Vile Things: Extreme Deviations of Horror

by et al. Ramsey Campbell

  He left and drove home. He couldn’t bear to face Adam now, what would he say to him? Son, I know what you’re doing and I’d rather you not eat and fuck dead corpses anymore?

  And what about that woman? Was that for real? It certainly looked so. How is it that they were doing almost exactly the same thing as he’d seen in the film from seventy years ago?

  His grandfather was involved, or had been, he knew that. And his father may have known, perhaps that’s why he left the barrens.

  He remembered the boxes of his grandparent’s belongings he’d put in the basement when he first came out after his grandmother’s death. Among the boxes was a small, locked filing cabinet. Was there something there? He intended to find out.

  He pried open the filing cabinet with a crowbar, and after a few moments of rummaging through the papers, found a letter dated February 4th, 1999, from his grandfather to his grandmother.

  Dear Marge,

  Please forgive me for what I am about to do, but I cannot continue living this way. You believed in me, helped me get straightened up after being released from the hospital so long ago, and I was always grateful to you for that. And I really tried, I tried to forget everything, but I couldn’t, and I can’t go on pretending everything is okay, because it’s not. You will be better off without me. I’ve done some terrible things, but I did them because of her, and she’ll never leave me alone. She’s always been there, seeking me out, she would come to me in the night, making me do terrible things. When I got sick, I guess I should have been relieved, but I wasn’t. She’ll never let me go. I know this is the only way to relieve myself of this nightmare I’ve lived my whole life. You must contact my grandson. You will have no choice and she will not have it any other way. She’s waiting for me, and I have to go now. I love you. And I’m so sorry.

  Love always,

  Randall

  Great, Cord thought. His grandfather had offed himself and had not died of his illness. And so he was brought here to carry out Elizabeth’s curse? His grandmother had left everything to him in her final will, so apparently she had agreed to her husband’s wish. But why? Why would she want to continue this? But as Randall had put it, perhaps she really had no choice. Maybe Elizabeth had made sure of that.

  But Cord did have a choice. It would end here. The next morning he rented a trailer, packed up everything, and said goodbye to that godforsaken town. Adam seemed nonplussed, not caring one way or another. Elizabeth would not have him or his son to carry out her revenge. If the bitch wanted Adam, she’d have to come get him. Fuck them. Fuck the town and the rubes who lived there, who seemed to be resigned and unwilling to put a stop to the mayhem.

  As they drove up the Jersey turnpike, the skyline of Manhattan suddenly came into view. He thought of his old nemesis, the Manhattan Monster. Cord smiled. At least the Monster was human. It was good to be home.

  Two weeks later, Cord lay awake at 4:30 am in his New York apartment bedroom. He heard the front door softly open and close. A moment later, the stench of decay and death seeped into his room.

  Rat King

  Jeffrey Thomas

  * * *

  I APPRECIATE THE DRINK, my friend, but please don’t take pity on me; those boys meant me no real harm. My face frightens them and bullying me gives them control over their fears. It is easier to be cruel to the maimed, the weak, the cowed. We don’t respect these things, they fill us with disgust … because we don’t want to become them.

  And please, don’t feel sorry for me on account of my disfigurement. After all, I did this to myself. Literally, of course. But also, I earned this face. My face changed to become what I had become. It was a miracle that I could fire a bullet from a .455 through the roof of my mouth and live. It is nothing but that; a true miracle. God did not want me dead, my friend. Death would be too quick and merciful. God spared my life through divine intervention so that I could grow old as I have … and suffer the contempt of boys. And suffer my memories of that pit …

  When I was a boy myself I once went out on the broken ice of a pond to save a friend’s dog from the water. I might have died, rescuing that animal. How, then, did I become the man I was in 1945? What changes in my heart, in my soul, shaped me … led me … fated me to become an SS guard at the camp of Bergen-Belsen?

