Lycanthropos

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  But you are alive! You are alive!

  Now he did laugh, loudly and long. "I told you, Louisa," he said aloud. "I told you." I told you that I would survive, because I am a survivor. And now Helmuth is dead, and I am free to go home, back to my own bed and my own chair and my books and my quiet, placid life, which is all I ever really wanted to do. I have survived it all. I have survived the S.S. and the creatures Helmuth created and I have survived Helmuth himself. Why. I even survived being bitten by a…

  I even survived being bitten by...

  ...being bitten by...

  "NO!" he screamed, jumping to his feet and falling back against the wall of the office. "NO!"

  I did break my ankles when I fell from the ladder, I know I did! I remember the pain, I heard them snap! But now the bones have knitted, the breaks have healed! I felt my bones being crushed between the jaws of the creature, I felt his fangs tearing into my flesh, I remember the pain! But now the wound is closed, the wound is healing!

  "NO!" he screamed again. "NO!"

  He felt an uncontrollable hysteria rising in him, and he looked desperately, pointlessly around the room.

  He saw a dagger and a holstered revolver hanging from a hook upon the door, and he ran over and pulled out the knife. Just to see, he thought, just to see, just to show that it isn’t true. His right hand trembled as he drew the blade across the palm of his left.

  Nothing. No cut, no blood.

  Now he grabbed the hilt of the dagger tightly and stabbed its tip into his palm with all his strength.

  Nothing. No wound, no blood.

  Weyrauch dropped the knife and took hold of the revolver. He pointed the weapon at his foot, closed his eyes and pulled his head back as far as he could away from the weapon. He fired. He heard the explosion, smelled the acrid smoke, and felt a sensation on his foot like unto the impact of a falling acorn. Weyrauch opened his eyes and stared down at the hole in his shoe and at the bit of lead that had flattened against his foot and now lay on the floor beside it.

  And in that instant, as if the curtain had just been raised on the first act of an eternal, tragic drama, the future showed itself to him. He saw himself wandering the earth as Kaldy had done, wandering through the hundreds of years and the thousands of years, with no home, no family, no peace, no rest, a slave to the cycles of the moon, a slave to the spirit of the wolf. He saw himself forgetting who he was, forgetting his own name, forgetting everything, becoming in the end a faceless, nameless, emotionless engine of death...

  …of death…

  Death!

  There was no salvation save in death. There was no redemption save in death.

  Life was all he had wanted, life was he had needed, all he had desired. All he desired now was death.

  Weyrauch took a deep breath, placed the barrel of the pistol into his mouth, and fired it again and again and again. The bullets rattled around his mouth harmlessly until he spat the hot bits of lead out and they clattered loudly on the floor.

  He tried to weep, but he had no tears, for a werewolf does not weep. He tried to pray, but he had no words, for God’s ear is deaf to hell.

  He had the one thing which he had always wanted. He had life.

  He had nothing.

  Weyrauch burst from the building and ran from the camp, ran out into the still, peaceful morning, screaming madly at the top of his lungs, "Kaldy! KALDY! KALDY!"

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The air was cold but bracing, and Louisa von Weyrauch pulled the ribbon from her long blond hair, letting it fall freely so that the Alpine breeze could dance through it. She sighed slightly as she gazed out over the green valley and the small storybook village where she and the old Gypsy had spent the past few months. Blasko lay nearby on his back, his hands folded behind his head, softly whistling one of the melancholy melodies of his people.

  They were only sixty miles from Germany, but the war and the bloodshed and the misery seemed a universe away. Louisa knew that even now the Allies were converging on the Reich, that the Russians had invaded Poland and were nearing Prussia, that the Americans and the British had raced through France and Belgium and were drawing nigh to the Rhine. She knew all this because the little storybook village was filled with literate, sophisticated, educated people…in other words, typical Swiss…and the newspapers and the radio and the conversations she heard at the inn where she worked told her all she needed to know about the mad world which surrounded this little mountain oasis of sanity.

  She looked over at the Gypsy and asked, "Blasko, would you like some more wine?"

  "No, Donna, thank you." Blasko replied, yawning. "At my age I cannot drink wine the way I used to." He paused and then took the earthen mug from its place on the fresh new grass of springtime. "Well, perhaps just a bit more."

