So when the body struggled to its feet and turned towards us, no-one knew what the Devil was going on.
A writing genre that I am particularly fond of, is that peculiar intersection of Lovecraft with World War 2. Imagine Indiana Jones finding not the lost Ark of the Covenant, but instead some cosmic horror from an uncharted Pacific island; imagine the Ahnenerbe or Thule Society discovering Thor’s hammer and using it in the campaign in Russia to open a portal that brings the frost giants to our world; imagine a world where the very real human horrors of WW2 are made even worse by the addition of some eldritch, ancient horror…
I have dabbled in this genre many times over the past 10+ years for one simple reason: I was following the old adage of ‘Write what you know’. I have had an interest in military history going back to the first time I was able to grasp a book and look at pictures - my youth was filled with countless hours pouring over reference books that detailed tanks, weapons, aircraft, and every imaginable topic from both the first and second World Wars, and as I grew older that interest expanded into the US-Vietnam War and other conflicts as well. Similarly, after a teenage introduction to H.P. Lovecraft, I found myself thoroughly absorbed by his work, and spent hours reading and re-reading my Penguin Classic copies of his various collected works.
The union of the two topics seemed quite obvious to me, after that, and my first short story on the combined topic was written early in 2012, titled ‘The Nuremberg Diary’. It detailed the story of a German officer, condemned and about to be executed for war crimes, who spends the last nights before his execution writing his account of what really happened in that one fateful village in France. Years later, when a similar event happens again - this time in West Germany, involving US troops - the diary is found, and referenced by the investigators looking into the West German case.
Numerous other short stories followed, all exploring the Lovecraftion topic and theme within the setting of the ongoing WW2, and I soon managed to collect a double handful of stories with - I hope! - a broadly similar feeling.
The titular story from this post, ‘The Shamblers of Telboshnya’, is told from the viewpoint of a German squad in the interior of Russia, somewhere in 1942. In the vast emptiness of the German-occupied Russian hinterlands, they are about to have an eldritch encounter of their own…
We were some miles south of the village when the call came in. Some disturbance with the villagers, and a crowd of them had pulled up to the local command post. No violence - yet - but the situation was tense.
I had just relieved myself behind one of the roadside hedges - it was not much of a road, and the hedge was not much better either - and was busy squelching my way back to the car when Kroller called to me from the open hatches on the top.
“Fritz, hurry up! Command is calling, we need to head back!” He filled me in on the story then, ducking back into the turret as I clambered up the side of the car, and I had heard the whole thing by the time I had finished scrubbing my boots.
It was not much of a story, at that point.
“So why does this affect us? We’re on patrol, they know that.”
“Ja, ach... What is there to say? They think we can help.” Kroller fiddled with the radio dial while Bergermann continued to whistle his tuneless song - he had been doing it since we left the village some hours earlier, and I had been tempted to stamp on his head several times - and it took me only a few moments, born from years of practice, to swing inside the turret and into my seat besides the cannon.
Bergermann put us into gear and we lurched off, wheels churning up mud and thin, frost-choked weeds from the nearby field as we turned and headed back the way we had come. The sun was on the horizon, sinking slowly and casting long shadows over the few open fields that we passed, while the patches of forest blocked the sun completely and threw thick curtains of darkness across our path. We were some distance from the front, and while the partisan threat was not to be ignored, we could at least use our headlights with some degree of safety.
Funny how those two beams of light could make such a difference.
As we headed north, jolting around the inside of the car, Kroller received several more radio reports and relayed them to us as they finished. Over the drone of the Maybach in the back, the story that unfolded was quite surreal, and the feeling of detachment - that same feeling that catches one whilst dreaming, when you recognize the dream nature for what it is, but still do not have the power to break it - that swept over me as I listened was the beginning of the dread that would overtake me later, in the woods.
