Ubo

12

STRIPED PAJAMAS. GORDON had had a couple of pairs. His favorites, with the red stripes. Not like the blue stripes on the uniforms the Jews wore. His stripes had been narrower. And of course they hadn’t had the two superimposed yellow triangles making the Star of David. Still, Daniel wished now he hadn’t bought them for his son. Now he couldn’t think of them as anything but uniforms for the sleep walkers, for the walking dreamers, the soon-to-be-dead.

Daniel and Elena had recognized that something was wrong, although they rarely put that worry into words. Gordon was less active than his classmates, more reticent to enter into the almost mindless, almost violent play of other boys his age. Although he clearly wanted to—Daniel could see it in his dark eyes, the vague shininess they took on when he saw the other boys playing. Daniel recognized the desire to be a “real” boy, all boy, the kind of boy everybody loved.

Before the diagnosis Daniel had taken Gordon’s reticence for shyness. He saw it as his job to draw his son out of his shell. For about six months when Gordon had been six or seven, the normally affectionate boy had become squirmy, stubborn, and reluctant to be held.

“It’s natural,” Elena had said. “My sister’s kids went through the exact same thing.”

“Maybe. I’m not so sure.” Daniel’s strategy had been to rough-house with his son, wrestling, grabbing, pretending to be a cowboy astride his horse. Daniel as the bull had been an angry force of nature.

Gordon waved the giant beach towel in Daniel’s face. Elena had sewn a picture of an enormous frog on it. Daniel aimed his head with its imaginary horns at the frog’s round belly.

“Here, Daddy‑bull! Come get me!”

Daniel crawled on all fours as fast as he could beneath the towel, shoulders and butt thrashing. “Snort! Snort!”

“Daddy‑bull’s got a cold!” Gordon leaped onto Daniel’s back, clutching his T-shirt at the shoulders, digging his small hands into Daniel’s sides, giggling. “I’m beatin up Daddy! Hey, I’m beatin him up!” Gordon liked the game more and more as he grew older, playing his part even more aggressively.

And Daniel encouraged it. He was even rougher in his play, as if to demonstrate to his small son how much the boy could actually handle, that there was no reason to be afraid.

“Wrestle, Daddy! Wrestle!” Daniel pulled Gordon off his back, laughing, put him on the floor beneath him, straddled him and began tickling. Gordon squirmed with uncontrollable laughter.

“That’s probably enough, Dan,” Elena said from the kitchen. “You’re getting him all worked up.”

It was a guy thing, he supposed. Not that girls couldn’t play as aggressively as boys, but it seemed that more frequently they knew when to stop. A father and his son, that was just two boys playing together, not knowing when to stop. And sometimes the games lasted a lifetime.

Daniel tickled more insistently, then bent over, wrapping his arms around Gordon, trying to hold him more tightly, kissing him on the cheek, clutching him with a strange sort of desperation, kissing the boy’s small hands, and before he knew it he had taken his son’s upper arm into his mouth, as he had at other times—playing “lion” or “monster,” and Gordon was giggling so, and Daniel thought about biting him, thinking how adults were always telling kids “I could just eat you,” and he tasted the salt, and stopped.

Gordon’s giggles faded, and he stared at Daniel with those shiny black eyes as if waiting to see what Daniel was going to do next. Daniel didn’t know himself. He loved this little boy so much he just had to step away before he ate him all up.

After the heart diagnosis Daniel would think back to this little wrestling match and shudder. He would remember the grunting sounds his son used to make, and his puffy eyes, and how he used to think Gordon must have allergies, terrible, persistent allergies. Later he and Elena would work out their shifts so that one of them could be with Gordon at all times. It all accumulated, there was so much to think about, and they became estranged. They hardly knew each other anymore. If only Gordon hadn’t gotten sick, but he’d always been sick, hadn’t he, since the day he was born? They just hadn’t known. And Daniel, and Daniel could have just eaten him up, eaten him up.

Later, in another life, in a scenario in which he floated in and out of the mind of Albert Fish, apprehended 1934, who had killed‑-and oftentimes eaten—a dozen or so children, he would think how the desperation, the hunger, was all‑pervasive and inescapable.

ONE MORNING DANIEL woke up to discover Gandhi sitting on the edge of his bunk. From this angle he looked as small and fragile as a child. “We let you sleep in. You’ve been having a particularly hard time of it lately, I think,” he said. “Alan didn’t come back from his last scenario.”

