But the creature had no intention of that. It had been pursuing him for sometime now and this was the crossroads of their fates which had been twined together from the very first, from the moment Creel had stepped upon his first battlefield and seen his first ravaged corpse and taken his first photograph for his private morgue. “You came to see and you came to know,” it said to him. “Now you will SEE and soon you will KNOW…”
Then without hesitation, it released him, grasped a few strands of loose stitching at its chest and, like a child unthreading a bootlace, pulled itself open and unwound itself and Creel screamed as what was inside came flooding out in a slimy gushing river that covered him, enveloped him, drowning him in a steaming, wriggling sea of grave-maggots. They filled the trench, rising and bursting over the banks of sandbags and he fought in their depths like a swimmer going down for the last time. His fingers broke the surface of the squirming, noxious sea, but no more. They were at his eyes, in his ears, up his nostrils and pressing through the cleft at his ass. His mouth pulled open in a demented scream of violation and they flowed down his throat, filling him, gagging him, plummeting him into loathsome charnel depths, suffocating him on the death he had sought and finally made his own.
He sank beneath the carrion graveworm waters and the reanimated, carefully-sewn husk that had held the Angel of Death within collapsed like a balloon bled of air, just a collection of yellow bones and a shroud of skin that drifted to earth like a sheet blown from a line.
And from every quarter, the dead sank back into their holes, sunless, bleached faces closing their eyes for a final time and limbs going stiff and trunks dissolving into pools of maggoty rottenness and hot gassy putridity. Soon they were only carcasses, what was inside taking wing in great buzzing black clouds of corpse-flies seeking higher plains and fresher winds.
25
Breathing Out
As you may have guessed, I was the only survivor of the reconnaissance party to Charbourg. I wandered for hours seeking a peaceful oblivion that I never found. I remember little of it. I was told that a BEF raiding party of the 12 ^ th Middlesex found me and brought me back to the lines. After that, it’s a feverish blur of aid stations and casualty wards. It was some weeks before I came to my senses and when I did, when I made a full recovery-or as near of a recovery as one could hope for after what I had seen-I was repatriated with my unit only to be brought before my commanding officers for court-martial proceedings.
West was there, too.
We were being held following evidence that was gathered at West’s farmhouse, which we were told was of such a grisly, deplorable, and execrable nature, that there were those who wished us to be brought before a firing squad without trial. The farmhouse was burned to the ground along with what was still in there.
No matter.
After due consideration, command decided that the court records of the investigation would be sealed and we would be discharged, honorably, with the understanding that we would never utter a word of what we did or what we saw or other blasphemous, ungodly acts we had perpetrated.
Still, at West’s side, I returned to private practice in Boston. I should have despised the man and I suppose I did, but there was a magnetism to his brilliance and soon we returned to our somewhat peculiar line of research skulking about midnight graveyards and moonlit burial grounds. For we had an appointment in the skull-toothed hollows of the valley of the dead and our work was not yet done…