“Creel,” it said in a voice of subterranean damps, “Creeeeeeellll—”
Then he was running again, slipping through the mist, hiding, waiting, rising to run again, knowing that those children were out there in numbers and that even if he managed to avoid them, he could never, ever avoid the shrouded thing… it would find him wherever he went.
He stumbled into an open square.
A dozen men trained rifles on him.
“Hold your fire,” someone said. “He looks… almost human.”
Creel dropped to his knees, shivering, holding himself, sobbing behind his gas mask.
He was taken inside a ruined building and soon, the gas dissipating sufficiently, all removed their masks. He found himself in the company of a reconnaissance patrol of the Canadian 1 Light Infantry.
A tall, handsome medical officer with stark, haunted eyes said, “You can return with us to the lines. My name is—”
“Hamilton,” Creel said with something of sneer. “Doctor to the dead.”
21
The Corpse Factory
“You’ll excuse my deceit, I hope,” said Dr. Herbert West to me, “but after you told me what was happening, I somehow lacked the fortitude to confess to my crimes. I knew if I had admitted my foul deeds you would have no longer helped me and I so dearly needed your help… the reanimation of the dead is… is not a solitary pursuit. It is not something one does alone by candle light.
“You see, old friend, I became somewhat fixated with the idea of mass reanimation. I needed a group of cadavers that had all fallen at the same time, sharing the exact or near-exact moment of death. It would be a comparative study, you understand, wherein I would be able to establish a certain modus operandi as to why certain animals rise up at a certain time and others need more time for the reagent to regenerate metabolic processes. So… when I heard about those children gassed during the shelling of the orphanage at St. Bru… I could not help myself. They were buried instantly in a common grave and it was there I went, mere hours after their interment.
“I did not go alone. You will recall a certain Monsieur Cardoux that I had become somewhat reliant upon in my researches? Cardoux was the undertaker employed by the Army to bury not only our dead but the Hun who had fallen within our perimeter. He was not well liked, as you can recall, by either peasant or soldier. Both would turn away from him in the street when they saw him coming with his boxy old hearse towed by a single draft horse. The children of the villages… yes, they would spit at him, throwing stones and shouting, “Allemands! Allemands!” when they knew he had a berth filled with German corpses. He was an odd sort, certainly, well known for his criminal dealings and shady operations. I can see him even now—his dirty old coat, the red scarf at his throat, the moth-eaten black satin top hat he wore so proudly. His beady rodent’s eyes, leering grin of yellow teeth. Yet… he was of use to me and I had full authorization to use the Hun remains as I so pleased.
“Well, it was to the cemetery at St. Bru that Monsieur Cardoux and I went that very night, those unfortunate little waifs cold only a matter of hours. Cardoux had been paid well, but as I saw him there, skulking about the fresh graves with his shovel, a ghoulish figure to say the least, I knew the matter before us was more than a matter of monetary compensation.
“Cardoux, you see, had something of an unsavory, unnatural fixation with the dead. I had seen it in his buzzard eyes many times, the carnal twist to his swollen pink lips. Do I dare even mention the shocking, nauseous activities it was rumored he partook of? The unholy grave-wares it was rumored his small stone cottage in the wood was decorated with? The grisly grinning death masks upon the walls so meticulously preserved and presented? The blasphemous trophies of mummified children frozen in gruesome poses of play? The grave-loot and charnel trinkets that he displayed with sardonic obsession? The locks of hair braided into funereal ropes that dangled from the ceiling? The revolting shelves of infant’s skulls? The tanned heads and bone sculptures, the jeweled necklaces of teeth and the memento mori volumes bound in human skin? Yes, a thoroughly vile creature was our Monsieur Cardoux, graveworm, corpse-rat, a grinning, drooling deviant who—I later learned—shared his bed with that tiny, unspeakable golden-haired cadaver.
“Given time, oh yes, Cardoux would have been hanged by the peasants, perhaps his entrails would have been torn out with iron hooks and burned in the traditional way.
“But listen: to the cemetery at St. Bru we went, two skulking grave-robbers, resurrectionists in more than name, I assure you. The children, as I have said, were interred in a common grave. So beneath that pale harvest moon, cloaked by the crepuscular shadows of grotesque graveyard trees, we began to dig. Down into the black, moldering earth as the sepulchers and tomb-angels crowded about us. It was simple enough work. The boxes were four feet down. Deep enough to discourage the wild dog packs and tunneling graveyard rats, but not too deep for the weary workmen and their grim chore. We opened the communal grave and, one by one, we unearthed those small, pathetic plank boxes, scraping them free of dirt, flicking obscenely swollen earthworms aside. We opened each box and of the forty-seven cadavers within, only thirty-two were of use to me. We laid them out on the ground, single-file, moonlight washing their dead little faces an even boneyard white. Carefully then, Cardoux holding the lantern for me—and breathing quite hard, not out of exertion but some unnamable, abhorrent passion—I made the necessary incisions at the base of the skulls and injected each with a necessary concentration of the reagent.
“It took about thirty minutes.
“And thirty minutes later, there was still no reaction. I was encouraged by supple limbs and the pliability of muscles and tendons, but I was unable to record any significant rise in metabolic temperature. I had given each a pre-measured dose that was less than used for an adult taking into account overall body mass. But nothing happened… or almost nothing. Some twenty minutes after I had injected the animals I noticed something not necessarily encouraging but certainly disturbing: their eyes were open. Every single last child had their eyes open and this after they had been gummed shut before the makeshift funeral. I examined each by the light of the lantern and those eyes were open, glistening like wet stones, almost brilliant and sparkling with vitality. Lips were pulled into pale smiles that were almost mocking.
“Yet… nothing was happening. It was almost as if they were playing possum, as insane as that sounds. Something about them unsettled me in ways I cannot describe. But it was a failure. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Cardoux kept staring into their faces, illuminating their grave-pallor with the lantern. ‘Look at these little darlings, eh?’ he said to me. ‘Ah, it is as if they would wake at any time… can you not feel it?’ I pretended I was unaware of his somewhat unwholesome attentions to certain handsome blonde girls, that macabre craven gleam in his eyes, the drool that hung from his lips. He volunteered to re-box them and re-inter them himself. ‘A great surgeon and scientist such as yourself, Dr. West… he should not be bothered with such unpleasantries, eh? Let Cardoux take care of it while you run along. No, no, have no fear, my friend, for I will not be alone. My fine little darlings and sweet dumplings will keep me company far into the night…’
“I shouldn’t have allowed it. I do not claim by any means, of course, to be of the utmost moral and ethical fiber where my work is concerned, but there are certain disagreeable things that sicken even I. Oh, I knew full the obscene attentions that Cardoux would impress upon those sleeping angelic forms… yet, thoroughly depressed and disheartened by what I considered another abysmal failure… I left him to it. And it was only several days later, after a marathon session of surgery at the aid station, that I knew I could not let the matter rest. I made inquiries of Monsieur Cardoux, but to my astonishment and ever-growing unease, he could not be located. I went so far as to contact Captain Fleming, the Corps Burial Officer—or, as the Tommies called him, the ‘Body Snatcher’, the ‘Cold Meat Specialist’—but even our dour Captain could not help me. That’s when I knew something had happened. Something horrible, yet, considering Cardoux’s shall we say ‘peculiarities’, not unwarranted, hmm?