The Mammoth Book of Terror

TIM LEBBON HAS WON two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and his work (including the following story) has been optioned for the screen on both sides of the Atlantic.

His books include the novels Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Until She Sleeps, Dusk, Desolation and Into the Wild Green Yonder (with Peter Crowther), plus the novellas Naming of Parts, White, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Changing of Faces and Dead Man’s Hand. Lebbon’s short fiction has been collected in As the Sun Goes Down, White and Other Tales of Ruin and Fears Unnamed.

Brian Keene is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the author of The Rising, Terminal, City of the Dead and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and is collected in No Rest at All, No Rest for the Wicked and Fear of Gravity. He contributed one half of the Earthling Publications chapbook The Rise and Fall of Babylon back-to-back with John Urbanick, and he is also the fiction editor of Horrorfind.com.

“I’ve written several stories based during the First World War,” reveals Lebbon, “and this is one of my favourites. The scale of that destruction, that waste of life, that slaughter, has always had a profound effect on me, and when Brian and I worked on this story I read quite a bit around the subject. I felt terrible for giving those poor soldiers something even more awful to deal with than the hell of the trenches, but it all came together for me with the end of the story, and that wide-ranging twist on events.”

“‘Fodder’ was a real treat to write,” Keene admits. “Tim is not only one of my best friends – he’s also an author that I have an enormous amount of respect for. I knew that in collaborating with Tim, I would have to be on top of my game. We originally wrote the story for a William Hope Hodgson tribute anthology, and the character of William was based (very) loosely on him. We both had relatives that served during the First World War, so we wanted to touch on that. We also wanted to add the very real element of the flu bug that killed tens of thousands of people at the end of the war.”

“What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”

—Wilfred Owen

THE SUN WAS ALREADY scorching, yet Private William Potter’s watch showed only nine o’clock. The straps of his knapsack chafed his skin as he walked. He tried to ignore the protests from his aching muscles, but his blistered feet were balls of flame, and his neck was burned lobster-red. He had never felt so exhausted.

The remaining men of the British 3rd Infantry shuffled southward. Swirling clouds of dust, kicked up by their boots, marked their passage along the road towards Argonne. Around them, the beet fields had come to life with the buzzing chatter of insects and the birds’ morning chorus, interrupted only by muffled booms from the front; intermittent, yet always present. The sounds of battle were drawing closer with every step.

William blinked the sweat from his eyes and listened to the symphony around him, losing himself in the strange beauty of the moment. The strings and brass of the remaining wildlife accompanied the angry percussion of man. A new poem began to suggest itself to him then, and he longed for a sheet of paper and a pen to write it down. He was away pondering the first line when he slammed into Liggett.

“You, Bollocks,” the irate Corporal spat in his thick Cockney accent? “why don’t you watch where yer going?”

“Sorry, Liggett,” William mumbled apologetically. “I was listening to the birds.”

“Oh yeah, listening to the birds, were you? Walking around with your bloody head in the clouds more like.” He stopped to rescue his dropped cigarette from the dirt.

“He’s right, William,” laughed Winston. “Keep going like you are, you’ll float above this mess one day.”

“Leave him be,” Morris said, coming to his friend’s defence. “You can laugh all you want now, but William will have the last laugh when he writes a book about all of this.”

“Not if he gets his head blown off first,” Liggett mumbled, “and that’s exactly what’ll happen if he don’t join the rest of us back down here on earth.” His mood did not improve when he found the cigarette in a small, brown puddle. “Look at this,” he gasped. “The only bit of water on this whole bleeding road, and Potter makes me drop my lastciggiein it!”

“Can we have a break, Crown Sergeant?” Winston called out to the large man ahead of him.

Crown Sergeant Sterling paused and looked back at the four men. “I suppose you lads will be wanting tea next then?”

“No, Crown Sergeant, it’s just that we haven’t stopped since . . .” Winston’s voice trailed off, lost in the warbling of the birds.

William closed his eyes and unbidden images of the last battle flooded in, the horrors of close-quarter bayonet fighting, the brutal, terrified expressions on their enemies’ faces that meant It’s you or me. Hideous memories of how Dunhill and the others had died.

Sterling softened. The past was haunting him as well.

“I guess we could all do with a break,” he said quietly. “Right then! We’ll rest here and carry on just before sunset. Should be there within another couple of hours.”

Gratefully the exhausted men unslung their knapsacks, rested their rifles upright to keep them clean and sank to the ground. William felt his muscles knotting into cramps, and he spent long minutes stretching the pain away. He did not mind the cramps. He could deal with them. There were far worse pains he had seen other people suffering, indignities visited upon them by murderous Man . . .

“What will we do when we reach the forest, Crown Sergeant?” Morris asked.

The big man drank deeply from his canteen before answering. “Find out if any of the other lads made it out alive,” he answered grimly. “See if we’re the lot of it. If so, we’ll fall in with the French and the Yanks until we reach the Hindenburg line. The Yanks are sure to have a radio. I’ll get advisement from headquarters on what we’re to do.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Crown Sergeant,” Winston joked, “I’ll just walk on to London. I’ve seen enough to the Hun and I’d like to hear a bit more about this Chaplin fellow.”

“That’s very noble of you, Private,” Sterling said with a humorless grin. “But I’m guessing you’ll stay with the rest of us.”

“Who is this Chaplin bloke anyhow?” asked Morris. “I heard some boys from the Royal Fifth speaking of him as well.”

“A politician, I should guess,” Liggett said. “One of the bastards . . .”

