by Dan Simmons
Samuel’s body lurched, steadied, and then lurched again. It was as if he had been standing on a platform which had dropped a foot, then eighteen inches. Where the edges of the grave had come just to his waist, they now rose to his armpits.
Iverson’s nephew threw aside the pickaxe and thrust his arms out onto solid ground. But the ground was no longer solid. Colonel Iverson and I stumbled backwards as the earth seemed to vibrate and then flow like a mudslide. The nephew’s left hand seized my ankle, his right hand sought a firm grip on thick vines. Iverson’s hand remained firm on my neck, choking me.
Suddenly there came the sound of collapsing, sliding dirt, as if the floor of the grave had given way, collapsing through the ceiling of some forgotten mine or cavern, and the nephew threw himself forward, half out of the grave, his chest pressed against the slippery edges of the pit, his fingers releasing my ankle to claw at loam and vines. He reminded me of a mountain climber on a rocky overhang, using only his fingers and the friction of his upper body to defy the pull of gravity.
“Help me.” His voice was a whisper, contorted by effort and disbelief.
Colonel Iverson backed away another five steps and I was pulled along.
Samuel was winning the struggle with the collapsing grave. His left hand found the pickaxe where he had buried it in the mound of dirt and he used the handle for leverage, pulling himself upward until his right knee found purchase on the edge of the pit.
The edge collapsed.
Dirt from the three-foot-high mound flowed past the handle of the pick, over the nephew’s straining arm and shoulder, back into the pit. The earth had been moist but solid where Samuel excavated it; now it flowed like frictionless mud, like water … like black wine.
Samuel slid back into the pit, now filled with viscous dirt, with only his face and upraised fingers rising out of the pool of black, shifting soil.
Suddenly there came a sound from all around us as if many large forms had shifted position under blankets of grass and vines. Leaves stirred. Vines snapped. There was no breeze.
Iverson’s nephew opened his mouth to scream and a wave of blackness flowed in between his teeth. His eyes were not human. Without warning, the ground shifted again and the nephew was pulled violently out of sight. He disappeared as quickly and totally as a swimmer pulled down by a shark three times his size.
There came the sound of teeth.
Colonel Iverson whimpered then, making the noise of a small child being made to go to his room without a light. His grip loosened on my neck.
Samuel’s face appeared one last time, protruding eyes filmed with dirt. Something had taken most of the flesh from his right cheek. I realized that the sound I now heard was a man trying to scream with his larynx and esophagus half-filled with dirt.
He was pulled under again. Colonel Iverson took another three steps back and released my neck. I grabbed up the lantern and ran.
I heard a shout behind me and I looked over my shoulder just long enough to see Colonel Iverson coming through the break in the fence. He was out of the field, staggering, wheezing, but still coming on.
I ran with the speed of a terrified ten-year-old, the lantern swinging wildly from my right hand, throwing shifting patterns of light on leaves, branches, rocks. I had to have the light with me. There was a single thought in my mind: the Captain’s pistol lying where Samuel had laid it on the table.
The saddled horse was pulling at its tether when I reached the house; its eyes were wild, alarmed at me, the swinging lantern, Iverson shouting far behind me, or the sudden terrible stench that drifted from the fields. I ignored the animal and slammed through the doorway, past the foyer, and into the dining room. I stopped, panting, grinning with terror and triumph.
The pistol was gone.
For seconds or minutes I stood in shock, not being able to think at all. Then, still holding the lantern, I looked under the table, in the hoosier, in the tiny back room. The pistol was not there. I started for the door, heard noises on the porch, headed up the stairs, and then paused in indecision.
“Is this … what you are after … young man?” Iverson stood panting at the entrance to the dining room, his left hand braced against the doorjamb, his right hand raised with the pistol leveled at me. “Slander, all slander,” he said and squeezed the trigger.
The Captain had called the pistol a “double action.” The hammer clicked back, locked into place, but did not fire. Iverson glanced at it and raised it toward me again. I threw the lantern at his face.
