries of hunting and killing. Its darkened claws flashed as it came on. It was closing the space between them.

“Don’t look back.”

The words wheezed from his lips as he picked up his pace, ignoring Kitty’s tired cry of protest. There would be time to care for and nurse their pains later. In his mind, he saw the powerful muscles of the predator at their heels working away. It was seasoned and well-built, able to keep up with its prey for mile upon mile. Wilson and Kitty were both drained and tired.

They could not run forever.

Even this short distance was enough to bring them up against their limits. Sleepless nights, distress and frugal rationed supplies left them with few reserves of strength to call upon. Wilson could see the hospital ahead, the flickering hurricane lamps casting their limpid glow. Hearing the sound of the wolf’s paws falling close behind, he pumped his legs even harder. He hoped Kitty would be able to keep up. Nearly there now, he thought.

Then, the hospital seemed to retreat. Moving further away. Wilson’s heart skipped up into his throat. The hospital moved closer once again. Then away.

Wilson shook his head, feeling dizzy. His vision swam, sending the hospital rushing off into the distance, until it was little more than a glowing point on the horizon.

His heart sank. He slowed. The hospital camp was almost gone, barely visible across a lightless no man’s land. Kitty’s grip on his arm tightened. She pulled at him.

“What’re you doing? We can’t stop.”

Wilson shook his head, out of breath. Pointing at the distant light, he knew they would never reach the camp now. The wolf was going to get them. They were going to die. He could already feel its claws raking through his flesh.

Kitty swore at him.

Wilson hung his head, listening to the thunder of the wolf’s approach, readying himself for its strike. Maybe this was better. How it should be.

Kitty slapped him hard across the face.

Wilson snapped his head up, blinking, looking at her in stunned surprise. Her face was flushed. Her eyes were teary. A few metres away, he saw it. The hospital camp. It was there, no longer teetering on the horizon’s precipice. He smiled and ran forwards, enjoying the wet thud of a duckboard underfoot.

Forgetting their feral pursuer for the moment.

He heard Kitty behind him. Feeling her grip on his wrist slacken, Wilson turned his head, “Kitty, are you okay?”

Wilson ran straight into a figure he had not seen.

He fell backwards, landing hard on his coccyx. He looked up into a blind, punctured face, its empty sockets nestling in pulpy skinless folds. Water ran over the distorted features, mixing with trickles of pus and rheum. He glimpsed a torso of fleshy ridges and open sores. It did not speak. It squealed, raising its mummified hands.

Wilson recoiled from the abomination, recognising it from the trench. He could see there were other shapes moving about in the camp. Shapes with body movements that were wrong, awkward. They shambled through the driving gusts of the growing storm, pursuing the men and women of the camp. Unnatural silhouettes flickered and danced inside the tents and huts. Kneeling over the bed-ridden. They were peeling off bandages. Picking at opened wounds the way a curious child picks at its food. They were sliding long fingers under helpless skin, scratching at the bones beneath, making men beg, buck and scream. Some of them were crouching over the unmoving, plucking out eyeballs and tongues to absently chew upon.

Wilson heard the wolf’s claws clatter onto the duckboards behind them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The wolf snarled and leapt at Wilson. He crashed to the ground, banging his bad thigh on the earth, swearing. He locked his hands around the beast’s throat, feeling the taut tendons as it leaned forwards. Its muzzle was reaching for his throat. Silhouetted by the dancing shadows, Wilson could only see the hypnotic blackened diamonds of its eyes. Huffing out powerful breaths, it scrabbled at his torso with its forepaws, raking claws through his pyjama suit, carving gashes into his flesh.

Wilson howled.

He clenched his teeth against the pain bursting inside his skull. His arms were shaking from the strain of holding the wolf back. He could not keep this stalemate up for much longer. Ropes of expectant drool slid from between the wolf’s jaws.

There was a blur of motion over Wilson’s head.

Kitty had punched the wolf. With a growl, it looked up at her. Kitty’s face blanched as she saw that the wolf was still there. Still very real. Wilson gasped as the wolf leapt at her, punching him in the stomach with its paws as it launched itself. The wolf knocked Kitty down hard, pinning her with ease under its weight. She screwed her eyes shut as she felt its claws cut her, stifling a cry. Wilson got to his feet.

He went for the wolf.

Snaking his arms around its neck, he heaved at it, trying to twist it off the prone girl. The wolf lashed about, grumbling in its throat as it struggled to throw him off. Wilson’s face contorted into a snarl. He pulled at the wolf’s lower jaw, craning its head back. With a yelp, it overbalanced, crashing to the ground, leaving Kitty gasping, shaking but free.

Wilson was lying on the wolf, adrenalin pumping through his veins. He hissed through his teeth as its legs lashed at him, nicking him with its claws. His hands were at its throat. His vision swam. For a second, he saw himself there, where the wolf should be. His eyes wide and frightened, a stream of blood running from one of corner of his mouth, dressed in his old uniform. Cold, grey, dying.

