A Stranger in Augsburg (A short paranormal story)


It was 1970 now, I was lost in the beautiful city of Augsburg, the streets I was not familiar with yet; I was assigned to Reese Compound, US Military stock, the 1/36 Artillery, to a Battery unit, of some forty-four men, I was twenty-two years old then, a Private First Class, and it was a weekend, and I was moseying about.
Being lost in this city, was not a big thing to me back then; I could simply jump in a taxi and be back at my unit in fifteen to twenty minutes at any location in Augsburg.
Accordingly, it was early afternoon, on a Saturday, and I was standing nearby this shanty of sorts, which was in-between two stores, and a small park, not sure exactly where I was as far as identifying the streets, but there in front of me come into view a small creek, in a park close by, with a bridge that crossed it, perhaps it was more on the order of a canal that found its way throughout the city and park system. In any case, I wanted, or intended to anyways—to cross it, but got interested in a view of an old man however, so I ventured closer to the old man’s shanty, nearer the park and onto the bridge, elbows on the bridge’s wooded railing, looking over towards the old man again, the old German war veteran I presupposed, or so I invented he was. He appeared to be doing something intimate when I looked his way I just did not concentrate on what, but had intentions to.
The old shanty had but three walls to it—if you looked through the front window, to its back you could see there was no back, the only reason I could figure he had the back tore off was because he had intentions of rebuilding the whole place, the front door being opened. In any case, I didn’t venture across the bridge, I walked to the edge of the park, his shanty across the street, sat on a tree stump, and pondered his business, like a peeping tom, I suppose you could say. I watched him doing whatever he was doing; I simply could not get a clear picture of what he was doing. He mumbled to himself in some language, it didn’t sound like German to me, and it wasn’t English for sure, or any kind of Spanish I was familiar with, and I knew all three languages quite well, and I reconfirmed, he was not speaking them—period.
He looked as if he had lived a long life, a hard lived life, and now, in a word, an awaken drunk, so I thought because of his behavior, he was clumsy, awkward—slow moving. He had a haggard look to his bone structure, kind of droopy, as if he was inside another person’s body trying to stretch it out because he was too huge to be in it, in the first place.
He had charcoal and olive colored skin, some sore like blotches here and there, huge shoulders, and tall, perhaps close to seven feet; an unsavory look, a villainous composure, eyes hard—steel hard. Curiosity to him—so it appeared—was a thing of the past, he paid little to no attention to me, or the people walking by, or standing about waiting for buses, taxis and so forth: ‘…an old warrior,’ I said to myself, indeed he must be; WWI, yes, what else.
As I had now gotten closer to the shanty, and the old man, his cloths was like a scarecrows; he must had been all of ninety-years old, or at least that is my guess, not sure why I say ninety, but that is what came to mind, him being wrinkled up like a cooked tomato and so forth, but he was agile, and strong looking, he could have been younger or older I assume.
He then pulled these old looking rags out from behind a stove, from a hole in the wall it looked to be, where he kept them evidently, and then he chopped them up, and I got a better look by taking a few more steps towards him, gazing over the edge of the sidewalk, I was in the street, and he nailed them to the wall as if to dry, and he had some already drying, and now the rages, that I thought were rages, were not rags at all, but some kind of substance, bird, wings, that is what I saw, funny I thought, I was now more curious.
Fine, I told myself, then looking sternly at his operation and now on the sidewalk, I noticed he was boiling something, it was that substance, the wings, the birds, whatever, because he pulled some of them out of his pot, a cooking pot, those chopped up, whatever things he hand, and a few he swallowed whole.
After about thirty more minutes of stretching my neck, it got to me, and I was as close to him now as any neighbor could be, what he was boiling on that small gas stove still remained a mystery. My instinct or sentries said they were something eatable that was not supposed to be eatable, and therefore, somewhere in all of this, resides a mystery, so I took a few more steps closer, looked closer and began to bethink —this was none of my business, or was it? I was no perchance, ten-feet from him.
Anyhow, my observations quickened as I approached, the old man’s eyes, five feet from him, had a yellowish crust look to them, one I had never came into observing before, not at at least in any human.
There seemed to be no danger as I now stood in front of the shanty. Accordingly I began to look at the wall, what was in the boiling pan, the hole behind the table that held the little gas stove on top of it, in the corner, and on the table where he was doing the chopping, where there were droppings of blood. He really paid no attention to me, as if I was not even there. Then seizing the moment, I asked the old man if he knew what he was doing? Not sure why I asked it in such a blunt and rude manner, but I seemed to have taken charge of the moment, and somehow expected him to adhere to my request, and somehow I figured he would.
“Yes,” he echoed, as if the sound came from his feet, not his head, adding, “cooking leftover meat from the butcher shop across from my place.” I think in essence, he meant, he had friends like him, anyhow, I looked closer, into the boiling water, then on the wall, on the table, and what was hidden behind his coffee cup, perhaps not hidden, but laying there.
I held my mouth, as if to vomit, for a moment closed my eyes hoping when I opened them I’d not confirm what I had just validated to be, indeed I was seeing right. An unholy sense came upon me, and I said as nonchalantly as I could,
“Sir, I hate to tell you, but you are cooking some species of bat.” (a species I had never seen before, a thick head like a rat, and long wings, the whole bat perhaps being a few pounds.)
He looked deep into my eyes, as if holding me in a trance,
“I’m eating my food from my planet, it’s traditional, ice-bats…!” so he said, his eyes deep dark as the bats wings—the center yellow like a wolf’s. I next took a moments rest, there on the floor behind him was a heap of bats, reeking with a foulness of death, I mean to say, a pile, twenty or thirty.
“Take a look around if you wish,” he said, as if he was harmless and so was his abode and way of life. And I did, I took a quick scanty view, of the small shack.
The bed, his bed, the only bed I saw, was of rags and straw. Other than that, it was a pig’s haven, messy and stunk to high heaven.

I had been to Bali, and other places where there is bats galore, and seemingly sacred to certain groups, even stood under a bat temple, which was an open large cave, with over a hundred thousand bats above my head, but never, ever have I seen them boiled as to be used for a stew, or so huge.

—One thing never left my mind those ten months I spent in Augsburg, Germany, which was the name of the butcher shop next to the old man’s shanty, it was called, “The Moiromma Special Cuts.”
I would later on in life put two and two together, it was discovered (yet untold to the general public at the time) the adjacent solar system to Earth’s, that there was a peculiar planet, among the so called ‘Cadaverous Planets,’ which formed this new solar system, called Moiromma, a strange planet indeed. And perhaps I should add, I was fortunate enough to have met a visitor from another local such as Moiromma.


Written: 4-19-2007 ((Part two, not provided here, “No Eyes to Weep With”) (there are 26-stories to the Cadaverous Plants series, along with three long novelettes.))