by Joe Hart
Lineage
Joe Hart
Lineage
Text copyright © 2012 by Joe Hart
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination and are not constructed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For Jade, Rainyn, and Keegan—you are the lights in my darkness.
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Prologue
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part 2
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Introduction
I’ve always loved ghost stories. I used to read them for hours under a card table with a blanket thrown over it and only a small lamp when it was sunny outside, just for effect. My nieces and nephews used to beg me to tell them stories by candlelight in the basement of my childhood home. I’ve read so many that each one has become a little part of me. Whenever the sky begins to blacken and threaten rain, I want to read one, a good one that makes you glance around the room uncomfortably when you’re alone. The ghost stories I’ve read have shaped my view of the world (well, at least my writing view of the world), and I finally gathered the courage to write my own.
What follows within these pages are not just the musings of a socially deprived guy with some pretty dark takes on life. It’s the culmination of years spent scaring myself silly. Of hurrying across my darkened room after flipping the light off, knowing something was going to grab me before I jumped into bed. Of always getting my chores done before darkness claimed my daytime playgrounds.
If you’re reading this, then you’re just like me, and somewhere deep down inside there’s a scared little kid hiding beneath a card table, eyes wide as the pages turn, loving every minute of it. Hopefully, I live up to what’s brought me here and I’m able to take you somewhere terrifying that you’ve never been before.
Joe Hart
May 30, 2012
Prologue
“What we have worn out our iron-soled shoes searching for in vain may come to us without the slightest effort.”
—Unknown
Germany, February 1945
“The final order came through, sir.” The words hung in the nearly empty room like the cobwebs that would reside there later when the office had been abandoned completely, and only the spiders remained to move within the dead air.
The man who sat at the desk at the far end of the room let the words sink into his mind like drops of water on a dry sponge. They mingled with the feelings that were rising to meet them, and for the first time since joining his nation’s army, he felt a sense of unease.
He licked his cracked lips and sat back from the desk he had been leaning his elbows on. The double-S insignia on his collar caught the dim light coldly on its silver facing as he settled into the padded chair and gazed across the expanse of the room at the soldier standing in the doorway.
“And what is the final order?” His voice carried across the room as if it had been magnified, but in actuality he had nearly whispered. He preferred not to speak above a conversational level if he could help it. He didn’t need to. His words held power and they always meant something. So many spoke without meaning, and he refused to be one of the many.
“We are to pull back to Berlin and await orders there.”
The SS officer exhaled through his nose and turned his brilliant blue eyes to the window that sat a few yards to his left. The gray grounds of the camp lay beyond, and he noticed a light sleet had begun to fall. He could see the long, squat buildings that sat beneath the snow mixture like cattle barns. Water had begun to drip from the eaves and pool into miniature lakes below.
Without bringing his gaze back to the younger man in the doorway, he spoke again. “And who issued the order?”
The young soldier shifted in his polished boots, as though he were standing on the edge of a cliff that dropped into an unknown abyss. “The Führer himself, sir.”
The officer’s jaws clenched so hard that he felt pain in several teeth as he did so. He gazed at the gray puddles next to the buildings and wondered, as he often did, how so many instances and decisions came to be. There was no order, only chaos and the choices therein. Nevertheless, it was time. He blinked once and turned his attention back to the young man who stood before him in the crisp, black uniform.
“Has the disassembly begun?”
The soldier in the doorway dropped his gaze, which had been resting on a spot just above the officer’s left shoulder, to the seated man’s eyes. He could only hold the contact for a few seconds before he had to look away again. He swallowed and breathed deeply before responding.
“No. The men have been lining up supplies, along with the vehicles, for abandonment of the camp.”
The man behind the desk didn’t change position or look away, but the soldier in the doorway felt a shift in the atmosphere. It was almost imperceptible, as if an errant gust of wind had entered the room and disturbed the quiet air between the two men.
“Begin disassembly. I will join you shortly.”
Without further hesitation, the younger man nodded and turned on his heel. His boot steps moved through the entry of the building and then onto the wooden stairs outside.
The officer sat motionless behind the desk, his face an immovable mask with two burning blue orbs above the long regal nose. After a moment, his right hand reached out and grasped the black telephone that sat on the far right edge of the desk. The gleaming buttons of his uniform cuff scraped lightly on the maps and pages of notes that sat before him.
He dialed and waited with the earpiece pressed tightly to the side of his head as he gazed out through the rafters of the office. The phone on the other end of the line rang twice before it was picked up, and a voice answered timidly.
“Gisela, it is time. I will be home before nightfall. Be ready.”