Wilson paused.

The body beneath him dissolved into that of the thing from the crypt. Its cinder-point eyes were laughing as it slashed at him, raking its brittle fingernails down his face. Blinded by blood, Wilson tumbled to the ground, feeling the monster shift back into its wolfish form.

Kitty looked up and saw the eyes of the wolf. It was very close to her now. She could see the hairs matted to its body by the rain. She watched a rope of slaver drop from its jaws. She could smell the rotting meat odour on its breath. Kitty closed her eyes, praying, unable to control the shaking that was pulsing through her freezing body. She bit her lip, wanting to be brave at this moment. She had tried to be strong. She hoped that was good enough. It leapt. Felling her with ease.

The wolf tore her throat out.

Wilson screamed as the light went out in Kitty’s eyes.

Blinking, she clutched a slender hand to her neck, uttering a single liquid gurgle as dark oily fluid ran through her fingers. She was dropped with a wet slosh, arms and legs sprawling out. The wolf buried its muzzle in her open throat, its jaws chomping down, tearing away flesh and muscle, jerking her about with hungry tugs. It licked gobbets of matter from her lifeless face, lapping up blood, savouring it. The ugly wounds steamed as rain fell, pooling in them.

Tenebrous hands darted out of the blackness, grabbing Wilson. He struggled against the mummified grip of the creatures holding him. It did no good. His throat was already raw from the scream he had uttered as he watched the wolf savaging Kitty.

The wolf backed away from the corpse, letting the shapes come shambling in. Their under-formed nostrils were twitching, scenting the odour of a fresh kill. Their spindly fingers slid over her legs and ankles. Wilson screamed as he watched them beginning to work themselves under her soft skin. One of the creatures turned in his direction. An earthworm was writhing in the crusty hole where an eye should have been. A malformed, sinewy arm twitched, hanging broken as a twig at its side. They were all laughing at him, gibbering with delighted alien hysterics. It was a few seconds before Wilson realised he was laughing too.

It was the laughter of the damned.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Wilson squinted as early morning light thrust bright knives into his eyes, awakening him from where he had fallen. A bitter morning rain was falling, creating a gentle dewy haze. Wilson froze as he took in the sights before him. What had been done to them was worse than anything he’d seen at Ypres. He tried to throw up. Wishing that he could. There was nothing left inside him now. He was empty.

The horrors of the night before were coming back to him. He looked up and saw what was left of Kitty Goldsworth. Her throat and torso were torn open. Her limbs, chewed and broken. Her face flecked with blood, spittle and bits of meat. The eyes were blind marbles staring up at the sky. Tears sprang to his eyes as he knelt, running his fingers over the exposed bones of her ribcage. Something glinted amongst the moist offal of her internal organs. He reached out and picked up a decorative silver cross. A gift from a loved one. He held it up and watched as it was washed clean by the touch of the morning rain. It became the one thing left untainted by the night. He felt his heart tightening, hurting so much. He had fought and he had failed. A hand fell onto his shoulder, raising him to his feet. The pits of its eyes glinted, glimmeringly dead, so empty. The long splinters of its teeth were caked with blood. It grabbed Wilson by the chin. It breathed the deaths of many into his face.

“Bastard.”

He spat in its eye.

It struck him, sending him hurtling backwards. Wilson banged his head, black blossoms coloured his vision. He felt the world spin away from him, dissolving into the Grey.

Chapter Thirty

It washed over him in waves, making his veins feel as if they were flowing with ice. He pushed on through. Each step heavy. Wilson felt a sweat prickling his brow and underarms. He could feel their voices. The vibrations he made disturbing the ether they dwelt in. Wilson quickened his pace. He knew that picking up speed would cause ripples here, echoes, alerting them to his presence. He no longer cared.

They were coming for him.

Wilson took another step, and then he fell, for the last time.

Wet ground slapped him in the face. He breathed in, gagging on a mouthful of pure winter. The Grey was gone. He was out of it, but he knew, he felt in his guts, that they were still coming for him. Wilson clambered to his feet. He stumbled, righting himself with an effort. He was nowhere near the hospital. He was in no man’s land. The mechanised chatter and wail of battle reached his ears. It was in the distance, so he was safe for the moment. Looking down at himself, he saw that he was in full uniform.

Wilson shook his head, dislodging nagging questions from his mind.

He felt a stab of pain dart through his hand. It was clenched into a fist. Opening it, he saw a tiny silver cross in his palm, its points driven into his hand by the tight grip he’d had on it. He picked it out of the small wound in his hand. The self-made stigmata seeming to mock him as it bled. He slipped the crucifix into a pocket. He tried to wipe himself down but wiping at the mud just turned the splatters into streaks. With a sigh, he stopped the fruitless exercise.

He began walking.

That thing was still after him.

He was going to have to get rid of it.

