by Pat Kelleher
“Home from home, then, ain’t it?”
“Corp!”
“What?”
Banks pointed into the undergrowth. Something was moving. They backed away, raising their rifles.
An officer, sallow-faced, unsteady on his feet, stumbled out of the undergrowth, his hand out searching for support to steady himself, but the branches and saplings bent under his weight and left him staggering. His skin and uniform were grey, dusted with a powder, motes of which swirled about him in the air as he moved.
“I recognise him,” said Walker straining his neck as he peered into the gloom. “It’s Lieutenant Mathers, the Tank Commander.” He lowered his rifle and stepped forward “Are you all right, sir?” Mathers lurched forward as if concussed and suffering from commotional shock, his mouth moving as he tried to speak. Walker and Mitchell dashed to help him. “It’s all right, sir, we’ve got you.”
Mathers looked up at them. They could see, now, his eyes were rimed with grey powder.
Mitchell saw a gaping hole in Mathers head, filled with something soft and spongy extruding from the shattered cranial cavity. Not brain.
He’d seen men with their brains hanging out, and this very definitely was not that.
Mathers’ mouth still moved, as though he were trying to dislodge some obstruction in his throat.
“Here, Corp, I don’t think ’e’s well.”
Walker slapped him on the back to see if it would help. Clouds of powder billowed into the air. Walker and Mitchell coughed thick phlegmy coughs as they inhaled it, drawing it deep into their lungs. Hardiman backed away. “That ain’t dust, it’s growing on him. Look.
He’s covered with it.”
A network of fine grey filaments had spread across Mathers’ pallid skin and uniform, like a gauzy shroud.
Walker and Mitchell’s coughing fit dissolved into desperate asthmatic gasps as they clawed at their throats, eyes wide with panic. Mathers stepped clumsily toward the others, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish, as something swelled inside it. There was a soft pop and a cloud of spores exploded from his mouth, enveloping the soldiers.
They tried very hard to scream.
CHAPTER TEN
“A Fear That is Weird and Grim...”
THE AIR OF the Croatoan Crater was humid and thick with cloying scents and the heady smell of decay. Under her coveralls, Nellie’s skin was slick with sweat as they moved through the jungle, following Napoo in Indian file.
“Wherever Alfie is, he can’t be far. Why, this crater can’t be more than a mile wide,” she said, more to convince herself than anything.
“If he’s still alive,” said Norman, avoiding her gaze.
Nellie’s eyes narrowed. “Of course he is. He must be.” But there was a note of uncertainty in her voice.
A string of muffled cracks reached them through the jungle foliage.
Reggie cocked his head. “Is that gunfire?”
Norman listened for a moment. “No,” he said dismissively. “That’s them whip things up in the trees, is that. Gave me a heart attack first time I heard them. Thought we were being sniped at.”
They pushed on, ignoring the faint firework crackle. Cecil approached Nellie, barely able look her in the eye as he mumbled, “I got scratched,” and held out the back of his hand to her.
She suppressed a smile. When she took his hand to inspect it, his face flushed with embarrassment. She cleaned it, bandaged it and packed him off to rejoin the others.
“If the rest of them get cuts or scratches, tell them to see me immediately,” she said.
Cecil nodded dumbly and hurried off to lose himself in male company.
Over the next few hours, Reggie and Wally came to her individually with cuts, grazes and sheepish glances. Cecil regarded them jealously. Nellie knew the smallest cut on this world could lead to Lord knows what kind of infection. She patched them up from her dwindling medical supplies and they were pathetically grateful for her ministrations. Without their commander, without their petrol fruit juice, without the Ivanhoe, they seemed a little less than themselves. A little lost.
As Napoo followed the trail, the jungle folded in on itself, forming a living labyrinth, as if to protect itself against the parasitic creepers that spread everywhere and sought to engulf it.
They threaded their way through the labyrinthine alleys of giant trees, buttress roots and tangled undergrowth, sharing them with things that scuttled and oozed briefly across their path. In there, the air was close and stale.
