Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories Read Online Free PDF

looked away, but she kept listening. “A pair of moth-eaten gloves might mean your hands—after working ten hours in sub-freezing temperatures to dig grave trenches while the kapos and the guards whipped, beat, or shot ‘slowpokes’—were saved from frostbite that led to infection that led to amputation—generally without anesthesia. . . . So, yes, ‘Canada’ saved us from many a worse hell. It also bred the worst kind of corruption. In the hospital we had access—such as it was—to medical supplies and services so scant as to be near non-existent. It corrupted some of us,” I said. “A tiny vial of gentian violet for fungus got you 500 gold marks—or, better still for an inmate who knew which guards could be bribed, a half-kilo of meat . . . ”
    “Sneak it,” Ludwicka whispered under her breath. We were in the supply room—a name that might have been a laughable irony a few weeks ago, when it mostly consisted of tottering empty shelves, a few bandages and a cracked beaker labeled “sterile water” to wash out the very worst wounds. Applied with a dropper, the water served to briefly scatter flies drawn to purulence and rot. But the infirmary had changed when Dr. Viktor Freisler—he who’d formerly been in charge of selections—was ordered by someone to conduct a few autopsies here and there. Someone (Himmler? Hoess? Mengele?) wanted to know the precise mechanism by which starvation and dysentery killed prisoners—maybe to speed the death process here and at the other camps. Freisler, perhaps remembering real hospital work before the war, and with a certain amount of ego and pride connected to his new duties, commandeered enough instruments and drugs so that the infirmary was now suddenly on a par with the kind of first-aid station you might have found at a resort or a beach in those liberal, carefree years before the war.
    “Do you want him to kiss you or not?” Ludi said.
    “Well—” I hesitated.
    “It’s nothing to me, Miss-Sweet-Sixteen-and-Never-Been-Kissed,” she said with the loftiness I assumed came from the adulthood conferred by her eighteen years—most of which she’d spent in chic, pre-war Berlin.
    My hand stole out toward the bottle marked “Morphine Tablets,” my fingertips just about to graze the cool glass. “Isn’t this collaborating?”
    She shrugged. “It’s what’s in your heart that counts. Do you think I cared when my eaten up old aunts and uncles or spiteful cousins told me it was wrong to dance with Nazis in the supper clubs? Nazis. They’re filthy,” she made a spitting gesture. “But so what? You can hate them; I did! But a smile and a wink, and then I had pretty clothes and champagne instead of rags and piss-water.”
    There was something wrong with her logic, I knew, because after all, Ludi was here in Waldemar.
    “Who is going to miss two lousy quarter-grain tablets of morphine?” Ludi said.
    “They count them. My mother counts them—”
    She flapped a hand. “So big deal. The head nurse counted wrong.”
    I was shaking my head.
    She grabbed my shoulders: “Listen, don’t be a fool—haven’t you seen what she does?”
    I must have looked blank for a moment because she cut in with: “To the new babies?” Her right hand gripped tighter. “To save the mothers!” Ludi meant to jar me out of my daze; instead, even then, I sank deeper.
    “Am I the first to tell you this? I mean about the mothers and babies?” I tried to look into Stella Johansson’s eyes, but my lids kept fluttering and finally I turned away. I was leaning over the makeshift desk, staring down at my fingers, playing nervously with, of all things, a hook-shaped bobby pin that must have fallen from her upswept hair.
    Ludi wore her hair like that, I recalled. In all that misery and filth, somehow—maybe by contrast—she managed to look glamorous. . . .
    “It’s all right,” Stella said. “Go ahead.” But that didn’t tell me whether she already knew.
    “The mothers, you see