The Suff

Andrew Portnoy, a gifted polyglot and grifter, has a horrifying encounter on one of WWI’s worst battlefields in the dark days before the formation of the Office.

Not even Vigilance is safe from the Lovecraftian dream virus infecting Substack. After reading everyone else’s fantastic work, I couldn’t help myself. Operation Arm Breaker is all laid out, so consider this a quick bonus story. Keep reading after the end to see links to all the stories that inspired this one.

Content warnings: body horror, gore, death, gun violence.

FRIDAY NIGHT, APRIL 30, 1915
BOIS-DE-CUISINÈRES
YPRES, KINGDOM OF BELGIUM

Andrew Portnoy trod gently through the battle-haunted Kitcheners' Wood. He felt like he could still hear the echoes of firefights days past. Dozens, scores, hundreds of men had died 'neath these trees, so recently that the ground still squelched with the mud their blood had made. He could feel discarded brass by the score through the soles of his boots. He gripped his MLE rifle tight and forged ahead into the dark forest.

The boy he was looking for was certainly dead. 'Missing in action' after a battle that had killed eighty percent of his comrades left little room for another possibility. Still, Portnoy supposed, it was worth knowing for sure. The dead man's father had paid him quite a sum to procure his body, healthy or otherwise.

The Canadians who had fought so desperately for this patch of forest had been rotated to the back. Those in any condition to provide insight into the whereabouts of nineteen-year-old Percy Leighton had conflicting stories. Some say he died at the hedge. Others say he got past and they remember him swinging his shovel in the German foxholes. But they all mention the hedge.

Portnoy happened upon it suddenly. It was six-foot-high, thick with brambles, and run through with heavy wire not visible until one was atop it. When the Canadians had charged the German lines, they'd pancaked themselves against it, unable to push past but as exposed as if they were naked. While they struggled, the krauts sprayed them with machine gun fire. They say they bashed holes in the obstacle with their rifle butts as their squads were mowed down around them. Portnoy could imagine the panic, the desperation.

The suffering.

He jumped to his feet.

“Who is there?” he demanded, swinging his rifle around. The whisper was so faint that it might have been uttered in a half-breath an inch from his ear, or screamed in agony a mile away. He tried again, cycling through his languages: “Qui est là? Wer ist da? Wie is daar?”

Whatever it was deigned not to answer. Just a whisper on the wind, he thought, a rustle through the few chlorine-scalded leaves still clinging to their branches.

Portnoy shook his head, chuckling to himself. The words might have simply been his own thoughts. He had heard stories, of course, of the strange and unexplainable. Angels, valkyries, vampires, giant rats, black hounds, birds as large as biplanes, and more populated the lines. Some little simpering voice was nothing to worry about, if he had heard anything at all.

He had kept his head by staying away from places like this. He was more valuable than simply as a target for enemy cannons. His life depended on being useful to the people who made such decisions. Often, being able to speak eleven languages proved that worth. If not, the way he spoke English did. Given the chance to bend a man's ear for a minute or more, he could convince that man to do whatever he wanted. Sometimes that was getting a Canadian tyre magnate to pay him a ridiculous sum to collect his boy's corpse, but most times it was to get officers to keep him as far from this horrid war's carnage as he could get. Being confronted with such furious, pervasive death was alien to him.

He rubbed his face. He had been awake too long. His beard rasped his hand. It was coming in curly and red, a development he was none-too-pleased with. He had always been shaved clean, even before his first whisker had sprouted. Then in university, he had tried to cultivate the image of the next generation of academic, far and away from the shellacked mustaches and muttonchops of the old guard. When his stubble first sprouted in the field, he had let it take root, more out of curiosity than anything else. He had always been accused of have a baby face, so perhaps a beard might have leant him some gravitas when he assumed a professorship. Unfortunately, the bright red curls that he pushed out were unwelcome and unexpected. Paired with his chestnut hair, he felt like an odd mutt or circus clown.

“I need to find this lad,” he muttered to no one. If not to get paid, then to regain access to shaving cream and hot water. He could not wait to feel the cleansing rasp of a razor across his face.

Portnoy squeezed through a hole in the reinforced hedge and moved on. The wire twanged behind him, catching on his sleeves for a second before springing back. Brown leaves fell away from the dying plant, settling around his boots.

“Christ,” he muttered. The krauts had used chlorine gas here. If Leighton had gotten a dose of that, he might not have had to worry about the machine guns. Still, most of those survivors willing to talk said he pushed through.

The makeshift gas protection hung heavy with urine on Portnoy's belt. He could hardly imagine a situation where wrapping a mask filled with his own cold piss around his face would be the best alternative. Still, the reports had made the kraut attack sound awful. Men blinded, choking, burned by the air. His eyes watered at the thought of it.

The suffering.

He froze in place. The voice was no louder than the first time he'd heard it, but it was clear. It rattled wetly, it struggled to bridge the syllables, and it was not his imagination.

“You had better show yourself,” he warned whoever was out there in the dark. With what had happened there, perhaps a man had been left behind, witless and wandering, shellshocked beyond reason. An ally lost to his senses could be as dangerous as an enemy. Portnoy called out again: “I'm warning you...”

He ducked behind a tree, oozing into the forest's pooled blackness. Leighton and the reward for him was not worth dying over. Still, if Portnoy returned to his lines without the boy the AWOL charges he was certainly facing had no chance of being expunged with the elder Leighton's resources. Without Percy, he would be thrown in a cell or shot as a deserter.

“Show yourself!” he warned again. The dying forest offered no response.

