Chapter Six: One Man Left to Scream
France, October 1944 — Two Days After Contact Loss with Mercer’s Squad
The order came down simple: “Find Mercer. Recover survivors. Avoid direct engagement.”
Sergeant Rupert Kendall didn’t like simple orders. Especially not ones that smelled like silence. No follow-up. No backup. No map corrections. Just coordinates, and a whisper from the adjutant:
“Radio cuts out in that sector. Be careful, it’s an eerie place”
Kendall led five men into the trees northeast of Arras.
The woods changed before they even reached the last known coordinates.
Trees leaned in strange ways—roots curling above the earth like skeletal hands. The ground was soft underfoot, springy, not like soil, but like something breathing below.
Corporal Leeds took the lead with his compass.
“Needle’s drunk,” he muttered. “Keeps pointing east, then twitching like it wants to snap.”
Two hours later, they found the first listening post—Mercer’s fallback camp.
Torn canvas. Shredded bedrolls. A boot still tied, empty.
In the firepit, someone had stacked bones into the shape of a spiral. Chicken bones? Human?
Nobody said a word.
That night, they posted watches.
Private Howell was first.
By morning, he was hanging upside down from a tree branch twenty feet up, his body wrapped in barbed wire that hadn’t been there the night before. His eyes had been dug out. Not gouged—dug—with something small, and many-handed.
Sergeant Kendall wanted to fall back immediately.
But the trail was gone. The woods had moved.
Private Brant, the youngest, kept whispering to himself.
“They’re in the air. The dirt talks.”
Corporal Leeds agreed. “Last night I heard chanting. In Latin or Greek. Maybe older.”
“Did it stop?” Kendall asked.
Leeds looked up.
“No. You just stop being able to tell the difference between the words and the wind.”
They found it by accident.
The trench had collapsed again, wider this time. As though something beneath had expanded. Dirt sloped inward, revealing the spiral entrance Mercer must’ve taken.
They found the knife first. McBride’s. Sticky with thick black blood.
Next to it: Rooker’s helmet. Empty. In its place was a wet, grey pulp of tissue, like someone had peeled off a face and stuffed it inside.
Only Kendall and Brant dared approach the entrance. Leeds started reciting the Lord’s Prayer. By the time they turned around, his mouth was full of black feathers.
He hadn’t made a sound. Not even a gasp.
Kendall fired a mercy shot. But the body didn’t bleed.
Kendall took Brant down into the trench.
The walls were different now—hardened, like clay fired in a kiln. Veins ran through it, some of them still pulsing. Brant clutched a flare like a holy candle.
“We shouldn’t be here,” he whispered.
“I know,” Kendall said.
He didn’t say what he really felt: that they’d never left. That maybe they’d stepped into the trench days ago, and everything since had just been the entity feeding.
They passed bones. Old bones. Some marked British. Some Roman. One had a helmet shaped like antlers, carved from ivory.
And then: a voice.
“He took the knife. He fed us blood.”
Kendall raised his weapon.
Brant collapsed, convulsing.
The tunnel shifted—tightened. Flesh walls clenched. Something unseen breathed through Kendall’s ears.
Then came the sounds of hundreds of footsteps. Not ahead. Not behind.
Above.
In the soil. In the ceiling. Walking in circles.
Last Memory — Private Colin Brant (recorded 1956, Bradford Asylum)
“It’s not dead. It’s never been dead. The mud eats people. Not the bodies—the memories. It remembers war. It remembers bones breaking. It takes shapes like people you loved. Mercer opened the door, but it was already waiting. Said it had seen McBride years before, and kept a piece of him. Maybe it was the part that made him afraid to die.
Kendall tried to fight it. It took him gently, like a parent feeding a child. He didn’t scream. Just sank, slow, like he wanted to go. I only got out because it wanted me to. I’m its messenger now.
It says the next ones will come with machines and questions.
It’s ready for them.
God help them.”
