Morbid Anatomy

by Curran, Tim

  He saw a Tommy not ten feet away suddenly disappear in a flurry of reaching white hands that came from the trench walls and floor and the gurgling water that sluiced around his waist. Many of them were not attached to anything but limb shanks. He screamed as they tore at him, joints popping and ligaments snapping, rendering him to a dismembered flailing thing like themselves.

  The Tommies were shooting, throwing grenades, hacking the dead apart with trench knives and bayonets and still their numbers swelled, more rising all the time like maggots—white and wriggling and voracious—abandoning graying meat for something sweeter.

  The living dead came in waves of carrion washing ashore on a charnel beach of white gleaming bones, piling up into great ramparts of festering rot that were hideously alive, hideously animate, creeping and slithering, stumbling about on skeleton legs and pulling themselves forward on their bellies like corpse-rats.

  As Creel screamed and fell into a black hole within himself, he saw hands crawling about like white bloated spiders. He saw hopping legs. Undulating torsos. Inching trunks. Things walking about with nothing above the waist…and still more fingers broke through the mud-scum and more tombstone faces floated to the surface of black pools.

  The night became a surreal shadow-world backlit by blazing stumps and burning sandbags, described by rolling pockets of fog, punctuated by screams and gunfire and the occasional shell tossing earth up in fiery plumes like lava from volcanic cones.

  He pulled himself up out the trenches as they were infested by the undead. He crab-crawled over the blasted earth, swimming across flooded bomb craters, navigating skeleton forests, picking his way through jawless skulls, jutting femurs and ulnas, yellowing ribcages and obscenely white lengths of vertebrae. Slicked with dirt and the slime of carrion, he found a dugout up above the water line and fell into it, landing on a heap of rubble that gave way and dropped him into a hollow filled with a few inches of rank water.

  “Hello, mate,” a voice said as he pulled himself free. “You’ll give my best to Dr. West, won’t you?”

  In the flickering light of fires and descending flares, Creel saw a Tommy sitting there in a mildewed uniform. His face was like something braided from yellow, black, and vividly red ropes. Each alive, each horribly undulant. A slick green corpse-worm slid from his left eye socket and another from the cavity of his nose and then a dozen were coming out, splitting his face lengthwise and sideways, and the flesh was crumbling, dropping away in clots and loops, leaving something behind like a grinning fright mask feathered with strings of tissue. That grinning mask kept smiling until it burst apart in a wild, hysterical cackling that rolled into the night becoming part of the chaos that was breaking open in every conceivable direction.

  Creel dragged himself from the dugout, moving over bones and through slime and ooze and mud. Then he fell into the muddy depths of the trench, sliding on his belly into the water like a seal. Clawing up walls of smooth moist clay, he saw a flapping gray shape above him and uttered a choking cry as his throat filled with a thick mass of terror he could not swallow away.

  It was the thing from the cavalry post, the thing from Chadbourg…that malevolent shrouded graveyard angel.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Just a scarecrow, he realized with a dry laugh in his throat. Just a scarecrow.

  The shroud had been hung from a couple iron poles shoved into the earth that had been used as a framework for sandbags that were now blasted away. The thing had abandoned its winding sheet now. It was no longer hiding and Creel had the craziest feeling that it wanted him to know this, that there was something darkly symbolic in this offering of graying, slime-spattered cerements.

  The shells were still coming intermittently, gouts of white and yellow smoke mixing in with the ground fog into a murky haze. The men of the 1st, those that were still alive, were firing and crying out. Creel was hearing other sounds, too, moist tearings and wet snappings, unpleasant sounds like boiled chicken peeled from bone.

  And screaming.

  “NO! NO! NO! PLEASE DON’T TOUCH ME! GET AWAY! OH DEAR GOD, GET AWAY—”

  That scream tore through the night, raging and barely human, the sound of absolute animal fright and human despair. Then it cycled off into nothingness.

