A brutal scream tore through the walls; it was a violent, anguished voice that surpassed and muted the whimpering of children so often heard in Doctor Mengele’s facility. In this particular room, there were hard wooden floors and cabinets—amenities that had long since been removed from Gunther’s crypt-like chamber. Josef looked up from his notations and gazed down at the slab in the center of the room. Two doctors beside him worked quickly, but carefully, on something inside the mouth—held wide open by a speculum—of the squirming German boy on the table held down tightly by leather straps. Josef reached out to him to brush away an errant strand of blonde hair from watering eyes, opened to their widest by two smaller speculums.
The boy gurgled, shook, and tried to scream, but every inch of him was immobilized by straps and vices. Josef watched a pair of pliers in the hand of one of the doctors as it left the mouth and dropped a bloody canine onto an already-stained tray. He then reached out, examining it with brimming fascination as he scribbled wildly onto his notepad. The unbearable sounds coming from his subject tangled and echoed with the wailing from some nearby room while the doctors continued their work.
Josef remained quiet and only set the tooth down as a nearby door opened with a creak. A head poked in. “Doctor?”
“There you are.” Josef stood up. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I’m so sorry, Hauptsturmführer, sir, there was an emergency in—”
“Shut the hell up,” Josef snapped. “You want me to waste time with your Poles and cripples? I have serious patients here.”
Josef motioned to the sorry sight on the slab. The man who had entered balked at the sight. “Are you not ready for me yet?”
“Are you mad?” Josef grumbled as he picked up a tray full of sharp, unsettling tools and instruments and shoved it into the man’s hands. “You’re fucking late. Get to work.”
The man looked at the quivering body. “I can’t—I can’t operate while they’re doing oral surgery; the anesthetics will—”
“There’s no need,” Josef spat, angrily. “Now get to work.”
“But your patient this morning—”
“Are you listening to me?” Josef slammed his fist on a table. “You miserable fucking kike—why do I keep you around?”
The two busy doctors ignored the exchange while the man stood nervously enduring Josef’s berating. Josef grabbed a small metal box sitting beside the slab and popped the top; it was filled with ice, and a cold mist billowed from inside.
“Now,” he commanded, motioning to the container.
The man swallowed again as he approached the body on the slab. He sat the tray of tools down by the boy’s head and tried to ignore the bloodshot eyes as they darted around in a panic. As the man donned a pair of gloves, he asked Josef, “How long have his eyes been open like this?”
“Who cares how long his eyes have been open? Get started.”
He slowly moved his hands to pick up a small scalpel. He shivered, terrified at what he was about to do.
He whispered to the boy, “I’m sorry.”
Oh God, oh god, my fucking God…. Gunther’s mind was a swirling haze empty of coherent thought; what he had previously devoted to emotions or feelings was replaced by pain that dwarfed even what he had already experienced.
My eye… my fucking eye… Oh my God…. The words in his head made no sense; they failed to form any meaning. His body flailed as it had so often before, but unlike in the past, his torso and extremities were now held down tight; he could only barely shake his head as he screamed more loudly than ever before.
It hurts. Oh fuck… fuck… fuck. Hideous sounds escaped his dry lips, rivaling the worst he had ever made previously.
“Gunther,” a voice said, going unheard by him. “Gunther.”
Some part of him recognized it, but could take no notice.
“You really need to quiet down,” the voice scolded. “It’s getting excessive.”
Josef reached up to Gunther’s face with both hands, using one to subdue his violent shakes and the other to pull away a small eye patch.
“Hmm,” Josef jotted down a note and then took hold of Gunther’s jaw, prying it open. He examined a raw, dry socket where a long fang had once protruded, only getting a brief look before the jaw snapped shut. Josef drew back quickly.
“I know it hurts—don’t be angry.” He started writing something again. “I’m trying to help you.”
Gunther struggled to lash out in rage, fruitlessly, as Josef turned his attention back to the boy’s face. He watched curiously and then held a hand toward Gunther while closing one eye.
“It’s really fascinating,” he mused out loud. “Like a mirror image.”
Gunther could hardly discern a word of the doctor’s nonsense or what it meant. Josef patted him on the shoulder—seeming completely oblivious to the enduring screams—and started toward the door. As he reached it, he took note of the calendar—the last crossed-off date was in early December.
“Hmm.” Josef considered it before reaching up and taking it down. “I suppose it’s time to replace this.”
January.
Some minute scrap of sanity had somehow persisted and stayed with Gunther through the worst of the pain; it waxed now, slowly as the agony waned, and his thoughts became more coherent. My eye…. What did he do…?
