die Stunde X

by Shaun Stafford

  After a few seconds, his eyes began to see a little better. The vision they gave him was far from brilliant, but was enough to enable him to see a wall that backed onto the yard behind the funeral directors.

  And below that wall was a row of dustbins.

  Smiling now, Jerome made his way over to them.

  There were five of them, black plastic tubs, about three feet high. A couple of them were missing their lids. The lid of a third was perched on top of a pile of garbage that towered over the sides of the dustbin. Jerome could smell the stale rotting odour of old food, and wrinkled his nose.

  Determined now, especially since he had a way in, he climbed onto one of the dustbins, grabbed the top of the wall, and hauled himself up onto it.

  The other side, the side that belonged to Meredith’s, looked dark, ominous, unforgiving. He couldn’t see the ground, had no idea how far down it was. He presumed it was the same drop as that on the side he had just climbed, but there was no way of being certain. He also had no idea whether there was anything beneath him – coffins, glass, spikes, nor whether the ground was grass or concrete.

  Steadily, he held onto the wall and lowered himself down until he thought his feet were almost touching the ground. He let go.

  The drop was brief, nothing more than a couple of inches. Jerome breathed out and turned, his eyes scanning the yard he now found himself in. To his left was the rear of the building, to his right, the rear wall of the yard. In front of him were the vans and trucks, parked up for the night, their reflective headlights glistening in the weak moonlight.

  Jerome realized that he had scaled the first hurdle, only to be presented with another. How to get inside the building. It would, after all, be locked, and there would probably be an alarm.

  His heart pounding in his chest, he walked carefully and slowly across the yard toward the building. Perhaps somebody had left a window open. Highly unlikely, he thought, but there was always a possibility.

  As it was, he found no open window, no magical and easy entrance into the building. He didn’t really expect to. In fact he realized that perhaps he should just go home.

  His mother needed him. So did Nicole, and so did Campbell. Aunt Mary had been right. He’d been an idiot, he was acting like a complete arsehole. His place was back home.

  His looked skywards as though seeking guidance from a God he didn’t believe in … and then his eyes fell upon an open window on the first floor of the building. Quite a large vent, only open a crack, but enough to enable him to reach in and unhook it. A way in.

  Even so, it was still six feet or so beyond his reach. It was still a worthless opportunity.

  He looked around the yard, he eyes now becoming more used to the dark, his night vision almost perfect. He saw the silvery, shadowy forms right at the back of the yard, piles of old timber, a row of dustbins, a couple of dumpsters. What caught his eye, however, was the distinctive outline of a ladder.

  Jerome almost ran across the yard, but the need for stealth overcame his base emotion, and he walked quietly to where the ladder lay. Grabbing it, he realized that a few of the rungs were missing, and that it was only six or seven feet in length. Long enough, he thought to himself, as he lugged it back to the building.

  Seconds later, he was inside, in the office of Mr Meredith himself.

  20

  The building seemed even more frightening at night, Jerome thought, as he stepped across Meredith’s office towards the door. It was quiet, dark, and he couldn’t shake from his mind the fact that the only other people in the building with him were corpses.

  His father included.

  He opened the door and crept into the corridor. It was darker in the building than it was outside. There wasn’t even the sliver of the moon to light his path. For the most part, he groped his way along the wall, came to the stairs, and descended.

  He tried the door of the room he had entered when he first arrived earlier that evening. Thankfully, though it was poorly lit inside, he could see that the woman had been removed.

  He looked around, his eyes falling upon mysterious and shadowy shapes that his mind only occasionally registered as recognizable objects. He saw nothing that visibly resembled a corpse. A couple of coffins stood on their ends against the far wall, brightly and eerily illuminated by a shaft of moonlight shining through a window opposite.

  Jerome saw some tools on a bench to his right, found a crowbar, and picked it up. Then he backed out of the room, his heart still pounding furiously in his chest. He opened the door on the opposite side of the corridor and entered. This room, it appeared, contained the caskets, the coffins, about fifty or sixty of them, of varying shapes and sizes. Jerome shuddered and shut the door on them.

