Gloom of the Grave

Bruce Carter was a coward in the face of the Martians until an encounter with the ghost of his great-great-grandfather.

Martian War Chronicles: Days of Wrath

Gloom of the Grave

Written by Michael A. DiBaggio. Illustrated by Shell "Presto" DiBaggio

Bruce Carter was a coward in the face of the Martians until an encounter with the ghost of his great-great-grandfather.

“The red caps are coming!”

Bruce Carter jolted, grazing his head on the low rafters. He hissed, touching his dusty fingers to his scalp, feeling the thin river of blood where the edge of the ancient timber bit into him. He looked across the cluttered attic to the spot where Joel Farwell, crouched beneath the window sill with his rifle balanced across his knees, hastily extinguished his kerosene lamp and plunged half the room into darkness. His sight diminished, Bruce’s other senses were amplified, and he could now hear the scraping of mechanical limbs and feel the vibrations of a giant tread. He knew they would be here soon. Immediately he returned to the great wooden chest, emptying its contents randomly into his knapsack, desperate to preserve whatever he could of his family’s heritage. So much had already been swept away, but he vowed that the Carter name, at least, would not be.

“The red caps, Bruce!” Joel whispered in the darkness. “They’ll hear!”

Bruce could hear the crunch of glass and masonry in the street below. The tremors from each footfall reverberated through the timbers of the old house, setting the little lantern that hung above Bruce’s head to a fitful shaking, casting eerie shadows over the jumbled mass of his ancestor’s accumulated treasures. There was so much there, but already his pack was overflowing. The titanic strides grew louder. He heard the metallic pulse, that uncanny and unmistakable noise of the machine’s artificial musculature as it pumped its legs, and then the wet clap of its razored footpads on the sodden grass. It had now crossed the man-high stone wall at the edge of the property, he knew. It was in the back yard.

“Bruce!”

With a final grab at the precious heirlooms, he seized a battered tricorne and a gray wool cloak and blew out the lantern just as the machine passed the attic window. The peak of its slope-armored head, painted red like the world of its manufacture, was at first level with the glass, but in another moment the machine elevated, a movement rather like a slouching man correcting his posture. Bruce froze in terror as its turreted head swept the room with its great triple-eye of electric spotlights. It lingered there for a dreadful moment, and Bruce, rigid as the post he leaned against, wondered if perhaps the Martian eye, unadapted to the shapes and proportions of earth, might fail to distinguish him from the jumbled litter of the attic. But the machine let out a heart-stopping mechanical wail that cracked the window pane and shook the dust from the rafters.

They had spotted him. They would come to take him.

Bruce knew from the low stature and markings on the machine that it was a harvester, one of the vehicles the Martians sent out to snare men and carry them off in the great mesh baskets to God-knows-what grisly fate. Two men on foot, with walls and ruins to obscure them, might escape the clumsy weaponry of the towering war machines of the red planet, but against the scores of the harvester’s lightning-fast tentacles, there was no chance of escape.

But while Bruce surrendered to despair, Joel Farwell leaped into action. He smashed the window pane with the butt of his rifle and drew out a long stick from his satchel. With a single deft movement, he struck a match and lit the fuse, then hurled it through the shattered window directly against the harvester’s pilot house. The explosion shook the house and sent the startled tripod reeling backwards, its electric lamps extinguished.

Bruce bolted across the room, probing in the darkness for his friend. “Joel! Joel!” he cried, barely able to hear his own voice through his ringing ear drums. A strong hand clamped on his forearm and pulled him down.

“Bruce, I’m struck! My legs, a piece of wood, or--”

Bruce patted down his friend’s side; his hand become wet and warm with blood. “Come on, old man!” he said, bending down to hoist Joel across his back. “Hold tight, now. I’ll get you out of here!”

Suddenly the wall in front of them disintegrated into a cloud of pulped wood and hot metal, a desperate defensive act from the reeling Martian. Its close-in guns barked again, sending thousands of steel darts sizzling just over their heads. The roof split an instant later, broken by a bundle of the grasping tentacles twined together into a makeshift mace. Again and again the Martian flailed, shivering the floor planks and wrenching loose the thick joists from their mountings. The stairs splintered and Bruce flew up and backwards, carried away on a plume of debris. He bounced off the roof with such force that he lost consciousness. When next he opened his eyes, the great ceiling of the house was crumbling down on top of him. In his confused desperation, he tried to shield himself with the closest thing he could find, which was nothing more than the old woolen cloak he’d pulled from the chest. The great timbers of the roof split and crashed beside him, and then his stomach felt the sudden pull of gravity as the floor gave way.

