You get all kinds of mud, you know. People – city folk, mostly – dismiss it all as one and the same. To them it’s just wet dirt, something that stains their shoes and their clothes. But to a farmer, or a gardener, it’s soil, not dirt, and things grow in soil. Flowers. Shrubs. Weeds.
Beautiful things.
Ugly things.
The criticism had begun to get to the General. One could see it in his face, in his bearing. It wore him down. They had a name for it, he told me, a name for what they were doing to him. “Revisionism”, it was called: changing history to suit themselves, damaging a man’s legacy for their own ends, shredding his reputation with a thousand cruel cuts. That was why he had decided to write down what really happened, he said, his shadow falling over me as I pruned the wisteria.
So I listened to the General while I cut. His wife, Lady Jessie, was up in London, and didn’t show any sign of returning before the autumn, so I was his sounding board. Most folk called him Sir William, but to me he had always been the General, and I think that, in his heart, he preferred to be acknowledged by his rank. That was probably why the revisionism business hurt him so.
He’d entered the army through the Oxford militia, commissioned as a second lieutenant. He didn’t train at Sandhurst or the Staff College, and he always felt that his peers looked down on him because of it. He was knighted in 1915, the same year that he received his promotion to lieutenant general. They say that was as good as his war ever got, for he had blood on his hands after 1915, but I’m no soldier, no military man.
The official inquiry into Cambrai exonerated all of the formation commanders and found fault only with the subordinate officers and lower ranks. The General told me so, just like he told me that Barter was responsible for what happened at High Wood. They blamed the General for it, or tried to, but the General convinced Haig to dismiss Barter in the aftermath. Still, the whispers never really went away, and so the General started writing his story of the war in order to silence the naysayers. He was doing it for England, he said, not for himself. Morale had to be maintained. Doubt was the enemy.
That was when the mud began to appear.
The first I knew of it was when the General called me to the house. I was up a ladder, working on the espalier apples, when I heard him calling my name. I got there as fast as I could, and smelled it almost before I saw it. It had a nasty stench to it. As I said before, there’s all kinds of mud, some cleaner than others. This stank like animals had lived and died in it, bleeding and excreting at the last. It smelled like the yard of a slaughterhouse. The mud was grey, and great wet clumps of it had been traipsed across the floorboards and up the stairs to the bedrooms, the imprint of a boot clear upon it in places.
The General was howling blue murder about how Lady Jessie would have someone’s guts for it. He turned on me as soon as I appeared, accusing me of coming into the main house without permission, of failing to remove my footwear, of destroying his home. He told me I’d be jailed for it, and I’d never work again, and it took the housekeeper to calm him down and point out that I’d been over in the orchard, and she’d been watching me herself, and I’d never come next nor near the house. I showed him my boots, which had barely a trace of soil upon them. We’d been having a dry summer, and the ground was hard. I’d been wishing for rain, but none had come.
Well, as soon as the General recovered himself, and accepted that I hadn’t caused the damage, the question was raised as to who might be responsible and, more to the point, whether the individual in question might still be around. The General was a hunter, and had served in the Uganda protectorate against the Banyoro and the Nandi. He took a shotgun from the cabinet, and I picked up a poker from the fireplace. Together we searched every room in the house, but we found no trace of an intruder, and the mud petered out somewhere near the General’s bedroom, halfway along the upstairs hallway.
As far as the General could tell, nothing had been taken, but it was a queer business. The footprints only went up, not down. I mean, I suppose that by the time whoever it was reached the first floor, most of the mud had probably dropped off his shoes, but I would have expected some traces of it to appear on the way down too, certainly if they’d been that muddy to begin with.
The General called the police, and a constable came along to take a statement. There wasn’t much that he could do, though, except promise to keep an eye out for suspicious characters, and advise the General to keep his doors and windows locked for a time. I helped the housekeeper to clean up the mud, and filthy stuff it was. I wouldn’t have eaten anything that grew out of it, not if it had been boiled to within an inch of its life.
I offered to sleep in a chair outside that night, just in case our visitor tried to come back, but the General told me not to be silly. He liked his own company, the General. I think he was secretly glad that Lady Jessie had chosen to stay in London. I kept working in the garden until darkness fell, though, and I walked the housekeeper to her home, just in case.
