by Stephen King
“School’s cool.”
“Going to be on the honor roll again?”
“Sure.” Actually, he thought his grades might slip a notch this first quarter. He had been spending a lot of time with Dussander, and when he wasn’t actually with the old kraut, he was thinking about the things Dussander had told him. Once or twice he had dreamed about the things Dussander had told him. But it was nothing he couldn’t handle.
“Apt pupil,” she said, ruffling his shaggy blonde hair. “How’s that sandwich?”
“Good,” he said.
“Would you make me one and bring it into my office?”
“Can’t,” he said, getting up. “I promised Mr. Denker I’d come over and read to him for an hour or so.”
“Are you still on Robinson Crusoe?”
“Nope.” He showed her the spine of a thick book he had bought in a junkshop for twenty cents. “Tom Jones.”
“Ye gods and little fishes! It’ll take you the whole school-year to get through that, Toddy-baby. Couldn’t you at least find an abridged edition, like with Crusoe!”
“Probably, but he wanted to hear all of this one. He said so.”
“Oh.” She looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. It was rare for her to be so demonstrative, and it made Todd a little uneasy. “You’re a peach to be taking so much of your spare time to read to him. Your father and I think it’s just . . . just exceptional.”
Todd cast his eyes down modestly.
“And to not want to tell anybody,” she said. “Hiding your light under a bushel.”
“Oh, the kids I hang around with—they’d probably think I was some kind of weirdo,” Todd said, smiling modestly down at the floor. “All that good shit.”
“Don’t say that,” she admonished absently. Then: “Do you think Mr. Denker would like to come over and have dinner with us some night?”
“Maybe,” Todd said vaguely. “Listen, I gotta put an egg in my shoe and beat it.”
“Okay. Supper at six-thirty. Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“Your father’s got to work late so it’ll just be me and thee again, okay?”
“Crazy, baby.”
She watched him go with a fond smile, hoping there was nothing in Tom Jones he shouldn’t be reading; he was only thirteen. She didn’t suppose there was. He was growing up in a society where magazines like Penthouse were available to anyone with a dollar and a quarter, or to any kid who could reach up to the top shelf of the magazine rack and grab a quick peek before the clerk could shout for him to put that up and get lost. In a society that seemed to believe most of all in the creed of hump thy neighbor, she didn’t think there could be much in a book two hundred years old to screw up Todd’s head—although she supposed the old man might get off on it a little. And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he’ll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.
And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedaling up the street on his Schwinn. We did okay by the lad, she thought, turning to make her sandwich. Damned if we didn’t do okay.
4
October, 1974.
Dussander had lost weight. They sat in the kitchen, the shopworn copy of Tom Jones between them on the oilcloth-covered table (Todd, who tried never to miss a trick, had purchased the Cliff’s Notes on the book with part of his allowance and had carefully read the entire summary against the possibility that his mother or father might ask him questions about the plot). Todd was eating a Ring Ding he had bought at the market. He had bought one for Dussander, but Dussander hadn’t touched it. He only looked at it morosely from time to time as he drank his bourbon. Todd hated to see anything as tasty as Ring Dings go to waste. If he didn’t eat it pretty quick, Todd was going to ask him if he could have it.
“So how did the stuff get to Patin?” he asked Dussander.
“In railroad cars,” Dussander said. “In railroad cars labelled medical supplies. It came in long crates that looked like coffins. Fitting, I suppose. The inmates off-loaded the crates and stacked them in the infirmary. Later, our own men stacked them in the storage sheds. They did it at night. The storage sheds were behind the showers.”
“Was it always Zyklon-B?”
“No, from time to time we would be sent something else. Experimental gases. The High Command was always interested in improving efficiency. Once they sent us a gas code-named PEGASUS. A nerve-gas. Thank God they never sent it again. It—” Dussander saw Todd lean forward, saw those eyes sharpen, and he suddenly stopped and gestured casually with his gas station premium glass. “It didn’t work very well,” he said. “It was . . . quite boring.”
But Todd was not fooled, not in the least. “What did it do?”
“It killed them—what did you think it did, made them walk on water? It killed them, that’s all.”
‘Tell me.”
“No,” Dussander said, now unable to hide the horror he felt. He hadn’t thought of PEGASUS in . . . how long? Ten years? Twenty? “I won’t tell you! I refuse!”
“Tell me,” Todd repeated, licking chocolate icing from his fingers. “Tell me or you know what.”
Yes, Dussander thought. I know what. Indeed I do, you putrid little monster.
“It made them dance,” he said reluctantly.
“Dance?”
“Like the Zyklon-B, it came in through the shower-heads. And they . . . they began to leap about. Some were screaming. Most of them were laughing. They began to vomit, and to . . . to defecate helplessly.”
“Wow,” Todd said. “Shit themselves, huh?” He pointed at the Ring Ding on Dussander’s plate. He had finished his own. “You going to eat that?”
Dussander didn’t reply. His eyes were hazed with memory. His face was far away and cold, like the dark side of a planet which does not rotate. Inside his mind he felt the queerest combination of revulsion and—could it be?—nostalgia?
