by Curran
And then Through that bacchanalian cacophony of fleshy monstrosities, I heard a tapping. A single finger on the woman’s left hand trembled. It was tapping against the slab as if impatient. Then her body jerked stiffly, her back arching, bones straining beneath that thin veneer of skin, and a low mournful moaning came from deep in her throat. “Aaaaaaa,” she said. “Gaaaaahhhh.” It was a dry and scratching sound like claws on concrete, like the rustling of ancient wrappings in a violated tomb.
“ Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds,” West said above the din. “Reanimation achieved…”
I was terrified to come into contact with her, for my fingers to brush against that shining, near-phosphorescently pallid flesh. And I say to you now, she sensed my unease, filled herself with my anxiety and tremor. For the eyes peeled open in that skullish face and they were glossy pink orbs, translucent like egg yolks, set with tiny pinprick pupils. She looked right at me, titling her head slightly and offering me a charnel grin of yellow, narrow teeth and blackened gums. It was a mirthless, sardonic grin of sheer malevolence that made me take a step back.
“ You must not get up,” West told her as if she were any patient that had just undergone a difficult procedure.
Licking my lips, fear-sweat running down my spine, I said, “Tell us…where have you been?”
She began to shudder, limbs contorting, fingers gripping the edge of the slab out of sheer unbridled terror. Her mouth opened into a wide oval and she screamed, screamed with a tortured voice that echoed up from the bleak cellars of hell: “YAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!” It rose the hackles on both West and I. She looked around frantically like a caged animal. “I saw it…I…saw…IT…” she finally managed.
“ What?” I said, my heart pumping in my throat. “What did you see…”
“… IT…IIIIIIIT!” she cried out. “IT! IT! IT! The jagged face…it was coming for me, it filled time…it filled space…EYAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”
I had no idea what she was speaking of, but my mind cavorted with the most dreadful imagery. She had seen something. Something that terrified her and no doubt had shattered her mind. I could not know what. We all wonder what lies beyond the grim edges of death. We all hope it to be our savior, our deceased loved ones, the ultimate good…but what if it is something else? Some forbidding evil anti-human essence of malign corruption?
A mad terror took hold of me as she climbed from the slab, hugging herself with those stick-thin arms. I trembled so badly I thought I might swoon. And it was because she said my name. Looking at me with those eyes like suppurating pink ova, she said my name clearly, but with the mocking flat tone of a parrot. Her grinning mouth like that of a hooked fish…dead, blank.
Stumbling along with a pronounced stiff-legged gait, a foamy red-tinged saliva running down her chin, she descended on West who suddenly looked frightened. As she moved, snaking ribbons of saliva swung back and forth at her chin, her face a distorted, seamed fright mask made of white gossamer flesh like spider’s silk. Her eyes were sunken, pustular pits of wrath. She reached out to him with white-skinned, blue-veined hands that were like reaching, gnarled twigs.
Though an icy fear gripped me, squeezing my heart with cold fingers, I knew I must do something as she moved at my friend with her jerking, mechanical walk. I came up behind her and took her by the bare, bony shoulders and her flesh felt like thawing meat beneath my fingers.
A black slime running from her mouth, she turned and fixed with me with those eyes that had seen Death. I trembled in the cold lamplight of her gaze.
I used the only weapon I had: “Where have you been?” I asked her.
She backed away, clutching hands to the side of her head, greasy strands of hair hanging over her face which was frozen in a silent, wasting scream. “IT,” she said with that grinding, subhuman tone. “IT…IT…COMES…”
With that, she whirled away from me, running from the room, knocking a table of glassware to the floor, her entire body jumping with wild spasms and contractions as if every neuron in her brain were misfiring. We heard the door open above the shrieking animals and heard the night, heard the woman crying out as she found the darkness of oblivion and it found her.
