Aaaiiieee!

Rat King

I appreciate the drink, my friend, but please don’t take pity on me; those boys meant me no real harm. My face frightens them and bullying me gives them control over their fears. It is easier to be cruel to the maimed, the weak, the cowed. We don’t respect these things, they fill us with disgust…because we don’t want to become them.

And please, don’t feel sorry for me on account of my disfigurement. After all, I did this to myself. Literally, of course. But also, I earned this face. My face changed to match what I had become. It was a miracle that I could fire a bullet from a .455 through the roof of my mouth and live. It is nothing but that; a true miracle. God did not want me dead, my friend. Death would be too quick and merciful. God spared my life through divine intervention so that I could grow old as I have…and suffer the contempt of boys. And suffer my memories of that pit…

When I was a boy myself I once went out on the broken ice of a pond to save a friend’s dog from the water. I might have died, rescuing that animal. How, then, did I become the man I was in 1945? What changes in my heart, in my soul, shaped me…led me…fated me to become an SS guard at the camp of Bergen-Belsen?

Thinking of that dog reminds me of an experience my cousin had while he himself was an Oberschaarfuhrer at Auschwitz. His name would be unknown today, but you Americans glorify some mass murderer who has killed only five, maybe a dozen people. My cousin personally gassed many thousands, with his fellows. He murdered enough people to fill towns.

He had a wolfhound, a great beautiful animal he told me, and one day the dog had run into a fence while playfully bounding about. The fence carried 6,000 volts and the dog was instantly electrocuted. This dog died just outside one of the crematoriums, where my cousin’s victims were incinerated. While he told me this story his eyes grew moist, I noticed. He blamed himself for the fate of his beloved pet, as he had been throwing a stick for it to fetch. He felt guilty for the animal’s death…outside that crematorium.

But let me tell you about myself, as I started to. Myself, and Belsen…

I understand that after a time the prisoners would no longer smell the stink of death and excrement that reached for miles, reached into the peaceful and lovely town of Belsen like a great tentacled monster which was invisible because the people of the town chose not to see it. We became accustomed to the stench also, though not fully immune, as we did not dwell in those horrid shacks. It was useful that we could still smell the stench. It filled us with repulsion for our charges, and repulsion made it easier to abuse them. It was useful that, starved and sick as they were, the prisoners came to look unearthly; animate skeletons barely sheathed in skin, no longer truly male or female…not so much less than human as other than human. Hideous, ghastly. Their ugliness made it easier for us to treat them as things. Things not human, things worthy of contempt. The way those boys see me now.

We manufactured these things at our factory death camps. We were manufacturing obliteration. We unmade people. We meant to unmake cultures, races. It was an ambitious project, one might say.

This was hell as Dante saw it. The prisoners were the damned. And that made me one of the demons. I know that now…

The British came on April 15, 1945, and captured Belsen before we could even hope to do away with all the human evidence. The British saw no grand vision at work here. They were appalled. Great pits were dug. Then, we ourselves were forced to bury the dead. We SS were now the wretched enslaved.

The British could not expect us to bury the dead with dignity; they had to be buried as quickly as possible, there were so many of them, all decaying, and all having lost their individuality in any case. They were all one same tortured soul, in effect, and they all went into one great grave in a jumble, in heaps, in mountains, until at last that vast grave was full of thousands and covered and we went on to the next.

For days we slung the pathetic figures into these pits. Their numbers seemed never to exhaust themselves; our labors, Dante-like, would seem to be eternal. You read of the numbers killed and find it hard to conceive of those numbers as lives. I carried these bodies, I saw how many there were, but I myself could not grasp that reality. As in life, we treated those dead as things. Sacks to be slung up onto truck beds. Slack mannequins to be dragged on their faces to the pit and flung over the edge to flop and sprawl atop the piles. They were horrible things; with slit eyes and twisted snarls, long-limbed and rubbery. Yes, rigor mortis is only a temporary condition. I could tell you more about the characteristics of a corpse than could a dozen morticians.

On the first day of this forced labor I had stumbled back from the lip of the first pit, my uniform soiled with sweat and befouled with human waste and smeared with decay. My shoulders ached, since I had slung bodies over them at times because it was faster than dragging. I mopped my face with a handkerchief, and saw that a British officer was moving toward me. I was weary but a defensive fury was rising in me. He was going to order me back to work and I was going to tell him to go to hell, even if he whipped me with his pistol for it.

