Chapter Four: The Sound Beneath the Static

France, October 1944 – Forest near Arras

Corporal John Mercer hadn’t slept in twenty-three hours.

He didn’t tell the others that, but they could see it. His eyes were cracked and red. His fingernails were dark with dirt and blood—he’d scraped at the edge of the collapsed trench until his hands bled. He kept telling himself it was to recover Rooker. But part of him knew it wasn’t.

He just needed to know what was underneath.

Private Hanley was losing it.

“Rooker’s alive,” he kept muttering, pacing the camp in tight circles. “He’s not dead. I can hear him.”

“We’d hear a scream,” said LeClair, the French interpreter attached to their unit. “You do not vanish without a noise.”

Hanley’s hands were shaking. “That’s just it. He’s whispering. Right under our feet. Calling to me.”

Mercer put a hand on Hanley’s shoulder. “You’re rattled, that’s all. We all are.”

Hanley looked up, and Mercer saw something in his eyes—a kind of fog. Like Hanley wasn’t seeing him anymore. Like something else was looking through him.

“They’re in the mud,” Hanley said softly. “The bones are waking up.”

The next night, the ground began to move.

Not an earthquake. No blast.

Just a slow, sickening heave, as though the earth was exhaling. The trees tilted. The radio cut out.

Then the sounds started.

It began as static, low and fuzzy. Then came the clicking—like beetles tapping against a glass pane. Then came the voices.

“Come down.”

“Come down.”

“The hollow is warm.”

“We will not take your eyes.”

“Just the rest.”

Mercer ripped the receiver from the radio and threw it against the tree. It exploded in a puff of wires and damp smoke.

Nobody spoke.

They set a perimeter.

LeClair laid tripwire with tin cups attached—simple noise traps.

By midnight, every cup was ringing.

One by one. One after another. Then all at once.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Dingdingding—

And then nothing.

Mercer raised his weapon. “Hold,” he whispered.

The forest held its breath.

Then—

A shape emerged from the tree line.

It looked like Rooker.

Same height. Same uniform.

But he was wet. Too wet. As if he’d been submerged in oil and water, his skin slick and grey. His face was blank, his mouth agape.

Mercer stepped forward.

“Rook?”

The shape twitched violently—its limbs snapping like joints unseating themselves—then sprinted toward the trench and dived into the earth.

Straight through a mound of mud.

Gone.

Hanley screamed. “He’s showing us the way!”

They tried to sleep, but none of them really did.

Mercer sat by the fire, sharpening his uncle’s old field knife. The edge had a notch in it now—from what, he didn’t know.

He pulled Dawley’s letter from his pack. Reread it for the fourth time.

“Be careful if you go digging into the past…”

He looked at the trench.

The spiral formation now seemed clearer, even under the moss. Like a drain. Or a spiral birth canal carved from centuries of suffering. He remembered McBride’s silence. The way he’d flinched whenever thunder rolled over open ground. The way he avoided puddles.

He knew this would happen again.

LeClair vanished next.

Mercer found a trail. Not footprints—drag marks. Something had pulled LeClair toward the trench. His rifle was found broken in half. His helmet had been bent in a perfect crescent, like it had been crushed against a wall of bone.

Mercer followed the trail. Hanley begged him not to.

“There’s something under there,” Hanley whispered. “I heard it last night. I think it has Rooker’s voice now. And LeClair’s. And… others. Some I don’t recognize.”

That night, Mercer sat alone with his knife and flashlight.

He crept to the trench.

The exposed beam he’d found earlier was now loose. He pulled it free. Beneath, a hollow passage.

Mud lined the walls, but deeper down: stone.

He reached in and uncovered a familiar shape.

A door.

Just like the one McBride had described in his half-muttered fever dreams.

Wood braced in iron. Smooth. Seamless.

As he touched it, he felt warmth.

And something pressed back.

He didn’t open it. Not yet.

He turned back to the camp to find Hanley gone.

No drag marks this time.

Just bare footprints, leading to the trench.

