Another world. Another existence. This place will never know that peace and solid contentment again, he thought. It will never know tired backs settling into feather beds and old women sweeping children into dreamland with twice-told tales and kettles of soup steaming atop blackened stove gratings on Sunday afternoons.
No. It will only know the cawing of crows, the scurrying of rats, the sound of leaves gathering and wind whipping through creviced walls, the spidersilk silence of gathering dust.
Filled with anguish and a bitter fatalism, he went to the window and looked out into the mist-choked streets. The breeze had picked up a bit and the fog blew along with rolling clouds of dust and fine debris.
“Nothing anywhere,” Howard said after he returned from checking the rooms. “Not a scrap of food. Not a bleeding thing.”
Creel found a lantern on a hook, half-filled with oil. “We’ll have some light if we need it,” he said.
Jameson started up the creaking stairs to the upper floor and stopped, grimy hand on the rail.
There was a sound from up there.
Like something dragged over a floor. Something heavy.
Standing there in his dirty greatcoat, dented steel helmet, and mud-caked trench boots, he looked like some little boy playing Army with his father’s old uniform. His face was dirty, though unlined and impossibly smooth like it had been pressed. His eyes were huge and white and he looked like he belonged anywhere but where he was.
Just a sound, that’s all it was, but it stopped everyone like they were standing in quick-set concrete.
The only thing alive about Creel at that moment was the cigarette in his lips: it was trembling. He felt a sharp stab of fear in his belly that kept cutting deeper, making a darkness that was toxic and oily spread through his vitals. It was not the fear of war. Of bullets and bombs and bayonets bisecting his stomach, nothing man-made. This was ancient. A formless, crawling terror that moved through him.
Jameson’s voice, when it came, was dry as a crackling corn husk: “There’s…there’s something up there, Sarge.”
Brilliant deduction, kid.
Kirk looked over to Creel and for the first time Creel saw that it was alive inside the man: fear and indecision. It was infesting him to the point that he was nearly unrecognizable. No more stiff upper lip or confident eyes or hard set to his mouth…no, his face was greasy with sweat and smudged with dirt like a chimney sweep. Eyes red-rimmed and bulging from their sockets, lips pressed tight to stop his teeth from chattering. Something had just given in him and he was now a dirty, hunched-over, chinless, scraggly trench rat, a middle-aged man who had no business in this war.
“We better go have a look, hadn’t we?” Creel said.
Jameson and Howard nodded. Kirk did not move so Creel went over to him, patted him on the back and slid the Webley revolver from the sergeant’s holster.
Poor guy had frozen right up.
He led them on a wild run through the living dead and did not bat an eye, and now…a simple noise from a shuttered room above was enough to suck the blood right out of him. It got like that sometimes in combat, Creel knew. You charged a trench and gored three enemy soldiers with your bayonet, you shot down another, skipped about on a merry lark avoiding machine-gun fire, bullets zipping around you, just so you could get close enough to toss a belt of Mill’s bombs into a trench mortar emplacement. You did your duty and you didn’t think twice about it. You made it through, got back with your mates…then you saw a bullet hole in your helmet that miraculously missed your skull and you fold up, start sobbing and can’t seem to stop.
There’s a breaking point to all.
His was last night when that living dead hag called his name and earlier today in the dugout when that…whatever that was…called his name again. Something broke loose inside and he was no good. Now he could feel the blood in his veins again and the wind in his lungs and he brushed past Jameson with a catty wink, looked back at Howard and the still immobile Sergeant Kirk. He did not feel betrayed by Kirk’s momentary weakness. In fact, he felt stronger and his respect for the sergeant increased.
“Come on, son,” he told Jameson, lighting the lantern, knowing this was what Burke would have done. “We’ll soon sort this shit out.”
Up the stairs then, feeling his strength abandoning him as nerves set in, as shadows pooled and lengthened, as things were heard scratching in the walls and others were sensed in the ganglia at his spine. A short, low corridor above. Two doorways. He knew even then which it would be. His fist sweating on the revolver, he kicked the nearest door open and a rolling wave of hot putrescence blew out at him and nearly put him to his knees.
“Gah,” Jameson said. “That stink.”
It was revolting and moist and cloying. It nearly made Creel stumble back down the stairs because he certainly did not want to look upon anything that smelled like that. Sucking in a shallow breath through his teeth, he stepped forward, holding the lantern high, night-black shadows swimming around him like eels.
What he saw made him step back because he was not really sure what it was he was looking at…just a swollen white mass spreading over the floor, a fermenting, yeasty excrescence.
It was a corpse.
Someone had died up here and instead of their remains crumbling away, they had grown in the damp shuttered darkness like a fleshy mushroom. He could see the basic outline of a skeleton-a grinning skull, a basket of rib staves, a pipe cleaner arm, a knee drawn up-all of it covered in a soft white pulp that had risen like bread dough turning the corpse into a great fruiting body that had ripened like a juicy peach, sprouting and budding and blossoming. Tendrils of that white decay had spread over the floor and grown right into the planks and up the walls like climbing vines in a cobwebby, lacey filigree that even hung from the ceiling in threads and ribbons.
It was disgusting to look at and worse to contemplate for given time, Creel thought, the creeping charnel rot would have invaded every last stick and board in the house until it all came down in a glistening fungoid mass.
“Who you suppose it was?” Jameson said, holding his nose.
Creel shrugged, staring at the oily gray toadstools that filled the eye sockets and sprung jaws in great clusters. “A peasant maybe. An injured soldier that crawled up here to die…”
“But we heard something move.”
“Maybe it was that… mass weakening the timbers.”
The words had barely left his mouth when the entire pulpy fungal mass shivered like jelly. Then it did it again. And Creel plainly saw a viscid wave pass through the thing like a breaker heading ashore in a sea of gelatin.
“Something in there,” Jameson said.
Creel did not dare speak. For whatever it was, he was certain that it was somehow responding to their voices or the vibrations of the same. That wave shuddered to a rest in the lower regions of the corpse and from between the legs there was a wet, tearing sound as the membranes of soft rot were sheared.
Both Jameson and Creel saw it.
They saw that fleshy mound between the corpse’s legs rip open and two tiny hands emerge that were waxy and gleaming, oddly boneless in their rubbery contortions.
Jameson let out a wild scream and just started shooting, he put three rounds into the mass where the rest of thing must have been and it stopped moving…those hands seemed to curl and wither, withdrawing back into the body cavity.
A woman, Creel thought with a madness scratching in his brain. Died pregnant…only what was in her did not die, it gestated in moist putrid blackness, it came to term in her rotting womb, something inhuman, something unbelievable, and something somehow related to everything else that’s going on.
They came down the stairs, faces pasty and stomachs in throats, but they did not report on what they had seen and nobody asked for the war came to life again and they heard the distant thump-thump-thump of heavy guns sending out shells. They went shrieking over Chadbourg and a few hit nearby with resounding explosions that shook the earth. They were pretty close and Creel figured they landed out in the cemetery. Overhead, the shells were coming and going, the Canadians and the Hun exchanging pleasantries.