Christ alone knew how he was going to do that. Nothing had worked so far. He had kept it at bay a few times but that was all. He needed to kill it, once and for all. No-one else was going to die because of him. His eyes roved across the land. It was an expanse of clay and soil pulped into a dirty grey mash. It was all the same. Nothing distinguishing one part of it from another. He had no idea where he was going. A few dead trees jutted out from the muck. There were no other landmarks.

A footstep fell behind him. He looked around. No-one was there. Another footstep. He spun around. His hackles rose. His breath skipping out in quick gasps. He stayed still for some time. He did not know exactly how long.

Then, he saw them. Pale and unclear, flickering flames. Ghosts from the sun. Eidolons of war. They saluted him. Wilson saluted back. A strange, twisting smile playing over his lips as he did.

******

Night fell across no man’s land. Intermittent gunfire rattled away in the distance, coming no closer than during the day. Wilson was glad of that. It gave him time to think. A little light was cast by the flickering of Wilson’s ghoulish companions. He had walked on for hours, after he saw them the first time, hoping they would disappear. They did not disappear. Their hollow eyes were always there, boring into him.

At the head of the dead patrol was Captain Bone. His uniform was clean, immaculate. The rhythm of his marching was a model of perfect time-keeping. He beat his swagger stick against his thigh, making the rest of the patrol keep up their pace. Bone’s voice sounded in his head.

…You lost them. How do you lose your comrades, Wilson? This is a man’s war. There’s no place here for you…

This was no man’s land, no place for anyone, frankly. This could be where he belonged. A place empty of people. An endless lifeless desolation, where no-one else but him could come to harm.

Smithy was a real mess. His uniform hung in tatters from his bones. The rats hadn’t left much of him behind. His tin hat balanced awkwardly on top of his picked-clean skull. Wilson swallowed hard at the rough sound of bone scraping on bone as Smithy marched along. The Sergeant puffed on a limp cigarette clamped between his bloodied teeth.

…Told you, boy, not to go on. You did though, didn’t you, eh? You’re more than halfway there now. You’re almost done. You’re seeing ghosts, for Chrissakes. You’ll be getting the horrors next…

I think I’ve already got them, Sarge, he thought.

Then there was Brookes, that smile still carved across his face. His torn throat flapping away, open then shut, open then shut, in time with his marching. His eyes were gone. Taken by the rats.

…Not much of a look out now, are you, Brookes, eh?…

Brookes nodded his dead head.

A puppet dangling on broken strings.

Kitty stumbled along at the rear of the procession, trying to keep up. She was using one hand to keep her insides from falling out. She was not trained. She was just a volunteer. She did the best job she could, under the circumstances. She avoided Wilson’s gaze each time he tried to catch hers.

I’m sorry, he thought.

His mind was too numbed to think of anything more fitting.

How do you console the dead?

…you can’t, boy…

…dead is dead…

…there ain’t no coming back…

The patrol tramped on and on. They wouldn’t lose him ever. The dead never tire, never sleep, never eat, never drink and they never, ever dream. The only sound he would ever hear was their relentless pursuit. They would be with him always. It was a kind of justice, he thought, as he lay down to sleep in a shell hole.

******

…so still, so cold, paralysis steadily spreading, the dead weight, uncomfortably numb, the voices in his head, torturing their way through the echoing cavern spaces of his scratching skull. Sinking into the wet, nothing but rain falling, the black birds in the trees, calling, hungry, waiting…

******

Wilson awoke, shivering.

He cried out at the sight before him. It was not a patrol watching over him. It was a battalion. They were little more than outlines in the air, discolorations in the morning light, but he could see them all the same. His peripheries seemed to be crowding with the drifting dead.

Wilson laughed out loud.

It was a shrill sound. There was no enjoyment in it, just desperation. He rolled to the ground, lay spread-eagled in the dirt and cackled at the heavens above. The shades of the dead waited for him to grow hoarse from his hysteria and get back to his feet. In the distance, beckoning black-boned fingers were stabbing out of the horizon’s rotten flesh.

Drawing him on, towards them.

******

He came to the edge of Black Wood as night fell. He was panting, aching and exhausted. He approached the forbidding fringes of the wood, feeling undergrowth crunch beneath his boots. At least he would have some shelter from the rain here. He had not looked behind him for a long time. He knew they were still there.

Their dead eyes accusing him.

Then, a tremor shook the air, making Wilson turn to face the ashen army of skin and bones he had been leading to this place. The wind was keening through them. Captain Bone stepped out from the ranks. His arctic eyes crucifying Wilson. The wailing of the wind became a roaring. Drowning out Wilson. It was growing into thunder. Becoming seismic, a deafening pandemonium. The very air was heaving, seaming, splitting, undulating. Swelling, falling in on itself.

The disturbance burst open.

