Even More Nasty Stories

by Brian McNaughton

  “The Boche, you mean?"

  “As a splendid beginning."

  “What, er, is it?” asked Cyril, who still didn't entirely believe his orders.

  “A man, perhaps, a giant man, assembled and animated by sorcery—"

  A nasty Welsh noise erupted from the throat of Corporal Jenkins, who then hastily begged the priest's indulgence.

  “—or by a science that is still mercifully beyond our understanding,” Father Nathaire continued, not pausing in his recitation even as he made an absolving sign at the corporal.

  Cyril wondered at the priest's offhandedness and at Jenkins's apparent release from guilt. If the awful power of God, whom he had learned not to believe in as a student at Christ Church, could be invoked and dispensed so casually, this would be a greater miracle than any clockwork scarecrow from the Dark Ages.

  Their destination was not the ruin of a Cistercian abbey that crowned the hill, as Cyril had speculated, but a deep ravine athwart the upward path. The stream that carved it had long ago been diverted, and the gap was filled almost to its rim at one point with the debris of an ancient rockslide. Father Nathaire hiked up his soutaine and descended onto boulders balanced like jackstraws with the indifference of a spider. Uncertain whether to follow but unwilling to solicit advice, the lieutenant cast a blank look at the corporal, who cast it back with practiced ease. Deciding to press on, he was pleasantly surprised to hear the men picking their way down after him.

  When it seemed that further descent was impossible, the priest ducked through a narrow fissure and disappeared into the heart of the pile. Cyril switched on his electric torch and followed into a descending tunnel of relatively recent construction.

  Their guide bobbed onward with the aplomb of Dante's Virgil, nor did the Englishman feel any discomfort beyond that of damp and cobwebs, but the three miners’ sons were most uneasy. Much muttering echoed in the tunnel before Cyril put a stop to it.

  “I thought you lads would be used to this sort of thing,” he chided.

  “Not this sort of thing, no, Sir,” said Jenkins. “Yon lintel, look you, the bleeders didn't know what they was about when they stuck it there. And it looks like...."

  “Rats, Sir,” said Powell when the corporal hesitated, “bloody great—your pardon, Father—buggering rats."

  “Spiders, Sir,” said Thomas, “as big as my Grammy Evans's Sunday dinner-plates, with—"

  “—it was dug from the inside out,” Jenkins concluded in a mutter, as if reluctant to advance this queer opinion.

  They were right about the rats, at least, which followed them down to a cavern so large that it drank the torchlight. The floor sloped to a vast pit on whose very lip the priest stood rubbing his hands as debonairly as a fly. Lacking his assurance of a glorious afterlife, perhaps, the Britons all but hugged the floor as they inched to his side.

  “It was said that the component parts of the Colossus rebelled against their bondage, forcing it to lie down and decompose.” Smirking into the abyss, the priest added, “But that, as you see, was not so."

  Cyril peered over the rim into what looked like a mass grave from the Middle Ages, a compacted hill of cadavers that had been twisted into a mare's-nest of intertwined limbs. The pile was domed at the center, sloping down to black emptiness at the sides, and a cool breeze flowed steadily from the depths. It carried a scent of rot that seemed remarkably strong after the demimillennium the bodies must have lain here.

  “No rats?” Cyril said, for he saw little evidence of verminous damage. Eyes, flat and dull as common stones, reflected the light of his torch. Some of the bodies were no more than leather and bones, but a few looked alarmingly fleshy. To make a symmetrical dome, they had been packed every whichway; buttocks and pudenda thrust at him in a mockery of temptation, a frozen image of an orgy in Hell.

  He shivered off this unhealthful fancy and repeated his question. Father Nathaire shrugged and waved a hand at the shadows, no longer pinpricked with red eyes.

  “They are French rats. They know what is good for their livers, if not their souls."

  “Bloody hell,” said Jenkins, and Cyril at the same time noticed a change in the atmosphere. The breeze from the pit had stopped, and now it resumed in the opposite direction. The downward flow of air was accompanied by a long-drawn stridulation, as of a sarcophagus being furtively dragged across a stone floor.

  Jenkins said, “It's breathing, Sir. Snoring."

