The Crawling Abattoir Read online

  Now they were all in deep comas, maybe screaming for help down at the deepest bottoms of the blackest pits their minds could conjure. Maybe just unconscious. Grady didn’t know which, but he had visited McManus, fetal-curled in his hospital bed, the low, new-age, ambient beeping of monitors filling the room; just like that, overnight, down to ninety, ninety-five pounds. He hadn’t visited Annie or Sam.

  Grady couldn’t think of many things worse than watching someone being eaten alive by darkness, unless it was feeling the tongue and teeth of darkness on himself.

  Grady had once slept with Ben’s wife. That was more than enough reason for his name to be on a shit list. Except Ben couldn’t know that. Only Grady and Susan knew that, and she wouldn’t tell, not in a million years. Would she? No, she wouldn’t, Grady thought, so Ben couldn’t know, and he couldn’t be on a shit list.

  Besides, Ben was in a coma himself. He had been the first, before Joe, before Annie, before Sam. So why were all his friends following him, in some kind of danse macabre into the shadows of entropy?

  Maybe it was all a coincidence. Except Grady’s medulla kept twitching as if there were something lurking behind him. And Grady was positive he wasn’t paranoid. Wasn’t he?

  He heard another noise in the hall.

  He loaded the shotgun.

  “Yes, yes, I was a guard at Auschwitz.”

  Andy wasn’t tired. He patiently answered every question, even the ones asked over and over again.

  “Yes, yes, I knew we were killing Jews there, yes. What? Oh, I ignored it. You must understand. They were just Jews, yes? I didn’t care, any more than the next person.”

  He spoke in German, because phrases like Endloesung and Nacht und Nebel sounded more truthful in the original.

  He leaned forward slightly, his manacled hands in his lap, sitting very still, to make sure he didn’t drift out of the frame of the videocamera.

  He was not halting or fearful or evasive. He supplied details when he could. He spoke with an easy rhythm entirely free of duress. He had asked for no lawyer, had refused the offer of one.

  “Yes, yes, I personally shot several. Yes, killed them. No, there was no point in wounding them, was there? No, that was not discouraged. No, I don’t remember names. No, I don’t remember how many exactly. Four, five, ten?

  “They were just Jews, yes? And, I believe, one Russian. Yes, I am certain, one Russian. A prisoner of war. I didn’t like him. But exactly how many Jews, I don’t remember. Do you commit to memory every cockroach you kill? No, of course not. One must be more circumspect now, of course, but, you see, that’s how it was back then, yes? It was not at all discouraged.”

  Andy was in an infinite confessional, dark as a sky without stars, falling. He kept tossing out bits of the truth, hoping they would act like parachutes and stop the falling, but only the complete truth would do that.

  “The first one I shot was hard.”

  He considered. He remembered. He fell.

  “I shot her eight days after I arrived in camp. She was five or six. She couldn’t work. There was nothing to be done, really. I was being merciful. After that it became easier.”

  Susan knitted. She didn’t even like to knit. Her mother had taught her, a mother-daughter thing, and she had painstakingly learned.

  Her fingers didn’t enjoy the work. But talking with her mother while knitting, now that was different. That she had looked forward to. That had been a joy. A mother-daughter thing that was rare because it was a joy.

  She had knitted at her mother’s bedside for the year it took her mother to die. After that, without voices, knitting became something less than a joy.

  Now she only knitted when she was alone, while working useless regrets over and over in her mind, replaying bad memories, scenes that wouldn’t end any differently, that couldn’t end any differently, because they were already ended.

  But at least at the end of her worrying, she had something. Something tangible. Always a small thing. A partial scarf. A mitten. A potholder. She wasn’t very good, but she did always end up with something that she could ball up in her fists and throw away.

  She looked at Ben curled up on his left side in the hospital bed, wires and tubes holding him up like a suspension bridge.

