Lycanthropos (7 page)

Weyrauch walked closer and, repressing his nausea, looked into the freezer. It was packed full with parts of human bodies: arms, hands, legs, internal organs, wild,
staring eyes set into severed heads whose open mouths had been frozen into death screams, chunks of flesh that
had been torn brutally from human bodies. They were the ripped and raked
and ruined pieces of mutilated corpses.

"Your findings, Doctor?" Schlacht asked, a hint of
amusement in his voice.
What a weakling you are, Gottfried
,
he thought.

Weyrauch leaned closer, feeling the bile rising in his
throat. He looked at the edges of the body parts, at the
length and structure of the scraping wounds. He stepped back
and wiped his brow. "Well, I couldn't be certain, of
course…"

"Of course," Schlacht agreed patiently. "Just give me your impressions. What killed these men?"

Weyrauch sighed. "They were S.S.?"

"Yes. You noticed the shreds of uniform, of course."

"Of course." He paused. "Well, I would have to say, as
strange as it sounds, that these men were torn apart by wild
beasts."

"Precisely the findings of our doctors," Schlacht agreed, and then leaned forward to say in almost
conspiratorial tones, "The problem. Gottfried, is that these
two dozen heavily-armed, well-trained soldiers were killed
by one unarmed man."

Weyrauch stared at Schlacht for a moment and then, at a loss for how to respond to so outrageous an assertion, he said, "That's, uh, remarkable, to be sure."

"It's more than remarkable, Gottfried," Schlacht said, closing the freezer door. "It may very well be a matter of the greatest importance."

"Yes, yes, of course it may, of course it may," Weyrauch
agreed, having not the foggiest notion what Schlacht was talking about.

"Come with me, Gottfried, Louisa. I want you to meet some prisoners." He led them from the room and they followed him as he walked down the corridor. "You need some background to understand why you are here and what I want from you."

"At last, the truth," Louisa said. "And why doesn't it surprise me that you have people imprisoned here?"

"Your concern is touching, if misplaced, my dear,"
Schlacht said calmly. "It is fortunate that you and I are
related, else I might be tempted to take exception to your
attitude."

"Take all the exception you want, Helmuth," she said
heatedly.

Schlacht was not accustomed to being spoken to in such a manner, and he required great self-control not to strike his
cousin in the face. Turning to Weyrauch, he said, "I'm sure
you know that the war is not going as well as we could hope.
We had expected to complete the pacification of
Russia
last year and...well, we have run up against unexpected resistance."

"Yes," Weyrauch agreed, "unexpected resistance."
Repeating what he was told seemed a safe way to participate
in the conversation.

"With the entry of the Americans into the conflict and
the refusal of the British to listen to reason, we have had
to explore other avenues of offensive warfare. We can no longer rely merely upon the prowess of German arms and the brilliance of the Führer's strategies."

"Of course, of course," Weyrauch nodded. Louisa fumed
silently, following behind the two men as they walked down
the subterranean corridor.

"It has long been the Führer's belief that it is only
Churchill's irrational hatred of
Germany
that prevents the
British from reaching an accommodation with us. If Churchill
were to be eliminated, we might not only be able to remove
Britain
from the list of our enemies, we would also be denying to the Americans an operational base in
Europe
." He stopped walking and turned to Weyrauch. "Are you familiar with the English word ‘lunatic'?"

"I've heard
it,"
Weyrauch replied. "A madman, is it not?"

"The root of the word is ‘luna', the moon. A lunatic is
someone who goes mad when the moon is full. Some people speculate that it has something to do with the gravitational pull of the moon upon fluids in the brain."

"Like the effect upon the tides." Weyrauch suggested.

"Precisely." He resumed walking down the corridor. Weyrauch walked along beside him and Louisa continued to follow. There was sufficient room for her to walk on her cousin's other side had she so chosen. She chose not to.

"Last month, coincidentally on the last night of the full moon, a number of my troops were sent out to round up some of the Gypsy tribes which infest the forest areas. One squadron did not report back, and so we sent out a search party. We found what you saw in the freezers. All of them killed, ripped to shreds, some apparently partially devoured. Standing in the midst of the carnage were two Gypsies, the two men I am taking you to see. Another Gypsy, one who could speak a human language, was found prowling
about the woods nearby, and the officer who made the
investigation used him as the translator during the preliminary interrogation. Unfortunately, that Gypsy died soon thereafter, but not before some basic questions were asked
and answered. I read the officer's report... apparently the
two Gypsies offered no resistance to the questioning...but
their answers were what pricked my curiosity." Schlacht drew
up to another large door and stopped. "The younger of the two, hoping perhaps to save his older friend from torture, claimed that it was he and he alone who had killed my men.
The older one, probably hoping to save the younger from
execution, claimed that his companion was not responsible
for his actions because he is a werewolf."

A few moments of silence followed Schlacht's words, and then Weyrauch laughed despite his ever present undercurrent of nervousness. "Helmuth, that's..."

"Yes. I know, it's absurd. But when our doctors examined
him, the younger one, I mean, they found shreds of human flesh embedded in his teeth." He paused, allowing his words to register, and then went on. "I believe it to be quite
possible that this man is a lunatic, that when the moon
rises he succumbs to a murderous rage so overpowering that
it enabled him to kill two dozen of my men without suffering
any injury himself. I don't know how and I don't know why.
That," he said meaningfully, "is what I want you to find out.
"

Weyrauch nodded thoughtfully, not quite knowing how to respond. "Yes, yes, I see. But..."

