a bit higher up the slope.
I couldn’t hear the officer up there. Had he stormed off in disgust, embarrassed, enraged? Had he thought I deserved nothing more than to be left down here, where a monster like me belonged? I had not been able to roll over yet to look. As I struggled to do so, another body sprawled onto my back and the back of my head, pressing my face down against flesh. Pressing my lips against flesh. I made a convulsive effort, at that point, to jerk my buried arm free.
I jerked, but it resisted. Something down below me in the heap had snagged the cuff of my sleeve.
Fingers, it must be…bent into claws in death, I thought. The idea horrified me; hooked claws or not, I should be able to rip my arm free. But I couldn’t when I tried again. And now a terrifying idea came to me. A vision born of my growing desperation as it approached panic. I imagined that it wasn’t fingers that had caught hold of my sleeve…but teeth.
A hand slid across the left side of my face, one finger trailing teasingly into my ear as it went, and I screamed.
I rolled onto my back with a surge of strength, a burst of adrenaline, and in so doing it seemed I upset an entire hill of corpses looming just beside me, for the hill then toppled over me, and what I saw of the night sky for a moment was eclipsed when I was suddenly and utterly buried beneath a languid, rubbery avalanche of the dead.
I had watched that mass of bodies descend, as if in slow motion. It was a heavy and crushing blob of darkness woven from frail scarecrow figures. It had descended on me like one many-armed creature, but this pile was only a part of the creature, I realized…and I was screaming again, at the knowledge. Clawing, squirming, desperate for breath as I realized that the bodies beneath me were also a part of this creature. The bodies all around me. Linked, locked, braided and meshed. They were all weak as individuals, but as this one unified form they had become amazingly strong, and they had trapped me. And their intent, of course, was to absorb me into the mass. To make me one of them, and thus a part of
I blubbered crazily for help. The weight seemed only to press me down deeper. Were more of them from either side moving in waves to pile further atop me? Were dead bodies not yet dragged from the barracks now slithering across the camp on their bellies and toppling themselves into the pit?
A girl’s long hair had fallen across my throat, her face nuzzled into my shoulder. A bush of pubic hair ground against my forehead in a terrible moist kiss. Fingers had hooked in the back of my shirt collar, the nails lightly scraping my skin. I shrieked and began to sob outright, hopelessly, like a woman, lifted my neck as best I could away from those nails…but my cheek pressed against the sharp ridge of a spine barely painted in skin.
It was as though the sharp bones above and below me were fangs that meant to impale me, fanged jaws that meant to rend me, devour me.
They’re not all dead, I reasoned in an effort to remain sane. That was it! The officer had pointed it out himself. In the barracks, the dead lay thick upon the floors mixed in with the living so that you could not tell one from the other. Living people must have been thrown into the pit with the dead in our haste to finish all the burying. That was why the hands seemed so purposely to be reaching to me, taking hold of me. That was why the cadavers seemed to have intentionally rolled atop me, covered me…
That some of the bodies were alive is not very possible, but it may be. True or not, it didn’t comfort me much. Was it that the living mixed in with the dead sought to have revenge upon me…or that the pale starved spirits of all those dead had somehow merged into one powerful entity? Both possibilities were equally hideous— rational or supernatural. Because either way, I was helpless. Either way, they would have their revenge.
Because I was never getting out. I was going to suffocate, or my chest would be crushed, or my heart would burst, or that hand at the back of my neck and others were going to curl around my throat at any moment…
Nails raked down my face. I squeezed my eyes shut as the nails clawed my eyelid. I wanted to die at that moment, my friend. Right then. Before the other nails came. And the strangling hands. And the teeth. I wanted it over with because the officer had had his revenge on me, too—he had abandoned me—and I would never escape this pit.
The bodies were churning atop me, moving more actively, and a hand took hold of my arm in an unmistakable grip.
Then the pressure eased from my chest and I looked up to see a face hovering above me, the eyes glittering, the teeth grimacing. A flashlight beam fell upon my face. More bodies were lifted off me, and I realized this was the reason for the feeling of activity above me. More hands took hold of me. I was passed up to other men, all British. I pawed crazily at the dirt slope of the grave, in my frenzy probably hindering their efforts to rescue me.
“What happened?” I heard one man ask. “Did he attack you?”
“No,” I heard my officer say. “He just…fell.”
Those were the last words I heard from him, as the man never spoke to me again.
I was out now, standing on the edge of the pit. I had been rescued from hell. I turned to look back down, and in the new lights I could see the creature. It had many eyes, some catching the light. I saw many mouths, smiling in that odd little expression of faint amusement so often seen on the dead.
What I did then was inexplicable. Like kissing my British officer. But I had been driven mad. It didn’t matter that I had been rescued. The monster was smiling at me, staring at me, it knew it had shattered my mind and my soul and its will was strong, it commanded me to give myself to it. It would have me yet. It was the only way to exonerate myself, to repent, to pay for my sins. The British would not execute me. I must execute myself…
And I had to die, I felt, as I reached out to my officer and snatched the revolver from his holster. Dying was the only way I was ever going to escape those eyes.
And dying was the only way to empathize with it in the way the monster demanded of me.
The soldiers clawed at my arms to stop me from thrusting the barrel in my mouth. Maybe that was why the bullet went wrong, up through my nose and into my eye socket rather than into my brain. Or, as I have suggested, it may have been the will of God that I should not have escaped my punishment so neatly.
I never much believed in God or in punishment, until after I had met that officer. Until after I had met that monster.
They are a monster in your country, aren’t they? Numerous and unified, rich and powerful. Can I blame them? They are a monster in Israel, smaller but tougher and with very sharp teeth. I have a deathly fear of both countries. Of their retribution. Monsters always turn on their makers.
You think I’m still insane, the way I’m talking. That after that night I never regained my sanity. But I did, my friend. I am sane now. In fact, I didn’t really go mad when I fell in the pit. It was up until that point—before I fell— that I was insane.
And maybe I was saved when they pulled me out of that hell. Maybe my eternal soul has been burned clean. But maybe not.
So that is my story. I see you don’t believe certain mysteries I’ve suggested. Just as the British officer didn’t believe me about the Rat Kings. And now that you know my past, you find me repellent, as he did. Repulsive, now that you know the truth about me. You can call me a demon, a monster. Something other than human. Just like we called the Jews and the rest. Anything, so long as you can say that I’m not a man like you.
Yes, you found my story a trifle unpleasant, eh? But like my officer…you wanted to listen.
Chapel
“You want TV tonight, honey?” A small gray-haired woman with a clipboard came walking into Devin’s room so quickly that it startled her. She had been gazing out the plate glass window which ran along one wall.
“Yeah…sure,” Devin said.
The woman inserted a key into the small color television suspended from its bracket, swivelled it so that the set was within Devin’s reach. “Watch a few Christmas specials, honey; take your mind off.”
“You work on Christmas eve, huh?” Devin asked with very little interest.
“My kids are grown and moved away, and my folks and brother are dead. I have one son right over in New Hampshire but he can’t come to see his mother until tomorrow night. He isn’t even married…but he chooses to be with his girlfriend’s family.”
Don’t complain about your son, Devin thought. At least yours is still alive.
“How much is that?” With a small groan she reached for her purse. The woman told her, and Devin counted