He hung the phone up without waiting for a response, and stood before the desk as he straightened the leather straps and belts on his uniform. He bent at the waist and drew out one of the desk’s lower drawers. The drawer’s opening yawned blackly, and his mind envisioned an open mouth as he stuck his hand into the darkness and retrieved what lay within.
A belt with many sheaths emerged from the inky shadows of the drawer and came into full view. Light fell and died on the blackened and stained wooden handles of the knives that sat snugly in their leather sheaths.
With a practiced motion, the officer swung the belt around his back and caught it on the opposite side. It buckled comfortably around his narrow waist, and he ran his hands over the ends of the handles that rested near his hips. Nearly a dozen blades hung from the belt as he deeply breathed the still air of the office one last time and adjusted the belt before stepping out from behind the desk.
His boots were polished to a black shine that reflected the dim rectangles of the windows, and his uniform swished as he strode across the floor of the room. When he reached the door to the outside, he paused and glanced back at the space with the solitary desk and the large red banner that hung above it.
The black angles of the swastika stood out starkly from the bright red material around it. The man’s eyes took all of it in, and then with the movement of a person leaving a childhood home for the last time, he jerked the door open and stepped out into the wet grayness that blanketed the day.
The air, although dampened by the moisture that dropped steadily from the oppressive gunmetal sky, still held the ever-present black ash and acrid tang of burnt meat. But there was a change today—a vibration also hung in the air. It wasn’t necessarily electric in nature, but almost a precursor to a lightning strike, the air before a storm that was already in progress nearby. The vibration hung all around the many trucks that were being loaded hastily with food stores, ammunition, and every manner of weaponry. It hovered over the soldiers’ heads and made them turn and look to the sky to see the force that pressed down upon their shoulders. As they nervously gazed around, they noticed each other’s anxiety, which in turn made the pressure more palpable. The vibration swelled deep into the dark recesses of the long buildings with the many chimneys, and pushed the shambling, emaciated figures further in, adding to the prodding of the machine-gun barrels that brushed their sides and backs like cold reminders.
The man with the SS insignia on his collar walked briskly across the grounds, his hands in black leather gloves swinging at his sides. The soldiers that he passed glanced at him, their eyes darting to the belt and sheaths that hung from his waist. But they didn’t pause in their tasks. The work carried on as though the small army that tarried within the compound was a machine itself—the many minds operating as one when an order was given. Even on this day—so many days, and months, and years into the war—they still moved as one, a hive mind that plowed relentlessly on through the signs and signals of the end that was so near.
Gunshots rang out every so often paired with muffled cries. Sometimes keening or snippets of prayers drifted through the air, but were always cut short by the harsh bark of small-arms fire. A deep rumble shook the ground at different intervals, as though a drunken giant were stumbling aimlessly across the countryside several miles away. The whine of American, British, and German planes could also be heard as the battle that raged to the west began crawling across the rolling hills that were again turning white in the shadow of a recent thaw.
A soldier who was hurrying across the grounds with his head down, his arms folded protectively around a short-barreled machine gun, caught the officer’s eye. The officer recognized his block leader, his Blockwart, and called out to him. The soldier veered from his former course and stopped several feet away from the other man as the sleet continued to fall and began to build upon the already-soaked shoulders of his uniform.
The Blockwart was one of his best men. He didn’t shy away from the work that was being done here. He could never be found in any of the latrines after dark, vomiting a recent supper into the refuse below like so many other soldiers among the ranks. The Blockwart had no trouble meeting his gaze.
“When will disassembly be completed?” The officer’s voice carried across the moisture-laden air as his eyes shifted from building to building and truck to truck.
“We will be ready to move within four hours, Oberführer.”
The officer’s eyes shifted back to the face of the other man, and within the recesses of his mind he was pleased to still see fear there. This soldier had steel, but not the same that ran within his own blood.
“Four hours? We could take each building down brick by brick and haul them away in four hours. Explain why the sons of Germany would need so long to disassemble a camp such as this?”
The soldier’s breathing quickened with the question, but he needed only a moment to form a decisive answer. “We received a large shipment two days ago, Oberführer. We have nearly twice the count we estimated and the processing is going slowly.”
“And why is that?”
“Well, the furnaces are only so large, and—”
The officer raised a gloved hand to silence the younger soldier. The Blockwart licked his lips and nearly shivered as a drop of water trailed down between his shoulder blades and came to rest near the top of his buttocks.
“Do you understand what disassembly means?”
The question caught the younger man off guard and he merely squinted in response. He had come to learn that when the Oberführer asked a question that should be known, it was pertinent not to answer.
