aus-der-traum:

Capt J’s men found the German hiding in a chicken coop, snow on the roof and feathers around his feet. Hiding may not have been the right word, the men later said, exchanging nervous looks – nervous about what? He had simply stood there, they said, still, waiting.

Like all of the bastards before him he looked miserable, dirty and tired, but a little more rotten too. Something aristocratic about him. Dark hair slicked back and the widow’s peak of a man twice his age, skin like wet paper stretching over blue veins, hollows of sickly purple under his deep-set eyes and those eyes – predictably: blue, but a blue of a dull and foggy kind like the rattlesnake’s before the shed. Of all the gaunt, hungry, utterly consumed looking men they’d taken prisoner so far this one looked particularly cadaverous.

He was an SS officer and didn’t mean to hide it. He could have easily dropped that cap with the sinister little skull somewhere by the side of the road and torn off his collar tabs (funny ones those were, like rotten, grasping hands – not like anything J had ever seen before), but they were all too proud for that, weren’t they, those fucking fanatics. You could see it in their eyes, dull and cold like iron and stone, incapable of expressing any emotion but pure unfiltered hate. As far as J was concerned they were barely human.

The German’s lips (white, not a shot of blood in them) remained a condescending line as J ran down the usual questions: his unit, their strength, their position. Not even his name he would give, J had to take it by force, pulling the identification papers from the pockets of a heavy leather coat that was stained as if the man in it had been literally wading through blood.

“Wolf-Heinrich?” J read the name off the document, butchering it with American pronunciation. “Some proper Nazi name you got there, momma must be proud.” Chuckles around. Smell of sweat, bodies strained for release. They wanted to see the prisoner hurt.

The German smiled like a snarling dog. His gums were as white as his teeth and of his teeth he seemed to have a couple too many. For the first time he spoke, voice like smooth bourbon, tickling the hair on the back of J’s neck, but a haughty bastard still. “Wolf-Heinrich Siegfried Hermann Wilhelm von Kleist,” he said in a tone as if schooling a child.

Oh, that got to J.

Sudden memories of teachers and their arrogant little smiles. Sadistic, withered up hags with their powdered faces and their hair tied up so neat and their backs straight like they got something stuffed up their ass, always looking down on little J no matter how tall he grew. Continental accents – Oh, you don’t know that, you idiot, you inbred hick, you stupid dog? And the ruler across his fingers (howling like a dog indeed) and his pants at his ankles in the headmistress’ office.

J hit the German square in the face, closed fist, and he dropped to the ground unconscious. A glob of blood ran from his nose, dark and thick like machine oil, unnervingly slowly, like a fat leech squeezing out.

J could have the prisoner sent down the line, let someone else handle it, put him in some camp by the shore and let the intelligence squeeze his secrets out of him – and all the other dreck that would come floating up with it.

“He strikes me like the type who’d know important stuff,” he said into the silence of held breaths and swallowed coughs, “would be better if we keep him though. Intel down the line is too slow. Could crack him here.. I know I can. ” Hesitant nods all around. No one had asked and no one would object.

The German was still unconscious when he was thrown in the back of J’s truck, blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back and tied also to the seat on such a short leash that once he came back to it he could only wiggle like a worm. J would have gladly also stuffed his mouth had the prisoner raised his voice, but he was too proud to object and merely laid there, quiet and motionless, trying to look dignified when not thrown about by another bump in the road. In the rear-view mirror J could see how he opened his mouth then as if hissing, but through the noise of the engine the sound did not reach his ear. He did like taking the bumpy road.

They had picked up the German at dusk and a few hours later the night was black except for a gravid rising moon. Not a star pinned to the sky, not even the light of a plane or muzzle flash to be seen. They’d made good progress and for J and his men an abandoned farm house was a good as any to hole up in for the night. Not intending to make his prisoner’s life any more pleasant and as a way to soften him up for further questioning come morning J considered leaving the German out in the cold, but as frail and pale as the man looked J feared he might not survive the night. His men also were not always to be trusted with an item as controversial as a Jew-hating, kid-killing SS officer, so J at last decided his precious catch would have to stay with him for the night and he had him dragged to a room in the basement. The room he had chosen for himself because it wouldn’t be leveled by artillery in an instance and because it had a door that actually shut.

