From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (115 page)

"Hey schoolboy, you look a little young to be out here busting your ass, shouldn
’t you be in college or something?"

He was sitting up now, leaning against the back of the b
unk, and smoking a cigarette that smelled like it was made of dried grass. Grey smoke wafted around and swirled in a plume towards the open entrance.

I stood for a moment, puzzled by his comment. There were enough young men in the camp, and there had been
a lot more of them in the trenches than I had expected, but no one had thought to comment on it.

"What
’s up boy? You slow or something?"

He smiled, a lopsided, cheeky grin that was infectious.

"No sir, I’m not slow, I just hadn’t thought about being too young to be here."

Joe sat up, grimacing a little with the pain, and holding his leg, which, from the bandages wrapped around it, I presumed was the reason for him being in the tent.

"How old are you boy? You can’t be above seventeen at the most."

I nodded.
"Sixteen, sir. But my papers say I’m twenty one."

"How
’s that come to be? You change your papers so you could come out to this hell hole?"

"No sir," I said, shaking my head.

"No I didn’t think so. That must make you a damn criminal."

"I was caught stealin
g sir, just some food and a newspaper though."

"Just? Stealing is stealing boy. I guess after this place you won
’t be doing that again anytime soon?"

"No sir."

He didn’t look convinced, but that was okay with me. I started to head toward the exit but he called me back over.

"Hey, wait up, no need to be heading off so quickly now, is there?"

"I suppose not sir, but I do have my duties to attend to."

"You know folks around here don
’t you? I’ve been here a week and all I’ve had to read is a half torn comic book some dead guy left behind. If you could find me a newspaper or something it would be damn good of you."

I shrugged.

"I don’t know if I can find one sir, I’m not supposed to take stuff. Stealing is stealing."

He smiled at that.

"Oh come on, there must be a few lying around in the officers' quarters, or one of those doctors must have one. It doesn’t have to be the latest. Anything will do just to take my mind off this place and the moaning."

He indicated the bed next to him, where the dying man lay mumbling and coughing.

"He ain’t the most interesting of company."

Joe reached back behind him and into his jacket pocket, taking out what looked like a half full packet of tobacco, and then waved i
t in my direction.

"I
’ll make it worth your while."

"I don
’t know, sir, I’ll see what I can do."

"You do that son, and I
’ll have a few smokes here waiting for you when you come back. And maybe you might want this damn comic book while you're at it."

That s
ealed the deal. I knew exactly where there was a pile of newspapers. The surgeons in the south of the camp used old ones to soak up the blood from the floor of the operating tent, when they didn’t have any hay or sawdust to throw down. I unloaded a stack of them from the back of the supply wagons at least once a week. It seemed that even though we were stuck in this hell and there weren’t always enough medical supplies to go around, the folks back home still saw fit to be able to send the latest news spread.

Two days later, when the supply wagon came in, I asked the driver if it would be okay to borrow a copy. He was a friendly old guy, and was more than happy with an extra packet of field rations. Joe was as pleased as anything, and I walked away with half
of a comic book, and a few smokes in my pocket. Quite a trade I’ll say.

The next week I spotted a single copy of the
Washington Post
tucked in that pile, and earned myself not just a few smokes, but a bar of genuine American candy to go with it. I left the tent with a smile on my face, and I could still hear Joe’s voice fifty yards away proclaiming his annoyance at whatever he had just read. Even so, the smile on his face when I showed him that paper was enough to make me smile right back at him.

The following weeks turned up copies of the
New York Times
, and more frequently
Stars and Stripes
, some military press thing that Joe found interesting. I never found him anything from his home state, but I think that just being able to read about what was going on back in America was enough for him.

I always found it strange, how we learn to adapt to our surroundings so easily. When you got use
d to the cries of the wounded and the dying, the field hospital wasn’t so bad. My wound was healing up nicely, almost too quickly I thought, dreading the likelihood of going back to the front line when I was fit enough, and I had gotten to know a lot of the folks in the camp. Most of the doctors called me by my first name now, and even the surgeon general said hello to me if our paths crossed.

The doctor that I liked the best was an old, crooked-backed man called Major Elsmoor. He was in charge of the sickn
esses on the camp: cholera, tuberculosis, foot-rot - we had pretty much every ailment you could imagine passing through the place on a daily basis. Unlike the modern hospitals of today, that field camp just couldn’t provide a cure for a lot of things, so most of the sufferers would be drugged and left to die as peacefully as possible. I’m sure that if there had been a way to get them back to England they might have stood a chance, but the reality was that a lot of them would just die on the way.

Major Elsmo
or was a strange man, but his constant chattering made me laugh. Quite often, when I delivered something to him, I would find him sitting in the corner of one of the tents chattering to himself. I know it sounds strange, but I warmed to the man. As soon as he saw me, he would snap out of his blathering and a smile would brighten up his face. He always seemed pleased to see me, and asked how I was.

It
’s odd that such a quirky and seemingly harmless old man could have been responsible for all those deaths.

