THE BLACK SWAN

BY DAMIAN CROSSE

Copyright © 2026 Damian Crosse All rights reserved

Dipped in moonlight, Stephen Poole thought through the cloud of pain and narcotics. She’s all…all dipped in moonlight, but her feathers never change. The feathers…they stay black as night.

He peeled open eyes gummed shut with exhaustion and sickness. The fever persisted, low and steady, though it no longer seemed intent on burning the soul from him. He considered himself lucky—though who could say how long that luck would hold? Days? Hours?

Black wings, all white…white all over with moonlight.

The first thing to resolve in his blurry awareness was the entrance to the medical tent, the thin flap of camouflage green canvas halfway open and caught in the hand of a breeze. The night air creeping inside was muggy and smelled of sweat and gasoline. Yet against his flushed skin, the kiss of night was generously cool, and smelled far better than the pollution of piss, shit, and blood hanging around him like a suffocating fog.

The surgical tent ran long, able to accommodate up to twenty wounded men at once. And there were two more tents, identical in every way, set up outside: room enough for sixty soldiers, should there be so many wounded and in need of care. Of course, there weren’t nearly so many; most had died already. He guessed there might be seven of his fellow infantrymen left to keep him company in here, based on what he’d been able to hear, but it was difficult to say with any degree of certainty. And just because they’d come in alive when he had, didn’t mean they’d stayed that way. Each cot was divided from the one beside it by a thin curtain. Some bid at maintaining privacy, he supposed, though what that mattered at a time like this, he couldn’t say. And the moans and sighs, the soft tears of pain, all sounded the same after a certain point.

“It’s all a numbers game now,” his friend Joey A. Ramirez used to say, referring to the orders given them by the higher-ups, and the higher-ups of higher-ups. Never had his words rung truer to Stephen Poole.

But Joey was gone now.

Poole blinked, bringing the world into better focus. A full moon kept watch in the sky tonight, bathing the camp in a blue-white luminance that looked nearly day-bright to him. Black wings…

He tried to move his leg. His right leg. But of course, it didn’t move—there was no right leg anymore, not below the knee, anyhow. It was the strangest thing, missing a piece of himself, a piece that had been with him his whole life. It was almost easy to forget it was gone when he would swear on his mother’s life he felt the toes still, that he could even make them flex and curl.

Quite quickly, however, the pain rushed forward to remind him, a spearhead of flame when he tried to move that shot straight through his groin, clear up into the pit of his roiling stomach. The bullet he’d taken had wreaked havoc on his shin, splintering the tibia in a hundred different places, according to Staff Sergeant Harrington, the platoon’s only remaining combat medic. “Unsalvageable” had been his exact word—a regrettable scenario, indeed. Poole hadn’t been too surprised; they hadn’t been able to put Humpty Dumpty back together either, and the crafty little egg had had the good will of all the king’s men and horses, apparently. The same could not be said for Stephen Poole; the horses had all fled in terror, and he didn’t think the king even knew what had befallen him, much less cared.

All the king’s horses…all the horses…black steeds galloping under a full moon.

He was about to turn over, drawing breath as he braced for the pain, but froze. A shadow, just there, painted on the ground right outside the entrance. A slender shape. Had it been there before? The night held many shadows, and this was too slight, too small—too delicate—to belong to anyone in camp. Any soldier out and about on patrol would be too large, and would be moving around besides, not simply standing motionless in front of the medical tent. Harrington would most likely be face down in his quarters, unconscious next to an empty fifth of scotch. And if not already, he’d certainly be well on his way there. This wasn’t a fully staffed hospital, after all, with night nurses and an endless supply of narcotics, and if one of the condemned left to rot in here happened to pass in the night…well, what was one more body atop the pile?

What was one more number?

But the shape never moved, and so Poole figured it must belong to a tree, or some other equally harmless object. He rolled onto his back, the pain gnawing away at him with its voracious razor teeth, then twisted on the rickety cot, away from the entrance and the sweet promise of moonlight. The darkness deeper inside the tent stood like murky pond water, polluted and stagnant; it gave him the sense of both falling and drowning. After several long minutes, the bladed agony in his missing limb blessedly dulled, returning to the steady, blunt ache that centered about his thickly bandaged knee. He could feel his toes down there again, moving, flexing. And there was the faintest itch, just on the outside of his ankle.

No one was standing there, he assured himself. How could there be anyone? No one’s coming for us…no one cares.

The night before the ambush, Sergeant Mathers had radioed in a request for much needed reinforcements. That same night, command had promised to fulfill that request. That had been over thirty-six hours ago. There’d been no sign of reinforcements, no communication from outside whatsoever. Perhaps the squad sent to aid them had suffered a similar fate.

Perhaps Poole’s platoon had simply been lied to.

It mattered not either way. There were no reinforcements coming, no metal angels descending from the sky, trumpeting salvation upon chopping blades and droning motors. No savior to scoop him up and ferry him from this nightmare.

No Black Swan.

