by Curran, Tim
16
The Workshop
When I finally caught up with West it was at the farmhouse and I wasted no time in taking him aside rather roughly and demanding some answers because it was far past the point where I wanted to listen to his sarcastic little denials and his cheeky morbid humor. Events were rapidly escalating out of control.
“You’re in a blue mood today, aren’t you?” he said.
“And I’ve got a damn good reason to be, Herbert. I’ve just come from Loos.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Most unpleasant from what I’ve heard, hmm? The BEF advanced and were pushed back to where they started from.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Herbert. The LIR shot down one of your pets, that thing you had chained up in the corner,” I said, pointing to where that abomination had been but was no more.
He gave me his typical little smile. “Hmm. Unfortunate. It seems to have escaped in the night. You know how dogs are.”
“Herbert, please.”
“Good God, you don’t think I released it on purpose?”
It wouldn’t have surprised me. “The point is, Herbert, that people are starting to ask questions. About that dog. About a great many other things. It’s only a matter of time before they trace it here.”
He held up a hand. “I have full and complete authorization from Colonel Wimberley to conduct research into advanced battlefield medicine.”
“Enough, Herbert!” I said. “This has gone far enough! You apparently can’t control these experiments of yours! It’s time to destroy them! If the BEF traces things here, I don’t even want to think of the reprisals.”
“Destroy them? No, no, no, not yet. Not until I’m done, not until the tissue has properly fermented.”
He was referring to that vat, of course, that he was freely feeding various bits of human anatomy daily. I did not like the constant low throbbing coming from that vat of hissing tissue which sounded very much like the steady beating of some huge fleshy heart or how those assorted parts in the glass vessels of bubbling serum seemed to respond with rhythmic contortions. It was not only obscene, but perverse, and, yes, evil. For the sinister, noxious atmosphere of West’s workshop could not be denied and its source was simple enough to trace: the vat, that bubbling vat of nameless flesh.
West was in his usual disagreeable, argumentative mood. I put certain questions to him concerning certain stories circulating amongst the troops of animate dead things encountered out in No-Man’s Land. Denial was all I got out of him. Sheer denial.
“Do you know anything about the orphanage?” I asked him, referring to the Catholic orphanage at St. Bru that had been devastated by a misdirected poison gas attack of the Hun using high-velocity, long-range shells. There had been no survivors. Some forty-three children died in that particular atrocity. I had not been involved in the reclamation of their poor little bodies, but heard it was horrendous as I could well imagine.
“St. Bru?” he said. “Of course. What of it?”
Such an exasperating man. I told him what of it. I put it to him with no due consideration to his feelings for I was sick of this cat-and-mouse. He denied everything and told me I was a superstitious old woman to believe any silly rot about walking dead children in No-Man’s Land. But I would not let it rest there.
“Herbert!” I said, angered. “Did you or did you not disinter those children and give them injections of reagent?”
Now it was his turn for anger. “Listen to me, you simpering, gourd-rattling little peasant…I have no interest in children. Not now. Not ever. As far as I know, those little ones are still in their graves.”
“Then how—”
“Tall tales, chimney-corner whispers, amusements from bored soldiers in the trenches.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have believed him for his sense of ethics was like some garment he donned only for convenience’s sake. Yet, I honestly believed he was telling the truth and his stern gaze did not falter even for a moment. But I was not satisfied. One or two ghost stories told by the Tommies of scavenging undead children? Fine. But the stories had now reached critical levels and were being told by dozens and dozens of men. And I, yes, I had seen the corpses out in No-Man’s Land. I had seen the gnawed bones, the tell-tale dentition of tiny teeth.
“The explosion, Herbert,” I said. “Is it possible that when your other workshop was destroyed by the shelling that certain elements were released?”