Portnoy clenched his jaw and slid from behind the tree trunk, watching for shifting shadows down his rifle sights. He moved onward, foot-by-foot, tracing the Canadians' brave, pyrrhic charge into the German holdfast. Gassed men had died by the score where he walked. Everywhere he looked was evidence of carnage: a shattered gunstock here, a discarded boot there, a mat of hair clinging to a branch, a scorch in the very earth. A chill ran up his spine.

The suff - !

“Enough!” Portnoy yelled. He swung his rifle around and found a lone figure standing behind him. Portnoy's shout careened off the poisoned trees. If the man saw the rifle, he did not care. “Who are you?”

The man did not answer.

“Percy?” Portnoy asked him. He stepped forward, squinting, trying to discern the man's features in the midnight gloom. All he could see was a cloak of rags draped over the man's stooped shoulders and the glint of moonlight in the man's eyes.

“Percy Leighton?” Portnoy tried again. “Are you him? Do you know him? His father wants him home.”

The man didn't not move.

Portnoy lowered his rifle. The last thing a traumatized soldier needed was a gun in his face.

“What are you doing out here?” Portnoy asked him, gently as he would speak to a shivering puppy.

Portnoy did not so much hear the man speak than the voice sprouted within his mind:

The suffering.

“The suffering?” Portnoy said, too taken aback by the strange sensation to react in any way beyond agreement. He surveyed the hellish battlefield, looking around at the abandoned foxholes as he spoke: “I suppose this place has had more that its fair share.”

When he looked back at the man, he was just a yard away. Portnoy had not heard him move, nary the crunch of a leaf nor the rustle of fabric.

This close, Portnoy could see that this was no man. The figure certainly had the face of a man, a dour, unmoving grimace like that of a factory drudge haunted by decades of back-breaking labor and lost dreams. But behind the mask-like visage, the thing's eyes were wide and wild.

“What...” was all Portnoy could stammer. He stumbled away as the thing raised its arms. They were long, far longer than was right, long enough to touch the ground while he stood. His spidery fingers splayed wide. The cloak of wispy rags hung loose off his arms, dangling like gauze and burlap wings.

“Stay back!” Portnoy yelled. He snatched up his rifle again as he backed away. The thing followed him step-for-step. Its legs were misshapen, short and bowed. It reached for him with those hooked fingers, with those grasping gray hands. Portnoy's boot found empty space and he tumbled backward.

He landed hard in a foxhole. His rifle fired into the air with the impact. The thing leaned over the pit. Its eyes, its hands, its rags followed him in. The shot that missed it by a hair's breadth gave it no pause.

The suffering.

Its voice permeated Portnoy's being. He felt as if he could see everything this thing had seen in these woods. The men choking, bleeding, blown to pieces, chopped apart, coughing, strangled, stabbed, cut open and hollowed, shot full of holes. The rage, the fear, the fury, the inhumanity. The suffering. Portnoy's body locked itself rigid, the images running like lightning through his marrow. Tears welled in his eyes. The thing's gnarled fingers, long as reeds and knobbed with too many knuckles, sought his face. He squeezed his eyes shut, the only bit of himself that would respond to his desperate commands.

“I heard it over here!” someone shouted in the distance. English, a Canadian accent.

“Form up on Blanding!” an officer called out. Portnoy could hear dozens of boots crunching their way toward him.

He opened his eyes. He found only black trees and moonlight. The thing was gone. His body worked again. The tears that he had been holding back tumbled down his face. He threw his rifle out of the hole and raised his hands.

“Who goes there?” a Canadian demanded.

“Here,” Portnoy managed. His voice did not sound right, like something else was working his voice box. He stood up in the foxhole, slowly, hands held as high as he could get them. His body suddenly felt like a lead and clay collection of loose organs and tissues rather than a whole, and each piece of him moved of its own accord. A tremor coursed through him, nearly doubling him over. He did not know whether he needed to vomit, pass out, or scream.

The platoon quickly surrounded him, keeping their blindered torches on him. One snatched up his rifle, another patted him down roughly, taking his knife and spare magazines. Their officer gave him a once-over, eying his patches.

“What do we have here, a tommy?”

Portnoy did not know what to say.

“Are you all there, son?” the officer asked.

“Is he sick?” one soldier whispered. Portnoy looked at his trembling hands. Had his fingers always had this many knuckles? His skin was pale and he was sweating. He wanted to sit and fade away, he wanted to sprint out of these woods.

“He looks a little green around the gills,” another soldier observed.

“Can it, you,” the officer snapped. He leaned over Portnoy and asked: “What's got you here?”

He knew Percy Leighton was dead, ground into meat with this war's industrial efficiency. There was nothing to find other than...

An unheard voice echoed in Portnoy's head.

“Take me away,” Portnoy managed to whimper, no louder than a sigh. Gray hands stretched and grasped at the end of his arms. Was this how long should arms be?

“What's that?” the officer asked, leaning in closer to Portnoy, over the lip of the foxhole. Portnoy's head snapped upward, his eyes wide and wild.

“Get me out of these bloody woods!” he shrieked, so loud that the Canadians recoiled away. He surged out of the hole, reaching for the stunned officer's face. A rifle butt cracked against the back of his head, and every voice went quiet.

The entity known as ‘the Suff’ was inspired by a strange experience written about by

Jeff Kinnard

and expanded upon by

The Chronicler

in this story. A ton of fantastic Substack writers have posted their takes on this odd occurrence, everything from short horror stories to haiku to song lyrics. Check them out here.

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by

Jon T

.