The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918

by Kim Newman

  13

  Dr Moreau and Mr West

  The duckboards were warped and ill-fitting, but it was best to walk on them rather than the mud. The top layer was frozen but boot-shaped holes showed where others had sunk to the knee in viscid filth.

  'We don't see many civilians parading through here,' said Lieutenant Templar, a handsome new-born with a quizzical eyebrow. The breed prefer to fight their wars from armchairs in Boodle's.'

  'Boodle's is not my club,' Beauregard said, treading carefully.

  'No offence meant. It shows pluck to come this far when you don't have to.'

  'You are right. Would it were that I was possessed of such spirit. Sadly, I do have to be here.'

  'Worse luck, then.'

  The slip-trench was ten feet deep. Its higgledy-piggledy sandbag walls were mortared with frozen mud.

  A projectile overshot the line, sailed above at a decent altitude, and exploded a hundred yards off, where fields were patched with the last of the snow. Earth rained down. Templar shook like a dog, raising a halo of loose dirt. Beauregard brushed the shoulders of his Astrakhan coat.

  'A whizz-bang,' said the lieutenant. 'Nasty beasts. Fritz has been lobbing the little devils all week. We think they're trying to fill in this thoroughfare.'

  The slip-trench fed men and materiel to the front line. If breached, the blockage would have to be cleared.

  Another shell whizzed over and banged in the abused field.

  'Fritz's calibrations are off. That's two they've laid back there.'

  Beauregard looked up. The late-afternoon sky was grey, dotted with wind-whipped earth fragments, trailed across with smoke. Faint in the low cloud were the buzzing black shapes of flying machines.

  'If those bats report back to Hunland, the gunners will make a few twiddles and drop whizz-bangs right where we stand. It won't be pretty.'

  Early in the war, a reporter wrote up such a situation in The Times, boosting home front morale with a picture of cheery Tommies capering in the knowledge that the enemy's heavy guns consistently missed their positions. Devoted readers in Berlin passed on information to the German artillery, who made adjustments with devastating upshot. Journalism was now strictly regulated. Well-intentioned boobs did more harm with jingo puff than iconoclasts like Kate Reed with trenchant criticism. Beauregard would rather have the white cliffs of Dover defended by Kate than by a regiment of Northcliffe's flag-waving grubs.

  'Hurray,' Templar exclaimed, 'the Camels are coming.'

  A triangular formation of British aeroplanes closed on the German spotters. The gunfire was a tiny sound, like the chattering of insects. The aerial battle was fought in and above the clouds.

  'There's one down,' Templar said.

  A winged fireball burst through cloud, wind shrieking around it, and streamed towards No Man's Land. It ploughed noisily into the ground.

  Air supremacy meant preventing the enemy from using his aeroplanes to gather strategic intelligence. The Germans, and to some extent the Allies, wasted column inches on daring deeds of the knights of the sky, but it was a nasty, bloody business. As things stood, a British observer, unless he ran into Richthofen, was more likely than his German opposite number to bring back details of troop dispositions and gunnery emplacements.

  Another German came down, slowly as if approaching an airfield. The machine went into a spiral and crumpled in the air as if colliding with an invisible wall. The pilot must have been dead in his cockpit.

  'The slip-trench stays open to fight another day.'

  Looking about, it did not seem a particularly notable achievement.

  It was a fairly quiet afternoon at the front. Both sides bombarded non-committally, but there were no big shows on. Rumours flew that enemy divisions from the Eastern Front were filtering through Europe, freed by the peace negotiated with the new Russia. Naturally, the rumours were true. Beauregard had reports from the Diogenes Club's associates in Berlin that that Hindenburg and Dracula were preparing for Kaiserschlacht. In a last push to victory, the remaining resources of the Central Powers would be thrown into a costly stab at Paris. 'Schlacht' could be translated as 'attack', but also meant 'slaughter'. Knowing what was to come might not be enough to put a stop to it, especially if carefully gathered intelligence was ignored by the likes of Mireau and Haig.

  Now they were near the front itself. The impact of shells was a permanent low-level earthquake. Everything shivered or rattled: tin hats, duckboards, mess kits, equipment, cracking ice, teeth. Beauregard was interested not in forward positions but in an odd, underground emplacement just to the rear of the line.

