Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Flesh Golem

The Western Front in 1916, two British privates uncover a tunnel stretching beneath no man’s land. Finding it abandoned and unguarded, they venture inside only to discover there is far worse than Germans lurking below the battleground. A creature of hate and pain and fear, the Bogeyman.

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The Western Front, Northern France, 1916

During the day, that stretch of blasted landscape along the frontlines belonged to nobody but the dead. At night, it was dominion of the rats. Flares hissed high into the crisp night above the trenches. By their red glow, a carpet of overfed bodies could be seen rippling across dead heroes blown up and shot and bayoneted and tangled in barbed wire and bled out, scattered among the ashes of the French countryside. The flares and occasional chatter of gunfire did nothing to deter the rats. Neither did the sounds or movement a meal, assumed dead, might make when it revealed it had not passed from this mortal coil just yet and feebly tried to fight them off. Men in the trenches tried to block out the chewing noises that filled empty silences as ragged teeth pierced flesh and gnawed bone.

But when the ground suddenly swelled beneath one corpse, a couple dozen rats scattered. No man’s land might have been their dominion in the darkness, and they had grown fat and bold on the spoils of it, but there were things they still feared lurking beneath the surface. The dirt shifted the body and made it look like it was trying to sit up. Its face, pale, remained slack as its chin fell against its bloody chest. Then the ground collapsed into a sinkhole and sucked the corpse into the earth. Dirt closed over the gap like it was never even there.

Daybreak came, and even the sky looked bloody. Puffing cigarettes like chimneys, a dozen men carrying shovels and picks negotiated their way down the British trenches. Sleeves were rolled up over corded forearms. Trenches scarred the French countryside between broken townships, half-populated with ghosts and occupying soldiers. Rifles and nervous faces lined dugouts. Paranoia and hostility and bullets aimed in both directions, backed by the weight of nations. Reaching the end of their trenches, orders were to extend them.

Private Nunn wedged the blade of his shovel beneath a stone and struggled to lever it out of place. When it finally came free, he picked it up in both hands and wrestled it over to the pile of refuse he and Private Tottingham had been building. They could hear other privates cajoling and complaining in other trenches nearby.

Both Nunn and Tottingham were young men, nineteen and twenty respectively. Poorly kept moustaches clung to their upper lips. Hollows purpled the undersides of their eyes. Although the British officers kept expectations high in regards to the men’s appearances, even in the trenches, it was inevitable that the dark olive of both men’s uniforms was streaked with dirt and dried mud and sweat, even blood. Nunn searched the pockets of his shirt.

“Here.” Tottingham removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

Rather than use a match, Tottingham lit two cigarettes from the stub he was already smoking. He handed one of them to Nunn and both men inhaled deeply.

“Much obliged.”

“We’re digging in the wrong direction,” Tottingham said. “Nothing in this direction but rocks and tree roots. What are we going to do, split the whole blasted country in half? Need to be going forward, not sideways.”

“Don’t let the lieutenant hear you say that, we’ll be going over the top so fast it’ll make your head spin.”

“Idle hands do the Devil’s work. They’re just keeping us busy until they find some better use for our talents.”

Tottingham picked up his shovel and aimed it at the spot where Nunn had just removed the rock. The shovel head punched through the dirt with surprising ease, disappearing all the way up to the shaft. Tottingham pulled back and twisted. A small hole crumbled out of the wall of the trench. Underneath, blackness. A strange and unpleasant smell wafted out of the hole. Rot, with something alien mixed into it.

“Hello, what’s all this then?” Tottingham said.

With a sudden enthusiasm for the work, Tottingham hacked at the dirt slope. Nunn joined him out of obligation. More stones and tangles of dead roots impeded their progress but they excavated around them or pushed them aside. The opening they created revealed a natural or at least preexisting abscess the trench had come to rest against.

“Hello, a cave, or a tunnel!” Tottingham peered inside. “Could be the work of the Huns?”