“It means to disassemble. Do not shoot them one by one and feed them to the flames. Lock them inside and set the buildings on fire.”
The Blockwart blinked several times and then nodded. He began to turn away, but paused before he could take a step. “What should I do with the workers in the south paddock? It would be time-consuming to herd them across the compound.”
The officer stood silent, gazing past the young soldier into the unending gray sky. His fingers twitched in their gloves, as if they yearned to reach for something nearby. When he returned his eyes to the Blockwart’s face, the color had drained from the blue orbs, so that now they seemed to merely mirror the sleeting heaven above them.
“The ditch has been dug that was ordered yesterday?”
“Yes, Oberführer.”
“Bring them there.”
Without another utterance, the officer turned and walked away from the block leader through the soft mud of the camp, and into the sleeting day.
The men and women stood along the side of the shallow trench that stretched a hundred yards on the rim of the compound. On the far edge of the trench, ten feet of barbed wire rose up in horizontal slants and designated the western boundary of the camp. The people that stood at the edge of the trench wavered.
They wavered physically, their emaciated legs like stalks under meager torsos.
They wavered mentally; some seemed to consider running, their eyes flitting to the far side of the trench and the wire beyond. What was left of their minds calculated the height of the fence and the gaps between the hooked wires. Others only stared down at the trench before them and saw nothing, their minds already broken from months of endless labor, little rest, and almost no food. The rest looked longingly at the trench and their eyes welled up with tears, to know that they were close, so close.
And above all, they wavered in the eyes of the soldiers that stood at either end of the trench and several yards behind them. The people before them seemed to fade in and out of reality through the falling snow, as if they were already gone and their spirits had decided to reenact the events that were about to take place.
A young boy stood at the end of the line of people. His hand hung loosely in his mother’s withered grip, and he could feel the hard bones beneath her paper-thin skin. His brown eyes gazed at the trench, and he wondered the small thoughts of youth. He imagined the trench filled with water and a hundred toy boats floating there. He could see their brightly painted bows and their shining steam stacks. He imagined some were warships and their guns boomed loudly as they fired on their enemies. Some were sailboats and glided across the surface, like they were flying rather than floating and their sails were actually wings.
His mother squeezed his hand again. She had been doing this ever since the dark men had come and forced them from their corral. She would blink her tired eyes and try to smile at him, though the curve of her mouth never did seem happy. Then she would clutch his hand, as if they were on the lip of a much deeper precipice and he was too close to the edge. His father held his mother’s other hand, and he too was smiling down at him, his small, round glasses perched on his long nose.
“What are we doing, Mama?”
The boy’s mother swallowed painfully, and her stomach growled beneath her woolen shawls. She glanced at her husband and pursed her thin, waxy lips together into a tight line. When she looked down at the small white face of her son, her resolve almost broke. She had to resist the urge to grab him up in her arms and run as fast as she could away from the ditch in front of them. Away from the men with guns. Away from the smell in the a
ir that never truly dissipated. And when she thought about what that smell was, what she was breathing into her lungs, it was almost too much to bear.
Instead she smiled her painful smile and blinked her still-beautiful eyes. They were brown, like her son’s, and even with all they had witnessed, they still held a glint of life and nearly forgotten dignity. “We’re going away, my baby.”
The boy seemed to consider this. The camp was all he had ever known. His very first memories were of the fences that surrounded it, the cold that never seemed to abate, and the uniforms the dark men wore.
“Away where?”
His mother again looked to his father imploringly. After a moment he nodded and turned toward his son before speaking.
“It’s a beautiful place. The sun shines each day, and there is so much food to eat, we’ll never be hungry again.” His father smiled once more and reached out to caress his son’s face, but his movements made several of the soldiers yell and pull up their weapons, training them on his back. With his brow pulled together and the smile still on his face, his father dropped his hand to his side and stepped back to face the ditch.
The boy knew better than to run to his father’s side; he had seen what the soldiers did to those who disobeyed them. So instead, he was content to hold his mother’s bony hand in his own and imagine the place that his father had described. It was nearly beyond his comprehension, but after a time he was able to see a valley bathed in golden light with tables, long and low, filled with food. It wasn’t the food that he ate here, not the gruel, strained through screens of boiled bones from animals he didn’t know. It was the food his mother had told him of, food he only knew existed by his faith in her words. Fresh bread and cheese, milk in tall glasses, and cookies, mounds and mounds of cookies. He had had a cookie only once; his father had bribed it from one of the soldiers after a meager dinner. It had been cold and hard, but it was the most wonderful thing he had ever eaten. He was still imagining the taste of it when he heard boot steps approaching through the snow and mud from behind the line of people.