Bruce awoke to complete blackness and a suffocating weight on his chest. He tried to sit up on his elbows, but found both his arms and torso pinned. No amount of exertion could free him, and what little air he could draw in was stale. An almost maddening fear swamped him as he realized that he was buried alive.

“No, God. No!”

The halting, gasping cry barely left his lips when another voice called out from beneath him.

“Yes, Bruce! Yes! You are dying!” The voice was rich with an uncanny resonance, and edged with a tone of bitter anger and frustration. “Life flees from you as you fled from it. Soon, you’ll be limp and cold, memorialized only by the worms. You’ll go like all the others are going: uselessly, futilely. Stupidly! My countrymen, dying ignobly like mayflies, all their work unfinished. How it burns me!”

“Help… me…”

“Help you, you soft weakling? You beg for your life, not for the strength to do what is needful. Where is your honor? Where is your sense of duty?”

“Please! I can’t breathe…”

“Yes. Yes, I will help you. For the sake of our country and the name of our great family, but not for your own sake, Bruce Carter the Third!”

“We’ll all help thee.” “Aye, all of us.” These were other voices, from mouths colder and more distant, deep within the earth — or so they seemed.

“Quickly, Bruce, before you perish!” that first, strange voice called out again. “Let us in!”

Now the darkness began to recede before a ghostly green light. Nothing more than an ember at first, it soon encompassed Bruce’s entire vision, a field of endless, spectral fog, above which shined the moon, like the pale corpse of the sun. A legion of men marched from the fog, men with cocked hats and high-crowned leather caps, with bandaged faces and blood-stained breeches. Fur-covered frontiersmen with shotguns and Zouaves with fixed bayonettes stood beside gold-braided cavalry officers and gaunt Puritan yeomen, sabres and long pikes at the ready.

“Let us in, my unworthy heir! This nation must be saved.”

“From the terror of flight…”

“..and the gloom of the grave.”

Reason could not tell him how to do what they asked, but in a mind near broken by maddening, mortal fear, reason was no longer enthroned. Now, he reverted to instincts spawned in the vast, black gulf of unremembered time, when the ancestors of men first trafficked with spirits and learned to fear their power.

Bruce Carter gave himself up to the ghosts and was reborn with a strength not his own.

Through two tons of rubble, he smashed his way to freedom. There was molten metal in his veins; his skin was like forged steel, his fists like wrecking balls. Bursting through the last layer of plank and shingle, he bellowed a savage challenge to the Martian.

The tripod’s high waist slanted downward and the turret pivoted, bringing the shattered lamps and the cracked, red-tinted portals into view. The concave lens of its heat ray projector drooped crookedly from the center of its chin, like a dislocated eye. The fall of light and shadow from the shower of sparks blazing intermittently from its ruptured case gave the impression that it blinked, as if astonished. For a second, the Martian hesitated. By the time the pilot ventured a probing tentacle at its foe, it was already too late. With preternatural quickness, Carter leaped past the constricting cable and hurtled his body into its first knee joint.

It was a vertical leap of ten feet and Bruce struck like a cannonball. The Martian metal groaned as it bent beyond even the limits of its unearthly suppleness. A gout of dark, viscous fluid sprayed out of the joint like a burst artery. The tripod staggered from the impact, but quickly rebalanced on its remaining legs. The nimble machine recovered so quickly that it might have easily crushed Bruce in a knot of two or three of its tentacles if he had not landed a full five yards behind it at the foot of the wall that ringed the yard. Long before the Martian ever knew where he was, Bruce tore out a chunk of mortared stone as easily as he once pulled weeds from the garden and hurled it at the machine’s head. The projectile rang thunderously off the armored cowl, dozens of the segmented armored panels exploding into a cloud of metal fragments from the impact. The tripod’s head swiveled completely around, its tentacles lashing from the momentum. It advanced toward him like a man on crutches, its damaged third leg folded.

“Come grapple with me, murderer!” Bruce screamed. His voice shook with an uncanny resonance, echoing through the deserted streets.

“No, fool!” his ancestor’s voice cried out within him. “Our strength is not unlimited! Strike now or flee, but waste no time with taunts!”

Spurred by his great-great-grandfather’s urging, Bruce charged. A terrific leap carried him past the Martian’s vainly swatting tentacles, and he brought both fists down like an ax handle into the left hip joint. It was a gigantic blow. The machine sagged amid a cry of rending steel. The tripod unfolded its damaged third leg and bent at the knee to compensate, but the effort was futile. It tumbled over, pinning its thrashing tentacles beneath itself.

