“You seem to have forgotten the lessons that the veriest dunce could have memorized from the Great War,” I grumbled. “And if the gods in Valhalla are awake, it’s because not even they can sleep through the pandemonium unleashed on us every night by Mr. Churchill’s bombers.”
* * * *
Had some stranger happened upon this scene in the elegant bedroom of a suite at the Grand Hotel, he would have made the woefully inaccurate observation that West and I were young men of an approximate age. But fifteen years before, we had both been dragged screaming through the furnace of the Great War, an experience horrific enough to age any man long before his time.
Even before that, we had been young together at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, where West’s dazzling brilliance and his even more dazzling sense of mission had enslaved me as his assistant and accomplice. His goal was simple, and it was deceptively praiseworthy: to restore life to the dead. It was the very promise extended by no less a Personage than our blessed Savior. It seemed to me that West intended to redeem this promise, which had fallen somewhat short of universal expectation, with the methods of modern science. In my most deluded transports of hero-worship, I had confused this madman with Jesus Christ.
But the reality soon grew horrible, and horror was heaped upon horror until the word lost all meaning and the emotion all power to move. With my high ideals and good intentions I was buried in a pit from which a descent into hell would have seemed a holiday outing. Why, you ask, did I not rebel? I can only reply that man is a despicable worm who can get used to anything, that horror can become a habit, that slavery can bring freedom from the unbearable burden of free will, and that I was no more than a man.
I was a man, I say, but after West tried to ensure my loyalty even further by murdering me and bringing me back to life with his methods, I became something different, something not unlike the mad, dead West himself. With nothing more to lose, I did at last rebel, whereupon I learned that I had not even ventured beyond the outermost anteroom of true horror.
I killed West, and nothing in my life or in my subsequent life-in-death ever gave me such undiluted joy. I was glad I killed him. I was free! I was a fool....
I created what I believed was a new beginning for a new life with a beautiful young woman who consented to become my bride. We were sublimely happy together, and no happier than when she told me that she was with child. With the same breath, however, she revealed a secret so terrible that I must leave off writing for a moment to scream aloud with shame and loathing.
There. It brought me no relief.
The abominable West, the unspeakable West had studied the discipline of mind-transference under the tutelage of certain depraved and scarcely-human mentors. Killing him had done no good, for his fiendish intellect had skipped blithely into the body of Barbara Bishop, the woman I had loved. The most intimate and precious moments of our life together had been a sham. The form I embraced so avidly held the soul of the monster, inwardly mocking and sniggering at my protestations of love and proofs of desire.
The child, my own son, was rushed to an unholy semblance of maturity by West’s scientific skills; whereupon the madman effected another mental leap, this time into the body of the boy to whom he, while posing as my dear wife, had given birth.
So that this was no pair of ordinary young men that our hypothetical observer would have seen conversing in the Berlin hotel room. West was my son. He had been his own mother. And we were both dead. No writer of pulp fiction, however crazed by drink or drugs, could have hallucinated a tentacled monster more different from the creatures of the sane, natural world than we were. God Himself would have been hard put to find a name for us.
* * * *
Not even West’s piquant social life had prevented us from fulfilling the purpose for which we had been transported to Germany. We had re-animated whole battalions of dead soldiers for service on the Eastern Front. Signally deficient in Teutonic discipline, these resurrected heroes had to be conveyed to the east in sealed and heavily guarded freight-cars. Herded into crude formations, they were shoved into the vanguard for the principal purpose of stopping bullets that might otherwise have found their marks in living men.
At first the walking walls of dead meat had a profoundly demoralizing effect on the ignorant peasants who comprised the bulk of the Red Army, but it was not long before even the brutish Slavs perceived the limitations of our handiwork and overcame their superstitious fears. The dead soldiers seldom had the sense to use their weapons, preferring teeth and claws for hand-to-hand combat. Their formations could be reduced to wriggling heaps of harmless scraps by a skilled machine-gunner; they could be even more easily dispatched with flame-throwers and incendiary shells. I believe most of them were simply immobilized by the fearful cold, since no thickness of winter clothing can keep a corpse from freezing solid.
