The Oeuvre

by Greg James

  Sister Fearing's eyes were becoming wet.

  “Get out! You…both of you, get out!”

  Madeleine drew Kitty away from the Sister and out of the hut. She saw the hard glint in the old woman's glazed eyes as they left. She saw what was going through the Sister's mind. The wolf of her dream flashed before her eyes. She felt her heart tighten and she urged Kitty on, towards their hut. Her plan had not worked.

  They had to leave tonight.

  *

  Sister Fearing shook as she sat down at her desk, cradling her head in her hands. She began to cry. Thick, choking sobs burst out from her. Her body shook with wave after wave of weeping. The tears subsided after a time.

  A living piece of the night passed by her tent.

  It made Sister Fearing sleep.

  The moon was hollowed out, a broken shell crescent casting a paltry light. The graveyard was no longer a graveyard when night fell upon it. It was a maw of splintered gravestone teeth. Shadows seemed quick to gather here. A lonesome soul stood by her son's resting place, her head bowed.

  Nathaniel Fearing

  1897-1915

  Gone but not Forgotten

  With our Father, who art in Heaven

  She'd watched him grow up to become reserved, educated, full of scientific rubbish, rejecting the rough and ready pursuits that were normal for a boy his age, instead becoming an effete thinker. He asked too many questions. He stopped attending church. He said that he did not believe in God. That there was no logical reason for His existence.

  Logic, she thought, what an ugly word to come from the mouth of an unwise child.

  Her son's blasphemy shamed her as she sat in church alone. The other women were hand-in-hand with their sons whilst hers did not even deign to respect the Sabbath. Her relationship with Nathaniel grew into one of disrespectful silence. Bad feeling blossomed into a twisting tangle of tendrils that wound its way around their souls. Binding tighter and tighter each day. Feeding and watering the growths there with self-righteousness. Letting rage become hatred, allowing it to strangle their hearts. He thought her stupid. She thought him insolent. Other mothers wept and wailed as their young boys left home to fight in the war. Margaret Fearing did not. He signed up and off he went, without so much as a word to her. She had none for him either.

  She did not care.

  Nathaniel was invalided home, sick from gas gangrene. That early in the war, there had been no curative measures available for the bacillus that caused it. She sat at his hospital bedside, watching her son breathe his last. The defiance was gone from him. His eyes, red and sore from weeping. His body shivering, exhausted, as the bacillus did its degenerative work, eating him alive. She remembered that last look he gave her. She had held his hand, feeling him slip away as his grip went light and loose. When he looked gone, she allowed herself a little smile.

  A little triumph.

  His eyes opened, just for a moment.

  …he saw me smile…

  Then he died.

  Guilt for what she had wished upon him, what he suffered lingered, torturing her, driving her to try and save other young men. But, each one she saw, had Nathaniel's face and she was repelled. Still wounded by her son's treatment of her, unable to forgive him, unable to let her unhappiness go.

  The frosty sickle of the moon hung over the scene. A funereal fog shrouding it. A few maggots squirmed out of the ground. Margaret Fearing didn't see the white squirming shapes at her feet. She was trying to speak. To get the words out that she'd never been able to say to him. Her words were silent, unheard. The ground beneath her feet shuddered. The earth there was breathing in and out. One hazy moment flowed into another before she realised something was moving, crawling up her leg. Margaret shrieked as she looked down and saw the small quivering forms surging around her. She looked up at the moon.

  She screamed at it.

  She tried to pull herself free from the parasitic mass. But, below the knees, there was little more than bone left. Unable to support her weight or co-ordinate, her legs buckled and she fell to the ground. Bucking, gagging on her own vomit and blood, she cried and slapped at the cemetery ground in desperation. She tore up fistfuls of grass, desperate to pull herself away from what was flooding out of the ground. She could feel the vicious invertebrates making their way up her. Burrowing into her. Her body shook violently, going into spasm. Dried tears mingled with snot and phlegm on Margaret's face. Her cries were degenerate gurgles. The maggots ate their way through her soft insides, hollowing her out. Satiated clots of the parasites came spilling from her lips, ears and nostrils. Shaking, she began crawling, pulling herself over to her son's grave. The earth had split wide open. The lid of the coffin was in pieces. There was not much left of Nathaniel Fearing but a sticky skeleton and the fraying tatters of internal organs. Segmented nuggets of puce matter clothed every inch of him. His eyes opened. His blue-brown irises, they were completely untouched by decay.