  Behind the next door he found a room that was almost identical to the first. Obviously where the corpses were prepared. There were no corpses on display, however, tonight.

  The final door greeted Jerome, and he swallowed noisily as his hand gripped the handle. He opened the door slowly, and saw a long corridor. Frowning at the fact that the door should lead onto nothing more spectacular than a corridor, he entered, and saw doors to his left, each placed at a regular interval as though the rooms behind them were of uniform shape and size. Each door was closed.

  Jerome entered the first one. Soft light fell from a low wattage bulb in the ceiling, and the sight of a corpse in an open casket greeted him. The woman he had seen being prepared earlier, her skull seemingly magically repaired.

  Almost gagging, he stepped out of the small chapel of rest, and made his way to the next door. He had to try every single one, and knowing his luck, his father’s coffin would be in the final room.

  In the event, he found his father’s sealed casket in the fourth chapel of rest. There was certainly nothing spectacular about the coffin. It had been paid for by the State, and Jerome knew his mother would shortly be receiving the bill. As such, the casket was simply the basic model. There was a brass plate on the lid that was engraved with his father’s name, but that was it.

  Jerome gripped the crowbar tightly in his hand, and felt the sweat breaking out on his forehead. Here he was, standing before his father’s coffin. His father’s corpse was inside, and he was prepared to open it, to view firsthand the bloody cadaver. If it was bloody, he reminded himself. But of course it would be bloody – they’d killed him, after all. This wasn’t a case of death by natural causes.

  Swallowing deeply, he shoved the flat end of the crowbar beneath the slight slit between the coffin and the lid, working it in from side to side. Then he pushed down on the bar. The wood splintered with a quiet crack, and the crowbar popped out from beneath the lid, throwing up a few slivers of wood.

  Cursing silently, he tried again, and banged the end of the crowbar with the palm of his hand. There was a creak as one of the nails started to pull from its hole, and Jerome knew that he had enough leverage to use more force. He pushed down on the bar, and the lid began to rise slowly, as though the corpse inside, his father, was pushing his way out.

  When that section of the lid had risen an inch or so, Jerome moved further down, and performed the same ritual on that part. Soon, the entire lid was raised an inch from the coffin, held aloft by the loose nails, as though it were on tiny stilts.

  Jerome stared at his handiwork for a moment, and then tossed the crowbar on the floor, where it landed with a metallic clank. Then he grabbed the coffin lid tight and wrenched it open. It broke free from its shackles and flew up, out of his hands, spinning round so that the dozens of nails were facing upwards.

  It landed on the floor on the other side of the coffin with a loud thud.

  Jerome took a couple of steps back, closed his eyes, not daring to look inside the opened coffin. He’d come this far, only to lose his nerve. He wiped his sweaty palms on the thighs of his jeans and swallowed noisily, blinking tears from his eyes.

  His father was in that coffin.

  He stepped up to the casket, eyes still closed, rested his hands on
the side, and took a deep breath.

  Then he looked down.

  His father was naked, and lay on a white cotton sheet. Surprisingly, there was very little blood, but that didn’t detract from the horror and sheer revulsion Jerome felt.

  The head, the face that Jerome had grown up loving, occasionally hating, usually arguing with, was separated from the body, and lolled over to one side. The stump of the neck seemed almost to glow in the dimly lit room, and Jerome knew that there was blood there. There had to be.

  Up and down his father’s body, he saw dark blemishes that he took for bruises. His father’s knees in particular seemed to have suffered horribly. Jerome thought about the pain his father must’ve been in prior to his execution. Then he tried to imagine the fear his father had to have felt as he was being led away to the execution chamber.

  He shuddered.

  The bastards had beaten him, probably tortured him, determined to squeeze information out of him – information he could never possibly have possessed.

