Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

He was led to a slanted iron rack painted yellow and spotted with rust. The bottom of the rack had a gutter. Two weak and bare bulbs burned above it. Kehr had two assistants, heavy men in bright yellow shirts who helped Karel off with his clothes and looked at him with the neutrality of old cows. They locked his wrists and ankles into shackles so he was spread-eagled on the rack, the iron cold everywhere against his bare skin. While they worked on him he said harshly to Kehr, “Is Leda Schiele dead?”

“Leda Schiele is not your concern right now,” Kehr said. “Believe me.”

“I’ll kill you if I get out of here,” Karel said. “I’ll kill you.”

“Well said,” Kehr said. “Now.” He shook out Karel’s two shirts before him. “Who are the people we’re interested in?”

Karel looked at him, breathing hard. He shook his head. “ I don’t know, ” he shouted, straining and banging at his shackles. “I never knew. I would have told you. I would have told you .”

Kehr nodded as if that was exactly what he’d suspected, and gave Karel’s bare shoulder a reassuring pat. Karel shivered involuntarily. Kehr folded his clothes carefully and gave them to one of his assistants, who looked around for a moment and then dropped them on the floor.

“We’re going to start with the knee, and the face,” Kehr explained. “They’re already — how should I put it — sensitive.”

“Please,” Karel pleaded. His hatred for Kehr was gone. Fear was sweeping over him like cold air after a shower. Kehr was rummaging around the shelves, and the instruments made a quiet racket on the tin.

He returned with a simple pair of pliers and an awl and a complicated something that Karel didn’t recognize that looked like a plumber’s helper.

“Now,” Kehr repeated, with an exhalation of breath like someone sitting down comfortably to a long monotonous job, “who are the people?”

“Please please please,” Karel said.

One of the assistants put a soft piece of wood in his mouth. He looked at the man’s eyes in wonder and shock and felt he was watching things happen in which he only vaguely participated, that this couldn’t be true, because no one would do what they were about to do, and no one would do it to him.

“Who are the people?” Kehr asked.

“Please,” Karel said. One of the assistants held his leg with both hands.

Kehr put the tip of the awl under Karel’s kneecap and drove it through the swelling.

Karel shrieked and jolted upward and cried out so that the sound tore his throat.

Kehr was holding the awl in place and Karel could feel it under his kneecap, probing the joint. He jiggled it. Karel howled and thrashed out of the assistant’s grip, and the awl came out.

He could feel the blood and the pain and he swept his head from side to side. This was worse than anything and he would have renounced anything to stop it.

“So who are the people?” Kehr asked.

“Please,” Karel cried. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“It occurred to me a while ago,” Kehr remarked, “that this for me could be an intriguing test. Do you know what I mean? What would it be like, doing someone I genuinely liked? Someone I genuinely had hopes for?”

Karel writhed on the rack, feeling only a bestial, desperate terror. It paralyzed everything in him but physical reaction.

Kehr reinserted the awl and Karel felt it get purchase on something inside his knee and then Kehr levered it outward and there was a tearing and cracking sound and Karel screamed so that he brought a blackness on himself, and when it passed the pain was a disk within his skull, tilting and oscillating, and then in his knee, flexing and spiraling outward. It rolled and pulsed and there was a grate of bone and he shrieked again. Kehr took the pliers and they clamped onto the kneecap with a wet and gritty sound and then he lifted and pulled.

The room reassembled like a pattern discovered in a cloud and Kehr was putting the instruments away on the shelf. Someone was wrapping Karel’s knee in a large loose gauzy bandage that was soaking through. Karel’s head was down and he was bringing up slaver and his chest was wet with it. He raised his head and the light through his tears prismed in concentric and iridescent circles. He couldn’t breathe and the air seemed to come back to him from a great distance.

Kehr came up close and asked him who were the people. When Karel didn’t answer Kehr hit him so hard across the face that it changed the taste in his mouth. Then he went away and the two assistants unshackled Karel and carried him back to his cell.

He lay on the floor feeling his nausea as a kind of acidic chill. He had nothing to fall back on in his attempt to understand what had just happened. He was aware of flies, houseflies and smaller flies with greenish heads. They buzzed and helixed before him when he moved his leg.

He thought, Am I better now? He was always aware of his knee, the pain like metal within it. He came to with a strange man bending over him. The man said he was the doctor and sat him up and showed him his knee. There were petals of flesh curled back from the opening and the whole thing seemed to him like meat on a plate. The man touched a white sponge soaked in something yellow to the area and Karel’s whole leg moved independently while he watched. The man held Karel’s palm open and tumbled three orange aspirins into it, to get him, he suggested, over the rough patch. He suggested when he left that Karel shake off the past and look to the future.

They brought him back to the torture room while he was still half muddled and he struggled and cried and tried to hold on to parts of his cell door like someone searching a sandy ocean bottom in murky water. Kehr asked him who the people were and he wailed and jabbered and tried everything to keep it from happening again. They leaned him back against the rack with one of the assistants supporting him since he could no longer support himself, and he tried feebly to keep his hands together so they couldn’t be shackled. The assistant patiently pulled them apart.

Kehr said, “Long ago we figured out, in laboratories like these, that certain things can be done to human beings without the sky falling in. Most people really don’t know that everything’s possible. You resist,” he said. “So you’re back again. Who are the people?”

“I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you,” Karel said, but images and information all milled around in his head and he couldn’t think of a name to give or invent.

Kehr had something metal on Karel’s thigh and sawed into it and tore back whole sheets of muscle. It was as if his leg had been inverted into fire.

He came to dizzy and weak from the loss of blood. Behind his eyes ovals and whorls of light cascaded. Somebody save me, he thought.

“Why are you resisting?” Kehr said. “There’s no one left. Do you think there’s anyone left?” But Karel couldn’t focus on the words, overwhelmed with a suffocating and implacable fear. He refused to think, tried in every way possible to preoccupy his mind: Eski, he thought, and the little dog passed untouched through the darkness.

“Do you recognize this?” Kehr asked, and he held up bloody clothing. Karel didn’t.

They started to strip the skin from the soles of his feet. He had the sensation they were trying to separate the skin at the edge of the wound with a pair of pincers. He passed out and came to and slid down a huge slippery tube where he would disappear and it would all stop. When he revived he was fully horizontal on a pallet, still in the room. His feet were on fire and he was howling and whining and his legs galloped weakly in place to make it stop. Something was holding them down. Kehr was over him.