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World War 2 - Blog Posts
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>japanese contemporary history lessons
yes man.
(via Tumbling)
(via Tumbling)
German soldiers at the point of collecting trophies inspect the captured Belgian anti-tank ACS T13
(via Tumbling)
PzKpfw IV 12th Panzer division SS “Hitler youth” in Cannes, June 1944.
(via Tumbling)
Captured French Renault R35 tanks in the service in the panzerwaffe.
(via Tumbling)
Captured French tank Hotchkiss H-35, equipped with snow plough.
For Your Own Good
Albus fished in his pockets for something to give the man. "I don't suppose you'd care for a spearmint humbug...?" Albus trailed off pathetically as the man gave him a baleful stare and moved on. Albus sighed and rubbed his short, auburn hair. It was only just growing back in.
"Stop fussing," his date said.
"Nervous habit," Albus sighed again and forced a smile.
"Look, there's nothing you can do for the poor beggers, as much as you try." His date seemed half amused, half exasperated.
Albus smiled thinly. "There's no harm in trying."
The golden haired youth looped an arm through Albus', and together they set off down the cobbled lane. After several strides into the dark alley, Albus found himself pressed up against the crumbling brick of a high wall as his date leaned in to kiss him.
"Jeremy, we'll be caught."
"So what? You can just, you know..." Jeremy mimed aiming, and then blasting, with his right hand.
"That would violate I don't know how many laws." That was a lie. Albus knew exactly how many it would violate, but speaking of them would only make his transgression of the first, the most vital law, all the worse; the Statute of Secrecy.
"Come on, Al. We fought in the fucking war. We died in the war. We've earned the right to enjoy a bit of freedom. It's 1945, for chrissakes!" This emphatic speech was undermined somewhat by the furtive dark of their surrounds.
They stood against one another, breathing loudly into the quiet. Albus leaned in and placed a gentle kiss on Jeremy's mouth. "You're right. Of course, you're right. I've been living with secrets for so long, I've become rather accustomed to it." Jeremy looked Albus in the eye, naked pain and anger mixed with the deep exhaustion they all felt. The soldiers of the Second Great War.
Jeremy kissed Albus roughly, desperately, as though trying to draw his magic right out of him through that kiss. As though reaching for a miracle. Albus knew how he felt, returning the kiss with ardour. His hands clawed at Jeremy's shirt, burrowing beneath the thin material to caress his chest. Jeremy was more bold, fumbling with the buckle of Albus' belt.
"Wait, wait not here."
Jeremy groaned in frustration. "Why not?"
"It's cold, and muddy, and it's starting to rain— "
"Look, I'm not a breakfast in bed kind of guy here, Al! I like you, but can't we just have this moment? Here? Now?"
Albus turned his head away, and Jeremy cursed under his breath. "I'm sorry, Al."
"No, I'm sorry Jeremy. You reminded me of someone I had once cared for. Deeply. But I can see now this was a mistake."
Jeremy shook his head and turned to walk away. As he retreated further into the alley, Albus aimed his wand at Jeremy's back. With a whispered word, all memory of Albus was erased from his mind. Jeremy never looked back.
Tears streamed down Albus' face as he wandered the crowded streets, making his way slowly towards the Leaky Cauldron. Breaking his final Sickle on a Firewhisky, Albus knocked it back and climbed the stairs to his room.
Albus lay on his bed, realising too late that he had walked the length of London with his fly undone. Albus laughed, placing his hands over his face. Albus unbuckled his belt and reached beneath the waist of his pants. It truly had been a shame, he had liked Jeremy's fervent, if obnoxious and misguided, enthusiasm.
Albus stroked himself, thinking of a different golden haired youth. One recently incarcerated in Nurmengard. Albus pushed aside the grief, the guilt, the raw and maddening lust for power he harboured still, and concentrated on that beautiful face. The one who had smiled so sweetly while uttering those fateful words. Greater good. Albus groaned as he climaxed, not caring that he was still wearing his pants.
He lay for a while longer, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, spilling down his face to pool on the pillow.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Gellert," he whispered. "It was for your own good."
