Chapter Seven: Her Father’s Ghost
Northern France – September 1973
Forest near Arras, Site 17B – Classified British Coordinates
Eleanor Mercer zipped up the tent flap and checked her watch.
Day One:
06:15. Fog heavy. Humidity high. EMF baseline: unstable.
They’d set up camp three miles from the original trench site, using copies of WWII-era maps and sanitized military archives—what little remained after the war department had erased the coordinates in 1950.
“Dr. Mercer,” called Lance, the field technician. “We’re getting something on channel two. Low resonance, but it’s… almost rhythmic.”
“Don’t jump at shadows,” she muttered, adjusting her recorder. “Wind mimics patterns. Keep it running.”
What she didn’t say was that the rhythm matched a pattern she’d seen before—on the final transmission from her father, Corporal John Mercer, before he disappeared in 1944.
That transmission had played in her dreams for thirty years.
“It’s not him—it’s not…”
(unintelligible static)
“…don’t dig…”
Eleanor Mercer never talked about her father in public. Her mother had remarried. Her stepfather was a dentist from Cheltenham who believed in rotary brushes and tight boundaries.
But Eleanor believed in unresolved patterns. Repeating traumas.
And she believed that men don’t vanish into the dirt for no reason.
Especially not entire squads.
She’d found Colin Brant’s asylum records in a locked drawer in the basement of Bradford Asylum while reviewing old psychosis case files for anomalous language.
There were drawings. Spirals. Ribbed tunnels. A faceless figure sewn into a mud wall.
One line had been scratched over and over:
“They’re waiting for someone, someone with his blood.”
Her crew consisted of three plus herself:
• Lance Davis – skeptical technician, ex-RAF radio operator, built half their gear from scratch.
• Holly Cochran – spiritual medium, soft-spoken, prone to migraines near “thin places”.
• Greg Anderson – cameraman, war film obsessive, carried a 16mm camera like it was a rifle.
They entered the woods on the third day.
The compass died within minutes.
“It’s like magnets are liquefied here,” Lance mumbled. “No—it’s interference,” said Eleanor. “Maybe electromagnetic strata. Or…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
Or the forest remembers.
They found Brant’s warning first.
Carved into a collapsed beam just outside the trench mouth:
“BELOW IS MEMORY—DO NOT GIVE IT YOUR NAME”
“That’s comforting,” said Greg. “Definitely wasn’t carved by someone having a good day.”
They filmed it and tagged the coordinates.
That night, the recordings changed. What should’ve been six hours of forest ambience turned into layered sound
• Marching boots
• Breathing
• A man crying softly in German
• And then…
“Ellie.”
Her father’s voice.
“It wants your voice, too.”
Eleanor dropped the headphones.
“No more playback after midnight,” she told the group.
But Holly had already started weeping. Her nose was bleeding. “There are faces in the trees,” she whispered. “They’re wearing uniforms… but they don’t have eyes.”
Day Two:
Greg insisted on filming the old trench mouth at dawn.
The spiral was still faintly visible, exposed in the grass and bone-white soil.
Eleanor placed her father’s broken knife—recovered from Site 17B archives—at the center of the spiral.
She thought it might trigger something.
It did.
The ground beneath them sank, not abruptly—but with a slow, suctioned collapse, like something beneath had exhaled.
Greg fell first. Holly screamed.
Lance grabbed the rope and climbed in after Greg.
Eleanor followed.
They descended into what was no longer a trench.
Beneath it was warmer than it should’ve been.
And, wet.
Their torches revealed the same unnatural walls described by Brant in 1944: veined, ribbed, streaked with mud that looked more like rotted skin.
The deeper they went, the louder the tapping became.
Greg’s camera picked up something: flickers of movement just behind them, never in frame. Shadows shaped like rifles. One crawling backwards, dragging itself by its jaw.
Holly collapsed at the edge of a chamber.
“This is the mouth,” she sobbed. “We’re standing on its tongue.”
Then, for the first time, Eleanor heard it:
“Daughter of the one who fed me…”
“Your blood runs backward.”
“He still screams. Shall I show you?”
End Recording [Field Tape #3 — FOUND AT BURNT CAMPSITE
(Heavy breathing, Crunching dirt.)
GREG: “Dr. Mercer? I think Lance is gone.
HOLLY (faint): “He’s part of the wall now.”
ELEANOR: “Don’t answer it. Don’t speak your name. That’s how it gets in—”
(Sound distortion – a voice, like Mercer’s, overlapping itself)
MERCER?: “Ellie, I love you. But it’s not me. You have to seal it.”
(Static, Low humming. Something wet and loud. Screaming. Then silence.)
Final recorded words.
ELEANOR: “We opened it again. And now it wants out.”
The forest let her go, but the thing beneath the trench did not.
