Christmas wreath, all mounted over the doorway and dripping with cobwebs, he steps inside his bedroom.
It is the only other room in the house that Eddie ever enters. Beyond it lies the Sacred Place, boarded off by Eddie years before. The second story is visited only by an occasional squirrel scuttling down through the chimney.
Eddie sets his oil lamp and handmade bowl on a wooden crate. Because its underside is so irregular (Eddie has tried to file down some of the bumps, but with limited success), the bowl threatens to tip over, and Eddie takes a moment to balance it on the crate top. Then, picking up a few sticks of kindling from the floor, he starts a fire in the potbellied stove near his bed.
The room is, if possible, even more squalid than the kitchen, a chaos of discarded food tins, empty cartons, crumpled newspapers, corroded hand tools, old musical instruments (including a broken accordion and a violin without strings), and a three-foot stack of tattered coveralls. A clothesline hung with soiled handkerchiefs is strung above Eddie’s iron bedstead. Amid the insane clutter and filth, the only objects that seem to have been treated with care are Eddie’s firearms: two .22-caliber rifles, a .22 pistol, a 7.65-millimeter Mauser, and a 12-gauge shotgun.
Outside, the rain has stopped falling, but—though a full moon has emerged from behind the clouds—no light enters the room. Its two windows have been tar-papered shut.
Seating himself on his sagging, grease-stained mattress, Eddie sifts through the pile of books and periodicals at his feet and selects his reading matter for the evening: a pulp magazine called Man’s Action , with a lurid cover painting of an impossibly big-breasted blonde, outfitted in a Gestapo uniform and applying a riding crop to the naked back of a writhing concentration-camp prisoner. Then, picking up his food, he takes a mouthful of the viscous mixture, opens the magazine on his lap, and begins to read.
Lately, he has been studying accounts of Nazi barbarities, and tonight, as he spoons down his supper, he pores over a story that relates, in loving detail, the atrocities committed by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” accused of collecting human heads and using the tattooed skin of her victims for lampshades and book bindings. He also likes reading about the deeds of Irma Grese, the angelic-looking nineteen-year-old SS warder who wore a sky-blue jacket that matched the color of her eyes, kept a horse whip stuck in one of her jackboots, and performed her primary duty—selecting enfeebled women and children for extermination at the Auschwitz and Belsen death camps—with uncommon zeal and enjoyment.
Eddie’s tastes, of course, aren’t limited to Nazi horror stories. He has a special fondness for South Seas adventure yarns, particularly ones concerning cannibals and headhunters. Only recently, he came across a supposedly true-life narrative that he can’t seem to get out of his mind. It concerned a man who murdered a wealthy acquaintance and escaped on his yacht, only to be shipwrecked on a Polynesian isle, where he was captured, tortured, and flayed by the natives. Of particular interest to Eddie was the graphic description of the process used to shrink and preserve the victim’s head, though he also enjoyed the part about the drum that had been fashioned by stretching the skin of the dead man’s abdomen across a hollow gourd.
Stories about exhumations are also among Eddie’s favorites. He has read everything he can get his hands on about the English “resurrection men,” or “body snatchers,” who peddled corpses to nineteenth-century anatomy schools. Another story set in nineteenth-century Britain, about a club of depraved young aristocrats who dug up corpses of beautiful young women and put them to unspeakable uses, has left an equally lasting mark on Eddie’s fantasy life.
Lately, Eddie’s imagination has been fired by an astounding tale unfolding in papers
It is the only other room in the house that Eddie ever enters. Beyond it lies the Sacred Place, boarded off by Eddie years before. The second story is visited only by an occasional squirrel scuttling down through the chimney.
Eddie sets his oil lamp and handmade bowl on a wooden crate. Because its underside is so irregular (Eddie has tried to file down some of the bumps, but with limited success), the bowl threatens to tip over, and Eddie takes a moment to balance it on the crate top. Then, picking up a few sticks of kindling from the floor, he starts a fire in the potbellied stove near his bed.
The room is, if possible, even more squalid than the kitchen, a chaos of discarded food tins, empty cartons, crumpled newspapers, corroded hand tools, old musical instruments (including a broken accordion and a violin without strings), and a three-foot stack of tattered coveralls. A clothesline hung with soiled handkerchiefs is strung above Eddie’s iron bedstead. Amid the insane clutter and filth, the only objects that seem to have been treated with care are Eddie’s firearms: two .22-caliber rifles, a .22 pistol, a 7.65-millimeter Mauser, and a 12-gauge shotgun.
Outside, the rain has stopped falling, but—though a full moon has emerged from behind the clouds—no light enters the room. Its two windows have been tar-papered shut.
Seating himself on his sagging, grease-stained mattress, Eddie sifts through the pile of books and periodicals at his feet and selects his reading matter for the evening: a pulp magazine called Man’s Action , with a lurid cover painting of an impossibly big-breasted blonde, outfitted in a Gestapo uniform and applying a riding crop to the naked back of a writhing concentration-camp prisoner. Then, picking up his food, he takes a mouthful of the viscous mixture, opens the magazine on his lap, and begins to read.
Lately, he has been studying accounts of Nazi barbarities, and tonight, as he spoons down his supper, he pores over a story that relates, in loving detail, the atrocities committed by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” accused of collecting human heads and using the tattooed skin of her victims for lampshades and book bindings. He also likes reading about the deeds of Irma Grese, the angelic-looking nineteen-year-old SS warder who wore a sky-blue jacket that matched the color of her eyes, kept a horse whip stuck in one of her jackboots, and performed her primary duty—selecting enfeebled women and children for extermination at the Auschwitz and Belsen death camps—with uncommon zeal and enjoyment.
Eddie’s tastes, of course, aren’t limited to Nazi horror stories. He has a special fondness for South Seas adventure yarns, particularly ones concerning cannibals and headhunters. Only recently, he came across a supposedly true-life narrative that he can’t seem to get out of his mind. It concerned a man who murdered a wealthy acquaintance and escaped on his yacht, only to be shipwrecked on a Polynesian isle, where he was captured, tortured, and flayed by the natives. Of particular interest to Eddie was the graphic description of the process used to shrink and preserve the victim’s head, though he also enjoyed the part about the drum that had been fashioned by stretching the skin of the dead man’s abdomen across a hollow gourd.
Stories about exhumations are also among Eddie’s favorites. He has read everything he can get his hands on about the English “resurrection men,” or “body snatchers,” who peddled corpses to nineteenth-century anatomy schools. Another story set in nineteenth-century Britain, about a club of depraved young aristocrats who dug up corpses of beautiful young women and put them to unspeakable uses, has left an equally lasting mark on Eddie’s fantasy life.
Lately, Eddie’s imagination has been fired by an astounding tale unfolding in papers
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