  Another scream, somewhere off in the mist and shadows, terminated by a wet, meaty sort of sound like a cleaver sinking into a shank of beef. Then another. And another. And still another. Then Creel knew: whatever was out there, whatever was slaughtering the men, it was moving down the trench in his direction, killing anything that got in its way. Rifles fired. Revolvers. A grenade went off. But none of it could stem the black tide of whatever was rushing through the trenches and Creel had a pretty good idea what it was and what it wanted.

  The water was up to his knees and he ran through it, slipping and sliding on the muck that covered the trench floor, tripping over buried things and losing his footing, falling, getting up, his mind gone white with panic.

  “Oh…God…oh God,” a soldier called out and Creel turned to see a figure coming out of the fog, limping, shambling, holding itself upright by sheer force of will. In the light of the flares and flames, he could see that the soldier’s face was a mask of bloody strings and ribbons like something had tried to tear it free from the bone beneath and only been partially successful. There were four ruts peeled from the left cheek to the right temple, the remaining eye just a red scarified pit.

  “Run!” the soldier said with what life was left to him. “Run while you still can…”

  And then something…a gigantic grotesque shape…came out of the fog and took hold of him and neatly tore him in half like he was nothing but a doll stuffed with rags, casting his remains aside and vaulting forward.

  Creel ran, fell face first in that polluted water and came out of it, mad with fear, trying to claw his way up the trench wall, fingers digging into soft clay that oozed between his knuckles. Sobbing, he slid back into the water and shivered beneath the icy shadow of the thing that towered over him, the thing that exhaled a hot breath of gnawed corpses.

  “Oh please…” he said.

  “Creel,” it said to him, reaching down with immense gnarled hands. “You’re one of us…”

  23

  Catalyst

  Make no mistake about it, we were torn apart in the flooded trenches outside Charbourg. Some men died gallantly in the shell-fire, but other men were reduced to whimpering things when they saw what our true enemy was out there, the walking dead that came slithering from their mephitic holes to rage a war of extermination against the living.

  We were scattered in every direction and we did what we could, but men to each flank were dying. The Hun had buried their dead everywhere in the trenches—in the floor, in the walls, and that did not take into account all the other corpses in the mud. As I looked around for survivors, ducking every time a shell screamed overhead or erupted in a column of mud and black water, I did not—and could not—know what had reanimated so many. Certainly, West was responsible for some of it…but not this many. Even that megalomaniacal brain could not conceive of a mass resurrection on such a scale.

  There was another factor.

  A catalyst.

  It was not until I found three soldiers who were putting up a fierce defense that I knew what that catalyst was. As the dead poured forward and the soldiers literally blasted them into fragments—some were so rotten and waterlogged from the mud holes and lakes of stagnant water that they burst apart—the earth began to tremble. The water boiled in the trenches. Sandbags collapsed and dugouts crumbled to rubble. A single limbless tree fell over.

  The catalyst showed itself.

  Not fifteen feet from us it burst from the muddy earth in a yellow, pink, and gray-white mass of surging corpse-jelly. It pushed itself up, hiding no more, a great pulsating, noisome coagulation of tissue in horrible, surging motion…it kept coming and coming, rising up into a great glistening wave of noxious flesh that was easily twenty feet high and twice th
at in volume.

  The men screamed as it continued to rise from a great jagged cleft in the earth like a birth canal.

  As sickened as I was, I did not scream.

  I knew what it was, you see.

  This was some great monstrous mutation formed out of West’s vat of reptilian embryonic matter. When the Germans shelled the barn, West’s original lab, completely destroying it…they had not destroyed what was in that vat. It had escaped and tunneled underground like a monstrous worm, breeding in the darkness, suckling itself upon corpse-fat, corpse-meat, and the rich marrow of thousands of bones sunken into the mud of Flanders. West had another vat, a larger one, germinating at his other workshop in the farmhouse—or had—but this massive organism was part of the original. I knew that without question.