They chatted, bantered, avoiding any subject close enough to remind them of the war. William tuned them out because he so liked to watch, to see the way their eyes changed when the spoke of home, to sense the relaxation settling into their bones when they could forget the fight, even for a moment. Fighting men, he thought, were as close to the basis of the human animal as could be. Every emotion was emphasized, every thought clear, the fear and the hope and the dread actually felt, not just thought.

“Penny for your thoughts, William,” Morris said.

William started, realized he had been drifting away, although to where he had no idea.

“I’m not sure I could articulate them properly,” he said, pausing to think for a moment. He was aware that the others were silent now, watching him. “Have you noticed the birds and the insects all around us?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought,” Morris admitted, fishing through his knapsack.

“There’s a war going on all over, happening in their very home, yet they stay. They adapt. They sing along with the sounds of the artillery. Remember when we saw the tanks?”

Morris nodded. Then he frowned.

William wondered if they were remembering the same thing.

There had been more of them then, of course. They’d been farther north, securing a bridge to provide safe passage for the armored column. It was the first time any of them had actually seen the new form of weaponry. The tanks had been slow, ponderous things. Even Crown Sergeant Sterling, a career soldier, marvelled at the sheer destructive force the machines bespoke.

As the column had rolled safely across the bridge and chewed its way through a field on the other side, a herd of deer stood watching from the treeline.

“Those deer adapted as well,” William said to the seated men. “Something new had entered their home and they investigated, then dismissed it. The sound of artillery echoes off the hills, and the birds become accustomed to it so quickly. I was just wondering . . . how does nature accept the changes?” He shook his head. “How long before it refuses to accept them?”

He kicked at the dirt under his feet, and wondered whether it was the dust of dead men.

“And just look at the new ways we’ve devised to kill each other: the machine-gun; the tank; poison gas! The press calls this the war to end all wars. We hurtle toward our date with destiny, our date with the future. Yet what do we really know of the world we live on? What mysteries of nature have eluded our grasp? What do we truly know of this planet’s inhabitants? I wonder what other creatures have adapted to this chaos . . . creatures we don’t even know about yet. After all, this is their home too. We’re the intruders here. We’re the murderers.”

“Well, that may be,” Morris replied, “but it’s not very well our choice.” He fished around in his rucksack and pulled out a faded photograph. A young woman stared back at him. He sighed deeply.

“You miss her,” William stated.

“Oh aye, I miss her terribly,” Morris whispered. “But it’s more than that.”

“What?”

The men were silent, none of them looking at Morris, all of them waiting to hear what he had to say.

“I’m sure I’ll never see her again.”

There was something wet and red in the middle of the trench. William stepped over it as he ran. Behind him, Brown was still screaming.

Dunhill was holding something ropy and glistening. As William raced toward him Dunhill held up his cupped hands in a plea for help, and the shining strands spilled out into the mud.

William knelt to help him, the mud squelching around his knees. Desperately, he grabbed at the soldier’s innards, clawing his hands as they slipped through his fingers and into the dirt.

He scraped at the mud. A pair of yellow eyes stared up at him.

They blinked.

“Everything has adapted, William,” Dunhill spat, a crimson froth forming on his mouth. “Known, and not yet known.”

Morris careened around the corner then, running at the two men squatting in the muck. Behind him came the Hun, bayonets gleaming in the moonlight.

“William!” Morris screamed as a blade sprouted from his chest. “Are you writing this down?”

The Germans trampled over him, bearing down on William. The eyes in the mud blinked again, then narrowed. William struggled to rise and two gnarled hands burst from the earth, grasping his shoulders in a fierce grip.

“William!”

He opened his eyes with a gasp. Morris was shaking him.

“Come on then, time to get up. Something’s happening.”

“I was dreaming,” William said breathlessly, looking around in confusion. “Dunhill . . .”

“I dreamed about him too,” Morris said, nodding his head sadly. “I imagine we’ll dream it forever.”

“No,” William insisted, “this wasn’tjust the battle, not just what happened to Dunhill. There was something in the earth.”

“Look lively, lads,” Sterling hissed. “We’ve got company.”

A thick fog had descended over the countryside, obscuring the beet fields and the road in front of them. William glanced at his watch. It was nearly sundown. Already the gloom was pervasive, the mist swallowing what little sunlight was left.

Something was coming toward them.

“Off the road,” Sterling commanded in a harsh whisper.

They scrabbled into the bushes as the disembodied sounds of many booted feet approached.

“Bloody hell,” Liggett muttered, “if it’s a fight they want, we’ll give it to them.”

“Quiet,” Morris whispered.

Out of the fog a column of men appeared. French infantry. A slackness pervaded their tattered ranks. The soldiers looked exhausted, covered with dust and dripping with sweat. Gloomy and silent, the procession passed by their hiding place.

Sterling called out a challenge and the ranks halted. They stared at the soldiers in the ditch, showing no hint of surprise. In halting French, Winston conversed with them. Then they shuffled onward.

“What news?” Sterling asked him.

“I’m not sure, Crown Sergeant,” Winston replied, a look of confusion on his face. “Apparently, a major offensive is about to begin in the Argonne trenches. But they’re not participating. They’re leaving this area.”

“Deserting,” Liggett snapped. “How do you like that?”

“No,” Winston countered, “that’s what doesn’t make sense. They said that they just had an encounter in a village up the road here. I couldn’t understand it though. My French is lacking. Something about the dead in the ground.”

“What do we do, Crown Sergeant?” William asked.

Sterling shrugged. Shouldered his knapsack. Slapped a fat fly from his cheek. “We move on.”

Edging along the fog enshrouded road, they encountered the sad dregs of a fleeing army. Soldiers and civilians passed by in disorder and panic; women carrying children in their arms and pushing them in small carriages; young girls in their Sunday best; boys and old men hefting all sorts of pointless artifacts of their safe life before the war. Soldiers slumped on peasant carts, gazing at nothing.