The ordinary German soldiers liked their new comrades even less than the Russians did, with the exception of the SS troops, whose appetite for nihilism was immoderate. In fact our greatest success was with a private named Werner Spitzbart, who served with such flair that he was rapidly promoted to obersturmbannfuhrer in the crack Totenkopf Division. In line for a Knight’s Cross after repulsing an armored attack by calling in repeated air-strikes on his own position, he was instead transported to a labor camp in Poland when it was discovered that he had been a Jew in his former life. My attempts to learn the subsequent fate of our protégé were brusquely rebuffed.
* * * *
I found myself thinking of Werner the next morning as we were chauffeured to the Reich Institute for Military Research in an elegant touring-car with snapping Nazi flags, for West was ranting on and on about the Jews. He was expounding on the theories of his newest admirer, Reichsfuhrer Himmler, whose views on even the most commonplace subjects seemed bizarre, even to a dead man.
“Christianity is a plot, you see, concocted by the Jews to emasculate their superiors,” West said. “They never could have got a stranglehold on so many areas of human endeavor—business, banking, the arts, medicine—if they hadn’t spun an elaborate fairy-tale designed to convince their Aryan masters that they should turn the other cheek and love their enemies. The glorious message of the Man who proclaimed that He had brought us not peace, but a sword, was twisted into an unspeakable perversion by the so-called Saint Paul and his co-conspirators, Semites of the lowest type, who promulgated the fiction that this purely mortal Übermensch had risen from the grave.
“The whole sorry history of Christianity began with a slip of a Greek scribe’s pen,” he continued, “whereby parthenos, or virgin, was substituted for pantheros, or panther. Christ was no son of a virgin—” here he paused to snicker in his ghoulish way—“but the son of a Roman centurion known as the Panther. Since folkish tradition is our only infallible source of truth, all the traditional paintings of Christ as a blond, blue-eyed, Nordic hero must reflect the reality of his appearance. His father was recruited into the Roman army from beyond the Rhine—where, incidentally, the true Jews of the Ten Lost Tribes, God’s Chosen People, had previously made their home after wily Semitic intruders betrayed them to the Assyrians.”
“You don’t deny that Christ’s mother was a Jew,” I interjected. “As in the case of poor Werner Spitzbart, that makes Him unquestionably Jewish, whoever His father may have been.”
“I have come to expect such captious quibbles from you. Under the Jewish way of reckoning, of course He was, but that way is designed to humiliate the warrior-male and enslave him to women, his natural inferiors. In the Aryan tradition, the father’s line is paramount.”
“How do you account for the fact that you haven’t taken at all after your father?” I said somewhat waspishly.
“Next time, by God, you’ll be my wife, and I promise you won’t like it one little bit,” he snarled.
* * * *
Our hosts were such masters of efficiency and organization that we had little to do with the mass re-animation of soldi
ers anymore. Most of this daily drudgery went on at a factory in East Prussia, performed by volunteers from a nearby labor-camp. At our laboratory in the Institute for Military Research, West and I worked on improving our formulae and procedures in a clean and sterile atmosphere of pure Science. It was a far cry from the bloody labors of our earlier years, when we had often toiled under conditions reminiscent at once of a butcher-shop and a lunatic-asylum.
Our main goal was to perfect West’s amply-proven theory that even a single cell from a once-living organism contains a blueprint for the entire creature, and that anything that once lived can be made to live again. If you discount the unfortunate Rudolf Hess, re-animated by our standard methods after his secret execution for treason and dispatched to sow confusion among the English, the so-called Loch Ness Monster was our greatest triumph; although, like all our triumphs, it fell short of our intentions. The Cretaceous monster that our hosts had hoped would rampage through the north of Britain proved to be a passive creature that devoted all its energy to avoiding notice. The only serious havoc it wreaked was at a fish-market in Bremerhaven on its way to the docks, requiring Herr Goebbels to broadcast a tirade against the RAF for the cowardly raid that had killed so many harmless civilians.