  Some months ago, he had learned Dr Moreau was supervising a front-line hospital, presumably ministering to the sorely wounded. This was the same researcher whose vivisections had earned him repeated expulsions from learned bodies and exposure in the popular press. Beauregard had run across the scientist before, in the thick of another bloody business. By his estimate of Moreau's character, it seemed unlikely the man harboured a patriotic or philanthropic impulse in his breast. Yet here he was, in the worst place in the world, ostensibly risking his own skin to ease appalling suffering.

  In consideration of Gertrud Zelle's narrative, he wished to consult Dr Moreau. If anyone this side of the lines could shed light on the darkness of the Château du Malinbois, he was the man.

  Towards the front, the trench narrowed. More sandbags were exploded. Major earthworks showed where breaches had been shored up. Templar whistled a little tune, a strange chirrup. Beauregard had heard the new-born was a good officer, concerned for the men under him.

  Three Tommies sat at a wonky table, smoking and playing cards. A hand stuck out of the packed-earth wall, cards fanned in a frozen white grip. After a few visits to the front, Beauregard was not shocked by the grim humour. The unknown soldier was too well embedded to be dug free without causing a collapse. His release would have to wait till after the war.

  Beauregard remembered a cartoon of two British soldiers chatting in a shell-hole. 'I'm enlisted for twenty-five more years,' one says. 'You're lucky,' replies his comrade, 'I'm duration.'

  Two men threw in their cards and the third consulted the hand dealt the dead man. If able to bet, he would have won. Aces and eights.

  'Moreau's show is down here, sir,' Templar said, lifting a stiff canvas flap.

  It was like the entrance to a mine. A tunnel sloped down, shored up with bags, floored with boards, roofed with corrugated iron. An electric light was strung up about twenty feet in, but there was darkness beyond. Treacly mud ran slowly from the trench into the tunnel, but was diverted into sluices. Beauregard could not imagine where the liquid filth ended up.

  A high-pitched scream came from the tunnel, followed by lesser yelps and groans. The cries sounded more animal than human.

  'It's always like that,' said Templar, eyebrow raised. 'Dr Moreau says pain is healthy. A person in pain can still feel. It's when you can't feel anything that you have to worry.'

  Another shriek was cut through by a rasp like the downstroke of a saw.

  'It's unusual to have a clinic this close to the line, isn't it?'

  Templar nodded, it's practical, I suppose. But not good for morale. The situation is fearful enough without all this. Some of the men are spooked by the confounded din. They're more scared of being taken into the hole than of being wounded in the first place. Silly stories go around about the doctor using the wounded as experimental subjects.'

  Beauregard could imagine. Given Moreau's reputation, the stories might not be all silliness.

  'As if there were anything to be learned from torturing wounded men. It's absurd.'

  Templar was a decent sort, for a vampire; perhaps too decent. Such saintliness often overlooked man's capacity for pointless cruelty.

  Beauregard stepped into the tunnel. A curious miasma filled the enclosed space, a strong sulphurous smell. Wavering electric light made the walls reddish.

  The lieutenant stayed outside, like an old-world vampir
e at the edge of consecrated ground.

  'You can go on without me, sir. You can't miss it.'

  Beauregard wondered if Templar were as immune from superstition as he claimed. He shook the young man's firm hand and walked past the light into the dark.

  The tunnel ended at a solid iron door. Getting it down here and set into stony earth must have been a herculean task. An extraordinary soldier stood guard. Stooped almost double, he barely came up to Beauregard's waist. His arms were six inches longer than his sleeves, most of his brown face was matted with hair, large teeth pushed lips out in an apish grin and red marks, like healed wounds, showed in loose folds of skin around neck and wrists. His uniform bagged in some places and stretched in others.

  Beauregard took the guard for a savage, perhaps indigenous to a South Sea corner of Empire. He might be a pygmy afflicted with gigantism. The war called upon all manner of King Victor's subjects.

  At Beauregard's approach, the guard wrapped long fingers around a rifle and did his best to stand straight. He bared remarkable teeth, yellow bone-spurs in an acre of bright- pink gum.

  'I'm here to see Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said.

