SNAFU: Hunters

That Old Black Magic James A. Moore

We didn’t find him. He found us.

We’d just loaded up on supplies, as much as we could at any rate, and we were headed out into the field. Somewhere along the way, the new guy was just there.

He was a slick sleeve. Not a bit of rank to him, but no one in their right mind would have looked at him and called him green. He was too old, for one. I was twenty when we met. I have to say he was ten to fifteen years older than me. New soldiers, those fresh from basic, they don’t look that way and they don’t move that way. He wore the same combat boots as everyone else, but he almost never made a noise when he walked, and I never heard a single sound that startled Jonathan Crowley.

Sergeant Marks took one look at him and scowled. “How long have you been here?” He looked at the man’s uniform and spotted the nametag exactly where it belonged. “Crowley! You listening to me?”

The man looked at him and nodded. “I’m not deaf the last time I checked.”

That was about all it took for the sarge to grab him by the arm and haul him out of the ranks. Being of sound mind and wanting to keep our bodies as close to that state as possible, we ignored the action and kept walking. Smart people don’t piss off their sergeants.

Twenty minutes later Crowley and Marks got back into the ranks. Not a word was said, but from that moment on, Crowley was one of us. He did his job, he took care of his equipment, and he kept to himself. I have never much trusted a quiet man. It seems to me that a man who keeps to himself is either full of too many dark thoughts or too many secrets, and I’m not so sure there’s much of a difference.

I think with Crowley it was dark thoughts.

Normandy was done.

We’d stormed the beach and done our best and paid a price that no one dared think about. It’s been decades and I can tell you with complete sincerity that when I close my eyes and the weather feels too much like France did, I can count on nightmares to come into my sleep and hunt for my soul. They are hungry dreams, too, and they sniff in every dark corner of my mind and under every hidden memory while they seek their prize.

What part of France were we in? Who knew any longer? I didn’t. How long had the war gone on? Too long.

I missed my home. I missed my family. I missed Jenny, even though she’d already sent me a letter that sounded a lot like she was looking to move on. I was young, but maybe not completely stupid. I knew what was written between the lines even though I was trying hard not to see those ugly, unwritten words.

According to the captain, we were in France and not far from Luxembourg. You couldn’t have proven it. All I saw was hills and trees and from time to time a field that had maybe once been planted with something to seed and was now growing a variety of muds. Frozen muds, mostly, as the weather had gone cold and we woke in the morning with frost on the ground and spent the days trying to stay warm.

Infantry. Love that word. It says so much if you’ve been a foot soldier. We were well armed. We had a little food left. We were getting colder every day as autumn snuck in and changed the remaining greens to differing shades of orange and yellow and blood red. I kept hearing that we had the Germans on the ropes, but all I saw was more of the same, and every time we turned around we were ducking back into the woods because this was not our territory, much as we were planning to take it back.

It was just past the point when we should have been walking any longer. It was dark, pure and simple. The only lights were coming from a building that was too far away to identify. We went for it anyway, because there comes a point where any shelter would be better than none and there was a chance that they would be friendly. Yes, we had tents. Not a one of us said a damned thing about trying to pitch them.

Lester was walking next to me. Desmond Lester was a good egg, kept his calm and did what he had to in order to get through the day. He didn’t smile much, he didn’t talk much, but he was also reliable. If something needed doing he did it. Four times in the months we’d known each other he had taken the lives of other people. Some of the guys cried when they killed, some of them grinned and made marks on the butt of their rifle or bragged. Lester just did what he had to do and plodded on, his lean face drawn and tired but his eyes alert.

He was the one that stopped me moving and pointed them out.

Them.

The ghost dogs and their ghost master.

Since then I’ve heard they’re called the Wild Hunt, or Wotan’s Hunt, or la Chasse d’Artu, depending on where you are. I guess that last one was the best because it was the French countryside. Whatever name you want to call them, they were terrifying.

So what’s so scary about a bunch of dogs? I had a friend of mine ask me that when I was a few beers too many into my night and my tongue was looser than usual.

I looked at him for a long time before I could answer. It’s hard to find the words.

The dogs themselves were the sort most sane people would be wary around. They were big animals, lean and hard and hungry. You could almost feel how hungry they were. They were hunting for fresh kill, and they intended to have it. I have seen men look at women that way and known they were trouble. I have seen addicts looking for their next fix with that same sort of starving desperation. Now and then, in moments of weakness, I still look at a shot of whiskey that way. I haven’t had a drink since, well, since I got drunk enough to swing at my wife if I’m being honest. I can never forgive myself for being that angry and that weak. But I also knew a big part of both those feelings came from the bottle and I made myself stop. Jenny forgave me. I know that. I have never forgiven myself. Every time I’ve ever had that thirst for the bottle I remember the fear in her eyes when I cocked back my fist, and the rest is easy.

But I was talking about the dogs. They had that sort of hunger and there was nothing like mercy in the snarls drawn across their muzzles. I couldn’t say what sort of dogs they were. They were black and they were shaggy and they leaped and heaved their way through the air and above the trees.

And behind them came their master, riding on a massive beast of a horse. I was raised around horses. I know them well enough and I’ve ridden them all my life. Never in the whole of my existence have I seen the like of that steed. It was as black as the night and carried the man on its back with ease. The hooves of the thing ran across the sky, but each time they struck where ground should have been, I swear I saw a tiny flash of lightning and I heard a ghostly rumble of thunder. The breaths that snorted from that stallion’s muzzle were storm clouds waiting to be born, and the winds that moved in the animal’s wake were sure to let those seeds grow. I could feel the menace that came from the thing and knew that the passing of its form would lead to disaster.

The rider himself was worse. He crouched low over the neck of his mount, his face thrust forward as if he, like his hounds, scented the air for fresh trails to hunt. One hand held to the mane of his horse, the other held a great hunting bow that rattled against his side with each stride of the charger beneath him.

How long did I stare? I couldn’t say. It felt like hours. I’m guessing about six seconds in reality. Sometimes it feels like that after the fact. When you’re in it, everything happens so quickly, too quickly to think if you want to survive. When it’s done, you can look at what happened and you can examine it a thousand times and your mind makes it bigger I think. Except with the Wild Hunt. I don’t think my mind could ever make that bigger than it was. When the hunt had run past, both me and Lester stared after it and then stared at each other with wide, wet eyes.

Not a word was spoken. We agreed not to talk to anyone else about it, but I can say this, we were more alert after the passing of that spectral huntsman.

Looking back, I think that night was the first time I ever saw Crowley smile. Crowley was a plain man. That’s the only way I can put it. He was as average as any one I have ever seen in my life. If you put him in a crowd of a hundred people, he’d fade from view. I believe that, because mostly I can’t remember much about him. Brown hair, brown eyes, lean build and average height. There was nothing at all about him that stood out.

Except when he smiled. I can barely remember his face, I already said that, but, oh, my, I can remember that smile. His mouth didn’t grin. His lips peeled back into a feral wolf’s snarl that tried to hide inside a smile. His smile was bright and sunny and promised a hundred painful ways to die. I was still reeling from the vision of a hunting pack running across the sky, but I remember his smile standing out even then. I can look back and remember the bloodied shores of Normandy beach and the bodies that floated in the water as we tried to make our way first to shore and then, somehow, to safety, and I am chilled. I can remember the night I saw the Wild Hunt and I am humbled. I remember Crowley’s smile and I shiver. I guess that’s all I can say about that.

I almost asked him if he had seen the hunt too, but I didn’t. In the end that damned smile of his scared me too much.

There wasn’t much to say after that. We just walked on, moving as quietly as a dozen men can when walking down the road in the darkness of the night.

The lights turned out to be an inn at the edge of a crossroads. I’d like to say we came upon a quiet scene but that would have been a lie.

We came upon a scene of violence.

Seems to me that one of the biggest problem with that war was the bullies. I don’t care what country they came from there were some folks just seemed to need to show how much in control they were, how much they could do and what they could get away with. Me? I was raised to believe we were supposed to help people, not hurt them.

There was a gathering of people standing around the small inn at the crossroads where we’d seen lights. It was a small place, the sort that I guess has been around for just about forever. The road wasn’t much and the fields were ruined, but once upon a time there must have been crops and I reckon the inn had been new. I couldn’t tell you the name. I never did learn French when I was over there. Hell, according to most of my teachers I never even really learned English, but I suppose I caught enough of that one to get by.

In any case, the inn was lit up by lanterns and there was a small gathering of people outside it, looking at what had been done. They shivered and I think it was more than the cold that chilled them.

There were four bodies. They were situated together, their heads close enough that, if they’d been alive, they could have whispered to each other. Each pointed in a different direction on the compass, and each was naked. Someone had taken the time to carve their bodies with hundreds of runes. By the blood on the ground it had happened there and I’m guessing they were alive when it happened.