An infantryman galloped by on an officer’s horse. Spying them, he dismounted and threw his arms around the animal’s neck. He gasped something in French and then dashed off into the fields.

“What did he say?” asked Liggett.

“He thanked it for saving his life,” Winston replied.

“That’s an officer’s horse,” Sterling observed. “The fellow fled on his captain’s horse!”

Another soldier paused to speak to them.

“Ask him why it is he doesn’t have a rifle, knapsack, or equipment,” Sterling told Winston.

Winston listened to the soldier’s reply and then translated. “He says he lost them swimming across the Meuse.”

“Bollocks,” Liggett replied critically. “His clothes are dry! Here we are, fighting for their country, and they flee like schoolchildren!”

Darkness encircled them like a steel trap as they approached the village. The procession had trickled down to a few stragglers, the last of whom approached them through the dispersing mist. He bore the rank of officer and greeted them in English.

“Where are you going?” Sterling inquired. “We’re on our way to the Argonne forest. Do you know what’s happening there?”

“I wish only to be away from this cursed ground,” the Frenchman replied.

“But sir,” Sterling said, fighting hard to hide his exasperation, “why have you left your unit?”

“I am a company commander,” he stated proudly. Then he cast his eyes to the ground. “And my company’s only survivor.”

“But what the hell happened?” shouted Sterling.

“I can speak no more of this place. Let me by!”

The Frenchman brushed past them and William caught a brief glimpse of the tears streaking his grimy face. Then he vanished into the dark along with everyone else.

Face set with steely determination, Crown Sergeant Sterling motioned them onward. With the sounds of the battle drawing closer – the noise of death seemed to be carried further by the night – they entered the village.

Nothing remained save for a few crumbling walls. The five men walked slowly, rifles at the ready, their hearts hammering with fear. The road was paved with rubbish: linens and undergarments; litters of clothing; letters; burst mattresses and eiderdowns; fragments of furniture and shattered pottery.

And the dead lay everywhere.

Retching, William stumbled across five corpses in a tattered heap, all of them children, all of them hugging each other for comfort in death. Farther along lay a young mother and her two daughters, all dressed in their Sunday best, their faces forever frozen in an horrific visage.

Morris placed a comforting hand on William’s shoulder as the young man heaved into the dust.

“What do you think happened here?” William rasped.

“I don’tknow. They don’t seem burned or shot. Yetmosthave been—” The private’s answer was cut short by a piercing squeal from behind a ruined building, followed by a guttural grunt.

William jumped to his feet and dashed after Morris and Sterling.

Another squeal ended abruptly as a rifle echoed in the darkness.

They rounded the corner and halted in shock. In what had once been a courtyard, bodies had been stacked like cordwood, limbs flung out in deathly abandon. Pigs wandered through the pickings, feasting on human flesh.

Winston sighted and squeezed the trigger. A second bloated beast sagged to the ground, ignored by its brethren. Liggett was frantically reloading, his efforts punctuated with more swearing.

“Stand down,” ordered Sterling. “If there’re snipers about, you’ll bring them down on our heads!”

Liggett cursed again and brought the rifle up to his shoulder, drawing a bead on the nearest swine.

“Stand down, Corporal! That’s an order, Liggett!”

The shaken Corporal looked at them, and in the moonlight William noticed the tears of rage and bewilderment that streaked the dust on his face.

“This isn’t right,” Winston exclaimed. “It’s not natural!”

Sterling stepped forward to survey the makeshift abattoir. “I spent twenty years on the farm, lads,” he said quietly. “And I never saw pigs do this. They’ll eat most things, but . . .”

“Crown Sergeant,” called Morris. “Come and look at this!”

He was standing before a small mound of dirt. The men approached, wondering what new horror was about to be revealed. Slowly, they took their places next to Morris.

In the ground before them was a gaping hole. The yawning entrance led down into the earth, disappearing from sight. A peculiar smell wafted from the chasm. It reminded William of pig iron and summer storms.

“What do you make of this, then?”

“Artillery,” Winston answered, the word almost forming a question. “The Germans must have shelled the village.”

“No,” Sterling countered, “this was no explosion, we can all see that. This was dug. See that dirt? This tunnel was made from beneath the ground, not from above.”

“Well then what in bloody hell was it?” Liggett stammered.

“Something else. I don’t know what.”

“Perhaps the Germans have some new tunnelling machine,” William offered.

“There you go, thinking you’re bleeding Jules Verne again,” growled Liggett. “Pull your head out of yer arse, William!”

“Leave him alone,” Morris retorted and stepped toward the surly Corporal.

“Enough!” shouted Sterling, his voice echoing in the silent streets. “The Devil take you all, that’s enough! Whatever made this hole, whatever atrocity occurred in this village, we won’t solve anything by standing here. Let’s move on!”

Shaken, they departed from the village, stepping gingerly over the scattered corpses. The road wound on, cresting a hilltop a few kilometres away. Stealthily, they crept over the hill and looked down upon the valley of the Argonne Forest.

Away in the distance, the trees stood silent watch over the battlefield. The valley was a labyrinth of trenches, both German and Allied. To William, it looked as if ants had burrowed through the vast field, leaving no acre untouched. Ghostly fires dotted the landscape, as soldiers from both sides huddled in the mud while darkness closed upon them.

A maze of barbed wire surrounded the trenches, and they picked their way carefully through it.

