Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  I went into deep catatonic shock and just lay there, trembling, a thin stream of bile trickling from my mouth. The medics were puzzled, of course, and finally just diagnosed it as a case of total, sudden burn-out (a not-unheard-of phenomenon in men who had been out in the bush one time too many). I was sent to the base hospital at Plei Me ‘for observation’. They pumped me full of Valium; I slept a lot; the symptoms faded rapidly. After a week, the doctors could find nothing wrong with me. Neither could the shrink who spent a few hours prodding my psyche - if I had tried to tell him the truth, he would probably have thought I had just concocted a fantasy in the hope of getting a psychiatric discharge. So they declared me fit for duty and I went back into the bowels of the Green Machine.

  Where I performed my soldierly duties well enough to earn a Bronze Star. My lieutenant kept a close eye on me for a few days, to make sure, I suppose, that I didn’t suddenly start foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, and then, because he needed the Man with the Golden Nose, he put me back on point whenever there was an especially hairy mission to perform.

  But something had profoundly changed in me. That apocalyptic vision of death and corruption had altered my perceptions. I did what I had to do out of loyalty to the men I served with, but all illusion was now stripped from me. I knew we were not going to win this war: I had quaffed the stench of defeat on a psychic wind, I had turned over the biggest rock in the country and seen the maggots crawling on the underside. I knew now that every death, on either side, was one more drop in a tidal wave of futility and waste. And there were times when that knowledge tore at my heart, for there was nobody I could share it with.

  For the rest of my tour, you may be sure of it, I smoked no more pot. And as these things have a way of doing, my inability to share its benign balm made it all the more desirable to me. Time after time, when the other guys were passing joints or fellating the bore of a shotgun while someone else poured smoke into the breech, I cursed the chemical peculiarity that was Virginia’s legacy to me. I felt shut out of the camaraderie that made our miserable existence tolerable. I longed to join them in the communal high, but was terrified at the thought of what even one toke might trigger. When the fumes got thick, I had to leave. Another olfactory visit to that vast charnel house might really drive me nuts, and I knew it.

  What did I do instead? I began to drink. Not just the lukewarm beers that were plentiful in any base camp, but Jack Daniels, straight out of the bottle. Oh, I never did it on the night before we were scheduled to Go Out, at least not in the beginning, but when the other guys lit up their Thai sticks and pipes full of Laotian Brown Lung, I reached into my locker for the bourbon and sought out an empty bunker for another ride on what Willy Nelson called, in one of his greatest songs, ‘The Amber Current’.

  By the final weeks of my tour, I was walking a thin line indeed. Off duty, I had become a drunk, and there were days when I went into the field nursing God’s own wrath of a hangover, which did nothing to increase my chances or my usefulness to the other guys. The lieutenant knew, and sometimes when he talked to me, I could see him weighing his decision: should I ground this guy before he gets himself or someone else zapped, or does he still have enough left to be of value?

  It was getting harder and harder to pull myself together, especially there at the end. I was now a short-timer, subject to all the traditional fears of getting my ass shot off just before it was time for me to leave, and I was a borderline alcoholic to boot. Things were made even worse by the fact that we were now patrolling a region that had been in enemy hands for months and was known to be riddled with tunnels. Guess who was the Designated Tunnel Rat? Yes sir, it was Air Golden Nose himself.

  About ten days before I was due to rotate home came the mission that won me the Bronze Star and finished me as a soldier. Things were hot in our zone: lots of scrappy little clashes with NVA regulars, our resources stretched thin putting out tactical fires, and incessant demands from headquarters for the sort of intelligence one is more likely to find in a tunnel complex than on the body of some ordinary dead gook.

  The one I sniffed out on that particular morning gave every promise of being a monster, a labyrinth that went God-knew-how far back inside a massive jungle-covered ridge.