  Jerome felt the tears well up in his eyes, and fell against the wall beside the door behind him. He gulped some air, shook his head, wiped his eyes, and stepped back up to the coffin. He had to put it back together. He bent over, dragged the lid around to his side, and lay it down on top of the coffin, trying not to look at his father’s corpse again.

  The noise was faint at first, but loud enough to startle Jerome, to send pin-pricks of alarm rushing through his limbs. He spun around, looked at the doorway behind him.

  He saw the vague beam of light waving around in the corridor outside. A torch. He looked around frantically for somewhere to hide, but there was nowhere. He couldn’t even hide in the coffin, even if he could bear to jump in on top of his father – which he actually doubted he could do. But even if he could control his revulsion for a few minutes, it wouldn’t do any good. The coffin’s lid was splintered, and there was no way he could get it to lay flat.

  Besides, he didn’t have time to mess around with such a hiding place. He needed somewhere easy. There was only one easy place, and it was also the first place anybody would think of looking.

  Behind the door.

  Jerome scooped up the crowbar and jumped lightly across the room, pressing himself flat against the wall behind the door.

  He heard footsteps in the corridor outside – heavy footfalls, punctuated by a light tapping sound as steel heels rapped on the floor. Somebody in heavy boots.

  Ordnungspolizei?

  Jerome felt a shudder rack through his body, and he closed his eyes in a silent meditation.

  The footsteps stopped right outside the doorway.

  21

  Jerome held his breath, gripped the crowbar lightly, and watched as the shadowy form entered the chapel of rest. He couldn’t make out the colour of the uniform the man was wearing as he stepped across to the opened coffin, but he could see that it was a uniform of some kind. He could also see the empty holster that hung around the man’s waist, and the SIG Sauer pistol he held in his hand.

  With sweat pouring down his face, Jerome launched himself at the man, knocking him into the coffin, which fell from the small table it was resting on, spilling its contents onto the floor.

  The man bounced sideways into the wall, and fell down onto his backside. Jerome raised the crowbar and brought it down on the man’s waving arms. The man yelled out in pain, and Jerome saw him trying to bring his gun to bear upon him. He dropped down on top of the man, throwing the crowbar aside, and attempted to wrestle the pistol from the man’s grip. The man’s grip, however, was firm, and it was all Jerome could do to keep the weapon aimed away from him.

  The both of them grunted as they fought on the floor of the chapel of rest, and the pistol remained at the end of an outstretched arm, pointing away from Jerome. At that moment, Jerome wasn’t too concerned with being shot. He was more concerned with a stray bullet being fired, which would alert everybody in the area to the fact that something was awry. And if this bastard was a member of an Orpo patrol …

  Jerome flinched as the man punched him in the face, and a knee in his kidneys rolled him sideways and into the table where moments earlier the coffin had been resting.

  As the man tried to pull himself upright, and swung the pistol around to Jerome, Jerome gathered his senses and flew across the room, landing on top of him, knocking the wind out of him. The man grunted, and his gun hand was forced down against his body. As they struggled with each other, their embrace resembling a couple in the act of making passionate love, Jerome heard a muffled explosion, felt something vibrate against his belly, and felt his stomach go hot and damp.

  Terrified, he rolled off the man, half expecting to see his intestines hanging outside his body. There was certainly enough blood, he thought, and perhaps the shock of being shot meant that he would feel no pain.

  But it didn’t take him long to realize that he hadn’t been shot. The other man had, the man in the uniform. He lay perfectly still on his back, the pistol pressed against his ribcage. Gasping, Jerome reached across and pressed the man’s body, felt the blood. The barrel of the gun was warm to touch, and also wet and sticky.

  The man made no sound.

  Cursing, sweating, and covered in blood that wasn’t his own, Jerome stumbled to his feet, pressed a hand to his forehead, and surveyed the scene before him. His father’s coffin lay on the floor behind the table, the headless corpse half hidden beneath it. The decapitated head was either completely hidden beneath the coffin or else was in the shadows. Jerome didn’t want to think about that.

