Kraus Angel Down

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83541-539-9
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

A stylistically bold and innovative, cinematic horror novel about greed and paranoia, set amongst the grit and mud of the trenches in WW1. Perfect for fans of Stephen Graham Jones and Alma Katsu. From the New York Times bestselling author of Whalefall, and the co-author of The Shape of Water alongside Guillermo del Toro. Private Cyril Bagger has managed to survive the unspeakable horrors of the Great War through his wits and deception, swindling fellow soldiers at every opportunity. But his survival instincts are put to the ultimate test when he and four other grunts are given a deadly mission: venture into the perilous No Man's Land to euthanize a wounded comrade. What they find amid the ruined battlefield, however, is not a man in need of mercy but a fallen angel, seemingly struck down by artillery fire. This celestial being may hold the key to ending the brutal conflict, but only if the soldiers can suppress their individual desires and work together. As jealousy, greed, and paranoia take hold, the group is torn apart by their inner demons, threatening to turn their angelic encounter into a descent into hell. Angel Down plunges you into the heart of World War I and weaves a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict.

DANIEL KRAUS is a New York Times bestselling author. With Guillermo del Toro, he co-authored The Shape of Water, based on the same idea the two created for the Oscar-winning film. Also with del Toro, Kraus co-authored Trollhunters , which was adapted into the Emmy-winning Netflix series. Kraus's The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch was named one of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Books of the Year, and he has won two Odyssey Awards (for Rotters and Scowler) and has been a Library Guild selection, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults, Bram Stoker finalist, and more. Kraus's current project is The Living Dead, a posthumous collaboration with legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. Kraus's work has been translated into over 25 languages. His feature films as director include Musician (New York Times Critics' Pick) and Sheriff (PBS's Independent Lens). He lives in Chicago. Visit him at danielkraus.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kraus, Daniel

Leseproben

II

and Bagger wipes his face with his forearm and five pounds of matter plop off his head, his brains, he supposes, all that blood on his face was his after all, and because he’s become educated in what brains look like, he stares into his lap for confirmation but all he sees is yellow clay, there’s nothing more ordinary than yellow clay in the Argonne,

and while he’s staring at the claybrains, he notices a voice,

and the voice feels like part of the shriek, an undertone,

and Bagger knows undertones, he grew up enveloped in the poly-phony of the church’s old pipe organ, the Swell, the Choir, and the Great woven like flutes, strings, and reeds, but this undertone is from a yet uninvented keyboard called voice,

and the voice says, Bagger,

*   *   *

and it’s stimulating how the word seems to buzz from within his own flesh, that’s how it felt when standing beneath the sanctuary pipes, though Bishop Bagger would have told little Cyril that’s only guilt murmuring from inside you, a sentiment the adult Cyril Bagger refuses to buy, he’s worked too long to bury such weepy notions along with the hundreds of dead bodies,

and so he ignores the voice, it’s just his skeleton vibrating from the mortar strike, and takes a big, fetid inhale, all right, Bagger, your division’s on the march, not good, but otherwise things are as you left them, which is to say absolute shit, Jerry’s shells have slashed a half-mile cleft through the trench system’s doglegs so that front, support, and reserve trenches all reside under a fourth designation called smithereens,

and within those smithereens Bagger verifies that Company P indeed lingers, there’s Lieutenant Aquila’s gorilla limp, there’s Sergeant Rasch’s crow caw, but instead of slumped like mutts in post-battle stupor, Company P is on its feet, bumping like windup toys between fat tongues of displaced mud, and Bagger wonders if the shriek is driving them mad, too, damn sure something strange is afoot, and Bagger’s got to goose himself to life if he’s going to outfox it same as he’s outfoxed everything else,

*   *   *

and so he imagines General John. J. Pershing lording over him, demanding, Where are you, Private?, and he saying, France, sir!, and Pershing saying, More specifically, Private!, and he saying, Bois de Fays, sir, and bois is frog for woods, sir!, and Pershing saying, Very good, Private, and do these look like woods to you?, and he saying, No sir, but they might have been woods a few years ago, sir, before the giant trolls came through, and Pershing saying, And what were those trolls’ names, Private?, and he getting the gruff old army commander to crack a smile by saying, Marne, sir, Verdun, sir, Somme, sir, stomped the shit out of everything, sir,

and Bagger laughs, and it helps more than the Bible, hallelujah, hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle, do or die, Private First Class Cyril Bagger feels more like lucky old Bagger again, the Hawkeye Hustler, the Sioux City Sharpie, the Council Bluffs Crossroader, the Dean of Dubuque, nicknames he earned from being banned from half the riverboats on the Mississippi, not that he doesn’t own a tackle box of disguises capable of getting him back on those boats the second he gets home,

and once he’s back in Iowa, he’ll rerun the same schemes, the flop, the ring reward, the pigeon drop, mine salting, pig-in-a-poke, the fake-counterfeiter, he’ll even do a classic melon drop just to prove he still can, hell, before the Army nabbed him, he even toyed with psychic boobery, finagled a metal rod to jut from a hidden leather cuff to make the table seem to rise beneath his hands, a total bust, though he knows the spiritualism con is a growth area, grievers make the best marks and postwar America’s going to be lousy with grievers,

