Tucked away in a little funk hole scraped into the side of the trench, just large enough to curl up in, Creel managed to drift off around five and the dreams came for him right away.
He saw the sun, buried behind layers of leaden clouds, extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle. It sought its grave and moist earth was thrown in after it and it was simply no more.
Then all across No-Man’s Land, there was a stillness and a waiting; morbid seeking shapes drifting about with a lonesome whispering and a stifled, subterraneous breathing. For here it was always the witching hour and the grinning throng of tomb-shadows moved like an October breeze through a sullen churchyard with a sighing breath of rainy crypts. Their cadaverous moon-faces gave praise to the night and the rain and the human wreckage. They were formed of red casket velvet and white mannequin wax. They hid in shadowy pools of reeking water, the black blood of sunken graves, showing themselves only when there was movement and the beating of living hearts.
Creel moved with them, as them.
The legions of the dead.
They were aware, they were sentient, they were driven and relentless and unspeakably hungry. From the pestilent deeps of Flanders they moved, slinking and slithering through sewer-damps and flooded trenches like disease germs in clotted arteries. Throughout this night and many more there would be scratchings at parapets and whispers in the shadows, a clawing at the doors of ruined village houses. Fungous faces would be pressed to shuttered windows and crumbling fingers would scrape against casements. The dead would wake in flooded cellars and ooze down the throats of fire-blackened chimneys and expunge themselves from waterlogged shell-holes.
But they would come.
And every night there would be more.
And he would be one of them, never knowing or fathoming the stillborn depths of their decaying minds.
Together, they marched into the night.
When Creel woke up, a scream on his lips, three fat-bellied rats were gnawing on his boots.
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?”
Curran, Tim
Zombie Pulp
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