  They were weeping for her.

  In the waking world, a thin rancid flux of black-headed grubs and dead spiders ran out over Margaret Fearing's lips and onto her pillow, soaking in, turning the linen to yellow and brown. For a moment, she gagged, choking on the vile syrup. Then, she was still, dead and gone. The shape in the shadows knelt down over her, to feed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Madeleine held Kitty close to her as they made their way back to the hut to pack, “Why must she be like this? Why did she do this to us?”

  “It doesn't matter, Kitty. It's all over for us now. There's nothing more we can do. We'll go back home tomorrow and do what we can there.”

  Madeleine wanted to get her sister out of here fast. Sister Fearing's murderous eyes were still burning in her mind.

  “But I don't want to go, Mad. I feel we've let the boys down. They need as much help as they can get. We can't go and leave them.”

  “I know, Kitty. I want to stay. I do want to stay here, but we're not deemed fit for service. Maybe we can help out in some other way when we get back home.”

  She wanted to get away as soon as possible, before that witch of a woman went after Kitty. She knew she would, given half a chance. It was all in the eyes.

  A scream cut the air open and they ran to meet it.

  It was Wilf; naked and bleeding with a knife in his hand. He was carving at his skin. His sheets were soaked scarlet. Cuts criss-crossed every inch of his torso and he continued to hack and saw away.

  …rats on me…

  …need to get them off…

  Blinded by tears, he tugged and pulled at his savaged skin with his other hand, peeling it off in tatters. Twisting and jerking, he tried to shake off the rodents that only he could see.

  …they're all over me…

  Kitty and Madeleine looked on in shock at the mad display. The scream had brought them running. The sight of Wilf mutilating himself without remorse stopped them dead. The men in the beds around Wilf shrank away. The boy was snarling, waving the knife with an animal ferocity. None of them dared get close to the frenzied sweeps and jabs of the blade. His body was a jigsaw puzzle of ugly lines. His knife hand was shaking. He was weakening from the loss of blood. His skin draining, becoming colourless.

  The voice was in his head, it was scratching around the inside of his skull. It had woken him. The voice had told him things. It had told him what it felt like to peel off your own skin. It had told him how a baby's cries will rise to a certain beauteous pitch when you drive thorns through the softest parts of its body. It told him what it felt like to be eaten by wild dogs and rats. It told him that he was damned. Wilf could feel the rats inside him. Their sharp little feet and louse-infested skin. He could feel their ragged teeth biting.

  …one in my mouth…

  Wilf thrust the point of the knife into his mouth, gouging away at his tongue, sending a stream of blood and sloppy matter down his throat. The scratching in his skull was growing ever fiercer. They were inside his head, behind his eyes.

  …want my
eyes!...

  …leave 'lone my eyes!...

  He spat out the last meaty pieces of his tongue.

  …leave 'lone my eyes!...

  Gritting his teeth, he stabbed the knife point into his left eye. He burrowed the blade in, twisting it, scraping its edge around the bone of the socket, working the soft sphere of his eyeball loose. The socket drooled jellied matter as he carved deeply into it. The eye came free in a cascade of clear fluid. He sliced the knife through the optic nerve. The soft remains of the eye fell away, severed. He could feel the rats nibbling at the back of his other eye, raking their claws around the rim of bone which it nestled in, shrieking a shrill murderous song that reverberated inside his skull.

  He dropped the knife.

