:GHOST

A short Story

By Eric McQuiston

Part One – The Whistles of War

Mud sucked at Tommy’s boots like it had a grudge. Three days of cold rain had turned the trench floor into a soup of rotted straw, spent cartridges, and whatever else a man tried not to think about. His feet were wet to the bone; socks long gone to rot, and the dampness crept up his legs like a slow disease.

The trench stank of wet earth, unwashed bodies, oil, and the sick-sweet perfume of decay. Somewhere behind him, a man coughed hard enough to rattle bone. No one looked. They’d all heard worse. Overhead, the pale, grey sky leaked drizzle; steady and uncaring.

Tommy shifted his weight and reached inside his coat. From a wax-coated fold, he drew out a scrap of dry paper and a pencil stub. With elbows on a sandbag, he began to write:

Dear Maman,

I don’t know what day it is anymore, only that the rain won’t stop and the mud wants to swallow us whole.

We lost David last night. A shell took most of him. I said a prayer. I think he was Catholic. I hope someone does the same for me.

I joined because the papers said we should, that it was noble, that we’d be representing the whole country. I liked the sound of that. Sounded like something a man could be proud of.

Now I just want to come home.

I think about fishing in Bayou Black. About the way you made pain perdu on cold mornings.

He folded the letter, sealed it, and tucked it back into his breast pocket.

“You writing home again, cher?” came a voice beside him. Dubois, lean, Creole, too young for the creases on his face offered a tired smile beneath his helmet.

“Just in case,” Tommy replied.

Dubois nodded. “Always just in case.”

To their left, McCreary struck a match off his bayonet and lit a cigarette with surgical care. “Snagged this off a dead Hun,” he said. “If I die, I want to go out tasting something imported.”

Tommy gave him a sideways look. “You die, I’m taking your boots.”

“You’ll have to fight Dubois for ’em,” McCreary shot back.

“I’ll sell them to him,” Dubois said with a shrug. “Two francs and the rest of your sardines.”

They chuckled; not because anything was funny, but because humor was the only weapon left to fight fear.

Then...

Whheeeet — whheeeet — whheeeeeeet.

The first signal whistle.

Gas masks were donned like ritual. Tommy pulled his on, lenses already fogging. He stepped onto a shattered ammunition crate and scanned the land beyond the trench.

It wasn’t land anymore, just ruin. Barbed wire tangled like black veins. Craters steamed. Smoke drifted in greasy curtains. And then...movement. Gray shapes advancing in the mist.

The enemy was coming.

He raised his rifle, found a target, fired. The figure fell. Worked the bolt. Fired again.

Around him, men shouted, screamed, fell. Another whistle; closer now. Mortar shells slammed down, churning the ground into geysers of blood and wet soil.

Then...

A detonation behind him.

He hit the trench floor hard, ears ringing. When he scrambled up, his rifle was gone; lost in the mud. A German vaulted the parapet, bayonet gleaming.

Tommy met him barehanded.

Mud, sweat, and a single crushing headbutt. He snatched a shovel from the muck and swung it just in time to meet the next charge.

Then he ran.

Down the trench, past the dying and the dead, until there was nowhere left to run. With enemy troops surging ahead, he clawed his way up and over the wall...

Into open ground.

Into no-man’s-land.

Bullets snapped past. Fire and shrapnel tore the sky.

He ran blind through mud and ruin until a half-burnt hedgerow came into view. He crashed through it, branches clawing at his mask, ripping it off, and stumbled onto a rough cart track.

He didn’t stop.

WHUMP!

A shell landed off target. The blast lifted him from his feet and threw him into the roadside ditch.

And the world went black...

---

Part Two – The White Room

He woke to silence and light.

Clean, white light from a ceiling that hummed softly. No rats. No rain. No stink of death. Just antiseptic and linen.

Machines quietly clicked and beeped beside his bed. Two women spoke French nearby, their voices gentle but strange. Their uniforms were crisp, white, and cut in ways he’d never seen. The walls were smooth, the sheets impossibly clean.

A tall, lean man stood near the door wearing a dark blue suit with a silver lapel pin; his calm eyes untouched by war.

“Hello, Mr. Walker,” the man said. “How are you feeling?”

Tommy coughed. “Like I got blown up.”

“I’m Brian Cooper,” he said. “U.S. Embassy.”

“You were found unconscious near Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The local police think it was a hit-and-run.”

Tommy frowned. “No… no, I was in the Argonne. With the Forty-Second; the Rainbow Division. The Germans were overrunning the line.”

Cooper hesitated. “Yes, we checked. You were wearing a U.S. Army uniform... from World War One. Your dog tags identify you as Thomas H. Walker. Records show you were declared Missing in Action... in October 1917.”

