The small glass window in the solid door was broken out. A thin bar had been bolted over the opening. A low moan issued from the room. Daniel pressed forward. A pale face suddenly filled the opening, wide-eyed, multiply scratched, some of the scratches scabbed over, others fresh with blood.
“At last!” the face sobbed. “Human beings! I never thought...” His skinny hand came up and one fingernail clawed deeply into the flesh on the left side of his nose, tearing down with a fresh stream of blood.
“Stop that!” Daniel cried.
“I can’t help it! It itches unbearably! It’s growing inside my skin. It’s trying to tear its way through!”
“The hair?” Gandhi said. “The hair of the wolf?”
“My rage!” the face screamed. “There’s more of it every day! It wants to cover me!” And he disappeared.
Daniel walked slowly to the window. The stench was like a punch in the face. The man had moved to the center of the room, naked and gesturing frantically at the hundreds of scars, old and new, layering his body. “See, see how it’s trying to get out?” The man had a starved appearance, but it was hard to tell how emaciated he really was, given the confused mess of torn flesh and dried blood.
The cell was unfurnished. But floor and ceiling and all four walls were covered with severely stained, worn padding, soiled foam innards protruding like yellowed fat from a deep wound. One corner was thick with the prisoner’s waste.
“Look at me!” the werewolf shouted. “No one has looked at me in—no one sees me anymore!” The prisoner tore at his face, yanked his long matted hair, contorted his mouth. His teeth were yellowed and blood-stained, and looked incredibly long although that might be an illusion. Daniel backed away from the window, unable to look at the man anymore. The werewolf screamed, and Lenin jumped in to take his place at the door.
“Hush!” Lenin ordered. “That won’t help you!”
The werewolf stopped, struggled to control his voice. “I was once... like you. A prisoner.”
“We wouldn’t call ourselves that,” Lenin said.
“Then you are foo—oo—ools!” The werewolf’s voice went high into a howl on the last word before he managed to cut it off. “You did not volunteer, I know this,” the werewolf continued. “No one would volunteer for this. You were snatched right out of your lives, just as I was. My wife in bed beside me, my twin babies in the other bedroom, at last asleep, their aimless, maddening energy spent. Like most nights, I was unable to sleep. My mind raced with the most insane impulses. I should have been a happy man, but apparently happiness simply will not thrive in a creature like me.
“So they brought me here, those... insects. They strapped me into their torture chamber, and sent me off into that faraway place, that mad space inside an evil man’s skull, and I had to watch from inside that space as he raped, as he tortured and killed, as he dismembered child after innocent child, and I was unable to return, and as you can tell I still live in that hateful room inside the monster’s skull!”
“Ask him if he means de Rais,” Gandhi said. “He is speaking of Gilles de Rais, isn’t he?”
“You mean Gilles de Rais,” Lenin said.
There was a pause. “Who gave you permission to use my name?” The shredded voice was quite different, heavily accented and somewhat musical, but as if the music were coming out of a torn and battered instrument.
Lenin took a half-step back. Daniel quickly took his place. The werewolf looked different, his eyes dark and piercing, his posture erect. Daniel tried to be formal. “We did not mean to offend, Sir. We are at your service.”
The werewolf blinked, then appeared to relax a bit. “It is no bother, you could not know. It is a difficult thing, understanding how a person should behave. I never knew how to behave. I never understood the power. I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a peasant like you, just on a whim, particularly during war time. But of course you do not understand the problem. When you can do anything you want, how then do you know what you should do?”
“Listen to God, perhaps? Is that what you did?”
The werewolf threw his head back, and Daniel did not think he could bear to hear the howl again. But the werewolf laughed instead. “I did that. I spoke to Our Lord God for years. I was good, I was pious, I was the most devout. I was the very best of men. But in the end it did not get me where I wanted, not that I could have told anyone what I wanted. Nor could I now. It’s maddening!”
