The Man by the Fire

Amsterdam, 1940

They were cheerful. It wasn’t surprising, the invasion had been pulled off with such cool efficiency that they had virtually walked into Holland without seeing so much as the hair of an enemy. For them it had become no more than an extended holiday, an adventure, like the ones they used to have every summer with the Hitler Youth; just bigger, more exciting. What they were experiencing now was the epitamy of happiness, left to their own devices in some vast and exhilarating city, women and alcohol plentiful all around. They had no parents now to worry about coming home late to, no girlfriends to keep them in check and under control. Before them lay only sheer and blissful freedom; they took what they liked and did as they pleased. They drank endlessly from the public houses, demanded food and clothes in return for the lives of the locals. They were drunk from the beer and drunk from the happiness, they stumbled down the street laughing all the way.

Gently, the voice a woman rose slowly into the air, accompanied softly by notes from a piano. They stopped to listen, although faint her voice was fantastic, and they decided to go hunting the source, with the aim of admiring more than her songs.
From the shadows before them a shanty pub rose out of the darkness, its walls so dark that the dimly lit windows seemed to hover in mid-air. From within her voice lofted into the darkness, mingled with the moonlight.

They crashed clumsily through the door. Instantly heads turned and the music stopped. It was a small locals’ hole with a dozen tables and a small stage at the front. The young soldiers laughed from the floor, rising to demand beer, their currency the redemption of the land lord’s life.

The land lord was a small man, middle aged, balding generously with shrew like eyes. He watched them closely, with much contempt, but was wise enough to realise the folly of refusing. He proceeded to pour them their beers, slowly, carefully filling the glasses, handing over the drinks one by one.

She had a beautiful voice. In the time it had taken the soldiers to get up and get their beer the music had resumed. She sang elegantly, reaching angelic tone with vast amounts of talent, but the boys were disappointed – her face lacked the beauty of her voice.

Not to say she was ugly. She carried too much weight around her middle and her features left much room for improvement, yet admittedly they could have been much much worse. She walked slowly around the stage, timidly, either from the strain of performing publicly or because of the arrival of the soldiers, who by now where shouting obscenities.

‘Less singing more stripping!’ one of them was calling out. The others laughed. She went incredibly red, but had become so embarrassed that it would be even more humiliating to stop mid-piece. The other seven or eight locals glanced at them angrily, despising the obnoxiousness, the arrogance, the fact that boys like these were now their superiors.

They soldiers grew more impatient with the routine. They began to get more aggressive and moved closer to the stage. One of them tried to grab the singer’s leg, immediately another tried to rip off her dress, and she screamed. A man sitting close by leaped on her protagonists and henceforth a scrap broke out, all the people in the pub bursting into full animation, and it ended only when a gun was fired.

The shot had the same effect of pushing the pause button in a game of musical statues, everyone froze and the room was festered upon by a gaunt, unholy silence. The victim was a Dutch man in his thirties, the first to leap on the soldiers, and he lay writhing on the ground, blood spurting out from his mouth, gurgling softly. The rest of the locals watched in silence, the harsh reality that there was nothing they could do weighing down upon them, and they regarded the soldiers with such a burning stare that passers by would not have been surprised to see it sear through iron. Realising the extent of their mistake, the soldiers began leaving, navigating carefully around the frozen statues that regarded them cruelly from all around the room. The girl lay crying on the floor, a long tear in her dress exposing her breasts.

Their joy had gone. Their high sprits evaporated by witnessing the death of an unarmed civilian. None of them had ever seen a man die before and suddenly the cruel truth of the war they were part seemed to dawn on them. Most affected of all was a young private, Muller, aged only nineteen, who was now completely uncommuntive and detached from the others, unable to come to terms with what he had done. He was the one who had fired the shot.

The three of them proceeded silently down an alleyway at the side of the pub, deep into the shadows, reduced again to boys, lost, far away from home. The front two exchanged nervous and melancholy glances but Muller was completely beyond this, travelling much darker passages inside his own troubled mind.

Suddenly, masked men jumped out of the darkness, forcibly covering the soldiers’ heads with sacks and knocking them unconscious by brandishing them around the heads. They barely had heart to struggle, falling carelessly to the cobbles.

