He Who Walks in Shadow (24 page)

One night, when a storm hid the noise of cannon fire with heavenly thunder, I stumbled upon the story which I now relate. I had entered the tavern, intent upon nothing more than a glass of wine before I retired. It was a rustic place, the ceiling blackened by decades of pipe smoke and oil lamps that still hung from rafters. They swung gently, as if softly touched by the tremors from the fall of each shell miles away. Shadows danced upon the walls, and I followed them to a gathering of men, all of whom I knew well.

They were surrounding a sergeant, Nicholas Couchet, a man whom I had come to know as not only a fine soldier but as a loyal friend. And yet there was a feverish look about him that I did not recognize and did not like. The fire in his eyes burned with a quiet intensity, the lines of his mouth quivered, and I knew that whatever he spoke of now to these men was not something he would have so freely shared with me.

As I approached, he fell silent, and the men about him began to scatter, as those caught in imprudence are wont to do.

“No, stay,” I said gently, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Something of my words or my demeanor must have calmed them, for I saw the tension relax in their shoulders as they allowed themselves to fall back into their seats. Only Nicholas still seemed nervous.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “to what do we owe the honor of your presence?”

I pulled out a chair and slid into it. My glass of wine was full, but their tankards of ale were empty. I turned to the bar and ordered another round for them all.

“That’s very kind of you, sir, but the night has grown old, and I best be making my way.”

“No, no, Nicholas, please. Stay at least until you finish your drink. Besides, I noticed that you were regaling the men with some tale, and I thought I might hear it myself.”

He glanced to either side of him, but if it was in supplication to his fellows, none of them stepped forward to save him.

“It’s nothing that would interest you, sir,” he said. “Just gossip amongst the enlisted men.”

“And since when have you and I stood on rank? Let’s have it. I could use a distraction.”

He drew in a breath and sighed long and deep. That fire came back into his eyes, but this time I recognized it as fear.

“I’ve always respected you, Lieutenant Villard, and I suppose I’ve taken the notion that you respect me too, as much as a gentleman such as yourself might have such feelings toward a man like me. And I hope, after I tell you what you want to hear, that you’ll still respect me.”

I nodded, now both unsure of what was about to be revealed to me and somewhat unsettled by the possibilities.

“There are rumors spreading amongst the men,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Stories, mad ones I would say, did I not know the sort who have related them, had I not seen some of the evidence with my own eyes.”

He must have detected a look of concern flash across my face, for he paused then, and I had to urge him to continue.

“Go on.”

“Something walks in No Man’s Land,” he said. “Something that the bombardment awoke. Something that shouldn’t be, but is.”

I was, of course, incredulous, but the look on Nicholas’s face—his eyes wide, his skin blanched, his eyebrows raised high—cut off any thought that this might be a jest. More serious concerns presented themselves, that perhaps Nicholas had been broken by the bombardment, that a career spanning decades and dressed in the highest honors might have come crashing down around him.

“I know what you must be thinking, sir,” he said, “but in my days I have seen enough to believe that there are things beyond our ken. Things that neither you nor I can understand, that they do not teach in universities and that cannot be found in books. At least, none that any Christian would dare to read.”

“All right,” I said. “Just what have you heard?”

“It started after the first bombardment, the one that you so honorably endured. They say that there has ne’er been one of its like, not in this war or any war to ever scar the face of earth. Something was uncovered, or awoken, or some door opened that was always meant to stay shut. But whatever the cause, strange things have started happening all along the lines.”

“What sort of things?”

“It started with a mist,” he said, “a fog unlike any that the men had ever seen. It crept across the broken fields when the battle was over, but it glowed green with its own light, even on a night when there was no moon and the stars were shrouded in cloud. They thought at first it was a weapon, some gas the Germans had released. But it came and did no harm to man nor beast. But it shone with that devil’s fire, lying thick and putrid on all the land.”

Of this one thing, I could not argue, for I had seen the green fog before our unit was relieved. “I assume there was more to it than unusual weather,” I said.