He revolved suddenly on one foot, his laugh a rumble deep in his throat. When he came back around he looked embarrassed. “I took the family to church every weekend, the wife, my babies—we did it as a family. But my babies didn’t understand what they were hearing, of course. And I knew I was a hypocrite, even as I tried to be a good man. Maybe if I’d really been a good man I would have gained some joy from it, but I was so full of need and dissatisfaction. I think my wife got some strength out of it. Maybe it helped her deal with the likes of me.”
He spat on the floor and a bit of blood trailed down his chin.
He lunged toward the door. Daniel had an urge to retreat, but held fast. “Tell me,” the werewolf said. “Are you angel, or are you human? No, do not tell me. Let me hope. Let me at last have a voice that will tell me what I should do. That bitch Jeanne d’Arc, she had her voices, all her mad voices. When we served together at Orléans I had to suffer that bitch’s voices. They would command her what to do, and then she would command us what to do. Charles demanded that it be this way, and we obeyed. And then she became the saint and I became the monster! Where is the justice?”
The more the werewolf spoke the faster the raw quality in his voice faded, so that at some point Daniel could see him as more or less a typical human being, and then there came a point beyond that when a certain serenity bled through, a calmness in the eyes and a reverence in posture, that made Daniel think of portraits of saints.
“Not that I am doubting her miracles. I would never deny them. She believed in God. She listened, answered and obeyed. ‘Here I am Lord!’ she said. ‘I come to do Your will!’ She recognized the Dauphin, Charles the VII, on sight, although she had never seen him before—she picked him out even when he was dressed as an ordinary man and attempted to blend with the rest of us. She changed the direction of the wind at Orléans so we could cross the river. The men loved her! Even I was not immune to her charms! The way she rode across the field in her white armor, waving her standard with a field sown with lilies, Christ holding the world with an angel on each side! She survived an arrow to the breast that would have killed a vigorous man. She won a battle no man could win! The vision of her will forever haunt me, that maid, that bitch, that whore! I tell you we all loved her!
“But I grew weary of her voices, always her voices! What about mine? No one wanted to know of the things speaking to me!
“I had followers of my own, of course, but I had to pay them for their loyalty. For a time everywhere I went I was preceded by royal escort, accompanied by an ecclesiastical assembly and two hundred armed men and trumpeters, all on my payroll. I wanted to fascinate the crowd, I wanted to dazzle them! I discovered I could do anything I wanted—the peasants could not object for fear of their lives—can you even imagine how frightening that was for me?”
The werewolf closed his eyes and sighed, growled, and then began to speak again. “My wife told me she was going to leave and take the babies. Not that I wanted the babies. Oh, I loved them, even though they hadn’t much in the way of personalities, but clearly I wasn’t the nurturing one—I could never have taken care of them by myself.
“But to be rejected that way by the person who had promised to love me forever—how humiliating! I was nothing!” His voice fell deeper with the last few words, and the eyes told Daniel this was the wolf again.
“No one could understand how a man could spend his wealth this way. Certainly not my family, certainly not my old bastard of a grandfather. He was an indifferent guardian—he let us do as we liked. Our nurse raised us,
but of course she could not control us. In only a short time we realized we were above the law, or the law was applied differently to those of our position in society. But I must say it did not make us feel safer in the world.
“When you have such resources, does it not compel you to use them in the most creative, most dramatic way? I cared nothing for the riches. I wanted to be an artist who would be remembered for all time. So wealth was like my paint, and the world the background where I could create anything I desired. My Le mistère du Siège d’Orléans, surely no one before or since has mounted so grand a production! If wealth had been my prime motivator, would I have staged such an elaborate and expensive spectacle? One hundred forty speaking parts and over five hundred extras. In an attempt to preserve the purity of my vision the six hundred costumes were worn once, discarded, then recreated for each new performance. The grand scaffolding erected and taken down and then erected again. And of course we had to feed our audience, otherwise they might not have come! My family was livid over the expenditures, but they were not possessed of my vision! Should I apologize because I was driven by my imagination? In order to create something grand, something everyone will remember, you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself to extravagance!”