  Wilf began clawing at his remaining eye with his fingers, sending a torrent of pale claret tears down his face. He dug his fingers in, crushing the eye, then raking it out as a handful of sopping translucence. Gouging into the socket one more time, he pulled free a clot of moist mush. He dabbed his fingertips at the tattered hanging strings of his optic nerves. He touched the slippery smears running from the holes in his face. He shook, feeling fault-lines of fire opening inside his head. He fingered the gashes on his torso. The stump of his tongue squirmed in his mouth. Bubbles of blood blew out, popping between his ravaged lips. He collapsed, moaning, haemorrhaging.

  “Where did he get that knife from?”

  No-one answered.

  No-one knew.

  *

  Wilson was awoken by the aching in his bladder. Easing himself upright, he reached under the bed for the pan. He hoped he wouldn't wake any of the others whilst he had a tinkle. He was sliding the pan out when he saw it, standing at the foot of the bed. Its tattered fingernails scratching on the sheets.

  Wilson shrank away.

  He watched the world drowning around him into a thick welter of shifting, shuddering pitch. The blackness of its eyes glittered, showing him sights he did not want to see. The things that he had done.

  …sliding the knife into Wilf's sleeping hand, then kneeling by the boy, whispering into his ear standing in a bell tent, a half-dressed nurse before him, tugging lice from her frizzy red hair, blood, livid and brilliant, running out over his hands…

  Then it disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Wilf was watching the parade. It was the Sunday parade with the soldiers in their fine coats and medals. He loved their coats. He wanted one of his own. There was loud brassy music playing as the smart men walked past. Everything was safe and okay. The soldiers looked so smart. Wilf looked down at his worn clothes and wished he was as smart-looking as them. One of the soldiers had a very bright medal, a great big glinting disc that Wilf could not stop staring at.

  He would be proud if he had a medal like that. He would never run away from school again. You needed schooling if you were going to be somebody good in the world. That was what his mother told him. If you were good at your schooling then you could become one of the soldiers. Smart in the head will make you smart in a uniform, she said. He looked closer at the soldier's face. There was something familiar about it.

  Things changed.

  The recruiting Sergeant rubbed his fingers through his moustache, assessing Wilf.

  “How old are yer, sonny?”

  “I'm seventeen, sir.”

  “You sure about that? I think you've made a mistake there.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Tell you what, go back outside that door and think about it. You look about nineteen to me. Come back here when you remember your right age. Tomorrow morning.”

  Wilf nodded and went out through the office door. It slammed shut behind him. The lights went out. He walked forwards, hands reaching out. Nothing was there. He turned around. Nothing there either. He tried to cry out.

  No sound came from his mouth.

  Wilf's hands flew up to his face. His mouth was gone. There was just a plain of unbroken skin. His fingers found two depressions in his face where his eyes should have been. Running his hands over his head, he searched for the missing pieces of his face but everywhere was blank skin. He slumped down onto his knees, feeling himself sinking into the stuff of the void. Screaming and screaming a soundless scream.

  He could feel the fibres of the blankets grazing against his neck through the bandages. He treasured the sensation. So little was left to him of the outside world. His senses were failing. A stream of drool leaked out of the side of his mouth. If he still had a tongue, he could have licked it away. Instead he lay there, feeling the warm wet path it was tracing down the side of his bandaged face. There was nothing else he could do as he felt the world growing faint around him. If he let his attention wander from the myriad little sensations that teased and fired his thoughts, he would become aware of the emptiness. The void spreading around him. Separating him from the living. It was claiming him and it did fascinate him. But, he knew, if he let himself go into the void, he would be lost there forever. Never to come back.

  The void terrified him but it was where he was going. Nothing could change that. He had always thought of it as a blackness but that was wrong. It was without colour, substance or depth. It was an absence of everything. Death was not a nothing. Nothing was a definition. Where he was going, there were no definitions. No sights, no sounds, no ups, no downs.

  Wilf remembered what he had seen happen to other men. Their limbs reduced to macerated pulp. Ruined faces held together by plaster masks and patches. Uniforms soaked through with the juices of too many infected wounds. Yet they were so quiet about the pain. That had unsettled him. But now, he understood.

