Table of Contents
The Gospel of Madness
The Rats of Frankfurt
Foreworld I
MADWORLD
Foreworld II
POSTSCRIPT
Links´n´Stuff
Let me introduce: OLD BARON - The Chronicles of the Red Rage!
THE GOSPEL OF MADNESS
Book I
The Rats of Frankfurt
By
Georg Bruckmann
Special thanks to Richard Briscoe and Conny Kirsch. I owe you!
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Foreworld I
Father Bianchi
Restlessness spread throughout the classroom as soon as Father Bianchi had left the room and closed the door behind him. Costa, the head of the small mining village hardly ever bothered to wait until the lessons were over when he wanted to discuss something. Inside, the preacher sighed. The Provost was a good guy, but here up in the mountains near Vestone it was hard to find a man of education and of a certain intelligence these days. And if one found someone worth talking to, that person was certainly an atheist. This circumstance was the only one that annoyed Father Bianchi every now and then, since he had asked for a transfer. Rome had not been good to him. Too much poverty. Too much crime. He was just too weak for that. Too soft, as his superiors had told him over and over again. But how could he not have been desperate in the face of abused and neglected children, underage whores of both sexes and the almost daily found victims of stabbings and other violent clashes? His superiors couldn’t tell him either. They just had looked at his despair for five long years and then decided that his faith was too weak for the big city. They had transferred him to the country and he was okay with that. Even if he now had to deal with the simple but egotistical soul of Provost Costa.
“What is it?”
The Father tried not to let his anger at the interruption of his class shine through and fled into a calm, soothing tone of voice, which he had also become accustomed to for teaching. Only during his sermons, especially during Sunday Mass, did he allow himself a little more passion.
“Father, Father...”
The head of the Provost was fiery red.
“... little Da Silva! The brats have...”
The excited Costa didn’t need to talk any further. It’s happened more and more lately. Of course, he had noticed that Toni’s seat had been empty again this morning. For the fifth time in the last two weeks.
“Have they tied him to the oxen again?”
The oxen wasn’t a real oxen. It was a statue and something like the landmark of the village. Signore Barbieri, a sculptor who grew up here, had donated it, probably in a seizure of age-related sentimentality. It had been placed on the “Red Stone”, a small rock plateau on the outskirts of the mining town, so that it now looked as if the oxen was watching over the small settlement.
Toni had already been found there the last time. His hands and feet tied in such a way that his head was pressed between the stone buttocks of the statue. The Father shook his head sadly.
What was it about the boy that attracted the malice of his peers over and over again?
“As bad as last time?”, he asked.
“Nah, worse. We untied him and sent him home.”
“I’ll go see him tonight. Thank you for letting me know, Mr. Costa.”
A deep, disapproving humming followed as an answer. Alright, preacher boy. If you say so.
Then the Provost turned away and left the small schoolhouse. The man was rightly dissatisfied with the reaction of the priest, he had to admit that to himself. This whole affair wasn’t something to be taken easily. Somehow it had to be possible to end Toni’s ordeal. In a larger city Toni would have been able to simply avoid his tormentors, at least to a certain degree. That wouldn’t work here.
Too small. Too narrow. Nearly two hundred souls. Just one single school class.
The Father wasn’t ready to face his students again.
Their laughter and giggling told him that they knew exactly what had just happened outside the classroom. That he had been put in the picture. It was certainly the older boys who went after Toni. Too much energy. It saddened Bianchi that it expressed itself in meanness, not in diligence and ambition. He would have been satisfied even with sportsmanship. He’d take on the four greatest bullies after class and hope that his status as village teacher and pastor alone would be enough to make an impression on them. Because this was all he had.
***
The four were sitting in front of him and the priest was mildly delighted that none of them dared to grin. Four pale and wary faces, the glances gently touching the obscene graffiti cut in and drawn on the plates of their school tables. Inside and against his will, he had to smile a little. It’s always the same with the young ones. Then he recalled the seriousness of the situation. Little Da Silva. He started with the budding man on the outside left. He built himself up in front of him, placed the tips of his somewhat too slender fingers next to each other on his table top and began to perform steady, annoying tapping movements.
“I know it was the four of you. This morning. With Toni. That seems a little too much right now. Given your age I realize you can get into a fight every once in a while quite easily, but you’re clearly overdoing it. Young guys like you getting into little brawls from time to time, that’s all right. That’s not a good thing, but quite normal, I guess. But this ongoing torturing ... is something completely different. That’s ... bad. And I don’t use the word like you use it on a toddler who refuses to empty his plate at lunch. I use the word as it is used for adults. Because that’s what the four of you will be in the blink of an eye. This has to stop. Is that clear? Look at me, Luca!”
