“I asked him what he meant and he shook his head, a look on his face that said he felt like maybe I was a bug, and one he wouldn’t mind squashing under his foot. ‘They weren’t just trucks, old boy.’ He looked at me as he spoke and I had to look away. I figured if I’d kept staring I was likely to wet my pants. ‘All of those trucks had SS soldiers on them. They were hiding something, maybe something big.’
“I hated him right then. I hated him because I knew he was serious, and I knew he was right. The Allies had just started making ground in France and, if the Nazis had something big planned, we had to let someone know as soon as possible. There were a few groans, but no real protests. We all knew what we were getting into when we volunteered for the war, but it seemed a little odd to me that Jenkins didn’t even try to take command. He just let Crowley lead the way.
“I’ll say this for the French: they know how to make a road accessible. I’ll also say I wish we could have taken the roads that night, but that wasn't an option. Instead of taking the easiest route, we took the safest route, and that meant a lot of climbing and hauling our meager supplies over some damned ugly surfaces. Springer, the boy from New York, had the worst time of it. He kept trying to get where he needed to be and falling, sliding halfway down the hills. He never was very graceful as I recall, but he was damned strong.
“There was one point when we were climbing up the side of a cliff that seemed to go on for miles. Oh, I reckon it wasn’t much more than a few hundred feet, nothing we hadn’t at least learned how to do in basic training, but it was dark and the ground was wet with dew and it was maybe the most scared I’ve ever been when I wasn't looking at someone who was trying to blow my head off my shoulders. The only ones who made it look easy were Toby, and Crowley.
“Well, we were doing our best to get up there, and had made it most of the way, when Springer slipped and started falling. He’d have surely fallen and split his skull wide if Crowley hadn’t showed a little initiative and snatched him. I know it sounds like a lie, and I still have days when I doubt that I saw it, but as Springer started to fall, Crowley grabbed hold of him with one hand and held him in the air. Springer wet himself right then and there, and I can’t say as I blamed him for it. He opened his mouth to scream and Crowley yanked him closer, until they were face to face. I was about ten feet below them, looking up and ready to do some screaming myself because the rock that man was planted on was starting to crumble. I figured if it went, I could pretty much call my life over unless it decided to float away. From where I was standing it was a sure thing that slab of stone would crush me like a bug.
“Crowley smiled brightly as he looked Springer in the face. His mouth was wide in a grin big enough to just about reach ear to ear. ‘Make one goddamned sound, boy, and I’ll let you fall. Do you understand me?’ Those were his exact words. I can still hear them and I can still hear the pleasure he got out of saying them. Springer nodded so hard I though his head was just gonna fall off. Crowley brought him even closer to his face, like he was looking deep into that New Yorker’s eyes and studying him. He had a look like that, Crowley did, and most times I figured he didn’t much like what he saw. ‘I ought to drop you right now. I ought to let you fall and break and bleed. But I won’t. You might make too much noise.’ I think Springer would have cried right then, but he was too afraid. Crowley kept a hand on his jacket the rest of the way up the cliff, and I think more often than not he actually carried the Yankee rather than risk him slipping again.
“It seemed like an eternity, that climb to the top, but it wasn't much more than maybe an hour. Crowley barely even looked at the rest of us. He just headed towards that big stone building like a man on a mission from God Himself. What else could I do? Let him go in alone? I followed him, cursing under my breath the entire way.
“Well, eventually we made it to the château itself. It must have been a beauty in its heyday, but there really wasn’t much worth looking at anymore. The Germans had already been through the place and taken anything worth having. What they left behind was a lot of broken furniture and lots of bare stone walls. They'd been very thorough in their search of the place. I wish I knew what they'd been after. I suspect that they found it.
“Crowley led the way again. There was something about him that made you not want to argue about who was in charge. And something that inspired confidence, though I can’t for the life of me say exactly why. Maybe it was because he never seemed scared of anything. He seemed more like he was waiting to hear the punch line to a joke, or maybe waiting to tell it.