My
walking papers arrived not long before the end of the war. It seemed that some administration problem had happened back home, and someone, somewhere had discovered that a prison in London had been sending out young men far below the call-up age, just to free up space. Apparently they had been hunting down all of the underage conscripts for months, unfortunately discovering that most of them were now dead. I heard from the officer who spoke to me, though, that some had been sent back home, and that I was one of the last to be found. They had trouble finding me because I'd been away from the front and unofficially placed for the last few months as a helper in the field hospital. Apparently, so many of the men at the hill had died, and been unidentified, that most of the names of those men serving in that assault had been written off.

They'd lost me.

The officer seemed almost saddened to see me go. I don’t know whether that was because they were short of hands in the place, or whether he was a little embarrassed to be giving a boy his ticket home, knowing that I should never have been there in the first place.

I was to leave on the next convoy out, along with a handful of patients who were fit enough to travel back to England, but not healthy enough that they co
uld ever be sent back to the front line.

When I climbed into the back of the truck, my sack of meagre belongings over my shoulder, and three bars of chocolate and a packet of tobacco stuffed into my pockets that were a gift from some of the staff there, I
was sad, sad to be leaving a place where I felt I was of use, only to be heading back to homelessness in that damn city. But I was also exuberant to be getting out of the war. It’s the strangest thing, having mixed emotions.

I soon forgot all about that th
ough, because as I pulled up the shutter on the back of the truck and sat down, I noticed a familiar face sitting opposite me.

"Well, well. Ain
’t that a thing," I heard in that deep Texan drawl. "Looks like I’m not the only one who got their walking papers." Joe Dean smiled from the seat opposite me.

I looked back at him, smiled, and glanced down at his left leg, still wrapped up tight, with a fresh bloodstain creeping through.

"Not so much walking from what I see."

"Yeah, boy, is that chocolate you got the
re?"

I laughed.

We talked about Major Elsmoor for a long time on that journey, which seemed to last for ever. We went back over the events that had led up to Joe’s close scrape with death, and the unavoidable outcome. We both found it puzzling that a man like the Major, who was a doctor of amazing talent, could turn like that, even if he was quite an eccentric fellow.

It started two weeks before I left the camp to head back to England on the convoy. One day he was his normal chirpy self, jigging around the
camp like he was in Sunday school, rather than a sprawl of dirty tents filled with the dying, then the next morning, when I went to his surgery tent, which was a small, barely standing square canopy that was open on two sides for most of the day, he was a little too quiet. I handed over the crate, which contained a new supply of some drug that he used a lot. I don’t remember its name. I also took him a new set of surgical knives, which under most circumstances he would have been joyous about. That morning he just nodded at me, and continued reading from a small clutch of papers. They looked like they were a letter of some kind, but I didn’t pry. Elsmoor liked his privacy. I’m not sure what was in the letter, but it can’t have been anything good, because I’d never seen him so withdrawn first thing in the morning.

That was the day that the deaths started to happen.

From that day onwards, Elsmoor was the same, always quiet and withdrawn, like someone had just switched off a light somewhere and not bothered to turn it back on again. He spent most of his free time, which was very little in that place, sitting in his personal tent, behind his surgery, quiet as could be. Whenever I saw him sitting in his tent, he was still reading that same letter, over and over again, must have been a hundred times.

At first it wasn
’t really noticeable, but I did overhear a couple of the staff talking that evening, as I sat on the bank near the river eating my supper. One of the nurses, a woman called Sue, was speaking in hushed tones to a supply driver who was due to leave in the morning. I didn’t hear the start of the conversation, but when I heard his name mentioned, my ears perked up like a rabbit hiding in a field. I must have been ten feet away, so I wouldn’t have been the only one to overhear it.

"I think Doctor Elsmoor is not well," she whispered. "He just didn
’t seem himself today."

"What do you mean?" asked the driver. I think he was from the same part of the country as old Looky, except his accent wasn
’t as deep.

"Well he just seemed quiet today," she said, "and I don
’t think he is paying attention as he normally would. He administered a restful peace to two gentlemen today, and I’m not sure they were lost causes."

"Are you serious?" The driver
’s voice was strained. "That’s wrong isn’t it?"

"Well I don
’t know, you know how short of supplies we are here."

"Yes, I deliver them, but p
utting down a man who could be saved."

"Oh, I don
’t know, they were both in pretty bad shape, and he said we needed to preserve what supplies we had for those who were coming in that could more easily be saved. I didn’t question him at the time, but I feel terrible about it now."

"You should tell someone." The driver
’s voice was grave.

"I can
’t do that," came the exasperated reply. "He’s the best doctor in the field, I’m wrong to question his practice in the first place."

"If he is a danger to folks..."

"No, it’s not like that, he’s just distracted at the moment, I’m sure he’ll be fine."

"Well I hope you know what you
’re doing Sue, I wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble just to defend the doctor."

I think Sue must have regretted bringing the subject up
, because she backed off and changed the subject as fast as an alley-cat smelling a dog.

My thoughts drifted away from their conversation after a while, before I eventually turned in to sleep. It had been a long day, with a new batch of the injured arrivin
g at dawn that morning, mostly diseases. It was amazing how we seemed to get more diseased soldiers than injured ones. But then I remember that field below the hill, filled with the dying after our assault, and the moans of pain that slowly stopped as each one of them passed into his fate. If you were shot out here that was you pretty much finished.

I woke up a little late the next morning, and was lucky that Elsmoor had gone about his rounds early, otherwise I might have had myself a little telling-off for
tardiness.