Out of the great wound, came hands, raking the air, grasping and clutching. The condemned dead flickered out, fading from sight, snuffed out by the sudden violence. Great arms came forth, followed by hideous suppurating heads he knew too well. Their wet liquescence weeping tears of pus and viscous fluid. He watched them, these piggish horrors, as they were disgorged onto the ground. As one, they raised their ropey diseased heads, screaming and gurgling. Their mummified fingers reached for him, rattling and chafing. Wilson fled from them.

Losing himself in the depths of Black Wood.

Branches clipped his face, snagging him. He batted his arms about, trying to clear a path. The trees lunged out, clawing at him. Through tears streaming from his stinging eyes, he saw the trunks twisting and writhing. The undergrowth seemed to be alive as well. It was trying to snare his ankles and make him fall. He knew if he fell, the trees would overrun him and drag him down into their witchy depths. Faces flickered in his peripheries. They were traced out on the trunks of the trees. Rain pattered down onto Wilson from the branches above. It stung his eyes. He wiped it away with his hands. Some of it ran into his mouth. He tasted it, recognising the sharp metallic tang.

It was not rain.

He felt the undergrowth shifting beneath him. In the poor light seeping through the trees, he saw a mass of the dead trembling underneath his feet. Corpses drowning in a mire of sucking skin. Cataract-ridden eyes wept infectious trails of tears. Toothless, tongueless maws murmured as he struggled over them. Blind, gibbering spineless things swam through the soft clogging salts leaking from the bodies. Snatching at Wilson’s heels with boneless fingers as they slithered and dragged on by.

Wilson dashed out into open ground.

A great crashing came from the trees behind him. They were hot on his heels. Up ahead, a shattered farm house loomed. Its hollow shell taunted him. It was a husk, a carcass. Another dead thing in this land of the dead. The crashing grew in volume. Wilson’s heart was thundering. He was tired. He couldn’t run for much longer. He was bleeding in dozens of places from the clawing he’d received in the wood. Drawing in a wheezing breath, he ran towards the farmhouse.

Pushing the door open, he fell inside.

The air was damp and musty, he guzzled it into his lungs, lying on the floor, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Knowing my luck, this place will be a Jerry machine gun nest and I’ll be shot dead in the next few seconds, he thought. Wilson lay on the damp wood floor, breathing heavily, waiting for disaster to befall him. No light came on. No harsh Teutonic tones disturbed the quiet of the house. Wilson got up. The sound of many feet tramping along reached his ears. The things were out of the trees, on their way to the house. They knew where he would go.

He needed to hide.

He could make out a table and chairs in the room. Beyond them was a lightless oblong. He edged towards it, hands held out, fingers probing for obstructions. The last thing he needed to do was cripple himself. The oblong was a doorway, steps led down from it into a cellar. The tramp-tramp-tramp of misshapen feet came closer. Wilson ran down a few steps, turned and shut the door. Not slamming it, he held it in place. Feeling around for what he hoped would be there. A lock. A bolt. A wooden bar he could draw across it.

There was nothing.

He carried on down into the cellar. Maybe they won’t search down here, he thought. They might check the house and then go. The door to the cellar shook as it was smashed in. Wilson looked around the cellar, praying for a hiding place of some sort to become clear to him. Irregular heavy footsteps thumped their way down the cellar steps.

There was a table. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. They didn’t seem all that limber and, with their faces in that state, they must be blind. He doubted if they could hear or smell much. Touch and vibration would be how they would find him. As long as he stayed still, he could have a chance. He knelt down under the table, clasping his hands over his head. He caught his breath as he heard rotten feet slopping onto the cellar floor. They dragged across the stone surface, leaving a glistening excremental trail. Wilson gritted his teeth as his stomach rebelled against the smell coming from the nightmare bulk invading the cellar’s space.

It was lurching around trying to find him. Tins and boxes toppled to the floor with a series of clatters and bangs. The shape knocked everything flying, searching for its prey. He heard a frustrated grunting escape from the thing. It bellowed, striking a wasted fist on the table top.

The footsteps stopped. Wilson stopped breathing. Had it heard him? Did it know he was under the table?

He froze.

Waiting for the table to be swept away. Waiting for those hands to seize at him. The footsteps slopped over to the cellar steps. He held his breath. He listened. The footsteps kept going, receding further and further away.

After quiet returned to the cellar, Wilson squeezed out from under the table. Breathing in measured gasps, he crept up the steps to the room above. The door hung loose on its frame. A huge hole smashed through it. He peered round the corner of the frame. The room was empty. The door to the house was open and there was no movement or sound outside, just the rattling of the rain. Wilson sank down onto the floor, his breathing becoming free and easy.

They were gone, like a passing storm.

Running for so long, so hard, Wilson felt exhaustion wash over him, a visceral wave of static. This time, he let it take him.

Letting himself fall and sleep.