  The guard's tiny eyes glittered. He snorted, nose moving as if free of his skull. More screams sounded from behind the door. The guard, who might be expected to be used to the noise, shrank in terror, cowering into an alcove.

  'Dr Moreau,' Beauregard said, again.

  The guard's furry brows knit with extreme concentration. He unwound his fingers from the rifle and took hold of a ring set in the door. He hauled the iron portal open in a succession of creaking lurches.

  A draught of bloody stink belched out. Beauregard stepped into a chamber hewn out of earth and rock. A row of cots took up fully half the space. On most were patients with terrible wounds, strapped to bloody mattresses. Some stared silently through bandage masks, others keened in idiot pain. A bin overflowed with cut-up uniforms and sawn-through boots. Electric lights pulsed in time with an unreliable generator grumbling in another room. The walls glistened with fresh blood. Everything was speckled. Even the light-bulbs were spotted, blood drops cooked to brown moles.

  He saw Dr Moreau at once, a powerfully built old man in a vilely streaked tunic, with a leonine mane of white hair. The doctor bent over the living remains of a soldier, prising apart exposed ribs with a steel implement. The patient was a skeleton clad in wet scraps of muscle and meat. Hurt eyes shone in the red wreck of a face. Exposed fangs clashed in a devil's grin. Beside Moreau, holding down the patient's shoulders, was a smaller man. Moreau gave a cry of triumph as bones parted. A squirt of purple blood shot into the assistant's face, smearing his thick spectacles.

  'There, West,' Moreau said. 'The heart still beats.'

  West, the assistant, tried to find a clean stretch of sleeve to wipe off his glasses.

  'I am right again and you owe me half-a-crown.'

  'Certainly, doctor,' West said. He had a flat accent, American or Canadian. 'I'll add it to the tally.'

  'You are a witness,' Moreau said to Beauregard, the first time he had acknowledged the intrusion. 'Mr West wagered it was impossible for the heart to continue to function under such conditions, yet the resilient organ beats still.'

  Moreau lifted his arm to give Beauregard a view of the heart. It pumped like a squeezing fist, though most of its tubes were severed.

  'This man could live,' Moreau declared.

  'Surely not,' West countered.

  'Your debt will mount, my man. Observe, how tenacious these little snakes prove.'

  The cut tubes writhed swiftly. An artery probed like a blind worm and reattached itself, blood flowing through it, the break healing. Layers of tissue clustered, swarming over the heart, burying it. The pulled-back ribs closed like a trap, assuming their normal formation. A wash of musculature flowed over the bones.

  'The resilience of the vampire corpus may well be infinite,' Moreau said. 'Only human despair permits death and a man whose brain has been halved can know no despair. Instinct takes over the animal.'

  The patient's head was severely pulped at the back. Flesh swarmed strangely around the eyes. Every scrap of the soldier lived tenaciously. Beauregard remembered Isolde's sad performance. In thirty years' research, Moreau and his like had not set a limit on the vampire power of regeneration.

  'But without the brain,' West said, tapping the area of activity, 'the creature has no purpose, no coherence . .

  Muscle strands hungrily lapped West's fingertip. He pulled his hand away and watched smugly as a cheeklike slab of flesh formed over a startled eye.

  'This is not a living man,' said West, 'just a collection of disparate, individually mobile, parts and functions. The template of human form is held in the brain. Without that template, this senseless creature can only flow in a random search for freakish shape.'

  Skin formed over the patient's mouth, ripping on teeth and healing again.

  Moreau's huge face reddened with anger. 'This man is guilty of a failure of will. He has surrendered his grip on human shape.'

  Moreau stood away from the cot, disappointed and angry. The patient's jaw hinged open, fangs extending like poignards, rending the new skin. A croaking exhalation emerged from the bloody hole.

  'The voice is entirely lost,' Moreau said. 'This is merely an animal. It cannot be saved.'

  He took a scalpel from his tunic pocket. Its blade shone silver.

  'Stand back, West. This could be messy.'

