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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed when he saw me. ‘Where the hell have you been and what the hell happened to you?’

  ‘Went to a party that got a little rough,’ I muttered.

  ‘Must have been some fuckin’ party. You missed at least three final exams, you know.’

  ‘Impossible. I don’t have my first final until Monday afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, man, don’t you know what day it is?’

  ‘I thought it was Sunday night.’

  ‘Sorry to break the news, pal, but it’s almost Wednesday morning. You’ve been gone four days.’

  * * * *

  How I got through those final days of my Senior year, I don’t know. I took make-up exams, of course, but my mind and heart were elsewhere and I did poorly in every subject. Enough to drop my grade average from a B-plus to a C-minus. Enough to jeopardise my plans for graduate school. Enough to make me prime fodder for the draft board.

  To this day, I remember nothing about graduation, except my parents’ troubled displeasure at the way my scholastic career had nosedived. I was like an addict who had suddenly been deprived of his drug of choice. Nothing could erase the horror of what I had awakened to in Virginia’s room, but neither could I get her out of my mind. Perhaps, just perhaps, there had been some explanation, which she’d had no chance to give, that would have enabled me to live with this new and bizarre element in our relationship. Part of me was now afraid of her, but larger and more primal parts of me ached for her, for the voluptuous rapture her presence filled me with. I knew, with a woeful certainty, that I would never find another woman who could conjure such erotic magic.

  I lost track of days and nights; I hung out in my parents’ house, parried some with my old friends, made a few desultory passes at my manuscript. In my own way, I had ‘dropped out’ before the phrase became a cliché.

  When the draft notice came in the mail, in late June, I accepted it stoically. I suppose, looking back on it, that I held fairly conventional ideas about the Vietnam crusade. As an avid student of history, I was under no illusions about the purity of Communist causes - I knew how much blood dripped from the mandarin-thin hands of Ho Chi Minh; and as a writer, I knew the old bastard was at best a third-rate poet. I fancied myself something of a military history expert, and I was curious to see if we could do what the French had failed to do: put a lid on the ideological ant-heap. But in the end, I guess, I submitted to the United

  States Army’s call more or less for the classic reason men enlist in the Foreign Legion: I wanted to forget. I wanted a distraction big enough to cure me of Virginia. I figured it would take something on the scale of a war to do that.

  But before I entered the embrace of the Green Machine, I wanted to pay her one last visit. I guess I had some bullshit notion of letting her know it was due to her that I was going off to war and maybe going to get my young ass shot off, not to mention some other parts of me that she had been very fond of. I wanted some kind of apology, some kind of explanation, some kind of closure.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  * * * *

  I drove to The Gardens on a muggy windless Wednesday night, a couple of days before I was scheduled to embark for basic training at Fort Bragg. On impulse, I shut off the headlights and coasted quietly into the parking area in front of the house, not wanting to spoil the impact of my sudden appearance at the door. All around, the groves and fields were in full summer riot and when I inhaled that opulent mixture of fragrances I felt not unlike an alcoholic who’s taking his first belt of bourbon after months of sobriety. Memories washed over me. I was a bit unsteady when I silently closed the car door and mounted the front steps.

  After waiting a few minutes for someone to answer my knock, I tried the door. It was not locked. There was dim light spilling from the kitchen into the hallway, but otherwise the place was dark. I heard no sounds of activity. It was too early for the inhabitants to be asleep, and I was quite sure they were not out watching a movie or eating at a local cafe. I walked down the length of the hall and paused before entering the kitchen. I knocked again, rather timidly, on the doorframe. Again, no response. The kitchen was empty.

  But now that my ears had grown used to the silence, I did hear Virginia’s voice - distant and too muffled for me to make out any words. It seemed to come from within the walls. I circled the room, trying to home-in on the sound, until its volume increased slightly. I was standing in front of what I had always assumed was the door to a storage closet or a pantry.

  After a moment’s pause, I also became aware of a new and altogether unpleasant set of aromas: dank, heavy, suggestive of mould and fungi, even of rot. Part of my mind was urging me to forget the whole business, turn my back forever on this part of my life and just drive away. Another part of my mind was intrigued: was this perhaps the entrance to Mother’s private lair? If it was, and I managed to get a look at what was going on there, I might at least come away from this journey with answers to a few of my questions.

  This internal debate did not last long, and, of course, the curious part of me won it. I turned the door knob, and slipped through the opening. As I did so, the foetid, fungal smells grew oppressively stronger: organic, heavy, full of slow, unpleasant moisture. I fought down an impulse to gag and tried to breathe through my mouth.

  I was standing at the top of a narrow rickety flight of stairs that made a sharp righthand turn about fifteen feet below the door. There was enough light to see by, but it was a type of light that corresponded to the smells emanating from below: greenish and sickly and thick enough to verge on mist.

  Now I could hear Virginia’s voice clearly. She was talking eagerly about whatever experiments were being conducted, horticultural terms mostly, and her words were punctuated by the sounds of glass and metal implements. It took a moment or two of hard listening to realise that the conversation was two-sided.

