Lycanthropos

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  Janos Kaldy stood as if he were alone, neither hearing nor seeing anything around him as the gas entered and the frenzy grew. He was thinking about the last thing he had seen before he walked down the stairs into the gas chamber. Kaldy had seen the flag fluttering high above the guard towers, the red flag with the white circle which enclosed the black swastika, now the dark symbol of the new barbarism, once the mystic signature of Zoroaster.

  "Ahura Mazda," he prayed in the long dead tongue of ancient Persia, "Great God of all truth, author of all mercies and destroyer of all daevas, I, Isfendir, the son of Kuriash, most unworthy priest, most pitiable of Your children, call upon You now in this, the hour of my departure from this life. I have conquered the evil within me, great and good Ahura, and I have battled the evil without. I pray that in Your infinite mercy, You will forgive me my weakness and my cowardice and my sin. Take me in Your arms, O Lord of the Ages. Take me in Your arms, and give me rest, and give me peace." And then he said, "And I pray that my great and good master Dzardrusha be given leave to greet me when I leave this world, and see me safely across the Bridge of the Separator."

  Janos Kaldy, Janus Chaldian, Ianus Chaldaeus, Isfendir the son of Kuriash, closed his eyes and smiled.

  And then, inhaling deeply, he drank death.

  EPILOGUE

  Theirs was a friendship of many years, and it had seemed only fitting that they should meet in Cracow, Poland, on this anniversary, for it was there that they had first met a half-century before.

  William Henry Pratt had been a callow youth back then, barely into his twenties, and Creighton Hull had been little older. It had been chance which had thrown them together, young Billy Pratt from Syracuse, New York and young Creigh Hull from Sandwich, near Canterbury, England. The Allies in the Second World War did not as a matter of practice lend each other personnel, but when the Russians found themselves short of medics as they drove ruthlessly into Poland, the British and the Americans both willingly placed some of theirs under temporary Soviet command. Allied solidarity, and all that.

  Thus it was that Corporal Creighton Hull, a first year medical student until he went off to fight for King and Country, found himself in the company of Corporal William Pratt in October of 1944. They had met and, as two English-speakers in a sea of Russian voices, had become friends, and had remained friends over the long years, exchanging letters and phone calls and visits to London and New York. And when Pratt had suggested that they and their wives meet in Cracow on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, Hull had cheerfully agreed.

  Bill Pratt’s wife Martha had always seemed to get along well with Creigh Hull’s wife Doris, and so the four had spent a pleasant week together in Cracow. They were old now, their children grown, their careers behind them. Pratt had sold his tool and dye works five years ago and was now enjoying the fruits of his long labors, while Hull had retired from medical practice five years earlier. As they sat in the popular Cherubino restaurant on Tomasza Street and drank glasses of rich, frothy Polish beer, Martha and Doris exchanged bemused looks of affectionate toleration as their husbands insisted upon telling them war stories they had both heard a hundred times.

  Pratt was in the middle of one of his favorite anecdotes when he noticed that Hull was neither paying attention to him nor adding the little details which Pratt customarily left out. He watched his old friend’s face as he looked toward the window of the restaurant, watched as Hull frowned and muttered, "I say!"

  "What is it, Creigh?" Pratt asked.

  "Billy, look over there, at the chap outside the window."

  Hull was sitting with his back to the front of the restaurant, and so he turned his chair around slightly in order to search in the direction his friend had indicated. "Where, Creigh? I don’t see anything."

  "There, Billy, just there, in the corner. Look at him. Look at his face." Billy moved his gaze to the edge of the window and then both saw the man to whom Hull was referring and understood immediately the reason for his friend’s reaction. "Well, I’ll be damned," he whispered.

  "Isn’t it...that’s him, isn’t it?" Hull asked.

  Pratt shook his head. "No," he said with finality after a few moments. "Looks a lot like him, but it can’t be the same guy."

  Martha and Doris followed their husbands’ eyes and they too looked at the lone figure who was staring into the restaurant from the street outside. He was a basically nondescript man, his features unremarkable, his physical appearance average in every way. His clothes were old and ragged, and he looked much like one of the lost, lonely men who wander the streets of many cities, men with broken minds and cirrhotic livers, men whom their societies had cast out and ground into the dust, men whose beds were the gutters and whose homes were doorways. Martha had seen such men on New York’s Bowery, and Doris had seen such men in London’s East End. "Oh, the poor thing," Martha clucked.

  "Do you suppose he’s hungry, Creighton?" Doris asked, turning to her husband. "Perhaps we should see that he gets some food." She looked back out at the pathetic figure who was staring into the restaurant with large sad, envious eyes, watching the cheerful conviviality within as if it were part of a world in which he had no place, a world of simple human pleasures, a world of belonging and acceptance and friendship. It was as if he were standing outside the universe itself and looking in from an empty, fathomless void at things which he could never really have, at the simple commonplaces of human life which he could never really know. And before Hull could respond to his wife’s suggestion, the sad-eyed man turned and disappeared into the crowd on the busy Cracow street.

  Pratt turned back to the table, shaking his head. "Looks a hell of lot like him, Creigh, I’ll give you that. But it couldn’t be the same guy."

  "No," Hull agreed slowly. "No, I suppose not."

  "I mean, it was fifty years ago, Creigh! He’d be in his nineties by now, and that poor soul out on the street doesn’t look a day over forty-five."

