“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 doglike 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.
The officers wanted the men to go back, but Creel got in there for a look before they stopped him. One of the Tommies trained a spotlight on it. The beast had pretty much been blasted into pieces, but enough of its hide remained in a single smoldering husk that he could see what he needed to see.
He couldn’t say about all of it, but the heads of those pups were clearly sutured into place.
“A camera?” he called. “Does anybody have a camera?”
But none were forthcoming and that was because the sergeant-major was scattering the Tommies with an evil eye, daring them to challenge his might and authority.
“Out of there now!” he shouted as a thin young military surgeon came forward to look at the remains. “Let Dr. Hamilton through!”
And what struck Creel the most was that Hamilton did not seem surprised at what he was looking at. Shocked, yes; disgusted, certainly. But surprised? No, it was almost like he had expected this.
Later, back in the reserve trench—after Captain Sheers gave him a good dressing down for “interfering in military matters” of all things, promising him that he was done with the London Irish Rifles, thank you very much—he pulled Burke aside in the support trench. “You saw it same as I did and don’t sit there and give me any of your goddamn Yorkshire stoicism,” he said to him, his face inches away. “That thing is part of this. It did not happen by accident and you know it. That thing was fucking stitched together, Burke, and our Doctor Hamilton didn’t even blink an eye about it.”
Burke sighed. “And you want me to do what, mate?”
“I want you to help me figure this out, Old Shoe,” Creel said, grinning almost maniacally. “That thing was no dog… good God, it screamed like a woman. It’s part of the whole. All the weird things we’ve seen and heard about are part of something. Something that was made to happen.”
“All right. How do we start?”
“We start by finding out about this lieutenant, this Doctor Hamilton. He’s with the Canadians but his accent sounds American,” Creel explained. “That’s where we start. Because this guy, oh yes, he holds the keys to hell in his hands.”
15
The Sleep of Reason
Tucked away in a little funk hole scraped into the side of the trench, just large enough to curl up in, Creel managed to drift off around five and the dreams came for him right away.
He saw the sun, buried behind layers of leaden clouds, extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle. It sought its grave and moist earth was thrown in after it and it was simply no more.
Then all across No-Man’s Land, there was a stillness and a waiting; morbid seeking shapes drifting about with a lonesome whispering and a stifled, subterraneous breathing. For here it was always the witching hour and the grinning throng of tomb-shadows moved like an October breeze through a sullen churchyard with a sighing breath of rainy crypts. Their cadaverous moon-faces gave praise to the night and the rain and the human wreckage. They were formed of red casket velvet and white mannequin wax. They hid in shadowy pools of reeking water, the black blood of sunken graves, showing themselves only when there was movement and the beating of living hearts.
Creel moved with them, as them.
The legions of the dead.
They were aware, they were sentient, they were driven and relentless and unspeakably hungry. From the pestilent deeps of Flanders they moved, slinking and slithering through sewer-damps and flooded trenches like disease germs in clotted arteries. Throughout this night and many more there would be scratchings at parapets and whispers in the shadows, a clawing at the doors of ruined village houses. Fungous faces would be pressed to shuttered windows and crumbling fingers would scrape against casements. The dead would wake in flooded cellars and ooze down the throats of fire-blackened chimneys and expunge themselves from waterlogged shell-holes.
But they would come.
And every night there would be more.
And he would be one of them, never knowing or fathoming the stillborn depths of their decaying minds.
Together, they marched into the night.
When Creel woke up, a scream on his lips, three fat-bellied rats were gnawing on his boots.
16
The Workshop
When I finally caught up with West it was at the farmhouse and I wasted no time in taking him aside rather roughly and demanding some answers because it was far past the point where I wanted to listen to his sarcastic little denials and his cheeky morbid humor. Events were rapidly escalating out of control.
“You’re in a blue mood today, aren’t you?” he said.
“And I’ve got a damn good reason to be, Herbert. I’ve just come from Loos.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Most unpleasant from what I’ve heard, hmm? The BEF advanced and were pushed back to where they started from.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Herbert. The LIR shot down one of your pets, that thing you had chained up in the corner,” I said, pointing to where that abomination had been but was no more.