NEWS    Current / Submit    Archive    HELP    Walkthrough    Cheats    Editing    COMMUNITY    Forums    Fan Fiction    Fan Art    Links    FILES    Game Demo    Patch    Editing Tools    Community maps    Movies    Music    Submit    UNDYING    Game Info    Features    Requirements    Screenshots    Characters    Enemies    NPCs    Weapons    Spells    Inventory    Macintosh    Playstation2    FAQ    JERICHO    Game Info    SITE    Site Info    Contact Email Vignettes: Jeremiah The following is based on the game Clive Barker's Undying, ©. 2001 Electronic Arts Inc. [O] Covenant Family Vignette: Jeremiah France—Autumn 1915 Jeremiah had seen Hell: an endless wasteland of corpse-filled trenches and pits of black mud.      For days now he believed he would go mad. The endless barrage of artillery threatened to unhinge his sanity. He had seen it happen to other soldiers. The other day a fellow in his outfit had sliced off his own ears with a bayonet and stopped the bloodied holes with mud in attempt to block out the sound of exploding shells and the screams of victims. He’d heard and read reports of men performing similar mutilations upon themselves, and of others committing suicide rather than face another day in the hell that was No Man’s Land. Fatigue, of course, was the gate through which insanity made its entrance. The soldiers who had lost their minds had not slept for days on end. They had lost all power of reason and will, becoming nothing more than a shell into which madness, the great usurper, crept in and made its home. Jeremiah feared that happening to him. Sleep only came to him in snatches and it was always accompanied by strange dreams that left him wondering if he had even slept at all. He had dreamed, for instance, of leading a charge against an enemy that lay hidden behind a wall of fog, but when he’d broke through the fog, he was alone, and instead of facing withering machinegun fire he stood before the Covenant mansion, its windows dark, its doors opening into nothingness. He’d thought of approaching the chaplain and telling him about these dreams, but decided against doing so for the simple reason that the chaplain was ten years his junior. What advice could a mere lad provide?      The only solace Jeremiah found was in the letters his sister Bethany wrote to him. Until recently, that is. Her letters of late had become less cordial. The last letter he had received from her she had filled up six pages with invective against his younger brother—and her twin—Aaron. She complained that he was an inveterate gambler and that he often spent days on end locked up in his studio brooding and drinking absinthe. She no longer had any respect for him, she wrote; it made her sick that he was frittering away his talent by selling his paintings to pay off creditors. She described a recent incident where a group of men—“churlish brutes,” she’d called them—had come to the estate looking for Aaron, and only left when she’d told them that he’d fled to London the week before. It was a lie, of course—Aaron was in his studio, half-drunk—but she knew the men had come to collect on her brother’s debts. What really offended her, however, was Aaron’s ingratitude for what she had done for him. In fact, he had yelled at her for sending the men away, telling her to keep her nose out of his affairs. “For all I know,” she wrote, “I saved his life by sending those men away. But apparently that’s a disservice! Fine. We’ll see how well he fares the next time they come calling.”      Jeremiah knew, of course, that Aaron had had troubles in the past with gambling, but it was obvious now that it had become an addiction that was spiraling out of control. But what was he to do? He was in the middle of nowhere fighting a war; it was not as if he could simply go home and set things straight with his quarreling siblings. It was very frustrating. What made it even more so was his suspicion that his own letters were not making their way back to Ireland. It was not uncommon for mail to go missing during wartime, but Jeremiah could not help but feel that his letters were being intentionally misdirected. There was no sense bringing this up with his superiors, however; they would ask him for evidence to support his allegation, and he could not provide it. All he would be able to tell them was that none of the letters from his sister ever mentioned that she had received any from him—which, of course, was hardly proof enough that someone was responsible for sending his letters astray. Besides, his superiors had more urgent things to do than investigate a possible conspiracy within the mail dispatch. The only thing Jeremiah could do was keep writing responses to Bethany and hope that she did not stop sending him news from home, however bitter it was.      It was while Jeremiah was composing a new letter to Bethany that a senior officer approached him with the information that he had been selected to lead a “special operations” unit. When he tried to get some details about the assignment the officer simply told him to report the next morning to an abandoned farmhouse several miles behind the front; there, he was told, he would find all the answers to his questions. When Jeremiah arrived the following morning as ordered—on a provisions truck, of all things—he noticed that the area was under tight guard. Sentries patrolled the grounds around the farmhouse and a handful of machinegun nests had been set up along a perimeter; there was even a tank parked on the road, its shape sinister in the early morning fog. The interior of the farmhouse had been transformed into a base of operations. Uniformed men ran to and fro and the chatter of telegraph machines filled the air. A man in civilian clothes, who introduced himself as Benjamin Harkane, welcomed Jeremiah and showed him to a makeshift office on the top floor of the farmhouse. It was here that Jeremiah learned of the Trsanti, a group of foreign mercenaries that were becoming more and more bold in their incursions, and that he had been chosen to command a unit whose sole responsibility would be the neutralization of the mercenaries.      “These Trsanti aren’t like the Huns,” said Benjamin. “They have no sense of honour. They strike out of the shadows and then disappear like smoke. I’ve spoken to a number of soldiers who have survived attacks by the Trsanti, and they claim that there is something numinous about them, that they are not like normal men. Of course they’re not—they’re bloodthirsty savages, by Jove! But there are rumours circulating among the men that the Trsanti are in some way supernatural. I want this nonsense to stop, and the only way to do that is to prove to our boys that these mercenaries are flesh and blood like everyone else. And that’s where you come in, lad.”      At first Jeremiah was grateful for his new assignment. It meant that he would no longer have to endure the endless artillery barrages and the long days of trudging through mud-filled trenches. His gratitude was short-lived, however. Due to the sensitivity of his missions, everyone in his unit, himself included, would remain incommunicado from the rest of the world for the duration of operations; he would not be able to send any more letters home. Furthermore, he would be expected to operate with a minimum of men and material, for even though his assignment was of great importance, it apparently did not have much priority as far as supplies were concerned.      In the days leading up to his first encounter with the Trsanti, Jeremiah had the opportunity to meet some of the soldiers he would be leading into battle. To his dismay he found that most of them were nothing more than uneducated, superstitious farm boys, and he wondered if his superiors had given him soldiers deemed unfit to man the front lines. There were a handful of reliable men, however, one of which was a fellow Irishman by the name of Patrick Galloway. He found Patrick to be a decent fellow, if a little withdrawn, and the two became fast friends. On the day that the unit received its marching orders, Jeremiah gave Patrick a pistol he had taken from the body of a German officer. “As a token of good luck,” he explained.      The opening skirmishes with the Trsanti revealed to Jeremiah that they were poorly organized and fell in battle as easily as any man. What the mercenaries lacked in battlefield tactics, however, they compensated with sheer ferocity. Their nightmarish war cries were also enough to raise the hairs on any man’s neck. Something else that Jeremiah noticed about the Trsanti was that they were led into battle by shamans of some kind, though he had never seen any of these leaders actually die in combat. These shamans were distinguishable by tattoos that covered their entire body, and they often wielded strange artifacts that seemed to have some sort of galvanizing effect on the Trsanti soldiers. The more he witnessed the power these shamans wielded, the more Jeremiah’s curiosity about them grew. It occurred to him that if he could get possession of one their artifacts, he would be able to study it and possibly use it against them. This became an obsession for Jeremiah, and it would be nearly a year before an opportunity presented itself.      One evening after a particularly vicious battle, a patrol had discovered a wounded Trsanti and brought him back for interrogation. Jeremiah learned from the captive, who was near death and refused treatment, that the Trsanti had a large camp in the area. Jeremiah set out the next morning in search of the camp and found it exactly where the dying man had said it would be. The camp appeared lightly guarded, so Jeremiah launched an assault without summoning reinforcements. It became obvious within minutes that the Trsanti had set a trap for him and were lying in wait in the surrounding hills and forest. Everywhere he looked Jeremiah saw his men either fleeing or being cut down by the Trsanti. He knew he should have signaled a retreat, but he saw the Trsanti shaman less than twenty yards from where he stood, a strange green stone held over his head. He knew he would not get another chance, so Jeremiah charged forward, howling like a madman, emptying his pistol into the enemy soldiers around him. He became aware of Patrick fighting alongside him, and a strange hope filled him, as if the younger man’s presence were a kind of blessing. As Jeremiah dropped his emptied pistol and brought out his knife he saw Patrick from the corner of his eye take aim at the shaman…and then time slowed. A flash of green light erupted from the stone and Patrick was thrown to the ground, his body seared and smoking. Jeremiah looked from his fallen friend to the shaman, who was staring at Patrick like a predator gloating over its kill. The roar of battle had become a muffled groan. Nothing seemed to exist other than Jeremiah and the Trsanti shaman. Their eyes met, and Jeremiah raised his arm to throw the knife. He watched in disbelief as the blade traveled between the two men with unnatural slowness, as if moving through ether. To his surprise, the shaman did not move or do anything to avoid the oncoming knife. With an inexplicable grin he let the green stone drop from his hand, as if he no longer desired it…and in that instant time resumed, and the knife found its mark in the shaman’s neck.      With the shaman dead, the rest of the Trsanti turned and fled from the battle. Jeremiah knelt beside Patrick’s inert form and saw that despite the grievous wounds his friend was still alive. He bandaged him as best he could and waited by his side until the stretcher-bearers arrived to take him away. While he sat there waiting he examined the strange green stone the shaman had dropped. It was warm in his hands, and as he inspected its surfaces he began to feel light-headed. Numbness crept into his limbs. He tried to stand but fell to his knees. Voices filled his head, voices he had not heard in years. He saw his sister Lizbeth, less than six months dead. She was calling to him, which he knew was impossible. He tried to regain his composure, to block out the intrusive sounds, but it was no use. A curtain of darkness fell across his eyes.      When he came to, the stretcher-bearers still had not arrived. Other than a slight chill in his bones, Jeremiah felt fine. He looked down at the green stone in his hands and saw a face reflected on its shiny facets. He brought the stone closer to his own face and stared at the fragmented reflection. Empty eyes returned his gaze. For a moment Jeremiah did not recognize himself. Then he closed his eyes, and his name came back to him from the empty darkness where it had hidden. This fan-fiction story © dr_coma 2004.