In many of the fractured, smoldering villages they came to, the peasants burned their dead in great pyres, already infected by forward units of the Grand Armee. They huddled around fires, burning dung to keep pestilential vapors at bay. It did them little good.
Jarny often walked alone.
The other men knew what he was by then, an associate of Boulille, the corpse-eater. They shunned his company. Often he could hear them speaking: Regarder là, il est Jarny, l'ami de Boulille. Il mange les cadavres des hommes, remplit son ventre de charogne. Yes, they were right. He was a friend of Boulille’s, and he did eat the corpses of men and stuff himself with carrion. How right they were.
Covered in lice and sores, his greatcoat a soiled threadbare thing, his tunic crusty with urine and excrement, bloodstains and the grease and fat of his nocturnal feedings, he was a hunched-over goblin with hollow cheeks. Face dirty, teeth chattering, cataleptic eyes staring, forever staring, the mind behind them diseased and dirtied by what it had seen, what it had done, and what it yet would do.
Jarny was mad, infested. Jarny was a ghoul.
As he wondered alone, far from the others one day, he came upon a filthy little hamlet. A woman in rags was stirring a pot over a fire. Her eyes were like wet glass set in a yellow pocked face, her decaying teeth jutting from sallow gums. She was insane and Jarny knew it. She motioned him over and he drank from her foul well. Afterwards, she offered him a tin cup of soup. It was quite good, though the meat was seasoned unpleasantly sweet. And too familiar to the taste.
She giggled as he ate, scratching through the snow like an animal to the dirt and roots beneath. Finally, in perfect French, she said, “Ah! Je vous avais attendu, ami Jarny! Un autre dit vous viendriez! Ici … mon mari et enfants sont morts de la peste, ainsi j'ai fait un potage heary fin à partir de leur chair et os!”
But it wasn’t the roots she was scratching for, but to show him the well-boiled bones of her family. Her husband and children, from whom she had made a special hearty soup anticipating his arrival. Yes, Boulille had been there.
Telling the mad woman to expect another of similar appetites.
The column, as it were, marched on and bitter winter gave way to slopping, wet spring. With the warmth and wetness, the typhus fever raged and dropped dozens of men each day. The dysentery worsened as did the influenza. Diseased men leaned against one another just to make it another mile, a few more feet. The pestilence was blowing through Eastern Europe on a hot wind of plague. The lice were unbearable, breeding in the warmth and damp. The ragged clothing of the soldiers actually moved they were so infested. Jarny was teeming with them. As he tried to sleep at night by his pitiful fire, they nipped and bit, making him tremble and sweat there on the moist ground.
One night, a soldier named Betrand jumped up in a mad frenzy, stripping his clothes off and throwing them into the fire. They burned with a popping sound, the noise of hundreds of lice being incinerated. Hopping about in the mud, naked, he was delirious, slapping and scratching at his emaciated, lice-bitten body, calling out, “Grêle vers la France! Grêle à Napoleon!”
Another man raised his musket and shot him dead so the others might sleep. His body did not lay long before soldiers and peasants slipped out of the shadows and dragged it away to be quartered by bayonets and roasted. This is what they had become. No longer were they the Grand Armee. Now they were beggars and criminals and scavengers, skulking things less then men. Filthy with their own waste, human rats that spread disease, parasites that fed upon one another.
Tormented by thirst and hunger, the stragglers marched ever forward through the rains that turned the fields and roads to rutted mud holes. Pools of standing water were putrid with the corpses of men and animals. Only the mad sipped from them. It was to these ponds of carrion that Jarny was driven by what burrowed inside him. At night, while the others were scattered away from him, he would seek out especially deep pools of rank water that were seething and steaming with dozens of waterlogged corpses and carcasses, greening and flyblown as they broke the oily surface in putrescent tangles and staffs of white bone. He would dive amongst them, peeling mucid flesh from fungi-slicked skeletons, gnawing on jellied hides and innards boiling soft with rot. These were the ponds he swam in, bathed in, and filled himself with.
And this, ultimately, was the hideous creature called Francois Jarny that returned to France.
