by Various
“Come on,” he said, grabbing Mike’s sleeve and dragging him away. “There’s nothing there. Nothing real.”
Mike resisted for a moment, then turned and followed, still not blinking.
“Nothing real,” Donnie insisted.
But something was definitely watching. Something with a smile on its face.
0253
“We’re close.”
They were the first words that anyone had spoken for over half an hour, and the forest gobbled them up so quickly that Donnie had to ask Joan to repeat them.
“This is it, I’m sure of it,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “Just over there.”
Henry had stopped at a shallow gully, and when Donnie caught up he saw that the water below—what little of it wasn’t hidden by the fall—had frozen. On the other side was a bank that rose to a tight-knit line of short, fat pines.
“You sure?” Donnie asked, unclipping his holster and trying to pull out his pistol. His fingers were too numb, and he went for his Garand instead, swiveling the rifle into position.
“Looks pretty quiet,” said Henry. “No tracks.”
The snow had stopped a while back, although the trees continued to shed a mist of flakes. Nobody had been this way for at least thirty minutes, unless they’d thought to brush over their footprints as they went.
“I remember I came through those bushes so fast I didn’t see the ditch,” Joan said. “Nearly broke my neck.”
“What were you running from?” asked Eddie, his face mouse-like in its apprehension. Joan looked at him.
“I told you. Something bad.”
For a while, nobody moved; they just stared at the bank opposite and felt the silence drip from it in great, invisible chunks.
“It won’t do any good to go over there,” Joan said.
“This is crazy,” said Mike, pushing between them, rifle in his hands. “She’s a broad. You coming or not?”
He scrambled down the side of the gully, and managed to keep his feet as he stepped gingerly over the ice and up the other side. Donnie didn’t look at Joan again. He was frightened that if he did, if he met her eyes, he’d somehow see what she had seen and he wouldn’t be able to find the strength to carry on. He waited for Henry to move, for Eddie to slide down on his backside; then he half jumped and half fell onto the frozen river. Mike was waiting for him, hand extended, and Donnie let the man haul him up. When he turned, Joan was still standing there, a ghost against the glowing night, the snow on her helmet and silk parachute shawl making her look almost transparent, fading fast. Maybe we are specters, Donnie thought. Maybe we died back there, somewhere, and this is where we spend eternity.
“Joan,” he called, if only an attempt to keep her here, to stop her from dissolving into the night. “Come on. We’re safer together.”
She shook her head, but made her way across the stream anyway.
“A hundred feet, maybe,” she said as he carefully pulled her almost weightless frame up the bank. “Can’t be any more than that.”
Mike took the lead this time, walking too fast as if to prove that there was nothing to fear. But Donnie remembered his face, his grinding jaw—something between the trees—and knew that they were all feeling that same tug of panic in their guts. He jogged a little to catch up with him, rifle ready.
“Keep your eyes open, Private,” he said. “Could be anything up here. And spread out, all of you, five-meter intervals.”
The men fanned to either side of him, treading carefully, hunched over their rifles. There was nothing different about this stretch of forest—the same trees, the same snow, the same moon—and yet the pressure in Donnie’s ears was even greater, almost painful, like being back inside the transport plane as it took off from England heading into Fortress Europe. His pulse sounded as if something were furiously grinding its teeth inside him.
“Sir,” said Henry, nudging his Garand forward. “Over there.”
He saw them. Shapes between the trees. Only these weren’t phantoms of snow and wind. He lifted his rifle, peering down the sight as he took step after stumbling step.
“That’s Cuddy,” said Eddie. “Oh Christ, it’s him.”
And it was. Sergeant Bill Cudden stood there on the edge of a small clearing, motionless. There was something wrong with his face, and it took Donnie a moment to understand what.
It wasn’t attached to anything.