The last sentence the father spoke grumbling, threateningly whispering, and he seemed much more compelling to Luca in this way. Slowly the boy lifted his head and tried to look the priest in the eyes. Their eyes met, and Father Bianchi’s gaze held that of the boy.
“Amen, I tell you: Whatever you did for one of my least brothers, you did for me. How many times have you heard that line, Luca? Do you think it’s in the Bible for no reason? Or that it applies to everyone else, but not to you? You sin!”
Father Bianchi now took a step back and let Luca out of his sight.
“You sin. All of you. You’re making your souls ugly. You’re harming yourself with what you do. If you do not want to stop out of love for the Lord and the commandments, then it must be for your own sake at least. Remember, once your day has come, and you stand before the gates of heaven, you will be tested. You’ll have forgotten what you did to the poor boy by then. But the Lord will not. Take out your notebooks.”
Silence.
No movement.
“Take out your notebooks.”
Still no movement. The priest knew why they did not obey immediately. The order to take out the notebooks implied that d
etention would take quite some time. This meant that they could not help their families on the farms or in the household, as it was normally their duty - and they would have to explain the reason for their absence at home. At least Luca and Benno would have to take a beating for this, as he assessed their fathers. Pietro and Fillipe would probably get off a little more easily, but things back home would get very unpleasant for them too.
“Take out your notebooks. I won’t say it again.”
At last, the half-baked obeyed. Benno fought with tears. The others did not, but they tried hard to be inconspicuous, not to attract any more displeasure. They knew Father Bianchi had understood how serious their situation was.
“Now, write down everything you’ve done to Toni. Ev-ery-thing. Then write down why you did it. Then how you want to make up for it. None of you less than four pages. Begin!”
Four pages were quite a lot. It would take a while. The preacher stepped back and sat down on a free table. Fillipe was one year older than the other three, and in his gaze Bianchi could see a hint of resistance. So he mercilessly stared down the rebellious spark in the boy’s face, until finally Fillipe began to write. At first the pens scratched the paper slowly and unwillingly, but after a quarter of an hour and after the four boys had glanced at each other again and again, the dam broke at some point - much to the surprise of the priest. They now wrote hurriedly, almost feverishly, and each of them ended up with considerably more than four pages.
***
Late that evening, Father Bianchi put the last essay aside. Already in the middle of the first one he had fetched a bottle of wine from the cellar. After having read the third report, a second bottle followed. It was much worse than he had suspected. Not only because of what the four had done to the Da Silva boy, but their reasons and justifications were even more worrying. He couldn’t really believe all that he had read. It went way beyond thoughtless, stupid mocking of an outsider.
He took another big swig out of the bottle. Then he read the sections he had marked a second time. If he had not observed the faces of Luca, Pietro, Benno and Fillipe while they had written down these monstrosities, he would have thought all their claims were straight lies. Clumsy, silly lies too. But then the four boys would not only have had conspired to an agreement so that their essays could produce such an uniform picture as it now became apparent, no - they would also have had to foresee that they would even find themselves in a situation in which they would have to present these lies. The Father refused to imagine this to be a fact.
Weary and slightly drunk, much more slightly than would have been expected regarding his consumption, he leaned back in his chair and stretched.
What did he know about this Toni Da Silva? He and his mother moved here nine years ago. He was three then. A little pale, small for his age. Mrs. Da Silva was in her early thirties at the time. Widowed. They said it was an accident. She received a small pension and improved her salary as a worker at one of the larger farms in the neighboring village until her alcoholism became obvious after two years and was no longer acceptable to her employer. Since then she has only been seen in town while doing her modest shopping on the Saturday market. When Toni was still younger she had always taken him with her, but at some point that had stopped. In class, Toni was inconspicuous. Sitting in the back-left in the corner, seen from the teacher’s desk. The seat next to him was free, but he didn’t seem to mind that none of the other children wanted to sit next to him. He followed the lessons attentively, asked clever questions and kept quiet. During breaks and sports he stayed away from the loud and lively crowd of his classmates. There was one like him in every class, as the priest knew from experience, and for these children things always were a little harder than for the others. The girls made jokes about his appearance, and it didn’t matter whether there was really something wrong with it or not. The boys pushed him while passing, and so on, and so on. Not nice, but still normal. Normal, until one had read the reports of the greatest bullies. Father Bianchi sighed and then opened a desk drawer. He took out some sheets of paper and his own pen. A beautiful writing tool, handmade, with interchangeable steel feathers. He bought it when he started his seminary. Good old days. But he didn’t want to enjoy those memories now. He wanted to try to put the reports of the four detainees in a halfway chronological order. He started with Luca’s report.
