Emanations of Hate
Chapter 13
The most truly frightening aspect of this whole ordeal for Peter Newkirk, the one that would always stay with him, was seeing the chilling expression on Andrew Carter's face as he watched Amon Schuler slowly stirring. His awareness was continuing to return to him gradually; he still had no control over his movements, but he could now feel his hands on the wheel as he drove them to Schuler's cellar where it had all began. More importantly, they were beginning once more to feel like his hands. This reassured him, and helped alleviate some of the horror of having his unresponsive limbs jerked around like a puppet on a string.
But not being able to recognize a single thing about his friend in the back seat, the unnatural quality of what was happening to him, made Newkirk sick with fear. For the life of him, he couldn't believe that he'd ever see his friend again; that Carter wasn't lost for good.
And it's all my fault! It happened when I locked him in that bleeding room. Whatever it was, it happened there. He stared in the rear view mirror at Carter.
Oh, God help me! What've I done?
However, neither of the two men in the back seat were aware of this conflict in their driver. Townsend did note the English corporal gazing at him, but it was unimportant. He sat and gathered his strength and did his best to not let his repulsion get the better of him as he felt Schuler finally regaining consciousness beside him. He did not bother to hold a gun on Schuler, whose hands were tied behind his back. Even without that precaution, there would be no escape for the monster now; but oh, how he did want to kill the slimy bastard. Still, he considered, the others deserved their time with Schuler. He could not rob them of that.
Schuler moaned. "What is this?" he hissed.
Townsend did not deign to answer.
"I demand to know why I have been abducted!"
With tremendous force Townsend suddenly struck Schuler across the jaw, hard enough to knock the man's head against the far window.
"DO NOT make demands of your betters!" Townsend bellowed.
"My betters?" Schuler sneered, rubbing his jaw, but not daunted for a second. "You are nothing more than hired thugs. Degenerates picked to fill out the ranks of the SS and enforce the laws that your betters have helped create. That I have helped create. Do you know who I am?"
Townsend laughed. It was hilarious! "Herr Schuler, do you know who I am?"
But Schuler didn't get the joke. "I don't know and I don't care. I am a very important scientist doing vital work for the Third Reich. My work is imperative to the success of the Fatherland. I am irreplaceable."
"If only that were true, Herr Schuler," Townsend said. The world would be a better place. And it would make my killing you so much more rewarding.
"I assure you that it is. It is crucial that I continue my work without interruption." Schuler's supreme sense of self-importance was not shaken by being met with silence. "Do you hear me?" he demanded impatiently.
Townsend displayed no concern at this posturing.
"I have important connections. People who will notice my absence and want to know the reasons for my work being delayed. I know Karl Brandt, General Commissioner for Sanitation and Health and Hitler's personal physician. I am a member of the Institute for Military Scientific Research and therefore the Ahnenerbe Society, of which Heinrich Himmler himself is president. This also makes me an honorary member of the SS."
"That is hardly a point in your favour," Townsend laughed. "It's also rather foolish really. They had no qualms about turning on Rascher after all."
For the first time Schuler's face lost its expression of arrogant indignation. "It was different with Rascher," he argued.
"Ah yes, a doctor purging the 'unclean' executed for not meeting race requirements. Most ironic. I enjoyed reading about it in the newspaper. Of course, I had to compensate for the eternal propagandizing, but still - a very rewarding article. The only one that didn't turn my stomach as it happens. Yet I believe you're failing to see the point I'm making."
"There is no point. Rascher knew what we were trying to do. We are the true absolute people. We are divine. It is our sacred duty to eliminate the contagion and in doing so, usher in the New Golden Age." Townsend, even knowing what the man was, could only stare in shock as Schuler said all of this in an exalted tone, his eyes staring far off into the distance as if towards some fabled, golden tomorrow.
"My God! You actually believe that don't you? You truly feel no remorse at all."
