The Obscurati (8 page)

We still use the room today. It is a dormitory for our human staff. The fireplace is gone, and the entrance is easy to see. Oberon had some hand in the engineering of the door, but I’m not exactly sure what he did. He wasn’t pleased that they tried to come for engineering help in making sure the basement was solid. He couldn’t convince them that structural integrity of buildings was something he hadn’t studied.

“You want me to volunteer?” I asked him.

“No, that would really scare everybody.” Oberon laughed, and he agreed to jump in with everything he had. His role as my personal mad scientist hidden away in the basement workshop became his secondary job throughout the Second World War.

Oberon devised traps for troops in case we were invaded by the Russians and hiding places for the humans in case the SS stormed through looking for gays and gypsies.

The trouble with the Russians is that they always sent about a zillion troops through that left nothing in their wake. We could make a few companies disappear, but the Russians always had too many men. We couldn’t mount a private army at Lechmont Manor because (a), we didn’t have the skill, and (b), it would have attracted too much attention. Our experience during the war was all about keeping a low profile, and that was really difficult because I wanted to go kill Nazis, even if they were German. The Russians really scared me, but we ended up being spared their arrival. Our part of Germany was invaded by the Americans, and I didn’t hide my national origin. I even got the cooks to fix pot after pot of chili for the Yanks. A few of them recognized the recipe as being Texas chili: point for them. They wanted to stay. One of the American soldiers actually showed up on his own after the war. He was gay and recognized that we had more than our share of gay men, and he wanted to be part of the crew.

Menz’s land had always been known as a good source of hops. Paco had been in charge of the fields for decades, and his work had earned the respect of brewers all over Germany. Paco loved nature and farming, and he made sure that the hops crops were expertly tended. The yield would be called “organic” today, but those who bought hops just called them a good product back then.

Hops production was cut back during the war. Paco planted more rye and barley, and he let more eggs hatch into chickens. Paco worked magic in making the farm continue to earn money while increasing food for our hundreds of guests.

He planted vegetables in some of the formal gardens. When I told him it was a shame to lose the gardens, he told me it was more of a shame to lose so many young men. Around others, Paco maintained some show of support for Germany. In private, he was angry that his own country would start a second major war in his lifetime. He cried when he read the papers because he knew the military often lied about how the war was going. We all knew that Germany was losing another generation of men.

I know: Germany deserved to be whupped. The country was brutal in its treatment of the Poles and others. It doesn’t make the destruction easier to accept. Not when you saw everything from the inside. I cry just thinking about it.

From the outside, it looked like Menz was doing his part for the war effort. What he was really doing was feeding and protecting hundreds of people who would have been taken off to be killed or forced to work in a factory until they dropped dead. Our underground visitors were all terrified. I visited them often, even though my German was awful. I made sure all the gay boys got kisses. Everyone else got big hugs. One woman, probably a gypsy, knew how to crochet, and she made me a small American flag, all in white thread but with lots of intricate detail. All the stars and stripes were in the right places.

After the war, some Germans said they had no idea of all the terror that was going on. That’s what they said. They lied. Of course they knew. Everybody knew, and Menz was going to help save as many as possible. And yes, the Jews were killed in higher numbers than anyone else, but gay people were rounded up too. If you looked like a gypsy, you weren’t safe while the Nazis were in charge of Germany. There was so much hatred. Oberon understood hatred; he could almost taste it. He loved helping protect the humans in our basement. He was more engaged in the project than I have ever seen from him before or since. Oberon was quiet, but he was fierce when it came to protecting those hurt by society.

Vampires were the civilized beings during the war. It was the human race that was completely out of control. I was embarrassed to admit that I was even human once. When the war was over, all the Nazi laws were thrown out except for the ones against gay people. They figured that Hitler was awful but that he got at least one thing right. That antigay law stayed on the books until the 1960s, and it is still hard to find any memorial to the gays and lesbians who were murdered in the concentration camps.

There’s a modern Roman Catholic website that denies gay people were taken to concentration camps. These so-called religious people call it the “Gay Holocaust Myth.” It’s bullshit. I saw it, and I still have a pink triangle (gay) and a black triangle (lesbian) torn from the uniforms of some concentration camp victims. The best news for these hatemongers dressed in religious garb is that I won’t be the one at the pearly gates on Judgment Day. They will be judged by the righteous judge, and their only hope is that their status is not weighed by their merits or augmented by the amount of human suffering that they caused.

Show me the ledgers of these cretins and bullies, and let me go to town on them.

Those website authors aren’t religious. They’re modern day hatemongers in the finest Nazi tradition, only they brandish a crucifix instead of a swastika. Jesus of Nazareth would be ashamed that such people terrorize and belittle people while claiming to support the Christian cause. The founder of Christianity would run in horror at the kinds of things these uppity, over-educated Pharisees send out as God’s law and teaching. They know as much about Christianity as Lady Gaga knows about heart transplant surgery. And Lady Gaga has the sense not to order desperately ill patients to the Gaga Heart Clinic with threats of eternal damnation on anyone with heart disease who opts for a different tack.

And there’s the Roman Catholic pope who was a member of the Hitler Youth. The guy was a little Nazi, but he said all the kids were members. Bull-fucking-shit: they weren’t, and he knows it. I was there. I know that pope is lying through his teeth, but he does so with a sweet smile and a crucifix.

“
T
URN
the other cheek, Mårten.”

“Fuck the other check, Father Johannes.”

“Righteous indignation isn’t healthy,” he said.

“Fuck that too, whatever it is.”

“Lord Jesus, save Mårten from Thy followers. And save them from him.”

“Thank you, Father Johannes.”

“Take two Hail Marys and see me in the morning,” he said, and he was off in a poof as usual.