It was all the boy’s fault, Poole found himself thinking as he waded slowly into the shallows of unconsciousness. All that damn boy’s fault; they should never have spoken to him. Now, he could think of nothing but the swan, that fallen queen and her tainted beauty, her feathers turned black with grief, her wings burdened with the weight of death.

She was all he could think of…her and the devil. The snake, red-eyed and vicious. That harvester of souls, scouring the battlefield for poor wretches to mutilate. Wretches like him.

A few days prior to this miserable night, they’d taken shelter in a small, nameless village, tucked into some small, nameless corner of these endless woods. The locals had accommodated them willingly, offering what little food they could spare, and room enough to sleep, though as with most of the villages they passed through, their presence there was tolerated more than outright accepted, the perceived kindness derived from a place of trepidation and fear instead of some kind of duty or obligation. A superstitious rite to fend off some impending famine or other great disaster.

They hadn’t stayed long: only long enough.

The boy had been near twelve, if Poole were forced to put a number to him, though it was possible he’d been even younger. He couldn’t recall the boy’s name, and guessed now that was because he’d never heard it (they’d likely never cared to ask). The child had been far too kind to them, too trusting; on the face of it, it had seemed he didn’t even know who they were, or why they were there, marching across his home, eating his family’s food and drinking their water. He’d been adamant, however, eager to tell them the legend of the Black Swan. And so they’d listened.

Poole cursed the child now, cursed him for the pain in his missing leg, for the way his phantom toes continued to clench and cramp.

Lieutenant Corbin had translated for them, for he was the only one in their platoon able to speak the language well enough to track what the boy was prattling on about.

“He’s asking if we’ve seen her.”

“Seen her?” Miles demanded, and spit. “Seen who?”

Corbin said something to the boy. His words were slower, fumbled out. The boy’s own came back at him fast and smooth; it seemed, to Poole at least, he found Corbin’s attempt at speech amusing.

“Bird. Black bird,” Corbin said, frowning.

“Black bird?” Jones snorted, snapping off another bite of apple.

“No, not bird…Swan! He’s asking if we’ve seen a black swan.”

Poole had chuckled with the others at the time, finding the question absurd. Now, the mental image of a black-winged swan filled him with a feeling that, in his semi-conscious state, could only be described as some peculiar combination of dread and ecstasy.

Dipped in moonlight…so dark…so alone.

He floated there again, listening to the conversation as it was unveiled to them by the Lieutenant, wondering what of it he recalled now was the true story, and what was merely a construction of his own fragile, drug-addled consciousness.

The legend of the Black Swan, as the black-haired, dirty-faced village boy had put it, was a tale of tragedy, and of beautiful redemption. A fable meant to bring hope to the very destitute and war-torn people who’d conceived it.

According to the boy, the world had once been ruled by a heavenly swan. “Blessed by the sun”, she was beautiful and white, her feathers pure and clean. Likewise, the world itself had been a paradise of peace, free from the ravages of famine and disease—and most especially of war. Even when the wolf hunted the doe, or the bear the fish, all existed in natural harmony, and death brought purpose to this first life.

But there’d been another, a creature of darkness and shadow. A being that feared the light, yet was jealous of those who lived peacefully in it. Jealous of the swan and her beauty. Cunning was this creature, this…

“…Lizard?” Corbin said, but shook his head.

“The fuck’s he mean, lizard, Lieutenant?”

“Shut up…” He listened to the boy repeat the word, then looked back at the rest of the men helplessly. “Snake, I think. It’s the best I can—”

“Devil,” Ramirez interrupted, stunning them all into momentary silence. As far as Poole had seen, his friend hadn’t shown a scrap of interest in the patchwork tale until that moment, his attention fixed entirely on the apple he was busy peeling with his combat knife. “Doesn’t matter the word. He means the devil.”

“You want to do this, princess?” Corbin demanded.

Ramirez, unperturbed, shrugged and returned to peeling. “You’re doing splendidly, Lieutenant.”

Corbin cursed, some of the rest laughed, but Poole had grown somber; it had made a cold sort of sense to him. At least, he remembered it making sense then, though what sense could be found in anything anymore?

The steady throbbing in his knee injected a peculiar heartbeat into the story: at the crest of each peak, when the agony was at its worst, he wanted to laugh at the absurdity; yet in the valleys, when the pain ebbed as low as it would go, he wanted only to weep for the bitterness and heartbreak.

The devil, or snake, or whatever it was the boy had truly meant to name, was a jealous and hateful creature. Above all else, however, he was cunning. He fashioned from the soil of the Earth new creatures—men—and breathed life into them, then offered them to the Swan as a token of good will and kindness. Yet, with the breath of life, he’d instilled in each and every one of them the capacity to hate also. It wasn’t long before that hate grew and spread like fire, as the Snake knew it would, until the Swan’s wonderful gift, much to her horror and grief, began to war with and destroy itself before her very eyes.

