Grimshaw went on to tell a pretty tragic story. Evidently the Nazis took him in when he was a teen, but they hardly took care of the boy. They kept him locked up. They beat the shit out of him, and when they weren’t kicking his ass, they were making him exercise and build his body up. After a while, when his strength was up and his spirits were as low as they could get, they exposed him to a regimen of strange experiments.

“Most of these experiments were sheer nonsense,” he said. “These Nazi doctors tried putting spells on me and had me perform my own ceremonies trying to raise demons and the like.”

I lit a smoke. “And nothing worked?”

“Nothing,” Grimshaw shook his head, “until they captured an unusual specimen in the forest near Kaiserslautern.”

“Bless you.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m an idiot,” I said. “Please go on.”

Grimshaw gave me a head tilt of confusion and then went on to tell me that the specimen the Germans captured was a werewolf, which had been preying on local farms and villages for years. But the Nazis didn’t capture the lycanthrope to help the town, they captured it to use for their own mad purposes.

“You see,” Grimshaw commented, “they wanted to see if they could harness the power of the werewolf. They wanted to see if there was a way to transfer what gave the wolf its deadly power into the bodies of Nazi soldiers.”

“An army of Nazi werewolves. That is scary.”

Of course the Nazi doctors tried everything to discover what made a werewolf a werewolf, but there was one problem; even though they had successfully captured the creature, there was no taming it and not even the strongest sedatives would put the thing to sleep. At least thirteen doctors were killed trying to run tests on the wolf.

I nodded. “So they’d have to kill it to get inside it and see what made it tick?”

“Basically, but the Nazis weren’t about to exterminate such a marvelously rare find without exhausting every possible scenario. They may have been mad, but the Nazis were always thorough.”

Grimshaw removed his monocle, breathed on it, and wiped it on his jacket lapel. He had a very proper manner about him. He reminded me of the English butler stereotype; very stiff, overly polite and probably the one who committed the murder. I liked him, but I didn’t trust him. Not entirely. Not yet.

He went on to tell me what they did to him. In some kind of sound stage or air hangar they created a false wooded environment, a fake forest in a contained area. Both young Grimshaw and the captured werewolf were placed into the environment so an attack would occur as it happened in the villages and farms. The idea was to recreate a werewolf attack in its natural environment and see what the results were.