Grabbing a rifle from the clutches of a corpse, he peered cautiously over the edge of the crater. The dream lingered with him, the glint from the creatures’ yellow eyes as they lumbered toward him like misshapen men . . .
He was in the middle of no-man’s land.
And something was charging his position.
Screaming, William pulled the trigger and was greeted with an empty click.
The thing drew closer, its harsh and ragged breath echoing in the darkness. Ducking back down William flailed in the water, searching wildly for another weapon. His hand closed on something round and he brought it up to the surface – he had to, he could not help himself – and an eyeball stared back at him from his glistening palm.
He screamed again.
The shriek was answered from above.
The thing towered over the shell hole, darkness enshrouding its body like a blanket. William scuttled backward like a crab as a guttural laugh mocked him. The thing cocked its head, surveying him calmly.
It’s a man . . . it’s a man . . . it’s got to be a man . . . !
A flare popped half a mile away, throwing a sheen of sickly light over the scene.
Its body was pale and bloated, the skin mottled like melted cheese or wax. The creature bent at the knees and leapt, landing in the hole but not sinking into the mud. It snarled at him. Its fetid breath fogged the air between them.
It was not a German. It was not a man. Men didn’t have yellow eyes.
Or tusks.
Scampering up the slope, William fled across the field with the howls of the creature nipping at his heels. He risked a glance to see if it was gaining. Blessed relief washed over him when he noticed that the thing hadn’t left the hole.
He heard the ripping sounds, and the chewing. It was feeding.
He turned and ran into the night. The air exploded and burned around him as he dashed across the field and back into the labyrinthine trenches. Leaping over a sandbagged parapet, he saw hunched forms moving in the darkness below. He jumped another trench, missing his mark and clawing wildly at barbed wire as he slid down.
A cluster of German and French troops struggled against one another, not in battle, but in flight. Even as he watched the mud erupted before them, spewing earth and water skyward. William turned and ran before he could see what had caused it.
The earth was giving up its secrets.
The trench crossed another, then another, and soon he was lost in the intersections. The Argonne battlefield was a cacophony of hellish sound now, gunfire and explosions punctuated by cries of agony and other, less human exhortations.
Above him, out in front of the barbed wire, a man was being torn apart. The attacker ripped the victim’s arm from its socket. Brandishing the bloody trophy like a club, he began to beat the other man mercilessly. He sank into the mud, raised his remaining arm in a feeble attempt to ward off the blows.
The victor squealed in delight.
William continued moving, never willing to stop, always fearing that to halt would be to give in . . . give in to whatever had taken possession of this battlefield.
He reached an empty portion of the trenches and slowed for a moment, gasping for breath. The sounds continued from all around him. The air was heavy with the stench they had first encountered in the village.
Around a dogleg in the trench, footsteps approached.
William looked to his left and saw a thick, yellowish-green cloud veiling the night sky. He wondered if the forest and trenches were on fire. Perhaps that would be good. Maybe flame would purge this place of all its ills, both manmade and . . . other.
The footsteps grew closer, falling faster.
Dizzy, William struggled to remain standing. His throat burned as pain lanced into his chest. His eyes watered. Breathing became difficult . . . and then impossible. He spat blood; crimson frothed on his agonized lips.
Something raced at him along the trench.
“William!” It growled his name, voice horribly distorted, inhuman.
Then he saw that the thing was Morris, a wound on his scalp bleeding freely and matched by a gash in his side.
“William!” his friend screamed again through his mask, and then he was there, catching him as he fell.
“Morris . . .” he coughed. “Hurts.”
“Gas. They’ve gassed the trenches. Come on, we’ve got to keep moving.”
“The Sergeant . . . Winston . . . Liggett . . . they’re dead,” William spat.
“We’re all dead, William,” Morris answered as he dragged him through the mud, away from the cloud.
Through the haze, William saw that his friend’s hair had turned white.
And then he knew no more.
The grass in the meadow was cool. Beads of dew still clung to the green blades. Wetness also coated William’s face as he sobbed quietly, his knees drawn up to his head and his notebook discarded beside him.
“Why do you cry, William?”
The voice startled him. He looked up and saw beauty.
It was the girl from the baker’s, her head surrounded by an aura from the bright sun. Light gleamed from her golden tresses as she sat next to him. He remembered her name now. Clarice. She was . . . had been . . . his girlfriend. How could he have forgotten?
Slowly, as if surfacing from a dream, it was all starting to come back. He knew why he was crying. He’d had this conversation before.
“My father is butchering Onyx today,” he said quietly as she took his hand. “I know he’s only a silly cow, but . . .”
“You’ve grown fond of him,” Clarice finished.
“Well, yes,” William agreed. “I’ve looked after him since he was a calf. I can understand why father must do it, but it all seems so bloody unfair. Onyx has lived his life, day after day, never knowing why he really existed: for food. What kind of fate is that?”
“That is simply the way of things, my love,” she answered softly. “There’s too much of the poet in you. He’s just a cow. We raise cattle to eat. That’s why they exist.”
