The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  “We’re from the 3rd,” Sterling said. “Any good down here?”

  “Good,” the boy said blankly. “Don’t be daft. How could anything be good?”

  William frowned. He had seen many strange things during his last four months in France, but the private’s nonchalance when addressing the Crown Sergeant was something new and unsettling.

  The boy lowered his rifle and slumped back against the side of the trench. He seemed to merge with the ground, such was his grubby appearance. William wondered if he’d ever move again, or would he be sucked into the trench wall, subsumed into the churned mud of the battlefield like so many of his mates?

  Sometimes, they left dead men on the edge of the trench because they absorbed more bullets.

  “Come on, you lot,” Sterling said. “Let’s get some grub inside us, then I’d better track down someone in charge.”

  The young soldier began to laugh. It was a sickly sound, like gritty oil being poured through a sieve; more a hiss than a chuckle. “In charge,” he said. “In bloody charge!” He laughed again, but never once looked at William or his friends. He stared through them and beyond, as if he were talking to someone else entirely. As they shrugged past him, his laughter broke into a rapid volley of violent sneezes.

  They slopped through the trench, up to their knees in muddy water most of the time, feces or rotten food floating on its soupy surface. William closed his eyes for a few seconds every now and then, navigating by sound alone, and tried to imagine the summery meadow back home. He could find the smells of flowers and the sounds of birds, the feel of grass beneath his hands and the sense of one of the girls from the village sitting primly by his side . . . but he could not see it. Even when he tried to make-believe, he could not see it.

  Still, he had to try. Anything was better than this. Even despair was better than this hell beyond despair.

  Again his mind drifted back to the previous battle. He thought of the wounded soldier left out in no-man’s land because it gave the enemy snipers something to shoot at. Dunhill.

  “This’ll do,” Sterling said from somewhere up ahead.

  William opened his eyes. The Sergeant had paused in a much wider area of trench, two further burrows running away left and right. Straight ahead, a depression had been carved from the earth and covered with roughly chopped branches and shattered tree trunks. It was flooded but there were seats gouged into the walls, an unopened crate of rations, and a dead soldier bobbing facedown in the water.

  No one liked to touch a dead man. Some thought death was catching, like bad luck or a cold.

  “I’m not going in there, with him like that,” Liggett said. “Someone should bury the poor sod.”

  “Go on then,” Winston mumbled, just loud enough for the others to hear.

  “You do it,” Liggett said. “You and Morris drag him out of there and—”

  “No way I’m touching him!” A cigarette dropped from Morris’s lips as he spoke.

  “Just stop it,” William sighed, shaking his head. He felt like crying. He often felt like crying, and when he thought it would really help, he did. When it was dark mostly, the night lit only by the intermittent flashes of the guns. It was yet another thing he envied the animals; they would never have cause to despair at the savagery of their own race.

  He pushed past the bickering men, glanced at Sterling, and then stepped into the depression in the earth. The soldier was very heavy, weighted down with water, his rifle strap still tangled around one arm—

  “Oh Christ!” William gasped as the body flipped over.

  The dead soldier had no face.

  There was a hint of eye cavities, a hole in his head where his nose should be, but all other features had been destroyed.

  William closed his eyes and tried to dream of the meadow as he dragged the body into the trench. He left it against the sidewall. And he could sense everything of home apart from what it looked like.

  “What did that?” Sterling whispered later.

  William glanced at his Sergeant, unable to find an answer, unwilling to look.

  Sterling’s gaze did not falter. “That dead chap over there. What did it to him?”

  “A shell. A bullet. I don’t know.” William shrugged. “Perhaps he blew his own head off.”

  “You know what I mean, Potter, I’ve seen enough dead men, so have you. His face was taken off after he died.”

  Yes, thought William, I had thought that. I’ve tried to forget it, but it is what I thought at first. He wished he could lose the memory of the man’s ruined face as easily as he had mislaid the image of home.

  “Rats,” he said quietly.

  And then the first barrage of the night began.

  The walls of the trench were shaking. Not just vibrating, but actually moving, shedding clumps of dirt as if there were something inside trying to break out. Shells staggered the trenches, some of them striking home in sickening explosions of water and smoke and flesh. The sky was blinking at them with each burst of energy, clouds grey against the night, moon barely peering out at the slaughter its erstwhile worshippers were committing. While down here Man was busy racing to his death, in the heavens time was frozen.

  William ran through the trenches. Flowering eruptions of mud splashed the landscape, the ground shook, water sloshed around his feet, men shouted, men screamed, shells screamed, Morris shouted at him: “It’s all over now, William! The poem’s ending now!”

  William reached a section of trench that had been blown to smithereens. It looked like a giant hand had scooped up a thousand tons of mud, men, weapons, timber and water, then flung them back at the ground. He saw the bottom half of a body protruding from a bank of earth . . . its feet were shaking, trouser legs rippling and ripping as something pulled it further in.

  Then he was out of the trenches and into no-man’s land, and everything was being destroyed. In a swirl of colors – apple blossom and setting sun and poppy red – he caught a glimpse of rolling hillsides of gorse and grass. He could smell the loamy scent of moorland in the air, taste summer on the breeze, see sheep boiling the hills higher up . . . and the artillery barrage blew it all apart.

