by Unknown
The next time the soldiers appeared, the ash-gray winds scudded across the ground and swept the leaves up into bands of brown and amber clouds. This time they marched just overhead, barely above the treetops. Without putting on his coat, Mikhael left the warmth of his mother’s firelit kitchen and raced outside.
But this time they seemed to be different men entirely. Perhaps it was only because they were so close to the ground, but he could see they were unshaven, that their hair was matted and tangled, and that their noses were large and their nostrils flared. Their armor was the same color as the gray clouds which pressed them closer to the ground, and it shared the clouds’ virulent swirls and coils. The beasts that moved along side them, he could see now, were not beasts at all, but strange metallic machines which made whining noises that could be heard above the wind.
“Come inside,” cried his mother, who had followed him out.
“But the soldiers,” said Mikhael, “they are back.”
“Don’t look at them, Mikhael. I forbid you to look at the soldiers.”
“Go back inside, Elika.” Mikhael turned to see that his father had now joined them from the field. “Mikhael and I will watch them together.”
“No!” she cried. “I won’t let it happen again.”
“Elika, go inside, will you? I’ll look after the boy.”
“But … the fields … you can’t just leave …”
“Elika, I said, leave us!” Pavl’s voice was hard. “The fields are almost dead. We can only hope now that the winter is not long and the soldiers will soon stop marching.”
Elika tried to grab at Mikhael, but Pavl pushed her to the ground. She tried a second time and he hit her across the face. When she was about to try once more, he lifted his hand to strike her again. This time she looked up at the sky and spat in the direction of the soldiers. She let out a cry when the wind flung the spittle back into her face. Without saying another word, she turned and walked inside.
Mikhael glanced back for a moment and saw his mother’s stooped figure silhouetted in the firelight, then he turned again to look at the soldiers. His father placed his hand on his shoulder, and despite the gusting wind, Mikhael could hear him breathing deeply.
“Can you hear them calling to me?” asked Pavl.
Mikhael strained, and he thought he could hear a jumble of wind-driven voices, that was all.
“No,” he said finally.
“I can,” whispered Pavl so softly that a gust almost whisked the words away before they reached Mikhael’s ears. He turned to his son, and Mikhael could feel a deeper pressure from the hand on his shoulder. “I hope they stop marching before they call to you.”
Mikhael looked at his father’s unshaven face, at his dark, matted hair blowing in the gray wind. He shuddered for a moment because Pavl looked just like the faces in the sky. Only, his eyes were moist.
“Father,” he said, “are you going to the border?”
“Yes,” said Pavl. “Before the border comes here.”
Mikhael turned to look at the soldiers again. The dark clouds seemed to be pressing them even closer to the ground. They bent their heads and stooped in an attempt to avoid them.
“These are not like the first soldiers,” he said. “They are like men who …” Mikhael struggled for the words.
“I know,” said Pavl, “like men who have had to become soldiers.”
Mikhael nodded. They both watched as the soldiers and their machines were pushed lower. The marchers now barely hovered above the ground, and the clouds looked like a single dark blanket which threatened to smother them.
There was a cry of pain as one of the soldier’s feet made contact with the dirt. The wind blew an acrid smell into Mikhael’s nostrils.
Mikhael almost gagged. “What is it?” he asked.
Pavl shuddered too. “Sweat and confusion and … fear.”
Mikhael could feel the pressure on his shoulder again. “Come on,” said Pavl. “It is time we went inside.”
As they turned to walk back to the farmhouse, Mikhael realized that the smell was coming from his own father.
In the first days after Pavl left for the border, Elika tried to work the fields herself. She tried to force the old horse to drag the plough through the dirt, but it was as if the earth itself was refusing to turn. Pavl had been right: the fields were dead.
Mikhael spent more time in the woodlands with the ancient trees. He found that the deeper he wandered, the more protection the giant oaks gave from the biting winds that now cut across the landscape incessantly. He could not remember a winter as bleak or as cold as this one; and since his father had left, the farmhouse never seemed quite as warm as it used to.
He climbed tree after tree but found that none of them spoke to him. He liked to close his eyes and sit in the high branches, to feel the leaves caressing his skin, and to pretend that he was in the sky, marching along with the balance and rhythm of the first soldiers he had seen on that summer’s day long ago. He would almost convince himself that it was true, until a particularly sharp gust of wind would shake the tree top, and he would have to open his eyes and clutch tightly onto a branch.
After Elika gave up on the fields, she insisted that Mikhael spend his days in the kitchen with her. He would stare out of the window at the black clouds that writhed like a thousand dying serpents in the sky and at the thick mists that coated the terrain like molasses. Week after week was spent watching the landscape crack and fall apart under the strain.
Mikhael had given up asking his mother whether the soldiers would ever come again. It angered her when he spoke of them, and she always sent him to bed.
“When will it end?” he would ask.
“I pray soon,” Elika would answer. “It already feels like an eternity.”
Then the day came when the soldiers returned.
“Mother,” cried Mikhael. “The soldiers are here again.”
Elika rushed to join him at the window.
