Lycanthropos

by Sackett, Jeffrey

  "None, my lord. We found him covered with blood, surrounded by the bodies of his victims."

  Pilatus nodded. "Do you have anything to say in your defense?" Chaldaeus did not reply, and so Pilatus said, "You have been found guilty and have been sentenced to death. Execution of the sentence will be immed..." He stopped, and smiled as his eyes widened with a sudden idea. "Strabo, do you have any idea what his name is?"

  "None, my lord."

  "Don’t these people always identify themselves by giving their fathers’ names? I mean, so and so the son of so and so?" Pilatus looked at Chaldaeus. "What was your father’s name, Chaldean?"

  The prisoner shrugged. "I do not know my own name. How then should I know my father’s name?"

  Strabo coughed. "May I ask my lord what he is considering?"

  "You know more of the language of these Jews than I do, Strabo." Pilatus said, ignoring the question. "How do you say the word ‘father’ in their tongue?"

  "It is abba, my lord," Strabo replied, confused. "But…"

  "And ben means ‘son of,’ does it not?"

  "In their ancient language," replied the soldier who had brought Chaldaeus into the room, "the language of their priests and books. In the tongue of the mob the word is bar. "

  "Yes, of course," Pilatus nodded. "We have Yeshua bar Yoshef outside right now." He leaned forward and smiled at Chaldaeus. "Are you a gambling man, my friend?"

  Chaldaeus returned the smile with a sad one of his own. "Fate has not graced me with sufficient fortune for me to have confidence in my luck."

  "Well, you are about to become a gambling man, son of your father." Pilatus had been conversing in the Greek tongue, that universal medium of communication in the eastern Roman Empire, and spoke these last words in a Hellenized manner, addressing the prisoner, ‘son of your father,’ as Barabbas. He stood up and said to Strabo, "Bring him outside."

  As Pilatus walked back out toward the dais, Strabo turned to the soldier and asked, "How did you know that, about their ancient language and such?"

  The soldier shrugged slightly. "I have a woman here from among these people, centurion."

  Strabo nodded as he pulled Chaldaeus out after the procurator. A reasonable explanation. Soldiers are men, no matter where they are stationed.

  The mob outside the procurator’s residence had diminished neither in number nor in noise, and the din rose even more fiercely when Pilatus walked back out into view. He allowed them to scream for a few moments and then slowly raised his hand to command silence. At a subtle gesture from the high priest Caiaphas the screaming subsided. "You have a custom, I believe," Pilatus said loudly, "that on this, your most holy day, your Passover, your ruler release to you one prisoner who has been condemned to death..."

  The prisoner called Chaldaeus or Barabbas or any of a dozen other names was not listening as the procurator offered the mob a choice between his life and the life of Yeshua the Nazarene. At the moment Pilatus began speaking, Yeshua turned his head toward his fellow prisoner and captured Chaldaeus’s attention with his gaze. Chaldaeus stared deeply into Yeshua’s eyes, and those eyes were fathomless and sorrowful, filled with understanding and love. Chaldaeus began to shiver as he felt wave after wave of unbounded pity wash over him, and the waves of pity seemed to envelope his very being. The waves of pity seemed to roll out from Yeshua’s eyes as if those eyes were the ocean of infinity. Yeshua continued to look at Chaldaeus. No word was spoken, no gesture made, but Chaldaeus realized instinctively the significance of that look.

  He knows! He knows! The Nazarene knows, he understands! He can help. He can help me!

  "Not this man, but Barabbas!" the voice of Caiaphas boomed out, breaking into Chaldaeus’s thoughts.

  "Barabbas! Barabbas!" was the frenzied refrain of the mob. "Give us Barabbas!"

  They are going to kill him! Chaldaeus thought madly. If he dies, I am lost, I am lost!

  "I am the guilty one, not Yeshua!" Chaldaeus screamed. "Kill me, not him! Me, not him! I am a murderer, a murderer! Kill me, not him! He is guilty of nothing! I am guilty!" But his voice was drowned out by the screams of the mob that was determined to free him from the death he could not suffer so that they might kill the man who was his only chance to die.

  "But what of Yeshua?" Pilatus asked, shouting to be heard.

