Brenner: The Gospel of Madness (Book 5 of 6)

by Georg Bruckmann

  Mariam and Wanda

  Disoriented, Wanda opened her eyes. Everything was blurry. She felt sick too. She looked around. The first thing she recognized was Mariam. She was sitting next to her at the table, still gagged and tied up. Tied up? Who’s that? Wanda quickly noticed that she was also tied up. She jerked on her shackles and the chair she was sitting on wobbled slightly. Yet she was unable to free herself. She noticed that Mariam’s eyes looked kind of strange. Her gaze fell on a cup, one of those oversize coffee cups she knew from before the war. A strange smell came from it. Next to it stood a pot of ceramic on a stove in which a tea light was lit. Color and texture let Wanda suspect that it had been potted sometime by the owner. Maybe in an adult education class, she thought, and almost laughed. Once again Wanda’s searched for Mariam. Sweat was on the girl’s forehead. Mariam seemed to perceive Wanda, but she did not make any effort to communicate with her. Casually, the girl’s gaze grazed Wanda’s face and glided on without pausing as Mariam slowly and tirelessly turned her head back and forth. Wanda now also turned her head to capture more of the hut. A violent pain flashed through her, and with it came the memories of what had happened. The giant dog she had shot. A kennel - no, the kennels with the dead animals in them. The grotesque figure that had first knocked Wanda the gun out of her hand to then pulled her a wooden club over her head just a blink of the eyes later. It must have been that person who had placed her at the table and then tied her to the chair. Blurred, she remembered being dragged across the hut by a large, stinking figure. Where was that son of a bitch? She couldn’t hear him. A pungent smell similar to the one she had smelled in the forest penetrated the whole hut. It didn’t just seem to be coming from the kettle. Wanda noticed that everywhere in the hut tufts of dried herbs had been tied together and hung up. If only she could turn around to see more. From the outside, the building, which had been wildly built, had seemed much larger than what she could perceive from her current position. How long has she been sitting here tied to this chair? Where were the others? Armin? They must have heard the shots. The hut wasn’t that far from the camp. Was it? Wanda groaned as the walls around her began to rotate. The lighting was strange. Something was different now than the moment she sneaked into the cabin. No flickering flashlights. Still, it wasn’t dark inside. The colors were wrong somehow. Mariam kept turning her head back and forth. Her eyes seemed to stare at a point that was hidden from Wanda’s gaze. Wanda listened hard. If she could at least be sure that the fucking son of a bitch had really left them alone ... but it could well be that now, just at that moment, he was right behind her, watching. She listened again. There was an owl screaming outside. Branches moved gently in the wind. Wanda shivered. The cry of the owl passed into another, strange sound, then turned back into the cry of the owl and had soon faded away. She had the impression that the bird had to sit directly in front of her on the table. It’s not just the colors and the light that are strange, Wanda thought. The sounds were distorted, somehow watery, she noticed after turning her head back and forth just as Mariam still did and no owl could be heard anymore. All of a sudden the walls of the hut seemed to be made of water and not of strong boards, pallets and tree trunks. Not just that. They also seemed to be getting closer to Wanda and Mariam. The noise of the wind became louder, and all of a sudden the ambiance sounded less like a forest, but much more like a waterfall. Strangely enough, Wanda did not perceive the approach of the waterfall walls as a threat. She felt no fear, made her observations very calm and neutral. Part of Wanda wondered about this circumstance. Another part wondered that she was aware of her thoughts and that she could wonder about them in the first place. I’m completely beside myself, she thought. Then, suddenly, there was a hand. Different and somehow fishy and cold and soft, matching the liquid walls. It lay down on Wanda’s forehead, pulled her head back. Then suddenly there was a heavy pressure on her shoulders. The owner of the hand bent forward, pressed against her and passed her with his free arm. She felt a cool, stubbly man’s cheek on her own. She didn’t flinch. She also made this perception without evaluating it, and again a split-off part of her wondered about her own apathy. The arm, which moved into her field of vision from behind, was in ragged, earth-colored clothing. The fishy smell now erased almost all other sensations. The hand reached for the teapot, while the other hand continued to pull Wanda’s forehead back. The man grabbed the pot and filled the large cup, which was on the table in front of Wanda, with a steaming brew, and now he whispered in a rough voice right into her ear. “Well, little murderer? Rufus wasn’t the first one you killed, was he? No. No, don’t try to answer that. If even the little one here has already killed, then you have to outdo her in it by far. I think you taught her. Am I right? Actually, I should kill you right