Chapter 10

Leah then took Rachel to another scene. A bucolic scene, bursting with sunny colors. “We first made love in the Grunenwald, right on the bank of the Havel River.”

Leah and Isolde lounged on a blanket sunk into golden summer grass. Grasshoppers fluttered around them, and ducks fussed about in the slow-moving current over pieces of floating bread that the pair had tossed in for them. They had brought white wine to chill in the river, but both bottles were finished before the river had a chance to chill them. After the wine, they took their clothes off and jumped into the river and dried out lying next to each other in the last of the sunlight, right when it turned orange and the sky turned purple. They teased each other’s bodies. They drew lines with fingers along curves. Curves that drew closer and closer to sensitive parts. They had made it a sort of game to see who could draw their fingers to the naughtier place before the other folded. It started with the neckline. The edge of their lips. The edge of their armpits. Down to their breasts where they plucked and teased each others’ nipples while they blushed and laughed. Then to their stomachs, and finally, to between their legs. Laughter turned to soft bit-lipped moans. Their fingers were soon replaced by lips and tongues while their moans were replaced by muffled cries of ecstasy.

They stayed long after the twilight curtain of stars was drawn, warming each other with their naked bodies in the cool night as they listened to the serenade of crickets and the nightbirds, then made love again when the moonlight was the only illumination they had.

“That night, Isolde asked that we forsake everything, and run away together to live in a cabin in the Alps. How I wish now that we had,” Leah said before taking Rachel to another memory.

The next memory was of Leah presenting her doctoral thesis to a panel on which Doctor Fischer sat.

“I passed with flying colors. Sabine invited me to join her research team at Heidelberg University. At the time, it was my proudest moment. Little did I know the dark places my work would take me.”

Rachel next found herself in one of the basement laboratory rooms. Leah was in a smock and face mask, preparing a chemical for an intravenous injection. The patient, a frail woman, head shaved, lay slack-jawed and glass-eyed on a cold table.

Others in smocks and masks gathered around while Leah injected the chemical. A heavy silence fell, when the woman’s eyes rolled back into her head, and her head lolled to one side.

Leah cried out. She threw the needle onto the surgical tray and went to start resuscitating her, but Doctor Fischer held her back. She grabbed her arms sharply. “Wait,” she spat.

For a long moment, a moment which Leah spent trembling with tears in her eyes, the woman was still. Rachel was sure the woman was dead but was then horrified by a sudden jerking motion, and eyes that opened abruptly — eyes with pupils as black as coal. Murmurs and gasps went up in the room. The audience inched away while the woman let out a feral howl, and her limbs began to snap and twist like the limbs of an especially animate string puppet. The woman’s face stretched grotesquely. Fur burst out from her skin. The body grew. The straps that held her strained, threatening to burst. It was a transformation so violent that a few of the attendants left. One vomited. Doctor Fischer had a wild smile on her face, and a fierce fire in her eyes. The look of a power-hungry woman who had just witnessed her ambition finally bear fruit.

Finally, the transformation was complete. What was left on the table in place of the frail woman was a werewolf. Her jaws snapped violently. Her muscles strained fruitlessly. The doctors and scientists who remained in the room drew in around the werewolf, a buzzing excitement between them. Leah, at first stood frozen with terrified awe but then fled the room.

“My first victim. Her name was Mara.”

“What did I just witness?”

“The first successful controlled transmission of the lycanthropic virus.”

“What can you tell me about it? Is it a synthetic virus? A weapon?”

“Not synthetic. Not a weapon. Well, not directly.

“Doctor Fischer was always interested in the occult. She collected ancient scripts. Her knowledge of the material was encyclopedic. At first, I thought it was an eccentric hobby, but when I began to work for her, I realized it was something more. It was an obsession. Whereas I had come to Heidelberg with the hope of synthesizing new drugs of the sorts that the university was at the cutting edge of, Doctor Fischer was more concerned not with cures to diseases in illnesses, but with a cure to death itself. She was after immortality and she had turned her attention to werewolves in particular as a possible font of that immortality. I thought she was wasting her time. But what could I say? I was young, and… frightened. Of course, it was all ludicrous to me. Werewolves? Really? A silly children’s superstition. Utter madness on the part of the Frau Doktor I thought. That is until she brought one into the laboratory. A mummified one that she had found buried in an ancient holy site near Damascus. It was in very good condition. Good enough, that is, for us to isolate and extract a sample of the virus that turned it, and reproduce it.”

“So, you injected the virus into an unwilling patient, and it worked.”

“Yes. That’s what we did. One after another. We strapped them into the chair and turned them each into a werewolf in turn. We kept them in cages. We studied them. They weren’t patients. They were lab rats.

“By the time we had successfully isolated the virus and used it to make our first werewolf, Germany had invaded Poland, so we quickly found ourselves thrust into the war effort. The sanatorium was put under SS control, and Doctor Sabine Fischer became Standarten-Führer Fischer. A colonel in the SS Medical Corps. The facility came under very tight control. Everything we did was top secret. The objective changed from isolating an elixir of immortality to creating the perfect Ãœbermensch, more specifically, the perfect super soldier for the German war effort. The supernatural quality of our experimentation drew out a quasi-religious fanaticism in the other scientists. The experiments became ritualized. The Black Sun became their god. The werewolves were exsanguinated, and they drank their blood. Research was hardly the point anymore. Scientists and doctors became fanatics for a future even grander than the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. They became fanatics for the eternal Fourth Reich, where man would be elevated to the divine. The elixir didn’t work of course. There was absolutely no evidence that it would. Yet they were all blind to it. Their science had become their faith.”

