“ Ain’t the Hun,” Scratch said, his voice squeaky like a rusty hinge.
The whispering was practically on top of them.
Soon, any second now, what was out there would step out of the mist and Creel did not know what that could be. He could not wrap his rational brain around it, could not make himself believe it was men…for in his mind he saw specters and flesh-eaters, things with eyes like seeping red wine.
“ Withdraw,” Haines said under his breath. “Pull back…pull back for the life of Christ…”
And they did just as forms emerged from the fog. Neither Haines nor Scratch saw them and Burke had turned away, but Creel did. Just for a second before the fog enveloped them again. What he saw were…small, elfish, wraith-like things that looked very much like children.
He clearly saw a boy and his face was that of a stripped skull.
9
Dr. Herbert West
I had assumed, and maybe even hoped, that following the destruction of West’s laboratory in the barn that his research would also come to an end. That it was obscene and blasphemous, I did not doubt. That by taking part in it I had damned my eternal soul, I firmly believed. After the barn crashed down and burned into a smoldering heap of timbers, I implored West to stop. As fascinated as I was by his compulsions, his obsessions, his almost preternatural scientific acumen, I fully believed that it needed to come to an end. That the shelling of the barn was akin to the finger of God. An omen. A portent. Call it what you will.
When I broached these thoughts to West two days after the shelling as he amputated the leg of a man with considerable dexterity, he laughed at me. “Stop now? Now when I stand upon the threshold of ultimate creation? I think not. Now is the time for more intensive study than I have yet undertaken,” he told me, that cruel gleam in his eye. “Now, if you would kindly step down from your moral high ground and abandon your lofty ethics, Lieutenant, there are wounded men here that require attention.”
Typical West to a fault-arrogant, egotistical, superior. As if I was the one who was derelict in his duty. No matter. On the orders of Colonel Brunner, the A.D.M. S. of our sector, I was sent down to the battalion aide post as Medical Officer and I was glad to be away from West and whatever might be going on behind those glacial eyes of his. My duties at the front were fairly routine. I started my day with the morning sick parade where those thought to be too ill for duty were examined. There was the usual amount of malingerers, but many serious cases as well. The soldiers seemed to feel better with an M.O. at hand though in many situations, there was very little I could do.
The trenches were generally broken up into three sets-the forward fire trench, the rear trench, and the extension trench. The forward, I discovered, was nearly always about waist-deep in water while the rear had about two feet in it and the extension was flooded to nearly five feet in depth. As M.O. I had to slog through like the rest, barely keeping my footing on the slimy mud beneath.
The German trenches occupied higher ground so the rain washed downhill into our own as well as the drainage from their lines. The sanitary conditions of the trenches were abysmal. The Tommies fought, ate, slept, and relieved themselves in these flooded, narrow cuts of foul water. Empty ration cans were used when possible for feces and urine and tossed from the trench, but it all drained back down in copious amounts. Wounds exposed to that filth became infected and often necrotic in a very short time. The officers had the men dig drainage ditches, but it did little good.
There were decomposing bodies everywhere that drew millions of flies and thousands of scavenging rats which the Tommies called “corpse-rats”. I do not exaggerate when I say they were the size of tomcats. They were fat from feeding off the dead, spreading typhus, ratbite fever, and lice infestations and it was this louse whose feces caused numerous cases of trench fever. This, I must add, in addition to the suffering already caused by hunger, fatigue, shell shock, and raging cases of enteric fever. Prolonged submergence in the vile water caused feet to blister and swell with trench foot, often to two and three times their size if not treated immediately with dry socks and dry boots which were a rarity at the front. Sometimes boots had to be cut off infected feet very carefully as the skin was white, puckered, and suppurating, and often peeled free in great morbid sheets of tissue. The Tommies told me you could drive a bayonet through your foot when it was well-advanced and not feel a thing. Trench foot gangrene was common and resulted in amputation.
So the problems were numerous and the treatments few.
We had a terrible gas attack my first week and many men did not get their masks on in time. Dozens of them were brought into the aide post by the ambulance bearers. There was little that could be done. Those with some scant hope of recovery were sent rear to the Casualty Clearing Station. The others…dear God…they were burnt and blistered, covered with ulcerated lesions, blinded, eyelids stuck together. They vomited out great chunks of lung tissue, gasping for breath as they slowly suffocated.
The shelling went on nearly daily and I removed shrapnel and amputated limbs, gave morphia and treated wounds with antiseptics. But it was often of little use. Abdominal injuries were nearly always fatal. Many of the men were so disfigured they prayed for death.
After three weeks I returned to the rear, feeling defeated and worn and without hope.
West was far too devoted to his research to back away on any “superstitious whim” of mine as he called it. He relocated his chamber of horrors to a deserted farmhouse about a half a mile from the Casualty Clearing Station near the shelled ruin of the monastery at Abbincour. Apparently, unknown to me, he had been involved in this move for some time. Even before the destruction of the barnlike edifice by shellfire. Apparently, there had been certain inquiries into his activities.
At first, West would not allow me join him and I was not disappointed over this.
“You’ve become far too squeamish of late. Your archaic medical ethics are standing in the way of scientific progress,” he told me when I asked of his new laboratory.
“Herbert,” I said, “how long do you think you can keep this up? Sooner or later word will get out. What if somebody stumbles in there?”
He smiled at me. “Then they’ll be in for a bit of a surprise, won’t they?”
Despite myself, I was drawn to the man. His intellect was almost godlike. His surgical skill often quite literally took my breath away. I witnessed him saving life and limb that no other medico could even hope to attempt. I learned more in one afternoon with West than I could in any five years of medical school or surgical practice. He was uncanny. He fascinated me. He frightened me. He made me feel like some Medieval sawbones with a jar of leeches.
As horribly, insufferably dismal as the war was, there was one bright spot for me which was my guiding light and my strength and my hope: Michele LeCroix. She was the daughter of the mayor of Abbincour. Dark of hair and eye, an exotic beauty that made my knees week simply to gaze upon her. That I was in love there could be no doubt. West, of course, did not approve. “You have a good brain,” he told me, “but you’re wasting it on simple animal need.”
But he did not understand nor could he ever understand.
I decided to ask her for her hand in marriage. When I told West of it he laughed at the idea. “A marriage? In this godforsaken hellhole? It’s absurd. It’s high comedy.” Then he must have seen the look on my face and sighed. “But…never let it be said that I stood in the way of romance. Of course, I’ll stand with you.”