He acted dumbfounded, but knew exactly what I meant. The barnlike edifice where his laboratory had formerly been located had been destroyed in a German barrage. That much was known. But was it conceivable that the vat of tissue he had germinating there…that its contents had been spread around the countryside in the explosion or even been thrown up into the air in fragments only to be carried back earthward by the incessant rains? For we both knew the uncanny, frightening reanimative properties of that tissue in its bubbling bath of reagent. I thought my hypothetical scenario was the tree that bore fruit, but West disagreed.
“Dissipated, it would have simply died. It was merely a colony of cells.”
“And you can say,” I put to him, “that the mutative properties of that tissue, it’s inordinate, almost supernatural will to live could not be active at the cellular level?”
But he could not say that, only believed it to be “highly unlikely.” Yet, I could see that it had not occurred to him because he was more than casually excited at the possibility as blasphemous as it was. I should say here that West was exceedingly nervous—his intellect was blazing, as always, but there was an undercurrent of dread and agitation beyond his usual frenetic excitability. Twice while I was there, he peered out the windows as if looking for something and no less than three times he turned to me and said, “Tell me…old friend…did you see anyone on your way up the road?”
I told him that I hadn’t, yet he did not seem relieved.
Calmed somewhat by the fact that he had not deliberately resurrected any poor waifs, I relaxed somewhat even if he could not seem to sit still save for an occasional peep into his microscope. I brought a bottle of brandy and despite the mortuary spread around us, I forced him to drink with me for Michele LeCroix had accepted my proposal and we were to be married. West congratulated me, but I could see his mind was on other things—namely that awful vat and the unsettling sounds coming from it. I was certain at that point that whatever was coming to term in there had him scared to death.
17
Incoming
Sergeant Burke did a little snooping, something he was very good at, and learned that Dr. Hamilton was attached to the 1st Canadian Light Infantry, whose battle lines were only a few miles west of the 12th Middlesex. He was an American, as Creel had suspected, a lieutenant and quite a capable surgeon. Other than that, there was very little.
“There’s got to be more,” Creel said, somewhat exasperated.
“That’s it, mate.”
“Dammit. He’s involved in this somehow and I’m going to find out how.”
Burke sighed. “You’re going to get your arse thrown out of the war. And if you don’t care about that, think about me. I’ll have to go back to the fighting and I’m not liking the idea.”
Creel brooded for hours after that. He was too close. Right on the periphery of something that might be much bigger than even the war itself and he was not going to give up now. Though his relationship with Captain Croton was a little strained, maybe he could arrange a visit with the 1st Canadian, embed himself over there for a time because that’s where he needed to be. That was the epicenter or damned near to it.
Burke was always warning him about going slow because he was already trying the patience of command, but he wasn’t about to go slow. There was a time to hide and wait, a time to listen, and a time to spring and go for the throat and that particular time was now.
As he sat in the forward trench, lost in thought, watching the slugs inching out of the trench walls, listening to the frogs croaking out in flooded
bomb craters, he tried vainly to find his cynicism, his detachment, his objectivity—these were the meat and blood of any journalist—but they were gone. They no longer existed. He was one great creeping mass of anxiety from his head to his feet.
Go ahead, boyo, track down this Dr. Hamilton. Let him open his dark chest of wonders and let you peer inside. Write it all down. Write the story that can never be published. But it’s more than journalism now, it’s more than war reporting…it’s personal and you know it. Whatever’s at the root of this madness, it’s got your number.
And that number is about to be punched.
Sergeant Kirk came sloshing through the standing brown water and Creel nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Keep your head down,” he said. “The Hun is about to come calling. I can feel it in my bones.”
And Creel could too.
