by Curran, Tim
There was no time to admire the fog as the officers and sergeants called for the men to “stand to” and up on the fire step they went, bayonets fixed to guard against a dawn raid. It was the same every day. Afterwards came what the Tommies called the “morning hate” in which both sides exchanged machine-gun fire and some light shelling just to relieve the tension of waiting. It didn’t last long. The soldiers stood down, cleaned rifles and equipment, were inspected by the officers.
“Hear you’re coming for a walk with us,” Corporal Kelly said to Creel as they breakfasted on hard bread, bacon, and biscuits.
“Thought I might,” Creel told him.
“Won’t be good out there, sir,” Kelly said, shielding his rations from a light falling rain. “If I was you, I’d change me mind. You don’t have to go but we do.”
There was no getting past the dread underlying his words, but was that the understandable fear of the enemy or was it something else? Creel didn’t ask. No sense getting any of the boys worked up and nervous like he was.
“The bloody situations you get me in,” Burke said to him as he had a cigarette. “Think I’d be safer in combat.”
“Something’s going on out there,” Creel told him, “and I have to find out what.”
“Still on that, mate?” Burke said.
“Yes, and I’m going to be on it until I figure it out. You can’t tell me you don’t sense it like I sense it. It’s there. Something incredible. Something unreal.”
That made Burke laugh. “You believing them stories? Old Creel? The kingpin of cynical bastards everywhere? Cor, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“You saw those prints. You felt something out there.”
But Burke wouldn’t have it. “Not me, not me. Didn’t feel a thing. And I didn’t on account I like to sleep at night.”
The mist still held thick after breakfast and Haines gathered them together—Creel, Burke, Kelly, and a Private known as Scratch because of his lice infestations—and they climbed up on the fire step. Captain Croton scanned the perimeter with his trench periscope. “Right,” he said. “Good time as any.”
As they went over the sandbags, Creel understood the fear that ate at every man on the line. As foul and disgusting as the trenches were, there was safety in them and out beyond was death waiting, hiding in every draw and pocket. They crawled over the muddy ground, slipping through breaks in the barbwire ramparts that were tangled with bird-picked skeletons, and soon enough they were out in No-Man’s Land.
Though the fog was still heavy, Creel could see the shattered landscape of shell-holes, oozing pink clay and pooling brown mud, heaps of pulverized brick. There had been a forest or wood here at one time and now it was just a wasteland of stumps and limbless trees rising up like telegraph poles amongst sucking black mud holes crisscrossed by duckboard.
“All of you stay behind me,” Haines said. “Stay on the duckboard and be quiet.”
“Do what the bloody git says,” Burke said under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, Sergeant,” said Burke, grinning.
Gripping his Enfield, sixty pounds of fighting kit on his back, Creel did as he was told as they moved single file down the duckboard which seemed to sink into the mud as their weight pressed down upon it. Dirty water sloshed over their ankles and the stink of putrescence rose from pools of muck that were inundated with assemblages of corpses, maggoty and green, white bone shining through graying hides. Corpse-flies filled the air with a steady low buzzing. Out in the mist, he could hear the splashing and squeaking of rats.
How Haines navigated, he did not know. No sun, no stars, nothing but the repetitious expanse of stumps and sinkholes, the rain coming down in sheets, bomb craters bubbling with brown water, a muddy slime sluicing over the duckboard itself. But Haines was an old hand. He’d been in the trenches since the beginning, fighting amongst the slapheaps and pitheads of the Mons coalfields and leading suicidal charges against German Jager Battalions at the Battle of Marne. Maybe he had the intelligence and personality of a toad, but he knew his business.
The duckboard sank away just ahead but they stayed on it, feeling it beneath them as they waded through thigh-deep water that was cold and heavy, floating with branches and abandoned ration tins and empty rusting cordite cans, all matter of refuse. Rats swam from one heap to the next, huge things, bloated and greasy. The duckboard carried them up out of the swamp and soon enough there was no more duckboard—just the remains of the forest ahead, the shafts of blackened trees like graveyard monuments, crowded, leaning, strung with rusting barbwire, mist like white lace drifting about their trunks.