All of us looked. Most of us stared and more than a couple of the guys crossed themselves. What was done to them was blasphemous.

Crowley shook his head and said, “Flayed. They were still alive when it happened.” At odd intervals along their corpses strips of flesh had been peeled back, twisted over themselves several times, and then stuck back into the flesh of the people they’d been peeled from. I was grateful for the darkness. We couldn’t see the worst of the damage for the shadows.

Crowley turned to one of the locals and started firing off questions in French. Not a one of us knew he spoke the language, because, of course, he never volunteered that knowledge.

We all listened in, though I suspect most of them were as ignorant as me as to what was said.

Crowley’s face was an open book. He was angry. He was disgusted.

When he’d finished his interrogation he looked directly at the captain and shook his head. “Nazis. They came here yesterday morning and took over the inn. When the sun rose this morning they started working on the people here. The Innkeeper, his wife, his son and a girl who nobody here seems to know.” He gestured to the smallest of the corpses. I guess she was maybe eight or nine years of age. His voice was harsh, his expression was worse.

“Why would they do anything like this?” The captain was as shocked as the rest of us. He stared at the bodies as he spoke and his eyes seemed incapable of drinking in the details. He looked, but I don’t think he saw much of anything. I was in the same boat. It was easier to look at Crowley than to deal with what we were seeing.

Crowley didn’t much seem bothered. He squatted close to the bodies and started looking them over carefully. It only took me a few seconds to realize he was reading what was written on their bodies.

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘shut the hell up so I can read this.’”

I listened. I outranked the man, being as I’d made it all the way to corporal, but that didn’t matter.

He studied the writings on the first body, even going so far as to lift the legs and arms to see if there was more written that might be hidden in the bloodied mud, when the young girl’s corpse sat straight up and looked right at him.

The voice that came from her bloodied mouth never belonged to a child. It was low and deep and loud and spoke words I had never before heard. The sound of them chilled me almost a much as the source.

I backed away, and I know most of the others did too. Several of the villagers got the right idea in my mind and ran for their homes. They had that advantage. My home was over an ocean away.

Crowley spoke back, nearly spitting his answer.

She yelled louder, until he could barely be heard. Her chest did not move. She took in no breaths. Her words came out of a mouth that offered no steam in the cold of the night, when every other person who’d spoke showed their heat with every uttered word.

She came closer to Crowley and he stayed his ground, not looking worried about the approaching shape at all. He stood. I remember that. I also remember wondering why he wasn't screaming and running, because about half the squad broke ranks and started doing just that before the sarge called them back.

The dead girl kept screaming, obscene noises that hurt me to hear and that made my stomach lurch. I don’t know what she said. I don’t know that I ever heard a language that could make a person sick, but she was doing it.

Crowley started speaking in low tones, exactly soft enough that I couldn’t make out any words clearly, and with each word he spoke the dead girl staggered backward as if struck. She stopped speaking and turned to screaming instead, holding her arms in front of her face as if to ward off savage blows, and perhaps she was, because the flesh on her arms rippled, peeling away from her bones, blistering and then burning into dust and ashes though there was no heat. The rest of her body soon followed suit, and in a space of ten seconds, her remains were gone, drifting away on a harsh wind that affected nothing else.

When she had vanished into nothingness, Crowley rose from his squat and shook his head. And he was smiling. His eyes looked almost feverish and his smile was broad enough that I feared it might actually split the skin of his lips.

A moment later he sobered and shook his head.

“I’m not sure what the Nazis summoned, but whatever it is, it doesn’t want to be found.”

He was speaking to the captain.

The captain did not answer. He stared at the spot where the little girl’s body had been standing on lifeless feet, and trembled.

I understood exactly how he felt.

Per the captain’s orders, we left the area, walking for another mile or more before he decided we were far enough away to safely make camp.

We left the bodies where we found them.

When we started walking. Crowley stayed behind for a while. No one questioned his decision. I don’t think anyone dared.

The deaths haunted us. We were in a war zone. We had all of us been shot at and either wounded or killed other people. I was twenty or so, as I recall it, but just like most of the guys with me, I didn’t really act it. We were too busy worrying about whether or not we would live to see home to goof around. Most of the time we had to scout out towns before we could consider entering them, because as much as we might have wanted to claim we were winning the war it didn’t feel that way. There were Germans everywhere and they seemed to be in control of nearly every town we encountered.

Through all of that, the deaths haunted us. They weren’t acts of violence in a kill or be killed situation. They were slow, methodical murder.

Everyone was on edge, except, of course, for Crowley.

He seemed more alive than he had been, more vibrant and more vital as if finding those massacred shapes had somehow made his world a little brighter. I won’t say he had a spring in his step and he sure as hell wasn’t whistling, but he moved differently and seemed lighter on his feet.

And he smiled all the goddamn time. Not always a full smile, not always bright and sunny, but it was like that nasty grin of his was lurking just under the surface and you could feel it there, waiting to pounce.

We managed two days of peace and quiet before things went south.

Early morning on the third day we were walking and we were doing our best to be quiet in the early-morning light of a cloudy day when a rifle shot blew the helmet right off the captain’s head and took half his brain with it. I remember looking at his helmet as it bounced across the dirt road and looking at the bullet hole right through the front of it and thinking that it shouldn’t have been there, and that there shouldn’t have been hair and red sticking to the inside of it either. I didn’t really register that he was dead; I just looked at the damned helmet and tried to understand what had gone wrong.

I would have died right then, but Crowley was there and he hauled me backward and threw me into a ditch right around the time something blew a crater in the spot where I’d been standing.

“Pay attention!” He roared the words at me and moved, crouching low and grinning as he moved across the road and looked toward the woods about fifty yards away.

They were there. You couldn’t see them, but the flash from their muzzles let us know they were trying to kill us.

A bullet took Lorenzo in his chest and blew out his back. That was bad because Lorenzo was a good guy. It was worse because that same bullet also took out the radio pack Lorenzo was wearing. Just that fast we were cut off from any possible assistance.

Fifty yards away, and I swear to you that Crowley was looking at them. His eyes scanned the woods too intently. He took his time as the ground let off puffs of dirt where bullets came too close and as the rest of us tried to find a good position to shoot from while keeping ourselves intact.

I had trouble looking away from Crowley. I yelled at him to get to cover, same as he had yelled at me, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Instead he stayed where he was until he spotted whatever it was he was looking for and then he ran straight for the woods.

I thought it strange the sarge didn’t yell until I saw the man slumped in the road, both hands on his stomach and a dark stain marking his jacket and shirt alike.

Januski moved to help the sergeant. I looked back to Crowley.

I saw a bullet pound into his jacket along the shoulder. I don’t think it hit him, I didn’t think it then, either, but it blew the epaulette off the jacket as he charged, his long legs cutting the distance quickly.

He took the time to fire at the enemy. I give him that and nothing more. He did not duck. He did not dodge. He seemed utterly unconcerned about whether or not he lived.

All we could do was try to offer him covering fire or watch him die. I chose to offer as much help as I could and every time I saw a muzzle flash I aimed at it.

Crowley ran hard and fast and made the woods as quick as any track star I ever did see.

We couldn’t fire when that happened. We might have hit one of our own.

I can only tell you this. There was an explosion over in those woods that was large enough to shake the few remaining leaves from the trees and to split an old oak in that copse in half. After the explosion the gunfire slowed and then stopped.

Except for the sounds coming from Sergeant Marks as Januski tried to patch him up. There was an awful lot of silence. I don’t think I can explain how worrisome that is when you’re certain people are trying to kill you.

Crowley came out of the woods, hauling two men behind him. One man was struggling and thrashing, the other was either dead or unconscious and was being dragged along by his heel.

After about ten yards Crowley dropped the one who wasn't moving just long enough to beat the one trying to get away into a stupor. I could hear the punches from nearly forty yards away.

When the German stopped struggling, Crowley dragged his prisoners along with him.

They weren’t regular soldiers. Their uniforms were all black and they were older men, not soldiers but officers.

Not just officers, but SS. Hitler’s special elite according to what we’d heard. These were the guys the rest of the Germans were scared of.

Crowley scowled at us as he came back and threw the two men into the road.

The one he’d beaten on was breathing in rough gasps, and his face was swelling.

“Boys, I’m going to need you to keep a look out for a while.”

“What happened to the rest of them?” Lewis was a good egg, but not so bright.

Crowley looked at the kid for a long while and then spoke as if dealing with a child who refused to learn. “I killed them.”

“All of them?”

“Well, Lewis, I didn’t leave them in the woods so they could come after us.” A long pause while Lewis looked at him, frowning. Then, in an exasperated voice Crowley said, “Yeah, Lewis. They’re all dead.” He looked my way. “Is he actually this stupid?”

Lewis shook his head. “Hey. Don’t call me names.”

