by Gafford, Sam
When I returned to the 84th, Worth made me welcome and often sat with me during the long night watches. Although young and clueless, he loved to hear me tell my stories. I would recite them late into the night, for I had rarely forgotten a word I’d ever written despite the nearly fatal head concussion I had suffered back in 1916 while training new RFA recruits on Salisbury Plain. Even when I was interrupted, Worth would remember exactly where I had left off.
As I spoke, I recalled the events behind every tale and their inspiration. The days and nights, so far away now, spent working away at my typewriter as I tried to capture my imagination on paper. The endless rejections as my work came back again and again until the day when the dam finally burst and first one and then another and then another story sold. The hopes that rose with the publication of each of my four novels, which would be eventually dashed as the low sales figures would slowly trickle back to the publishers. In a way, the war had come at an opportune time for me and I abandoned my writing career for that of a soldier.
But there were times when my stories refused to let me go.
I have seen them. Out there, on the fields, rising from the dead bodies. Those ‘Ghost Pirates’ of mine walk amongst the corpses. I don’t know what it is they are looking for, but they search endlessly for something that hides from them. Occasionally a low moan floats over the ground, but I cannot tell if it is them or the dead that is calling. Several times I have caught them staring at me. Across the dead, we glare at each other, daring the other to make a move. I have sat this way for hours, feeling their fingers reach across and tug at my mind. Once I caught myself bringing my revolver up close to my head. Unaware, I was about to fire when my senses returned. Since that point, I keep my ammunition in a separate pocket.
These fields were once green and alive with flowers and birds. Now only corpses are planted here and the only singing comes from the mortar shells as they descend upon us. Their high-pitched screeches echoed across the fields in an unnatural mechanic choir punctuated by the explosions. The sounds of our artillery were different and with a lower timbre, so the shelling would become a strange symphony of fighting voices.
Worth had stopped over to see me and brought a warning. He had seen the units preparing the guns for movement. We were either preparing for a push or a defence. There seemed to be little difference between the two. I walked to the rear where the draught horses were quartered, but each step I took was like sinking into a soft sponge which took almost all my strength to step through.
“It’s just like the ship in your story, Hope,” Worth said to me with a smile on his face as he ran off again. In truth, he was right. Once I had written a story where a ship had become lost at sea and, through the mixture of chemicals in its hold and the centuries of elements upon it, had become alive. The seamen who found the ship were attacked by it as by an invading germ. Their boots were ripped off by the soft mass that was the ship’s flesh. Only a few escaped alive. This death ground had become the same as that ship’s deck. The parallels were disturbing.
Around midday, the Germans attacked with a sudden ferocity. Their guns began with a devastating barrage on our front line, making our soldiers retreat quickly while their fellows were blasted to bits. The order came to withdraw, and I led our men onto our horses as we shifted the guns to the pullback position. The horses strained as the guns sank in the mud, and I had to order several foot soldiers to push the wheels forward. The German army ran up quickly when its shelling subsided and pushed its line forward.
In a matter of minutes, the ground that we had fought and died to defend for most of 1918 fell back to the Hun.
We had to move the guns quickly into position, and the artillery teams were there waiting. There was barely any time to take the measurements before they fired their barrages into the German troops. The shelling slowed their advance but did not stop it. That task fell to the British Army, which, after retreating, set up a new line further in back of Mont Kemmel.
For hours, the air was filled with the high-pitched screeches of the shells and the screams of the men and machines exploding. The men enforced their positions and we moved the horses further back. I spent as much time as I could with my own horse, Monarch, cleaning and feeding him. This was my third horse since being in France. Most could only take so much of the sounds of the shells and the screams and the dying. I could look them in the eye and see when they were about to break. It’s one of the skills that had made me effective as a lieutenant in the RFA. My lifetime with horses had come into good use but, lately, I had seen the same looks in the eyes of the soldiers around me. So much so that there were only a few men who did not have that look, and Worth was one of them.
I sought him out during dinner and found him, once again, alone and not eating.
I admonished him for not keeping up his strength. More than anyone, I knew the importance of eating to one’s overall fitness. Without another word, I set to and quickly ate my own dinner as he stared at me in disbelief.
“How can you eat such food?” He asked. “It’s disgusting.”
I laughed and told him that this food was a luxury compared to what I had eaten in my youth at sea. I’d dined on slabs of hardtack that crawled with maggots and flies. Often the officers would bet on which of the starving seamen would break down first and eat from the open barrel. With pride, I remembered striding defiantly to the barrel, breaking off a large piece of tack, and biting down to the cheers of the cabin boys and sneers of the officers. The vomiting and bowel distress afterward had been worth it.
That night, I told Worth the tales of my own hunting ground, the Sargasso Sea. I told him of the ships caught helplessly in the grip of the seaweed-choked sea and the monstrous creatures that lived there. The story of the survivors of the Homebird, which had been one of my early successes, touched him deeply. “Did they ever escape?” he asked hopefully.
I looked in his eyes and saw the real meaning of his question. Instead of the truth I told him that their escape was a story that I had simply not written yet but would someday. But, in truth, there was no escape from the Sargasso. The rescue I had written in my novel about the ‘boats of the Glen Carrig’ had a false ending—one tacked on because my editor had requested an uplifting conclusion that would please readers. It hadn’t seemed to make any difference in the sales.