A
COUPLE
of our human guests knew about pottery. Menz worked with them to start an assembly line. They made pipe segments that the humans ran out to the river. It was a gravity-fed aqueduct that brought more water to the house than we could possibly use. They tried to engineer a private sewer system, but it never worked properly. The humans used cans and bottles to store their piss and shit, and they had teams to dump everything at night.

I always felt so bad that we couldn’t save everyone. The entire country went insane. I think it was like the American south during the 1960s. You had governors and state troops blocking entrances to white-only colleges against people of color wanting a college education. Bubba didn’t think twice about attending a college, but it was a major Big Deal for a young nonwhite person to think those same thoughts. Neither asked to be born where they were or to the parent they were born to. Neither did anything to make them better or worse (in most cases). It was just the will of the people, supported by the local law.

I remember one of our blood donors talking about how dangerous Alabama and Mississippi had become in the 1960s. Even if your skin was white, you didn’t want to be driving through those states on a federal highway if you had long hair. You could be a white supremacist who hated everyone who wasn’t white, but your life was in serious danger if the law in Alabama and Mississippi didn’t like your haircut.

It wasn’t just the Nazi government that could brainwash a country. Any government can do it. Any population can rise up and go insane. Christian groups can forget all the teachings of their founder.

D
URING
that war, Nazi soldiers came to the house twice. The first group looked around and left. They were the smarter of the two bands of soldiers.

The second group found our secret hiding place and demanded that we bring all our people out from the basement. Let’s just say that the five vampires living in the mansion got plenty of blood that night. We grabbed the Nazi soldiers and flew them out away from the house so our humans wouldn’t have to watch what we had in store for them. Hamlet was in charge of keeping the soldiers corralled in a clearing. They thought he was just one nelly little queer-boy. They were right, but he can also whup about a dozen soldiers in a second. After he dropped a couple of soldiers with his fists, the others became more compliant. That was a mistake, of course. Not that it would have done any good in the overall scheme of things, but they should not have tried to run away. By the time we had them standing still, we had a dozen Nazis. The soldiers had some vague idea that they were in trouble. The idea wouldn’t be vague much longer.

All five vampires attacked. We took blood directly from their necks, which is usually a sign that the vampire doesn’t intend on letting the human live. Most of the soldiers tried to scatter and save their sorry asses, but Hamlet kept them lined up. (Note to self: do not cross the nelly vampire.)

We were completely gorged on blood, so Oberon flashed up to the house and came back with several large empty bottles.

We drained their blood into the bottles. Paco and I held one soldier by the feet while Oberon and Menz slashed their throats and got their blood spewing and draining into the bottles. Holding them by their feet made all the blood drain out. A human has about five liters of blood. Yes, we were hurting humans. They had hurt plenty of others and were cocky about it.

The soldiers had looked so pleased with themselves when they found all the Jews and gypsies and gays in our basement. There’s something about a slit throat that wipes the smugness off a human face.

We were set for blood for a long time. Menz had built a cage in the middle of a small creek that was fed by melting snow and ice from the mountains. The water in the creek was always cold, so we could keep the blood in the cage for quite a while. There were so many bottles: fifty or sixty liters. We kept some but sent several bottles to Switzerland, and they never asked where we got the blood, but vampires all over Europe were well fed for a few days.

Tasty. Send me more Nazis.
Deutschland über alles. NS-Blut über alles.

The soldiers’ transportation was simple to hide: that second group came to the house on motorcycles with sidecars. That meant we had six motorcycles. I wanted to keep one, but Menz said that would just invite trouble. He told me that motorcycles have identification numbers etched into the frame and engine. I didn’t know that.

Menz promised to get me a motorcycle after the war if the Russians didn’t confiscate all of them. Most of us could lift a train locomotive without any effort, so hauling up a few motorcycles was nothing. We just took them out a few hundred kilometers and dropped them near a mountain road. The German military probably thought the squadron of thugs had met their end because of a bizarre and fiery traffic accident. Bizarre: yes. Traffic accident: not so much.

Sometimes we would get news that a train would be coming with guns and supplies, headed to the battle lines in Italy or off to the east. When we heard about it, mysterious things happened to the rails. Nobody ever really figured out what went wrong, but some of the spikes holding the rails disappeared, and the gap between the two rails was imperceptibly wider. We could pull out the spikes holding the rails to wooden cross-ties and pull one rail out just a little. Being strong as a vampire is handy. A train full of military hardware and explosives makes quite a flashy show when it derails. Oops.

We always made sure that the “accidents” never happened at the same place, and it was never too close to Menz’s estate. I don’t think anybody ever knew. You know, but the statute of limitations has expired.

What I’m saying is that we did our part during the war. I knew it was hard for the Germans to do things against their own country. Everything that happened in Germany started innocently, because we were punished brutally after the First World War, so the rise of nationalism was understandable. For a while, the Weimar Republic was in charge, and that was a really good government. They just couldn’t keep the economy in line, and they could never seem to stop the rumblings of revenge. They did for a while, but hatred of the French and others finally took over. Germany was consumed with national pride. Germany: love it or leave it. We wanted all the German-speaking people in nearby countries to be part of our fatherland, and we wanted a buffer of land to keep back the Russians and others.

We all eventually figured out that the Nazis were assholes and needed to be stopped. It took a while to come to that conclusion.

The vampires even tried to figure out a way to get Adolf Hitler himself. The trouble was that he always changed his travel plans at the last minute, and he was never where we thought he’d be. I wasn’t a sniper at the time, and I certainly didn’t have a high-powered rifle. If I had, I would have gotten the asshole or died trying. That’s just the way I’m built.

Maybe Hitler knew about vampires and how dangerous we could be. It doesn’t matter now: he killed himself.
So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good-bye.