Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

“Thank you.”

  “It makes me embarrassed for you to see me this way. Filthy, sweaty. I take pride in my appearance. I wish I could talk to you clean and smelling properly, like a human being.”

  “I’m sure I prefer you this way. I have no interest in seeing you in your SS uniform.”

  “As I say, we both wear uniforms. We both do our jobs. But if we were both naked right now, we would both be the same, wouldn’t we? Not German, not English. Not demon and angel. Just two men. Together. Talking.” And I spread a slow smile for him, like the bearded smile between a woman’s legs.

  I saw his adam’s apple bob once. It gave me a weird satisfaction. I felt more in control again, after my stumble of guilt.

  “I know you despise me, my friend,” I told him, “but I, in fact, enjoy your company. I respect you and enjoy talking with you. Perhaps this evening after I have bathed and changed I could join you for a cigarette and some more stimulating conversation? Then I would feel less ashamed of my condition.”

  “It sounds to me as though you mean to trick me, SS man, and take me off guard. Grab for my pistol. Hold me hostage and try to escape.”

  “Oh, come now. Are you afraid of me? We can meet in full view of others. The guards, your men. But if you’d rather not, then so be it…”

  “I’ll come and get you. I find you unpleasantly…educational. But if you try anything foolish I promise you I will put a bullet through your head.”

  “Thank you. I look forward to conversing with you more as a gentleman.”

  “You can bathe and change, sir, but you will still not be a gentleman, and you will still have every right to be ashamed of your condition.”

  Yes, I thought, but you’ll still keep that date, won’t you? And your heart will be beating heavier as you come to search me out…

  I had no intention of attempting escape. Of inflicting harm on him. As I told you, I just wanted to see if I could use him to my benefit. And I liked to see his adam’s apple bob.

  * * *

  My officer fetched me after dinner, after the sun had set. Lights washed the camp, leaving few dark corners, and he must have felt safe enough to stroll with me. Straight off he had given me one of his cigarettes, and while he lit it for me a soldier patted me down for hidden weapons. As we walked off I asked him, “Did your superiors ask why you were permitting me this pleasant liberty?”

  “I told them you were talkative. They asked me to write down what you tell me in my report.”

  I laughed. “Will you write about Rat Kings?”

  “I may have to, but I was hoping you would tell me more in depth what your people did here and at the other camps. The death camps.”

  “I have never been to one of these alleged death camps, sir.”

  “Listen, I can take you back and let you be hanged with all your knowledge intact. Or maybe you can be cooperative and make things easier for yourself.”

  Ah, so this was how he had justified our date to himself. He was going to question me as part of an investigation. He was going to probe the criminal mind. I remember how amused I was at his desperate attempt to rationalize or excuse his interest in me. As earnestly as I could sound, thus amused, I told him, “Sir, I am only a simple soldier. I acted on orders. The vision I followed was that of men far removed from me. But I can tell you what my responsibilities were, as that soldier. I can cooperate to that extent. But if I am to hang…well…what would be the point in helping you?”

  “Your superiors will no doubt hang. I hardly think we will hang every last guard and soldier; we are not barbarians like you fiends are. I was only trying to frighten you.”

  “Well, I am relieved. I will help you. But you have to promise to protect me. Please.” I stopped to face him, and he faced me. We were still within view of posted British soldiers, but were too far for anyone to hear our words. “Please protect me…”

  “Write down a full report of your activities here. Everything you learned about operations, your superiors, anything you think would be valuable to us. You’ve seen the film crew. We need to make the world believe this horror really happened. Maybe in some small way you can exonerate yourself.”

  “And you will take care of me?”

  “I told you; I’ll do all I can.”

  I took his hand and clasped it in both of mine. Squeezed it. He stood silhouetted against a flood lamp; had his adam’s apple shifted? “What is your name, my friend?” I asked softly, still holding his hand.