"Remorse? Why should I feel remorse? I remember attending a lecture given by Dr. Ernst Rudin, who assisted in composing the 'Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health'. He talked about the need for genetic purification, and how not only were some lives not worth living, but about how it was our responsibility as doctors to destroy such life and remove it from the general population. It was then that I realized my life's mission." (1)
"Your responsibility as doctors? Your responsibility as a doctor is to protect life! To save it! That is your sacred duty! The duty that you've betrayed!" The minute he opened his mouth he cursed himself. He had sworn he would not get involved in word games or debates with this odious, poisonous parasite. Schuler's mental capacities, other than devising ridiculous arguments for his monstrous behaviour, were stunted, his morals non-existent. Arguing with such a deformed and spiritually twisted example of the animal kingdom was pointless; and even simply answering the bastard implied some sort of credit to his ideas. That somehow they were in the smallest way worth listening to, if only to argue against the sheer sickening wrongness of them.
But he couldn't help it. In the logical part of his mind, Townsend had not for a moment truly believed that Schuler had ever felt remorse, even less that he would express it; but the heart of a good man can still be staggered by the evil in the world. Even with intelligence, strength of will, vengeful fury, and a thorough, personal knowledge and experience of Schuler's work, a part of Townsend was still completely taken aback by Schuler's own view of his actions. For some things, some evils, there is no preparation.
"On the contrary. My first duty is to my country. To my people. If weeds are destroyed, healthy plants survive. If the weak are culled from the herd, it is to the gain of the entire species. After all, all lesser creatures inevitably perish. By removing this refuse now, I am preventing their taint from spreading and infecting the German race. Instead of healing one person, I am healing an entire people and helping them grow stronger as a whole. My experiments provide an immense advantage to the soldiers of the Fatherland. My work will allow us to better understand the effects of cold and starvation upon our men. The effects of amputation, of infection, of weapons such as mustard-gas. And this will not only benefit our military, but all of humanity!"
"Excepting of course the part that you are slaughtering, anyone who loves them, and this and future generations whose lives would have been made richer by their presence and from the contributions they would have made!" Townsend stared straight ahead into the night. His voice was contemptuous. In the dark interior of the automobile, one could not see the pained glitter of his eyes, or sense the despair and futility that suddenly overwhelmed him.
"Don't be ridiculous. I am giving these worthless beings the only purpose they will ever have. By their deaths they will contribute more to further our existence than they ever could have dreamed of. Perhaps it causes some degree of unpleasantness, but what is the discomfort and loss of a few insignificants in terms of the bigger picture?"
Strangely, Townsend began to chuckle. It was a bitter sound. It was the laugh of a man accepting his defeat. In what way he had been defeated he was unsure. Perhaps it was because the universe or Fate or God had tricked him, made him the avenging protagonist in an epic battle only to discover that it was a meaningless skirmish, one in which his opponent was too blind and too stupid to see his own evil. To expect Schuler to repent was pointless. Perhaps there was no point to anything at all.
Still, as they had said in England when he was young, You gotta laugh, don't you.
Townsend turned a feral grin on Schuler. "Some degree of unpleasantness? Well, well. We shall see, my meerschweine." (2)
"What? What do you intend to do to me?"
Townsend smiled. "Why, I'm only going to continue your work Doctor. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that your death will contribute a great deal to further our existence that you could have possibly dreamed of."
Slowly, dawning realization at last penetrated into Amon Schuler's brain. Too preoccupied in defending the importance of his work - and therefore of himself - to the SS man beside him, it was only now that he was beginning to understand that this might not be an SS man at all. In an instant, all of the snide arrogance, the petulance and the self-exaltation were gone, leaving the innate cowardice of the man writ plain.
"Who are you?" he finally asked. Schuler felt a sudden, painful pressure over both his windpipe and carotid artery, but there was no hand against his throat.
"So now my identity is of some importance to you, is it?"
Schuler's mouth moved but no sound came out.
"Whatever is the matter? Can't you speak?"
Schuler's breathing was growing strained; his heart was galloping in his chest.
"Perhaps that is because I do not wish you to speak. A maggot should not speak as a man. So now I will speak and you will listen." The pressure on Schuler's neck grew still tighter. "I could argue with you. That your work is a moral abomination. That your results would be suspect and of little significance considering the physical condition of the poor people you experimented on, which would negate their value in terms of saving others. I could say that thinning out the gene pool is hardly helping it. I could even say, that more importantly than anything, the thing that matters most, is that by doing what you do, you are weakening humanity, because you are destroying its soul. You are obliterating the very meaning of humanity."
