by Brian Hodge
I am not the only one here. There is the dead man. And then…there are the others—those faceless companions whom I know solely from their screams. Some are close, many are far away. And beyond…there are those countless others who in bitter silence meet their fates hourly.
A smatter of bile blazed in his throat. He coughed, slung a filth-blackened hand across his scabbed lips, then picked at the wound on his stomach, its jagged texture no less jolting than the stench rising from his cellmate. From his lingering screams that refuse to abandon my head!
He gazed at his hand, calloused and coated in grime, making an ineffectual attempt to cleanse it in the scant puddle he sat in. Would it be better to cleanse my wounds with the guard’s meager gift of water, instead of drinking it?
So little life left, and so little to offer it.
He retreated back into the sad shelter of his arms, misery and affliction sweeping him up and driving him down into a violent vertigo. As his head whirled and his stomach heaved, he prayed: Dear God, you must have died your last death long ago, for I do not see any hope out here for me, something that can help me. Please! Help me!
He pressed back against the wall, the frail shell of his body trembling like a stripped twig in the wind. His muscles screamed, protesting the uncommitted effort. He closed his eyes, wishing for everything to be some horrific nightmare, one he’d soon wake up from in his own bed back in London, his decision to enlist as a BBC radio correspondent a reverie fraught with ridiculed madness.
After endless minutes, a prickling sensation stabbed at his toes. His eyes drifted open, granting him a meager gap to peek through.
Surveying his bluing toes and petrified nails, was a cockroach. It scrabbled along like a blind man reading Braille, big toe too little piggy and back again, dampening his skin with tiny insect footprints. Roberto watched the probing insect with indifference, making no effort to shoo it away. Eventually it grew disinterested and returned to the mountain of more desirable flesh across the room.
Stay wise, Berto. The guard promised to keep you alive. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To stay alive?
He’d been taken here in the back of a truck, a utility vehicle with wooden slats he could grip onto while gazing out into the lifeless landscape of the German battlefield. The sun had just begun to pull itself out of the sky, casting a blanket of gloom over the big picture, the overall death and destruction so expeditiously wrought upon the outskirts of Berlin.
As rabid dogs growled and snapped at the jarring truck, he thought back to the tireless months he’d spent hidden in the war-ravaged house, rationing the food and water there and trying to understand what had happened beyond the pitted walls of his asylum. American and British citizens had all been led to believe that their homeland’s armies acted as operational allies against Hitler and the Axis power’s threat upon the world. But Roberto had learned otherwise. He’d discovered the truth, and had become convinced that a Nobel prize in journalism would be awarded to him upon reporting his findings to the embattled world.
A Nobel Prize, or a stay of execution in one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps.
He’d had an informant, a high-ranking soldier from the German Army Group-B who’d abandoned his post in Berlin and in turn spilled what he knew to Roberto in exchange for sanctuary in the house. At first Roberto, despite his suspicions, had rejected the soldier’s outrageous reports. But somehow the soldier had retrieved a number of photographs suggesting that Hitler had acted in concert in his struggle to conquer all of Europe.
Evidence in hand, Roberto’s immediate goal was to escape Berlin into the British Commonwealth Embassy across the French border and show the world how the waging of the war had been conducted under false pretenses, how it wasn’t all about one man in power willing to send millions to their deaths to gain worldwide supremacy.
So at dusk, he packed up his meager belongings, and made his way out into the German landscape.
They’d been waiting for him. A troop of men, wearing dark robes emblazoned with swastikas, carrying rifles. They murdered the German defector and moved upon Roberto rapidly, sinister shadows encircling him like lions on a gazelle, German roars setting against him. He cried out and pleaded for mercy, his mind screaming please someone help me! before he was thrown into the back of the truck like a slaughtered pig.
Like a slaughtered human.