*

Muller woke to an intolerable smell beneath his nose. For a moment he was completely disorientated, his senses overwhelmed and scattered by extremity, then the cloud seemed to clear and he slowly became aware. He was tied to a chair in a gloomy chamber, lit by several long candles. A man, his face hidden under a sack with slits for eyes, was administrating a cloth under the noses of people either side of him, his companions, waking them immediately. They were tied similarly to Muller, with their ankles attached to the legs and their wrists connected behind their backs. As they came round they moaned softly, all three suffering from dull aches from where they had been hit and from burns around the wrists and ankles were they were tied.

The soldier to Muller’s right moved his head around and nervously took in his surroundings. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

The man responded by punching him in the face. ‘No talkin’,’ he snapped. He walked before the three of them, his voice muffled slightly by the sack. ‘If I ‘ear any more of yous talkin’ I’ll pull out yer fingernails, one by one.’

The man, after standing before them for a few more seconds, walked around the back of the chairs and left the room through a doorway behind them, hidden in shroud. After a few seconds a door was heard opening and then clanging shut with a metallic ring. The boys were too scared to move, terrified and cold, in some strange unknown foreboding place. There were no windows, just perpetual cold stone that mirrored around the room, giving the eerie impression of falling slightly inwards so that at any moment the walls might contract and crush anything between them. The floor was dirty, covered by a thin sheet of clear liquid, probably water, which flickered strangely and slowly, reflecting the dim light from the candles.

After a few moments, when he was confident that the hooded man was out of ear shot, the companion to Muller’s left turned towards him, whispering shrilly, ‘What the fuck is going on?’

From Muller’s right the soldier who had been punched replied, ‘Fuck knows, but I think we’re really fucked.’

‘We need to get out. We really need to get the hell out of this place.’

‘But how?’

‘I dunno, we just need to - ’

He stopped abruptly because the door had been opened and they could hear footsteps approaching. Within a moment three men stood before the captives, the hooded man from before, recognisable by his jeans and shoes, and two others.

‘One o’ them little rats was talkin’,’ the original man was saying, ‘I fucking heard him I did, he was saying some shit to pussyhole here on the right.’ He pointed a menacing figure at the solider whose face was now beginning to swell up from the punch and darted it between him and Muller.

Another of the hooded men spoke, taller than the other two, ‘One of you was talking,’ he said. ‘Who was it?’

The soldiers exchanged nervous looks between themselves and their captors but remained silent. Abruptly, the original man jumped forward and got the cheeks of the soldier he had punched firmly between his fingers. ‘It was ‘im,’ he declared, ‘I’m fucking tellin’ yer, I’ve already warned this bastard once.’ He threw him down to the floor and his head hit the stone hard, sending up splashes of water and causing ripples tainted by blood. He lifted his foot above the soldier’s face. ‘I’m a fuckin’ kill him this time, miserable little shit.’

‘Stop!’ The soldier on Muller’s left had called out in utter dismay. ‘It was me, I was the one who was talking!’

The heads of the captors turned slowly towards him and the original man trudged over, leaving his wrongly accused’s head spilling onto the floor.

‘Please,’ the soldier was begging, ‘Please, don’t hurt us, please, don’t hurt us.’

But the first man wouldn’t listen. ‘Talkin’ were yer? Yer think I was jokin’ when I said I’d rip out yer nails?’ He turned his head and called to the shorter of the two men, ‘Larry, get the pliers, and a knife.’ Then mumbling quietly to himself, ‘Fuckin’ Nazis, fuckin’ scum of the Earth the lot of ‘em.’

The shorter man trotted over to a corner and lifted the lid off a wooden casket, revealing an array of butchering tools secured in the underside of the lid. From within he secured a knife pliers and some more rope. He came back over and gave it to the original man.

‘Fuckin’ shut up,’ the original man was saying to the now crying soldier, ‘Shut up or I’ll have your eye balls shaved.’

He cut the soldier’s cords before having his arms pinned down and reattached to the chair. Then he picked the pliers up from the ground, raising them up before the soldier’s face, savouring the fear in his eyes which were glued terrified to the pliers, before lowering them slowly towards his struggling hand. The young man was crying out in a terrified frenzy, ‘No please, please, PLEASE!’

