Chapter 5-6 - 1944 (2)
Chapter Five: Mouth of the Earth
October 1944 — Forest near Arras
Two days after the last disappearance
The records say Seargent 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 it’s way 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, 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 downs.
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.
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 in tattered uniforms that marked them as British. Some as 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 into 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 it's messenger now.
It says the next ones will come with machines and questions.
It’s ready for them.
God help them.”