* * * *
I had no reason to doubt the sincerity of my master’s threat, and its horrific implications so distracted me that I failed at first to notice that we were not taking the elevator to our laboratory, but descending a disconnected set of stairways into the ever-more dank and cavernous bowels of the Institute. We passed through two separate sets of steel doors that would have done credit to the most orgulous bank on Wall Street, each of them guarded by steely-eyed SS men—not the store-window mannikins one normally sees modeling their grim finery in the capital, but camouflage-clad warriors from the Das Reich Division, armed with Schmeissers that they clearly knew how to use. They scrutinized our documents and our faces so sedulously that I very nearly apologized aloud for Mr. Roosevelt’s ill-considered slurs against these champions in the forefront of the struggle against atheistic communism.
All these precautions had been designed to guard a dripping dungeon of mediaeval origin whose mouldy horrors were glaringly revealed by a battery of bare electric bulbs that West activated as we descended the last stairway. I longed to be back in our clean laboratory, but I knew that had been merely a temporary respite from immersion in the natural element of my master, whose heart was gladdened by the ghastly, who gloated on the ghoulish, who gloried in the Gothic.
Ancient bones and instruments of torture had been tumbled aside at one end of the cellar to make room for a workplace. Among the racks of chemicals and electrical equipment I noted a table where a disconnected skeleton had been laid out, along with a drum of the plasma that had lately been shipped to us by a certain Dr. Mengele, whose experiments with volunteers recruited from Russian prisoners-of-war had kindled uncharacteristic transports of admiration in West. “He’s my kind of doctor!” he had exclaimed more than once while savoring the letters of this dedicated man of science.
I observed certain anomalies in the makeshift laboratory as we approached. Planks and tools suggestive of a carpentry-shop had been assembled to one side of the table, while theatrical costumes hung near at hand. West quickly dressed himself in the gown and miter of an ancient Roman pontifex and indicated that I should change into the bronze-and-leather gear of a soldier from the same era.
“Really, West, what on earth—?” But I needed no explanation. The Nazis had lured West into their service with the promise of a very special relic recovered by their agents in Palestine, and he had sardonically observed that this relic might teach us something about carpentry in the era of Tiberius. The implications of these hints had been so horrendous that I had pushed them firmly to the back of my mind all this while, but now they burst forth upon my consciousness like a black and putrid wave from a subterranean sea clogged with drowned demons.
“Yes, my friend, we want to make our very special Guest feel at home when He returns from His long sleep,” West said as I goggled at the ancient bones on the table with a horror and loathing that was strangely not unmixed with awe and, yes, reverence. He continued, “We shall prove, for once and all, the absolute correctness of the Reichsfuhrer’s views on the nature and origin of Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph, known to all the world as Jesus Christ!”
“No, West! This isn’t merely wrong, this isn’t merely wicked, this is a sacrilege beside whose magnitude the most depraved and wanton blasphemies of the Marquis de Sade would seem no more than boyish pranks!”
“Put up that absurd sword and stop your blithering,” he said as he smeared the ineffably sacred relics with the latest transmutation of his reagent. “I had deluded myself that an infantile intelligence might be mewling somewhere inside your empty head, but obviously I was wrong.”
“But, West ... the Lamb of God....”
“Indeed,” he sneered. “Pass the leg.”
He had uncovered the drum of Mengele’s plasma, releasing an odor that defied description. The foetor was so noisome that I feared I might lose consciousness, but West seemed oblivious to it as he dropped the bones he had treated into the drum. Its black, oily contents began to bubble thickly.
And then they stopped. The surface of the liquid was still.
I had anticipated—I don’t know what, a bolt of lightning, an angelic manifestation, the sudden entrance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. None of these could have been more unnerving than the absolute absence of observable phenomena that in fact prevailed. Even West grew nervous, and he stepped toward the drum with unwonted trepidation.
