Lycanthropos (51 page)

Such a comment served merely to excite the women's curiosity. "Come on. Creighton," Doris said. "We've been
listening for hours to you two talk about blowing people up.
I think our stomachs can take
it."

"And don't be rude," Martha added. "It's very impolite to hint at a story and then not tell
it."

Hull and Pratt glanced at each other and then Pratt
shrugged and said. "Well, you know how Creigh and I
met..."

"Oh, no," Doris muttered. "Not the stolen case of Riesling story!"

"No. no," Pratt said quickly. "I mean the absolute, very
first time we met."

An uneasy silence ensued, for the women knew that their
husbands' first meeting had occurred on that day in January of 1945 when the Soviet forces had battered down the iron
gates to the death camp at Auschwitz, and had discovered to their horror, and then revealed to the horror of the world,
the unspeakable atrocity
which was the soul of the Third Reich. "Yes," Martha said softly. "I remember the things you've told me."

"Well," Hull said, "something very odd happened that day. We saw so much madness that this incident didn't seem that important, but seeing that face reminded me of it."

"Yes." Pratt mused. "I hadn't thought about it for
years."

"You see,"
Hull continued, "when we broke into the camp we found that the Nazis had..." He paused. "I don't know
quite how to say this..."

"Just say it, Creighton." Doris said.

"
Well, when those bastards killed people in the gas chambers, they locked the door, filled the room with the gas, and then waited for fifteen minutes to make sure that everyone inside was dead. Then they'd drain the gas and take the corpses out and incinerate them." He paused, his mind searching back over the years. "They had other prisoners carry the bodies... I can't recall what they called them..."

"
Leichenträger,
" Pratt reminded him. "Corpse carriers."

"Yes, yes, that was
it,"
Hull went on. "Anyway, as the
war neared its end the Nazis...and I know this sounds
insane, but they
were
insane, after all...the Nazis started
to worry that they wouldn't be able to kill enough people, enough Jews and Gypsies and the like, before they were conquered and had to stop. So they started to hurry up and cut corners. Instead of waiting fifteen minutes before opening the gas chamber, they waited five. And instead of burning each body, they just dug enormous mass graves and
piled the bodies in until they were full, and then covered them over with dirt."

"The thing
was,"
Pratt said, "that when we got to the
camp we saw the ground moving very slightly. When
the commander was interrogated by the Russians and they found out about all this, they sent us…"

"And some Russian medics."

"…to investigate the most recent grave. At first we
thought that it was just the earth settling, but then we realized that some of the people the Nazis had buried might not have been quite dead."

Martha closed her eyes and turned away and Doris put her
hand to her mouth. "My God! That's horrible!"

"Yes, yes, horrible indeed," Hull agreed. "So we worked
frantically, all of us, digging down into the graves."

"And that fellow we just saw at the window," Pratt said,
"looked an awful lot like a man I pulled alive out of the earth."

"Couldn't have been him, of course," Hull commented once
more. "He would be in his nineties, as you say."

"And there's more." Pratt took a sip of beer before
continuing. "I helped the poor man over to our
physician-to-be over here," and Hull smiled, "so that Creigh could look him over, check him, and so forth."

"Yes, and he was in remarkable health, all things considered. Pulse, temperature, respiration, blood pressure,
all fine."

"He was watching as the bodies were being taken out of the pit...we forced those damned S.S. to do it, the bastards…and he saw the body of a friend or a relative or something, and he just lost all control. He
ran over and grabbed the corpse and started shaking him and
yelling his name, like he was trying to wake the dead man up
. "

"Yes," Hull recalled. "Kept calling him Charley or Carley, or something like that. Man was stone dead, and he kept shaking him."

"Well,"
Pratt went on, "we led him away and took him
into the infirmary and made him lie down. I mean, you can
imagine the state the poor thing's nerves were in."

"No, I
can't,"
Doris said, "and I pray to God that I never shall."

"I stayed with him, trying to comfort him," Hull said. "I didn't think it would be wise to leave him all by himself. And then he went mad, absolutely stark raving mad."

"I suppose his mind just snapped," Pratt said quietly.

Hull nodded in agreement. "Cause sufficient for that, I would think. He started yelling and screaming and throwing
the furniture around the room, and he even started pummeling
me with his fists. Billy and a Russki pulled him away from me, and then he ran out from the infirmary and rushed
off. Apparently he ran away from the camp."

"I hope someone found him and gave him some help," Pratt said. "He was, as Creigh said, completely out of his mind."

"But why did he attack you, Creighton?" Doris asked. "You were only trying to help
him."

Hull shrugged. "He was mad, my dear, that's all. I was
just trying to comfort him, and the things I said seemed to enrage him."

"Well, what did you say?"

Hull shrugged. "Nothing unusual. Just the sort of things
you'd think you should say to someone who'd been through what that poor devil
had been through." He sipped his beer.
"I just tried to make him understand that he was lucky to be
alive."