Nunn looked back nervously. “Maybe we should tell the lieutenant?”

“Let’s have a little poke about first. This could be big for the two of us, Nunn, mate. We could have uncovered something big!”

Tottingham dropped and crushed the last of his smoke. Retrieving a matchbox from his shirt pocket, he rattled it, took one, and struck it. He held the light ahead of him as he crawled into the hole. Nunn hesitated for a few breaths but then followed.

The smell under the earth was almost overpowering. Nunn breathed through his mouth but he could taste it, spoiled meat, the iron stink of blood, voided bowels, as it coated his tongue. They confirmed that it was a tunnel, not a cave or a mere hole in the ground. Tottingham’s match was the only source of light but they could see they’d entered the tunnel at a bend and it curved away in two different directions. Part of the roof collapsed where they’d dug through but after crawling for a few paces Tottingham stood up and Nunn did the same. The tunnel was almost perfectly round and tall enough that both men could stand so long as they remained hunched over. It stretched ahead to the limits of what they could see using Tottingham’s piddling match.

“Blimey, this goes all the way out under no man’s land,” Tottingham said.

“I don’t see no fortifications.”

The sides of the tunnel were raw rock and dirt. As Nunn pointed out, there were no fortifications holding the ceiling in place. No wooden rafters or supports of any kind. Instead, some kind of dried slime was encrusted across the walls. The slime seemed to be the source of the eye-watering smell. In spite of all that, the tunnel was far larger than those that formed parts of their own trenches, which they would routinely have to crawl through. This one, they could walk through bowlegged provided they watched their heads.

Tottingham’s match burned down to his fingertips and he hissed and tossed it aside. The sudden blackness fell on them like a collapse. Nunn became conscious of his heart pumping, and his breath caught in his chest. He felt like a child, sitting upright in bed, in the darkness, hearing the scratch of branches against the windowpane. Imagining, or maybe not, that the gap between the closet door and its frame was getting just a little bit wider and wider as it slowly drifted open. And maybe those scratches weren’t branches at all, maybe those were clawed fingers running their way down the inside of that door just out of sight. The Bogeyman was coming. Nunn remembered a snatch of poetry they used to sing as children. Tottingham lit another match, chasing Nunn back to reality. The fear, however, remained with him.

“We should go back,” Nunn said. “This whole place could come down on our heads.”

“Just a little further.”

Tottingham continued forward, holding his little light aloft. Slimy walls stretched into darkness. Nunn’s heart beat so loud he thought the other man should hear it.  Even if he ignored the childish fears that this place and the darkness conjured, surely if the tunnel was the work of the Germans it would be guarded. Neither man was armed. Sidearms were for officers, they only had their knives, long daggers similar to bayonets, and their shovels. They might well employ the shovels as they’d been taught to do in trench combat but they would be of little use if a gunblast and a bullet were to explode out of the darkness ahead.

Suddenly, Tottingham let out a yell and appeared to be thrown forward. The tunnel split in two. There was a section that continued ahead, under no man’s land, which Tottingham had been following. And there was another opening underfoot, a crater in the floor of the tunnel which the man had stumbled into. He fell forward, feet going out from under him.

“No!” Nunn lunged forward.

Nunn caught Tottingham by the shoulder but failed to pull him backward. Instead, he was yanked forward and off his feet. The drop was almost vertical. Both men tumbled against dirt and rock, and were flipped upside down, end over end.

Tottingham’s match snuffed out almost immediately. The two of them fell in darkness, unable to see what they were hitting or where they were going. An avalanche of stones and dirt filled the shaft as their falling bodies dislodged it. Nunn cried out but the sound died in his lungs. His jaw slammed into something, driving his teeth together. Hammer blows rocked his arms, his legs, his back. Finally, the two of them came to the end of the drop, hitting solid, relatively flat ground.

“What-, where are we?” Nunn heard Tottingham groan from the darkness.