  "It? What do you mean, it? There's nothing here, just old bones...."

  Cyril had extended his torch over the edge to descry the limits of the pile. His voice faltered as he tried to comprehend what he saw. The central dome, vast as that of St. Paul's, which rose almost to the top of the pit, did not limit the charnel. It rose high above a lateral field of corpses that had been tamped down just as tightly. He discerned a pattern, a monstrous architecture of interwoven bodies.

  “Good Lord! It's a head. And those, down there—"

  “Yes, those are his shoulders. But there is more, much more."

  The direction of the air-current changed again. His men looked sick, but Cyril doubted that the recurrence of the vile odor was entirely to blame. “It's a trick of the ventilation, that's all,” he told them briskly. “Look alive, then, we have to inspect the damned thing."

  Cyril accepted the fact that men are expendable, subalterns slightly less so. He held no foolish illusions about giving orders he himself wouldn't execute. But he could see that they believed he was acting from some such romantic notion when he ordered them to secure a rope and tie a harness around his chest, and he was willing to take credit for it. So much for their bloody Little Hansel!

  In fact he perceived no danger, and his curiosity was uncontainable. No weapon lay here, nothing at all in the line of “experimental warfare,” but a morbid wonder did, a macabre creation of medieval zealots to rival any Wonder of the Ancient World. If by some odd chance the Pyramids had gone undiscovered until the present, he who found them would achieve immortality; and Cyril stood in that man's boots. The war seemed suddenly far away. More closely glowed a peacetime world where he would present measurements and considered speculations to the Royal Society.

  “You'll want a gas-mask, Sir,” Jenkins said.

  “He'll want a canary,” said Powell. “A canary, Sir, that's your one sure defense against mephitic exhalations."

  “Take this,” Father Nathaire said, offering a wooden cross.

  It was no standard crucifix, but the image of a martyr who had been nailed upside down, his feet spread on the crossbar in a most undignified way and his face wearing an expresion, either through indifferent craftsmanship or Gallic whimsy, that looked sardonic. As he stuffed the fetish into his blouse, Cyril suppressed a smile at the absurdity of taking a tiny image of a dead man to a mountain of real ones. Although he would never have carried the one nor visited the other, he felt this was rather like importing a naughty postcard into a Paris brothel.

  Instructing the men to play out the rope slowly and, should he give two sharp jerks, to haul him up at once, he descended gingerly over the forehead and brow-ridge. He feared the old bones might collapse to powder under his boots, and where would such vandalism put him in the eye of posterity? To his relief, the cadavers were as solid and firmly fixed in place as stone blocks. That they might be stone, and this a conventional sculpture, briefly dismayed him, but a closer look gave reassurance. Black, brown, yellow, some shockingly fresh and white, they were very real corpses whose various degrees of decomposition had been arrested. No sculpture could have duplicated in all their infinite gradations the effects of mould and decay, of insect damage and rodent predation, on so many twisted limbs and staring faces.

  “Are you all right, Sir?"

  “Yes, yes,” Cyril said, but cursed a trifle shrilly as his cap tumbled away and his hair riffled in the downward draft, the indrawn “breath” of the abyss, when he stood perched on a hillock that comprised the bridge of a vulturish nose; a nose that was not unl
ike Father Nathaire's. The four figures at the rim of the pit—three of them bending forward in earnest concern, but the clergyman displaying the aloof serenity of a maniac—seemed very far above him, and an infinity of darkness extended below.

  He shone his torch down over the twin shields of the breasts, each large as a wall of the British Museum, but its beam dispersed before it could reveal them fully. On the floor of some immeasurably remote Avernus, could the giant be flouting the laws of physics by standing on two feet? Of course this was only a Gargantuan bust, but he couldn't shake the conviction that a descent with a longer rope would reveal a complete anatomy.

  “How many thousands—tens of thousands—bloody millions of corpses?” he muttered, and he cut short a giggle of grisly impropriety.

  That question could be solved by a mathematical formula, yet to be devised. Why remained a mystery, though not beyond the scope of all conjecture. The Black Death had killed every third person in Europe. The world had suffered nothing like it since; its dread light still flickers when we bless one who sneezes.