They eased gingerly between groves of giant thorns where the high pitched whines of insects made them flinch and duck just as much as any whizz-bang or Hun bullet.
“Reminds me of moving up communications trenches to the front,” said Jack without a trace of irony.
Here, however, the revetments reached to the sky. The sunlight, such as it was, came in momentary shafts of light, or glittering chinks in the leafy cover high above.
Even used to the cramped space in the Ivanhoe, the jungle was getting to some of them. Their petrol-fruit madness may have faded, but there remained a lingering paranoia. That could be a healthy thing on a world where everything was out to get you, but it didn’t do much for your peace of mind. Cecil whimpered, his eyes darting about in terror.
Jack laid a large hand on his shoulder, offering comfort, but even that made him jump. “Easy, lad.”
Napoo led them on between the trees and thickets, following a seemingly invisible trail, at times clambering over huge boughs or ducking under trailing creepers until, eventually, crawling through a spiny bower, they came to the end of the labyrinth and stepped out into open jungle.
A slight breeze rippled through the undergrowth.
“Fresh air!” declared Reggie with the manner of someone stepping off a train at a country station. He mopped his face with a handkerchief and puffed out his cheeks, before taking off his turtle helmet to wipe his balding head.
A rushing gurgle through the trees told of a river nearby, its cold current sucking the air towards it. They headed down towards the sound over damp rocks. The air felt cool and refreshing against Nellie’s clammy skin.
Cecil cried out and tugged at the sleeve of Jack’s coveralls. Jack turned.
Standing behind them was a figure both familiar and horrifying.
Jack frowned at the apparition. “Lieutenant Mathers?”
The others stopped their scrambling and looked back, drawn by the impossibility of its existence.
Bewildered, Reggie lost his footing and slipped on his backside.
“It can’t be.”
Mathers was covered with a fine cobweb of grey filaments. The hole in his head bulged with some sort of soft, grey puckered growth. His left arm had begun to lose its form as man and uniform were being absorbed by the malevolent mould.
Wally, stepped forward, hand extended. “Lieutenant?”
Norman pulled him back. “Wally, don’t.”
“But it’s the Sub!”
“No, no it isn’t. Look, man.”
The figure moved its mouth as if trying to speak, or draw breath. It stumbled towards them, clumsily, its arms outstretched to counterbalance its awkward leaden gait.
Nellie stood transfixed, as from its mouth a spongy growth began to swell. Stretching the jaw open unnaturally, it emerged obscenely from between grey cracked lips.
Cecil fired his Enfield twice, hitting the mouldering cadaver in the arm and chest. Plumes of dust puffed from the dry wounds. It reeled with the bullets’ momentum, but continued towards them.
Filaments, questing mycelia, spread out from Mathers’ feet towards them. The threads probed outwards, creating an expanding carpet of living fibres.
This was no longer Mathers. His cadaver was merely a host, ambulated by whatever foreign fungus now possessed him, seeking nothing more than to reproduce and spread its spore. If they succumbed to it, their fate would be that of Mathers himself, and right now that thought horrified Nellie more than anything el
se she could imagine.
“Back!” called Napoo, dragging Nellie away. “Back! It is Dulgur. Evil spirit!”
She stumbled away, unable to tear her gaze from it as the fruiting pod extruding from Mathers’ mouth continued to swell, its puckered skin now taut and shiny. As Mathers lumbered towards them, the pod burst, like a puffball, ejecting a cloud of spores.
The tank crew backed away from the drifting spore cloud, tripping over roots and dragging each other in an effort to remain out of its reach. Even as the breeze snatched the spores away from them, other pods were fruiting across Mathers’ body.
“Keep away from it!” yelled Nellie.
Mathers advanced, his lumbering steps pulling the spreading filaments behind him, like a bridal train, a counterbalance to his unsteady gait.
Norman fumbled in his haversack, pulled out a Mills bomb and slipped a finger through the ring of the safety pin. Jack’s powerful hand closed round his.