Bruce clung to the plummeting machine with an iron grip and pulled himself to safety atop the waist cowling just before it struck earth. He stomped on the damaged leg section, shearing it off completely at the socket.

Perhaps realizing its peril for the first time, the Martian crew reacted desperately, launching buzz-bombs in every direction, turning the neighboring homes into exploded kindling. Its close-in cannons stuttered, obliterating the stone wall and churning up whirlwinds of masonry and dirt. But it was to no avail while Bruce Carter crouched protected within the armored girdle of its own waist. When the tripod’s guns clicked, its magazines emptied, he crawled onto the turret and ripped them from their mounts. Suddenly, one of the tentacles writhed free and whipped with such terrific force that the tip cleaved through the machine’s armored waist. Bruce was crushed to the dirt. As the last of his breath wheezed from his collapsed lungs, his vision faded to darkness.

Again the ghostly legion surrounded him, but now they were in an uproar. As one tumultuous body, they surged around him, dozens of hands bracing and lifting him to unsteady feet. His great-grandfather faced him, his drawn face alight with berserk fury. “Up! Up, damn you!” he snarled. “I won’t fail again. You won’t fail. I won’t let you!” Turning to the other spectres, he cried, “Put all your strength into him, lads!”

Bruce felt himself being pulled up with great speed. The ghostly army vanished beneath him.

His eyelids opened onto the rapidly spinning ruins of his ancestral home and the burning town. The tentacle wrapped his waist in an ever-tightening grip, shaking him like a rag doll ten feet above the ground. With a painful gasp, he threw out his arms and latched onto the thrashing metal coil, squeezing with every ounce of strength. His hands glowed with an eldritch light, tongues of cold, green flame that licked out from his fingertips. Gradually, the indomitable metal began to dimple. The phantasmal fire burned on, discoloring and boiling away the outer coating of the tentacle until the pulsating rings within were exposed to the night air, and he tore them out. The great strangling cable went limp and crashed to the ground. Bruce landed on his feet and took hold of the arm once more. With a roar of exertion, he wrenched the cable free of its housing and cast it into the street.

Bruce panted, wiping blood and hydraulic oil off his face. “Now,” he rasped, “ a comeuppance.”

Mounting the turret, he rained titanic blows on the cockpit. Inside, the helpless pilots made eerie, ululating cries over the loudspeaker.

“They call for aid,” said his grandfather. “Finish them quickly before the hills crawl with foes!”

He seized a splintered timber from the house and thrust it through the view port, impaling one of the Martians through its beaked mouth. It died with a hideous squawk, its ropy limbs thumping wetly against the cracked glass. Again and again, he stabbed with the beam, until their cries ceased and the last of the squamous abortions lay still in a pool of their own juices.

“Well done, grandson.” The misty image of Bruce Carter the First now materialized before him, laying an airy hand on his shoulder. “The Carter blood has not lost its potency, after all.”

Bruce threw the wooden beam aside with a cry of anguish. “So many more lives need to be avenged!”

“And so they shall! But first, return to the rubble and retrieve my cloak. The cloak is the conduit of our power; if you are too long without it, we cannot help you. And remember that you have a debt of honor to pay.”

“Joel!” Bruce cried out. Suddenly he felt weak and sick. The thought of his friend lying dead beneath the rubble of his home was too much.

“He still lives,” the elder Carter intoned. “But he will join us soon. No man who perishes in war for this land finds rest.”

Bruce raced back to the rubble, his legs pounding like pistons, splitting his boots. He tore through the wreckage where the ghost of his ancestor pointed and pulled the broken body of Joel Farwell free.

“Joel! For God’s sake, come back, man,” Bruce sobbed, rubbing Joel’s hands. At length, his friend stirred and gave a weak groan. Bruce let out a cry of joy.

“Bruce… Bruce… you made it,” Joel rasped.

“So did you, old man!”

His old friend’s eyes fluttered and his chest heaved with a wheezing cough. “No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “I’m done for.”

“No! No, Joel, you’re not! Too much is relying on you!”

“There’s nothing for it, Bruce,” he repeated. “You’re going to have to pick up my end of things, I’m afraid.”

“No, Joel, you can’t! It’s my fault! I brought you here! I couldn’t live with the guilt!”