“Lewis?”

Lewis was a big man, easily six and a half feet in height and broad as a barn. “Yeah?”

Crowley smiled. Lewis flinched.

“Shut up and let me work here.”

Lewis nodded.

Crowley dragged the first of the men in black off to the side and crouched over him, speaking softly in the cold air.

Listen, technically I was supposed to be in charge at that point. I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I knew it and I accepted it. I was a grunt. I was there to fight and to take back what the Nazis had stolen, but I preferred not to lead. I didn’t want that many lives on my conscience.

Crowley spoke to both of his captives while we listened without any idea what was being said. He spoke to them in German. I didn’t understand a single word and if anyone else did they hid it well. I say he spoke. What I mean is he interrogated. That’s the only way to put it. He never touched them, but I could see them flinch when he talked, and I could well see the fear in their eyes. The second one actually cried while Crowley questioned him. At the end the man fell back and openly sobbed. I have no idea what Crowley said or did to cause that.

When he was done he pointed to the two men he’d dragged with him and said, “I’m done with them. Do what you want.”

He looked right at me as he said it.

“I. What?” It wasn’t my best moment.

“Corporal.” He pointed to my two chevrons. “You’re in charge. Your sergeant is dying, your captain is dead.” Those brown eyes looked at me and I nearly cringed. “That means it’s on you.”

“Well, the sarge is still alive.”

Crowley looked at me and spoke slowly, softly. The expression on his face was one of barely repressed anger. “He’s dead. He won’t make it through the day. There’s no one around to help him. I would, but I have other things to take care of.”

“What? Where are you going?”

“Leiber and Dunst over there,” he jerked a thumb at the Germans, “told me what I needed to know. Now I’m going to go find the man who committed those murders and make him tell me what he summoned.”

“Summoned? What are you talking about, Crowley?” I was doing my very best not to panic. I need to clarify this: I did not want command. I wanted to survive and get home and that was all. Two little patches on my sleeve did not make me a good candidate for command.

“I really don’t have time for you.” He spoke under his breath, but the way he said it, I knew he didn’t much care if I could hear him. “Okay. The four people that got killed? They were sacrifices. Their lives in exchange for summoning something to help the Nazis win the war. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s what I do. So, I’m going to hunt down the bastard that did the summoning. I’m going to kill him. I’m also going to stop whatever the hell he brought through. I don’t know what that is yet, but the Wild Hunt showing up told me there was some bad news coming our way. That’s why they showed in the first place. The only time the Wild Hunt appears is to warn people that something truly deadly is drawing near. You just have to know how to listen and what to look for.”

“Well, what do you look for?” I wanted to beg him to stay and take command. I needed that. I wasn’t ever going to be ready.

That look again, like he was talking to a deeply stupid person who simply would not listen. “You look for corpses laid out in a sacrificial cross. You look for corpses cut and marked and used as a beacon for things that should never be allowed into this world.”

I flinched a little, and he took mercy.

“Listen, kid. I need to go take care of the bad things that are coming. You need to take care of your people and try to get help for the sarge.” His tone remained patronizing and I felt my teeth lock down on each other. I wasn’t annoyed. I was angry.

“Miller!”

The eldest of the privates looked at me. “Yes, Corporal?”

“Get everyone on the road. Try to find help. See what you can do to keep the sarge alive. Tie up those two bastards and haul them with you. Me and Crowley are going to take care of some business with the Nazis.”

Miller nodded as did Nunnally and Januski who went back to patching up the sergeant as best he could. He wasn’t a medic. We didn’t have one any more, but he’d worked on a farm all his life and had taken care of more injuries than anyone else in the squad.

Crowley looked at me. “You think you should be coming with me instead of caring for your squad?”

“I think if you’re really doing something like taking care of whoever killed those folks, you might need back up.”

“I don’t.” He didn’t sound cocky when he said it.

“You’re getting it anyway.” In hindsight, that was maybe the dumbest thing I ever said.

Crowley stared at me for what seemed like a long time. Finally he nodded. He also smiled.

“Fine. Try to keep up.”

A moment later he was cutting back across the field he’d stormed to get to the Nazis in the first place. He didn’t quite run but it was close. I did my best to keep up.

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.

There was blood on his face, but there were no wounds. There were shreds ripped from his uniform, likely spots where the bony ridges of a hundred jutting fingers had scraped cloth and then flesh away from the meat underneath. But there were no wounds.

Crowley was intact as he moved between me and the grave thing. Alive and smiling. He was enjoying himself. Madness!

The bone thing moved forward raising both malformed arms over its misshapen head.

“You should run! Now!” I knew Crowley wasn't talking to the beast.

Instead of listening I fired three more rounds into the thing. Bone exploded. Mud blossomed away. If there was pain, if there was injury worth noticing, it gave no sign.

Crowley turned toward me, an angered expression on his face. I could see the anger in his expression. I could tell the anger was because he was worried about whether or not I would live through the fight.

The anger faded and his eyes flew wide.

“Drop!” I didn't question him. I simply listened and flopped to the ground like a sack of rocks.

Just in time to watch the dead thing explode. I saw the streak of smoke. I saw the whole shape stagger a step to the left as something slammed into it. I watched the left side of the body bulge. Expanding outward in a sudden flare of fire.

That almost face took on a shocked look as the center of the beast exploded. Had it been alive the creature would surely have died. Instead it fell forward and caught itself on arms built from a hundred corpses as it bled mud and decay.

The world was still there, but my ears rang with a painful note. Debris covered me and my left arm was screaming at me, burning just below the elbow where the meat of my forearm was thickest. Blue afterimages eclipsed my vision, but I could see well enough to make out the shapes of soldiers coming at me from behind the veil of ghost shadows.

I checked my arm; a fragment of bone cut into the muscle. It was old, weathered and dirty, a part of the beast.

The bone golem tried to rise and Crowley stepped back and hurled a lump in its direction. Grenade. There was no doubt in my mind.

I dropped again as the creature exploded into several thick lumps.

Detritus flew everywhere. Muck and burnt, shattered bones, rocks, roots and squirming insects both intact and torn apart, arced away from the monstrous remains and scattered across the ground and both of us.

I have heard it said that in moments of stress the world slows down and I don’t think that’s really true, at least not for me. I think we simply take in so many details that in order to understand them we must focus on them so harshly that the world seems like it’s slowing. All I can say with any certainly is that the events did not seem slow to me. They were overwhelmingly fast. Only in hindsight could I clearly see what happened.

As the thing convulsed and exploded I saw something in the distance, a red shape. I did not see it clearly, and I did not see it well, but I remain convinced that I saw it, and that what I witnessed was not added later by my imagination. I saw it even as I was raising my arm to cover my face and protect my eyes.

I stared at the ruined thing and breathed hard. I wanted to look away but it was damned difficult. Crowley did not have that problem. He was looking back the way we’d come and he was scowling.

I finally looked that way as the rest of my squad came toward us. They were the reason we were alive. Crowley couldn’t have defended us at that time, I think. I know that I was getting nowhere.

Miller looked at me and shrugged. “Radio’s fried and Sarge is dead. We followed you.”

All I could do was nod. While that was going on Januski looked at the bleeding wound in my arm and pulled out what was left of his medic bag. I don’t imagine there was much after all he’d used on the sergeant, but he managed to find some gauze and a white powder that burned like hell while it allegedly disinfected my wound.

Crowley scowled as he looked around, trying to find out where to go next, I guess. He didn’t just look. He sniffed the air, examined the ground tasted the soil and finally nodded to himself.

“Good luck fellas.” He started gathering his things.

While he did that Nunnally let out a few choice words and backed away from the remains of the cemetery thing.

The dregs were moving, slowly sliding toward each other, bugs and bones and everything else. Nunnally bumped into Crowley as he was backing away and Crowley sneered at the remains.

I don’t know what he said. I don’t want to know. The words made me feel feverish and I could sense the power that came from them. All I know is that the effects were immediate. The bones in those moldering heaps caught fire. Some of them popped like firecrackers and others blazed hot and then hotter still until the light from them was nearly blinding; like flash paper thrown by a stage magician. And then they were gone, burned away into nothing more than fine ash that drifted up into the air and scattered with the wind.

Without another word Crowley started walking.

I followed him and my squad followed me.

Of all the things that went wrong in that war, that was the worst. My squad followed me. I thought I was doing the right thing following Crowley. I was so very wrong.

I’ll say this for him. Crowley did his best to discourage us without ever saying a word. He had a talent for scowling, tsking, sneering and generally being unhappy with being followed.

I was not to be discouraged. We had no radio. We had no commanders other than me. Frankly, I was looking toward Crowley to get us out of the insanity in one piece. As plans go it wasn’t much but it was all I had and I wanted nothing to do with being in charge.

So, yes, it falls on me.

