Chapter 28: Carl-Heinz
The following night, I probed further and asked Carl-Heinz what the professor had wanted to do with his two tame vampires.
‘The professor was a pure scientist,’ he explained. ‘He had been fascinated by vampires for many years and wanted to know everything there was to know. He ran a lot of tests on us, something he couldn’t have done without the drug. As a haematologist he wanted particularly to study the blood and how it changed us.’
‘Did he ever intend to publish his findings?’
‘He once told me the world wasn’t ready yet for our kind and he wasn’t going to publish until he had a foolproof method of finding, capturing and controlling vampires.’
‘And didn’t he realise the military potential?’
‘He didn’t, but in 1903 he took on an assistant, a cousin that he thought he could trust.’ Carl-Heinz continued the story. The professor knew the two vampires had a connection and could sense each other’s presence so he was working on a device that could detect a vampire. With both the vampire research and his university work, the professor had badly needed help and looked to his younger cousin, Albert Lindtman for assistance. Albert was also a haematologist and the professor, thinking that a cousin and fellow scientist would make a trusted partner, let Albert in on his secret experiments and introduced him to his two vampires. Albert immediately saw how the military might exploit his cousin’s work and if the professor had looked closely he would have seen the look of pure greed rather than the hunger for scientific discovery in his cousin’s eyes. Albert knew an official in Berlin with connections to military research, so in 1908 the two vampires were moved to an old hospital outside Berlin and the professor was forced to retire and given a pension. As far as Carl-Heinz knew, the tracking device was never developed further.
Hedwig had by this time started to show some worrying side effects, like a sort of Alzheimer’s, and she had become very forgetful. When the professor left, her symptoms worsened and she became aggressive as well, reacting badly to all the strangers who wanted to inject her with this, that and the other. They stopped the drugs, but it was too late. Hedwig forgot what she was and how to feed, and even the simplest things such as dressing herself became tasks she no longer knew how to do. As she was still so dangerous and could kill someone with great ease, they decided to put her down like a sick animal.
‘Did you know all this was going on?’ I asked him.
‘I was walking in a haze most of the time, doing whatever I was told, but I do remember that they got me to do their dirty work on Hedwig,’ he told me looking very sad again.
‘They made you kill your maker?’ I asked, shocked.
‘Yes,’ he said, his voice flat.
‘How did you do it? Stake? Beheading? Or are there other ways?’ I asked with interest.
‘Does it matter?’ He looked at me with incomprehension. I don’t think he got many visitors, and he didn’t quite know what to make of this eager, restless young man, that wanted to know all the gory details despite it being clear that it took him great difficulty to talk about these painful memories.
‘Sorry. I’m just interested in how we can die. I watch and read all about these things and it’s hard to separate fact from fiction,’ I explained.
‘It was beheading. It is very quick. I used a sharp sword, standard German army issue if you need to know,’ he went on, slight irritation creeping into his voice.
‘Thanks. Sorry to push you on this, but do you think they used this as another test to see if the drugs worked?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure of it. I think we were no more than lab rats to them.’
‘Did you have any side effects?’ I asked.
‘Mine weren’t as bad. Apart from the occasional splitting headache, I was just in a daze, one day blending into the next. Even now, my memory is still very good. Playing chess keeps me sharp,’ he said proudly and asked if I played.
You can’t get me to sit still long enough to read a good book, let alone for a snoozefest like chess! ‘No, sorry. I don’t,’ I said with an apologetic smile and asked him to continue.
They forced Carl-Heinz to make another two vampires. One went quite mad on the drugs and just stood in a corner crying. When they took him off the drugs, he became dangerous and vicious and managed to kill one of the guards. They darted him with the drug and disposed of him when he reverted to a blubbering mess. On the other vampire, Otto, the drugs seemed to work. He calmly did what was required of him and seemed an ideal testing subject. But Otto had them fooled all along. The drug had actually had absolutely no effect on him and at the first opportunity he ran off never to be seen again.
‘Do you think he’s still out there?’ I asked surprised.
‘I am sure he is. He is a clever fellow and knows how to survive,’ Carl-Heinz told me with conviction.
‘You’re his maker, you’d be able to sense him. Haven’t you ever felt his presence?’ I asked him, intrigued.
‘No. I think he got as far away from Berlin as possible. I have never seen him again.’
The team decided to try again and two women were found for Carl-Heinz to turn. One, Anna, had been imprisoned for killing her two young children by drowning them in the bath and she was sentenced to death. No one would know that this murderess would get a second life as a vampire. The other, Elsa, had been sentenced to death for poisoning twenty of her neighbours by baking cakes with rat poison. Neither of these girls were sane to start with and the drug didn’t make things any better. Like Otto, Elsa pretended to do well on the drug, but she got impatient and after a week of treatment she snapped and rampaged through the facility, killing five guards and medical staff. Carl-Heinz was sent in with a stake to deal with the problem, but she didn’t go down without a fight.
‘I lost a finger in that battle,’ he said, showing me his left hand with his middle finger missing.
‘It doesn’t grow back then, once a limb is off?’ I asked, astonished.
‘We are not lizards, Cameron. We heal quickly, but once a limb is severed it doesn’t grow back,’ he told me impatiently.
‘Good to know,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Continue CH.’ He gave me another look. Probably too early for the CH.
Anna had complained about headaches straight away and was not as willing a subject as Carl-Heinz had been. After a few weeks she developed memory problems and it looked as though she was going to go the same way as Hedwig. They got Carl-Heinz to dispose of her before things deteriorated too badly.
‘A stake this time. I think it was oak, but I can’t be sure,’ he said, pre-empting my enquiry with a disapproving look.
They made no more vampires after that, but decided to keep Carl-Heinz alive. War was now looming large and they wanted to use him on the battlefield.
