Lycanthropos (3 page)

The S.S. troops organized themselves without instruction from their commander, for they had a great deal of experience in the transportation of
prisoners. A single line of people moved through the forest, Germans in back and
front and interspersed through the line. Guns were drawn and held at the ready. Any
Gypsy who attempted to break out of the line and flee into the woods would have been cut down in a matter of seconds. They moved in terrified silence, and the only sounds that broke the stillness of the darkening forest were the voices of
the soldiers as they urged their captives to move along more quickly.

A half-hour passed before they reached the paved road that ran along the
tree line. The dirt pathway that had afforded the Gypsies and their wagons entrance into the presumed safety of the woods ended at the place where the
transport trucks stood waiting by the roadside. As the captives approached, they
heard soft, frightened voices coming from five of the seven trucks, and they realized
that the Germans had been arresting others that night. One of the trucks was only partially filled, and the small group of new prisoners was ushered into it.
Kaldy, Blasko and the old woman everyone called Mother were at the end of the line of people, and when their turns came to climb into the truck, Blasko offered
her his help in getting up into the enclosed, canvas-roofed flatbed. She shook her
head vigorously and began to speak to Blasko in angry tones. The commander approached and said to Kaldy. "Tell that old woman to get into the truck at once,
and tell her to keep her mouth shut."

Kaldy smiled sadly at the old woman and then looked slowly up at the sunless sky, at the first few stars that were beginning to make an appearance. "She will not get into this truck if I am to get into it with her," he said softly. As if his words were a signal to the others of his band, one by one they began to dismount from the transport, slowly and timidly, but with an odd and nervous determination.

The commander smiled. He wagged his finger at the old woman, gesturing
that she should come forward. She hobbled over to him and began to jabber at him
in her strange, incomprehensible tongue. He listened to the sounds she was making
for a few moments, and then he drew his revolver and fired a bullet into her brain.

The Gypsies watched silently as the old woman fell to the ground, as her blood rushed out of the hole in her skull in a stream which shot a full yard up into the air before subsiding into a steady, but less forceful flow. The commander allowed them to watch for a few moments, allowed the point to be made and the
lesson to be learned, and then, smiling coldly, he motioned them back into the truck
with the pistol he still held in his unshaking hand. Slowly they complied. Blasko and Kaldy were the last two to enter the transport, and the wooden rear barrier was
pulled up behind them and locked tight.

The commander motioned to his adjutant, who then began to get the convoy under way as his superior officer walked forward to the first truck and entered the cab. He took a cigarette from his tunic pocket and lighted it as the trucks began to
rumble down the road.
"Herr Hauptmann," the S.S. corporal who was driving the truck asked as the
last rays of the sun disappeared and the clouds parted to reveal the brilliant full
moon, "where will we be taking them?"

It was not, strictly speaking, his driver's place to ask such a question, but the S.S. was a fraternity of particular devotion which tended to make officers a bit more
tolerant of the enthusiasm of their underlings than might have been the case in the
regular army, so the commander chose to answer. "To a detention center in
Budapest
," he replied, "in the
Ragoczy
Palace
. Colonel Schlacht has appropriated it
for our use during this assignment, and it has dungeons which will serve as temporary holding pens. From there, I assume the Gypsies will be shipped off to
one of the camps in
Poland
."

"Labor camps?"

The commander was annoyed at his driver's naiveté. "Let the Slavs labor for
us," he muttered, his irritation evident in his tone, "the Poles and the Czechs and
the Serbs. The Gypsies are like the Jews. There may be certain uses for disease-
ridden vermin, but society is much better off if they are just exterminated."

"Jawohl,
Herr Hauptmann," the corporal agreed.

"Besides," he continued, more to himself than to his driver, "the war is not
going well. After the catastrophe at
Stalingrad
, we are faced with the possibility..."
He did not finish the thought. The possibility of defeat, as the Führer had said so
often, does not exist. "The possibility of a longer war than we had expected. We
must see to the racial purification of
Europe
as quickly as we can. There is no way
of knowing how much longer we will be able to devote energy and personnel to
this task. We are all under orders, direct orders from Himmler, to see to the disposition of as many racial enemies as we can in as short a period of time as is
humanly possible."

"A sacred trust," the S.S. corporal commented.

"Yes, a sacred trust," his commander agreed.

As the convoy rumbled through the dark Hungarian countryside, Janos Kaldy sat silently within the enclosed flatbed of the rear truck. Blasko and the other
Gypsies had withdrawn as far from him as they could manage in the limited space, and the old man removed some flowering twigs from his pocket and held them out in front of him as if they were a shield.

Kaldy was not watching him. He sat motionless as the truck bumped along the uneven roadway, and then, some fifteen minutes after the last rays of the sun had been extinguished by the enveloping night, he sensed the coming of
the change. He felt the image of the beast billowing upward;
his human consciousness turned itself inward and fled from its
own inhuman spawn. Excruciating agony always accompanied the change; but to
consciously confront the hideous darkness within him would have been to invite a madness and a torture too great for any human being to survive. Thus it
was that at that moment, as it had been so many times in the past, his mind sank into the void as the beast arose. Then the agony struck him, and he began to scream; and as he screamed from pain, the other Gypsies screamed in
terror.

The S.S. corporal who was driving the lead truck glanced into the side mirror as the headlights of the rear truck began to flash on and off urgently. "Herr Hauptmann," he said, "something is wrong back there." Even as he spoke he saw the rear truck grind to a halt on the side of the road.