We walked for two days without much of anything unusual aside from Crowley himself, who continued to hunt and stalk whatever it was he was searching for. He did not volunteer information.

Several times he left us behind, but I was good enough at tracking that I found him again, much to his disgust.

On the third day, as he was crouching low to the ground and staring at the way the dirt settled along the side of a narrow road, I asked him, “What are you hunting, Crowley?”

The sun was up, almost directly over our heads, and I remember him looking at me and shielding his eyes from the glare.

“Something made that thing we fought. The Nazis raised something with their sacrifices. I don’t know what. I have suspicions, but whatever the hell it is, it does not belong in this world and I aim to remove it before it can do any more harm.”

“How?”

“Same way it was brought here, I suppose. I’ll find out what it is and then I’ll get rid of it.” I could have been asking a stranger about the time of day. The only difference was that I’d have been asking a stranger in a bad mood. I don’t recall Crowley ever being in a good mood, really, except when he was fighting something. That was the only time he seemed genuinely pleased with his world.

I blinked back the wetness that stung at my eyes, hating what I thought of as weakness. Tears were for kids and for girls as far as I’d been told. I was nineteen and not wise enough to know any better. “How do those things exist?”

“You mean the monsters or the Nazis?”

“The thing that came from the ground. The red shape I saw. The people all cut up.”

“What red shape?” Crowley’s eyes instantly narrowed and his lips twitched.

I hadn’t thought much of the form in the distance. It was there, but like the monster made from the ones of the dead I was doing my best not to think about it. There wasn’t much to say, but I told Crowley just the same.

He nodded his head and then rolled his shoulders. “Well, that might make this a bit easier.” The look he shot me said otherwise and I felt a flash of shame because I had not told him about what I had seen earlier. There should have been no reason for my worries, but there was a pervasive sense that I had let the man down, as if I had been asked by my teacher to go to the chalkboard and then completely botched a simple question. Crowley was like that.

When I was done with my brief description he stood and very slowly, carefully, scanned the area around us. He took his time and his eyes got a far off look.

As he looked, Crowley spoke to me. He said, “The world is full of things you don’t want to know about and even more that you never want to see. It always has been and likely always will be.”

“So monsters are real?”

His smile was not a pleasant thing. “Oh, yes, and some of them are even of the inhuman variety.”

I was puzzling that out when the first sounds came to us. They were distant, but not as far away as I would have hoped. Deep, throaty, rumblings came to us. Crowley frowned and I joined him. There are certain noises that stay with you forever, I think. Some of them are natural and some are not. This was a sound that lived in my nightmares for years, decades after the fact. This was the sound of a manmade monster.

There are folks I know who can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every possible type of armament. There are kids in my neighborhood who, even today, can give you exhaustive details about the sort of fuel used, the number of rounds per second fired, et cetera. Here’s what I can tell you: the Panzer IV tank was a terror to behold.

I can’t quote the dimensions of the great, thundering thing that came at us from down the road. All I can say is that it was larger than life and I wet myself when I saw it. One thing to see a tank go by in the distance, or to stand by one of the vehicles that is on your side in a war. Quite another to have a vehicle like that aiming for you.

There were four of them on the road, dwarfing the road, tearing the shit out of the sides of the road with their vast treads. The ground shook. The air shook. Our bodies shook as the damned things came our way.

I froze. I freely admit that. I took one look at what was coming our way and all thoughts left my head. They shouldn’t have, but they did.

All I wanted to do was hide. In addition to the tanks themselves, there were soldiers. So many, it seemed, that counting them all would be impossible. It was the perception, you understand. There were seven of us, including Crowley. Next to the tanks the soldiers seemed tiny, but they were there and we were grossly outnumbered.

We should have never stayed on the road. Around the same time we heard them, we could see them. More importantly, they could see us.

They did not check our credentials. They did not ask us to surrender. The Germans opened fire and a stream of bullets hit Januski and blew him into shreds.

That was enough to get the rest of us scattering. The tanks were scary as hell, but they also couldn’t turn and run as fast as we could. The weapons on them could do a fair impersonation, however, and they vomited lead and flames at a terrifying rate.

The ground shook. From time to time it exploded. Dirt and fire were everywhere and I had the fortune to manage not getting hit by anything as I ran for all I was worth.

Nunnally was right beside me for part of the trip but he stopped after a hard fifteen yards and turned back to face the enemy. He was swinging his rifle around when they ended him. I saw him drop from the corner of my eye. I also saw his helmet move past me, bouncing and rolling, dented into a new shape and bloodied to boot.

I lived. For a while I thought I was the only one. I tried firing back, and I think I hit at least one of the krauts, but I’d be lying if I said I acted heroically. I ran, because against four tanks and what seemed like an ocean of soldiers, I could think of nothing else to do.

How far did I run? Far enough that my body shook with the exertion and my heart hammered madly against my ribs. Far enough that every breath in the cold, autumn air was a painful stitch in my side. Far enough that the Germans stopped chasing me.

I was huddled in the woods when I finally lost consciousness. I cried myself to sleep.

When the morning came around I was shivering violently in the cold.

I might have stayed in a deep sleep for a while but Crowley woke me with a boot to the side of my helmet. He didn’t kick me. He just gave me a nudge.

I almost screamed when I came to, but the look on his face stopped me.

We didn’t speak for a long time. Instead he simply handed me the dog tags from all of my squad and squatted nearby while I looked them over and considered the situation.

There were no more tears. I’d cried them all out.

“The last tank.” His words startled me. He’d been quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten he was there.

“What?” I looked at him and sighed. “What about it?”

“It had the same mark we found in the cemetery. That means I’m going after it.”

“There are too many people.” I shook my head. “Too many tanks. You’ll never live through it.”

Crowley sighed. “Rules and regulations. That’s what there are too many of. The rules say I have to be asked for help. I can defend myself, but that’s all. If you ask for my help, I can do more than you might believe.”

“You want me to ask you for help?” Remember how I thought I was done with tears? My eyes gave off that same damned sting again and I shook my head. “What am I supposed to do here? Ask you to kill yourself?”

“Just ask for help. That’s all.”

I looked away from him for a moment and considered his words, wondering what would happen if I did nothing at all.

“Help me find the things they summoned. Help me kill them.”

Crowley’s smile was bright and chilling.

“Let’s go hunting.”

From that moment on my life became a series of exhausting maneuvers. Wherever the ones responsible had gone, they surely traveled by vehicles. We were on foot. I carried what I could, mostly extra ammunition and a few c-rations. Crowley hardly seemed bothered by the weight of what he carried, but I felt like I was sinking in the muck after an afternoon of rain washed the countryside. It was cold and I was miserable and all that mattered to me was not losing sight of Crowley as he moved along, looking at the ground and tracking his enemies even when I saw no indication there were tracks to follow.

We might have talked more, but he was too busy jogging along the roads and occasionally moving through fields.

When we stopped at last to rest I fairly collapsed. I was winded, dehydrated and dizzy.

“Still feeling good about following me?” Crowley’s voice was surprisingly soft.

I shook my head. There were no words left in me right then.

“So, the thing you asked about. How these things can exist.” Crowley shrugged. “There are other worlds all around ours. Most of them don’t know we are there any more than we know they are, but there are exceptions. Think of it like radio waves if that helps. Everything out there moves in its own way, and you, me, everything around us, it all moves the same way. Something moving in a different frequency might see us. We might see it. Hearne the Hunter, and his pack, that is a case where now and again we see something. It bleeds over. Hearne likes to chase down disasters. What he gets out of it I don’t know, but that’s what he does. The thing is, we can only really see him when the disasters are big enough to make him come close. He’s not a cause. He’s a symptom.”

Crowley didn’t look at me while he talked. He opened a C-Ration, looked at the dubious contents and then started eating.

“Thing is, there are ways to make things from other places more in tune to our world. Call it sorcery, because that’s what it is. You call these things and whether or not they want to come, they do. Sometimes the rules are specific and call for a particular demon or monster. Other times they just summon whatever is closest.”

“Where do all these worlds come from?”

“Don’t interrupt. It’s rude.” Crowley looked my way for a moment as he admonished me, but there was no venom in his words. They were merely spoken. “The thing to remember, and I mean this, is that sooner or later somebody always thinks they can work out summoning something to their advantage. They can’t. What’s happening now, is someone on the Nazi Party thinks they can use whatever they’ve summoned. They might be able to for a while, but it won’t last.”

I thought long and hard about what he’d said. He wasn't talking down to me, exactly, but he was simplifying and I was all right with that. I had a lot on my mind and I really couldn’t devote as much to him as I should have.

“Want to say that in plain English?”

“Son, I don’t know how much plainer I can get.” He looked my way. “Okay. Someone’s trying to summon a demon from Hell. That’s a good analogy. And that someone wants to control the demon. It isn’t going to work. Near as I can tell, the demon already got away.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because if the demon was still under whoever’s command, the damned Germans wouldn’t be looking all over the countryside trying to find it.”

