Corporal Hessling

#On His Station

A survey compiled in A.S. 201 for the Sacred Ledger of everything the record holds on Corporal Hessling: one observation, one deposition, one reassignment, and a habit he took with him to his new posting.

The Ledger requires a dossier for every name that a sealed record cannot do without. Sealed Record J-14 of the Bureau of War cannot do without Corporal Hessling. His rank was corporal and his duty was spotter. Beyond those two facts and the testimony he gave, the Ledger holds nothing. It has no given name, no company, no birthplace, and no service history that the Bureau has seen fit to share with me. None of the files I have been permitted to read gives a date for his observation, his deposition or his reassignment. This survey is dated A.S. 201 because that is the year in which I write it. It dates nothing else.

I first heard of him at second hand, which is how most knowledge worth having arrives. Stemmler, an archivist of the Bureau of Records, had been seconded against his will to chair the Bureau of War's field-taxonomy committee. He told me that the transformation of a Gorged into a Self-Devoured had been observed only once. He named the observer: a spotter named Hessling, who watched from four hundred yards through a Bureau of War observation scope.

At four hundred yards no appetite the Bureau has measured can touch, bite, breathe upon or reach a man. The distance is the most curious item in his file. The rest of the file suggests that four hundred yards was not far enough. I record that as what the documents imply. They name no mechanism, and I will not supply one.

#On the Deposition

The committee had theorised this circumstance and never seen it. A Gorged lives on provision. It is vast and near-immobile, and lesser servants feed it whatever their foraging yields. Kargath's hunger grows with feeding and accepts no shortage as an excuse. When the provision fails, the Gorged keeps eating. J-14 records what it ate.

According to Hessling's deposition, it began at the extremities. First the fingers went, then the hands, then the forearms, each consumed, regrown and consumed again. After that came the torso, and after that the face. The deposition does not tie each stage to a particular hour, and I will not do it on the deposition's behalf. The Ledger does not improve a witness by inventing his clock.

By the fourth hour, he reported, the entity had acquired what he called "a rhythm." Consumption and regrowth recurred in a pattern that, to his eye, suggested practice. Doctrine has noted the word and has not ruled on it. A pattern proves only that there is a pattern. Whether anything inside the creature was learning is the kind of question the Bureau of Doctrine keeps in a locked choir-stall and never sings.

The erratum appended to the bestiary entry on the Self-Devoured reports, on the authority of his deposition, that the screaming began in the second hour and did not stop. The same account says its character changed around the seventh hour.

Hessling declined to describe how.

That refusal is the only part of J-14 I would call eloquent. Stemmler described the deposition to me as "unfortunately detailed," and I have read enough of it since to understand the adverb. A spotter is trained to report what he sees as dispassionately as an inventory clerk. Hessling reported fingers, forearms, torso and face in exactly that manner. When the sound changed, he would not say how. By the eighth hour he had stopped watching.

The record says nothing more about that moment. It does not say whether he turned away, was relieved early, sat down, or let the eyepiece fall. I have seen dossiers fattened on such guesses. This one will stay lean.

#On the Relief's Report

After the eighth hour the witness chair stands empty. The account resumes through a different pair of eyes.

By the eleventh hour, Hessling's relief had trained the scope on the position. No account available to me names the relief. Where the Gorged had been, the relief reported a hunched thing, chewing, about one-third of its former mass. That fraction is an estimate made through glass at four hundred yards. Nobody went down to weigh the creature, and the Bureau has never ordered anyone to. The relief watched for six seconds and then covered the scope with a cloth. The observation post was later reassigned. The record does not say which post it was or what it was reassigned to.

The eleven hours of the transition are therefore the work of two witnesses with a hole between them. Hessling supplies the beginning and the middle, up to the eighth hour, and the relief supplies the end. Nobody in the record watched the hours in between. The committee reads the account as a passage of roughly eleven hours from Gorged to Self-Devoured. I read it the same way, with the gap marked in red ink. Only the Creator has all eleven hours. The Bureau has eight of them and an ending.

#On the Use of a Witness

The field-taxonomy committee spent nine months deciding whether the Self-Devoured were a class of their own or a degraded variety of the Gorged. It settled on a sentence I have always admired for its economy: the Self-Devoured are what the Gorged become when the food runs out. Older scholarship on Kargath's legions had held only that some Self-Devoured were believed to have once been Gorged. The committee turned that belief into a finding, and J-14 is the evidence it relied on: one transition, two witnesses, and a gap of some hours. The Bureau has built cathedrals on less, and I have consecrated a few of them.

The Bureau of War now rates the Self-Devoured Low for direct threat and Extreme for proximity. Those ratings classify the creature. They are tidy and they fit on a field card. They were built partly on the testimony of a man who could not bring himself to watch to the end. The committee needed his account to be precise, and he made it precise. Precision is what the Bureau asked of him, and it is the only thing the Bureau has acknowledged receiving.

The reader may have one comparison, and only one. Corporal Ereth Vey's case of A.S. 191 is recorded at length in the bestiary. He watched the Self-Devoured for six shifts on the southern observation chain and was then found gnawing the binding of his log. His is a separate case from a separate time. Nothing in J-14 places Hessling at Vey's post, in Vey's year or in Vey's condition. The record has Hessling eating nothing. He stopped looking. Of the two corporals, the Ledger prefers the one who looked away.

#On the Munich Reassignment

When I asked Stemmler where Corporal Hessling was now, he told me two things. I record both as his report.

The first was that Hessling had been reassigned to a supply depot in Munich. The city is the Bureau of War's central staging point and quartermaster depot. Rail lines from Strasbourg, Cologne and Kanzleiburg meet there before crossing into the forward zones, and the Bureau keeps its largest warehouse complex there. Soldiers call it the last comfortable city before the front. The record does not say which depot received him, what he counted there, or for how long. A spotter is paid to look at things far away. A depot clerk looks at crates within arm's reach. If the transfer was meant as mercy, nobody wrote that down. The Bureau does not put mercy in writing, in case someone cites it.

The second was that Hessling had taken to covering the mirrors in his quarters with cloth.

The record does not establish what the habit means. No physician's finding is attached to J-14. No chaplain's report says what Hessling feared to see, or whether he feared anything at all. Doctrine has drawn no conclusion of contamination, and neither do I. I note only this: after six seconds, the relief put a cloth over a lens. By Stemmler's report, Hessling put cloth over glass. The Ledger notes the resemblance and certifies nothing by it.

His recorded service ends in a city of warehouses, in quarters the record does not describe. A corporal who had watched a thing eat its own face, and would not say how its screaming changed, hung cloth over the mirrors.