  Something grabbed his feet and he looked down.

  There was a girl wrapping herself around his lower legs, working herself tight like a snake. He could not recall her name, but he knew that she worked in the baker’s shop back home. He thought that perhaps he had loved her at one time.

  She looked up at him. “Come home, my darling, my sweet. Come back to the valley. We so need a poet.” But then the ground broke apart as another shell struck home, and the girl vanished into mud, and the night was completely dark at last.

  There were explosions and shrieks, but they were muffled. Something had a hand clamped across his mouth and nostrils, over his ears, arm pressing into his throat and choking off the scream he was desperate to vent. He sucked in a difficult breath and smelled mud and rot and age. Filthy water seeped into his mouth and trickled down his throat, like an icy finger tracing his lifeline straight to his heart.

  He wondered how long he had been buried down here. Sometimes a barrage would seem to go on forever, so it could be anything from seconds to days. He hurt all over, but he could still shift his limbs, he could still feel the hurt. That was a good sign, at least.

  He pushed his arms and legs, shoved out from where he was curled up like a sleeping baby, trying to distinguish up from down. Fresh air suddenly washed across his face, a cool night kiss tainted with a tang of smoke and its constant companion, death. William pushed some more, heaving with his shoulders, dragging himself from beneath the showering of mud and into the waterlogged trench.

  He could not help rolling into the water. He closed his eyes and held his breath, stood quickly, shaking off the rancid mess like a wet dog.

  Confusion settled upon him. Where the hell was he? Where were the others, just what had happened?

  And then he saw.

  Liggett had never been a polite man, but no
w his arrogant self was spread around the remains of the trench. There were bits and pieces here and there, but it was his head that William recognized, face reddened by blast-heat but still undeniably Liggett. Whatever blood had leaked from him had been consumed by the earth. Here, everything was a constant shade of dirt.

  A line of inhuman creatures walked across the shattered horizon. Humped, slow-moving, paying hardly any attention to the massive conflict around them . . . and then William saw that they were medics evacuating no-man’s land of the injured and dead. It took him only seconds to identify them, but in that time his imagination had given them glowing red eyes and a lumbering, hippopotamus gait.

  He shook his head, looked back down at Liggett. He tried to imagine the dead corporal blinking, his severed arm waving. Grotesque and insensitive, perhaps, but sometimes the craziest notions kept William alive. Thinking about odd things meant, ironically, that he could forget about a whole lot more.

  “Potter!” someone shouted.

  William ducked as a new volley of shells fell a hundred yards away, then the voice called out again.

  “Potter! Over here!”

  He tried discerning which direction the voice was coming from, then made his way along the ruined trench. Mud sucked at him, the collapsed walls loose and moist. The night was almost permanently lit now by a flurry of flares. One of the sides must be charging across no-man’s land in the wake of the barrage . . . and sure enough, the cackle of machine-gun fire commenced out of sight, mowing down soldiers in hysterical patterns.

  William kept low. Above the background roar of the battlefield he heard the bee-buzz of bullets tearing the air overhead. And above even that, the cries of already-forgotten men falling into freshly-blown graves.

  “Potter!”

  It was Winston. He was huddled at ajunction of two trenches, hunched down like a beggar-boy on a London street. Something stirred at his feet, a shape whipping back and forth in the wet mud like a landed fish.

  “It’s Crown Sergeant Sterling. We were running for help after the shell fell, we’d lost you and Liggett—”

  “Liggett’s dead.”

  “Oh.” Winston paused briefly, but death was no surprise. He went on: “We only got this far. The tail end of that first volley caught us here, and . . . look. Look, Potter!”

  Those last words were cried, not spoken, and in the monotone of the flare light Potter could see Winston’s eyes. They glittered, but there were no tears. And then he looked at where Winston was pointing.

  Sterling was stuck up to his waist in a hole in the trench bottom. Water swilled around his chest. His eyes bulged from his face, his arms skirted across the surface of the water as he twisted . . . or was twisted by something, because he was dead. He was as dead as anyone William had seen, his throat was gone, the front of his uniform was glistening a different wetness to the rest of the place, a rich syrupy mess in the sodium glare of flares.

  “What the hell . . .”

  “I’ve tried to pull him out, but he won’t budge.”

  “He’s dead,” William said.

  “No, no, he can’t be, he’s trying to get out. Look, if we grab an arm each—”

  “He’s dead!” William frowned, closed his eyes and strove for home. Even trying to do so calmed him, though the image was as elusive as ever. He supposed it could be worse. It could be that he was able to think of the valley where he was born, like imagining the purity of Heaven in a never-ending Hell. Small mercy.

  A shape leapt across the trench.

  Another, merely a shadow blocking out the star- and flare-light, following the first into no-man’s land.

  “Winston!” William hissed.

  “I dropped my rifle,” Winston gasped, voice barely audible now that a new barrage had begun to shake the ground.

  This time, William thought the shells were aimed in a different direction. Something felt different; not better, just different. A new kind of promised pain.