“But the markings on the tank…”

“The markings are supposed to offer protection. Whoever summed the demon wants to stay safe. That’s why I’m going after the tank.”

“You can’t take on four tanks by yourself.”

“You’ve been dumb enough to stay with me, so I’m not really by myself.” He actually managed to sound amused instead of insulted.

The morning brought snowfall.

It was a wet, hard snow and even the treads from the tanks were hidden away. Despite that Crowley seemed cheery enough.

“Why are you smiling? We lost their trail.”

“Because if we have to stop, so do they. The snow’s going to slow them down, and that means we can get closer.”

“It still doesn’t mean we can do much to them.”

Crowley shook his head. “You’re still thinking about fighting them as if we were ever planning to go in with guns blazing. That’s not going to happen and it never was.”

“Well, I never said…” I let my voice fade off. He was right. That was exactly what I was thinking. It was what I was trained for.

“We’re dealing with necromancy and dark magic. That means there is no time to play fair.” Crowley looked at me for a long time, and I felt like he was sorting through whether or not to tell me things he had kept to himself. “You get to stay back here for now. I need to look over where the tanks should be and I need to decide how to handle them.”

I thought about arguing. In the end I just nodded instead.

Two minutes after he headed in the direction of the tanks — I was guessing about that, because I couldn’t have told you where they were on a bet — I followed him. I told myself I wasn't going to leave a man to fight on his own, but the truth was that he’d got my curiosity boiling and I wanted to know more than I already did about the things he was talking about.

The snow was hellish. I mean that. If I could have figured out which way was back I would have taken it. What had started as a heavy snow in the night became a full on blizzard. The sun was somewhere above me, but all I could see were thick, fat flakes of snow falling from the heavens. And trees. I normally found those before I ran into them.

The worst part, I think, was the way the snow danced. It was charming when I was at home and there was a heavy snow. But back then I knew where I was and I had the lights of the house and a hundred familiar landmarks. Here I was in the middle of the woods, possibly even a forest proper — and if you don’t know the difference, I pray you find out under better circumstances — and all I could see were the shapes the snow took on as it twisted and whirled in the currents of a wind I barely felt.

The silence was another thing. I heard no noises worth noting, save an occasional sigh of the wind.

From time to time I’d stop and try to listen for something more, but all I ever got was the low, whispered sigh and the shivers as the cold sank deeper into me.

That continued on through the day and well past the time the sun set. In the complete darkness I had no choice but to stop. I settled myself under a natural shelter, several branches that crossed over each other and left me an area of relative calm. The snow still fell and tipped and tapped the canopy above, but there was still no wind and the silence lulled me for a while.

I wrapped up as best I could and tried to think warm thoughts. I couldn’t make a decent fire, but I tried for a while before giving up.

Eventually, I slept.

When I came to I thought I’d been buried alive. I wasn't actually far off. The weight of the snow-covered branches above had crushed them lower to the ground, but as I grabbed at the first of them and rattled it back and forth a cascade of white plummeted down and the branches started to rise. Nature can provide sometimes. I’m lucky I wasn't buried under all of that snow forever. I’m lucky I didn’t freeze to death. Lucky, lucky man. Sometimes I forget how lucky I was to live through that. Not just the blizzard, though that was part of it. I mean the whole affair.

The silence was a living thing by the time I stood and shook myself off. The most impressive noises I heard were my own breaths and the sounds of snow falling in loose trickles from branches shaken by my passing.

It was World War Two in France and the Germans were everywhere. I should have known that would never last.

I had made only a quarter mile of travel at best; heading in what I believed was as a southerly direction. Crowley was, I was certain, either dead or gone. I was deep in the Nazi-ruled section of the country and I did not want to be. So I was headed south. I hoped. The problem was that the sun was hidden behind clouds too thick to let me even really guess the time of day, and after a few attempts my compass yielded nothing but a constant, slow spin of the needle, I gave up and moved on.

Have you ever walked through snow that was waist deep? I was half frozen and I was shivering but working up a hard sweat at the same time. It was all I could do and all I could think about.

Until the thunder came my way.

I knew it wasn’t real thunder, of course. It was the echoes of artillery fire blowing through the countryside and bouncing off the hills.

I stopped my forward motion and tried to decide where it was coming from. It didn’t take long. I was walking straight toward it. The ground beneath me shook and my boot soles vibrated right along with it.

The tanks were close. I couldn’t hope to know what had started them off. Maybe I was too cold to notice until they were close by. Maybe they had been stopped and had only just started moving again.

What I do know is that I heard Crowley’s voice amidst the chaos and was drawn to it. He was dangerous, I knew that, but he was familiar and I was desperate.

I can’t say I ran to his help. The snow was too deep. I did the best I could, pushing against a wall of cold and wet and trying simultaneously not to be spotted by my enemies.

The road came up abruptly. The tanks managed to force their way through or over the worst of the snow with little effort, and each tank following after made the path that much clearer.

I pushed myself until I reached the trench the tanks had cut in the snow and fell onto the road in exhaustion. My muscles shook and my breaths came hard and fast and left my sides feeling bruised.

When I got up, I looked at the path of destruction in my way and I followed it. Several of the Nazi soldiers were dead in that trail, broken and bloodied and lifeless.

Each corpse told a story that I could follow easily enough. They were behind the tanks, that much was obvious. The first few bodies I found had cut throats or broken necks. It wasn't hard for me to imagine Jonathan Crowley moving behind them in the snow and killing them one by one.

The snow still fell, you see. Despite a night of sleep and a half-day wasted in an effort to move south, the snow still fell from a dark, leaden sky and didn’t seem at all concerned with the deaths of a few Germans, but it made wonderful cover.

I counted ten bodies killed in quiet. I don’t know how many died before I found the trail. I wasn't about to go back and count. All I know is that ten men died before anyone sounded an alarm. It was easy to understand. The snow was too heavy for anyone to notice much of anything. These days, they have all sorts of ways to track people without seeing them, but in the Second World War, you mostly used your eyes. Bodies fell and it wasn't long before the snow tried to hide them. By the time I passed the seventh body I reckon the first was already out of sight.

The tanks were moving and they were noisy, but they were barely silhouettes. I finally managed to reach the one at the end of the trail and Crowley was there.

The man was walking just behind the tank, letting the snow hit the monstrous thing and take the brunt of the force. He saw me and nodded.

He didn’t seem at all surprised to see me, which was kind of a strange thing, as I hadn’t expected to be there.

We couldn’t risk being heard over the tanks. It wasn't likely, but sounds can carry in the damnedest ways. So we slowed a bit and walked on, following the thunder down the road.

“I was beginning to think you’d tried for the Allied side of France.” His face was deadpan, but his eyes looked at me hard and I felt a blush coming on as I looked down at my feet.

“I thought about it.”

“Get lost?”

“Something like that.”

“I tried asking a few of the krauts what they were doing. They didn’t know. The only one who has any idea is in the second tank. A captain named Rotenfeld. He’s the one that committed the sacrifices.”

I remembered the bodies. Every time I closed my eyes I remembered them. Rotenfeld had cost me a lot of sleep.

“What are we gonna do?”

“I have to get to that third tank in the line. It’s slow going.”

“So how can I help?”

Crowley smiled. “Make noise.”

He handed me a pouch that was deceptively heavy. Inside it I found several grenades. They were German made.

The good news about grenades is they all work about the same way. It didn’t take long to figure it out.”

“Which tank?”

“Start with this one.’ He pointed to the one closest.

Here’s the thing, you put down a grenade, you need to run. They make a very big explosion for their size. I always kind of chuckled when I saw someone throw a grenade in a movie, because right up until the nineties or so, it seemed to me they didn’t really get it. A puff of smoke wasn't all that happened. A body didn’t flip through the air and land in one piece all that often and even if it did, it landed broken in the worst ways possible.

So I ran hard to place the grenade. I pulled the pin and tossed the damn thing in front of the tank, and then I rabbited back to the trail and dove for cover.

I got lucky on the first one. I blew the left tread off the damned thing. Tank with one tread is about as worthless a vehicle as you have ever seen.

Before they could even climb out the see what the damage was, I was throwing another grenade and thanking God Almighty for my pitching arm.

The second tank in line rocked back a bit when the grenade went off. It didn’t seem to do much permanent damage, but I can bet safely the ears of those inside were hurting them at the very least.

I threw a third grenade that did even more damage to the tank closest me. But after that I had to run again.

The German soldiers were coming back to the end of the caravan and they were in a killing mood.

Here’s the problem. The soldiers that came back my way weren’t human.

I don’t know just what they were, but they were covered in fur and half ran, half loped on all fours, and their uniforms were torn because they just plain couldn’t hold all of what those poor bastards had become. They snuffled and growled and kicked at the tank a bit, and then they came for me.

