From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (112 page)

He looked down at me as I sat on that cell bed, glanced at the prison warden who was accompanying him, and nodded.

"He’ll do," he said, and then moved on to the next cell, where Larry Raymuss had committed suicide the night before, and lay cold and dead on his bunk, still waiting for somebody to come along and discover him. Poor Larry had problems of a mental kind, he was what they called "touched" and had cried himself to sleep nearly every night, mumbling constantly and incoherently, before he finally silenced himself.

When they discovered Larry he was drained of every drop of blood in his body, after cutting his wrists on the jagged metal edge of his bunk. That might not sound so strange, and it wasn
’t uncommon to see folks end their lives deliberately in the cells, except there was very little blood on the floor or on his bed. No, Larry had cut his wrists and painstakingly written, for everybody to see, the sins of his life, across the walls and the ceiling, even under the window, in his own blood, line after line of detailed accounts of the crimes he had committed, and of those that had been committed against him. I never saw it myself. I only heard the warden and the guards shouting about it as I lay on my bunk, quietly contemplating what was to become of me.

That Larry wrote what he did was an amazing feat in itself, but what was more worrying wasn
’t the details of the crimes, it was the other stuff, the unreadable stuff. For written in among his confession Larry had scrawled some strange script that no one could recognise. Not even the language professor from the big university that they called in could make any of it out.

That professor clearly didn
’t want to be down there in those cells with all the scum of London. I could see through the bars of my cells just enough to make out his face as he looked into Larry’s room. He stood there for a minute or so just staring in horror at the room. Then he tried to read it all, not just the stuff written in English, but the other writings. He said something about it looking archaic, or something along those lines, but he swore he couldn’t decipher it.

The prison warden didn
’t look convinced, but eventually he let it go, and let the professor go. That man scrambled out of the prison faster than a dog chasing a rabbit, nearly tripping over his own feet as he bolted up the stairs. I wouldn't be surprised if that man never answered to a similar call in his life after that.

And do you know what else I think, I think that those mumblings that Larry made d
uring the night, that incomprehensible chatter, I’m damn sure that was what he wrote, and to someone it would have made sense, though I would never have wanted to meet that particular someone, not at all.

My military visitor had signed over my fate to the
war, or so it seemed for me and for a number of other prisoners in that block. We were marched out to the yard and told that we would be leaving that afternoon.

I was much younger than the draft age, but sometime during my stay in the cells someone had cha
nged my age on a document to say I was five years older. They showed me the papers, smiling wickedly as I fumbled through them. They must have presumed that I couldn’t read, and of course I could. There on the page was a scribble mark and the new number '21' under the age of offender.

Now I don
’t know if that military gentleman believed it when he saw me, but he must have had some reason to decide I was to go, because he glanced at me for a moment, with an almost knowing look, said his few words that sent me out of that block and into a whole other world of chaos, and then moved on to the next cell, not even looking back, and I don’t think he once considered what he had just signed me over to. He probably hadn’t a clue himself.

Why did he let a young boy, ye
ars from a drinking age, go to probably die in the trenches? I don’t know. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the answer to that question.

So at the age of only fifteen I was shipped off to a training camp, where at least I got fed properly for a few weeks. Fr
om there it was onto a boat across the Channel. I had never been on the sea, and I spent the first half an hour marvelling at the view of the ocean, and then most of the remaining trip hurling my guts up over the edge. By the time I stopped being sick, we were near the coast of a whole other country.

We travelled across France for many miles, and you know, apart from the dirt and stench of war, it wasn
’t that much different to being in the country back home. Okay, the war had torn apart some of what might once have been civilisation, there were ruined buildings all over, but the odd time we crossed a place that hadn’t seen fighting for a while, I might as well have been back home.

But eventually I found myself hunkered down in a tr
ench, dodging bullets, and dreading the moment we would have to go over the top.

One day in June there was a major offensive, a push that we were told could change the war. I think it was just a pep talk that they tried to give us, with a genuine expressio
n on their faces, before they told us we were to climb up and head over the killing ground to die. That day was the last for many of the men I had grown to know, and many more I would never have the chance to speak to. It was the day of the gas attacks, and also the day that the world ended for thousands of men. For the very first time I began to suspect that everything you see in life is not always clear.

I had made friends with a couple of the older soldiers in the months that I fought in those trenches.
There was old Looky, an aged man who had been the army for most of his life, and he loved to smoke his pipe when he could get some tobacco.

There was also Winters, another older soldier who it seemed had taken a shine to me early on. He was from the north
of England, and at the start I found it hard to understand him, but I got used to his strong Yorkshire accent eventually.

The three of us stuck together, which often meant I tagged along behind, following them for guidance. Both of those old guys had been
in the war from the beginning, and Looky had been over the top at least a dozen times. He said it was all about luck, but I knew otherwise. Those two old soldiers had a way about them, call it a karma - they just kept on going, and fate followed them every step of the way. There was something they were meant for, I guess something like what I think I was meant for, to witness, to be there when something happened, and to be there to take notice. After my experience in that slave shop in London all those years ago, seeing those faces that came back to haunt me every night when I slept, I think I was ready when it finally happened, when the next strangeness reared up and waved its hand at me.

I had been over the top only once, and it was a very short distance
into a trench that was barely defended. Don’t get me wrong, I had my share of near misses just being there, but the one time we had been given the order to move, we met very little resistance. So when we moved on the hill that afternoon I was little prepared for what I was to see.

