Story: "The Bestiarium of Shinsuke Manu"

The Bear Inn, Oxford, Nazi-Occupied Britain, 1947

SS-Sturmbannführer Ewald von Haupt walks into the pub.

In one moment, a pleasant, warm cacophony — loud voices, clinking glasses, laughter, singing — in the next, a chilled sudden silence, heads turning and all eyes darting in the tall, blond man's direction, then eyes lowering, shoulders hunching, heads down, subdued conversations re-starting in lowered voices. 

A faint smile curls von Haupt’s lips as he goes to the bar and orders an ale. He scans the room with pale blue eyes. Spotting the couple he is looking for, he makes his way to the small table in the back corner.

“Adam, please introduce us,” von Haupt says. 

The man, Adam Gardner, a middle-aged don at Magdalen College, narrow-shouldered, long-nosed, weak-chinned, with a rat-like twitching of his upper lip, says: 

“Sturmbannführer von Haupt, allow me to introduce Luciana Vlachou."

She is petite, dark-haired, olive-skinned, with large, expressive brown eyes. She smiles up at him. A very nice smile, von Haupt thinks.  

"Call me Luciana," she says. There is a slight accent. Greek, perhaps? 

Von Haupt removes his peaked visor cap and sets it on the table, light glinting on the eagle with the swastika and the totenkopf skull-and-bones SS insignia. He sits down. 

"Pleased to meet, you, Fräulein Vlachou," he says.

"Luciana." There is that smile again.

"Luciana," von Haupt smiles back. "Adam told you about my hobby?"

"Yes. I believe you will find the item quite interesting."

"Pardon me," von Haupt says, "but you understand that there are many pitfalls and disappointments for the collector of rare books and manuscripts. How may I —" 

"I can assure you that it is genuine. The book has been in my family for generations."

"And how did your family come to possess this treasure?"

"Ah, treasure,” she says. “It is auspicious that you should use that word, since it is part of the story.”

“I love stories.”

“My great-great-grandfather, Demetrios Vlachou, owned an antiques shop in Athens. One day, in the year 1822, an English sailor entered the shop and offered the book for sale. The sailor said that he had recently returned from a voyage to the Orient. He claimed that in Shanghai he met an old Japanese man, a Kakure Kirishitan, that is a 'Hidden Christian' from the underground Christian church in Japan. The old man had escaped from Japan, where the Tokugawa shogunate had repressed Christianity since the early 1600s. Now the old man was dying and he wanted the sacred book to find a home in Christendom, away from the persecutions in Japan. He gave the book to the sailor, asking only that he would sell it to a reputable collector who would treasure it. Along with the book, the sailor presented a letter written in Japanese. My great-great-grandfather had the letter translated, and it confirmed the sailor's story and named the manuscript as 'The Bestiarium of Shinsuke Manu.'"

"The famous Shinsuke Manu," von Haupt says. "The Japanese Jesuit priest from the 16th century who studied Demonology."

"My family has treasured the manuscript ever since."

"They say the book is bound in human skin." Von Haupt's pale blue eyes glitter.

"We have authenticated the binding. It is indeed made from human skin," Luciana says. 

"And so you have brought it here, to Oxford."

"Yes, it is on loan to the Bodleian Library in exchange for the course fees and housing for my graduate studies. But now my time at Oxford is coming to an end, and I am considering whether to keep the manuscript, or, well, I could part with it, for the right price, as long as I follow the original requirement, to find a collector who will treasure it. Are you interested?”

"Perhaps," von Haupt says. "I would need to examine it, naturally."

"Naturally. I can take you to see it now, if you wish. It is kept at the Radcliffe Camera."

"Let us first enjoy some of your fine English ale."

Von Haupt takes a long draught, then turns to Gardner.

"Adam, I meant to tell you that your information about your colleague, C. S. Lewis, proved accurate. We did, in fact, find in his possession a partially completed manuscript of subversive fiction, a sort of fable where a young girl gains access to a fantasy land through a wardrobe. It was a quite heavy-handed Christian allegory, which of course was mildly objectionable. Worse was the negative depiction of the ruler of the fantasy land, an ice queen named the White Witch who was clearly a personification of Nazi rule in England. We destroyed the manuscript, of course."