There was no sign of Crowley. I’d done what he wanted and he’d moved on, looking for his chance to break into the third tank.

That just left me, and the pack of nightmares heading my way.

They came hard and they came fast. I guess you could say I got sort of lucky again, because whatever had happened to them left them not giving a damn about their rifles.

The first one I shot went down hard, a spray of blood flying from the back of that misshapen head.

The rest of them came at me in a fury and dove into the snow, heading in my direction. The waist deep snow, where I couldn’t see them worth a damn.

The day was overcast, and that helped a little, but there was still a sun up there and the light from it made the snow glare up something fierce.

I could have tried hiding in the snow, but the way those things moved, I figured they were probably going by scent.

That meant I wasn’t going to be able to hide very well.

I saw something moving a goodly ways off, and I didn’t think, I just threw. The grenade landed on target, and a moment later I saw snow rising in an wave and at the center of that wave was blood and broken bone, and what looked like a German outfit.

I was still trying to figure out where the next one might be when it came out of the snow and hammered me to the ground. It let out a sound like a chimpanzee maybe, or one of those screaming monkeys. And while I was trying not to piss myself a second time those massive arms came down and smashed me flat.

I’d have lost that fight right away if not for the snow. The fool thing dropped me hard and fast and the snow was loose enough that I fell back and the snow collapsed on me.

No time for guns and too close for grenades. I pulled my bayonet knife. Those hands came for me again and grabbed my shoulders. The fingers were hot despite the cold, and the nails were thickened to the point where they cut my jacket sleeves.

My knife cut too. I thrust it straight in between those arms and was rewarded with a different kind of scream. The blade slipped into something solid and then skimmed along a hard surface and the thing jumped back, roaring, blood flowing freely from where I’d opened it’s face, peeling back half the flattened nose and slicing a gash from the lower lip all the way down to the collarbone.

God, how it screamed. Even as it came for me again. I had only one move, really. It never let go of my jacket even when it backed away. All it did was haul me forward and so I stabbed again and again, and I think I was doing a fair bit of screaming myself until I realized it was down and I was standing over it, my arm warm from the blood of the damned thing that was bleeding out in front of my eyes.

You ever try to pull up a rifle while you’re holding a knife? I don’t know how I managed it to this day. Somehow the knife went back into the sheath and the rifle was lifted on its sling and I fired into the snow wherever I saw movement.

I couldn’t give you details if I had to. I just know I burned through my remaining bullets, firing at anything that looked like it might consider moving in my direction. When I was done with that it was back to throwing grenades until I was out of them. I nailed that first tank another time and something inside it finally had the decency to explode in return. The shockwave knocked me on my ass again, but when I stood, there weren’t any things coming for me.

The German at my feet looked human again, just dead as could be. Whatever had changed it must have left the body when he died. He was a kid, same as me and I’d ruined his face with my blade. Enemy or no, his family never did a thing to me, and I’d taken him away and mutilated him besides.

Of course, when he came for me, he was something else. I focused on that part and moved on. Sometimes you have to do that, I guess. The details of your life can eat you alive if you let them. Best to temper them with a little logic now and then.

I turned toward the tanks. I had taken on a mission to help Jonathan Crowley fight the bastard that had sacrificed people in the middle of nowhere, France. I intended to see it through.

In the distance I could hear the rumble of the tank engines, gunshots, screams. I could just make out the tanks through the shroud of snow. Much closer, I saw the red figure I’d seen before.

It was a thin shape. I cannot say if it was male or female. Despite standing on two legs the shape was too far removed from anything I could easily recognize. A long ribcage, broad shoulders muscled with thin, sinewy strands. The face was something between a skull and a horse, and had a thick head of hair that was darker but no less red.

It looked at me for a moment and then it came for me, moving over the snow, barely touching the frozen surface. It hissed at me as it came, and it reached out with one long-fingered hand that seemed to have too many joints on each finger.

I didn’t try to escape. I was too busy being horrified.

Everything about the beast was red, from its long-toed feet to its eyes, to its straggly hair.

That had draped over its face as I started to pull back.

After that all I saw was red.

Jenny was next to me in the meadow.

It was that perfect type of summer day, when the wind blew softly and washed away the possibility of sweat. Before I left for the war she and I parked ourselves under a big old oak on the family property and we had a picnic. When it was done we talked about how we would be together when it was over, how it was necessary to fight against the kinds of savages that would attack our shores, how much we would miss each other. The list was endless.

While we talked we wound up laying together under that tree. She was nestled against me and resting her head on my shoulder and I couldn’t see her face, but I could smell her sweet scent and I could feel a few wisps of her hair tickling along my jaw line and nose. I knew then I’d marry her.

It was like that again, only sweeter this time. She was comfortable and so was I. I wanted it to last forever.

So of course, it only lasted a few seconds. But I remember it so clearly, so intensively, that even after all of these years it felt more real than all the time I spent in the war.

I was lying somewhere. Jenny was gone and so was the homestead. It was a forest, but it didn’t seem like the same one I’d been walking in and freezing my ass off in.

The trees around me were vast things, massive in a way I had never seen before. The ground beneath me was a soft, thick loam. Far above, almost lost in the thickness of the forest, I could see a blue slash of sky.

As I looked around I noticed two things at the same time. First, the red thing I’d seen before was there in front of me, perched on a fallen tree that had long since begun to rot away. Second, I was dressed in my birthday suit and nothing more.

I pushed myself backward across the ground, my bare feet digging deep and shoving my body away from the thing.

It was wet with red; it dropped the stuff from its eyes and even from the pores of its skin. The air around that beast fairly seethed with disease. Just looking at it made me feel like I was sucking in every kind of hellish infection that ever existed.

As I backpedalled, it jumped down from its perch and came for me, low to the ground, almost like a hunting dog, those red, wet eyes bleeding hatred.

“Why are you not mine?” I did not see that mouth move, I saw the heavy teeth, some fangs and some flat like a horse’s, but I saw no lips to move and still the words filled me.

“I-What?” The words made no sense.

“All that I touch is mine to shape as a sculptor shapes clay and yet you are not changed. You do not obey me. Why?”

“What the hell are you?”

It swatted away my question like a man dismisses a pesky fly.

“Answer me! Why are you not mine?”

I looked around as quickly as I could. It was a quandary: I really wanted my weapons and my clothes but I didn’t dare look away from the bleeding thing coming at me.

“I don’t know!”

In my searches I realized two things: I wore no bandages but I was not injured, and I felt no pain. Actually, I felt nothing. Not an ache from sore muscles, no hunger, no thirst, not even the mulch and leaves shoved up against me as I backed away from the thing. I might have been a bit worried about that, but something with too many teeth was already coming at me and that sort of took all the worries away from the rest of my problems.

It didn’t touch me. Instead it moved closer and loomed over me. Andrew Cartwright used to loom over me when I was in third grade and he was in sixth. I was very adept at knowing what looming felt like. The menace was real, but it didn’t actually touch me.

Bits of rotted meat clung to those teeth. What I could only guess was dried blood mingled with the coarse hair falling from the thing’s head, and matted fur to the chest of the beast, but even from only a few feet away I smelled nothing.

“What did you do to me?” Anger surged inside of me, not quite burning away the cold fear, but definitely drawing my attention to the thing coming for me. How could I live a proper life if I couldn’t feel? Couldn’t taste?

The red thing moved closer, loomed over me and roared. I heard it. I felt it. Whatever it was doing, it had the upper hand.

“You are not here! You are still in the snow, freezing. You will die if you do not answer my questions! I will leave you there, to freeze!”

“I don’t know!” Fear aside, I was still angry and I roared my counterargument right back at him.

“What the hell are you? Why are you working with the Germans?”

The whole damned shape shuddered and jumped and shook with anger and it reached for me again, but this time it stopped maybe an inch from my face and I saw the claws of the thing scrape the air. I could see the way the pressure of contact with that air made the thick claws on those fingers bend instead of letting them touch me and I understood.

I don’t know how he did it. I didn’t begin to know why, but somewhere along the way Jonathan Crowley must have done something to me. I have always been a church-going man, but never been all that faithful and seeing what I had in the war already guaranteed I would never think much of God again. How could I? How could anyone be in a world where oceans were buried under the corpses of friends and enemies alike?

I didn’t think it was my faith that saved me. I thought then, and I know now that it was Crowley. He had managed somewhere along the way to stop the monster screaming at me from touching me.

And that knowledge made me smile as broadly as he did when he faced a new threat.

“You can’t touch me, can you?” I made myself stand and the thing glared at me and hissed.

I reached out to see if I could touch the beast and it stepped back, those red eyes rolling in the sunken sockets that surrounded them. There was no way I could read what that thing was thinking. It was too inhuman. But I could guess that it was furious.

