The Night Children

The Night Children
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Author	Alexander Gordon Smith
Illustrator
Published on
Published by	Square Fish
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The Night Children is a prequel novella set during WWII, way before the events of Furnace Penitentiary and explores the past of Warden Cross.

Synopsis

It is December 1944 and Europe is still gripped by war. In the densely forested mountains of Belgium one of the conflict's most brutal battles is raging. Cut off from the front, a ragtag group of young British and American soldiers finds itself being hunted by a patrol of elite German Special Forces, including a newly commissioned officer called Kreuz—a teenage boy who will grow up to become Warden Cross (the fearsome prison director who will one day rule Furnace Penitentiary, the terrifying underground prison specially built for teen offenders). As both sides fight for their lives in the unforgiving terrain, however, they start to realize that there are worse things hiding in the snow than soldiers. There are creatures out there with gas masks and piggy eyes (ancestors of Furnace prison's "wheezers")—demonic entities that cannot be killed by guns and grenades, monsters who do not care what uniforms their victims are wearing so long as they bleed, and so long as they scream . . .

Plot Summary

The novella begins with a search party: Coporal Donnie Brixton, alongside with his men Eddie Argento, Mike Levy, and Henry Grady search for Sergeant Cudden and his men who have seemingly vanished in the forest two days earlier. Cudden's original mission had been to ambush a small German logging village before they all disappeared.

During their trek, the men come across a figure in the woods that upon investigation turns out to be a fallen Allied parachute. Before they can deduct whose parachute it is, a stranger from the Royal British Air Force ambushes them at gunpoint and demanding the men to state their business. Satisfied with their answers, the strangers reveals their identity to be Joan Forbes, a female pilot of the Royal Air Force. Joan explains that she had been an escort pilot heading to Heilbronn for a follow up raid, but had been shot down by a German antiaircraft gun and forced to crash in the middle of the Ardennes. She figured to head south to where the Allied forces would be, and set up her parachute decoy and hid until she found Donnie and his men.

Donnie fills her in on what they were trying to accomplish. Despite the order to go north to find Cudden, Joan advises the men not to go, with the claim that something horrifying would await them and that the men they were looking for were likely already dead. Mike doesn't trust Joan, sure that she's secretly a German spy, but Donnie dismisses his theory. With nowhere else to go, Joan reluctantly joins the group to head up north once more.

Joan is horribly proven right about what she saw. In the middle of a clearing are Sergeant Cudden and his men - horribly mutilated with their faces nailed onto logs and posed like dolls. Drawn in frozen blood around each man is a symbol: three circles set in a triangle, with three dots in the middle of them and three lines connecting them together, along with the phrase "Sie sind alle gerettet." ("They are all saved.") Donnie takes charge, giving out orders to secure the area, signal for help, and look for tracks of whoever (or whatever) did this. Before they can get far into their work, a creature much like a grotesque rat with a child's face appears and attacks. The group collectively bail and retreat as far as they can, only to run into a group of Nazis and knocked out.

Donnie, Mike, and Henry are tied up and captured by the Nazis, Eddie and Joan are nowhere to be seen. The Germans interrogate Donnie about what the three of them were doing in the woods. Their first lieutenant, Kreuz, personally accuses the American of being assassins who had been sent out to slaughter two of their men. Donnie denies all of this, accusing in turn that the Nazis were the ones who had killed Cudden and his men, butchering them into dolls. As Kreuz threatens to kill him, Eddie appears from the woods, bluffing that he had the Nazis surrounded by backup. The Nazis surrender (though Eddie's forced to fire at Kreuz to get him to drop his gun), while Joan frees Donnie, Mike, and Henry of their bonds. It's in that moment that Eddie is snatched away by a creature and into the woods.

Characters

• Donnie Brixton
• Joan Forbes
• Eddie Argento
• Mike Levy
• Henry Grady
• Sergeant Bill Cudden
• Kreuz von Passchendale
• Stefan Holst
• Andreas Becker
• Gyorgy Markus
• Hans
• Albert Connaught