Late night, a cold Christmas here in New England. At our house we had a good spin around the planetary axis, and regardless of whether or not this is a time you celebrate, I hope you did, too. Having crawled through a pleasant foggy detour induced by Christmas wine (anonymous pink stuff) and Christmas scotch (Aardbeg Corryvreckan), I am now hastening upon a Christmas proofread in the hope of getting this thing out while it’s still Christmas somewhere on earth.
In my last note, I alluded to the strangeness of having anxiety attacks more or less removed from the bag of dirty tricks my brain likes to play on itself. ‘Strangeness’ in this case is by no means synonymous with ‘unpleasant.’ It’s merely odd. The single driving consideration when popping off even a relatively casual thing like this was If I can post; can I post? If I can post; can I post? in an endless painful cycle, a chant of binding. Now the question is a cheerful what shall I post? Good god, freedom. Horrible, horrible freedom! I have to prioritize projects again! I can simply do things! I can simply stare into the infinite void of ideas as its beautiful light paralyzes the lump of discount vulcanized rubber sponge inside my skull! One must admit, it’s funny. With anxiety, pain makes posting difficult. Without anxiety, lovely possibility makes posting difficult. Like the great sage Homer Simpson, I have been cast loose from the Stone of Shame, and am now proudly shackled to the Stone of Triumph.
So be it. Let’s nudge aside the Stone of Triumph and squeeze some juice out of the ol’ vulcanized rubber sponge.
I had always thought it might be fun to do a holiday-themed post featuring writing/ideas from my long-past work, my current work, and my hoped-for future. So that’s what we’re going to do this week… the Post of Christmas Past today, the Post of Christmas Present on Wednesday December 28th, and the Post of Christmas Future on Saturday January 31st.
Over the years I’ve had several public opportunities to describe the course of my early career, starting with my teenage aspirations, and it’s been painfully apparent that too many people have received this information as white noise. I settled on writing as a life goal around the age of 15, and I sold my first novel as 26, the story goes, and what gets heard is “…mwah mwah mwah mwah success at 26.” I’m not angry about this, nor do I blame anyone individually, because I think it’s clear our pop culture and what passes for our media discourse have a dangerously romanticized view of creative work.
“Oh, what a talented person,” our stories go, “oh, how powerful their inspiration must have been!” Talent certainly exists and inspiration certainly exists, but I fear our popular view of creativity artificially centers both, eliding struggle, practice, failure, and the investment of time. Too often, we talk about something akin to magic, about early purity of vision, about the notion that we are chosen or anointed for certain tasks, and while I cannot speak to how the secret machinery of the cosmos operates, I can testify that most of my own moments of lovely inspiration have been purchased with long hours of study, planning, and practice.
We love to hear about prodigies hatching symphonies from their heads fully-formed down to the last note, math geniuses thinking in flawlessly clarified equations, athletes kindling greatness the first time they lace up a pair of shoes. The truth is that if someone is dazzling in a physical arena it rarely has anything to do with a beam of light anointing them in heavenly glory, and more with countless hours spent doing solo drills, running patterns, lifting and stretching, caretaking their diet, resolutely avoiding so many opportunities for indulgence and leisure that the less focused might take for granted. So it is, perhaps less spectacularly, in the creative arts and crafts.
“They picked up a guitar for the first time at the age of ten, and it just felt right in their hands,” is what makes it into too many movies and essays and biographies. We ought to have more respect for “they picked up a guitar for the first time at the age of ten, and gods above how they sucked shit, their family could hardly stand the noise.” Only a rare few people can be part of that first story, the story of the anointed, the chosen one, the magic that falls out of the sky. Nearly anyone can be part of that second story— to want something so badly, to be willing to work at it for years, to suck shit until gradually or suddenly you don’t. That’s my story. The only thing prodigious about me was my enthusiasm. I was a wildly creative kid, but there wasn’t anything immortal falling out of my brain. Very few fully-realized symphonies. No sonnets. Lots and lots of Thundercats and Voltron characters, though, eventually followed by my own rip-off versions of Thundercats and Voltron characters. Page after page of robots and mecha and spaceships and laser blasts.