He lay motionless, giving his newest injuries—places where he had rubbed his flesh raw against the straps restraining him—time to rest. He tried to remember the sequence of events: Josef had appeared, along with two doctors, and they started to work on his teeth. The pain had been absolutely unbearable; the operation culminated in them removing one of his odd fangs. He was already reticent to recall the details of the event, but he remembered it getting worse from there. There had been a man—he didn’t look like a doctor or one of Josef’s men—and Josef kept yelling at him, almost forcing him. Gunther’s thoughts hesitated. He could hardly believe what it was he was remembering.
… The man cut out my eye.
February.
The screams continued—he could hear them echoing through the walls more clearly than ever. Sometimes, he thought he heard his own voice screaming even when he was certain he wasn’t—like he was truly going mad now.
His injuries were so innumerable, it was impossible to feel all the pain at once. Sometimes it was the eye socket beneath the patch, or his missing tooth, or his broken arms, or the rope-burnt marks from his straps, the shrapnel, the bullet wound, the burns, the unhealed bruises… even the hole in his neck… and something else: it was an ill feeling, some sickly craving that was not the same as—but had taken the place of—any hunger or fatigue. It was perhaps the worst of all his pain: some insatiable need for something unknown. It had been there since the very beginning, vague and indistinguishable from everything else. He didn’t know what it was. Food couldn’t cure it and sleep was impossible. Josef had long ago speculated it might be related to Gunther’s lack of blood, but several attempts had been made to address that possibility.
In the midst of his cloudy thoughts, the door creaked open.
“Well, Gunther,” Josef began. “Let’s see how we’re doing.” He reached down to Gunther’s eye. Like always now, the prisoner fought angrily, screaming and hissing at his captor, but Josef seemed content to ignore it as he peeled the eye patch away.
“Oh, this is good.” His voice almost trembled with excitement. “Gunther, this is really good.” He stepped away, appearing oblivious to Gunther’s violent rage and, holding a fresh notepad in his bandaged right hand, used his left to record his latest observations.
“You really do look just like your brother now.”
Gunther could hardly discern a word, but he recognized one.
“How the hell… would you… know…?” Gunther gurgled.
Josef only grinned his toothy grin. “Don’t worry yourself about that,” he replied. “You need to keep focusing on recovery.”
March.
Josef moved Gunther out of the room and into a hallway. A passerby asked someone for the date at one point, and it was the only context Gunther had for what month it was. A constant stream of people buzzed about—mostly Schutzstaffel soldiers and medics, but occasionally Gunther would see dirty, ragged men and women being led through by armed guards. They weren’t soldiers and hardly any of them were German.
Gunther had been turned onto his stomach, and had been gagged at some point, deadening his screams which initially had made him an even more hideous spectacle in the crowded area. He whimpered—softly and constantly—to anyone who passed by. Please… please…. His thoughts always fought to become words.
… Please….
It was all to no avail. Most who looked at him turned their heads in disgust or horror. Sometimes children would gasp or cry at the sight of his battered face and crippled, dirty body.
There was a daytime and nighttime now. There was no sunlight, but the stream of people would quiet periodically, and Josef, who now passed by Gunther nearly every day on his way from one place to another, resumed “Good morning” and “Good night” routine from what seemed so long ago.
Nothing felt real. None of the people around him seemed human. It was all an endless, waking nightmare. The soldiers and medics seemed stressed or even worried; they were all short-tempered and afraid of something. He heard them talking about the Bolsheviks sometimes in hushed, urgent tones.
It just dragged on, day in and day out, and then Josef appeared once more. He was holding something in a gloved hand: it was small and dark and fleshy, like a piece of putrid meat.
“What a fucking disaster,” he grumbled, looking at the rotten lump, and then to Gunther. With his free hand, he held Gunther’s face, focusing specifically on the eye socket that had once been covered by a patch. It was swollen now, often quite itchy, and Gunther could only imagine what the hole must have looked like, but Josef didn’t seem distressed. In fact, a smile crossed his face. “But one out of two isn’t the end of the world.” He smiled. “It’s just another testament to you, another day in our adventure, Luther.”
Luther…? Gunther thought but couldn’t find the strength to say.
“Gunther, rather,” Josef corrected himself, laughing. “Like I said, you’re the spitting image. I’ve never seen two people so alike, yet so different.”
It hit Gunther then—was Luther there? He shook, trying with all his might to break free. The gurney rattled loudly, briefly catching the attention of a one-armed boy being lead down the dank hallway.
“Oh well,” Josef mused to himself, looking over the thing in his hand once more. “I don’t really think there’s anything I can do with this anymore. If we had the time, I might give it back to you,” He examined Gunther’s eye socket again, “but you don’t look like you need it.”
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