  Louisa laughed and poured the crisp white wine into his mug, and then poured some into her own. She relished each and every day, but none more than those days when she did not have to attend to the tables and the linen and the dishes at the small inn. It was good work and it was honest work, but it was also hard work, and she sometimes wondered if she would trade places with her earlier self if she had the chance. And then she would think of Gottfried and Helmuth, about Hitler and Himmler, about the S.S. and the Gestapo, about the mad dreams and the bloody reality which had destroyed her nation and had taken the lives of millions and had left Europe a corpse-strewn continent in ruins.

  And she knew that her old life had been a purgatory of bitterness and shame and sorrow, and she was glad to be rid of it. It did not matter if the war ended next year or next week or tomorrow. She would never go back to Germany.

  She sipped the wine and then lay down on the grass beside Blasko, the old man whom she loved as if he were her father, who had taken her by the hand that last night in Budapest and had led her through the plains of Hungary and the hills of Croatia into the Alps of Italy and through the mountain passes into Switzerland. He had held her when she cried, he had watched over her when she slept, found her food when she hungered and clothing when she was cold. He had used all of his Gypsy cunning, all of the skills which his people had learned from untold centuries of wandering amid hostile populations, to see her safely out from beneath the darkness of the Third Reich into the light of day.

  And Blasko loved her as if she were his daughter, even to the extent of pretending sometimes that she was his long dead little Lura grown to womanhood. He knew what courage it had taken, what faith, for her to stand in dungeon of the RagoczyPalace and release the two monsters from their chains. He had seen them and heard them and smelled them as they ripped the door from his cell, and his body had shaken with terror as the werewolves led him and Louisa up to the streets of Budapest, killing soldiers at every turn. She was a brave woman and a good woman, and he loved her dearly.

  They had no way of knowing what else had happened that night, for as soon as they were out of the Palace the creatures ran off into the darkness, and they themselves began their long, furtive flight to freedom. As they sat now in peaceful security upon the Alpine hillside, Louisa was wondering, as she so often wondered, about Janos and Claudia, about Helmuth and Gottfried. She shook her head as if to dismiss the pointless speculation. They would never know if the two tortured souls had won release from their suffering, never know if Schlacht had at last killed Weyrauch, never know if Schlacht himself was living or dead.

  But God is gracious, Louisa thought, and all things do indeed work together for good for those who love Him.

  "Brecht was wrong," she said softly in German, watching the clouds drift lazily above her. "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann die Moral. He had the whole thing backwards."

  "Pardona, Donna?" Blasko asked in Romansch.

  "A line from one of our dramatists," she replied in Italian. "‘First you have to eat’, he said, ‘and then comes morality’. He had it completely backwards. Right and wrong are all that matter. Right and wrong are everything, everything."

  Blasko nodded, not wishing t
o waste his energy thinking about the point. "We have a similar saying, Donna."

  "Really? What is it?"

  "First comes the stew and then comes the whiskey."

  She stared at him for a moment, startled and not knowing if he was serious. Then, as the impish smile danced around the craggy old face, she laughed and hugged him tightly.

  And as Louisa von Weyrauch and the Gypsy Blasko reclined in ease upon the green grass of Switzerland, a thousand miles away Gottfried von Weyrauch was pacing impatiently back and forth in the office of the adjutant to the commanding officer of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. "What the hell is keeping them?" he demanded.

  "They will be here in due time, Herr Doctor," Major Kaufmann said curtly. "We are operating under great pressure against a serious deadline at the moment, you know, and my men have better things to do than arranging interviews with prisoners."

  "Yes, yes, I know, I know," Weyrauch said angrily.

  "We have very strict orders from Berlin, very strict orders indeed," the S.S. major went on. "It is clear at this point that the war is lost. Another four months, five at the most. Reichsführer Himmler has told us that we must exterminate as many Jews as possible before that time. As such, we have been operating day and night." He paused. "In fact, it is fortunate for you that you arrived when you did. The man you are looking for is in the last group scheduled for the gas chamber. After that, we are evacuating whatever prisoners are still there and shutting down the camp."

  "Yes, yes, yes," Weyrauch spat. "You have your concerns, Herr Major, and I have mine."