That night a frantic scratching at his bedroom door woke the General. He was still half-asleep when he opened it, and something white and brown shot by his feet. It was the cat, Tiger, a big, lazy old beast that had once been the terror of every bird and small mammal within a square mile of the house but now spent most of his time napping and swatting at flies. The General hadn’t seen him move so fast in years, but something had clearly frightened Tiger enough to cause him to relinquish his place in his basket at the foot of the stairs and make his way up to the General’s bedroom. Tiger climbed on to the headboard of the bed and stood against one of the posts, hissing at the open door, every hair on his body raised in fright.
The General had brought his shotgun to bed with him, something Lady Jessie would never have permitted had she been there with him, not even if the whole German army had been threatening to invade through the rose garden and annex the vegetable patch. Now he grabbed the shotgun and called out a warning, but he received no reply. The smell had returned, though, that stench of filthy mud, and he could hear something moving in the darkness of the hallway, low against the wall. Even at the risk of exposing himself further, he turned on the lights.
A rat was running along the carpet by the sideboard, but it was no ordinary rat. This creature was bigger than the cat, its fur caked with mud, its belly swollen with carrion. As it sensed the General’s approach it raised itself up on its hind legs and sniffed at the air. It had no fear of him, not even as he levelled the shotgun at it. In fact, just before he pulled the trigger, the General felt certain that the thing was about to launch itself at him. Then he fired, and the rat was no more. But even when I saw it the next day in its ruined state (for the General had let it have both barrels, leaving little of it but fur and regrets) I could tell what a monster it had been. The tail was enough for a gauge. It was as long as my forearm.
What I noticed that day, though, was the stink of the mud. It had permeated the entire house. You couldn’t take a breath but that you smelled it, and you couldn’t put a bite of food in your mouth but that you tasted it. The carpet and floorboards retained their own memory of it too, for even after all of our efforts the marks of footprints remained. I feared that even a professional would be hard pressed to do much about the damage. The carpets would, in all likelihood, have to be replaced, and the boards sanded down and varnished again. That might get rid of the smell too, although it wasn’t any worse if you got low down and sniffed at the marks. It was just there, in the air, and every door and window left wide open failed to rid the house of it.
That day, the General returned to work on his memoir. If anything, the events of the previous 24 hours seemed only to spur him on to greater efforts. I saw him through the window, writing furiously. He’d rubbed a little clove oil under his nose to help with the stench.
As for myself, I disposed of what was left of the rat, but I still had no idea where the mud on its fur might have come from – or, indeed, the creature itself, for I had never before seen such a rodent, dead or alive.
It was only as I was dumping it among the trees near the house – for the insects and birds would do a better job of ridding the world of it than I ever could – that it struck me how little blood there had been in the aftermath of its destruction. In fact, I couldn’t recall seeing any blood at all, only bone and fur and some unidentifiable gray organs. Now, as I examined the remains more closely, it seemed to me that the fur wasn’t quite of a whole, for it was not uniform in colour, even through the mud impacted upon it. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced that the patches of fur were even from the same animal.
Similarly, the bone fragments appeared to be of different ages, and as I began laying them out I thought I discerned what might have been part of a bird’s wing, and an upper jawbone that belonged more correctly to a smaller mammal – a squirrel, perhaps, or even a bat, for I saw that it had two long short fangs in the centre with two longer ones at either side, and no rat that I had ever seen bore such teeth.
I sat back on my heels and considered the problem. It was, I thought, as though a rat had somehow been assembled from whatever pieces of other deceased animals might be found in the undergrowth or the soil, the fur and bones formed into a whole that, from a distance, might well resemble a large rodent but would not bear closer examination. Yet how could such a thing be animated? Surely the General must have been mistaken in believing that he had seen it run, for this was a dead thing formed of other dead things. Someone must have been playing a nasty trick upon him, perhaps the same individual responsible for tracking muddy footprints through his house.
And as my thoughts returned to the mud, so I made a kind of connection. I rose and walked through the trees to the pond at the heart of the woods. It wasn’t much of a body of water, even when swelled by rain, and the level was now as low as I could ever recall it being. Had I made my way to its deepest point, I doubt that I would have been submerged further than my waist. The water was cloudy, and the bank was dry. I looked for traces of footprints but could find none. Flies filled the air: nasty black brutes that went for my eyes and ears.
I caught a smell. It was fainter than the odour at the house, but I thought that I could detect it nonetheless. Then again, the stink of the mud at the General’s residence had attached itself to my clothing, my hair, my skin, or so it felt to me, and I couldn’t be certain that what I was smelling had its source at the pond or had simply been carried with me. I admit to feeling uneasy, though. I can’t say why. A kind of stillness, I think: a sense that something, somewhere was holding its breath.