In the next instant he fell back with a scream as a Shape burst upward from the still surface of the vile potion, mouthing and gibbering as it splashed the liquid on our theatrical costumes. My own reaction was an unseemly peal of laughter, for this Person gave the lie to West and Himmler, and probably to the preconceptions of most devout Christians, as well.
What we had re-animated was a thoroughly unremarkable Man, nearing forty, balding, somewhat paunchy, whose limbs and chest were covered with an almost apish growth of black hair. The style of his hair and beard and his general cast of features would have aroused no comment at all among the importunate pushcart-peddlars of New York City’s Delancey Street. In fact the only remarkable thing about Him was His height, scarcely four inches over five feet. So much for the tall, blond, blue-eyed, Nordic Übermensch of all those ludicrous paintings!
But I had no doubt at all of His identity. His brow was cruelly lacerated, right down to the bone, as if by a crown of thorns, and His body had been torn as if by a remorseless flogging. Not on the hands, as all those deluded stigmatics believe, but between the radius and ulna of the wrists were ragged holes where iron nails ran in. As His struggles upended the vat and He tumbled onto the floor in a flood of foul liquid, I saw that His ankles had been similarly pierced. The wound in His left side, presumably made by a Roman spear, gaped large and jagged, as if the final executioner had twisted the blade for the best effect.
“Good God, West! Stay clear!” I screamed, for I observed something he apparently had not as he approached our latest and most spectacular failure. It was obvious from the blank, mad eyes of our subject that His intellect, or perhaps His soul, had not accompanied the body in its transit from beyond the tomb. This thing was as dangerous as any of our earliest subjects.
“Those fools!” West snarled. “They obviously recovered the wrong—”
In the next instant, our subject gripped West by the throat, dragged his head down and began gnawing on his chin, mouthing and mumbling in some foreign tongue all the while.
“No! It’s not possible!” West cried. “It can’t be!”
“What? What is it?”
“He’s speaking in Aramaic, which I learned in preparation for this experiment,” my master explained, his words somewhat disjointed by his struggles. “He said, ‘Take this and eat, for this is My body!’” Almost as an after
thought, he added, “For Christ’s sake, man, help me!”
It would have been poetic justice, surely, to let the Redeemer of All Mankind devour my monstrous mentor, but some unextinguished glimmer of feeling for a fellow-creature impelled me to seize one of the wounded wrists and tear it from West’s neck.
“’Because thou art neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I shall spew thee from my mouth,’” West said, his scholarly instincts compelling him to provide a translation even in this extremity; and then, perhaps not translating, he screamed: “This is my blood!”
As all our subjects tended to be, this creature was preternaturally strong, and it was all I could do to hold one of His hands down. But a plank came to hand from the carpentry supplies West had assembled to make Him feel at home. It was the work of a moment to seize a hammer and nail and pin His hand securely to the board. When I had torn the other hand from West’s throat and dealt with it similarly, I was appalled to see the unthinking parody I had created of one of the most momentous events in all the history of the world: the Son of Man lay nailed to a crossbeam at my feet.
“What’s He saying now?” I asked.
“’Verily, I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise,’” West snarled, and added: “It doesn’t know what it’s saying, you fool! It’s just so much worthless meat.”
Before I could protest—and I’m not entirely sure that I would have—West seized the Roman sword from my belt and began hacking our subject in manageable pieces, which would still have to be dissolved in acid. At the very end it cried out words that even I understood: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”
As the separate pieces writhed and humped and scampered about the cellar, I became suddenly aware that we were not alone. Unnoticed in the confusion, the Reichsfuhrer himself had entered the room with his menacing entourage and stood pondering the scene. A look of utter loathing crossed his rather prissy face as he stared at the severed, still-mouthing head of the Light of the World, but the reason for his loathing startled me as he spat: “A Chew! He vass not’ingk but a Chew all along.”
Nasty Stories Page 13
