The Suff

Flash fiction for Substack's first (?) urban legend

1863

Clara looked up from her letter. Everything had gone quiet. Unnaturally so. A field hospital was a loud and chaotic place by nature. The conversations of doctors and nurses punctuated by the groans of the wounded and dying. Holding out her lantern, she walked through the row of camp beds. Empty. Each bed had held a man just ten minutes ago, when she had last made her rounds. It didn’t make any sense. She would have heard them, seated nearby as she was. Many of them could not sit up on their own, let alone walk.

 “Doctor Wils—”

The words died suddenly in her throat. There was a figure standing at the end of the row of beds, just at the edge of the lantern’s light. Dingy rags hung from its body like a madman’s shroud, obscuring everything but its glassy eyes. She knew she ought to scream, that it was her best and only hope for survival. There were hundreds of soldiers camped within earshot of the hospital tent. They would hear her. They would come. And yet she could say nothing at all.

It moved closer, slow and inexorable. Clara tried again to cry out, tried to move, but it was as if her body was no longer her own.

“The suff…”

Its words were soft and drawn out like the hissing of a snake.

What do you want?

Whether she spoke these words aloud or only thought them, she didn’t know.

“The suffering must end…”

Then allow me to ease their suffering. That’s why I’m here.

The creature stopped just in front of her. Eyes unblinking, as if they could see her innermost being. Then it broke into a wide, terrible smile.

“We are the same, you and I,” it whispered. “You will learn this with time.”