Daniel sat up quickly, blinking. Alan? Bogart. He had no idea what to say. But it wasn’t as if they were actually friends, any of them. “Are you sure, Walter? Maybe he’s just late. Sometimes we’re late coming back.”

Gandhi shook his head. “Never this late. If you’re this late you’re not coming back.” He looked down, closed his eyes as if offering up a prayer. “Well, I just thought you’d like to know, for when you didn’t see him.” He started to get up.

“What do you think happens to them, Walter, when they don’t come back?”

Gandhi shrugged. “Some of the fellows, they say the roaches execute them, that it’s like a trial, and then they’re executed.” He shook his head. “In our situation, people believe anything. I think sometimes they have heart attacks. It’s a lot of stress. I’ve always wondered if the roaches screened for high blood pressure before they took us. Probably not. And sometimes I think they go crazy, afterwards. Not hard to believe, is it? That’s what happened to the werewolf, I suppose. Maybe there’s a ward full of them someplace, unless the roaches put them out of their misery, unless they want to study them, like with the werewolf. That would be the humane thing, under the circumstances. Not an execution, exactly. Euthanasia.”

Gandhi got up and walked toward some of the others gathered nearby. His small bare feet made no sound. He seemed to barely have a presence. That slight, tentative profile, made Daniel ache for Gordon.

Unexplained disappearances had happened several times since he’d been in Ubo, but never to anyone Daniel actually knew. Joining the others, talking to them—however little it might do—was the decent thing.

He had reached the group, taking his position beside Falstaff, when a peculiar thing occurred. The lights blinked. He might have thought it was just his own eyes blinking, but from the look on the others’ faces he knew that wasn’t the case.

Except for Falstaff. Falstaff looked thunderstruck, appalled.

But the truly peculiar thing was the momentary hallucination or crazy notion he had during that blink. He saw skin melted away, and something not bone underneath. And metal prostheses of some sort, as if they’d all been maimed. He couldn’t be sure if the others had seen the same thing, but they all looked uncomfortable. And Falstaff, Falstaff looked sick.

It would be impossible to say whether the interruption in power had anything to do with it, but there were no scenarios for the rest of the day. Daniel had never seen so many men in the barracks or in the waiting room, and they all acted as if they weren’t quite sure what to do with themselves. There was much staring off into space, staring at each other, visual and hands-on inspection of their own bodies. Daniel himself felt compelled to wave his own hand in front of his face, fingers spread, moving it fast, then slow, trying to make himself aware of the point at which it blurred and whether that matched experiences he’d had of similar actions on earth.Maybe this was related to the slight shimmer he’d noticed around the roaches, like the visible distortions of air on a hot summer day.

The roaches themselves were scarce. None had appeared in the observation windows all day, and Daniel had had only a brief glimpse of a guard in the outside corridor. Some crisis must have occurred—he just hoped it wouldn’t make life for the residents more difficult.

By afternoon nervous energies were spilling over into small quarrels and shoving matches, usually because someone had been staring too long or chosen to extend his physical examinations beyond his own body. Usually it was Falstaff who broke these quarrels up.

FOR SEVERAL NIGHTS in a row the werewolf howled incessantly, his voice transitioning from a low, dream-entrapped groan to an ear-splitting hysteria. Periodically Daniel would climb out of bed and find Lenin or Gandhi sitting on the edges of their bunks, hanging their heads wearily, or walking around in the gray-dark, listening, not knowing what to do. The next day they’d all be groggy and staggering, except for Falstaff, who apparently refused to let it bother him.

They rarely spoke about it during the day. He supposed they all just hoped it would get better.

But on the sixth night of the howling, the raw-throated screams, Gandhi and Lenin and Daniel were standing, staring at each other, with occasional glances at Falstaff’s snoring and immobile mass. “Let’s put a stop to it,” Lenin said. “Let’s go find the beast.”

“How are we going to stop it?” Daniel sat back down on his bed.

“Who knows? Give him what he wants, maybe.” Gandhi sounded spent, aggravated. “Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I wander around. It’s strange, but I almost never encounter the roaches that late anymore. Maybe they’re short-handed.”

“Or they’re hiding, waiting for us to overstep our bounds.” Lenin threw up his hands. “Not that it matters. I’d try anything at this point.” He started off toward the wide door at one end of the barracks, the “roach door.” “Be bold, gentlemen,” he called back.