  The insides of his eyelids were silvered. His ears brimmed with static, the surface tension of the white noise seamless and tight, proof against any incoming sound. The folds of his brain were stretched flat; his fingertips were filed smooth. His touch had been retracted beneath his waxy skin.

  His eyes didn’t move. His breathing didn’t change.

  She looked back at her needles and resumed her knitting.

  She was making a comforter, something large enough for her bed. It wasn’t very good, but it was the most ambitious thing she had ever attempted.

  Max Heiliger did finally request a lawyer.

  Every question had become repetitious.

  “Yes, yes, one of your bright, young public defenders will do very nicely, thank you,” he said.

  He met the bright, young public defender, a man not far removed from campus life, in a small, private interrogation room. No videocamera, no tape recorder, no guards, nothing to inhibit confidentiality.

  The public defender, a Mr. Jack Sawyer, had his face obscured behind his open briefcase. Nice leather, moderately expensive, a gift to himself to celebrate his new job.

  He hadn’t given his first name to Heiliger, not liking the necessity of sitting opposite a Nazi, vaguely suspecting he had been handed the case in order to ensure that nothing very clever was done which might slip the old stormtrooper from his leash.

  That Heiliger was belatedly attempting to slip his leash was plain to everyone involved. Why else ask for a lawyer at this late date? The situation had “retraction” and “entrapment” written all over it.

  Sawyer shut his briefcase.

  “Mr. Heiliger, when were you read your rights?” He started to raise his eyes to his new client.

  Two old, but surprisingly vigorous hands, gripped his throat. Sawyer was too astonished to cry out. He sucked in an abrupt breath.

  He saw darkness directly in front of him, when he should have seen the old Nazi’s orange, prison jumpsuit. He saw darkness, like a sky without stars.

  He also saw a second Max Heiliger, lying curled on the floor, eyes closed, trembling and quivering, knees drawn up to his chest.

  He was so confused, he forgot to fight.

  The hands hauled him into never-ending night, and he lost consciousness.

  Max Heiliger zipped himself closed and melted into the shape of Lawyer Sawyer, the inevitable nickname, really.

  Max Heiliger also shook on the floor, abandoned in the cold basement of his own mind, the doors locked from the outside, the windows bricked up, the single bare lightbulb unscrewed from its socket and taken away.

  Sawyer sounded the alarm. Heiliger had collapsed. After the confusion had died down, Sawyer walked out the front door, new briefcase in hand, new body sleek.

  Ben had ignored her for a long time, had stopped loving her. Susan had watched the distance between them grow, unable to keep up. He wouldn’t tell her the truth about his work, about what consumed more and more of his time. He disappeared from her life. The work stole him from her.

  At some point, she simply stopped loving him.

  No, she decided, that wasn’t really true.

  She hadn’t stopped loving him; she had just cheated on him, several times, out of anger, out of frustration. She had lied about it, clumsily, so he wouldn’t experience the pain of betrayal all at once, but would only suspect at first, as she had.

  She fed him repeated teaspoons of lies, of excuses, like layering on little doses of poison, none sufficient in and of themselves to kill him, but just enough to produce gradual cramps and tiny seizures. She wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble if she didn’t still love him, would she?

  She managed to twist a knife inside him without ever actually having inserted it
. She really was much better at talking than at working with her hands.

  She regretted it. Now. Too late.

  She knitted.

  She heard a noise at the door and looked up. A doctor stood there quietly. She hadn’t seen him around before. He was a young man. He had a common sort of face, neither handsome nor ugly.

  He said nothing, and neither did she.

  She looked away, back to Ben on his bed.

  There was no telling when the coma would end, if it would end. Various doctors had struck out on long explanations, carefully blending probabilities and hope, all of which were the equivalent of a shrug to Susan. They didn’t know why he was in a coma; they didn’t know when he was coming out. She could have gotten as much from a fifteen-year-old. Uh, I dunno.

  She knitted. She had only just begun the comforter.

  Behind her, the young doctor zipped himself open.

  The answering machine clicked on, and Grady’s message unwound into the telephone.