Like those helpless, doomed characters, so were we marching towards an inevitable end. I knew in my heart that those fictional characters on my stranded ships would eventually succumb to the sea monsters around them or starvation. That was why I never wrote the final chapter. It was too much to deal with characters who, for all their efforts or enthusiasm or hopes, would never escape.
There were Watchers out there, in the dark, just waiting beyond the firing line.
Later that day, the commanding officer gathered us all together. We were a ragtag group, standing in the mud and the blood, patched together with bandages and grit. The line would be retreating in the night, he said, but we needed to set up a forward observation post on the base of Mont Kemmel. He could barely look us in the eye because he knew what he was asking of us. Volunteers were needed, he explained; he would not order any man to take the risk. It would surely mean death for any who stayed.
I volunteered immediately, although I had no idea why.
The C.O. nodded gratefully at me and paused. Finally Northrup also volunteered and we set out to prepare. I’d known little of Northrup and spoken to him less. He was a strong, strapping lad when he joined the 84th. Now he was shrunken and his clothes hung on him as on a child’s doll. His eyes were dull and, though he would follow any order you gave him, the rest of his mind had walked away in the hope of coming back out someday when the sun shone again and there were birds singing in the air instead of bombs.
April 18th
The 84th has retreated further back from the line. We watched them leave with a sense of stern resignation. Under darkness, we moved forward and set up our post. Northrup said nothing an
d I lost interest in speaking to him. I put him in charge of sending our messages back to the company and tried to get some sleep.
When I awoke, a grey dawn had already broken and I was surprised to find Worth sitting by my side. “You didn’t think I’d leave you here with that great sausage, did you? That’d be a fate worse than death!”
I laughed, and he asked me to tell him one of my Carnacki stories. I’d always enjoyed writing them and still couldn’t understand why they didn’t sell better. It would be a long, painful day, so I told him the story of the hideous ‘Hog’ from the outer spheres, which I always considered to be my best Carnacki yarn even if I couldn’t sell it anywhere.
As I told him of the battle between Carnacki and the ‘Hog,’ I described the oppressive atmosphere that bore down upon the Ghost-Finder and the way it tried to influence him to create his own undoing. Worth asked if it was the same atmosphere as the one we felt there, dug into Mont Kemmel like ticks on a dog. I replied simply that it was the same atmosphere as I have felt all my life, whether in Ireland, on the deck of a ship sailing around the Horn, on a stage in Blackburn as I faced down the greatest escape-artist of all time, at a typewriter wrestling with my inability to express in words what I dreamed in my mind or here, on a battlefield that had lost all meaning. I carried it with me always.
The Germans made another advance with a volley of artillery later that day. The rest of the night was spent hiding low from the bursts and the singing bombs. We sent back several messages that alerted the 84th with no idea if they were ever received. Through the night we tried to sleep as much as possible, but little rest was claimed.
I feel old and that is not something I have ever felt. I look at Northrup and I feel our lives draining away from us. Only Worth remains upbeat. Sometimes his nature keeps me going but at other times I swear I could kill him.
April 19th
The barrage has been endless. I do not know how we have not been killed already. By the afternoon, a haze falls over the battlefield and all we can see are vague shapes moving back and forth. Northrup has been busy sending messages back to the 84th and I find myself praying that we will receive withdrawal orders soon, but the C.O. has been silent.
I have no more words. Worth asks for more, but I have none to give him.
My sight is riveted to the grey shapes coming closer in the mist and haze. The Ghost Pirates are there, running back and forth, stopping, running, crouching, and crawling. Their eyes penetrate me. I cannot tell if they are stalking me or beckoning me to join them.
Then, in the dim background, behind the grey shapes and booming crashes, I see it moving forward like a mountain walking. I have seen it before in my mind and in my dreams, but now it stumbles towards me.
I see the Watching Thing of the North-West from my land of future night eclipsing the dull circle of the sun. It strides forward. The sounds of the exploding bombs echo his footsteps. I try to tell Northrup, but he sees nothing.
I cry out for Worth to bear witness, and then Northrup finally speaks. There is no Worth, he says; who am I talking to? But Worth is there beside him, smiling. I point at him but, again, Northrup sees nothing. “You’ve gone mad again,” Northrup says. “You’ve been this way since you took that blow to your head. Talking to yourself. Telling tales. I tell you there is nothing there!”
I look back at the battlefield and see the Watcher even closer this time. So close that I can see its huge maw opening and closing to the sounds of battle. “It’s coming!” I scream and Worth moves away, apologising. He had only come for the stories, you see, and didn’t want to see the end. Suddenly, as if he had moved behind a curtain, Worth is gone and Northrup is pulling on my sleeve.
We have to leave, he says, withdrawal or not. It’s too dangerous as the German shelling comes ever closer and closer. I begin gathering up our gear when I hear the Watcher’s voice speaking to me. It comes in a high-pitched shriek. I look back in a terrified peace as I see the great mouth screeching at me. The sound of the bombs comes closer. I stand still, arms outstretched. Northrup grabs at me, but I do not move. The Watcher speaks me out of existence.
