[indent][indent][indent][center][img]https://i.ibb.co/zHmr9FML/589c898b64b351149f22a858-1.png[/img][/center]When I first discovered roleplaying as a teenager, I had already gotten into the habit of writing by hand in my notebooks (and sometimes just on whatever scrap of paper was handy!), and would write the majority of my posts that way as well before typing them into the computer. Most of these stories never concluded (or even got off the ground), as is the roleplayers curse, but I would always save whatever I had written in a shoebox under my bed to read again later.

While almost all of those orphaned tales have been lost over the years of moving and decluttering, I do have many an unfinished yarn in Ye Olde Google Docs, some of them from roleplays that ended too soon, some from projects I've abandoned (or perhaps temporarily shelved — time will only tell!), and I figured there was no harm in sharing them here for anyone who wanted to read (and, perhaps, as writing samples.)

My first excerpt is from [i]The Black Douve[/i], a historical cosmic horror novel I used as an excuse to hyper-fixate on the (very interesting, very [u]difficult[/u]) lives and work of WWI tunnelers for a month, only to produce a prologue before hitting a brick wall on where I wanted to take the story next. I'll probably write the rest of it when I retire, if I somehow manage to retire before I'm 97. 

Cheers! 

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[b]AUGUST 28, 1916[/b]
[b]WEST FLANDERS, BELGIUM[/b]

Eighty feet beneath No Man's Land, Corporal Franklin Creed inched his way along the shoring timbers, helmet bumping the ceiling every third lurch, sweat stinging his eyes and mixing with the sour reek of carbide. Past the last proper set, the gallery was a bastard child: too high for a crawl, too low to crouch, a spur in the clay built by men desperate to live and just as likely to die in it. Frank braced one shoulder against a beam slick with weeping water and pushed his boots into the blue clay, levering forward in a worm-like sprawl.

Behind him, Gladdis's breath hitched into a familiar rhythm, a soft "da-dum, da-dum" that vibrated the cramped air between them. The notes slipped through the darkness, faint but unmistakable, until Frank's jaw clenched at the recognition of those rising tones.

"[i]It's a long way to Tipper[/i]—"

Frank contorted his neck to shoot a look behind him. "Pipe down, for Christ's sake," he hissed, barely a breath. "Keep it up and the Jerries'll have us pinpointed before they've finished their morning tea."

The humming died at once, swallowed by the close dark. Only their breathing and the wet drag of elbows and knees remained. Above and below, the world shivered with distant detonations, each one sending a gentle rain of powdered earth onto Frank's neck.

"You hear that, Creed?" Gladdis's voice came in a low rasp, smothered by mud and the yards of war above them.

Frank listened. There. Faint, separate from their own scrape and shuffle. Picks, somewhere up ahead but higher, a different rhythm than theirs. The taps didn't match the brittle percussion of British steel on timber; this was softer, cautious. He pressed his palm to the wall and let his nerves do the listening. For a second, he felt nothing but the slow pulse of his own blood, then, there. A faint shiver through the packed blue, a tickle that crawled from his fingers up to the hinge of his jaw.

He spat grit. "Jerries. Ten feet above us, maybe less. Listening gallery. Close. Too close."

Frank tapped two quick knuckles against the nearest prop--quiet, listen--and angled his chin at Gladdis. "Next bag you tram back, you tell the sarge at the shaft: Jerries are close overhead. If their picks stop, we pull back to the last set."

Behind him came a clumsy shuffle, then Gladdis's boot jammed against the back of Frank's thigh, nearly catching him where it would've hurt most. "Can't be just a listening post, mate, not with that racket. They're coming to blow our arseholes to Berlin." More coughing, a sound that always made Frank grind his teeth, because Gladdis's lungs were half-shot from gassing, but he refused every evacuation order.

