48

Introductory Text

48th Post

Posted 11 May 2016 at 22:14:03 EDT

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> There, mostly hidden in the darkness, was a great inexplicable monstrosity. Everything had been burned and blackened, but still I could see human shapes and forms. Arms, fingers, faces, jawbones, teeth, eye sockets, all burned and reduced to ash clinging to bone. But this was no pile of burned bodies. I had seen piles of burned bodies. I had seen mountains of burned bodies. This was something different.
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> Human parts were coming out of the walls and the floor and ceiling. Arms and legs hung like stalactites. Faces came out of the floor. They were fused together in ways that could not be possible. At seeing this, I was filled with the strongest possible urge to turn away, to back out of the awful laboratory and run for my life. But I heard again the Jew's final words, "You must," and knew this to be a command.
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> I went inside. As the curtain closed behind me, I was enveloped in almost total darkness. Bones cracked beneath by boots. Near the back, I saw a shaft of light where one of the old doors had been sealed up but had become partially open again. I walked toward it, stepping over unspeakable, crunching shapes, brushing past nightmarish forms. I reached out to the crack of light and pulled back a board which was covering the door. Though I was not able to rip it free, I pulled it loose enough to let in a considerable amount of light, enough to reveal what sat at the back of the laboratory.
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> As a child, I once went to a zoo in Vienna where I saw an elephant skull. Looking at the object now before me, I was reminded of this long ago moment and of how I had spent maybe half an hour staring at the skull from every angle, how I was titillated by its enormousness, its impossible alienness, and its unsettling similarity to what was familiar and human.
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> Before me was a large obloid shape, almost as tall as me, stippled with hundreds of what looked like eye sockets. The lower portion consisted of a complicated structure that resembled several sets of jaws, each with hundreds or thousands of teeth of all different kinds, including molars, incisors, canines, even animal teeth, some of them of normal size, some of them as big as my fist. The center of the shape was split vertically and inside was a set of curving bone tubes that seemed to fill the interior.
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> I stood there in the charred darkness, staring at this thing, this blasphemous, alien thing, while my mind filled with images of the awful dream mother and the final gasping words of the Jew.
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> "There is still time... To stop her..."
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> His commandment became strangely clear to me. This thing that the scientists were attempting to create, whatever it was, must not be allowed to exist. It was an abomination. Engel and his team were dead, but there were others working on the project. It was secretive enough that the essential personnel would be few in number. The lab in Switzerland. A few top scientists. Perhaps that was entirety of it. It would not be easy, but far from impossible to find them all.
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> It was perhaps in my power to destroy the whole project, especially if we lost the war, which seemed increasingly likely after Stalingrad. And if this chemical that they were using was obscure enough, it might be possible to eliminate the entire world's supply. Thus I could shut the door on whatever unholy creature these madmen were attempting unleash.
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> Yes, I could do this. At least I could attempt it. I felt now a distinct sense of the entire world's history resting on what I decided to do next. Surely moments like this did not come about often. Surely they must come only to men who are worthy of them...
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> Surely...
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