“What a heavenly gift that child has for gracefully illuminating the epic moral struggles of the heroic Autobots and the treacherous Decepticons,” said no one, ever, “and how magnificently he shades with both green and orange Crayola crayons!”
So I was in my early years, and so I was as a teenager, shading with more advanced Crayola equivalents. Novel fragments, fanfic fragments, script fragments, half-assed or stillborn comic strips, badly-designed roleplaying games. Those were my contribution to the world, year in and year out, as I read and studied and scribbled and clawed my way toward something I didn’t understand, whether it was a sense of completeness within myself or a sense of being able to achieve completeness in my work (do either of those things ever show up, I wonder). This went on until 2004, when I finally arrived at enough mysterious writerly potential for a complete stranger to say “Sure, this is the lunatic for me, let’s spend some money on the little bugger.”
That’s where too many people like to start— in 2004, at the age of 26, I fell out of the sky and sold a novel. The part where it took me eleven years of relatively serious effort, study, and screw-ups to get there is of less general interest. Part of this, as I said, is cultural narrative. Part of it is a certain unkindness of the field and the industry. Life and criticism are rarely charitable to early work or new writers. Comparisons to more mature bodies of work are immediate and not always proportional. Early mistakes or awkwardness may be seized upon and ridiculed, sometimes fairly, but often separated from all meaningful context. I don’t proclaim myself a saint in these affairs, either. I am a demanding reader and I have been unkind to much early work, though I have usually tried to keep such opinions firmly within my own skull.
What I am trying to say is that is is understandably much reluctance to even admit to having early work, inadequate work, not-quite-there work. There’s a certain marketing and social pressure to pretend to have arrived on Planet Publishing fresh and clean and flawless. Therefore, I think it’s important, for those of whose careers have given us room to laugh off some of the pressure to feign perfection, to forthrightly admit that we came from somewhere, that we have written flawed things, that some of our notions or experiments did not work as intended, or even work at all. I’m not talking about some sort of gee-willickers false humility. My first novel alone has sold a million-plus copies and been continually in print for sixteen years. I’m tolerably good at this gig. But before that situation could evolve, I spent a long time struggling and failing and half-assing things, and I’m going to show you a little glimpse of where I came from to prove it. A visitation from a spirit of 21 years ago…
2000-2002 was one of the most careless and ramshackle periods of my life. I was a bit adrift, deftly evading any acquaintance with good decisions, and I was still years away from confronting the fact that my weird moodiness wasn’t just a quirky artistic temperament, but a hint at the depression that would eventually become more constant and severe. The only shred of personal discipline I nurtured was a commitment to reading and writing that didn’t much flicker even when everything else was a shambles.
In early 2001, I discovered that a major local SF/F convention, Convergence, had an annual short story contest. I don’t recall much of the writing process, but I smashed together a bunch of half-remembered boot camp movie cliches into an alternate-WWII frippery called “Uncle Sam’s Chalk Circle Boys.” I do at least vividly remember the day I received an answering machine message telling me that the story had won the writing contest, and would be printed in a souvenir booklet, and would also net me the princely sum of $150. I do not exaggerate by so much as a fraction of an electron’s orbit when I say that was the most timely and crucial financial boost I ever received. My girlfriend and I had scraped our pockets down to lint to afford an unwise hotel room, and that money meant paying our phone bills and being able to eat human food at least once that weekend, rather than raiding the consuite for saltines and candy.
Here’s the source of that magnificent bounty, straight outta 2001, with all of its errors and wretched eye-dialect and nonsense intact. Not my proudest moment, but still a finished story that did me a bit of good, still a marker on the path toward more obvious competence. This post, like the two that follow, will be shared with all subscribers on the theory that pain shared is pain diminished. Heh. Nobody made ya click that button, suckers. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and brace yourselves.
"Uncle Sam's Chalk Circle Boys"
by Scott Lynch, a smol dumbass, circa 2000/2001
*****
“If that’s a magical ward circle, my grandpa trained circus dogs for the Kaiser!”
I watched out of the corner of my eye as the Drill Instructor did something fast and violent to Private Seagram, who hit the dry Kansas dust of the drill yard and scudded back several feet. The D.I. was in his face before he came to a complete stop.
“Your entire platoon was trusting you to build that circle! Thanks to you, they’re all dead!”