The Snake understood that hate could not exist in balance with life, and that his voice, lurking in the heart and soul of every man, would bleed out and destroy all beauty and harmony it came in contact with. Eventually, it would chase away even the light itself and plunge the whole world into bitter darkness.

War begot war; death swept the world like a plague. And in her grief and sorrow, the once beautiful swan shed all her pure feathers, and in their place grew ones black as midnight.

Midnight, Poole thought, and may or may not have tried to laugh in the silent sleep of the medical barrack. A child’s concept of evil, as pure and simple as the lovely Swan Queen’s white feathers. White and black; good and evil.

He saw them together, white on black, the face of the moon reflected in the waters of midnight, revealing the waves and ripples while at the same time drowning in them.

That was how he saw it, but not how it was. Black and white weren’t insoluble, but mingled and combined. They grew ugly, transforming into impure and ambiguous grey.

Queen of life, oh White Swan…My Queen of Midnight. My Wings of Death.

At her transformation, the Snake rejoiced, and he’d laughed in the Swan’s face, and called her the foolish Queen, the Filthy Swan. In joyous spite of her, he scoured the battlefields and the war-ravaged lands, mutilating all the bodies of men he could—for to mutilate the body, according to the village boy (real? Was he even real? The village…?), robs the soul of its place in the afterlife.

“Such bullshit,” Ramirez had complained to Poole later, as they hiked through the muck, the weeds, the heat and bugs. “There’s only one place your soul goes in the end.”

And where is that? Poole asked, then and now.

“Back in the dirt…right where it belongs, along with all the rest of the shit.”

Saddened, filled with fury at the injustice of the Snake’s great lie, the Filthy Swan spread her tainted wings and took once more to the heavens. The black feathers she could never shed, but with them she hid herself amongst the shadows, much as the Snake had done. So concealed, she was able to steal souls away from the Snake before he had a chance to butcher the bodies. It didn’t matter who had died, who fought for whom or belonged to which tribe, all souls she determined to save…all those the Snake had determined to destroy.

So it was, the true war: the War of Life.

There are no heavenly wings coming for me…the reinforcements would’ve been here by now. They’re gone…all gone, my sweet, beautiful swan.

But what did that leave? Poole trembled in his dark place of stolen rest, this purgatory between waking and death. He quaked with fear. What did that leave, if not the reinforcements?

Why, the Snake, of course. The devil and his mutilation.

Stupid, he tried to tell himself. Just a stupid story, that’s all. Superstitious bullshit. Such…

“Bullshit,” Ramirez had said. “Do you seriously believe in that shit, Poole? Are you still so naïve?”

It was the noise that pulled Poole up from the darkness. A subtle sound, so much so he couldn’t be sure he’d heard it. A footstep, maybe; it had sounded like someone creeping into the tent, taking care not to be heard. Yet when he twisted enough to peer over his shoulder, he saw nothing. Doing his best to swallow in the desert of his throat, Poole glanced toward the entrance again, where he thought he’d seen a person’s shadow only minutes ago. But the ground was clear. There was no shape, no shadow…and that disturbed him more than anything.

The worst part of the injury wasn’t the pain itself, at least not anymore. Now it was the doubt, the constant sense—brought on in no small part by the drugs meant to fend off his pain—that what he was seeing, hearing, experiencing had the faintest color of fantasy to it. His perspective was muddled, his mind confused, and thus what he knew and thought he knew was always kept, at least partially, in the shadow of doubt. Was he seeing the slender shadow of a woman outside the tent—a woman? Do you hear yourself right now? There are no women here—or was that his imagination running to all corners of the world, trying to make sense of the confusion? To scoop up all the shattered pieces and glue them back together?

All the king’s horses…

It moved, and he heard it. A shadow passed, too fast, a split second—yet he’d seen it there, painted on the ground just outside the tent, interrupting the moonlight. Then the sound of wings buffeting the air, slow and graceful, and in his mind all Poole could see was the curving form of the Swan (that was somehow also the sensuous form of a woman) gliding across the face of the moon, the very essence of it the color of midnight.

Was it real, the legend, or only what I wanted it to be? Do I want her to save me? Do I deserve it?

The wings beat again, and time slowed such that he could almost feel it: vibrations in the webbing network of reality, strange chords plucked by cosmic fingers. As time slowed even further, he heard the droning tone, the single despondent voice, of a melancholic chorus. And she was the conductor of that chorus, the keeper of all that made the world turn and the universe burn on with its millions and billions of points of light, and he wished she would save him, bear him away upon her delicately feathered back, pluck his dying, suffering soul from the throat of Hell.

“Back in the dirt…” Ramirez had said. “…along with all the rest of the shit.”

You can’t know that, Poole thought back.

“Oh, can’t I?”

And suddenly he was speaking to Ramirez, as clearly as if the man were suddenly there, kneeling beside his cot.

“I thought you’d come back,” Poole whispered, wondering if the others in the tent could hear their soft voices. “I knew it couldn’t have been true.”

