Morbid Anatomy

by Curran, Tim

  So the problems were numerous and the treatments few.

  We had a terrible gas attack my first week and many men did not get their masks on in time. Dozens of them were brought into the aide post by the ambulance bearers. There was little that could be done. Those with some scant hope of recovery were sent rear to the Casualty Clearing Station. The others…dear God…they were burnt and blistered, covered with ulcerated lesions, blinded, eyelids stuck together. They vomited out great chunks of lung tissue, gasping for breath as they slowly suffocated.

  The shelling went on nearly daily and I removed shrapnel and amputated limbs, gave morphia and treated wounds with antiseptics. But it was often of little use. Abdominal injuries were nearly always fatal. Many of the men were so disfigured they prayed for death.

  After three weeks I returned to the rear, feeling defeated and worn and without hope.

  West was far too devoted to his research to back away on any “superstitious whim” of mine as he called it. He relocated his chamber of horrors to a deserted farmhouse about a half a mile from the Casualty Clearing Station near the shelled ruin of the monastery at Abbincour. Apparently, unknown to me, he had been involved in this move for some time. Even before the destruction of the barnlike edifice by shellfire. Apparently, there had been certain inquiries into his activities.

  At first, West would not allow me join him and I was not disappointed over this.

  “You’ve become far too squeamish of late. Your archaic medical ethics are standing in the way of scientific progress,” he told me when I asked of his new laboratory.

  “Herbert,” I said, “how long do you think you can keep this up? Sooner or later word will get out. What if somebody stumbles in there?”

  He smiled at me. “Then they’ll be in for a bit of a surprise, won’t they?”

  Despite myself, I was drawn to the man. His intellect was almost godlike. His surgical skill often quite literally took my breath away. I witnessed him saving life and limb that no other medico could even hope to attempt. I learned more in one afternoon with West than I could in any five years of medical school or surgical practice. He was uncanny. He fascinated me. He frightened me. He made me feel like some Medieval sawbones with a jar of leeches.

  As horribly, insufferably dismal as the war was, there was one bright spot for me which was my guiding light and my strength and my hope: Michele LeCroix. She was the daughter of the mayor of Abbincour. Dark of hair and eye, an exotic beauty that made my knees week simply to gaze upon her. That I was in love there could be no doubt. West, of course, did not approve. “You have a good brain,” he told me, “but you’re wasting it on simple animal need.”

  But he did not understand nor could he ever understand.

  I decided to ask her for her hand in marriage. When I told West of it he laughed at the idea. “A marriage? In this godforsaken hellhole? It’s absurd. It’s high comedy.” Then he must have seen the look on my face and sighed. “But…never let it be said that I stood in the way of romance. Of course, I’ll stand with you.”

  Some days I had hope for the man, but very rarely.

  As I said, I had little contact with him, then he again sought me out, dragging me away in the night to view his new workshop. In the past two months, I discovered, he had been very, very busy indeed. How shall I tell of what I saw there? The bones scattered over the floor…the buckets of seething anatomical waste…the spreading foul-smelling stains…the still sheeted forms atop slabs…the articulated skeletons hanging from wires…the dissected monstrosities…the revolting stench of the charnel. The walls were covered in anatomy prints, shelves crowded with skulls and books and arcane tubular glassware, bottles and jars of unknown chemicals and powders, grim preserved things in casks and tanks of oily fluid.

  Amongst profuse biochemical apparatus which seemed a combination of modern scientific equipment and the wares of Medieval alchemy, I saw that his research was following perverse lines that were nearly unspeakable. What I viewed was a warehouse of the dead: large glass vessels filled with body parts—heads, arms, legs, hands, various organs…and dare I say that none of them in their baths of preservative and vital solutions were as dead as they should have been? That I saw a perverse and diabolical movement amongst that collection of morbid anatomy?

