Lullaby For A World At War

Lullaby for a World at War

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

They called it The Lost Black Sonnenrad.

It was not a single night. It was the entire war.

By the end, more than ninety million people were dead.

The official histories called it the price of victory. But those who heard the violin knew the truth.

The American Lullaby had found the greatest well of maternal grief the world had ever known, millions of mothers losing sons across oceans and it had turned the conflict into a feeding ground.

The violin rode radio waves. It hid inside V-mail letters.

It drifted through blackout nights and jungle darkness and the static after atomic fire.

And every time a star vanished from a Gold Star banner, another mother stepped into the dark believing her boy was calling her home.

This is the record of how the Lullaby became global.

-

Eleanor Hayes: East Coast Industrial Town, 1942–1945

Eleanor Hayes packed artillery shells on the night shift and came home to a house that grew quieter every month. Her son, Private James Hayes, had shipped out in 1942.

She kept his photograph on the mantel and a single Gold Star banner in the front window. Every night she whispered the same prayer: “Come home soon, Jimmy.”

The first letter arrived in the spring of 1943. The handwriting was still James’s, but the words were wrong.

Ma, the nights here are quiet sometimes. I can hear music. It sounds like the song you used to hum when I was little. I know it’s impossible, but I walk toward it anyway. Don’t worry. I’ll be home soon.

Eleanor folded the letter and told herself the war was making her boy hear things.

The second letter came two weeks later. The handwriting had changed.

She’s here, Ma. I saw her between the trees last night. She was holding our flag. The stars were glowing like they were alive. She told me you miss me. I’m walking toward her now. I think she needs me more than the Marines do.

Eleanor stopped sleeping through the day. She sat by the radio at night, listening to the static between war reports. Sometimes she heard four slow notes beneath the crackle.

A — C — B — A.

She told herself it was only the wind in the wires.

By the winter of 1943 the blackout drills had begun. Every evening the streetlights died. People sat in darkened rooms and listened to the sirens. That was when the violin grew louder.

Gold Star mothers began reporting the same thing. They would sit in the dark staring at their banners and watch the stars flicker. One would glow. Then another. Then the four notes would drift through the walls.

Some of them walked outside.

Mrs. Patricia Lowell left her house at 2:17 a.m. during a blackout.

Neighbors heard her calling her son’s name.

They heard the violin answer from the direction of the old rail yard. She was never seen again.

The next morning her banner lay on the floor. One star was missing.

Eleanor began keeping a journal.

December 1943, Heard the violin again tonight. It was coming from the rail yard. I almost went outside. God help me, I wanted to.

January 1944,  Mrs. Ellison’s banner is missing a star. She got the telegram yesterday. She hasn’t been seen since.

February 1944,  The radio played the four notes during the President’s speech. I am not imagining this anymore.

She stopped going to church.

The preacher spoke of sacrifice and God’s plan.

Eleanor had seen the stars bleed on fabric. She no longer believed any of it.

-

The Pacific Theater: James Hayes, 1944

James’s letters grew shorter and stranger after the handwriting changed.

Ma, the jungle moves at night. The trees sound like they’re breathing. Last night I saw her standing between two palms. She was playing the violin. The flag was on fire but it didn’t burn. I think she’s looking for all of us. Tell the other mothers to stop listening to the radio.

His final letter was never sent. It was found months later on what remained of his body.

Ma, I’m walking toward her now. She says you’re waiting. I love you. I’m sorry.

He was listed as Missing in Action. His squad told a different story.

They said the violin had played for three nights. Soldiers from both sides began walking toward the sound with rifles lowered. Then the things came out of the trees.

They moved faster and more silently than anything human.

Their bodies were those of apes powerful, heavy, and hunched with long monkey tails and the raw strength of great apes.

Their hands were like those of jungle margay cats, hooked and clawed.

Their bodies were fused from fallen American and Japanese soldiers' skin, uniforms, and bone melted together into one grotesque form.

When they roared it was layered with the screams of dying men from both sides of the war.

The lullaby made soldiers on both sides walk toward each other in the dark, believing they were helping a grieving mother.

They met in the undergrowth and never came back.

Some men were later found hidden dead in deep man-made graves, as if something had dragged them there to conceal the evidence.

Missing military equipment lay scattered nearby.

The survivors stopped talking about that night. Some of them heard the four notes in their sleep for the rest of their lives.

-

D-Day: Normandy, June 6, 1944

The official reports spoke of machine-gun fire and burning landing craft.

The day was extremely hot, so hot that metal equipment burned skin on contact and bodies began to catch fire under the relentless sun.

Buried deeper in the redacted files was another story.

A deaf soldier named Corporal Thomas Reilly survived the landing and later drew what he saw in a journal he titled *Living Hell*.

His sketches showed soldiers dropping their rifles and walking into the sea, pulled by something beneath the waves. In one drawing, the Mother stood on the shingle, violin raised, while the sea ran red.

Soldiers wading through chest-deep water heard the violin rising from the surf.

Four slow notes. Some dropped their rifles and turned toward the sound.

They felt a strong, overwhelming urge to stop fighting the war and help the grieving mother instead.

They walked into deeper water and vanished.

The things that dragged them down were officially named the whirlpools. Twisted, waterlogged entities that were half-shark and half-turtle, with walrus-like tusks, crab-like hands, humpback whale eyes, and half-anglerfish features with glowing bioluminescent lures.

They wore rusty WWII helmets and dog tags from drowned soldiers and the bodies of the invasion force.

They moved through the red water with terrible purpose and pulled the living back into the sea.