  Thinking of that dog reminds me of an experience my cousin had while he himself was an Oberschaarfuhrer at Auschwitz. His name would be unknown today, but you Americans glorify some mass murderer who has killed only five, maybe a dozen people. My cousin personally gassed many thousands, with his fellows. He murdered enough people to fill towns.

  He had a wolfhound, a great beautiful animal he told me, and one day the dog had run into a fence while playfully bounding about. The fence carried 6,000 volts and the dog was instantly electrocuted. This dog died just outside one of the crematoriums, where my cousin’s victims were incinerated. While he told me this story his eyes grew moist, I noticed. He blamed himself for killing his beloved pet, as he had been throwing a stick for it to fetch. He felt guilty for the animal’s death … outside that crematorium.

  But let me tell you about myself, as I started to. Myself, and Belsen …

  I understand that after a time the prisoners would no longer smell the stink of death and excrement that reached for miles, reached into the peaceful and lovely town of Belsen like a great tentacled monster which was invisible because the people of the town chose not to see it. We became accustomed to the stench also, though not fully immune, as we did not dwell in those horrid shacks. It was useful that we could still smell the stench. It filled us with repulsion for our charges, and repulsion made it easier to abuse them. It was useful that, starved and sick as they were, the prisoners came to look unearthly; animate skeletons barely sheathed in skin, no longer truly male or female … not so much less than human as other than human. Hideous, ghastly. Their ugliness made it easier for us to treat them as things. Things not human, things worthy of contempt. The way those boys see me now.

  We manufactured these things, at our factory death camps. We were manufacturing obliteration. We unmade people. We meant to unmake cultures, races. It was an ambitious project, one might say.

  This was hell, as Dante saw it. The prisoners were the damned. And that made me one of the demons. I know that now …

  The British came, on April 15, 1945, and captured Belsen before we could even hope to do away with all the human evidence. The British saw no grand vision at work here. They were appalled. Great pits were dug. Then, we ourselves were forced to bury the dead. We SS were now the wretched enslaved.

  The British could not expect us to bury the dead with dignity; they had to be buried as quickly as possible, there were so many of them, all decaying, and all having lost their individuality in any case. They were all one same tortured soul, in effect, and they all went into one great grave in a jumble, in heaps, in mountains, until at last that vast grave was full of thousands and covered and we went on to the next.

  For days we slung the pathetic figures into these pits. Their numbers seemed never to exhaust themselves; our labors, Dante-like, would seem to be eternal. You read of the numbers killed and find it hard to conceive of those numbers as lives. I carried these bodies, I saw how many there were, but I myself could not grasp that reality. As in life, we treated those dead as things. Sacks to be slung up onto truck beds. Slack mannequins to be dragged on their faces to the pit and slung over the edge to flop and sprawl atop the piles. They were horrible things; with slit eyes and twisted snarls, long-limbed and rubbery. Yes, rigor mortis is only a temporary condition. I could tell you more about the characteristics of a corpse than could a dozen morticians.

  On the first day of this forced labor I had stumbled back from the lip of the first pit, my uniform soiled with sweat and befouled with human waste and smeared with decay. My shoulders ached, as I had slung bodies over them at times because it was faster than dragging. I mopped my face with a handkerchief, and saw that a British officer was moving
toward me. I was weary but a defensive fury was rising in me. He was going to order me back to work and I was going to tell him to go to hell, even if he whipped me with his pistol for it.

  But instead of withdrawing his revolver, the officer produced a tin of cigarettes and extended it to me. I nodded with a grunt meant to sound polite, and accepted one, which he also lit for me. Then the man dropped his gaze into the pit as he inhaled on his own cigarette. His eyes were squinted in revulsion, as if they half wanted to close and shut the scene out.

  He said to me in English, “How could you people do this?”

  “We didn’t murder these people,” I told him.

  He looked to me suddenly; at first I thought he was surprised that I spoke English, but then I realized he was shocked at the words I had spoken.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t kill them?”

