with that tiny, unspeakable golden-haired cadaver.
“Given time, oh yes, Cardoux would have been hanged by the peasants, perhaps his entrails would have been torn out with iron hooks and burned in the traditional way.
“But listen: to the cemetery at St. Bru we went, two skulking grave-robbers, resurrectionists in more than name, I assure you. The children, as I have said, were interred in a common grave. So beneath that pale harvest moon, cloaked by the crepuscular shadows of grotesque graveyard trees, we began to dig. Down into the black, moldering earth as the sepulchers and tomb-angels crowded about us. It was simple enough work. The boxes were four feet down. Deep enough to discourage the wild dog packs and tunneling graveyard rats, but not too deep for the weary workmen and their grim chore. We opened the communal grave and, one by one, we unearthed those small, pathetic plank boxes, scraping them free of dirt, flicking obscenely swollen earthworms aside. We opened each box and of the forty-seven cadavers within, only thirty-two were of use to me. We laid them out on the ground, single-file, moonlight washing their dead little faces an even boneyard white. Carefully then, Cardoux holding the lantern for me-and breathing quite hard, not out of exertion but some unnamable, abhorrent passion-I made the necessary incisions at the base of the skulls and injected each with a necessary concentration of the reagent.
“It took about thirty minutes.
“And thirty minutes later, there was still no reaction. I was encouraged by supple limbs and the pliability of muscles and tendons, but I was unable to record any significant rise in metabolic temperature. I had given each a pre-measured dose that was less than used for an adult taking into account overall body mass. But nothing happened…or almost nothing. Some twenty minutes after I had injected the animals I noticed something not necessarily encouraging but certainly disturbing: their eyes were open. Every single last child had their eyes open and this after they had been gummed shut before the makeshift funeral. I examined each by the light of the lantern and those eyes were open, glistening like wet stones, almost brilliant and sparkling with vitality. Lips were pulled into pale smiles that were almost mocking.
“Yet…nothing was happening. It was almost as if they were playing possum, as insane as that sounds. Something about them unsettled me in ways I cannot describe. But it was a failure. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Cardoux kept staring into their faces, illuminating their grave-pallor with the lantern. ‘Look at these little darlings, eh?’ he said to me. ‘Ah, it is as if they would wake at any time…can you not feel it?’ I pretended I was unaware of his somewhat unwholesome attentions to certain handsome blonde girls, that macabre craven gleam in his eyes, the drool that hung from his lips. He volunteered to re-box them and re-inter them himself. ‘A great surgeon and scientist such as yourself, Dr. West…he should not be bothered with such unpleasantries, eh? Let Cardoux take care of it while you run along. No, no, have no fear, my friend, for I will not be alone. My fine little darlings and sweet dumplings will keep me company far into the night…’
“I shouldn’t have allowed it. I do not claim by any means, of course, to be of the utmost moral and ethical fiber where my work is concerned, but there are certain disagreeable things that sicken even I. Oh, I knew full the obscene attentions that Cardoux would impress upon those sleeping angelic forms…yet, thoroughly depressed and disheartened by what I considered another abysmal failure…I left him to it. And it was only several days later, after a marathon session of surgery at the aid station, that I knew I could not let the matter rest. I made inquiries of Monsieur Cardoux, but to my astonishment and ever-growing unease, he could not be located. I went so far as to contact Captain Fleming, the Corps Burial Officer-or, as the Tommies called him, the ‘Body Snatcher’, the ‘Cold Meat Specialist’-but even our dour Captain could not help me. That’s when I knew something had happened. Something horrible, yet, considering Cardoux’s shall we say ‘peculiarities’, not unwarranted, hmm?
“It was through Fleming that I tracked down the grimy, crumbling hovel in the dark wood where Cardoux squatted when not involved in more funerary pursuits. It was just after sunset when I arrived alone and I found his tall, narrow, evil-looking peasant’s hovel darkened, threaded in shadows of the blackest coffin silk. Repeated knockings upon the heavy, ivy-hung door brought no response. Finding the door unlocked, in I went. The stench of the charnel was immediate and I found it most repellent even with my nose which was somewhat jaded from the odiferous emanations of my laboratory and assorted battlefield litter.
