Amish Vampires in Space (76 page)

• • •

The place was named the Nachthaus because no matter what time of day it was, it always seemed dark inside and out. The Nachthaus had an official German name, what might be loosely translated in English as the
reclamation center
. It was not your standard Nazi concentration camp; it was too cramped to function as a full fledged death camp. Instead, its limited facilities were directed at extracting information from enemy agents and torturing select dissidents from the eastern front. That may be the reason it’s not as well known as some of the others, but for those who knew about it, it was feared above all others.

The Reich established the Nachthaus not far to the northwest of Ploiesti, Romania. Ploiesti was an important industrial and energy hub in Romania, capable of supporting Operation Barbarossa, the German codename for its offensive against Russia.

The Nachthaus was a short drive from Ploiesti. One moment we were driving past factories and oil refineries, and the next we were plunged into a primeval Romanian forest in the foothills of an eastern arm of the Carpathians. It was as if we were catapulted out of civilization, even by 1940s’ standards. This forest seemed to have a soul, and one time I thought I saw its face. I could feel it, even when we were driving through.

The forest’s soul matched its darkness. Something, I think, had fled to the wood to escape the onslaught of western civilization with its materialism, science, progress, and rationalism. It hid there in the hazy fog of perpetual night among the primordial trees, the rotting undergrowth, creeping vines, and elemental terrain, untarnished by humanity for centuries, unacquainted with ax or saw.

I felt it my first trip to the Nachthaus. I watched the forest pass by out the back windows of the Mercedes I rode in, and I felt it looking back at me. When you brought me back here yesterday, I looked for it. After all these years, it was still there, and grinning back at me. I heard Robert Frost speak gently in my mind: The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

At the deepest part of the wood, the Nachthaus appears like a stunted castle, right at the foothills of the mountains. From what I gathered of the history of the place, it began as a mining camp. There are probably still some spent shafts behind these walls. In a way, it became our
Volksgemeinschaft
. The Nazis added a Bavarian touch to the camp and for some reason cut stone right out of the side of the mountain to build these interior walls.

The thickness of the canopy and the constant fog create dusk during the day and the darkest of nights at night: black, foggy, starless night. The perfect place for something to hide.

I arrived at the Nachthaus in December of ’41 not long after Romania joined the Axis powers. When I stepped out of the Mercedes and straightened my Nazi gray uniform, my anxiety was confirmed.

My black jackboots crackled in the gravel as I pivoted around, absorbing first impressions of my new post. With my first sight of the Nachthaus I attempted to locate the all-encompassing preternatural dread I sensed riding through the wood. It was pretty easy. I kept a Luger and an officer dagger on my belt, but they seemed woefully human in sight of the forest.

The one-lane dirt path winding through the forest fed into a hundred-foot diameter circular gravel lot that fronted the compound. Our driver snaked around lofty conifers that drooped their lower limbs over the roof of the Mercedes. All of a sudden, the compound materialized, but there was no real clearing.

The trees were cleared within ten feet of the entrance to the Nachthaus, which allowed a decent view of the compound’s face. It was a bulgy face of dull stones, some of them massive, protruding from the foot of the mountain. It reminded me of the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s face.

Its complexion was marred by moss and lichen, and the entranceway at the bottom and center of the face was a gaping black maw. The forested mountainside rose into a murky haze above the Nachthaus, giving it the impression of a forest god descending in judgment upon its realm.

The Hitler youth had instilled in me that members of the Aryan race, and specifically those members of the Aryan race who were Nazis, were intrepid conquerors, members of a super race that had banished fear from their hearts. I learned firsthand it wasn’t true, crackling in the gravel outside the Nachthaus.

The noonday dusk unnerved me, and I gathered one last first impression: the oppressive humidity, the limited visibility from the dense forest and the low level mist, the smell of compost in the dampness, and the utter quiet.