But instead of drawing his revolver, the officer produced a tin of cigarettes and extended it to me. I nodded with a grunt meant to sound polite, and accepted one, which he also lit for me. Then the man dropped his gaze into the pit as he inhaled on his own cigarette. His eyes were squinted in revulsion, as if they half wanted to close and shut the scene out.

He said to me in English, “How could you people do this?”

“We didn’t murder these people,” I told him.

He looked to me suddenly; at first I thought he was surprised that I spoke English, but then I realized he was shocked at the words I had spoken.

“What do you mean, you didn’t kill them?”

“They starved. And most of them were very sick. This camp was intended originally to house privileged Jews with Allied nationality. American, British nationality.” I nodded at him. “Conditions here were very good. But this winter they began transporting great numbers of prisoners here from…elsewhere…” Elsewhere meant the camps of Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Mittelbau and others. Like Auschwitz. “We became hopelessly over-crowded. Conditions necessarily worsened. And they made us a center to receive sick prisoners, mostly. So it was these conditions that killed the people you see. We did not exterminate them.”

“How can you look me in the face and say that, man? If…if you were to abandon a newborn infant in the forest, you’d be murdering it through neglect. Murder is murder. You’re only insulting my intelligence and your own.”

I shrugged, drew on my cigarette. The taste of smoke helped mask the stench of death that had even coated the inside of my mouth. “You will be murdering us by exposing us like this so closely to these rotting diseased bodies.”

“A fate well deserved, my friend, I’m sure. And some of you we will murder quite consciously, I assure you. On the gallows.”

“Yes, of course you will. So don’t look down on me, ‘my friend’. You murder for your purposes, we murder for ours; as you say, murder is murder.”

Again my words made the British officer gape at me. “Ten thousand unburied dead, we estimate here. Three hundred dropping dead every day, I’m told. No, SS man, don’t think to compare your motivations to ours.”

“You have your notions of justice, and we have ours. It’s what makes the world so colorful.” And I grinned broadly.

“Colorful. Yes. Blood red.”

I had expected the man to strike me, then, but he was still too much a gentleman, too British. He simply strode away. And I turned back to my labors.

I was going to flick the end of my cigarette into the pit but my eyes locked with the foggy yet weirdly direct gaze of a young man down there, and oddly, I dropped it to my feet and stamped it out instead.

* * *

The next day I was actually down in the pit, spreading the dead out more evenly, as they tended to clump up where those above pitched them. At last I was relieved, picked my way not too delicately through the carpet of bodies and climbed up and out. Waiting there was my friend from the previous afternoon, the British officer. My earlier words did not dissuade him from offering me another cigarette.

I had no doubt he had sought me out specifically, and now I understood why. It amused me somewhat but I was careful not to show this. The man was a homosexual, as we liked to claim all British men were, in addition to their all being alcoholics. I knew this because I was very handsome then, my friend…yes, it is ironic now indeed. I had been told all my life how beautiful I was. Heroic, god-like, my admirers had gushed; but for my dark hair I was the Aryan ideal. Many times I had seen women act in this man’s manner…seeking me out after an initial meeting, trying to make it look accidental, casual, trying to seem aloof but churning inside with desire so that I felt the vibration of their lust in the air between us. Even now in this horrid air I felt it.

And maybe that was part of it. You know? Death has a strange glamour, even in its most hideous forms. Your beloved serial killers, as I say. I think it was subconscious with this individual. I’m certain that outwardly he truly was appalled at our crimes, and agonized at the loss of lives. I am not saying he condoned our actions. But I think he was drawn to the darkness he perceived in me. The allure of the dangerous hidden under the beautiful. No, don’t be naive, don’t protest. It goes beyond mere morbid fascination; it’s the seductiveness of evil. Look at the new Nazis you Americans have. Your Klan. Your obsession with us real Nazis in films for decades! You find us as beautiful, our uniforms as glamorous, as did the most devout of us! We love villains, criminals. Gangsters. Monsters. We all have that inside us, after all. Maybe it’s our way of accepting that side of us.

He appeared properly contemptuous, anyway, standing there in his neat, unstained uniform. “Now you need a shower, SS man. Now you stink. Now you have lice, no doubt.”

“And maybe typhus.”