  In a hesitant, uncertain voice, he told me. But I will not tell you what he said. He was a fine officer. A good man. I would not want to sully his reputation, even if he might be dead now. I was trying to corrupt him, confuse him. I was finding vulnerable places in him. It is my reputation that should be sullied. I am the one who should feel embarrassed.

  We strolled on, smoked another cigarette. He walked, I noticed, so that his holstered revolver was on the far side of him. His nervousness, his tension, was electric in the air but I don’t think he was really nervous that I would assault him.

  Why did we walk at last to the pit? Remember, I had become immune to much of the stink of Belsen, but my companion surely hadn’t. I think now that we ended up there because it was as deserted a place as the camp had to offer. It left us in intimacy. And thus far, the pits had been the place of our rendezvous. Like a garden where lovers meet.

  This particular pit had not been filled to capacity, that evening, so it had not yet been plowed over by the bulldozers. It gaped as a huge crater, and was black except for the far wall, where one flood beam slanted into it. There were thousands of people down at our feet, and yet we felt alone.

  “Here we are, drawn back to the nightmare,” I had to remark. “It fascinates you.”

  “It horrifies me! I can’t comprehend it!”

  “Yes. But it fascinates you. Just as you find me interesting. Perhaps fascinating.”

  “I find you disgusting.”

  “But you met me tonight,” I said in a near whisper, stepping so close to the man I’m sure he felt the breath of my words on his cheek.

  I heard him swallow. It amused me, but I think my game of seduction had begun to consume me, really. By projecting those energies toward him, I believe I had actually started to become aroused by the game. His reactions to my manipulation were giving me a very odd gratification. My attempt to dominate him was resembling those times I had coaxed some young girl out of her virginity. The desire in her, but the fear. Then the succumbing…

  I am not a homosexual. And yet, at that moment, a hungry warmth spread through my lower body and it was almost dizzying. So I reacted to it, without thinking. If I thought anything at all, I suppose I justified my actions to myself as an attempt to seduce him utterly, so that he would let no harm come to me. That’s what I told myself then. But I know now it was the warmth in my belly.

  What I did, you see, was step even closer to him, and press my lips onto his lips. I reached one hand down to lightly cup his testicles. My tongue began to slide into his mouth, where the taste of our cigarettes mingled.

  But it was only an instant, and then the blow under my jaw sent my head back with a snap. I had bitten my tongue badly. Light filled my vision as if a spotlight had fallen on my face. In his fury, the officer had struck me with incredible force.

  Thus dazed, I stumbled back from him. And in stumbling back, I toppled into the pit.

  I rolled down the dirt incline. Then I sprawled on my belly across the floor of the pit. And the floor of the pit was an ocean of bodies. An ocean of stench. Totally dark. It was more the bottom of an ocean, and the stench was drowning me, filling my lungs. One of my boots had wedged between several bent limbs, and in thrusting out my hand it slipped off a set of ribs and slid into a space between bodies so that my arm became buried to the shoulder. I grunted, spat blood, fought to extricate my arm and roll over, tangled as I was.

  A hand brushed my cheek. It was light, a caress, then gone. But I hadn’t imagined it. In my fall I had caused
the heaped bodies to shift, I thought…for a body then flopped onto the backs of my legs. It must have tumbled from a bit higher up the slope.

  I couldn’t hear the officer up there. Had he stormed off in disgust, embarrassed, enraged? Had he thought I deserved nothing more than to be left down here, where a monster like me belonged? I had not been able to roll over yet to look. As I struggled to do so, another body sprawled onto my back and the back of my head, pressing my face down against flesh. Pressing my lips against flesh. I made a convulsive effort, at that point, to jerk my buried arm free.

  I jerked, but it resisted. Something down below me in the heap had snagged the cuff of my sleeve.

  Fingers, it must be…bent into claws in death, I thought. The idea horrified me; hooked claws or not, I should be able to rip my arm free. But I couldn’t when I tried again. And now a terrifying idea came to me. A vision born of my growing desperation as it approached panic. I imagined that it wasn’t fingers that had caught hold of my sleeve…but teeth.

