“Lad? Lad!”
The youth groaned.
“He’s alive. Nellie. Nellie!”
Nellie came over on all fours, the medical knapsack swinging at her side from one shoulder as she sought to avoid the tendrils of energy that spat from the rocks. Needing to do something, Padre Rand went with her on all fours.
Nellie checked Tarak’s pulse and breathing. He was still alive, but unconscious.
She gently prised the book from the lad’s grasp, and as she did so, she gasped.
The Padre made the sign of the cross. “Dear Lord, the poor man,” he said under his breath.
Seared into Tarak’s chest, from the iron design on the front of the tome, was the Sigil of Croatoan.
STAYING LOW, TULLIVER scrambled over to the temple wall and, with a wary glance back at the arcing rock, raised his head to look out through a loophole.
The clearing surrounding the temple was white, as if someone had draped a fine muslin sheet over everything. It was like a thick white cobweb. Through it, taut, swollen bulbs had fruited. It seemed as alien to the surrounding vegetation as that did to the flora of Earth, and that, thought Tulliver, was saying something.
The urmen, fleeing the electrical discharge in the temple, had run straight into the deadly carpet. The fruiting bulbs exploded, enveloping them in yellowish clouds. They coughed and choked, gasping for breath in the noxious plumes, clawing at their throats.
“Christ! Gas! Gas! Gas!” cried Gutsy, peering out of a loophole in the wall.
“It’s not gas, it’s spores,” yelled Nellie.
By now, the Tommies were at the loopholes, peering out as stray bolts of energy crackled out at the wall of the temple around them. They fumbled at their chests for their PH gas hoods, pulled them over their heads and tucked them into their collars. With their circular mica eyepieces and short red rubber non-return valves, they looked as alien as anything else there.
The urmen of the Ruanach succumbed to the spore clouds and fell to the ground, where the gossamer fine carpet of mycelia advanced inexorably over their bodies, and the spores that they had inhaled sprouted from their mouths and noses, choking them.
The fast-spreading network of living threads made short work of their bodies. It desiccated them before the Tommies’ eyes, and the mummified remains split open with dry cracking noises as more fruiting bodies rose from them.
Atkins hurried from one loophole to another. The carpet of threads was creeping towards the temple. “Whatever it is, it’s surrounding us,” he called out.
“I knew this was a bad place,” said Napoo, a bandanna of cloth round his face against the spores.
Everson stood at the temple doors, revolver in hand. “Evans, Jellicoe,” he called out. “Fall back! Get inside.” Everson turned to the others. “The rest of you, stand to!”
Mercy and Pot Shot hared through the doors, slammed them shut and rested against them with relief.
“One minute it wasn’t there, the next it’s sprouting up through the ground. What the hell is that?” heaved Mercy through his gas hood.
Pot Shot turned towards him with an exaggerated movement so he could see him though his eyepieces. “Don’t you ever get tired of asking that question?”
“Around here?” queried Mercy. “Half the time it’s the only sane question worth asking.” He arched his back, pushing himself off the door, and ran in a low stoop along behind the rest of the section and the tank crew at the loopholes, stopping only to duck and yelp as a venomous electrical tongue lashed out from the rocks, snapping indolently at the wall above him. He took his place next to them, and Pot Shot appeared by his side.
Outside, drifting in from the jungle, a yellowish spore mist was rising and a vague shadowy shape moved with it, coalescing into a ghost-like grey figure that stepped lethargically from the trees.
“Huns!” yelled Cyril, glancing back into the temple from the loophole. “It’s bloody Huns!”
Risking a whiplash of energy, Jack launched himself up to the loophole and peered out across the shrouded clearing. “Huns?” Then he saw. It had been an easy mistake for Cyril to make. Too often, in a pale dawn, they had seen the grey-clad Huns creeping towards them.
This, though, was no Hun. Thin and cadaverous, its skin was grey and sunken, its ill-fitting serge uniform scarcely visible beneath a dusting of fine threads. Wrinkled, puckered growths, like some sort of cankers, distorted the shape of its head and right arm and half its chest. The figure moved clumsily, as if trying to maintain its balance was an effort. This was a misshapen travesty of a man, an obscene mockery of a Tommy.
Nellie recognised the sight, too.
“Mathers!” she cried though her gas hood. “But that’s impossible. We saw him swept away.”
“It’s wearing puttees. It’s not an officer,” said Atkins, peering out. “That’s Talbot, one of the tank salvage party.”
“Jeffries has woken the dead to do his bidding!” cried Tonkins.
“Can he really do that? Bring back the dead?” asked Cecil, his voice tremulous with fear.
“It’s the kind of diabolical thing he probably would do,” said Mercy.
“Well, the last time we saw Talbot, he weren’t actually dead,” said Gutsy.
“Maybe so, but he doesn’t look well,” admitted Mercy.
“I’ll give you that.”
Mercy and Pot Shot fired at him. The bullets tore through Talbot’s body, the initial force throwing his shoulder back and twisting him off balance momentarily as he recoiled from the impact, but he remained standing. Motes of grey spore dust swirled in the air around him from the impact.
Mercy looked back over his shoulder. “Well if he wasn’t dead then, I’d say he is now.”
“No!” came the muffled cry from one of the tankers. “It does no good. You’ll just spread the spores. We tried it. You can’t bomb them, shoot them, or burn them without spreading spores. There’s no way to stop them!”
The gaunt, grey-faced soldier turned towards them and watched implacably.
“He’s possessed by the same thing that Mathers was,” said Nellie.
From out of the spore mist, other emaciated forms appeared to surround the temple, each one a shambling mockery of a Broughtonthwaite Mate, each one laced with a fine filigree of mycelia and deformed by cankers. It was the rest of Corporal Talbot’s salvage party.
“Talbot, stand down!” cried Everson through his gas respirator.
The cadaverous Corporal and his grey men stood immobile. From their feet, thin, pernicious threads began to advance across and through the soil, joining with the carpet spreading from the dead urmen, weaving its way toward the temple.
ATKINS LOOKED ON with revulsion. Since he’d volunteered and been shipped over to France, death was something he’d lived with daily. For Christ’s sake, his own pal had just died. On the Somme, you couldn’t escape from death and decay; everywhere you looked there were bodies, English, Belgian, German, French. The stench of rotting corpses filled the air, but there was at least some comfort in that. As the old trench song went, ‘When you’re dead, they stop your pay.’ Dead was dead. But this? This was abominable. It appalled him. The fact that they knew these men repulsed him even more. There was Hume, Owen, Fletcher, Banks, Preston, Mitchell, Walker and Hardiman. It was like some sick joke Jeffries might play, reanimating the dead to serve his own evil ends. In some way he wished it were. But this was just nature, some kind of hellish mould that animated their bodies. It had taken them over, while all the time feeding on their flesh in order to sustain itself, even as it used them to migrate to look for new hosts, new food.
Now it had found them.
STANDING WITH HIS back to the wall, beside a loophole, revolver in hand, Tulliver glimpsed the shine in the centre of the temple again between the rocks. It grew brighter, shining as though the air was threadbare and worn.