Gandhi glanced at Falstaff’s sleeping mass. “Should we wake him?” But Lenin was almost to the dim outline of doorway. Daniel and Gandhi stumbled into each other, then hurried after him and into a series of increasingly damaged hallways, down neglected staircases, Daniel fought to keep his nerve. At least the spaces they travelled through were generally, if dimly, lit. The walls throughout the structure had been equipped with shallow baseboards that glowed in the dark, casting the surfaces with a pale blue. Some of the larger rooms had matching parallel ceiling borders in white. The resulting light showcased wall after wall of damage and corruption.

Navigation was inexact, based on whatever directional clues the werewolf’scries provided. They let Lenin take the lead. Daniel didn’t know that Lenin possessed any more understanding of the building than the rest of them, but at least he showed confidence. The werewolf continued to moan and whimper, scream and howl, the perceivable origins of these sounds complicated by the echoing emptiness in this part of the building.

For a time they shuffled their way across floors inches deep in wall and ceiling fragments that rattled and clacked against their shoes. “Who knew concrete would turn out to be a universal building material?” Gandhi said at one point, underlining a detail that had been nagging Daniel. For all their alienness, the roaches appeared to have problem-solved in a way not that different from human beings.

They descended several floors, but to Daniel’s ears they were no closer to the werewolf, who now alternated whining complaints with a rhythmic shrieking as if he were being stabbed. It increasingly troubled Daniel that they hadn’t seen a single roach, and he wondered if perhaps they were going where the roaches wanted them to go.

But then they saw one asleep in a far corner, surrounded by empty brown drink bottles. They walked slowly, watching where they put their feet, until they were past.

They came into a large area lined on one wall with broken windows. Encroaching vegetation had covered part of the floor and traced the walls. “Perhaps we should go back,” Lenin said softly.

“I want to finish this,” Daniel said, and no one disagreed.

The fractured window frames allowed moonlight to flood the space, providing a different view of the city than any he had had before. He was immediately drawn there, walking over a floor dotted with shrapnel pits and larger sections where the tile appeared to have been completely scraped to the subfloor. The wall beside and under the window frame looked unstable so he kept a couple of steps back. When he peered down through the frame he could see a great pile of debris several stories in height banking the base of the building. More ruins spilled out of a huge hole caved in the outer wall. Thick, woody vines had pushed their way into the hole and webbed the exterior, some tendrils snaking into the destroyed windows in front of him.

In the distance he could see a few standing structures within the rubble at the edge of the tumbledown city, and beyond that the red of fires and boiling black smoke. Faint traces of shouts or maybe screams floated in the air, but he might have imagined them.

“Someone’s done a mural,” Gandhi said behind him.

Daniel turned and moved toward the back wall, the mural revealing itself gradually in the unobstructed moonlight. Bullet holes speckled parts of it, and one portion nearest the door had been heavily damaged by fire. “It’s religious, I think,” he said, although he wasn’t sure why he thought so. “And it’s crude—I don’t think anyone professional did this.”

It was a city scape, ill-proportioned or from a severely distorted perspective. Central to the painting were the rooftops, seen from above, squares and rectangles distorted, with tiny human forms clinging desperately. It was a mix of paints and drawing media, markers, anything that might register on the wall, so some parts had faded to near invisibility while other portions were still quite vivid, as if an observer had precisely recalled only certain details and allowed the others to recede into a blur of forgetfulness.

“What are those larger beings?” Gandhi pointed at several figures, glowing and unrecognizable, floating above the rooftops.

“I believe they’re meant to be angels, the way they observe everything,” Lenin said.

Daniel thought they were meant to represent people, or what people someday hoped to be, but he might be wrong. They all might be wrong.

The buildings in the mural were bent, wobbly, snaky things, more like giant square hoses with windows than proper rigid architecture. Down at the base of these surreally twisted high rises lay—‘pandemonium’ was the word that came to mind. Dark figures danced in joy or agony, their bodies shiny and broken like those of insects, vehicles smashed and fires spreading as a frightful mania travelled through the streets.

“It’s an unhappy picture painted by an unhappy person,” Gandhi said.

The howl beneath their feet shook the floor. Gandhi stamped his foot. Even though the gesture made but a small sound, another howl returned. “Just one level down, I’d say.”