  As the men cried out, several going insane, I just waited for that blobby mass to fall over me and squeeze the life from me, make me part of its slithering immensity. But that did not happen. The Hun fired a devastating salvo at us—high-explosive rounds followed by incendiaries. They struck the creature, blasting it into fragments, into a pustulant rain of filth and hot drainage and spongy tissue that rained to earth and then went up in a massive fire storm as the incendiaries struck.

  The soldiers were buried alive in mud and the creature’s excrescence…I survived. I crawled out of the muck and somehow found my feet, blessing the Hun for intervention and begging only one last thing of them: that they would send but one more shell to end my wretched existence.

  But that did not happen either.

  I saw something coming out of the mist. It walked with jerking, mechanical motions, its arms held out before it. I knew what it was. It was dressed in a rotting bridal gown, holding out gray-skinned, black-veined hands for me. It had no head, but it knew where I was and it had been looking for me for some time. I could hear the rats that nested within, the buzzing of the insects that honeycombed that walking corpse.

  I should have run, I should have done something.

  But it was my Michele, resurrected—I like to believe—via the tissue that had burrowed below. She came for me and I waited for her with my trench knife in hand. Tears rolled down my cheeks and something inside me withered and went black. As she got closer I could see the rotting lace, the white of purity stained with corruption—mud and drainage and coffin-slime, a spreading furry fungi.

  A stink of fetid graves in my face, she took hold of me and I allowed this last embrace. Somehow, someway, I heard her voice in my mind like the sound of tinkling bells:

  I AM HERE.

  I brought the trench knife down, crying, shrieking, laid open by savage, cruel memory. I brought it down and kept bringing it down, slashing her into a limbless, writhing thing at my feet that I stabbed and stabbed and stabbed and right before it stopped moving with its obscene graveyard gyrations, the voice again:

  BUT I LOVE YOU

  PLEASE

  PLEASE HOLD ME

  I slashed and cut until there was nothing but a reeking, pooling mass of putrescence at my feet and then fell back, struck mad, as carrion beetles came out of her in a black oily flood and rats crawled free and then her belly opened and spewed forth a slimy, shocking pink river of squirming fetal rats that I hacked to bits.

  The trench knife still in my hand, splattered with my love’s remains, I staggered off into the mist waiting for the shrapnel-kiss of a shell that never did come.

  24

  The Conqueror Worms

  “Turn and face me, Creel,” came the voice that was oddly eloquent like Death himself yet garbled as if spoken through a mouthful of suet. “Look upon me.”

  Creel did as he was told, kneeling there in the mud and slopping brown water, clay packed beneath his fingernails and dirty water running down his face. It was not a voice you could refuse. He looked and his throat filled with hot desert sand, a choking whirlpool of it. His lungs gasping, his eyes refusing to shut out the horror they took in.

  The Angel Of Death—for it could be nothing else—was a huge, hulking, bulging mass of muscle, fleshy growths, and corded artery barely contained in a stretched, shining gray skin that was intersected by black suturing, a zigzagging, overlapping maze of it that held it together. It was manlike in form, but bulbous and mounded, its misshapen head bald on one side and sprouting with irregular tufts of long greasy black hair on the other, plated machine-like beneath by a jutting, distorted skull that was trying to burst free, the nose but a skullish cavity, one eye set much lower than the other, black and juicy like a tumor, the other yellow and bright and unbearably sentient.

  It stood there breathing with a deathly rasp, its barrel-like chest rising and falling, ribs slats tearing through the skin, knobs of bone protruding from holes worn in the hide. It was like something put together from a dozen separate corpses, stapled and wired and catgut-threaded, a patchwork ghoul made from human hides and oily gray lizard skin and the bristling pelts of hogs. A mortuary crazy quilt. Even its face was an assemblage. Black stitching ran from the crown of its skull, down its forehead and nose and below the jawline. Suturing lines split off it, dividing the face into thirds, then fourths, and finally fifths…each offset and sucked in by hollows or pushed out by abnormal mounds of bone so that the effect was hideous…the blurred, subhuman face of something seen through a cloudy freakshow jar.

