Beneath the earth they dug, shovels scraping away at the loam. Above them, the war raged on, a staccato heartbeat of artillery shells that rattled the filth packed tight against their heads.
They did not care about the noise. It had become a creature comfort for them, a tether to a new normalcy drilled into their minds by the white-hot brand of tracer-fire and machine gun rounds. All they had to do was dig. So, they did, their faces corpse-masks sculpted from muck, hovering in the dark. Yellow streaks of lamplight cast a jaundiced sheen on bloodshot eyes that skittered as they moved forwards. Where their shadows merged, their silhouettes became monstrous moles. Bestial, blind, scrabbling with calloused hands towards the depths.
Cadan Hughes tried to avoid looking at his surroundings as he worked. Instead, he focused on the bite of his pick as he swung it. He braced against the tremors that ran eagerly up his arm. Better to fixate on the little things; the way the damp leg of his trousers rubbed up against his ankles like the family cat begging for treats back home, the way Broderick always coughed three times before he sniffed, or how, without noticing and without fail, Aidan’s shovel dug in time to the phantom tune of “Sosban Fach.”
Cadan furrowed his brow and struck the wall. Maybe it wasn’t good to remember home. It conjured images of a warm pub keeping out the fog that hovered over the mountains, of drinking games they played, before marching off to the blasted heaths of Belgium. Away from all that was good or green. As he jostled against his fellow miners, their sweat ran and streaked together. He stepped aside to let Gruffydd lurch past with a bucket. They weren’t strangers to mining. Cadan’s mighty arms had garnered him something of a notoriety in the coalmines back home, and the feel of a spade in his hands had been familiar to him even before the rattle. At least that was his father’s joke.
This was different. The coalmines were hot, rough work, but softened by jokes and gossip (miners gossiped more than housewives, broken up by breaks taken in clouds of obsidian dust that settled on their brown paper bags as they compared packed lunches and drank cold, sweet tea from metal flasks. After each day, there was always the prospect of coming home and soaking in a hot tin bath then heading down to the pub to play cards and sing and dance.
Cadan could not remember the last time any of them had sung.
The thought of it was lunacy. You did not sing in the tunnels. You did not talk in the tunnels. Because the enemy also knew how to dig, and they were forever stalking through the soil. Prowling in searching for sappers, to break their bones and split their skulls and leave their corpses sepulchered by the blood-stuffed loam of no-man’s-land.
Occasionally they would stop, drawing in tight, quick breaths. The muggy air would grow thin, cracking from the strain as their ears perked up, searching for the tell-tale thuds of the enemy as they mined. In those moments, the roots oozing from the sludgy roof became fingers poking through the walls in search of victims, and the trickles of dirt slithering around their boots whispered, anticipating screaming hordes erupting from the walls. Cadan had never killed a man. None of the team had, but every one of them knew their luck could only last for so long. At any moment the tools of their trade could become instruments of butchery.
Cadan would not have ordinarily said he was afraid of dying, but the prospect of meeting his end in the tunnels was a different story. It was every miner’s greatest fear: to be claimed by the earth they had ravaged, to be buried yet forgotten. The pressure of the earth trapping the soul for eternity where it would harden, crumble, blacken until it was just another lump of coal. As he shuffled forward, sloughing through the sod, Caden looked from man to man.
Cold grey water wept in streams of pus from the puckered earth. In the half-light a dozen pair of eyes burned with gold to pay the ferryman.
Rhys, in the lead, raised a hand, calling for silence. The miners froze. It was only until several seconds had passed that it began to dawn on them that there was nothing to listen for. Worse still, all the rats had gone.
They always took the rats for granted. The war-machines of monkeys never deterred them. Their fat, mangy bodies were a common sight, paddling through the tunnels, chittering, black fur glittering with blood. Red-eyed gargoyles perched on the wooden support beams and laughing scornfully at the slaves that toiled below their kingdom, the trench rats were fearless beings. No matter how many of their brethren were impaled, crushed or dashed into pieces, still they returned, their pink, puppet hands grasping at any scrap of waylaid food they could pilfer. What could cause the vermin to flee?
Cadan had never even considered there could be something worse down here with them. The realization was an icy jolt to everyone present, the creeping anxiety of returning home only to realize that all the furniture had been moved out of place. This was the silence of the womb; a wet, dull cocoon that signaled the beginning and the end of all things.
The quake of the guns had ceased. Cadan pressed himself against the nearest man, digging his shoulder-blades into his back. The tunnel had become impossibly small, it was too small, the walls flexing, pulsing, closing in, a mouth ready to chew them up and spit out their bones.
At his side, Gruffydd let out a yell. Something had moved up ahead.
All they could see for now were its movements, but that was enough to understand that whatever had shifted in the gloom was not human. It was a sudden, primitive understanding relayed instantly to all present. Now the lamplight was the weak, crackling flame of the campfire, and the hunched and ragged men were once again cavemen huddled together against the terrors of the night.
A shape was approaching from within the scummy water-no, it was the water. It defied any attempt at categorization, any clumsy desire to label or confirm. It rushed toward them with the implacable tread of shadows emerging from beneath a child’s bed. All the miners could do was stumble backwards, battering uselessly at the dark.
From the ground a being surged, growing before their eyes, blossoming like cancer. Grey, viscous liquid churned. Within it floated the ravaged corpses of rat and man alike, splinters of yellow bones and leathery flesh mixing, merging, separating. The organism’s body towered above them, its recesses throbbing with a million nameless dead. In the seething recesses of the beast Cadan could see the broken names from grimy labels, trailing broken stitches from where they had been peeled off jackets and trousers, the tattered shreds of handkerchiefs, photographs, rusted lockets and amulets, smothered together into a mess of death. Remains trawled from the filth, animated by a consciousness that smoldered with the pain of dying stars.