The D.I. rotated his scowl ninety degrees, so that it was resting squarely on me, and I felt the contents of my bladder turn to ice water. Nobody has ever devised a magical ward against a D.I.’s stare. Knowing it was too late, I forced my shaking hands back to the creation of my own ward circle. I had almost completed a half-arc with the contents of the olive-drab pouch labeled M11 SALT, MAGIC RITUAL, CONSECRATED. The black boot of the D.I. crossed my arc, and I silently prayed for the earth to swallow me.
“And you, Private Colfax! Pay attention to your own damn circle!”
The D.I. kicked my ward out of existence, artfully, so that a nice gout of sand and salt rose level with my eyes and set me gagging. I came to weak-kneed attention.
“While you were amusing yourself watching me beat some sense into Seagram, you lost concentration on your own ward. Are you trying to get yourself killed, Colfax? Is this man’s army spending good money to train you just so you can go out and get hexed by the first second-rate Nazi spell-chucker you bump into? So you can fall in battle to some crazy Japanese battle monk and one of them ghostly Samurai?
The D.I. rolled that last word off his tongue; “sam-you-rye.” It was a calculated mispronunciation, rich with disdain. My army recruit reflexes told me a response was called for.
“Sir, of course not, Ward Sergeant, sir!”
When in doubt, state the obvious and cap with sirs.
“Of course not? Boy, when will you get it through your head that a ward circle derives its power from the investment of your total attention? You will be preparing wards and counterspells under fire. You will be expected to perform! If half your platoon is on fire six feet away, you will consecrate the circle. If Hitler and Tojo are playing craps right in front of your face, your first and only task is to consecrate the circle! Your buddies in the trenches have only one defense against enemy sorcerers, and that, Gawd have mercy, is you sorry bastards!”
The D.I. withdrew eye contact and looked around. The corners of his mouth went south in disgust. “And here we have a case in point! You all thought I was giving a general lecture! Not one of you followed orders and finished his damn circle! Gawd have mercy!”
Grinning like an arsonist at a three-alarm blaze, the D.I. began kicking half-made circles left and right. “Form up, ladies! Since you have such an excess of energy this morning, let’s try a scientific experiment. I want to find out how hot it gets in Kansas in July! Five miles at the quickstep, right behind me!
Pretty damn hot, that’s the answer. Just another day in the U.S. Army Thaumatechnical Corps.
*****
My family has no history of witchcraft, though it’s common enough back in Milwaukee where I grew up. I enlisted in the U.S. Army the day after I turned eighteen, in January of 1942, reckoning that army life would be simple, easy to understand. Walk here, walk there, take orders, collect pin-up girls.
The war was desperate then, dangerous and uncertain. In Europe, the Germans had demonstrated the deadly efficiency of their Hexenkrieg, rolling over their neighbors with a fanatical corps of sorcerers. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese shocked us with fire spirits and a conjured hurricane- a supernatural sneak attack on an unprecedented scale. We were caught in a modern wizard’s war and had too few modern wizards to go around. My induction screening showed that I had a rare and thusfar unsuspected potential. Our boy Arthur Colfax was going to be a combat sorcerer for Uncle Sam.
*****
"It's a German attack!"
Ward Sergeant First Class Walter J. Warren was not a happy man, but he had one thing going for him in life- consistency. Every single day, from reveille to lights-out, he assured us that we were the dumbest bunch of chalk-headed lackwits that had ever taken up wand and dagger to practice the mystic arts in the service of God and Country. Today he was inspiring us to greater heights by firing a Garand rifle into the air while we scrambled in deep concentration to erect our ward circles (this time on asphalt, using M13, PAINT, CEREMONIAL, WHITE). The loud crack of that rifle scared the hell out of me, but I set my teeth and grimly willed myself to maintain the sorcerous state of mind. A circle on the ground was just a pretty place for a young Thaumatechnician to die if he didn’t pour his will into it. After a week and a half, we all knew we were improving. This only inspired the D.I. to new heights of creative torture.
“You are under fire!” He screamed while reloading his weapon.
“The men around you are under fire! There are dead men to your left and your right!”
All twenty-one of us remained intently focused on our circles. The army standard for a simple field ward was ninety seconds, and we weren’t even half there yet. Three more deafening cracks broke the humid summer air.