[On April 19th, 1918, William Hope Hodgson and another officer sustained a direct hit from German artillery. They were blown to pieces.]
Passing Spirits
For H.P.L.
“. . . Cthulhu never existed. Azathoth never existed. Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, none of them. I made them all up.”
I was sitting in H. P. Lovecraft’s small study, listening to him rant. It was 1936. In barely under a year he would be dead of stomach cancer. I felt a need to try to tell him this. To let him know that the pain in his abdomen was not just ‘gas’ but a serious medical problem that he should seek treatment for immediately. When I tried to explain that I knew all about those types of things, he refused to listen and went on ranting.
“But you know what is the worst thing about all this?” he continued in his nasal voice. “This is what I’ll be remembered for . . . if I’m remembered by anyone. For making up a pantheon of monster-gods. Basically, for stealing from Dunsany.”
I tried to explain that that wasn’t the truth, that he had added much more to it than just the idea of a cosmic mythology; but he wouldn’t listen. It was very strange and not at all the type of conversation I had envisioned having. I wouldn’t say that the man was bitter, but he certainly wasn’t happy about a lot of things.
Looking at him, I felt that there were so many things I should be saying, but I didn’t. My time was too short for that and the memory was already fading.
When I awoke, I was in my apartment and there was a ribbon of spit on the pillow next to me. I checked it for blood, but it was clear. My head throbbed as usual and I felt the familiar dull ache behind my eyes. I crawled out of bed and turned the TV on as I dressed. CNN was going on about some flareup in the Middle East (I had long ago stopped caring about such things—there was always a flareup somewhere or other), and I flipped it over to “Scooby-Doo” on the Cartoon Network. It was one of my favorites from the first year (the best year before they got into all that guest star nonsense and then brought in Scrappy-Doo—who the hell ever thought that was a good idea?) with the laughing space ghost that had the glowing skull head. I remember how that scared the piss out of me as a kid. A lot of things scared me back then, before I learned that the only real scary thing in life was stuff like cancer and brain tumors. There weren’t any gods or monsters. Not in the real world. Here we had sickness and disease instead of vampires and ghosts.
I brushed my teeth and took my medicine. Looking at the clock, I had about an hour to get to work, so I knew I’d have enough time. I sat down and watched the rest of the show, waiting for that great ‘Scooby-Doo’ ending where they unmask the villain. I always loved that.
At work, I tried to pretend that I cared about what I was doing, but it didn’t really matter. I was just another clerk in just another bookstore. Nothing special. Nothing unique. I had ‘Help Desk’ duty, which everyone knew was the worst. Listening to blue-haired old ladies trying to describe what they wanted. “I don’t know the name but I saw it on Oprah. It had a green cover.”
The other clerks tried not to look at me too closely. My hair had grown back, more or less, but there’s still something about a cancer patient that sets you off from everyone else. Maybe it’s a smell or some invisible ‘early-warning’ system, but no one looks at you the same way afterward. That didn’t bother me too much. Most of them weren’t worth knowing anyway; weird, trendy people of questionable sexuality. I’d never had much in common with them, nor they with me.
Lovecraft’s ghost followed me through the Reference section while I guided a customer who was pointing out books with errors in them. I hate it when someone does that.
“The tumor’s getting larger,” intoned Dr. Lyons with all the seriousness of a hanging judge. He held up two cat scans. “As you can see from the earlier one, it was only about the size of a grape. Now it’s getting close to
a plum.”
I’d never eaten a plum, so had no idea about its size. I figured that it wasn’t a good comparison.
“So none of the treatments have done anything?”
Dr. Lyons sighed. “No. The radiation treatments barely seemed to slow its growth. Since we stopped doing those, it’s gotten bigger. The medication doesn’t seem to be working either. Surgery, although not recommended, is still an option.”
“You told me before that it was too dangerous.”
“It is. But I don’t really see any other way.” He got up from behind his desk. “Michael, you have to understand that without surgery this is going to continue to grow.”
Apparently I wasn’t impressed enough by this.
“Michael, you will die without this operation.”
I thought about this. Dying wasn’t necessarily the worst thing. Chemo was certainly on an equal footing. Poverty was right up there too.
“How long?”
“If the tumor continues to grow at this rate, maybe four to six months, on the outside. But, Michael, they won’t be comfortable months.”
He went on to describe how, as the tumor grows, I would begin to lose brain functions. My speech and sight would be affected. My coordination would deteriorate, and I would start having hallucinations. In short, it would be a living death.
I thanked him and left. Dr. Lyons was confused and followed me out into the hall. He wanted to know why I didn’t want to schedule the operation immediately. I looked at him.
“Because I can’t afford it.” I turned away. He didn’t stop me.
Robert E. Howard made a writing career out of stories of strong, rugged men who tamed their worlds and bent others to their will. It was a universe of barbarians with strong sword arms and evil sorcerers who plotted magic schemes of conquest. Not once do I recall an REH character dying of cancer or an illness. Of course, that probably would have been too personal a thing considering how his mother died.
