The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, April 19, 1638 – Hans Schermer – The Claw of the Devil

 He came with mud on his boots, even after four days in the cellar.

Hans Schermer, stable hand at the inn Zur wilden Ente, twenty-six years old. Broad-shouldered, with hands like hammers and a gaze that would not bend. They found him asleep in the hay beside a dead mare. His master claimed he had poisoned her. The pastor said he had struck the church door with his fists and “muttered spells in his sleep.”
I knew his kind: too strong to be weak, too proud to bow.
But everything breaks, in the end.

When he stood before me in the Ulrich Chapel, he said:
“You have an iron wheel, don’t you? Then bring it.”
I replied:
“Not for those who ask for it themselves.”
But I brought it all the same.

We began with the hand screw.
His fingers bent slowly. First he bit his teeth together. Then his tongue. Then he began to curse. Not at God. Not at me. At the horse.
“The beast looked at me as if it knew me! As if it were my father!”
I turned further. The skin beneath his thumbs split open.
He laughed. A rough, jerking laugh.
Then he began to weep.
“He came in the night. He stood in the stable. He had hooves of fire. He gripped my neck with a claw. He said my name.”
The preacher whispered: “The goat. He touched him.”

I asked: “Did you serve him?”
He answered:
“He wanted my voice. I gave him nothing. But I dreamed. And in that dream… I had horns.”

I ordered the fire iron to be brought.
Not to break him further — that was no longer needed.
But to confirm the mark.
An inverted triangle, on his chest. Between the ribs.
He screamed then. Not from pain. But from recognition.
“That’s what he drew upon me!”
The theologian made the sign of the cross.
I wrote:
Confession of contact. Possessed vision. Ready for judgment.

Note (night):
His eyes stayed open, even as he fell from the bench.
I did not close them.
They did not look at me.
They looked at something behind me.




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