“Is that the only reason?” William retorted. “Aren’t they intelligent creatures, living things? Maybe they have hopes and dreams? How would you feel if you lived your life only to end up on someone’s supper table? It’s not fair, Clarice. Onyx is nothing more than fodder.”
“Maybe we all are, William,” she stated simply. “Come, would you like to see your home?”
“Yes!” William cried. “I’d like that very much. I can’tseem to remember it properly at all.”
They walked hand in hand through the pasture, the roof of the farmhouse looming just over the hill. They passed through a grazing herd of Holsteins.
“Mind the dung,” William warned her, stepping lightly.
Then he stopped, terror rooting him to the spot.
A monstrous bull gazed at him with Sterling’s face. “We’re all fodder, lad,” said the Crown Sergeant, slowly chewing his cud, a bulbous wound opening in his side.
“That’s right, William,” echoed Winston, his teats swollen with milk as he tore ravenously at a patch of grass. “It’s the way things work. We exist to provide sustenance to the planet.”
“We’re germs,” Liggett mooed through a splitting throat.
“I don’t understand,” William gasped.
“Perhaps you are not meant to,” said a voice from behind him.
Clarice had vanished. William turned and saw Morris, buried up to his waist in the soft earth of the meadow.
“The earth still has secrets, William,” he said gravely, sinking deeper into the loam. “Buried forever and never meant to be seen. Not by us.”
“Come, William,” his father cried from over the hill. “Bring the cattle. It’s time for the slaughter.”
Liggett, Winston and Sergeant Sterling began to snort in agony. Then William was sinking into the earth as well, struggling desperately as he watched the tufts of Morris’s hair sink below.
It’s a dream, I know it’s a dream becau
se his hair turned white back at the front.
William opened his mouth to scream and the earth rushed in. Above him, the slaughter began anew.
He tried to scream again, but his mouth was still blocked. Something long and cold was stuck in his throat. It was connected to . . .
He gagged, grasping the thing and pulling the cadaverous fingers from his mouth. Gasping for breath, he panicked when he found he couldn’t move. He turned his head to the right and Morris’s glazed eyes stared back at him, unblinking and filled with blood. A warm and sticky fluid dripped onto his forehead. Something heavy lay on top of him.
Bodies, he realized. He was buried beneath bodies. Muck and water covered most of his form, leaving his shoulders and head above, but the night was hidden from view. The echoes of the artillery blast still ricocheted through his mind, even though it could have been minutes or hours ago.
Something landed nearby with a heavy splash and a grunt, and then, for a few brief moments, there was silence. William held his breath and strained to hear or see, but his world had contracted to this; a claustrophobic stench of fresh blood and turned earth, and a cloying darkness caused by the shadows of the dead. He whispered Clarice’s name . . .
And then something started ripping and tearing at the bodies around him.
It’s time for the slaughter, he heard his father say again.
Something stopped him from crying out. At the time he thought he was being calm and cautious, but later – when he was walking across a shattered, silent landscape with only the dead and unwanted as company – he realized that it was outright terror.
He was frozen stiff by fear.
Animal sounds of feeding, the snap of bones, wet sucks as bodies were hauled from the mud . . . whole or in pieces . . . gulping and retching. And in the background there was still gunfire, still the occasional thud of an artillery shell finding a home somewhere, but it no longer had the sound of a fullblown battle. Now, it was more like a skirmish.
Soon, with the sounds seeming to grow nearer as the thing ate its way down to him, the gunfire ceased altogether.
But the fighting continued. William heard shouts and screams, feet splashing through water and mud, bodies hitting the ground. At one point, he heard the Lord’s Prayer chanted frantically in German. A horrific squeal sent him into a shiver. He clenched his fists and bit down on his lip, tasting blood, desperate to remain still lest the gorging thing sensed him down here.
He realized that he could see it, now. The body above him shifted and jerked as mouthfuls were taken from it. Its head snapped back and crunched into William’s nose. His eyes watered, his face caught fire, but he remained still. He should be playing dead, he knew, holding a breath, narrowing his eyes so that light could not glint from the moisture there . . . but he could not close his eyes because he could see the thing, and the horror of it forbade him any solace.
Its mouth was the worst because it was surrounded by flecks of blood and clots of meat. The pale snouted nose leaked copiously over its fleshy lips and chin, diluting dead men’s blood and sending it spraying into the air every time the thing moved its blockyjaws. A second before William finally managed to close his eyes, it sneezed.
Retreating into his own mind – trying to escape, to find beauty in his memories – William felt the warmth of alien fluid spatter across his face and run, slowly, down over his split lips.
He imagined blood gushing from a slaughtered bull’s throat.
He tasted the vile mucus of the creature, the salty blood of the dead men, and the alkaline fear that was his own.
Daylight woke him. If the corpse had still lain atop him, he may well have remained there until his own body weakened and died, cosseted within his own strange dreams. But the dead soldier had been ripped up and scattered. The sun found William’s face and gave him back his life.
He struggled from the loose earth and the body parts that surrounded him, trying not to look too closely. His hands found some horrendous things as he tried to haul himself upright. They were all cold.