Loose soil and rocks showered Nunn from above. Protecting his face, he moved before a rockslide buried the surrounding area. He brushed against Tottingham, breathing hard. Nunn struggled to find enough air. The stench all around them had, if anything, increased. It was black, so black and lightless he might as well have been struck blind. He could have flicked himself in the nose and never seen it coming. Trying not to panic, he searched the confines of the space they occupied with his hands. He felt the roughness of a rock wall, slightly curved. He touched bits of detritus in the dirt they knelt in. Snarls of cloth. What felt like boot leather. Something smooth, too smooth and round to be a stone, a helmet. His hand curled around something else that he was pretty sure was the body of a rifle.

“A light,” Nunn said. “The matches?”

“Hold your horses, I’m looking,” Tottingham said.

Nunn was pathetically grateful when he heard the rattle of Tottingham’s matchbox. A few more pregnant seconds and he heard the scratch of the match just before a yellow nova flamed to life in the absolute blackness. Nunn blinked furiously, letting his eyes adjust.

“Where are we?” Tottingham repeated.

Shrieking, a small pack of rats fled ahead of the sudden light. Nunn and Tottingham found themselves in a large chamber, the ceiling more uneven than the tunnel above but looking like it had been bored out with the same methods. Tunnel entrances ringed the chamber, walls and ceiling and floor, all roughly circular. Scattered debris carpeted the rock floor, like Nunn had felt as he groped in the dark. Bits of clothing, torn and lying in heaps, uniforms and boots. Helmets and other bits of equipment were scattered amongst it all along with weapons, rifles, knives, even sidearms.

“What is this place?” Nunn said.

Something screamed, and both men jumped. It sounded both human and animal, a cry of hate and rage coming from a dozen different throats at once. It was impossible to say which direction the cry came from. It could have echoed from any of the score of open tunnels, all of them leading into absolute blackness.

“What was that?” Tottingham said.

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

The match burned down and went out. Darkness drowned the chamber again. Nunn gasped. It could be in there with them, whatever made that noise. The Bogeyman. As if playing on a record player, far removed from anything else, he could hear that childhood rhyme in the back of his mind.

Late at night, while you sleep,

That’s when the Bogeyman comes and creeps,

He’ll take your tongue, he’ll take your eyes,

When the Bogeyman comes you’d better hide!

A scrape, and another of Tottingham’s matches burst into light. He scrounged around and picked up some scraps of cloth. Nunn joined him, looking through the uniforms and bits of weaponry.

“We need to make a torch,” Tottingham said.

“Two torches.”

Quickly, they bound lengths of torn clothing around a couple of pieces of wood and metal. Nunn found himself holding the barrel of a Lee Enfield rifle, snapped in two just fore of the trigger guard. Tottingham used the match to light his torch and then lit Nunn’s as well. The strips of uniform burned rapidly. Nunn collected some more rags in case he needed them.

Whatever they’d heard screamed again. The Bogeyman, it sounded closer. Nunn looked about the chamber. After that fall, he had no idea how deep below the ground they were. The suffocating weight of the earth, all that soil, all that rock, bore down on their heads. It would be a long, long way to climb, to dig, back to the surface. The channel they’d fallen down appeared to have collapsed. Bits of dirt still showered from above.

“Where do we go?” Tottingham asked.

“I’m not sure. Up, we should go up.”

“Is there something down here, Nunn? Is there something down here with us?”

“I don’t know, what do you think that was? That sound?”

“Maybe an echo? Something fell, and maybe it was an echo?”

“It didn’t sound like an echo.”

“We’ve got to get back. Back to the trenches.”

Before going anywhere, Nunn hunted through the debris for a weapon. He’d lost his shovel in the fall and only had a knife. Amidst the castoffs, he found an officer’s sidearm, a Webley Mk IV revolver. Nunn broke it open and saw six unfired cartridges, .455s, staring back at him. Tottingham found a loaded Lee Enfield rifle, intact and apparently undamaged but with some of that dried slime down the side.