The truck shook and rocked, carrying him far away to the outskirts of Berlin. He’d surveyed Germany’s ruined countryside through the narrow slats, the towns long lost to charred grounds and blackened fragments. I know who’s responsible he thought, more afraid of the unseen truth of the matter than of the horrors his current captors were capable of doling out.
Why are they wearing robes, and not Nazi uniforms?
It was hours before he reached his destination unknown.
Yells ensued and the back of the truck was hauled open. Two of the robed men prowled in, seized Roberto and dragged him into the moon’s cold blue beams, their hands rough, fingernails sharp like knives upon his bare skin.
He glimpsed their eyes…and shuddered with uncertain fear, his mind presuming the stress of his months under duress to have finally taken some hallucinogenic toll on him.
I have seen the photographs that show the real horror taking place, more shocking and devastating than the images of death witnessed at Austria’s Ebensee extermination camp.
And yet, the truth in the photos does not explain what I am seeing here.
Despite the shroud of hoods, Roberto could glimpse the guards’ eyes through the ragged holes: impossibly black and wet, almost inhuman in nature. With their rough and strangely mangled hands, they squeezed handcuffs on Roberto’s wrists and led him away from the truck towards a large structure.
A prison. A concentration camp.
I’m going to be murdered. Today.
He was ushered through a series of dark hallways and eventually forced into a leaky cell by a waiting hooded guard. The door was shut and for hours he remained motionless, silently cowering in the corner like an injured animal, hoping for water and not getting any until many hours later.
Days passed and he pondered the war’s atrocities: of the Jews who’d lost their land and their possessions to Hitler’s armies, tortured and murdered because of their ethnic diversity. He thought of the civilians and the teenagers who were called upon by Hitler to fight barehanded against the Soviets in Seelow Heights.
God weeps for the unsympathetic actions of His children, and for those who suffer at their hands.
Indeed, it would be foolish for Roberto to shun faith.
But this is no ordinary war, the aggressor no child of Christ. How could He possibly help?
A shrouded guard came. He offered Roberto a drink of water and a slice of stale bread.
Is this not a concentration camp? Are there not thousands of people being murdered outside the walls of this building?
The guard stood and watched Roberto eat, his inhuman eyes fixed upon him from beneath the soiled cloth of his hood. When Roberto finished his bread and water, the guard swung the butt of his rifle down upon Roberto’s skull, shattering his consciousness.
Later, he awoke in utter darkness, a pool of blood tiding out from the drying wound in his head. His face peeled away from the ground as he rose, carrying with it a layer of gritty cement.
There was another man in the cell now—Roberto could hear him, his labored breathing and phlegmatic wheeze.
His lips parted in an attempt to call out to the shadow-cloaked man, but dehydration had stripped his ability to speak.
He dropped his head back and gave all his positive power and heed to the invocation of God, then prayed for a blessed revelation—for a remote voice filled with holiness and miracles.
Only silence answered him.
Soon thereafter, sleep came, filling his head with fevered dreams.
The guard with the deformed hand had come by once a day, bringing stale bread and water. He would place
the food down before Roberto and answer the screams of the dying man in the cell with a single slam of his rifle’s butt.
For days, perhaps weeks, Roberto could hear additional prisoners being brought in and out. He watched with tortured eyes as the robed guards with their impossibly dark eyes staggered back and forth, delivering bread and water to others.
The man at the other side of the cell grew sicker by the hour, his coughs and screams rising in volume and frequency. While Roberto slept, his coughs tapered. Then, stopped altogether.
Soon thereafter, he stopped moving.
But his screams…they went on and on.
The cockroach surveying Roberto’s toes made its way back into the shadows of the dead man, rejoining his fellow cockroach accomplices in their corrupt feast. For the first time since the man stopped moving, Roberto crawled away from the wall and into the shaft of colorless light, gazing with gross fascination at the corpse.
The eyes were gone, sockets bruised trenches that seemed to gaze back at him. He’d been young, it seemed, much younger than Roberto’s own thirty-five. Roberto could see a tuft of brown hair escaping the odd angle his neck managed to find just before his death.
