The shouts grew louder as they drew closer to the camp, and the old woman drew in her breath loudly, fearfully, as she saw the reason for the commotion. She was not so learned in the ways of the world that she could identify by the soldiers who had invaded the camp, but by the flickering firelight and the dying rays of the sun she was able to see the insignia they wore, the skull and crossbones upon the black cap, the two lightning bolts upon the collar, the black, twisted, hooked cross within the white circle upon the red arm band. She did not know what the Schutzstaffel was, she had never heard of the S.S., but the presence of danger communicated itself to her and spoke to every fiber of her being. She had known danger all her life, the danger that can be known only to those who never rest, are never safe, never welcome, never truly home.
Blasko came up behind her and was soon joined by Kaldy. They stood and watched as the black-garbed Germans herded the Gypsies into a circle near the fire and kept them motionless under the barrels of their guns as the wagons were first searched and then put to the torch. Blasko, Kaldy, and the old woman stood off to the side and watched, as if what was happening was something in which they were not involved; but then they were seen, and the S.S. commander barked a few words to two of his soldiers, and they ushered the three stragglers into the circle with the tips of their gun barrels.
A few moments of tense silence preceded the words of the commander of the S.S. squadron. He walked forward into the circle of captives and allowed his cold blue eyes to drift lazily and with undisguised distaste over the assembly. He was a tall man, thin but muscular, with a cruel mouth set beneath a thin nose, and his bearing and demeanor bespoke confident arrogance as he placed his balled fists on his hips and demanded, "Do any of you speak German?" There was no response at first, and so he repeated his question a bit more forcefully. "If you value your lives, you will reply. I know what you Gypsy scum are like. You travel all over Europe, stealing and polluting. Some of you must speak our language." He noticed that a few of the captive Gypsies were glancing furtively at one of the three who had been found lurking at the edge of the camp, and so the commander turned to him. "You! Do you speak German?" Janos Kaldy looked at the S.S. officer with what seemed to be disinterest, a fact which the commander found extremely irritating. "Answer me, pig, if you can. Do you speak German?"
Kaldy emitted an almost inaudible sigh and then replied in German, in an unusual and somehow antique accent, "I have some knowledge of the tongue."
"Good," the commander said sternly. "Then you will serve as translator for the time being. Tell your people that they are to be relocated, by order of S.S. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Tell them that their days of wandering and stealing and spreading disease are over. Tell them that they will cooperate and do what they are told. Tell them that any resistance will lead to their immediate execution. Tell them that this applies to women and children as well as men, to the old as well as to the young."
Kaldy sighed once again and then muttered a translation of the German’s words. A babble of frightened voices arose at once from the Gypsies, but silence was restored when the commander nodded curtly at one of his men and the latter released a few rounds of machine gun fire over the heads of the captives. "Tell them that no questions will be answered and no protests will be tolerated," he said to Kaldy." Tell them that they will come with us to the trucks on the road at the edge of this forest and..."
"They ask no questions and they make no protests," Kaldy interrupted him. "They have a request."
The commander frowned. "Indeed! What is it?"
"They want you to bind me with chains, and they want you to leave me here."
A stern look from the commander silenced the muffled laughter of his men. He turned back to Kaldy and, ignoring his words, said, "Because you can speak German, I shall speak to this rabble through you. You are responsible for their behavior. If any resistance is shown, you will pay for it. Do you understand me?" Kaldy did not reply. He returned the commander’s haughty gaze with an impassive one of his own, and the commander felt slightly unnerved. He was accustomed to prisoners being frightened and obsequious, at times rebellious and violent; but this Gypsy seemed unimpressed, unconcerned about his plight, not so much brave as bored. Making a promise to himself that he would make this scum pay for his arrogance, the commander barked a few orders to his troops, and the captives and their captors began to move from the clearing onto the narrow pathway through the woods.
The S.S. troops organized themselves without instruction from their commander, for they had a great deal of experience in the transportation of prisoners. A single line of people moved through the forest, Germans in back and front and interspersed through the line. Guns were drawn and held at the ready. Any Gypsy who attempted to break out of the line and flee into the woods would have been cut down in a matter of seconds. They moved in terrified silence, and the only sounds that broke the stillness of the darkening forest were the voices of the soldiers as they urged their captives to move along more quickly.
A half-hour passed before they reached the paved road that ran along the tree line. The dirt pathway that had afforded the Gypsies and their wagons entrance into the presumed safety of the woods ended at the place where the transport trucks stood waiting by the roadside. As the captives approached, they heard soft, frightened voices coming from five of the seven trucks, and they realized that the Germans had been arresting others that night. One of the trucks was only partially filled, and the small group of new prisoners was ushered into it. Kaldy, Blasko and the old woman everyone called Mother were at the end of the line of people, and when their turns came to climb into the truck, Blasko offered her his help in getting up into the enclosed, canvas-roofed flatbed. She shook her head vigorously and began to speak to Blasko in angry tones. The commander approached and said to Kaldy. "Tell that old woman to get into the truck at once, and tell her to keep her mouth shut."
