They were not called for another three days. The letter Frank was given was thick. As he tucked it into his pocket, he heard whispers in an unknown tongue. Corrupted. He tried not to think of it, but that only made me think of the words that had been seared onto his eyelids. Daag glash naag abaat glaag blan. He shivered as he tucked the letter into his breast pocket.

               Fred drove. About halfway into their journey, Frank took the letter from his pocket, and read. The paper did not have words; it was more like impressions. It was like falling down a darkened hole. He lost himself for a moment, and blinked back the darkness only to find that it had infected him. He could hear the voice of someone else in his head. The letter lay in his lap. He refolded it, hid it in his pocket. Frank looked up and Fred, who was singularly focused on driving. His helmet and goggles hid all his expressions, and masked all his thoughts. Frank closed his eyes, seeing the strange the words.

               At the shack, they did not find Madame Joile. Her encampment looked to have been abandoned for years. She had left paper and pencil though, as well as an oil lamp, with a bit of oil in it. Everything was covered in dust, as if she had never been there at all.

               “What do you think happened to her?” Frank asked.

               Fred trailed a finger through the dust on the desk. “I don’t know, but I don’t like this at all.”

               Frank could feel that slow creeping darkness sliding through him. He tasted it, the smell of it filled his nose. “Corruption,” he said. His voice was like sandpaper.

               Fred glanced at him, the concern plain in his eyes. “What did you do?” he asked.

               “I read the letter,” Frank said. He was bubbling, like a boiling pot. His whole being felt like water dripping through rocks. “I couldn’t help it.”

               “Let’s get out of here,” Fred said, reaching for his arm. He pulled him towards the door, but Frank’s feet grew heavy.  Fred’s eyes were wild with confusion, with fear that he was barely containing. Then Frank felt the presence around him. The klumskaag. What had Reiner said? It had been trying to call him. It lived here and it wanted him here too. He thought back to Madame Joile’s skeletal smile, trying to remember what she had said. She would ascend. That’s it. Frank laughed to himself, aloud, and Fred dropped his arm in horror. The klumskaag was helping them; that’s what Reiner thought. It was helping them ascend.

               “Go, Fred,” Frank said. He hesitated. “Go home.”

               “Frank!” Fred tried to argue, but Frank hushed him.

               “Don’t you want to go home?” he asked.

               Fred backed away from him, the fear beading on his forehead, and then he ran towards the motorbike. Frank watched him speed away, the dust cloud of the raid rising behind the vehicle. Frank watched for a long time, until the dust was gone from the air, and the night had settled over him. Then he shut the door of the shack and sat down at the desk.

               He never saw Fred again.

Frank handed the letter with the strange markings to the captain once they got back to the camp. He tucked it into a folder without comment, then shooed him away, as he waited to the collect the next letter from the next soldier. Frank moved off slowly, wondering about what he had seen. He could still make out the markings if he closed his eyes. They still didn’t make any sense, but if he tried hard enough, he could see how all the markings were connected. Maybe there was an order to it after all.

               Frank and Fred stood in line in the mess hall, waiting for their stewed potatoes and beans, or whatever other meager meal was being dished out today. The hall seemed emptier than it had the first week. Frank looked around, studying the face. Several notable people were missing tonight. He nudged Fred. “Hey,” he whispered, and Fred dipped his face closer to him. “What happened to everyone else?”

               Fred looked around the mess hall too. The wooden walls and dark floor seemed to swallow all the light that came in through the windows. Frank scratched his head, wondering why it felt dark, even though the sun was still out. Chatter was sparse tonight. An uneasy nervousness buzzed in the air.

               “Did Jack and Peter go out today?” Fred asked, still eyeing the room.

               They had almost made it to the front of the line, where a man everyone called Kitchen Joe was dishing out the stew. “I think so,” Frank said.

               “Where are they?” Fred asked.

               As soon as he asked, their friend stumbled into the mess hall, looking haggard, like the dead. Harry was with them, and he too looked almost gray with fatigue. Or fear. Or something else, Frank thought, the idea sliding up from the dark parts of his heart. Something other, like the script.

               They found each other at the table. “You look bad,” Frank said to Harry.

               “I think I’m sick,” he said.

               “Go to the medic,” Fred offered. He chewed on a potato.

               “No, I think I’m sick in my mind,” Harry said.

               Fred stopped eating, looking hard at Harry from across the table. “So, go to the medic,” he said again.

