This was Death’s place.
He did not know what Flanders was before it was scarred by trenchworks and gutted by shellholes, its viscera yanked inside out and covered in mud and sunken in stagnant rainwater, a great bog floating with carrion and peppered by bones…but he was pretty sure it had been a pretty place. Probably green and growing, fertile, old world European where you could smell the sweet flowers and count the yellow haymows at the horizon, listen to the creak of horse-driven farm wagons meandering up rutted dirt roads. Like something out of a pastoral landscape by Pissarro or Cezanne.
But now war had claimed it and forever changed its face from wonderland to wasteland. The countryside had been dotted with tiny farming villages-he knew that much because their ruins were everywhere-and he imagined they had been quaint little places once upon a time. But they would never be that way again. The hand of Death was absolute, it had cast a diabolical spell here, a sinister alchemy, an infection that rotted Flanders to its moldering bones. That could never be completely erased. When he looked around now and saw those villages like monuments standing in rubble, cold, blasted, and empty, surrounded by boneyards, mud swamps, refuse and the wrecked machinery of war, blown by a cold/hot thermal wind that stank of putrescence, sewage, and excrement…he was sick to his core.
For he could not get past the awful and somewhat monomaniacal idea that this was his private hell and it was being staged for his benefit.
Insane. Paranoid. Egostistical. Yet, it had now reached the point where he could not seem to remember a life before Flanders. Even when he tried to remember his mother, his father, his brother in Cleveland and his ex-wife in Boise, all he saw were the shattered faces of the war dead from his collection of mortuary photographs.
That’s all there was.
And he feared it’s all there ever would be.
Maybe I’m nothing but a maggot feeding on death like they always said, but it all leads here. It all leads to Flanders and what’s happening here. The dead are rising and I’m going to find out why because that’s my destiny.
One thing was certain: as he sought death, death sought him.
14
Shell-Shock
The fourth night following the Battle of Loos, Creel was in the support trench trying to catch a few winks in the shadow of the machine-gun blockhouse when German flares began to fill the sky. They burst yellow-green overhead, trailing sparks, drifting down on little parachutes, their flickering light turning the trenchworks into some surreal, expressionist tangle. Then the shells started coming down as the Hun worked their artillery and siege guns. While some covered their heads-Creel included-he saw many who just sat around, smoking, and staring off into the night watching the rounds coming in as sandbags disintegrated and huddled men vanished in thundering explosions and mud flew and the parapet crumbled, the air hissing with smoke and steam. He watched one young private looking up as a shell came down, greeting it, tracing its descent with his eyes, then there was eruption of debris and water and he was no more.
The barrage lasted another ninety minutes and when it was over Creel’s ears were ringing, his gums sore from clenching his teeth, his hands throbbing from being balled into numb fists. It was amazing the things you would do as you waited to die, waited for the shell that would turn you into mulch. A few slugs of rum, a cigarette or two, and he began to relax somewhat though nobody in Flanders ever truly unwound.
For some time there was silence, only the sound of the wounded being evacuated, the dripping water, the air pungent with the stink of burnt cordite, hot metal, and burning canvas. A welcome odor that overpowered the stench of the trenches and the evil smells blowing in from No-Man’s Land.
Creel drifted off.
Around three a.m., a noise cut through the night…something that might have been the tormented scream of a man or the agonized shrill howl of a dog. Creel came awake with Burke next to him and could not be sure. Only that it was eerie and it shocked him into silence as he listened to it rise up into a wild unearthly wailing then fade away.
Then there was the sound of rifles firing, men shouting and more than a few men screaming hysterically. Creel and Burke followed the sounds with a dozen other men down the communication trench and it came far from the rear where little sandbagged Elephant Shelters were being used as makeshift morgues for the dead from the barrage. It was sheer chaos as the Tommies either fought forward to get a look or fell back in waves after they had. Lights from lanterns and electric torches were jumping about, throwing wild shadows over the muddy ground.
That weird wailing sound rose up again and Creel could feel it right up his spine.
“What the hell is it?” he cried out.
“It’s been feeding on them corpses!” one man said.
“Keep back!” shouted an officer and the men responded, pulling away as that wailing rose and fell, sounding at times very much like a piercing human scream and at others like a bestial roaring that fragmented into guttural cackling.
Burke tried to pull Creel away, but he shrugged him off. He had to see this…whatever it was. He just had to see it. He was drawn forward with a sort of magnetism.
“Jesus,” Burke said when they got close enough.
Inside the shelter Creel could see a seething mass of motion, teeth flashing and eyes blazing. One of the officers had a Webley in his hand and he pumped three rounds into the thing and it snarled ferociously, then let go with that all-too human, high-pitched screaming that seemed to echo on and on as if there were a dozen creatures in there and not just one.
“Is…is that a dog?” Creel said under his breath, wishing like hell he’d brought his little camera with him.
Whatever it was-and he was making no rash guesses-it looked roughly dog like in appearance, like some massive hairless hound whose flesh was ghostly white and pulsating, almost vibrating with a jellied undulant motion. Yet, if it was a dog, then it was horribly distorted and grotesque, something made of mounded pallid flesh and twitching growths, a massive head rising up on a fleshy trunk, limbs seeming to splay out in every direction and Creel could not be sure that some of them did not have fingers.
All around it were mutilated corpses that it had been tearing apart in some manic feeding frenzy.
The stink of violated carrion was unmistakable…but a worse odor blew off the thing itself that was acrid and almost violent, like apples rotted to acidic cider.
A rifle squad came forward and just stood there, not sure what they were seeing or what they should do about it.
“WELL, BLOODY WELL SHOOT!” a sergeant-major called out.
The beast rose up on its back legs and it was taller than a man, some immense dog-thing snapping and growling and whining. In that moment, as the men opened up and slugs from the Enfields drilled into it, Creel saw more of it than he wanted to…in the muzzle flashes it was forever burned into his mind.
Darting back and forth on wrinkled accordion necks it had two jelly-fleshed, purple-veined heads with juicy, swollen eyes like plums gone to a pulp of decay and snarling maws set with spiked teeth which jutted from sagging gums at crazy angles. All of which was bad enough, but the thing that truly sickened him, that filled him with a crawling physical aversion, was the fact that the hairless heads of eight or ten pups were rising from its hide like tumorous growths. They were blind, almost fetal, but hideously alive and wildly animate, mouths opening and closing, a squeaky sort of mewling coming from them.
The sight of that put him down on his ass and he only vaguely remembered Burke pulling him away and the cry of the men and the reports of the Enfields and that sergeant-major shouting for everyone to get, “DOWN! DOWN!” as he pulled the pin on a Mill’s Bomb and threw it at the thing. There was a thundering explosion and fiery bits of ejecta came drifting down along with smoking bits of the violated corpses.