  There was a short beep, and Susan began talking.

  “Grady, are you there?” she said. “Pick up, Grady; it’s Sue.”

  Pause.

  Grady sat in the dark and listened. He kept very still, afraid that the answering machine might hear him. He pointed the shotgun at the telephone, had been pointing it since the first ring. He spent all his evenings like that now, in the dark, armed, waiting.

  “I didn’t want to do this over the phone,” she said. “But I don’t have time to call again. Grady,” she inhaled, and it was as if their eyes met. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything. I’m sorry I slept with you. I’m sorry I led you on. I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t thinking about how you felt. I was only thinking of myself. I used you, Grady. You know that now, don’t you? The truth is, I used you for revenge. I needed to hurt Ben, but I didn’t need to hurt you, too. It never should have gone as far as it did. It never should have happened. I’m sorry I hurt you. I needed to say that. I just needed to say that. I’m sorry. Goodbye, Grady.”

  She hung up.

  Grady realized that she had inhaled only once during the entire speech.

  Grady would have called it a drunken confession, except for the lack of slurring in her voice, except for the lack of emotion. The orderliness of it.

  An apology. Her version of the truth of their relationship. Pointless, uncharacteristic confession.

  Well, it was all over for Sue, then, wasn’t it? She had been next in line, not him.

  He lowered the shotgun.

  Tomorrow, he knew, he would hear that she had unexpectedly lapsed into a coma, causes unknown. Unexpected to everybody except Grady.

  Apologies. Truth.

  Those were the beginning, followed by comas.

  There were more people being affected than Grady had thought at first. Twice as many, at least.

  It was alternating, whatever it was.

  Newspaper clippings and news-magazines covered the floor of his living room. Grady had circled, in red, articles about ancient Nazis crawling out of their hidey-holes on spindly legs like cicadas, turning themselves in, confessing.

  Useless apologies. Old, old truth.

  Ben had hated Nazis with a passion. There were more books about the Holocaust in his office than about his work.

  Grady took particular care in his analysis of the dates of the confessions. His analysis had yielded a steady progression. Something was moving methodically from person to person.

  Ben had been first. Then a Nazi from Ohio named Bernhard Huber. Then Joe. Then another dried-out, old goosestepper from Chicago. Then Annie. Another Nazi. Sam. A Nazi from right here in New York named Heiliger, just blocks away, for godsakes. Yesterday Heiliger had been found in a coma, just like all the rest. Not one date overlapped. A steady progression. An assembly line. Check-marks on a list.

  Investigations had turned up zero in terms of causes. Nobody had put it all together, like Grady had, at least not publicly.

  Joe had called around to everyone he knew, apologizing for injuries caused, insults given, omissions made.

  So had Annie.

  So had Sam.

  So had the Nazis, to the police.

  Now Susan. Grady knew that if he called her right now, her phone would be busy. She had lots of calls to make.

  Something was out there. Something Ben had set in motion, something with Ben’s hatreds and grudges, something that Ben had let get out of control. Something with machine intelligence. Something vengeful as a Golem.

  Grady was on Ben’s shit list. He just had to be. Everyone got on it eventually. But he had some time now. Somewhere out there was some loathsome, twisted, unrepentant, old swastika-waver who was just about to wake up in the middle of Ben Heller’s traveling, three-ring nightmare.

  Grady hefted his shotgun. The barrel was too long, he decided. Too heavy. Too unwieldy. He had to saw it off. Maybe the stock, too.

  He had some time, days or weeks. And maybe he wouldn’t be the next one of Ben’s friends to get dipped and coated and hardened into a coma. Maybe. After all, Ben had hated a lot of people.

  He started thinking about everybody in his life he had hurt. Everybody who might deserve apologies. At least several were already in comas, but a rough draft of the list took him the rest of the night to compile.

  He was surprised at the number of names.

  A young man knocked three times at the front door of a ranch house in Macon, Georgia. A fifty-year-old man in a gray undershirt, a morning’s beard and a forty-year-old potbelly answered.

