The Isis Covenant by James Douglas Read Free Book Online

how, but that was of little consequence. His was a mind trained to ignore distraction and diversion and focus only on the target ahead. He was like a hunting dog, its every sense attuned to the trail. It wasn’t just the story, told in such intimate detail, but the living flesh before him that provided the evidence. To his certain knowledge, Max Dornberger had been born on a farm outside Linz, Austria, in December of the year 1910. Yet the man on the bed, even despite his illness, did not look a day over sixty. And he had looked that way for as long as Paul could remember. What other explanation could there be, but the obsession that had ruled his life – and shaped his son’s?
    Paul’s memories were of an unusual childhood, though that didn’t mean he looked back on it with any kind of regret. He had been educated by personal tutors and had no contact with other children. The extracurricular lessons with his father had been designed to exploit and enhance certain talents and tendencies that the old man believed were in his breeding. And if those talents and tendencies did not exist, they had been beaten into him by constant repetition.
    He couldn’t remember when he had realized his father was evil. Only that by then it didn’t matter. A ten-year-old boy isolated in a rambling, ramshackle house in the country; there had never been any escape from what he was to become. Before he could be allowed to inflict pain, he must understand pain. To understand it, he must suffer it. Strapped to the chair. Whipping. Burning. Electricity. So many levels of pain. So many consequences. He had come – at a certain level – to relish the pain, even to be as one with it. And, after he understood the pain, they began to be brought to him. First the animals, so he should know the feeling of the knife in flesh. The exact position of the vital organs and the most efficient way they could be reached. How the cringing muscles trapped the blade like a clamp if it was pushed too far. The scrape on bone if the point missed that vital gap between the ribs. How you could feel the beat of the heart through the knife until the very last spasm of the dying organ. The way a living, breathing entity kicked and bucked when it realized you were trying to kill it, even though its brain didn’t understand what was happening. All repeated over and over in that cold, dark cellar until he was drenched in blood.
    ‘No! Use your wrist to twist the knife, so the blade itself breaks the suction. Again. Again.’
    And after the animals, the people.
    Where did he get them?
    Little Pauli never knew, but his older self could guess. The lost and the lonely picked up from bars, or anywhere a sedative could be administered unseen; those were the days before all-seeing CCTV surveillance. An offer of a lift home for a staggering drunk; a cup of coffee handed to a homeless vagrant. Nobodies.
    It was the eyes he remembered. The eyes had a vocabulary all of their own. Fear, pleading, hopelessness, defiance, hatred. Agony, suffering, fading. Dying.
    Of course, it wasn’t enough to kill them. First there must be the mock interrogation. The gift of hope. That was when he discovered a new truth: that a man able to withstand enormous amounts of pain could be broken by terror. Rip out a man’s right eye and he would do anything or say anything to save his left. Cut off one hand and the thought of living without the other would drive the subject to the brink of madness. Take away a finger and let him know his manhood will be next and he will tell you anything you want to know.
    They all talked in the end.
    He learned how to carry a man to within a heartbeat of death and keep him there. How to gauge the effectiveness of the pain he was inflicting to minimize the time it took to break his subject. He became adept. And if he ever betrayed that he was enjoying what he was doing, little Pauli would be placed back in the chair, and the learning would begin again.
    Eventually would