It had been cut loose, and hung like a flag from the top of a wooden man. Moonlight shone through the eyes and mouth, nestled like a halo in his hair, giving him the appearance of a saint. His body was a collection of sticks and branches, standing maybe eight or nine feet tall, a rifle for one leg. A coat had been draped over his shoulders, twigs poking from the bloodied cuffs and the pockets stuffed with straw. Donnie stared at him, at this human doll, and felt something break loose in the engine of his mind.
“No,” somebody sobbed. “It isn’t…It can’t be.”
Donnie staggered forward, his rifle hanging by his side, forgotten. Cuddy hadn’t suffered his fate alone. Two more men had been propped around the circumference of the clearing, each just as tall, each facing inward as if attending a bizarre midnight rendezvous of quiet giants. They, too, were puppets of flesh and wood, their faces leather masks worn by crude, knotted mannequins. One—it was Albert Connaught, Donnie thought—held his helmet against his chest with twig fingers, like a pious man entering a church. The other, unrecognizable, had a deer’s skull for a torso, the antlers pushing up the arms of his jacket as if he had frozen midway through a lumbering dance. His legs were saplings thrust through the eye sockets of his improvised chest.
The world came undone, spinning on a brand-new axis. Donnie swung in a wild circle, the dead men surrounding him, and were they closing in, taking clumsy steps with their stick-legs, their gaping mouths uttering voiceless truths? He felt his body give way, shaking hard, and it was only the adrenaline that kept him on his feet, the thought that if he lost it here then soon it would be his face hanging there, eyes like buttonholes.
He looked back, saw Eddie on his knees clutching at his throat, Henry and Mike to either side of him, suddenly aged. And Joan, standing there shaking her head as she sobbed into her hand, I told you not to come. I told you it was something bad. But never in his life could he have understood.
He opened his mouth, croaked out a word, cleared his throat and tried again: “Mike.”
Nothing.
“Private Levy, Private Grady, look at me.”
Mike’s head swiveled around on his shoulders like a mill wheel, his bloodshot eyes fixing on Donnie.
“Pull yourself together,” he said. “Both of you. That’s an order. And get Eddie on his feet. Do it!”
Mike flinched at the barked command. He hooked an arm under Eddie’s armpit, hoisting him up. Donnie walked over and cradled the boy’s head.
“Eddie,” he said to a gaze that was about as far from here as it was possible to be. “Eddie, look at me.”
He did, although it took an age for him to focus. He was going into shock. It usually happened with an injury, a bullet wound or shrapnel, but Donnie had seen minds snap for plenty of other reasons, too. He clicked his fingers until he had the kid’s full attention.
“Listen, Eddie, it’s not real. It’s some Nazi trick. You know what they’re like, they’ll try anything to get into our heads. You, uh, you remember those pamphlets Gunny found back in Bastogne? The ones about the gas?”
“The gas that makes your pecker fall off?” Eddie said, a distant glimmer of a smile.
“Yeah, the pecker gas. All lies, Eddie, lies. Scaring us is half the battle.”
“But that’s Cuddy,” Eddie said, trying to look over Donnie’s shoulder. Donnie held him in place, kept eye contact.
“Cuddy’s dead. But is that any different to the other guys we’ve lost? Davidson, Crawford on that mine. This is war, and you’ve seen worse. We all have.”
Eddie swallowed; then he nodded, some of th
e color seeming to find its way back into his eyes.
“Don’t let them get to you, kiddo, okay?”
He let him go, left his arms hanging there in case Eddie slumped to the ground again. But the boy stayed standing. Donnie checked Mike, then Henry, both pale but alert. Then he walked to Joan.
“You see anything else?” he asked. She shook her head, then nodded it, tears as bright as diamonds etching down her cheeks.
“The ground. In the snow, there was blood. A pattern.”
“A pattern?” he said, and he realized he was snapping at her, leaning in too close. “What kind of pattern. A swastika? What?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “Something with circles.”
Donnie swore, marching back into the clearing, refusing to look up at the crinkled, old-men faces of his friends. Fresh snow had fallen here as it had everywhere else, and he kicked it away until he found the crimson ice below, sweeping his way from side to side, back to front, until he stood in the center of a spiderweb of frozen blood that ran from corpse to corpse to corpse in perfect symmetry.