Haines led on and the muck was up to their knees but thankfully got no deeper. The sergeant let them rest a moment while he took a bearing with his compass. There were rags and bones, boots and helmets everywhere as if the moist, steaming earth had regurgitated a meal of men. Scratch and Kelly sorted around a bit, finding shell casings and old Lewis gun drums, scaring carrion crows from the remains of Hun soldiers.
“Look at this,” Scratch said, holding up a German helmet with a bullet hole channeled neatly through it. “He took it in the head, poor bastard.”
“Aye, but it was quick, weren’t it?” Kelly said, gnawing on some canned Bully Beef.
“You eating again?” Burke said.
“I’m hungry.”
“Swear you got the worms or something.”
“Pipe down,” Haines told them, reading his compass.
Creel sat there smoking, clicking off a few shots of the wreckage around him with his Brownie. He did not need to be there at all and he knew it. He could have had a soft, cushy job back home in Kansas City. He rated an editor’s job, but here he was in this misting netherworld of rats and crows, carrion and mud. He didn’t belong here…then again, he hadn’t belonged in the Balkan Wars or the Mexican Revolution, the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion, but he’d been there and now he was here.
War and the litter it produced, always drew him.
Sighing, he watched Kelly and Scratch.
Just kids. That’s all they were. Maybe the atrocities of the trenches had bleached the innocence from their eyes and replaced it with a perfect hollow glaze of indifference, but they were still kids. He watched them scavenging, playing in the mud while Burke just shook his head. They found the fully articulated skeleton of a Hun officer gripping a tree trunk for dear life. They could not pry him loose…he had grown into the tree with ropy tendrils of decay like the fibers of woodrot threading through a deserted house.
Haines gave the word and they moved on, splashing through the muck, rain running from the brims of their steel helmets. It grew very quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing scurried. Water dripped from the trees, but little else. The mist blew around them in churning clouds. Creel wiped a mixture of cold sweat and colder rain from his face, very much aware of the beat of his heart. His greatcoat and mud-slicked boots seemed like concrete. He thought if he stopped completely he would simply sink away. He was seeing things moving around them, but he knew it was imagination…ghosting, long-armed forms at the periphery of his vision.
“Down,” Burke suddenly said.
They crouched in the mud, not seeing anything or hearing anything…then three ghostly forms emerged from the fog: a German reconnaissance patrol, faces blackened, bayonets fixed. They moved with an eerie silence over the boggy ground, not muttering a word. They faded into the mist and Creel could not be certain that they hadn’t actually been ghosts.
Ten minutes later, fighting through mud pools and crawling over the exposed roots systems of blasted trees, they sighted the trench system and ruined dugout Sergeant Stone and his men had been using. Creel could see a nearly-obliterated sandbag rampart enclosing a series of trenches flooded with a slimy yellow muck which bobbed with rat corpses. There was a crumbling brick wall that looked like the remains of a house or hut that had taken direct hits from heavy artillery. A single dead tree rose up above it, hooded crows gathered on its remai
ning branches.
They moved closer, spread out now so that a single volley of machine-gun fire could not cut them all down in a single sweep.
A crow squawked.
Rain fell.
And for each man, dread moved in their bellies.
Creel put a cigarette in his mouth and it was sodden with the rain almost immediately.
“Go easy here, gov,” Burke told him, a guiding hand on his shoulder. “My back’s up. We’re being watched. Sure we are.”
Creel looked around but could see nothing. Yet, he could almost feel eyes, watching eyes, staring out at them from the gathering fog.
Rats scratched over the sandbags, dozens of them sitting atop the broken wall as if waiting for something. Creel nearly stepped on a bloated white corpse and then jumped back when he saw not two but three rats come out of the torso in a steady march. They hissed at him and went on their way.
“Kelly, I want you off to the left flank,” Haines said. “Scratch…the right. Secure the area. Creel, with me.”