The Colonel batted it aside, breaking the glass. Flames ignited the ancient curtains and shot toward the ceiling, scorching Iverson’s right side. He cursed and dropped the revolver. I vaulted over the stair railing, grabbed the kerosene lamp from the table, and threw it into the back room. Bedding and books burst into flame as the lamp oil spread. Dropping on all fours, I scrabbled toward the pistol but Iverson kicked at my head. He was old and slow and I easily rolled aside, but not before the burning curtain fell between me and the weapon. Iverson reached for it, pulled his hand back from the flames, and fled cursing out the front door.
I crouched there a second, panting. Flames shot along cracks in the floorboards, igniting pitch pine and the framework of the tinder-dry house itself. Outside the horse whinnied, either from the smell of smoke or the attempts of the Colonel to gain the saddle. I knew that nothing could stop Iverson from riding south or east, into the woods, toward the town, away from Iverson’s Pits.
I reached into the circle of flame, screaming silently as part of my tunic sleeve charred away and blisters erupted on my palm, wrist, and lower arm. I dragged the pistol back, tossing the heated metal from hand to hand. Only later did I wonder why the gunpowder in the cartridges did not explode. Cradling the weapon in my burned hands, I stumbled outside.
Colonel Iverson had mounted but had only one boot in a stirrup. One rein dragged loosely while he tugged violently at the other, trying to turn the panicked horse back toward the forest. Toward the burning house. The mare had backed away from the flames and was intent on running toward the break in the wall. Toward the Pits. Iverson fought it. The result was that the mare spun in circles, the whites of its eyes showing at each revolution.
I stumbled off the porch of the burning cottage and lifted the heavy weapon just as Iverson managed to stop the horse’s gyrations and leaned forward to grab the loose rein. With both reins in hand and the mare under control, he kicked hard to ride past me—or ride me down—on his way into the darkness of the trees. It took all of my strength to thumb the hammer back, blisters bursting on my thumb as I did so, and fire. I had not taken time to aim. The bullet ripped through branches ten feet above Iverson. The recoil almost made me drop the gun.
The mare spun back toward the darkness behind it. Iverson forced it around again, urged it forward with violent kicks of his small, black shoes.
My second shot went into the dirt five feet in front of me. Flesh peeled back from my burned thumb as I forced the hammer back the third time, aiming the impossibly heavy weapon between the mare’s rolling eyes. I was sobbing so fiercely that I could not see Iverson clearly, but I could clearly hear him curse as his horse refused to approach the flames and source of noise a third time. I wiped at my eyes with my scorched sleeve just as Iverson wheeled the mare away from the light and gave it its head. My third shot went high again, but Iverson’s horse galloped into the darkness, not staying on the faint path, jumping the stone wall in a leap which cleared the rocks by two feet.
I ran after them, still sobbing, tripping twice in the darkness but keeping possession of the pistol. By the time I reached the wall, the entire house was ablaze behind me, sparks drifting overhead and curtains of red light dancing across the forest and fields. I jumped to the top of the wall and stood there weaving, gasping for breath, and watching.
Iverson’s mount had made it thirty yards or so beyond the wall before being forced to a halt. It was rearing now, both reins flying free as the white-bearded man on its ba
ck clung desperately with both hands in its mane.
The arbors were moving. Tall masses of vines rose as high as the horse’s head, vague shapes seeming to move under a shifting surface of leaves. The earth itself was heaving into hummocks and ridges. And holes.
I saw them clearly in the bonfire light. Mole holes. Gopher holes. But as broad across the opening as the trunk of a man. And ribbed inside, lined with ridges of blood-red cartilage. It was like looking down the maw of a snake as its insides pulsed and throbbed expectantly.
Only worse.
If you have seen a lamprey preparing to feed you might know what I mean. The holes had teeth. Rows of teeth. They were ringed with teeth. The earth had opened to show its red-rimmed guts, ringed with sharp white teeth.