Apparently, and so Kroller told, a girl had gone missing from the village. Not a surprising thing in itself, for there were soldiers billeted there, and they were capricious creatures when it came to womenfolk - but this one was special somehow. She was the granddaughter of the old Orthodox priest that lived in the village, whose father ran the local garage - an insult to any other garage I have ever visited, by comparison - and whose mother baked for our mess on occasion. I had only the vaguest of ideas of what she looked like at the time, remembering a shy, dark-haired girl that had accompanied her mother several times when visiting our camp, but I would be lying if I could remember exactly what she looked like.
Her disappearance would not have raised this much of a furore if it was not for the fact that her man friend - a euphemism the peasants used for any male lover that was not officially a fiance - had also disappeared at the same time, but then been found by the mother.
Found with his head, feet and hands missing, and the body lying in a blood-lined circle at the local spring. It was a quiet place, the way I remembered it from my off-duty times, a clearing of calf-high grass some twelve or fifteen metres across and bordered by the dark trunks of the forest, and I struggled then, in the confines of the car, to consolidate the two images with each other. The spring was in the one corner of the clearing, and was a favourite visiting place for the younger people of the village, as well as the couples - our patrols there regularly walked in on trysts in the thick undergrowth that mantled the ground just outside the clearing.
The man friend I did not know, but my mental image was of one of the typical Slavic peasants, with slightly swarthy skin and black hair, simple clothes in dull colours, and probably a beard of some kind. Local tradition no longer went quite as far as arranged marriages, but he had probably known the missing girl since childhood, growing up with her and being like a son to her parents.
His body had been drained of blood, which had then been used for two things: a circle had been drawn around his mutilated body, and the rest of the blood had been dumped in the spring. It was not a very strong spring, and the off-flow trickled away deeper into the forest in a general north-westerly direction - but apparently the addition of blood had been so severe that the pool was still red at this time. The villagers had been shrieking and moaning around the clearing, not daring to enter it and remove the body, until Wessel and his squad arrived to chase them away and secure the body.
“A message from the partisans maybe? Did he collaborate with us?” I mused out loud in one of the intervals when the radio fell silent. Kroller had linked myself and Bergermann into the radio channel, and we heard the news as it came to us, although Bergermann did not partake in the conversation that ebbed around the reports.
“Everyone here collaborates, if you want to take the Bolsheviks’ viewpoint on it. We have never had this kind of reaction from them though.”
“I heard they executed several locals at Kresni, when they told the garrison there of the plot to blow the rail line. Shot them in a line on one of the patrol routes.”
“Yes, shot them. Not decapitate and drain them,” Kroller snorted, and went back to tweaking the radio dials. “These people are truly not human. Barbarians, the lot of them.”
Incited by whatever significance the locals saw in this act, they had converged on the local garrison command post, and demanded that action be taken. What, and against whom, took some time in getting from them, but eventually a name and a location came back to us, and the reason for our involvement in the foolishness - or so I thought at the time, callous as it makes me sound now - became clear.
Hermit Zyenka, in the forest south of the Kravin-36 route.
Bergermann was the first to react to this news, grunting from the depths of the car’s nose in such a vile manner that both myself and Kroller gave a start.
“Fucking peasants! We have to drive out Wehrmacht petrol to some forest hut in the middle of nowhere, so that we can talk to some crazy bastard?”
I was speechless for a moment, and then had to laugh. The mood had been edging towards the grim side for several minutes now as the last reports came in, and Bergermann’s outbreak was enough of a contrast to change things quite effectively.
“Ploesti is just south of here, we can always get more Red petrol,” I joked, feeling my smile tug across a face that was, after a long day of patrolling, starting to feel the fatigue. “And when it comes to crazy hermits, I’m sure this Zeni or whatever his name is - Zyenya? Zyenka? - will be nothing special.”
“Crazy men living in the woods, talking to themselves and giving names to the trees - you know what they are like,” Kroller added, muttering a last affirmative to command before dialling the set down. “He’ll probably be asleep by the time we get there, and then it’ll be the Devil’s work to get him...”
“Do we even speak Russian?” Bergermann interrupted, and I realised that he had a point. We had all picked up a smattering of Russian from our time in the field, mostly curses and toasts and things like that, but none of us spoke the language fluently. Especially not for what would effectively be an interrogation, albeit a very simple one.