"You don't really see anything, Gottfried," Schlacht interrupted him, "because you are, as usual, so nervous that you haven't been listening to me or thinking about what I've been saying. Consider this: if we can discover the process, the psychological mechanism, if you will, of this gypsy's
madness, and if we can train him, condition him, manipulate his rage, we can smuggle him into
Britain
and use him as a
weapon against Churchill."

"You mean...you mean use him to assassinate...?"

"Precisely. We have made attempts on Churchill's life, but they have all failed. It is difficult to infiltrate
England
, and their security is unfortunately quite effective. But this man seems to be unstoppable when the madness is upon him. With Churchill dead, we might find ourselves very quickly fighting a one front war."

Louisa stepped up to her cousin. "Has it never occurred
to you that Churchill is not the cause of
Britain
's unwillingness to surrender? Haven't you considered the
possibility that the British may simply view your Hitler as
evil, as a barbarian, as a threat to human civilization?"

Schlacht dismissed her absurd comments with a wave of his hand. "The British are Aryans, as we are. The Jews are controlling Churchill. With him out of the way, the Jewish power in
Britain
will be broken and we can make peace." Louisa sighed and shook her head. This was becoming depressingly similar to the conversations she and her cousin
had had so often when they were children.

"Well, in any event," Weyrauch said, "why do you need me?
I have some training in psychology, true, but I'm not a practicing psychologist, Helmuth, not even a practicing
physician."

"Yes, but you have knowledge of these things, certainly more knowledge than I have. And...well, you must realize
that I am in competition with many other officers of the same
rank. We all desire official favor, especially since the new
European order after we win the war will rest upon a
foundation of rule by the S.S."

"In other words," Louisa said, "you want to arrange for Churchill's assassination all by yourself so that you can get all the credit."

He disliked the contempt in her tone. "Like it or not, my dear cousin, the future of
Europe
rests in the hands of
the National Socialist Party, and the power behind the Party
is the S.S. When this war ends and we are able to structure a new civilization that will last for the next thousand years, you might find yourself quite happy to be related to a confidante of S.S.
Reichsführer
Himmler. Happy, and
secure."

Schlacht turned from his cousin and rapped loudly on the
large oaken door. A voice from within demanded, "Identity?"

"Colonel Schlacht," he replied. A key could be heard turning in an inner lock, and then the door swung open. Schlacht motioned for Weyrauch and Louisa to precede him
into the room. Weyrauch came to the portal and then stopped,
as if the action of crossing over it would commit him to something which portended danger, as if he were somehow about to make an irreversible decision. He shook his head to
dispel the foolish notion and took his wife's arm to lead her with him through the doorway, but she pushed his hand away and entered before him. They walked past Schlacht and
then, after following them in, he shut the door behind him and locked it. He turned to his guests and smiled. "Now, Gottfried, Louisa, allow me to introduce my lunatic."

The
Ragoczy
Palace
in
Budapest
had been built centuries before as one of the many grand residences of the Magyar aristocracy which had dominated the region until the overthrow of the regime of Admiral Horthy just the previous
year. The capital city, indeed the entire nation, was now
effectively in German hands. A puppet Magyar regime still exercised nominal authority, but the realities of power were otherwise. The German army was in occupation of the country; the S.S. was supervising the coordination of
Hungary
into Hitler's new order; and the Gestapo prowled the streets and cafes, the churches and the museums, the
offices and the villages and the parks.

When S.S.
Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler had put Helmuth Schlacht in charge of the liquidation of
Hungary
's Gypsy population, it had been necessary for him to establish an operational headquarters, and the
Ragoczy
Palace
was a logical choice. In addition to its size and splendor, it also had what most late medieval noble residences had: a
complex of large, subterranean chambers that had in the past
served as dungeons. Under Schlacht's devoted ministrations, they served this purpose once again. Day in and day out the
dungeons were filled with the hundreds of Gypsies who
had been arrested the night before, and periodically the
dungeons were emptied as these same unfortunates were
shipped off to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sorbibor and Treblinka and
other cities of death.

As the door of the dungeon was locked behind him, Gottfried von Weyrauch surveyed the room he had just entered with undisguised trepidation. The walls were built of large blocks of grey stone tinged slightly green by moisture and moss, and though the Germans had installed an
ad hoc electrical system into the old palace, the sconce holes
that had been sunk deep into the walls centuries before had not been filled in. The ceiling was high, nearly twenty-five feet from the floor, and small windows near the top of the wall, just above ground level, allowed a few rays of the
setting sun to enter the room.

He realized almost immediately that the room itself was merely the entranceway, the anteroom as it were, of a series of ancient cells. At the far end of the room a small wooden door with a small barred window was set into the cold
stone wall, and as it was opened by the armed S.S. guard who
stood before it, Weyrauch could see even before Schlacht ushered him through that it led to a narrow corridor on both sides of which were dozens of barred doorways. Weyrauch glanced into one such cell as he, Schlacht and Louisa proceeded down the corridor, and he shuddered at the thought of what it must have been like for the poor devils who had been imprisoned here. The doors themselves consisted of iron frames and long iron bars, which afforded an
observer a clear view of the entire interior.