“Whatever else I can say about the man, good or bad, he knew how to move without making a sound. I felt like an elephant waltzing through tin cans in comparison. But I guess I was quiet enough walking through those dark halls. We never ran across a guard or even a mouse. I kept waiting for them around the next corner, and Crowley just kept leading me through the maze of rooms and corridors like there was nothing to worry about.”
My grandfather looked at me for a moment. His eyes glittered in the faint light of his cigarette. Almost against my will, I looked away and went inside for another beer. I brought out a full six-pack, and then I stole another of his cigarettes. When he started talking again, his voice was subdued and sounded…weaker than I’d ever heard it sound before. “That should maybe have been my first hint, in hindsight. I’d heard Crowley whistle in the middle of artillery fire, like there wasn't the least little thing to worry about. And here he was, just gliding along and leading me into a darkened building. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if he’d started singing.
“Well, sir. We finally got where we were going. We found where the Nazis were, and we saw what they were doing. But I have to be honest; to this day I don’t really understand it all.
“There was this huge chamber down in the lower levels of the chateau, and I figure the Krauts must have torn down all the walls they could without actually making the foundation give away, just so they could set up everything they needed.
“There were all sorts of machines lining the walls of the room we found them in. Machines like I’d never seen before and don’t want to ever see again. They made noises like you’d expect from a power plant, that deep hum that rattles your teeth and sets your hair standing on end. I hadn’t even heard it until we were almost in the room, because the walls down there were solid stone. They had a sort of operating station in the center of the place, with seven separate tables. Each of these had a man on it, or what had once been a man at any rate.
“Not one of them much looked human anymore. They looked like nightmares. Their skin was pale and bloodless, their faces drawn and withered, like those pictures you see of mummies, but with a little moisture left to them. Each and every one of them was strapped to the table while men worked on their bodies with scalpels and other tools, the sort you don’t really expect to see used on a person. There were places where the ones they’d been working on the longest were covered in metal, like armor almost, but actually bolted into their skin. I could see the way the metal cut into their soft flesh and could see the blood that welled around the rivets they’d used to drive the metal in. I could almost imagine the pain they must have been feeling, as surely as I can imagine the Nazis used the bones of their victims as anchors for those steel plates. Just like the studs in a wall, Eddie, they’d drive those bolts into skin and muscle and then down into the bone. Worst of all, there wasn't one of those poor bastards who wasn’t awake and screaming.”
My grandfather looked at me again; his eyes seeming to wander in my general direction, unfocussed until he settled on me. I have seldom seen a man look so haunted, and that was unsettling for me, especially after looking in the mirror for the last two weeks. He reached over and popped a beer, drinking half of it down before he continued.
“Every last one of them was awake, and in all my years I have never heard screams like those before, or since. They weren’t the screams of dying, or even the seriously wounded. They were the screams of men having thei
r souls ripped out.
“I stared down there like I was looking past the opened gates of Hell. And I watched as one of those poor bastards was dragged from his table and set down in a glass cage. Crowley stood right next to me, his eyes narrowed down to slits, his whole body tensed and waiting to see what would happen next. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, Eddie. I turned away from the sight of that torn and bloodied prisoner and I saw him smiling as he watched the Germans flip their damned switches and read whatever devices they had to understand for what they were doing.
“His mouth was stretched wide and he had the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. I half expected the sonuvabitch to start laughing then and there. But he didn’t. His mouth was smiling, but it never reached his eyes. His eyes, they were dark brown as I recall, but they looked black as a coal mine at midnight right then.
“I looked back just as the glass chamber they’d put that man in was filled with a green gas. It wasn't just green. It had specks of light in it, like fireflies seen in a heavy fog. Whatever it was they’d put in that little glass cage, it was enough to stop the tortured screaming I’d been hearing. The man’s body was barely revealed through the dark gas that floated in the area with him. I think part of me was happy for his silence, or maybe just relieved. Either way, it didn’t take long for me to get over that. I stopped feeling much of anything but a lump of fear in my throat when I saw his body start twitching.