Kaldy smiled sadly at the old woman and then looked slowly up at the sunless sky, at the first few stars that were beginning to make an appearance. "She will not get into this truck if I am to get into it with her," he said softly. As if his words were a signal to the others of his band, one by one they began to dismount from the transport, slowly and timidly, but with an odd and nervous determination.
The commander smiled. He wagged his finger at the old woman, gesturing that she should come forward. She hobbled over to him and began to jabber at him in her strange, incomprehensible tongue. He listened to the sounds she was making for a few moments, and then he drew his revolver and fired a bullet into her brain.
The Gypsies watched silently as the old woman fell to the ground, as her blood rushed out of the hole in her skull in a stream which shot a full yard up into the air before subsiding into a steady, but less forceful flow. The commander allowed them to watch for a few moments, allowed the point to be made and the lesson to be learned, and then, smiling coldly, he motioned them back into the truck with the pistol he still held in his unshaking hand. Slowly they complied. Blasko and Kaldy were the last two to enter the transport, and the wooden rear barrier was pulled up behind them and locked tight.
The commander motioned to his adjutant, who then began to get the convoy under way as his superior officer walked forward to the first truck and entered the cab. He took a cigarette from his tunic pocket and lighted it as the trucks began to rumble down the road. "Herr Hauptmann," the S.S. corporal who was driving the truck asked as the last rays of the sun disappeared and the clouds parted to reveal the brilliant full moon, "where will we be taking them?"
It was not, strictly speaking, his driver’s place to ask such a question, but the S.S. was a fraternity of particular devotion which tended to make officers a bit more tolerant of the enthusiasm of their underlings than might have been the case in the regular army, so the commander chose to answer. "To a detention center in Budapest," he replied, "in the RagoczyPalace. Colonel Schlacht has appropriated it for our use during this assignment, and it has dungeons which
will serve as temporary holding pens. From there, I assume the Gypsies will be shipped off to one of the camps in Poland."
"Labor camps?"
The commander was annoyed at his driver’s naiveté. "Let the Slavs labor for us," he muttered, his irritation evident in his tone, "the Poles and the Czechs and the Serbs. The Gypsies are like the Jews. There may be certain uses for disease-ridden vermin, but society is much better off if they are just exterminated."
"Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann," the corporal agreed.
"Besides," he continued, more to himself than to his driver, "the war is not going well. After the catastrophe at Stalingrad, we are faced with the possibility..." He did not finish the thought. The possibility of defeat, as the Führer had said so often, does not exist. "The possibility of a longer war than we had expected. We must see to the racial purification of Europe as quickly as we can. There is no way of knowing how much longer we will be able to devote energy and personnel to this task. We are all under orders, direct orders from Himmler, to see to the disposition of as many racial enemies as we can in as short a period of time as is humanly possible."
"A sacred trust," the S.S. corporal commented.
"Yes, a sacred trust," his commander agreed.
As the convoy rumbled through the dark Hungarian countryside, Janos Kaldy sat silently within the enclosed flatbed of the rear truck. Blasko and the other Gypsies had withdrawn as far from him as they could manage in the limited space, and the old man removed some flowering twigs from his pocket and held them out in front of him as if they were a shield.
Kaldy was not watching him. He sat motionless as the truck bumped along the uneven roadway, and then, some fifteen minutes after the last rays of the sun had been extinguished by the enveloping night, he sensed the coming of the change. He felt the image of the beast billowing upward; his human consciousness turned itself inward and fled from its own inhuman spawn. Excruciating agony always accompanied the change; but to consciously confront the hideous darkness within him would have been to invite a madness and a torture too great for any human being to survive. Thus it was that at that moment, as it had been so many times in the past, his mind sank into the void as the beast arose. Then the agony struck him, and he began to scream; and as he screamed from pain, the other Gypsies screamed in terror.
The S.S. corporal who was driving the lead truck glanced into the side mirror as the headlights of the rear truck began to flash on and off urgently. "Herr Hauptmann," he said, "something is wrong back there." Even as he spoke he saw the rear truck grind to a halt on the side of the road.
He told his superior what he was seeing in the mirror, and the commander muttered, "Those damned Gypsies must be attempting to escape. We had better..." He paused, listening as a strange sound reached his ears from the rear of the convoy. "What was that?" he asked.
"What, Herr Hauptmann?"
"Listen. Do you hear that?" He strained to listen for a moment and what sounded like a horrendous scream reached his ears. It was followed immediately by others, many, many others, screams so loud and bespeaking such abject terror that they startled the commander and left him momentarily nonplussed. He turned to his driver and said, "Signal the others to stop." The commander waited as the hand signal was given and the convoy came to a halt on the moonlit country road. He climbed down from the cab and walked back toward the other trucks, from which his officers were already disembarking. "What was that sound?" he asked them.
"I don’t know, Herr Hauptmann." one of them replied. "I heard it also, coming..." His statement was cut off by an eruption of further frenzied screams from the rear of the convoy. The commander drew his weapon and walked quickly back toward the sound. The other S.S. troops followed him, their guns likewise drawn, ready to teach the Gypsy scum a sorely needed lesson in obedience.
