Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror

by et al. Ramsey Campbell

  Using the uprights, he pulled himself to his feet and pressed his moist, feverish face to the fence. The wrought-iron was cool. Like death.

  Picking up his shovel, he scaled the wall and dropped down on the other side, panting. Not exertion. Not really. Something else. Père-Lachaise: a winding maze of crypts seemingly piled one atop another like some morbid excrescence of graveyard stone. The hunger bloomed inside him like funeral orchids. It wanted, it needed, it desired. Jarny moved along through the battalions of leaning headstones and moon-washed sepulchers. The cemetery was a study in silence, a marble forest that held its breath. Tree limbs creaked overhead, rats scratched in the darkness.

  As always, he deluded himself. It was the only thing that kept him comparatively sane.

  He tried to convince himself that if he wandered in circles long enough, maybe he would get confused and not be able to find the grave. It was a nice ruse, but it did not work: for the hunger knew where the grave was. It could smell the black soil and oak box, what rested within. It had the scent and like a bloodhound straining at its leash, it led him there. A small, conservative tombstone the color of a blanched skull. Jarny looked up through the intertwined tree branches at the sullen eye of the moon, but there was no solace there.

  Something hitched in his belly.

  Spikes were driven through his stomach wall.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “Quit being so greedy.”

  He touched the stone and silently read the name there: ELIZABETH DUPREE. She had drowned in the Seine. Fifteen years old, she had been in the ground nearly a week. The hunger increased in his belly. Yes, she would be seasoned properly.

  Forgive me, he thought. Forgive me.

  He took the shovel and cut away the sod. That was easy enough; it hadn’t the time yet to properly take root. He rolled it away and began to dig. At first, he dug into the soil almost languidly as if he planned on never finding what was buried below. But the pains kept rising and falling and he began to dig through the wormy black earth in earnest, taking it down foot by foot and squaring off his excavation as he went. Three feet, four, five.

  The hunger rolling though him made him practically giddy now.

  He kept digging, his pile of dirt getting larger as the moon slipped across the sky. And then … the shovel struck wood. Breathing hard, drenched with sweat and black with earth, he began pawing the soil away from the polished box. When it was clean and gleaming with dirty moonlight, he raised the shovel over his head and let out a wounded, agonized cry, breaking the catches one by one.

  Jarny hoped, God how he hoped, someone would hear him, that the noise he purposely made and his cry of loathing would bring someone. The gate swinging wide, men with rifles rushing through the grass. Finding him, seeing him for what he was.

  Yes, yes, yes, seeing the thing I am and killing me, shooting until their guns are empty and—

  The pain again. Not a full-fledged attack, not an out and out violation, but more like a groping of filthy, unwanted hands, an obscene kiss in the dark. Shaking, tears running down his cheeks, he gripped the lid of the box and threw it open.

  The stench.

  Oh, the high foul stink of it.

  It came rolling out of the casket in a mephitic cloud, green and wet and sickening. Jarny fell back against the side of the grave while his stomach lurched and roiled. Thick and noisome and utterly offensive, it was also … delicious.

  He lay there, shaking his head, in complete denial of the perversions to follow. Bile climbed his throat, spitting hot and acidic onto his tongue. He couldn’t do this. Dear Lord, he couldn’t do this again.

  But the hunger was a living thing inside him, huge and silver-toothed and unwieldy. It was so irresistible that it blotted out who and what he was, made him into a host, a vessel with hooked fingers and teeth and insatiable desires.

  The corpse of Elizabeth DuPree was not a pretty thing after nearly a week in the damp, rank earth. Her white lace burial gown was mottled and water-stained from seepage and a dark mildew had grown up her neck and over her cheeks like a beard. Her folded hands were likewise meshed with morbid fungi. Her face was sunken, lips shriveled away from the teeth so that it looked as if she were grinning.

  Please don’t make me do this, don’t make me touch … that …

  But then as always, Jarny’s will was no longer his own.