“You can’t touch me. You can’t hurt me.” I stepped toward it again and I drove the flat of my hand into the beast’s torso and pushed with all my might.

I felt like I drove my hand into boiling oil, but the creature screamed as loudly as I did and then I fell back and landed in the bitter cold of the snowdrift.

I felt the cold. I felt the pain in my arm from where a bone shard had broken skin and where the wound was likely already starting to fester.

I nearly wept. Every pain, every discomfort, was a blessing after only a few moments of absolute numbness.

I was so happy I almost missed the thing coming for me.

I need to make this clear. I’m older now and I’ve lost a lot of my mass, but back then I was over six feet tall and I weighed in at a solid hundred and seventy pounds, if you added in all supplies I was carrying. That red nightmare was tall and skinny and if it weighed in at more than a hundred and twenty-five, then I will eat my hat.

It grabbed me by my arm. I felt the wound that Januski had patched up tear open under the pressure. I swear to you now, I felt the disease spill into that wound through my jacket, my shirt and my bandages.

And then it threw me. I said before that Crowley got thrown. I did too and I think I went further. I saw the tanks go by while I was tumbling through the air and screaming my fool head off.

I hit the snow hard and fast and sank into it. To this day I don’t know what I hit. I just know it broke my arm in three places.

I have to guess I screamed. I don’t clearly recall.

I got up. I don’t know how, except that maybe it was adrenaline. I looked toward the area I’d come from and had no idea how I could have gone that far and lived. I know I was in shock. I also know the pain that was howling through my arm and my body probably helped keep me going.

I looked for Crowley, and I found him.

I can’t say if the damage I saw was done by me or by something else, but the tanks were in horrible shape. The damage to a couple of them was definitely my doing. The other two? I don’t believe so. The very first tank, the lead vehicle, it was on its side and billowing black smoke from every conceivable opening. The treads were broken, the underbelly of the thing bled oil and fuel and even as I watched it caught ablaze. I expected an explosion, but instead it just burned and the people inside of it screamed.

They screamed and I shivered.

The tank that Crowley had started for in the first place was a different case. It was still intact, but the hatch at the top was open and while I could not see what was inside the vessel, I could see odd lights. The sort of lights I had never seen inside a tank before, flickering and offering colors from every possible part of the spectrum.

In front of that I saw Crowley arguing with a man in a black SS uniform. The man held an ancient knife. I have to guess that it was ancient, because the blade was made form some sort of black stone and the handle was covered in old, cracked leather and dangled several more stone trinkets under it.

Crowley stared at that blade like it was a cross and he was a vampire. He didn’t seem capable of looking at it for long without flinching. A man I had seen charge across a half a football field’s distance in a hail of bullets. A man I had seen take on a monster made of rotting bodies and headstones and worse things. He looked at that knife with genuine fear in his eyes. And he looked at the man holding the knife with hatred. I would not want to face Crowley under the best of circumstances, but the anger he aimed at the Nazi should have burned him to the ground.

The Nazi was a thin man, even more gaunt than Crowley. He was pale and his skin was sweating. It was snowing. The air that came from my mouth with every breath was a fog, but the man was sweating. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and I had to think he was sick, like pneumonia sick.

As if to make my point, he coughed and then doubled over in a coughing fit. The only part of him that didn’t move was the hand holding that knife out like it was a ward to fend off Crowley.

Crowley didn’t move on him.

I did. I’d like to say I ran across the field and tackled the sick bastard that had killed those poor souls back at the inn, but the truth was I started slogging his way and cursing the lack of any real weapons on my body.

Not that there were many I could have used. My arm throbbed with every heartbeat and I had to take in hard, deep breaths to keep moving.

The good news was that the man in black kept trying to cough out his lungs.

Crowley looked at the man and seemed intent on trying to reach him, but he never moved forward. He just glared.

No gun, no knife. Not even a rock. I only had one arm to use, so I just pushed through the snow until I finally flopped onto the road I did my best to catch myself with my one decent arm, but the other one, the useless one, flapped around a bit, and every movement made me want to vomit or pass out or both.

I couldn’t tell you how I managed to get to my feet. All I know is that I went for the SS officer and I slammed into him with all my mass. He was thin and feverish and coughing his fool head off until he was almost purple in the face and his eyes were bulging.

I wouldn’t say I hit him all that hard, but it was enough. Down he went into the snow near the last remaining tank and he let go of his knife to catch himself. He let out a scream and coughed again and I reached down with my one good hand and grabbed his little knife and held it in my hand.

And while he was still coughing, I backed up.

And then Crowley smiled again.

By the time I’d made ten paces back, Crowley was on him. He hauled the coughing man off the ground by his jacket and screamed questions at him in German.

The man laughed and coughed at the same time, shaking his head. I don’t think he could respond in any other way. I thought then and I think now that he was already dying from whatever sickness he’d taken into his body.

Crowley might well have shaken the wreck to death, but then the red thing came back.

It looked the same. It was red and wet and furious. It didn’t even seem to notice me when it came charging through the snow, leaving red footprints as it moved.

Crowley stood his ground. He reached into one of his jacket pockets and brought out a handful of black powder. I don’t know what he said or what he did, but when he opened his hand the dust moved against the wind and swirled into a stream that slapped the red thing in the face like a swarm of bees. It fell back into the snow and screeched. My ears throbbed from the sound.

The skin on the red thing burned. It blackened and smoldered and I watched the black patch grow, moving over the body as it rolled and hissed and shrieked in agony. The eyes of the thing blackened and it fell onto all fours before grabbing at the snow and trying to wash away whatever Crowley had done.

And then it jumped for the tank.

Crowley had been grinning before that, but he changed his mind when it started moving into the tank itself.

It did not climb the side of the tank and move through the open hatch. It dove for the metal and flowed into it like a man diving into water. The steel sloshed and buckled around it before becoming what it had been before.

“Damn it, no!” Crowley ran for the tank.

The tank squealed as loudly as the demon had and started collapsing in on itself. The metal crunched and screamed and bent, and the thing that had moved into it took it over.

That’s the only way I can say it. The thing I’d seen earlier was pulled from the graveyard and it seemed like this was a similar notion. The Panzer didn’t quite melt. It didn’t grow hot or fall apart and rebuild itself into something else like the cars in that Transformer movie. It just sort of pulled itself together into a new shape.

I watched it with a slack jaw. I couldn’t quite accept it. Or maybe shock was finally getting the better of me.

The German coughed and laughed and said something in his own tongue that I couldn’t understand. He looked worse than before, but he was smiling.

Crowley stopped short as the tank stood up on two legs. There was no symmetry to the outside of the thing. It looked nothing like the red monster I’d seen before.

This thin was metal, and it was as lumpy and unfinished as the grave golem had been. There was a head. There was a rudimentary face. There were tank treads wrapped into the arms and head and chest of the monster. Gears that had been squashed like pumpkins were pressed into the thing. The arms didn’t end in hands, but in clubs of more twisted metal.

It tried to hit Crowley. Like any sensible man, he tried to get the hell away from it. When that fist hit the snowy ground, the earth shook. I mean that. I remember when I was a kid there was a farm hand that was heavy enough you could almost feel a tremor when he walked past in a hurry. His name was Earl and he died of a massive heart attack while he was trying to get an old generator to work again.

I didn’t think maybe the ground shook. I saw the snow ripple away from where the monster hit and I saw Crowley lose his balance and scramble back to his feet as the thing came for him.

The German said something else, his voice hoarse and crackling from whatever was broken inside of him. I looked away from the fight for a second and stared at that smiling face, and I lost my temper. Two steps brought me close enough to raise my heel over that bastard’s head and to stomp down with all I had in me. He stopped laughing and his temple got a dent in it.

I don’t know what to say about Crowley. I guess part of me doesn’t think he was human. All I know was he took a punch from that thing. He blocked it with his arm and instead of being crushed into a pulp, he actually deflected the blow. He got knocked back a dozen feet, and he landed on his backside again, but he took that blow and wasn’t crushed. Hell, I’d stomped on the Nazi’s head and likely killed him, and by all rights Crowley should have died when he caught that punch.

He got right back up, that smile of his wide and nasty, and his eyes as glassy and feverish as the man I’d just killed.

And he roared words at the tank-monster and it flinched back from him like he’d aimed a flamethrower at it.

Crowley walked closer to it, taking his time as the thing stumbled back, that rough, unfinished face screwing into a different shape and a noise coming from it that was like a thousand tortured cats screaming at the same time.

It came for him again, stomping down the snowy road and making that horrible noise as the metal of its body started to heat up. At first it steamed the air, and then it started glowing. Crowley stood his ground as it rumbled his way, and kept speaking, saying things that hurt my mind as much as the damned thing I was looking at did.