"But really, there would be little point to such an exercise, would there? You have already shown yourself incapable of remorse. You are too ignorant and warped to see the injustice of what you have done. Face facts, you aren't human, let alone humane. So I would strongly suggest you leave the discussion of humanity to those who actually have some. As to your motivations…well, you can go on and on about serving humanity and the Fatherland, but I believe that deep down we both know what drives you. Your slipshod 'work' speaks for itself. You are nothing but a pitiful and insecure toad, scurrying and bootlicking to your superiors in your sad attempts to reach the top of something that you are too stupid to see is merely a dung heap. But even without the approval of your fellow sociopaths, I know that you would keep doing what you do because you are an a sad, depraved, worthless coward. The only true motivation behind your experiments is a twisted exercise of power over those who, as vulnerable as they were, you already saw as being better than yourself."
Red-faced and choking, eyes watering, Schuler struggled to protest.
"And why children Amon? Are you truly so pathetic that you could not even take on an adult? It's a poor excuse of a man who could possibly believe it a victory to overpower such small beings. But it's silly of me to ask, isn't it? We both know for a fact that you are that pathetic. It's a sad truth. I had such a different idea of how this would be. Quite frankly, if it wasn't for your "experiments", you'd be too damned stupid to be worth bothering about. Just another craven bully in a world full of them. So, in the end, it does come down to revenge. In a purposeless situation, I can only take pleasure in stopping you and paying you back in kind."
Townsend turned a pair of gleefully inhuman eyes on his prey. "Well, we all must take what we can get, eh?" He laughed out loud. "And certainly, I will enjoy it!"
"Who is this Schuler?" Hogan asked Dietrich Heidemann after the older man directed him to drive to the underground cellar where he had sent Carter and Newkirk nearly a week before.
"An odious man. London believes he's another one of these Nazi scientists using shoddy experiments and dubious conclusions in order to prove Nazi superiority."
"And you don't?"
"No. I think he's another one of these Nazi bastards using science as an excuse for their love of mindless torture and brutality."
Hogan was silent for a moment, digesting this as the first spatters of rain began to hit the windshield. Even over the engine he could hear the first rumbles of thunder. Looks like Klink's storm is finally here, he thought to himself. In the back, Kinch and Baker were being held 'prisoner' by Lebeau, Foster, Wilson and Olsen.
"What does this have to do with Carter and Newkirk?" Those in back moved closer to listen through the opening in the back of the truck's cab.
Heidemann hesitated, unsure how to begin. At last he said, "They are being used by a man who is determined to stop Schuler."
"How exactly are they being used?" Hogan's tone indicated that he fully remembered Heidemann speaking English in the tunnel, and that until that was explained everything the German said was now under some suspicion.
No use dilly-dallying, Heidemann considered. "Colonel Hogan, have you ever heard the term 'possession' used in a spiritual sense?"
"Once, back in Catholic school…Oh, wait just a damned minute! Are you telling me that you dragged my men and I out of camp because of some mystical idea that two of my men are being controlled by ghosts?" he shouted. Furious, he pulled the truck over to the side of the road.
"Yes, I'm afraid that that is exactly what I'm telling you," Dietrich answered.
"Damnit! What is this? An epidemic? I'm not about to believe - "
"Sir," Kinch interrupted quietly, "Please listen to him."
Hogan was about to make a retort but stopped as he turned and looked into the faces of his men. Except for a slightly puzzled Wilson, they all believed it. All of them. He was about to argue, but then he remembered the events in the barracks that had driven him down into the tunnel in the first place.
"Fine, fine. I'm listening."
Heidemann saw the belief reflected in the faces of Hogan's men as well. He also saw that Hogan believed more than he wanted to. He continued, "About seven years ago a man named Gerald Townsend from British Intelligence contacted me. For what exactly is unimportant, but after we had worked together for awhile, he came to me with a story that a man named Amon Schuler was performing bizarre and fatal experiments on homeless children. Mostly Jewish children by that point, but Townsend believed that it had been going on for years; that Schuler had been abducting and murdering any unattached child he could lay his hands on - with things just becoming easier for him once his work had come to the attention of the Nazis. After that his victims were provided for him and his results gained a wider audience."