“When the gas cleared—and by cleared I guess I mean when it had been absorbed into his flesh—I saw the bloodied, torn body lying flat on the ground in the little glass cage. And I saw the way the lungs didn’t breathe in and out anymore, and the way the eyes had rolled into the back of his head. I felt my blood ready to boil over at the very notion of that sort of torture just to kill a man. To actually peel back flesh and muscle, to bury screws in skin and leave a man in that state, only to gas him to death…I couldn’t believe it, and I whispered as much to Crowley as I started checking my rifle. I was gonna end this madness, and I was gonna kill me a few dozen Nazis in the process.
“Crowley looked over at me and for the first time since we’d entered the chateau, I could see the humor in his eyes as well as on his face. He leaned in really close to me, close enough that for a second I was afraid he was going to kiss me, and then he whispered back. He said, ‘I’m betting that thing down there might not be so easy to kill with a bullet, old son. I’m betting that maybe he would take a bullet from you as an insult and maybe decide to kill you for your trouble.’
“I had no idea what he was talking about, but he pointed toward the glass chamber and I looked in that direction. And all that rage I’d built up, all that anger to I’d focused to help me with the idea of killing so many people…died away. I went from angry to terrified in about as long as it takes me to blink my eyes.
“The man they’d killed was standing up, and he looked even less human than before. The skin on his body had turned green, a little lighter in color than the gas he’d been forced to breathe, but not by much. And his eyes, which I had seen roll back into his head until all I could see was the whites, looked around with pupils that glowed with that same firefly light I’d seen earlier. He stood up and looked around, and his mouth I’d seen screaming earlier closed with a snap like a bear trap slamming down on a deer’s hind leg.
“I stood there looking down at the thing in the chamber. It barely resembled the man they’d dragged in there minutes earlier. One of the men, the one wearing a Gestapo uniform under his lab coat, barked out orders in German at the thing. It stepped forward, leaving its cage and moving with all the precision of an honor guard presenting itself to the President of these United States. That poor, tortured soul knew how to follow orders, and it was ready to follow its new master for as long as he saw fit.
“Crowley tapped my shoulder, and when I looked at him, he winked. ‘You want the green guy, or do you want the soldiers? Your choice.’ I answered him by leveling my rifle and putting a bullet through the head of the Nazi who was barking orders.”
I barely heard my grandfather speak his next words. They were so faint I had to strain to make them out. He spoke them in a hurried whisper, a dirty confession that he had to make, but didn’t want to speak of. “That was the first time in my life I ever enjoyed killing a man, Eddie. But before the night was done, I’d enjoyed the feeling over a dozen times.
“Jonathan Crowley, slick-sleeved soldier in the U.S. Army, looked at me and set his rifle down next to me. He grinned like a kid at Christmas, and said to me, ‘You’re a good man, Ben Finch. Don’t let them take that away from you.’ Then, before I could even say a word, he was running. He moved like lightning down the hallway, and I thought for sure he was abandoning me to get my ass killed by a bunch of pissed-off Nazis. I didn’t see as I had much choice, so I picked off the next one.
“By the time the second one hit the ground—trying to scream through the hole I’d made in his throat—the rest of them were calling out in German and one or two of them were pointing at me. The ones that had guns started shooting. I ducked for cover and watched as two of them made for the stairwell, ready, I’m sure, to meet me head on and put a few hundred rounds into my sorry ass. I’d ask if you ever had bullets coming at you, Eddie, but I already know the answer. It was all I could do to look up from time to time from my prone position. I just knew I was a goner as soon as those soldiers made it to the top of the stairwell. I’d be a sitting duck, and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.
