Lycanthropos (21 page)

"That chemist thinks she may have..." She paused, not
knowing how to explain chemical analysis to this untutored
man. "The scientist thinks that she has discovered something in Kaldy's body which causes him to change form."

"Indeed," Kaldy said, also in Romansch out of deference to his friend. His voice was not exactly disinterested, but
he was much less intrigued than Louisa had expected. "The news would be much more welcome if they had discovered how
to kill me."

Louisa began to walk back and forth in the cell, shaking her head and saying, "I just don't understand what's happening to the world, I just don't understand. When I was born, just as the war was ending, everything seemed bad, terribly bad...my mother used to tell me about it...my father died in the war, you see, fighting against the
French..."

Blasko and Kaldy exchanged glances. Louisa seemed upset
to the point of incoherent rambling. "Donna..." Blasko said
gently.

"But when I was growing up, things were...well, things were...things made
sense
.
Blasko, they made
sense
,
but nothing makes any
sense
anymore! I mean, look at the people
who are running our country! Look at the people who are
running all the countries! Look at the things they are doing! The world is turning into a madhouse!" she moaned,
sitting down on an empty stool.

"It has always been a madhouse," Kaldy said kindly."It
is simply that you have never before lived in one of the
wards. "

She looked at Kaldy and asked, "Do you remember anything
of the past, anything beyond what the hypnosis brought to
the surface?"

"Oh, I remembered my first meeting with my good friend Blasko quite well before the hypnosis, Madam. Your husband's
ministrations served merely to afford my memories an
immediacy they might not otherwise have had."

As before, Louisa was struck by the dignified
intelligence of Kaldy's manner of speech. "And your memories of things prior to that?"

He shrugged. "As I have said, my memory is clear enough back to the late eighteenth century. Before that, before the
French Revolution released me from prison, I remember next
to nothing."

"Do you remember kindness and civility?" she asked, tears once again welling up in her eyes. "Do you remember a time when people were not cruel, heartless, inhuman swine?"

He smiled sadly. "I remember very little kindness,
Madam, but I remember much cruelty. I fear such behavior is
endemic to the human condition."

She looked into his dark, sad, weary eyes. "Are you an
educated man, Herr Kaldy?"

He shrugged once again. "I have no idea, Madam."

 

As Louisa von Weyrauch was calming herself with
conversation and as Janos Kaldy and the Gypsy Blasko were
helping to settle her nerves by their very presence, in
another part of the Ragoczy Palace Nathan Rabinowicz was
fast approaching the moment of his death.

Rabinowicz had been born and raised in
Poland
, in that
area which under the Tsars had been referred to as the
Jewish Pale of Settlement, that area which had become part
of the
Republic
of
Poland
once the government of Tsarist Russia had collapsed under the duel assault of military
defeat and Bolshevik revolution. He was an average man,
neither stunningly good nor appallingly bad, and he had
lived the thirty-six years of his life in a totally
conventional manner for a man of
his
station and his means.
He had been a watchmaker, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and he had earned an adequate, if modest, living at his trade. He had been able to give his wife
Rachel and his two daughters, Sonya and Esther, a
relatively comfortable life for a while.

That had been before September of 1939. After the German
conquest of
Poland
, everything changed. Rabinowicz had been
able to take his wife and daughters east, ahead of the German armies, into that area of Poland which was in the process of being annexed by Germany's ally, the Soviet
Union; but this brief security was shattered in 1941 when
the Nazis turned on their Communist associate and invaded Russia, with Poland once again the invasion route,
as it had been in 1914 and 1812, as it had been during the Middle Ages; and the Jews of Poland were then totally under
the control of the German Behemoth. For Nathan Rabinowicz, that had meant transportation to the Lodz Ghetto, and then transportation to Auschwitz, and then transportation to the
Ragoczy
Palace
.

He was now trembling with fear as he looked at the cold, impassive faces appraising him clinically,
and he wondered where his wife was, where his daughters
were. They had been separated when the family was taken to
Auschwitz
, and he prayed that they were still alive in that hell hole. He did not know that Rachel had long since been gassed and reduced to soap. He did not know that Sonya and
Esther, after having served for a time as
Leidenträgerinen,
corpse carriers at the death camp, had been gassed the night before.

All of which he was certain, as he looked into the faces
of Helmuth Schlacht and Joachim Festhaller and Petra
Loewenstein and Gottfried von Weyrauch, was that he was
facing the end of his life.

"An adequate specimen?" Schlacht asked
Petra
.

"Yes, he'll do," she replied. "He's relatively young,
not more than forty, I'd say, and his condition is good
enough under the circumstances."

Schlacht noticed the appalled, horrified look on
Weyrauch's face, and he struggled to contain his amusement
at the minister's weakness as he asked, "Is something
troubling you, Gottfried?"

"N…no, Helmuth, no…" he stammered.

"Good. Then let us begin."

Schlacht nodded to the two guards who were standing beside the captive Jew, and they proceeded methodically to prepare him for the experiment. Rabinowicz was seated in a wooden chair and his hands were tied behind it as his feet were bound to its legs. Rabinowicz's face showed confusion through his fear as loop after loop of heavy chain was wrapped around him, chain into the links of which had been
inserted dry and withered plants. When the S.S. guards were
finished they stepped back from the prisoner, as Schlacht
nodded to
Petra
.

The young woman went to the surgical table which had been standing in one corner and took a hypodermic needle
from the metal tray. She picked up a stethoscope and held it
out to Weyrauch, saying, "Doctor? If you would?" Weyrauch walked over to her and took the instrument from her hand,
wiping his brow and swallowing hard.