“You have seconds to complete your ward! You are U.S. Army Thaumatechnicians! You are tough sonsabitches! No Kraut will get the drop on you! No Jap can send his dead grandma’s ghost after you! You are fast! Your concentration is unbreakable!”
His words seemed to filter down to me from a distance. I was definitely in the right frame of mind. I could feel my power like a rush of warmth in the blood as it left my fingers and entered the circle. Under my breath, I intoned my spell (U.S. Army Procedures Manual TTC-13, “Power, Words of”) and felt the circle gathering around me, properly, as it had only a handful of times before.
“The fate of other men depends on you! They trust you with their lives! Magic must counter magic! You are their shield!”
Each of these statements was punctuated by a shot, but I no longer cared. I was almost finished. Naturally, the D.I. sensed this and decided to impart another valuable combat lesson.
“Colfax!” He screamed, “Colfax, look out! A Nazi stormtrooper is coming right for you!”
A looming shadow appeared in my peripheral vision, fast as a nightmare. Sergeant Warren stopped on a dime just beyond the limit of my nearly-finished circle, but my self-preservation instincts betrayed me. I fell backward onto the baked, sticky asphalt, catapulted out of my trance.
“Dammit, Colfax! If you flinch, you die! You only get one chance to make a circle in combat. One chance, and you can’t louse it up!”
The Sergeant’s boot came down on my chest, and my breath rattled out of my lungs. My eyes crossed in a daze.
“You must trust the men around you to protect you while you work! Every Thaumatechnician has a whole squad of watchmen, looking out for his sorry behind! Did you actually read your training manuals, Private Colfax, or did you walk onto my base this morning by accident looking for the Navy yard?”
“Sir, sorry, Ward Sergeant, sir!”
“Damn straight you’re sorry, Colfax. You have four more weeks here in Kindergarten, and then it’s Hell Night! You and your platoon will face a genuine mystical assault cooked up by myself and Bindings Sergeant Barrows! You will defend your barracks with your own powers, Gawd have mercy! You will have to prove yourselves before we let you out in the field to endanger good men!”
The Sergeant seemed comfortable with his boot on my chest, so he kept it there while he scanned the platoon grimly. While he had been berating me, most of the others had finished their wards. Though dazed, I could see that a number of them glowed with the arcane light of success. I was sure my own would have been among them, if the Nazi stormtrooper hadn’t gotten me.
“I’ll be damned,” rumbled the Sergeant, “progress! Well done, lads! Only problem is that Able Seaman Third Class Colfax here has wandered onto our base by mistake! He wants to know what the army does in the afternoon, so disband your wards and fall in for a nice run!”
A nice run. That’s how our summer was passed, a summer that lasted ten thousand years under a malicious Kansas sun. We measured it in inches, and in long creeping minutes, and in waterless forced marches behind our grinning D.I. At the end of it all loomed the promise of Hell Night- magical combat against the very men who were teaching us our poor arts.
*****
Corporal Rowan Dobbs wasn’t inclined to put up with our bitching and moaning, since he’d been dead for almost eighty years. Dobbs was a Missouri boy who’d gone east to sign up with the Union Army of the Potomac and make his fortune. He’d hit the field just in time for Gettysburg, where the chamber of a faulty rifle had blown up in his face. He was now one of the base familiars, unquiet spirits of previous wars called up and bound to assist in our training, with the promise of freedom once the whole mess was over. During our first few weeks, the D.I.s used him to stage night raids on our bunkrooms, overturning trunks and scattering clothes. The security of our belongings depended on the skill with which we warded our barracks, and it took us many sleepless nights to get it right. Despite that, and his near-transparency, he was an amiable enough fellow. Sometimes he dropped by in the minutes before lights out, and we’d scratch out a ward or two to let him in.
“Sure’nall, we had us sorc’rers back in my day. Called ‘em spellers or circle-men. Weren’t no corps, neither, just volunteers here an’ there, some by the generals’ tents, some just back the firin’ lines. Scary as hell, though. Put a hex on you at a hunnert yards. Make a stream run black an’ poison.”