Joel squeezed Bruce’s hand weakly. “No time for that, now, Bruce. This isn’t of… our… making. Bruce, promise me you’ll take care of my sister… see her through this. Joan… always loved you.”

“I swear it,” Bruce choked. He clenched Joel’s hand, felt his grip slackening, his skin growing cold. “I swear it on my soul, and on the souls of my ancestors.”

For the last time, Joel Farwell smiled. “Farewell, Bruce, my friend…” Then his eyes closed and his head rolled back, and he spoke no more.

Bruce wept bitterly. Somewhere in the distance, thunder boomed.

“That was a terrible mistake, Bruce Carter. Our souls are not yours to swear on,” the voice of his ancestor growled from inside his head. “We will hold you bound to that vow, for good or ill.”

“Good!” he cried. “May we all be damned if I fail to keep it!”

They buried Joel Farwell early the next morning, alongside three other men and the body of a young child found on the roadside, their identities known only to God. The morning burial ritual had become rote since the dwindling band of exiles arrived one week ago, a mechanical process that engaged spades and bent backs but little else. No fine words or sweet hymns were heard here; there was no preacher or sexton to lead them. One did not speak eulogies for strangers, and singing invited too much danger. Brief and perfunctory prayers were muttered and then they moved on. This efficiency, it seemed, was the one great virtue of life among the dead. No sane or wholesome person could ever grow accustomed to the indignity and the cold horror of living in graveyards, but in this one respect, the arrangement seemed meet: they had become expert undertakers.

Very rarely were any tears shed; the gigantic weight of the trauma unfolding all over the world had benumbed even the most sensitive hearts. But that morning, a downpour of grief fell around Joel Farwell’s grave.

Bruce had barely finished the commendation when Joan Farwell collapsed at the edge of the grave. Bruce rushed to her, gathering her frail body up in his arms as he joined in her bitter sorrow. Bereft, they clung to each other as the small crowd of mourners dissolved around them. If any among them offered consolation, neither Joan nor Bruce heard it. They were alone with the world’s first and cruelest tragedy, and no human being would ever know greater misery. They wept for an age, tears enough to drown the hostile earth.

“Forgive me, Joan.” Bruce’s plea came through clenched teeth. He was in an agony of guilt and shame. “I was a fool. I should never have gone back. Nothing could be worth this!”

“Who will forgive me?” Joan cried, grasping him by the collar. “I knew what would happen and I said nothing. My brother… Oh, God!” Her shaking hands clapped over her face, muffling a choked cry.

Bruce shook his head. “No, Joan. You didn’t know. No one could have known.”

“But I did, Bruce! I dreamed of you and Joel leaving in the night. I watched you walk off deep into the woods, then at the last Joel looked back at me. It was just a glance; his eyes were so sad. And then he put his head down and you disappeared into the mist. I didn’t know then where you were going, but I knew instantly that one of you was not going to come back. I knew it, Bruce--do you understand? I knew it, but I said nothing, even when he told me that you were setting out for Chelmsford.

“What a coward I am! I was too afraid of rebuke to warn you. I feared you would think me a hysterical fool, and Joel — you know how vehemently he hated all talk of spirits and prophecy and how quickly he put it up to the devil!”

Like so many women in the gay years before the invasion, Joan Farwell had fallen into the farther orbits of those twin, mist-shrouded stars called Spiritualism and Theosophy. Though she kept firmly within those tracks where the truth of the Gospel was maintained and Christ was not demoted to the status of a transcendent mortal, Joel was not the least tolerating. Her brother, more Puritan in belief and attitude than any of his ancestors, was vehement to the point of violence in his opposition to these curious dalliances. Once, Joel returned early from a business trip and broke in on a seance taking place in his parlor. In a rage he overturned the tables, nearly setting fire to his home by the upset candles, pistol-whipped the medium, and chased the other guests out at gunpoint. Only Bruce’s intervention restrained Joel from taking the strap to his sister for disobedience and blasphemy.

And what would Joel tell Bruce now about the haunted cloak of his ancestor? Bruce knew what his friend would name the spirits: demons. He imagined Joel’s urgent warnings, his angry exhortations to burn the mantle. Joel would never have accepted their proffered power. He would see it as a snare for his immortal soul, and if that power had saved his life he would have trusted it all the less.

But Bruce Carter was never so certain in his convictions or resolute in his purposes. Now that all of Joel’s burdens had fallen onto Bruce’s shoulders, he could not so easily reject the strength needed to carry them. For the moment, he forced these doubts from his thoughts.

