Morbid Anatomy Read online

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  MORBID ANATOMY

  CHARNEL HOUSE

  www.severedpress.com

  MORBID ANATOMY

  Tim Curran

  “Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil,

  as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the

  grave, or tortured the living animal to animate

  the lifeless clay?”

  —Frankenstein, 1817

  Copyright 2013 Tim Curran

  1

  An Introduction and a Horror

  Of my experiences in the Great War with Dr. Herbert West, I speak of only with the greatest hesitation, loathing, and horror. For it was to the flooded, corpse-filled trenches that we came in 1915.

  Perhaps I held some naïve patriotic and nationalistic motives of serving mankind and saving the lives of the war wounded—a state of mind induplicable once the truth of war is known—but with Herbert West it was never the case. Openly he disparaged the Hun, but secretly our commission in the 1st Canadian Light Infantry was merely a means to an end. You see, my colleague’s motives were hardly altruistic. Though a surgeon of exceptional, almost supernatural skill, a biomedical savant and scientific wunderkind, West’s lifelong obsession was not with the living but the dead: the reanimation of lifeless tissue and particularly the revivication of human remains. And in the war itself and the horrid by-products it produced like some great fuming factory of death, he saw the perfect environment for his arcane research…not to mention unlimited access to plentiful raw materials.

  I came to the war as West’s colleague, yes, but I felt deep inside that I was answering the subtle call of a higher power, that I—and my surgical skill—were the instruments of good in a theater of evil. I arrived with high ideals and within a year, I departed Flanders, hollow-eyed, broken, my faith in mankind hanging by a tenuous thread. For many months, the memories struggled within me, stillborn shadows of pestilence—living, crawling, and filling my throat until, at times, I could not swallow nor draw a solitary gasping breath.

  If that seems a trifle melodramatic, then let the uninitiated consider this:

  Flanders, 1915.

  A cramped, claustrophobic maze of waterlogged trenches cutting into the blasted earth like deep-hewn surgical scars. Throughout the long misty days and into the dark dead of night, machine-guns clattering and high-velocity shells bursting, the thumping of trench mortars and the choking cries of gassed soldiers tangled in the barbwire ramparts. The stink of burned powder, moist decomposition, and excrement. Rotting corpses sinking into seas of slopping brown mud. Rats swarming atop the sandbags. Flares going up and shells coming down. And death. Dear God, Death running wild, sowing and reaping, gathering His grim harvest in abundance as the bodies piled up and the rain fell.

  It was just the sort of place where a man of Herbert West’s peculiar talents would thrive.

  Unlike I who held faith in the existence of the human soul and its ascension, upon death, unto the throne of God, West held no such misconceptions (as he put it). He was a scientific materialist, a confirmed Darwinist, and to him the soul was a religious fantasy and the Church existed only as a political entity to oppress and control the masses for its own remunerative ends. Life was mechanistic by nature, he claimed, organic machinery that could be manipulated at will. And if I had doubted such a thing, he proved it repeatedly with a reagent he had developed that galvanized life into the dead…often with the most unspeakable results.

  Even now, these many years later, I can see West—thin, pale, his blue eyes burning with a supernal intensity behind his spectacles—as he sorted through the piles of corpses, whispering off-color remarks to me and giggling with his low cold laughter as he scavenged about like a butcher selecting only the finest cuts…a clot of gut, a stray undamaged organ, a particularly well-proportioned limb or the rare intact cadaver. I can see corpses floating in flooded bomb craters and the black clouds of seeking corpseflies. And I can see the terrified eyes of young men about to go over the top in search of their graves.

  I can see Flanders.

  I can see West’s workshop—a converted barn—part surgical theater and part laboratory of diabolical creation. I can see things in jars and vessels of bubbling serum…remains that should have been dead but were horribly animate with a semblance of ghoulish life. I can see the headless body of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee that West had reanimated. And I can hear the Major’s head crying out from its vat of steaming reptile tissue right before German shell-fire brought the structure down in a blazing heap.