My circle (Thaumatechs are organized in training platoons of twenty-one; seven “circles” of three each) was Jimmy Seagram and Blaise Shepherd. Each of us was sitting up in our bunks, shooting the breeze with a Civil War ghost as the August night grew deep and still. Just goes to show what you can get used to.
“They don’t teach us none of that stuff,” piped up Shepherd, “but I hear the Magister-General can break a twig in his hands and make a man’s spine snap clean in two.”
The Magister-General of the Thaumatechnical Corps was a living legend, a grim old man named Bradley. According to rumor, he’d once turned a buck private into a pack horse for failing to salute. If a Magister-General was anything like a Ward Sergeant revised and edited, I had no doubt the story was true.
“I seen that, I sure have,” the ghost whispered. “An’ I heard all sortsa wild things from them sergeants what bound me. Like them spirits them Jap’nese make use of. Not just ghosts, neither. Other things.”
He said “other things” with a kind of cold reverence. I wondered what it took to give a dead soldier pause. We’d all heard rumors, by that time, of the Japanese kami , the plant and animal spirits with a thousand forms. We’d heard of the black, eyeless sharks that rose out of the depths to drag sailors down near sinking ships, and of the shared nightmares that would drive men screaming into the jungle night, never to be seen again.
“God, I don’t want to go to the Pacific. I hope they ship us out to Europe,” Seagram said.
I wasn’t so sure. I’d read reports from naval Magister’s Mates (poor suckers, trapped in circles on the decks of heaving ships, calling up air and water spirits until they dropped from exhaustion) on the North Atlantic convoys. The Germans were fond of weather magic, battering our transports and destroyers with ice storms and thirty-foot waves. Unconfirmed reports even told of attacks by spectral dragon boats full of screaming Norse and Teutonic warriors from an age long past. That was what we did know. Darker rumors hinted at new sorceries the Germans were perfecting, secure in their eerily silent European fortress.
“Seems like a raw deal either way,” I offered.
In that you might just be right,” came the voice of the ghost, “right as rain. Thinkin’ ‘bout that won’t do none of you no good, though... you boys’d best keep your wits about you for this here Hell Night that’s comin’.”
Hell Night was two and a half weeks away. None of us could find out anything more than Sergeant Warren had already told us- we would be left to our own devices, and the noncoms (some of whom had ten or more years of thaumaturgical practice) would do their worst.
“What’s going to happen, anyway? There’s got to be more to it than they're telling us, Rowan,” I whispered eagerly, “Some of the officers shut up any time it’s mentioned, like someone’s talking about a funeral.”
The ghost’s near-invisibility generally made his expression inscrutable, but I was certain that he was suddenly frowning. Very quietly, he whispered:
“That’s ‘cause it might jus’ be, if your heart ain’t in it. Last bunch they run through Hell Night, three of them got kilt by what they was up against. Them sergeants is serious, boys. Them what can’t take it are like to get a lot of good men killed out in battle. The corps, they figure it’s a favor to everyone if the slackers don’t get no further.”
Suddenly none of us had anything to say.
“I’d best be goin’, fellas. Them sergeants’ll strap my hide, ghost or no, if I tell you anything else. They wanted me to let you know what the stakes were- now I done that. Put your heart in it, boys. That’s for damn sure. ”
He let himself out. We forgot to put the wards back up behind him, but at that point our training was beyond underwear raids by friendly ghosts.
Well beyond.
The next two and a half weeks passed in a haze of exhaustion. We went to bed every evening feeling like boiled macaroni and woke up every morning feeling like bit players in Dante’s version of Hell.
In the drill yard, under that mean August sun, I would watch the D.I. as he passed up and down our ranks. My eyes would fixate on the Thaumatechnical Corps insignia under his chevrons- the crossed golden wands on a field of black. I wondered if I would live to wear that insignia on my own sleeve. Not too long after that, wonder was a luxury I could no longer afford. As August gave way to a still-hot September, Hell Night was upon us.
*****
That day we were let free after a light morning workout and given the rest of the day to spend as we pleased. Most of us slept fitfully in our airless bunkroom. My dreams were full of Japanese battle monks in their blood-red robes, and of German Hexensoldaten with long gray cloaks and black ceremonial knives. The thought of facing them in combat terrified me to the center of my bones.