  "Crucify him!" Caiaphas cried, and the mob took up the words as a chant, repeating them over and over in a deafening rhythm.

  Strabo cut the leather thong which bound the hands of Chaldaeus together, and then the centurion pushed him from the dais into the hands of the crowd below, who largely ignored him. And as the rest of the drama was played out in the courtyard and on the execution hill, Chaldaeus was an impotent spectator. Yeshua bar Yoshef, the preacher from Nazareth, was crucified, died, and was buried.

  And when the day ended, and the sun set, and the moon rose, a werewolf crept through the streets of Jerusalem.

  The creature was making its way toward the residence of the procurator, its subhuman mind obsessed by a drive which was new to it, which it could neither understand nor control. It was seeking the woman, seeking the one whose face had been emblazoned on the mind of its human self earlier that day. The werewolf did not remember seeing Claudia Procula, it did not remember its human self, it had no memories of anything other than the moon and the hunt and the taste of human flesh; but something was different on this night, something had happened, and it was as if the creature felt an itch it could not scratch, an irritation, an urge, and it sought out the woman without rational thought, for it was incapable of rational thought, without knowing whither it went nor why.

  It climbed up the southern wall of the residence of Pontius Pilatus and his wife Claudia, quietly, furtively, stealthily. It ignored its hunger, it did not pounce upon the guards. It crept in silence, a consummate hunter, through the corridors of the residence, until it found the woman.

  She was lying in a deep sleep upon a large, soft bed which was swathed in fine, almost transparent linen. The werewolf moved closer and gazed down at her for a moment. It did not remember the shock its human self had suffered when he first saw the woman, but that which had caused the prisoner Chaldaeus to stare at Claudia Procula so intently was the same thing which even now told the werewolf that it had found the object of its search. On her forehead, glowing red in the darkness, invisible to all the world save to the eyes of the beast, was a circle of blood-red light within which rested a pentagram, a five-pointed star.

  The creature ripped away the linen and attacked, but it did not kill. It only bit, and in its bite was damnation.

  It was to be years, centuries, before Claudia Procula became the companion of Chaldaeus, before the horror of what he had done to her and the unspeakable monstrosity he had caused her to become was overpowered by her need to be with someone and her desperate drive to know and to understand. She fled from him and he followed her, from Jerusalem to Syria, from Byzantium to Rome; and though she sought to escape from the presence of the sad-eyed, tragic young man, she awoke in his company on the morning after each full moon, for when the power of the beast rose in her, she sought him out and feasted alongside him upon the flesh of the innocents, bound to him in a perverse Eucharist of blood.

  Eventually she accepted his presence, and eventually she came to cling to him with the same pathetic loneliness with which he clung to her. He was, she told him, like the Roman god of the doorway, the god Ianus, with two faces, one looking out and one looking in; but for Ianus Chaldaeus, Janus Chaldian, Janos Kaldy, one face was the face of sorrow and the other the face of the death.

  Weyrauch’s face was flushed with anger as he shook Kaldy roughly. "Wake up, Kaldy!" he barked.

  Kaldy opened his eyes and gazed up at the minister, though he seemed to be looking through him. "So that was what happened." he whispered. "She always said that she had a memory, a dim recollection. She always believed that somehow I was responsible for making her what she is..."

  Weyrauch had been sitting o
n the cold stone floor beside his subject, and as he rose stiffly to his feet he said, "An interesting coincidence, don’t you think?"

  "Coincidence?" Kaldy asked innocently.

  "Yes, that just after I enunciate a rather detailed introduction to Zoroastrianism, you have a memory in which the worship of Ahura Mazda plays a part?"

  Kaldy did not frown, but his voice was cold and steady as he responded, "I’m not entirely certain what you mean, Herr Doctor."

  "Oh, it’s quite obvious, I think," Weyrauch snapped. "Schlacht was correct. You have been lying to me, you have been fabricating this entire biography." He laughed bitterly. "So you were Barabbas, and your friend Claudia was Pontius Pilate’s wife, and she was a Zoroastrian! How fascinating! How convenient! How ridiculous!"

