Grimshaw smiled slightly and stepped across the porch and through the open front door. He was good. He looked a hundred percent human, but he glided like an un-natural. To the normal eye, he seemed to walk like anyone else, but if you looked very close you could see he was hyper-aware of his every movement.

I stepped inside after Grimshaw. He had his back to me and he was scanning the living room. I didn’t have to see his face to see he was disgusted. I imagined his office had carpet and red velvet chairs. Fuck that. I like my squalor.

I waited for him to take in the mess and get over it.

“Take a seat anywhere you like,” I said knowing fancy-pants would be appalled at the prospect.

But he surprised me and brushed aside a stack of magazines and sat on the edge of the arm of the couch, his ass covering years of unmentionable stains. I took a seat behind my desk.

“So,” I said eager to get things rolling. “What can I do for you?”

Grimshaw adjusted his monocle. “Well, it’s not so much what you can do for me, as what you can do for your country, really.”

“And I have nothing to fear but fear itself. Your turn.”

Grimshaw gave me that one and then got serious. “In 1939 I was sixteen years old. I was born in London, but my father worked as an engineer and we moved around, eventually winding up in Germany, where my father worked for the military until he was killed when I was fifteen. A year later my mother passed away as well. I was alone. They were my only family.”

“Until the Nazis took you in.”

Grimshaw sort of nodded/bowed. “Exactly. Thank you for keeping up with my story.”

“I look a lot dumber than I am.”

“As you probably know the Ger . . . the Nazis experimented with the supernatural, the occult as well as unnatural science.”

“Unnatural science?”

“The study of the supernatural from a scientific viewpoint,” Grimshaw said. As he spoke he allowed his index nail to extend to a razor point. He scratched carefully under his eye. The monocle was bugging him.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with the concept . . . vampires have a virus and werewolves are a mutation of that same virus,” I said. “I just never heard it called unnatural science before.”

“It was a fairly unpopular term, coined by Dr. Joseph Mengele himself.”

“He was really a renaissance man, wasn’t he? Just loved to dabble.”

I knew all about the Nazis and their brief experiments with the supernatural. I knew they fucked around with a lot of weird shit and I knew they didn’t get much in the way of results. I also knew that they did achieve some results, but nothing ever made public. Well, until Victor Von Fleabag walked in.