Erich Vogel

Mud. Eternal, clinging, all-permeating Rzhev mud. It squelched under his boots, clung to his coat, slid in icy drops down his collar. Erich walked hunched beneath the low, leaden sky; the muffled growl of artillery had long become background noise — something like the ringing in one’s own ears. In his hand: a battered field folder with a report for headquarters. Just another routine errand at the end of the world.

Ahead, carved into the slope of a ravine, the entrance to the dugout gaped black — low, reinforced with damp, dark logs. A half-erased chalk mark on the beam. He brushed aside the flap of his coat and felt for the cold iron handle of the door. His last thought before pushing it open was purely practical: “Ask Schmidt for dry footwraps. And hope there’s at least some kind of Stew-kopf left in the pot…”

He pushed the door and stepped forward.

And the world broke.

There was no smell of damp earth, tobacco, or sweat. No muted voices near the radio, no creaking boards underfoot. No half-darkness cut by the weak flame of a kerosene lamp.

There was… light. Steady, clear, pouring from a flat matte disk on the ceiling. Warmth. Dry, even warmth he hadn’t felt, it seemed, since Poland. And silence. A deaf, ringing, absolute silence, in which his own hoarse inhalation sounded like a gunshot.

Erich froze, neither stepping forward nor retreating. His eyes, accustomed to gloom, squinted in pain. He was not in a dugout.

He was in a room.

A small, strange, impossibly clean room. On the walls — smooth, pale wallpaper without soot or mildew. Under his boots — not planks, not soil, but a sleek dark surface reflecting that unnervingly even light. In the corner stood a low couch upholstered in a fabric of an unnaturally bright color. There was a window — huge, clean, without gaps, beyond which stretched a kind of night utterly unlike the front.

It resembled neither a field hospital nor a staff room in an occupied manor. It looked like… an image from another world. Sterile. Peaceful. Impossible.

Instinct acted faster than thought. He lunged back toward the door, toward the crack in reality that led home. But behind him there was only a smooth, seamless wall covered with the same pale wallpaper. No handle. No gap. No rough timbers. Only a flat surface where, a heartbeat ago, the exit to hell had been.

His heart struck once — heavy and dull, as if trying to punch its way out through his throat. A high ringing filled his ears. He pressed his palm to the wall. It was warm. Warm. His breath caught.

Hallucination. Poison. Gas. Exhaustion. A dream. It had to be a dream. He had to wake up. He had to—

He squeezed his eyes shut, hard enough to hurt, until sparks bloomed behind his eyelids. He counted silently. One. Two. Three. Opened them.

The room did not disappear. It stood before him — mute, bright, alien.

Cold sweat traced down his spine, freezing instantly beneath his uniform. His hand, without conscious command, sank to his holster, unfastened the flap, wrapped around the grip of his Luger. The familiar, rough cold of the metal. The only real thing in this… this mirage of a chamber.

And in that moment, everything inside Erich Vogel — twenty-five years of service, front-line cynicism, iron discipline — contracted into one tiny, white-hot point of panic that he crushed in the fist of his will. Outwardly, only the lines around his mouth deepened, and in his grey eyes — as empty and cold as the sky over Rzhev — something wild, animal, flickered for a second before being forced back down.