  “They starved. And most of them were very sick. This camp was intended originally to house privileged Jews with Allied nationality. American, British nationality.” I nodded at him. “Conditions here were very good. But this winter they began transporting great numbers of prisoners here from … elsewhere …” Elsewhere meant the camps of Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Mittelbau and others. Like Auschwitz. “We became hopelessly over-crowded. Conditions necessarily worsened. And they made us a center to receive sick prisoners, mostly. So it was these conditions that killed these people you see. We did not exterminate them.”

  “How can you look me in the face and say that, man? If … if you were to abandon a newborn infant in the forest, you’d be murdering it through neglect. Murder is murder. You’re only insulting my intelligence and your own.”

  I shrugged, drew on my cigarette. The taste of smoke helped mask the stench of death that had even coated the inside of my mouth. “You will be murdering us by exposing us like this so closely to these rotting diseased bodies.”

  “A fate well deserved, my friend, I’m sure. And some of you we will murder quite consciously, I assure you. On the gallows.”

  “Yes, of course you will. So don’t look down on me, ‘my friend.’ You murder for your purposes, we murder for ours; as you say, murder is murder.”

  Again my words made the British officer gape at me. “Ten thousand unburied dead, we estimate here. Three hundred dropping dead every day, I’m told. No, SS man, don’t think to compare your motivations to ours.”

  “You have your notions of justice, and we have ours. It’s what makes the world so colorful.” And I grinned broadly.

  “Colorful. Yes. Blood red.”

  I had expected the man to strike me then, but he was still too much a gentleman, too British. He simply strode away. And I turned back to my labors.

  I was going to flick the end of my cigarette into the pit but my eyes locked with the foggy but weirdly direct gaze of a young man down there, and oddly, I dropped it to my feet and stamped it out instead.

  The next day I was actually down in the pit, spreading the dead out more evenly, as they tended to clump up where those above pitched them down. At last I was relieved, picked my way not too delicately through the carpet of bodies and climbed up and out. Waiting there was my friend from the previous afternoon, the British officer. My earlier words did not dissuade him from offering me another cigarette.

  I had no doubt he had sought me out specifically, and now I understood why. It amused me somewhat but I was careful not to show this. The man was a homosexual, as we liked to claim all British men were, in addition to their all being alcoholics. I knew this because I was very handsome then, my friend … yes, it is ironic now indeed. I had been told all my life how beautiful I was. Heroic, god-like, my admirers had gushed; but for my dark hair I was the Aryan ideal. Many times I had seen women act in this man’s manner … seeking me out after an initial meeting, trying to make it look accidental, casual, trying to seem aloof but churning inside with desire so that I felt the vibration of their lust in the air between us. Even now in this horrid air I felt it.

  And maybe that was part of it. You know? Death has a strange glamour, even in its most hideous forms. Your beloved serial-killers, as I say. I think it was subconscious, with this individual. I’m certain that outwardly he truly was appalled at our crimes, and agonized at the loss of lives. I am not saying he condoned our actions. But I think he was drawn to the darkness he perceived in me. The allure of the dangerous hidden under the beautiful. No, don’t be naive, don’t protest. It goes beyond mere morbid fascination; it’s the seductiveness of evil. Look at the new Nazis you Americans have. Your Klan. Your obsession with us real Nazis in films for decades! You find us as beautiful, our uniforms as beautiful, as did the most devout of us! We love villains, criminals. Gangsters. Monsters. We all have that inside us, after all. Maybe it’s our way of accepting that side of us.

  He appeared properly contemptuous, anyway, standing there in his neat, unstained uniform. “Now you need a shower, SS man. Now you stink. Now you have lice, no doubt.”

  “And maybe typhus.”

  “Good. How do you think the people in some of those barracks have felt? I went into one that I could only stand in for less than a minute, on account of its stench. The living people lay amongst the dead people and I couldn’t tell them apart from each other. They were too weak to move, most of them. Many were in a coma. Just covering the floor. How do you think they have felt lying there?”