  There was a ritual to preparing for a tunnel-crawl. I stripped off everything except my basic clothing, took a flashlight, shouldered an empty pouch, and drew a special silencer-equipped .38 revolver (if you fired a regulation .45 in the confines of a tunnel, there was a good chance you’d rupture an eardrum). I felt like a matador donning the Suit of Lights before entering the bullring. Then I shook hands all around, trying not to observe those I’m-glad-it-aint-me expressions on the other guys’ faces, got down on my belly and slithered in.

  A few feet from the entrance, I paused to let my eyes become adjusted to the dark. The dank brown walls stretched ahead of me like the coils of an intestine. As silently as I could, I began to lever myself forwards with my elbows, keeping the flashlight in my left hand and the revolver in my right. At the first fork in the tunnel, I paused again. Which way to go? I needed some advance warning if there were live people down here. So once again, ritualistically, I reached for Virginia’s magic bag and took a whiff.

  Instantly, my smeller prickled with new sensitivity. The scents from the righthand tunnel were old and stale, but from the left came a trace of recently boiled rice - an underground kitchen, perhaps, or even a command post. I went that way, the tunnel broadening slightly. I discovered the command post by falling into it. Whoever had been living here, they’d had time to fix things up rather comfortably: desks and chairs, a couple of cold lanterns, a radio set, crusted rice bowls, some sleeping pallets. All the comforts of home, VC style. After untangling myself, I shone the light around and found what I was hoping to find: a cardboard box fall of what appeared to be old radio messages, a couple of folded maps with marks on them (no booby trap; I could smell those, too), the sort of stuff that gave the intelligence analysts a hard-on.

  But as I gathered up this bounty and stuffed it in the pouch slung over my shoulder, I was blasted by a new wave of scent: hot, fleshy, sanguine, tainted with fear, sweat, and pain. Somewhere in the tunnels ahead was a hospital. If I could force myself into that loathsome reek, I might find more documents, perhaps fresher and more timely than the relics I had already bagged.

  Moving very slowly now, I entered the tunnel that led away from the command post, the smell of the hospital becoming almost unbearable as I advanced. There was candlelight ahead. The tunnel went upwards and beyond the lip of earth, I sensed an expanded space. I could smell human habitation, too, but the scent of blood and bandages and sweat was so powerful that I could not tell if it came from occupants recently moved or still there. A wounded VC could be very dangerous. I shut off my own light and decided I needed some more precise olfactory input. Time for another hit off the pot-pourri bag.

  This time, I got more than I bargained for when I raised my head over the entrance and peered in. Christ, what an abattoir was there! Five or six cots, all of them rusty with old blood, a dented operating lamp connected to a dead generator, a pile of basic surgical instruments near an old-fashioned boiling-water steriliser, rolls of bandages, a few jars of ether. And a big corrugated washtub full of putrid human parts - arms and feet and blackened lumps of tissue. It looked positively mediaeval.

  Then the full wave hit me, with so much force I almost fell back into the tunnel. I smelled, and felt, the agony of every wounded man who had been brought here. Suddenly I saw this whole war as my enemy must have seen it: endless effort, endless pain, endless suffering, endless hiding from our planes and artillery, years and years of it, and still burning fiercely beneath all that, a raw, primal determination to be rid, once and for all, of the foreigners who had held this land in bondage since antiquity. It was a staggeringly simple perception, but it turned my mind inside-out. I felt the hopelessness and suffering of every man who had been treated in this room, and I also felt the
ir pride, the determination of those men to bear any pain, any suffering, if by doing so they could move their cause forward by a single inch. The hospital I had been in was no Disneyworld, but it was a suite at the Plaza compared to this primitive butcher shop. What a foe they were! How could we hope to outlast them?