Tommy stared, unable to breathe. “World War One? What are you saying?”

Cooper’s voice softened. “Thomas… it’s October 2017. You’ve been gone a hundred years.”

The room tilted.

Tommy gripped the sheet. “That’s… not possible.”

“I don’t understand it either,” Cooper said. “But somehow, you’re here.”

Tommy turned toward the window. Blue sky, clouds and a silver/white streak slicing across them faster than any bird.

“I don’t know how I got here,” he whispered.

“We’ll try to find out,” Cooper said. “But you’re safe now.”

Tommy nodded slowly. His voice cracked. “I just wanted to go home.”

---

Part Three – A Hundred Years Gone

When Tommy was discharged, Cooper handed him a small envelope. “Your ticket home,” he said. “And some cash. You’ll need it.” He offered no explanations or answers.

Inside was an airline ticket and paper money like he had never seen. He was transported in a clean, sleek and comfortable vehicle to an airport; a dizzying place of noise and people. He waited in a chair and watched the marvelous flying machines come and go until he was escorted onto one himself.

---

The flight was a dream stitched from miracles. He’d heard of airplanes during the war, even saw a few; delicate things of canvas, wood, and wire. But this machine was a roaring cathedral of steel and light.

When it lifted from the ground, his heart climbed with it. The world below shrank into patches of green and gold; rivers gleaming like molten glass. Above the clouds, the light was clean and endless.

He looked around; men and women in unusual uniforms. He had been told it was a U.S. Military flight. They spoke quickly, their accents slightly strange; their faces lit by the glow of small glass rectangles held in thier hands.

He wanted to shout, Don’t you see? We’re flying! But he stayed silent.

A smiling attendant offered him a simple meal on a tray and a cup of fizzing water that sparkled like captured lightning. He thanked her quietly, still stunned that such wonders existed and that everyone seemed bored by them.

---

Fourteen hours later, the Mississippi River appeared below, winding like a living thing through a patchwork of green. Just beyond the vast Lake Pontchartrain, the sprawl of New Orleans unfolded; bigger and brighter than the city he’d left long ago.

At the airport named for a man he didn’t know, Louis Armstrong, he stepped into a world of glass and noise. Shops, cafés, moving stairways, voices speaking a dozen tongues unfolded against a background of music that seemed to come from nowhere, or everywhere. No one spoke to him or even acknowledged his presence. They seemed intent on their own missions. He felt like a ghost in a marketplace of the future.

Outside, the air was warm and damp, smelling of gasoline and rain on pavement. He hesitantly took a taxi per the instructions that the lean man had written for him. And, after telling him the destination, the driver took him through a blur of highways, lights, and electric signs. The city gave way to cane fields and the familiar lowland scrub.

Tommy watched it all, eyes wide, feeling both wonder and grief.

When they reached Houma, the house he had left was gone. Only weeds and a leaning pecan tree remained. A rusted mailbox lay in the long grass like a headstone. At the parish records office, a clerk with bright nails told him there were no living relatives, the last Walker had died twenty years ago.

Saddened and stricken by loss, Tommy walked out and stood silently under a gray sky until a neon sign caught his attention through the warm drizzle: Café Boudreaux.

Inside he was welcomed by the smell of coffee. Tommy sat at the counter and ordered a cup. The waitress poured the coffee as a bell over the door chimed.

A man entered; average height, average build, forgettable except for the purpose in his eyes.

He approached Tommy, “Mind if I sit?”

Tommy gestured. “Free country, I guess.”

The man slid onto a stool. “Thomas Hiram Walker?”

Tommy nodded.

“My Name is John Smith”, he said. “How's the coffee?”

“It'll do”, replied Tommy. “How do you know me?”

“I was waiting for you. I followed you from your old home... or where it used to be.”

Tommy cocked an eyebrow, curious.

“Men like you don’t just appear,” the man said, as if in answer to the unspoken question. “You’ve come back from somewhere you shouldn’t have survived”, he hesitated a moment, “That makes you interesting to certain people.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind who knew you were coming. And who can tell you something the others could not,” he paused again, “you weren’t the only one who came back.”

Tommy was bewildered, unable to form a sentence.

'Mr. Smith' placed a small white card with a series of numbers on the counter. “Call when you’re ready for those answers.”

He smiled, stood and left with a nod; the bell chiming behind him.

Tommy stared at the card without touching it. Outside, rain tapped softly on the window.

He thought of the Argonne; the mud, the whistles, the men that marched along side him.

“I guess we're all ghosts now”, Tommy whispered to no one and sipped the coffee.