‘So this is when they got you to make me and god knows how many others!’ I said, shuffling excitedly in my chair.
‘That was the idea. I would turn an allied soldier and hope he would go back to his trenches and cause mayhem.’
‘Did it work?’ I asked.
‘Not at all. You know it takes a few days for the bloodlust and the realisation to set in. After that it is anyone’s guess what will happen. The first soldier I turned went for the German trenches and caused quite a few problems for us. It took me three nights to find him and kill him again.’
‘Whoops!’
‘I know. They waited and deliberated until 1915 before they tried again,’ he said.
‘And that was the great German success of Cameron,’ I said raising my arms in triumph. He gave me another look, but I got a faint smile too.
‘Yes, not the debâcle of the previous attempt but just futile. I made another a week later and I took him behind the allied lines hoping he would go for the first human prey he saw. I even tried to brainwash him, but again he went for the German lines and had to be dealt with,’ he went on.
It was decided that vampires were just too unpredictable and dangerous to be created
so they just used Carl-Heinz as a soldier. He was a pretty good and indestructible one, but the dream of a great vampire army fighting for the Kaiser had crumbled. When the war was over, no one knew what to do with Carl-Heinz. A completely tame and obedient vampire was too good to be killed, but the team of scientists at the facility had been depleted and by 1921 only Albert and his assistant were on the payroll. Germany was suffering financial meltdown and there was absolutely no money for any more research. Most of the time Carl-Heinz was left undrugged and just stayed in his cell while Albert and his assistant worked on other projects.
‘You must have been bored out of your mind,’ I cried in horror.
‘It wasn’t too bad. They gave me books to read and it was nice to have my head clear again. The worst thing was I could remember everything as clear as day,’ he said sadly.
‘Did they not trust you to be out of your cell? I mean, you were a scientist too. You could have worked,’ I asked.
‘They’d had so many bad experiences with the vampires that they were happier just to keep me locked up and out of the way. You know, to them I was no more than a gorilla or something; some human qualities but a wild animal that could kill you in an instant after all,’ he explained.
‘Did you ever wonder why the drug worked on you but not on the others?’ I asked him.
‘Of course. I don’t know for sure, but I have always been a quiet character, without any rebellion or aggression,’ he told me. ‘I think that was the difference.’
I was just about bouncing in my seat. At last I was going to get answers to some crucial vampire questions and I was making myself quite dizzy trying to decide what I wanted to know first. ‘I have so much to ask! They experimented on you, so what did you discover? Do you know if garlic can kill?’ I was just bursting with curiosity.
He filled me in on a few facts and myths. Garlic was toxic and gave you a nasty rash but was not deadly. Holy water and crosses did nothing at all; he thought that had been invented by the church to accentuate their role in the good versus evil of the vampire myths. Oh yes, and a virgin’s blood is no different from that of a non-virgin. He finished by telling me that sunlight was indeed deadly. We called it a day at that point and I went back to my hotel agreeing to meet again the next night.
When I arrived the following night, I dived straight in, eager to pick up the story.
‘And then the Nazis came along.’ I asked shuffling in my chair excitedly, ready for some more juicy information.
‘Indeed. Fucking Nazis. Bunch of fanatics that ignored all previous research and decided that I was the only good vampire, as I was a good Aryan boy. They ignored totally the fact that Anna had been blue-eyed and blonde too.’ Carl-Heinz was angry. Nazis apparently weren’t his favourite either. I wanted to ask if he thought they’d tasted funny too, but thought better of it.
The Nazis cranked things up a notch; suddenly the place was crawling with scientists again. A lot of racial and psychological profiling was done on Carl-Heinz and volunteers with a similar physique and intelligence were recruited. It was a bloodbath and of the 25 test subjects only one was allowed to stay alive. The rest either went mad or became too dangerous and unreliable to keep.
One, a fanatical party member and mathematics student called Heinrich, had been an ideal candidate on paper. He seemed to react well to the drug and carried out all the commands he had been given, but Carl-Heinz had his suspicions. He believed that the drug had had no effect on Heinrich and that, like Otto, he was pretending. It didn’t really make much difference, as Heinrich’s goals were the same as those of the research team.
Carl-Heinz and Heinrich did not get on. Heinrich loathed the older vampire who only obeyed orders because he was drugged and did not share his fervid vision. When war broke out, the two of them were sent east on strategic missions that put their night vision and stealth to use with devastating effect in Poland and later in Russia.
‘You know, there’s a photo of either you or Heinrich circulating on the internet,’ I interrupted again.
‘No, that can’t be.’
‘I know we don’t photograph. It’s more a shot of a Polish soldier fighting off an unseen thing around his neck. That’s how I got on your track,’ I told him.
‘I have to see that. Maybe I will remember if that was me,’ he said shrugging his shoulders.
When the war turned and the Soviets started advancing, the two vampires were sent out almost every night on their deadly missions until, one night, Carl-Heinz returned alone.
‘Do you think Heinrich ran off?’ I asked.
‘I doubt that, you could not get a more loyal soldier than him. I hope that the Soviets killed him as he was a truly evil vampire.’
‘Do you think the Soviets had knowledge of vampires?’ I asked.
‘I know they did. They eventually caught me too and they were ready for me with a silver net.’
‘Did they have the drug?’ I asked him.
‘No. As our troops pulled back, we got close to Berlin and the facility, but by this time the drug no longer worked so well on me and my head was clearing,’ he said. He explained that his officers had ordered him to torch the facility with himself inside, but he’d managed to escape. He hadn’t wanted to be captured by the Soviets, but they were already advancing on the facility and seemed to be ready for him. They didn’t have the drug, but knew of it and were keen to develop it, so once again Carl-Heinz disappeared and for a number of years was kept in a laboratory near Moscow.