  Things like defiance and self-control and resolution no longer existed. They had been crushed beneath the stark and vile immensity of the hunger and the need of what lived inside him. He was just a vehicle, a machine with no conscious volition of its own. And that’s what made him jump into the casket, on top of the corpse, feeling its feel and smelling its smell, disgusted beyond earthly bounds. He pressed his face to that of the dead girl until her putrescence filled him and the hunger went mad inside him. His tongue came out and licked her blackened lips, tasting the powders and chemicals the undertaker had used on her, and something beneath all that, something repellent and nauseous.

  He dragged the body up into the moonlight, dumping it on the damp grass.

  And what was inside him said, Fill us … we’re starving …

  There was no more waiting.

  Jarny sank his teeth into the gelid flesh of her throat, yanking out damp flaps of fetid meat, chewing and tasting, driven insane by the textures and revolting flavor on his tongue. He tore her gown away, gnawing at the greening meat of her thighs and belly, tearing at her cold breasts and nibbling at her mottled buttox. He licked and sucked and tore. He used his teeth and his hands, shredding and devouring and spitting out gobs of black juice that ran from his mouth. The taste was disgusting, the feel of that rotting meat sliding down his throat made him feverish and disoriented. And when he was filled, satisfied with his charnel meal of pulp and bone and graying meat, he screamed and mutilated what was left, tearing the corpse asunder and rolling in the scraps until its feel was his feel and its stink was his own vile perfume.

  And then it was done.

  Jarny slowly came back to himself, ribbons of decomposing tissue hanging from his mouth, his uniform splashed down with drainage and oozing black ichor. The sickly-sweet stench of putrefied meat clung to him in a ghastly bouquet. His first impulse was to scream and his second was to vomit. To throw out his guts and everything that was in them: that warm and slushy mass resting in his belly. But he didn’t dare. For they would not allow it. They would never have that, never have him denying him their feast of grave-meat.

  Show us, they said. Show us.

  So Jarny stood up, unbuttoning his filthy tunic, revealing the yawning hollow in his side that was eaten away and infested by a squirming mass of white maggots. No ordinary graveworms, these were impossibly fat and pale and sluglike, a coiling and slinking mass even then lengthening and thickening and bursting with eggs from the feast he had given them.

  It was enough.

  They were happy.

  Whimpering, Jarny retreated from the plundered grave as the worms inside him grew fat and lazy and torpid. As they went to sleep, he ran from the cemetery, a hot wind of dementia blowing through his head.

  By the time they marched into Vilna, Napoleon’s Grand Armee had been reduced from 100,000 to barely 7,000. Weakened to a deplorable state by fevers and plagues and starvation, the bitter cold did the rest and this in a matter of weeks. Jarny, now having supped upon the meat of men, was not like the others. Strong, vital, full-blooded, he fought the Russians and peasants at Boulille’s side. While the others fell dead at his feet from exposure or cowered in the trees, Jarny fought like an animal, taking sheer savage joy from the men he killed. When he emptied his rifle, he drew his saber and charged into the Russian ranks, slashing and hacking, delighting in the screams of the enemy and laughing with merciless sardonic humor at their pleas for mercy.

  His saber fell a forest of men, leaving a writhing carpet of carcasses underfoot. Limbs were scattered, heads rolling free, bowels spilled steaming to the snow. There was purity and glacial joy in th
e killing that he had never experienced before. There was nothing finer than the brutal act of the saber, laying open one’s enemies and staining the snow red. And there was no sweeter joy than having their blood sprayed over you in reeking gouts, splashing over your face so that you could taste the life you had taken, knowing it, feeling it, filling yourself with its hot wine.

  This is how it was for Jarny.

  He saw his enemies as cattle to be slaughtered, to be brought under heel and blade, swine to be carved and smoked over a hot fire. And while the others died in numbers, laid low by fever and famine, his belly was full. And who could know of the secret joy Jarny felt bursting into the miserable huts of peasant farmers with others of like appetites? The screaming, the cutting, the rich heady aroma of spilled blood? The slabs of juicy meat roasted on spits, entrails cooked on sticks over hot fires? He lived for the kill, the feeding, and his prey was abundant.