After days of stuffing himself with whatever was convenient—gassy rats and flyblown dogs found in alleys, the maggots led Jarny on a wild chase down in the sewers where they smelled something delicious, something ghoulishly tantalizing. Beneath the metal grating, it was a place of stagnant waters and sucking black mud, sewage and rats and rotting things.
Amongst all that misting decay and nauseous stench, they had scented something they wanted.
They pushed Jarny on and on. He slopped through the smelling muck of those winding, echoing tunnels, scattering vermin, his arms specked with insect bites and curious rashes. Long after midnight, in a clogged leaf-covered backwash where leeches clung fatly to his legs, they found what they wanted.
The corpse of a little boy.
Jarny had seen his sketched face in the papers. Everyone had. He disappeared and no one could find a trace of him. But they could not smell like the maggots could. Once he went soft and pulpy and fragrant, the worms could scent him easily. Jarny dragged the boy’s gas-bloated, swelling body out of the foul water and laid it on the concrete embankment. By moonlight, the child was an atrocity. He had bloated so badly that the buttons of his little shirt had popped free.
He looks wonderful, the maggots said.
Jarny frightened off the rats that had been nibbling at him and did what he must do.
In the wan light of the leprous moon peering through a sewer grating, he licked the boy’s bluing face, revolted and insane, touching him and squeezing his distended bulk like a butcher with a fine cut of beef. The maggots went wild within him, biting and pulsing and digging into the loam of his intestines. And Jarny was pushed, as always, into higher realms of depravity. He tore open the boy’s belly with his teeth, swooning as a nauseating sickly-sweet cloud of corpse-gas blew into his face. Then he was biting and tearing, screaming into the night as he sank his teeth into pulpous flesh. He buried his face in the putrescent mush of the boy’s abdomen, yanking out soft entrails with his teeth, sucking down rivers of carrion-slime, tearing and biting and ripping until his jaws were sore and his face oozing with corpse-jelly.
Panting and gagging in the rank, sluicing water, Jarny cackled like a lunatic. And the maggots said, Show us…let us see.
Shuddering and convulsing, gore dropping from his mouth in clots, he stood and let them look through his eyes and their delight was almost hallucinogenic: carnal and hot-blooded. The boy was nothing but a mangled gray-green heap of mildewed meat, marrow-sucked bones, and shattered, gnawed wreckage.
Now finish, Jarny, they said. The sweet-meats, don’t forget the sweet-meats.
With a loose brick, he broke open the skull, gnawing and licking at the jellied gray matter within, spitting out beetles and worms that dared defile this rarest of cutlets. At first, he was gently passionate with the sweet-meats, but soon the ravenous ghouls within pushed him to new heights of frenzied gluttony. He yanked the buttery-soft meat out in rancid handfuls, shoving it greedily in his mouth, chomping and feeling it crush to a sweet, juicing paste beneath his teeth. He smeared it over his face and danced madly in the dappled moonlight. In the end, breathless and horrified, he licked the skull clean as a soup bowl.
And then, satisfied, the maggots went to sleep.
Jarny scrambled up out of the sewers and vented his horror in a whooping, hysterical scream.
He lay awake that night.
Barely breathing.
A vile-smelling juice ran from his pores like sweat. He stank of corpses and graves and decomposition. Inside, he was infested. As the worms slept off their hideous repast, Jarny lay shivering and polluted with thei
r wastes and drainage.
It couldn’t go on much longer.
The next day he was summoned before Captain LeClerq. He was a stern, gray-haired man that had absolutely no tolerance for anyone. But he had a soft spot for Jarny. They had both survived Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and had crossed the Neiman together—the Russians laying waste to what remained of the Grand Armee as they crossed the freezing river, hundreds cut down, hundreds more drowning, but the majority rafting across on corpses. They had both received the Légion d’Honneur for their valiant actions.
“Sergeant Jarny,” LeClerq said, not looking up from his daily reports. “You have, no doubt, heard of this ghoul haunting our cemeteries and of the vile things he or it has been doing.”
“Yes, sir.” Jarny waited, at full attention, the maggots looping in his stomach.
