Creel would tell them that he had no home and a silent apartment in Kansas City didn’t count because it depressed him. He hated being at the front and he hated being away from it. That was something they understood.
“No wife or little ones, mate?”
“None. One divorce. Can’t hold a family together jumping around the world looking for that story I can’t seem to find.”
“How many wars for you now?”
“Thirteen,” he’d tell them.
They wouldn’t comment on that number as if acknowledging it would contaminate them with its poor luck. They’d just keep asking him why he was there and he’d tell them the truth: “I’m looking for something.”
They’d ask what and he would not say.
What really could he say?
That he saw Flanders as a great poisonous flower and they were all trapped in its petals, waiting for it to close up, caught in the inevitable venomous darkness, waiting for the slow call of forever night? Even to him with the somewhat morose and macabre rhythms of his thoughts that sounded more than a little like some kind of psychological/metaphorical sinktrap, the result of an overtaxed mind and an overburdened imagination.
But that was how he saw it.
Death was here, in this place. Malignant, wasting, hungry death and it was a force far beyond anything as simple as the misfortunes of war. It was alive, elemental, discorporeal and sentient… and he could feel it and had felt it ever since he got to Flanders.
Like it has been waiting for me, he often thought in the heavy shades of night. I’ve hounded it through battle after battle and now it’s not running from me anymore, it’s not hiding, it’s just waiting in the darkness like an ivied graveyard angel, arms open to embrace me and draw me beyond the pale into a world of rustling shadows and nonexistence.
And whenever his cynicism laughed at the very idea, he needed only take a tour of the countryside by day, chain-smoking and nail-biting, to see that it was not too far from the truth.
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.