He left the prisoner blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back, he didn’t trust the man not to try to murder him in his sleep and there was a certain psychological benefit to putting him in such an uncomfortable and helpless position to ponder over all night.

J was lying on his back with one hand on his pistol, staring at the ceiling and a slit of light cast by a narrow window up high, waiting for the embrace of sleep when from his subconscious it struck him that the prisoner was watching him. He turned to check. In the darkness of the cellar it was hard to make out any object clearly, shadows blending together to more unnerving shapes. He found the outline of the prisoner where he’d been dropped, but it seemed he had curled up now like a cat. Just a dark spot in the corner of the room, but yes, facing him, with his eyes covered, yet undoubtedly, the white piece of cloth making it much easier for J to see it, the German was looking right at him and like a droning noise that his mind had blocked out all the while suddenly breaking through into conscious awareness, he could hear it then, when he held his own breath, the other man’s heavy breathing, deep and labored like from great pain or great pleasure, and then it stopped and he heard the man sniffing like a dog taking scent and then it was quiet again.

Clutching his pistol J listened and waited for a long time. The cube of moonlight cast by the window wandered across the wall, but the noise did not return and eventually the blindfold seemed just a blindfold again, not those inhumane eyes, the German probably sleeping soundly for a while already and so J too fell into a restless sleep.

In his dream the man in the corner was no longer man but the monster that had haunted his childhood; a tall figure, all black, standing at the foot of his bed and J in his room again, a little boy too weak to move a man’s limbs. With the flicker of a cinema projector the shadow grew hair like a wolf and eyes glowing like snuffed out charcoal buried in ash and long teeth from rotting gums, many of them, dripping with thick, gooey spit. From the foot of his bed – so very far away it seemed now as he was boyishly small again – the creature came forward, not walking or crawling but slithering like a snake, the whole body like one strong muscle, gently, caressingly sliding up his leg, grinding sensual pleasures, and settling on his chest, so heavy it pressed the air out of his lungs, stifling a scream stuck halfway up his throat. Face to face now with the creature J could see it was man and owl and wolf all the same. The drool dripped out of its mouth and on J’s face and it was warm and smelled of hunger and sick. With its long prehensile tongue  the creature licked his face, it forced his mouth open with its beak and drew him into a tender kiss.

When J woke up the German – still bound and blind – was on top of him, straddling him. His mouth was at J’s throat, biting and licking and sucking on it with a wet, sexual slurping sound. He heard himself whimper and it occurred to J that he was being assaulted and that he should be terrified, that he should struggle and fight for his life. There was still the gun in his hand. He might be able to tilt it just a little bit and muster enough strength to pull the trigger. The German rose and J felt a sudden jolting hot pain in his neck as spurts of blood shot out of it in the arcs of a fountain.

The German’s mouth was smeared with blood, it had soaked his blindfolds, it was dripping from his lips, it was running down his neck and pooling under his collar. He swallowed down a gulp of it. He seemed to look at J and joyful now, healthy and strong, he smiled bearing a row of awfully mundane, human looking teeth.

“Tu das nicht,” he said, soft buzz under J’s skull, and J obeyed and he let go off the gun entirely.

The German bent down again to commence his feast and with the succulent touch of his tongue the pain of the wound faded away into numbness and black and then J felt very light, very warm, relieved of a heavy burden. Falling asleep to the sound of water dripping in the distance. The leaky faucet at the back of the barn that daddy never did fix. The house creaking, breathing in the night. Time stretched and compressed. Doves cooing in the attic. The warmth of sunrise coming over corn fields and under him a cooling puddle of piss, and little J is lying in his wet bed so very helpless and yet also content in this place and moment in time wishing it would last forever.

@reichblr-ficathon