Chapter One: The First Door

France, November 1917

The rain hadn’t stopped in three days.

Private Edward Hale stood in knee-deep sludge, his coat sodden and stiff with cold, watching the waterline inch higher against the trench wall. The wood was beginning to rot. Everything stank of iron and rot—old blood, wet canvas, and something beneath that… something sweet, like spoiled meat left too long under the floorboards.

He exhaled a breath that fogged the air and tried not to shiver. Shivering meant your body still thought it had a chance.

“Oi, Hale,” came a voice from the dark. Sergeant McBride, thick-necked and always smoking something he wouldn’t share. “You writing more bloody poetry in your head?”

Edward blinked, then shook his head. “Not tonight, Sarge.”

“Good. You get sentimental out here, the mud eats you first.”

McBride sloshed past, boots pulling free with wet pops. The man moved like he weighed nothing, like the trench had learned not to swallow him. Edward watched him go and returned his gaze to the sky—or where the sky should have been. Just fog now. Endless and grey and pressing down.

He wanted to be anywhere else.

The explosion came just after midnight.

The shell didn’t hit the trench, but close—too close. The wall opposite Edward erupted in a spray of muck, wood, and bone. Screams cut through the ringing in his ears as a section of the support dugout collapsed like wet cake.

“Get a light!” someone shouted.

Corporal Lyle was already scrabbling into the wreckage. His lamp cast flickering light on a mess of collapsed timber and something pale beneath—a hand, severed cleanly at the wrist.

But there was something else under the debris.

“Christ,” Lyle whispered, backing away.

Half-buried in the mud was a wooden door.

No latch. No hinges. No reason to be there. It leaned at a crooked angle, embedded in the collapsed wall like it had always been waiting.

McBride stared at it without speaking. Then: “Cover it.”

“Is it part of a cellar?” Edward asked, stepping forward.

“No,” McBride said flatly. “It’s older.”

Lyle gave a nervous laugh. “Older than what? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

McBride spat. “Older than this war.”

That night, Edward’s sleep was restless.

The trench whispered. Not just the wind in the slats or the groan of shifting earth—but voices, words just out of reach. He huddled in his blanket, ears full of rain and static, and dreamed of a place where the land was red and the sky never turned.

He dreamed of fireless rituals—shapes robed in ash-colored linen, kneeling before a door that pulsed like a living thing. No face behind the door. Just breath, deep and wet and knowing.

Two nights later, Lyle disappeared.

One moment he was eating a tin of jam, the next—gone. No scream. No fight. Just a splash in the dark and his lamp rolling into the mud. When they reached it, the only trace of him was a trail, a single drag mark etched into the trench floor. It led back to the door.

The mud was warmer there, Edward noticed. As if something below was radiating heat.

“Don’t touch it,” McBride warned. “Don’t even look too long.”

The others started to fall apart after that.

One soldier clawed at his own ears until they bled, raving about a heartbeat under the ground. Another began muttering prayers in a language no one recognized. He hadn’t spoken more than two words the entire tour.

McBride held fast. But even he looked… older. Hollow.

“Don’t you feel it?” Edward whispered one night, voice trembling. “It’s under us. All the time. Moving.”

McBride stared off into the dark. “It doesn’t move,” he said. “It waits.”

On the seventh night, the door was open.

Edward didn’t see it happen. No one did.

It had simply opened—quiet and wide, revealing a stairwell that spiraled down into the earth. The steps were slick with mud, but deeper… stone. Carved and etched with symbols Edward didn’t know but understood in his blood.

McBride was waiting, rifle slung, lamp low.

“I dreamed this,” Edward whispered.

“So did I,” McBride said.

They stood in silence.

Then McBride turned to him. “Do you want to run?”

Edward thought about it. “No.”

He took the lamp and descended the first step. Then another. The earth sighed.

Behind him, McBride whispered, “You brave fool.”

And the door began to close.

He was three turns down when he saw the walls begin to move—not collapse, but shiver, like muscle beneath skin. The stone was slick with some kind of fluid, thick and dark, and there were flies, large and sluggish, swarming in pulses.

At the bottom, he found an altar made from human bones.

Ribcages arranged like wings. Skulls set in concentric rings. And at the center, a hollow space in the shape of a man curled into a fetal position, as if something had once nested there.

A heartbeat throbbed beneath it. He felt it in his teeth.

Then something moved in the dark. Something massive. Something that didn’t walk.

Edward opened his mouth to scream, but what came out was a prayer he’d never learned. And then—

Above, in the trench, the ground shook.

McBride watched as the mud churned. It wasn’t rain anymore—it was thick, black, and it smelled like something long dead.

He dropped to his knees.

“God forgive us,” he muttered, just before the door slammed shut, buried under the collapse of the trench wall.