“But it is true, my friend.” Ramirez sighed, a sound that passed as slowly, as mournfully, as the ponderous beat of those long, curving black wings. “You were always so stubborn with the truth, especially when you didn’t like it. Who would know better about death than me?”

“So what is it then?” Poole asked.

“Death? A contradiction.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Do you remember that time we got lost backpacking near Mount Eddy?”

A strange question, but Poole remembered. “It’s hard to forget: out there for five days, the weather turning sour, our food running low.”

“You got us out of that.”

“We got out of that. Together, the four of us.”

It had been their first real trip together as young men, without the suffocating hand of parental supervision grasping them by the throat. They’d borrowed Joey’s father’s Jeep—under the pretense that it would only be himself and Stephen going. Of course, it hadn’t only been them, but Joey’s girlfriend, Kim, and her friend Christy as well (who was single then and whom Stephen had hoped to get better acquainted with during their planned three-day excursion into the wilderness).

They’d driven deep into the northwestern woods, navigating rocky roads that often better resembled old deer trails, then had begun their long climb toward the base of Mount Eddy. At the start of the third day, they’d decided to start back early on account of Christy’s sudden and worsening cold, but soon found themselves turned too far around in the confusion of dense foliage and unfamiliar terrain. Supplies grew short, tempers more so, and panic lurked behind an ever-shrinking horizon.

“It wasn’t me,” Poole said stubbornly. “I’d still be up that damn mountain if you hadn’t been there with me.”

But Ramirez only denied this, as he’d done every time they’d ever argued about their hike to Mount Eddy. The smile he sensed on his best friend’s face wasn’t fond or sad…only there. “We were as helpless as newborns, but it was you who stepped up. Our mother duck, leading us safely across the road. You just couldn’t accept our fate.”

“It wasn’t meant to end that way,” Poole said, confused why Ramirez would even bring this up. Wasn’t it obvious?

“And how is it meant to end?”

“How’s what meant to end?”

“You know…”

But he didn’t, not really, and that frustrated him. All at once, he was aware of his leg again, could feel every part of it, the blood pumping through it, the gooseflesh tickling all the short hairs. He wondered where good ol’ Doc Harrington had put it after he’d cut it free, if it was still somewhere nearby, transmitting signals like some rotting organic radio.

“I was planning to propose to Kim on that stupid trip,” Ramirez went on. “Did you know that?”

Poole couldn’t remember when Ramirez had specifically told him so, or if he even had. Was it true, or only more smoke? Either way, he decided to play ball, curious where Ramirez meant for all this blather to go. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I knew already…whether we made it out of those woods or not, I wasn’t coming back. Not really. It was up in those woods when I realized where I needed to go, and that I could never truly be there for her. I understood it all finally, for the first time: it doesn’t matter how you die or when, only that you will. I see now that I was always dead from the start—my life was merely a long-running memory of a past that happened long ago. Not my past; no one owns their own life. It was merely a past. Gone now…all smoke.”

“It could’ve been different,” Poole argued, though the pain soaring in his leg made it difficult to know what he was trying to say. “You weren’t meant to come here, I know it. You were meant to be a lawyer. Remember that? A lawyer, like you always told me you wanted to be when we were kids. If only I could’ve talked you down. If only…If only I’d…Oh, God, it hurts!”

“What could’ve been doesn’t mean shit, my friend. Take it from someone who’s been all the way to the sunset land and back: it goes the way we all do…into the ground…with all the rest of the shit.”

I should’ve…should’ve saved you…I should’ve been faster.

“Why did you come here, Poole? Why did you chase after when you saw me walking down the throat of Hell?”

The tears could’ve come then—tears of grief, sure, but of fury as well. Yet he choked them back. “How can you ask me that? There’s no grand secret, no deeper purpose with me. What you see is what you get. I had to pull you out…I couldn’t leave you alone in here. Simple as that.”

“Simple as that,” his friend echoed softly. “Trying to change an inevitability. Trying to create a memory that was never yours to make in the first place. You would’ve had better luck trying to make the world spin backward.”

“It’s like you said, I guess…I’m already dead, remembering something that happened long ago. Is that what you want to hear? Me saying you’re right?”

“And what does that tell you? If I’m right…”

Poole thought a moment. “I never chose to come here with you. I was simply meant to.”

“Now you’re beginning to see the truth.”

And suddenly Stephen Poole could see his oldest friend in full, stark relief. He saw him both as the boy he’d grown up with, and as the man he’d watched him grow into. He saw the kid he’d spent countless hours chasing through the misty woods behind Spruce Elementary, had wrestled with in the dirt and played every season of little league baseball with. He saw the teenager who’d shared his first school dance with a girl named Kim, who’d learned to drive behind the wheel of his family’s CJ-5 at the age of twelve.

He saw the hard-eyed, stiff-lipped, shaven young man standing at rigid attention in his very first fatigues.