Some soldiers suddenly sank into the sand shore like sinkholes, pulled down into the Pit as massive craters from naval bombardment opened beneath them.

Entire platoons disappeared into the sand while the sea ran red.

The Mother stood on the shingle among the dead.

She was extremely tall and gaunt, towering over soldiers and vehicles.

Her skeletal frame had unnaturally long limbs and a massive, swollen pregnant abdomen.

Her long, wind-whipped black hair hung almost to the ground.

Her ash-gray, cracked corpse-like skin was covered in deep wrinkles and decay.

Her face had hollow sunken eye sockets with tiny dark eyes buried inside, a long skeletal nose, and a mouth stretched impossibly wide into a vertical scream reaching down toward her chest.

The inside of her mouth looked like a deep black abyss.

Her teeth resembled rows of pointed 7.62 rifle cartridges. She held a cracked, war-damaged violin while the American flag snapped in the wind.

Stars on the flag blinked out one by one as the tide carried bodies away.

-

The Fatties: Nazi-Occupied Europe

Inside the concentration camps the violin was heard after lights out.

Prisoners reported new figures appearing during selections.

They were fat, uniformed entities both men and women.

They wore iron Scold’s Bridle masks that clamped their tongues and held their mouths in permanent silent screams.

Around their necks hung Pear of Anguish devices.

Their black gloves ended in long knife-fingers.

They sorted the prisoners with cold, bureaucratic calm.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Those sent left never returned.

The ground beneath the barracks sometimes opened and swallowed entire blocks whole.

Children were often told they were going home.

They were lined up smiling, holding hands, believing they would see their parents again. Instead, the Fatties led them away.

Some were sent directly into the Pit that opened beneath the barracks.

Others were eaten.

The Fatties would extend a long, fleshy tube from their stomachs into the victims.

First they slurped the brains, a wet, sucking sound that echoed through the camp.

Then they slurped and glopped up the body parts and bones, the tube pulsing as it pulled everything inside.

They laughed while eating, but due to the masks it sounded like heavy pig breathing.

Sometimes food overflooded into their mouths but was forced back inside, eventually exploding within the mask.

The mask never came off.

The horror was methodical and endless. The camps became one of the darkest feeding grounds the Mother had ever known.

-

The Ashes: Hiroshima & Nagasaki, August 1945

After the bombs the world went quiet for a time. Then the static returned.

American airmen who flew the missions heard the four notes in the static of their radios on the flight home.

Their families heard the same static on home radios between victory announcements.

The Enola Gay and its crew went missing shortly after and were never found.

In the radioactive ruins something moved through the ash. They were called the Ashes entities made of fused ash, thermal burns, radioactive glow, and bone.

They looked like spiders but also resembled cockroaches.

They had been first observed by scientists at the Hiroshima blast site.

They did not attack at first.

They hid in the ash to avoid predators and dry air.

They were thigmotactic; they preferred the comfort of solid surfaces touching their bodies on all sides and squeezed into dark cracks and crevices during the day.

They possessed microscopic wind-sensitive hairs on their rear that detected approaching footsteps and triggered an escape reflex in one-twentieth of a second.

When threatened they could run at speeds up to forty miles per hour.

They shot venomous radioactive glow poison to lure prey.

Then they wrapped victims in violin strings to immobilize them.

Because they could not chew, they injected enzymes and radioactive venom that liquefied tissue.

They drank the resulting liquid mush through the web wrapping, using it as a container so nothing was wasted.

At night they gathered in huge groups and piles, creating a heatwave of the lullaby and radioactive gas that spread only after dark.

It forced people to sing the lullaby over and over until their voices were damaged and they could no longer speak or sing.

They would hum, then their mouths would shut, and they would dance the lullaby, dancing off into death, some into oncoming traffic, buildings, mountains, or the sea.

Once dead, the Ashes sensed the death smell and delivered the bodies to a Pit.

The Mother stood in the blast shadow, holding a burning American flag. The stars on it were gone.

-

Final Blackout: August 1945

The war ended. Radios played victory music. People danced in the streets.

Eleanor Hayes did not dance.

She sat in her darkened living room with the Gold Star banner hanging in the window. The single star was still there. For now.

She picked up James’s photograph and held it to her chest, tears streaming down her face.

“Jimmy… if you’re out there, Mama’s coming. I hear you calling. I’m so sorry I let you go.”

The radio crackled between songs. She heard the four notes clearly.

A — C — B — A.

During the final blackout, the horror reached its deepest point.

Children were seen playing in the streets with their eyes closed wide shut, as if they could no longer bear to see the world.

Slowly, everyone began going blind.

The air turned bitterly cold, an unnatural frostbite that crept into bones and made teeth chatter even in summer.

Mothers held their children tighter, whispering prayers that went unanswered as the cold took their sight and their hope.

Eleanor stood and walked to the window. The star beneath her fingers was warm.

She stepped outside into the blackout-dark street.

The Mother waited at the end of the block, holding the Hayes family’s American flag. The stars were bleeding down the fabric.

Eleanor walked toward her.

She believed, in that final moment, that she was finally going to see her son.

She never returned.

-

Epilogue Note:  FAERD Agent, 1952

The war changed everything.

Before 1939 the Lullaby was mostly localized as a regional terror.

After The Lost Black Sonnenrad, it became global.

The Mother learned how to feed on entire nations at once.

The hunters evolved.

The flag itself became a beacon and a map.

We have burned more records than we have kept. Some nights I still hear the four notes in the static. I wonder how many more wars it will take before the stars run out.

The American Lullaby continues.

It always has.

End of recovered document. 

Further access denied.

The End