Lycanthropos (50 page)

Weyrauch strode angrily into the barracks, but he
waited until the guard had shut the door from without before
running over to Kaldy and grabbing him by the throat. He struggled to restrain himself from indulging in a fit of what he
believed would be impotent fury.

The young man was wan and thin and ill. His face was
covered with scabs and his matted hair was crawling with lice. When Kaldy smiled, Weyrauch noticed that he was
missing some teeth.

Weyrauch released him and stepped back. "Do you know
what you've done to me?!" he shouted.

Kaldy laughed softly. "A rather silly question under the circumstances, don't you think?"

"I have killed, Kaldy, I have killed
!"
Weyrauch
screamed. "I have sunk into the darkness and awakened with
blood on my hands and human flesh between my teeth! How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?!"

Kaldy shook his head. "I haven't done anything to you,
Herr Doctor.
You did
it all to yourself."

"You
bit
me, you maniac!"

"Yes," he agreed, "and I am terribly sorry about that."

"Sorry! You're
sorry!"

"Yes, but I really had very little choice in the matter," Kaldy said pensively. "When I saw the sign on your brow, I had to bite you. I simply could not stop myself. The urge to inflict the curse upon others may have some divine injunction at its root. I tend to believe that mankind
always needs physical expressions of abstract ideas, to give
substance to the insubstantial, to give form to the..."

"What in God's name are you talking about?!" Weyrauch
shouted. "Kaldy, you did this thing to me, and you must take
it away, take it back, make it stop, make me well!"

Kaldy shook his head sadly. "I cannot."

"You must!" he screamed. "You must!"

"I cannot." Kaldy repeated. "You must discover the means
of your liberation all by yourself, and it must come from
within your own being, not from my words. True, there are some things I must tell you, so that you can begin to
understand. But your salvation cannot come from me or from anyone else. It must come from within your own heart."

Weyrauch's face grew red with rage. "You stand there so
smug and so calm and self-confident, knowing that I can't force you to help me, knowing that you cannot be injured and cannot be killed…!"

"Ah, but I
can
be killed, Herr Doctor," Kaldy smiled. "At last, at long last, I can die. In fact, I suspect that I am going to the gas chamber today."

"The gas chamber!" Weyrauch said, his eyes widening and a mad hope surging up in his breast. "The gas chamber? You
will be killed in the gas chamber?" Kaldy nodded. "We can be
killed by gas! We can be killed by gas!"

"No, Herr Doctor, wait! You misunderstand me! I must
explain something to you, I must tell..." Kaldy began, but
Weyrauch had run from the room before the sentence could be
finished. Kaldy sighed and shook his head sadly.
I do not envy you the next few thousand years, Herr Doctor
, he
thought as the guard entered and he himself was pushed from
the room.

Weyrauch accosted a passing soldier and demanded, "The inmates' uniforms! Where do you keep the inmates' uniforms?"

The soldier appraised him coldly. "What are you doing here? No civilians are allowed..."

"I am here with the permission of your commander," Weyrauch shouted, "Now tell me where you keep the inmates'
uniforms!"

"Behind this building, in a pile," the soldier replied,
perplexed by the question and annoyed at its tone. "We have
them strip before...before they are deloused, and we pile the uniforms up in the back for use by future prisoners."
He watched as the oddly frantic man ran from him and made
for the back of the building.

Weyrauch found the towering pile of dirty, insect infested uniforms and grabbed a set at random. He tore off his own clothing, threw the uniform on, and then ran madly
back out toward the center of the camp. Two guards saw what they assumed to be a prisoner attempting to escape and they
fired at him, believing that they had missed when the running figure did not fall to the ground. They grabbed Weyrauch and one of them clubbed his face with the rifle butt.

"Not
me,"
Weyrauch told them slyly. "You won't put
me
into the gas chamber!" Which, of course, is precisely what
they then proceeded to do.

Weyrauch was ordered to strip, and he stripped. He was ordered to stand in line with a hundred other men to await
delousing, and he stood in line. And when the heavy iron door of the gas chamber swung open, he pushed ahead of the
others to get inside.

The death room was filled to capacity, naked bodies pressed against each other, whimpers and moans and the sounds of weeping filling the small space. As the door clanged shut and the bolt was thrown, Weyrauch rubbed his
hands together nervously and whispered, "Be with Thy child, O
Lord, in the hour of his death, and send Thy holy angels
to..." He stopped his prayer as he saw Janos Kaldy not five
feet away from him. Weyrauch tried to push his way over to him, but found that he could not move through the ocean of
flesh, so he merely cried, "Poison gas, Kaldy, poison gas!" and laughed insanely. His words sparked an upsurge of panic
among the other men in the gas chamber, and they began to scream and those who were near the door began to claw desperately at the thick iron with their splintering fingernails, as if they could dig their way through the metal with their bare hands. And then they smelled the gas as the pellets of Zyklon-B cyanide dropped into the chamber and were dissolved from solid into gas by the body heat of the victims. Then their panic
collapsed into madness.

Janos Kaldy stood as if he were alone, neither hearing nor seeing anything around him as the gas entered and the
frenzy grew. He was thinking about the last thing he had seen before he walked down the stairs into the gas chamber.
Kaldy had seen the flag fluttering high above the guard towers, the red flag with the white circle which enclosed the black swastika, now the dark symbol of the new barbarism, once the mystic signature of Zoroaster.

