Descendant

Between us, we dragged him across to one of the Egyptian-style pillars. He was wriggling and struggling and trying to bite us, and he was unnaturally strong, considering how wasted he looked. It took a whole lot of grunting and shoving to press him up against the pillar, but while Corporal Little held him in position, I wound the whip around him six or seven times and made it fast. The silver wire cut into his skin as if it were candle wax.

“All right, then,” I panted, “I’m going to ask you again. Where are your friends hiding?”

“You think that I will tell you anything?” he said, speaking in German again. He spat at me, although I was too far away, and the thick saliva ended up swinging from his chin.

“Listen,” I warned him, “I don’t want to hurt you, fellow, but if you won’t cooperate. ”

“Go to hell.”

I went over to the Kit and took out the dental forceps. Then I came straight back to the Screecher and gripped his nose tightly in my left hand, so that he couldn’t breathe. He tried to waggle his head from side to side but I held him fast. “Mmmmmhhff!” he protested, trying to keep his mouth closed. “Mmmmmhhff! ”

But he couldn’t keep his lips together for longer than a minute and a half. When he opened them, gasping for breath, I immediately forced my thumb under his upper lip. Then I gripped his left front incisor with the dental forceps, and wrenched it, hard. His gum made a sharp cracking noise, and welled up with blood, but the tooth was reluctant to come out. I had to jerk the forceps backward and forward three or four more times before I managed to extract it altogether. Immediately I gripped his right front incisor, and started to tug that, too.

“Aaaaggghhhh!” he choked, as I pulled the tooth out by its roots. Without hesitating, I moved the forceps across to his canines.

“You want me to stop?” I asked him.

He said nothing, but coughed, so that a fine spray of blood covered his chest.

“OK. maybe you need something more persuasive. What do you think, Corporal, something more persuasive?”

“Sounds good to me. Think of all the innocent people he must of killed.”

“That’s right. Like Ann De Wouters. Now, why did you and your friends want to murder Ann De Wouters?”

“I told you to go to hell,” the Screecher spluttered.

“Well, yes, you did. But you and I have to talk first, and you have to tell me what I need to know.”

“You can’t kill me.”

“What? Is that what they told you?”

“You can hurt me as much as you like but you can never kill me. When you have been lying in the cemetery for a hundred years, I will still be alive to piss on your grave.”

“Sorry, pal,” I told him. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but somebody’s been shooting you a line. Not only can I kill you, but I can kill you in such a way that you will wish you had never been born.”

The Screecher spat out more blood. “You’re lying.”

“I’ll prove it to you. That’s unless you tell me where your friends are.”

The Screecher struggled against the silver wire, but he succeeded only in cutting himself, so that blood ran down his skinny white thighs. When I thought back on it after the war, I sometimes found it hard to believe that I could have treated anybody with such cruelty, even a Screecher. But then I remembered all the times we broke into houses in France and Belgium and the Netherlands and found heaps of men, women and children, massacred so that the Screechers could feed on them. When I remembered that — the smell and the flies and the tangles of pitiful bodies — what I was doing, by comparison, seemed almost restrained.

I took the bottle of holy oil from the Kit, unstoppered it, and held it up in front of the Screecher’s face. “With this oil, I thee anoint,” I told him.

“You think that scares me, you shitbag?”

“No, I don’t. In fact I don’t think your or your friends are scared of anything, which makes you very dangerous. And because you’re so dangerous, that makes me all the more determined to kill you.”

I poured about a tablespoonful of oil over the Screecher’s head, so that it ran down his face and dripped from the end of his nose. He shuddered, and took a deep snorting breath. To him, in his state of utter unholiness, consecrated oil would have felt scalding.

I took hold of his oily hair and twisted it up into a point, like the wick of a candle. Then Corporal Little stepped forward, and handed me his Zippo.

“Last chance,” I said, flipping back the lid. “You could save yourself a whole lot of pain here, believe me.”

The Screecher said nothing, so I snapped the lighter into flame. The Screecher stared at me with such venomous hatred that I wished that I had blindfolded him.

“I’m going to count to three,” I told him. “Then you’re going to burn like a church candle.”

“I’ll do the counting for you,” he said. “Eins — zwei — drei — now do whatever you have to do!”

I lit his hair, and immediately the whole of his scalp caught fire. His hair shriveled and his skin blistered and even his ears were alight. He managed to bear it for nearly five seconds without moving and without crying out, and he even managed to keep his eyes open. But then the oil on his face burst into flame and he closed his eyes tight shut and screamed. I had never heard a man scream like that before. It sounded just like a French woman in Normandy whose legs had been crushed by a Sherman tank. Three soldiers had pulled her out but her legs had stayed where they were.

The Screecher tossed his head wildly from side to side, which only had the effect of fanning the flames and making them burn more fiercely. He screamed and screamed for nearly half a minute but then he stopped screaming, and let his head fall back against the pillar. The flames died down and he was left smoldering, his whole head blackened and raw, his lips enormously swollen and his nostrils clogged with blood.

I used the Zippo to light a cigarette. I waited for a while, smoking, and then the Screecher slowly opened his eyes.

“Now that smarts, doesn’t it?” I asked him.

“You can’t kill me,” he said, his voice thick with pain.

“Oh yes I can. Do you want to know how?”

“You can’t kill me, whatever you do.”

I reached into the Kit and produced the nails. “You see these? Do you know what these are? These are the same nails that the Romans used to nail Christ to the cross. And do you know what I’m going to do with them? I’m going to hammer them into your eyes, and right into your brain. That won’t kill you, I admit, but it will have the effect of paralyzing you, so that you won’t be able to stop me from doing what I’m going to do next.

“I’m going to cut your head off with this saw, and I’m going to take your body to the Calvary Garden of Sint Paulus Kirk, and I’m going to bury it there, because I have special dispensation from the Dominican monks to do that. Then I’m going to take your head and I’m going to boil it until the flesh falls off and your brains turn into broth. And that is how I kill people like you.”

“Whatever you do, we will have our revenge on you. I can promise you that.”

I smoked my cigarette right down to the very last eighth of an inch, and then I stepped on it. “Corporal Little,” I said, “how about passing me that holy oil again?”

Corporal Little did what I asked him. I took the stopper off the oil and said, “This is what we call burning the candle at both ends. Just our little joke.”

With that, I poured oil between his legs, all over his scraggy pubic hair and his penis, and relit Corporal Little’s Zippo.

The Screecher stared at the flame out of his swollen, half-closed eyes.

“I want you to know that I am doing this simply for the pleasure of it,” I told him. “I don’t care whether you tell me where your friends are, or not. I’m going to kill you whatever. I just want to hurt you as much as I possibly can before I do.”

Corporal Little was holding his collar but Frank made a strangled whining noise and scrabbled his claws on the floor, as if he wanted to get away. I don’t know if that was what convinced the Screecher that I was serious, but he suddenly said, “Seventy-one Schildersstraat, on the corner of Karel Rogierstraat. They’re hiding in the attic.”