  “Me too. Get down, and—”

  Something else leapt, hit the wall of the trench and slithered down into murky water.

  William froze. The soldier was yards from him, struggling to bring his rifle to bear, whining deep down in his throat like a dreaming dog. His nose was running, his mouth slack and dribbling dark saliva onto his tunic. He sneezed.

  “Wait, who are you?” William said, more to establish a language than anything else.

  “What are you?” the man shouted.

  “William Potter, 3rd Infantry.”

  The man laughed and lowered his rifle. “You’d best follow me then, or they’ll get you too.”

  “Is there an offensive? Are we storming the Hun’s trenches? In the night, with a barrage still underway?”

  The man shook his head and slumped back against the rough earth, letting its slickness lower him into a sitting position. All the time he talked he looked back the way he had come. And he kept his rifle pointed that way, too . . . back at their own lines.

  “Who cares about the Hun?,” he said. “Who fucking cares? And the barrage? We’re not shelling the enemy, you fool. We’ve turned the guns around to—”

  Winston screamed. It was a sudden, irrational exhalation of terror and pain, heartfelt and automatic. By the time William had spun around, his friend was already splashing on his stomach in the bottom of the trench, hands and feet throwing up fans of dirty water. He hadn’t been hit by a bullet or shrapnel; whatever had struck him down was still happening, still whipping his body back and forth.

  “Winston!” William shouted.

  “Don’t bother,” the soldier said, his voice high pitched and insane, and he fired his rifle along the trench at Winston.

  William took one step to tackle him, and then something else happened. He felt it first, a vibration more frequent and intense than the regular thud of explosive Shockwaves. This was machines churning underground, or something rolling over. He paused and looked along the trench . . . and the knee-high water began to swill and flow, down into several holes that had opened beneath their feet.

  William leapt at the trench wall and grabbed hold of something hanging down from above. He looked up into the blank eyes of a dead soldier, his extended arm William’s lifeline, his hand cold and hard. Looking back down he saw Sterling disappear underground with a squelch, and Winston drifting to one of the holes and remaining there, half in, half out, filthy water flowing by him.

  In seconds, the trench had emptied of water. Six inches of mud was all that remained; that and humped bodies here and there, rotting, disintegrating already. There were also the pits, each of them steaming and spitting sprays of water into the illuminated night.

  He recalled the hole they had seen in the decimated village . . . and the smell that had come from it.

  This tunnel was made from beneath, Sterling had said. Well, now the Sergeant knew just where they led.

  William hauled himself out of the trench before he could see what emerged from the holes.

  Once on top, he lay flat out and searched for the soldier who’d fallen in moments before. But the madman was already dodging his way into the murk of no-man’s land, rifle thrown away, arms held wide as if craving a liberating spray of bullets across his chest.

  William thought to call after him but knew it would do no good. He was mad. Everyone was mad. Maybe there was a poem there somewhere, but who would be left to read it? Madmen? He laughed, and the sound of his own lunatic giggle perturbed him greatly.

  More men came from behind, scrambling over the trench, some of them falling in and never reappearing. There were noises from down there now, shouts and shots and the sound of flesh finding its doom.

  Ahead of him, certain death under a hail of enemy fire.

  Behind him, dead friends and dying men, dying in ways he could not properly describe or even imagine. From the sounds drifting from the trench . . . the terrible screams suddenly cut off, the crunching of bones being snapped and pulled apart . . . his choice had already been made.
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  It was war, after all.

  William stood and ran into a storm of lead.

  Liggett was following him. His various dismembered parts skipped and dodged shattered tree trunks and fallen bodies. One remaining arm hauled his torso through the mud, and his head moved by rolling itself forward. Its mouth was wide open, trying to scream, but it had no neck or throat.

  “Help me!” Liggett croaked nonetheless.

  William slowed to a halt. Bullets whipped the air around him, slamming into bodies and sending them toppling down to add to the muck. He was in what had once been a forest. Now it was merely another part of the mud, with strangely contorted stumps seeking their lost heads.

  “Help!” Liggett rasped as the first of his parts dashed past William.

  Dreaming. He had to be dreaming. He could smell home here, not war and death. He could taste honey on the air, not cordite and blood and smoke.

  He looked back from where Liggett had fled.

  Dreaming.

  Strange shapes lumbered from the smoke, slopping through the mud but unhindered by it. Indeed, these things seemed to flow with the filth, not struggle against it. They looked like the stretcher-bearers he had seen earlier, but as they approached he saw that there was no likeness there. None at all.

  Dreaming . . . please God, let me be dreaming.

  The demons had yellow eyes.

  William came to in a flooded shell hole. At first he though he was alone, but then he saw the dead men keeping his night company. He lay in a horrible mire of flesh and blood.

  He shuddered, a tortured sigh escaping his cracked lips. The battle continued around him, but now the fighting was more scattered. In the midst of the tumult, he could hear the steady tac-tac-tac of the German machine guns, spreading death precisely and methodically. William reflected on how the emotions of the man behind the weapon never hindered its evil effects. The machine gun was new to this world, yet it could have been created and directed by some ancient, scheming spirit of destruction.