Weyrauch had fallen to the ground when the soldiers released him, and he struggled to rise to his feet through the overwhelming weakness with which his fear had smitten him. He had managed to climb from his back to his knees when the last gunshot sounded and the last human scream echoed
through the carnage of the camp, and as he got unsteadily to his feet he saw the werewolves charging in his direction. He screamed when they sprang, but he had not been the target of
their attack. One of them knocked him down and he rolled
over and grabbed onto the piled up chain-link ladder which
lay beside the pit and clung to it desperately as he fell over the edge. He hung there, unable to climb up and unwilling to climb down, as the two attacking werewolves
seemed to fly the fifty feet to the bottom of the pit.
Weyrauch almost lost his grip and the ladder began to unroll through his slippery fingers. He cried and sought to
restore his grip, but he had fallen and slid more than
halfway to the cement floor before he had a handhold
adequate to stop his descent.
From his precarious vantage point, Weyrauch's traumatized mind was not able to employ its faculties to draw the obvious conclusion as to the identities of the two attackers, and so he watched in mute, horrified fascination at the infernal drama that was unfolding beneath him.
The man-made wolfmen had swarmed over the true werewolves when the latter jumped into the pit, but a few sweeps of the mighty arms were sufficient to dispel the attackers. They seemed confused, startled, and they withdrew to a wary circle around the two larger werewolves, eying them with a mad mixture of hatred, confusion, and barely restrained blood lust. Then the larger werewolf jumped forward and raked the chest of one of the others with its claws, and found to its shock that the wound was not fatal. The man-made wolf-man was severely injured, but the pain served only to increase its anger. It leapt at its enemy with an ear-piercing shriek of rage, struck out at the true werewolf's face and tore a gash in the hairy cheek. It struck out again, but this time it was deflected and then seized in an inhuman grip considerably stronger than its own.
The two creatures fell to the ground as the others jumped madly around them, howling and roaring as the two combatants sought to crush and rip and bite the other, until at last the true werewolf was able to snap its mighty jaws shut on the throat of the other and rip it open; but it had taken every bit of strength it had, strength such as it had never needed to use in three thousand years. The victor then rose from the ground and ignored the bleeding body at its feet.
The mind of Janos Kaldy, still present in the body of the monster, still struggling to remain in control, became aware of a stinging pain and an odd liquid warmth beneath the fur on its face. With a slow, deliberate, almost tentative gesture, the werewolf touched the wound with its paw and then stared at the red droplets of blood that lay upon it.
I am bleeding,
Kaldy realized.
I am injured
.
I am bleeding! I am injured!
I can die!
The creature that had been Claudia Procula approached her ancient companion and gazed at the wound with wonder and hope. Their eyes met and each knew that the other understood the significance of the blood flowing freely from the wounded face. They turned to confront the creatures that were still circling them cautiously. Kaldy and Claudia roared, and then they attacked.
In mute horror Weyrauch watched the
Lyconvolk
fall back as the werewolves rushed at them, but then they too succumbed to their own murderous instincts and they fought back with fang and claw. Shrieks of rage mingled with howls of pain as the war was fought in the cement pit. The two werewolves were engaged in a hellish battle with their man-made relatives, and though the true lycanthropes
were killing the pseudo-lycanthropes, they were being
visibly wounded in the process, wounded in such a manner as neither of them had ever been wounded through the course of
the long centuries. The larger of the werewolves was
bleeding from the face and arms and an ugly wound had been torn open
in the stomach of the smaller.
The battle raged for an hour, and the howls and snarls
and wails that rose up from the pit echoed from the walls
and filled the darkness, a din of screeching madness that mirrored the eternal cacophony of hell itself, as claw
ripped and fang bit and inhuman blood flowed like an
infernal river, and mad howls shattered the moonlit sky.
Weyrauch's hands grew weaker and his fingers grew numb,
and try as he might, he could not retain his grip on the ladder. He screamed, and then fell into the midst of the madness. He screamed again as his feet struck the cement ground and both of his ankles broke with audible cracks, crushed beneath his own weight. He lay, crippled, motionless, in excruciating pain, as the warfare of monster against monster rocked the very walls of the pit.
He closed his eyes and prayed.
And then, suddenly, the chaotic din ceased. Weyrauch
forced himself to open his eyes and look around him.
Everywhere were strewn the dead or dying bodies of the
Lycanvolk
, and in the midst of the slaughter were the two surviving werewolves, the larger one kneeling on the ground and the other lying weakly in its hairy arms, a tableau of human tenderness in the center of a stygian
landscape. Weyrauch almost forgot the incredible pain which
was radiating upward from his shattered ankles as his eyes went wide with what he saw happening not five yards away; for one of the creatures, the more seriously wounded one whose blood poured out of the tear across
its
stomach, the one which lay back
in the arms of its companion as if it were a perverse,
lupine Pieta, was slowly changing its shape.
The bright moonlight streamed down and mingled with that
of the electric lights, allowing Weyrauch to see clearly as the billowing hair seemed to be sucked backward into the
body, as the fangs withdrew into the jaws, as the talons
sank back into the paws which then became human hands, as
the bloody muzzle shrank into a human face.
"Petra," he whispered in awe.