Frank thumbed the tiny screw on his belt lamp until the carbide flame shrank to a trembling blue pinprick. His fingers left wet smudges on the metal. The darkness rushed in, pressing against his eyelids, filling his nostrils with sour fuel and the close, human reek that never quite left these tunnels. When he inhaled, he could taste the battlefield above: the coppery sweetness after artillery, the thick rot of something big lying up there since the last push. Along the props ran the air pipe, tied off to each set; somewhere back in the shaft-head dugout, a blower worried it forward, sending only the thinnest draught into the close dark.

He cupped his hand around the lamp, choking the spill of light, and listened again. The German tapping went on, steady as a metronome behind the earth. Counting him. Counting all of them.

Ahead, the gallery kinked like a broken finger, left, right, then plunged into deeper dark. Frank dug his boot heels into the clay, felt it give beneath him as he slid forward on his belly. His fingertips probed the shadows, twitching at every pebble and flint. Something wormlike burst from the wall beside his ear, too pale to belong at this depth, writhing and slick, smearing a cold line across his cheek before he could flinch away.

Two lengths ahead, at the face, Somers was waiting. Smaller than most, a scrap of a lad with a nervous jaw and eyes like burnt coal. Best digger in the section, even if he pissed himself every time the roof creaked. He lay with his shoulders nestled into the wooden cross, boots braced, whispering to the wall, one ear pressed so hard into the clay he'd leave an impression.

Frank reached him and put a hand to his ankle. "How close?"

Somers looked up, wild-eyed in the dim. "They're moving--backward? Not closer, not now. But I think they're planting something. Picks went quiet, then I heard tamping, sandbags, maybe. Heard the charge set. Small one, but--"

Frank nodded, already doing the sums. "Camouflet."

The Bluff, Railway Wood: stories of whole working parties snuffed out in the dark, no crater, no glory, just a pencilled line wiped off some engineer's map. If it had been close enough, they'd have felt more than that first dull shiver. That was the theory.

He ran his thumb along the nearest prop, feeling for a tremor. The timber was steady under his glove. For now.

"We finish the round," he said. "Two at the face, no more. Gladdis, you keep your ear on the props at the last set. If you hear them pull back, you haul us out. Then we see what the Captain says about staying down here."

Gladdis crowded up behind them, shoulders wedged between timber and clay, his lamp held tight to his chest to choke the glow. "If Jerry's throwing camouflets this close, don't you think we ought to be headed the other bloody way, Corp?"

Frank shook his head. "We're under orders to shore it and keep it. They want this branch back in hand under La Petite Douve by Friday." He didn't bother adding that the officers didn't give a shit which poor sods did the holding. Half these drives were bait, busywork to keep Jerry occupied. Somewhere, back up the main gallery, fifty thousand pounds of ammonal already sat wired and waiting under the farm; this little spur was just another line on a map.

Somers shivered. "I don't like the ground here, Corporal Creed, sir." His voice cracked on the honorific, betraying his sixteen years. He dug his fingers into a lump of clay, kneading it, then brought it to his nose. "Did you see the striations, sir? All wavy-like, as if—" He swallowed. "As if someone took a spoon and stirred it all about."

Frank grunted, but he'd noticed too. The layers didn't line up right. Some old violence had twisted the hill, left fault lines like scars. He pressed his fingers into a seam, felt a faint warmth, maybe a chemical reaction or maybe just blood moving under his own skin.

From the end of the gallery came their own sounds now: the scrape of boots, the hush of breath as the last shift made way. Each man took his turn at the face until his thighs started to shake, then swapped out with the bagger or the trammer. Frank slid past Somers and settled himself into the digging rig, a tilted board wedged against the clay, his shoulders snugged back into it. He raised his feet until his boot soles found the narrow tang of the grafting spade already wedged into the wall.

"Right," he murmured. "Let's get on."

He drove his heels forward. The spade bit into the blue with a soft, wet chunk. He pulled it back with his hands, scooping the loosened spit of clay into the waiting sandbag Somers held between his knees. Another thrust, another spit. Somers wriggled back a pace at a time, passing the heavy bag to Gladdis. Gladdis would tram it on, dragging it along the cramped gallery floor like a corpse.