  Hull laughed. "Of course, Billy, you’re right. It just struck me, that’s all. They look so much alike..."

  "Sure," Pratt laughed, "and we both have a crystal clear memory of the face of a man we both saw for an hour a half-century ago, right?"

  "Good point, old fellow," Hull replied, joining his friend’s laughter. "Good point."

  Martha and Doris looked at each other and then Martha asked, "Do I suspect another war story coming out of this?"

  Hull and Pratt both shook their heads. "It isn’t the kind of story to tell after dinner," the Englishman replied. "It isn’t pleasant, and it isn’t funny."

  Such a comment served merely to excite the women’s curiosity. "Come on. Creighton," Doris said. "We’ve been listening for hours to you two talk about blowing people up. I think our stomachs can take it."

  "And don’t be rude," Martha added. "It’s very impolite to hint at a story and then not tell it."

  Hull and Pratt glanced at each other and then Pratt shrugged and said. "Well, you know how Creigh and I met..."

  "Oh, no," Doris muttered. "Not the stolen case of Riesling story!"

  "No. no," Pratt said quickly. "I mean the absolute, very first time we met."

  An uneasy silence ensued, for the women knew that their husbands’ first meeting had occurred on that day in January of 1945 when the Soviet forces had battered down the iron gates to the death camp at Auschwitz, and had discovered to their horror, and then revealed to the horror of the world, the unspeakable atrocity which was the soul of the Third Reich. "Yes," Martha said softly. "I remember the things you’ve told me."

  "Well," Hull said, "something very odd happened that day. We saw so much madness that this incident didn’t seem that important, but seeing that face reminded me of it."

  "Yes." Pratt mused. "I hadn’t thought about it for years."

  "You see," Hull continued, "when we broke into the camp we found that the Nazis had..." He paused. "I don’t know quite how to say this..."

  "Just say it, Creighton." Doris said.

&
nbsp; "Well, when those bastards killed people in the gas chambers, they locked the door, filled the room with the gas, and then waited for fifteen minutes to make sure that everyone inside was dead. Then they’d drain the gas and take the corpses out and incinerate them." He paused, his mind searching back over the years. "They had other prisoners carry the bodies... I can’t recall what they called them..."

  "Leichenträger," Pratt reminded him. "Corpse carriers."

  "Yes, yes, that was it," Hull went on. "Anyway, as the war neared its end the Nazis...and I know this sounds insane, but they were insane, after all...the Nazis started to worry that they wouldn’t be able to kill enough people, enough Jews and Gypsies and the like, before they were conquered and had to stop. So they started to hurry up and cut corners. Instead of waiting fifteen minutes before opening the gas chamber, they waited five. And instead of burning each body, they just dug enormous mass graves and piled the bodies in until they were full, and then covered them over with dirt."

  "The thing was," Pratt said, "that when we got to the camp we saw the ground moving very slightly. When the commander was interrogated by the Russians and they found out about all this, they sent us…"

  "And some Russian medics."

  "…to investigate the most recent grave. At first we thought that it was just the earth settling, but then we realized that some of the people the Nazis had buried might not have been quite dead."

  Martha closed her eyes and turned away and Doris put her hand to her mouth. "My God! That’s horrible!"

  "Yes, yes, horrible indeed," Hull agreed. "So we worked frantically, all of us, digging down into the graves."

  "And that fellow we just saw at the window," Pratt said, "looked an awful lot like a man I pulled alive out of the earth."

  "Couldn’t have been him, of course," Hull commented once more. "He would be in his nineties, as you say."

  "And there’s more." Pratt took a sip of beer before continuing. "I helped the poor man over to our physician-to-be over here," and Hull smiled, "so that Creigh could look him over, check him, and so forth."

  "Yes, and he was in remarkable health, all things considered. Pulse, temperature, respiration, blood pressure, all fine."

  "He was watching as the bodies were being taken out of the pit...we forced those damned S.S. to do it, the bastards…and he saw the body of a friend or a relative or something, and he just lost all control. He ran over and grabbed the corpse and started shaking him and yelling his name, like he was trying to wake the dead man up. "

  "Yes," Hull recalled. "Kept calling him Charley or Carley, or something like that. Man was stone dead, and he kept shaking him."

  "Well," Pratt went on, "we led him away and took him into the infirmary and made him lie down. I mean, you can imagine the state the poor thing’s nerves were in."

  "No, I can’t," Doris said, "and I pray to God that I never shall."

  "I stayed with him, trying to comfort him," Hull said. "I didn’t think it would be wise to leave him all by himself. And then he went mad, absolutely stark raving mad."

  "I suppose his mind just snapped," Pratt said quietly.

  Hull nodded in agreement. "Cause sufficient for that, I would think. He started yelling and screaming and throwing the furniture around the room, and he even started pummeling me with his fists. Billy and a Russki pulled him away from me, and then he ran out from the infirmary and rushed off. Apparently he ran away from the camp."

  "I hope someone found him and gave him some help," Pratt said. "He was, as Creigh said, completely out of his mind."

  "But why did he attack you, Creighton?" Doris asked. "You were only trying to help him."

  Hull shrugged. "He was mad, my dear, that’s all. I was just trying to comfort him, and the things I said seemed to enrage him."

  "Well, what did you say?"

  Hull shrugged. "Nothing unusual. Just the sort of things you’d think you should say to someone who’d been through what that poor devil had been through." He sipped his beer. "I just tried to make him understand that he was lucky to be alive."