"Ahura Mazda," he prayed in the long dead tongue of ancient Persia, "Great God of all truth, author of all
mercies and destroyer of all daevas, I, Isfendir, the son of
Kuriash, most unworthy priest, most pitiable of Your children, call upon You now in this, the hour of my departure from this life. I have conquered the evil within me, great and good Ahura, and I have battled the evil without. I pray that in Your infinite mercy, You will forgive me my weakness and my cowardice and my sin. Take me in Your arms, O Lord of the Ages. Take me in Your arms, and give me rest, and give me peace." And then he said, "And I
pray that my great and good master Dzardrusha be given leave
to greet me when I leave this world, and see me safely across the Bridge of the Separator."

Janos Kaldy, Janus Chaldian, Ianus Chaldaeus, Isfendir the son of Kuriash, closed his eyes and smiled.

And then, inhaling deeply, he drank death.

Theirs was a friendship of many years, and it had seemed only fitting that they should meet in
Cracow
,
Poland
, on this anniversary, for it was there that they had first met a half-century before.

William Henry Pratt had been a callow youth back then, barely into his twenties, and
Creighton Hull had been little
older. It had been chance which had thrown them together, young Billy Pratt from Syracuse, New York and young Creigh Hull from Sandwich, near Canterbury, England. The Allies in the Second World War did not as a matter of practice lend each other personnel, but when the Russians found themselves short of medics as they drove ruthlessly into Poland, the British and the Americans both willingly placed some of theirs under temporary Soviet command. Allied solidarity, and all that.

Thus it was that Corporal Creighton Hull, a first year medical student until he went off to fight for King and Country, found himself in the company of Corporal William Pratt in October of 1944. They had met and, as two English-speakers in a sea of Russian voices, had become friends, and had
remained friends over the long years, exchanging letters and
phone calls and visits to London and New York. And when Pratt had suggested that they and their wives meet in Cracow on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, Hull had
cheerfully agreed.

Bill Pratt's wife Martha had always seemed to get along
well with Creigh Hull's wife Doris, and so the four had
spent a pleasant week together in Cracow. They were old now,
their children grown, their careers behind them. Pratt had sold his tool and dye works five years ago and was now enjoying the fruits of his long labors, while Hull had retired from medical practice five years earlier. As they sat in the popular Cherubino restaurant on Tomasza Street and drank glasses of rich, frothy Polish beer, Martha and Doris exchanged bemused looks of affectionate toleration as their husbands insisted upon telling them war stories they had
both heard a hundred times.

Pratt was in the middle of one of his favorite anecdotes
when he noticed that Hull was neither paying attention to him nor adding the little details which Pratt customarily left out. He watched his old friend's face as he looked
toward the window of the restaurant, watched as Hull frowned and muttered, "I
say
!"

"What is it, Creigh?" Pratt asked.

"Billy, look over there, at the chap outside the
window."

Hull was sitting with his back to the front of the restaurant, and so he turned his chair around slightly in
order to search in the direction his friend had indicated. "Where, Creigh? I don't see anything."

"There, Billy, just there, in the corner. Look at him. Look at his face." Billy moved his gaze to the edge of the window and then both saw the man to whom Hull was referring and understood
immediately the reason for his friend's reaction. "Well,
I'll
be damned," he whispered.

"Isn't
it...
that's him, isn't it?" Hull asked.

Pratt shook his head. "No," he said with finality after
a few moments. "Looks a lot like him, but it can't be the
same guy."

Martha and Doris followed their husbands' eyes and they too looked at the lone figure who was staring into the restaurant from the street outside. He was a basically nondescript man, his features unremarkable, his physical appearance average in every way. His clothes were old and ragged, and he looked much like one of the lost, lonely men
who wander the streets of many cities, men with broken minds
and cirrhotic livers, men whom their societies had cast out and ground into the dust, men whose beds were the gutters and whose homes were doorways. Martha had seen such men on New York's Bowery, and Doris had seen such men in London's East End. "Oh, the poor thing," Martha clucked.

"Do you suppose he's hungry, Creighton?" Doris asked, turning to her husband. "Perhaps we should see that he gets
some food." She looked back out at the pathetic figure who was staring into the restaurant with large sad, envious eyes, watching the cheerful conviviality within as if it were part of a world in which he had no place, a world of
simple human pleasures, a world of belonging and acceptance
and friendship. It was as if he were standing outside the universe itself and looking in from an empty, fathomless void at things which he could never really have, at the
simple commonplaces of human life which he could never really know. And before Hull could respond to his wife's
suggestion, the sad-eyed man turned and disappeared into the crowd on the busy Cracow street.

Pratt turned back to the table,
shaking his head. "Looks a hell of lot like him, Creigh,
I'll
give you that. But it couldn't be the same guy."

"No," Hull agreed slowly. "No, I suppose not."

"I mean, it was fifty years ago, Creigh! He'd be in his
nineties by now, and that poor soul out on the street
doesn't look a day over forty-five."

Hull laughed. "Of course, Billy, you're right. It just
struck me, that's all. They look so much alike..."

"Sure," Pratt laughed, "and we both have a crystal clear
memory of the face of a man we both saw for an hour a half-century ago, right?"

"Good point, old fellow," Hull replied, joining his friend's laughter. "Good point."

Martha and Doris looked at each other and then Martha
asked, "Do I suspect another war story coming out of this?"

Hull and Pratt both shook their heads. "It isn't the
kind of story to tell after dinner," the Englishman replied.
"It isn't pleasant, and it isn't funny."