  Then I smelled, and saw, the wounded man. He rose from his cot like a wraith: emaciated, terrified, his face consumed by two black-lacquer eyes that burned with fever. Now I was belted by the char of the gangrene that was devouring him. His torso was wrapped in slime-covered bandages, and I was sure they were the only thing holding his guts inside. I got a burst of his pain, too, and it was almost more than I could bear. Maybe his comrades would come back for him when our unit had left the area, although it didn’t seem likely that he had that much time left. One thing for certain: I could not shoot him like a dog.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, shaking my head and pointing at my pistol. ‘I won’t kill you. Just lie back down and I’ll leave.’

  Of course, he didn’t understand a word. I held up both my hands and made placating gestures. I was going to back out of the room and his existence would be our little secret. There was a pile of ragged, torn, bloody uniforms in one corner of the room, but I had already decided not to look for any more papers in their pockets - it would have been too much like sticking my hands into other men’s gaping wounds.

  As I started to back away, I spotted the AK-47 he’d been hiding by his side. Though it must have cost him immense pain to do so, he was slowly swinging it in my direction, his eyes glowing like coals.

  ‘No! It’s not necessary!’ I yelled to him, but even as the words came out, my hand swung up and the .38 barked twice, its reports muffled by the silencer. And I felt, almost as hard as he did, the impact of the bullets as they tore through his ruined body; I also felt the last dying flicker of determination that made him pull the trigger of his own weapon, emptying the whole clip in one long roaring burst that blew the bed next to his in half. And I felt him die, still hating me.

  How long after that I lay there, I don’t know. Long enough for the lieutenant to send somebody in after me. When they dragged me out into the sunlight, he took one look at me and knew I was finished. But the stuff I brought out in my satchel, along with the other odds and ends my rescuers had filched from the pockets of those bloody uniforms, actually proved to be valuable information, so he wrote me up for the medal.

  I stayed in the base camp until my time was up, drinking heavily, staring into space mostly, trying not to relive that moment when I felt the impact of my own bullets snuffing out the existence of a brave man who had been keeping himself alive by sheer willpower and consuming hatred for his enemies. I was so hungover on the morning I was lifted out that I puked out of the helicopter - my last contribution to the soil of Vietnam.

  The rest, as they say, is history - literary history, anyhow. There was money put away for graduate school, but I took it and moved to New York instead, just as the city was turning into one of the nation’s two biggest hippie meccas. For the whole time I’d been with Virginia, and during odd moments of nostalgia during my ‘Nam tour, I’d kept working on that huge, romantic, Thomas-Wolfeian novel - fanciful autobiography, most of it - whose avowed theme was to capture the essence of that Ball-Before-Waterloo period of the late fifties and early sixties, before the death of innocence and the collapse of the American Dream as my parents had lived it, and I had absorbed it, during my early adolescence.

  The writing was (need I even tell you?) a gushing amalgam of Kerouac, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and every other writer whose work had given me a hard-on during my formative years. With my graduate-school grubstake and a part-time job, I figured I would be all set to do the Young-Writer-in-New-York bit for two or three years, and at the end of that time, naturally, give birth to a great novel.

  I arrived in Manhattan near the end of 1966, still suffering from periodic ‘Nam-mares and bad flashbacks, but still young and so grateful to have survived combat that I felt, on my better days, not unlike I had during my affair with Virginia: freshly laundered nerve endings, pumped with Possibilities, ready to drink in the scene and spew out the words.

  Trouble was, I expected to find the same New York I’d read about in Wolfe and Kerouac: Bohemian cafes with chequered tablecloths and drippy Chianti bottles, great jazz, wild poets reading their sequels to ‘Howl’, and hip intellectuals sitting up all night discussing books, movies and music.

  What I found instead was a three-year block party thrown by a chaotic alliance of cultural anarchists, political zealots who harboured all the good will and tolerance of Joe Stalin’s favourite judges, puffed-up media pundits, and greed-crazed record company executives. I was armed with a theoretical knowledge of what Young-Writers-in-New-York were supposed to do with their careers, but that aspect of my book-learnin’ was hopelessly out of date. Nobody gave a shit about big, romantic, traditional novels any more. In my small southern college, I had been regarded as a rebel; in the Big Apple in late 1966, I was hopelessly middle-class.

