Chapter Two: That Which Watches

France, November 1917 — Three Days After the Collapse

They said the trench had gone quiet.

Not in the way you wanted—not like peace. The guns still barked in the distance. Shells still fell. But in their little stretch of hell—Sector C8, a kink in the front line no one wanted to hold—the birds had stopped flying. The wind had stopped blowing.

And no one spoke above a whisper anymore.

Private Jansen slit his own throat on the second night after Hale disappeared.

McBride found him sitting upright against a crate of rations, eyes open, hands resting neatly in his lap. His blood had soaked the sandbags behind him in a fan-like shape, almost ceremonial. The knife he’d used was regulation issue—but the angle was all wrong. No man could cut that deep without screaming.

But Jansen’s mouth was filled with mud.

No one could explain that.

McBride smoked more now. He sat up at all hours, wrapped in his overcoat, staring at the collapsed wall where the door had been. Sometimes he mumbled to himself in Scots Gaelic—words soft and slurred like a drunk reciting prayers through a fever.

He wasn’t alone.

Men twitched in their sleep. One, Private Dawley, woke up biting his own fingers. Bit one clean off before anyone could restrain him. When asked why, he sobbed and said: “I couldn’t let it in through my nails.”

Another man, Fletch, drowned in his own dugout. No flooding. Just mud in his lungs, like he’d inhaled the trench itself.

They stopped rotating patrols after that.

McBride kept to his journal.

It gave him something to do with his hands. Ink was running low. He’d started to dilute it with rainwater.

“The men no longer look me in the eye. They act like dogs around a dying master. And I can’t shake the thought that Edward Hale isn’t dead. Not properly. Not the way men die. I dream of him still. But it’s not him anymore.”

He paused there, watching a rat pick at Jansen’s boot.

“I heard something under my bunk last night. It was breathing again. Slow. Closer than before.”

That night, he woke to find someone standing over him.

He didn’t cry out. Something in him knew not to.

The figure was tall, thin. The uniform was British issue but water-damaged, crawling with mold and dark with rot. The skin peeled from the jaw like sunburned parchment. But it was the eyes that held him.

No light. No pupils. Just veins and soil, packed into the sockets like they’d grown there.

The figure leaned down and whispered in a voice that wasn’t human anymore:

“We’re all beneath something.”

Then it collapsed into mud—not turned to, but dissolved, like it had never been a body at all.

He didn’t tell the others.

What was the point?

They were already unraveling. Something was in the trench with them—not walking, not moving in the usual ways, but present. Like static in the air before lightning, or the sensation of a dog growling behind your back.

Sometimes, McBride would turn and find the other men staring at the same patch of earth. Not talking. Not blinking.

Sometimes it was the collapsed wall.

Sometimes it was their boots.

Once, it was the sky, where a flock of black birds had frozen mid-air like insects in amber.

None of them remembered it afterward.

A week after Hale’s disappearance, new orders came down: abandon the trench.

Command cited structural instability. Too close to artillery lines. Too much rain.

McBride didn’t argue.

They packed in silence. No jokes. No songs. No talking.

When they left, none of them looked back.

Except McBride.

He paused at the edge of the trench, his boots on dry land for the first time in months, and turned to face the door. Or where the door had been. There was nothing there now. Just wet earth and the faintest hollow sound when the wind passed through.

He thought, for a moment, he saw movement—like something pulling itself up from beneath. A shadow against the wood, a hand made of rib bones and black sinew, reaching for the surface.

But then it was gone.

McBride was transferred to a rear-line encampment, then rotated home after a shell wound to the leg. He never fought again.

But he never stopped dreaming.

And neither did the men who’d been there with him.

Private Dawley was institutionalized in 1921 after chewing off three of his toes.

As for McBride—

His journal ended with a single entry, written in a trembling hand:

“I think it’s rising again. I see Hale when I close my eyes. He’s not speaking. Just pointing. Down. Down. Down.”