“Aye,” he said, “much more. Private Étienne, tell the Lieutenant what you saw.”

A rosy-cheeked lad who could not have been more than sixteen if he was a day stepped forward, his cap clutched in his hand.

“It’s all right, lad,” Nicholas said. “Just tell it true.”

“The day after the battle,” he began, his voice cracking as he spoke, “two German officers came to headquarters under a flag of truce. They wanted to know what we did with the bodies.”

“The bodies?”

“Yes, the Germans who had been killed in the fighting.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They were missing, you see. When the German stretcher bearers went into the field, they only found a handful of men, far fewer than there should have been. Far fewer than they had expected, given their losses. And some of the ones they did find were, well…”

He looked down at his hands, and I noticed for the first time that they were shaking. Nicholas slid a tankard of ale over towards him, this child. He took it and gulped it, almost greedily.

“They were mutilated,” he said finally. “And not like you would expect. Not from bullets or even bombs. From something else they couldn’t explain. The Germans were very angry. They said that we had violated every law of war and human decency. The commander denied it all, of course. He threw them out, and told them that the next time he saw them he’d have them arrested.”

“Which is understandable,” Nicholas said. “Who would believe such a thing? But three nights ago we launched an offensive against the heights, to take the German guns. The results were…” Nicholas glanced at the men, mostly boys, who surrounded him and remembered his place, “a good beginning. But our losses were also steep.”

The young man piped up again. “The stretcher bearers went out as soon as the ceasefire was called. Most of them were very busy. All but the ones in Quadrant C. In C, there was no one.”

“No one?” I said.

“The commander thought it was the Germans, retaliating for what they said we had done with their dead and wounded. He said that they had done it on purpose to spite us. But I’m not so sure.”

“Why not? Would you put anything beyond them?”

“No,” he said, “of course not. But there was no time. Not to carry that many men away. Whatever took them did so quickly and quietly. Like a spirit.”

“Or a demon,” someone chimed in from the back.

“Or a monster,” said another.

“Oh, come now,” I said. I was unnerved, but I have seen many things in this war to unnerve me, and I have come to understand that the only real job of an officer is to never show his fear to his men. “This is a German ploy. They know they cannot break us with arms, so they will break our spirit instead with tricks and stories of ghosts in the darkness.”

“Perhaps,” said Nicholas, and I could tell that I alone truly believed it. “But watch yourself out there, Lieutenant. There’s more to fear in No Man’s Land than German bullets.”

* * *

I must be brief. Our unit has been ordered back to the front lines to prepare for an attack on the heights. I don’t have to tell you, my darling, what that means. I love you. I love you with all my heart, with all my soul. And if this is to be my end, then I will die with your name on my lips.

* * *

I have seen the darkness that haunts men’s dreams, and I pray for the dawn.

I am writing from a shell crater deep within the dead zone, halfway between our lines and the Germans’. A boy named Joseph once lay beside me, shot through the throat. He is dead now, but it wasn’t the bullet that killed him.

The army arrayed at dusk, miles of men and guns, bayonets gleaming in the dying light of the last day for so many. Row upon row of helmets, like corn in a field, stretching forth forever, awaiting the thresher.

The attack began at twilight.

We poured across the broken field, the mad shouts and hurrahs of boys fresh from the cities cut short by the
rack-y-tac-tac
of German machine guns. Sappers cut barbed-wire and blew hardened positions. Artillery shells filled the sky and crashed down ahead of us. Rangers hit machine-gun nests, and raiders dropped into forward trenches and slashed and stabbed and lobbed grenades.

Forward we pressed, as bullets passed and men died and the ground grew sodden with the tramp of a thousand feet and the gentle rain of blood. We reached the German heights. We went no farther. All of man’s greatness, all of his genius, all that he has harnessed and achieved, distilled into the fragmentation grenade and the 8mm cartridge and the Big Bertha heavy-artillery gun.

Our lines faltered, then stopped, then broke. The bugles sounded. The retreat began. We fell away, a receding wave. Back, back, back.