now. But, you know, I rarely have visitors here. I want to know everything about you. Tell me your story. Tell me about your life!” Then a quiet laugh. Wanda tried to speak, but he immediately interrupted her again. “No. No, first you have to drink a cup of this. It’s the only way I can be sure you’re telling me the truth, little skinny dog killer.” He held the cup to her lips. She knew she had to fight back. The strong smelling brew she should not drink under any circumstances, do not let it into her body. But she was unable to rebel against him. It wasn’t because she was tied up and he was holding her head. No, it was a mental thing. Again there was the part of her, far back in her brain, that analyzed the situation but was not able to influence it. This part told her the man must have instilled the brew into her once before. Apparently the brew had not yet had the desired effect on her. Now he increased the dose. Without being able to help it, she drank big sips even though the contents of the cup were hot and she could feel the liquid burning her neck. The walls of the hut were no longer made of water, but looked normal again. Almost. They still curled easily. Then a strong heat rose in Wanda, which came from her stomach and soon spread to all extremities and especially to her head. Her skin began to tingle, and on the back of her hand she could see something moving through her veins. The skin bulged. A ... no ... many little beetles ran around under her skin and tickled her nerves. She began to squirm and now - finally – to resist again and pull her shackles. She wriggled and screamed, and the cold, fishy hand moved down from her forehead and shut her mouth. “Quietly, murderer, quietly. It’ll get better in a minute. Be a good girl and don’t fight back. You’ll tell me about yourself, and when you’re done with it, I know you better than you do yourself, believe me, murderer.” Contrary to her own expectations, Wanda calmed down a little. Did he do the same thing to Mariam? Drugged her and then questioned her? What’s the matter with him? Wanda turned her head. Mariam still let hers glide from left to right. A saliva thread hung in the corner of her left mouth and glittered in beautiful rainbow colors as she turned to Wanda’s face again. Fascinated, Wanda looked at him. Then the tingling under her skin got worse again, and she screamed into the relentlessly strong, wet, fishy hand lying on her mouth. Again she couldn’t help but squirm and wriggle and pull on her shackles. But it didn’t help. The tingling became more and more intense. Stronger and stronger. More and more it took over all her senses and finally ... Then, suddenly, it was as if she had traveled back in time. She was naked and she froze. She could see Aldrin. Aldrin, whom Shepard later turned into Onehand. Now both hands were intact again, holding a spear on which, lined up on a string, the ears of those hung he had killed in battle. Wanda knew that these were equally the ears of degenerates who had challenged his leadership and those of other victims of his will to power. She knew it because she had seen it and because it hadn’t taken much for one of her ears to find its place on Andrin’s spear. Again she felt the rough rope around her neck that one of Andrin’s people had attached to the heavy, four-wheeled wooden cart that she and her naked parents had to drag along an abandoned street. Her father’s back was streaked, just like her mother’s. The degenerates sang a song in Latin. Wanda recognized the melody. She was sure that the words were wrong without knowing the language.
One of the Degs came up and hit her. The rod he used cut deep into her flesh. At least that’s how it felt, but Wanda knew that her skin hadn’t burst open at least in this blow. He told them to go faster. She accelerated her steps even though her feet were only lumps of raw meat and bloody blisters. She knew the others were hardly better. They wouldn’t allow shoes. Before dark they wanted to make it to the next village. The first houses were already visible in the distance, like miniatures for a model railway. It could hardly be more than four or five or six kilometers which the slave caravan still had to cope with. Yet it seemed to Wanda like an eternity in hell. There was no escape. Step by step she fought her way forward and watched her parents do the same ahead of her. The village was only slowly approaching. So slowly that every step became a torture. Wanda avoided turning back, but she knew there were more. Even more naked prisoners with bloody feet pulling even more heavily loaded carts. At that moment she somehow also knew that Mariam was there too, further back, although part of her consciousness contradicted that feeling. Mariam was only later picked up by Andrin’s group. Or did her memories deceive her? Wanda did not fight against what she was now experiencing in her mind. Nor did she try to prevent her lips from moving and forming words that told the unknown, strange smelling man behind her of her horrific, nightmarish visions of the past. Inside, she knew it was the drug he had given her. Her will was too weak to resist. She went on. They were still about a kilometer away from the first buildings of the small village when her mother fell. Immediately Wanda, who had pushed the cart from behind, tugged at