               But Harry didn’t go to the medic. He went outside in the middle of that night and he never came back.

               It was another five days of waiting before they were given a letter to take to Madame Joile. This time Frank drove the motorbike. Fred carried the letter, and argued with Madame Joile, who looked older than the last time they had seen her by several decades. Her smile was almost skeletal as she handed them the reply they had forced from her. Fred tucked it into his breast pocket without even glancing down at the paper.

               “We are nearly completed,” Madame Joile said. “That is my final reply. I will not be hear when you return.”

               “Why? Where are you going?” Frank asked.

               Fred nudged him hard. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked.

               “Why do you ask? You want to go with me?” she said. Her lips peeled back into an awkward grin. There were too many teeth.

               “No,” he said, even though yes was the first word that came to mind.

               “You can learn how to ascend if you follow the maps through the tree,” Madame Joile said.

               “What?” Frank asked. His chest felt tight with anticipation. He swallowed the lump growing in his throat.

               “No thanks,” Fred said, steering him away from the woman, who stood in front of the shack watching them go. He could feel her eyes on him, like twin beacons of fire at his back.

               “You drive,” he said to Fred, as he climbed into the sidecar. “Let me carry the reply.”

               “Why?” Fred asked, looking hard at him, all but saying that was a terrible idea.

               “Because…I’ve already seen it, and this way, you won’t be tempted to look…”

               “I don’t want to look,” Fred said.  

               Frank’s hands shook as he thought about the script in the letter he had opened the previous week, and the letter that was in Fred’s pocket. “You don’t?” he asked.

               Fred looked at him as if he was out of his mind. “No,” he said with disgust. “Why would I?” Frank didn’t have an answer, and Fred continued to stare at him, his expression morphing to one of concern. “You shouldn’t either,” he said.

               “Why?” Frank asked, though he knew why, and now it was beginning to make sense why they had needed so many messengers.

               “Don’t you want to go home?” Fred asked.

               He nodded. He did. He wanted to go home more than anything. But whatever had taken hold of Harry, of the others who had gone missing, he suspected was already rooted in him. “I shouldn’t have looked at the script,” he said.

               “Nope,” Fred said. He started the bike, and rolled off down the road, away from Madame Joile and her strange, other-worldly smile.

               Peter had not come back with Jack. Frank, Fred and Jack all stood around the burn barrel that night, silent to their companions, through Frank was internally screaming. The markings he had seen where still on the backs of his eye lids. When he looked, he could almost read them now, but he didn’t understand the language. It wasn’t French or German. It didn’t sound like Russian or Polish. He wondered if it was an invented language, something the army created just to send letter back and forth to informants. He watched the fire, closing his eyes for just a minute, to get another glimpse, another taste. Daag glash naag abaat glaag blan. He didn’t understand what it meant but it felt wonderful sliding around his mind.

               “We followed a girl into the house,” Jack said. “The one that looked wrong, like a rotten apple in a bag of perfectly crisp ones.”

               “I don’t want to know,” Fred said. He stomped out his cigarette and walked away without another word.

               Jack looked at Frank, and Frank could almost hear a whisper in the air, the words in his mind on the wind. “Tell me about her,” he said to his companion.

               Jack scrubbed a hand through his hair, scratched the back of his head before he launched into the tale. “She was gaunt, and looked sickly, but in a sort of nice kind of way, you know? I followed her up those stairs ‘cause I thought…well you know, a girl invites you inside and you think…you know? So I went, but Peter was ahead of me, and he seemed crazed over her.” Jack’s eyes had grown wide. “And he said he’d go first and then I could go in after he was done, but he never came out. Something just…I don’t know, I think I came to my senses, and I remembered I was supposed to wait five minutes and then leave.”

               “Was her smile all wrong? Too many teeth? Too big for her face?” Frank asked. His mouth had gone dry and his fingers tingled. He wiped the sweat from his face.

               “What do you think she is?” Jack asked.

               “Klumskaag,” he said, the word coming to his lips without a thought.  

               “What is that?” Jack said, his voice shaking. “German?”

               But Frank didn’t know, so he just shook his head.

               A crunch behind them alerted them to the presence of someone in the shadows. “Reeves,” the voice said, using Frank’s last name.

               “Sir?” he asked, turning towards the voice, which he was pretty sure was the German captain. He had learned his name was Reiner.

               “Come with me,” he said.