Chapter Thirty-One

The stars were long dead here but a little of their light remained. The sky was funereal, a glimmering morgue, except it was not a sky. Wilson tried to get to his feet but there was nothing to stand on. Nothing was there but shadows gathering. They caught at him. Snatching him down, dragging him into unspeakable undercurrents. It was not water but it behaved so, closing over his head, snuffing out the lingering starlight, their faint, shining memory, old, fading photographs. The undercurrents became fierce, tearing at him. He beat his arms back and forth against it, striving to swim upwards, his muscles aching, straining. It was no use. He continued on downwards. A long way down. He held his breath. He knew that he was not drowning. He knew that this stuff was not water. But the similarities were hard to ignore. He was also sure that, if he saw all of this as it truly was, his mind would snap and he would be done for.

He felt a subtle change in the texture of things. A spreading expanse below as smooth as glass, whereas the stuff dragging him down to it was an amniotic treacle. He was looking out over the edge of Forever. Out there was Outside. Illimitable absence. That was where he was going, falling towards.

For a moment, Wilson surrendered.

He was so tired of fighting. He wanted this all over and done with. The barrier was pulsating. Entrancing Wilson as he came rushing down at it, driven by the hating dark. He braced himself for extinction.

Wilson’s boot soles hit the membrane.

Seconds, minutes or hours passed. He did not know how long. But he was still there. He had not passed through. Squinting in the dimness, he could see the membrane. Twisting and buckling. A curious warmth enveloped him up to the waist. He had been driven into the membrane but the membrane was holding. Stretching, bending around him. Unbroken. The atmosphere of the depths became fearsome. Hitting him hard. Pounding upon his form but it could not drive him through, banish him to oblivion.

The membrane, whatever it was, would not yield.

For the first time in ages, a genuine smile spread across Wilson’s face. He felt the membrane’s embrace ease, slowly pressing him back out. Then, with elemental force, he went rushing upwards. The seething sea ebbing away, thinning into flux. Black waves burst open over him.

He was out.

He let out a roar and it was heard by the dead stars.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The night sky was sparkling with stars when Wilson came to. For a moment, he felt stiff, dead and cold, could not see the walls and ceiling of the farmhouse. He felt the heavy sucking of mud on his limbs, heard a rustling and shuffling of feathers, a clicking of beaks and claws in the night. The black birds waiting in the trees, growing restless, starving. Then it was gone, a passing thought. He could again see the ceiling, the walls and the stars shining through the glassless windows.

He heard something outside.

Getting to his feet, he padded over to the door, pushing it open. The scratching tore through his mind. Closing his eyes, he saw the rats scrabbling inside his skull, working themselves into a blood-frenzy. Wilson clasped his head in his hands. He opened his eyes and stared out into the stillness. There were figures out there, rocking and swaying on their feet around a form he knew all too well. He could see those terrible eyes shining in their sockets. Spattered and smeared with bodily fluids, he could make out the shapes that had pursued him from no man’s land to the hospital and back again. Gurgling, they slapped their ragged lips together as Wilson came out into the open.

He shuddered but knew he had to go through with this. This was the end, whatever came of it. He would run no more. Wilson took one shaking step after another out of the house, towards the gross horde. The thing from the crypt leered at him. It raised a finger, gesturing. The words it spoke were a whisper, he heard them in Smithy’s voice.

“Remember the truth, boy.”

“No.”

“Remember everything.”

Wilson screwed his eyes shut, trying to force the memory down. It rose instead, a vengeful kraken, a long-buried demon of the deep. The waters of memory erupted. The monster broke loose, and Reginald Wilson remembered.

His finger sank into burnt, ravaged flesh. The earth was steaming around him, opaque with rivulets of hot petrol. They were dead. Every one of them, dead. The fire-breathing phantoms had come and gone, walking in and out of the inferno. Wilson did not know how he had survived. Luck was a commodity in short supply at the Front. Yet he had just had some. A bucketload. I should feel great, he thought to himself, I survived. I lived.

But he did not.

He was surrounded by twisted mangles of cooked meat and cindered bone. They had once been men. Some had swapped smokes with him. Others once passed him nips of black market rum. They were all gone. Roasted to death.

There was a cry off to his left. Wilson got to his feet and went to the body he could see moving. It was hunched over, gurgling to itself.

One of them was alive.

Exaltation ran through him. He was not alone out here with the dead. He did not recognise the man but who would after the punishment that the fire dealt out?

His skin was blistered, bleeding, burnt scaly in places. His uniform hung in tatters, clinging to his back. Wilson reached out a tentative hand, touching the man. The man yelped and Wilson jumped back. Uncurling, the man raised his head and his eyes met Wilson. The man was younger than Wilson. The man was a boy. Something wet and red hung from his charred lips, torn from one of the dead. His teeth were grinding at it, insistently. The sticky scarlet strip disappeared with a slurp. A crackling wet croak of a voice came from the burned boy’s throat.

“Y’want to try some? S’good.”

Wilson did not understand. The boy opened his fingers. There was meat there, in his palm. Lots of it. He offered it to Wilson.

“First cooked meat in months. Heh.”