William was struck by the silence engulfing the valley. During a battle, when the heavy field guns, rifles, and machine guns were all booming at the same time, the noise was so tremendous that it seemed beyond the limits of human endurance. Amidst a storm of steel and fire, the riot of battle would change in character, volume and tempo; rising and falling with alternating diminuendo and crescendo in both a hurrying and slackening pace. Relentless, the deafening volley of reports had always sounded to William like the clattering of a clumsy and lumbering wagon, jolting heavily over the frozen ruts of a rough country lane. Sometimes it reminded him of the brisk hammering of thousands of carpenters and riveters. Or it could have been the rumbling of hundreds of heavy goods trains, thundering and bumping over uneven points in the line and meeting head on in a hideous collision.

But even more awful than that hellish cacophony were the sudden and unexpected silences, which made William hold his breath and wait for the storm to start again.

It was this silence that greeted them as they entered the trench system. And William finally gasped a new breath, because the barrage had truly halted. For a time, at least.

The ground was a heavy, impermeable clay that had been gouged and displaced in a series of tunnels and ditches. Thick mud puddles filled every hole and depression, forming a sticky mire for them to flounder through.

“Halt,” called a voice from the darkness. “Who goes there?”

Sterling brought up a hand, stopping them as they slogged through the water. “Who do you think? The bloody Red Baron?”

“I’ve got to ask. Wh-who goes there?”

William could just make out the young private who had issued the challenge, a skinny chap barely old enough to shave, with a uniform caked onto his body like a second skin. His eyes seemed far too big for his face. His rifle was shaking, the butt clinking against the lad’s belt buckle.

“We’re from the 3rd,” Sterling said. “Any good down here?”

“Good,” the boy said blankly. “Don’t be daft. How could anything be good?”

William frowned. He had seen many strange things during his last four months in France, but the private’s nonchalance when addressing the Crown Sergeant was something new and unsettling.

The boy lowered his rifle and slumped back against the side of the trench. He seemed to merge with the ground, such was his grubby appearance. William wondered if he’d ever move again, or would he be sucked into the trench wall, subsumed into the churned mud of the battlefield like so many of his mates?

Sometimes, they left dead men on the edge of the trench because they absorbed more bullets.

“Come on, you lot,” Sterling said. “Let’s get some grub inside us, then I’d better track down someone in charge.”

The young soldier began to laugh. It was a sickly sound, like gritty oil being poured through a sieve; more a hiss than a chuckle. “In charge,” he said. “In bloody charge!” He laughed again, but never once looked at William or his friends. He stared through them and beyond, as if he were talking to someone else entirely. As they shrugged past him, his laughter broke into a rapid volley of violent sneezes.

They slopped through the trench, up to their knees in muddy water most of the time, feces or rotten food floating on its soupy surface. William closed his eyes for a few seconds every now and then, navigating by sound alone, and tried to imagine the summery meadow back home. He could find the smells of flowers and the sounds of birds, the feel of grass beneath his hands and the sense of one of the girls from the village sitting primly by his side . . . but he could not see it. Even when he tried to make-believe, he could not see it.

Still, he had to try. Anything was better than this. Even despair was better than this hell beyond despair.

Again his mind drifted back to the previous battle. He thought of the wounded soldier left out in no-man’s land because it gave the enemy snipers something to shoot at. Dunhill.

“This’ll do,” Sterling said from somewhere up ahead.

William opened his eyes. The Sergeant had paused in a much wider area of trench, two further burrows running away left and right. Straight ahead, a depression had been carved from the earth and covered with roughly chopped branches and shattered tree trunks. It was flooded but there were seats gouged into the walls, an unopened crate of rations, and a dead soldier bobbing facedown in the water.

No one liked to touch a dead man. Some thought death was catching, like bad luck or a cold.

“I’m not going in there, with him like that,” Liggett said. “Someone should bury the poor sod.”

“Go on then,” Winston mumbled, just loud enough for the others to hear.

“You do it,” Liggett said. “You and Morris drag him out of there and—”

“No way I’m touching him!” A cigarette dropped from Morris’s lips as he spoke.

“Just stop it,” William sighed, shaking his head. He felt like crying. He often felt like crying, and when he thought it would really help, he did. When it was dark mostly, the night lit only by the intermittent flashes of the guns. It was yet another thing he envied the animals; they would never have cause to despair at the savagery of their own race.

He pushed past the bickering men, glanced at Sterling, and then stepped into the depression in the earth. The soldier was very heavy, weighted down with water, his rifle strap still tangled around one arm—

“Oh Christ!” William gasped as the body flipped over.

The dead soldier had no face.

There was a hint of eye cavities, a hole in his head where his nose should be, but all other features had been destroyed.

William closed his eyes and tried to dream of the meadow as he dragged the body into the trench. He left it against the sidewall. And he could sense everything of home apart from what it looked like.

“What did that?” Sterling whispered later.

William glanced at his Sergeant, unable to find an answer, unwilling to look.

Sterling’s gaze did not falter. “That dead chap over there. What did it to him?”

“A shell. A bullet. I don’t know.” William shrugged. “Perhaps he blew his own head off.”

“You know what I mean, Potter, I’ve seen enough dead men, so have you. His face was taken off after he died.”

Yes, thought William, I had thought that. I’ve tried to forget it, but it is what I thought at first. He wished he could lose the memory of the man’s ruined face as easily as he had mislaid the image of home.

“Rats,” he said quietly.

And then the first barrage of the night began.

The walls of the trench were shaking. Not just vibrating, but actually moving, shedding clumps of dirt as if there were something inside trying to break out. Shells staggered the trenches, some of them striking home in sickening explosions of water and smoke and flesh. The sky was blinking at them with each burst of energy, clouds grey against the night, moon barely peering out at the slaughter its erstwhile worshippers were committing. While down here Man was busy racing to his death, in the heavens time was frozen.