With grateful thanks
how i feel after being the only person to post under the MLD tag for a whole year now (all my MLD posts get 0 notes) (the only other person in the fandom deactivated) ☺️☺️☺️☺️
One piece of media that totally changed my perspective is Viktor Frankl’s "Man's Search for Meaning." His story hit hard. Frankl talks about how he found purpose even in the darkest moments, saying, “When we can’t change a situation, we have to change ourselves". It made me realize that life can throw some serious curveballs, but how we respond is what matters.
He says,“life isn’t unbearable because of circumstances", and that idea flipped a switch for me. Nowadays, whenever I encounter difficulties, I work hard to understand what is the purpose behind it rather than just get stressed about it. I have been able to forgive and have compassion for myself and other people who might find it difficult to understand where I am coming from. To be frank, it is a game changer. 💯💯💯
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song, etc.) that completely changed your perspective on life? How did it impact you?
Do you know what I need? I need a fanfic focused on Wolverine and Captain America during World War Two. Picture it, newbie overexcited Steve doing his best to represent the US overseas and already battle hardened Logan committing war crimes left and right with his Canadian comrades.
Steve: It's so nice of you and your unit to be throwing food over to the enemy side. We'll be able to gain their trust and maybe convince them to surrender!
Logan *chuckling*: There won't be much to convince once we start throwing grenades.
Steve: Start throwing what? 😰
We could do everything right, and they'd still think we were dangerous
- We are not free ; Traci Chee.
It is the oldest lighthouse in the United States, which is more than 250 years old. It was built in 1764 and is still in use.
🇺🇲 Remembering the 243,000 U.S. Merchant Mariners (including my father) who served during the Second World War. Special remembrance to the 9,521 who were lost. Lest we forget ⚓⚘.
🇺🇲 Happy 248th Birthday to the United States Navy - Semper Fortis ⚓.
🇺🇸 Remembering actress and patriot Carole Lombard who along with 21 other persons; including her mother, were killed in a plane crash 80 years ago today on Potosi Mountain, Nevada while returning home from a war bond drive🕯.
This week on Showfer.com's #throwbackthursday is Saving Private Ryan! Released on this month 20 years ago, it's a brilliant historical capture of humanity and inhumanity in WWII. Watch now and many more free movies on SHOWFER.COM: https://goo.gl/2tZ7X2
Some more examples of my aviation art. More can be found here.
Faustus '47: Ch. 2 - Darkness
Photo by Veit Hammer on Unsplash
Chapter 2: Darkness
The night’s darkness descended on them as they slowly crept into the cemetery, and soon Caldwell was squinting and swearing under his breath as the Scot ahead of him kept disappearing. The clinging rain-mist that had descended was not helping either. Knee-high grass clung wetly to his legs as he hunched forward, one foot slowly in front of the other, and every so often he found himself suddenly lurching into a gravestone or cast-iron railing around a small family plot. Wicker would turn back and hiss, and Caldwell would slowly fumble onwards in the new direction, trying to home in on the hiss and instead just discovering more gravestones with his kneecaps. The darkness was absolute.
Caldwell felt the grass underfoot changing, becoming shorter, and suddenly he was on what felt like a gravel patch. The grating of the stones overfoot sounded like a gunshot to his straining ears, and Wicker was at his side moments later, gripping his upper arm.
“Careful now. We’re almost in the old Breton district.” Wicker breathed the words into Caldwell’s ear, the sound barely audible over the soft patter of the rain. “It should be over the little rise ahead.”
Caldwell murmured agreement, and wondered how the Scot could see a little rise ahead.
True to his word, after another handful of minutes of slowly shuffling up what felt like an incline, Wicker stopped Caldwell and pulled him down to his knees, and the two crept forward on hands and knees from there. Caldwell kept the Sten slung around his neck, praying that the muzzle or action would not foul on something in the grass they snaked through. The ground was cold and sharp beneath his hands and knees, and his woollen trouser legs were soon soaked through. Pebbles and stray shards of gravel dug into his palms as well, making him grit his teeth at the sharp pains that sporadically flashed up his arms.