  Then, just outside Vilna, a Russian reprisal. Musket balls whizzing through the air and shells bursting, men screaming as they were cut down in the snow. The air was wet with a fine mist of blood. Everywhere, bodies and parts of them scattered about in a gruesome hodgepodge. Jarny was hit by shrapnel as he jumped over the shattered anatomies of his fellow soldiers in a vain attempt at escape. The shrapnel nearly tore his right leg off, it sheared open his belly and filled his gut with burning fragments of metal. Unwilling to die, he crawled through the snow dragging his viscera behind him in freezing loops. He left a trail of blood and slime.

  After that, his mind fell into a fog.

  He and dozens of others were dragged into Vilna, seeking food, shelter, and medical aid. But there was none to be had. Vilna had been ransacked by peasant riots and fighting. The typhus plague had swept the city and corpses were heaped in untidy, loose-limbed stacks right out in the streets. The population was starving, diseased, and filthy. They crowded into stinking little huts infested with cockroaches.

  Jarny was dumped with the rest of the sick and wounded in the field hospital at St. Bazile. It was an awful place even by the standards of the day. Crowded, steaming, and stinking, jumping with lice, men were packed in wards shoulder-to-shoulder, sometimes right on top of one another on floors that were a seething pool of human waste infected with disease germs. Typhus raged, as did influenza and dysentery. The wounded and ill literally drowned in their own vomit, blood, bile, and excrement. The corridors were stacked with thousands of corpses. So many that a crude maze-like path had to be opened through them. Rats fed on the dead and dying. Broken windows and ruptured walls were stuffed with torsos and limbs in a grisly rampart to keep the polluted air from infecting the living.

  Jarny was thrown in a tight, close room with hundreds of others that were delirious from hunger and fevers. The floor was covered with rotting straw fouled with urine, bile, and feces. There were bodies everywhere, many rotted right to mush. He was tossed atop the wormy, spongy mass of a bloated corpse. A corpse infested by … maggots. And no ordinary maggots were they, he soon learned. But a race of graveworms with a perverse communal intelligence, a single overriding need to infest and feed. Jarny landed on the body of their previous host, in fact, who was too rank and polluted by that time to be of any further use to them.

  So they entered Jarny.

  They came in through his eyes and nostrils and mouth, up his ass and through the numerous holes in his hide where sharpened staffs of bone jutted forth. They filled him, infesting and breeding.

  You won’t die, they told him. We won’t let you.

  And that’s how it began. He did not die: they would not allow it. They repaired him, rebuilt him, and soon he was well again … as well as a man can be that is little more than a host for hundreds and hundreds of worms.

  Out in the streets of Vilna, as the plague overflowed every house, every barn, every makeshift morgue and spilled out into the streets until it was possible to cross them by walking over bodies, it was a horror as well. Constantly harassed by Cossacks and insane peasants, Napoleon pushed on as the Russians poured in to fight, leaving the sick and dying behind to their gruesome fate. By the end of December there were 25,000 people in Vilna, nearly all of them stricken with typhus fever. By June, only 7,000 would still be alive.

  Jarny was one of them.

  But by that point, colonized as he was, he could no longer call himself human. What the worms had given him was secret and what he would have to do for them was no less secret.

  And it was always the same: Feed us.

  It was in the streets and all over the Paris papers the next morning: the awful slinking ghoul had struck yet again. This time it had violated the grave of a young girl. The body had been carefully unearthed then savagely mutilated, torn to fragments in a deranged frenzy. Parts of her were scattered over the walks and dangling in the trees.

  He learned of it as did all and hearing it, remembered that once he had been a man named Francois Jarny. A human being.

  * * * *

  When he woke in the barracks several days later after another hideous night of mania, sweating and shaking, the worms had been busy. They had spun a cocoon of new pink flesh over the gaping hollow in his side. It was their gift to him so he did not have to look on their wriggling, industrious masses.

  Yes, a gift and it filled him with a loathing that was absolute.

  He vomited bile into the basin, then, wiping his mouth, he fell against the tub, shaking and whimpering. He could still smell the grave ooze on his hands, his breath.

  After the tears had finally dried up and that stark insanity stopped scratching inside his skull, Jarny stood up and allowed himself to look at that patch of pink skin just below his ribs. It was very shiny, almost waxy-looking. And warm. Very warm, almost hot. Like a child intrigued by a scab, he pressed his fingers against the patch of skin. The new flesh was squishy, flaccid. When he applied pressure to it, his fingertips sank into it like it was not human skin but the flesh of a soft, rotting peach.