  Kaldy sat up and drew his knees up to his chest, wrapping his thin arms around them. "I do not propose to debate with you, Herr Doctor. What I remember is what I remember." He frowned and looked down pensively. "But why did I see a pentagram on her forehead? Why did I wound her and not kill her?" He shook his head. "I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all."

  "Well, I understand," Weyrauch said. "You have put my life in danger, and you have put my wife’s life in danger."

  Louisa, who had been listening silently from the moment that the regression had begun, spoke up. "Don’t be absurd, Gottfried," she said, her voice trembling with the tears she was struggling to repress. "It isn’t Herr Kaldy’s fault that we live under the rule of murderers."

  Weyrauch turned to his wife and shouted, "Louisa, how in God’s name can you defend this man?! He has been laughing behind our backs from the first day! He can’t die, he can’t be killed, so he has nothing to risk, nothing to lose! He has been playing with us, amusing himself at our expense! And now what am I supposed to tell Helmuth? Am I seriously expected to report to him this...this...this fable?!"

  "Tell him whatever you want!" Louisa shouted back, weeping. "I think that I am beginning to prefer death to this satire of life! My marriage is a farce, my leaders are barbarians, my family is corrupt, and my nation glories in its own shame! So tell Helmuth whatever you want, and let him murder us now, like he has murdered so many others!"

  Weyrauch began to respond when he heard the sound of a key turning in the lock of the cell door. A guard pushed the door open and Petra Loewenstein slowly entered the cell. She fixed her eyes on Kaldy and did not look away from him as she said softly to Weyrauch, "The formula works. The Colonel sent me to fetch you. The program goes into effect tonight."

  "Tonight!" he exclaimed. "Surely he will want to wait for another three days! Tomorrow night is the full moon!"

  "Tonight," she repeated. "He wants you immediately. I suggest you not keep him waiting."

  "No, no, of course not," he muttered distractedly as he walked toward the cell door. "But what am I going to tell him? What on earth am I going to..." He stopped and looked at Petra. "Fräulein Loewenstein, you are in the same room with Kaldy and you aren’t wearing your surgical mask!"

  "No," she agreed, never taking her eyes off the young ancient. "I’m not."

  Weyrauch nodded. "I suppose you’ve finally realized that there’s no danger of infection."

  "I suppose so," she said in a deadly monotone.

  "Yes...yes, well...well..." Weyrauch had nothing further to say, and so he left the cell. The guard closed the door behind him but did not lock it, knowing that Petra would herself be leaving shortly.

  Louisa stepped forward and stood before Petra. "Did you hear any of what Herr Kaldy just told us?"

  "I heard," she replied softly, still staring at Kaldy. "I have been standing outside the cell for a long while. I heard everything."

  "But you don’t agree with Gottfried, do you?" Louisa asked, eager to have her husband contradicted, needing to hear Petra say that it was all true, that Kaldy was not lying. "It isn’t all a fabrication! It simply can’t all be a fabrication!"

  Petra ignored Louisa, moving around her and walking over to Kaldy. She looked down at him silently for a few moments, and then her face grew suddenly red with anger. "So it was you, Janos. I was right. It was you all along!"

  Janos Kaldy smiled up at her warmly. "Hello, Claudia," he said.

  PART THREE

  THE BRIDGE OF THE SEPARATOR

  Du muss herrschen und gewinnen

  oder dienen und verlieren,

  leiden oder triumphieren,

  Amboss oder Hammer sein.

  You must rule and win

  or serve and lose,

  suffer or triumph,

  be anvil or hammer.

  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  "A little exercise" and an oblique reference to the possibility of another autopsy was all Schlacht would say in response to Weyrauch’s inquiry. The Colonel had not been in his office when Weyrauch arrived, but the two S.S. soldiers who had been waiting for the minister had been left quite specific orders, orders that caused Weyrauch to feel a sourness in the pit of his stomach and a numbing weakness in his knees.

  They had been ordered to see to his transportation from Budapest to Hunyad, a town some fifty miles from Budapest and less than thirty miles from the border of Croatia, the rump puppet state that Hitler had carved out of the conquered and dismembered Kingdom of Yugoslavia. But what had upset the minister was neither the distance nor the late hour. What had caused him such fear was the fact that the S.S., under Schlacht’s direction, had recently established at Hunyad a new relocation center, which was to say a concentration camp, which was to say a city of death; and Weyrauch kept reviewing Schlacht’s ominous warning in his mind as he sat in the back of the automobile that was taking him thither.