No-one professed a sudden proficiency with the peasants’ language, and aside from a few parroted curses and invectives in Russian, the inside of the car soon fell silent again. The drive to the Kravin-36 route would take the better part of an hour, and all of us were feeling the exhaustion of the day. The area we had to keep a watch on was a godless stretch of forests and marshes, muddy lanes and thin rivers that trickled north and west, and our patrols took hours to complete. With the Zyenka detour added, it would be well after sunset before we even arrived at the hermit’s place.
At the time, I felt an unreasonable hope that we would not be able to find the hermit, that the path would be obstructed or obscured or just plain not there when we arrived, but it was a foolish hope. Command had given us an order, and carry it out we would. Another part of me wondered at the hasty nature of the order, and whether Command was not merely humouring the villagers. After all, as Bergermann had pointed out, none of us were proficient in Ivan’s tongue, and talking to the hermit would be no mean feat.
Perhaps we would get more orders later, but they never came - and I wonder now whether it was not because of this particular affair on Kravin-36 that the radio failed.
We had been driving for the better part of an hour, twisting and bumping and ploughing through trails that alternated between stony and muddied, when the figure loomed ahead in the headlights. I was dozing at the gun controls, in that mindful yet semi-catatonic state that any soldier on campaign will soon learn as the opportunities for sleep dwindle, and Kroller was fiddling with the radio. Bergermann had stopped his whistling, but now swore colourfully as he stepped on the brakes, bringing the car to a slewing halt not ten metres distant from the shape in the road.
“It’s the middle of nowhere, and this bastard has to sit down in the middle of the road!” The car’s horn blared - a violation of our normal noise rules, and very indicative of our mood - and then blared again, Bergermann pulling furiously at the lever. “Look at this bastard!”
Hunched over in the most peculiar of positions and places, the man - for the figure wore the common peasant garb, we now saw in the lights - looked like he had been crossing from one side of the road to the other before stopping in the middle, going down on his knees, and then bending his torso forward until his head was also on the ground. His arms were at his sides, stretched backwards past his hips and bended knees, and his hands had the black tinge of frostbite on them.
“Wait. It could be the partisans. They leave traps like this.”
“Damned ghoulish trap to leave, even for them,” I replied to Kroller’s caution, stretching over the gun to one of the observation slits in the side of the turret. I could feel my own fatigue starting to recede, carried away by the sudden increase in heart rate that I had come to associate with incipient battle, but my fingers were still slow as I levered the slit wider. “He looks fresh.”
“Fresh from the grave, ja - look at all that dirt on him. Bastard looks like he ploughed a field in those clothes.” Bergermann’s observation was quite apt, and I shifted my attention to study the surrounding area.
For a trap, the stretch of road was as perfect as any of the forested lanes we had driven through that day. Trees crowded in on either side of the road, leaving only a thin strip of mud and a mostly-submerged layer of stones for the road, and the darkness that followed immediately after sunset lay thick about us. The headlights threw two wide fingers of yellow light down the road, illuminating the body and drawing its shadow away from us, while doing little to expose the flanking trees. Anything could have hidden amongst those trunks.
As precaution, we pulled back a distance and commenced to rake the surrounding trees with machine-gun fire. A cautiousness had gripped us all, and no-one wanted to use the pintle-mounted gun that swung above the turret, so we used the coaxial gun and fired off bursts into the trees. Splinters flew and orange-white tracers skipped off into the depths of the wood, lighting up flashes of dark ground and darker trees, too quick for the eye to follow, as they travelled.
Nothing moved.
Our last move was to machine-gun the body, a quick burst that I felt kicking against my hand as the gun spat out one-two-three bullets in quick succession, and a spray of mud and material showed where the rounds struck flesh and tunnelled right through the body. If there had been any grenades or bombs in or underneath the body, they would surely have gone off at that point.
So when the body struggled to its feet and turned towards us, no-one knew what the Devil was going on.
Thanks for reading - tune in next week for Part 2! Remember to like, share and subscribe if you enjoy my work and want to read more of it.