“I was thinking about that and how full my bladder felt, when I saw the two guards who’d come up the stairs go right back down again. I could tell by the way they fell that they were dead. You can’t move like that and be alive. Next thing I saw was Jonathan Crowley walking down those steps and looking around the room. Everyone was so busy looking for me that they never even saw him come into their little torture chamber.
“It didn’t take him long to rectify that situation. He strutted right on up to the first of them and lashed out with a foot that moved so fast I barely saw it. The Kraut dropped just as sure as if I’d shot him, his mouth bleeding and teeth flying. I shot the next one over, and then I saw most of them turn toward Crowley. He should have been terrified, I know I was scared for him, but he was smiling again, looking happier than any man has a right to look during a war.
“One of them shot him from fifteen feet away, and missed. I was watching, you understand? I was watching that man shoot, and I was calling out a warning, and Crowley managed not to be there when the bullet left the muzzle of that pistol. I don’t think he actually dodged the bullet, I don’t think that’s possible, but I know he wasn't where he had been by the time the bullet met that spot. Instead, he was right next to the man with the gun. And the man with the gun was screaming because his shot had missed and more than that, it had hit one of his comrades.
“Crowley slipped his arm around the man’s neck like he was gonna say something confidential to him, then he twisted his body and the man fell dead. Even from where I was, even over the shouting and the gunfire, I heard that man’s neck snap. Before the soldier even hit the ground, Crowley used him like a springboard and leapt high into the air. He landed on another Nazi a few feet away and I reckon he killed him as soon as he hit, but just about then I looked in another direction. I looked at the green man them Germans had made. I looked that way because someone else was shouting a command in German, and that fella turned at the sound of the voice and then turned to face Crowley.”
My grandfather looked away then, rubbing his grizzled chin with one hand and staring into the darkened field where the cows grazed. He kept talking, and I kept my mouth shut. “I know I sound crazy but I swear that thing had grown bigger while I was watching Crowley. Not just the flesh on its body, but the metal as well. It looked to be almost seven feet in height. It moved right at Crowley like it was a freight train and he was a piece of rail it meant to run over. Every last one of them Krauts jumped out of its way, too. Like they knew it
would be a bad idea to be between that monster and its target.
“I took the opportunity to shoot the thing in the head, opening up and squeezing four rounds into the green scalp. I saw the holes they punched into that thing, and I saw the way its head was knocked sideways by the impacts, but it never even slowed down. It just moved at Crowley.
“Crowley saw it too. He saw that thing coming at him, and he looked away long enough to stare me in the eyes. His smile was as broad and wild and he winked at me and said, ‘I’ve got him, Ben. Get the soldiers.’
“Well, I figured he was a nut case, but I was also riding on a combat high right then. I did what he said, and I promised myself I’d see he got a proper funeral stateside. I took down three more Nazis then I dropped my rifle and grabbed for Crowley’s, because the third man I shot at should have died and instead he just stood there. My weapon was out of bullets.
“Even so, right then I felt pretty damned invincible, I must say. I was above the actual combat, and I was shooting them as easy as a man could shoot a fish in a barrel. They were shooting back, and if you look closely you can still see the scar under my right eye where one of them hit the wall near me and a piece of that stone flew off and punched me in the face. I felt it, but it didn’t matter. I had the advantage. I still figured I was a dead man and too dumb to know it, but it was one hell of a fine feeling right then. I reckon maybe I was a little crazy right then. I shot four more of them and was ready to aim again, when I saw one of the Gestapo types hit the switch on the wall.
“There were alarms going crazy a second later. The air was filled with a sound like an air-raid siren, and I was so shocked I actually dropped Crowley’s rifle. I looked around, my heart in my throat and beating way too fast, and I saw Crowley and the green thing struggling against each other. That thing was swinging its huge hands at Crowley and Crowley was swinging right back. I saw him take a fist in the gut, and I saw his body lifted off the ground by the force of the hit, but when the monster pulled its fist back, he landed swinging as hard as he could.
Mister October - Volume Two Page 31
