Chapter 1: Fibres
The first reports crossed our desks in 1940. The Germans were digging in Poland, in the middle of nowhere, ripping up ancient forests and tearing down old castles at a breakneck pace. Hunting for something, something that their people were desperate to find. The next year, when they turned on the Soviets and chased them out of Poland, the first thing they did was dig some more in the territories the Soviets had held. Scattered reports, unreliable witnesses, informants that went missing as soon as they spoke about it - it was a fog to us, and there were more important things to deal with at the time.
Or so we thought.
We suspect that between the digs in Poland, and the raiding of the Soviet science facilities that they captured, the Germans finally - some time in the autumn of 1941 - got their hands on whatever it was that had been driving them . Our informants grew frantic - and then disappeared. One by one the stations in their territory stopped transmitting. Our last report was from Warsaw, in December 1941. The agent spoke of a new German unit, the Paranormal Division, and that was the last we heard from that frequency.
Spring 1942 saw the first dead walking in Russia.
Chapter 1: Fibres
Coleman stubbed out the last bit of the cigarette against his boot. The forest around him was dim, the midday rays already hidden behind a thick blanket of iron clouds, and the drip and splatter of infrequent raindrops seemed to reduce the world around him to the clammy confines of his lean-to. The manual said it was a Tent, Canvas, Standard - but the reality was a bit of a wet mess that barely managed to earn its title as a tent.
Wicker was outside somewhere, stalking along the perimeter. The Scot could not sit still to save his life, and his highlands experience made him a woodsman second to none. Here, in the damp woods of France, he could at least put that energy to use. At the Dublin camp, he had been as cagey as a hound with a sore tooth, and when their Whitley had finally taken off two days ago, Coleman had breathed a sigh of relief. Dropping Wicker into the wilds seemed to be the only way to keep the man sane.
Coleman missed his books and his smoking jacket. To him, the wilds were a place best experienced between two sturdy book covers. The journal he sat with now was something else, something that felt wrong to him somehow - despite all the practising back in Dublin - and he could not look at it for long before bundling it back into its waterproof wrap again. Then, wrapped up, it would nag at him, with that little voice that felt like cobwebs in his mind, until he opened it up again.
Footsteps crunched outside, and the tent flap opened. Wicker was dripping wet, from his tartan cap all the way down to his muddied boots, but had a smile plastered across his face that showed more teeth than Coleman had seen on his face in a long time.
“I found them. On the northern road, heading east. Purple pennants on all the cars,” the Scot burred. Coleman had spent enough time with the man to at least make sense of the accent without much effort by now. “One staff car, two trucks, handful of motorcycles. They are heading towards Sains Grieu.”
“About bloody time we had some good news. Small mercies for informants that are reliable, these days.” Coleman got to his feet, stuffing the wrapped journal into a jacket pocket, and reached for the over-loaded backpack that stood waiting. “I trust you can get us there in time?”
Wicker grunted as he swung his own pack up and onto his back. Both of the men were laden with enough supplies to last them the next three or four days, if all went to plan.
The rifles and the dynamite were there for the alternative.
“There’s an old lumber trail that runs to the village. I walked it yesterday - dead quiet. I think even the locals must have forgotten about it.” The Scot had his Enfield wrapped in an oilcloth cover that left only the muzzle and trigger free. It went onto his shoulder, next to the pack, with a muffled clink. “We follow that until night falls, and then we should be close enough.”
Coleman took his own rifle - one of the last Sten guns, smuggled out of England before it fell - and made sure the waterproof cover was tight before also slinging it across his chest. The little guns were nasty and scrappy, and failed as often as they worked - but when they worked, they gave a terrible accounting of themselves.
“Good enough. Let’s get this done with, then.” Coleman stepped out behind Wicker, receiving a gush of rain in the face as he exited the tent, before turning and kicking in the lone tentpole that kept the canvas up. With a wet sigh, the tent folded in on itself, taking with it the loose branches that had been propped against its sides. Within moments, no part of their erstwhile shelter was visible except a tangle of fallen branches, and a guy rope which Wicker stomped on to push deeper into the mud.
The Scot set the direction and pace from there, and Coleman had to stretch to keep up. This region of France was far from the gleaming civilisation of Paris and Vichy, and after the culls of ‘45 and ‘46, it had become an empty, dark place. The Germans had no use for this region, and left it to the devices - and ghoulism - of the Paranormal Division and its creatures. The handful of villages that survived here were fortified affairs now, walled and gated and barred, and only the most critical of industries survived if they were fortunate enough to obtain a gendarmerie guard from the Occupation Government.
Coleman walked, lost in thought, as Wicker led them up stony hills and down mossy, leaf-choked forest paths. The place reminded him of home, of England - of the England that had been before the Germans came.
1942 was the first time the dead walked. The Russian reports were confused and contradictory, and the British agents were hampered by the Soviets’ insistence on keeping them away from things. Moscow fell when the dead from the disastrous winter of ‘41 rose from their graves, and swamped the city in their thousands. Leningrad and Stalingrad followed - the mighty Soviet citadels, overrun by their own dead. In the south, the Libyan desert twitched and stirred, and the dead there did what the living had failed to achieve the year before. Rommel marched into Alexandria by the end of the year.