               He took a long, desperate look at Jack before peeling away. Jack couldn’t save him from whatever it was he had gotten mixed up in. He turned from the light of the fire, and followed Reiner across the green behind the barracks, to the building where the officers worked. Reiner said nothing until they had moved all the way into the building, and the door was shut behind them. There was an oil lamp on a desk. Reiner sat at the desk and pointed to the chair on the opposite side. “Sit,” he said.

               He sank slowly into the chair, waiting for revelation, for reprimand, for release. He wasn’t sure. He fidgeted nervously as Reiner folded his hands in front of him, elbows resting on the desktop. The captain stared at him for what felt like half the night. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “How did you know about the klumskaag?”

               “What?” he asked, surprised by the question. He tried to think of anything to say that wasn’t the truth—that he had no idea how he knew about the klumskaag, whatever that was. “I…well, I think…I don’t…”

               “Did you read it in a letter?” Reiner asked.

               “No,” Frank said forcefully. He was sweating under Reiner’s stare.

               “But you read other things in the letter?” Reiner asked.

               His mouth worked against his will. “Daag glash naag abaat glaag blan” he said mechanically.

               Reiner nodded. “Yes, that’s what I thought.”

               “What does it mean?” Frank asked.

               “It means the klumskaag is trying to find you,” he said.

               “What is the klumskaag?” Frank said, his anxiety rising. His heart was racing like he was climbing a hill with a full kit strapped to his back.

               “We don’t know,” Reiner said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.” He stood and moved across the room, to another desk, where he picked up a piece of paper. He turned slowly, held it out for Frank to take.

               Frank hesitated, but then, snatched up the paper, reading through it as rapidly as his eyes could move. He inhaled sharply when he had finished. “So that’s why we’re all here? That’s what we’re doing?”

               Reiner nodded. “We’re messengers to the Others,” he said.

               “But…why?” Frank asked, the word burning on his tongue.

               “Don’t you want the war to end, Reeves? Don’t you want to go home?” Reiner asked, folding his arms over himself.

               Frank suddenly wanted to go home more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. “Yes, of course I want to go home.”

               Reiner seemed pleased. “Then let the klumskaag have you. It is trying to help us.”

               “Why would it want to help us?”

               Reiner shrugged. “We are also trying to discover why that is.”

               Did he have a choice? “What are people like Madame Joile?” he asked. Reiner raised an eyebrow, and he elaborated. “What is she?”

               “Corrupted,” Reiner said.

               The answer satisfied him for the moment. He imagined how many others there were in the world—people who used to be people, but were now something else. “So what do you want me to do now?”

               “Now you will write messages,” Reiner said. He took a fresh sheet of paper from the desk, and handed it to him. From the desk drawer, he fished out a pencil. He sat, then passed the pencil over to Frank.

               “What messages?” Frank asked.

               “Any message that you think will help us solve this puzzle,” Reiner said.

               Frank looked down at the sheet of paper in his hand, laid it on the desk gently. ‘I don’t know if I should,” he said.

               Reiner leaned forward in the chair. “This is why you were brought here. You are a messenger now,” Reiner said. “Most will only deliver the messages, and return the replies. But some of you will write the messages.”

               Reiner had a desperate expression, as if his future depended on Frank picking up that pencil. Frank wondered how Reiner got to be a captain of the French army, managing an American encampment. None of this made any sense. “Can you write to the klumskaag?” he asked. “Does it speak with you?”

               Reiner smiled. “No,” he said.

               So they were being used. They’d been drawn into a war that wasn’t their own, to fight a fiend they couldn’t see so that the French could protect what men they had left. And they’d drawn this defected German into the picture as well, and he seemed happy enough that he wasn’t the one risking his neck. “I’m not doing it,” Frank said.

               Reiner raised his eyebrow, then thought to himself before pointing to the door. “Then you’re free to go.”

               The words crawled through his head again—those odd words that didn’t mean anything, and yet held all the answers he had ever searched for. “That’s it?” he asked, skeptical.

               “That’s it,” Reiner said. “You can go. Next time I need a messenger, you and Kilpatrick and go back out on your motorbike.”

               It was too easy. It unsettled him. “Okay,” he said. He stood, watching Reiner suspiciously. He looked expectant, but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t even rise from his chair.

               “Okay,” Frank said again, before he began moving to the door. He paused, looked over his shoulder at the captain. He was calm, waiting patiently for an exit, or an argument. Frank shook his head in bafflement. He yanked open the door and left the building.