The roaches and their larvae had appeased themselves to a few small lesions in the man’s throat—these festering wounds, peppered with tiny fecal droppings, looked like bullet holes in the spiritless light of the cell. The corpse’s lips had shriveled into flat gray strings, drawn back from the teeth and gums, revealing rotting jaws. To Roberto, it seemed as if the man were laughing at the appalling injustices leading to his cold, undistinguished death.
As Roberto sat staring at the dead man, he tried to rationalize his own purpose in this dark miserable world, where the only other signs of human existence were the undying screams of the dead man before him, and the raging screams of others in the blackened distance.
The guard, he is not human. He is an animal. He is the enemy. And yet, he feeds me because he wants me alive for some reason.
He stared at the corpse for hours, for days, examining every crevice, every swollen vein, every writhing maggot and skittering cockroach. He spoke to it, voice a pained whisper. He cried, laughed, coughed.
He heard something. The dead man, speaking to me?
Not voices, but odd crackling sounds, like bones popping. When his nightmare reverie faded and his focus bore in on the truth of the matter, he beheld the terrible cause of the sound: the dead man’s withered jaw, creaking open, pulling the wrinkled skin taut. A horrid stench of gas exuding, so thick and corrupt that it dug right through Roberto’s skin into the heart of his gorge. He gagged in a fit, and did his damnedness to maintain himself, but soon lost control and surrendered to the concrete floor a thick smattering of bile.
He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand, then through acidic tears, peered back up at the corpse.
It was vomiting too, the distended throat moving up and down like the gullet of a regurgitating bird. But no bile or long last meal spewed from its mouth—from within came a great cockroach, nearly twice the bulk of its wandering predecessor, spiny appendages digging out in search of a place to rest now that its bountiful share had been devoured.
Roberto skittered back, squeezed his eyes shut as he pressed against the wall.
And then, as the cockroach spread its tenebrous wings and took flight, he passed out.
A commotion broke out from somewhere deep in the prison, bitter screams and a terrible metal on metal clanging sound. Roberto awoke, coughing. He pressed back against the cement wall, the bone-dry skin of his thighs splitting at the sudden movement. Had his time come? Would the guard come and lead him to his execution? He buried his face in his arms, hopelessly hiding from the approaching horror.
In the darkness of his shuttered eyes, he perceived an oddness in his body that he’d never felt before: a twisting feeling in his gut, of something alive that wished to free itself from the prison of blood and substance that made up the surviving remains of his body. Are there roaches inside me too? He felt a panic rise in him, and when he gazed back at the corpse he saw at least a dozen roaches, black and glistening with coagulated blood, crawling about in a frenzied search for a more plentiful site.
Roberto clawed at his stomach, swollen and pleading for nourishment. He cried back: “I can’t help you!”, and then swallowed, tasting only bitter horrors.
He dreamed of the cloaked guard, black-shrouded and standing over him, two small holes cut around his glowering eyes, one at the mouth, a crudely painted swastika adorning his sleeve.
The man had remained silent for endless minutes. He then held a hand out to Roberto, its deformity obvious and shocking, coarse fingers gnarled and twisted into worthless fleshy lumps. In his other hand he carried the silver bowl filled with soiled water.
When he awoke and opened his eyes, the bowl was next to him, alongside a molded slice of bread.
Ravenous, he ate the bread and drank the water. When he finished, he crawled to the bars of the cell, reminiscing about his simple life back home in London, as a man living in the city and working for The London Times; how his wife used to yell at him when he didn’t feed the dog; how he argued with his fourteen year-old daughter because she wanted to go to the movies with eighteen year-old Jake Stafford; how he decided to attend college to become a writer instead of working on the family farm in Devonshire because the world outside seemed so big and attractive. Dear God, how I wish to go back, to see my quaint home, to smell the riches of the city, to hold my daughter and kiss my wife. That isn’t too much to ask for, is it?