And beneath the static, the voice again:

“One more, and the mouth will open.”

Chapter Five: Mouth of the Earth

October 1944 — Forest near Arras

Two days after the last disappearance

The records say Sergeant Malcolm McBride died in a mudslide in 1937.

It happened in a quiet field just outside Oban. A minor hill gave way during a freak storm. Locals said the soil had been dry for weeks before, and the slide made no geological sense.

They found McBride buried chest-deep in wet, black earth, head tilted back, mouth wide open as though screaming. There were no injuries, no broken bones. Just dirt in the throat, packed so tightly it crushed the vocal cords.

The pathologist said it looked like the mud had forced itself in.

The report was closed. Mercer never believed it.

Now, as he stood before the uncovered door beneath the trench, he felt what McBride must have felt.

The pressure in the air.

The pull beneath the feet.

The feeling of being watched by something older than memory.

The others were gone.

Rooker. LeClair. Hanley.

Only Mercer remained.

And the voice on the wind no longer pretended to be static.

“John,” it said in McBride’s voice.

“Come down. It’s almost ready.”

Mercer gripped his uncle’s field knife and stepped through the door.

The passage was not natural.

The mud here was not like surface soil. It pulsed with warmth. It breathed. The walls were ribbed—like flesh over bone. As he descended, torch in one hand, blade in the other, he saw faces in the clay.

Not impressions. Faces.

Staring out with hollow sockets and open mouths, like they’d been swallowed screaming.

The deeper he went, the more the walls became veined, and the light dimmer. Not from lack of fuel. The darkness here was thick, alive.

It pressed against the torchlight like muscle resisting intrusion.

Halfway down, he found Hanley.

Or what remained of him.

The body was kneeling, spine snapped backward at a grotesque angle. His jaw was dislocated, pulled open so far the skin had split at the corners. Something had been forced down his throat—a mixture of mud, hair, and roots.

In his hand, clutched like a child’s comfort, was Rooker’s dog tag.

Mercer didn’t cry. He couldn’t.

The air was too thick. And something was breathing through the tunnel now, slow and wet.

Each exhale drew him deeper. Then came the hallucinations.

(Or were they hallucinations?)

First, McBride.

He stood at the bend in the passage, looking exactly as Mercer remembered: tall, tight-jawed, weary-eyed. But his uniform was soaked, hanging in strips. His skin peeled around the temples.

He held out his hand.

“It won’t let me leave. You shouldn’t have come. You were supposed to forget.”

Then he smiled, and his teeth were wooden.

Not false teeth. Actual splinters, black and jutting, like tree roots grown into a jaw.

Mercer turned and ran.

He ran down. Always down.

No stairs. Just spirals. Soft ground. The trench sank now, turning tighter, slicker. The mud oozed up to his knees. Something pulled at his boot. He kicked it loose—but not before he felt fingers.

When he finally stopped, he was in a chamber.

A circular void beneath the earth, as wide as a church nave. And in its center: a mound of limbs, fused into a mass. Arms, legs, ribs. No heads. No mouths. Just a single black opening at its core, pulsing like a throat.

The voice came from there.

“We remember all who dig.”

“You are of the bloodline of the first witness.”

“Your veins have always been ours.”

The mound shifted.

Something began to rise.

A head, bald and smooth, crawled from the throat of the mass. Its face peeled open like a flower—petals of skin lined with teeth, weeping black ichor.

Mercer lifted the knife.

It didn’t matter.

Something spoke behind him, right against his ear:

“You brought it all with you.”

Then the earth swallowed the torchlight.

Audio Recording — Fragment Recovered, 1977]

Source: Field Recorder, 1944 Operations Team, last transmission

Condition: Degraded. Warped.

“…this is Corporal John Mercer. We’ve—lost contact with… others.”

“…going below. Something’s… under the trench. Moving…”

“…I can hear McBride’s voice. It’s not him. It’s not…”

(unintelligible static)

“…if this gets out—don’t dig. Don’t…”

(static becomes low humming… then stops)

End of transmission.