And it was at that moment, as she fled, that we both felt something in that room, a presence, a force, a darkness beyond death, moving around us with the whisper of casket satin, the flutter of shrouds. I think it was IT: the Angel of Death. It was there, so palpable that it flooded the room with an unspeakable despair and darkness…then it was gone as if it never were.
West, the master of understatement as always, said simply, “Why, I think she was out of her mind.”
And yes, she truly had been out of her mind until we called her back. Out of her mind in some unknown place, but with WHAT?
I came as close that night as I have ever been to full blown lunacy. And it was only West’s quick thinking and his good whiskey that saved me before it was too late. But even now I can feel that place, those things clawing in their cages, smell the chemicals and putrefaction, that steaming miasma in the vat, and, above all, I can hear that doglike thing in the corner.
Why wouldn’t it be quiet?
Why did it have to keep screaming?
10
The Graveyard
The moon that rose over the battlefields of Flanders was a luminous, disapproving eye and the darkness was a cracked egg breaking over the land, spilling a creeping black yolk of shadows that filled trenches and shell-holes, rain-dripping dugouts and the cemetery of No-Man’s Land. Like the ever-present rain of Flanders, it flooded the countryside and sank it in a perfect stygian blackness disrupted only by the frosted moonlight gleaming on spent shells and polished white bone.
Creel watched the moon come up and the darkness settle in, thinking, remembering, and shivering white inside as he tried to make sense of what he’d seen out at the devastated listening post.
You can’t be sure what you saw, he told himself. You saw something…something that looked like a boy…a boy who’d laid in a grave moldering for a week, rats chewing the good red meat and pink skin from his face. But, surely, it was a trick of the light, the refraction of the same through the mist. But not…not what you thought.
You’re too damn old to believe in ghosts, aren’t you?
But he didn’t know, he just didn’t know.
Not after the burial party…those tracks, those damn footprints.
Die toten…die toten dieser spaziergang.
Yes, it haunted his every waking moment and turned his nightmares into ugly, black affairs.
His cynicism, his pragmatism…even they could not save him this time. He had been skeptical, of course, because he was skeptical about everything. One war zone after another, year after godawful year of poking his nose into the grim machinery of death, it had turned something inside of him, chased away light and filled those hollows with darkness.
All those fine young men.
Battlefield after battlefield, the politics might change, but the faces were always the same: boys of eighteen and nineteen living with fear and horror day by day until it scrubbed the color from their faces, trading young flesh for old, lips gone rigid and bloodless, eyes leeched of youth and replaced with a wizened desperation. All of them aged, worn, shattered, old before their time, used up before they saw twenty. Creel had seen them again and again, war after war, the survivors returning from the latest action, ears still ringing with shellfire and the screams of the wounded, limping along, shoulders slouched, backs bent…like old men, old broken men.
That was war.
Some months back, following the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, after a particularly fierce bombardment by German heavy guns, Creel had watched as burial parties came in carting the dead in stretchers, laying them out on the cracked pink clay of the ground…a dozen, then two dozen, then three times that many. The bearers looked at him with a boiling hate in their eyes only it wasn’t for him, but for the war and the wreckage it produced. He stood there for a long time, unable to tur
n away, unable to pull his gaze from those tormented, gored faces. Their eyes were open, staring right at him, and he’d felt a cutting guilt open inside him.
During the battle, the trenches had been packed with Tommies, four-deep, firing rifles and machine-guns and trench mortars, trying to repel the German assault. The Hun poured in, wave after wave, and the guns roared and the shells erupted, and the bodies piled up, hundreds caught in the barbwire entanglements or sinking in the mud as high velocity rounds sought them out. The Germans had gotten so close that you could hear their individual screams of agony, see the fright and torment etched into their young faces…and afterwards, dear God, the bodies. They lay there for days, nesting with flies and maggots, worried by rats, a white and red patchwork of corpses that seemed fused into a greater whole of festering carrion gone green and gray and black. During the night you could hear the buttons popping off their tunics as they swelled with gas. The stink was unimaginable and it was more than the stench of death but the sharp, sour smell of an entire generation exterminated for no good reason.