“Roberto…”
He startled at the sudden voice, the harsh English-speaking whisper, and for a fleeting moment thought it had come from the corpse, its rotting flesh now clothed with maggots. When he gazed beyond the bars, he saw the guard, dressed in the usual garb: body robed, head cloaked with only the dark wet glow of his eyes peering through.
He carried a glass of clear water, and held it through the bars. For the first time in weeks, Roberto stood. With trembling legs, he staggered to the bars, grabbed the glass, and sipped at it carefully.
The guard remained silent, staring.
Roberto drank more water.
The guard gripped the bars, then without the use of a key, opened the cell and paced in. He stepped to Roberto and rubbed a careful thumb over the wound on his head. “It is time.”
Roberto remained silent.
“The screams of the dead man haunt you…” the guard uttered.
Roberto stood stunned. His head pounded its bitter fury against his skull. He hears what’s in my head!
In Italian, the guard stated: “Do you believe in the blessed life, that God indeed came down from the heavens to give his life for those he loved?
Roberto fell stunned. His language, his voice. Is my mind playing more games with me? “Yes, I…”
In German: “Do you believe in his adversary, the darkness that arises from the depths to grant sinful pleasures upon those willing to accept its offerings?”
Roberto, seeing no alternative but to comply, nodded weakly.
The guard leaned in, gripped Roberto’s face with both hands. Sharp tingles assaulted Roberto’s body as the guard’s speech returned to English, whispering sour breath in his ear, “Then follow me and believe in yourself and realize that God created you just as he created me—in a form made to bathe in the venoms of this new world thrust upon us, where disease and famine and war is the norm. Where we, the chosen few, can be strong and remember that the pleasures of death can be relished from the outside looking in, no matter what obstacles block our path. In the end, we shall ultimately win the battle against good, solely because God created us to persevere—to evolve.”
The guard held out his deformed hand to Roberto. Roberto took it, gripping the fleshy knots in his palm, and with great pains forced himself to follow the man’s lead.
For the first time in weeks or months or years, Roberto exited the confines of his cell.
The
dark hallway went on forever, ignited only by weak intermittent bulbs, a multitude of cells lining one side like a surrealistic painting, disappearing into infinite darkness. Here in this unexplored territory, previously unheard moans emanated, the uncoerced grieves of pain from the incarcerated seeping out into the hall and idling into aimless echoes. They paced in measured silence, Roberto peering into the shadowed cells, each one identical to his, holding dark shivering lumps numbering from one sole occupant to masses of twisted bodies laying immobile, possibly lifeless.
Like a wind-stripped branch, a bony hand jutted from a cell and clawed at Roberto’s ankle. He shuddered, staggered, setting his sights upon the tortured visage of a woman whose wild blue eyes, hinting prettiness in the days before the war, were wide with terror and madness. Most of her hair had fallen out. Her skin hung in tattered strips from her face. Her lips were bloated, riddled with yellow sores.
The guard kicked at the woman’s arm. She let out a pig-like squeal and scampered back on all fours, into the shadows of her cell.
Roberto peered at the guard. They locked gazes. Roberto’s heart battered his withered ribcage, body shivering with icy-cold fear. Warm tears sprouted from his eyes. “Where are you taking me?”
The guard turned away and continued down the hall in silence. Roberto followed, passing additional cells, all occupied by rotting prisoners.
Two more robed guards appeared ahead. They walked towards them, their gait strong and purposeful. Upon sighting them, waves of harsh dizziness consumed Roberto and nearly dragged him to the cement floor. The guard pulled him aside and they both remained fixed against the wall until the dark pair passed them, seemingly ignorant of their presence. Roberto leaned against the guard, and they continued their slow, arduous journey down the hall.
They reached a barred partition. The guard opened it—again no key—and they entered another shorter hall with a series of rooms branching off at various angles.