A year of living in the ground had not accustomed Moyer to the smell. He wondered how the French, who’d been at this business so much longer, could stand it. But if the officers who had trained his unit in the intricacies of trench life were any indication, they were so weary and battered as to scarcely notice the world around them any longer. They walked slowly, like mechanical men, and when they turned their heads it was slowly too, as if the rusted gears and cogs inside required time to work.

At least the earth they smelled was their own, and not that of some strange land far away; that must help. He couldn’t recall how dirt smelled back home, how it might differ from the cold mud in this narrow channel. If he ever made it back he would find out. He’d take great handfuls of the stuff and bury his face in it, breathing it in hungrily, concentrating so as never to forget.

“Promise what?” asked Palkowski.

“I didn’t say anything.”

Palkowski shrugged and resumed his scan of the German line. It was twilight, a dangerous time when both sides emerged to resupply and to collect their dead. Eager to escape the day’s monotony, inexperienced men would go too soon, before the full cover of night, making tempting targets for Hun snipers whose muzzle flashes pulsed like fireflies on a string. Those who died at dusk were not infantrymen, who knew better, but cooks.

When true darkness fell, Moyer inevitably found his eyes drawn to the west, to a line of trees a few hundred yards away, an uncontested wood of no strategic importance. Set slightly lower than the trenches on either side, it made a poor location for snipers. He’d been there many times and knew it held nothing but burnt desolation.

Tonight, though, that wood seemed darker than it ought, darker than either the sky above or the ground below, as if nothing could survive there, even light.

That he was a calm soldier came as a surprise to Moyer. As a clerk in the feed store, the occasion for valor had never presented itself; but if it had, no one would have expected much from him. He was a slight thing, only a passable shot, and useless in hand-to-hand combat.

What they didn’t tell you, though, was that war was now waged with nerves, not muscles. Death came not from a man three feet in front of you, but from an anonymous shower of shrapnel and smoke in the night. From the random zip of a bullet to the skull as you went to take a piss. From insidious gas that appeared without warning, silently seeping along the ground like the billowing cloak of Death himself.

Moyer told no one about his dread of that gloomy wood, his belief that something lurked there.

• • • •

He was a boy when the knacker man first came to the farm, his rickety cart pulled by an immense black mare Uncle George thought twenty hands high if she was a hand. But then Uncle George had been kicked by a mule years before, and went bent over, so everything looked taller to him and he couldn’t be trusted.

The knacker man came when you had a carcass too large to bury and no good for eating. What he did with it, Moyer wasn’t sure. It might be rendered into tallow for candles, he figured, or bonemeal—more than that was a mystery.

For a long time he thought the knacker man couldn’t speak. He could clearly hear, for after he and Uncle George disappeared into the barn for a time, the knacker man always emerged knowing what to do. But he never said anything.

Lonely and bored, Moyer tried to engage him in conversation, peppering him with questions.

“Where do you come from?” he asked, as the knacker man methodically arranged his block and tackle. “How old are you?”

The gaunt man continued his grisly work, showing neither pleasure nor annoyance.

The boy tried to wear him down, firing question after question. What was his name? How did he get that scar on his cheek? Did he have a wife? Children? A dog? What was it like to have no hair? Why didn’t he wear a hat?

He’d given up on the possibility of a response when one soft comment caught the knacker man’s attention: “I’m only here because my parents died. Uncle George hates me.”

At this, the knacker man paused his work, studying the boy’s face for a long time.

When he finally spoke, it was not with the terse farmer’s twang Moyer had come to expect of men, or with the deep, rich voice he’d imagined the knacker man might have, but rather a strained whisper: “I like you.”

• • • •

Amid the soft and soothing thunder of distant artillery, Moyer approached the dark wood. Periodic flashes, like heat lightning, revealed the outlines of the trees, now dead and shattered through no fault of their own.

He couldn’t say what compelled him toward the void, or exactly how he got there, or why, once inside, he was unsurprised to find the knacker man there.

“Ah,” whispered the gaunt man, leaning on his ancient cart. “You’ve come.”

Moyer jumped into the wagon and sat with his legs dangling. “I wasn’t under the impression I had much choice.”

“Maybe,” said the knacker man. “Hard to say sometimes.”

The great mare whinnied.

“Can you do me a favor?” Moyer asked.

“Maybe,” said the knacker man.

“Can you tell me what to expect? What’s next?”

The knacker man shook his head.

“Why? You’re not allowed?”

“No,” said the knacker man. “I can say whatever I like.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” said the knacker man.

“Why would it hurt my feelings?”

The knacker man paused, then said, “Do you know how your rifle works? I mean the physical principles that allow it to hurl lead across that meadow?”

“Unless it’s a trick question.”

“It’s not.”

“Then yes, I think so.”

“If we found the smartest cat in the world, the smartest who ever lived on this planet, could you explain the workings of a rifle to it?”

Moyer thought about that. “Certainly.”

The knacker man hesitated, then smiled. “I like that. I like that a lot. Of course, what I mean is, would the cat understand you?”

“Right,” said Moyer, “I’m the cat. I can’t possibly understand because you’re a demigod or something.”

The knacker man shrugged. “I don’t know what a demigod is.”

“Why bother even talking to me then?”

The knacker man smiled. “I like cats.”

“Well, you’ve done what you promised. My feelings are hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” said the knacker man.

“Why don’t you just give me the feline version.”

The knacker man began to speak, stopped himself, and began again. “I’ll say this. Not far from here, a man has just discovered that matter and energy are first cousins. It’s a stunning insight, as if a cat suddenly learned to write poetry.”

“I don’t know what that means,” admitted Moyer.

“Neither does he, yet. But the answers you crave are in the very smallest things.”

“Does that mean we aren’t cats anymore?” suggested Moyer.

The knacker man considered this. “Perhaps dancing bears.”

A barrage of shells fell on the wood then, an impossible wave that seemed to come from all sides at once, ripping fresh craters in the ashen ground, which smelled, somehow, of home.