  It reached down with one hand, fingers wired to the knuckles and hung with ropy strands of skin. It was immense and fleshy, disfigured, as it gripped Creel’s own. And the feel of it…like being embraced by the cold guts of a dead fish…he could feel the squirming larval motion within.

  “You’ve hunted death your entire life,” it said to him, swollen black lips peeling open from pockets of scar tissue and intricate stitching to reveal glossy yellow-gray teeth. “Now death hunts you and has found you.”

  “Please…”

  It reached in his bag, emptying his collection of mortuary photos over his head like pillow down.

  “Mercy?” it breathed. “At this juncture? Really, Creel. I expected more. I have cast aside my shroud to reveal my true nature…maybe at this hour, you would do the same…show us the ghoul within…expose it so we may gloat upon its unbearable ugliness…”

  “Dear God…just let me live,” Creel sobbed. “Please just let me live…”

  But the creature had no intention of that. It had been pursuing him for some time now and this was the crossroads of their fates which had been twined together from the very first, from the moment Creel had stepped upon his first battlefield and seen his first ravaged corpse and taken his first photograph for his private morgue. “You came to see and you came to know,” it said to him. “Now you will SEE and soon you will KNOW…”

  Then without hesitation, it released him, grasped a few strands of loose stitching at its chest and, like a child unthreading a bootlace, pulled itself open and unwound itself and Creel screamed as what was inside came flooding out in a slimy gushing river that covered him, enveloped him, drowning him in a steaming, wriggling sea of grave-maggots. They filled the trench, rising and bursting over the banks of sandbags and he fought in their depths like a swimmer going down for the last time. His fingers broke the surface of the squirming, noxious sea, but no more. They were at his eyes, in his ears, up his nostrils and pressing through the cleft at his ass. His mouth pulled open in a demented scream of violation and they flowed down his throat, filling him, gagging him, plummeting him into loathsome charnel depths, suffocating him on the death he had sought and finally made his own.

  He sank beneath the carrion graveworm waters and the reanimated, carefully-sewn husk that had held the Angel of Death within collapsed like a balloon bled of air, just a collection of yellow bones and a shroud of skin that drifted to earth like a sheet blown from a line.

  And from every quarter, the dead sank back into their holes, sunless, bleached faces closing their eyes for a final time and limbs going stiff and trunks dissolving into pools of maggoty rottenness and hot gassy putridity. Soon they we
re only carcasses, what was inside taking wing in great buzzing black clouds of corpse-flies seeking higher plains and fresher winds.

  25

  Breathing Out

  As you may have guessed, I was the only survivor of the reconnaissance party to Charbourg. I wandered for hours seeking a peaceful oblivion that I never found. I remember little of it. I was told that a BEF raiding party of the 12th Middlesex found me and brought me back to the lines. After that, it’s a feverish blur of aid stations and casualty wards. It was some weeks before I came to my senses and when I did, when I made a full recovery—or as near of a recovery as one could hope for after what I had seen—I was repatriated with my unit only to be brought before my commanding officers for court-martial proceedings.

  West was there, too.

  We were being held following evidence that was gathered at West’s farmhouse, which we were told was of such a grisly, deplorable, and execrable nature, that there were those who wished us to be brought before a firing squad without trial. The farmhouse was burned to the ground along with what was still in there.

  No matter.

  After due consideration, command decided that the court records of the investigation would be sealed and we would be discharged, honorably, with the understanding that we would never utter a word of what we did or what we saw or other blasphemous, ungodly acts we had perpetrated.

  Still, at West’s side, I returned to private practice in Boston. I should have despised the man and I suppose I did, but there was a magnetism to his brilliance and soon we returned to our somewhat peculiar line of research skulking about midnight graveyards and moonlit burial grounds. For we had an appointment in the skull-toothed hollows of the valley of the dead and our work was not yet done…

  —The End—

  CHARNEL HOUSE

  By

  Tim Curran