Hans van Houten... 'who is he?' you may be asking... Well... If you have to ask... you can't afford him.
When it comes to Hans Van Houten the price goes beyond monetary or material possessions, the cost is far greater. The world in which Hans Van Houten exists is a seedy, and darkened realm of careless violence and unrestrained sadism.
The first time I heard his name was in a small sleepy town in the Czech Republic in the winter of 1986, just as things were easing off with the politics at the time. I had taken up lodgings in a local, hotel-nothing fancy, the sort you'd see a small family business run that probably only got a handful of guests during the off season. It was during my sojourn to the local beer hall that I struck up a conversation with a man named Wolfgang Hess. Now Hess was a hard man, and from the way he constantly looked at the doors and windows I could tell he was possibly part of the secret police; he had those cold eyes that you see in the eastern bloc types. Yet this man, this man of violence, within his killer's eyes I could see a trace of something that went beyond the typical paranoia of someone in his line of work. There was a real and genuine terror within this man. And then he told me of the abandoned estate that hung on the outskirts of town, though if we're being honest it was little more than a slightly posh house that had long gained a haunted look from years of neglect and disrepair.
To hear Hess tell it, the place was once an orphanage, or government run school of some such. Though of course, there was a storm of rumours coming out that it was just a smokescreen for secret soviet experiments being done on various children in the hopes to create some form of perfect soldier or übermensch. Whatever the case, nothing was proved one way or the other and the school enjoyed a healthy life. All that changed one day, when the entire school-the teachers, the nurses, the whole staff and all the children died. There was one man who made it out, a school councillor, and before he eventually died of multiple organ failure brought on by ricin poisoning, he managed to give an account of what happened to the officer on the scene-Hess. It was an annual dance between the students, a real do up affair with the teachers and staff all on hand as chaperone. When the first child collapsed, everyone went to the boy's aid, even as he choked on his own blood. Then, one by one, they all fell. The punch was spiked you see, and on that day 55 people-most of them children- all died in that old school. Standing amongst it all, drinking in the misery, was a young man named.....Hans Van Houten.
Enter into this man's world at your own peril.