Interlude: Letter from a Survivor

March 1931 – Wiltshire, England

From: Private Edwin Dawley (ret.)

To: Mr. John Mercer

Dear John,

I am writing to you in what I am told is one of my lucid moments (they think I am a madman, but it isn’t so) because your uncle will not. He’s a proud man, and what we saw in France took something from him none of us could give back. You asked him once what happened to Edward Hale. You won’t get an answer from him, not in the way you want. But I’ll tell you this: Hale went down beneath the trench, and none of us ever truly came back up.

Your uncle saw it too. He kept watch on the place long after they told us to pull out. And when he came home, he never walked past bare ground without flinching. It wasn’t just war that broke us. There was something under that stretch of land. Something older than the trenches. I saw it once, rising in the dark like a man made from roots and bone, and I have never closed my eyes in peace since. Be careful if you go digging into the past. Some graves don’t stay shut.

Yours in truth,

Edwin Dawley

Chapter Three: The Hollow Earth

France, October 1944 — Forest near Arras

Corporal John Mercer was a man of routine. He didn’t believe in omens or ghosts, just in clean boots and dry socks. But even he had to admit: the woods here were too quiet.

No birds. No insects. No wind. The trees bent inward like they were listening.

He led his squad through the underbrush toward a rusted-out French bunker marked on an old Allied map. The area had been shelled to pieces in the last war, but Command wanted it cleared for use as a forward listening post. The irony wasn’t lost on Mercer. His uncle—Sergeant McBride—had fought in these very woods during the last war and rarely spoke about them. The stories were vague, always half-sentences. “The earth moved sometimes,” or “Some mud ain’t just mud.” John had dismissed it then. But he carried McBride’s old field knife now, blackened from age. And he hadn’t thrown out Dawley’s letter either.

“Got something,” shouted Private Rooker.

Mercer knelt beside the lad and brushed away loose soil. What emerged from the ground was not a bunker. Not at first. It was a wooden beam, blackened and warped, buried just beneath the moss. Another followed. Then another. A structure—old trenchworks, mostly collapsed. He dropped to one knee, clearing dirt with his hand. His fingers struck something cold.

Metal.

A dog tag, mottled with rust. He held it to the light.

E. Hale

19137

A strange chill crept up his spine. He looked around, as if expecting someone—something—to be watching. No one was there.

Just trees, and the mud. But it was warm.

They set up a camp nearby that evening. A basic perimeter, two foxholes, one radio. The static on the line made no sense—it was dense, not like normal interference. Like it had weight. The sound of wet cloth dragging across a microphone.

“Atmospheric distortion,” Rooker muttered.

Mercer didn’t answer.

He kept glancing at the exposed trench beams, now roped off with yellow tape. There was a curve to the structure, unnatural, more like a spiral than a linear defense. As if something had been designed to lead inward.

That night, Mercer dreamt of his uncle’s voice.

“John. You’re too close. They remember blood.”

He awoke drenched in sweat, the dog tag clenched so tight in his palm it had cut his skin.

Outside, the woods were dead silent.

Then, in the dark, a footstep.

Not twigs snapping. Not boots.

Wet. Sloshing. Slow.

Something moved just beyond the trees—tall, pale, faceless. Just long arms and dripping hands, dragging something heavy behind it. He raised his weapon. Clicked the safety.

It vanished.

In the morning, they found Rooker’s foxhole empty. Boots still there. Gun untouched. No signs of a struggle. Just a thin vein of black mud leading from his bedroll to the edge of the collapsed trench.

Mercer didn’t report it. He just sat with his map, tracing the trench pattern again and again, trying to ignore the pulsing static still hissing from the radio speaker, now joined by something else. Something beneath the signal. Like chanting.

Low. Faint.

And in Gaelic.