Creel watched the moon come up and the darkness settle in, thinking, remembering, and shivering white inside as he tried to make sense of what he’d seen out at the devastated listening post.
You can’t be sure what you saw, he told himself. You saw something…something that looked like a boy…a boy who’d laid in a grave moldering for a week, rats chewing the good red meat and pink skin from his face. But, surely, it was a trick of the light, the refraction of the same through the mist. But not…not what you thought.
You’re too damn old to believe in ghosts, aren’t you?
But he didn’t know, he just didn’t know.
Not after the burial party…those tracks, those damn footprints.
Die toten…die toten dieser spaziergang.
Yes, it haunted his every waking moment and turned his nightmares into ugly, black affairs.
His cynicism, his pragmatism…even they could not save him this time. He had been skeptical, of course, because he was skeptical about everything. One war zone after another, year after godawful year of poking his nose into the grim machinery of death, it had turned something inside of him, chased away light and filled those hollows with darkness.
All those fine young men.
Battlefield after battlefield, the politics might change, but the faces were always the same: boys of eighteen and nineteen living with fear and horror day by day until it scrubbed the color from their faces, trading young flesh for old, lips gone rigid and bloodless, eyes leeched of youth and replaced with a wizened desperation. All of them aged, worn, shattered, old before their time, used up before they saw twenty. Creel had seen them again and again, war after war, the survivors returning from the latest action, ears still ringing with shellfire and the screams of the wounded, limping along, shoulders slouched, backs bent…like old men, old broken men.
That was war.
Some months back, following the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, after a particularly fierce bombardment by German heavy guns, Creel had watched as burial parties came in carting the dead in stretchers, laying them out on the cracked pink clay of the ground…a dozen, then two dozen, then three times that many. The bearers looked at him with a boiling hate in their eyes only it wasn’t for him, but for the war and the wreckage it produced. He stood there for a long time, unable to turn away, unable to pull his gaze from those tormented, gored faces. Their eyes were open, staring right at him, and he’d felt a cutting guilt open inside him.
During the battle, the trenches had been packed with Tommies, four-deep, firing rifles and machine-guns and trench mortars, trying to repel the German assault. The Hun poured in, wave after wave, and the guns roared and the shells erupted, and the bodies piled up, hundreds caught in the barbwire entanglements or sinking in the mud as high velocity rounds sought them out. The Germans had gotten so close that you could hear their individual screams of agony, see the fright and torment etched into their young faces…and afterwards, dear God, the bodies. They lay there for days, nesting with flies and maggots, worried by rats, a white and red patchwork of corpses that seemed fused into a greater whole of festering carrion gone green and gray and black. During the night you could hear the buttons popping off their tunics as they swelled with gas. The stink was unimaginable and it was more than the stench of death but the sharp, sour smell of an entire generation exterminated for no good reason.
There had been a fast, fleet-footed runner named Collins. Nice kid, naive as hell, always giggling and sure of himself, untouchable as all the young Tommies thought they were untouchable, completely possessed by the idea of playing soldier, content with his speed which was impressive. After the battle he returned from the rear in time to see the killing fields. Ten minutes of it and his young skin was mottled, his eyes nearly rolled up white, the entire left side of his face hitched up like he’d just suffered a stroke. He started screaming and nobody could get him to stop.
Later, they got the kid calmed down and Creel looked in on him. His eyes were black starshot. “Ghosts,” he said, “oh dear Christ, all them…ghosts…out there…”
Yes, ghosts. And the older Creel got and the more of it he saw, the more certain he was that they were there, sliding around him, shadowing him…pitying him, hating him, jealous of the life he had that he wasted in the graveyards of combat.
Sometimes he wondered if that’s why he kept taking pictures of the dead-some fanatic, vague hope that he’d catch one of them on film. Some hollow-eyed ghost slipping away from the corpse that had housed it.
And why not? he thought as he waited in the stinking mud of the forward trench. Why the hell not? Who has a better right to see ghosts? Who has spent more time with them than me?
In the pale moonlight, he could see out beyond No-Man’s Land, into a stripped forest that lay far beyond. The same one they’d passed through on their way to the listening post. Not dozens of trees, but maybe hundreds or even thousands, all of them de-limbed, de-barked, and soot-blackened from shellfire. They stood up straight or leaned over or collapsed into one another in great pillar-like deadfalls. Creel had been through them, had stood amongst them one bright day when the Germans had been pushed back and there had not been a single green shoot or leaf or so much as a solitary songbird. A dead place. The trees were like a thousand-thousand battle-worn skeletons climbing up out of that blasted inky-black soil that was rank and burnt smelling, so thick in your nose and throat it was like breathing ash. Ten minutes into it he’d began to suffocate, the good air sucked away and replaced with that gritty, powdery crematory ash that blew and blew and filled his lungs with sand.
Yes, death everywhere and would it be that insane to believe that here in the netherworld of the battlefield where life was extinguished so casually and ghosts roamed so freely that maybe death had turned back upon itself? That the dead were eating spilled life, filling themselves with it, so they might walk again?
Dead children that walk and feed on corpses? Are you willing to accept that?
The rain started coming down again, pooling, sluicing, filling the trenches with yellow-gray slime as the sky above scudded with black clouds that split open. In the dying moonlight, the rain was like falling crystals, billions of falling crystals: shiny, reflective. It drenched him, ran down his face and lips, dripping off his steel helmet. But it did not smell fresh, it only stirred up the rot and muck and filthy drainage bringing a rotten wet-dog smell to Flanders that sickened him to his core.
The rain subsided and there was silence for a time.
Listen.
Listen.
He was hearing it now, hearing it perfectly welclass="underline" gnawing sounds. The sounds of teeth sinking into meat and scraping over bone. Too loud to be rats. He did not believe it was dogs. Things out there feeding, filling themselves, glutting obscene appetites.
“Just cover your ears,” Burke whispered to him. “Maybe it’ll go away.”
The rain returned, coming down in sheets and Creel stared through it, certain for not the first time that just beyond the sandbags there were things moving out there, small twisted elfin forms taking advantage of the rain to feed on the dead.
11
Tomb Orchids
The dead waited.
In mud holes and bomb craters and shell pits, in skeleton forests and decimated villages and ruined cellars and filth-bubbling trenches, they waited. Moist with decomposition and sprouting tangles of green moss and rungs of polished white bone, they waited. In flooded ditches and muddy trench walls, in cheap plank coffins and beneath mildew-specked tarps, they waited and would wait. Steaming with rank corpse gas, netted in morbid sheaths of fungi, and exhaling the vile stench of the charnel and tombyard, they were patient.