William ran through the trenches. Flowering eruptions of mud splashed the landscape, the ground shook, water sloshed around his feet, men shouted, men screamed, shells screamed, Morris shouted at him: “It’s all over now, William! The poem’s ending now!”

William reached a section of trench that had been blown to smithereens. It looked like a giant hand had scooped up a thousand tons of mud, men, weapons, timber and water, then flung them back at the ground. He saw the bottom half of a body protruding from a bank of earth . . . its feet were shaking, trouser legs rippling and ripping as something pulled it further in.

Then he was out of the trenches and into no-man’s land, and everything was being destroyed. In a swirl of colors – apple blossom and setting sun and poppy red – he caught a glimpse of rolling hillsides of gorse and grass. He could smell the loamy scent of moorland in the air, taste summer on the breeze, see sheep boiling the hills higher up . . . and the artillery barrage blew it all apart.

Something grabbed his feet and he looked down.

There was a girl wrapping herself around his lower legs, working herself tight like a snake. He could not recall her name, but he knew that she worked in the baker’s shop back home. He thought that perhaps he had loved her at one time.

She looked up at him. “Come home, my darling, my sweet. Come back to the valley. We so need a poet.” But then the ground broke apart as another shell struck home, and the girl vanished into mud, and the night was completely dark at last.

There were explosions and shrieks, but they were muffled. Something had a hand clamped across his mouth and nostrils, over his ears, arm pressing into his throat and choking off the scream he was desperate to vent. He sucked in a difficult breath and smelled mud and rot and age. Filthy water seeped into his mouth and trickled down his throat, like an icy finger tracing his lifeline straight to his heart.

He wondered how long he had been buried down here. Sometimes a barrage would seem to go on forever, so it could be anything from seconds to days. He hurt all over, but he could still shift his limbs, he could still feel the hurt. That was a good sign, at least.

He pushed his arms and legs, shoved out from where he was curled up like a sleeping baby, trying to distinguish up from down. Fresh air suddenly washed across his face, a cool night kiss tainted with a tang of smoke and its constant companion, death. William pushed some more, heaving with his shoulders, dragging himself from beneath the showering of mud and into the waterlogged trench.

He could not help rolling into the water. He closed his eyes and held his breath, stood quickly, shaking off the rancid mess like a wet dog.

Confusion settled upon him. Where the hell was he? Where were the others, just what had happened?

And then he saw.

Liggett had never been a polite man, but now his arrogant self was spread around the remains of the trench. There were bits and pieces here and there, but it was his head that William recognized, face reddened by blast-heat but still undeniably Liggett. Whatever blood had leaked from him had been consumed by the earth. Here, everything was a constant shade of dirt.

A line of inhuman creatures walked across the shattered horizon. Humped, slow-moving, paying hardly any attention to the massive conflict around them . . . and then William saw that they were medics evacuating no-man’s land of the injured and dead. It took him only seconds to identify them, but in that time his imagination had given them glowing red eyes and a lumbering, hippopotamus gait.

He shook his head, looked back down at Liggett. He tried to imagine the dead corporal blinking, his severed arm waving. Grotesque and insensitive, perhaps, but sometimes the craziest notions kept William alive. Thinking about odd things meant, ironically, that he could forget about a whole lot more.

“Potter!” someone shouted.

William ducked as a new volley of shells fell a hundred yards away, then the voice called out again.

“Potter! Over here!”

He tried discerning which direction the voice was coming from, then made his way along the ruined trench. Mud sucked at him, the collapsed walls loose and moist. The night was almost permanently lit now by a flurry of flares. One of the sides must be charging across no-man’s land in the wake of the barrage . . . and sure enough, the cackle of machine-gun fire commenced out of sight, mowing down soldiers in hysterical patterns.

William kept low. Above the background roar of the battlefield he heard the bee-buzz of bullets tearing the air overhead. And above even that, the cries of already-forgotten men falling into freshly-blown graves.

“Potter!”

It was Winston. He was huddled at ajunction of two trenches, hunched down like a beggar-boy on a London street. Something stirred at his feet, a shape whipping back and forth in the wet mud like a landed fish.

“It’s Crown Sergeant Sterling. We were running for help after the shell fell, we’d lost you and Liggett—”

“Liggett’s dead.”

“Oh.” Winston paused briefly, but death was no surprise. He went on: “We only got this far. The tail end of that first volley caught us here, and . . . look. Look, Potter!”

Those last words were cried, not spoken, and in the monotone of the flare light Potter could see Winston’s eyes. They glittered, but there were no tears. And then he looked at where Winston was pointing.

Sterling was stuck up to his waist in a hole in the trench bottom. Water swilled around his chest. His eyes bulged from his face, his arms skirted across the surface of the water as he twisted . . . or was twisted by something, because he was dead. He was as dead as anyone William had seen, his throat was gone, the front of his uniform was glistening a different wetness to the rest of the place, a rich syrupy mess in the sodium glare of flares.

“What the hell . . .”

“I’ve tried to pull him out, but he won’t budge.”

“He’s dead,” William said.

“No, no, he can’t be, he’s trying to get out. Look, if we grab an arm each—”

“He’s dead!” William frowned, closed his eyes and strove for home. Even trying to do so calmed him, though the image was as elusive as ever. He supposed it could be worse. It could be that he was able to think of the valley where he was born, like imagining the purity of Heaven in a never-ending Hell. Small mercy.

A shape leapt across the trench.

Another, merely a shadow blocking out the star- and flare-light, following the first into no-man’s land.

“Winston!” William hissed.

“I dropped my rifle,” Winston gasped, voice barely audible now that a new barrage had begun to shake the ground.