  But worse, far worse, are the dreams that come for me in the blackest marches of night. For I see Michele. Articulated, wraithlike…she comes to me like a jilted lover in the night. She wears a white bridal gown like a flowing shroud. It is spattered with mud and gory drainage, threaded with mold and infested with insects. I can clearly hear them buzzing and clicking. I can smell her odor which is flyblown and fusty, equal parts mildew and filth and grave earth. She comes to me with outstretched arms and I seek her as fast. Her bridal train is discolored, ragged, worried by plump graveyard rats whose stink is the stench of the darkest, moldering trenches of Flanders. When her arms embrace me I shiver for I can feel the grave-cold of her flesh, the coffin-worms writhing in her shroud. I gag on her stink.

  She does not kiss me.

  For she has no head.

  2

  The Walking Dead

  Creel had been in Flanders for four months, embedded with the 12th Middlesex, when he got invited on a little raiding party that was being thrown together. No volunteers were asked for. The sergeants went down the forward trench, picking men at random like apples from a barrel and none of them were too happy with the idea.

  Somehow, he had thought there would be a little more military precision involved in such a thing, but it was no different than anything else in that war. Eenie, meanie, miney, mo. Looking at the dour faces of the selected, Creel asked Sergeant Burke what would happen if one refused to go.

  Burke got that pained expression on his face that Creel so often seemed to inspire. He was Creel’s aid. His job was to stay by Creel’s side, keep him in one piece if possible and keep him out of trouble…if such a thing were feasible.

  “Well, they’d replace him, wouldn’t they?” Burke said. “Then they’d march him out and shoot him.”

  Creel wrote that down, amused by his own question.

  Being a journalist, he was there out of the mutual suffering of the general staff and the line officers. The Brits already had their own carefully-controlled correspondents, they didn’t need some Yank from the Kansas City Star coming in and mucking things up with his glib tongue and saucy manner, but President Roosevelt had pushed the British on the matter. Saying that if American correspondents were not embedded with British and Canadian units, it would harm the war effort…in other words, if the proper spin wasn’t presented to the American public by Americans, he’d never be able to get the public to swallow the idea of committing troops and dollars.

  So the British Expeditionary Force submitted and the BEF did not like submitting to anything.

  There were four men in the raiding party: Sergeant Kirk, Corporal Smallhouse, Privates Jacobs and Cupperly. In addition to his Enfield rifle and fixed bayonet, Jacobs carried fifty rounds of ammunition. Kirk was the grenade man. He carried a haversack filled with Mills bombs. Smallhouse was a grenade thrower, too. Last in line was Cupperly, another rifleman with fifty rounds in his bandolier.

  Two other raiding parties led by two other sergeants would be going out as well.

  “We’re going to go out and play naughty schoolboy,” Kirk said, grinning. “Our job is to annoy, disrupt, and cause trouble. A burr in the Hun’s behind, that’s us. A merry lark it shall
be.”

  Creel found it interesting how Kirk, who was a pretty decent guy by all accounts, really enjoyed these raids. There was a mischievous gleam in his eye and a crooked smile to his face like the appointed task was a bit of boyhood deviltry like tipping over privies or putting wormy apples on the teacher’s desk.

  With Burke and Creel tagging behind, they went over the top at nightfall and into the muddy, corpse-strewn waste of No-Man’s Land. Faces blackened, moving like shadows, they crept at a low crouch or crawled through the mud, legions of corpse-eating rats moving in dark rivers around them. On his belly, Kirk cut them a hole through the wire and within minutes they spotted two German forward sentries. Jacobs and Cupperly took them out silently, rising like shades behind them and clubbing them over the heads with the butts of their rifles, then bayoneting them in the throats. It took very little time and the only noise was the impact of rifle butts against helmets and the sound of blood bubbling from gored throats.