The woman whom he had known as Petra Loewenstein, the
woman who was Claudia Procla, the wife of Pontius Pilate and
a priestess of Ahura Mazda, looked up into the face of the
werewolf that was cradling her in its arms as if she were
its child, and tears of happiness began to stream from her
eyes as the blood continued to flow from her midsection. No tears
fell from the eyes of the monster, but its mighty chest
heaved with emotion.
"Janos..." she murmured. "Janos...I am dying... I am
dying..."
Janos?!
Weyrauch thought.
Kaldy?!
The werewolf leaned forward and pressed its bleeding
face against her cheek.
"I am dying, Janosâ¦I am dyingâ¦I am dyingâ¦" Claudia's voice grew slurred and indistinct as her eyes glowed ecstatically and she said, "I shall await
you...
I shall await you, Janos...on the
Bridge...
on the Bridge...of the Separator...I shall await you. Janos...
Janos..." Her voice faded and her eyes grew white and empty. "
Janos...
"
she murmured. "Janos..."
Her head fell back and she was
still.
The werewolf stared into her dead eyes for a long while
and then it placed her body gently down upon the cement floor and stared down at her for an eternity. Then it raised its face to the moon, and a howl unto the fiery winds of the underworld burst from its bloody mouth
and wafted to the heavens; but it was not a wail of sorrow. It was a shout of triumph. It was a cry of joy.
The creature turned and walked slowly over to Weyrauch,
and the minister, rolling over onto his stomach, tried with pathetic desperation to crawl away from the approaching
specter. But the werewolf did not mean to harm him, for it
lifted him up, threw him across its shoulder and carried him
upward as it climbed the ladder which led from the pit. When
they had reached the edge of the high wall, the werewolf put
Weyrauch down carefully, and then turned to leave.
But then it stopped in mid-stride as if it had been struck by something. It spun around, jumping back and
landing on the ground beside the crippled minister. The creature brought its face close to that of the man, and then seemed to freeze in place. Weyrauch gazed into the
burning yellow eyes, into the glowing, inhuman orbs which
stared at him from above the bloody snout of the monster, but those eyes did not return his gaze, those eyes did not
meet his own.
The werewolf was staring at his forehead.
"K...K...Kaldy?" Weyrauch whispered. "Is it you? Kaldy,
is it you? Do you know me, Kaldy?"
The werewolf did not move, did not respond, did nothing
at all except stare at the sweaty brow of the minister. And
then, with a motion so fast that Weyrauch's eyes could not
follow
it,
the werewolf snapped its jaws shut on his
shoulder. The pain tore through his body, the world spun
around him, and he lost consciousness.
When Weyrauch awoke, the warm sunlight was bathing his face, and the birds were proclaiming the beauty of the
morning. He raised himself up onto his elbows and looked
around at the shredded bodies which lay everywhere, in all directions, which were already providing a feast for the
crows. H
is traumatized mind slowly reassembled the events of the previous night in his memory, and he remembered his broken ankles; but then he tried to wiggle his feet, and they moved without pain.
I must not have hurt myself as badly as I had thought
, he reasoned. He remembered the attack of the creature just before he blacked out, and he cried softly as his hand went to his shoulder; but he saw
that the wound was not as severe as it had seemed. There was
very little blood, and it seemed already to be healing.
It was the horror of the entire night
, he told himself.
It made
everything seem worse than it was
.
Weyrauch tried to stand up and found that he was so weak
and
dizzy
that his first effort left him pitched forward onto his face. He tried again, more slowly and more carefully, and at last was able to stand erect without swaying. And then, with a rush of elation, he realized:
I am alive! I am alive!
He felt like laughing, but he lacked the strength to do
more than smile. He began to walk upon his still unsteady legs back away from the pit toward the administration
building of the now vacant concentration camp. He entered the
wooden structure and, finding the office where he and
Schlacht had donned their combat uniforms two nights before,
walked in and fell down heavily into a chair. He saw a
bottle of cognac on a shelf against the wall, and he grabbed
it and poured it greedily down his throat. The fiery liquor warmed him and refreshed him for a moment, and then he felt the bile rise up in his throat and he vomited onto the
floor.
Well
, he thought to himself,
what do you expect,
after what you've been through? Of course your system is upset and your nerves are shattered.
But you are alive! You are alive!
Now he did laugh, loudly and long. "I told you, Louisa,"
he said aloud. "I told you." I told you that I would
survive, because I am a survivor. And now Helmuth is dead,
and I am free to go home, back to my own bed and my own
chair and my books and my quiet, placid life, which is all I
ever really wanted to do. I have survived it all. I have survived the S.S. and the creatures Helmuth created and I
have survived Helmuth himself. Why. I even
survived being bitten by aâ¦
I even survived being bitten by...
...being bitten by...
"NO!" he screamed, jumping to his feet and falling back
against the wall of the office. "NO!"
I did break my ankles when I fell from the ladder, I
know I did! I remember the pain, I heard them snap! But now
the bones have knitted, the breaks have healed! I felt my
bones being crushed between the jaws of the creature, I felt
his fangs tearing into my flesh, I remember the pain! But now the wound is closed, the wound is healing!
"NO!" he screamed again. "NO!"
He felt an uncontrollable hysteria rising in him, and he looked desperately, pointlessly around the room.
He saw a dagger and a holstered revolver hanging from a hook upon the
door, and he ran over and pulled out the knife. Just to see, he thought, just to see, just to show that it isn't true. His right hand trembled as he drew the blade across the palm of his left.
Nothing. No cut, no blood.