“How’d this all get down here?” Tottingham asked. “Who put it here?”

“Maybe Huns? Dropping bodies down these holes, and they got ate up by the rats.”

“Got ate up, bones and all? There’s no bodies, only uniforms and equipment.”

Nunn thought of that strange roar in the tunnels. “I don’t know, right? It doesn’t matter, we just have to get out of here.”

Leading with his torch and the Webley revolver, Nunn walked bowlegged across the chamber and stood under one of the tunnels. The round shaft continued straight up, totally vertical for as far as the torchlight reached. The sides were sheer and crusted with slime. It might have been possible to climb but not with their hands occupied, and not easily.

“Come on.” Nunn ducked and walked to another tunnel entrance.

The second tunnel sloped upward. It was steep but climbable, even holding the torches and guns. Before Nunn could say as much, however, Tottingham grabbed one of his legs.

“Nunn, Nunn,” Tottingham whispered.

“What?”

“It’s here, something’s here!”

Dropping to one knee, Nunn studied the tunnel entrance that Tottingham pointed toward. Dirt and stones sifted from the roof of the opening. A powerful new wave of rotting stench wafted out of it. And at the edges of the torchlight, reaching as deep into the opening as it could reach, Nunn saw what might have been the glitter of eyes. He couldn’t say quite how many, a dozen perhaps? They didn’t appear to be arranged in any particular pattern, only a few of them sitting in pairs, but Nunn found it easy to imagine a spider. A giant spider, twisted, demonic, something that had crawled halfway out of Hell and ended up here in these tunnels beneath the battlefield. Nunn felt a kind of energy from the opening, he couldn’t explain it. Feelings of hate, rage, fear. He felt them the same way he might feel heat or cold, the emotions weren’t his own.

Tottingham dropped his torch so he could raise the Lee Enfield rifle in both hands. They’d both been trained how to load and shoot and maintain a rifle, and precious little else, before being sent to the front. Tottingham’s hands shook but they did what they needed to do to arm the rifle and point it at the tunnel opening. Nunn’s hand felt no steadier holding the officer’s revolver.

A hand appeared at the edge of the hole, pale and waxen. A hand, a hand, a human hand, attached to a narrow forearm. It looked lifeless but it gripped the edge of the opening with rigid strength. And then a second hand appeared at the top of the tunnel, and a third. A total of eight hands came forward and sank their bony fingers into the edges of the hole, all attached to long and spidery but human limbs. Some of the arms even wore dirty cuffs and sleeves that looked like uniforms.

Nunn and Tottingham were struck dumb by terror. Both men quivered like babes in the firelight. Eyes glittered deeper in the hole. As they eased closer, Nunn could see the sockets they belonged to and got impressions of the planes of hollow faces and the gleam of teeth. Bogeyman.

Tottingham’s nerve broke and he opened fire. The blast of the rifle tore apart the underground silence. His shot disappeared inside the hole. Rapidly, with admirable practice, Tottingham worked the bolt and fired into the hole a second time. The monster screamed a siren scream, like the shrieks they’d heard echoing from the tunnels. Scores of voices screeching in pain and rage. Pulling itself forward, it exploded into the chamber.

Nunn didn’t know what he was looking at. A vast worm or serpent, built from human flesh and bristling with human limbs that pointed in all directions. At the front of the creature were eight or nine human heads, jumbled in different directions, some attached to necks, shoulders, and arms. Jaws hinged open. Eyes stared but there were just as many empty eye sockets as occupied. Behind the heads of the beast were what looked like bodies, arms, legs, chests, more faces, all mashed and melded and fused by some unknown process. They formed a great, insectile monstrosity, lacking any form of symmetry, a disaster of limbs and flesh.

“What is that?” Tottingham yelled.

