And then he did see it and maybe he had been looking at it for some time, for there atop the ridge in a near- perfect band of moonlight was what he’d first taken to be a withered dead tree rooted in the earth…but it was moving and it looked, if anything, like some marionette: skeletal like a broken doll, twisted at the waist, head laid low against one shoulder sprouting hair like limp cobwebs, trailing limbs like living sticks.
It was sniffing the air.
“Where are you hiding?” it said, a woman’s voice gone to a shrieking dry screech like iron scraped over concrete. “I know you’re there…I can smell you.”
Her face was bleached and bloodless, cratered and sunken like the dark side of the moon. He could see eyes that were a hot smoldering red scanning the landscape, fingers twitching, as she sniffed the air.
“Here,” she said. “I can smell him…he’s here.”
All around her, figures rose up. A dozen then two dozen-wraiths, ghost-children whose faces were a luminous white in the moonlight like glowing paper lanterns. Moppets in ragged shrouds, rungs of gleaming bone jutting through, the buzzing of flies only slightly louder than their whispering voices.
“Find him!” the woman ordered.
They sank away into the mist like swimmers submerging, only they didn’t vanish. They were down on their hands and knees, sniffing the earth like hounds, crawling down the ridge like spidery white ants on a hillside. Creel, seized up with a terror that was limitless, watched them coming, moving like lumbering insects, thick glottal noises coming from their throats.
Several passed quite near to him and it wasn’t a matter of whether they would find him, but when. This was it. It all hung in the balance and he was painfully aware of the fact. To die by shellfire or a sniper’s bullet was one thing, but to be taken down by these…these children was something else again. He would be rendered to the bone. They would suck his blood and marrow, swim in his viscera and bathe in the blood from torn arteries.
Out of desperation, he tried the simplest trick in the book. His hand found a stone that was perfectly smooth, perfectly worn, as if it had lay on a river bottom for many, many years. He felt its weight in his palm, hefting it. He tossed it over his shoulder with everything he had and heard it thump against something and then splash.
A dozen heads wreathed in flies popped up from the mist.
“There!” called the old witch on the ridge. “There he is!”
She joined the chase and passed within five feet of him. When they were all gone into the fog, he scampered away up the ridge and down the other side, running and stumbling and swimming across flooded shell-holes. He threw himself down and fell atop a waterlogged corpse that went to a gushing white slush beneath him. The stench was gassy and evil, but he did not dare cry out.
For far in the distance he heard the hag: “Find him! Bring him to me! I want Creel! He’s one of ours…”
18
The Dugout
When Creel came awake there were hands on him. The hands of men. A shadowy face said, “Easy, mate. We found you out there. We brought you back. Quiet now. There’s Hun patrols about.”
The last thing he could remember were those creeping children, then running, hiding, dragging himself along on his belly, half out of his mind if not all the way. He must’ve went out cold. Something. He could not remember. Only a braying voice I want Creel! He’s one of ours…
– he bolted upright, sweating, shaking, feverish. His teeth chattered and a canteen was pressed to his lips. Then a flask of rum. He calmed inch by inch, breathed, smoothed out the wrinkles and unsightly folds like he was an unmade bed. Even in the dimness he knew he was still with the 12 ^ th Middlesex, because that was Sergeant Kirk over near the gun slit in the dugout wall, scanning the terrain.
“How’d you get way out here, Creel?”
Burke…oh Jesus, Burke.
“I don’t know. The barrage…everything was torn up…bodies everywhere…I didn’t know which way was which.”
“You’re not alone,” one of the Tommies said.
“Where is this place?”
“It’s a dugout,” Kirk said. “An old cavalry post the Hun overran last winter.”
“How far are we from our lines?”
“Difficult to know,” Kirk said. “I’m afraid the lines have been scrambled. My best guess is we’re a few miles off.”
There were two men with Kirk: Privates Jameson and Howard, both young, both scared, both looking like their mouths were filled with something they could not swallow down. It was near dawn and slowly the dugout began to fill with a soft bluish illumination. The dugout was more or less intact, though the far wall was crumbled as if it had taken a heavy shell. The rest was sandbagged, the brushwood roof heavily timbered. Rubble scattered across the floor, a few rat skeletons in the corner.
“Tonight,” Kirk said. “After dark, we’ll make our move. Until then we’d better sit tight.”
By daylight, Creel peered out the doorway and what he could see was a gutted landscape that could have been anywhere in Flanders. He saw a line of deep-hewn trenches and sandbagged ramparts stretching around the dugout, some of it collapsed, most of it flooded. Beyond the trenchworks was just a flat expanse crated by shell- holes, a few stumps rising up, what looked like the surviving chimney of a stone house in the distance.
Not much else save for a few skeletons rising from the water and a stray skull that was perched atop a trenchknife sank into one of the sandbags like some sort of sentinel.
“We found two Hun last night,” Howard said. “They was skinned. Right down to the muscle.”
Sergeant Kirk shushed him, grumbling about horror stories and nonsense and the slow degradation of the British Army.
Creel had to wonder what other stories Howard knew. Or Jameson. Or Kirk. Because there was no way by this point they hadn’t at least heard things if not necessarily seen them. It seemed unlikely that he himself could have had several encounters with walking dead things and they not a one.
But he had to ask himself: Are you sure? Are you sure this isn’t something more personal? That thing last night, it called you by name and you know it did. Don’t bother pretending otherwise or deluding yourself by saying you were hallucinating. You know better. The dead know you. Maybe all these battlefields you been sneaking around in all these years, all the graveyards you’ve poked into…maybe they’ve laid claim to you…
“You all right, Mr. Creel?” Jameson asked.
“Yeah.” He wiped sweat from his face. “I’ll be better when we get back to our lines.”
“You and me both, mate.”
Creel crept out into the trenches with Kirk to have a better look, but there was little to see but the gouged battlefield, a mass of barbwire clustered about a thicket of denuded trees. With Kirk’s field glasses, he could see that a major operation had been fought here judging by the bomb craters and pitted earth, the spent shell casings in the mud. Over in the thicket, amazingly, there were at least a dozen skeletons tangled up in the wire or tossed right up into the trees themselves, speared through limbs. It was a ghastly, unnerving sight and one that Creel felt he would see for a long time to come. When the wind picked up, a low moaning came from the skeleton forest, the sound of air blowing through hollow skulls and ribcages. It sounded like someone blowing over a bottle…maybe dozens of them.
Everyone was hungry but there was no food to be had and precious little water. So they waited. And waited. A light drizzle fell all morning and then, by two that afternoon, a heavy fog settled in thick as a tarp. Just beyond the barbwire, the world was a surreal, gloomy place of gauzy mist and leaning, nebulous shapes.
Kirk did not like it. “Too easy for a Hun raiding party to slip up on us.”
He posted himself with Jameson outside, both of them with Enfield rifles but no grenades. They stayed within visual contact and kept watch.
Creel heard his own voice speaking, talking about the barrage, about Burke. When he had finished, he was sobbing. But it was out. It had to come out.
“ You got one of them cigarettes?” Howard said after a time. When he got it lit and took a few calming drags,