Frank kept his rhythm jagged on purpose. Three quick kicks, pause. Two more, pause. Sometimes he stopped entirely and let the earth talk, ears straining for the lighter, higher scrape of German picks above. The section had had it drummed into them: the quieter you were, the longer you breathed.

After fifteen minutes, the air turned cold. A crawling cold, worse than the ordinary chill of depth, climbed his hands and chewed along his spine. The spade met something new. Not soft clay, not crushed bone or old timber, but a dead, hard echo that made his jaw ache. He eased the tool free and tapped the wall with the handle, careful and slow. A dull, close sound. No give.

"Hold," he breathed.

Somers froze, the half-filled bag sagging between his knees. Gladdis stopped his slow retreat and listened.

Frank brushed the face clean with his gloved hand, squinting into the guttering lamp. The spade had scraped a patch of dark stone, black and smooth as river glass, no Belgian blue, no chalk. It arced overhead, curve too neat, too precise to be a natural vein. As they wiped more clay away, the line grew, bending over them in a tight sweep, stone blocks laid so close together he could barely find the joins. The arch sank down into the floor, a buried doorway swallowed whole by Flanders mud.

Frank's first thought was Jerry. Some mad feat of engineering.

Then the depth caught up with him.

On one of the blocks, half-choked with clay, a shallow carving showed through: a woman's form, the head rubbed away to a blank oval, and beneath the throat a hooked mark, wing or feather, cut with blunt certainty.

The stone felt colder than the rest. When he laid his fingertips along one of the dressed blocks, a spark jumped his teeth.

"Get the sarge," Frank muttered.

Gladdis made a face that was mostly yellow teeth and white eyes in the half-light, but he started the awkward backward crawl toward the shaft, lamp clutched to his chest. Somers just stared at the stone, lips moving in some silent catechism.

Frank leaned in till his ear pressed to the arch. At first, there was only the familiar murmur of seeping water and the slow tick of shifting ground.

Then: three beats, low and patient. Not picks. Not his heart.

[i]Da—dum. Da—dum. Da—dum.[/i]

Under the beats, sounds Frank's mouth couldn't shape, syllables that slid through the stone like water through a crack.

He swallowed, throat suddenly tight. He couldn't have said what tongue it was. Only that it wasn't coming through the tunnel so much as rising inside the stone, as if the arch itself had learned to speak.

"Somers, clear the sides. I want to see how far she goes."

Somers didn't answer.

Frank pulled back. The boy had both palms spread flat on the stone now, shoulders bowed, swaying from side to side like a man at prayer, fingers worrying at the bird-mark.

"Oi," Frank said, sharper. He grabbed Somers by the collar and yanked him away. "I said clear the sides, not fondle the fucking thing."

Somers's hands came away smeared with black, gritty paste clinging to his knuckles. His face had gone slack, pupils blown wide like the time he'd been gassed at Hill 62. "There's something behind it," he whispered. "I heard—" His teeth chattered; then he turned his head and was sick all over the floorboards, the sound wet and helpless in the close dark.

Frank pushed past him, back toward the timbered section, and lifted his lamp as far as the low roof allowed. Faint echoes bounced down the shaft: boots on rung, the clink of kit. Taylor's voice drifted after, muffled with distance and annoyance.

"Who's dragged me down this bloody well, then?"

It would've taken him a good few minutes to climb down all eighty feet of ladder from the surface, and he sounded like he knew it.

Above, the German picks stopped. Not just theirs. Everything. Silence settled in the clay. Frank hated silence in the tunnels. Silence meant Jerry was listening. Or dead. Or waiting for you to cock it up.

And then it happened.

The first shudder came up the gallery in a long, gut-deep roll, slamming his teeth together. Deeper than any shell, a blow struck somewhere in the clay behind them. The air thickened; sound went flat and distant. The lamp guttered low, starved by dust, then flared hard white-yellow as a rush of air went by, throwing the arch into harsh relief before it fought back to a trembling blue.

"Back, now!" Frank barked. He grabbed Somers by the wrist and hauled him into the shored section just as Gladdis and the sarge barreled into them from the opposite direction.