the rope that connected her to it. Her father, however, seemed to be in a kind of trance and went on, not noticing that his wife had fallen. The degenerate with the rod had seen it and had stopped to watch Wanda’s futile efforts to stop the wagon in time, grinning. Her fight was in vain, she didn’t have enough strength left in herself to fight against the mass of the cart and the stoic power of her father at the same time. Her mother had possessed the presence of mind to roll aside as far as the rope with which she was attached to the cart allowed. Then, inexorably, as if in slow motion, the iron-clad, roughly cartwheel rolled over her left ankle and crushed it. Wanda had screamed loudly, although she knew that she would be punished for it. Now the cry of pain from her naked mother mingled with her own. Finally her father had noticed that something was wrong and stopped pulling the cart and helped Wanda stop it. He hastily keeled down beside his wife, which the rope had just allowed him to do. He was pale as a sheet. Even paler than Wanda’s mother, who was trapped in all her pain and whimpered. He and also Wanda had been taken in by a horror of a completely different kind. Their fear was not about the injury itself, but about the consequences it brought. The rod swinging degenerate, a dirty grin on his face, already approached. When he began to speak, Wanda had overcome her shock so far that she wanted to hurry to her injured mother, but the rope did not leave her enough room to move forward and past the cart. Until just now, in this moment of horrified re-experience, she hadn’t been aware of how deeply the features of the rod swinger had burned into her brain. With false regret in his voice, he said: “Oh dear, the little horse broke its leg. Now it must be slaughtered.” Then Wanda had only been able to watch him bend over her mother, suddenly a knife in his hands. She could still remember the animal cries of her father. Full of disbelieving protest. Full of panic and rage about his own powerlessness. It didn’t help. The knife raised and lowered again and again, and again and again, each time the bow reached its zenith, there was a little more red on the blade. Then suddenly they were somewhere else. They camped. Wanda and the other prisoners had huddled closely together, at the edge of the circle of light that emanated from the campfire. Wanda had Mariam in her arms. She was smaller than now. Her father sat next to Thomas and surrounded by others whose names Wanda did not bother to remember. They came and suffered, and then they were gone again. Then new ones came and did the same. Andrin appeared before them, accompanied by two or three other Degs. They chose among them. They chose which one of them would be in the middle of the circle for entertainment tonight. Wanda knew the procedure. They were beaten to recite laws, biblical passages and wisdom from the damn book. Those who made mistakes were beaten or cut. They were all raped one way or the other. The only question was how much permanent damage it would do. For Wanda it was always worst when she and Mariam were chosen, because that meant that Wanda had to endure two rounds. For some reason, Andrin, or Onehand, liked that Wanda wanted to protect Mariam. They probably had bets on how long she’d last. She didn’t care. As long as they let her, she’d do it. Her memories showed her a close-up of Andrin’s dirty teeth as he grabbed her hair and pulled her up. Then another scene change. Wanda knelt beside a wooden post. A naked man whose intestines were hanging from the abdominal cavity was tied to this stake. Burns infused the skin, could be found all over the body. The eyes were black sockets, the mouth frozen in a horrible scream. Wanda’s father. One wheel of the cart, which they had to pull in pairs now that their mother was dead, was broken. No one could help it. The Degs just weren’t good craftsmen. Nevertheless, they had punished their father, who had gone back to the front, for it. He hadn’t been paying attention to where he was steering the cart, Andrin had said. It happened in the evening. They had tied him to the stake and executed him that way. Wanda didn’t know how much time had passed from her mother’s death to that moment, but it had been at least a few weeks, she was sure. Weeks in which she had forgotten to feel sadness or fear or hope. Only an insane kaleidoscope of wounds, fear, tormented flesh and religious half-wisdom was in her head. That, and a little green plant that allowed Wanda to go on. Her concern for Mariam. If one disregarded a black eye that Mariam had somehow gotten herself - Wanda didn’t know how or why anymore, and it didn’t matter - her tender face and the rest of her body were uninjured. Every square inch of intact skin on Mariam’s lean girl body was a victory for Wanda, a heroic triumph, a symbol of her unbrokenness. Whenever Wanda thought she couldn’t carry on any longer, she only had to take a look at the girl and her mind was no longer threatening to burst. Whenever... “I understand. So that’s how it was. You used the little one as a crutch. Smart of you, murderer, really smart,” said the voice of Fishhand close to Wanda’s ear. All of a sudden she was back in the hut, and all of a sudden she could feel her shackles again. Again the faceless hand filled the cup