Hours later, a cool evening breeze against my face tore me out of those nightmares. I felt the creeping sensation of sorcery, like centipedes running up and down my spine, and knew it was no natural breeze- there was a powerful weather magic at work around us. Already the last rays of sunlight were being swallowed by bruise-dark clouds that gathered with ominous speed. My platoon was quiet and agitated, staring out the barracks windows as the light died.
A sharp knock came at the door, and I wasn’t the only one who half-fell off his bunk or chair. The door swung open, and there stood Bindings Sergeant Barrows in battle dress and rain gear, his belt hung with bags of ceremonial materials. His ritual dagger was long and curved like a sickle, hanging at his waist without a sheath.
“Orders, Gentlemen! This barracks is your base of operations! You will select an acting platoon NCO by any means you see fit, and prepare defenses against mystical assault. You are expected to hold this barracks and protect your own lives until oh-six-fifteen tomorrow morning. If this barracks is not in your hands, you’d all best be dead if you know what’s good for you. You may expect assault at any time after twenty-two hundred hours.”
Ten o’clock. I glanced at the quartz clock set up on the wall. That gave us a little more than half an hour to get our act in shape.
The sergeant’s eyes seemed to soften for a moment. “God be with you, boys. We won’t make it easy on you. Quartermaster’s hutch’ll be open for fifteen minutes so you can requisition anything you like, within reason.”
As he left, twenty other voices rose at once, and I had to shout some awful things to get the platoon quieted down.
“We’ve got half an hour, boys. Someone’s gotta lead. Who’s it going to be?”
At that point Seagram and Shepherd stepped forward in unison and proposed that we draw lots. Agreement was swift and unanimous, and it turned out that my circle-mates had already cut straws. I should have been suspicious. Naturally, I drew the short straw. My spine tingled.
“Wait a damn minute,” I growled as twenty pairs of eyes fixed on me, “this feels wrong. Feels like a spell, in fact.”
“Just a little one, Art,” Jimmy Seagram said sheepishly, “It’s plain as day the Ward Sergeant only picks on you ‘cause you’re the best we got. We decided while you were asleep it was you, one way or the other.”
I felt like screaming. I should have been honored as those twenty earnest faces looked at me, some nodding. I was terrified.
“I can’t do it, fellas. Vargas should be the one. Vargas or Shepherd. I’ll just get us killed.”
“Well, then the corps’ll have twenty-one more unquiet spirits to make life miserable for the next batch of recruits,” Vargas said, “so give us some orders. Sir.”
I gulped several times, as though I were trying to swallow my tonsils. My brain clicked steadily though all the available gears. I ran over a mental list of everything I knew they could throw at us- ghosts, hexes, elemental spirits, bad weather, earth tremors...
“Okay. Swear to God I’ll get you all for pulling this. Blaise, you and Jimmy pick four guys and run over to the supply hutch. Get us a ceremonial field kit for every man. Get us some rain gear, because I think one of the sergeants is screwing with the weather. Get us some flashlights, some C-rations, and some filled canteens, and anything else that catches your eye. You’ve got ten minutes to run and fetch. The rest of you, gear up.”
I was already moving for my own footlocker. The room exploded into motion. I threw my “wobble pot” on my head, leaving it unstrapped, and buckled on my ritual belt and ceremonial dagger. The cold iron blade would afford me some protection from anything that came my way, and despite myself I began to feel more confident. I had forgotten that bravery is usually the last mistake an infantry soldier ever makes.
“Okay, look sharp. I want mattresses over the windows, and I want them braced. We’re in for some crazy weather,” I said, glancing around the barracks and praying that I didn’t sound like a total idiot.
As we threw mattresses over the windows, the errand-boys reappeared with armloads of rain gear and ceremonial packs. These were olive-drab rucksacks, filled with premeasured ritual components in waterproof packages. Each of us grabbed one, and then we piled the half-dozen spares in the middle of the floor.
“Good. Now, we’ve sealed this place tight against ghosts already, so let’s not worry about that.”
Mind racing, I ordered four men in rain gear to stand watch outside, within the damnedest circles they could conjure up. I had four more put down circles inside the room, under strict orders not to drop their wards until the exercise was declared over. They were the last line of defense.
