Creel had experienced it before, on many battlefields and in many wars.
Usually during the blackest hours of night, it would descend over the trenches and for a few shocking, gut-crawling moments you would wonder if you had died. If a shell had come screaming down on your position and blasted you to ropy fragments. They said you never heard the shell that got you and there was probably a truth buried in that one, but sometimes the silence was much worse than the shelling.
Out in No-Man’s Land, beyond the perimeter and wire entanglements, just…nothing. No rats scavenging, no wild dog packs howling. No men moving. No rain falling. It was eerie, hushed, waiting. Like something hiding in the darkness making ready to spring and tear out your throat. And though it was soundless, that silence had a quality to it all its own. A bigness, a volume, a weight that you could feel crushing the wind from you second by second as it settled down like a stone slab over an open grave.
It never lasted for more than hour or so and oftentimes, much less, but while it did it was impossible not to feel it gathering around you. Impossible not to listen to it, to see if there was something out there, something hiding in that blank-faced murk…like maybe you might hear the soft thud of its heart or the sound of its breathing.
The bottom line was, for however long it lasted, he knew, senses became very finely attuned and your mind assured you it was hearing something that no ears could possibly detect: bodies decomposing, rats licking their fur, flies laying eggs, maggots bursting from the sweet-sickly pulp of carrion.
Creel was breathing hard now.
He hated this.
It was like all of Flanders was waiting for something, tensing, coiling itself into a tight silent ball.
Trembling, he lit another cigarette and the sound of his lighter echoed into the night with volume as if the very physics of the air was somehow…deranged, turned inside out.
Wait, just wait, boyo, because it’s coming and you know it’s coming. Something’s about to happen. Get ready.
A perfectly white mist had gathered over the ground now, blown up, it seemed, from craters and shell-holes and jagged cuts. At first he thought with panic that it was gas, but gas was never that perfectly white, the color of bridal lace. About the time he finished his cigarette, he began to hear sounds out there in the desolation. Sounds like whispering voices.
Was it men like him sneaking about or He could hear feet in the muddy earth, splashing through puddles, pushed down, pulled free. Many, many feet and they were coming in his direction. Swallowing, a sudden heaviness in his chest, he felt a cool tingle at his spine and something like a current of electricity in his bones.
Closer now.
He did not see them, but he knew they were there. He smelled a stench of putrefaction that was warm and yeasty, but it could have come from anywhere out there, a dozen pockets of the unburied dead. It did not mean that…what was out there was not human. Yet- yet- he felt certain that what was coming to call was something other than lost soldiers creeping through the blasted remains of the trenches.
This was something else.
Something that was not evading, but… hunting.
He heard a sound, quite near, like someone breathing in through their nose with a quick wheezing intake of breath. The sound of someone sniffing like an animal, trying to scent prey, follow the spoor.
Creel felt himself go hot then cold all over. Drops of perspiration wetted his skin and a greasy sort of fear-nausea twisted in his belly.
Something was coming.
He would see it soon.
It was coming over the ridge.
And then he did see it and maybe he had been looking at it for some time, for there atop the ridge in a near-perfect band of moonlight was what he’d first taken to be a withered dead tree rooted in the earth…but it was moving and it looked, if anything, like some marionette: skeletal like a broken doll, twisted at the waist, head laid low against one shoulder sprouting hair like limp cobwebs, trailing limbs like living sticks.
It was sniffing the air.
“Where are you hiding?” it said, a woman’s voice gone to a shrieking dry screech like iron scraped over concrete. “I know you’re there…I can smell you.”
Her face was bleached and bloodless, cratered and sunken like the dark side of the moon. He could see eyes that were a hot smoldering red scanning the landscape, fingers twitching, as she sniffed the air.
“Here,” she said. “I can smell him…he’s here.”
All around her, figures rose up. A dozen then two dozen-wraiths, ghost-children whose faces were a luminous white in the moonlight like glowing paper lanterns. Moppets in ragged shrouds, rungs of gleaming bone jutting through, the buzzing of flies only slightly louder than their whispering voices.
“Find him!” the woman ordered.
They sank away into the mist like swimmers submerging, only they didn’t vanish. They were down on their hands and knees, sniffing the earth like hounds, crawling down the ridge like spidery white ants on a hillside. Creel, seized up with a terror that was limitless, watched them coming, moving like lumbering insects, thick glottal noises coming from their throats.
Several passed quite near to him and it wasn’t a matter of whether they would find him, but when. This was it. It all hung in the balance and he was painfully aware of the fact. To die by shellfire or a sniper’s bullet was one thing, but to be taken down by these…these children was something else again. He would be rendered to the bone. They would suck his blood and marrow, swim in his viscera and bathe in the blood from torn arteries.
Out of desperation, he tried the simplest trick in the book. His hand found a stone that was perfectly smooth, perfectly worn, as if it had lay on a river bottom for many, many years. He felt its weight in his palm, hefting it. He tossed it over his shoulder with everything he had and heard it thump against something and then splash.
A dozen heads wreathed in flies popped up from the mist.
“There!” called the old witch on the ridge. “There he is!”
She joined the chase and passed within five feet of him. When they were all gone into the fog, he scampered away up the ridge and down the other side, running and stumbling and swimming across flooded shell-holes. He threw himself down and fell atop a waterlogged corpse that went to a gushing white slush beneath him. The stench was gassy and evil, but he did not dare cry out.
For far in the distance he heard the hag: “Find him! Bring him to me! I want Creel! He’s one of ours…”
18
The Dugout
When Creel came awake there were hands on him. The hands of men. A shadowy face said, “Easy, mate. We found you out there. We brought you back. Quiet now. There’s Hun patrols about.”
The last thing he could remember were those creeping children, then running, hiding, dragging himself along on his belly, half out of his mind if not all the way. He must’ve went out cold. Something. He could not remember. Only a braying voice I want Creel! He’s one of ours…
– he bolted upright, sweating, shaking, feverish. His teeth chattered and a canteen was pressed to his lips. Then a flask of rum. He calmed inch by inch, breathed, smoothed out the wrinkles and unsightly folds like he was an unmade bed. Even in the dimness he knew he was still with the 12 ^ th Middlesex, because that was Sergeant Kirk over near the gun slit in the dugout wall, scanning the terrain.
“How’d you get way out here, Creel?”
Burke…oh Jesus, Burke.
“I don’t know. The barrage…everything was torn up…bodies everywhere…I didn’t know which way was which.”
“You’re not alone,” one of the Tommies said.
“Where is this place?”
“It’s a dugout,” Kirk said. “An old cavalry post the Hun overran last winter.”
“How far are we from our lines?”