  “Yeah?” he said from behind the screen. He held his left hand out of sight behind the opened front door.

  “You are William Jefferson Saunders.” It wasn’t a question, but Saunders heard it as one. He had been served and arrested before. Being a Grand Dragon required certain sacrifices, in order to protect real Americans from their own weaker natures.

  “Who wants to know?” he said, and his eyes darted left and right around the door, wondering whether it was the FBI or the ATF or just the local yahoo, Sheriff Kerwin Smith come to arrest him this time.

  The first organized thought that crossed his mind was 555-2258. That was Bates’ number. Bates was an ACLU lawyer. He hoped this would be something he could call Bates about. Watching Bates squirm always amused him.

  The young man creaked open the screen door.

  “Hey, let’s see your warrant,” said Saunders, drawing his left hand into sight, holding a Colt .45 Automatic, a good American pistol.

  The young man grabbed Saunders by the throat with his left hand, his right zipping himself open. He pulled Saunders into bleak emptiness, trailing strangled curses like puffs of smoke.

  The ones he pulled in face-first usually fought more, those who weren’t stunned by seeing the space without stars. The process wasn’t designed to be comfortable, of course, or easy, or painless.

  One faint gunshot escaped as the soundproof skin-opening sealed behind the Grand Dragon, echoing as if it came from the bottom of a very deep hole.

  The young man stepped into the ranch house and closed the door behind him. The first phone number to call already bobbed at the surface of Saunders’ brain.

  555-2258.

  Grady remembered when Ben had gone politely crazy, but in a very organized way. He had confessed and apologized to hundreds of people, to everyone he could find. Virtually everyone he knew, Grady included. In alphabetical order.

  It had been awkward, unpleasant, embarrassing, even to those who hated him back, because he had been so damned sincere.

  The whole shuffling procession had taken more than a week, because, well, Ben had never been too discriminating in spreading his hatreds around.

  Once he got going, he used the same strings of expletives to describe Hitler and Heydrich as he used to describe some guy who had cut him off while driving to work in the morning, and everybody in between, all of them parts of an apocalyptic, underground, shadow conspiracy aimed at Benjamin Heller.

  The woman
in front of him in the ten-items-or-less checkout lane with eleven items? A dark agent sowing chaos into the fabric of Western Civilization. That is, after Ben had really begun to analyze it. He didn’t have compartments in his brain. He didn’t have gradations. He had a single long list, and everybody’s name got put on it, sooner or later.

  Grady had known Ben for years before he realized that Ben’s name was at the top of the list. Ben seemed unable to believe in anything good in anyone else, there being nothing good in himself. He left the sticky residue of his own unhappiness on everything he touched. He wasn’t satisfied until he had exposed the muddy, hidden, crawly, ugly underside of any good thought or deed he came across.

  Ben’s brain got to be like a huge ball of string, everything in his life twisting into one long string of cynicism, going around and around and around, without any ends that he could pick out, and maybe start to unravel the whole seamless, brooding mess.

  A coma, Grady thought, seemed appropriate, since it wasn’t that much different from how Ben was normally sealed away from reality anyway.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Grady turned to look, racking a shell into the shotgun’s chamber.

  Yesterday a confessed murderer in Georgia, a Grand Dragon of the KKK, had been found in a coma in his cell. The newspaper articles that Grady had circled in red were objective, a clear recitation of facts. The editorials were less charitable to Mr. Saunders, especially after his lengthy and detailed confession, a casual, lifelong tale of murder, arson, assault, theft, and on and on.

  There was a second knock at the door.

  Grady had a plan, and a backup plan. The plan wasn’t very good. It involved use of the shotgun. The backup plan was considerably worse. It involved the shotgun as well.

  He stood up and held the shotgun at his side, pointing at the floor. He didn’t really expect a bearer of comas, the swinger of the dull scythe, to knock. It could be someone else.