A dark shape leaped from the rear of the most recently filled transport, and the commander opened fire at it, angry at having his orders disobeyed by his racial inferiors. The shape, however, did not fall, did not recoil from the sound of the gunfire, seemed untouched by the bullets which at so close a range could not possibly have missed. And then the shape began to run toward the commander, crouching over, almost but not quite on all fours. The approaching figure emitted a screech of hate-filled agony at the same moment that the bright light of the full moon enabled the Germans to see the bristling fangs, so white against the hairy face, the black, moist snout which flared menacingly beneath the burning yellow eyes, and the long, hirsute hands whose fingers ended in the talons that were even now stretching out toward the German commander
His men opened fire on the attacker. Side arms, rifles, machine guns, all spat their burning, molten missiles of destruction at the creature. Bullets thudded audibly as they struck, and still it ran forward, snarling through its champing fangs. The Gypsies in the trucks jumped out onto the ground and ran in all directions, fleeing, of course, from the Germans, but fleeing also from the fiend that was even now attacking their captors. The creature’s hands swept out and decapitated two soldiers with razor-like claws, and then, without breaking its stride, it grabbed the commander and bore him down to the ground. The commander opened his mouth to scream, but the scream remained unuttered as the creature snapped its jaws tight upon the German’s throat and ripped it open.
The creature took but a second to swallow the bloody mass of flesh and cartilage and bone, and then it sprang to its feet and attacked the other soldiers. They continued to fire at it, they beat it with the butts of their guns, they thrust their bayonets at its hairy body, but it was to no avail. The creature swept about like a murderous whirlwind, disemboweling them, tearing into their throats, swallowing huge hunks of their flesh, and breaching the dark silence of the night with its agonized howls of hatred and hunger. The gunfire mingled with the shrieks of the dying and the roars of the creature as the cold, hard ground grew soft and muddy with blood.
In a very short time the Germans were all dead, the Gypsies had fled into the woods, and the creature had vanished into the darkness. Only the old Gypsy Blasko remained behind. He surveyed the destruction, shook his head, and sighed. He walked slowly and sadly over to one of the trucks and sat down on the running board of the cab. He rubbed his old, weary eyes and then took a pipe from his pocket. He stuffed it full of tobacco, lighted it, and then relaxed, puffing languidly. Blasko knew that Kaldy would seek him out when the moon set. He would wait until morning, wait until sunrise, wait until Janos Kaldy returned, wait until Janos Kaldy was once again a human being.
He sat quietly in the darkness, his weathered face reflecting the red glow from the bowl of his pipe. He was listening to the distant cries of the lost soul who was his friend and his charge, his enemy and his burden. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a few thin sprigs of the plant with wilted yellow flowers. Holding the wolfsbane pensively, Blasko waited for the dawn.
PART ONE
THE WEREWOLF
Die Lust der Vernichtung ist eine schaffende Lust
(The passion for destruction is a creative passion.)
CHAPTER ONE
As a clergyman, Gottfried von Weyrauch spent a good deal of time contemplating the intricacies of sin and righteousness and the meaning and nature of faith.
Weyrauch was an honest man in his own way. When pressed on the issue, he would be the first to admit that his devotion to righteousness was only inadequately embodied in his actions. Not that he was sinful in the sense in which sinfulness is generally understood; he was not an adulterer, he did not steal or covet, he had honored his parents while they lived and respected their memories now that they were gone, he did not bear false witness, and he had never taken a human life. He was a husband, a minister and a doctor of medicine, and he took very seriously the vows of matrimony, the vows of ordination, and the Hippocratic Oath. He was on the surface a reliable, dedicated, introspective, intelligent, concerned servant of God and his fellow man. His problem was one which was all too common in the Third Reich. It was
a problem which has been depressingly common throughout human history. Gottfried von Weyrauch was a coward.
He knew he was a coward, and the knowledge tortured him with guilt. He knew that his wife Louisa also knew that he was a coward, and he had found in recent years that his eyes had a difficult time meeting hers for any prolonged period of time. He believed that he could see in her face the contempt she felt for him, and his own guilt combined with his wife’s contempt to make him a very unhappy man.
He was, of course, a coward of the civilized variety, possessed of a cowardice which is unique to the modern world. A soldier who is terrified of the bombs exploding all around him is not a coward; were he not terrified, he would be either a fool or a madman. Someone who feels fear when confronted by a criminal with a weapon is not a coward; neither is a woman who feels fear when subjected to a sexual assault. Fear is a survival mechanism. Its total absence is indicative of emotional illness.
But a civilized coward like Gottfried von Weyrauch is one whose devotion not only to his own survival but even to his own freedom from inconvenience leads him to avoid speaking the truth, even when he knows what the truth is and knows that it needs to be spoken; to smile and nod and agree with people whom he knows to be both evil and dangerous, just because they are more powerful than he; to accept the unacceptable, to deny the undeniable, to pretend not to know the obvious, to go about his business quietly and unobtrusively, ignoring what he knows to be right and allowing to exist without opposition what he knows to be wrong.
Lycanthropos Page 2