Now it was his turn for anger. “Listen to me, you simpering, gourd-rattling little peasant…I have no interest in children. Not now. Not ever. As far as I know, those little ones are still in their graves.”
“Then how-”
“Tall tales, chimney-corner whispers, amusements from bored soldiers in the trenches.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have believed him for his sense of ethics was like some garment he donned only for convenience’s sake. Yet, I honestly believed he was telling the truth and his stern gaze did not falter even for a moment. But I was not satisfied. One or two ghost stories told by the Tommies of scavenging undead children? Fine. But the stories had now reached critical levels and were being told by dozens and dozens of men. And I, yes, I had seen the corpses out in No-Man’s Land. I had seen the gnawed bones, the tell-tale dentition of tiny teeth.
“The explosion, Herbert,” I said. “Is it possible that when your other workshop was destroyed by the shelling that certain elements were released?”
He acted dumbfounded, but knew exactly what I meant. The barnlike edifice where his laboratory had formerly been located had been destroyed in a German barrage. That much was known. But was it conceivable that the vat of tissue he had germinating there…that its contents had been spread around the countryside in the explosion or even been thrown up into the air in fragments only to be carried back earthward by the incessant rains? For we both knew the uncanny, frightening reanimative properties of that tissue in its bubbling bath of reagent. I thought my hypothetical scenario was the tree that bore fruit, but West disagreed.
“Dissipated, it would have simply died. It was merely a colony of cells.”
“And you can say,” I put to him, “that the mutative properties of that tissue, it’s inordinate, almost supernatural will to live could not be active at the cellular level?”
But he could not say that, only believed it to be “highly unlikely.” Yet, I could see that it had not occurred to him because he was more than casually excited at the possibility as blasphemous as it was. I should say here that West was exceedingly nervous-his intellect was blazing, as always, but there was an undercurrent of dread and agitation beyond his usual frenetic excitability. Twice while I was there, he peered out the windows as if looking for something and no less than three times he turned to me and said, “Tell me…old friend…did you see anyone on your way up the road?”
I told him that I hadn’t, yet he did not seem relieved.
Calmed somewhat by the fact that he had not deliberately resurrected any poor waifs, I relaxed somewhat even if he could not seem to sit still save for an occasional peep into his microscope. I brought a bottle of brandy and despite the mortuary spread around us, I forced him to drink with me for Michele LeCroix had accepted my proposal and we were to be married. West congratulated me, but I could see his mind was on other things-namely that awful vat and the unsettling sounds coming from it. I was certain at that point that whatever was coming to term in there had him scared to death.
17
Incoming
Sergeant Burke did a little snooping, something he was very good at, and learned that Dr. Hamilton was attached to the 1 ^ st Canadian Light Infantry, whose battle lines were only a few miles west of the 12 ^ th Middlesex. He was an American, as Creel had suspected, a lieutenant and quite a capable surgeon. Other than that, there was very little.
“There’s got to be more,” Creel said, somewhat exasperated.
“That’s it, mate.”
“Dammit. He’s involved in this somehow and I’m going to find out how.”
Burke sighed. “You’re going to get your arse thrown out of the war. And if you don’t care about that, think about me. I’ll have to go back to the fighting and I’m not liking the idea.”
Creel brooded for hours after that. He was too close. Right on the periphery of something that might be much bigger than even the war itself and he was not going to give up now. Though his relationship with Captain Croton was a little strained, maybe he could arrange a visit with the 1 ^ st Canadian, embed himself over there for a time because that’s where he needed to be. That was the epicenter or damned near to it.
Burke was always warning him about going slow because he was already trying the patience of command, but he wasn’t about to go slow. There was a time to hide and wait, a time to listen, and a time to spring and go for the throat and that particular time was now.
As he sat in the forward trench, lost in thought, watching the slugs inching out of the trench walls, listening to the frogs croaking out in flooded bomb craters, he tried vainly to find his cynicism, his detachment, his objectivity-these were the meat and blood of any journalist-but they were gone. They no longer existed. He was one great creeping mass of anxiety from his head to his feet.
Go ahead, boyo, track down this Dr. Hamilton. Let him open his dark chest of wonders and let you peer inside. Write it all down. Write the story that can never be published. But it’s more than journalism now, it’s more than war reporting…it’s personal and you know it. Whatever’s at the root of this madness, it’s got your number.
And that number is about to be punched.
Sergeant Kirk came sloshing through the standing brown water and Creel nearly jumped out of his skin.
“ Keep your head down,” he said. “The Hun is about to come calling. I can feel it in my bones.”
And Creel could too.
He could feel the tension building through the trenches like every man there was wired together, part of some machine of cycling dread. In the dugouts, on the firestep clutching rifles with almost religious devotion, huddled over meager dinners of cheese and Bully Beef, leaning up against sandbagged ramparts-all the faces were the same: bleached white, lips pulled into stern gray lines, eyes huge and almost neurotic in their intensity. The Tommies prayed, squeezed rosary beads in their fists, holding tight to good luck charms and fetishes, everything from rabbits’ feet to a badly worn photograph of a wife or a cherished child, and-in some cases-the dingy brass button off the tunic of a mate who’d gone home or a favored spent shell casing that had saved a life or some nameless wooden effigy carved out of boredom and hope, smoothed into an unrecognizable shape by oily grasping fingers.
Creel was not immune to it.
He found himself gripping his field notebook, tensing fingers pressing into familiar grooves in the leather cover. He watched men going through the pre-battle rituals of survival-touching objects, holding their rifles a certain way, squatting in a particular stance, many of them humming beneath their breath or whistling a lost tune from childhood. These were all protections against evil, dismemberment, and death. Charms that would get them through one more battle and one more day and the stark horror of fatalism was apparent on the faces of any that had broken, however minutely or innocently, the sanctified steps of ritualization.
Night crept over the sandbags in black twisting worms of funeral crepe. Breathing was low, heartbeats high. Sweat broke on faces. Limbs trembled so badly they had to be held in place.
Sergeant Burke was next to him. “Hold tight, mate,” he said. “We’ll soldier through.”
Good old Burke. Tough as nails. Made of the real stuff, as they said. Unlike himself whom he viewed more and more as some death-obsessed carrion crow picking away at the remains of lives, Burke was the real thing: a soldier, a hero, someone you could look up to, would be glad to call friend, the sort you’d be glad to give your daughter’s hand to in marriage knowing that, in the end, he always did the right thing, the honorable thing. As he thought this, he felt Burke’s hand take hold of his own and clasp it tightly in friendship. It was something the men did when the shelling got heavy-holding onto one another, fusing themselves together. But Creel had never been part of it. He was always alone…now Burke made him part of the chain and he felt a tear in his eye.