Bone Dust

By Robert Hodum

"Bone Dust" is a chilling collection of tales filled with horror, suspense, magical realism, and the supernatural world. Psychological twists and frights highlight the unsettling lives of engaging characters that inhabit eerie and sinister worlds.

Get ready to embark on a shadowy journey through alternate realities where the macabre, haunting childhood fears, and ghostly entities await. Twisted encounters in these unsettling and frightening personal worlds will seem so familiar, so frighteningly possible, so disturbingly real. Follow the shadows in these tales, step through this portal, and you'll find yourself reflected in the whispering silhouettes that follow you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667805566

Robert Hodum

Robert Hodum attended Stony Brook University in New York and the University of Bolivariana and the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia. He completed his graduate work at Stony Brook University, specializing in Latin American history and Ibero-American culture and civilization. He is the author of two other books and currently resides on Long Island, New York, where he enjoys walking the bluffs and beaches, and kayaking the waters of the Sound.

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©2021 Robert Hodum

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Print ISBN: 978-1-66780-555-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-66780-556-6

For these beings, fall is ever the normal season ... Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. ... They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth....Such are the autumn people.

— Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Stories

Nomanneslond

The Widow of the Woods

The Return

Cellar Stairs

This Too Will Pass

They Have To Be Fed

I Dreamed of Skeletons Last Night

Bone Dust

The Captain’s Vessel

Nomanneslond

... like the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.

Wilfred Owens, poet and recipient of the Military Cross for bravery at Amiens in 1918, thus described No Man’s Land.

A barren stretch of shell-cratered open field lies silent. Stitched haphazardly together by lengths of barbed wire, the unclaimed ground discharges spirals of smoke, that grudgingly dissipate in the late afternoon sun. The ferocity of the bombardment flattened, shredded or curled beyond uncoiling some of the wires of these killing pens.

Many of the expired hang from the wire in grotesquely animated poses. Some are partially buried, others dissected by machine guns, mines or heavy ordnance. Human residue floats in the puddles at the bottoms of shell holes. Nomanneslond, London’s medieval execution grounds, has found its most recent ideation here.

Most of the wounded, withdrawn under the white flag, bare up well to the torturous jostling of rutted dirt roads to their respective care stations in the rear. Survivors of the day’s charges and countercharges, they’ve left their weapons, comrades, and limbs on the front that ranges across five miles of farmland. Though recovery under these abysmal conditions has improved since the first year of the war, many still fear the surgeon’s scalpel and saw. But it is the stories of the shadows that morph and lurk in the corners of the hospital tents that echo in their thoughts. The silhouettes that carry off the wounded haunt their dreams. This torments them more than surgical steel.

At least in death, they can expect to be identified and sent home, relatively intact. Such is their hope. But this night’s casualties will learn differently.

The last stages of the day’s battle will be fought at dusk, signaled by the launch of the new weapon over the German lines. The Brits concerned with their proximity to the Huns’ front lines, the unpredictable winds that crisscross the trenches and the rumors of an experimental gas, protest to no avail this use of chemical munitions.

The German brigade, having abandoned backpacks, gas masks, and extra supplies days ago, haven’t been fed. The impending fight will be to the death, not for Fatherland or the Queen, but rather for food.

British and German brigades spend their final hours lost in memories, sharing smokes and stories. Some sleep, others crouch in mud puddles, and a few kneel in their own waste. Orders are given to check ammunition and attach bayonets for the frontal assault, which will not come. Most will never leave their trenches, intact or cognizant.

It would be the gas.

The American artillery supported by three brigades of gas-masked Yanks, positioned on a rise, distant from the trenches and the evening’s winds, wait. Officers have been briefed on the impossibility of anticipating outcomes. The seasoned rank and file of America’s finest will comply and perform. And later, do their best to forget.

The presence of civilian scientists who confer in groups, mulling over what the parameters of a successful battlefield trial might be, reassure the American troops. Only days before these specialists instructed them in the use of the state-of-the-art gas masks that had been designed for this experiment. Promised to be sent home after this mission, few ponder the limited range of their flame throwers and their relative proximity to the trenches of their Tommy allies. Nothing mattered more than being sent home, unscathed, liberated, and out of reach of the stench of this hell.

Dusk falls.

Yellow-striped shells, loaded with an innovative gas, have been rushed to the front lines after much deliberation in the States. The Commander in Chief made it clear to the Army that the moratorium on shipping chemical weapons would not apply to this specific munition. Its experimental use, highly classified to any and all participants, who had been sworn to fifty years of silence, would go forward.

Trials, testing, refinements, failures, and even fatalities figured in its clandestine development. Finally perfected at Bowe Hill College, a former Civil War fort, in the outskirts of Washington D.C., this novel, elegant solution would be the White House’s last ditch effort to turn the tide against the Huns who after four years of war have tenaciously held their ground.

Its testing resulted in unpublicized casualties. Three workers were horribly melted, leaving their flesh jiggling off the bones, their families compensated and sworn to secrecy under penalty of imprisonment. Others suffered a state of frenzied mania, unparalleled in current psychiatry. Hospitalized in facilities for the criminally insane, they’d be rendered invisible in their isolation cells.

The four lab technicians who survived the exposure to these unique experimental compounds, simply vanished. Officially categorized as unexplained disappearances, they unknowingly set precedent for what is about to transpire over the dusk-shadowed European landscape this evening in 1918.

Twilight is the new beginning.

The order, run up to the front lines from the General Command, startles the sleeping cannoneers. Scribbled in pencil on unlined paper stands the simple order, Gentlemen, commence!

The artillery barrage falls behind the German lines. The gas, immediately fogging the terrain, slithers into the trenches. Quiet follows after the initial alarm of a gas attack, no gurgling, gasping screams or frenzied move- ments out of the battle line excavations.

Silence.

And then the growling begins, screams and howling, ferocious ripping sounds from below the mist. Only the occasional shoulder, crown of a head, human torso attempting flight, and forms climbing out, only to be yanked back by invisible hands, break the smog of gas in the descending twilight.

Assured of the absolute improbability of any change of air current, the Brits crouch below the horizon, sharing smokes, rations, and jokes. Nature’s vengeance touches them all, as the winds of war shift the contagion to the British lines only three-hundred yards south.

An inaudible dinner whistle sounds somewhere deep in the German trenches. A swarming, fire ant-like mass of human forms, some armless mutilations, many dressed in remnants of German uniforms, animated by super strength and speed, floods across the darkness of No Man’s Land towards the British lines.

Flaming machine guns and infantry rifles, frantically thrown hand grenades, and the artillery’s first salvos fail to blunt the onslaught. The English infantry positions crumble, overrun by growling human-like forms. The noxious fumes steam off the mutated figures as they race towards the panicked troops. Along the British lines, soldiers abandon their positions, wildly crashing into one another. Slipping in the muck, tangled in abandoned rifles and gear, some succumb to the hopelessness of it all