It was as if Ramirez had finally stepped out from behind an opaque curtain, a veil whose existence Poole only now became aware of. Revealed in the naked light of truth, Joey A. Ramirez, sometimes called “the ferret” by kids in grade school for his sharp features and small, dark eyes, but known primarily as “Joey Boy” by his closest friends. The wily trouble-maker and bane of substitute teachers. His face missed one of those seeing, intelligent eyes now, the right one; in fact, he missed much of that side of his face now, the flesh stripped and gouged away by fiery shrapnel. Dragging along behind him atop an invisible black floor was the greater length of his entrails, trailing like crimson streamers from the ruptured stomach of some child’s birthday party pinata.

“Tell me, brother. Is it too late for your swan to take me? Am I too much of a mess now?”

Shaking, Poole turned away from Ramirez and his dead, bleeding face. He knew he was fleeing, knew he was being a coward, but he couldn’t help it. Who could stand to look upon something so repulsive? He discovered a little bare pocket of darkness nestled in the cracks between his more mountainous thoughts, far away from the recency of Ramirez’s death, the smell of it, and tucked himself far down inside. In here, it wasn’t quite so bad; the memory of that push through the valley—of watching Ramirez fail to hold in his leaking guts, attempting to do it for him before hooking his arms under Ramirez’s, his hands all slippery with blood, and hauling him back the way they’d come, making it thirty or more yards before finally taking his own wound—could almost be forgotten, shoved behind the same ethereal curtain Ramirez had used for hiding.

And in the darkness came a single shaft of cool moonlight, melancholic in the silence, and a shadow passed across his face, a shape with a long, curving neck and soft wings and…

Poole was ripped to wakefulness as something brushed past the foot of his cot. He twisted and tried to push himself up, but fell back against his sweaty lump of a pillow, having to bite down hard on his lower lip to keep from crying out. Hot tears steamed into his eyes, making it impossible for the moment to see anything.

“Watch your back, Poole,” Ramirez warned from somewhere far away, as if from the end of a long, vacant hallway. “Your soul is up for the taking now. Who do you think will reach you first?”

Against that watery sheaf of darkness, he believed for an instant he saw something: movement, dark and shadowy, a fast thickening of the night at the foot of the cot. Yet when he finally blinked his eyes fully clear, the space was empty. No sound came to him, not even from his fellow wounded. All in the world was darkness, silence, and pain.

Plenty of pain.

He almost wept then, but felt a formidable, if childish, shame at the thought of doing so with his injured infantrymen trying to sleep in their own cots beside him. Most of them were worse off than himself. The ChiCom claymore that had claimed Donald Plinket’s left foot had also taken part of his hand, as well as any hope he might once have harbored to father children. Jonas Baron had taken two shots to the back and was most likely paralyzed from the navel down. And William Bull, nicknamed the bull for his brutish, six foot eight stature, looked like a wax figurine pressed face-first into an open flame.

“She’s come for you, my friend…come to lift you from the dirt, just as you always wanted.”

This was insane. Poole knew there was no swan, and no soul to be found even if there was. There was only time—time to be spent until it was all used up and all that remained was a husk, an empty shell.

“She’s come for you…You can’t fathom your purpose.”

Again Poole woke, jerked up from God-knew-where. He heard weeping. Soft and strained, as if whoever was doing so meant to keep the fact concealed. The sound made Poole suddenly furious. If this man, whoever he was, went on like that, it might very well make him weep…and once that started, he feared there might never be an end to it. What right did he—did either of them, for that matter—have to that? They were alive, if not exactly whole. There was a chance for them.

A chance.

None for Ramirez. Or Corporal Dave. Or Lieutenant Corbin. Or any number of people they’d known, too many to count now. There was no chance for any of them, and never would be again.

They’re in the ground now…with all the rest of the shit.

Furious, he squeezed his eyes shut hard, trying to shove out the abhorrent sound and fumble his way back onto the road to sleep. But the longer it went on, the more he realized the sound wasn’t quite right. For one, it came from somewhere to his right, he thought, near the front of the tent. But he was nearest the entrance; there shouldn’t be anyone there.

Poole opened his eyes; it was a struggle even to do that, his face felt so swollen and hot.

He was on his left side again, hands folded under his cheek, truncated leg butting awkwardly against the whole one. The pain there was warm and fast and insistent. The most he could see was the smooth black face of the curtain dividing him from the wounded man one bed over. He went to swallow, but there seemed to be a lump the size of a golf ball in the middle of his throat, and his mouth was too dry to produce any spit besides.

The sound was definitely coming from his right…from beside his cot.

A long moment passed in which he considered not looking at all. He was delirious, not hearing right; that was all.

Only delusion.

And so, holding his breath tight in his chest, Poole dug up the strength to move, turning over onto his back. It was all he could do not to let his consciousness slip away down a fast, dark chute, so colossal was the pain. The sobbing drew him back, however, holding his awareness hostage and keeping him alert.

It was closer now.

Rolling, Poole squinted through teary eyes into what he first believed to be only darkness. Was it the wind making that noise? Was he only hallucinating?