The holes moved. The mare danced in panic but the holes shifted like shadows in the broad circle of bare earth which had cleared itself of vines. Around the circumference, dark shapes rose beneath the arbors.
Iverson screamed then. A second later his horse let out a similar noise as a hole closed on its right front leg. I clearly heard the bone snap and sever. The horse went down with Iverson rolling free. There were more snapping noises and the horse lifted its neck to watch with mad, white eyes as the earth closed around its four stumps of legs, shredding the ligament and muscle from bone as easily as someone stripping strands of dark meat from a drumstick.
In twenty seconds there was only the thrashing trunk of the mare, rolling in the black dirt and black blood in a vain attempt to avoid the shifting lamprey teeth. Then the holes closed on the animal’s neck.
Colonel Iverson rose to his knees, then to his feet. The only sounds were the crackling of flames behind me, the rustling of vines, and the high, hysterical panting of Iverson himself. The man was giggling.
In rows five hundred yards long, in lines as straight as a dress parade and as precise as battle lines, the earth trembled and furrowed, folding on itself, vines and grass and black soil rising and falling, rippling like rats moving under a thin blanket. Or like the furling of a flag.
Iverson screamed as the holes opened under him and around him. Somehow he managed to scream a second time as the upper half of his body rolled free across the waiting earth, one hand clawing for leverage in the undulating dirt while the other hand vainly attempted to tuck in the parts of himself which trailed behind.
The holes closed again. There was no screaming now as only the small, pink oval rolled in the dirt, but I will be certain to my dying day that I saw the white beard move as the jaws opened silently, saw the flicker of white and yellow as the eyes blinked.
The holes closed a third time.
I stumbled away from the wall, but not before I had thrown the revolver as far out into the field as I could manage. The burning house had collapsed into itself but the heat was tremendous, far too hot for me to sit so close. My eyebrows were quickly singed away and steam rose from my sweat-soaked clothes, but I stayed as close to the fire as I could for as long as I could.
Close to the light.
I have no memory of the fire brigade that found me or of the men who brought me back to town sometime before dawn.
Wednesday, July 2, was Military Day at the Great Reunion. It rained hard all afternoon but speeches were given in the Great Tent. Sons and grandsons of General Longstreet and General Pickett and General Meade were present on the speakers’ platform.
I remember awakening briefly in the hospital tent to the sound of rain on canvas. Someone was explaining to someone that facilities were better there than in the old hospital in town. My arms and hands were swathed in bandages. My brow burned with fever. “Rest easy, lad,” said Reverend Hodges, his face heavy with worry. “I’ve cabled your parents. Your father will be here before nightfall.” I nodded and stifled the urge to scream in the interminable seconds before sleep claimed me again. The beating of rain on the tent had sounded like teeth scraping bone.
Thursday, July 3, was Civic Day at the Great Reunion. Survivors of Pickett’s brigade and ex-Union troops from the Philadelphia Brigade Association formed two lines and walked fifty feet north and south to the wall on Cemetery Ridge which marked the so-called high water mark of the Confederacy. Both sides lowered battle flags until they crossed above the wall. Then a bearer symbolically lifted the Stars and Stripes above the crossed battle flags. Everyone cheered. Veterans embraced one another.
I remember fragments of the train ride home that morning. I remember my father’s arm around me. I remember my mother’s face when we arrived at the station in Chestnut Hill.
Friday, July 4, was National Day at the Great Reunion. President Wilson addressed all of the veterans in the Great Tent at 11 A.M. He spoke of healing wounds, forgetting past differences, of forgetting old quarrels. He spoke of valor and courage and glory which the ages would not diminish. When he was finished, they played the National Anthem and an honor guard fired a salute. Then all the old men went home.
I remember parts of my dreams that day. They were the same dreams I have now. Several times I awoke screaming. My mother tried to hold my hand but I wanted nothing to touch me. Nothing at all.
Seventy-five years have passed since my first trip to Gettysburg. I have been back many times. The guides and rangers and librarians there know me by name. Some flatter me with the title historian.