“Don’t. If it goes off it’ll scatter that stuff and put us all in more danger.”
Fire wouldn’t work for the same reason, spreading what spores survived on currents of hot air. There didn’t seem to be anything they could do to stop it that wouldn’t make the situation worse. Nellie felt a nauseous wave of panic rise like bile.
Then she heard the rushing susurrus in the background.
“The river,” she ordered, in a tone that brooked no dissent.
Wally and the others didn’t need telling twice. She was startled at how readily they obeyed her.
Their hobnailed boots slipped and skidded on exposed roots and rocks, damp and slick with reddish algae as they headed down toward the sound of rushing water.
Mathers followed at a plodding but relentless pace.
Nellie could feel the moisture in the air and the greasy wet stones beneath her feet. Flat, wet leaves slapped against her face as she raced on to the river’s edge.
She was brought to an abrupt halt as Jack thrust out an arm to stop her. She looked down. Another step and she would have tumbled headlong into the river. Half-hidden by foliage, the rocks dropped away into the torrent.
Powered by the waterfalls that plunged into the crater, the river rushed past below, foaming and tumbling as it roiled over smooth, waterworn rocks.
“It’s too fast and deep to cross,” called Norman above the water’s roar. “We’re trapped.”
Nellie looked around. Humid spray hung in the air, a rainbow struggling to materialise within it. It would dampen the spores, stick them down. It gave them a fighting chance.
“We have to get it into the river!” she yelled.
They hunted round for anything they might use. Jack pulled experimentally at a thick green branch growing across the path. He hauled it back to the side of the trail and let it go. It sprang back into the path with a satisfying whip. He grunted with satisfaction.
Norman pulled a long length of fibrous creeper from the undergrowth. Unspoken, a plan materialised.
Mathers, his grey dusty pallor glistening with a dew of condensation, came on, step by jerky step, having built up a stumbling momentum, a fruit pod swelling and ripening on his gnarled arm, like a blister.
Jack watched it from the shadows of the undergrowth, his muscles aching, his teeth clamped together as he held back the supple branch. “Come on, you bastard, hurry up,” he hissed.
Wally stepped out of the undergrowth by the river’s edge just long enough to shout, “Oi, Sub!”
Jack watched as Mathers turned his head and took a step past him towards the sound, another spore pod fruiting from his mouth.
Jack let the branch loose. It whipped forward, hitting Mathers in the small of the back with enough force to wind an ordinary man. Mathers stumbled forward. Reggie and Napoo, hidden either side of the trail, pulled the length of creeper taut, catching him just above his calf-length boots.
Mathers toppled forward, but there was nothing for him to catch hold of. Arms flailing, he tumbled forwards through the thin foliage and down into the raging torrent below.
The spores were instantly drowned by spumes of water as the current carried him spinning slowly out from the bank, the train of filaments billowing out around him like some obscene Ophelia. His mouth opened and closed, one arm raised above the water as he was swept along into the white water rush.
Nellie hurried along the bank, following his progress until she reached a rocky promontory. Below them, the water tumbled recklessly over a lip, not into some pool but into a huge crack in the rock, a fault in the ground that swallowed the torrent whole; she could hear its roar echo as it fell away into blackness. She watched with a mixture of pity and horror as the figure of Mathers, half-lost in the churning waters, rushed over the edge and into the yawning dark.
The men took it hard, losing Mathers again, and it was all Nellie could do to chivvy them on as Napoo picked up the trail of Alfie’s abductor.
MOTES OF GREY mould danced in the air as spore-rimed eyes followed their movement.
With an unsteady, barely coordinated gait, the fungus-ambulated things that had been Corporal Talbot and his party set off in slow, inexorable pursuit as a filigree of mycelia spread across the ground at their feet.
SERGEANT DIXON LOOKED up at the canyon wall. He was less than impressed with the results of the demolition blast. It had cleared perhaps another twenty feet of scree, exposing only more wall of the same featureless metal. Not a scratch, not a dent. No sign of a hatch or window.