This time, William thought the shells were aimed in a different direction. Something felt different; not better, just different. A new kind of promised pain.

“Me too. Get down, and—”

Something else leapt, hit the wall of the trench and slithered down into murky water.

William froze. The soldier was yards from him, struggling to bring his rifle to bear, whining deep down in his throat like a dreaming dog. His nose was running, his mouth slack and dribbling dark saliva onto his tunic. He sneezed.

“Wait, who are you?” William said, more to establish a language than anything else.

“What are you?” the man shouted.

“William Potter, 3rd Infantry.”

The man laughed and lowered his rifle. “You’d best follow me then, or they’ll get you too.”

“Is there an offensive? Are we storming the Hun’s trenches? In the night, with a barrage still underway?”

The man shook his head and slumped back against the rough earth, letting its slickness lower him into a sitting position. All the time he talked he looked back the way he had come. And he kept his rifle pointed that way, too . . . back at their own lines.

“Who cares about the Hun?,” he said. “Who fucking cares? And the barrage? We’re not shelling the enemy, you fool. We’ve turned the guns around to—”

Winston screamed. It was a sudden, irrational exhalation of terror and pain, heartfelt and automatic. By the time William had spun around, his friend was already splashing on his stomach in the bottom of the trench, hands and feet throwing up fans of dirty water. He hadn’t been hit by a bullet or shrapnel; whatever had struck him down was still happening, still whipping his body back and forth.

“Winston!” William shouted.

“Don’t bother,” the soldier said, his voice high pitched and insane, and he fired his rifle along the trench at Winston.

William took one step to tackle him, and then something else happened. He felt it first, a vibration more frequent and intense than the regular thud of explosive Shockwaves. This was machines churning underground, or something rolling over. He paused and looked along the trench . . . and the knee-high water began to swill and flow, down into several holes that had opened beneath their feet.

William leapt at the trench wall and grabbed hold of something hanging down from above. He looked up into the blank eyes of a dead soldier, his extended arm William’s lifeline, his hand cold and hard. Looking back down he saw Sterling disappear underground with a squelch, and Winston drifting to one of the holes and remaining there, half in, half out, filthy water flowing by him.

In seconds, the trench had emptied of water. Six inches of mud was all that remained; that and humped bodies here and there, rotting, disintegrating already. There were also the pits, each of them steaming and spitting sprays of water into the illuminated night.

He recalled the hole they had seen in the decimated village . . . and the smell that had come from it.

This tunnel was made from beneath, Sterling had said. Well, now the Sergeant knew just where they led.

William hauled himself out of the trench before he could see what emerged from the holes.

Once on top, he lay flat out and searched for the soldier who’d fallen in moments before. But the madman was already dodging his way into the murk of no-man’s land, rifle thrown away, arms held wide as if craving a liberating spray of bullets across his chest.

William thought to call after him but knew it would do no good. He was mad. Everyone was mad. Maybe there was a poem there somewhere, but who would be left to read it? Madmen? He laughed, and the sound of his own lunatic giggle perturbed him greatly.

More men came from behind, scrambling over the trench, some of them falling in and never reappearing. There were noises from down there now, shouts and shots and the sound of flesh finding its doom.

Ahead of him, certain death under a hail of enemy fire.

Behind him, dead friends and dying men, dying in ways he could not properly describe or even imagine. From the sounds drifting from the trench . . . the terrible screams suddenly cut off, the crunching of bones being snapped and pulled apart . . . his choice had already been made.

It was war, after all.

William stood and ran into a storm of lead.

Liggett was following him. His various dismembered parts skipped and dodged shattered tree trunks and fallen bodies. One remaining arm hauled his torso through the mud, and his head moved by rolling itself forward. Its mouth was wide open, trying to scream, but it had no neck or throat.

“Help me!” Liggett croaked nonetheless.

William slowed to a halt. Bullets whipped the air around him, slamming into bodies and sending them toppling down to add to the muck. He was in what had once been a forest. Now it was merely another part of the mud, with strangely contorted stumps seeking their lost heads.

“Help!” Liggett rasped as the first of his parts dashed past William.

Dreaming. He had to be dreaming. He could smell home here, not war and death. He could taste honey on the air, not cordite and blood and smoke.

He looked back from where Liggett had fled.

Dreaming.

Strange shapes lumbered from the smoke, slopping through the mud but unhindered by it. Indeed, these things seemed to flow with the filth, not struggle against it. They looked like the stretcher-bearers he had seen earlier, but as they approached he saw that there was no likeness there. None at all.

Dreaming . . . please God, let me be dreaming.

The demons had yellow eyes.

William came to in a flooded shell hole. At first he though he was alone, but then he saw the dead men keeping his night company. He lay in a horrible mire of flesh and blood.

He shuddered, a tortured sigh escaping his cracked lips. The battle continued around him, but now the fighting was more scattered. In the midst of the tumult, he could hear the steady tac-tac-tac of the German machine guns, spreading death precisely and methodically. William reflected on how the emotions of the man behind the weapon never hindered its evil effects. The machine gun was new to this world, yet it could have been created and directed by some ancient, scheming spirit of destruction.

Grabbing a rifle from the clutches of a corpse, he peered cautiously over the edge of the crater. The dream lingered with him, the glint from the creatures’ yellow eyes as they lumbered toward him like misshapen men . . .

He was in the middle of no-man’s land.

And something was charging his position.

Screaming, William pulled the trigger and was greeted with an empty click.

The thing drew closer, its harsh and ragged breath echoing in the darkness. Ducking back down William flailed in the water, searching wildly for another weapon. His hand closed on something round and he brought it up to the surface – he had to, he could not help himself – and an eyeball stared back at him from his glistening palm.