They moved on. Daniel lingered to touch the art piece. The lines and colors had been rubbed and gouged in, as if drawn with great passion, with a need for the mural to last. At the bottom of the images, just above the floor, was a border of larger figures in panicked poses, as if desperate to escape the destruction. They were humanoid for the most part, but the occasional stick figure had gears, pinions, pulleys—it was some sort of mechanical creature. All of them looked panicked, all of them persecuted in this strangely detailed Hell. Who would have drawn this, and when? Had there always been residents? This experiment, or study, whatever it was, might have been going on for decades. He looked through the window at the shambling sprawl beyond, and wondered if something out there had inspired this.

As he turned back, his shoes kicked up rubble on the floor. Something white and shiny, torn, lettered. “… Psych…”

“This world is grown old.”Shakespeare’s Falstaff had said that, but Daniel could imagine those words coming out of his large acquaintance’s mouth. It seemed an appropriate title for a painting such as this. Perhaps they had made a mistake in not awakening Falstaff and dragging him down here.

The howls gained force and volume again as the menmoved through the next level down. The werewolf must have heard their approach and wanted to make sure he could be located. But the howls didn’t feel like cries for help exactly, more like some mindless complaint. Finally, off a long and empty corridor, they found the door with the sound of intense scratching on the other side.

The small glass window in the solid door was broken out. A thin bar had been bolted over the opening. A low moan issued from the room. Daniel pressed forward. A pale face suddenly filled the opening, wide-eyed, multiply scratched, some of the scratches scabbed over, others fresh with blood.

“At last!” the face sobbed. “Human beings! I never thought…” His skinny hand came up and one fingernail clawed deeply into the flesh on the left side of his nose, tearing down with a fresh stream of blood.

“Stop that!” Daniel cried.

“I can’t help it! It itches unbearably! It’s growing inside my skin. It’s trying to tear its way through!”

“The hair?” Gandhi said. “The hair of the wolf?”

“My rage!” the face screamed. “There’s more of it every day! It wants to cover me!” And he disappeared.

Daniel walked slowly to the window. The stench was like a punch in the face. The man had moved to the center of the room, naked and gesturing frantically at the hundreds of scars, old and new, layering his body. “See, see how it’s trying to get out?” The man had a starved appearance, but it was hard to tell how emaciated he really was, given the confused mess of torn flesh and dried blood.

The cell was unfurnished. But floor and ceiling and all four walls were covered with severely stained, worn padding, soiled foam innards protruding like yellowed fat from a deep wound. One corner was thick with the prisoner’s waste.

“Look at me!” the werewolf shouted. “No one has looked at me in—no one sees me anymore!” The prisoner tore at his face, yanked his long matted hair, contorted his mouth. His teeth were yellowed and blood-stained, and looked incredibly long although that might be an illusion. Daniel backed away from the window, unable to look at the man anymore. The werewolf screamed, and Lenin jumped in to take his place at the door.

“Hush!” Lenin ordered. “That won’t help you!”

The werewolf stopped, struggled to control his voice. “I was once… like you. A prisoner.”

“We wouldn’t call ourselves that,” Lenin said.

“Then you are foo—oo—ools!” The werewolf’s voice went high into a howl on the last word before he managed to cut it off. “You did not volunteer, I know this,” the werewolf continued. “No one would volunteer for this. You were snatched right out of your lives, just as I was. My wife in bed beside me, my twin babies in the other bedroom, at last asleep, their aimless, maddening energy spent. Like most nights, I was unable to sleep. My mind raced with the most insane impulses. I should have been a happy man, but apparently happiness simply will not thrive in a creature like me.

“So they brought me here, those… insects. They strapped me into their torture chamber, and sent me off into that faraway place, that mad space inside an evil man’s skull, and I had to watch from inside that space as he raped, as he tortured and killed, as he dismembered child after innocent child, and I was unable to return, and as you can tell I still live in that hateful room inside the monster’s skull!”

“Ask him if he means de Rais,” Gandhi said. “He is speaking of Gilles de Rais, isn’t he?”

“You mean Gilles de Rais,” Lenin said.

There was a pause. “Who gave you permission to use my name?” The shredded voice was quite different, heavily accented and somewhat musical, but as if the music were coming out of a torn and battered instrument.

Lenin took a half-step back. Daniel quickly took his place. The werewolf looked different, his eyes dark and piercing, his posture erect. Daniel tried to be formal. “We did not mean to offend, Sir. We are at your service.”