He could feel the tension building through the trenches like every man there was wired together, part of some machine of cycling dread. In the dugouts, on the firestep clutching rifles with almost religious devotion, huddled over meager dinners of cheese and Bully Beef, leaning up against sandbagged ramparts—all the faces were the same: bleached white, lips pulled into stern gray lines, eyes huge and almost neurotic in their intensity. The Tommies prayed, squeezed rosary beads in their fists, holding tight to good luck charms and fetishes, everything from rabbits’ feet to a badly worn photograph of a wife or a cherished child, and—in some cases—the dingy brass button off the tunic of a mate who’d gone home or a favored spent shell casing that had saved a life or some nameless wooden effigy carved out of boredom and hope, smoothed into an unrecognizable shape by oily grasping fingers.
Creel was not immune to it.
He found himself gripping his field notebook, tensing fingers pressing into familiar grooves in the leather cover. He watched men going through the pre-battle rituals of survival—touching objects, holding their rifles a certain way, squatting in a particular stance, many of them humming beneath their breath or whistling a lost tune from childhood. These were all protections against evil, dismemberment, and death. Charms that would get them through one more battle and one more day and the stark horror of fatalism was apparent on the faces of any that had broken, however minutely or innocently, the sanctified steps of ritualization.
Night crept over the sandbags in black twisting worms of funeral crepe. Breathing was low, heartbeats high. Sweat broke on faces. Limbs trembled so badly they had to be held in place.
Sergeant Burke was next to him. “Hold tight, mate,” he said. “We’ll soldier through.”
Good old Burke. Tough as nails. Made of the real stuff, as they said. Unlike himself whom he viewed more and more as some death-obsessed carrion crow picking away at the remains of lives, Burke was the real thing: a soldier, a hero, someone you could look up to, would be glad to call friend, the sort you’d be glad to give your daughter’s hand to in marriage knowing that, in the end, he always did the right thing, the honorable thing. As he thought this, he felt Burke’s hand take hold of his own and clasp it tightly in friendship. It was something the men did when the shelling got heavy—holding onto one another, fusing themselves together. But Creel had never been part of it. He was always alone…now Burke made him part of the chain and he felt a tear in his eye.
As darkness dimmed the sky and shadows crawled thickly, the German flares burst overhead, green and yellow, turning the trench system into some weird strobing shadowshow of stiff-legged figures as they drifted earthward, sputtering, on their little parachutes, revealing the jagged wounds in the earth and the insects that scuttled in them.
Then it began.
Shells came in with screaming blue-white velocities, dropping like autumn leaves and detonating the scarred countryside in vast, ear-shattering eruptions of pulverized earth and spraying black mud. Blazing shrapnel lit anything afire that was remotely flammable. Wood and fallen trees were blackened into charcoal sticks, water boiled to steam, sandbags glowed into blossoms of fire.
Creel saw lightning flash, heard thunder and felt earthquake. Smoke and fire and screaming and burning flesh. In the distance, the heavy guns popped like champagne corks, and every man in the trenches was listening intently, giving each and every round a personality all its own. Not just mindless projectiles, but death-dealing fingers of fate that were preordained to take certain lives and spare others. Pop, pop, pop, went the field guns and the men would think, worry, contemplate the unknown, the great mystery: There…that one…that one sounds like the one for me, I know that sound, I heard it before, maybe that’s what I heard when I died last time. The sky rained shells and some detonated in the distance and some quite close, but all shrieking with their expulsions of shrapnel seeking flesh to macerate.
Crouched against the trench wall while men shouted and sobbed around him, Creel listened to the shells come as he always listened to them come, gripping Burke’s hand ever tighter: whistling and screaming, buzzing like swarms of locusts…and others, fired from the heavy guns…came roaring like freight trains passing overhead. But the result was always the same—an eruption, flying shrapnel, a shockwave that would knock you flat and give you a concussion if you were close enough.
The shells kept coming and coming as if the Hun were intent on destroying the trenches themselves, erasing the battlescars of man’s preoccupation with killing his own kind. They came in volleys that went on for thirty minutes or more then there was a shattered silence for maybe ten or fifteen and they started flying again.