"What about Lewis?" Gardner asks. 

"Off to the work camps," von Haupt says, taking another long draught. "He was shipped out last night. A stubborn man like him, fat and old and frail, will not last long there, I am afraid to say. But he will have the company of his old friend, Tolkien, who is already there since last week. You were of course quite right about him as well. Tolkien was working on a manuscript that glorified the bucolic English village life in the guise of cute little half-sized humanoids living in innocent bliss in an idyllic place called the Shire. The manuscript’s title, 'The Lord of the Rings', referred to a demonic creature named Sauron, who was clearly an allusion to our Führer. I personally burned the manuscript and sent the ashes to Berlin, accompanying my latest report on our progress with the reeducation of England."

Von Haupt downs the last draught of ale. "With the help of good, honorable men like you, Adam, men who are fully committed to the great cause, we will tear down the old ways, dig up all the rotten roots of the past, and teach the young generation to be good citizens of The Reich. And you will be rewarded, Adam."

"Heil Hitler," Gardner says, arm flashing up in the Nazi salute. 

"Heil Hitler," von Haupt says automatically, not bothering with the salute. He turns to Luciana.

"Now, to the matter of 'The Bestiarium of Shinsuke Manu'."

* * *

High Street, Oxford, Early Evening

As von Haupt and Luciana turn from Alfred Street to High Street, Luciana slips her arm into von Haupt's, hooking them together at the elbow. It feels too familiar, too forward, and yet completely natural. 

So, she is one of those women, von Haupt thinks, drawn to the uniform, the power it represents. Or perhaps she just wants to insinuate herself, get a better price for her antique book. 

As they walk past the old stone buildings of Brasenose, now decorated with long red banners with the black swastika on the white disc, he says: 

"I am, in fact, quite the Anglophile. Does that surprise you?"

"A little." There it is again, that charming Greek accent. "I seem to recall you saying that you want to tear it all down, dig up the rotten roots." 

"Perhaps a better way to put it," he says, "is that I want to prune it. Yes, that is right. There is so much admirable in the English, after all. They built an empire. They were even the ones who saw the value of concentration camps, during the Boer Wars. The boarding school education of their ruling class is properly stoic. But then, when they come here," his free arm sweeps out towards the college buildings, "they are encouraged to explore intellectual blind alleys, to meander down poetic rabbit holes. It makes them soft. It is not optimal. Education must be like a magnet, aligning all the iron-shavings to point in the same direction. That is the way this nation will evolve to be a strong part of The Reich. This is how we will build a society that will last a thousand years. More. There will be no end to it. The Reich will last until the stars burn out.”

"Spoken as a true believer," she says. "Small price to pay to burn some useless manuscripts and ship some old dons to the labor camps. Repeated, naturally, until the message is clearly received, or the old generation dies off. This is the cost of order."

"Precisely," he says, as they turn down St Mary's Passage by the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. 

Soon they arrive at the circular building at the heart of Oxford University.

* * *

The Radcliffe Camera, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Inside the baroque structure of the Radcliffe Camera, they find a table in an obscure part of the library, and Luciana fetches a large mahogany box from a locked storage closet nearby. It is evening, and this part of the library is abandoned. They are alone. 

She places the box on the table and they sit down, side by side. Luciana opens the box with a key. 

Inside the box is a pen, a bottle of ink, and a leather-bound book.

"It is so small," von Haupt says. "I thought it would be larger."

She carefully lifts the book out of the box and sets it on the table between them. 

"May I ... ?"

"Please, go ahead," Luciana says.

He caresses the leather. It is oddly warm to the touch. It must be his imagination, but he feels a slight movement under his fingertips, as when in touching an animal, the small muscles under the skin may twitch involuntarily in response.

"Is it really ...?"

He knows, and she knows that he knows, since they have already discussed it back at the Bear Inn, but she answers the unfinished question:

"Yes, it is bound in human skin."

"Amazing."

Von Haupt opens the book reverently, begins leafing through the pages. They are all blank. 

"Flip the book over and start from the back," Luciana says. "Unlike the western way, this book is meant to be read back to front, and from right to left."

"Ah, of course."