His scream rang hauntingly round the room, magnified and echoed so much more because of its small volume and inescapable walls. The fingernail was put under more and more pressure, pulled further and further back, torn away from the skin, until it reached the critical moment and snapped, off from the finger. The original man did this on three on the soldier’s fingers, swearing all the while, until he got up and looked down at his impotent victim writhing helplessly before him, blood seeping from his fingers and staining the floor.

‘Take him away,’ he told the shorter man who dragged him out by the chair, screaming all the time. No one moved till they heard the clang of the door and the soldier’s cries fade away.

‘What’ve we got left then?’ the taller man asked, stepping forward.

‘Old chatterbox ‘ere,’ said the original man, gesturing at the solider unconscious on the floor, ‘And ‘im, the quiet one, the one ‘ho did it.’

The tall man lifted Muller’s head by his hair so he could look at his face, ‘Him?’

‘Yeah, ‘im alright.’

He pulled harder on Muller’s hair, making his face screw up with the pain. ‘You killed old Charles Waterleigh, did you then boy? I’ll fucking make you regret that, you’ll pay so hard for fucking with things around here.’

The original man came towards them, ‘We gonna muck him up right now, boss?’

‘Nar, not yet anyway, he can watch us screw with his friends first and we’ll fuck with his head. Take that other shit away.’

The original man started to drag the solider on the right down the doorway, leaving a thin trail of blood dispersing into the water in his wake. The taller man had gone over to the casket, he rummaged around before finding a long silver pole and examined it as it shone gently in the candle light. He walked over to Muller and drew it up above him, then he brought it down, then it was dark.

*
Muller woke to the same intolerable smell burning his senses. For a moment, as he opened his eyes, the world was hazy and he could only make out the faint out line of shadows before his eyes. Then, as things started to settle, his eyes began to focus and he saw one of the men checking to see if he was awake, the other two standing not far away. A bath tub had been added to the scarce furniture and beneath it a fire now burned heartily, making the water boil and churn. The steam rising from the bath made the small room misty and humid to the point were visibility was greatly reduced and the light from the candles became more smudges than flames. Directly before him, hanging upside down, was one of his companions, naked, his damaged fingers still dripping occasionally with blood.

‘I reckon he’s awake,’ one of the men said.

‘I dunno,’ said the one closest to him, ‘his pupils are still too dilated to really be able tell…’

‘His eyes are open for fuck’s sake. That means the bastard’s awake.’

‘People can be conscious with their eyes open, idiot.’

The man closest to him walked in front and moved his fingers before Muller’s eyes, ‘Yeah, he’s awake alright.’

‘Good,’ said the tall one, ‘Then we can get started.’

He pulled a knife out of its sheath and walked towards the suspended soldier. The young boy hanging from his heels looked on terrified as the hooded figure approached, his eyes wide, screaming, but silent, his mouth stuffed with cloth so he could make no real sound. Still he moaned incessantly, struggling this way that, but achieving no more than slightly shaking the line from which he was held. The man put the knife to his ankle just below the rope and softly cut around, the boy writing his abdomen with renewed vigour making, his penis flutter helplessly around his groin. A single drop of blood ran down his leg like tear.

The tall man looked up towards Muller, ‘This is for Charles Waterleigh,’ he said calmly.

He bent down and removed the cloth from the soldier’s mouth, tossing it onto the floor. ‘No, please,’ the soldier begged, ‘Please, please - ’

The man tore down the skin on the boy’s leg in a single strong contraction, leaving the flesh bare up to the knee with blood spurting out all over the floor. The boy’s screams echoed endlessly around the room, ringing in every crack in the wall.

Almost immediately, while the echoes still rang, the man began to make an incision in the soldier’s other leg. Before he had time to beg the skin had been torn away and cast down to the floor. The soldier screamed, twitching monstrously like a spider with its legs caught, then cried profusely.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ the tall man told him, ‘It serves you right for trying to rape a poor innocent girl. Who the fuck do you think you are walking into a pub like that in some town you don’t know and thinking you can have your way with who ever you want. You fucking scumbag. You don’t even deserve to die.’

He started an incision above his waist and tried to pull the skin off as he had on the leg. The abdomen, however, proved to be more difficult than he had expected and he only brought the skin down a few inches at a time. His hands became slowly covered in blood and all the while the soldier screamed.