“All Paris is angered. There are cries from the highest offices.”
Yes, Jarny was certain of that. He could just imagine the vociferous outcries of condemnation coming from the plush salons of the aristocratic and the social climbing upper bourgeoisie. Were they truly offended? Truly outraged? Probably not. Decadent to the core, these people lived lives of leisure while the masses starved in the streets. They frequented their salons and cafes of the Champs-Elysées, talking at length of poetry, art, and politics. Many subjects they were equally ignorant of. But when something like this happened … they feigned outrage … but secretly delighted in it. Anything to escape the self-imposed dull sameness of their regal prisons.
The vegetable sellers, ragpickers, rat-catchers, and common tradesmen of the Les Halles and the rue de Venise were probably the ones truly incensed. And the prostitutes who sold themselves nightly for fifty centimes or a head of cabbage to eat. Yes, incensed probably, but not surprised. Not in this city.
“I suppose they are angered,” Jarny said.
LeClerq removed his spectacles. “Come now, Jarny. Let us speak openly.”
Jarny sighed. “That is … sir … I wonder if these people are truly angered or secretly relish the gruesome details.”
“Ah! You speak of the culturally elite? The privileged? The aesthetics? It is well you have no political ambitions, Jarny. But I prefer, as do you, to think that I serve the all not the few. It is important to remember this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But this business at hand … it is a most …” He paused, studying Jarny through his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Are you well, Jarny?”
“Yes, sir. I but slept poorly last night.”
LeClerq merely nodded … though for one trembling instant, Jarny was certain that the man suspected him, was about to stand up and cry out for Jarny to confess his evil sins, to admit to what he was. But he did not.
“Monsieur Betreaux was here, Jarny,” LeClerq said with a certain gravity behind his words. “Betreaux is the Police Commissaire for this quarter as you probably know. What he told me was most disturbing. You will not read of it in the newspapers or scandal sheets. His men at St. Parnasse Cemetery … they claim the man they fired at was a soldier.”
Jarny felt woozy, his head spun and his eyesight seemed to blur. “But … but,” he stammered, “such a thing … it is impossible …”
“Yes, Jarny. So thought I. Until I was given this.” LeClerq dropped a small brass disc on the desk. “Do you recognize it?”
Jarny tried to lick his lips, but it would have taken rivers. He swallowed, tried to stay on his feet as his world careened madly around him and the maggots gnawed hungrily at the lining of his stomach. Of course he recognized what that disc was: a button. A button from a military infantry tunic. Why, his tunics had the very same buttons …
“Watch your men closely, Jarny. I told Betreaux I would personally make an inspection of every tunic in the barracks.” But LeClerq waved that away. “But I will not. I find the idea distasteful. Besides, it would create a certain amount of suspicion, yes? So you and my other sergeants shall do it. Check your platoon, Jarny. Check their tunics.”
Look at me, you fool! Can’t you see guilt, the horror, the madness in these eyes?
“Yes, sir. I shall.”
Jarny saluted and turned to the door, amazed that he was able to stay on his feet, amazed that he did not fall to his knees and cry out his obscene crimes. If only he had but the strength.
“And Jarny?”
“Sir?”
LeClerq studied him with typical flat indifference. “Watch your men closely.”
“Yes sir.”
“This fiend must be found and destroyed.”
His eyes welling with tears, Jarny said, “I couldn’t agree more, Captain …”
A popular pastime in those grim days was to visit the Paris morgue. Passers-by and the morbidly curious would enter that forbidding stone building, immediately making for the display room. Here, behind a large viewing glass, arranged on slabs, were the unclaimed corpses laid out like meat in a butcher’s window. Engulfed in a sweet stench of decay and less definable odors, the curious could study, at their leisure, the bloated white bodies fished out of the Seine, the crushed remains of workmen, suicides with the burn of the rope cut into their throats, and street women found hacked in dim alleys, their eyes glazed in horror. All were laid out naked in grisly splendor, there being no secrets in death. Tacked to the wall behind were personal articles: trousers, coats, petticoats, hats, scarves. It was thought that if a particular slab of moldering meat was no longer recognizable, perhaps an article of clothing or a favored watch might be.