There had been a fast, fleet-footed runner named Collins. Nice kid, naive as hell, always giggling and sure of himself, untouchable as all the young Tommies thought they were untouchable, completely possessed by the idea of playing soldier, content with his speed which was impressive. After the battle he returned from the rear in time to see the killing fields. Ten minutes of it and his young skin was mottled, his eyes nearly rolled up white, the entire left side of his face hitched up like he’d just suffered a stroke. He started screaming and nobody could get him to stop.
Later, they got the kid calmed down and Creel looked in on him. His eyes were black starshot. “Ghosts,” he said, “oh dear Christ, all them…ghosts…out there…”
Yes, ghosts. And the older Creel got and the more of it he saw, the more certain he was that they were there, sliding around him, shadowing him…pitying him, hating him, jealous of the life he had that he wasted in the graveyards of combat.
Sometimes he wondered if that’s why he kept taking pictures of the dead-some fanatic, vague hope that he’d catch one of them on film. Some hollow-eyed ghost slipping away from the corpse that had housed it.
And why not? he thought as he waited in the stinking mud of the forward trench. Why the hell not? Who has a better right to see ghosts? Who has spent more time with them than me?
In the pale moonlight, he could see out beyond No-Man’s Land, into a stripped forest that lay far beyond. The same one they’d passed through on their way to the listening post. Not dozens of trees, but maybe hundreds or even thousands, all of them de-limbed, de-barked, and soot-blackened from shellfire. They stood up straight or leaned over or collapsed into one another in great pillar-like deadfalls. Creel had been through them, had stood amongst them one bright day when the Germans had been pushed back and there had not been a single green shoot or leaf or so much as a solitary songbird. A dead place. The trees were like a thousand-thousand battle-worn skeletons climbing up out of that blasted inky-black soil that was rank and burnt smelling, so thick in your nose and throat it was like breathing ash. Ten minutes into it he’d began to suffocate, the good air sucked away and replaced with that gritty, powdery crematory ash that blew and blew and filled his lungs with sand.
Yes, death everywhere and would it be that insane to believe that here in the netherworld of the battlefield where life was extinguished so casually and ghosts roamed so freely that maybe death had turned back upon itself? That the dead were eating spilled life, filling themselves with it, so they might walk again?
Dead children that walk and feed on corpses? Are you willing to accept that?
The rain started coming down again, pooling, sluicing, filling the trenches with yellow-gray slime as the sky above scudded with black clouds that split open. In the dying moonlight, the rain was like falling crystals, billions of falling crystals: shiny, reflective. It drenched him, ran down his face and lips, dripping off his steel helmet. But it did not smell fresh, it only stirred up the rot and muck and filthy drainage bringing a rotten wet-dog smell to Flanders that sickened him to his core.
The rain subsided and there was silence for a time.
Listen.
Listen.
He was hearing it now, hearing it perfectly well: gnawing sounds. The sounds of teeth sinking into meat and scraping over bone. Too loud to be rats. He did not believe it was dogs. Things out there feeding, filling themselves, glutting obscene appetites.
“Just cover your ears,” Burke whispered to him. “Maybe it’ll go away.”
The rain returned, coming down in sheets and Creel stared through it, certain for not the first time that just beyond the sandbags there were things moving out there, small twisted elfin forms taking advantage of the rain to feed on the dead.
11
Tomb Orchids
The dead waited.
In mud holes and bomb craters and shell pits, in skeleton forests and decimated villages and ruined cellars and filth-bubbling trenches, they waited. Moist with decomposition and sprouting tangles of green moss and rungs of polished white bone, they waited. In flooded ditches and muddy trench walls, in cheap plank coffins and beneath mildew-specked tarps, they waited and would wait. Steaming with rank corpse gas, netted in morbid sheaths of fungi, and exhaling the vile stench of the charnel and tombyard, they were patient.
