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 sometime 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 were only carcasses, what was inside taking wing in great buzzing black clouds of corpse-flies seeking higher plains and fresher winds.
25