  Off-balance from the start, I foundered. I had, God knows, as much reason to loathe the Vietnam War as anyone, but I boiled with rage every time I saw the TV images of protestors vilifying or even spitting on returning vets whose only crime - like mine - was that they had survived their tour.

  But as 1967 dawned and the bloodbath increased, I, too began to oppose it, at least in my mind. The war had started to stink (as I knew all too literally) like fish gone bad in the sun. By then, it lacked even the tragic existential grandeur of the French debacle, that operatic, Foreign-Legion-to-the-front sense of a once-great empire dying like an old Gauloise butt hissing-out in the mud. It was not just the bull-headed stupidity of our ‘body-count’ tactics that offended me, it was also the deplorable lack of style that characterised the whole American effort on any level above the regimental: thousands of young men just like me being fed into a meatgrinder by generals who specialised in management theory instead of honest-to-God warfare and who probably had cement deer in their yards at home.

  Work on my novel sputtered, then died. That ‘innocence’ I had wanted to capture now seemed as remote as the Court of Versailles. I decided to make an all-out effort to plunge into the milieu in which I was stranded, and forget about trying to find what Wolfe and Kerouac had found in the city. I grew my hair long, bought some fashionably outlandish duds, and tried to blend in. Everybody I knew was awash in hedonistic abandon, grooving on the music, turning on, living for the day, etc., etc., the whole Party Line. Not to mince words, there was enough good fucking going on to exhaust a dog with two dicks.

  Problem was, it was all fuelled by pot. In the words of my sometime-friend Norman Mailer, ‘Sex has got to be pretty goddamn great to match even a quickie on pot’, and, as he so often was in those days, Unca Norman was right. If you smoked, you flowed. You could participate in marathon conversations whose contents would stupefy with their banality if you were straight; you could wallow in music you would ordinarily consign to the cultural midden-heap after the first eight bars; you could laugh a lot, get the munchies, and score with any nearby chick who happened to look at you with even a flicker of interest.

  And I wanted all that, wanted to immerse myself in What Was Happening; if I could not write like Thomas Wolfe any more, well then, I could become the madman chronicler of the craziest, horniest, yeastiest era since flappers and bathtub gin.

  But - God damn you, Virginia! - every time I tried to get high, every time I toked on a soggy passed-around joint, I suffered an attack of hypersomia so close to clinical schizophrenia that I had to lurch out into the night and heave my Nachos into the nearest alley, leaving me sodden and slow and disoriented for days afterwards. Whatever she had done to my metabolism, the changes were permanent. While the circulating fumes of other people’s tokes only made my eyes burn and my appetite for junk food increase, the first touch of cannabis on my own lung tissue always, always, threw me straight to the vestibule of
my private Hell.

  Imagine yourself a poor but goodhearted child, confronted with a vast display of toys and candy - all the things you’d ever wanted Santa to bring you, but your parents could never buy. And all that separates you from this bounty is a membrane as transparent as glass and the society around you has given you blanket permission to reach in and grab anything your heart desires. But every time you press your hands against that invisible barrier, it’s like sticking a wet finger into a light socket. Imagine the frustration, the longing, the gnawing bitterness.

  On every side, the century’s greatest party was going full blast, and to groove with it all you had to do was smoke a little reefer and check your mind at the door. How I ached to join the dance! Because I could not, however, I became consumed with directionless anger and jealous envy of all those who were lustily soaking up enough memories of sensual pleasure to keep their hearts warmed up in the old-folk’s homes, decades later.

  At the age of twenty-five, then, I had become as crabby and cynical as the crustiest NY Times columnist railing against the excesses of youth. Jesus, I wanted those excesses to be mine, too, and I burned to write about them from the inside. There were weeks when I felt like a man with a permanent erection who could not, for the life of him, achieve a decent climax.