  Weyrauch had never been inside a concentration camp, had never seen a concentration camp, had done his best for a decade not to think about concentration camps, and as the heavy iron gates opened to admit his automobile into the large open space that separated the buildings from the high wall, he reflected that this was an experience he wished he could have postponed indefinitely. He looked at the sign on the iron gate as they drove into the camp. Arbeit Macht Frei, the sign proclaimed. Labor liberates. Weyrauch shuddered, knowing that ultimate liberation from life itself was the prime function of these institutions of Hitler’s regime; that, and the slave labor ubiquitous in the empire of the S.S.

  As the car pulled to a halt in front of the administration building and Weyrauch stepped out into the cool evening air, he noted with some surprise that the camp itself was extremely clean, immaculate in fact. In the dim light of the setting sun he saw a few prisoners engaged in ground patrol near the building. Their hollow, cadaverous faces were frozen into ivory masks of utter misery as they stooped here and there to pick up cigarette butts and random bits of paper. The extreme cleanliness and perfect order of the environment contrasted starkly with the filthy gray and white-striped uniforms which the prisoners wore, with the shaved scalps matted with encrusted grime, with the cracked, diseased lips and the festering sores on hands and faces and God only knew where else.

  They are already dead, Weyrauch thought sorrowfully. They are walking around, seeing, hearing, thinking, but these are the walking dead. And then he felt a surge of panic as he realized that he might have been summoned here to join their company.

  But Schlacht had greeted him cheerfully, perhaps a bit too cheerfully, when he was ushered into the Colonel’s presence in the office of the camp commander in the administration building, and he had been partly but not totally relieved when Schlacht made his cryptic comments about an exercise and autopsies.

  "Helmuth," Weyrauch asked, "Fräulein Loewenstein said that the experiment was a success. If so, what then is the need for any more autopsies? I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you."

  "You don’t follow me because I haven’t really told you anything yet, my dear Gottfried," Schlacht grinned, as he set above removing his dress uniform and began to don combat garb. He took a neatly folded uniform and a helme
t from a shelf behind the desk of the camp’s commanding officer and tossed them to Weyrauch, who, not having been prepared to catch the apparel dropped it all to the floor. "Here, put this on," Schlacht said as he buttoned his tunic. "You’ll need it, the helmet in particular, where we are going."

  "Going...? Where we are going?" Weyrauch stared at the uniform which lay at his feet. "You are sending me into combat?!"

  "In a sense, Gottfried," Schlacht smiled, "in a sense. Now put on the uniform."

  "But Helmuth," Weyrauch insisted nervously, "I am exempted from military service! As a clergyman, I am not legally obligated..."

  Schlacht walked over to Weyrauch and grabbed him roughly by the lapels of his black coat. "Now, my dear old friend, listen to me. You are obligated to do whatever I tell you to do. You will follow my orders without question or debate, even as I obey the orders I receive from Reichsführer Himmler and he himself obeys the orders he receives from the Führer. Do you understand?" Schlacht’s face was not four inches from Weyrauch’s face as he made this quiet yet chillingly threatening statement, and his ice-cold blue eyes were boring their ways into Weyrauch’s. The minister nodded a rapid assent. Schlacht smiled and added, "Of course, if you believe that I am violating the law, you have every right under the constitution of the Reich to bring suit against me in the Volksgericht. Is that what you intend to do, Gottfried?"

  "Oh, n...no, Helmuth, no, c...c...certainly not," Weyrauch muttered. He knew as well as Schlacht that the German constitution had been a dead document ever since Hitler had been given "temporary" dictatorial powers eleven years before, and that the Volksgericht, the National Socialist "court of the people," was well known to the entire nation essentially as a ratifying instrument for the judicial murder of opponents of the regime. "I wouldn’t dream of making any sort of legal objection to..."

  "I’m pleased to hear it," Schlacht interrupted amicably. "I would hate for anything so tawdry as a lawsuit to come between us, cousin."