The werewolf blinked, then appeared to relax a bit. “It is no bother, you could not know. It is a difficult thing, understanding how a person should behave. I never knew how to behave. I never understood the power. I could do anything I wanted. I could kill a peasant like you, just on a whim, particularly during war time. But of course you do not understand the problem. When you can do anything you want, how then do you know what you should do?”

“Listen to God, perhaps? Is that what you did?”

The werewolf threw his head back, and Daniel did not think he could bear to hear the howl again. But the werewolf laughed instead. “I did that. I spoke to Our Lord God for years. I was good, I was pious, I was the most devout. I was the very best of men. But in the end it did not get me where I wanted, not that I could have told anyone what I wanted. Nor could I now. It’s maddening!”

He revolved suddenly on one foot, his laugh a rumble deep in his throat. When he came back around he looked embarrassed. “I took the family to church every weekend, the wife, my babies—we did it as a family. But my babies didn’t understand what they were hearing, of course. And I knew I was a hypocrite, even as I tried to be a good man. Maybe if I’d really been a good man I would have gained some joy from it, but I was so full of need and dissatisfaction. I think my wife got some strength out of it. Maybe it helped her deal with the likes of me.”

He spat on the floor and a bit of blood trailed down his chin.

He lunged toward the door. Daniel had an urge to retreat, but held fast. “Tell me,” the werewolf said. “Are you angel, or are you human? No, do not tell me. Let me hope. Let me at last have a voice that will tell me what I should do. That bitch Jeanne d’Arc, she had her voices, all her mad voices. When we served together at Orléans I had to suffer that bitch’s voices. They would command her what to do, and then she would command us what to do. Charles demanded that it be this way, and we obeyed. And then she became the saint and I became the monster! Where is the justice?”

The more the werewolf spoke the faster the raw quality in his voice faded, so that at some point Daniel could see him as more or less a typical human being, and then there came a point beyond that when a certain serenity bled through, a calmness in the eyes and a reverence in posture, that made Daniel think of portraits of saints.

“Not that I am doubting her miracles. I would never deny them. She believed in God. She listened, answered and obeyed. ‘Here I am Lord!’ she said. ‘I come to do Your will!’ She recognized the Dauphin, Charles the VII, on sight, although she had never seen him before—she picked him out even when he was dressed as an ordinary man and attempted to blend with the rest of us. She changed the direction of the wind at Orléans so we could cross the river. The men loved her! Even I was not immune to her charms! The way she rode across the field in her white armor, waving her standard with a field sown with lilies, Christ holding the world with an angel on each side! She survived an arrow to the breast that would have killed a vigorous man. She won a battle no man could win! The vision of her will forever haunt me, that maid, that bitch, that whore! I tell you we all loved her!

“But I grew weary of her voices, always her voices! What about mine? No one wanted to know of the things speaking to me!

“I had followers of my own, of course, but I had to pay them for their loyalty. For a time everywhere I went I was preceded by royal escort, accompanied by an ecclesiastical assembly and two hundred armed men and trumpeters, all on my payroll. I wanted to fascinate the crowd, I wanted to dazzle them! I discovered I could do anything I wanted—the peasants could not object for fear of their lives—can you even imagine how frightening that was for me?”

The werewolf closed his eyes and sighed, growled, and then began to speak again. “My wife told me she was going to leave and take the babies. Not that I wanted the babies. Oh, I loved them, even though they hadn’t much in the way of personalities, but clearly I wasn’t the nurturing one—I could never have taken care of them by myself.

“But to be rejected that way by the person who had promised to love me forever—how humiliating! I was nothing!” His voice fell deeper with the last few words, and the eyes told Daniel this was the wolf again.

“No one could understand how a man could spend his wealth this way. Certainly not my family, certainly not my old bastard of a grandfather. He was an indifferent guardian—he let us do as we liked. Our nurse raised us, but of course she could not control us. In only a short time we realized we were above the law, or the law was applied differently to those of our position in society. But I must say it did not make us feel safer in the world.

“When you have such resources, does it not compel you to use them in the most creative, most dramatic way? I cared nothing for the riches. I wanted to be an artist who would be remembered for all time. So wealth was like my paint, and the world the background where I could create anything I desired. My Le mistère du Siège d’Orléans, surely no one before or since has mounted so grand a production! If wealth had been my prime motivator, would I have staged such an elaborate and expensive spectacle? One hundred forty speaking parts and over five hundred extras. In an attempt to preserve the purity of my vision the six hundred costumes were worn once, discarded, then recreated for each new performance. The grand scaffolding erected and taken down and then erected again. And of course we had to feed our audience, otherwise they might not have come! My family was livid over the expenditures, but they were not possessed of my vision! Should I apologize because I was driven by my imagination? In order to create something grand, something everyone will remember, you have to be willing to sacrifice yourself to extravagance!”