“Good. How do you think the people in some of those barracks have felt? I went into one that I could only stand in for less than a minute, on account of its stench. The living people lay amongst the dead people and I couldn’t tell them apart. They were too weak to move, most of them. Many were in a coma. Just covering the floor. How do you think they have felt lying there?”

“I don’t think those individuals really feel much of anything any more. But they came here sick, most of them. Already sick, as I’ve told you.”

“Oh, how innocent you are. How could even one human being let this happen? Do you know that if we all had true empathy for one-another, could do something so simple as put ourselves in each other’s shoes, there would be no murder, no war, and no inhumanity?” He gestured with his cigarette into the vast grave. “Look there, my friend. You see that woman? She could be your wife. She could be your sister.”

I smiled. “I have neither.”

“Don’t be so bloody smug, you bastard. You know what I’m saying. She could be your mother, your daughter, she could be you.”

“But she isn’t. She’s a Jew. She’s a woman. She’s down there and I’m up here.”

“Your positions will some day he reversed.”

“On Judgment Day, eh?” I chuckled mockingly. I knew I shouldn’t provoke his anger, repulse him. Perhaps I could use his attraction to my advantage. My pride aside, I would rather have become his secret lover than hang. But I didn’t think he would ever chance an outright relationship with me. Still, I knew I should try to benefit myself from the situation, to flirt with him, beguile him, in the same way I had skillfully mesmerized women. After all, I had consciously enthralled ugly women, women I wouldn’t have slept with. In my vanity, I simply enjoyed the attention. The power. Looking back now, I wonder if my flirtation with the officer was motivated less by my attempt to better my situation than it was by this feeling of power. Maybe it made me feel superior to the man, less a prisoner. I was still a Nazi then, of course. I still believed in mastering others.

In any case, when the officer proffered another cigarette and lit it for me, I lightly cupped my hands around his. I felt a slight tremor flinch through him at this contact but he didn’t jerk his hands away. He was indeed smitten, and he was indeed afraid of me, which I think made him more smitten.

Both of us said nothing for several minutes as we watched others drop one emaciated being after another over the side, like mummies being reinterred, but without the finery. I flicked a louse off my arm; the officer had been right. Parasites. We had called the Jews parasites. Vermin to be exterminated with no more compassion than we would feel spraying insects, or killing rats.

These conversations, philosophical as they were, put me in mind of our motivations as Nazis, brought to mind the analogy of vermin. And seeing the interlaced arms and legs, the entwined skeletal bodies below, made my thoughts take another leap. But a very strange one, unsettling. I shuddered unaccountably; it was the first time staring into the pit, staring at the heaped corpses, actually brought out goose flesh on my arms.

“Have you ever heard,” I asked my new-found friend, “of Rat Kings?”

We looked at each other; he said, “No.”

“My grandmother told me about them. Of course, it’s always grandmothers who tell you such things. In any case, she told me that when rats were more plentiful amongst us than they are today, sometimes in a nest of rats a Rat King would be found. This was a group of say a dozen rats or more, whose tails had all tangled together so that they couldn’t pull apart, with their heads all facing outwards. Because they were stuck together like this they couldn’t move very far, and were often found pitifully starving or already dead. They seemed like many-headed monsters to those who found them, and that was why they were thought of as Rat Kings. Did you know there is a Rat King in The Nutcracker? But they call it a Mouse King.”

“Yes…that’s right. But all this about rats with their tails knotted up sounds like wives’ tales and nonsense.”

“Perhaps it is, though my grandmother swore to me that such things were truly discovered. As a child she herself had a neighbor who supposedly found one in their barn consisting of two dozen rats, which was why she told me about all this. It could be that huddling together in the winter, it was their own frozen urine that was linking their tails together. In any case, only the attic rat, as we Germans call them, have been found as Rat Kings. These are the black rats. They’re smaller and more rare than the brown rat…mostly because the bigger and stronger brown rats have preyed on them and diminished their numbers greatly. Nearly wiped them out. The brown rats are the more successful and superior species.”

“An interesting science lesson. But why would only the weaker black rats get bound up into these Rat Kings, then?”

I shrugged, smiled enigmatically. “One of the many mysteries of life, friend.”