Once I was at the lake with my sisters. It was August and very hot. We took our clothes off and went swimming in the water. There was no one else. We were swimming races and I always won and was the first to return to shore. I saw something in the forest. A branch has moved strangely. I wanted to see who was there, but they wanted to compete with me again, even though they knew I would be faster. I let them win the third time. I was a little tired too. When we went back to our clothes. Noemi’s panties were gone. We searched everywhere, even places they couldn’t actually be. We have a special hiding place for our clothes. I won’t tell you, just to be clear.
At some point we gave up searching and went home. When we had almost made it back, we found the panties. They were by the wayside. Was dirt in it. Man-dirt and a little branch had been stuck through the fabric. Noemi still wanted to take it home, but I threw it away with a stick. She started crying, but she still came home with us. Dad really beat her pretty badly cause she lost her underpants.
The next day at school everyone asked what happened because of her black eye and so on. Everyone laughed except Toni. He was standing on the edge, just listening and not saying anything. I thought that that was strange. That’s why I asked him if he had been at the lake when we were there. He turned around and said he was at home. But he wasn’t looking at me. Couldn’t stand to, I guess. I didn’t want to hurt him back then, because I didn’t know if he really did the panty thing. Two weeks later another one was gone.
From the clothesline this time. My mother found it in the hen-house two days later. Dirty again and again with a small stick in it. She told me. Did not tell dad, though. He can get mean. Secretly bought a new one and made it look old, on the washboard. Seven days later the same again, only it wasn’t the hen-house, but on the window sill where everyone could see it. Luckily Dad always goes to work in Vestone very early. He didn’t see it. He can get very angry.
Afterwards I secretly lay in ambush at night. And then I saw him. Toni. In the meantime we always deliberately left some underwear on the leash so that whoever did this would come back. He didn’t even tried to hide while doing it. Did it right in our garden. Then put the panties back on the windowsill.
I wanted to follow him right away, with the knife, but mother woke up and by the time I had told her everything, he was gone again. Not with the knife she said. Luca, for God’s sake not with the knife.
I took a big stick then. Waited for him after school. But he was stronger than me, even though he was smaller. Knocked loose three of my teeth and kept saying: Want to know? You really want to know?
He only stopped hitting me with my stick when Benno came around the corner. That’s when he ran away. And Benno helped me, and...
The Father knew from the first reading that no more relevant facts were written down in Luca’s essay, just that the matter with the dirty panties had stopped shortly after the incident.
He put Luca’s notebook aside and took Benno’s. As with the other essays, he still had to smile at the slightly childlike tone in which they told their stories. Big boys whose muscles grew faster than their brains. Still, they were basically good guys. Or hopefully would be one day. Benno was the only one of the four boys who had bothered to headline his essay. A headline that drove off Father Bianchi’s smile.
Why I hate Toni Da Silva.
If it wasn’t a sin, I’d kill Toni. You want to know why? I don’t think it’s any of your business, but you’re the Father and our teacher. We were playing soccer. Under your supervision, by the way. You were there, but you didn’t hear anything. Read something, if I remember correctly. Nobody wanted to vote Toni in, but in t
he end he ended up playing for the other team. In the second half, just before the end, it was a draw. Toni had the ball and headed for our goal like a lunatic. I was gonna take the ball from him. I didn’t mean him to trip. I was just clumsy. But he fell and hit his knee. I wanted to apologize to him right away, but he just yelled. Foul! Foul! Red card! Red card! and pointed at me. Benno is fouling! he yelled. I really wanted to tell him I was sorry, but he just didn’t hear me. You then came on the field and stopped the game because Toni’s knee was bleeding so much. He didn’t want to get patched up. He wanted me to get the red card and his team to win. Absolutely. He couldn’t get his head around it. Foul, foul ... he was always babbling about it. You told him he was in shock about the blood and pain and stuff. I’m sure you remember it now. We all went home. Toni’s injury wasn’t so bad after all. The next day he was back. Hobbled a little, but he basically was okay. Quiet, his corner in the back. Nothing happened for six months. Oh wait, yes it did. He ambushed Luca after school with a stick and beat him up. I don’t know why. Luca would not say. Anyway, after half a year later our Peppa foaled. I was there for the first time and I was allowed to give the foal a name. It was a mare and I called her Giada. That was great. I told everyone about it the next day. Three days later the foal was dead in its box. I discovered it. The snout had been tied together with a rope. The axe my father used to make wood with had been leaned against the door of the box. I had to put it away so I could open the door in the morning. Was blood on it. Instantly I knew something bad had happened. Giada was all chopped up. All hooves off. The neck was almost through. I saw axe strokes all over the foal. Then I saw that with all that blood something had been written on the wall of the box. Foul. That was Toni. Toni killed Giada and chopped her up. I immediately called my father and ...
The Rats of Frankfurt: The Gospel of Madness (Book 1 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 1