As
Petra
thrust the needle into the arm of the terrified man, Weyrauch donned the stethoscope and placed
the end upon Rabinowicz's chest.
Petra
depressed the plunger
and the synthesized enzyme poured into the prisoner's blood
stream.

Thirty seconds passed. The observers watched the prisoner intently, and Schlacht's lips narrowed with irritation as nothing seemed to be happening. But then Rabinowicz shrieked as a sensation of incredible burning exploded in his chest and abdomen, and he tried to double over in pain. The ropes and chains prevented him from moving, and so his poisoned body merely rocked and shook and shuddered. His eyes widened as the toxin which was already wracking his body penetrated his brain, and spasms of involuntary muscle contractions caused him to slam his jaws tightly shut, catching his tongue between his teeth. The edge of his tongue sheared off and splattered onto the floor as a river of blood began to pour from his mouth. His body shuddered and wrenched against its bonds. And then it
ceased to live.

Weyrauch stumbled backward away from the still trembling
corpse, and he repressed an urge to vomit. "His heart...has
ceased beating."

Schlacht walked forward and, leaning over, stared into the face of the dead man. Rabinowicz's eyes were wide and staring madly, and his bloody mouth was frozen open in a final, unvoiced scream of excruciating agony.

"Damn!" Festhaller muttered.

"It appears that the chemical ratio was incorrect,"
Petra
said calmly. "I had feared as much. As I pointed out,
there were so many steps involved in the analysis that I was
not confident that the correct mix would be arrived at on
the first attempt."

"Apparently, your suspicions were correct, Fräulein,"
Schlacht agreed. "Gottfried, I think that an autopsy is
called for. Fräulein, return to your laboratory, and Herr Professor, arrange for the shipment of more test subjects
from
Auschwitz
." He seemed troubled, harried. "We simply
must nail this down!"

Weyrauch lost the battle he had been waging with himself. He turned his face away from the scene before him
and vomited copiously.

Can you hear me, Kaldy? Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, Herr Doctor. I know who you are."

"Where are you now, Kaldy? What year is it?"

"I do not know the year, Herr Doctor. It is.
..it
is
before I was imprisoned."

"Are you in
Hungary
?"

"No...no, France. I am in
France
."

"Are you being imprisoned now? Are they taking you to prison now?"

"No...no...yes...no, not to prison. I am being taken
into a courtroom."

"Is Claudia with you?"

"Yes."

‘"Is she being taken into court with you?"

"Yes...yes, she and three others."

"Three others?"

"Yes."

"Are they...are they...like you and Claudia?"

"They are accused of werewolvery. We are all accused of
werewolvery. Yes, yes. I remember it now. I can see it all
now. It is the Inquisition. We are being taken before a court of the Inquisition."

"And all five of you are werewolves?"

"No. I am a werewolf. Claudia is a werewolf. The others are madmen...all of them...all of them...the prisoners, the
judges, the mob...madmen." He paused, and then added softly.
"No...no, one sane man is
there...
just one..."

 

How long had it been since he had seen their faces, the
face of the sad, tired young man, the face of the sad, tired
young woman? Had it really been forty-five years? Could it
possibly have been forty-five years? He had been eighteen years old when he saw them dragged before the tribunal, and now he was in his sixties, old and worn out and ill and
ready to die. But they! They had not changed, they had not aged, they looked exactly as he remembered them.

Michel de Notre Dame, savant, alchemist, scholar, astrologer, court physician to His Most Catholic Majesty Charles IX, shook his head as he stared into the faces of
the two people who stood before him. This is impossible. It
cannot be they.

The old astrologer remembered that week back in 1521
with the clarity which old age often imparts to memories of
one's youth. He was eighteen years of age, his Jewish family now Catholic for a scant nine years, when he was sent by the Monsignor to observe the proceedings then being conducted at Poligny by the Dominican Friar, Jean Boin. It was not that the Monsignor had any reason to mistrust Boin; indeed, Monsignor Pierre d'Avingnon did not even know Boin. But d'Avignon mistrusted the Inquisition for a very simple and, to him, logical reason; anything invented by Italians, conducted by Dominicans, and enthusiastically supported by Spaniards, had no place in
France
.

And so young Michel de Notre Dame, young Michael of Our Lady, was dispatched on foot to make the long journey from Paris to Poligny so that his benefactor might have an eyewitness report of the investigation into these charges of lycanthropy. Michel had accepted the task willingly. He was a good student, a source of joy to his teachers, but he yearned to see people and places outside of the abbey, he
longed to explore the world as all young men long to explore
the world; and while Poligny was not Kambaluc or Thule, not Novgorod or Bagdad, it
was new to him, and thus it was welcome.

He stood among the other spectators in the large open courtroom, waiting for the proceedings to begin. A thick, wooden railing separated the spectators from the court proper, and it was only the special letter of authority given to him by Monsignor d'Avignon which had enabled him to move to the front of the crowd, and even that only with the assistance of the soldiers. The customary loud, boisterous,
intoxicated banter of the morbid curiosity seekers who spent
their time waiting to see people tortured and hanged was
today subdued and nervous, for this was no simple witchcraft
trial, no simple inquiry into heresy or apostasy, no common trial for murder or theft or rape. Everyone in the room had seen the mutilated corpses lying in the mud in the town's street, had seen the jagged wounds where the inhuman teeth had ripped flesh from bone; many of the people present that day had heard the screams of their neighbors and the roars of the beasts on that night not three weeks before. The onlookers, like the officials, knew that werewolves were
prowling about Poligny, and they were shaking with anger and fear.