It was not, of course, a pleasant place.
But pleasant or not, people stopped by in droves. For unlike many other Parisian exhibitions, this one was free to the public. At any given time of the day one might glimpse workmen with their satchels of tools standing about, gnawing on fresh loaves of bread from nearby vendors. They stood shoulder-toshoulder with high-born melancholic ladies in their silken gowns and lacey parasols, self-styled intellectuals and street poets chiming graveyard verse, upscale businessmen with top hats and walking sticks, dozens of giggling girls fresh from the mills and shops who moved around in rosy-cheeked swarms. They all came: lower classes, bourgeoisie, intellectuals, aristocrats. They looked upon dead faces that were swollen blue from the river and eaten to the bone by fish; faces waterlogged to the point that they were coming apart like boiled chicken; faces that were sliced, jabbed with holes, chewed by rats and dogs, burnt and mutilated by forces unknown; faces that were like so much molten wax, heated by the sun and infested with larvae, until their soft pulping flesh literally slid from the skulls beneath; faces that were the shriveled dusty yellow of mummies or lacked eyes or smiled the autopsy grin of the death rictus; and, now and again, the face of some young woman who’d thrown herself into the Seine only to find exquisiteness in death: lustrous sweeping hair, flawless marble skin, high skullish cheekbones, lips pulled into a soft gray pout. Life encapsulated and death personified in the ravishing beauty of the charnel. The undertakers often made death masks of these poor girls. One of which—known as L’inconnue de la Seine—was copied and sold in great numbers, decorating sitting rooms and parlors across the country.
By day the morgue was a thriving place, by night just as still and quiet as the flyspecked faces in the display case.
And it was here, in the dead of night, that a man named Francois Jarny came, driven by what starved within. It was not his first visit to the maison des morts, as it was known. He knew there were troublesome attendants in the cellar where the most select cuts were to be found. But the maggots were smart. They made Jarny hide in a broom-closet until first one attendant slipped off for his lunch and another napped in an empty office.
The buffet was open.
The maggots, of course, had Jarny bring an iron prybar with him. After a bit of straining and grunting, he popped the door to the cellar and went down the sweating steps. The postmortem room was of no interest to them … though there were certain lingering odors that were positively succulent.
In the
cold room, Jarny opened the drawers set in the wall. The fare was adequate. The crunchy flesh of a burn victim. The rheumy eyeball of a suicide. The soft fingers of a drowning victim. The sweet belly fat of a strangled infant. Snacks, mainly. Appetizers. Enough to drive the maggots into contortions of rapture, but hardly enough to sate them. They kept at Jarny, piercing and biting, tearing his internals raw. Filling his bowels with shards of glass.
Feed us, they said. We need real meat. Find it.
In one of the last drawers, he found what they wanted. A murder victim plucked swollen and gas-blown from the cloying soil of a cellar floor. A woman. She was wrapped tightly in a stained, gray sheet like a Christmas present. Jarny hefted the package from its chamber and shook it. What was inside sloshed about lusciously as if the present were filled with a thick mint jelly. He opened it slowly, teasing and almost seductive. The maggots appreciated a fine presentation. Much of the woman splashed out in a repellent surge of watery meat and sludgy tissue. The stench was pure joyous putrefaction: gamy and yellow and marvelously brined in its own heady juices. Perfectly repulsive and perfectly appetizing.
Taste her, they said, sip her.
Jarny, a wet distorted scream breaking in his throat, dipped his fingers into the gelatinous mass of her remains like she were fondue. He licked them clean, nibbling at the green mossy bulge of her throat, yanking her blackened tongue from her mouth and licking it like it was still alive … then chewing upon it. As the hunger rose up inside him and his mind was thrown into a blank gray haze, he began ravenously tearing and snapping at the goodies.
And, the maggots said: Behind you!
The sleeping attendant had stole back in, stealthy thing he was. He stood there with a look of absolute, revolted horror on his face. “You!” he shouted. “You! What … what in God’s name are you doing?”
Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror Page 9