He told his superior what he was seeing in the mirror, and the commander
muttered, "Those damned Gypsies must be attempting to escape. We had better..."
He paused, listening as a strange sound reached his ears from the rear of the
convoy. "What was that?" he asked.

"What, Herr Hauptmann?"

"Listen. Do you hear that?" He strained to listen for a moment and what
sounded like a horrendous scream reached his ears. It was followed immediately by
others, many, many others, screams so loud and bespeaking such abject terror that
they startled the commander and left him momentarily nonplussed. He turned to his driver and said, "Signal the others to stop." The commander waited as the hand signal was given and the convoy came to a halt on the moonlit country road. He
climbed down from the cab and walked back toward the other trucks, from which
his officers were already disembarking. "What was that sound?" he asked them.

"I don't know, Herr Hauptmann." one of them replied. "I heard it also, coming..." His statement was cut off by an eruption of further frenzied screams from the rear of the convoy. The commander drew his weapon and walked quickly back toward the sound. The other S.S. troops followed him, their guns
likewise drawn, ready to teach the Gypsy scum a sorely needed lesson in obedience.

A dark shape leaped from the rear of the most recently filled transport, and
the commander opened fire at it, angry at having his orders disobeyed by his racial
inferiors. The shape, however, did not fall, did not recoil from the sound of the gunfire, seemed untouched by the bullets which at so close a range could not possibly have missed. And then the shape began to run toward the commander,
crouching over, almost but not quite on all fours. The approaching figure emitted a
screech of hate-filled agony at the same moment that the bright light of the full moon enabled the Germans to see the bristling fangs, so white
against the hairy face, the black, moist snout which flared menacingly beneath the
burning yellow eyes, and the long, hirsute hands whose fingers ended in the talons that
were even now stretching out toward the German commander

His men opened fire on the attacker. Side arms, rifles, machine guns, all spat
their burning, molten missiles of destruction at the creature. Bullets thudded audibly as they struck, and still it ran forward, snarling through its
champing fangs. The Gypsies in the trucks jumped out onto the ground and ran in
all directions, fleeing, of course, from the Germans, but fleeing also from the fiend that was even now attacking their captors. The creature's hands swept out and decapitated two soldiers with razor-like claws, and then, without breaking its stride, it grabbed the commander and bore him down to the ground. The
commander opened his mouth to scream, but the scream remained unuttered as the
creature snapped its jaws tight upon the German's throat and ripped it open.

The creature took but a second to swallow the bloody mass of flesh and
cartilage and bone, and then it sprang to its feet and attacked the other soldiers.
They continued to fire at it, they beat it with the butts of their guns, they thrust their bayonets at its hairy body, but it was to no avail. The creature swept about like a murderous whirlwind, disemboweling them, tearing into their throats, swallowing
huge hunks of their flesh, and breaching the dark silence of the night with its
agonized howls of hatred and hunger. The gunfire mingled with the shrieks of the dying and the roars of the creature as the cold, hard ground grew soft and muddy
with blood.

In a very short time the Germans were all dead, the Gypsies had fled into the woods, and the creature had vanished into the darkness. Only the old Gypsy Blasko remained behind. He surveyed the destruction, shook his head, and sighed. He walked slowly and sadly over to one of the trucks and sat down on the running board of the cab. He rubbed his old, weary eyes and then took a pipe from his pocket. He stuffed it full of tobacco,
lighted it, and then relaxed, puffing languidly. Blasko knew that Kaldy would seek him out when the moon set. He would wait until morning, wait until sunrise, wait until Janos Kaldy returned, wait until Janos Kaldy was once
again a human being.

He sat quietly in the darkness, his weathered face reflecting the red glow
from the bowl of his pipe. He was listening to the distant cries of the lost soul who
was his friend and his charge, his enemy and his burden. He reached into the pocket
of his trousers and pulled out a few thin sprigs of the plant with wilted yellow flowers. Holding the wolfsbane pensively, Blasko waited for the dawn.

THE WEREWOLF

 

Die Lust der Vernichtung ist eine
schaffende Lust

(The passion for destruction is a creative passion.)

As a clergyman, Gottfried von Weyrauch spent a good deal of time contemplating the intricacies of sin and righteousness and the meaning and nature of faith.

Weyrauch was an honest man in his own way. When pressed
on the issue, he would be the first to admit that his
devotion to righteousness was only inadequately embodied in his actions. Not that he was sinful in the sense in which
sinfulness is generally understood; he was not an adulterer,
he did not steal or covet, he had honored his parents while they lived and respected their memories now that they were
gone, he did not bear false witness, and he had never taken
a human life. He was a husband, a minister and a doctor of medicine, and he took very seriously the vows of matrimony, the vows of ordination, and the Hippocratic Oath. He was on the surface a reliable, dedicated, introspective,
intelligent, concerned servant of God and his fellow man.
His problem was one which was all too common in the
Third Reich. It was a problem which has been depressingly
common throughout human history. Gottfried von Weyrauch was
a coward.

He knew he was a coward, and the knowledge tortured him
with guilt. He knew that his wife Louisa also knew that he
was a coward, and he had found in recent years that his eyes
had a difficult time meeting hers for any prolonged period of time. He believed that he could see in her face the contempt she felt for him, and his own guilt combined with his wife's contempt to make him a very unhappy man.