Three circles, one beneath each body, arranged in a triangle and connected by lines.
And in the middle, right beneath his feet, four words that even Donnie’s halting German could translate: Sie sind alle gerettet.
They are all saved.
0313
“Mike, secure a perimeter, make sure nobody else is here. Henry, get on the radio and see if you can find the nearest squad.” Donnie paced back and forth just outside the clearing, helmet off, running a hand through his hair. “Eddie.” The boy stood like a puppet in the rack, strings slack. “Eddie! I need you to check for prints, for broken trees, anything that might tell us what happened to the rest of the squad.”
“We’re not going after them,” he replied, a statement rather than a question. His face looked so drawn that it too seemed as though it had been worked loose.
“No, we’re out of here just as soon as we have coordinates. Whatever happened to the rest of Cuddy’s men…We can’t help them, not on our own, not now.”
He felt sick for saying it, and he knew the others could see the cowardice in his eyes. But he could see it in them, too, even in Mike, who looked away without a single word of protest. Nobody would argue, not this time. If the rest of Cuddy’s squad was still alive, and that was doubtful, then they’d be far from here by now, probably heading for a POW camp or a firing line or something. Do they still have their faces? he wondered, and saw them marching through the forest, a line of men with moons for heads. He almost giggled, he almost broke.
“But if we have an idea of which direction they went in,” he said. “Then we’ve got something to report.”
Eddie nodded, pushing his helmet up.
“Go with Mike,” Donnie told him. “Stay close, just keep your eyes open, find out where they went.”
“Sir,” Eddie said. He walked to Mike, so small and so close that he could have been a kid hanging on to his father’s coattail.
“Keep your eyes open,” Donnie repeated. “Just call if you see anything.”
They crunched off into the snow, keeping well wide of the clearing and its conference of the dead as they vanished behind the pines. Henry had the radio out and was speaking softly into the handset. Donnie wiped a hand over his face, the skin there so cold it was burning.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Joan said quietly from his side. “Mutilations, yes, but never skinned and posed like…like china dolls. I don’t understand it.”
“They’re trying to scare us,” Donnie said.
“Out here? Miles away from the front? Who is going to see it, Donnie, aside from the birds?”
“They must have known we’d come looking,” he floundered.
“And all this just for you, a handful of boys? It must have taken hours. It’s…It’s like something a child would do, making toys and dressing them. And the words, gerettet. Saved? How on earth are they saved?”
Donnie’s head was ringing, that same pressure, as if something up there was about to blow. He stepped away, trying to think of something else, trying to think of home—of Betty laughing on his stoop, Betty taking his hand, kissing his fingers, Betty leaving with tears in her eyes—until the pain shifted and dulled.
“You get anything?” he asked Henry. The man looked up, shaking his head. “Ah, screw this, let’s get the hell out of here.” He put on his helmet, shouting: “Mike, Eddie, get back here.”
“What about the radio?” Henry asked.
“Forget it, we’ll try again west of here.”
“And them?” Joan asked, nodding into the clearing. “We can’t leave them like that.”
“They’re probably rigged,” he said, and he wasn’t sure if he believed that or not, but there was absolutely no way that he could go in there and peel those men’s faces from their mounts. “Grenades, claymores maybe. We can’t risk it. Mike, Eddie, I said get back here now!”
Something answered him, a soft cry that turned his bones to snow. He looked at Joan to make sure she had heard it, too, and she had, because she was reaching into her pocket for the Webley. Donnie swiveled his rifle around as the noise was repeated, more animal than human, coming from the direction of the clearing.
Don’t go in there, he told himself. Because you’ll never come out again, not as a sane man anyway.
The sound again, a mewling that ebbed into a wet purr. It was impossible to tell how loud it was, or how close. He stepped toward Cuddy as another gentle groan slipped from the dead man’s gaping mouth. He couldn’t be alive, not with the moonlight streaming through his sockets, not with a body made of wood and straw, and yet he was uttering chirruped monkey grunts that rose in pitch, becoming more and more frenzied.