“The rest of us are going to form a simple ritual circle, and then we’re all going to do Patton’s Sigil,” I directed.
Patton’s Sigil was a new ritual developed by one of the Magister-General’s staff. It would offer some protection to a man while he moved around. It was nothing like a real ward circle, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. I swallowed nervously and settled down to some serious spellcraft. Just at that moment, a hard rain began to patter against the roof, and Hell Night was on.
*****
Two hours passed, interminably, by the blood-red lights that we conjured to float around us. The barracks lights were turned off to preserve our night vision, and the rest of the base was as dark as a cave under the mantle of the unnatural storm. The wind moaned and lashed at our building, and the miserable rain hammered the roof. Midnight came and went. One o’clock came and went. The clock was ticking toward one-thirty when the screaming started outside.
I risked a peek out the door and took a cold blast of rain to the face for my troubles. Rushing toward us across the black, muddy drill yard was an amorphous white shape, howling wildly and flailing its pale, rippling mass. Bile rose in the back of my throat, and I crouched with ritual dagger drawn, shouting, “Spirit, boys! Spirit in the drill yard!”
As my voice rose against the wind, the thing began to laugh uproariously. With a flourish, the shape tore its outer covering off, revealing Ward Sergeant Warren. His camouflage had been nothing more than a few rain-soaked bed sheets. I was speechless.
“Show some backbone, dogfaces!” The sergeant hollered in delight. “Y’all spook mighty easily! Keep your cold iron handy!” Cackling madly, he vanished into the night as quickly as he had appeared.
Dumbfounded, I stared at the men just behind me for a few seconds. We soon broke into sheepish grins, and in no time at all those of us who had seen the “ghost” were laughing like twits. Naturally, it was then that our real troubles began.
Our four sentries started yelling, and their voices were overpowered by an inhuman chorus of whoops and shouts. It sounded as though a crowd of men were hollering just outside the barracks. I soon saw what was making the noise- and froze in my tracks.
Glass-like and grinning, dozens of ghosts surged out of the night in line abreast, their dead throats raising a marrow-chilling war cry. I squinted, and saw that they carried spectral muskets and a tattered flag. I thought briefly of Rowan Dobbs, and then corrected myself. The ghosts advancing on the barracks were Confederate battle dead.
“Someone raided a national battlefield, boys,” I cried hoarsely, “reinforce the barracks wards! This time it’s for real!”
There was no subtlety in the ghostly platoon’s attack. They threw their power at the barracks, rebounded, and reformed for charge after charge. The wards held, but the very timbers of the damaged building shuddered with every attack. Our defenses had been constructed to keep a single spirit pest at bay, not a whole skirmish line. We absorbed ourselves in lending will to the buckling wards, knowing that sooner or later they would fade and break. Hours passed in the hell of total concentration.
Just after four in the morning, our attackers withdrew, leaving barely half of us conscious. The others had collapsed from exhaustion, Panting and groaning, we assessed the wards and our own condition, unable to decide which was more tattered.
“This ain’t right,” Seagram moaned with a dry throat, “ it makes no sense to train us for months and just overpower us like this. They gotta know we can’t take this.”
I nodded agreement, punch-drunk with exertion.
“Those ghosts’ll come back,” I whispered. “They’ll gather power for a few minutes and come back fresh. Our defenses can’t hold them until dawn.”
Suddenly, I realized that I deserved a bullet in the head. The only possible solution to our problem was staring me right in the face. Some leader I had turned out to be.
“Holy Christ, Jimmy,” I shouted, more than a little crazy, I think. “Our defenses can’t possibly hold out. That’s the key. We have to find the sergeants and attack them back. That’s the only way to win.”
The other members of my platoon looked at me like I had suddenly started speaking German.
“I know it sounds crazy. But they know we can’t take this much, so obviously if we’re going to win we’ve got to take the offensive. “
Private Vargas huffed, “No offense, General MacArthur, sir, but you want us to call the Air Corps for an assist, or what?”
Gears turned over in my mind, sloughing off the bitter rust of fatigue.
“We need a divination, to find out where the sorcerer controlling those ghosts is. If that’s not Sergeant Barrows, I’m a total jackass. Then I need some blood, boys, because we only have one chance to cast the spell I need. Cast it on me, and I’ll go after the sergeants while you hold out against those ghosts. All for one and one for all.”