  West was convinced that there was an ethereal, intangible connection amongst various parts of a body, that even severed from nervous tissue the attendant parts of a dissected form would answer the call of its brain. I knew it was true. For I had seen such evidence in the barn with the headless trunk of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, who had been decapitated in an aeroplane crash then successively reanimated by West…head and body.

  So, yes, I saw the most unspeakable and hideous things in the farmhouse. Whilst his research into the vagaries of perfect reanimation continued, he had involved himself in certain side projects, the nature of which turned my blood to ice. There, atop at table, in a metal wire cage surrounded by beakers and flasks, a maze of glass tubing and what appeared to be archaic alembics and retorts and spirit chambers, I saw a grotesque fleshy thing that was not one rat, but six or seven that had been shaved of fur then expertly sutured together into a common whole—a flaccid, pulsating mass of tissue with various clawed appendages scratching for escape and several heads with yawning jaws, bleary red eyes staring out at me with a voracious hunger.

  “It’s horrible,” I said. “Why, Herbert? Why in God’s name would you do that?”

  He laughed as he sank several eyeballs in a jar of brine. “Why? Because I can, old boy, because…I…can.”

  We moved amongst tables set out with dissection instruments, surgical knives, exotic curcubits and glass pelicans, beakers and flasks and distillation units. Nearby was the head of a monkey resting in a jar of serum. Pale and hairless and shriveled, it floated in bubbling pale green plasma. Merely a specimen, I thought…and then out of some ghoulish curiosity I touched the jar and it was hot against my fingertips. A few oblong bubbles emerged from the puckered lips of the ape…and it opened its eyes. One eye, yes, for the other was stitched closed. But that eye, rheumy and pink and filled with a malevolent vitality, looked upon me and the lips parted, revealing yellow teeth that began to grind against one another.

  “Toothsome little thing, isn’t it?” West said.

  There is madness in war, but the story West told me was beyond that. There was an officer, a Captain Davies, with the West Surrey Regiment, who routinely tiptoed over the top of the sandbagged parapet, whistling “Tipperary” with his pet monkey tucked safely under his arm. No one doubted that he was a lunatic for he often charged into battle stark naked. One evening, a German shell exploded as he walked the parapet, the shrapnel neatly decapitated his monkey and reducing him into an unrecognizable mess of red meat. Somehow, of course, West had gotten his hands on the monkey’s head.

  And what he did with it you can well imagine.

  I would be remiss at this point if I did not write of the massive bubbling vat that was secreted in the very center of the workshop. I likened it to some massive aluminum womb that was connected via an intricate spider-webbing of glass tubing and rubber hoses to various immense glass tanks and vessels that hung from the ceiling in swaying harnesses, all filled or half-filled with red and green and yellow solutions that bubbled almost continuously. Other snaking tubes led to upended vacuum jugs and what I was certain were athenors, sublimation vessels, and decomposition chambers straight out of the Middle Ages, all connected together and feeding into the vat with an intricate system of glass piping like organs connected by artery and vein. I saw what I thought was a primitive digester furnace alongside vacuum pumps and gas combinators.

  A womb. No more, no less.

  The centerpiece of that congested laboratory.

  West had yet again cultivated a seething mass of reptilian embryonic tissue. It was steaming and fluid and pulsing. A terrible hissing came from it as it “cooked” in its own vile secretions. There was a steel lid keeping
it in absolute darkness. West kept it at 100% humidity and at a stifling temperature of 102º. Mimicking some offensive tropical spawning ground, the vat was but a revolting noxious womb of wriggling fetal life. As I stood there, trembling, he dropped the corpses of six rats in there, a jar of carrion and something else he would not let me see.

  “Soon enough,” he said, ducking under the tubing and piping and ductwork. “Soon enough.”

  I did not inquire further though my scientific curiosity was nearly insuppressible with a desire to know. West showed me something that snarled in the corner, a thrashing nearly impossible thing that bayed like a hound in its reinforced cage. I dare not describe that fanged doglike horror, its jaws dripping foul-smelling saliva.