Daniel decided to try a different tactic. “You hold an innocent man inside you.” He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true, but he had no proof otherwise. “His name is Henry. You have no right to keep him prisoner. Please, won’t you release him?”
But the werewolf acted as if Daniel hadn’t spoken at all. “Eventually, of course, they had their way. They appealed to the king and I was allowed to sell no more of my property in order to finance such magnificence. Never mind that it was no business of theirs. Never mind that I had created something that had never existed before!”
Suddenly he stopped speaking. “My mouth is like a desert cave. Could I have some water, please?”
Daniel looked questioningly at the others. “There’s no water here.” Lenin shrugged.
“I’m sorry,” Danielsaid. “We have none.”
The werewolf winced, and there was movement along the inside of the cheek. When he next opened his mouth blood spilled from the corners. “I needed moisture, to speak.
“Still, I attempted to find my satisfaction in religion. I became creative in my devotion. I constructed my Chapel of the Holy Innocents where I officiated in robes of my own design.
“But it was not enough. Nothing is ever enough!”
The werewolf sobbed. But when he lifted his head it was clearly Henry who was crying. “He’s not going to let me go.” Then the face distorted again and the werewolf shook his head and flashed his teeth.
“I turned my back on my religion and set out to pursue my own demons, the demon Barron, specifically. My learned accomplices assisted me in my alchemical and demon-summoning activities at my castle at Tiffauges. Am I to blame that the ceremony required the parts of a child?
“I loved my beautiful children! They were my angels! They were poor, they had never had anything to speak of, and I dressed them in the finest clothing they had ever known. And then when we led them upstairs, we told them what was going to happen to them. I am not ashamed to say that that was the initial part of my pleasure. Their reactions. Have you never wanted to tell someone some terrible truth and then observe the drama of their reaction? It is an experience far better than any play by the greatest of our playwrights! It is a creative act! As the children cried and screamed, as they begged to be returned to their parents, I am not embarrassed to say that I wept with them. And when finally I broke their necks and removed their parts I kissed their flesh and I wept!
“I loved my children, my babies! I just wasn’t capable of taking care of them! Is that so difficult to understand? I wondered, I... speculated, if I killed them, and killed my wife, I could be a good human being again. I know that sounds insane. But think, who could be more sympathetic, more admired than a grieving husband and father?”
He was panting, hot and raw.
“I have no idea how many I killed—I may have exaggerated. I wanted it to be a very large number in my final confession, because if I had to play the monster, I wanted to be the greatest monster who had ever lived!
“I burned the bodies whenever possible in my fireplace. It was a large and grand fireplace,I must say. And I made a grand play about doing so.”
Daniel stepped away from the door, unable to stand there anymore, not wanting to listen to one more word and yet not wanting to miss any piece of this confession.
Gandhi came forward. “There, there. We understand. It has been difficult for all of us.”
“The children, they were as beautiful as angels. My two, my twins, when they weren’t crying, I could imagine them as angels. I could almost imagine myself happy with that life, that wife and those children, with nothing more to show for all my remaining years. No pageantry, no spectacle, no special accomplishment, simply an ordinary life. Why couldn’t that be enough? Why couldn’t I make myself feel that would be enough?”
“You’re talking of your real life now? Not the one you played as de Rais? What was your name? Henry, wasn’t it? Try to hold onto your name.” Gandhi kept pressing. Daniel waited for some kind of explosion.
“Again, should I apologize because I was driven by my superior imagination?
“I should be ashamed to say that I have eaten a variety of human flesh and that I know that babies taste the best of all. I understand there are some things a human being should never know, but there is the fact of it and should I deny it now?”
“Wait, wait, are you the werewolf now? Are you de Rais?” Gandhi cried. “I don’t want to hear this story anymore! I really can’t!”