He screamed again.

The shriek was answered from above.

The thing towered over the shell hole, darkness enshrouding its body like a blanket. William scuttled backward like a crab as a guttural laugh mocked him. The thing cocked its head, surveying him calmly.

It’s a man . . . it’s a man . . . it’s got to be a man . . . !

A flare popped half a mile away, throwing a sheen of sickly light over the scene.

Its body was pale and bloated, the skin mottled like melted cheese or wax. The creature bent at the knees and leapt, landing in the hole but not sinking into the mud. It snarled at him. Its fetid breath fogged the air between them.

It was not a German. It was not a man. Men didn’t have yellow eyes.

Or tusks.

Scampering up the slope, William fled across the field with the howls of the creature nipping at his heels. He risked a glance to see if it was gaining. Blessed relief washed over him when he noticed that the thing hadn’t left the hole.

He heard the ripping sounds, and the chewing. It was feeding.

He turned and ran into the night. The air exploded and burned around him as he dashed across the field and back into the labyrinthine trenches. Leaping over a sandbagged parapet, he saw hunched forms moving in the darkness below. He jumped another trench, missing his mark and clawing wildly at barbed wire as he slid down.

A cluster of German and French troops struggled against one another, not in battle, but in flight. Even as he watched the mud erupted before them, spewing earth and water skyward. William turned and ran before he could see what had caused it.

The earth was giving up its secrets.

The trench crossed another, then another, and soon he was lost in the intersections. The Argonne battlefield was a cacophony of hellish sound now, gunfire and explosions punctuated by cries of agony and other, less human exhortations.

Above him, out in front of the barbed wire, a man was being torn apart. The attacker ripped the victim’s arm from its socket. Brandishing the bloody trophy like a club, he began to beat the other man mercilessly. He sank into the mud, raised his remaining arm in a feeble attempt to ward off the blows.

The victor squealed in delight.

William continued moving, never willing to stop, always fearing that to halt would be to give in . . . give in to whatever had taken possession of this battlefield.

He reached an empty portion of the trenches and slowed for a moment, gasping for breath. The sounds continued from all around him. The air was heavy with the stench they had first encountered in the village.

Around a dogleg in the trench, footsteps approached.

William looked to his left and saw a thick, yellowish-green cloud veiling the night sky. He wondered if the forest and trenches were on fire. Perhaps that would be good. Maybe flame would purge this place of all its ills, both manmade and . . . other.

The footsteps grew closer, falling faster.

Dizzy, William struggled to remain standing. His throat burned as pain lanced into his chest. His eyes watered. Breathing became difficult . . . and then impossible. He spat blood; crimson frothed on his agonized lips.

Something raced at him along the trench.

“William!” It growled his name, voice horribly distorted, inhuman.

Then he saw that the thing was Morris, a wound on his scalp bleeding freely and matched by a gash in his side.

“William!” his friend screamed again through his mask, and then he was there, catching him as he fell.

“Morris . . .” he coughed. “Hurts.”

“Gas. They’ve gassed the trenches. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.”

“The Sergeant . . . Winston . . . Liggett . . . they’re dead,” William spat.

“We’re all dead, William,” Morris answered as he dragged him through the mud, away from the cloud.

Through the haze, William saw that his friend’s hair had turned white.

And then he knew no more.

The grass in the meadow was cool. Beads of dew still clung to the green blades. Wetness also coated William’s face as he sobbed quietly, his knees drawn up to his head and his notebook discarded beside him.

“Why do you cry, William?”

The voice startled him. He looked up and saw beauty.

It was the girl from the baker’s, her head surrounded by an aura from the bright sun. Light gleamed from her golden tresses as she sat next to him. He remembered her name now. Clarice. She was . . . had been . . . his girlfriend. How could he have forgotten?

Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, it was all starting to come back. He knew why he was crying. He’d had this conversation before.

“My father is butchering Onyx today,” he said quietly as she took his hand. “I know he’s only a silly cow, but . . .”

“You’ve grown fond of him,” Clarice finished.

“Well, yes,” William agreed. “I’ve looked after him since he was a calf. I can understand why father must do it, but it all seems so bloody unfair. Onyx has lived his life, day after day, never knowing why he really existed: for food. What kind of fate is that?”

“That is simply the way of things, my love,” she answered softly. “There’s too much of the poet in you. He’s just a cow. We raise cattle to eat. That’s why they exist.”

“Is that the only reason?” William retorted. “Aren’t they intelligent creatures, living things? Maybe they have hopes and dreams? How would you feel if you lived your life only to end up on someone’s supper table? It’s not fair, Clarice. Onyx is nothing more than fodder.”

“Maybe we all are, William,” she stated simply. “Come, would you like to see your home?”

“Yes!” William cried. “I’d like that very much. I can’tseem to remember it properly at all.”

They walked hand in hand through the pasture, the roof of the farmhouse looming just over the hill. They passed through a grazing herd of Holsteins.

“Mind the dung,” William warned her, stepping lightly.

Then he stopped, terror rooting him to the spot.

A monstrous bull gazed at him with Sterling’s face. “We’re all fodder, lad,” said the Crown Sergeant, slowly chewing his cud, a bulbous wound opening in his side.

“That’s right, William,” echoed Winston, his teats swollen with milk as he tore ravenously at a patch of grass. “It’s the way things work. We exist to provide sustenance to the planet.”

“We’re germs,” Liggett mooed through a splitting throat.

“I don’t understand,” William gasped.

“Perhaps you are not meant to,” said a voice from behind him.

Clarice had vanished. William turned and saw Morris, buried up to his waist in the soft earth of the meadow.