  The concerns of the S.S. major were shared by others of his kind at camps all over Hitler’s rapidly shrinking empire. "If Germany is to die," Himmler had said, "we must not leave one Jew left alive to feast on the carcass." And so the needs of the S.S. had overridden the needs of the army, and the Nazi elite had reserved for their own use dozens of trains and miles of track and tons of raw materials, all serving to ship as many subhuman racial enemies as possible to the death camps, to pack as many of them into the gas chambers as they could fit, to slide as many bodies as possible into the ovens. At Auschwitz the need to increase the output of corpses had already led the S.S. to dispense with the burning of the bodies. Corpses were just piled up and up and up and then pushed by bulldozers into enormous mass graves.

  But none of this was of the slightest interest to Gottfried von Weyrauch. He did not care about the war or the Reich or the Jews. All that was of importance to him was that at last, at long last, after months of searching and a dozen moonlit nights in hell, he had located Janos Kaldy.

  Kaldy had shown up at the gates of the concentration camp at Karolyi four days after the camp at Hunyad had been attacked and destroyed, presumably by communist partisans. He had cheerfully announced to the guards that he was a Jewish homosexual communist Gypsy, and had demanded that he be admitted. It had been obvious to the S.S. at the gates that the man was a lunatic, but he was arrested anyway, just to be safe.

  And when the guards recounted the amusing incident to their commander, he recognized the name from an order circulated to all camp commanders from the office of Reichsführer Himmler. Himmler had been furious to learn that Schlacht’s project had ended in a massacre at the Ragoczy Palace and in carnage at the camp at Hunyad, and though he reported the official lie of partisan activity, he also sent out search and arrest orders for Janos Kaldy and Petra Loewenstein and an old Gypsy named Blasko and both Gottfried and Louisa von Weyrauch.

  Weyrauch was located two months after the massacre, and was personally interrogated by Himmler. He told the S.S. Reichsführer most of the truth as he knew it, omitting any reference to his own situation. He had no knowledge of the whereabouts of his wife or the old Gypsy Blasko, of course, and thought it prudent not to comment on the death of Petra, reasoning that Himmler would not believe that he had not known she was a werewolf. The minister also impressed upon the Reichsführer his desire to be told if Kaldy were apprehended, using supposed concern about his wife as an excuse for requesting the information. Himmler promised nothing and promptly forgot about the minister, but when the commander of the Karolyi camp informed him of Kaldy’s "capture," Himmler had ordered the Gypsy sent to him for interrogation. It did not take Himmler long to determine that this was not the man he had seen in Schlacht’s film, for when this man was cut, he bled, and when he was beaten, he bruised, and when he was tortured, he screamed in pain. So Himmler, who was at the time on an inspection tour of what was left of Germany’s Polish state, had sent him off to the nearest concentration camp, which was Auschwitz.

  Weyrauch knew nothing of this, but he had exploited his family relationship with the dead hero, the posthumously promoted General Helmuth Schlacht, to keep in touch with as many high-ranking officers in the S.S. as he could manage, and it was this effort that had enabled him to learn of Kaldy’s incarceration.

  An S.S. private opened the door of the commander’s office and said. "HerrKommandant, the prisoner is in the guards’ barrack."

  Major Kaufmann glanced up from his paperwork and said, "Good. Herr Doctor, gowith this soldier. He will take you to your Gypsy." He returned his attention to his reports, ignoring Weyrauch as the minister followed the soldier from the room. Kaufmann was relieved to be rid of the pest.

  Weyrauch strode angrily into the barracks, but he waited until the guard had shut the door from without before running over to Kaldy and grabbing him by the throat. He struggled to restrain himself from indulging in a fit of what he believed would be impotent fury.

  The young man was wan and thin and ill. His face was covered with scabs and his matted hair was crawling with lice. When Kaldy smiled, Weyrauch noticed that he was missing some teeth.

  Weyrauch released him and stepped back. "Do you know what you’ve done to me?!" he shouted.

  Kaldy laughed softly. "A rather silly question under the circumstances, don’t you think?"

  "I have killed, Kaldy, I have killed!" Weyrauch screamed. "I have sunk into the darkness and awakened with blood on my hands and human flesh between my teeth! How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?!"

