There were cinders and soot everywhere. The entire landscape-what he could see of it-had been taken apart and rearranged and there was no way to tell where the rear was or where the Hun lines were or where to escape to.
Stunned, face black with ash and mud, Creel found he could not stand and when he did, he went right down to his knees. So he crawled over the earth, calling out for survivors in a dry, ragged voice that was barely above a whisper. A shadow stepped out of the gloom and he knew it was a German soldier, a big fellow in a shining steel helmet, rifle in hands, an enormous bayonet raised to strike. Then there was a single hollow report and the Hun fell to the earth and did not move. Another shape came out of the gloom and Creel called out to him, but was ignored. Whoever it was took the German’s helmet and rifle and disappeared into the shadows.
Trophy hunter, he thought, a goddamn trophy hunter of all things.
He got to his knees, crawling again. The BEF artillery was answering in kind now, lobbing shells at the German positions. There was sporadic gunfire all around him, the sound of grenades going off, the occasional dull thump of a trench mortar. The Germans, he realized, had let loose with one barrage after the other and now raiding parties were moving into the sector. He saw the silhouettes of several men climbing atop a razorbacked hill that had not existed before the barrage.
He climbed to his feet again, still wobbly, but better. He stood there for a time, clearing his head, stumbling along a thread of earth that zigzagged haphazardly amongst a series of bomb craters. Then he tripped and fell into a shell-hole, emerging finally from muck and water. He heard a volley of machine-gun fire, felt rats crawling over him. His grasping fingers searched along the muddy wall and found he was in luck: a ladder. The crater must have been part of a trench before the barrage.
He crawled out, over the muddy pitted ground, scaling humped things that he soon realized were bodies. Then another flare passed overhead and he saw that he was in a field of corpses, hundreds of them spread in every direction. Not all were dead. Some were writhing on the ground calling for medics and stretcher bearers. He saw men without limbs. Men who were living trunks being worried by rats.
He kept moving, sickened, beaten, beyond hope.
“Hey, mate, over here,” said a voice.
Creel crawled towards the form. He cradled the broken body in his arms and realized the man was dead, shattered by concussion. His head in Creel’s hands, though intact, was almost liquid within, the skull nearly disintegrated. Everything inside moved with a slow gelatinous roll.
Crawling again.
Over corpses. Fragments of the same. Through muddy holes and pools of standing water, rats skittering around him, driven into panic by the bombardment. He came across a Tommy who was sitting upright, his back wedged up against a furrow of blackened earth. “Hallo, Captain,” he said. “Bit of bitters tonight, ain’t she?” His left leg was missing, his right arm nothing but a burnt fleshless mass. In his left hand he was holding his stomach and intestines. He kept talking as though Creel were not even there.
“Barmy bit of luck,” he said as Creel moved off.
How long he crept through the nightscape he did not know, only that after what seemed hours, the war still murmuring around him from time to time, he began to see men coming through the moonlight. What appeared to be hundreds of them, gashed and broken, streaming blood from wounds. Their eyes were bulging. They were tearing at their throats. Gassed. All of them gassed. Yellow foam was gushing between their lips and he watched as they all began to fall, piling up atop one other, vomiting yellow slime from their mouths. Even in the pale moonlight, he could see that their faces were black as they gasped out their last breaths.
For not the first time, his writer’s mind contemplated the possibility that he was in hell. For he’d been in lots of battles but never anything like this. Never anything that so completely took apart the earth and put it back together again like a puzzle missing half its pieces.
When he hadn’t heard anything for a time, he crawled into a muddy furrow and let himself smoke, let his nerves calm, his heart find its rhythm. He was probably crawling in circles. Better to wait. Listen. Make sense of things. An orderly retreat when the time came.
Sure, that was sensible military thinking.
He laid there for some time, the roaring of the guns in the distance now, the war having moved on to more fertile pickings.
Quiet.
Yes, it was suddenly unnaturally quiet. There was not a sound in any direction just that hushed weird stillness like a great switch had been thrown.
Creel had experienced it before, on many battlefields and in many wars.
Usually during the blackest hours of night, it would descend over the trenches and for a few shocking, gut- crawling moments you would wonder if you had died. If a shell had come screaming down on your position and blasted you to ropy fragments. They said you never heard the shell that got you and there was probably a truth buried in that one, but sometimes the silence was much worse than the shelling.
Out in No-Man’s Land, beyond the perimeter and wire entanglements, just…nothing. No rats scavenging, no wild dog packs howling. No men moving. No rain falling. It was eerie, hushed, waiting. Like something hiding in the darkness making ready to spring and tear out your throat. And though it was soundless, that silence had a quality to it all its own. A bigness, a volume, a weight that you could feel crushing the wind from you second by second as it settled down like a stone slab over an open grave.
It never lasted for more than hour or so and oftentimes, much less, but while it did it was impossible not to feel it gathering around you. Impossible not to listen to it, to see if there was something out there, something hiding in that blank-faced murk…like maybe you might hear the soft thud of its heart or the sound of its breathing.
The bottom line was, for however long it lasted, he knew, senses became very finely attuned and your mind assured you it was hearing something that no ears could possibly detect: bodies decomposing, rats licking their fur, flies laying eggs, maggots bursting from the sweet-sickly pulp of carrion.
Creel was breathing hard now.
He hated this.
It was like all of Flanders was waiting for something, tensing, coiling itself into a tight silent ball.
Trembling, he lit another cigarette and the sound of his lighter echoed into the night with volume as if the very physics of the air was somehow…deranged, turned inside out.
Wait, just wait, boyo, because it’s coming and you know it’s coming. Something’s about to happen. Get ready.
A perfectly white mist had gathered over the ground now, blown up, it seemed, from craters and shell-holes and jagged cuts. At first he thought with panic that it was gas, but gas was never that perfectly white, the color of bridal lace. About the time he finished his cigarette, he began to hear sounds out there in the desolation. Sounds like whispering voices.
Was it men like him sneaking about or He could hear feet in the muddy earth, splashing through puddles, pushed down, pulled free. Many, many feet and they were coming in his direction. Swallowing, a sudden heaviness in his chest, he felt a cool tingle at his spine and something like a current of electricity in his bones.
Closer now.
He did not see them, but he knew they were there. He smelled a stench of putrefaction that was warm and yeasty, but it could have come from anywhere out there, a dozen pockets of the unburied dead. It did not mean that…what was out there was not human. Yet- yet- he felt certain that what was coming to call was something other than lost soldiers creeping through the blasted remains of the trenches.
This was something else.
Something that was not evading, but… hunting.
He heard a sound, quite near, like someone breathing in through their nose with a quick wheezing intake of breath. The sound of someone sniffing like an animal, trying to scent prey, follow the spoor.
Creel felt himself go hot then cold all over. Drops of perspiration wetted his skin and a greasy sort of fear- nausea twisted in his belly.
Something was coming.
He would see it soon.
It was coming over the ridge.