It’s too real too real I can’t only be imagining it because it’s right there, I—

He didn’t so much find the shape as it let itself be found. The noise—all that intolerable, wet sobbing, was unmistakably its doing. It came forward, a part of the darkness, yet at the same time separate from it. Poole’s disbelief glued him in place. His head swam with pain and drugs. It was so difficult to see, to keep his eyes open, and even as the shadow—tall and wide, yet impossibly angled—neared his cot, his faintness swelled, filling his skull up like dense, scratchy cotton.

The crying ceased suddenly; the shape made no sound at all, not even as it stepped (floated?) forward. Close enough now to smell the spoiled-food rot on it, Poole choked on the scream that had been rising sluggishly up his throat. His leg, all of it, missing and real, exploded into a fierce, fiery agony. Poole was suddenly aware of the missing limb in a way that he’d never been even when it had still been attached to his body. He knew exactly where Doc Harrington had put it once it was removed: the great pit they’d dug for all the rest of the twisted, torn, useless bodies. Poole could feel it in there now, lying plaintive and forgotten, rotting and stinking with all the other decaying flesh, the smell carried now to him by this tall dead thing, this living slice of night.

The shape loomed, and Poole knew death was upon him. He opened his mouth, tasting more of that vicious rot, and gurgled out some meaningless noise. As the pain swelled, he heard a sudden slew of voices, distant and unintelligible. He couldn’t tell if they were laughing or screaming. The sound was trapped inside him, the laughing (screaming?) people all seeming to be born of some dark memory.

The shadow-made being reached what looked like a hand toward him, meaning, Poole supposed, to smother the life from him. But that hand, cut at strange angles from the cloth of night, stopped short of his writhing, feverish flesh, hovered, then drew back. The shadow retreated, shimmering and shifting against its screen of darkness in a way that made Poole’s head throb. It reached the tent’s entrance and floated through, almost like a curtain of smoke, its form disintegrating the moment it touched open, moon-spilled night. It was gone.

With it went all the voices in Poole’s mind, and the ensuing silence was like a great vacuum into which rushed all the regrets and terror he’d buried deep inside. The inrush of feeling—combined with the relief and horror of what he’d just witnessed—spun his mind until he could no longer think, and a shallow, empty kind of sleep claimed him.

He jerked awake some time later, awoken for reasons he didn’t know. Slowly, piece-by-piece, the night returned to him…the night that would never end. The breeze sighing into the tent sounded like a whisper. His flesh burned, sticky with fever sweat. Yet he shivered, shivered as if the breeze was really a winter wind, and the dampness soaking his bedding was freshly melted snow. His missing leg was one great throbbing pain, and his mouth and throat were so dry he couldn’t even swallow.

“Water,” he croaked out, the sound so quiet and feeble he barely heard it himself. “Water!” His voice came free on the second attempt, though it didn’t go far before the darkness swallowed it right up, like a dry sponge greedily drinking water.

Poole coughed, then tried to sit up. The pain almost made him bite through his tongue.

“Water!”

Surely, he’d spoken loud enough that time. He waited, listening. No one came.

“Doctor? Doc! Harrington!” No movement, no sound.

He’s passed out, Poole reminded himself. Passed out drunk, the useless asshole. Come morning, he might even be dead…might’ve finally eaten that bullet like he always joked about…and then we’ll really be in a jam, stuck between a rock and a hard place, up shit creek without a paddle, we’ll be…

“Help!”

Then he heard it. Movement, off to his left, somewhere deeper in the tent. Someone was moving around…walking around, down amongst the shadows. Was it the doc? Was it one of his fellow wounded? An enemy spy infiltrating their camp?

“Morse? Parker? Anyone?”

Nothing.

Nothing but those soft, unmistakable footsteps. A gentle rattle, followed by the scrape of metal-on-metal; one of the dividing curtains had been drawn aside, Poole thought. It wasn’t the one immediately beside him; he could see that was still shut. It was one further down, though just how far he couldn’t say.

“Hey?” he hissed at the shadows, fear and frustration making him reckless. “Who is that?”

“The thief of souls…The deceiver,” Ramirez’s ghostly, disembodied voice said from a long, deep darkness inside, and suddenly Poole was very afraid. Something shuffled in the night, and Poole was almost convinced he’d heard the sound of flesh parting beneath the blade of a scalpel. He knew that sound quite well now, after all.

Have to get out, he thought crazily, his heart a painful pounding stone in his throat. Sweat leached from his hairline, ran fast and hot down both temples. Have to get away before—

Thump!

Something heavy and wet—a sack of wet clothes, or rain-soaked garbage—struck the hard tent floor. A smell rose from seemingly nowhere, a combination of piss, shit, and other noxious excretions. Then there was silence, until…

Poole heard the whisper-scrape sound of another curtain being drawn aside, this one closer. Why was no one else moving around, crying out? Couldn’t they hear what he was hearing, smell what he did? Didn’t they know?

