raw materials of the grave and not just imbue each separate segment with life but bring into being an entire creature? The idea dominated my research for several months. I wasted no time in assembling my specimen piecemeal from the bodies of Hun that were brought to me on a regular basis. The Hun are large people and from the remains furnished me, I selected only those of the greatest stature, building my specimen piece by piece and fragment by fragment, a giant, a specimen of physical perfection.
“Perfection? Hardly. When my labors of dissection and engineering were at an end, I had put together an immense, grotesque monstrosity held together by profuse stitchwork and surgical stapling, a bulging mass of muscle, jutting bone, and artery. But I wasted no time. I applied my reagent to the limbs, the torso, various autonomic centers of the brain and spinal ganglia…all were a failure. Oh, I made certain limbs tremble and fingers wiggle, and once the specimen opened one bleary yellow eye and fixed me with a look of absolute loathing. But that was it. About the time I decided I would take the thing apart, it occurred to me that if the tissue in the vat could wield disparate remains into a colony, why could it not do the same to my creation? Unlike my crude attempts, the tissue would absorb, assimilate, and regenerate at the cellular level.
“Using a winch, for my specimen was incredible in stature and weight, I lowered it into the vat and let it ‘cook’ for nearly a week. And it was at this point that I heard the fleshy throbbing for the first time from the vile steel womb. It was, I knew, the gargantuan beat of a heart and why not? My specimen had several. I was improving upon nature, you see. You may recall visiting me and hearing it for yourself. It grew stronger by the day and then one night, yes, I heard the lid of the vat open and looked upon what came crawling out-it was an abomination, a sideshow grotesquerie, a gigantic, hulking mass of distorted anatomy from a dissection room that pulled itself in my direction, gaining its feet, and looking at me with a cold, fathomless hatred and something more-a deranged, icy intelligence. It was the embodiment of not only what I had made but of what lived in that vat. Its very life-force and, dear God, its dire ambition given form.
“Oh, how that walking carcass incited every scrap of tissue in my laboratory! Things in jars and tanks and vessels underwent violent contortions as if they were trying to break free to follow that horrendous being that inched ever closer to me…limbs trembled on shelves, heads began to scream, dissected animals thrashed post mortem. Hysterical, I ran from there and never returned. And as I did so, oh yes, I saw them: the children. Their corrupt grave odor belied their appearance. They were standing outside in the rain like servants of some dark, nameless resurrected god…and I think that’s what they in fact were…and are.”
This is what Herbert West told me, a confession to the obscenities his scientific mind had plummeted to. It was no worse than I suspected for in every case where West’s methodical, somewhat perverse intellect was involved, there was tragedy and chaos and horrors beyond human comprehension. Who better knew that than I? But he had not confessed all. That I learned in due time. After the episode of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, I should have known what he would do and in fact, did. But I was blissfully ignorant at that time and revelation did not come just then. No, not until my fate intersected that of the deserted village of Chadborg.
22
Morbid Anatomy
While the soldiers watched the street for enemy incursions, Dr. Hamilton took Creel into a back room and together they smoked and it took little prodding for Hamilton to tell him the story he so badly wanted to hear. It was a quick version of events because there was no time for much else.
“And you expect me to believe that?” Creel said, his cynicism alive again, spinning like a drill bit within him, hot, relentless, boring deeper into him as it sought truth not battlefield horror stories, but… truth.
This is the truth and you have to accept it. Truth couched in fiction and fiction couched in truth, raving, demented, full-blooded, surreal and hallucinatory, but the truth, he told himself. The whole nine yards, the scream- in-your-face truth.
“Whether you believe it is of absolutely no concern to me,” Hamilton said, not miffed, not insulted exactly. He was beyond that. His eyes were the dismal, cheerless mirrors that reflected the war itself-graveyards, battlefields, and body dumps. And something more, something almost cabalistic and mystical lorded over by a pain that was without end.
And Creel, feeling all the horror and pain and madness of the past few months coming back at him, biting into his throat with teeth, began to curse him, to shout at him, to call him every rude, loud, boorish and ultimately meaningless name he could think of.
Hamilton said nothing.
His face was absolutely blank; he was untouchable.
The patrol moved out then and Creel tagged behind. Out of the rubble and twisted streets of wreckage and into the surrounding countryside which was ravaged, torn open, bleeding a sap of mud and brown stinking water. The fog still held and it was a grim world as the sun sank and the darkness crept up from hollows and ditches. The entire area around Chadbourg was a flooded trench system with staved-in bunkers, shattered stone and sandbag ramparts, collapsing dugouts and the remains of men, horses, ammunition wagons and mangled artillery pieces sunken into the earth.
Ten minutes after darkness found them, the world exploded with gunfire.
The darkness at either horizon was lit by flashing lights as heavy guns on both sides began to exchange salvos and the earth began to tremble as if from a distant quake. Shells were bursting and ammo dumps on both sides went up in great blazing pyres that painted the sky with guttering red light. The artillery officers were marching their salvos at each other’s lines and soon enough the countryside surrounding Chadbourg was near to ground zero and shells were landing everywhere and men were being thrown down face-first in the mud.
“MAKE FOR THE TRENCHES!” someone cried. “TAKE COVER! TAKE COVER!”
Creel was knocked into a mud pool right atop two bodies in an advanced state of putrefaction. They were the only things that kept him from drowning in the slop. They were bloated like fleshy barrels and they popped when he fell on them, dissolving into a gray-white jelly beneath him as he madly scrambled to be free, hot gases of decay filling his head and making his eyes water. He fought free, pulling an entrenching tool from his belt and sinking it into firmer earth, pulling himself free of carrion.
The platoon was scattered as whiz-bangs and heavy shells erupted all around them, tearing men to pieces. The survivors leapfrogged from shell-hole to shell-hole, barely avoiding red-hot shrapnel that flew through the air in cutting arcs. Mud and dirt and water were thrown high above, coming back down again in rains of filth. The shellfire was stirring up the old battlefield, bringing up buried stenches of decomposed bodies and pockets of chlorine gas, a dozen pungent odors competing against the stink of cordite and burnt powder. Yellow and scarlet flares burst overhead, filling the mist with wavering shadows.
The Tommies made for the trenches and jumped into them with cries of horror, for the dirty water was deep with Hun corpses that went to a sludge of liquid putrefaction beneath their trench boots. They fought through the corpses and standing water as salvos of shells battered the earth around them.
By the time Creel managed to crawl over there, he saw rolling clouds of green and white smoke coming over the trenches in dense columns, mixing with the mist, forming a ghastly pall that swallowed everything, separating men but a few feet apart. It cleared somewhat after ten or fifteen minutes, but never went away entirely, just drifting around in fuming patches that hemmed the platoon quite neatly into their private hell.
“Something,” a voice said, “something out there…”
Creel peered over the ruptured sandbags, digging his boots into the muddy trench wall. He had hoped to see a row of Hun helmets and fixed bayonets charging in their direction, but what he saw was something quite different.
Figures…forms…skeleton-shadowed apparitions rising up from the bubbling brown mud, from pools and lagoons and bogs of corpse-slime. In whole and in piece, Hun in rotted uniforms and Tommies with blank fish-white eyes and puckered holes for mouths, peasants with rotted faces of graveyard ooze, and the children, of course, ghost-faced, hollow-eyed, clouds of poison gas rising from their shriveled mouths like steam.
Creel saw them as he knew he would see them, ranks of them rising at every quarter. Like twisted, distorted things seen through a cracked window pane, they pulled themselves up in grim battalions, running with ochre- brown mud.