Burke went along. Haines did not include him by name because he did not like him. Burke had the VC and Haines was livid with jealousy.
Creeping over the sandbags, they moved up on the dugout.
A hot stench of decay wafted out at them. Inside, it was shadowy and dim, black swarms of flies rising in clusters, crawling over their faces and hands. There was three feet of water inside, rubble and refuse, and Sergeant Stone. He was leaning up against the wall like he was about to catch a smoke…only he was slit open from belly to throat and perfectly hollow within. Not a scrap of viscera or meat could be seen.
“Rats?” Creel said, amazed by that point that anything could sicken him.
But Haines shook his head, breathing hard. “He wasn’t bitten open, you fool…he was slit. He was opened by a trench knife, maybe, then gutted, cleaned out like a bloody fish.”
Again, Burke examined the body and flashed Creel a look. “Like the others,” he said.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Haines demanded.
“It means, you great bloody gob, that Stone was chewed on by something that wasn’t a rat nor a dog,” he said, glaring into the man’s eyes. “These teeth marks…they’re from something else. Something, I’m thinking, that walks about on two feet like we do.”
“Idiot,” Haines said, crawling up and out of the dugout.
“Scared stiff, ain’t he?” Burke said, pointing a thumb at the sergeant’s hasty retreat. “Don’t blame him, I don’t. Not at all.”
Creel found himself staring at Stone’s face which was a grinning grave rictus, lips pulled back from discolored teeth. There were maggots in his eye sockets. In the tomblike silence of the dugout you could actually hear the industrious suckering sounds of them feeding.
“Enough,” Burke said.
They moved back over the crumbling wall, the bricks tumbling away beneath them. Scratch was waiting there with his rifle, surveying the flooded trenches and the swimming rats crossing them. There was a Hun corpse at his feet.
“Look at this,” he said. He pressed his foot down on the corpse’s chest and the blackened tongue slid out from between the lips. He lifted his boot and the tongue retreated. He kept doing it, giggling, human remains having lost all shock value for him.
And the war will end, Creel thought, taking a snapshot of the body, and he’ll have to go back home, his mind a black sore of corruption.
“Kelly!” Haines called out, just above a whisper but firm. “Kelly!”
They looked around and he was nowhere to be seen. They moved off to his last position but there was nothing. Swearing under his breath, Haines led them off, circling around the post in an ever-widening search pattern.
Kelly was gone.
“We better be off,” Burke said. “Whatever got him is still out there. I can…I can smell it.”
And the absolutely crazy thing was so could Creel. What was that odor? Sharp, pungent, like a stench beyond death.
“Oh, Christ,” Scratch said. “He was there…I saw him…”
Creel studied Haines. This was a judgment call now and he could almost hear the gears whirring in his head. Did they retreat back to the trenches and leave Kelly or did they stay and risk their own lives in what might be a vain search? Maybe the reconnaissance patrol took him out quietly. Maybe he sank in the mud. Maybe he wandered off. The grim possibilities were endless.
Scratch’s face was white as cream, flecked by specks of mud. His squinting eyes like knife scars, his mouth trembling. Haines peered about like a hunting hawk. Burke was listening. The rain came down in gray sheets, chill and clammy.
“Quiet now,” Haines said, picking up on something.
Creel felt it and feeling it could not be sure of what it was…just a vague unformed terror that seemed to be swelling inside him, filling him up and making him go bad to the roots. He studied the devastation, the falling rain, the plumes of mist creeping over the ground.
“It’s coming,” Burke whispered.
Creel was hearing it, too…something out there in the fog, something moving in their direction. Slowly. At first it was just a muffled sound and then it became clearer: footsteps in the mud. Squishing sounds of feet—many feet. Stealthy, relentless. Then something else that sounded just beneath the falling rain like a hissing but soon revealed itself to be whispering, voices whispering.
Creel felt an irrational terror move inside him. His mouth was so dry he could not swallow. Those footsteps were coming from just ahead, to the left, to the right, as was the whispering. It was growing in volume but it was completely unintelligible. Like pressing your ear to a bedroom wall trying to make out voices in the next room that were purposely hushed.