Mikhael could feel his mother shiver at his side as they watched the soldiers slowly coming into view through the mist. He shuddered; it was as if his mother’s shiver had traveled into his own body.
It was wrong. It was all wrong.
The soldiers were walking on the ground, like ordinary men. And they were no longer marching. There was no rhythm. They shuffled like old men: hunched, stooped, their movements jerky and unsteady.
And they were going in the wrong direction.
“Mother, the border is the other way,” said Mikhael.
Elika shook more violently. “The soldiers are coming back,” she said. “They’re coming back. It must be over.”
“Does that mean father and Adam are coming back?”
“I hope so, Mikhael”
“But that’s what it must mean. If it’s over, they must be coming home.”
Elika didn’t answer. She was too busy straining to see through the mist-shrouded fields to make out the features of the returning soldiers.
Suddenly the mist began to lift, and a brightness cut through the gray. For a moment Mikhael thought the golden skies of the first march were about to return, but then he realized that this time it was a different brightness. This time the brightness was red and chilling. As the mist cleared, he could see a river of red stretching to the horizon. He saw the soldiers through a filter of blood.
There were men with half-faces, men with scars like ploughed fields, men without arms or legs or noses or mouths, men with limbs twisted in bizarre angles, men with bodies like sacks of potatoes, men with jaws sagging and unhinged, men with insides bursting through gaping wounds, men with strips of flesh hanging from them like sodden rags; burnt men with skin like ashes, broken men with bones protruding like calcified spears, blind men with empty sockets where eyes had once been, deaf men with holes in the sides of their heads, half-men, quarter-men, and men who were barely men at all.
Mikhael screamed and turned to his mother. “They aren’t soldiers,” he cried. “Where are the s
oldiers?”
Elika stood in silence and scanned each skull-like face as they walked past. Mikhael wanted to turn away, but she grabbed him by the arm.
“Look at them,” she spat. “Now look at them. That’s what soldiers are.” And Mikhael vomited.
Elika grew more silent with every day that passed and neither Pavl nor Adam returned. Mikhael tried to speak to her, but she rarely said more than a word or two, so he left her alone. The soldiers now passed by in intermittent intervals, always moving along the ground and in the opposite direction to the border. They no longer walked in a large procession, they crossed the fields on the edge of the farm singly or in small groups. Many of them couldn’t walk at all, instead they crawled on hands and knees along the bitter, cold earth.
On several occasions Elika had raced out of the farmhouse, crying Pavl’s or Adam’s name when she thought she had seen one of them. But she had always been mistaken and was met only by cold, empty stares.
Eventually she gave up and didn’t leave the farmhouse at all. She would sit at the table, with her back to the window, and stare at the blank wall.
Then one afternoon she heard someone calling her name. At first she thought she must have been dreaming, but then she heard it again: strained, but clearly her name and no-one else’s. And it was a man’s voice.
She opened the door and raced out into the gray wind-driven mist that permanently seemed to encircle the farmhouse.
“Elika!”
The call came from one of the fields and she ran in its direction. On the ground lay a man. His fingers and knees were bleeding and he was shivering uncontrollably. She looked at the scarring on his face and saw eyes devoid of everything except a cold grayness.
“Pavl!” she cried. “You are home.”
“Elika … you heard me,” he said, in a voice that sounded like a stranger’s. “I knew I was close, but I thought I was going to die out here, alone.”
“You’re not going to die, Pavl,” she cried. “You’re home.” She bent down and gently placed her cheek against the side of his scarred face.
“The border,” said Pavl, trembling under Elika’s touch, “it’s like an animal we’ve given life to. And now it’s coming for us.”
“And Adam?” she whispered, drawing away slightly.
“I’m sorry,” said Pavl after a moment’s silence. “I am truly sorry. But I wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if I had wanted to. It was the call, you see …”
Pavl stiffened suddenly. “Mikhael - where is he?” An urgency had entered his voice.
“Why, he’s … I … I don’t know.” Elika raked her fingers through her hair. “I haven’t been paying him much attention … I …”
“When did you see him last?”
Elika started crying. “I … I don’t know.”
A look of pain crossed Pavl’s face. “Find him. You must find him.”
Elika’s eyes darted from left to right as if she was afflicted by some strange fit. “He could be in bed … or maybe he’s working in one of the far fields … or maybe …”
Pavl dug his fingers into Elika’s flesh. She was surprised by the strength he still possessed. “You must find him. He has to be here.” He drew his face closer to Elika’s. “They’re calling children now,” he said.
Elika shook her head, unsure of what he was saying.
“Elika, did you hear me? I said, the children are being called now—to the border. They’re the only ones left to call.”
Elika shut her eyes as a wave of nausea washed through her. “No!” she screamed. “Not Mikhael as well. Not Mikhael. Not Mikhael.”
Pavl tried to get to his feet, but he was too weak. “Find him,” he cried. “Leave me here and find him. He might not have answered the call yet.”
Elika stood up and ran back inside the farmhouse.
“Mikhael!” she shouted again and again, stopping only to listen for a reply. She raced into his bedroom, but his bed looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for a long time.