After almost colliding head first with another gravestone, the first hint of light ahead crept into Caldwell’s sight. Buttery yellow flickered and twisted through the grass ahead of him, and upon reaching the crest of the rise, he found himself looking down on the Breton district of the Sains Grieu cemetery. Wicker was already there, flat on the wet ground, and pulled Caldwell down beside him to study the scene below.
The Breton district, based on the old records that Caldwell had been able to scrounge up in Ireland, dated back to the time of the Crusades - if not earlier. A long list of noble - and a shorter list of less noble - knights and lords had been buried here in those years, and the centuries since had seen the district expand with more tombs, mouldering mausoleums, and burrowing crypts as others had been laid to rest in the same area. Statues of weeping angels, broken-armed men, and a host of other funeral themes loomed into the night sky here, and only the faint light of the distant lanterns made their outlines visible. Darkness loomed thick and heavy where the light failed to fall, and created a veritable maze between their position and the light ahead.
It was the list of less noble dead that had drawn them here, after the informant message had arrived those weeks ago. The Paranormal Division had been canvassing the French countryside for years now, seeking out old tombs and burial places - but Sains Grieu was different. Sir Jacques Montbard was allegedly buried there - the same man who had, according to the rumours, sold his soul to the djinns of Persia during the Crusade, and returned a changed man. The story had been legend and myth for centuries, recorded as a footnote in the serious histories of the Crusades - until Caldwell and the other researchers in Dublin made the link between the stories told of Montbard, and those coming out of Occupied Europe. What the stories recounted of Montbard and his deeds in France had sounded like pure fiction - until 1942 changed everything.
Someone else had made the connection too, though, which was what brought Caldwell and Wicker to this place. More lights were going up in the distance, achieving little more than multiplying the number of shadows and pools of darkness that lay ahead of them, and after a signal from Wicker they both set off down the other side of the rise. The grass here was shorter and thinner, and crawling along on their bellies took them into the shadowy alleys between the tombs in no time. Here, over moss-caked gravel and through standing puddles of water, they wend their way steadily closer, until eventually they found themselves at the perimeter of the light. Drawing up close behind a gravestone, Caldwell took a moment to check the muzzle and action of his weapon, fumbling through the motions with cold, stiff fingers, before turning his attention to the sight ahead.
There were seven of them.
Four were regular footmen, clad in bulky field-grey trench coats and with the lantern light gleaming off their rain-streaked coal-scuttle helmets. They had rifles slung across their backs, and were hauling more lantern stands into position from a stack of crates further away. Drops of rain glistened on their equipment and on the damp patches on their coats, but they worked in silence, without complaint.
The other three were as different as could be. The first was a field chaplain, with a purple sash around his neck that reached down almost to his knees. A peaked cap gave him no protection from the rain, and the medals on his chest glittered wetly. He stood with head bowed, as if in prayer - Caldwell thought he could see his lips moving, but the distance was too great to be certain.
The second was one of what the reports were calling necromancers. His uniform was black from head to toe, and a leather coat hung around his shoulders like bat wings. He too wore a peaked cap, but where the death’s head of the SS would usually leer there was instead an eye symbol in silvery metal, lined with purple. The same purple eye was visible on the collars of the four footmen, and had become the unique identifier of the Paranormal Division in 1942 already. By now, five years later, it usually evoked feelings of bowel-churning terror wherever it surfaced.
An articulated, cable-clad gauntlet covered the left hand and much of the left arm of the necromancer, and a faint blue glow emanated from the shoulder area where it was strapped onto the man. Caldwell squinted and tried to see what powered the device, but the telltale cables which usually linked them to a generator of some kind, were conspicuously absent for this unit.
Wicker nudged Caldwell, and pointed at the third figure.
“Is that our contact?” The Scot’s eyes were large in his darkened face, and Caldwell could only give a grim-faced nod in return.
The third figure was Codename Merida, and she was already soaking wet. Clad in only a thin white shift, and with her hands bound together in front of her, the Special Operations Executive agent knelt on the ground between the necromancer and the chaplain. A livid bruise covered one side of her face, where it was visible under her wet, dark hair, and a fabric strip had been used to gag her quite thoroughly.