The officer drew up closer to me, and thus nearer to the edge of the pit. He gazed down into it on today’s cairn of corpses, one hand cupped over his lower face as a filter. “Here’s a mystery of life for you. I just can not accept this. Look at these bodies. So wasted. Many of these men were once muscular and strong. Tanned. Many of these women were lovely, shapely, fussed over their hair. Now they all look the same. Horrid. Are you really looking at them? Look at that young girl. See? Look at her posture.”

I looked. Her arms flung, her legs spread. Her patch of pubic hair seemed too large for her skeletal frame. It was so bluntly exposed. Probably swarming with lice. Pubic hair and sunken eye sockets were the black areas that showed up most against all the masses of white torsos and limbs. There was something very disturbing, even I had to admit at that moment, in seeing so many naked figures so shamelessly exposing private parts that in life they would have shyly hidden. Had these same women been alive and healthy, seeing them naked and sprawled on a bed would have aroused me greatly. This motionless orgy of plaited cadavers, however, made me wonder how I would feel the next time a woman spread herself for me. Would memories of these images get in the way of my view? Would I fear that black nest of hair? Fear its smell of rot, and the lice hiding there in wait for me?

I grew irritated with myself. What effect was this delicate British fop having on me? Was I actually letting him stir feelings of guilt in me, with his admonishments?

My contempt for him at this moment gave me the perverse desire to exploit his interest in me further, to manipulate him as he was seeking to manipulate me. I reached out and picked a piece of lint from his jacket’s breast. He stepped back from me, a look of potential alarm in his eyes, but I showed him the lint before I blew it off my fingers. I then lightly patted the place on his breast where I had plucked the lint, as if dislodging some dust that actually wasn’t there.

“A handsome uniform, my friend,” I told him.

“Thank you.”

“It makes me embarrassed for you to see me this way. Filthy, sweaty. I take pride in my appearance. I wish I could talk to you clean and smelling properly, like a human being.”

“I’m sure I prefer you this way. I have no interest in seeing you in your SS uniform.”

“As I say, we both wear uniforms. We both do our jobs. But if we were both naked right now, we would both be the same, wouldn’t we? Not German, not English. Not demon and angel. Just two men. Together. Talking.” And I spread a slow smile for him, like the bearded smile between a woman’s legs.

I saw his adam’s apple bob once. It gave me a weird satisfaction. I felt more in control again, after my stumble of guilt.

“I know you despise me, my friend,” I told him, “but I, in fact, enjoy your company. I respect you and enjoy talking with you. Perhaps this evening after I have bathed and changed I could join you for a cigarette and some more stimulating conversation? Then I would feel less ashamed of my condition.”

“It sounds to me as though you mean to trick me, SS man, and take me off guard. Grab for my pistol. Hold me hostage and try to escape.”

“Oh, come now. Are you afraid of me? We can meet in full view of others. The guards, your men. But if you’d rather not, then so be it…”

“I’ll come and get you. I find you unpleasantly…educational. But if you try anything foolish I promise you I will put a bullet through your head.”

“Thank you. I look forward to conversing with you more as a gentleman.”

“You can bathe and change, sir, but you will still not be a gentleman, and you will still have every right to be ashamed of your condition.”

Yes, I thought, but you’ll still keep that date, won’t you? And your heart will be beating heavier as you come to search me out…

I had no intention of attempting escape. Of inflicting harm on him. As I told you, I just wanted to see if I could use him to my benefit. And I liked to see his adam’s apple bob.

* * *

My officer fetched me after dinner, after the sun had set. Lights washed the camp, leaving few dark corners, and he must have felt safe enough to stroll with me. Straight off he had given me one of his cigarettes, and while he lit it for me a soldier patted me down for hidden weapons. As we walked off I asked him, “Did your superiors ask why you were permitting me this pleasant liberty?”

“I told them you were talkative. They asked me to write down what you tell me in my report.”

I laughed. “Will you write about Rat Kings?”

“I may have to, but I was hoping you would tell me more in depth what your people did here and at the other camps. The death camps.”

“I have never been to one of these alleged death camps, sir.”

“Listen, I can take you back and let you be hanged with all your knowledge intact. Or maybe you can be cooperative and make things easier for yourself.”

