I’ve gotten into WW1 related media lately. It blurs the line between modern and ancient warfare, with its modern weaponry but outdated tactics, even at the time. I decided to go to my local library and look at some WW1 books. One thing that’s always stood out to me about WW1 is barbed wire, it was an ingenious invention. Something so deadly, light and fast to set up that can even slow down tanks. I decided to check out a couple books and take them home.
While on my way home I passed by a school holding a costume contest, a little late for November, but whatever, it’s not hurting anybody. One of them stood out to me, however, a German WW1 soldier. Due to it being a school zone, I had to slow down a bit, giving me a good look at him. He looked authentic, really authentic, too authentic for a child. He was also extremely tall, too tall for even the 6th graders there. There was barbed wire wrapped around his feet, and it looked like it was actually digging into his shins. I just thought it was some tall kid or even a teacher, one of my classmates was 5’ 9’’ by grade 5, so tall kids aren’t anything all that new to me. But then I realized, he was staring directly at me, with his head moving to look at my passing my car.
When I got home, I read through some of my books, and quickly realized that one of them just kept copying the same barbed wire section, that was, until page 10, where there was several pictures of a German soldier, all from different points in the war, his name tag read “Friedrich Hoffman”. There were only pictures of him, with some of them being multiples of other pictures, until page 54, the final page of the book, where there was an obituary dedicated to the man. He had died on June 12th, 1915, and on the left of the obituary there was a picture of a body tangled up in barbed wire, clenching his rifle to his chest. I immediately recognized it as the man, after all, I had been staring at his face for the past 44 pages. I thought the book was just a joke, something that teenagers would just put on the shelves to scare younger people, so I just put on my nightstand and carried onto the next one.
A couple hours later I fell asleep. I woke up to a loud banging sound on my door, I grabbed my gun, just in case, and ran to the door, and just when I got there, it stopped. I opened the door, gun drawn, and nobody was there. When I closed my door, I was met with loud German music playing in my house, it took me a while but I soon figured out that it was coming from my bedroom, so I made my way there to find the source of the noise. The closer I got to my room the louder the noise got, but not like how a sound gets louder the closer you are, but it got physically louder. I soon found it was coming from that book, it was wide open, I could’ve sworn it was closed when I got up. When I closed it, the sound stopped and my ears were ringing. I thought to open the door, just to take a peak, I quickly opened it, there was no sound. It was normal, well… sort of.
It was now all German, and every page had that picture of the man in the barbed wire, but each page got more and more decayed, until there was just a skeleton. I now knew this was serious, and I knew I had to bring it back to the library immediately. Just as I was making up my mind, a man, who looked just like the man in the costume at that school I passed by ran up to my window from the woods and started banging on it. I tried to grab my gun but before I could even touch it, barbed wire wrapped around his throat and arms and pulled him back into the woods. I took a closer look, and there was an actual shatter on the glass, I immediately knew this was real, and decided to just go now, before that bastard in the gas mask came back.
So at 5 AM I grabbed the book and my pistol and ran to my car, turned on the ignition and drove to the library, on my way there I passed through a wooded area. Then, I almost drove into someone standing in the road. I swerved to avoid them and crashed into the ditch. When I got out of the car the man charged me. It was him, the man in the gasmask. The barbed wire tried to grab him again, but he grabbed onto a rock and slashed the barbed wire with his bayonet. He then got back up and got back to charging at me, I got up and grabbed a rock.
He jumped on me, pinning me to the ground. He grabbed his bayonet and tried to stab me. I grabbed his hand, with the knife inches away from my face. I hit him on the temple with my rock, knocking him off me. I tried to escape but he pulled me back down, he stabbed me with his bayonet and pulled his rifle from his holster and aimed it at me. I pulled the gun to my right, and he missed. I hit him with the butt of his gun, knocking him down, and shot him in the head.
I needed to know who this asshole was, so I slowly removed his gas mask, and it was him. Friedrich Hoffman. Just then, barbed wire pulled his lifeless corpse away. I knew the book had to be destroyed. Maybe it was haunted, or maybe it was just me, but I’m not risking it being an isolated incident. Luckily, boy scouts taught me how to start a quick fire, and I had everything I needed. I set that evil book ablaze and kept feeding the flames until it was just ash.
I dialed 911 for my injuries and was taken to the hospital. I got out of the hospital about a week ago, and everything’s been normal since. I offered to pay for “losing” the book, but the people at the library told me there was no book with that name. This hasn’t discouraged my interest in WW1, but it definitely made me less of a skeptic.