Then Cuddy blinked his eyes.
“No!” said Donnie, staggering backward, waiting for the man to come after him, for them all to shamble across the clearing on sapling legs, reaching for him with dry, twig fingers. He squeezed the trigger, the Garand barking, Cuddy’s torso exploding into splinters.
The mewls became a roar, louder than an M2 spitting out rounds. Donnie fired again, still retreating, and this time a shape moved out from behind Cuddy. Donnie almost had time to feel relief before he saw that this thing too had a body of broken branches, and eyes of fathomless pitch. It unfolded itself, long arms dropping to its side, crippled by countless joints. Its torso was bent and broken, and yet when it took a step forward there was no denying the power there in every exposed muscle. The demon’s empty eyes burned into Donnie, full of anger but full of childish glee, too. It opened its mouth and unleashed another guttural, awful scream.
Then it charged.
It managed three steps before recoiling, a gout of black blood erupting from its head. Joan steadied herself by Donnie’s side, then pulled the trigger again. This time one of the creature’s eyes imploded. It howled, thrashing, and Donnie fired once, twice, again and again until the Garand pinged and the clip ejected. The creature threw itself between two pines, shedding gluts of oil-black blood. The branches cracked, the trees rustling as it forced its way through them.
“Jesus Christ,” Donnie said, or didn’t say, he couldn’t be sure. He felt a hand on his arm, Joan dragging him away from the clearing. The creature squealed in pain and something answered—a distant banshee scream, followed by another, this one closer.
“Come on!” Joan said. “Donnie, let’s go!”
“Not without Eddie and Mike,” he said, but they were both there, panting hard.
“Heard the shots,” said Mike. “What’s going on?”
“Just move,” Joan said, and they must have seen something in her face because they didn’t argue, none of them. A gargled howl, more screams, and footsteps coming from the same direction as Eddie and Mike, too large and too fast to be human. It sounded like a horse in full gallop, the earth trembling.
Donnie ran, groping in his belt for a fresh clip. He almost dropped it and forced himse
lf to stop, slamming the eight-round into the rifle and aiming it back the way they’d come as the others sprinted past. There was something there, in the snow, and he fired twice before fear drove him onward. Henry had stopped ahead, loosing cover fire from his own Garand. Donnie grabbed him by the collar, hauling him up.
“Forget it, just go!”
It sounded like there was a zoo behind them now, like every single animal had been woken—desperate grunts and excited shrieks and those same awful forlorn cries, so full of human grief, so much like a child, that Donnie almost stopped. Don’t, his mind ordered him, because those things, whatever they are, they are what killed Cuddy and cut off his face, they are what made stickmen out of your friends. And they’ll do the same to you if they catch you.
He sped up, not caring that he might slip or hit a low branch in the unearthly gloom, just needing to be away from that clearing. He ran, they all ran, and the noises behind them grew quieter and more distant until they faded into the silence of the forest. He ran, wondering how he ever could have been frightened by the quiet when there were noises like those in the world. He kept running, running, running, so fast and so hard that he didn’t see the men in front of him until the butt of a rifle connected with his nose and the world exploded into a storm of black snow.
0404
Somewhere in the darkness was a dream of a trench, of faces in the mud, but Donnie was pulled from it by another kind of nightmare.
“Sollten wir sie töten.”
He tried to move and it felt like a Model 24 detonating behind his eyes. Pain pulsed down his face, ringing in his nose and teeth, bearable only because the cold had rendered him so numb. He tried to move his arms and found that he couldn’t, rope burning into the skin of his wrists. He opened one eye, the world slowly re-forming itself. There was a young tree right in front of him, little more than a shoot, crystals of snow clinging onto the pines and nestling like dew in the knotted stem. He didn’t think he had ever before seen anything in so much detail as this little plant.