Halfway home, between Heaven and Hell, I caught a round in the shoulder that spun me like a top before it passed through my flesh to bury itself in the dirt. It carried me forward with it, throwing me into the shell crater where I now lay. Joseph, bless his foolishness, turned to me. He started to say something, to check on me, I suppose. But a German somewhere pulled the trigger on his gun a split second earlier, and the words were drowned in lead and gore. Joseph’s throat exploded. The artery within pulsed, and a stream of blood arched through the darkness and splashed into my face, stinging my eyes. Joseph collapsed beside me, his hand to his bleeding neck.

I was covered in it, Joseph’s blood. I could taste the metallic tang deep in my throat. I staunched his wound as best I could, and we waited, his life slipping away and me trying to hold onto it. I prayed for daylight. The sun would rise, the battle would end, and the stretcher men would come. We had only to survive the night.

The sounds of war faded, save for the occasional crack of a sniper’s rifle. Enough to keep us down, even if Joseph weren’t bleeding to death in my arms. Eventually, even the sniper fire died away. It was just Joseph’s ragged breathing and the sound of my own heart.

Hours passed. I could not help but notice that the same strange, green fog I had witnessed days earlier had grown thick and unyielding on the battlefield. I had little time to consider it, though. With every passing moment, I worried that help might not make it in time for dear Joseph. And then something happened that made that fear seem like the obsession of a child.

It began with a sound which I am not certain can be described, but I will do as best I can. It was a clicking sound, like claws on a tile floor, or scales sliding across each other. I tried to tell myself it was some kind of weapon, something we had not seen before, but it was a lie. I knew better. And whatever it was, it was coming closer.

I peered over the edge of the shell crater. Something moved in the mist.

I blinked, wishing it away. And yet it was there, and inching toward us. It stayed low and tight to the ground. It slid across the earth like the shadow of a Nieuport flying above at mid-day. But there was no light to cast that shade. It was a thing, like a man lying upon his belly, slithering, the blackest cloak ever put through the loom trailing behind.

I stared at it, stupidly, unable to take my eyes off of that specter, that ghoul. And then what I perceived to be its head tilted up, and it looked squarely upon me.

I dropped, sliding down the slope of the crater wall, praying to God that it had not seen me. The silence closed in. My heartbeat thundered with such violence that I was afraid whatever was out there could hear it. When Joseph moaned beside me, I am ashamed to write I drew my pistol, though what I intended to do with it I cannot say. To hush him perhaps? Even if I were so selfish, I would have been equally foolish. In that hell-quiet my gun would have sounded like thunder.

In the end, it didn’t matter.

A moment later, it was upon us. It rose above the edge of the crater, a thing like a man in form only. Its hands were claws, skeletal and ragged. I might say that its face was something like a corpse, but even that would not do justice to the horror I beheld—noseless, its mouth a gapping maw, what passed for eyes burning like flames in its skull.

It swept down the ledge, and I did fire my gun then, though the bullet either passed through it or simply did nothing to stop it. It fell upon me, and the stench was such that I could not draw a breath. It crawled along my body, slithering like a snake. It seemed as though it breathed deeply of me, its face mere millimeters from the wound in my shoulder. Then it drew away sharply, and, fixing me with its gaze again, I would swear, were it not madness made manifest, that it said something.

Joseph, poor Joseph. It noticed him. It spun away from me, sliding across the ground. It breathed deeply again, but this time it did not hesitate. It fell upon the boy. He screamed only once, but even that was quickly stifled. I could not move. I could do nothing to save him. And I could not look away. I watched as this thing seemed to suck him dry, as blood and viscera and God knows what else splattered across the shell crater.

As quickly as it began, it ended. The thing slid over the top of the crater, carrying Joseph with it. Then it was gone.

I sit here, waiting, alone, for dawn to come. I know I made a solemn vow to you that I would hide nothing from your eyes. But in writing this letter, I know that this is too much. I will take this story with me to my grave, and if anyone finds these words here in this field, know from their telling that No Man’s Land is not empty, but that it is no man that walks upon it.