The last page has a single symbol in the middle of the page, a circle with a very small dot at its center.

On the next two pages, there is an image of a horned demon on the right, and on the left, a page full of calligraphic lettering, soft rounded shapes with small curled tails, dots below some of the symbols, indecipherable to von Haupt, but familiar.

"Hebrew," he says. "Not Japanese, then?"

"Shinsuke Manu was a student of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek so that he could read the scriptures in the original languages."

Von Haupt studies the image of the demon. It is so finely drafted, with such exquisite workmanship, such realistic detail, that it could very well be a modern day photograph, except that it is not black and white, nor even the washed out palette of German Agfacolor. Its vibrant colors are much more lifelike than even the latest American advances of Kodachrome.

The image seems three dimensional, as if embossed off the page a fraction of a millimeter. He runs a fingertip lightly over the fine paper until he reaches the image, and, yes, he can feel the slightest bump, as if the ink has been applied in layers upon layers in a technique he is not familiar with.  

He flips the pages, admiring the handiwork and the strange and wonderful creatures depicted. There are so many — hundreds — each distinct, different, and all drawn with the same photographic attention to detail. 

Then he reaches the page with ... 

... the image of his old boss, his old friend, his old mentor, KZ-Kommandant Heinrich Zill, who ran the Treblinka III extermination camp. 

His eyes are transfixed on the image of his old friend, so perfectly captured on the page. He leans closer to examine it in detail, the haughty little smile he knew so well, the sardonic glint in Zill's eye, so lifelike that he feels as if he is standing face to face with the man.

And, von Haupt realizes, he is now leaned in so close to the page that his nose is nearly touching the paper. 

He hears Luciana push her chair back, stand up, and position herself behind him. 

“Here is the true story,” she says. “There was no great-great-grandfather Demetrios, no English sailor, no old Japanese man in Shanghai. The Bestiarium has been handed down for generations from master to pupil, for four centuries. I carry on the work of Shinsuke Manu, collecting the varieties of evil in all its forms, preserving them in the pages of this book.”

Von Haupt cannot move. He is frozen in place. He cannot speak.

"Yes," she says, "I collected Zill, the perfect specimen exemplifying the monsters of his kind, representative of what you did, what you are still doing, in the camps."

Von Haupt feels the peaked visor cap being placed back on his head, and she straightens the gorget patches at his collar. 

“You, Ewald von Haupt, will be a perfectly preserved exemplar of the monsters of your kind,” she says, ”the evil that seeks to snuff out creativity, to suffocate the soul, to remake humankind in the image of machinery.”

Her hand comes into view, as she turns to the next page in the Bestiarium — a blank page. Her mouth is next to his right ear as she whispers:

“This is going to hurt … for a very long time. It will hurt for as long as the Bestiarium lasts, in fact.”

She straightens up, places both hands on his back, and begins to chant. Von Haupt recognizes the language as Hebrew. It brings him back to the memory of lamenting voices in the extermination camp. 

Von Haupt is compelled, against his will, to lean even closer to the page, his nose first, then his cheek, his right eye, grinding into the paper. 

Then there is a tremendous pressure, a sense of being squeezed, pressed, the moisture in his body evaporating through the pores of his skin, rising as steam, draining him, drying him like a leaf, like a pressed flower in a herbarium.

* * *

Luciana Vlachou sits down and examines the pressed specimen she has just collected in the Bestiarium. Satisfied, she reaches for the pen and ink in the box.

She pauses for a moment to smile at the pressed-beast-von-Haupt. In his miniature, dried-out form, he is still conscious, aware, as are all the others they have collected over the centuries. 

She leafs through the book, reflecting on the many faces of evil, drawing inspiration from the writings of her predecessors as they documented the demonic, laid bare the poison and corruption that lurks deep in the human heart: pride and self-centered desire, contempt and fear and hatred of 'the other', and what follows — the injustice, the suffering, the sorrow.

Now she returns to von Haupt’s page. She opens the bottle of ink, dips the pen, and begins writing.

— THE END —

The story was inspired by this Reedsy.com writing prompt:

Write a story about discovering a lost manuscript. It can be from a famous (or infamous) author, or an unknown one.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts