Zombie Pulp

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?

“It was through Fleming that I tracked down the grimy, crumbling hovel in the dark wood where Cardoux squatted when not involved in more funerary pursuits. It was just after sunset when I arrived alone and I found his tall, narrow, evil-looking peasant’s hovel darkened, threaded in shadows of the blackest coffin silk. Repeated knockings upon the heavy, ivy-hung door brought no response. Finding the door unlocked, in I went. The stench of the charnel was immediate and I found it most repellent even with my nose which was somewhat jaded from the odiferous emanations of my laboratory and assorted battlefield litter.

“I immediately sought and found an oil lantern and there is no need to describe what I saw as I have already sketched that out for you. In the flickering orange-yellow light, shivering beneath the cold marble leering of his collection, shadows crawling about me like hell-spawned imps, each step revealed more unnamable, hideous sights in that museum of the catacomb. For everywhere was the blasphemous plundered tomb-loot and disinterred faces of the undertaker’s ghoulish obsession. But it was not these things which made me perspire and chatter my teeth, but it was what I saw in the large high-timbered room amongst the moldering oblong boxes: the remains of Monsieur Cardoux, a mangled corpse riven throat to belly. But not alone, oh no. For crouched over him, their teeth sharpened upon his bones, were the children. They looked up at me with their vaulted eyes, grave-pallid faces pulling into sepulchral grins that are nearly indescribable. Bits of gore dropped from their mouths and I fled, dear friend, I burst from that house of horrors, a mad and gibbering thing. For, you see, they called me by name. They knew me.”

This was the story told to me by West upon the morning of my wedding day. If it was intended as a gift, it was of the most dreadful variety. Yet, it certainly explained things and justified certain fears of mine. I now knew why he asked me if I had seen anyone on my trip out to his workshop; he was firmly convinced that the children were watching him, making no threatening overtures as of yet, but studying him intently for reasons he would not dare admit to me. But I knew it had something to do with a conspiracy of some sort directed against him by the dead risen by his hand.

It was but the first tragedy of that day I shall never forget.

At the chapel in Abbincour, I took the hand of my betrothed that day. If I could but capture the essence of Michele LeCroix standing there at the altar in her white bridal gown, the sun arcing through the stained glass windows and surrounding her in a halo of purity. But I cannot. Hers was a clean beauty, fresh, vibrant, and breathtaking as she stood there, tall and angular, looking upon me with her huge dark eyes, her olive skin contrasting the flawless white of her gown and lace. That is how I shall always see her. And that, you see, is in fact my final image of her before that immense German shell came screaming through the air, landing just outside the church. It was fired-I later learned-by a gigantic siege gun, a 420mm Howitzer. The shell itself weighed well over 800 pounds. When it exploded, it took out the entire western wall of the chapel which had stood for some three centuries by that point. The wall literally vaporized, the chapel went to matchsticks, and all present save for a few were buried in an avalanche of rubble and debris, most mangled beyond recognition and crushed to pulp. I remember coming to as I was being dragged from the blazing, shattered husk of the church by West and Colonel Brunner. I fought free of them, completely out of mind, hearing the screams of the dying echoing in my ears, and I recall hearing Brunner say, “Dear God, man, don’t go in there! Don’t look at her!”

But I did.

Coughing, eyes filled with dust, my uniform in rags, I crawled through the wreckage as what remained of the chapel threatened to fall. And there I found my Michele. Her dress was dirty, burnt in places, but nearly intact as was her body. But she had been cleanly decapitated by a falling timber, her head smashed beyond recognition.

In the days that followed, I was offered a sympathy leave but I refused. I buried myself in my work, volunteering for any hazardous duty that would take me closer to death and closer to my Michele. Weeks later, a thin and trembling specimen, I again met up with West.

Here is what he told me:

“As you know I had great success with the secretions of the reptilian embryonic tissue in the vat. By combining these in varying quantities with the reagent I achieved incredible results-the gassed children of the orphanage were but one of them. I found, to my amusement, that if I added certain animal parts to the tissue that it absorbed them, rendered them, made them part of the great hissing pulsating whole. That fascinated me. Whether it was the corpses of rats, dogs, or spare human limbs, all were assimilated. That mass of tissue was quickly becoming a colonial life form with its own specialized organic processes and metabolic peculiarities. A few excised cells grew at a fantastic rate under the microscope if given the appropriate nourishment.

“As you also know I had for some time been reanimating various body parts and had proved, I think, that there was some ethereal biophysical connection between divided anatomies of the same animal. Well, I soon discovered that parts of different animals would react to a common brain in the same way. And it was then that I formulated a very Frankensteinian hypothesis: would it be possible, I wondered, to assemble a specimen from the raw materials of the grave and not just imbue each separate segment with life but bring into being an entire creature? The idea dominated my research for several months. I wasted no time in assembling my specimen piecemeal from the bodies of Hun that were brought to me on a regular basis. The Hun are large people and from the remains furnished me, I selected only those of the greatest stature, building my specimen piece by piece and fragment by fragment, a giant, a specimen of physical perfection.

“Perfection? Hardly. When my labors of dissection and engineering were at an end, I had put together an immense, grotesque monstrosity held together by profuse stitchwork and surgical stapling, a bulging mass of muscle, jutting bone, and artery. But I wasted no time. I applied my reagent to the limbs, the torso, various autonomic centers of the brain and spinal ganglia…all were a failure. Oh, I made certain limbs tremble and fingers wiggle, and once the specimen opened one bleary yellow eye and fixed me with a look of absolute loathing. But that was it. About the time I decided I would take the thing apart, it occurred to me that if the tissue in the vat could wield disparate remains into a colony, why could it not do the same to my creation? Unlike my crude attempts, the tissue would absorb, assimilate, and regenerate at the cellular level.

“Using a winch, for my specimen was incredible in stature and weight, I lowered it into the vat and let it ‘cook’ for nearly a week. And it was at this point that I heard the fleshy throbbing for the first time from the vile steel womb. It was, I knew, the gargantuan beat of a heart and why not? My specimen had several. I was improving upon nature, you see. You may recall visiting me and hearing it for yourself. It grew stronger by the day and then one night, yes, I heard the lid of the vat open and looked upon what came crawling out-it was an abomination, a sideshow grotesquerie, a gigantic, hulking mass of distorted anatomy from a dissection room that pulled itself in my direction, gaining its feet, and looking at me with a cold, fathomless hatred and something more-a deranged, icy intelligence. It was the embodiment of not only what I had made but of what lived in that vat. Its very life-force and, dear God, its dire ambition given form.

“Oh, how that walking carcass incited every scrap of tissue in my laboratory! Things in jars and tanks and vessels underwent violent contortions as if they were trying to break free to follow that horrendous being that inched ever closer to me…limbs trembled on shelves, heads began to scream, dissected animals thrashed post mortem. Hysterical, I ran from there and never returned. And as I did so, oh yes, I saw them: the children. Their corrupt grave odor belied their appearance. They were standing outside in the rain like servants of some dark, nameless resurrected god…and I think that’s what they in fact were…and are.”

This is what Herbert West told me, a confession to the obscenities his scientific mind had plummeted to. It was no worse than I suspected for in every case where West’s methodical, somewhat perverse intellect was involved, there was tragedy and chaos and horrors beyond human comprehension. Who better knew that than I? But he had not confessed all. That I learned in due time. After the episode of Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, I should have known what he would do and in fact, did. But I was blissfully ignorant at that time and revelation did not come just then. No, not until my fate intersected that of the deserted village of Chadborg.