When the trench wall blew apart, covering him in mud and dirt and sandbags, Creel crawled up through it like a mole seeking sunlight. All around him in the flickering glow of the German flares he could see that the trench system had been wiped out, reassembled. There was nothing but an irregular series of smoldering shell-holes all around him flanked by mountains of earth, sticks, rubble, and corpses. Men were crying out for stretcher bearers, but not many because most were either gone or buried alive.
He was still gripping Burke’s hand…but Burke was no longer attached to it. He cried out and tossed the hand aside, almost hating himself for doing so.
The darkness was broken only by flaming wreckage or an occasional flare drifting overhead, the air thick with rolling plumes of smoke and a dust storm of dirt and grit and pulverized fragments that slowly rained earthward. There were cinders and soot everywhere. The entire landscape—what he could see of it—had been taken apart and rearranged and there was no way to tell where the rear was or where the Hun lines were or where to escape to.
Stunned, face black with ash and mud, Creel found he could not stand and when he did, he went right down to his knees. So he crawled over the earth, calling out for survivors in a dry, ragged voice that was barely above a whisper. A shadow stepped out of the gloom and he knew it was a German soldier, a big fellow in a shining steel helmet, rifle in hands, an enormous bayonet raised to strike. Then there was a single hollow report and the Hun fell to the earth and did not move. Another shape came out of the gloom and Creel called out to him, but was ignored. Whoever it was took the German’s helmet and rifle and disappeared into the shadows.
Trophy hunter, he thought, a goddamn trophy hunter of all things.
He got to his knees, crawling again. The BEF artillery was answering in kind now, lobbing shells at the German positions. There was sporadic gunfire all around him, the sound of grenades going off, the occasional dull thump of a trench mortar. The Germans, he realized, had let loose with one barrage after the other and now raiding parties were moving into the sector. He saw the silhouettes of several men climbing atop a razorbacked hill that had not existed before the barrage.
He climbed to his feet again, still wobbly, but better. He stood there for a time, clearing his head, stumbling along a thread of earth that zigzagged haphazardly amongst a series of bomb craters. Then he tripped and fell into a shell-hole, emerging finally from muck and water. He heard a volley of machine-gun fire, felt rats crawling over him. His grasping fing
ers searched along the muddy wall and found he was in luck: a ladder. The crater must have been part of a trench before the barrage.
He crawled out, over the muddy pitted ground, scaling humped things that he soon realized were bodies. Then another flare passed overhead and he saw that he was in a field of corpses, hundreds of them spread in every direction. Not all were dead. Some were writhing on the ground calling for medics and stretcher bearers. He saw men without limbs. Men who were living trunks being worried by rats.
He kept moving, sickened, beaten, beyond hope.
“Hey, mate, over here,” said a voice.
Creel crawled towards the form. He cradled the broken body in his arms and realized the man was dead, shattered by concussion. His head in Creel’s hands, though intact, was almost liquid within, the skull nearly disintegrated. Everything inside moved with a slow gelatinous roll.
Crawling again.
Over corpses. Fragments of the same. Through muddy holes and pools of standing water, rats skittering around him, driven into panic by the bombardment. He came across a Tommy who was sitting upright, his back wedged up against a furrow of blackened earth. “Hallo, Captain,” he said. “Bit of bitters tonight, ain’t she?” His left leg was missing, his right arm nothing but a burnt fleshless mass. In his left hand he was holding his stomach and intestines. He kept talking as though Creel were not even there.
“Barmy bit of luck,” he said as Creel moved off.
How long he crept through the nightscape he did not know, only that after what seemed hours, the war still murmuring around him from time to time, he began to see men coming through the moonlight. What appeared to be hundreds of them, gashed and broken, streaming blood from wounds. Their eyes were bulging. They were tearing at their throats. Gassed. All of them gassed. Yellow foam was gushing between their lips and he watched as they all began to fall, piling up atop one other, vomiting yellow slime from their mouths. Even in the pale moonlight, he could see that their faces were black as they gasped out their last breaths.