The boy was one of the smiling insane. Dead inside. Wilson smiled back to him all the same. He took the meat. His stomach was rumbling. He was hungry, had been for days. He raised it to his lips. He took a bite. He savoured the taste of the meat. It was bloody and burnt but it was meat all the same. It was familiar in flavour too. He could not place it. The boy reached up with one hand, hooking a finger and thumb into the moist flesh underneath his own eye socket. Wilson watched the boy pull at it, tearing off a bleeding length of meat from his own face, all the way down to the chin. Ripping the end of the charred matter free, the boy popped it between his lips, sucking it all in with another slurp. Wilson gagged, swallowing the flesh in his mouth, inadvertently.

He looked into the boy’s eyes.

They were his eyes.

The boy was who he had once been, back then, after the night of the fire. Starving, feasting on his chums, the leftovers of their bodies, just to survive, until rescue came. All alone with the wet red horror of what he was doing to stay alive. All that time, all those mouthfuls of cold, charred, mouldering meat. Something was lost to him then, because something awful had been done. Inside, shades swarmed, gathering themselves, rolling in numinous waves through his brain, drowning him, veiling his past with a shadow of darkness. Submerging the horror of what he had done in the blackest stuff of all. Concealing the creature he became after the night of the fire, until now.

Wilson screamed, shaking his head, clawing at his eyes, trying to reach inside his head and tear out the memory. His stomach buckled. He bent over, retching violently. He looked up at the thing from the crypt.

“Who are you? How the fuck did you get inside my head?”

Its leer broke, it sighed.

Wilson pressed a hand to his brow. There was that migraine again, lancing through his brain. The taunting expression of amusement was there on its face. The one that haunted the pathways of his brain. His migraine spread out into a web of agony. Hot livid lines were pulsing underneath the dome of his skull as more memories burst free.

He left Brookes to find Smithy.

Wandering deep into the crypt, he found the coffin. He saw the silver blade jutting out of the body and admired the winking emeralds inset in the bronze hilt. A pretty little souvenir to take home. The body the blade had violated was nothing to admire. It was gaunt, yellowish and pale. The skin was stretched taut across ribcage and pelvis, cartilage at the elbows and knees poked through a filmy epidermis. Its fingernails were long, crusty with brownish muck. The droppings of rats and parasites coated it. Putrefied genitals hung between wasted thighs. Its bony arms were clasped about the wizened torso, as if it were hugging itself for protection against the sour atmosphere of the crypt. Its lips were drawn back over rancid gums, revealing ratty teeth, which rested over the lower lip.

Not paying a second thought to his actions, Wilson jerked the silver blade free.

The body shook, sucking in air, greedily. Coarse whispery breaths escaped from the jagged mouth. It looked too frail to do so but it began to move. The body arched its back, heaving in a terrible asthmatic breath.

It shot upright, sitting up in the coffin, turning its head towards Wilson.

Its infernal eyes held him, freezing him where he was. He gulped at the air, shivering on the spot. The blade dropped from his hands, clattering away. Clawed hands reached out, fastening around his shoulders and the thing puppet-walked him closer to it. He watched as it opened its maw into a hole edged with decaying fangs, discoloured saliva sliding from them.

It clamped down on his throat, stabbing deep, its fangs sinking in. He trembled as he felt them burrowing into his flesh, holding on tight, feverishly sucking at him, so hungry.

As it fed, the paralysing gaze was broken. His will became his own again. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He tore himself free with a wordless shout. He clasped a hand to his neck, gingerly fingering the ragged wound. The beast raised its face to him, gurgling, lapping the blood from its lips with a grey snake of a tongue. A tremor shook through it. There was another terrible asthmatic gasp and it flopped down, hanging over the edge of the casket, a puppet abandoned, its strings cut.

Holding a hand to his neck, Wilson stroked the sticky bites it had made, hissing through his teeth as he did so. Inspecting his fingertips, he saw beads of something laced with the blood. Viscous, black and yellow. He looked back at the lifeless form.

What the fuck was that thing?

Wilson looked into the face of the thing from the crypt.

Knowing what he would see now.

Its face was his face.

It had always been him. Before he was him, it had been him. Now, all was lost to him but his name. The black of its eyes ebbed away, fading to grey. Wilson looked away from it, his eyes coming to rest on the crowd of quivering shapes around him. He stepped towards the grotesque creatures. He looked into their faces and he recognised them. Each one of them was a mangle, a mirror, flesh as fragments, pitiable pieces. Little things gave the truth away. An eyebrow here, a facial tick there, vestigial mockeries of fingers and toes that he knew. An eye, his eye, embryonic and filmy, blinked at him.

Wilson reached out a shaking hand, touching them. The creatures quivered for a few moments, moaning and wheezing. Then, they crumpled to the ground. Their enseamed flesh softly undulating, collapsing. Wilson cried out, wounded. Then, one by one, the fallen fleshy sacs burst open and black rats came boiling out, pouring, shrieking, streaking away into the stygian depths of the surrounding trees.