It tried to grab him, but Crowley danced past, taking a glancing blow from an arm that was red again, but not wet. No, it smoked and steamed and burned and as Crowley spun away I could see the fabric of his jacket catch fire from the intensity of the heat.

The blow was enough to throw Crowley again, but he didn’t stop. He kept speaking and pulled off his jacket and dodged again as it turned to find him and then stumbled in his direction.

It might have hit him too, but by that point the entire shape was losing cohesion. It was melting and dripping and falling into fiery drops that burned right through the snow.

Crowley walked backward as it kept coming. It fell to the ground on its rough knees and then slumped forward, its arms still reaching for him.

Crowley kept talking, even as it collapsed completely, sloshing into a pool of white hot metal that faded under the level of the snow.

It finally stopped screaming.

I thanked God and trembled.

And then I passed out.

When I woke up again I was in a house. It was a small affair, but it was warm and it was dry and I was on a bed.

I guess I must have gone back to sleep for a while, but when I came to again Crowley was sitting on a chair near my bed. He was clean and dressed in fresh clothes. I was clean too, and dressed in a pair of worn but comfortable long johns.

“How did we get here?”

Crowley didn’t smile. “I carried you. Not really that hard to figure out, really.”

“Thanks.”

“You saved my life. I figured I owed you.”

“I figured the other way around. You did something to me. Put a spell on me or something, but that red thing couldn’t even touch me.”

“Wicht. Or wight.”

“’Scuse me?”

“It was a wicht in German, or a wight in old English.”

“I have no idea what that means.” I hurt everywhere and I was feeling a bit cranky, but I was also feeling mighty grateful. I outweighed Crowley by a good bit, but he got me away from all of that craziness. I had no idea how far he’d carried me. All I really knew was that I was safe, I was warm and clean and someone had even splinted up my arm nice and tight.

“It’s a kind of minor demon.”

“Minor?” I sounded dubious, but only because I was.

He nodded and then reached to an end table on his side of my bed and offered me a cup of warm broth. Chicken soup never smelled or tasted so good. It was just the right temperature, too. I could drink it without burning the sin out of my mouth. “You keep that down, there’s bread and cheese.”

“Where are we?”

“Allied side of France. I have a few friends here. One of them is helping us, because I helped her once upon a time.”

“You said that thing was a minor demon?”

“Ralf Rotenfeld was the man who summoned it. He’s the fella you kicked in the head.”

“What was he trying to do?”

“Win the war, I guess. Not the first time and not the last some jackass will try. Instead of summoning a major demon from the pantheons of hell, he got an inconvenience.”

I know I must have stared like a fool. Crowley grinned at it. “’Inconvenience?’”

“You should try keeping up. Repeating myself is annoying.” The words were said without malice. “That thing was a minor demon. He couldn’t control it, because he couldn’t figure out what its name was. Sometimes names have power. Not always.”

“How did he even summon it?”

“That knife of his, I don’t know where he found it, but that was… that was old and powerful.”

“I dropped it.”

“I found it. It’s safe.” He waved the notion aside. “In any event, it’s gone now. Banished.”

“What happens now?”

“You go back to the army and tell them that you encountered Nazis and lost your entire group.”

“Where are you going?”

“Maybe you didn’t notice, but I wasn’t a part of your squad. I was just along for the ride.”

“I sort of got that when you had your talk with the sarge.”

He nodded. “Nice enough guy for a moron.”

There was a long silence while I considered his words.

I was almost ready to drift to sleep when Crowley spoke again. “Unless you’re looking to get a section eight, I wouldn’t mention the wight or me. It won’t go well if you do.”

“I have to report what happened.”

“Nazis happened. It’s enough. You have an arm with three breaks to it, and you have a bad infection in the other arm. Your feet don’t look so good and if I had to guess you’re going to lose a few toes to the frostbite.” He was very direct. I listened on with a growing sense of horror. “Likely you’re done with the war. You leave the right way, you go home a hero. You leave the wrong way and no one believes you, but they’ll all say what a shame it was you came out broken.” He stood. From my perspective he was very tall. “Your choice.”

Crowley cut me a chunk of bread and a thick cut of cheese and I nodded my gratitude. While I was eating it he looked my way again and said, “I don’t like to mention these things, but I have to. Don’t go thinking about doing what Rotenfeld did. It won’t go well. No matter who tries to win that way, it ends badly. Keep yourself clean is what I’m saying. I owed you. Maybe I still owe you, but don’t push it.”

He grabbed his supplies then. A small sack. Not remotely military issue. Then again, neither were his clothes.

“Where are you going?” I hated that I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“Rotenfeld told me a few things. He didn’t really want to, but I made him.”

“I thought you said he was dead.”

Crowley nodded. “There are ways to get answers.” I could tell he was serious. My skin crawled at the notion. “Rotenfeld told me there are others working with Hitler to use sorcery to do their work. I’m going to look into that. So, time for me to head out.”

Crowley left just that easily.

I never did hear what he did for Jacques and Madeline, the people who cared for me until they could notify an army squad heading by.

That’s the whole of the story, really. I never saw Crowley again. We didn’t exchange cards or any such nonsense.

He was right. I lost two toes on my left foot. I also lost a little of my strength in my arm. I wasn’t so worried about that. I got away a lot easier than a lot of the soldiers did.

And you know what? I even got Jenny in the end. We reconciled. We married. We had kids and they’ve had kids and now there are even a few great-grand kids that come to see me around the holidays. I miss her every day. I guess I always will.

It’s almost Christmas and the snow is falling. And that always makes me think of Crowley.

There’s a strange thing going on in town lately. Not sure what it is, exactly, I just know that a few people have vanished, been gone a few days and then been seen by other folks who swear they looked like they were sickly and desperate. No one ever sees them up close, but they see them, normally moving around the river.

Last week I woke up from a dream of Crowley and I had the phone in my hand. I’m old, but as I like to say, I ain’t stupid and I ain’t dead. I looked at the call history on my phone after I woke and it said I made a three minute call to an unlisted number.

You get old enough, you can accept a lot of things. I figured I dialed some numbers on the phone when I was sleeping.

I felt that way until I got the call from an unknown number and answered it.

It was a short conversation. Crowley asked me if I was sure I wanted his help. I didn’t even think about it. I just said yes and he said he’d see me soon.

That’s why I wrote this down. See, I don’t think Crowley will do me any harm, but I think l he’ll come and see me and I expect he’ll ask me a few questions. I expect I’ll have to invite him into my house. That seems like one of the rules to me. I have to ask him for help. I have to invite him past the threshold.

And I reckon I’ll have to beg him to leave my family out of whatever is happening.

My family. They’re the ones who told me about the missing people coming back. They’re the ones who keep me posted on the latest sightings of the folks that have been called “river people” by a lot of my neighbors.

So I’ll answer his questions. I’ll ask for his help and I’ll invite him in, because I owe him that for saving my life.

And then I’ll beg him not to meet my family or talk to them and I’ll hope he still thinks he owes me one for saving his bacon back in the day.

Thing is, I’ve heard from a lot of my family. Most of them. But I haven’t heard from Lincoln. He’s my second eldest grandson. He’s the one no one says bad things about, and who, sometimes, gets the strangest look on his face. He’s the one I told this story to a long while back when he was young enough to sit on my knee, and he’s the one who likes to haunt old bookstores.

Now and then Lincoln has shown me things he bought. When he was very young it was magic tricks and books on Houdini. Later it was an occasional necklace or ring he’d found. They always had the sort of images that weren’t shown in polite society when I was a kid and everyone went to the same church.

Eventually he graduated up to tattoos. I never got heavy into the research after meeting Crowley. I didn’t want to know, you see, but I read a bit. Here and there. Look carefully at my doors and windows and you’ll see some very carefully concealed symbols that are supposed to ward off evil. Just in case, you understand.

I know enough to see that Lincoln is maybe doing things he shouldn’t.

To hunt down something that he said was minor, Crowley cut down a lot of German soldiers. A whole lot.

I can’t help but wonder what he’d do to get to whatever Lincoln might have called.

I can’t help thinking maybe if I’d never told him all those war stories when he was just a kid…

Crowley should be here soon. He might be happy to see me. I know I won’t be happy to see him. His voice was too young. I think, God help me, that the man I see when he comes here will be unchanged. I know that sounds crazy, but I guess if a man can heal from getting broken and beaten until he should be dead, holding back the years is probably not beyond him.

I think he will be young. I think he will be friendly. I think he will be smiling that damned creepy smile of his as he asks me polite questions and considers whether or not I’m responsible for what Lincoln has done with the old stories I told him. I expect whatever answers he wants, I’ll give them to him. It’s been a lot of years and I still keep hearing his voice and seeing the distant, cold expression on his face when he said, “There are ways to get answers.”

I have never been that brave a man.

I pray he decides to forgive me.