“The earth still has secrets, William,” he said gravely, sinking deeper into the loam. “Buried forever and never meant to be seen. Not by us.”

“Come, William,” his father cried from over the hill. “Bring the cattle. It’s time for the slaughter.”

Liggett, Winston and Sergeant Sterling began to snort in agony. Then William was sinking into the earth as well, struggling desperately as he watched the tufts of Morris’s hair sink below.

It’s a dream, I know it’s a dream because his hair turned white back at the front.

William opened his mouth to scream and the earth rushed in. Above him, the slaughter began anew.

He tried to scream again, but his mouth was still blocked. Something long and cold was stuck in his throat. It was connected to . . .

He gagged, grasping the thing and pulling the cadaverous fingers from his mouth. Gasping for breath, he panicked when he found he couldn’t move. He turned his head to the right and Morris’s glazed eyes stared back at him, unblinking and filled with blood. A warm and sticky fluid dripped onto his forehead. Something heavy lay on top of him.

Bodies, he realized. He was buried beneath bodies. Muck and water covered most of his form, leaving his shoulders and head above, but the night was hidden from view. The echoes of the artillery blast still ricocheted through his mind, even though it could have been minutes or hours ago.

Something landed nearby with a heavy splash and a grunt, and then, for a few brief moments, there was silence. William held his breath and strained to hear or see, but his world had contracted to this; a claustrophobic stench of fresh blood and turned earth, and a cloying darkness caused by the shadows of the dead. He whispered Clarice’s name . . .

And then something started ripping and tearing at the bodies around him.

It’s time for the slaughter, he heard his father say again.

Something stopped him from crying out. At the time he thought he was being calm and cautious, but later – when he was walking across a shattered, silent landscape with only the dead and unwanted as company – he realized that it was outright terror.

He was frozen stiff by fear.

Animal sounds of feeding, the snap of bones, wet sucks as bodies were hauled from the mud . . . whole or in pieces . . . gulping and retching. And in the background there was still gunfire, still the occasional thud of an artillery shell finding a home somewhere, but it no longer had the sound of a fullblown battle. Now, it was more like a skirmish.

Soon, with the sounds seeming to grow nearer as the thing ate its way down to him, the gunfire ceased altogether.

But the fighting continued. William heard shouts and screams, feet splashing through water and mud, bodies hitting the ground. At one point, he heard the Lord’s Prayer chanted frantically in German. A horrific squeal sent him into a shiver. He clenched his fists and bit down on his lip, tasting blood, desperate to remain still lest the gorging thing sensed him down here.

He realized that he could see it, now. The body above him shifted and jerked as mouthfuls were taken from it. Its head snapped back and crunched into William’s nose. His eyes watered, his face caught fire, but he remained still. He should be playing dead, he knew, holding a breath, narrowing his eyes so that light could not glint from the moisture there . . . but he could not close his eyes because he could see the thing, and the horror of it forbade him any solace.

Its mouth was the worst because it was surrounded by flecks of blood and clots of meat. The pale snouted nose leaked copiously over its fleshy lips and chin, diluting dead men’s blood and sending it spraying into the air every time the thing moved its blockyjaws. A second before William finally managed to close his eyes, it sneezed.

Retreating into his own mind – trying to escape, to find beauty in his memories – William felt the warmth of alien fluid spatter across his face and run, slowly, down over his split lips.

He imagined blood gushing from a slaughtered bull’s throat.

He tasted the vile mucus of the creature, the salty blood of the dead men, and the alkaline fear that was his own.

Daylight woke him. If the corpse had still lain atop him, he may well have remained there until his own body weakened and died, cosseted within his own strange dreams. But the dead soldier had been ripped up and scattered. The sun found William’s face and gave him back his life.

He struggled from the loose earth and the body parts that surrounded him, trying not to look too closely. His hands found some horrendous things as he tried to haul himself upright. They were all cold.

An eerie silence hung over the battlefield. There were no whistles or whispers, no crackle of gunfire, no shouting or groaning or screaming from no-man’s land. There was not even a breeze to rustle by his ears. Nothing. And as William dragged himself from the collapsed trench that had so nearly been his grave, he saw why.

Everyone was dead.

Never had he seen human destruction on this scale. The landscape around him was carpeted with corpses, piled two or three deep in places, all of them mutilated and tattered by whatever had killed them. Both armies must have abandoned their trenches to fight in the open . . . but fight whom? Not each other, he knew that. He had heard tales about the Hun, seen caricatures of them before he came to war, but the ones he had seen since then . . . the ones he had killed . . . had all looked exactly like him.

The things doing the killing last night were not even human.

William picked his way between corpses, but it soon became too much to look down all the time. So he strode, arms swinging, every fourth or fifth step finding something soft to walk on. He closed his eyes for minutes at a time, mindless of the danger of flooded shell-holes or barbed wire. He had faced much, much worse.

On the backs of his eyelids he saw perfection, beauty, Utopia: the valley back home that could not possibly be as wonderful and innocent as he saw it now, but in his mind’s eye it was still the ultimate aim for his poor wandering self. He could smell it and taste it, and he could see it as well, every detail clear and defined, every rolling field—

He wondered what might live beneath his father’s farm.

He had to get back to his lines, warn them, tell them there was something here worse than the Hun. He had seen and heard thousands die, but he could save many more if he hurried. There was so little time. It was midday already. He did not want to be out here after dark.

William sneezed twice and spat out a great clot of mucus. A parliament of rooks feeding on a horse’s bloated corpse took to the air.

He wiped his nose with a muddy sleeve. His head had begun to throb and his joints were stiffening with every step.

Damn. After all this, he was coming down with the ‘flu.