14
Shell-Shock
The fourth night following the Battle of Loos, Creel was in the support trench trying to catch a few winks in the shadow of the machine-gun blockhouse when German flares began to fill the sky. They burst yellow-green overhead, trailing sparks, drifting down on little parachutes, their flickering light turning the trenchworks into some surreal, expressionist tangle. Then the shells started coming down as the Hun worked their artillery and siege guns. While some covered their heads-Creel included-he saw many who just sat around, smoking, and staring off into the night watching the rounds coming in as sandbags disintegrated and huddled men vanished in thundering explosions and mud flew and the parapet crumbled, the air hissing with smoke and steam. He watched one young private looking up as a shell came down, greeting it, tracing its descent with his eyes, then there was eruption of debris and water and he was no more.
The barrage lasted another ninety minutes and when it was over Creel’s ears were ringing, his gums sore from clenching his teeth, his hands throbbing from being balled into numb fists. It was amazing the things you would do as you waited to die, waited for the shell that would turn you into mulch. A few slugs of rum, a cigarette or two, and he began to relax somewhat though nobody in Flanders ever truly unwound.
For some time there was silence, only the sound of the wounded being evacuated, the dripping water, the air pungent with the stink of burnt cordite, hot metal, and burning canvas. A welcome odor that overpowered the stench of the trenches and the evil smells blowing in from No-Man’s Land.
Creel drifted off.
Around three a.m., a noise cut through the night…something that might have been the tormented scream of a man or the agonized shrill howl of a dog. Creel came awake with Burke next to him and could not be sure. Only that it was eerie and it shocked him into silence as he listened to it rise up into a wild unearthly wailing then fade away.
Then there was the sound of rifles firing, men shouting and more than a few men screaming hysterically. Creel and Burke followed the sounds with a dozen other men down the communication trench and it came far from the rear where little sandbagged Elephant Shelters were being used as makeshift morgues for the dead from the barrage. It was sheer chaos as the Tommies either fought forward to get a look or fell back in waves after they had. Lights from lanterns and electric torches were jumping about, throwing wild shadows over the muddy ground.
That weird wailing sound rose up again and Creel could feel it right up his spine.
“What the hell is it?” he cried out.
“It’s been feeding on them corpses!” one man said.
“Keep back!” shouted an officer and the men responded, pulling away as that wailing rose and fell, sounding at times very much like a piercing human scream and at others like a bestial roaring that fragmented into guttural cackling.
Burke tried to pull Creel away, but he shrugged him off. He had to see this…whatever it was. He just had to see it. He was drawn forward with a sort of magnetism.
“Jesus,” Burke said when they got close enough.
Inside the shelter Creel could see a seething mass of motion, teeth flashing and eyes blazing. One of the officers had a Webley in his hand and he pumped three rounds into the thing and it snarled ferociously, then let go with that all-too human, high-pitched screaming that seemed to echo on and on as if there were a dozen creatures in there and not just one.
“Is…is that a dog?” Creel said under his breath, wishing like hell he’d brought his little camera with him.
Whatever it was-and he was making no rash guesses-it looked roughly dog like in appearance, like some massive hairless hound whose flesh was ghostly white and pulsating, almost vibrating with a jellied undulant motion. Yet, if it was a dog, then it was horribly distorted and grotesque, something made of mounded pallid flesh and twitching growths, a massive head rising up on a fleshy trunk, limbs seeming to splay out in every direction and Creel could not be sure that some of them did not have fingers.
All around it were mutilated corpses that it had been tearing apart in some manic feeding frenzy.
The stink of violated carrion was unmistakable…but a worse odor blew off the thing itself that was acrid and almost violent, like apples rotted to acidic cider.
A rifle squad came forward and just stood there, not sure what they were seeing or what they should do about it.
“WELL, BLOODY WELL SHOOT!” a sergeant-major called out.
The beast rose up on its back legs and it was taller than a man, some immense dog-thing snapping and growling and whining. In that moment, as the men opened up and slugs from the Enfields drilled into it, Creel saw more of it than he wanted to…in the muzzle flashes it was forever burned into his mind.
Darting back and forth on wrinkled accordion necks it had two jelly-fleshed, purple-veined heads with juicy, swollen eyes like plums gone to a pulp of decay and snarling maws set with spiked teeth which jutted from sagging gums at crazy angles. All of which was bad enough, but the thing that truly sickened him, that filled him with a crawling physical aversion, was the fact that the hairless heads of eight or ten pups were rising from its hide like tumorous growths. They were blind, almost fetal, but hideously alive and wildly animate, mouths opening and closing, a squeaky sort of mewling coming from them.
The sight of that put him down on his ass and he only vaguely remembered Burke pulling him away and the cry of the men and the reports of the Enfields and that sergeant-major shouting for everyone to get, “DOWN! DOWN!” as he pulled the pin on a Mill’s Bomb and threw it at the thing. There was a thundering explosion and fiery bits of ejecta came drifting down along with smoking bits of the violated corpses.
The officers wanted the men to go back, but Creel got in there for a look before they stopped him. One of the Tommies trained a spotlight on it. The beast had pretty much been blasted into pieces, but enough of its hide remained in a single smoldering husk that he could see what he needed to see.
He couldn’t say about all of it, but the heads of those pups were clearly sutured into place.
“A camera?” he called. “Does anybody have a camera?”
But none were forthcoming and that was because the sergeant-major was scattering the Tommies with an evil eye, daring them to challenge his might and authority.
“Out of there now!” he shouted as a thin young military surgeon came forward to look at the remains. “Let Dr. Hamilton through!”
And what struck Creel the most was that Hamilton did not seem surprised at what he was looking at. Shocked, yes; disgusted, certainly. But surprised? No, it was almost like he had expected this.
Later, back in the reserve trench-after Captain Sheers gave him a good dressing down for “interfering in military matters” of all things, promising him that he was done with the London Irish Rifles, thank you very much-he pulled Burke aside in the support trench. “You saw it same as I did and don’t sit there and give me any of your goddamn Yorkshire stoicism,” he said to him, his face inches away. “That thing is part of this. It did not happen by accident and you know it. That thing was fucking stitched together, Burke, and our Doctor Hamilton didn’t even blink an eye about it.”
Burke sighed. “And you want me to do what, mate?”
“I want you to help me figure this out, Old Shoe,” Creel said, grinning almost maniacally. “That thing was no dog…good God, it screamed like a woman. It’s part of the whole. All the weird things we’ve seen and heard about are part of something. Something that was made to happen.”
“All right. How do we start?”
“We start by finding out about this lieutenant, this Doctor Hamilton. He’s with the Canadians but his accent sounds American,” Creel explained. “That’s where we start. Because this guy, oh yes, he holds the keys to hell in his hands.”
15
The Sleep of Reason