Tottingham fired a third time into the creature as it circled the outside of the chamber. Nunn saw the bullet impact with a splatter of gore but it appeared to have little effect on the whole. Tottingham worked the bolt and fired again. The bullet drilled through the forehead of a face protruding from the Bogeyman’s side. Bone collapsed. Its eyes rolled back in their sockets and its tongue lolled from its mouth but it didn’t die.

The Bogeyman had to consist of dozens of bodies, corpses, bearing the wounds that had killed them. It was two to three horses in length and several corpses thick. The remains of uniforms threaded through the melted flesh proved the bodies were soldiers, British, French, and German, maybe a few others. The kind of corpses that might be found scattered throughout the no man’s land between trenches. Emotion poured off the creature in waves, stronger than the choking stench of death. Hate and anger, an overwhelming torrent of agony directed at the two intruders.

The Bogeyman surged. A chaos of arms and legs worked in concert to propel the monster while other limbs kicked and clawed uselessly at the air. A single cry of disgust bellowed from dozens of throats. It didn’t matter what the thing was. Nunn leapt into the opening of the tunnel he’d been inspecting. He dug at the walls with the butt of his makeshift torch and the hilt of the Webley Mk IV, and he started climbing, and climbing, desperately.

“Nunn!” Tottingham shouted.

The Bogeyman slammed into Tottingham as he fired a final time, tackling and grasping him with half a dozen limbs. Open mouths bit and tore at the man’s clothing and exposed flesh. He screamed as he was pulled away from the tunnel and out of sight. Nunn kept climbing, abandoning Tottingham to save his own skin. From behind him came pulses of fury, a mixture of screams, and then other noises. Horrible noises, horrible, wet, gruesome noises. It sounded as if the Bogeyman, whatever that thing was, was pulling Tottingham apart with its bare hands.

Desperation and terror propelled Nunn up the shaft. At the angle he was climbing he had to hunch over, digging his toes into the dirt. Occasionally he fell, only to claw his way upright again. His head hit the ceiling, dislodging small rocks. Slime crusted over everything.

Below, the Bogeyman screamed. Nunn couldn’t hear anything from Tottingham. He climbed even harder, with no idea of where he was going. It didn’t matter, up, up was all that mattered. Presumably there were more tunnels just under the surface like the one he and Tottingham had stumbled upon. If he could find his way back to one, he could find his way out. Even if he didn’t, once he reached wherever appeared to be as high as he could go, he could dig his way out. He didn’t care if he emerged right in the middle of no man’s land, or in the German trenches, he only cared about getting out.

Late at night, while you sleep,

That’s when the Bogeyman comes and creeps,

He’ll take your tongue, he’ll take your eyes,

When the Bogeyman comes you’d better hide!

Coming to a flatter section of tunnel, which flared at the sides, Nunn paused for a moment. The material he’d wrapped around his torch was burning too quickly. The light was dying and strips of ashy clothing fell apart. Nunn didn’t have any matches, those had been with Tottingham. Some more bits of uniforms were strewn around the tunnel, and Nunn carried some scraps from below with him anyway. Very carefully, he wrapped more material around the torch, careful not to burn himself or to put the fire out. Other bits of debris decorated the chamber, bits of uniforms, boots, equipment, even some snarls of barbed wire. Most of the weapons looked broken but amongst them he spotted a belt holding three German Stielhandgranate grenades. Also known as potato mashers, each grenade consisted of a dark cylinder attached to a wooden handle, designed to be thrown further than the grenades used by the Allies.

Something screamed and wheezed below. Nunn could hear it digging its way up the shaft. Squatting, Nunn directed his torch into the opening. By the refreshed light he could see the Bogeyman climbing toward him. Its multitude of mismatched limbs worked in perfect concert. Fresh blood painted across the faces that formed the front of the monster. They were clearly corpses, but alive. Many of the Bogeyman’s eye sockets gaped, empty, and the eyes that remained were foggy and lifeless yet somehow still worked. The faces, chests and arms bore signs of injuries, rot, and rat bites. Dark patches showed where blood had pooled in the flesh, along with black veins, and sallow skin. The reek of death pushed ahead of it. Its bulk filled the tunnel. If Nunn got stuck there’d be no getting around it.