Except the quiet was not utterly quiet. It was odd that there were no birds chirping, no howling of forest denizens, no wind coursing through the trees. But there was, and always would be, this faint groaning, as if all the trees of the forest were bending at once, their trunks laboring not to snap in two. This constant low moan would haunt me as time passed but, as disturbing as it was, it was never as bad as the scratching.

I followed my escort toward the cavernous entrance of the Nachthaus. We passed two personnel carriers, knobby-wheeled trucks with the military green canopy over the bed. I adjusted my gray Nazi cap, fingering the pewter emblem of an eagle that rested above the cap’s black visor. I straightened my formal uniform by tugging at my jacket right above the beltline in a downward motion. The starched jacket was reassuring through my black gloves. I shouldered my backpack of chemist equipment, picked up my travel case of extra uniforms, which held a stash of classic literary works forbidden by the Nazis, and soldiered on.

When we reached the aperture leading inside, I tilted my head skyward to note the transition of the sky to the stone ceiling of the Nachthaus overhead. It invoked a sensation of going from dark to darker to darkest, from hopelessness to despair.

Outside, the forest moaned.

• • •

At the end of the twenty-foot, unlit cave, which may have very well been an adit, a sentry flanked either side of a great iron plate blocking the passageway. The uneven curvature of the cave rippled along the iron door, but the floor was fairly level and I detected a groove cut into the rock of the cave floor into which the door was set.

My escort pounded the door three times and barked out a password. The door began to inch open, scraping against the floor as it slid into the cave wall on the far side from where we stood.

It stopped after three feet, and we entered single file through the portal. The iron plate seemed to be about three inches thick. Two guards on the inside rested against a makeshift gate opener to my left. It was a large wooden wheel, much like a ship’s wheel on a pirate schooner, connected by ropes to a pulley system that facilitated the opening and shutting of the iron plate door. As we shuffled past, the guards began to turn the wheel and the iron door scraped shut. A thick
clank
reverberated through the cave as it latched into place.

We were greeted by the tallest man I had seen up to that point in my life. He introduced himself as Sergeant Major Adalbert Falke. He pronounced the surname with two syllables. He must have been six-eleven, and over seven feet tall with his hat.

He saluted with a hand that resembled a tennis racket and his voice was so low, but soft, that it sounded like he had a pillowcase lodged in his throat. He may have been even taller, since he seemed to be stooping, with a noticeable curvature in his spine that forced his head out in front of his body like a diplodocus. His nose was shaped like a butterknife, with deep-set, widely spaced eye sockets to the sides. Oddly enough, I felt I had known him my entire life, yet was unable to describe him clearly.

“Colonel Hayner wishes to see you without delay,” Falke said. Hayner’s SS title, Standartenführer, exited crisply out of Falke’s mouth, which was surprising given the size of his lips. He rotated laboriously and sauntered ahead through the cave like a giant sloth, his hands moving forward and back in cadence with his footfalls like enormous pendulums. Stringy brown hair flowed from under his cap down a little past his shoulders.

My escort dropped off to the side, and I followed Falke alone, slowing my usual gait to match Falke’s awkward, loping stride.

The walls were roughly hewn, if not natural, and supported every ten feet or so by enormous columns. Water dripped from the ceiling at intermittent points along our nominally descending trek, pooling in depressions in the floor. The cave was gloomy, sparsely lit by single 40-watt light bulbs at least twenty-five feet apart, suspended by a single electrical cord stapled to the ceiling. It was generally cavernous.

Two hundred feet in, the shaft was blocked by rubble. Falke steered himself through an adjoining passageway on the left, about thirty feet before the rubble. The floor was covered by wooden planks constructed like a makeshift pier, or raised boardwalk. It sounded hollow underneath, and Falke’s footfalls echoed through the cave. The passageway smelled like a mixture of sewage and a chemical disinfectant, which I recognized as a chlorine derivative.

The passageway was bordered on both sides by deep alcoves, rooms almost, quarantined by chain-link fences and, in some cases, wrought-iron gates. Were they storage areas? Why the fence and iron?

I halted in front of one of the wrought-iron gates. “What’s stored here?”