  The survivors would have had all the material they needed for this Colossus. Infected by the vision of some mad artist, some Arcimboldo of necrophilia, they had assembled it in terror and desperation. The subject, the sum of all the specific men and women, was an abstraction: Man. No immortal hero flaunting marble thews at the heavens, just a heap of decayed meat, this image of its makers was fittingly buried in a forgotten pit.

  He thought the artificers would have been forced to use a finer material for the closed eyelids, but he saw that these had also been fashioned from corpses. Except for a few grotesqueries that mocked the human form in the marbled pattern, they had been stamped or rolled so flat as to lose their shape. Unflattened fingers extended from the edge to suggest lashes.

  When he took a step back for a better look, these lashes twitched. The eyelids then lifted like the curtains of an infernal stage.

  As a foeman armed with a Mauser automatic against his trench-knife, met suddenly face-to-face in a disputed worm-hole, had not made him do, Cyril screamed. He didn't know whether to reach for his revolver or the crucifix, and in his confusion he forgot to signal before he tripped over his boots and fell into the abyss.

  “Have a care, Sir!” called Powell, who thought, or who affected to think, that his fall had been an exuberant leap, that his cry had expressed high spirits. An attempt to validate this interpretation kept Cyril silent even when the harness bit cruelly into his armpits and he was bounced upside down at the end of the rope. Before he could right himself he swung against the lower lip of the monster and halfway into its intolerably moist mouth. Disgust mingled with terror in the thin sound that squeezed through his gritted teeth.

  “Darkness visible,” he muttered as he slipped and slid in a vain effort to escape the wet underlip, “darkness visible,” nor could he at first say why.

  Scores of crowded faces had composed the irises of those terrible eyes. Each face had been turned towards him. Each human eye—even the blind milky ones, even the blank sockets, but, most frightfully of all, the ones that glittered with awareness—had focused on him. In the center of these clustered faces had stared the pupils, made of no human material, made of an indescribable nothing. That was it! Milton's description of Hell's illumination, “not light, but darkness visible,” described those pupils. He knew that he could never again enjoy Milton, for he had looked into Hell.

  His future reading pleasures were a moot point, however, for the lips had now closed on him and squeezed him in a slimy, airless embrace. They worked at him, rolled him; at any moment he would know the touch of the teeth, huge slabs of calcified flesh that he had not dared to look at closely on his way in. He tried to kick, he tried to draw his pistol, but he couldn't move. His eyes felt ready to burst like tormenting boils.

  And then, with a contemptuous flick of its tongue, the Colossus spat him out.

  No one had witnessed his panic; he had done most of his screaming inside his head. Physically incapable of speech after he was hauled from the pit, he made no answer to questions about the soggy state of his uniform, and his silence was taken for the calm reflection of a man whose thoughts could never be distracted by mere terror. His quiet monotone, wrung dry of all feeling, and his banal words, the only ones he could at length form, enhanced this image of casual heroism: “I rather suspect we've found it."

  The men turned whiter even than Father Nathaire's normal shade, and for an instant it seemed they might bolt, but Jenkins managed to laugh, “God help Fritz,” and then they all laughed, none louder than Cyril.

  Lying under canvas that night, he was plagued by dreams of an elusive but consistent flavor. When at last he woke fully, after a lifetime of startled outcries and sickly delusions of waking, he fancied that he had dreamed of London, but that belief faltered under scrutiny. The locations he remembered could not be matched with Belgravia or Piccadilly or other places he knew: these were foreign scenes, but in the context of the dream so familiar that he had taken scant notice of them.

  The real likeness to the greatest of cities lay in the innumerable multitude of innominate humanity that had babbled about him. It was as if he had spent the night pushing through crowds whose every stranger had been determined to detain him and confide in him matters of vital importance. Whatever they had told him, he had understood little, for they had spoken in dream-French.

  Not only had he not understood, he hadn't wanted to. He woke with the impression that all those importunate strangers had earnestly desired to talk about the sort of things one didn't talk about: to speak passionately of failed hopes, lost loves, secret sins and lonely obsessions. Embarrassment compounded his confusion until he abandoned politeness and fought his way forward in a near frenzy to be left alone.

