We moved hard and fast and I managed to keep pace, but I’d be lying if I said it was easy. Truth of the matter is, I think Crowley actually slowed to let me keep up with him but I can’t prove that. It was just a feeling. I think that maybe he cold have run as fast as a Jeep moves if he wanted to.
That copse of trees was the first obstacle. I saw several dead German soldiers in that cluster of trees. Most of them had expressions or horror on their faces. All of them were broken in ways that made no sense to me. I don’t think I had but a few seconds to look at them as we were going past. I know Crowley never gave them a second glance. I also know that image of their bodies has haunted me for decades.
Past the trees were more fields, most of them burnt out and blown apart. Crowley moved through them at a trot and I had no choice but to follow.
We kept that pace until we ran into a small town that had been utterly destroyed by the war. I can’t say for sure who destroyed it, but I like to tell myself it was the Nazis and that we could never have done any such thing.
I said it was a small town, but I think that’s wrong. There were a lot of buildings, or rather there were remains from a lot of buildings. Mostly there were shattered pieces of walls and foundations and the burnt-out husks of what had likely been homes and churches and a few communal structures.
The only thing that had not been destroyed was a cemetery at the edge of what had been the town. Headstones rose from the ground, a crop of remembrance to those who had passed before.
When we got close, Crowley raised a hand and beckoned for me to slow, to approach with caution. Not a word was spoken then, but I listened anyway.
The ruined town had unsettled me. I had seen combat. But mostly we’d managed to avoid civilized spots and stayed to the countryside. It was safer, you see. The remains had jarred me. All I could think as I passed through them was that there had been people there once. There had been families and they’d had lives and lived them as best they could and now all of that was gone. Either they were dead or the Germans had taken them. I did not know which, but I suspected the former.
The cemetery was worse. There was a feeling of menace there. The fine hairs on my neck rose as we approached and my skin felt almost feverish. There was something here. Something bad.
I said the cemetery was untouched and that was a lie. When we got closer I saw the truth of the matter. Each headstone had been marked. It wasn't a big thing, but it was there. Someone had cut each marker with a rune. Crowley stopped and studied the first one and then moved on. The same mark on each piece, two jagged s marks, like stylized lightning. I remembered that symbol on the lapels of the of the black-garbed Germans — the symbol of the SS. But a stroke mark cut through each of those symbols.
“What do they mean?” I asked Crowley, fully expecting no answer.
“Either it’s a sign that someone doesn’t like the Nazis or it’s a name. Hard to say.”
“A name?”
He sighed. “A name. A sigil representing that name. Or, someone doesn’t like the Nazis.”
“What kind of name?”
“If I knew that, sweet pea, I’d have told you.” I contemplated the fact that he’d just called me ‘sweet pea’ but decided to let it go. Crowley scared the hell out of me.
Maybe it was my fault. Maybe if I hadn’t distracted him, Crowley would have noticed the one mark that was different. It was almost the same but three small dots had been added into the broken SS symbol and Crowley had been looking at me as he passed it.
As soon as he moved past, the symbol glowed, and the air thrummed; a single low note vibrated across the whole cemetery and Crowley looked around, frowning.
My sense of unease increased and my stomach turned and lurched. My mouth watered and I thought for certain I would vomit all over my shoes.
I never got the chance. Instead the ground quaked under me and I fell on my ass in the dirt as the headstones bucked and threw themselves to the sides. Something was moving under the ground and it pushed everything above it around with ease.
The earth shrugged and then let out a moan of pain. I was there when my daughters were born, and when my son struggled before dying in the process of being born. I heard the sounds my wife made. They weren't all that dissimilar to the sounds the ground offered up as it split and gave birth to a hellish thing.
I do not know about life after death. I'd certainly thought about it before. When you are swimming in bloodied waters and bullets are hammering the people around you and slashing the waves, the afterlife kind of becomes a thing you consider about as often as you blink.
None of my thoughts on the subject ever came close to what ripped itself from the cemetery. It knitted itself from the remains of the dead, clothed itself in the mud and the roots and the insects that feasted on the lifeless remains of a whole village.
There was a system to it. I remember thinking that even as I watched the demon heave itself from the groaning, whimpering ground. The bones and flesh of the dead tried to make themselves fit into a pattern that made sense, I suppose. The bodies tore themselves apart even as they ripped from the ground. From the smallest toe bone to the femurs, those bones collected in twin columns, rose from the ground like weeds stacking themselves into a misshapen mockery of legs. Mud and roots and blades of torn grass formed the muscles over a structure of bone, leaving much of the collected pillars of muck-crusted remains exposed.
Above that more skeletal remains crowded themselves together and pushed into a colossal form. It was not human, but it aped that form. A golem crafted from bone and filth, a giant with a head built from a cluster of skulls mashed together like grapes crushed in an angry hand.
It did not stand still as it was born. Like a living thing it writhed and squirmed. Like a monstrous, bloated deformed toddler, it staggered on clumsy legs and screamed its outrage to the world.
I screamed, too. Nothing in my life, not the war, not even the spectral forms of the Wild Hunt had ever prepared me for watching that abomination tear itself from the funereal womb.
That lump of a head was not a proper shape, but it hinted at what should have been. The deep cuts and broken earth formed a rudimentary face, hollows where eyes should have been, a bulge in the general shape that mimicked eyebrows. A gash for a mouth. That head turned and looked, the whole of the shape seeming to look toward me and then toward Crowley.
The thick, brutish appendage that closely mimicked an arm and a hand, swept up from the thing's side and crashed into Crowley, swatting him as easily as a grown man might slap aside an infant.
Crowley grunted and rolled through the air, his face battered into a new form, his body very obviously broken.
I did the only thing I could in that situation. I raised my rifle, took aim, and fired at the thing. My aim was good. Bone and muck snapped away from the shape in a small fountain, for all the good it did. I may as well have stabbed at a rock. One leg rose, ripping free from the earth in a cascade of severed plants and crushed headstone.
The shape came at me and opened its mouth; a low noise pumped from that opening, a wet sound that made me remember the bodies that never reached the shore at Normandy Beach.
I fired again with no noticeable effect, but to buy me time to stand. I stepped back, looking around for any possible weapons that might be more useful, when Crowley came at the bone heap.
Crowley's face was bloodied. His clothes and his flesh covered in smears of mud. He should have been dead. I'd seen him hit by the thing and knocked aside as easily as a man struck by a runaway car. I’d seen his leg bent at an impossible angle, flopping as he rose higher into the air and then struck the ground.