  Some of Virginia’s remarks were answered by monosyllabic grunts that seemed to come from a throat stopped with phlegm, the words barely intelligible to me, as though they bubbled up from underwater.

  Carefully, I descended the last few steps and peered around the edge of the entrance to this subterranean den.

  I only got a glimpse before I turned and ran back upstairs and out of the house, but I remember every detail, flash-frozen on my retinas: beds of glistening moulds and fungi, some of the growths extruding waving fronds that looked very similar to the vines that had fastened upon me in Virginia’s workshop; Virginia in a stained lab smock, transplanting a vile-looking lump of matter that shuddered and humped in her hand as though it were not merely alive, but sentient; creepers and vines writhing on the ceiling, turning the room into a living cavern; tubes filled with circulating fluids that were being pumped from one obscene growth to another.

  And Mother, of course.

  Mother still retained a human shape, if you could call it that: an immense, shuddering bulk of distended and puffy flesh, mottled with unhealthy greens and charnel greys and pocked with scabbed-over sores, some of them oozing a dark yellow ichor. Mother, whose fingers had fused into some unholy amalgam of flesh and vegetable matter, Mother, whose face, when she turned it more fully into the greenish light, was a mass of pendulous polyps. Mother, who moved to hand her daughter a glass beaker, and who did not step so much as slosh forward, as though the simple act of movement brought her flesh - if that’s what it was in her condition - to the verge of liquefaction.

  I made a sound, more a groan of disgust than anything else, and fled up the stairs as fast as I could go. Most of my mind shut down from the impact of what I had seen, but one rather incongruous thought did keep surfacing as I drove recklessly away: that woman, or whatever she had become, had fixed my supper. Dozens of times.

  * * * *

  Lucky me: I got to Vietnam just in time for the Ia Drang Valley campaign, in November of 1965. Actually, I was pretty lucky in a sense: my unit did not participate in the main battle in the mountains just east of the Cambodian border,
where more than five hundred men of the First Cav were killed or wounded in a vicious, close-up encounter with about two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. But I was on the fringes of the battle, participating in numerous patrols and ambushes in the vicinity of Due Co. My unit didn’t have any stand-up fights with the NVA - not in November, at any rate - but we lost men almost every day to mines, mortar attacks, and snipers.

  Every man took his turn at point on those patrols. My CO gave me a few weeks to get acclimated before giving me that assignment. That day’s operation promised to be hairy: we were to scour an area of particularly thick jungle south of Route 19, where some of the enemy units decimated in the Ia Drang fight were thought to be regrouping and licking their wounds.

  Visibility under the forest canopy was dangerously limited; I could see, at best, maybe twenty metres ahead of my M16 barrel and I kept turning around to make sure the rest of my platoon was still behind me. We’d gone about a kilometre when we came to a slight clearing that bordered a stream. On the opposite bank were some mammoth trees with roots the size of a small car, surrounded by dense underbrush. The thought crossed my mind: if I were the enemy, I could not ask for a better place to mount an ambush.

  I’ll cop to it: I was scared shitless. I’d never been this close to the enemy before, nor been in a close-range firefight. Without thinking, I reached for the only talisman I had: Virginia’s little pot-pourri bag, which I carried in one pocket of my blouse. My fingers closed over it, and it released a slight, comforting fragrance. I sniffed my fingers, just as I had on the morning after we’d first made love, hoping to obtain some magical connection with a simpler, sweeter time.

  As soon as I did that, I experienced the first major olfactory flashback I’d had in months. It came over me like the first rush of a hit of bad speed. My skin prickled, my vision blurred and I was suddenly cognisant of the rainforest smells, in all their wet, fecund, richness, just as if I had inhaled some of Virginia’s custom blends. It was overwhelming: orchids and vines, earth and mould, the silvery scent of the creek, even a passing feral hint of a tiger somewhere in the deeper forest.

  I knelt behind cover and signalled for the men behind me to do the same. I tried to ride out the sensations, sort out the smells, get myself together. With this kind of sensory overload, I was worthless as a point man.

  Or was I?

  After the first blast of scent, my mind began processing the input in a more rational manner, and beneath all the jungle odours, I began to discern - as sharp and keen as woodsmoke on a winter night – the smell of human flesh, and the unmistakable odour of the fish-sauce the Vietnamese love to put on their food. And I knew with absolute certainty that the enemy was on the opposite bank of the stream, waiting for us to come into the open.

  I crawled back to the platoon and told the lieutenant what I thought.

  ‘How do you know they’re over there?’ he whispered. ‘Did you see movement?’

  ’No sir. I smelled ‘em. And I’m not just guessing - they’re there’

  The lieutenant stared at me for a moment, weighing his decision. I didn’t blame him for being sceptical - I was still considered an FNG (Fucking New Guy) and this was, after all, my first time as point man. Then he made up his mind, pulled out a map, and signalled for our d radioman to scuttle closer. Two minutes later, the radioman was bent over the handset of his PRC-25, calling in a fire mission from a battery of 155s that were on call to support us.