  Of all those thousands, he recalled only a scholar's drone, a bully's strut, a girl's glimmering eyes, a hag's incongruously mellifluous voice. All these and more flashed brightly for a moment before fading and flaking into ashes from which they could never again be retrieved.

  But a soldier in a war has no time to brood on his dreams, and he was soon mired in the details of exploiting his discovery. He hoped to organize the local civilians, but Father Nathaire advised him that no native would go near the place. “It gives them nightmares,” the dwarf explained with a smile no more knowing than usual.

  The only telephone in town ornamented the priest's study, where Cyril wasted the morning trying to cajole or threaten a line to the experimental warfare people through a succession of operators as ephemeral and cryptic as the spirits of his dream. Failing miserably, he tried to reach the government in Paris to demand men and equipment.

  Although he managed to worm his way to a very junior clerk in a department of public works, he had only begun to recite his list of requisites before being dismissed as a prankster. Shortly after this functionary had sputtered his denunciation of English drolleries and rung off, the phone went completely dead. Cyril believed that the government had thus flicked him off like a flea, but the priest averred that such interruptions were common; and that they often lasted for weeks.

  Cyril returned to the site in late afternoon, mulling over impracticable schemes for sending the news by carrier pigeon or heliograph. He mused aloud to Powell that they would need a crane, disassembled at some dockyard and carried hundreds of miles overland, to lift the rocks and the thing beneath them. In the absence of any lorry or railway wagon big enough to hold it, the monster might be hoisted by balloons—it was dashed inconvenient that England had no proper Zepps—and lofted to the front when the wind was right.

  “You'll live in history like the builders of your Stonehenge, Sir,” the Welshman rhapsodized with what Cyril suspected only later of having been irony.

  “It's alive, then, isn't it?” Jenkins said. He added a corollary inevitable to any non-com: “Why not get it to march, Sir?"

  Cyril thought this ridiculous; he suspected that Jenkins did, too. The fearful tension they hadn
't dared admit was released in unmilitary hilarity when Cyril agreed to have a go at it. They raced one another down the precipitous rockpile and into the menacing tunnel like schoolboys on holiday, and not even the enormous cavern, nor the smell and sound of the monster's breath, could sober them.

  “Right, then, you sodding excuse for a giant!” Jenkins shouted into the pit. “On your feet, you horrible little man! Alley-oop, Alphonse!"

  The vast sound of breathing neither faltered nor quickened. In the silence that followed the last echoes of these commands, it seemed newly ominous.

  “Give it a dose of your French, Sir,” Thomas suggested, and the timidity of his whisper confirmed the sudden death of everyone's jolly mood.

  Why not? "Venez ici, Monsieur Colosse! La Patrie vous require."

  Nothing happened: nothing, at least, that the others sensed. But from the darkness of the cavern Cyril saw and heard the folk from his dream returning, beseeching, a host of Ancient Mariners who ached to unburden themselves.

  This time he identified their language as Old French, their dress as medieval, and a superstitious man would have further recognized them as the ghosts that still haunted their curious grave. But Cyril knew them for hallucinations brought on by exertion in bad air, no more real than Alice's vexatious playing-cards, and he dealt with them as firmly.

  “Stop it!” he cried, “Go away!” and he was obeyed. And obeyed, too, far beyond his intention, when some impulse led him to employ a Biblical turn of phrase: “Colossus, come forth!"

  The Colossus raised its arms from the pit and pressed its palms to the ceiling of the cavern, a precarious heap of interdependent boulders, lifting it “like Mr. Lloyd George doffing his silk hat,” Powell later said, but it was more like a circus strongman hoisting some heterogeneous weight. The bulging of muscles gave the component parts of the monster an illusory life as hundreds of legs stretched, arms unfolded and sightless heads rolled loosely. Corpses slipped everywhere like swimmers—or, more precisely, like drifting corpses caught in an irresistible sluiceway—to arrive at new positions in the overall fabric. Limbs or heads popped out and flopped here and there, but they marred the outline of the rippling muscles no more than hairs on the arms of a man.