Daniel decided to try a different tactic. “You hold an innocent man inside you.” He wasn’t sure if this was exactly true, but he had no proof otherwise. “His name is Henry. You have no right to keep him prisoner. Please, won’t you release him?”

But the werewolf acted as if Daniel hadn’t spoken at all. “Eventually, of course, they had their way. They appealed to the king and I was allowed to sell no more of my property in order to finance such magnificence. Never mind that it was no business of theirs. Never mind that I had created something that had never existed before!”

Suddenly he stopped speaking. “My mouth is like a desert cave. Could I have some water, please?”

Daniel looked questioningly at the others. “There’s no water here.” Lenin shrugged.

“I’m sorry,” Danielsaid. “We have none.”

The werewolf winced, and there was movement along the inside of the cheek. When he next opened his mouth blood spilled from the corners. “I needed moisture, to speak.

“Still, I attempted to find my satisfaction in religion. I became creative in my devotion. I constructed my Chapel of the Holy Innocents where I officiated in robes of my own design.

“But it was not enough. Nothing is ever enough!”

The werewolf sobbed. But when he lifted his head it was clearly Henry who was crying. “He’s not going to let me go.” Then the face distorted again and the werewolf shook his head and flashed his teeth.

“I turned my back on my religion and set out to pursue my own demons, the demon Barron, specifically. My learned accomplices assisted me in my alchemical and demon-summoning activities at my castle at Tiffauges. Am I to blame that the ceremony required the parts of a child?

“I loved my beautiful children! They were my angels! They were poor, they had never had anything to speak of, and I dressed them in the finest clothing they had ever known. And then when we led them upstairs, we told them what was going to happen to them. I am not ashamed to say that that was the initial part of my pleasure. Their reactions. Have you never wanted to tell someone some terrible truth and then observe the drama of their reaction? It is an experience far better than any play by the greatest of our playwrights! It is a creative act! As the children cried and screamed, as they begged to be returned to their parents, I am not embarrassed to say that I wept with them. And when finally I broke their necks and removed their parts I kissed their flesh and I wept!

“I loved my children, my babies! I just wasn’t capable of taking care of them! Is that so difficult to understand? I wondered, I… speculated, if I killed them, and killed my wife, I could be a good human being again. I know that sounds insane. But think, who could be more sympathetic, more admired than a grieving husband and father?”

He was panting, hot and raw.

“I have no idea how many I killed—I may have exaggerated. I wanted it to be a very large number in my final confession, because if I had to play the monster, I wanted to be the greatest monster who had ever lived!

“I burned the bodies whenever possible in my fireplace. It was a large and grand fireplace, I must say. And I made a grand play about doing so.”

Daniel stepped away from the door, unable to stand there anymore, not wanting to listen to one more word and yet not wanting to miss any piece of this confession.

Gandhi came forward. “There, there. We understand. It has been difficult for all of us.”

“The children, they were as beautiful as angels. My two, my twins, when they weren’t crying, I could imagine them as angels. I could almost imagine myself happy with that life, that wife and those children, with nothing more to show for all my remaining years. No pageantry, no spectacle, no special accomplishment, simply an ordinary life. Why couldn’t that be enough? Why couldn’t I make myself feel that would be enough?”

“You’re talking of your real life now? Not the one you played as de Rais? What was your name? Henry, wasn’t it? Try to hold onto your name.” Gandhi kept pressing. Daniel waited for some kind of explosion.

“Again, should I apologize because I was driven by my superior imagination?

“I should be ashamed to say that I have eaten a variety of human flesh and that I know that babies taste the best of all. I understand there are some things a human being should never know, but there is the fact of it and should I deny it now?”

“Wait, wait, are you the werewolf now? Are you de Rais?” Gandhi cried. “I don’t want to hear this story anymore! I really can’t!”

Gandhi stepped away and Daniel gestured for Lenin to step up to the door. But Lenin shook his head. Reluctantly, Daniel returned to the window.

“But those are the facts of it!” the werewolf shouted. “What kind of man is it who cannot or will not deal with the facts?”

The werewolf stopped speaking suddenly and stared into Daniel’s face. “Am I frightening you, Sir?”

