France, 1917
The mud in the trench was always there, thick, clinging, and alive in a way that made Private Edward Hale uneasy. It sucked at his boots, pulled at his ankles like it wanted him down with the others who’d never made it back to the surface.
He kept to himself mostly. The other lads in his unit thought he was soft, too poetic for war. He wrote no letters to anyone and stared into the mist longer than a sane man should. But Sergeant McBride didn’t mind. The old Scot had his own ghosts.
It was during the third week of rain that the trench wall collapsed.
McBride had just barked something crude about the German artillery when the earth groaned and gave way, swallowing half the dugout in a mess of timber, mud, and bone.
They dug through the rubble expecting corpses.
What they found was a door.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that should be there, not wood like this, not iron hinges from a forge no one had used in centuries. It leaned at a crooked angle, embedded deep in the earth. It bore no markings, just a thin seam around the edges and a faint, rhythmic pulse. At first, they thought it was an echo from the guns. But the guns didn’t breathe.
“Leave it,” McBride grunted. “This land was cursed long before the Kaiser’s lot marched through it.”
The others laughed, but Edward didn’t. That night, he dreamed of black soil turning red, of robed figures chanting in languages he didn’t know but somehow understood. And the door was always there, waiting beneath the mud.
Two nights later, Lyle vanished.
One minute he was there, cleaning his rifle. The next, gone—rifle left behind, boots abandoned as if he’d stepped out of them. Only the mud was disturbed, a wide drag mark leading back to the place where the door lay buried.
McBride didn’t say anything. But Edward saw the way he avoided the spot now, and how he spat twice every time he passed it.
It got worse.
The trench felt narrower. The walls seemed to breathe. Men started whispering about voices in the fog, dead brothers calling out, long-lost mothers singing lullabies. A runner went mad and charged over the top, only to vanish into No Man’s Land without a shot fired.
Edward stopped writing. There was nothing to say.
On the seventh night, the door was open.
It hadn’t swung outward. It simply… was open. No one saw it happen. No one wanted to admit they noticed.
But Edward did. He stepped closer when the others were asleep, drawn to it by something deeper than curiosity. The smell was ancient, wet stone and iron blood.
He looked inside and saw a stairwell spiraling down into the dark. Something moved just out of sight—something huge, but slow, as if it had been sleeping for too long and only just begun to wake.
“Close it,” McBride said behind him. “For God’s sake, lad, close it.”
Edward turned. The old man’s face was pale and hard, like he’d seen it before.
“I dreamed of it,” Edward whispered. “Before we even got here.”
“I did too,” McBride muttered. “That’s why I volunteered for this section.”
They tried to seal the door, but the mud wouldn’t hold. Every time they shoveled, it sloughed off like skin from bone. Edward could feel the heartbeat now, not just underfoot, but in his chest, slow, deep, patient.
“You hear it, don’t you?” he asked McBride.
The old sergeant nodded. “It remembers. It feeds.”
That night, Edward made his decision.
He waited until everyone was asleep. Then he took what timber he could find, lit it with the last of the lamp oil, and crawled down the stairs.
The walls pulsed. The air was thick with rot and memory.
He never screamed.
Weeks later, the trench was abandoned, written off as structurally unstable. A new unit was assigned elsewhere. Rumors spread, of course. The usual ghost stories.
And deep beneath the mud, something breathed slower now. Content. Waiting again.
The End?