  What else could you do?

  Your life was ending. You were going to die. This was it. There was no going back. The pain of existence was finally going to end. All you had to do was lie back and wait for it to happen. The void, it was thrumming with the beat of his heart and he was so alone. There would be no girl for him to lose his virginity to. There would be no shiny silver medals. There would be no tomorrow.

  He lay on the bed, waiting. He felt it in the stuff of his being. Falling, coming down on him, a black snow. The slight breeze drifting into the tent was disturbed by it. He could feel it on the bandages, seeping into his ravaged body. He could feel its coldness in his heart. He did not struggle. The void spoke, it roared. His shattered nerves went spiralling up to a shriek. He was being born for a second time. Wilf wept a few stinging tears through his butchered tear ducts. He was going to be free of this tortured cradle of blood and bone, at last. The breeze picked up. A heavy rain pattered down onto the ground. Wilf's body gasped, shuddered and then relaxed.

  The rain stopped for a moment.

  His heart stopped forever.

  *

  Kitty's hand pawed at her mouth as she looked behind the screen that had been erected around the bed. Wilf was propped up on two pillows with bandages coating him. She could see spots of scabby blood, here and there from where he had cut himself. Thick bandages swathed his head. Two wads of cotton dressing were in place over his eye sockets. Kitty could see that they were deeply discoloured, partially sunken into the holes. Her stomach heaved at the sight. Tears swelled in the corners of her eyes, she wiped them away with her fingers. A hole was opening up inside her; deep, joyless and forbidding. She reached out, touching one of Wilf's bandaged hands. It was cold. She squeezed it hard.

  As she came out from behind the screen, her eyes were drawn to Wilson. He was sitting quietly, huddled in his bed sheets, watching her. Sadness weighing heavy in his grey eyes. He didn't seem to see her. His blank eyes were staring right past her, over her shoulder. Kitty looked around, following the direction of his gaze to the tent flaps.

  “It was there, Kitty. I saw it. The devil-eyed thing. It was there, I swear it was, just behind you, smiling at me.”

  Shaking her head, she managed a weak smile.

  She approached him and sat down on the bed.

  “I'm leaving.”

  “What d'you
mean, leaving?”

  “Leaving the hospital. Mad and I are being sent back to England.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, looked around, sighed, and then rested her gaze back on Wilson. “Sister Fearing saw you and I holding hands. It was bad conduct on my part. I was being too 'familiar' with you and now we've both got to go home.”

  His face sagged. “Will you write? Let me know how you are? Keep in touch?”

  “I'd like to. But I don’t know your name.”

  Wilson stared into her eyes, feeling a kindling inside him, a faint ignition.

  “Reg. Reg Wilson.”

  She smiled, delighted, “You did it. You remembered.”

  “I know. I don’t know how. I woke up and it was there. Back in my head. Somehow.”

  “That’s wonderful though, Reg. It shows you’re getting better. You’re healing.”

  “Yes, I hope so. Y’know, we could meet up after the war, y'know. When all this has blown over and everyone's happy again.”

  Kitty doubted anyone would ever be happy again after this war. She moved around the bed to his side. She smiled at him. Wilson smiled back, faltering as he did.

  “I'll come back later and give you my home address, Reg. You can write to me first.”

  “Okay.”

  She could feel that hole of cheerlessness boring into her heart. Tears were worrying the edges of her eyes. She hung her head. Rain was pattering down outside. Wilson's hand fell on hers. Tears burst from Kitty's eyes. She wiped them away, trying to control the swelling of emotion rushing up from deep inside her. She turned away from Wilson.

  “He's such a mess, Reg, and it's all because of me.” She swallowed hard as another tidal wave of sobbing tried to burst out.

  “Why's it your fault?”

  “I've got the Blighty Touch. Haven't the others told you?” she laughed bitterly, “If that boy hadn't touched my uniform when I tended to him, he wouldn't be in that bed now. He did that to himself because he wanted to go home. It's all because of me, because he believed in me. I let him down.”