The next two years were chaos. The Soviet front collapsed, infighting and petty politics turning the communists against each other as they scrambled to make deals with the Germans. In England, there were reports of German paratroopers landing in the countryside, and the dead there too rose. Coleman received a last frantic letter from his family outside Cornwall, and then he was on a boat to Ireland. Buckingham Palace signed the surrender documents after that, while Churchill fled to Canada. Ireland played up their neutrality, like Spain, and managed to escape an invasion - but the Germans sent their agents over anyway, and one by one the resistance members and “government in exile” voices fell silent. No-one was brave enough to make a fuss about it.
The Americans sued for peace in December of 1944. They had no bases in Europe any longer, and the fighting in the Pacific had achieved nothing. The Germans agreed, everyone shook hands, and the Atlantic became mostly peaceful again. It was a big ocean to carry a grudge over.
Wicker’s hiss broke Coleman out of his reverie. They had approached the edge of the forest, and the distant outlines and hazy smoke lines of the village of Sains Grieu swam through the fog and the murk ahead. The two men found a landmark to stash their backpacks, unwrapped their weapons to do a last ammunition check, and then carefully transferred the waxed dynamite sticks to their knapsacks. The rain had not let up, nor had it gotten worse, and the pervasive damp was raising all manner of paranoid alarms in the back of Coleman’s head. The Sten would not like it - nor would the explosives. Coleman had a backup revolver, but in a firefight it was barely one step above having a letter-opener. You were already royally sunk if things deteriorated to that point.
In his coat pocket, the journal with the drawings and the phrases still waited, wrapped in its waterproofing. The voices were silent now, for once.
Lightened and with weapons in hand, the two snuck the rest of the way in. Wicker had a knack for finding gaps and spaces to move between the foliage, while Coleman felt like every branch and twig and errant bit of foliage somehow ended up in his face. The Englishman gritted his teeth and pushed on, trying to not lose sight of the flitting Scot ahead of him. Raindrops rolled down the back of his collar, icy cold against the sweat from the ruck march, and the forest floor swallowed his feet up to the ankles, soft moss parting and shifting as his boots came down.
The cemetery was surprisingly large for the size of the village, and was located at least partially up the side of one of the small hills that dotted the area. Coleman’s first look at the overgrown space left him with an impression of blackened trees, heavy bramble hedges growing up and over rocky walls, and a strange procession of tombstones that twisted and tilted in every which way. A neck-high stone boundary wall looped around it all, the grey stones capped with wicked cast-iron spears that seemed to keep the clouds propped up from below. There appeared to be little reason or rhyme to the outlay of the place, and while Wicker loped down the boundary wall to look for a gate, Coleman burrowed into one of the wall-hugging shrubs and used this hidden vantage point to peer over the wall and study the cemetery’s interior.
What was it about this place? Coleman could not put his finger on it, but the longer he looked at it, the more it felt like there was something pulling at the edge of his vision whenever he looked for too long at any one area. Random jumbles of headstones would suddenly seem to form a pattern just aching at the edge of recognition - and then he would blink, and the fog would shift, and the pattern was gone. A black tree split in two as he watched, the trunks widening and moving away from each other as if born on the backs of some subterranean beast - but then they were one again, and dripping silently and unmoving in the grey that swirled over the ground.
Coleman felt his mind starting to spin into the pattern of dread that he had come to associate with the practice fields of Dublin. There was an energy here, something that spoke to the journal that lurked against his chest, and it was reaching out for him with fingers of ice and fear.
Wicker was at his side the next moment, silent as a ghost, and Coleman’s lurch of surprise almost sent him toppling back onto his backside.
“I found a way in. There’s an old breach about a half-mile thataway,” The Scot pointed back the way he had come from. “The rest of the wall is brambles and spikes all the way, we’re not getting over it without a fight.”
“Any signs of life?”
“Dead quiet, all the way. The main gate looks to be past our breach, I reckon the main focus will be there.” The Scot had his Enfield in hand, the rifle cradled expertly under his one arm, and with the other hand he dug up a handful of muck from the forest floor. “Put this on your face, and then we can go.”
Coleman shuddered at the touch of the slimy soil and leaves against his skin, and soon both men were muddied and darkened. The sun, long lost to the clouds overhead, had been sinking towards an unseen horizon all afternoon, and the gloom of evening was fast approaching.
“So, professor - are you ready for this?” Wicker’s voice was low when they were finally ready to set out.
“Can I lie and say yes?” Coleman tried to smile, but instead of relief felt only the trickle of mud down his cheeks. “I do not have great faith in our chances.”
“I have great faith in this,” Wicker replied, and patted his bag of dynamite. “It’s not every night I get to hunt Germans, and I have never - in the entire history of my family line - heard of anyone in my family who has hunted the beast that we face tonight.”
“An interesting perspective, for sure,” Coleman muttered.
The Scot grinned toothily again.
“Come now, professor - how often do you get to tell people that you spent your summer hunting necromancers in France?”
“Hopefully never, if we survive this - and then hopefully never, because of all the paperwork we signed.” Coleman sighed, and rolled his shoulders to try and lessen the tension there. “You know we can never talk about this, to anyone.”
“I know, I know. So we better make sure it’s a big beast then, to match the size of the secret.” Wicker winked, and set off down the side of the wall. Coleman gave one last look at the cemetery on the other side, then crossed himself briefly before setting off after the Scot.
In his jacket pocket, the journal voices started speaking again.
They sounded hungry.