“Go away! You’re not real, you can’t be real!”

Nunn raised the Webley in his right fist, thumbed the hammer, and fired. The bullet ripped apart half of one upside down face. Clots of gore spilled from the hole. Nunn thumbed the hammer and squeezed the trigger again, feeling the recoil bounce through his wrist. Like with Tottingham’s rifle, the bullets did nothing. Hate etched into every line of every one of the Bogeyman’s mismatched faces as it clawed its way toward the living soldier.

Nunn grabbed for the German grenades he’d found moments before. Obviously the British didn’t use them but he was familiar with their operation. Nunn unscrewed a cap from the bottom of one Stielhandgranate’s wooden handle and found a pull string running through it. Taking the string, he ripped it through the middle of the handle to ignite the grenade’s fuse. He didn’t have far to throw it, not as far as he would have liked. Nunn tossed the potato masher down the tunnel and turned away, taking his torch, revolver, the remaining grenades, and running.

One. Two. Three. Four. The Bogeyman screamed, fury coming off it in waves. The grenade rolled to a stop right in front of the unnatural creature and exploded.

Within the small space, the concussive blast of the grenade travelled up and down the tunnel. Nunn spilled forward, nearly landing on top of his torch. The blow felt like a club across the side of his head and made his ears ring. It got inside his skull and threatened to hammer its way back out again before fading. Stunned, he reeled for a few seconds. Only his own imperative forced him back to his feet and forced him to keep moving.

Behind Nunn, the Bogeyman screamed. It had been right on top of the explosion but it sounded no worse for it, and just as angry as ever. Fortunately, Nunn heard another sound as his ears recovered. The walls rumbled as the concussion of the grenade caused part of the tunnel to collapse. He risked a glance backward and saw a wall of rock and dirt chasing him. Nunn picked up speed, clamouring up the shaft as it turned steep again.

When the noise stopped, Nunn paused and looked back. The tunnel had folded in on itself, severing him from the monster. But then again, the Bogeyman must have been the one to dig all the tunnels in the first place, and the soil looked loose. Depending on how injured it had been by the blast, it could easily make its way after him. His torch was already burning low. He picked himself up and hurried along.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” Nunn prayed breathlessly as he climbed. “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.”

At points, the tunnel became almost vertical. Nunn stowed the Webley Mk IV into his pants and climbed, holding the torch. Its light died worryingly fast. If the light went out he’d be blind, lost, and he would never find his way to the surface. The two remaining potato masher grenades hung off his chest. Nunn wasn’t sure how far they’d fallen when they dropped down that first shaft, and he wasn’t sure how far he’d climbed back up.

The tunnel flattened and Nunn found himself at the intersection of another running horizontal in both directions. He hoped he’d found the original tunnel they’d followed from the surface, or at least another close to ground level. Mud slicked the walls in places, which he took as a good sign. He wasn’t sure which way he should go. Left, or right, or if he should try digging straight up.

The decision was made for Nunn. Suddenly, a section at the edge of his torchlight bulged and exploded open. A stench of death spewed from the hole, open wounds and decay and torn bowels. Clutching hands pulled the serpentine body of the Bogeyman through the rupture, leaving a fresh tunnel behind. Legs kicked and faces yawned and cried out down the creature’s sides. Nunn screamed and stumbled backward.

The grenade had damaged the Bogeyman but not as much as Nunn had hoped. Several of the faces as the front of its body were deformed and blinded. A few of its grasping arms ended in burnt stumps and splinters of bone. Cold blood and fluids ran from rents in its fused flesh, but it wasn’t going to bleed out or break apart or stop.

“No, no! Get away, monster! Get away!”