Wilson fell to his knees, sobbing, clawing at the earth.

…we are such stuff as nightmares are made of…

He got to his feet, shaking. None of this made sense. His mind was splitting into bits. He could feel the hot, loose fragments moving freely inside his head. Wilson wrung his head in his hands. There were too many pieces. None of them were fitting.

He had forgotten who he was. The night of the fire had burnt it all away. Wilson tried to see further back, to glimpse more of who he had been, before the crypt, before the rats and the dark.

There was nothing.

All he could see were shadows gathering. So much was gone. So much lost to him.

“What do I do?”

A voice answered him, familiar and far away.

…You do the right thing, Reg. That’s what…

Wilson was alone now in the clearing at the heart of Black Wood. The thing from the crypt was gone. He knew what he had to do. He went back into the farmhouse.

Down into the cellar.

******

The cellar was no more. Wilson was standing in the crypt. Ahead of him was the tunnel and, by the wall, rested his long-lost rifle. The bayonet was mounted, ready.

…You’re gonna need this, boy…

On the floor was the same skull that frightened him when he first entered the crypt. Wilson kicked it away. He picked up his rifle. He knew where he had to go. What he had to do. The lightless tunnel was there, waiting to consume him with its shadows.

******

Inside the tunnel, the gloom became intense, almost a pulsing glow. The ground was sloping beneath him. It became one with the Grey. It clung to him, like cobwebs, trailing from his limbs in streams. The definition of the tunnel faded away, not coming to an end, retreating away, evaporating, disintegrating. The Grey became thicker, swallowing all and everything. Wilson felt the slope come to an end. Shivers passed through him as a rarefied electricity. The temperature down here made his head hurt and his eyes burn. His tongue felt heavy, embalmed by bitumen and bitter mineral salts. Wiping clots of a cloying frosty substance from his eyes, he went further in.

Space opened out around him.

It was an unearthly cathedral, stalactites depending from above as long nacreous tears, covered in dripping layers of clear oily residue. Grottoes and shadow-obscured hollows created numerous echoes, giving sonorous voice to the most minute of disturbances.

Nothing breathed.

Nothing was alive.

The only stirring came from a whispering in the tainted air, a rich rank draught wafting out from adjoining networks of catacombs that went even deeper into the bowels of the Grey. The surface underneath Wilson was slippery and soft. Giving, crackling, sometimes hissing. The dead were everywhere, squelching under his feet. Not substitutes for duckboards here, they were the stuff and hideous substance of the ground. Every one of them having fallen through to this place from the killing grounds of Black Wood. Wilson picked his way through the grisly heaving remains. Walking across the slick backs of the lifeless, he could feel the weight of the quiet settling on him. The pressure in the freezing air. The cavern, awesome in its scale, stretched on before him into a distance where there was a tinged mist hanging as a veil. Drawing nearer to it. Wilson glimpsed something shuddering there, hidden within. It was not human, unfamiliar, nothing he knew. It was big, gigantic. Seeming to hover, to hang in the air.

Wilson felt a chill sweat peppering his brow as he approached.

The vile air flowing around the shape in the mist was thick, heady and close. Wilson could feel its deadness. He was conscious of each step he took. He heard, with unusual clarity, the sucking sound of his boots as they pushed into failing flesh and then drew back out.

He did not want to go on. He could feel it watching him. It was the rats, the wolf and the thing from the crypt. Nestled within the Grey, it had been waiting for him. A nightmare that lived and breathed and rooted about in the deep, hidden pits of a man’s mind, feeding on what it found buried there.

The rifle shook in his hand.

He listened to the rats scratching inside his skull. It was strange how he had almost become used to the raking and scraping of their claws. The shrouded shape was before him. Bulbous and distended, it hung in the air. Rippling, unsteady, abortive in its breathing. Wilson thought that he could see a light emanating from it. A tumour-white light that burned. Wilson wanted the veil of mist to stay there. More than anything else in the world. More than anything he had ever wished for, he wanted that veil not to part. He did not want to see what was on the other side. He did not want to see it but he had to. He raised his rifle. He slashed the bayonet blade into the veil.

He split it open.

Chapter Thirty-Three

And there it was, suspended in a corrupt, disintegrating womb. Deathless and wormy. Obsidian eyes, poison moons, blazing with nocturnal brilliance from its mildewed and crabby underside. Tangled vegetative fronds came weaving out from the chitinous matter of its layered hide. Reaching to the high vaulted ceiling of the cavern, weaving in with the hoary roots of Black Wood. Drinking the sustenance of blood and suffering from its noxious soil.

Wilson stood before the Vetala.

The spaces within him, the old wounds, were brimming over with the bad blood of thought, feeling and memory. He shuddered, nauseated by terrible remembrance. Some things are best left forgotten. Wilson knew now what the dead fear, what follows on, the fate that comes after extinction. When something becomes nothing. When everything of you and about you is gone from this world. When no-one remembers your name.