  A hand slid across the left side of my face, one finger trailing teasingly into my ear as it went, and I screamed.

  I rolled onto my back with a surge of strength, a burst of adrenaline, and in so doing it seemed I upset an entire hill of corpses looming just beside me, for the hill then toppled over me, and what I saw of the night sky for a moment was eclipsed when I was suddenly and utterly buried beneath a languid, rubbery avalanche of the dead.

  I had watched that mass of bodies descend, as if in slow motion. It was a heavy and crushing blob of darkness woven from frail scarecrow figures. It had descended on me like one many-armed creature, but this pile was only a part of the creature, I realized…and I was screaming again, at the knowledge. Clawing, squirming, desperate for breath as I realized that the bodies beneath me were also a part of this creature. The bodies all around me. Linked, locked, braided and meshed. They were all weak as individuals, but as this one unified form they had become amazingly strong, and they had trapped me. And their intent, of course, was to absorb me into the mass. To make me one of them, and thus a part of it.

  I blubbered crazily for help. The weight seemed only to press me down deeper. Were more of them from either side moving in waves to pile further atop me? Were dead bodies not yet dragged from the barracks now slithering across the camp on their bellies and toppling themselves into the pit?

  A girl’s long hair had fallen across my throat, her face nuzzled into my shoulder. A bush of pubic hair ground against my forehead in a terrible moist kiss. Fingers had hooked in the back of my shirt collar, the nails lightly scraping my skin. I shrieked and began to sob outright, hopelessly, like a woman, lifted my neck as best I could away from those nails…but my cheek pressed against the sharp ridge of a spine barely painted in skin.

  It was as though the sharp bones above and below me were fangs that meant to impale me, fanged jaws that meant to rend me, devour me.

  They’re not all dead, I reasoned in an effort to remain sane. That was it! The officer had pointed it out himself. In the barracks, the dead lay thick upon the floors mixed in with the living so that you could not tell one from the other. Living people must have been thrown into the pit with the dead in our haste to finish all the burying. That was why the hands seemed so purposely to be reaching to me, taking hold of me. That was why the cadavers seemed to have intentionally rolled atop me, covered me…

  That some of the bodies were alive is not very possible, but it may be. True or not, it didn’t comfort me much. Was it that the living mixed in with the dead sought to have revenge upon me…or that the pale starved spirits of all those dead had somehow merged into one powerful entity? Both possibilities were equally hideous—rational or supernatural. Because either way, I was helpless. Either way, they would have their revenge.

  Because I was never getting out. I was going to suffocate, or my chest would be crushed, or my heart would burst, or that hand at the back of my neck and others were going to curl around my throat at any moment…

  Nails raked down my face. I squeezed my eyes shut as the nails clawed my eyelid. I wanted to die at that moment, my friend. Right then. Before the other nails came. And the strangling hands. And the teeth. I wanted it over with because the officer had had his revenge on me, too—he had abandoned me—and I would never escape this pit.

  The bodies were churning atop me, moving more actively, and a hand took hold of my arm in an unmistakable grip.

  Then the pressure eased from my chest and I looked up to see a face hovering above me, the eyes glittering, the teeth grimacing. A flashlight beam fell upon my face. More bodies were lifted off me, and I realized this was the reason for the feeling of activity above me. More hands took hold of me. I was passed up to other men, all British. I pawed crazily at the dirt slope of the grave, in my frenzy probably hindering their efforts to rescue me.

  “What happened?” I heard one man ask. “Did he attack you?”

  “No,” I heard my officer say. “He just…fell.”

  Those were the last words I heard from him, as the man never spoke to me again.

  I was out now, standing on the edge of the pit. I had been rescued from hell. I turned to look back down, and in the new lights I could see the creature. It had many eyes, some catching the light. I saw many mouths, smiling in that odd little expression of faint amusement so often seen on the dead.