Hogan didn't know what to say. He had heard rumours of such things, but it was still hard to really comprehend how a person could do things like that. Instead he asked, "Why would a man from British Intelligence come to you?"
Heidemann sighed. "I'm from England originally. My real name is George Allen. Shortly after the first World War, I was sent here to Germany by British Intelligence to well… 'monitor' things."
"You're a sleeper?" (3)
"I suppose that is the closest description. My actual assignment was loosely defined. At the time, it was only meant to be temporary, but after I made contact with a German general who had been sympathetic to our side during the war, I met and fell in love with his daughter. When we decided to marry, her father and my superiors decided to take advantage of the situation and arranged for things to become more permanent. Ostensibly, I became my father-in-law's personal aide, but with his help I would feed information to England. After his death, a new man and his staff took over and I was demoted to clerk. My wife and I considered returning to England, but by then Hitler was starting his rise to power and my superiors requested that I remain. I was asked to watch over things, and to provide any support I could give to the field agents London would send to me."
"Why didn't you tell us any of this?"
"Colonel Hogan, I have lived as Dietrich Heidemann for nearly twenty-five years now. The safety of my wife and father-in-law, not to mention my own, required that I remain undercover constantly. Every second of every dayof every year. Do you understand? I could never, even once, allow myself to think of my former identity. And after awhile…well, I became Dietrich Heidemann. When once, not long after he arrived, Townsend accidentally referred to me as George, I nearly didn't know who he was talking about."
He trailed off and then his voice grew quiet. "Even my own wife was never able to call me George. She knew, but she also know that one slip-up could be fatal." He turned his face away. "Still, I wish that…" He shook his head; it was not the time to dwell on regrets.
Silently Hogan started the truck up again and pulled out onto the road. Willing once more to trust Heidemann, at least temporarily, he asked the Englishman to continue on with what he knew about Carter and Newkirk.
"There's not much more that I can tell you. When Townsend came to me with his story about Schuler, we had a falling out. We both knew that it would be ridiculous to assume that the Nazis would conduct a legal investigation. Perhaps if my father-in-law had still been alive something might have been done, but not by then. Townsend wanted us to take care of the problem ourselves. I argued that it wasn't our jobs; that it was an unnecessary risk. He demanded to know how I could simply stand by and let something like that happen. I argued that he had to be mistaken; that no one could truly do something like that. After all, he had no evidence."
Heidemann's voice grew infinitely sad, "I didn't believe him. Truthfully, I did not want to believe him. I knew enough by that time to realize that espionage was not the gentleman's game that I had been taught it was, but I still needed there to be rules. Being a spy in peacetime was distasteful enough, I needed evidence before I could become an assassin. But I was a coward. I denied what Gerald was telling me because I did not want to believe in something so terrible, so obscene."
"What happened after that?" Hogan asked.
"I don't know. Gerald simply disappeared. London sent someone to investigate, and I did my best from this end, but there was no trace to be found. I decided that he must have been killed looking for the evidence I had asked for. Either that, or he had resolved to do something about Schuler himself; he was a man deeply concerned with justice, natural if not legal. I told London all I knew about Schuler. They said that they would look into it, but to this day, I have no idea if anything was ever done. I've kept track of Schuler over the years. However it grew more difficult as he moved up in Nazi circles and I moved down. I had come in before the Nazis and was part of the old guard. Soon I was no longer even able to keep my job as clerk, and was made to retire. After that, what little I could learn about Schuler was simply what anyone could read in the newspapers. It was only luck that I had him under surveillance when he moved after his house burned down and so was able to discover where he lived. I also prodded around the remains of his first house and that's how I eventually found his cellar. I examined the main room and the storage room, but found nothing. I had thought that that was the end of it. When I heard about the new headquarters being built nearby, I told you of the cellar so that at least it would go to some use."