Nine veterans died during the Great Reunion of 1913—five of heart problems, two of heatstroke, and one of pneumonia. The ninth veteran’s death certificate lists the cause of death as “old age.” One veteran simply disappeared sometime between his registration and the date he was expected back at a home for retired veterans in Raleigh, North Carolina. The name of Captain Powell D. Montgomery of Raleigh, North Carolina, veteran of the 20th North Carolina Regiment, was never added to the list of the nine veterans who died. He had no family and was not missed for some weeks after the Reunion ended.
Jessup Sheads had indeed built the small house southeast of the Forney farm, on the site where the 97th New York regiment had silently waited behind a stone wall for the advance of Colonel Alfred Iverson’s men. Sheads designed the small house as a summer home and erected it in the spring of 1893. He never stayed in it. Sheads was described as a short, stout, redheaded man, cleanshaven, with a weakness for wine. It was he who had planted the grape arbors shortly before his death from a heart attack in that same year of 1893. His widow rented the summer house out through agents for the years until the cottage burned in the summer of 1913. No records were kept of the renters.
Colonel Alfred Iverson, Jr., ended the war as a Brigadier General despite being relieved of his command after undisclosed difficulties during the opening skirmishes of the Battle of Gettysburg. After the war, Iverson was engaged in unlucky business ventures in Georgia and then in Florida, leaving both areas under unclear circumstances. In Florida, Iverson was involved in the citrus business with his grand-nephew, Samuel Strahl, an outspoken member of the KKK and a rabid defender of his grand-uncle’s name and reputation. It was rumored that Stahl had killed at least two men in illegal duels and he was wanted for questioning in Broward County in relation to the disappearance of a 78-year-old man named Phelps Rawlins. Rawlins had been a veteran of the 20th North Carolina Regiment. Stahl’s wife reported him missing during a month-long hunting trip in the summer of 1913. She lived on in Macon, Georgia, until her death in 1948.
Alfred Iverson, Jr., is listed in different sources as dying in 1911, 1913, or 1915. Historians frequently confused Iverson with his father, the Senator, and although both are supposed to be buried in the family crypt in Atlanta, records at the Oakland Cemetery show that there is only one coffin entombed there.
Many times over the years have I dreamt the dream I remember from that hot afternoon in the grape arbors. Only my field of view in that dream changes—from blue sky and a stone wall under spreading branches to trenches and barbed wire, to rice paddies and monsoon clouds, to frozen mud along a frozen river, to thick, tropical vegetation which swallows light. Recently I have drea
med that I am lying in the ash of a city while snow falls from low clouds. But the fruit and copper taste of the soil remains the same. The silent communion among the casually sacrificed and the forgotten-buried also remains the same. Sometimes I think of the mass graves which have fertilized this century and I weep for my grandson and great-grandchildren.
I have not visited the battlefields in some years. The last time was twenty-five years ago in the quiet spring of 1963, three months before the insanity of that summer’s centennial celebration of the battles. The Mummasburg Road had been paved and widened. John Forney’s house had not been there for years but I did note a proliferation of iris where the foundation had once stood. The town of Gettysburg is much larger, of course, but zoning restrictions and the historical park have kept new houses from being built in the vicinity.
Many of the trees along the stone wall have died of Dutch elm disease and other blights. Only a few yards of the wall itself remain, the stones having been carried off for fireplaces and patios. The city is clearly visible across the open fields.
No sign of Iverson’s Pits remains. No one I spoke to who lives in the area remembers them. The fields there are green when lying fallow and incredibly productive when tilled, but this is true of most of the surrounding Pennsylvania countryside.
Last winter a friend and fellow amateur historian wrote to tell me that a small archaeological team from Penn State University had done a trial dig in the Oak Hill area. He wrote that the dig had yielded a veritable goldmine of relics—bullets, brass buttons, bits of mess kits, canister fragments, five almost intact bayonets, bits of bone—all of the stubborn objects which decaying flesh leaves behind like minor footnotes in time.