There was nothing else for it but to try. I outlined the needed spell by the crimson light, and then we pricked thumbs with our daggers, drawing blood to power the final desperate spell of Hell Night.
*****
I stumbled across the lightless, storm-wet field, shuddering and waving my arms like a man possessed- which was what I hoped to God I really looked like. Our training manuals had outlined the symptoms of possession by a hostile spirit, and I was hamming it up. Shaking like a puppet on invisible strings, I lurched toward the hill where Bindings Sergeant Barrows and Ward Sergeant Warren were controlling their legion of the dead. If our divination was correct, that was.
As I jerked and wrenched my ridiculous way across that field, I heard the harrowing Rebel Yell rising behind me once more. Time was the enemy. I lurched faster, hooting madly, trying with all my heart to be as obvious as possible. As the shape of the hill loomed before me, I saw a pale red glow suffusing its peak, and two black shapes motionless within that halo of conjured light. Suppressing a surge of elation, I reminded myself that the hard part was yet to come.
“Who passes?”
The booming voice from the hill was Barrows.
“I command thee, halt and announce thyself,” came Warren’s voice a moment later.
“I done captured one o’ these Yankee spell-men,” I hollered in my best impression of a deep Southern drawl, “I po-zessed him good, an’ I’m ridin’ him like a hoss, sirs! What y’all want me ta do with ‘im?”
The crux of the deception lay in the spell we had all drawn blood to cast. It had sheathed me in a ward against scrutiny, an aura of confusing magical energy. Any mage worth his salt could tell a possessed man at a glance, so this spell had to do its job or I was a plucked goose. Those hard stares made my skin feel like it was covered with curious ants.
After a breathless interval, one of the sergeants laughed. “I command thee, stand before us. Let’s see who you’ve caught!”
Eyes wide, pulse beating in my temples like machine-gun fire, I stumbled the last few yards up the slope and stood before the sergeants. Each was standing with awesome dignity in a glowing field ward. For a split second, my brain rebelled at the thought that a poor sod like myself could challenge their might. Then I remembered half of my platoon fighting desperately to keep back a horde of Confederate ghosts, and things got a lot easier. I slid my empty .45 from under my field jacket and pointed it at Sergeant Barrows.
“Bang!” I hollered. Calmly, I swiveled to cover Sergeant Warren.
“Bang! Bang! Bang,” I yelled again, thinking the Ward Sergeant deserved a few extra rounds.
“Sirs, this Private respectfully informs the sergeants that they are dead, seeing as they have warded themselves against supernatural attack, but not against bullets, sirs.”
They stared at me for a few seconds, eyes wide and mouths open.
“The hell?” muttered Barrows. Warren suddenly broke up and cackled like a madman.
“This here boy was never possessed, Jack. Look closely at that aura he’s got himself. It’s just empty magic, that’s all. He pulled a fast one on us and pumped us full of lead.”
“Thaumatechnicians in the field have armed escort,” Barrows barked, “this stunt wouldn’t have done him any good in combat.”
“Begging your pardon,” I snapped, “ but I only see two Thaumatechs who didn’t bother to bring an escort. You told us to expect anything, and that’s what we gave you. Sir.”
The last sir was added as a quick afterthought. I figured it was best not to gloat. It was already clearly established in the Thaumatechnical Corps that snappy privates made good pack horses.
“The boy’s done good, Jack. He’s right. He got the point,” Sergeant Warren boomed without malice. “Call them poor rebel ghosts back and let’s see how the rest of his platoon made out.”
Quivering with relief and exhilaration, I secured my sidearm and shuddered against the still unnatural cold. Suddenly witless and lacking anything else to do, I stood at attention and saluted. Ward Sergeant Warren laughed again.
“Gawd have mercy, Private Colfax! You got it right! I told you to keep your cold iron handy, but you remembered that hot iron does the trick just the same!”
Enjoyed your writing. Subscribed because I hadn’t read much from you in years. I hope to see further books.
Reading through your anxiety, musings and thoughts are interesting on another level.
Ah yes, the overnight success story... Because all the hard work, failures, and struggles are depicted only in montage.