Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

They both turned to me with stares that went from amused, to annoyed, and then to blank. She whispered something in Todtenhausen’s ear and left the room.

He watched her leave and then, turning to me, smiled. The grandfather clock in the hallway chimed indicating that it was three in the afternoon. I had set a two-hour timer thirty minutes before. Unless I rotated the cork out of its armed position, all six of the fertilizer bomb bottles would detonate in ninety minutes.

Todtenhausen set down the demitasse, folded his hands over his lap, and sat back in his chair, addressing me as a parent would a disappointing child.

“So, are you the twin? The one with whom Mengele was so infatuated?” He asked me. He had put the pieces together quickly.

I began to compose my denials, pretended outrage and indignity that the Californians had tricked me with their counterfeit wine, and started to make my way to the car, explaining that they could of course keep the remaining bottles. I pushed myself out of the chair, turned to leave, but found Kathe blocking the arched entrance to the room, wearing her swastika wimple, her eyes sparkling. With a hint of a smile on her face, her weight on one foot, and one arm across her waist holding the elbow of the other arm, I saw a syringe in her upright hand, squirting a small jet of some clear fluid into the air, ready to conduct business.

I would never know if she used that syringe—I was several centimeters taller, and a couple of kilograms heavier, so I could have taken her down had that needle come any closer. But I would never know. It was the syringe I felt enter my neck from behind that sent me to the floor, my legs collapsing under me, paralyzed.

Someone caught my fall. Todtenhausen admonished me or Kathe. “No bruises, Liebchen. They’re almost impossible to remove.”

The ceiling bobbed and weaved. I was being carried away. Kathe held my legs, he carried my heavier torso at the shoulders, and with a gentle swing, placed my limp body a gurney they kept on hand for whatever purpose-from-hell I could not imagine. What crosses one’s mind when it should be processing fight-or-flight options can evidently be highly inappropriate, and the thought that crossed mine was that Kathe ran Absinto as a bed-and-breakfast, and the gurney was used to adjust guests as necessary to fit the furniture.

Out of the corner of my eyes I watched, with inexplicable calm, Todtenhausen preparing an IV drip and insert the needle in my wrist. I felt nothing, but I could see Kathe scissoring off my shirt, pants, and boxers, then my shoes and socks. Unless my mind had conjured a nightmare, I recall her flicking my cock contemptuously, pinching it, and saying something about it being uncircumcised causing Todtenhausen to laugh.

The IV drip brought a ringing in my ears, a taste of metal in my mouth, and the smell of almonds in my nose. Then my vision collapsed, and I felt as if I was entering a tunnel, a deadly silent tunnel, like the passage to an unlit catacomb.

Nicolaus: Zugzwang

Chimes from the grandfather clock in the hall answered one of the urgent questions lingering in my head. I had been out for an hour. The other urgent question was: what had Hitler’s taxidermist and his concubine done to me?

During that time, either of them could have easily killed me. So I concluded that Todtenhausen had to be in the middle of any number of his other pet procedures. Then I sensed him nearby, sitting on a stool that glided up and down along my nude torso, probably on rollers. Kathe was hovering above my mid-section, handing him instruments and assembling a pump and a yellow rubber hose, the kind used in funeral homes to prepare a corpse for viewing. The remark that Todtenhausen made an hour ago about “bruising” came to my mind.

In this case, I would not need to last more than thirty minutes before Halina’s dead man switch settled the matter for the entire casita, all its occupants, and regrettably, some of the campaneros tending to the vines as well.

Whatever cocktail was being dripped into my wrist from the bag above my head, it induced a remarkable sense of calm, a comfort almost, having also robbed me of my ability to move or feel. The only tactile sensation was the scraping, so distant it could have been in another room, and the easing of tautness I surmised was Todtenhausen cutting tendons and muscle. My head was restrained but my eyes could move a bit, so I caught my reflection in the glass door of the cherry wood bookcase that filled the entire wall of the casita’s library. I was on my back, naked, with my arms pinned behind me, and my feet and palms flat on the floor forming a bench. Or, as Kathe was clarifying in jocular conversation with Todtenhausen, a sex device for women called a sybian.

“Of course, Liebchen,” was his answer. “A vibrating cock that will never go soft. My passionatta of taxidermy. Likely the first female that this cock has ever entered,” Todtenhausen mused.

Kathe laughed, smacking her lips playfully.

“Ooh. Er ist virgin!”

Todtenhausen laughed, then glancing at me and noticing that I was awake, he sensed that the wheels in my head were cranking away to piece together the missing events.

Todtenhausen smiled, speaking German. “Hello sleepy head. It is Nicolaus, correct? I don’t remember your brother’s name. What?” Kathe provided the answer.

“Oh, yes. Your twin was Pyotr. Such an excellent apparatus.” Todtenhausen began pumping fluids from me while Kathe covered her nose. Todtenhausen seemed unaffected. I had no sense of smell or taste. My five senses were being reduced one by one, now only sight and sound remaining.

“You know, the idea first came to me when I was—I’m not ashamed to say—er, gobsmacked, utterly speechless the first time I saw