“Dead…” came Ramirez’s resigned voice, and Poole suddenly knew the truth of it: everyone inside the tent—except for himself, of course—was already dead.

“They go to ground…with all the rest of the shit.”

Poole fought against the pain and finally managed to bring himself up, supporting himself on trembling, frail arms. He leaned forward as far as he could, trying to see around the curtain, but it was no use; it was simply too far to stretch.

He opened his mouth to call out again, but the sound died in his throat. Did he want to be noticed by whatever was moving around down there?

Have to get out…

But how? The drugs kept him disoriented and dizzy, and he was missing a leg, besides. He couldn’t very well run away.

Then crawl! something desperate and afraid cried at him. Do something!

More shuffling; the whisper of blade on flesh; wet flesh being twisted and pushed around; the reek…death.

Poole rolled to the right, meaning to tip himself off the edge of the cot. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t fear such a brief fall, not in his life. But the drop seemed impossibly far away now, as if there were no ground beneath the cot, but only some endlessly deep void.

Pain. Sudden and burning, filling up his mind, his lungs, coursing through his blood. Agony. He collapsed back against his lumpy pillow, the cot creaking on its rickety frame. Fuck! He’d made noise, and that was bad.

Thump!

Something hit the floor. He envisioned a bag, a huge, black, industrial-grade garbage bag, bulging and irregular, full of assorted, disassembled body parts, a pool of oily black blood already oozing around its lumpy bottom.

Movement. Footsteps. Around, from the darkness, a shape, shuffling up to the final curtain dividing Poole from the man (corpse) beside him. A shimmer, like smoke, sharpened by trace moonlight, long wings, dark feathers, a beak as sharp as a scythe…

She revealed herself to Poole fully then, in cruel, uncompromising detail. The vision was stark, though lasted for no longer than an instant, as if she’d been lit by the sudden flash of a camera or the glare from a bolt of blue lightning. Her beauty was rivaled only by her hideousness, and both claimed her body and features in a maddening, mind-bending simultaneity.

Her flesh was papery and pale, bloodless, stretched taut over bones protruding at sharp and irregular angles. Said flesh stank of old, rotted leather, mold, and something faintly medicinal. Her eyes were two glass marbles, clouded and milky and without definition, yet he understood she was in no way blind; those eyes saw well, saw more than he ever could possibly know. Lidless, they stared out from deeply shadowed sockets that seemed many sizes too big for the skull they were set in. Her hair was stringy and long, sprouting in sparse patches from a leather-spotted, peeling scalp. Impossibly, he knew it had not always been that way, but that her hair had once been full, sensuously long and flowing, glossy black. Colorless lips thin as cheese cloth skinned back from a mouthful of rotten black teeth, several of which were chipped and jagged, revealing a black cavernous mouth where a tongue, looking like some diseased green slug, writhed with idiot life.

She wore nurse’s whites, neat and pressed, though spattered and stained with blood, both old and new. In her bony hand, the fingers several inches too long, the nails longer still, she gripped a long scalpel, the blade honed and spotless.

Then she was gone, first to shadow, then to sight altogether as she vanished behind the curtain. Metal hooks rattled; fabric ruffled and shook; the cutting began.

In his terror, Poole nearly lost hold of his consciousness, clawing it back only by the very skin of his teeth. A stale note of a sound, like the teeth-jarring hum of a telephone pole transformer, rose into the air and stayed there. It took him a moment to realize that the sound was himself, issuing from somewhere deep in his own throat.

I’m just an animal. A mewling, frightened piece of meat that can walk and talk…well, maybe not that first thing so much anymore…and that’s all. A thing to be hunted and skewered, bled and skinned. To be eaten. I’m…

Gritting his teeth, he rolled away again, time growing as short as his hope. He had no choice but to drop to the floor and crawl. To reach the outside, where the Black Swan (I can see her there! I can see her shadow just on the ground!) might take pity on him and carry his soul away.

He was at the cot’s edge, ready to fall, when something suddenly tugged at his arm. At first he thought it was her—the Snake! I thought the devil was supposed to be a snake!—but it was only the IV line, still married to his arm by its long wasp’s stinger, drip feeding him nutrients and pain relief. With fingers that felt as stiff and ungainly as cold sausages, he ripped at the slender hose, pulling until the long silver needle slipped painfully from his clammy flesh. Dripping, it fell away to swing and dangle just above the floor, but Poole was already moving, twisting, yanking, pulling himself away with the fright of a caged animal.

His missing toes clenched tight until a breath-stealing cramp seized his phantom calf muscle. He was crying, wet, wracking sobs, but thrust himself off the cot without a second thought. He struck the icy ground hard enough to drive most of the air from his lungs. It didn’t matter; there was no time for breathing. The agony in his shortened leg, however, would not allow itself to be so easily ignored. He couldn’t fathom what force—fate? God?—kept him conscious.