  He pulled his hand away, fingers stained with a dirty brown liquid. The smell was horrid like the drainage of gassy corpses. More of that liquid ran in tiny streaks from the holes his fingers had punched into his side.

  There was revulsion, of course, a deep-set physical revulsion that had become an almost common thing with Jarny, a natural rhythm like happiness and sorrow. He subsisted on a daily diet of it. Knowing that he was host to them. That they owned him. That they would make him violate more graves, feed upon the rot within, stuff himself with it like a glutton at a buffet. He was infested by graveworms and there really was no way out.

  They were small and he was large.

  They were weak and he was strong.

  But he was one and they were a multitude, forever starving. Forever demanding.

  They felt what he felt. Tasted what he tasted. Knew what he knew. And, oh yes, they could see what he saw. They could look through his eyes and make him experience things as they experienced them. And to Jarny, there was no greater horror in this world beyond the feasting itself. To look out through his eyes, as them, feeling their lust and depravity and knowing their cold, cutting, metallic hunger. To become a corpse-worm appraising a shank of greening meat and not feel repugnance or simple disgust, but a joy and pleasure that was almost sexual. A noxious hunger, an overwhelming chemical desire to crawl over the offered putrid mass, to bore into it, chew and suck upon the grave bounty, and, yes, meet others of your kind in those moist, tainted depths, to mate, to spawn, to lay your eggs in hot pearly masses within.

  That was horror … to do such things and love it.

  He couldn’t even kill himself, because they would not allow it. They would repair whatever damage he incurred and make him walk again, a mindless and demented cadaver, a shell that existed only to find and feed upon the carrion they desired. Not that he hadn’t tried. Again and again. But they always patched him up and would until he was so polluted by their larva and waste that he was of no further use to them … except as food.

  He could feel them
wriggling about in his side repairing the damage he had done. They did not punish him. The feel of them slinking and slithering inside him was punishment enough.

  Already, they were hungry and he would have to feed them. Such was the penalty of resurrection and morbid symbiosis.

  Jarny thought it was months now, but maybe it was years. It was hard to remember. Yes, he had a fine new sheath of pink skin at his side … but what of the rest of him? He was bony and pale, tiny red lumps of infection broken out all over his body. They were soft to the touch, filled with discolored pus. He was rotting from the inside out and the maggots kept him alive, kept him going even as he drowned in their own diseased filth and poisoned wastes. For he was their home. A home that needed constant maintenance. But they were ambitious, diligent, they would not let him fall to disrepair.

  Not just yet.

  The La Gazette reported that the ghoul had been active again. This time at the cemetery of St. Parnasse. Watchmen of the Gendarmerie Royale had fired at the creature, but it escaped over a wall. They claimed it had the face of a wolf or perhaps a hyena.

  Jarny laughed at that.

  Laughed and remembered Henri Boulille … and hated.

  He stood before the mirror, looking at the cadaverous thing he was. Hollow-socketed, sallow, gums pulling back from yellow teeth sharpened on corpses and gray bones. The worms moved within him, digging and tunneling and forever burrowing. He could see their plump shapes moving just beneath his skin. Down his arms and over his chest, like peas pressed beneath the flesh of his face and in constant, busy motion, writhing through his honeycombed tissue.

  Yes, he looked at himself in the mirror.

  But what looked back was a monster.

  The horrible destruction of the Grand Armee in Russia was final testament to the vulnerability of Napoleon’s forces. As the tattered, ragged remains retreated through Poland the Russians continued to harass them, circling ahead of the scattered army of the living dead and practicing a scorched earth policy. They burned villages and farms, slaughtered animals and heaped wells and ponds with the carcasses of men and cattle. Food was scarce. Water contaminated. Peasants began to join the remnants of the Grand Armee, forming a wandering parade line of refugees that stumbled along, at a distance, behind the broken, zigzagging march of soldiers seeking France. And as they moved, they spread typhus and influenza in their wake.