“I immediately sought and found an oil lantern and there is no need to describe what I saw as I have already sketched that out for you. In the flickering orange-yellow light, shivering beneath the cold marble leering of his collection, shadows crawling about me like hell-spawned imps, each step revealed more unnamable, hideous sights in that museum of the catacomb. For everywhere was the blasphemous plundered tomb-loot and disinterred faces of the undertaker’s ghoulish obsession. But it was not these things which made me perspire and chatter my teeth, but it was what I saw in the large high-timbered room amongst the moldering oblong boxes: the remains of Monsieur Cardoux, a mangled corpse riven throat to belly. But not alone, oh no. For crouched over him, their teeth sharpened upon his bones, were the children. They looked up at me with their vaulted eyes, grave-pallid faces pulling into sepulchral grins that are nearly indescribable. Bits of gore dropped from their mouths and I fled, dear friend, I burst from that house of horrors, a mad and gibbering thing. For, you see, they called me by name. They knew me.”
This was the story told to me by West upon the morning of my wedding day. If it was intended as a gift, it was of the most dreadful variety. Yet, it certainly explained things and justified certain fears of mine. I now knew why he asked me if I had seen anyone on my trip out to his workshop; he was firmly convinced that the children were watching him, making no threatening overtures as of yet, but studying him intently for reasons he would not dare admit to me. But I knew it had something to do with a conspiracy of some sort directed against him by the dead risen by his hand.
It was but the first tragedy of that day I shall never forget.
At the chapel in Abbincour, I took the hand of my betrothed that day. If I could but capture the essence of Michele LeCroix standing there at the altar in her white bridal gown, the sun arcing through the stained glass windows and surrounding her in a halo of purity. But I cannot. Hers was a clean beauty, fresh, vibrant, and breathtaking as she stood there, tall and angular, looking upon me with her huge dark eyes, her olive skin contrasting the flawless white of her gown and lace. That is how I shall always see her. And that, you see, is in fact my final image of her before that immense German shell came screaming through the air, landing just outside the church. It was fired-I later learned-by a gigantic siege gun, a 420mm Howitzer. The shell itself weighed well over 800 pounds. When it exploded, it took out the entire western wall of the chapel which had stood for some three centuries by that point. The wall literally vaporized, the chapel went to matchsticks, and all present save for a few were buried in an avalanche of rubble and debris, most mangled beyond recognition and crushed to pulp. I remember coming to as I was being dragged from the blazing, shattered husk of the church by West and Colonel Brunner. I fought free of them, completely out of mind, hearing the screams of the dying echoing in my ears, and I recall hearing Brunner say, “Dear God, man, don’t go in there! Don’t look at her!”
But I did.
Coughing, eyes filled with dust, my uniform in rags, I crawled through the wreckage as what remained of the chapel threatened to fall. And there I found my Michele. Her dress was dirty, burnt in places, but nearly intact as was her body. But she had been cleanly decapitated by a falling timber, her head smashed beyond recognition.
In the days that followed, I was offered a sympathy leave but I refused. I buried myself in my work, volunteering for any hazardous duty that would take me closer to death and closer to my Michele. Weeks later, a thin and trembling specimen, I again met up with West.
Here is what he told me:
“As you know I had great success with the secretions of the reptilian embryonic tissue in the vat. By combining these in varying quantities with the reagent I achieved incredible results-the gassed children of the orphanage were but one of them. I found, to my amusement, that if I added certain animal parts to the tissue that it absorbed them, rendered them, made them part of the great hissing pulsating whole. That fascinated me. Whether it was the corpses of rats, dogs, or spare human limbs, all were assimilated. That mass of tissue was quickly becoming a colonial life form with its own specialized organic processes and metabolic peculiarities. A few excised cells grew at a fantastic rate under the microscope if given the appropriate nourishment.
“As you also know I had for some time been reanimating various body parts and had proved, I think, that there was some ethereal biophysical connection between divided anatomies of the same animal. Well, I soon discovered that parts of different animals would react to a common brain in the same way. And it was then that I formulated a very Frankensteinian hypothesis: would it be possible, I wondered, to assemble a specimen from the