He scrambled up to inspect his handiwork with Lambert and stood at the base of the wall. The newly exposed metal was the same colour, same smooth texture. Whatever this stuff was, it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
They could blast all week, but he suspected the result would be the same, even if they cleared all the scree.
“We could try knocking,” suggested Lambert.
“What do you think we just bloody did, Private?” said Dixon curtly, surveying the scattered scree and newly-exposed metal. “Where’s the Iddy Umpty bloke?”
Lambert fetched Buckley to the top of the scree, loaded down under the weight of several wooden boxes and haversacks.
“You’re next on the bill. Show us what you can do, lad.”
Buckley produced two copper plates each about a foot square, connected by wires to a listening set in one of the boxes. Normally they’d bury the plates in the ground to listen for German telephone communications, but now he set the plates against the metal wall.
“I need quiet,” he said.
Dixon glared at him, took in a lungful of air until Buckley thought he’d pop the buttons on his tunic and bellowed, “Quiet!”
The order found itself repeated several times as it echoed off the canyon walls. Below them, the men stopped what they were doing and stood in silence.
“Quiet enough for you?”
Buckley smiled weakly. “Much obliged, Sarn’t.”
He put the earphones on his head and his forehead creased as he strained to listen...
NEWS OF THE armistice between the Pennines and the Chatts who’d plagued them for the last four months spread, and the air of relief in the trenches was palpable. Jubilation broke out in spontaneous displays of bonhomie as the soldiers celebrated in their own meagre ways; rousing choruses of When this Bloody War is Over, the more generous breaking out what little luxuries they had managed to save; tins of Ticklers, once despised, now prized; some shared their last hoarded gaspers, passing each one out as far as it would go, every inhalation so cherished and savoured they might have been the best cigars from the most exclusive gentlemen’s club.
Even Sister Fenton, as stern and taciturn as she was, cracked a smile, so her patients claimed.
Impelled by his newly-remembered vision, Padre Rand anxiously made his way through the trenches looking for Lieutenant Tulliver. It was frustrating, therefore, to find himself stopped and congratulated every other fire bay or so; his shoulder patted, his back slapped and his hand shaken, even though he protested with all
modesty that really he’d had nothing to do with the current situation and had merely been an observer. But they would have none of it and he was forced to bury his impatience deep down, for in their faces he saw the respite from their tribulations that he had long prayed for and took comfort in it. How might his vision shape their future? If it came true, could he shepherd them back to the Promised Land that was England?
The padre eventually found the pilot in the Command Post with Lieutenant Palmer, sharing what they called mock coffee. It was hot, brown and came from some sort of bean, which was about all it had in common.
Tulliver raised his tin mug in salute, as he entered.
“The man of the hour,” said the young pilot.
The padre shrugged it off with a brief smile. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, Lieutenant. I believe you’re due out on another reconnaissance flight.”
“That’s right, Padre, up with the angels. Want me to put in a word for you?”
The padre smiled. “That won’t be necessary. I want to accompany you. I need to get my report to Lieutenant Everson. There are things he needs to know. I’m sure he’d want to be apprised of the situation on the Chatt front.”
Tulliver drained his tin mug and put it down. “Well, I’ve no doubt you can patter out the prayers, and God knows a spare few might come in handy, but how good are you with a machine gun? There’s something up there, and it’s hunting me. I need someone who can watch my back.”
“I’ve done a little hunting in my time,” the Chaplain said. “I really must insist, Lieutenant. I don’t want to have to take it up with a higher authority.” He glanced at Palmer.
“I think you’ll find I’m the highest authority round here,” said Tulliver, tapping the RFC patch on his breast, a wry smile playing round his lips.
“Mine is a little higher, I think,” retorted the padre.
Tulliver glanced at his dog collar and grinned. “Touché, Padre,” he said, scraping his chair back and standing up. “Very well. I’ll be wing, you be prayer. Because God knows, we’ll probably need both.”