In the centre of attention, ringed by the lantern rigs, stood a waist-high stone casket partially overgrown with vines. A stone statue of a knight, depicted in Crusader grab and almost black with lichen, stood with arms and sword raised behind it, warding off a sun that had already fled hours before. The lanterns around it limned the statue in orange and yellow, and its outline blurred and shifted in the thin veils of rain that swept down.
The rain tapered off just as the last lanterns got hauled into position, and when their lights were finally lit, the four footmen began to spool out reels of copper wire, connecting each lantern rig to the other via some complex pattern. Caldwell followed their movement like a hawk, drawing a mental image of the copper outline as it took shape, and when they were halfway done he could already see what the final design would be: a giant septagram, each arm tipped by a lantern rig, and with a large ovoid eye shape in the middle, centred around the casket. The reason for the oil lanterns, and the lack of generator lines on the necromancer’s gauntlet, suddenly fell into place in the professor’s mind: they were crafting the Eye of Ankara, a ritual that was notoriously troubled by the presence of mechanical machines.
Whatever they wanted to do here, was going to be a highly sensitive ritual.
A plan began to unfold in Caldwell’s mind as he studied the setup, and when the footmen were briefly on the other side of the clearing, he rolled sideways and ended up next to Wicker. The Scot was a puddle of darkness and mud, invisible except for the whites of his eyes. Caldwell realised that the man’s Enfield was aimed unerringly at the necromancer, and hastily clapped his one hand over the rifle’s rear sight.
“Don’t shoot until I give the signal.” It was Caldwell’s turn to hiss, and it took a long moment before Wicker’s eyes shifted from the Germans and met the professor’s. Caldwell saw blackness there, blacker than the night that surrounded them, and the cobwebbed voices in his head seemed to titter with glee. “They are going to use Merida as some part of this ceremony, but before that there is going to be a lot of talking and ritual. I need you on the other side of the clearing, behind that angel with the missing head. Wait for my signal there.” Caldwell pointed to where he wanted Wicker to move, and after a brief moment the Scot grunted and lowered his rifle. He scuttled sideways behind another gravestone, drawing his rifle close to his body, and was gone from sight a moment later. Caldwell blinked and squinted hard into the darkness, but there was no sight the man had ever been there.
In the ring of lights, the necromancer barked an order at the footmen once they were done with the copper spools, and the four men retreated out of the circle to where the distant supply crates squatted in the dark. The man’s voice was low and hard, and when he ordered the chaplain to the head of the stone casket, Caldwell caught a glimpse of hard blue eyes flashing below the black cap. The recruitment and training programme that produced these men for the Paranormal Division was a great mystery to Caldwell and his colleagues, although it seemed to favour candidates that were cold, calculating, and very much in control of every encounter and event they partook in. Shrieking demagogues and bloodthirsty lunatics did not seem to pass into their ranks.
Caldwell shifted, trying to make himself more comfortable atop the grave mound he was lying on, and gently drew the journal from his jacket pocket as the three figures in the septagram moved into position. Merida, still kneeling, was dragged to her feet by the necromancer and taken to the foot of the casket, where a loose end of one of the copper wires was quickly wrapped around her left forearm. The Crusader statue loomed over her, as cold and as silent as the hands that worked the copper wire. Caldwell waited - prayed - for her to struggle and resist, but the woman was limp and unresponsive to the hands that dealt with her. Whatever the interrogators had done to her, had taken its toll, and now she could only shiver in her wet shift.
One of the lanterns guttered and suddenly went out, right in front of the headless angel where Caldwell had directed Wicker. The professor found himself holding his breath as one of the footmen hurried up, tinkered with the lantern to relight it, and then returned to his previous post. Caldwell thought he could see two eyes gleaming in the dark behind the statue, but it was probably his imagination. Wicker would not be seen until he wanted to be seen.