The Bogeyman clawed toward him, faces both intact and damaged distorted with rage. It filled the passage. Nunn retreated backward, unwilling to take his eyes off of it. He wrestled the revolver out of his pants and opened fire. Four bullets. His hand shook violently but there was little chance of missing in the tight tunnel. It didn’t matter, the rounds did nothing. The Bogeyman hissed and continued to advance.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Nunn dropped his empty gun. “Leave me alone!”

Hate thundered out of the creature, enough to physically stagger Nunn. Hate and anger, pain, and even fear. Although the feelings weren’t his own, Nunn began to understand where the storm of emotion came from. It was the rage and hatred of young men sent to die in war for no reason. Fed to the front lines like meat into a grinder for a few square miles of razed landscape. Sacrificed to the ambitions of men far more powerful and cruel than themselves. They never had a chance, British or German or whoever they were. All those bodies, discarded and left to rot, had come together in a spasm of hate and fury too strong to be contained.

Backing away, Nunn tripped and fell against a slope of debris. His torch dropped beside him, flames guttering low. He twisted and clawed at the dirt, finding the tunnel had collapsed. The Bogeyman had steered him into a dead end.

“No! No!”

The Bogeyman drew nearer as Nunn dug at the obstacle with his bare hands. He made no progress, loose dirt falling into any gap he made. Nunn turned and saw the Bogeyman only a few paces away. Worse, he saw a familiar face amongst its coterie of corpses. Tottingham, his head and left shoulder protruded from the beast’s side just behind its ‘head’. He wore shreds of his uniform, and although his face was battered and torn Nunn recognised the wormy moustache above his upper lip. He’d been sucked in and added to the mass, becoming part of a legion of hate and anger and death.

“No, no! You won’t get me! You won’t get me!”

Nunn retrieved the remaining Stielhandgranate grenades from the bandolier on his chest. Gripping one in his teeth, spinning the other with his fingers, he whipped both caps off the grenades’ wooden handles. Refusing to be denied, the Bogeyman surged forward. Nunn spat out one of the caps. He gripped both pull cords in one hand and ripped them through the body of the grenades, sparking the fuses inside the weapons.

“You won’t get me!” Nunn hugged both grenades to his chest.

Above, nothing had been seen or heard of the battle below no man’s land. A search combed through the British trenches for the two missing privates but the tunnel entrance they’d inadvertently uncovered had collapsed shortly after they entered it. From beneath the earth came a muffled boom that roused a few sentries and curious men. They looked up, peering over the lips of trenches, but quickly assumed the blast came from distant artillery fire.

No one noticed as a section of earth in no man’s land collapsed in on itself, raising a brief shower of dust. The crater resembled an open grave but it would soon be filled with mud and blood and bodies. That stretch of blasted landscape belonged to nobody but the dead.

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Sean: I was at the shops the other day and on the escalator, I saw a kid in a pram hugging a toy farm set from Fisher-Price or something similar. With a little red barn and, you know, toy farmer, little plastic animals, that sort of thing. Genuinely it might have been this set, I’m not 100% because most of my focus was on the back of the box where the most visible words were:

Today, you’re the farmer,

Tomorrow, the pig?

And my God, didn’t that grab me. I really admire that, to tell the story of such a terrifying dystopian hellscape in just seven words. I envy that level of skill. So beautifully succinct, so layered. Obvious shades of inspiration from George Orwell’s Animal Farm but just cutting right to the blackened core of this grim and threatening portentous future where from one day to the next a farmer can just as soon find himself ready to be fattened for the slaughter. And the choice of medium for such a tale, the packaging of a child’s toy? Magnificent.

Been seeing more and more numbers on the website, so welcome if you’ve only just recently discovered me here! I try not to look too often but sometimes I catch a fleeting glance and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised. Go for a journey through the archives, you should find plenty there, come to me if you’d like some recommendations! You can find me on Facebook and Twitter, Reddit, and I’m now on Instagram and Threads. Back with another story soon!