An eerie silence hung over the battlefield. There were no whistles or whispers, no crackle of gunfire, no shouting or groaning or screaming from no-man’s land. There was not even a breeze to rustle by his ears. Nothing. And as William dragged himself from the collapsed trench that had so nearly been his grave, he saw why.
Everyone was dead.
Never had he seen human destruction on this scale. The landscape around him was carpeted with corpses, piled two or three deep in places, all of them mutilated and tattered by whatever had killed them. Both armies must have abandoned their trenches to fight in the open . . . but fight whom? Not each other, he knew that. He had heard tales about the Hun, seen caricatures of them before he came to war, but the ones he had seen since then . . . the ones he had killed . . . had all looked exactly like him.
The things doing the killing last night were not even human.
William picked his way between corpses, but it soon became too much to look down all the time. So he strode, arms swinging, every fourth or fifth step finding something soft to walk on. He closed his eyes for minutes at a time, mindless of the danger of flooded shell-holes or barbed wire. He had faced much, much worse.
On the backs of his eyelids he saw perfection, beauty, Utopia: the valley back home that could not possibly be as wonderful and innocent as he saw it now, but in his mind’s eye it was still the ultimate aim for his poor wandering self. He could smell it and taste it, and he could see it as well, every detail clear and defined, every rolling field—
He wondered what might live beneath his father’s farm.
He had to get back to his lines, warn them, tell them there was something here worse than the Hun. He had seen and heard thousands die, but he could save many more if he hurried. There was so little time. It was midday already. He did not want to be out here after dark.
William sneezed twice and spat out a great clot of mucus. A parliament of rooks feeding on a horse’s bloated corpse took to the air.
He wiped his nose with a muddy sleeve. His head had begun to throb and his joints were stiffening with every step.
Damn. After all this, he was coming down with the ‘flu.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS a novelist and screenwriter who lives in north London and Brighton with his wife Paula and two cats. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second, Spares, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in seventeen countries worldwide, while his third, One of Us, was optioned by Warner Brothers.
His most recent books, The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead (aka The Upright Man), were published under the name “Michael Marshall” and have been international best-sellers. He is currently writing a third volume in the series.
Smith’s short stories have won the British Fantasy Award three times, and are collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning More Tomorrow & Other Stories. Six of his tales are currently under option for television.
“I’d been nursing the underlying idea for this story for quite a while,” reveals the author, “waiting to find a way to get into it: I am someone who will watch wacky home video programmes on television and spend as much time looking at the details in the houses, at the hints of other lives, as I do laughing at the people falling over. Then one afternoon I happened to walk past a nice, normal house in our neighbourhood, and I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be odd to just walk up that path, knock on the door and walk in.’
“Thankfully I only did it in a fictional reality . . .”
NEVER BEEN GREAT AT planning, I’ll admit that. Make decisions on the spur of the moment. No forward thought, unless you count years of wondering and speculating – and you shouldn’t, because I certainly don’t. None of it was to do with specifics, with the mechanics of the situation, with anything that would have helped. I just went and did it. Like always. That’s me all over. I just go and do it.
Here’s how it happened. It’s a Satu
rday. My wife is gone for the day, out at a big lunch for a mate who’s getting married in a couple weeks. Shit – that’s another thing she’ll have to . . . whatever. She’ll work it out. Anyway, she got picked up at noon and went off in a cab full of women and balloons and I was left in the house on my own. I had work to do, so that was okay. Problem was I just couldn’t seem to do it. Don’t know if you get that sometimes: just can’t apply yourself to something. You’ve got a job to do – in my case it was fixing up a busted old television set, big as a fridge and hardly worth saving, but if that’s what they want, it’s their money – and it just won’t settle in front of you as a task. No big deal, it wasn’t like it had to be fixed in a hurry, and it’s a Saturday. I’m a free man. I can do anything I want.
Problem was that I found I couldn’t settle to anything else either. I had the afternoon ahead, probably the whole evening too. The wife and her pals don’t get together often, and when they do, they drink like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem – having a block of time all to myself for once. Doesn’t happen often. You get out of the habit. I don’t know. I just couldn’t get down to anything. I tried working, tried reading, tried going on the web and just moping around. None of it felt like I was doing anything. None of it felt like activity. It just didn’t feel like I thought it would.
I don’t like this, I thought: it’s just not working out.
In the end I got so grumpy and restless I grabbed a book and left the house. There’s a new pub opened up not far from the tube station, and I decided I’d go there, try to read for a while. I stopped by a newsagents on the corner opposite the pub, bought myself a pack often cigarettes. I’m giving up. I’ve been giving up for a while now – and sticking to it, more or less, just a few here and there, and never in the house – but sometimes you’ve just got to have a fucking cigarette. Sometimes the giving up is worse for you than the cigarettes themselves. Your concentration goes. You don’t feel yourself. The world feels like it’sjust out of reach, as if you’re not a part of it any more and not much missed. The annoying thing is that anyone who knows you’re not smoking tends to think that anything that’s wrong with you, any bad mood, any unsettled-ness, is just due to the lack of cigs. I was pretty sure it wasn’t nicotine drought that was causing my restlessness, but so long as I was out of the house I thought I might as well have a couple.
The Mammoth Book of Terror Page 42