Taylor shoved Gladdis aside as he shouldered through the cramped gallery. Sweat darkened his collar, chest still heaving from the ladder climb. He fixed Frank with bloodshot eyes, nostrils flaring. "What in Christ's bloody name is this panic, Creed?" His gaze darted past them to the exposed stone. "It's old masonry. Mark it. Shore it. And—"

The next vibration hit sharper, closer, like a hammer on the skull. A draft breathed through the gallery from the face, bringing with it a smell like rust and rotting roots dredged up from some long-drowned place. Frank watched the nearest timbers flex and groan; the shadows cast by the arch seemed to ripple, as if something immense shifted just on the other side.

Gladdis whispered, "Oh, fuck me. Oh Christ," as the far end of the gallery bulged inward. The black stone shivered. A hairline split etched itself across the keystone, thin as a knife cut, then widened enough that Frank fancied he could slide his hand in if he were stupid enough to try.

Time did that thing it did in tunnels: everything slow, then all at once.

The arch collapsed inward with a shriek, spraying shards of slick, black stone. A blast of freezing air blew out the lamp and threw Frank and the others hard to the boards. The gallery roof followed a moment later, squeezing inward, sealing them in darkness. He heard the timbers pop, heard Somers scream, then nothing but the slap and suck of mud filling the air pocket.

Frank's skull cracked against a beam. Stars burst behind his eyes, then vanished.

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When awareness slunk back, he couldn't see his own hand in front of his face. His ears rang with absence: no picks, no voices, not even the scrape of his own breath. The ridge pressed down on his chest, squeezing him until every rib felt braced against a vise; something inside shifted with a sickening grind, and he bit down on a cry.

Panic tried to buck him upright.

He killed it.

[i]Flat. Still. Save your air. Let the ground tell you where it's going.[/i]

He forced his mouth shut and breathed through his nose, thin sips that tasted of copper and mud. A faint hiss threaded the dark near his cheek, the air line, torn but still breathing a miserly draught. He found the rubber with his fingertips and stole one careful mouthful, then another, then sealed his lips again. He pressed his cheek against the boards and listened, for a pocket, for a seam, for the difference between burial and a way out.

In the ringing dark, something answered.

Not sound. Not breath. A pressure, a vibration in the bones of the world: three beats, patient as a countdown.

[i]Ue dubni. Dubera. Aeracura.[/i]

At the ragged mouth of the air line, something colder than clay, slicker than water pressed against his lips; it probed the corners of his mouth like a tongue, insistent and searching.

Frank jerked, choking on it. The taste flooded in. Grave-sweet, then the wet stink of turned roots and spoiled fat. He tried to spit, a breath went in anyway, wrong and easy. Another followed before he could fight it. His throat worked on reflex. He gagged, swallowed, gagged again. The cold slid past the back of his tongue and into his nose. It spread through his sinuses. It pressed behind his eyes.

The chant held.

His ribs moved without him. His lungs filled on a rhythm he hadn't chosen. Frank clawed for the line, for the hose, for anything to tear loose. His fingers closed on slime and clay. The air line shuddered once under his grip and went dead.

The chant held.

Then it shifted, like a hand turning a tool until it found purchase.

A thought not his own, casting its shadow across his mind.

[i]Down[/i], it said. [i]Down.[/i]

Frank's knees buckled. The word slid through his head, pooling cold at the base of his spine. His fingers scrabbled at wet clay, found nothing solid. Desperate thoughts of the others clawed at him: Somers, Taylor, Gladdis. But each image dissolved, the acid of that voice eating away everything.

[b]DOWN.[/b]

The darkness hummed. He felt the layers of clay shifting, folding, the earth chewing him, working him deeper into its gut. He tried to claw his way up, but his hands belonged to someone else, numb and useless.

Down.

Light flashed behind his eyes: shock, maybe, or memory. Men topside, laughing at some joke he'd never grasp. His mother, hands in coal dust. The arch, the black stone, the hairline crack blooming open.

Down.
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