Friday 10 May 2013

...of spectres

An accident... So The Bug rests alongside Tosh in the bleak cemetery in the shadow of the Witch's Hand.
An accident... drivers walking about with sullen eyes, and whisperings that are not pleasant listening... and I, in the hours after the midnight convoy, sitting thinking things that are best not thought... my fingers tight against Commandant's thick, red throat, gloating in the ebbing strength of that squat, healthy body until I am sick and faint with murderous longing.
The impulse has gone... but in its place has come something worse. I am haunted now as The Bug was haunted. Whenever I close my aching red eyes a procession of men passes before me: maimed men; men with neither arms nor legs; gassed men, coughing, coughing, coughing; men with dreadful burning eyes; men with heads and faces half shot away; raw, bleeding men with the skin burned from their upturned faces; tortured, all watching me as I lie in my flea-bag trying to sleep... an endless procession of horror that will not let me rest. I am afraid. I am afraid of madness. Are there others in this convoy fear-obsessed as I am, as The Bug was... others who will not admit it, as I will not, as The Bug did not... others who exist in a daily hell of fear? For I fear these maimed men of my imaginings as I never fear the maimed men I drive from the hospital trains to the camps. The men in the ambulances scream, but this ghostly procession is ghostly quiet. I fear them, these silent men, for I am afraid they will stay with me all my life, shutting out beauty till the day I die. And not only do I fear them, I hate them. I hate these maimed men who will not let me sleep.

[Not So Quiet..., Smith, H. Z.]

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