“With all the horrors of recent days, no one’s dreams could be untroubled. It was no prophecy, Joan,” he said, though his own encounter with the spirit world made this assurance feel like a lie. Of one thing, though, he was absolutely certain: “You bear no responsibility for your brother’s murder. No creature from this earth wears that guilt, except me.”

“The whole world is not big enough to encompass my guilt!” Joan’s voice quaked so much that Bruce barely understood through her sobbing. “I knew that one of you wasn’t going to return. And so I hoped that if either my brother or the man I love must die…”

“No, Joan,” Bruce hushed her. He pulled her tightly against his chest, trying to muffle the words he couldn’t bear to hear, but Joan broke away and looked at him with her fervent, tear-swollen eyes.

“I hoped that it would be you who returned, Bruce. And even now, I still do! Whose guilt could be blacker than mine?”

Bruce could say nothing. He stroked her golden hair and held her, and all the while he buried his face in her shoulder, his trembling lips making silent reproof of his failings. He dearly wished that it was he who died in the rubble of his home. He was worthy neither of Joan’s love nor of surviving her noble and worthy brother.

At length, when the last of her tears were finally spent and her shoulders no longer convulsed with anguished sobs, Joan stood up and looked once more over the grave of her brother. “The whole world is in calamity, Bruce. We live like ghouls, skulking among barrows and tombstones because it keeps the invaders at bay, just to wait for the food to run out or the winter to freeze us to death. There is no bright dawn at the end of this. I think this winter will be the last winter for mankind. And in truth, I would be glad for it.”

“You can’t think that way, Joan!” Bruce’s words flew through clenched teeth. It was a crushing betrayal to hear such hopeless words to pass the lips of a woman who’d never surrendered to a moment of pessimism in her life.

“Yet I do think that way.” Joan turned her wan face back toward him, but her gaze looked through him. There was a heartbreaking hollowness in her eyes that told Bruce that she was not just speaking in the throes of grief. “I am so tired of running from place to place, jolting at every noise in the night, cringing in fear of spying another half-decayed body around every bend in the road. Each is a little death, and after suffering ten thousand of them, will you really hold it against me that I wish for the embrace of final peace?”

“Yes, by God, I hold it against you! What were these words but a declaration that your brother has died in vain, that even his memory will soon pass into extinction? I will not — cannot! — accept that! This enemy has taken a great deal, but never did I imagine it had the power to reduce a proud young woman of boundless cheer and energy to… this!”

“You are a man. Strong and courageous, built to weather these afflictions. But I am not so strong, Bruce,” she said gently. “You mustn’t despise me for this weakness. God knows I’ve tried to fight it.”

“What childish nonsense! In my darkest moods I turned to you to sustain me. And you did! Without fail!”

Joan sighed. “That was the childish nonsense. I was just a naive girl, then. I had no taste of this world’s horrors. I had a father and a brother to shield me from them.”

Bruce seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “And now you have me! At your brother’s dying breath, I vowed to him, swore it on the souls of my ancestors, that I would protect you! And I shall! There is…” Bruce hesitated. He wanted to tell her the astonishing details of last night, but the words were blocked by a logjam of doubt and confusion. He knew it was no hallucination, and yet it seemed altogether unreal.

“There is a new strength in me,” he finally said. “But it won’t last if you, my rock of encouragement, turn to despair.” He stroked her cheek lovingly. “Something has happened. There is reason to hope, Joan.”

“Then tell me what it is!” she pleaded. “Reveal it to me, Bruce, because I can’t see it on my own! It was two months ago that we fled our homes. Weeks go by without any sighting of the invaders and then they turn up again, more numerous than before! You and Joel both thought it was safe to return to Chelmsford, but they were waiting for you. And if they won’t leave, then who will drive them away? Since they first landed, we’ve heard of nothing but defeat after defeat. There is no power on earth to stop them. No one is even left to fight them.”

“No power on earth, perhaps. But there are other powers, Joan, as you yourself have told me. And as long as I draw breath, I will fight them.”

She was baffled by this mysterious remark. “What do you mean? Bruce, please, there’s something you want to say. I wish you would say it. I beg you…”

“In time, I will tell you, Joan. I promise. But for now, just trust me. Trust me and stand firm for a little while longer, and soon you will understand why I say that there is reason for hope.”

Joan looked down and said nothing. After a long while, she shook her head. “You ask me to trust you, and so I shall, because I always trusted you. But don’t ask me to stand firm for long.” She laid her cheek on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I don’t know how much time I have to wait.”

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