  Silently then, the raiders dropped into the first line of trenches which were well ahead of the main German trench system. They crept their way through, moving from bay to bay, tossing grenades when they heard movement. They killed half a dozen Hun this way. It was quite efficient, Creel thought, and the element of surprise was a big part of it. There had been an artillery barrage less than an hour before which drove the Germans from their trenches and into their sandbagged dugouts on higher ground. The only men left behind were sentries and they paid with their lives as all three raiding parties moved fast, clearing trenches and stealing equipment, destroying anything they couldn’t take with them.

  Burke told Creel later that it was a near-perfect raid, for usually the Germans heard them cutting through the wire and opened up with machine-gun fire.

  The three parties combined cleared over four-hundred feet of trench before they heard a German reaction force mounting a counterattack.

  The raiders slipped out of the trenches with three prisoners, running and stumbling back to their own lines. All in all, it was a crazy, heart-pounding sort of way to spend a few hours.

  One of the captured Germans was an old white-haired sergeant with only two teeth left in his mouth. He had surrendered instantly, throwing up his arms and shouting, “Kamerad!”

  “Lot of them give up easy like that,” Burke said. “Just glad to be out of this bloody war.”

  The prisoners were taken into one of the British dugouts where they could be interrogated by the intelligence officer. Creel and Burke and a few others waited there with them. Creel gave the old sergeant a cigarette and he grinned with those near-empty gums. He smoked the cigarette, muttering, “Kamerad,” under his breath again and again as if to reinforce the point. But after a time, he began to look very grim, jabbering on incessantly and pointing in the direction of No-Man’s Land. “Die toten…die toten!” he began to cry out, his eyes as dark as burnt cinders. “Die toten…die toten dieser spaziergang! Das tote wandern! Die toten dieser spaziergang!”

  “Quit yer yabbering,” Burke told him.

  But if it was yabbering, then it was some of the most unusual yabbering that Creel had heard in that war. Maybe his German wasn’t the best, but what the sergeant was saying was all too clear and the fear behind it unmistakable.

  The dead, he was saying. The dead that walk.

  That’s when Creel began to get a few ideas and getting them, smelled blood in the water.

  3

  Memento Mori

  The Germans mounted a small, inconsequential, half-hearted offensive that left their corpses scattered about the perimeter like rice after a wedding. The rain fell, bloating the corpses, puffing them up into particularly unpleasant white mounds of decomposition that flowered weird growths of fungi. Though the stink of them was no worse than the usual smell of Flanders, they did season things up to the point where the officers were complaining and that got action. A small group was sent out to bury them in a mass grave.

  Creel went with, taking his little box-shaped Brownie camera with him and getting some nice shots of the cadavers. He had quite a collection by that point: corpses blown up into trees, tangled in the wire, sinking in the mud, nested by rats, and—his favorite—a Hun officer who’d been machine-gunned but was held upright in a casual sort of stance by a sharp oak branch that had speared him through the back. When Creel had snapped that one, many months after the First Battle of Ypres, the officer had been nearly picked down to bones by the local ravens and buzzards—sparrows nesting in his ribcage and skull—and he looked very much like a skeleton on a jaunty afternoon stroll, steel helmet tipped at a rakish angle.

  It became an obsession for Creel in that war to collect photographs of the dead as it had in other wars he had covered. The Tommies either politely ignored him or were openly offended by what he was doing.

  “Why?” Burke asked him one day. “Why do you want pictures of that? Your paper won’t print such things.”

  Creel had laughed as he always laughed at the question: a cool, bitter sort of laugh. “I do it because I don’t understand death. I don’t understand the process of life becoming death.”

  “Nothing to understand, mate. You get it or you don’t get it, saavy? Me mum would say it’s God’s province.”

  “Yes, God’s province, but man’s suffrage.”

  The day after the Hun were shoveled into a mass grave, the BEF put together their own little counterattack and with similar results. The trenchlines were stagnant and had been for months, the only thing that ever changed was the amount of corpses left to boil in the sun and melt into the mud of Flanders like wax effigies.

  Afterwards, Creel watched the walking wounded coming in—grimy, mud-caked, fatigued, bloody—with their slings and bandages, none of them speaking as if the war had erased their voices and turned them into mutes. They shuffled along, limping and hobbling on swollen feet, a procession of the maimed and he got the feeling that when they signed on beneath the grim shadows of Kitchener posters (WE WANT YOU!), they hadn’t expected it to be like this. All of them had the same dead tombstone eyes gray as puddles of rain. The only difference between them and the dead spread across No-Man’s Land is that they were walking.

  Die toten dieser spaziergang?

  Without a doubt.

  The stretcher bearers brought the real bad ones over to the ambulances for a trip to Battalion Aid or the Casualty Clearing Station and most of them would die before they got there. Creel liked to hang around and catch whatever after-action gossip he could. He listened to three men, blinded by gas, eyes patched with gauze, discuss what they had seen out there and it was more of the same. The gas came down on them in a mushrooming, rolling green cloud, they said, that appeared a luminous yellow by the time it reached them, blown by eastern winds. Then the Hun let loose with a massive barrage of shell-fire and smudge canisters that enveloped the battlefield in a pungent white smoke thick as London fog. Men got lost. They charged in the wrong direction. They fell into flooded shell holes and drowned. Some sank without a trace in the yellow-brown mud. The combined gas and smoke smelled like sulfur, one man insisted. No, more like ether, yes definitely ether, said another. But the third claimed it was the odor of rosin. They could not agree on that but they did agree that hundreds died, both Hun and BEF hard-chargers, suffocating on the fumes, choking, gagging, lungs dissolved to yellow froth that spilled from shrieking mouths.

  Creel walked amongst the wounded and discovered that some of them had been out there for days following the last offensive, lying in craters in the falling rain, no food, no water, fighting off the rats who were attracted by the raw, meaty smell of their injuries. Many of them were stark mad and many others in good spirits despite the fact that their wounds were crawling with maggots.

  Long after the stretcher bearers and ambulances had moved on, Creel was still standing there in the gray afternoon drizzle listening to the distant thump of artillery pieces and the much closer flapping of sheets that covered the dead at his feet. He took snapshots of them and p
articularly those where his own dark shadow had fallen over them like Death coming to collect His due.

  Smoking a cigarette and muttering things under his breath that even he was not aware of, he stood amongst them, breathing in the cool coppery odor of shattered anatomy and the hot smell of infection, filthy dressings, and corpse gas.

  He did not feel as if he were alone.

  An asphyxiating, cold-crawling fear took hold of him and he could not put a name to it. Only that it was all around him, a pall of rising black death, an unearthly possessed malignant intelligence that seemed to be standing just behind him and breathing cold catacomb breath down the back of his neck. He felt like he was bathing in it. When it passed, he was on his knees, panting, shaking, ignoring a wild, insane urge to lay down with the dead and close his eyes so he might know what they knew.

  And in his head, over and over and over again, that German voice: Die toten dieser spaziergang.

  4

  Corpse Rats

  At night, the rats would come out.

  Like some black pipe had ruptured, they’d flood out in numbers from hidey-holes and warrens, filthy nests out in the barbwire and crawlspaces beneath the sandbagged ramparts. Some of the Tommies said they lived inside corpses out in No-Man’s Land, chewing a hollow in the belly where they could bring their young to term in putrescent darkness.

  Regardless, they’d come surging out, swarming, infesting, feeding off the dead, biting the living, scavenging for food scraps, crawling through refuse heaps, and even eating leather boots and belts…quite often while some poor bastard was wearing them. Numbering in the millions, they knew no fear. They ran through the trenches in numbers, crawling over men whether asleep or awake. They were huge, gray things, fattened on carrion, rabid eyes beady, pelts greasy with slime and drainage, teeth forever gnawing and chewing and nipping.