  Kaldy shook his head. "I haven’t done anything to you, Herr Doctor. You did it all to yourself."

  "You bit me, you maniac!"

  "Yes," he agreed, "and I am terribly sorry about that."

  "Sorry! You’re sorry!"

  "Yes, but I really had very little choice in the matter," Kaldy said pensively. "When I saw the sign on your brow, I had to bite you. I simply could not stop myself. The urge to inflict the curse upon others may have some divine injunction at its root. I tend to believe that mankind always needs physical expressions of abstract ideas, to give substance to the insubstantial, to give form to the..."

  "What in God’s name are you talking about?!" Weyrauch shouted. "Kaldy, you did this thing to me, and you must take it away, take it back, make it stop, make me well!"

  Kaldy shook his head sadly. "I cannot."

  "You must!" he screamed. "You must!"

  "I cannot." Kaldy repeated. "You must discover the means of your liberation all by yourself, and it must come from within your own being, not from my words. True, there are some things I must tell you, so that you can begin to understand. But your salvation cannot come from me or from anyone else. It must come from within your own heart."

  Weyrauch’s face grew red with rage. "You stand there so smug and so calm and self-confident, knowing that I can’t force you to help me, knowing that you cannot be injured and cannot be killed…!"

  "Ah, but I can be killed, Herr Doctor," Kaldy smiled. "At last, at long last, I can die. In fact, I suspect that I am going to the gas chamber today."

  "The gas chamber!" Weyrauch said, his eyes widening and a mad hope surging up in his breast. "The gas chamber? You will be killed in the gas chamber?" Kaldy nodded. "We can be killed by gas! We can be killed by gas!"

  "No, Herr Doctor, wait! You misunderstand me! I must explain something to you, I must tell...
" Kaldy began, but Weyrauch had run from the room before the sentence could be finished. Kaldy sighed and shook his head sadly. I do not envy you the next few thousand years, Herr Doctor, he thought as the guard entered and he himself was pushed from the room.

  Weyrauch accosted a passing soldier and demanded, "The inmates’ uniforms! Where do you keep the inmates’ uniforms?"

  The soldier appraised him coldly. "What are you doing here? No civilians are allowed..."

  "I am here with the permission of your commander," Weyrauch shouted, "Now tell me where you keep the inmates’ uniforms!"

  "Behind this building, in a pile," the soldier replied, perplexed by the question and annoyed at its tone. "We have them strip before...before they are deloused, and we pile the uniforms up in the back for use by future prisoners." He watched as the oddly frantic man ran from him and made for the back of the building.

  Weyrauch found the towering pile of dirty, insect infested uniforms and grabbed a set at random. He tore off his own clothing, threw the uniform on, and then ran madly back out toward the center of the camp. Two guards saw what they assumed to be a prisoner attempting to escape and they fired at him, believing that they had missed when the running figure did not fall to the ground. They grabbed Weyrauch and one of them clubbed his face with the rifle butt.

  "Not me," Weyrauch told them slyly. "You won’t put me into the gas chamber!" Which, of course, is precisely what they then proceeded to do.

  Weyrauch was ordered to strip, and he stripped. He was ordered to stand in line with a hundred other men to await delousing, and he stood in line. And when the heavy iron door of the gas chamber swung open, he pushed ahead of the others to get inside.

  The death room was filled to capacity, naked bodies pressed against each other, whimpers and moans and the sounds of weeping filling the small space. As the door clanged shut and the bolt was thrown, Weyrauch rubbed his hands together nervously and whispered, "Be with Thy child, O Lord, in the hour of his death, and send Thy holy angels to..." He stopped his prayer as he saw Janos Kaldy not five feet away from him. Weyrauch tried to push his way over to him, but found that he could not move through the ocean of flesh, so he merely cried, "Poison gas, Kaldy, poison gas!" and laughed insanely. His words sparked an upsurge of panic among the other men in the gas chamber, and they began to scream and those who were near the door began to claw desperately at the thick iron with their splintering fingernails, as if they could dig their way through the metal with their bare hands. And then they smelled the gas as the pellets of Zyklon-B cyanide dropped into the chamber and were dissolved from solid into gas by the body heat of the victims. Then their panic collapsed into madness.