Flipping onto his stomach, he thrust his arms in front of him out like an Olympic swimmer, trying to pull himself away (doing far more useless paddling than actual pulling, it seemed). He moved, but far too slowly; behind him somewhere, the woman’s (Snake’s) scalpel sliced and cut and explored. Blood dripped steadily to the ground, and the scent of death seemed almost to coil tight around Poole’s throat.

He was halfway to the entrance when something hit the floor with the squishing plop of soft, wet meat. He froze on instinct (as if that would somehow hide him, make the creature forget his existence), but managed to break through the block after only half a second. Half a second too long, by God! His bandaged knee ached and throbbed as he dragged it along behind him. It was wet too he noticed, and he could see in his mind’s eye the long snail-trail of dark blood stretching out behind him.

The tent’s flap lifted and fluttered like a piece of fire-blackened paper caught in the wind. No: like the leathery, coarse wing of a bat, alive and full of as much of the frantic fear that pulsed and thrummed behind his temples.

More wet cutting sounds, then a heavy plop as something else slid onto the floor. Silence for a heartbeat, then…

It’s coming! Footsteps, squishing through whatever it had left on the floor beside the dead soldier’s bed. Coming after him.

A wheezing kind of whine broke from Poole as he pushed himself faster, harder. Fifteen feet from the entrance. Ten feet. Five…

But now she was coming, too fast for him. It was over. She was stepping through his own trail of fresh, glistening blood, dead lips skinned back from rotten teeth, bloody scalpel poised, ready for his throat…or maybe his eye, the back of his head, his ear canal.

With a strangled cry and a desperate burst of strength, Poole hauled himself up to the entrance, the night air rushing in to meet him, cooling his burning sweat. His flesh seemed to steam in the cold. Then he was through, spilling out onto the weed-choked ground. For an instant, the rotten flesh smell trapped in his nostrils was replaced by the scents of dirt and rain and grass. They were the sweetest, most glorious things he’d ever smelled: they were freedom—they were life!

He was free…all except for his good leg, caught on the edge of the tent at the ankle. He lingered for only half a heartbeat—but it was half a heartbeat too long. The force which seized him was hard as steel. He had a brief moment to ponder the depth of his failure, and what that failure might mean, then there was nothing but pain—oh so much pain, blinding him!—in the flesh and tendons just behind the knee. He didn’t have to see what was happening to know.

Even as the blood welled—even as he screamed loud enough to wake his fallen brothers from their fresh, anonymous graves—Poole looked to the sky. He looked to the sky, and in it found the naked face of the moon. Full and purest white. He reached up, searching that infinite white and black heaven for any sign of an angel.

For the black wings of a swan.

He reached up…and hoped.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” Ramirez asked him.

Poole squinted against the low hazy sun, felt the squish of mud beneath his boots—both boots. He could smell the smoke of distant fires, and hear the not-so-distant explosions of rifles all around. The valley was wide and empty, save for the two of them, and looked cast in gold in the strange waning sunlight.

“I’m saving you,” Poole said; it frustrated him that he had to say all this again. That he had to keep saying it.

“It’s too late for that,” Ramirez said, his voice cold and detached.

Poole’s irritation was met with a stabbing knife of panic. Shots rang all around, growing louder…closer. He opened his mouth to argue, but at that instant noticed the bloody ruin leaking from his friend’s right eye socket. He was too late; it had already happened.

“The boy’s full of shit, Poole. She never meant to save souls; she only wanted to take them. There’s no difference between the Swan and the Snake. In the end, they too go to the ground…with all the rest of the shit.”

“I don’t believe that!” Poole snarled.

“Oh no?”

Ramirez studied him through that weeping red hole of an eye, and Poole thought his friend had never seen him more clearly. He looked down, saw that he indeed had been too late; his right leg ended sharply at the knee, bits of ragged flesh and splintered bone dangling from a crimson-painted hole. This isn’t right, he thought with no real sense of conviction. The cut was cleaner than this. It was a huge pain, monstrous; it swallowed him up, swallowed him whole, a terrible beast with millions of razor teeth. He was but a child to it.

“The boy was wrong, take it from me.”

Hopping and swaying, Poole looked up again to find Ramirez sprawled on his back. He didn’t look like the twenty-year-old high school graduate turned soldier anymore, but instead the scrappy, freckled twelve-year-old farm boy who’d learned to drive his father’s Jeep while wearing nothing but crew shorts and flip-flops. He was split open from groin to collar, as if he’d been unzipped. What leaked out wasn’t blood and organs, but thousands of soft black feathers. They floated slowly upward, borne upon some unfelt wind. He spoke to Poole through a mouth that didn’t move, stared at him through eyes that didn’t see. “She comes for you now…the shepherd of souls.”

Something screeched, loud and fierce. Poole twisted toward it, hopping on his good leg, expecting a bird, sharp-eyed and sharp-beaked.

But it wasn’t a bird. It was the village boy, his hair oil-black, his eyes sightless stones. The boy opened his mouth, and from his throat erupted that terrible bird-shriek. And when he raised his arms, Poole saw they weren’t arms at all, but long black wings.