"What about Carter and Newkirk?"
"They came to my house earlier this evening. Carter, or Townsend I should say, demanded to know where Schuler was."
"You told him?"
"Yes."
"Then how the hell do you know they're not going there?" Hogan challenged. "How do you know they just won't kill Schuler right in his own home?"
"It's simply a feeling that I got from Townsend."
"A feeling? You're basing all of this on a feeling? I've got two missing men who could be anywhere by now! I can't just trust your feelings!" Hogan shouted.
"I don't know what to tell you Colonel Hogan, other than that I know Townsend. As I said, natural justice is very important to him. Whatever Schuler did to him, he probably did to him in that cellar. As an act of retribution, doing the same to him in the same place is an idea that I think would greatly appeal to him. I also believe - and I will admit I cannot back this up for a moment - that there are others involved. At least one other to keep Newkirk under his thumb."
"What if Newkirk is just going along with this to keep Carter safe?"
"No, Townsend implied that Newkirk was under his control as well. I do not believe it is to the same extent however. Sergeant Carter looked absolutely terrible, whereas Corporal Newkirk only appeared exhausted."
"What's wrong with Carter?" Hogan demanded.
"I don't know. Whatever Townsend is doing is hurting him in some way. That's why I asked you to bring along your medic."
"But Newkirk is alright?"
"I believe so."
"Perhaps Newkirk's freed himself somehow and this Townsend bloke doesn't know it," Foster suggested from the back.
"I concede that that is possible. However, his expression seemed all wrong for it. I also have tobelieve that he would have tried to signal me in some way. His expression was an utter blank and the entire time they were there he neither moved nor made a sound."
"I think he's right sir," Kinch said from the back. "I can't remember Peter saying a single word since the two of them came back that night. If Newkirk wasn't being controlled, he would have said something, or found some way to clue us in. Especially if Carter was in trouble."
"What? Newkirk hasn't said anything? Not a single word to anyone?" Hogan was stunned.
"And think about it sir, what does that say about us? How is it that we didn't notice?" Kinch went on. "We had to have been affected somehow."
Hogan suddenly remembered speaking to Carter and not being able to remember what he had been talking about. The incident was now more clear in his mind, almost unbelievably so. Carter hadn't seemed to notice anything at all when he was suddenly fumbling for words. The slightly worried look, asking if he was okay, which would have been part of Carter's normal reaction, hadn't been there. His voice…God Almighty! Hogan nearly drove off the road as he realized Carter had spent the whole of that conversation answering him with a British accent. How the hell didn't I hear that before? How didn't I notice anything at all? Kinch is right, what's been done to us?
Startled exclamations from the back met this sudden swerve. "Colonel, what is it?" Lebeau asked.
"Nothing, Corporal," Hogan answered, "I just remembered …" He turned to Heidemann, "You say there's more than one of them?"
In the woods, that night after the mission with Jelly Roll - there were so many of them.
"Yes. If there is one controlling Corporal Newkirk, I would guess that it is another victim."
"And if there is one victim, why not more?"
"Precisely."
"But still, why wouldn't they accompany Townsend to Schuler's new house?"
"It is possible that they did, but from what little I know about spirits, I believe that they would have limited energy away from their place of death."
"Why?"
"That I do not know. There are theories, but I don't believe anyone really knows."
"You sound like some kind of expert."
"Before I left England, I was a member of the Society for Psychical Research."
"The what?" Hogan asked, but then quickly guessed what it was for. "Never mind, we have to get to Carter and Newkirk." Outside, thunder was rumbling again, closer now, and it was growing harder and harder to see through the rain.
After concentrating on his driving for a few moments, Hogan shot Heidemann a pessimistic question, "Just out of curiosity, seeing as you're the expert here, do you have any idea at all what we're going to do once we find them?"
Heidemann still had no answer for him by the time they reached their destination.
Author's notes:
(1) Karl Brandt, Rascher, and Ernst Rudin are the unfortunately real people I mentioned in my disclaimer in the first chapter.
(2) guinea pig
(3) "sleeper" is a term for agents who live undercover -sometimes for years - before being activated.
