The Grey Shroud

In "The Grey Shroud," a young Archivist inherits her grandfather's attic filled with trunks of wartime relics from his service as a Captain during a global conflict reminiscent of World War II. As she sorts through the dust-shrouded items, she uncovers a hidden portfolio revealing untold, bizarre, and horrifying truths about the war: a chemist's secret sabotage of a heavy water plant to thwart atomic ambitions, the reedy true voice of a tyrannical leader exposed on tape, sunken ships laden with unexploded ordnance near her city, elaborate deceptions like inflatable ghost armies and staged corpses carrying false intelligence, and unlikely alliances, such as enemy soldiers fighting alongside prisoners against fanatics. These discoveries shatter her orderly understanding of history, exposing the war's absurdities, cruelties, and moral ambiguities, from incendiary bats and anti-tank dogs to dark bargains with criminals and immunity for war criminals in exchange for scientific knowledge. Driven by the revelation of a massive, still-live bomb in a nearby estuary—intentionally sunk through a hero admiral's conspiracy with an engineer—the Archivist grapples with the code of silence that protected these secrets for decades. Ultimately, she chooses to expose the truth by sending evidence to a newspaper, igniting a public scandal that upends her career and the city's complacency. The novella concludes with the "grey shroud" of postwar peace being lifted, forcing society to confront the lingering shadows of deception, heroism tainted by betrayal, and the explosive legacies of the past that continue to threaten the present.