  I was glad when we stepped away around tanks and heaped stacks of books.

  What West wanted me to see was lying on a slab in the center of the room. He pulled the sheet back and I saw the body of youngish woman. She was pale, certainly, but in no way decomposed. She had the “freshness” that West always sought in his subjects and which we both knew from our experiments was the key to successful reanimation.

  I found her disturbing.

  Just another corpse one might say and I should have been quite used to such things by that point…but the sight of her unnerved me. She was like Death personified: emaciated to a frightening degree, her ribs protruding and her pelvic wings seeming to nearly thrust from the flesh, legs and arms like broomsticks. Her grinning skull was horribly pronounced, lips shriveled back from dirty teeth and discolored gums. She was a skeleton stretched with tight yellow-white flesh that was shiny and ill-fitting. I was reminded, and unpleasantly so, of the female from Grunewald’s The Dead Lovers.

  “A prostitute,” West said, holding up one sutured wrist. “The poor thing tired of life. But, you and I, we’ll give her the chance that her maker never would.”

  The idea that this wraith could stand and walk was unthinkable. The very notion made cold chills run up my spine like spiders, a feverish sweat break out on my face.

  As I lifted her head up, West made a tiny incision at the base of her skull with a scalpel, then taking up his hypodermic of reagent, carefully slid the needle into the medulla oblongata at the sight of the inferior peduncle which was just below the cerebellum. There was no guesswork with West; when you had dissected as many bodies as he had and put them back together again, there was no such thing as chance. Once the needle was seated properly, he injected 8 cc’s into the selected site.

  Then I lowered the woman back to the slab and the waiting began. Perspiring, trying to ignore certain nameless oddities squealing and slithering in that anatomical sideshow, I timed it with my stopwatch. West claimed that this latest reagent—which now contained a certain abominable glandular secretion from the reptilian tissue that hissed in the vat—would give us, he believed, a near-perfect reanimation. I was skeptical, of course, remembering quite well the absolute horrors we had resurrected in the past. The very idea of them made something inside me clench tight.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Sometimes reanimation was achieved within minutes, sometimes not for hours.

  I wrote my observations in West’s voluminous leather-bound notebook while he examined the body: “10:27 PM,” he said. “Six minutes, twenty-three seconds since injection. No discernable reaction as yet. No evidence of rigor. Limbs are supple, flexible. Pallor mortis unchanged. Algor mortis has flatlined…temperature rising steadily now.” He checked the stopwatch. “At seven minutes, forty seconds, body temperature shows a noticeable spike. Sixty-one degrees…now sixty-two.”

  West continued his examination while I wrote feverishly by lamplight, the shadows sliding around me. Above the infernal noise of the creatures in that room, I could hear the wind whipping outside, hear the creaking of a tree, the scrape of branches at the roof.

  “Temperature up two degrees,” West said.

  It was happening and I could feel it as I had so many other times. How to explain it? It was as if something in the atmosphere of the room had subtly shifted, as if the very ether around us was being charged with some unseen malefic energy. I swear to you that I could feel it crawling over my arms and up the back of my neck like a rising static charge. The shadows thrown by the lamps seemed thicker…oily, serpentine shapes that cavorted about us. Those abominations in their cages seemed to sense it and they began what can only be deemed a whining/shrilling/baying/screeching chorus of bestial wrath and fury that was part fear and part near-human hysteria. The profane head of that primeval-looking ape began to move in its jar of serum, suckering flabby lips to the glass like a snail. And in those bubbling vessels of vital fluid, the various limbs began a mad, hellish dance, thumping and bumping, hands wiggling their fingers and swimming around like waterlogged spiders. And in that vat of pestilential tissue, that seething firmament of fungous, godless creation, there was movement and hissing, weird slopping sounds. The metal lid began to rattle as if what was inside desperately needed to get out.

  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. H
er 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.