“No, not really,” Daniel lied.

“Well, there’s no need for armor, so why do you wear it?”

“I don’t understand…”

“I cannot abide a metal face during polite conversation. I show you who I am, so please, Sir, permit me to see your eyes!”

Daniel didn’t know what to say. The werewolf blinked a few times, then his body convulsed in a series of muscle spasms. His arms suddenly looked crooked. His eyes swayed in their sockets. He jutted his chin forward and his ears appeared to flow back against his skull.

The werewolf rambled on for another ten minutes or so. The more Daniel listened to the man’s confession the more his vicious acts sounded like those of a young boy prodding and pulling the guts from a frog. Except these frogs had been children. And this creature seemed unable to tell the difference between the two. In the end pure evil was a banal and stupid thing.

“He’s crazy, but it’s not right that he is locked up like this,” Gandhi said. “Obviously this only makes him worse. We have to get him out of there.”

Lenin stepped between Gandhi and the door. “Are you sure that is wise—look what he’s done to himself!”

“To himself—that is the point. I did not hear him threaten any of us, however paranoid he might be. It is himself he damages. This isn’t right, to hold him like this. We’ve got to get him out of there!”

“I suppose. What more can they do to us? He is right, Daniel—now and then you must stand up for what is right, if you want to call yourself a decent human being.”

Daniel knew he’d feel unsafe with this monster running about, but he didn’t want to make any important decisions out of fear. He helped the others hunt for anything that could be used as a pry bar.

Lenin came up with a two-foot piece of ridged metal rod under a pile of crumbling concrete at one end of the corridor. It was rusted brown but still appeared strong. Daniel recognized it as what they called rebar, or reinforcing bar used to support concrete. Where have they brought us?

Lenin jabbed into the door frame with the end of the bar. The werewolf bobbed back and forth inside the cell making a high yipping sound, like a dog overly excited that its owner has come home. Finally Lenin managed to get the bar wedged into the frame and wiggled the bar back and forth; it chewed into the frame. He stopped and put his weight onto the bar, trying to pry the door open. Gandhi ran over and pressed his own small shoulder against the bar, his feet slipping futilely on the tile as he pushed. Although Daniel was conflicted, it embarrassed him to see Gandhi applying so much pointless effort. He came up behind the small man and placed his hands on either side of his trembling shoulder and pushed.

“Stop it! Don’t let him out!” Falstaff was at the end of the hall running toward them. “Get away from him!”

“He doesn’t belong in there! It’s not right!” Gandhi shouted back.

“You don’t know what you’re doing!” Falstaff slammed into them and all three went sprawling. The bar clattered to the floor. The werewolf’s throat made a painful huffing noise.

Lenin clambered to his feet and picked up the bar, swinging it about furiously.

“Stop it!” Daniel cried.

“He doesn’t get to make all our decisions! We’re going to get this man out of there!”

Falstaff was standing, bent over and breathless. “You… under… est… imate him. Henry… Henry come to the window.”

The werewolf’s face appeared, wide-eyed and panting. “Yes yes yes…”

“Would you hurt us if we let you out?”

The werewolf rolled his eyes. “Noooo… but I might eat you. You might taste good. If you tasted good I might not stop. Do you taste good? And that one?” He glanced in Gandhi’s direction. “Would he taste as good as a child?”

“We can’t, we can’t just leave him like this!” Gandhi cried.

“You can visit him, talk to him. As I do. You just can’t let him out. We won’t leave him alone, we’ll visit him more often, but we won’t let him out.”

The werewolf pushed his head as far into the opening as he could, his lips pressed and distorted under the metal rod. “I was alone at school, when they weren’t harassing me. My wife didn’t know me back then, or else I’m sure she never would have married me. She would never have been able to get that image out of her head. I was so pitiful, so humiliated. I knew I was a weakling, but sometimes I tried to pretend it wasn’t true. I tried to pretend I was a great warrior who hadn’t yet discovered the secret that would unlock his power.” Henry spoke weepily, a child caught with his hand where it should not have been. Daniel came up to the opening as three tears came out of the man’s right eye and streaked his dirty cheek as precisely and cleanly as a set of invisible claws. “I used to have dreams I destroyed the world on a whim, with no reason.” Then the voice changed, thickening into de Rais’ coarsely musical tongue, “But the power to transform a living man into a corpse.” He tilted his head back and sniffed the air with a scowl. “I can think of no greater léger de main.”