“They began to twitch all over and to make high, strange sounds in their throats. My men . . . they called PEGASUS the Yodeling Gas. At last they all collapsed and just lay there on the floor in their own filth, they lay there, yes, they lay there on the concrete, screaming and yodeling, with bloody noses. But I lied, boy. The gas didn’t kill them, either because it wasn’t strong enough or because we couldn’t bring ourselves to wait long enough. I suppose it was that. Men and women like that could not have lived long. Finally I sent in five men with rifles to end their agonies. It would have looked bad on my record if it had shown up, I’ve no doubt of that—it would have looked like a waste of cartridges at a time when the Fuehrer had declared every cartridge a national resource. But those five men I trusted. There were times, boy, when I thought I would never forget the sound they made. The yodeling sound. The laughing.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Todd said. He finished Dussander’s Ring Ding in two bites. Waste not, want not, Todd’s mother said on the rare occasions when Todd complained about left-overs. “That was a good story, Mr. Dussander. You always tell them good. Once I get you going.”
Todd smiled at him. And incredibly—certainly not because he wanted to—Dussander found himself smiling back.
5
November, 1974.
Dick Bowden, Todd’s father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named Lloyd Bochner. He—Bowden, not Bochner—was thirty-eight. He was a thin, narrow man who liked to dress in Ivy League–style shirts and solid-color suits, usually dark. When he was on a construction site, he wore khakis and a hard-hat that was a souvenir of his Peace Corps days, when he had helped to design and build two dams in Africa. When he was working in his study at home, he wore half-glasses that had a way of slipping down to the end of his nose and making him look like a college dean. He was wearing these glasses now as he tapped his son’s first-quarter report card against his desk’s gleaming glass top.
“One B. Four
C’s. One D. A D, for Christ’s sake! Todd, your mother’s not showing it, but she’s really upset.”
Todd dropped his eyes. He didn’t smile. When his dad swore, that wasn’t exactly the best of news.
“My God, you’ve never gotten a report like this. A D in Beginning Algebra? What is this?”
“I don’t know, Dad.” He looked humbly at his knees.
“Your mother and I think that maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time with Mr. Denker. Not hitting the books enough. We think you ought to cut it down to weekends, slugger. At least until we see where you’re going academically . . .”
Todd looked up, and for a single second Bowden thought he saw a wild, pallid anger in his son’s eyes. His own eyes widened, his fingers clenched on Todd’s buff-colored report card . . . and then it was just Todd, looking at him openly if rather unhappily. Had that anger really been there? Surely not. But the moment had unsettled him, made it hard for him to know exactly how to proceed. Todd hadn’t been mad, and Dick Bowden didn’t want to make him mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and Dick wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, was it? . . . and besides, that had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his family life). That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it had to be in a cockamamie world where murderers went unpunished, high school kids skin-popped heroin, and junior high schoolers—kids Todd’s age—turned up with VD.
“No, Dad, please don’t do that. I mean, don’t punish Mr. Denker for something that’s my fault. I mean, he’d be lost without me. I’ll do better. Really. That algebra . . . it just threw me to start with. But I went over to Ben Tremaine’s, and after we studied together for a few days, I started to get it. I just . . . I dunno, I sorta choked at first.”
“I think you’re spending too much time with him,” Bowden said, but he was weakening. It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and what he said about punishing the old man for Todd’s falling-off . . . goddammit, it made sense. The old man looked forward to his visits so much.
“That Mr. Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,” Todd said. “Lots of kids got D’s. Three or four got F’s.”
Bowden nodded thoughtfully.
“I won’t go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.” He had read his father’s eyes. “And instead of going out for anything at school, I’ll stay after every day and study. I promise.”
“You really like the old guy that much?”
“He’s really neat,” Todd said sincerely.
“Well . . . okay. We’ll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big improvement in your marks come January, you understand me? I’m thinking of your future. You may think junior high’s too soon to start thinking about that, but it’s not. Not by a long chalk.” As his mother liked to say Waste not, want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.
“I understand, Dad,” Todd said gravely. Man-to-man stuff.
“Get out of here and give those books a workout then.” He pushed his half-glasses up on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.
Todd’s smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. “Right on, Dad!”
Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a million. And that hadn’t been anger on Todd’s face. For sure. Pique, maybe . . . but not that high-voltage emotion he had at first thought he’d seen there. If Todd was that mad, he would have known; he could read his son like a book. It had always been that way.
Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent over it.
6
December, 1974.
The face that came in answer to Todd’s insistent finger on the bell was haggard and yellowed. The hair, which had been lush in July, had now begun to recede from the bony brow; it looked lusterless and brittle. Dussander’s body, thin to begin with, was now gaunt . . . although, Todd thought, he was nowhere near as gaunt as the inmates who had once been delivered into his hands.
Todd’s left hand had been behind his back when Dussander came to the door. Now he brought it out and handed a wrapped package to Dussander. “Merry Christmas!” he yelled.