  His eyes fell up on the man who lay on the floor. His uniform was dark, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was an Orpo officer. Besides, most Orpo officers carried submachine guns. This man was armed with a humble pistol.

  Jerome knelt down by him and felt for a pulse. Although he was no expert in first aid, he was confident that the man was dead. Dead, and he’d murdered him.

  Trying vainly to control his breathing, Jerome looked carefully at the uniform. The man’s cap lay on the floor a few feet away, and he reached over and scooped it up. There was no Hakenkreuz badge on the front, no Nazi insignia, as there was on the caps of the Orpo officers.

  He saw what appeared to be a name badge on the breast pocket of the man’s uniform, and he ripped it off, tried to look at it, to read the name. He thought it said L SOAME, an English name, but he couldn’t be certain. If, however, it was an English name, then this man couldn’t have been an Orpo officer. In which case, he had to be a security guard. A collaborating security guard, on patrol for the businesses in this area. That would’ve made more sense. He would’ve seen the ladder leading up to the first floor window, and known that the building had been broken into.

  Jerome was relieved, but only slightly. He’d still committed a murder, he was still going to have to pay for it.

  He tossed the badge down on the floor and grabbed the guard’s pistol. No sense in worrying about getting his prints on the gun. He was an Englishman, and the People’s court would not believe him when he said he hadn’t touched the gun. They wouldn’t even check it for prints anyway. They’d have him down as guilty without gathering any evidence whatsoever.

  Jerome looked at the pistol, shook his head, and tossed it back on the guard’s body. He didn’t need it. He wasn’t going to shoot his way out.

  He stood upright and ran his bloody hands through his sweaty hair.

  He wasn’t going to shoot his way out, but what the hell was he going to do?

  First things first – get the fuck out of the building.

  At first, Jerome didn’t know where to run to. He knew where not to run to. He knew he couldn’t run back home. They would connect him with the break-in, with the murder, and the first place they would look for him would be at his home in Goebbelsstrasse. So he couldn’t go back there.

  He thought about going to Ellen’s, but she lived in a large mansion on Himmelblaustrasse with her wealthy parents. If he turned up unannounced, there woul
d undoubtedly be questions. Questions he couldn’t possibly answer truthfully. And they would soon learn the truth for themselves.

  Being German, he didn’t doubt for one moment that they would report him to the police, whether the Orpo or the Kripo, it didn’t matter. He would end up in the same place. A Gestapo cell, where he would be beaten as part of his punishment, before they put him up in front of the Judge at the Volksgerichtshof, where he would be sentenced to death.

  Jerome staggered through the streets, trying to remain in the darkened areas, sometimes crossing the road five or six times in quick succession to stay out of the illumination from the street lights.

  He paused close to a park, saw the shadowy silhouettes of the slide and the swings, a roundabout, a climbing frame that resembled a Hakenkreuz. A man was walking up the road towards him a dog on a lead, a Doberman, its cropped ears erect, alert. He had to be a German.

  He looked back, saw the man with the dog entering the park via the gate. Cursing, Jerome reached the swings, sat down on one of them. He needed time to think, he needed complete silence, needed to clear his mind.

  He didn’t want to be disturbed, but the man with the dog was walking towards him. The dog was still on its lead. They could only be allowed to run free in designated parks. This wasn’t one of them.

  The man reached the play area, his face turned towards Jerome, the features lit by the silvery light from the crescent moon. Jerome thought he saw a smile on the man’s face.

  “Guten Abend,” the man said, raising a hand to his head.

  “Guten Abend,” Jerome said nervously. The man was a German. With a dog like that, he was probably an off-duty Orpo officer. Jerome was shaking, but the man hadn’t noticed. He was already ten feet away.

  Jerome waited until the man disappeared into the darkness, and then relaxed. But only just. He couldn’t be certain that the Orpo weren’t already onto him. He couldn’t be certain that the man who had just passed him wouldn’t contact the Orpo the moment he returned home to report the suspicious character he’d seen in the park.