and it’s this same sleight of hand that has kept him safe out here, that and a bacon can packed with dominos, bottle caps for shell games, loaded dice, a pen for drawing pips on sugar cubes in case he loses those dice, and marked cards, and when it’s too dark to read those marks, he razes the card edges with a fingernail he keeps sharp, or puts literal cards up his literal sleeves, there’s always a cornpone private unable to identify him as a shark who has more teeth than Iowa has corn, and those boys bet everything, lives included, when their manhoods are impinged, and here in frogland, challenges to one’s manhood crop up every few seconds,

and the result is soldiers who end up so far in arrears they have to pay back Bagger in derring-do, infantry charges mostly, they go over the top in his place and get on a first-name basis with bullets while Bagger steps back, way back, keeping to latrine and burial duties, where flying lead doesn’t whistle past one’s ears but rather whines like late-summer mosquitoes,

and when he’s not working a shovel, he’s insubordinating in front of every captain, major, lieutenant, and sergeant in the 43rd so they’ll “punish” him with more backline duty,

and by accident, he’s gotten good at those duties, he’s practically become the 2nd Battalion’s burier-in-chief, planting fellow doughboys in the dirt makes him feel like a proper goddamn artiste,

and the idea of other men doing Bagger’s work job while he was briefly unconscious offends him, what does the HQ staff, those signal men, cooks, clerks, quartermasters, bugle boys, and stretcher-bearers, know about burying bodies, nothing, that’s what, the savages probably laid them head-to-head instead of head-to-feet and neglected to cover their faces, and when they came across disarticulated parts, a foot or a head or a perfectly preserved bottom jaw, they probably chucked them in like olives into cocktails, and furthermore, probably failed to note the coordinates of the burial pit, not that it’s worth a crap, no recovery detail is ever coming back to exhume doughboy bodies and everyone knows it,

and, what the hell, there it is again, that voice, Bagger,

and then it’s replaced by something louder, realer, “Bagger! Bagger! There you are, Bagger!” and Bagger’s vertebrae crackle as he swivels his neck to see Lewis Arno dancing around upended oak roots and furry-looking clumps Bagger identifies as moss, only to feel stupidly naive, there was a minnie, there was a burial pit, and that’s not moss, Cyril Bagger, you dumb fuck,

*   *   *

and Bagger’s guts thicken like they do anytime he sees Arno, the kid’s fourteen, lied about his age to some Nebraska National Guardsfuck trying to make quota, and ever since has been a tick sucked to the 172nd’s underbelly, devoid of skills but too damn small for the Germans to hit, and Bagger resents the kid, really goddamn resents him, the kid complicates Bagger’s otherwise flawless loathing for everyone out here, there’s not even any point in swindling Arno, the kid doesn’t have a penny to his name,

and Bagger also loves seeing Lewis Arno, and there’s nothing he hates more than love, so he snaps, “What do you want? Little trench rat,” and Arno sets aside a Chauchat rifle bigger than him, stares big goose eggs, and whispers, “Are you dead?,” the second time Bagger’s heard this, he must look really goddamn bad, so he snaps, “Yes. I’m a ghost. And I’m going to haunt the fuck out of you,”

and this seems to satisfy Arno, who presses sooty palms over sooty ears and asks, “What’s that noise?,” which gives Bagger some relief, if Arno hears the shriek, it means Bagger’s not loony, he’s not gone 4-F, not yet,

and so he gins up the wildman grin he knows the kid wants to see, and replies, “Sounds like someone’s letting the air out,” and Arno asks, “Of what?,” and Bagger says, “The whole big balloon” with a mad chuckle, though what he imagines is quite sad, the earth, punctured by a 105mm heavy, leaking air, cratering inward, with all of them along for the crash,

and Arno says, “It hurts,” juvenile but accurate, the shriek does hurt, though not the ears, feels more like a small, feminine hand sliding into Bagger’s chest through a shrapnel wound and squeezing his heart arrhythmically, and if he wasn’t already kneeled, he’d have to take the posture, so damn the kid all over again for making the hard parts of him go soft, “You’re bellyaching to the wrong soldier,” Bagger gripes,

and what impresses him about Lewis Arno, from a con man’s perspective, is that the kid’s not easily bluffed, Arno points at him and says, “You got face on your face,” a statement that, at any other time and place would be gibberish, but there’s only one interpretation here, a real unfortunate one, and Bagger gingerly touches his own face, cracking the blood glaze into fragile plates, and Arno grimaces, and Bagger traces the grimace to his own right jaw, where something dangles, slight and flexible like a human ear,

and Bagger peels it off his face and holds it before him, and that’s exactly what it is, a human ear, clotted with clay and matted with a tuft of blond hair,

and he wipes his face of the face, and the only way not to throw up is to make a joke, so he takes the ear by its helix, holds it out to Arno, and says, “Ear you go,”

and the joke lands flat, the kid is appalled, so Bagger tosses the ear over his shoulder, devil-may-care, but he does care, he does, so much he wants to spin around and find the ear and pin it to his lapel, a medal more useful than...