  “I don’t think those individuals really feel much of anything anymore. But they came here sick, most of them. Already sick, as I’ve told you.”

  “Oh, how innocent you are. How could even one human being let this happen? Do you know that if we all had true empathy for one another, could do something so simple as put ourselves in each other’s shoes, there would be no murder, no war, and no inhumanity?” He gestured with his cigarette into the vast grave. “Look there, my friend. You see that woman? She could be your wife. She could be your sister.”

  I smiled. “I have neither.”

  “Don’t be so bloody smug, you bastard. You know what I’m saying. She could be your mother, your daughter, she could be you.”

  “But she isn’t. She’s a Jew. She’s a woman. She’s down there and I’m up here.”

  “Your positions will some day be reversed.”

  “On Judgment Day, eh?” I chuckled mockingly. I knew I shouldn’t provoke his anger, repulse him. Perhaps I could use his attraction to my advantage. My pride aside, I would rather have become his secret lover than hang. But I didn’t think he would ever chance an outright relationship with me. Still, I knew I should try to benefit myself from the situation, to flirt with him, beguile him, in the same way I had skillfully mesmerized women. After all, I had consciously enthralled ugly women, women I wouldn’t have slept with. In my vanity, I simply enjoyed the attention. The power. Looking back now, I wonder if my flirtation with the officer was motivated less by my attempt to better my situation than it was by this feeling of power. Maybe it made me feel superior to the man, less a prisoner. I was still a Nazi then, of course. I still believed in mastering others.

  In any case, when the officer proffered another cigarette and lit it for me, I lightly cupped my hands around his. I felt a light tremor flinch through him at this contact but he didn’t jerk his hands away. He was indeed smitten, and he was indeed afraid of me, which I think made him more smitten.

  Both of us said nothing for several minutes as we watched others drop one emaciated being after another over the side, like mummies being reinterred, but without the finery. I flicked a louse off my arm; the officer had been right. Parasites. We had called the Jews parasites. Vermin to be exterminated with no more compassion than we would feel spraying insects, or killing rats.

  These conversations, philosophical as they were, put me in mind of our motivations as Nazis, brought to mind the analogy of vermin. And seeing the interlaced arms and legs, the entwined skeletal bodies below, made my thoughts take another leap. But a very strange one, unsettling. I shuddered unaccountably; it was the first ti
me staring into the pit, staring at the heaped corpses, actually brought out goose flesh on my arms.

  “Have you ever heard,” I asked my new found friend, “of Rat Kings?”

  We looked at each other; he said, “No.”

  “My grandmother told me about them. Of course, it’s always grandmothers who tell you such things. In any case, she told me that when rats were more plentiful amongst us than they are today, sometimes in a nest of rats a Rat King would be found. This was a group of say a dozen rats or more, whose tails had all tangled together so that they couldn’t pull apart, with their heads all facing outwards. Because they were stuck together like this they couldn’t move very far, and were often found pitifully starving or already dead. They seemed like many-headed monsters to those who found them, and that was why they were thought of as Rat Kings. Did you know there is a Rat King in The Nutcracker? But they call it a Mouse King.”

  “Yes … that’s right. But all this about rats with their tails knotted up sounds like wives’ tales and nonsense.”

  “Perhaps it is, though my grandmother swore to me that such things were truly discovered. As a child she herself had a neighbor who supposedly found one in their barn consisting of two dozen rats, which was why she told me about all this. It could be that huddling together in the winter, it was their own frozen urine that was linking their tails together. In any case, only the attic rat, as we Germans call them, have been found as Rat Kings. These are the black rats. They’re smaller and more rare than the brown rat … mostly because the bigger and stronger brown rats have preyed on them and diminished their numbers greatly. Nearly wiped them out. The brown rats are the more successful and superior species.”