to the rim, and again it forced Wanda to drink. “It’s not enough yet, I’m afraid. We still have to go on.” Again, the dilettantish built hut walls disintegrated. Also the roof, and then Wanda was again tied to the cart. Thomas has now taken her father’s place. Not as strong as her father and much older, so it was much more strenuous than before. The road was straight as a die, and it climbed steeply. It was incredibly difficult to keep the cart moving and avoid the potholes and explosion craters left behind by the war. Up on the hill, Wanda knew for some reason, there was an industrial area that had been the target of violent air raids when the fighting was still raging. Their cart was about in the middle of the baggage. Andrin went up front with most of his people. The rearguard consisted of only four men and two in each of the flanks. The degenerates paid little attention to their prisoners at that moment. They were way too tense. Wanda had experienced this many times before, this time of dogged silence when they crossed enemy territory, when they had to be on guard. In this state they were particularly cruel to them. You couldn’t afford to make the slightest mistake. A failure to do so, which under normal circumstances would have resulted in rod blows, could now mean death or mutilation. Thomas ahead of her, she could hear that, whispered quotes from the damn book to himself. He did his homework. From the very beginning, his way of chumming up with their kidnappers had repelled Wanda. But they had chosen him as their cart partner, and there was nothing she could do about it. He seemed to have a weak spot for her and was nice, so she didn’t let him feel her dislike too much. Part of Wanda’s consciousness revealed that their initially distant relationship had only changed over time into a strange kind
of friendship through his unyielding determination to please her. But that was later. Now Wanda saw him looking for the degenerates. When he was sure he wasn’t being watched, he let himself fall back until he almost touched the cart. He still recited the commandments of the degenerates and quotes from their cardinal. The rope with which he was supposed to pull the cart was now hanging through, and Wanda had to make a double effort to keep the vehicle moving. The sweat broke out when she saw that he, his hands behind his back, was fiddling under the tarpaulin. She wanted to yell at him not to, but she didn’t dare. The one who would draw attention to himself in this situation, a situation where the Degs were almost fearful and their nerves were shattered, would suffer a terrible fate. So she tried hard to keep pushing the cart. She didn’t want it to slow down. For then they would come into the enclosure with the cart behind them. Her whole body was covered in a sour sweat film even though it was cold. If Thomas would at least make it quick. But it seemed to take forever. Silently she cursed the selfish old man when he finally pulled something indefinable out of the tarpaulin and stuffed it in his mouth. They were all hungry - no, that was wrong - they all starved to death infinitely slowly, and he, whose fleshless, naked back swayed back and forth in front of her to the beat of his footsteps, put them in danger because he thought he was something special. It wasn’t until he chewed that he took a look back. She saw him swallow and smile restrainedly in her direction, then he accelerated his steps again. The rope tightened and soon they had found their groove again. Then the memory faded. Again Wanda was in the hut. She couldn’t feel the fish man behind her anymore. The lack of pressure on her shoulders made her dizzy, although she still sat on the chair. She was a little sick. Mariam was still sitting next to her, and she was still turning her sweaty face back and forth. Wanda imagined that the girl looked a little more awake, but she wasn’t sure. Can she hear what I’m telling the fish man? The thought triggered a wave of nausea and horror in Wanda. What if he started asking the important questions? If he asked about the guilt that Wanda had brought upon herself to secure Mariam’s and her own survival? Would Mariam still want to stay with her if she found out what terrible things Wanda and Thomas had done to take advantage of the others? How they had cold-bloodedly manipulated others into the circle so that they themselves would be spared? Sure, Mariam had noticed some things, but she had been even smaller, no, much more childlike and bona fide when all this had begun. If she now listened to what Wanda might be forced to tell - how would the girl see Wanda from now on, how would she evaluate her actions? Or even worse: If Mariam realized how much she had really profited from Wanda’s and Thomas´ unscrupulousness - no, that couldn’t be allowed to happen. The child would be broken by the guilt. The fear of losing Mariam’s love and loyalty if she were fully presented with the truth, embellished and under the influence of this damned herbal herb infusion, was infinitely more threatening to Wanda than an imminent execution. She became cold and she began to tremble. The fish man wasn’t allowed to go on. He wasn’t allowed to infuse her with the brew again. Wanda had just formulated this thought in her head and suddenly it was back again. Again he filled the cup.