  Then the lieutenant and I crawled back to a point where we could observe the other side of the stream. The first round fell a little short, throwing up a huge geyser of muck. The radioman adjusted the range and called for a barrage. The far bank vanished in a whirlwind of fire, smoke and debris, and as the big shells chewed things up, we heard e screams and observed body parts and pieces of weaponry flying through the air.

  If there were any survivors among the would-be ambushers, they fled long before we crossed the water and started counting the bodies. Well, ‘estimated’ is maybe the word, because the barrage had left only bits and pieces. The lieutenant finally decided, somewhat arbitrarily, I thought, that we had zapped at least twenty NVA, and after he radioed that information back to headquarters, he slapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Ya done good, son. You must have a golden nose!’

  Of course, the tale of that patrol grew in the telling, and some of the other guys started looking at me funny, as though I had some kind of supernatural penumbra glowing around my head. Like it or not, I was stuck with the nickname ‘Golden Nose’ from that day until the day I finished my tour.

  But the funny thing - well, it really wasn’t funny so much as weird -is that from the moment of that olfactory flashback, my sense of smell became permanently hypersensitive and my ability to control it, to turn it on and off, grew with practise. Of course the very experience of combat heightens all the senses, adrenalises the reflexes, causes time to dilate (many a firefight registered on my eyes in Sam Peckinpah slow motion), and generally reinforces the notion that life itself is experienced most keenly when you’re in danger of losing it. All of us felt such things.

  Only I had an extra sensory edge. Whatever Virginia and her potions had done to my chemistry, to the very meat of my brain, I was blessed/ cursed with a nose that would have done credit to a K-9 tracking dog. Danger and adrenalin made my aroma-perceptions bloom. It was a blessing in the sense that I could literally smell an ambush or an otherwise undetectable enemy bunker complex. My CO was wise enough not to give me the point every time we went into the bush - a man can only do that so many consecutive times before he burns out and turns into little more than a quivering bundle of ganglia - but when we went tunnel-hunting or when there seemed a good likelihood of enemy contact, I was usually up front, nostrils flared, antenna twitching, filtering out the now-familiar rotten-ripe scents of the forest or the rice paddies, trying to pick up the smell of the enemy - the rice he ate, the bunkers he slept in, the hidden places where he buried his shit. I was good at it; I saved some lives and caused some serious hurt to the gooks.

  As for the ‘curse’ part, well, I learned about that a week or so after the ‘Golden Nose’ patrol. My platoon went into billet for a few days, while some other poor bastards went out and beat the bushes in our stead. We got a chance to catch up on sleep, write letters, take showers, eat steaks, drink beer, walk to the local native town and pay for a perfunctory blowjob.

  We also got a chance to smoke pot. Shit, everybody did it except some of the officers, and most of them just looked the other way. The rule of thumb seemed to be: get stoned when you’re off duty, if you want to, but stay clean when you’re in the field. I had not partaken of the weed since that disastrous Christmas party when it triggered my first, and so far worst, olfactory flashback. But when the corporal in the next bunk handed me a reefer of Thailand’s Best, I figured what the hell?

  Big Mistake.

  Oh, it felt good enough at first: a nice mellow buzz followed by idle thoughts of walking into the village and getting my ashes hauled. Going with the flow, I brushed my teeth, juiced my pits, and put on the one shirt I could find that was not fouled with sweat. Then I went outside and I got as far as the wire perimeter when the bottom fell out of the world.

  That first wave wasn’t so bad. The thing about Vietnam, once you discounted the heat, the monsoons, and the fact that about half the population wanted to kill you, was that it was a damned beautiful country. That first deep breath bequeathed me the essence of that lush green beauty: the delicacy of rice fronds waving in the wind, the richness of the jungles, the stern granite of the nearby mountains, the vast and sinuous pictogram of the Mekong River.

  Then I inhaled again and I smelled everything - and I do mean everything - which lay beneath that beauty. I smelled the decay of fifty thousand corpses, even the dry powdery effluvium of the bones of those Frenchmen who had died here in the 1950s. It was as though I had become suspended over a vast charnel pit where each and every victim of that tragic country’s endles
s wars had been gathered in one stinking mountain of human offal: the stale-shroud scent of the long dead along with the ripe fluid-and-tissue reek of the newly killed.

  I reeled and gasped again, and yet another layer of scent invaded my pores: the sour and devious reek of corruption emanating from the governments in Saigon, and the sly taint of hypocrisy pooled in the armpits and under the tongues of our own politicians and generals. I smelled the char of napalmed flesh, the palpable stink of fear from those about-to-be-tortured. I smelled the earthy wriggling of maggots. I smelled jet fuel and the cordite of a million fire-missions.

  Even now, after many years of trying to find the vocabulary to do justice to the experience, I can only adumbrate the palest echo of what it was like. My nostrils burned with violation, my brain began to seethe, unable to contain the input. With no other possible outlet, I began to scream. Those who witnessed me in the throes of this moment later told me I looked like a man who had been struck by lightning. Several guys ran over to where I lay, writhing on the ground in a foetal ball, clawing at my skull. I remember nothing that happened after I hit the ground, and that’s just as well, but one of the soldiers who reached me first later told me that the only intelligible words I said were: ‘Virginia, you bitch, what did you do to me?’