And my name is all I have left, he thought.

He could feel the infernal scratching worsening, raking the inside of his skull with its blinding fury. Darkened claws raged away. Scratching inhuman languages into hard bone. Every letter, a jagged point. Each word, a series of gouges.

…What’re you doing here, boy? This is no place for you…

A ripple passed through the cancerous hateful form.

Wilson looked up at it, “What is this place?”

…This is the Grey, where we dwell. You know that much…

“What am I doing here then? I’m not the same as you.”

…You are. You’re becoming one of us. Once we’re inside you, there’s no getting us out. Heh, you might say we’re like having rats in the brain…

More ripples coursed through the beast.

It was laughing at him.

“I’m not like you.”

Wilson brandished his bayonet. His stomach knotted. He held out the blade, then he inverted it, resting its point against his heart. He could feel the life-giving organ shuddering underneath. His time was almost up. He heard the voice of Brookes.

…Do the right thing…

He could feel the scratching under the skin of his arm. Wilson ground his teeth, glaring at his hand, paralysed. His fingers loosened. The bayonet began to slide free. The laughter of the Vetala shook a shower of limestone stalactites down from the vaults above. Better do it now and do it quick. He looked into the shimmering spider-eyes of the horror hanging before him.

“I might be a lie, I remember nothing about who I am, and you might well be the truth of me, but you know what? Sometimes, a lie can be noble.”

He drove the bayonet blade home. A mountainous shudder ran through the Vetala. A howl ripped out of it, a raw, hopeless, bleeding sound.

Everything stopped.

There was a moment of perfect stillness.

A wintry flush ran through Wilson. He clenched his teeth against it. Feeling his fingers and toes burn with prickling chills. Everything became blotchy. A ferocious scratching tore through his insides, burrowing into his heart, his lungs and kidneys. He let it pass through him. He knew this was it, the threshold between life and death. There was no going back. This was the point of no return. The rats inside his skull scurried over one another, scratching away at his brain, shredding his senses, trying to claw their way out, escape. But the black river came thundering through him, washing the rats, and the scratching, away forever. Wilson’s head fuzzed and went light. A strange aching pressure flared and then receded inside his skull. The Vetala trembled, shook, its carapace becoming translucent. A hissing wave of excretory fumes washed over Wilson. The Vetala was rotting, receding, crumpling in on itself. The shell of its hide crumbling, coming apart at the seams. Raining soundlessly to the ground. Fluids went gushing out in thick maggot-ridden rivers. Its eyes shattered like mirrors. Its tendrils writhed desperately over the dead bodies below, seeking to draw some sustenance from them. Wilson saw something small and black squirm its way out of the titanic carcass. The next second, it was gone. Then, with a cataclysmic groan and a reverberating crash, the Vetala fell from its cradle. Its grip on the roots of Black Wood dissolving completely.

All became quiet and still.

******

Smithy and Brookes were waiting for him, sitting on the steps of the crypt, sharing a fag, puffing out smoke through the holes in their bones. Smithy smiled a crooked smile, despite his broken jaw.

…Well done, Whiner. Couldn’t have done better m’self, and that’s saying summat…

Brookes nodded at Wilson. He was smiling, satisfied, stroking the open wound in his throat with a restless fingertip.

…Thanks, Reg. You did the right thing…

Epilogue

Wilson opened his eyes. He could see pale sky through the branches of Black Wood. He was sprawled on his back, wounded, his lifeblood pumping into the ground. His breathing was shallow. Every breath was a battle won. Wilson felt the bullet in his back grinding against bone. The still, white-eyed corpses of Smithy and Brookes were sprawled over him. Their eyes, glassy and empty. Shells whined and roared overhead. Men screamed and yelled. Everything sounded so distant, so far away. The rat from the crater was squatting on his belly. It was looking down at him, its eyes calmly regarding him. Something hurt in his side. Wilson drew it out from his pocket. Small, silver and tarnished. A crucifix. The stigmata scar it had made showing, white on his palm.

Wilson’s eyesight flickered and dimmed. The rat was swelling, spreading, dissolving into formlessness and shadow. He sighed, closed his eyes.

Overhead, he heard the black birds cry.

…We are such things as dreams are made on…

William Shakespeare

About the Author

G.R. Yeates was born in Rochford, Essex and went on to study English Literature at the Colchester Institute. He has lived in China where he taught English as a foreign language and he now lives in North London where he writes every day and sleeps very little. He considers his literary influences to include George Orwell, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, Franz Kafka and Thomas Ligotti.

The Eyes of the Dead is his debut novel.

For news and details of future releases:

http://www.gryeates.co.uk

http://www.twitter.com/_gryeates_

http://www.facebook.com/pages/GRYeates-Horror-Author/10150248772620001

Table of Contents

The Eyes of the Dead

Acknowledgements and Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Epilogue

About the Author

Table of Contents

The Eyes of the Dead

Acknowledgements and Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Epilogue

About the Author