None of them could move.
Cadan felt his knees knock together, clattering like dice on the stones of the schoolyard. Around him he heard the moans of his fellow men strike up in chorus. The stink of fear was worse than the sweat. Cadan tried to look at the thing, but something inside his brain resisted.
To understand it was futile. What remained was a weight, crushing down on them, driving them into a hapless quiver, the grindstone of despair. It stared down at its prey with hard, black withered eyeballs and spread tendrils of dented bullets, pockmarked teeth and rusted bayonet shards towards the nearest man.
Then it was the man, it was on Rhys, seizing him by the waist and tearing away his side. Rhys didn’t even scream. Undulating fingers, tipped with shattered dog tags and bent crucifixes pierced through the helpless victim’s jaw and stabbed into the back of his head. It pulled him upwards, the corpse’s feet trailing in the air like a hanged man. Butchered on the altar to the damp and the dark.
The beast held the dead man before the miners, and those stubs that might have been hands began to move his jaw up and down. Rhys wept blood in black rivers, and then the body spoke in a voice that was both its own but also something else. Brittle diamonds, an order filtered through the apish sludge of the human mind. The beast sounded out the commandment, ripping through the quiet and forcing its glass-tipped speech from the throat of the murdered man:
Know Me.
The command was everything. It bellowed its way inside every man, rushing like filth erupting from sewer-grates. It surged, crawling into their ears, forcings itself down their gullets, burbling past chapped lips. Worming between the moist cracks of tear ducts and quivering nostrils, it gouged and grubbed, spreading its barbed roots into the crevices of their mind until only it remained
One by one, the being moved from man to man. Bowing over them, drinking from the froth of madness that spilled from their lips. Supping on the blood that ran from their wounds as they tore at each other’s faces, ramming shovels and pickaxes into their skulls to beat out the voice that squirmed within them.
And Cadan understood. As the creature loomed before him Cadan learned of the solitude of obliterated galaxies. Ruined worlds, consumed by the frosted crystals of space, leaving behind a whirling, shrieking mind screaming for the answer to its existence. Begging for a response to a call that would let its name live just a few years more. Acknowledged by nothing. Collapsing onto a distant ball of earth, immured beneath the clay. Fossilized, disturbed, awoken, reduced to a relic of a savagery thought forgotten, cobbling together the rotting remains of a legacy from discarded trash, even as it crumbled into the muck.
The other miners were on their hands and knees, retching, gibbering, bawling. They groveled in the mud, choking on the earthen clumps, gargling the stagnant water in supplication, bone-white faces peeking from where the hot tears they wept swept away the grime. A chorus of Gaelic, English, Latin warbled out. In the snatches of words, God and Mother and Home ran together like ink and blood.
The beast ebbed and flowed from miner to miner, snatches of a face or the shape of a body visible for mere seconds. Its eyes whirled, burning wheels, fallen comets. Now a cry filled the recesses of the tunnel It was the drawn-out scream of throats raised in symphony with this thing. Yells, welcoming the unknown as the wetness crawled over their bodies, sucking them in. Faces within, stretched with howls of glee. Theatre masks, rolling their eyes in milk-white circles, champing and screaming. For a moment, the beast was whole, but then the connection was severed, and Cadan was a monkey again, except seconds ago he had been a God, and he thrashed, coughing hot blood. He wept in the agony of remembrance of what it had been to feast on quasars and couple with stardust. He hugged himself tightly, hating the thick, hairy arms that hung by his side, retching at the stubby fingers. The unbearable stink of his humanity was too much. The thing bore down on Cadan and his first impulse was to let it take him, but no, he would mingle his foul corruption with it, make it lesser, he would join it but not remember it, it would not be fair.
He ran, the lantern crashing against the floor. Darkness rushed after him, like hunting-dogs scrambling along the length of the tunnel. The thing was moving behind him, but Cadan tore down the path, splashing through the muck, laughing and screaming as he went. He was in the stomach of some great, hungry worm. Its walls shivered at his touch as he stumbled blindly down their length.
Up ahead-a noise. Cadan threw himself against the source. He had no shovel, he had forgotten his shovel, but he could still dig, he needed to dig.
In the dark his arms and hands bent, twisting into paws.
It was a German team that found Cadan Hughes, staggering in one of their tunnels, buried in dirt, stumbling towards them. The captain of the team ordered his men to stay back, hefting the sharpened edge of a trench-spade in one hand.
The approaching figure seemed like a shell-shocked soul, until it collapsed into the light, and they saw his eyes. The eyes of a blind man, clogged with mist. The figure reached out towards the captain, and where his fingers should have been there were only torn and savaged stumps, caked in gory muck. Shards of bone scraped feeble lines into the air.
In the distance, one could hear the slow rush of water, and the silence of the rats. The apparition gurgled. Know Me.
The captain drove the shovel into its head, and the madman died. The Germans moved on, walking over the corpse. Already, the mud was seeping over it, drawing it further and further downwards. Thick boots stamped the figure into the slime.
The mining team disappeared into the recesses of the tunnel. Overhead, the guns began to boom once more. A dull gleam from the broken figure stamped into the clay may have been a dog-tag.
Blanketed by ooze, the name etched into it had disappeared.
Pablo Lacalle Writing 