“Don’t mind the trappings.” Falke continued to lumber forward, the echoes from his footfalls matching the rhythmic cadence of his arms.

I set my travel case and backpack down and stepped off the wooden walkway, splattering a small pool of water onto my pants leg. I shook my leg in a vain attempt to dry myself. Cupping my hands around my eyes to prevent what little light there was in the passage from ruining my view, I pressed my face against the iron gate.

I strained to see through the bars, but to no avail. It was too dark in the recesses of the chamber, though my mind began to play tricks on me. It conjured a nebulous apparition floating in the darkness, more or less expanding and contracting in concert with Falke’s diminishing footfalls. Then as my eyes adjusted the apparition dissipated and I thought I could make out movement, but I was mistaken. There was nothing in the alcove.

My biology professor at Leipzig University had claimed that the tendency for people to imagine forms where none exist is an evolutionary heritage passed on to us from our ancestors. It always struck me as a “just-so” evolutionary story.

When I pulled my hands from the gate, a fleck of rusted iron swept into my eye. It was excruciating. I fell to my knees, drenching them in the water. I rubbed my hands against my eye, trying to work the fleck out. It burned. Finally, it dislodged against my nose, and I flicked it off. My eye was watery and unfocused. I rubbed it against my sleeve.

When my eye came back into focus, there was a face pressed against the gate inches from my own. An arm darted from between the iron bars and grabbed my jacket.

I fell onto my rear in the water and pushed with my feet, propelling myself backward onto the walkway.

The face was horrified. The eyes were vacant, and its throat was convulsing, as if it were trying to scream—but no sound came out. It was covered with grime. Abrasions were forming on its cheeks from it rubbing against the iron bars. The man’s hair was scraggly and protruding from his head in all directions.

At the corner of the man’s right eye, something ever so slight began to leak out. I thought it was a tear at first, but then I realized it couldn’t be. It was glowing and pulsating. In a moment of dreamlike insight, I understood it as a manifestation of abject despair. It sucked back into his eye and the filthy man disappeared back into the shadows.

In his place stepped a gypsy girl, as if floating out of the darkness into the muted light of the passageway, which cast faint shadows from the bars against her form.

She appeared as a girl, but she could have been a full-grown gypsy princess. She exuded an aura of maturity, as if she were an ancient soul, yet she stood only three feet tall. Her bangs reached down her forehead to her eyebrows and transitioned without seam to manicured shoulder length brown hair, combed so perfectly that no one hair overlapped another.

She wore a checkered blue knee-length dress with a faded white sash tied in a bow around her waist. There was not a spot of dirt anywhere on her. Her skin was a light olive complexion, and she was as flawless as a china doll. But it was the eyes…

The eyes were astonishing. They had to be the size of half-dollars. It wasn’t possible, but they were, and her three-foot frame accentuated them. I have never seen anything more strikingly beautiful in my entire life, and yet nothing more tremendously unsettling. It was an encounter with the numinous.

Each eye was a radiant blue that filled almost the entire eye socket, except for the outermost extremities in the corners and the slits right above and below her eyelashes. There was not enough light in the passageway to make her eyes shine that radiant blue. But they
shone
.

In the miniscule space around her eyes, starlight broke through in a pulsating resplendence. It was as if she had a strobe light in her brain and someone had cut slits around her eyes with the finest scalpel to let the light out. I’m convinced I’ll see those eyes on my deathbed, and I’m certain God will not be pleased with what later transpired.

Because of those eyes, I’m certain there’s a God. Something that exceedingly beautiful must have a creator, and only a God could create something that exceedingly beautiful. They say that God is the highest beauty: the beatific vision. If that’s true, He’s infinitely indescribable.

As I sat on the walkway, I felt the water soaking into my trousers, but it was a distant sensation. The eyes were everywhere, and all things to me.

I vaguely felt myself rising as Falke’s giant hands lifted me and my things off the walkway, and the gypsy girl floated back into the darkness. Before she disappeared, I heard these words:
Deus et natua non faciunt frusta. Ex malo bonum.