With his journal opened before him, Caldwell slowly paged through it until he found the section containing the Ankara notes. The lantern light was fragmented and dim here, between the gravestones, and he had to squint hard to make the letters on the page focus. It was one of the rituals they had discovered second-hand from sources here in Europe, and had never managed to replicate in Dublin. It always seemed to fail at a critical moment - after they learnt to do it far away from anything mechanical and moving - and the longer Caldwell studied the scene in front of him, the more he began to suspect the reason for their failures.
They had never tested it with a human sacrifice.
At the casket, with Merida finally secured and the chaplain still standing with his head bowed, the necromancer positioned himself at the midpoint between the two, and began to speak in a clear, sharp voice. His German was only mildly accented - Caldwell placed him around the eastern side of Berlin within a few words - and carried through the lit clearing with ease. With Merida on his left, and the chaplain on his right, the necromancer stood looking across the casket - almost directly at where Caldwell lay, and the professor had a disconcerting moment of terror when he imagined that the German was actually looking right at him.
The German words soon snapped over into something else, something Slavic, and Caldwell felt his eyes drawn to matching phrases on the journal pages. The paper seemed to shiver under his fingertips, vibrating in sympathy to the words being uttered, and the first outward sign of the building power was when the lanterns started to dim.
Merida’s damp shape seemed to come to her senses at that time, and she began to struggle, but the necromancer clamped his gauntlet onto the back of her neck and kept chanting, never missing a beat. Caldwell could see the pain etched across the woman’s face even across the clearing, but between her bonds, the copper tying her into the septagram, and the gauntlet on her neck, she could go nowhere.
The chaplain lifted his head at the same time and started chanting something in Latin, words that Caldwell could only half-hear, as a counterpoint to the chanting from the necromancer. Frantically trying to memorise the phrases, Caldwell did not even notice the copper wires starting to glow - until the lanterns suddenly popped out, and the blue glow of the septagram was the only light left in the clearing.
That, and Merida’s shrieking as her forearm began to glow and wither.
Faustus '47: Ch. 1 - Fibres
Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash
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
Caldwell 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. 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, Caldwell had breathed a sigh of relief. Dropping Wicker into the wilds seemed to be the only way to keep the man sane.
Caldwell 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 Caldwell had seen in a long time.
“I found them. On the northern road, heading east. Purple pennants on all the cars,” the Scot burred. Caldwell 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.” Caldwell 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.”
Caldwell 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. His woollen commando cap went on last, keeping the inclement weather mostly at bay.
“Good enough. Let’s get this done with, then.” Caldwell 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 Caldwell 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 1945 and ‘46, it had become an empty, dark place. The Germans had little 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 against the night. Only the most critical of industries survived if they were fortunate enough to obtain a gendarmerie guard from the Occupation Government.
Caldwell 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. Communism could not admit to failure or weakness - every comrade knew this. Moscow fell when the dead from the disastrous winter of ‘41 rose from their graves, and swamped the city in their thousands. Stalin disappeared, rumours took his place. 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, and the eagle of the Reich flew over the Nile.
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. Caldwell received a last frantic letter from his family outside Cornwall, and then he was on a boat to Ireland. Poison gas fell on the cities from bombers at night, and the dead would rise by morning. 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. Russia had fallen as well, and the Lend-Lease ships turned around and went home. The Germans agreed, everyone shook hands, and the Atlantic became mostly peaceful again - at least on the surface. It was a big ocean to carry a grudge over.
Wicker’s hiss broke Caldwell 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. Its boundary walls were wooden palisades over a brick base, with lone watchtowers swimming in the fog. Blind sentinels that watched the forest, yet saw little. The two men found a lightning-struck tree as 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 Caldwell’s head. The Sten would not like it - nor would the explosives. Caldwell 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. Caldwell did not trust those voices.
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 Caldwell 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. Caldwell’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 rhyme or reason to the layout of the place, and while Wicker loped down the boundary wall to look for a gate, Caldwell burrowed into one of the wall-hugging shrubs. His hidden vantage point allowed him to peer over the wall and study the cemetery’s interior, the iron spears beading with moisture this close to his face.
What was it about this place? Caldwell 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.
Caldwell 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 Caldwell’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.”
Caldwell 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?” Caldwell 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,” Caldwell 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.” Caldwell 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. Caldwell 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.