  Moreau knelt on the patient's abdomen, thrusting his scalpel down, cutting warty skin that had already grown thick. He sliced between the knitting ribs and punctured the heart. The patient convulsed and died. Moreau's fist sank entirely into the chest cavity. He pulled his gory hand free and wiped it on the patient's bedding.

  it was a mercy,' he said, perfunctorily. 'Now, sir, who might you be and why have you ventured into my domain?'

  Beauregard forced himself to look away from the ragged corpse. It putrefied fast, settling liquidly on the cot, dripping over the edges. The very old ones turned to dust. The patient had been a vampire for less than the lifespan of a normal man.

  'Dr Moreau, you will probably not remember me. My name is Charles Beauregard. We met once, many years ago, in the laboratory of Dr Henry Jekyll.'

  Moreau did not care to be reminded of his late colleague. Irritation boiled in his deep-set eyes.

  'I'm attached to military intelligence,' Beauregard said.

  'Only "attached"?'

  'Quite so.'

  'Congratulations.'

  West was sorting through the detritus on the cot, picking out bullets and shrapnel. He wore black rubber gloves.

  'I'm not yet ready to present my findings,' said Moreau, gesturing to direct attention to his array of strapped-down patients. 'I have not had enough vampires to work with.' 'You mistake my purpose, doctor. I'm not here in connection with your current work ...'

  (whatever that might be) . . but to solicit information which may be of service. It is with regard to another researcher in your field, Professor Ten Brincken.'

  At the mention of the name, Moreau looked up, alert.

  'A charlatan,' he spat. 'Practically an alchemist.'

  According to Beauregard's sources, Moreau and Ten Brincken had come to blows at a congress held at the University of Ingolstadt in 1906. That suggested the professor was not a man of insignificant stature.

  'We believe Ten Brincken is the director of a secret project given the highest priority by the enemy.'

  'Too much mysticism in the German mind. The Gothic imagination perverts their brains. I don't deny Ten Brincken is a daring thinker. But none of his results are verifiable. He surrounds himself with Teuton blood ritual. No control group, no hygienic conditions, no proper records.'

  Judging from this clinic, Moreau had a singular definition of 'hygienic conditions'.

  'No,' Moreau said, definitely. 'Whatever Ten Brincken works on will prove worthless.'

  The assistant fluttered around, gett
ing his nerve up to interrupt the great man.

  'What direction was he taking in his researches?' Beauregard asked.

  'Before the war? Crackpot studies of lycanthropy. Arrant nonsense. The old wives' tale that werewolves have reversible skin, hairy on the inside. Twaddle about animal spirits mingling with those of men. He seemed to suggest shape-shifters are subject to a form of demonic possession. It was all tied to bloodlines. Germans are obsessed with blood, with racial purity, with the strength of ancient vampire lines.'

  'Like that of Count Dracula?'

  Moreau snarled. 'There's an elder who has done his worst to sow confusion. In his superstition, he encourages fools to think of vampires as supernatural creatures. That's a sure way to stay in the dark.'

  West finished his probings and peeled off wet gloves.

  'I heard Professor Ten Brincken lecture at Miskatonic University in '09,' he said. Behind his spectacles, he had watery, nervous eyes.

  'This is Mr Herbert West of Massachusetts,' Moreau introduced his colleague. 'He has been of some minor help to me. In time, he might have the makings of a scientist.'

  'What was the subject of the professor's lecture?'

  'The effects of blending bloodlines. Like breeding cattle for more meat and less string. He claimed to be able to induce shape- shifting in vampires whose line does not entail the facility. Also, he suggested his methods could "cure" many common conditions and limitations of the undead.'

  'Conditions and limitations?'

  'The extreme sensitivity to sunlight. Fear of religious artefacts. Allergic reaction to garlic or other wolfsbane. Even the universal vulnerability to silver.'

  'Tchah,' spat Moreau. 'Blood, blood, blood. To the Germans, it's all in the blood. It's as if the corpus was constituted of nothing but blood.'

  'Did the professor produce any of his improved specimens?' Beauregard asked. 'A vampire who could survive being pierced by a silver arrow, for instance?'

  West shrugged and looked at the dead puddle on the cot. 'It was all theory.'

  'To call it "theory", is to dignify muddle-headedness,' Moreau said, angry. 'Only I am doing anything like real work in the field. Ten Brincken is a dunderhead and a dullard.'