  What I did then was inexplicable. Like kissing my British officer. But I had been driven mad. It didn’t matter that I had been rescued. The monster was smiling at me, staring at me, it knew it had shattered my mind and my soul and its will was strong, it commanded me to give myself to it. It would have me yet. It was the only way to exonerate myself, to repent, to pay for my sins. The British would not execute me. I must execute myself…

  And I had to die, I felt, as I reached out to my officer and snatched the revolver from his holster. Dying was the only way I was ever going to escape those eyes.

  And dying was the only way to empathize with it in the way the monster demanded of me.

  The soldiers clawed at my arms to stop me from thrusting the barrel in my mouth. Maybe that was why the bullet went wrong, up through my nose and into my eye socket rather than into my brain. Or, as I have suggested, it may have been the will of God that I should not have escaped my punishment so neatly.

  I never much believed in God or in punishment, until after I had met that officer. Until after I had met that monster.

  They are a monster in your country, aren’t they? Numerous and unified, rich and powerful. Can I blame them? They are a monster in Israel, smaller but tougher and with very sharp teeth. I have a deathly fear of both countries. Of their retribution. Monsters always turn on their makers.

  You think I’m still insane, the way I’m talking. That after that night I never regained my sanity. But I did, my friend. I am sane now. In fact, I didn’t really go mad when I fell in the pit. It was up until that point—before I fell—that I was insane.

  And maybe I was saved when they pulled me out of that hell. Maybe my eternal soul has been burned clean. But maybe not.

  So that is my story. I see you don’t believe certain mysteries I’ve suggested. Just as the British officer didn’t believe me about the Rat Kings. And now that you know my past, you find me repellent, as he did. Repulsive, now that you know the truth about me. You can call me a demon, a monster. Something other than human. Just like we called the Jews and the rest. Anything, so long as you can say that I’m not a man like you.

  Yes, you found my story a trifle unpleasant, eh? But like my officer…you wanted to listen.

  Chapel

  “You want TV tonight, honey?” A small gray-haired woman with a clipboard came walking into Devin’s room so quickly that it startled her. She had been gazing out the plate glass window which ran along one wall.

  “Yeah…sure,” Devin said.

  The woman inserted a key into the small color television suspended from its bracket, swivelled it so that the set was within Dev
in’s reach. “Watch a few Christmas specials, honey; take your mind off.”

  “You work on Christmas eve, huh?” Devin asked with very little interest.

  “My kids are grown and moved away, and my folks and brother are dead. I have one son right over in New Hampshire but he can’t come to see his mother until tomorrow night. He isn’t even married…but he chooses to be with his girlfriend’s family.”

  Don’t complain about your son, Devin thought. At least yours is still alive.

  “How much is that?” With a small groan she reached for her purse. The woman told her, and Devin counted out five dollars. “Expensive.”

  “Well, there are four pay-per-view movies on every day, honey.” While the woman made notations on her clipboard Devin turned the dial through the small offering of stations. The woman said, “When I get home tonight I’ll watch the midnight mass. You should, too, hon…it will make you feel more at peace, y’know?”

  I doubt that, Devin thought, so devout an atheist that she doubted even the historical existence of Christ, let alone the son of God part. “What is this?” she asked, coming to one channel. “Is this where they show the mass?”

  The woman leaned over Devin to peek. “Oh no, I mean on regular channel Five. That’s hospital channel Eight—Chapel. That’s the chapel right here in the hospital. Right down at the end of maternity, here, past the cafeteria. They’ll have a service tomorrow, but not tonight.”

  “Five dollars, and one out of what—eight? ten?—stations is a security camera view of an empty church.” Devin snorted a tired little laugh.

  “Chapel,” the woman corrected her. She clicked her pen point in. “A lot of people who can’t get out of bed rely on Chapel, honey. It gives them comfort.”

  To be so simple a soul, Devin thought. She smiled at the woman. “Merry Christmas. Nice to talk to someone. You seem to be the only person working tonight.”

  The woman drew closer conspiratorially. “Don’t get sick on a weekend or Christmas eve, hon. I feel bad for you that tonight it’s both. Not even a room-mate, huh? What are you in for, honey?”