“They? What about you? You stayed and you partook, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but only because I was afraid!” Leah replied coarsely. Her voice trembled as if she still felt that fear. “I was helpless. I was afraid of what would happen to me if I spoke out. Our test subjects — they weren’t mentally ill. Not all of them at least. Many were dissidents. Many were people who had spoken out. I felt my only recourse was to keep my head down, and above all, hope. Hope that Hitler and the Nazis would be overthrown. There was no one I could talk to. No one, that is, except for Isolde.”

“You told Isolde about the secret experiments?”

“Yes. And I condemned her to a fate worse than death by doing so. She was always very anti-Nazi, you see? A point of contention between her and her mother. Their relationship went beyond reproach. I still kept seeing Isolde in secret. We kept the flame of our love lit despite everything. One night, I told her everything, and, well, she didn’t believe me at first. How could she? How could she ever believe that her very own mother was turning innocent people into werewolves against their will and then drinking their blood? How insane does that sound? How depraved?”

“But she believed you?”

“Not until she saw it with her own eyes. One night, she snuck into the laboratory and saw everything. She tried to pass the information off to the resistance.”

“I’m guessing it did not go well.”

Leah took Rachel to another memory.

A dimly lit room. A bedroom. In the bed, two women were making love. Their bodies writhing. Sounds of kisses and moans and sighs emanating from the bedsheets. It was Leah and Isolde in a secret rendezvous. Isolde was on top, she moved her body rhythmically against Leah, her mouth down on Leah’s neck, kissing tenderly, while Leah’s hands went all over Isolde’s. Rachel could feel the uninhibited love there. She could feel the strength of the passion set flame to their fears.

When they finished, they held each other tightly, stared at the ceiling, and talked about escape. A frequent topic of conversation, but tonight, they meant it.

The door handle of the bedroom door jiggled violently. Then came loud rapping and shouting from the other side. Leah and Isolde sat up fearfully in bed, with the blanket wrapped tightly around them, absolute fear in their eyes. The door flung open. Two men in uniform, carrying machine guns stormed in. Doctor Sabine Fischer walked in behind. She wore a white SS officer uniform. On her left arm was a blood-red armband, the same red that colored her lips, the swastika brashly displayed.

“Isolde’s resistance informant was really a Schutzstaffel informant,” Leah said.

The two men dragged Isolde and Leah violently from bed, prying them apart. They reached out to each other. They lunged desperately to each other but they were held back. Bags were put over their heads.

“That was the last I saw her,” Leah said. “She was interred at the sanatorium, where she was later lobotomized by her mother.  For my crime, they made me a test subject. No, a sacrifice to the Black Sun. Mercifully, I was the very last sacrifice. Germany soon after lost the war, and they sealed up the laboratory.”

Rachel stayed silent. Many thoughts and many emotions swirled in her mind. The image of the two lovers reaching out in despair for each other. The victims of the tests forcibly turned into werewolves, only to be drained entirely of their blood for a fruitless purpose. She imagined Sabine Fischer, standing over her daughter, hammer in one hand, and in the other, the icepick-like lobotomy instrument jammed into her eye socket, right where it needed to be to sever her mind permanently, and her soul.

They went to another memory. To Isolde lying in the chaise by a familiar library fireplace, her face containing the haunted hopelessness of a woman adrift in a sea of ceaseless mist.

“After my death, I found Isolde. She was not the same, of course, after the lobotomy. She was a paralyzed, flickering remnant of what she once was. Though in her broken mind, memories remained. She remembered what her mother did. She remembered me.  And she remembered my complicity in the horrors of Odenwald. I asked for her forgiveness so that I may gain passage from Limbo, but she would not give me her forgiveness. Instead, she offered me a pact. Take her body and use it to take revenge on all those involved but especially her mother. I agreed. I took her body, and in secret, I infected it with the virus to turn it into a werewolf. I did it because I so badly wanted her mother to die at the hands of the monster she created.”

Rachel watched as Leah’s burning white soul entered Isolde’s body. Isolde spasmed, gasped, and her eyes widened with consciousness – Leah’s consciousness. The scene turned to black. 

Rachel found herself back in the operating theater. She collapsed to the ground from her weakening strength and glanced up to find Leah’s strung-up werewolf corpse in front of her, and the Black Sun sigil behind it seeming to burn with an eternal, black flame. The pain of her burning soul was extreme now. She was nearing the point of no return. She had more questions, but she was too weak to ask them. Her mind was too weak. She had to return to the mortal plane, or she might lose her soul for good.

Leah crouched before her. With iridescent hands grasping Rachel’s shoulders she said, “I have a great fear that they will choose to continue what they have done in this horrible place. That they will revive it and continue their wicked mission. You have the power to stop that, Rachel. You can shed light on it. Help me. Save the world from a great calamity and give me time to keep my promise to Isolde.”

With a smile, she added, “Blessed be the one true judge.”

Rachel released her arcanic energy. She tumbled backward out of limbo and into the mortal plane. The sounds of songbirds disoriented her. She stared up at the bright flare of sunlight and covered her eyes from it. She felt an overwhelming sickness surge up inside her, so she turned to the side where she lay and vomited as she always did upon completing such a trip. Only this time the sickness had put her on the cusp of a wrenching paralysis. She had stayed longer than she ever had in a particularly corrosive part of limbo. She was lucky to have come back with her soul still intact.

Schmidt crouched over her.

“Yeah,” Rachel gasped. “I’m fine.”

Schmidt handed her a handkerchief. She wiped her mouth and sat up.

She glanced around her to get her bearings and saw that she was just outside the sanatorium. Schmidt must have dragged her out of the building.

“Scheiße, I thought I lost you.”