Across from where we had found our little hole to bed down in for the few weeks that we held the trench at the bottom of the hill, was a stretch of land that had seen a lot of fighting in the months prior to my arrival. Winters to
ld me that nearly a whole battalion had been lost in those few hundred yards. I occasionally took a moment to spy out across that stretch of land, much to the annoyance of my new guardians. But being young and stupid, I had to look. Morbid curiosity is a natural human trait that I had accepted a long time ago, it’s never been a thing I denied. Everybody has it. I think that it's part of our make-up.

The nearest and most visible one sat bolt upright barely twenty yards across the run. He was leaning against
a twisted, splintered stump that might once have been the most majestic of trees. It was nearly ten feet across, and perched on our side of the stump was Harold. I don’t know why I named him that, but it was soon taken on by everyone in our trench. Old Harold sat there with his shoulders proud and his rifle leaning against the stump, still held firmly in his hands. What he was missing was his head. He could have been anybody, looked like anybody and come from any place in the world and you wouldn’t have known.

He was the first marker, the guideline for where death started. Up on that hill they were so bedded down that not even the artillery had managed to make much of a dent.

The guns had been sounding for three days almost constantly, a never-ending din of deep, ground-shaking thuds as they sent their payload roaring up into the sky to come crashing down on the entrenchments that circled again and again. Each time a bombardment finished we waited, and waited, and each time our enemies took to their mud walls again and answered with their own guns.

They didn
’t have any of the massive artillery emplacements that sat behind us, but what they did have was enough to shower the ground between the lines with a deadly thunder.

We would duck down to avoid any fragments from the assault, and be glad that our trenches were just that bit too far for them to reach. Old Harold would sit through all of it, somehow managing to stay upright and proud, while the land around him erupted i
n a deluge of fire and mud. I think if he hadn’t lost his head, his chin would have been raised to the skies in defiance.

When the call went up that last time, before we took to the killing ground to make our assault, I somehow knew it was coming. There was
a chill in the air. Fog had descended over the fields, and the top of the hill was masked from sight. At that moment following the shrill pierce of the whistles that signalled our time to advance, just on the edge of visibility I saw for the first time that Old Harold had moved. No longer did he hold his weapon upright, and no longer was his back straight against the rock. He had slumped forward as if finally giving in.

So it was that on that cold afternoon, with the sun blocked by mist and the skies grey,
the guns went silent one last time.

We poured out of those trenches like ants stumbling out into the light to face some unknown giant. Winters was the first over the top, followed quickly by Looky. I fumbled to climb the broken ladder, and I was easily te
n feet behind them when I finally leapt over the escarpment and began running to catch up with them. I glanced to my side and it seemed we were the fastest out of the trench, but within seconds the killing ground was a mass of bodies rushing for the slope of the hill. Four hundred yards away, past the slumped body of Old Harold, through an abandoned trench, the barbed wire twisted and torn from the constant pounding it had received from both sides, and over a stretch of ground that was pock marked with craters, mud and body parts. That was where we had to reach. The bottom of the hill and the cover that it would give us.

The trench was surprisingly easy to cross. That barbed wire was so damaged that I didn
’t even slow down when I reached it, I followed Winters and Looky’s example and just leapt up, out and down into the drop, landing heavily. One foot sank deep into the mud, missing the rocks that Winters and Looky had used with such agility to reach the other side. The other foot crunched straight down on the head of a dead soldier, one of ours by the looks of it. I saw his pale wide-eyed face for a moment before my weight sank the only part of him that wasn’t already submerged into the mud.

It was just as I reached the top of the trench and started running o
ut across the open ground, that the silence ended.

The hilltop guns unleashed their fury down upon us.

They were firing blind, but I was pretty sure that they had heard the whistles that signalled the assault, because the guns spoke heavier than they had from the trenches. Maybe it was just my imagination, and my being in the middle of the killing ground when the bullets started to hit.

Winters and Looky were easily ten yards ahead of me now, and all I could do as the whistling sound of deadly fire began to
flash by my ears was put my head down and charge like a bull across the ground, hoping that I could make it to the other side. Behind me, I heard the telling sounds of the carnage that was to come as the first screams of men began to sound in their hundreds across the length of our trench lines.

I think I was lucky, although I was sure I felt bullets brush by me, and I know one missed my shoulder by barely an inch, leaving a dark scorch mark on my jacket. I think that I had cleared most of the ground that
they were firing upon by the time they started shooting. There were a few explosions not far from me as I ran, and I was vaguely aware of others running across the same ground, but that open ground, towards the cover of the hill where Looky and Winters were crouched, waiting, was too quiet, too still. Apart from the guns roaring above us and the screams of the dying behind me, no one on that field made a sound.

My shoulder wrenched with pain as I hit the stone ramparts at the bottom of the hill. My friends
were ten yards further along the wall to my right, I guess I had lost track of them and veered off as an explosion sounded a few feet behind me. The mud was deep and I struggled to crawl through it to reach them, suddenly aware that I was covered in blood, though I felt no pain, so it couldn’t have been my own. Then I noticed what it was I was crawling on.

Half buried in the mud at the bottom of the hill were bodies, hundreds of them, rotten and plump, full of maggots, and they weren
’t whole either, many of them were just bits of body, Legs and arms, torsos and heads all submerged in the slush that lay next to the wall. The uniforms weren’t the same colour as ours, so I guess our hilltop nemesis had found a way to get rid of their dead, to stop them from stinking up the place, and we had the misfortune to have to sit in amongst it. Behind me someone called out in disgust, and I spun round to see a young man crawling back away from the wall, horror in his eyes as he looked down upon the open cavity of a ribcage into which a head had fallen, neatly, smiling its rotten grin out at us.