Dussander had cringed from the box; now he took it with no expression of pleasure or surprise. He handled it gingerly, as if it might contain explosive. Beyond the porch, it was raining. It had been raining off and on for almost a week, and Todd had carried the box inside his coat. It was wrapped in gay foil and ribbon.
“What is it?” Dussander asked without enthusiasm as they went to the kitchen.
“Open it and see.”
Todd took a can of Coke from his jacket pocket and put it on the red and white checked oilcloth that covered the kitchen table. “Better pull down the shades,” he said confidentially.
Distrust immediately leaked onto Dussander’s face. “Oh? Why?”
“Well . . . you can never tell who’s lookin,” Todd said, smiling. “Isn’t that how you got along all those years? By seeing the people who might be lookin before they saw you?”
Dussander pulled down the kitchen shades. Then he poured himself a glass of bourbon. Then he pulled the bow off the package. Todd had wrapped it the way boys so often wrap Christmas packages—boys who have more important things on their minds, things like football and street hockey and the Friday Nite Creature Feature you’ll watch with a friend who’s sleeping over, the two of you wrapped in a blanket and crammed together on one end of the couch, laughing. There were a lot of ragged corners, a lot of uneven seams, a lot of Scotch tape. It spoke of impatience with such a womanly thing.
Dussander was a little touched in spite of himself. And later, when the horror had receded a little, he thought: I should have known.
It was a uniform. An SS uniform. Complete with jackboots.
He looked numbly from the contents of the box to its cardboard cover: PETER’S QUALITY COSTUME CLOTHIERS—AT THE SAME LOCATION SINCE 1951!
“No,” he said softly. “I won’t put it on. This is where it ends, boy. I’ll die before I put it on.”
“Remember what they did to Eichmann,” Todd said solemnly. “He was an old man and he had no politics. Isn’t that what you said? Besides, I saved the whole fall for it. It cost over eighty bucks, with the boots thrown in. You didn’t mind wearing it in 1944, either. Not at all.”
“You little bastard!” Dussander raised one fist over his head. Todd didn’t flinch at all. He stood his ground, eyes shining.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Go ahead and touch me. You just touch me once.”
Dussander lowered the hand. His lips were quivering. “You are a fiend from hell,” he muttered.
“Put it on,” Todd invited.
Dussander’s hands went to the tie of his robe and paused there. His eyes, sheeplike and begging, looked into Todd’s. “Please,” he said. “I am an old man. No more.”
Todd shook his head slowly but firmly. His eyes were still shining. He liked it when Dussander begged. The way they must have begged him once. The inmates at Patin.
Dussander let the robe fall to the floor and stood naked except for his slippers and his boxer shorts. His chest was sunken, his belly slightly bloated. His arms were scrawny old man’s arms. But the uniform, Todd thought. The uniform will make a difference.
Slowly, Dussander took the tunic out of the box and began to put it on.
• • •
Ten minutes later he stood fully dressed in the SS uniform. The cap was slightly askew, the shoulders slumped, but still the death’s-head insignia stood out clearly. Dussander had a dark dignity—at least in Todd’s eyes—that he had not possessed earlier. In spite of his slump, in spite of the cockeyed angle of his feet, Todd was pleased. For the first time Dussander looked to Todd as Todd believed he should look. Older, yes. Defeated, certainly. But
in uniform again. Not an old man spinning away his sunset years watching Lawrence Welk on a cruddy black and white TV with tinfoil on the rabbit ears, but Kurt Dussander, The Blood-Fiend of Patin.
As for Dussander, he felt disgust, discomfort . . . and a mild, sneaking sense of relief. He partly despised this latter emotion, recognizing it as the truest indicator yet of the psychological domination the boy had established over him. He was the boy’s prisoner, and every time he found he could live through yet another indignity, every time he felt that mild relief, the boy’s power grew. And yet he was relieved. It was only cloth and buttons and snaps . . . and it was a sham at that. The fly was a zipper; it should have been buttons. The marks of rank were wrong, the tailoring sloppy, the boots a cheap grade of imitation leather. It was only a trumpery uniform after all, and it wasn’t exactly killing him, was it? No. It—
“Straighten your cap!” Todd said loudly.
Dussander blinked at him, startled.
“Straighten your cap, soldier!”
Dussander did so, unconsciously giving it that final small insolent twist that had been the trademark of his Oberleutnants—and, sadly wrong as it was, this was an Oberleutnant’s uniform.
“Get those feet together!”
He did so, bringing the heels together with a smart rap, doing the correct thing with hardly a thought, doing it as if the intervening years had slipped off along with his bathrobe.
“Achtung!”
He snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared—really scared. He felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough wit to stop them once they got started. The old man living in genteel poverty was gone. Dussander was here.
Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.
“About face!”
Dussander pivoted neatly, the bourbon forgotten, the torment of the last four months forgotten. He heard his heels click together again as he faced the grease-splattered stove. Beyond it, he could see the dusty parade ground of the military academy where he had learned his soldier’s trade.