Chapters 3-4
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—Seargent 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 lean inwards.
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, Snow.
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.
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 breath 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 they were 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.”
