A sound.
At first he was not certain that he had even heard it: a subtle scratching sound. It could have been a rat, but the way Kirk sucked in a gasping breath, he knew it was not. He moved very slowly over towards the gun slit which gave him a pretty good view of the trench system before him. He saw nothing…but he could hear that scratching and that’s when he knew.
Whatever was out there, it was circling around outside the sandbagged parapet, scratching for a way in like a hungry dog. The trenches themselves were over seven feet deep. You needed a scaling ladder to climb up and over the top. Outside the parapet, another deep ditch had been dug and this to make it that much more difficult for German raiders to make it over the wall. That ditch was slightly deeper, nearly eight feet in depth.
And that’s what scared Creel at that moment, filled his throat with ice and made his scalp creep on his skull. For he could see just the very top of something, possibly a head, moving through the perimeter ditch. This was what had frightened Kirk and Jameson so badly and this was what wanted in: something large enough that an inch of its head could be seen above the sandbags.
An odor was coming into the dugout and it was an odor that Creel knew only too well. It was the rank, suppurating stench of infected wounds and gangrenous tissue, filthy battle dressings and bile. And maybe something beyond that-vomit and corruption and cesspools gassy with decay. It was the smell of the thing out there, something birthed in the ravaged, dead womb of battlefields and maggoty mass graves.
They could hear it raking splintered nails over the sandbags, patient, very patient, but anxious to get at them.
“ What…what is it?” Howard finally whispered.
“ A ghost,” Jameson said in an airless voice.
Kirk licked his lips and kept licking them. “It…I saw it come out of the mist…something gray like a winding sheet…rustling…”
Creel was trembling now, as were the others, some defeated, hopelessly optimistic part of himself wishing it would just go away. His lips and tongue felt thick and ungainly and he didn’t think he could speak to save his own miserable life.
And then he heard a voice, dry and scratching, filled with dirt: “Creel,” it said. “Creel…”
And he almost went out cold at the sound of it, his heart pounding so fiercely he thought it might explode. In his mind, he was seeing that thing out there, that graveyard horror that called him by name-death walking, death stalking-and it rinsed his face of color. There was a scream in his throat but he did not have the strength to let it fly. He tried to stand over near the gunslit and his blood went to his feet and he stumbled over, his fevered mind showing him exactly what was behind that shroud: a distorted death’s-head with eyes like glowering moons, flesh that was acrawl with bloated black flies. Kirk caught him, held onto him, but there was little he could do to bring the blood back into him.
They gave him rum, rubbed some warmth into his face and finally his lips parted and he said, “It called my name.”
Kirk and his two men looked at each other. “There was no voice,” he said.
“ None,” Howard affirmed.
And that’s when Creel knew it was in his head, only in his head, a very private thing, an invitation to a mass for the dead that only he was being summoned to.
“ It got through,” Jameson said, on the edge of hysteria.
Creel figured it would. Sooner or later. There were parts of the parapet that had been destroyed by shellfire and the thing had found one. They could hear it and it was no ghost: slopping forward through the trenches, casting a wake of brown dirty water before it. Closer, closer…
Sergeant Kirk led them out of the dugout and the mist pushed in from all sides, fuming and dank. The splashing sounds seemed to come from every direction, growing louder by the second. Creel could hear the pained rasp of breathing, that stench growing stronger. Finally, Kirk broke to the right and Howard towed Creel behind him. As they made their escape he clearly saw an immense shrouded gray form emerging from the fog.
“ Creel,” it said.
19
Entombment
The mist shaped itself into phantoms and drifting ghosts that followed Sergeant Kirk’s retreating party as they pushed forward and away from the devastated cavalry post and what haunted it. The yellow-brown sucking mud came up to their knees and all around them were pools of standing water, shell-holes of bubbling muck, stumps and the masts of limbless trees. Nothing else but refuse and bones, a few corpses that had gone swollen and white in the rain, bursting with greasy gray toadstools. The mist blew around them in heavy blankets and fuming pockets.
Their boots and greatcoats were so heavy with mud that there were times when they literally could not go forward, but Kirk would not let them quit. After a time they found some higher ground, an island in the swamp of Flanders, and they took a few moments amongst the trees and wiry bushes to clean the mud off their boots.
Kirk, who had been judging position by what he could see of the sun-a hazy sinking disc at best-said, “We can’t be far from our lines now. I’m surprised we’re not right on top of the Hun. One should think they’d be thick out here.”
Nobody commented on that. They smoked and breathed and stared about with glassy eyes set in pale, grime-slicked faces.
They had a short trip through the thicket and then into the battlefield again or what had once been one. More shell-holes, huge bomb craters, the remains of barbwire enclosures sinking into the earth, great bogs of stagnant fly-specked water floating with dead rats. But just beyond, duckboards rising in and out of the swamp. They were crisscrossed, zigzagging, a veritable maze stretching into the mist. There had been action here and not too long ago, for there were shallow pools of decomposing bodies, both men and mules, cordite cans, splintered trench supports, shell casings, sheet iron fragments, fallen trees, empty boots…refuse in every direction. They saw a few sandbagged posts, the bird-picked remains of soldiers who’d manned them.
They clambered onto the nearest duckboard and it was a relief to feel something solid beneath them. But the unsettling thing they all felt and felt deep was the almost unnatural silence. Not so much as a distant shelling or staccato burst of machine-gun fire, yet Kirk assured them they were moving south towards friendly forces.
They pushed forward, preying for some sign of life.
Then Out of the fog they began to see objects thrusting from the murk. They were tall and leaning, luminously white, some nothing but simple wooden crosses and others rising headboard-shaped gravestones.
“A bloody cemetery,” Howard said. “Of all things.”
“They were fighting in a graveyard…bloody hell,” said Jameson.
“That fighting is long done,” Kirk told them as they advanced, the duckboard sometimes sinking but never giving way completely beneath them.
They moved forward and Creel did not say a word. He could feel something around them, the same sort of feeling he’d had back at the cavalry post…and it was getting stronger. It moved up his spine like claws and settled into his belly in a thick dark mass.
“Look,” Howard said.
There was a woman far to their left at the periphery of the mist. She was dressed in some ragged shift that was streaked with mud. Dark hair fell down one shoulder like a noose. Her face was gleaming white. She stood still as a statue, something sculpted, something incapable of movement. Then she opened her eyes and mouth and they were filled with a seeping blackness that was horrible to see.
“Keep going,” Kirk said. “Bloody crazy woman.”
But Creel knew better and so did the others.
The deeper they got into the cemetery the more profuse were the stones. They jutted from tangled stands of vegetation knotted with barbwire, from rank pools of water and ooze, rows upon rows of them, clustering and white and flecked with lichen, intersecting duckboard crossing amongst them. Creel heard splashing sounds too large to be rats. The noises seemed to coming from everywhere in the burial ground. And then they all began to see things in the mist, shivering white apparitions slowly weaving their way towards them.