“Ain’t the Hun,” Scratch said, his voice squeaky like a rusty hinge.
The whispering was practically on top of them.
Soon, any second now, what was out there would step out of the mist and Creel did not know what that could be. He could not wrap his rational brain around it, could not make himself believe it was men…for in his mind he saw specters and flesh-eaters, things with eyes like seeping red wine.
“Withdraw,” Haines said under his breath. “Pull back…pull back for the life of Christ…”
And they did just as forms emerged from the fog. Neither Haines nor Scratch saw them and Burke had turned away, but Creel did. Just for a second before the fog enveloped them again. What he saw were…small, elfish, wraith-like things that looked very much like children.
He clearly saw a boy and his face was that of a stripped skull.
9
Dr. Herbert West
I had assumed, and maybe even hoped, that following the destruction of West’s laboratory in the barn that his research would also come to an end. That it was obscene and blasphemous, I did not doubt. That by taking part in it I had damned my eternal soul, I firmly believed. After the barn crashed down and burned into a smoldering heap of timbers, I implored West to stop. As fascinated as I was by his compulsions, his obsessions, his almost preternatural scientific acumen, I fully believed that it needed to come to an end. That the shelling of the barn was akin to the finger of God. An omen. A portent. Call it what you will.
When I broached these thoughts to West two days after the shelling as he amputated the leg of a man with considerable dexterity, he laughed at me. “Stop now? Now when I stand upon the threshold of ultimate creation? I think not. Now is the time for more intensive study than I have yet undertaken,” he told me, that cruel gleam in his eye. “Now, if you would kindly step down from your moral high ground and abandon your lofty ethics, Lieutenant, there are wounded men here that require attention.”
Typical West to a fault—arrogant, egotistical, superior. As if I was the one who was derelict in his duty. No matter. On the orders of Colonel Brunner, the A.D.M. S. of our sector, I was sent down to the battalion aide post as Medical Officer and I was glad to be away from West and whatever might be going on behind those glacial eyes of his.
My duties at the front were fairly routine. I started my day with the morning sick parade where those thought to be too ill for duty were examined. There was the usual amount of malingerers, but many serious cases as well. The soldiers seemed to feel better with an M.O. at hand though in many situations, there was very little I could do.
The trenches were generally broken up into three sets—the forward fire trench, the rear trench, and the extension trench. The forward, I discovered, was nearly always about waist-deep in water while the rear had about two feet in it and the extension was flooded to nearly five feet in depth. As M.O. I had to slog through like the rest, barely keeping my footing on the slimy mud beneath.
The German trenches occupied higher ground so the rain washed downhill into our own as well as the drainage from their lines. The sanitary conditions of the trenches were abysmal. The Tommies fought, ate, slept, and relieved themselves in these flooded, narrow cuts of foul water. Empty ration cans were used when possible for feces and urine and tossed from the trench, but it all drained back down in copious amounts. Wounds exposed to that filth became infected and often necrotic in a very short time. The officers had the men dig drainage ditches, but it did little good.
There were decomposing bodies everywhere that drew millions of flies and thousands of scavenging rats which the Tommies called “corpse-rats”. I do not exaggerate when I say they were the size of tomcats. They were fat from feeding off the dead, spreading typhus, ratbite fever, and lice infestations and it was this louse whose feces caused numerous cases of trench fever. This, I must add, in addition to the suffering already caused by hunger, fatigue, shell shock, and raging cases of enteric fever. Prolonged submergence in the vile water caused feet to blister and swell with trench foot, often to two and three times their size if not treated immediately with dry socks and dry boots which were a rarity at the front. Sometimes boots had to be cut off infected feet very carefully as the skin was white, puckered, and suppurating, and often peeled free in great morbid sheets of tissue. The Tommies told me you could drive a bayonet through your foot when it was well-advanced and not feel a thing. Trench foot gangrene was common and resulted in amputation.