The rain fell and the mud pooled and the slime oozed beneath a misting gray sky the color of gelatin. The swarming graveyard rats worried at the dead, fed on them, brought their degenerate pink-skinned brood to term in their bellies. The flies covered them in buzzing black shrouds two inches thick and the maggots erupted from mouths and eye sockets, orifices and the lips of green-furred wounds in boiling, squirming masses, ever-fattening themselves on carrion and decay until they burst with wing.
For the dead of Flanders there was silence and the death-watch ticking of eternity…but then something began to happen. Maybe it was in the black soil, the yellow-brown sluicing muck, the water, or the falling rain…maybe it was set loose when a certain barnlike edifice occupied by Dr. Herbert West and his grave-wares was shelled by German artillery. But it was there. It was active. It had potential. It was the catalyst that canceled out death and filled rotting husks with a grisly semblance of animation, a gruesome half-life. Day by day as it grew more concentrated, a toxic effluvium of resurrection, eyes winked open like marbles in tombstone gray faces and mouths yawned wide like clamshells and essential salts, so long dormant, were revitalized into motion. From the muddy, flowing, bubbling bog of No-Man’s Land, faces like rotting weed and cemetery pulp peered into the night, ice-white fingers clawed in the slime as a great furnace of creation began to boil in the primordial ooze and warm amniotic mud of Flanders which was not so different from the primeval seas of earth where life first began.
By night, there was the sound of things pushing up from the swampy landscape, fingers breaking through the crust of graveyard mold, and ruined faces sliding from the mud. Each night, more and more. And beneath the wan, sickly moon of Flanders, in the gray rain and yellow fog and rustling shadow, there was a sound of feeding, gnawing and tearing, the noise of teeth on bone and lips sucking juice.
Each night it grew louder.
And louder.
12
Burial Rites
The commanders of the London Irish Rifles had no true idea of how many men they lost in the abortive raid on the German lines at Lens that September day. The Battle of Loos raged for three days and early estimations were that some 20,000 members of the BEF had died and another 50,000 were wounded. That information was to be kept from the troops, but of course it reached them as everything did.
In charge after charge, the LIR had captured German trench systems only to be pushed back by heavy shelling and intensive machine-gun fire that raked the barren hills of Cite St. Auguste.
Creel and Burke were there, having taken their leave of the 12 ^ th Middlesex for a time. Each morning was the same: t
he men were fed an extra large ration of rum and then it was up onto the firestep with rifles and fighting kit, the sergeants crying out, “FIX BAYONETS, BOYS!” and then over the top, fighting a costly battle through No-Man’s Land, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen, over twisted-up unburied corpses, leapfrogging bomb craters, slopping through the mud, hiding in shell holes, rising up to charge yet again across open fields and fighting through massive barbwire entanglements as they were raked by German sniper fire, volleys of shells and deadly accurate machine-gun strafing.
The BEF, lacking shells for true artillery support, used chlorine gas for the first time and the masked Tommies found themselves fighting through a rugged, scarred land that was obscured by rolling pockets of gas. One of the sergeants kicked a football ahead of him so his boys would charge in the right direction.
When it was finally over with and the smoke cleared, the offensive had been a disaster. For days, stretcher bearers and Field Ambulance companies moved the wounded rear to the battalion aid post and Ambulance HQ, the worst being shunted off to the Casualty Clearing Station. Both Creel and Burke worked hour after sleepless hour moving the wounded.
In the aftermath, Creel witnessed something he would never forget.
When the officers were in the dugouts, the men had a symbolic funeral for their fallen comrades: they arranged some thirty skulls in formation on the open ground beyond the support trench and paid homage to them. Who the skulls belonged to he did not dare ask, but such things were easy to come by in that war. The wind was blowing and little dust-devils were swirling about, coating those skulls with a fresh coat of age.