I have what happened next only from the General himself. I saw nothing of it, and can bear no witness. All I can tell you is what he told me after I found him out by the pond just as the rain began to fall.
He had remained in his study until after dark, regularly smearing his upper lip with clove oil to keep away the smell until his moustache was soaked in the stuff. Eventually, though, even the clove oil no longer worked, and he could only conclude that, somehow, the stench was getting worse, if such a thing were possible.
The room was unbearably close, even with the window before him slightly ajar. All of the other doors and windows in the house were locked. He set aside his pen, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and then remembered the blasted clove oil. He could have one or the other, but not both, and determined to wash the oil from his moustache and make do with the whisky.
He stepped from office, and his foot slipped in mud. The front door remained closed, but muddy footprints led from it to his study – where they appeared to have paused, as though someone outside had listened for a time to the scratching of his pen – then made their way both left to the dining room and the kitchen, and across the hall to the drawing room, and upstairs to the bedrooms. The footprints crossed one another, and even in the dim lamplight he could see that they were not one set of prints but many, for the feet were of different sizes, and the tread marks were not the same.
And the smell! God, the smell!
He followed the prints as if in a daze, heedless now of whom he might find, seeking only an answer to the mystery of their presence. In the drawing room he found smeared fingerprints upon a photograph of his wife. The taps in the bathroom were filthy, the sink stained with dirt and, he thought, dark smears of blood. There were marks upon the wallpaper in the halls, and mud dripped from the handles of the doors. The linen on his bed was no longer white, as though someone caked in filth had been overcome by the urge to rest upon it. Every room, with the exception of the study that he had occupied, bore traces of intrusion, but of the intruders themselves he found no sign.
When he went back downstairs, the front door was open, and moonlight shone near bright as day upon the lawn and the muddy tracks upon it, all now leading away from the house and into the woods. He walked in those footsteps, and the woods closed around him, drawing him deeper and deeper into their shadows, until at last he found himself by the banks of the pond. He stared down into the water at its base, the filthiness of it seeming to swallow the moonlight, and as he did so the water level sank, seeping away until all that was left in the pond was foul grey mud.
And in the mud, something moved.
The General caught sight of a shape ill defined, a figure that appeared both of the mud and yet a thing apart. It forced itself up from the mire, its back bent, its hands and knees braced against the bottom of the pond. Fragments of old wood and rotting vegetation partly concealed its features, like the hood of a shroud, but he caught a glimpse of pale features, like the face of a second moon, and clouded eyes that turned themselves towards him yet did not see, not truly.
Now all was movement, the mud in a state of slow yet constant turmoil as more and more men emerged, and the General had a vision of an immensity of bodies being forced up from below, a great eruption of the dead, hundreds of thousands of them, all with names to whisper, all with stories to tell, a generation of the lost that would give the lie to every word of self-justification and crack the hollow shell of each excuse.
Because he had known. He had always known.
He sank to his knees, and prepared to join their number.
That was where I found him the next morning, his clothes caked with grey mud, his body shaking from something more than cold. As I raised him to his feet the rain came, washing him clean, and the pond began to fill again. The General babbled as I helped him home, and I thought him unhinged. Even then, he seemed unsure of what was mud and what was not mud. He thought, he said, as he shivered against me, that they might not have been men at all but merely the memory of men given form by whatever substance was closest to hand.
He never told the tale again, and never mentioned it to another soul, as far as I know. He’s gone now, of course. He died in 1941, just as another generation was facing the guns. As for his great rebuttal, his justification of his actions, I never heard him speak of it again, and I believe that he burned to ash what he had written of it.
I’m not a scientific man, but I can read and write, and I retain a curiosity about the world. I find it hard to believe, but I have read that we contain billions of atoms in our bodies, and all of those atoms at one point formed part of other human beings, so that each one of us carries within us a trace of every man and woman who has ever walked this earth. It is to do with the law of averages, as I understand it. If it is true of us, then is it true also of other things? Like mud, I mean.
Ten million soldiers died in the Great War, most of them laid to rest in mud and dirt. Ten million, each containing billions and billions of atoms. If each human being can contain within himself an atom of every other, could not something of those dead men be retained in the very soil, a kind of memory of them that can never be dispelled?
There are all kinds of mud, you know.
All kinds.
John Connolly's latest book, The Wolf in Winter, is the 12th in his Charlie Parker series of novels