“Mikhael!” she cried until the name echoed through the walls.
“Mikhael!” she cried as she raced back out into the cold, gray mist.
Only the wind gusted around her ears.
Then something spoke to her, a sound which crept in under the wind, a sound unlike anything she had heard before.
The tree.
She ran across the scarred and pitted fields until she entered the woodlands. The wind died the moment she stepped under the trees, and soft whispers filtered through the leaves down towards her.
As she walked deeper into the woods, the whispers grew.
She reached the ancient oak and looked up into the high branches at the figure that was perched up there. “Mikhael?” she cried.
The figure shifted slightly, then came to life. It was her son. He stretched slightly as if waking from a long sleep and then began to climb down towards her.
When his feet touched the ground, Elika threw her arms around him and pressed him close to her chest. “Mikhael,” she said, “you didn’t hear the call.”
“I heard it,” he said, “but the tree told me not to go. It’s older than the soldiers, you know.”
Elika stroked Mikhael’s face and then ran her fingers through his mop of thick, brown hair.
“And you know what else it told me,” he said.
Elika nodded slowly.
“There is no border,” he said. “There is no border.”
They held each other’s hand tightly as they walked back out of the forest to where Pavl lay.
One in the A.M.
By Rachel Drummond
If you believe the short story is the toughest piece of fiction anyone can attempt to write well, then you should have no problem with the proposition the short-short is practically impossible. We receive literally hundreds of very short stories and most are disappointing. The problem is the “surprise” which people try to hammer into a substitute for a real resolution. In the majority of instances, the gimmick is tired and predictable, and rarely surprising. Also, we’re not really looking to be surprised in Borderlands, we’d rather be impressed by good writing. Rachel Drummond probably didn’t know that when she sent us “One in the A.M.,” and she was bucking some very tough odds. That she scored anyway speaks very highly of the short-short you are about to read.
You’re walking up those dark stairs and the house is quiet. Something doesn’t feel quite right, like someone or something is watching, listening, and waiting. You don’t turn on the light though, because you don’t want to admit you’re being paranoid. The stairs are carpeted; you realize you wouldn’t hear any footsteps if they were headed your way.
You go into the baby’s room, where you think you might be safe, but the room has too many shapes and shadows. Stuffed animals look like evil, glossy-eyed monsters. The crib looks like a cage with an open door, and the closet is a black cave where something clawed and fanged is hiding.
You back out of the room so the closet creature won’t jump out when you turn around. Your heart is beating fast. You’ve got that queasy tight feeling in your stomach, but in a strange way you’re kind of enjoying being scared, really spooked out. You’ve always seemed to be able to scare yourself more than any film or book could.
You need to take a piss but you decide to leave the lights off in the bathroom—just to keep that feeling going. The light from a streetlight outside is enough to see your reflection in the mirror, but your face seems somehow more sinister than it usually does. It’s difficult to piss while you stare into those dark eyes, but then your body finally relaxes and you feel the release and hear the stream. As you zip up and study your evil twin, you imagine it reaching out from the glass and caressing your face with one cold, gray finger. You leave the bathroom. Just in case it does.
Your stomach grumbles for a snack. The best time to eat is the middle of the night. It’s easier to sleep when you have a full stomach.
You go downstairs again and ram your shin into e
very sharp cornered piece of furniture and trip over wheeled toys. You try to walk quickly in case a taloned hand takes a swipe at your ankle from underneath the couch or easy chair.
In the kitchen, all the glass bottles of dried beans seem like bizarre entomological samples and the hanging chili peppers is a mass of bats.
Your tennis shoes squeak on the linoleum floor and you cringe at how loud the noise is. You find yourself tiptoeing to the fridge. When you open the door, the light nearly blinds you. You wonder, as you look inside, when the last time the thing was cleaned out. The white mold and green fungus on the leftovers are more frightening than any monster or animal you’ve dreamed up thus far. They’ve definitely killed your appetite.
The clock says one in the morning, your mind says it’s time to see if there are any monster movies on the tube. One o’clock is when the good old black and whites are on. The slimy monsters look just rubbery enough and the zippers are visible on the ape man’s back. Besides, the men are fearless heroes and the women know how to scream.
You don’t find that often these days.
Down to the rec room in the basement. It isn’t as creepy as a basement should be, it’s been finished with wood paneling and carpet. Luckily, it’s darker than the rest of the house and the air is damp and mildewy.
You don’t want to lose your adrenaline rush just yet.
You turn on the TV and wince as you accidentally crank up the volume and a snakelike hiss assaults your ears. Quickly, you turn it down, barely audible. You blink away the white afterimages of the static snow of the screen. A few loud kachunks of the channel changer as you search for your monster movie. There it is, an old classic, halfway finished. It doesn’t matter, you’ve seen it at least twice before.
You sit on threadbare basement couch, then decide to lie down as the fear wears off. The blue light of the screen and the cheesy movie make it hard to be scared anymore. The insides of your lids feel gummy and your head suddenly very heavy. You try to watch the film, but you find yourself dozing off.