Ah, so this was how he had justified our date to himself. He was going to question me as part of an investigation. He was going to probe the criminal mind. I remember how amused I was at his desperate attempt to rationalize or excuse his interest in me. As earnestly as I could sound, thus amused, I told him, “Sir, I am only a simple soldier. I acted on orders. The vision I followed was that of men far removed from me. But I can tell you what my responsibilities were, as that soldier. I can cooperate to that extent. But if I am to hang…well…what would be the point in helping you?”

“Your superiors will no doubt hang. I hardly think we will hang every last guard and soldier; we are not barbarians like you fiends are. I was only trying to frighten you.”

“Well, I am relieved. I will help you. But you have to promise to protect me. Please.” I stopped to face him, and he faced me. We were still within view of posted British soldiers, but were too far for anyone to hear our words. “Please protect me…”

“Write down a full report of your activities here. Everything you learned about operations, your superiors, anything you think would be valuable to us. You’ve seen the film crew. We need to make the world believe this horror really happened. Maybe in some small way you can exonerate yourself.”

“And you will take care of me?”

“I told you; I’ll do all I can.”

I took his hand and clasped it in both of mine. Squeezed it. He stood silhouetted against a flood lamp; had his adam’s apple shifted? “What is your name, my friend?” I asked softly, still holding his hand.

In a hesitant, uncertain voice, he told me. But I will not tell you what he said. He was a fine officer. A good man. I would not want to sully his reputation, even if he might be dead now. I was trying to corrupt him, confuse him. I was finding vulnerable places in him. It is my reputation that should be sullied. I am the one who should feel embarrassed.

We strolled on, smoked another cigarette. He walked, I noticed, so that his holstered revolver was on the far side of him. His nervousness, his tension, was electric in the air but I don’t think he was really nervous that I would assault him.

Why did we walk at last to the pit? Remember, I had become immune to much of the stink of Belsen, but my companion surely hadn’t. I think now that we ended up there because it was as deserted a place as the camp had to offer. It left us in intimacy. And thus far, the pits had been the place of our rendezvous. Like a garden where lovers meet.

This particular pit had not been filled to capacity, that evening, so it had not yet been plowed over by the bulldozers. It gaped as a huge crater, and was black except for the far wall, where one flood beam slanted into it. There were thousands of people down at our feet, and yet we felt alone.

“Here we are, drawn back to the nightmare,” I had to remark. “It fascinates you.”

“It horrifies me! I can’t comprehend it!”

“Yes. But it fascinates you. Just as you find me interesting. Perhaps fascinating.”

“I find you disgusting.”

“But you met me tonight,” I said in a near whisper, stepping so close to the man I’m sure he felt the breath of my words on his cheek.

I heard him swallow. It amused me, but I think my game of seduction had begun to consume me, really. By projecting those energies toward him, I believe I had actually started to become aroused by the game. His reactions to my manipulation were giving me a very odd gratification. My attempt to dominate him was resembling those times I had coaxed some young girl out of her virginity. The desire in her, but the fear. Then the succumbing…

I am not a homosexual. And yet, at that moment, a hungry warmth spread through my lower body and it was almost dizzying. So I reacted to it, without thinking. If I thought anything at all, I suppose I justified my actions to myself as an attempt to seduce him utterly, so that he would let no harm come to me. That’s what I told myself then. But I know now it was the warmth in my belly.

What I did, you see, was step even closer to him, and press my lips onto his lips. I reached one hand down to lightly cup his testicles. My tongue began to slide into his mouth, where the taste of our cigarettes mingled.

But it was only an instant, and then the blow under my jaw sent my head back with a snap. I had bitten my tongue badly. Light filled my vision as if a spotlight had fallen on my face. In his fury, the officer had struck me with incredible force.

Thus dazed, I stumbled back from him. And in stumbling back, I toppled into the pit.

I rolled down the dirt incline. Then I sprawled on my belly across the floor of the pit. And the floor of the pit was an ocean of bodies. An ocean of stench. Totally dark. It was more the bottom of an ocean, and the stench was drowning me, filling my lungs. One of my boots had wedged between several bent limbs, and in thrusting out my hand it slipped off a set of ribs and slid into a space between bodies so that my arm became buried to the shoulder. I grunted, spat blood, fought to extricate my arm and roll over, tangled as I was.

A hand brushed my cheek. It was light, a caress, then gone. But I hadn’t imagined it. In my fall I had caused the heaped bodies to shift, I thought…for a body then flopped onto the backs of my legs. It must have tumbled from 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 it.

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.