Gandhi stepped away and Daniel gestured for Lenin to step up to the door. But Lenin shook his head. Reluctantly, Daniel returned to the window.
“But those are the facts of it!” the werewolf shouted. “What kind of man is it who cannot or will not deal with the facts?”
The werewolf stopped speaking suddenly and stared into Daniel’s face. “Am I frightening you, Sir?”
“No, not really,” Daniel lied.
“Well, there’s no need for armor, so why do you wear it?”
“I don’t understand...”
“I cannot abide a metal face during polite conversation. I show you who I am, so please, Sir, permit me to see your eyes!”
Daniel didn’t know what to say. The werewolf blinked a few times, then his body convulsed in a series of muscle spasms. His arms suddenly looked crooked. His eyes swayed in their sockets. He jutted his chin forward and his ears appeared to flow back against his skull.
The werewolf rambled on for another ten minutes or so. The more Daniel listened to the man’s confession the more his vicious acts sounded like those of a young boy prodding and pulling the guts from a frog. Except these frogs had been children. And this creature seemed unable to tell the difference between the two. In the end pure evil was a banal and stupid thing.
“He’s crazy, but it’s not right that he is locked up like this,” Gandhi said. “Obviously this only makes him worse. We have to get him out of there.”
Lenin stepped between Gandhi and the door. “Are you sure that is wise—look what he’s done to himself!”
“To himself—that is the point. I did not hear him threaten any of us, however paranoid he might be. It is himself he damages. This isn’t right, to hold him like this. We’ve got to get him out of there!”
“I suppose. What more can they do to us? He is right, Daniel—now and then you must stand up for what is right, if you want to call yourself a decent human being.”
Daniel knew he’d feel unsafe with this monster running about, but he didn’t want to make any important decisions out of fear. He helped the others hunt for anything that could be used as a pry bar.
Lenin came up with a two-foot piece of ridged metal rod under a pile of crumbling concrete at one end of the corridor. It was rusted brown but sti
ll appeared strong. Daniel recognized it as what they called rebar, or reinforcing bar used to support concrete. Where have they brought us?
Lenin jabbed into the door frame with the end of the bar. The werewolf bobbed back and forth inside the cell making a high yipping sound, like a dog overly excited that its owner has come home. Finally Lenin managed to get the bar wedged into the frame and wiggled the bar back and forth; it chewed into the frame. He stopped and put his weight onto the bar, trying to pry the door open. Gandhi ran over and pressed his own small shoulder against the bar, his feet slipping futilely on the tile as he pushed. Although Daniel was conflicted, it embarrassed him to see Gandhi applying so much pointless effort. He came up behind the small man and placed his hands on either side of his trembling shoulder and pushed.
“Stop it! Don’t let him out!” Falstaff was at the end of the hall running toward them. “Get away from him!”
“He doesn’t belong in there! It’s not right!” Gandhi shouted back.
“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Falstaff slammed into them and all three went sprawling. The bar clattered to the floor. The werewolf’s throat made a painful huffing noise.
Lenin clambered to his feet and picked up the bar, swinging it about furiously.
“Stop it!” Daniel cried.
“He doesn’t get to make all our decisions! We’re going to get this man out of there!”
Falstaff was standing, bent over and breathless. “You... under... est... imate him. Henry... Henry come to the window.”
The werewolf’s face appeared, wide-eyed and panting. “Yes yes yes...”
“Would you hurt us if we let you out?”
The werewolf rolled his eyes. “Noooo... but I might eat you. You might taste good. If you tasted good I might not stop. Do you taste good? And that one?” He glanced in Gandhi’s direction. “Would he taste as good as a child?”
“We can’t, we can’t just leave him like this!” Gandhi cried.
“You can visit him, talk to him. As I do. You just can’t let him out. We won’t leave him alone, we’ll visit him more often, but we won’t let him out.”
Ubo Page 17