Frustrated, the tall man grabbed the soldiers head and kneed him in the face, leaving his nose splattered to one side and greatly increasing the puddle of blood beneath the carcass. ‘I thought I told you to shut up!’ he shouted.

Furious now, he grabbed the flapping skin over his stomach and pulled it down with all his might. The front half of his torso ripped off, letting blood pour from the soldier’s chest and onto his face. He was screaming louder than ever.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ the tall man was shouting. Then he called to the other two, get the razor and then get over here.’

A razor was acquired from the casket and the men came over to the soldier, already rehearsed in what they were to do. The two smaller men held the soldier’s head while the tall man cut off his eyelid, then he ran the razor firmly over the man’s eye. His screaming was intolerable.

‘Fucking wanker,’ the tall man shouted above the cries, ‘I think I’ve had about enough of him. Let’s chuck him in the bath.’

A knife was raised to the rope that held him in place and he was cut down so that he crashed onto the floor. The man rolled around in agony, crying, scratching furiously as his face, completely delirious from the pain.

The men picked up his blood covered body and carried him over to the bath, holding him above the steaming water for a second before dropping him in. The man’s screams now wailed even higher, his desperate body struggling ferociously to escape the scorching water, but because his arms and legs were still tied his attempts never mounted to anything more than futility. For eighteen minutes he struggled like this, his flesh boiled to soft tenderness, until the overpowering smell of cooked meat made the air repugnant to breathe. The water in the bath became a deep scarlet, around his body it still bubbled away.

Muller was crying, unable to speak.

‘You like that?’ the tall man asked him. ‘I told you you’d regret killing old Charles. We haven’t even begun with you yet boy.’

Then the man picked up the metal pole and it all went dark again.

*
The burning smell brought Muller round. On the floor was a cross with the previously unconscious soldier tied to it by his wrists and ankles. He was struggling frantically against the rope but was unable to pull away, his voice muffled by a cloth stuffed in his mouth. One of the men had pulled a hammer and nails out of the casket and, seeing this as he walked over, the soldier struggled even harder to the point were the rope was stained by blood from his wrists. Still his effort remained fruitless and the man proceeded to hammer the long nails into his wrists. His body contracted violently with each blow but there was nothing he could do, nothing could stop the regular thud thud thud of the hammer coming up and down.

After being pinned, the soldier was propped up by the short and the tall man, the original man being absent from the room. The soldier gazed sadly at Muller, blood seeping silently from his wounds, his body shuddering gently as he cried. Then the tall man unsheathed his knife again and, after tearing off his shirt, he cut open his belly, leaving his internal organs to lie helplessly over his belt.

‘You think this is bad?’ the tall man shouted at Muller, ‘You haven’t seen anything yet.’

From somewhere outside dogs were heard barking and then the door clanged open from the end of the hallway. Presently, the original man came into the room with two ferocious Alsatians, both foaming heavily and trying desperately to break free. Somewhat relieved, the man let go of their leashes and they pounced simultaneously on the crucified soldier, devouring his insides. The boy twitched uncontrollably as the dogs ripped up his intestines between them and so much blood poured from his stomach that the sheet of clear liquid on the floor become a violent sticky red.

The tall man grabbed Muller’s hair and punched him repeatedly, ‘This serves you right for being such a shit.’ Then he cut Muller’s left wrist free and offered it to one of the dogs who accepted it, jumping on his hand and tearing off his fingers.

Just then the door clanged open and multiple footsteps were heard coming down the corridor, a squadron of German infantry running into the room. ‘GET DOWN!’ the company commander was shouting, ‘GET DOWN!’

Seeing the invaders the dogs turned to attack but were quickly mowed down by a spray of machine gun fire. ‘GET DOWN!’ the commander shouted again.

The three hooded men looked at each other then lay down on the floor, surrendering themselves to the will of the Germans. The soldiers raced to them, their boots splashing through the blood, before the hooded men were secured and wrenched up. As they were acquired the squadron commander walked slowly over Muller, completely unnerved by the things that he saw; the body of the semi mutilated soldier still twitching on the cross. ‘What the fuck…’ he whispered under his breath.

He stopped before Muller as his men cut his cords and looked down at him sympathetically, shaking his head, ‘Don’t worry son,’ he told him, ‘You’re safe now.’